And we're back to letting technology parent for you.
If you have concerns, talk to your fucking children.
It's not fucking sufficient.
Technology creates a multitude of problems and issues for parents to be concerned about, such as making adequate supervision impossible or prohibitive, if any children are to be allowed to use technology at all, and it is eminently suitable that technology assist in solving technology-created problems.
If my parents had spent half the time asking me what was going on in my life that they did snooping through my shit, I'd probably have had a relationship with them between 15 and 25.
I see... you have personal issues going back to your childhood that prejudice you against reasonable technology-based solutions to address problems created by technology.
As EVERY rebellious child can attest, they are better at hiding things than you are at finding them.
Since they rely on technology you buy them to do technology-related things, that becomes exceedingly difficult for the child, particularly when all their technology is working for you.
At the age this would be used, the child would barely comprehend what is even happening
For non-technology-related activities, where the child does not have anonymity or obscurity, traditional methods of supervision apply.
Here's a for instance, they google for keywords like how to crash a hard drive.
Who cares?
I would be more concerned if they Googled "best way to kill someone", "how to find pot", or "felatio videos"
Google searches are a bit different from text messages. Googling such a thing is no evidence to imply any particular intent, only interest in a certain subject, which is not harmful to the child.
Searches are not part of a conversation, and it is rare that an explicit intent is apparent by a search
Parents would want to monitor further actions and only take action when the nature of the situation is clear enough.
For example, if the child was seen to Google "(cool computer game or movie)" on a Torrent website, then found to have installed a bittorrent client, and then opened a download page, parental smackdown and removal of computer privileges should happen only at that point, not the mere Googling of "BitTorrent" or even reading about BT clients.
Parents should not really be concerned about just any thing their child might Google search for, even if the results on the face of it, could in theory be applied to some nefarious purpose.
Even if a hard drive at home happened to crash shortly after the child Googled how to make a hard drive crash, the Google search is no evidence of either action or intent.
There are probably some Google searches that should be warning signs however... covert surveillance based on certain keywords, seems reasonable.
For example, if the child Googles for explicit obscene terms that shouldn't even be in the child's vocabulary for 10 more years.
How would you feel about someone using the same rationale to snoop covertly on you?
I wouldn't feel much at all if I never found out about it, and it was never used against me.
However, it's actually a privacy rights violation to snoop an adult's private conversations w/ other people without their consent.
How the channel 'might' feel is a hypothetical that does not matter, as long as you make sure the snooping is not so blatant that the child could ever possibly detect it.
Covert snooping might be combined with Overt snooping of another nature also.
You might warn the child of the risks of cell phones, that other people might be able to hear what they say or type, and never to text contact details -- just a risk of the technology.
The covertness serves more to get it out of the way.
A phrase to be used when overtly verifying, not as a justification for covert snooping.
There are multiple justifications for covert snooping on children.
To protect the emotional well being of the child: a desire to have the child not feel oppressed every time they send a text message, or feel every word they type is being scrutinized and might get them in trouble. So you only act on the contents of a text message if it's REALLY bad. To give them a sense or at least an illusion they are free.
The knowledge that every word they type is watched can have an emotionally negative effect on the child, it can make the child feel more like the parent is an enemy
and cause the child to rebel.
Another justification for covert snooping is smart children who will have no difficulty circumventing overt verifying.
For example, by encoding messages, using code words, borrowing a friend's phone to send the naughty text message with, by using an Email to SMS gateway,
or other modes of communication such as Instant messenger.
There are very good reasons for the snooping to be covert.
Having physical access to the phone does not imply that one is not malicious.
I think maybe you misunderstood the point of my post, which is to mock the example given and the idea that physical access implies non-malice.
Specifically the part about
how is it malicious? the person installing it has to have physical access to the phone. it's not like going to a website and downloading a virus
My claim is that going to a website and downloading a virus is exactly the same, because both require physical access.
Thanks to the ADA, it's illegal to make a website that does not make reasonable accomadations for the blind,
so there should always be some accessible equivalent to the Captcha image that does not require seeing a video
or security Captcha muddled with an advertisement.
That this method can't be foiled by simply changing the privacy settings or... say... not posting this sort of evidence in there.
They should still catch people who take those precautions, it will just require more time and resources.
But part of the job of police is to catch perps as quickly as possible, and that includes investigating the fruitful types of avenues that are easiest to investigate first.
Most criminals are stupid and if joined to a social network will reveal some HINT authorities could use, such as their location at X, so searching FBs raises the bar on the "perfect crime", whatever that is.
Facebook/social network investigation should be among the easiest, and can easily be automated, especially if the social network provider has a policy of assisting authorities,
and especially if they can combine this with info from cell companies -- such as the location of various FB/Twitter users when they posted their tweets.
Posting something completely innocuous could still flag the perp, if it revealed their location close to the crime scene, for example, at an unusual time. Even if their update didn't discuss their location.... the social network provider knows when the update was posted, and their cell phone company will know where their device was located, when the post was made.
"private settings" do no good, with the legal burden needed for police to require cooperation as low as it is.
The burden of proof is not probable cause, it's much easier to require a third party to cooperate, since no warrant is needed.
One of the differences is broad 'fishing expeditions' are legal and allowed, because the information posted "in private" is in the hands of a third party.
I always thought the best class action suit would be against every state and municipality for not making street signs accessible to the blind under the ADA.
It should probably be a bigger issue, that for some reason, they won't even give a blind person a driver's license.
Totally ridiculous, I tell you....
not only do they discriminate against blind people in this way... they actually perform medical tests on you, and discriminate against anyone who has a medical condition of vision poorer than 20/40.
And they really need to do something about the fact the wilderness mountain climbing / hiking trails are not properly wheelchair accessible.
And they don't seem to let any mute singers on the radio, either, even though they are perfectly fluent in sign language, so they should have no trouble gesturing their songs.
To be fair, it keeps the lawyers busy from doing something even more nefarious, so the user (and society) will gain indirectly.
I am not sure of that. These are probably lawyers that specialize in class actions like this one, taking advantage of the court's paranoia and ignorance about technology and technology-related issues.
Only a fraction of lawyers are into this specific thing, and this is no distraction for the lawyers who are not.
I think the corporate powers that be need a good, strong kick in the teeth about privacy issues anyway.
That's not how class action suits work.
They almost always involve a settlement arrangement, with a very sweet deal for the lawyers, a really crappy deal for the class members, and a sweet deal for the company (they can no longer be sued -- they work out settlements that concede very little, and give them liability protection now and in the future as long as they make practically zero-cost token gestures).
The corporation may even invite the class action in order to give them legal protection going forward and a binding absolution for any past activity, since really, noone / hardly anyone ever bothers to opt out of a class settlement.
On the other hand, if you don't do your research, it's not that obvious that clicking a button to watch a video means you've agreed to hand over your life's history for advertising purposes.
You have not. You handed them a unique identifier much like your name.
If you chose to publish your life's history so anyone who knows your name / id can find it, then any of that info they get is a result of you doing that and providing them the means to find info about you.
The thought occurred to me that the simplest way to archive would have been to purchase the Geocities disk drives. Then there would have been a near certainty that all of it was gotten. At the very least I hope there was coordination amongst all the archivists to prevent duplication and speed up getting the content.
The hard drives would contain confidential customer information.
Not all the files on a geocities site were 'public'. Sometimes sites might have contained unlinked "secret" files, URLs that have an obscure name like a password,
that the site owner would hand out manually by email.
Do you know that 95+% of people will never pay it because they simply don't have a large enough estate for it to kick in?
It's a silly argument. Akin to writing off the studies of meteors and the possibility of impacts with earth, because 99% of humans who ever lived are already dead and have nothing to gain by us stopping a meteor collision.
5% of the population is over 1.5 million people.
Yes, we know the US population is large, and there are a very large majority of people who are really really bad at managing money that spend every penny as soon as, or even before they actually get it, and don't budget or plan well.
And the people who do that are also the ones most likely to have way too many children, due to their lack of ability to plan -- which results in them and their children (who learn from them) consisting of a larger percentage of the population.
And this lack of planning puts them in the street and prevents them from ever having an estate, unless they learn better ways and more judicious money management.
That's neither here nor there...
taking up mountain climbing is expensive, getting the training is expensive, travelling to Everest is expensive.
Do you care to speculate on What percentage of Everest climbers will never have a large enough estate and won't get close to using up their lifetime gift allowance?
It's actually all a moot point since there's little to no chance of rescue on Everest.
It's useful in case you need to write that last letter for your love ones, finish that last Will and testament you forgot to do before you left for your trip.
Transfer all your money to your trust's swiss bank account, before you go, so the US gov't can't screw you with the death taxes.
Send your GPS position and pictures of where you're at to your loved ones, so they'll know where to collect the body (assuming they can get up there).
To be the first person to tweet: "On Mt. #Everest #mountain #climbing just reached the #Summit pwn3d. ph3ar m3 n0w n3wbs, for I am l337. Next stop, #Olympus Mons"
Now I will be able to e-mail Mountain Rescue when I get into difficulties. How do you operate an Android keyboard with frost-bitten fingers?
There are a number of vendors that sell capacitive stylus for the HTC and other Android devices. As long as you can still grasp with your palms, you should be okay.
This is, however, trading reliance on oil as a fuel source for reliance on lithium as a storage medium.
Technically... I think oil is just a storage medium as well the only real fuel source is the sun. Oil = storage medium for energy from the sun created by the decay of organic plant/animal materials over millions of years.
I suppose the advantage of lithium is, the lithium isn't really destroyed or combusted in the process of using the stored total energy; there's no gaseous release from the battery itself.
Instead the battery degrades when the cell itself becomes damaged, usually by the electrodes/plates corroding over time, or by things crystallizing on the electrodes.
Is this like you go into the grocery store and eat a few twinkies and the manager bum rushes you and makes you pay? Or, is this like picking up a discarded paper on the ferry and the guy at the news stand demanding you pay him for it?
This is like you went to the grocery store, and saw a stand with "free sample of product X", you take a sample.
A day later, you see the stand still up saying "free sample of product X", you take a sample, and the manager bum rushes you and demands $100, because you took a second sample, and the fine print says only 1 sample to a customer is free.
Requiring a customer username/password to access paid content on your website is not DRM; it's something else... it's called pay us before we distribute the content to you. I.e. if you don't pay you can't obtain the content legally in the first place, if download access is restricted.
DRM refers to restrictions applied to content that you obtain legally.
Mozilla/5.0 (EULA; For the privilege of replying to this HTTP request, you agree to remit $10,000 to me within 10 days per HTTP request you answered. Responding with a 200 OK, 302 or 303 REDIRECT HTTP status code constitutes your acceptance of this agreement. Payment is to be made in funds drawn from a US bank, by valid cashier's check or postal money order payable to XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX mailed to XXXXX address)
The keys are in the ignition, the doors are unlocked.
Nobody's going to stop you from taking the second hit, however the gangsters are watching from a distance, and the loan sharks/hitmen are going to come after you if you take a second ride and don't leave a couple hundreds in the glove compartment.
Contracts that lack competent parties, a mutual assent meeting of minds, or consideration, are not binding.
There is nothing about using a web browser that provides that the viewer is a competent party.
Mutual assent is a big issue, with displaying any sort of 'term' after a web page has already been loaded.
It's not reasonable to expect a visitor will not load multiple pages, especially if they are going through search results and find multiple links -- they may not even know the multiple links point to pages on the same web site, until after they visit them.
This stupid argument gets brought up every single time by Google fans. Entering someone's home, even if the front door is unlocked, is still an act of trespassing.
But taking pictures of you naked mowing your lawn in the front yard viewable from the street is not trespassing.
If you don't want people going around with pictures, you really should cover up -- use encryption, and stop broadcasting uncoded materials with sensitive information, for the world to hear/see.
Slashdot Mirror
And we're back to letting technology parent for you.
If you have concerns, talk to your fucking children.
It's not fucking sufficient. Technology creates a multitude of problems and issues for parents to be concerned about, such as making adequate supervision impossible or prohibitive, if any children are to be allowed to use technology at all, and it is eminently suitable that technology assist in solving technology-created problems.
If my parents had spent half the time asking me what was going on in my life that they did snooping through my shit, I'd probably have had a relationship with them between 15 and 25.
I see... you have personal issues going back to your childhood that prejudice you against reasonable technology-based solutions to address problems created by technology.
As EVERY rebellious child can attest, they are better at hiding things than you are at finding them.
Since they rely on technology you buy them to do technology-related things, that becomes exceedingly difficult for the child, particularly when all their technology is working for you.
At the age this would be used, the child would barely comprehend what is even happening
For non-technology-related activities, where the child does not have anonymity or obscurity, traditional methods of supervision apply.
Here's a for instance, they google for keywords like how to crash a hard drive.
Who cares?
I would be more concerned if they Googled "best way to kill someone", "how to find pot", or "felatio videos"
Google searches are a bit different from text messages. Googling such a thing is no evidence to imply any particular intent, only interest in a certain subject, which is not harmful to the child.
Searches are not part of a conversation, and it is rare that an explicit intent is apparent by a search
Parents would want to monitor further actions and only take action when the nature of the situation is clear enough. For example, if the child was seen to Google "(cool computer game or movie)" on a Torrent website, then found to have installed a bittorrent client, and then opened a download page, parental smackdown and removal of computer privileges should happen only at that point, not the mere Googling of "BitTorrent" or even reading about BT clients.
Parents should not really be concerned about just any thing their child might Google search for, even if the results on the face of it, could in theory be applied to some nefarious purpose.
Even if a hard drive at home happened to crash shortly after the child Googled how to make a hard drive crash, the Google search is no evidence of either action or intent.
There are probably some Google searches that should be warning signs however... covert surveillance based on certain keywords, seems reasonable.
For example, if the child Googles for explicit obscene terms that shouldn't even be in the child's vocabulary for 10 more years.
How would you feel about someone using the same rationale to snoop covertly on you?
I wouldn't feel much at all if I never found out about it, and it was never used against me. However, it's actually a privacy rights violation to snoop an adult's private conversations w/ other people without their consent.
How the channel 'might' feel is a hypothetical that does not matter, as long as you make sure the snooping is not so blatant that the child could ever possibly detect it.
Covert snooping might be combined with Overt snooping of another nature also. You might warn the child of the risks of cell phones, that other people might be able to hear what they say or type, and never to text contact details -- just a risk of the technology.
The covertness serves more to get it out of the way.
A phrase to be used when overtly verifying, not as a justification for covert snooping.
There are multiple justifications for covert snooping on children.
To protect the emotional well being of the child: a desire to have the child not feel oppressed every time they send a text message, or feel every word they type is being scrutinized and might get them in trouble. So you only act on the contents of a text message if it's REALLY bad. To give them a sense or at least an illusion they are free.
The knowledge that every word they type is watched can have an emotionally negative effect on the child, it can make the child feel more like the parent is an enemy and cause the child to rebel.
Another justification for covert snooping is smart children who will have no difficulty circumventing overt verifying.
For example, by encoding messages, using code words, borrowing a friend's phone to send the naughty text message with, by using an Email to SMS gateway, or other modes of communication such as Instant messenger.
There are very good reasons for the snooping to be covert.
Having physical access to the phone does not imply that one is not malicious.
I think maybe you misunderstood the point of my post, which is to mock the example given and the idea that physical access implies non-malice. Specifically the part about
how is it malicious? the person installing it has to have physical access to the phone. it's not like going to a website and downloading a virus
My claim is that going to a website and downloading a virus is exactly the same, because both require physical access.
And both are most often malicious in nature.
how is it malicious? the person installing it has to have physical access to the phone. it's not like going to a website and downloading a virus
What do you mean? How is "going to a website and downloading a virus" malicious?
The person 'installing it' (by downloading from the website) has to have physical access to the phone.
Thanks to the ADA, it's illegal to make a website that does not make reasonable accomadations for the blind, so there should always be some accessible equivalent to the Captcha image that does not require seeing a video or security Captcha muddled with an advertisement.
That this method can't be foiled by simply changing the privacy settings or... say... not posting this sort of evidence in there.
They should still catch people who take those precautions, it will just require more time and resources.
But part of the job of police is to catch perps as quickly as possible, and that includes investigating the fruitful types of avenues that are easiest to investigate first. Most criminals are stupid and if joined to a social network will reveal some HINT authorities could use, such as their location at X, so searching FBs raises the bar on the "perfect crime", whatever that is.
Facebook/social network investigation should be among the easiest, and can easily be automated, especially if the social network provider has a policy of assisting authorities, and especially if they can combine this with info from cell companies -- such as the location of various FB/Twitter users when they posted their tweets.
Posting something completely innocuous could still flag the perp, if it revealed their location close to the crime scene, for example, at an unusual time. Even if their update didn't discuss their location.... the social network provider knows when the update was posted, and their cell phone company will know where their device was located, when the post was made.
"private settings" do no good, with the legal burden needed for police to require cooperation as low as it is. The burden of proof is not probable cause, it's much easier to require a third party to cooperate, since no warrant is needed. One of the differences is broad 'fishing expeditions' are legal and allowed, because the information posted "in private" is in the hands of a third party.
I always thought the best class action suit would be against every state and municipality for not making street signs accessible to the blind under the ADA.
It should probably be a bigger issue, that for some reason, they won't even give a blind person a driver's license.
Totally ridiculous, I tell you.... not only do they discriminate against blind people in this way... they actually perform medical tests on you, and discriminate against anyone who has a medical condition of vision poorer than 20/40.
And they really need to do something about the fact the wilderness mountain climbing / hiking trails are not properly wheelchair accessible.
And they don't seem to let any mute singers on the radio, either, even though they are perfectly fluent in sign language, so they should have no trouble gesturing their songs.
To be fair, it keeps the lawyers busy from doing something even more nefarious, so the user (and society) will gain indirectly.
I am not sure of that. These are probably lawyers that specialize in class actions like this one, taking advantage of the court's paranoia and ignorance about technology and technology-related issues.
Only a fraction of lawyers are into this specific thing, and this is no distraction for the lawyers who are not.
I think the corporate powers that be need a good, strong kick in the teeth about privacy issues anyway.
That's not how class action suits work. They almost always involve a settlement arrangement, with a very sweet deal for the lawyers, a really crappy deal for the class members, and a sweet deal for the company (they can no longer be sued -- they work out settlements that concede very little, and give them liability protection now and in the future as long as they make practically zero-cost token gestures).
The corporation may even invite the class action in order to give them legal protection going forward and a binding absolution for any past activity, since really, noone / hardly anyone ever bothers to opt out of a class settlement.
On the other hand, if you don't do your research, it's not that obvious that clicking a button to watch a video means you've agreed to hand over your life's history for advertising purposes.
You have not. You handed them a unique identifier much like your name. If you chose to publish your life's history so anyone who knows your name / id can find it, then any of that info they get is a result of you doing that and providing them the means to find info about you.
Unless they "helpfully" stuck the whole thing into a rar or zip first. :(
Imagine downloading all 900gb, only to start up your Unrar program, or Unzip program, and get an "Enter password:" prompt....
And unhelpfully, the author of the torrent is nowhere to be seen, and noone posted any hints for the 64-character completely random password
The thought occurred to me that the simplest way to archive would have been to purchase the Geocities disk drives. Then there would have been a near certainty that all of it was gotten. At the very least I hope there was coordination amongst all the archivists to prevent duplication and speed up getting the content.
The hard drives would contain confidential customer information. Not all the files on a geocities site were 'public'. Sometimes sites might have contained unlinked "secret" files, URLs that have an obscure name like a password, that the site owner would hand out manually by email.
Do you know that 95+% of people will never pay it because they simply don't have a large enough estate for it to kick in?
It's a silly argument. Akin to writing off the studies of meteors and the possibility of impacts with earth, because 99% of humans who ever lived are already dead and have nothing to gain by us stopping a meteor collision.
5% of the population is over 1.5 million people.
Yes, we know the US population is large, and there are a very large majority of people who are really really bad at managing money that spend every penny as soon as, or even before they actually get it, and don't budget or plan well.
And the people who do that are also the ones most likely to have way too many children, due to their lack of ability to plan -- which results in them and their children (who learn from them) consisting of a larger percentage of the population.
And this lack of planning puts them in the street and prevents them from ever having an estate, unless they learn better ways and more judicious money management.
That's neither here nor there... taking up mountain climbing is expensive, getting the training is expensive, travelling to Everest is expensive.
Do you care to speculate on What percentage of Everest climbers will never have a large enough estate and won't get close to using up their lifetime gift allowance?
It's actually all a moot point since there's little to no chance of rescue on Everest.
It's useful in case you need to write that last letter for your love ones, finish that last Will and testament you forgot to do before you left for your trip.
Transfer all your money to your trust's swiss bank account, before you go, so the US gov't can't screw you with the death taxes.
Send your GPS position and pictures of where you're at to your loved ones, so they'll know where to collect the body (assuming they can get up there).
To be the first person to tweet: "On Mt. #Everest #mountain #climbing just reached the #Summit pwn3d. ph3ar m3 n0w n3wbs, for I am l337. Next stop, #Olympus Mons"
Now I will be able to e-mail Mountain Rescue when I get into difficulties. How do you operate an Android keyboard with frost-bitten fingers?
There are a number of vendors that sell capacitive stylus for the HTC and other Android devices. As long as you can still grasp with your palms, you should be okay.
This is, however, trading reliance on oil as a fuel source for reliance on lithium as a storage medium.
Technically... I think oil is just a storage medium as well the only real fuel source is the sun. Oil = storage medium for energy from the sun created by the decay of organic plant/animal materials over millions of years.
I suppose the advantage of lithium is, the lithium isn't really destroyed or combusted in the process of using the stored total energy; there's no gaseous release from the battery itself.
Instead the battery degrades when the cell itself becomes damaged, usually by the electrodes/plates corroding over time, or by things crystallizing on the electrodes.
Is this like you go into the grocery store and eat a few twinkies and the manager bum rushes you and makes you pay? Or, is this like picking up a discarded paper on the ferry and the guy at the news stand demanding you pay him for it?
This is like you went to the grocery store, and saw a stand with "free sample of product X", you take a sample.
A day later, you see the stand still up saying "free sample of product X", you take a sample, and the manager bum rushes you and demands $100, because you took a second sample, and the fine print says only 1 sample to a customer is free.
We bitch and whine about DRM because....
Requiring a customer username/password to access paid content on your website is not DRM; it's something else... it's called pay us before we distribute the content to you. I.e. if you don't pay you can't obtain the content legally in the first place, if download access is restricted.
DRM refers to restrictions applied to content that you obtain legally.
Surely you could do better...
Mozilla/5.0 (EULA; For the privilege of replying to this HTTP request, you agree to remit $10,000 to me within 10 days per HTTP request you answered. Responding with a 200 OK, 302 or 303 REDIRECT HTTP status code constitutes your acceptance of this agreement. Payment is to be made in funds drawn from a US bank, by valid cashier's check or postal money order payable to XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX mailed to XXXXX address)
Can someone please put it in a car analogy?
First ride's free.
The keys are in the ignition, the doors are unlocked.
Nobody's going to stop you from taking the second hit, however the gangsters are watching from a distance, and the loan sharks/hitmen are going to come after you if you take a second ride and don't leave a couple hundreds in the glove compartment.
If I made a web page saying "Anyone who views this web page legally owes me 100 USD" I think it would be difficult to enforce it in a court of law.
It wouldn't, unless you ensured that you conspicuously provided access to the terms before the user was allowed to download the page.
Specht v. Netscape
Contracts that lack competent parties, a mutual assent meeting of minds, or consideration, are not binding.
There is nothing about using a web browser that provides that the viewer is a competent party. Mutual assent is a big issue, with displaying any sort of 'term' after a web page has already been loaded.
It's not reasonable to expect a visitor will not load multiple pages, especially if they are going through search results and find multiple links -- they may not even know the multiple links point to pages on the same web site, until after they visit them.
This stupid argument gets brought up every single time by Google fans. Entering someone's home, even if the front door is unlocked, is still an act of trespassing.
But taking pictures of you naked mowing your lawn in the front yard viewable from the street is not trespassing.
If you don't want people going around with pictures, you really should cover up -- use encryption, and stop broadcasting uncoded materials with sensitive information, for the world to hear/see.
what law again?
Wiretap laws? The same ones you might violate running tcpdump on someone's network without permission, to capture e-mail contents?