If there was a shootout between rival gangs of organized criminals, and a body was found with information implicating the rest of their organization, would the police ignore the information because of the method it was gained?
Just because somebody in "the government" was involved, it doesn't make it legal, no matter what Nixon says. If a company was selling dangerous weapons to the Dept of Agriculture, they would get investigated for their practices, and the government employees involved would be subject to legal penalties.
It is the role of congress to investigate and give oversight to governmental agencies. The whole point of an investigation is to see if there was wrongdoing.
Proposing an idea is legal. Proposing an illegal idea may be subject to criminal penalties involving the words 'conspiracy to commit'. Government employees are subject to the rule of law just like the citizens.
He managed to point the finger at a few bored teenagers, who may, or may not, self identify with a hacker organization, and may or may not be involved with the actual hacking. He has no proof of any sort of wrongdoing, and who knows if the names he gathered are actual people.
On the other hand: He lost his high paying job from the company he founded. He was publicly humiliated. His company is embarrassed. His clients are embarrassed. His company may not recover, they've certainly lost a lot of future business, and been made the laughingstock of their industry, and their only hope is to rename and rebrand.
Why on earth do the Banshee developers give away 100% of the money rather than using it towards paying themselves and investing that money into their own software in some way?
More importantly, why on earth would Canonical piss off large swaths of the Linux community over something that has so far only generated a couple thousand dollars. Maybe in a few years of building, it might add up to the salary they pay one developer.
Knowing that I had jury duty the next day, I read up on the subject and learned a bit about the process and purpose as it was originally intended.
When I was selected to be on that jury, I was absolutely shocked when the judge's first action was to address the jury about our duties, which started and ended at following the letter of the law and not the spirit, and that we must base ALL decisions on the words written rather than any kind of moral duty to have justice for the people involved.
Based on conversations later with the jury pool and judge, it seems a surprising number of people consider "justice" as a concept to be entirely based on written words codified as law.
Me, like most every reasonable person in the world, certainly does not want to have You Tube, general web browsing, email, IRC, streaming music, game playing, or any of a number of other services negatively affected because Joe down the street is downloading his fifth illegal movie for the day, especially when he's likely to watch it later, or getting his next WoW updat
What if I'm Joe down the street, waiting on my linux iso to download, or waiting on my game to update? You are saying your ability to watch Justin Beiber clips on Youtube is MORE important than my ability to play my game? That is an unreasonable position to me. My traffic, whatever type it is, is no less important to me, than yours is to you. If you want to start throwing in usage patterns, and start penalizing me after a certain volume, I'm ok with that idea, and feel it is reasonable to throttle high volume users if you spell out terms and conditions when signing up for the service.
"[HBGary] proposed services to clients like a law firm working with Bank of America and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that included cyberattacks and misinformation campaigns, phishing emails and fake social networking profiles, pressuring journalists and intimidating the financial donors to clients’ enemies including WikiLeaks, unions and non-profits that opposed the Chamber."
"HBGary Federal’s Barr offered tactics like mining Classmates.com for information about a target individual’s friends, then building fake Facebook pages to gain access to subject’s personal details. He and Hoglund also discussed using spear phishing, a technique that typically plants malicious software on a user’s machine with a carefully spoofed email message."
Barr's company regularly engaged in criminal hacking behavior, working for the highest bidder and fighting against freedom. The hackers who broke into their systems and exposed this did in fact break the law also. But, they were targeting criminals. HBGary seemingly targets innocent people who have ideals about the freedom of information, journalists, and people in charities and non-profits who challenge the authority of big business. Their business is built on intimidating the weak & suppressing information.
So you think there are folks cheering for the anonymous "bad guys" who exposed all of this? You are damn right there are.
the sign potentially serves as a last warning: Let Anonymous ravage whatever they want, or die.
A sign that says, 'in it for the lulz' is a death threat? Do you really think that? If so, you must also think that Nelson on the Simpsons, going 'Ha Ha' is a death threat.
I live in Texas. On my order from Amazon from last week, I can see quite clearly on this receipt that they did not collect sales tax which they have a legal obligation to do. Your argument might hold weight if they were collecting taxes now, but they never have, and still aren't.
The law is absolutely clear, and written in black in white. No court in Texas will side with Amazon, I can assure you. Amazon has been violating state law, defrauding the citizens of Texas, and probably will be hit with a massive additional fine.
I have worked with the Texas State comptrollers office, because my company has been audited by the TX state comptrollers office several times, and I was heavily involved in the process. Audits are not fun. They aren't my favorite people, and I love ordering from Amazon.
However, Amazon is very blatantly breaking state law. The company needs to pay this fine, or it's executives will end up going to jail. It really is that simple.
We know from leaked emails that security companies hired by Bank of America and working with the FBI explicitly had the following plan to destroy wikileaks: Turn wikileaks insiders against each other, and spread FUD to dissuade people from trusting wikileaks as both a source of information, and as a safe haven to give information to.
Fast forward six months after those emails, and we have: Wikileaks insiders fighting against each other, splitting off due to distrust, and spreading information about a compromised safe upload system, and spreading various rumors and personal attacks against the frontman for the group.
Now, those rumors may or may not be true, but they certainly are an amazing coincidence considering the the leaked emails from HBGary. I'd personally wager that 99% of news stories about wikileaks have some level of disinformation involved to try to negate the impact on existing power structures. They have after all, decided to take on every government and multinational corporation in the world.
In March it was shot down, in May, the US "accidentally" bombed the Chinese Embassy. There was widespread speculation the next day that it was to destroy stealth material. It wasn't a random bomb that fell onto Embassy grounds, but the most precise bomb that was available, with GPS coordinates given by the CIA rather than military intelligence, and dropped right on top of a specific foreign agents office, 5 times.
This is actually a huge reason why otherwise talented kids abandon learning how to play a musical instrument. Cheap mass produced instruments are difficult to keep in tune, and it is nearly impossible to produce a high quality sound.
They may be played the same way, but it is very discouraging spending thousands of hours practicing on an instrument when the best result you can get is a mediocre sound quality. Most kids will give up if they can't play on a quality instrument after they learn the fundamentals.
Well, almost everyone has experienced a system crash or BSOD or similar computer failure. I can't even count the number of times I've heard non-technical people curse Bill Gates when their application crashed, whether it is an MS product or not.
When Toyota had its brake issue recently, did you ever hear anyone blame the company founder? Have you ever heard anyone blame Kiichiro Toyoda when their car had to be taken to the shop?
A large amount of people legitimately blame Bill Gates for everything that goes wrong on their computer, and hate him for that. Slashdotters hate him because of his business ethics. Some people hate him for the simple reason that he is rich. I don't know if "most" people hate him, but a lot do.
if the earth gets both hotter and cooler, does it matter?
If you look at the top grains that are used as the primary foodsource for feeding the majority of the worlds population, they have pretty specific temperature and moisture requirements for optimal growth. (Rice, Corn, Wheat, Soy, etc)
Genetic modification of crops has led to higher yields, but it has also led to a world dominated by those top producing crops, with a population dependent on being able to sustain that output. Variations in climate directly impact food output.
You might as well be asking if it matters if we lose 25% of the worlds food supply.
In reality, less than 5% of those who plead insanity are successful in the attempt. When they do succeed in their insanity plea, it doesn't let them off the hook. They are remanded to a mental hospital instead of a prison, and spend on average, a longer time in the hospital than they would in a prison for the same crime.
The insanity plea isn't a get out of jail free card. It means rather than jail, you spend years of your life in a padded room, possibly strapped down or restrained in jackets, and fed high doses of anti-psychotic narcotics.
The fact that Palin & the GOP's rhetoric included references to reloading, using the ammo box instead of the ballot box, "taking out" bad politicians, removing the liberal disease, and putting targetting crosshairs on a map while listed the name of the politican who just happened to be shot in the head, are a complete coincidence.
So, since it is a total coincidence, should we stop examining violent rhetoric that has been said by politicians or should we take a moment to reflect? Why should we be concerned about the words that politicians use, knowing that there are disturbed people who might engage in violence?
I think there is a great deal of difference between playing a game like Grand theft auto, and listening to a politician say that their opponent is destroying this country and ending our way of life. The infamous crosshairs map may not be to blame in any way, but it is still irresponsible.
Personally, I have a very hard time believing that this guy was obsessed with a member of congress to the point of attacking her, yet had never read a blog post about her.
Why is a person a bad employee if they are willing to point out poor leadership in their company? Isn't that a positive contribution to the company, if the bosses can be replaced with better leadership?
The article seems to think that pointing out flaws in the company that can be corrected are ok, but pointing out flaws in leadership shouldn't normally be allowed. I guess this article is directed at PHB's...
I think this quote from the article is an interesting explanation:
"Nevertheless," says Kaptchuk, "these findings suggest that rather than mere positive thinking, there may be significant benefit to the very performance of medical ritual. "
Sure it may be a sugar pill, but the people in the study are focusing on their disease, considering their symptoms, actively wanting the symptoms to lessen, and performing a "pill ritual". And they are doing all of this, twice a day.
Compare this to the control group, which basically only thinks about the issue when symptoms flares up.
It's amusing to me that the first comparison I thought of was Aleister Crowley, and others in the ritual magick field, who basically advocate writing your desires on a piece of paper and focusing on it once or twice a day, as the way to perform a "spell".
I'm aware that the situation only applies to my own experience. This is why I said, "in my company", and listed my business type, because you are right in environment playing a key factor. My numbers don't apply to everyone.
Personally, I do believe that banks face greater threat of theft internally than externally. Again, based on my own experiences- A guy I know was facing major medical bills for his child, while working as a teller, and skimmed money from the bank. Its not right, but he did it, and he got away with it and thousands of dollars. Second example, in my current business where we give various banks nightly deposits, we have twice pinned down shortages to the bank which led to their own internal investigations and firing/prosecuting their employees for stealing from our nightly deposits. Do you think banks are eager to publish statistics on how much internal theft they have?
I strongly suspect that CompUSA faced theft from its own employees beyond the $5 scenarios, that went undetected. But, that's just an opinion.
I would estimate the actual number at much higher than 9 out of 10. In my business (restaurant chain) I'm in charge of a approx 100 cameras at a couple dozen locations.
Company wide-
We fire at least 100-200 employees per year for theft.
We generally get burglarized a few times a year.
We've been robbed at gunpoint twice in the past decade.
Of the burglaries and robberies that I know of, at least half were inside jobs, with former or current employees to blame. So well over 99% of theft is internal, in my company. Camera positioning definitely reflects that.
You do realize that only ~1k out of ~250k have been released right? That is less than one percent.
I for one would prefer for DPRK to know it won't have allies if push comes to shove. Generally speaking, when little guys realize their big brother won't help them in a fight, they act less aggressively. But of course posturing plays an important role in negotiating a better deal.
There is the risk that information might destabilize their control and lead to violence. There is also the risk that the US and China plotting in secret to overthrow a nuclear power would lead to violence as well. Which situation is more dangerous, who can say?
Slashdot Mirror
If there was a shootout between rival gangs of organized criminals, and a body was found with information implicating the rest of their organization, would the police ignore the information because of the method it was gained?
Just because somebody in "the government" was involved, it doesn't make it legal, no matter what Nixon says. If a company was selling dangerous weapons to the Dept of Agriculture, they would get investigated for their practices, and the government employees involved would be subject to legal penalties.
It is the role of congress to investigate and give oversight to governmental agencies. The whole point of an investigation is to see if there was wrongdoing.
Proposing an idea is legal. Proposing an illegal idea may be subject to criminal penalties involving the words 'conspiracy to commit'. Government employees are subject to the rule of law just like the citizens.
Their attack was vastly more complex than anything Kevin Mitnick ever did, and he is arguably the most famous hacker in history.
He managed to point the finger at a few bored teenagers, who may, or may not, self identify with a hacker organization, and may or may not be involved with the actual hacking. He has no proof of any sort of wrongdoing, and who knows if the names he gathered are actual people.
On the other hand: He lost his high paying job from the company he founded. He was publicly humiliated. His company is embarrassed. His clients are embarrassed. His company may not recover, they've certainly lost a lot of future business, and been made the laughingstock of their industry, and their only hope is to rename and rebrand.
So... doesn't seem anywhere close to me.
Why on earth do the Banshee developers give away 100% of the money rather than using it towards paying themselves and investing that money into their own software in some way?
More importantly, why on earth would Canonical piss off large swaths of the Linux community over something that has so far only generated a couple thousand dollars. Maybe in a few years of building, it might add up to the salary they pay one developer.
That this "AIM Group" is incapable of basic math and statistical analysis.
Knowing that I had jury duty the next day, I read up on the subject and learned a bit about the process and purpose as it was originally intended.
When I was selected to be on that jury, I was absolutely shocked when the judge's first action was to address the jury about our duties, which started and ended at following the letter of the law and not the spirit, and that we must base ALL decisions on the words written rather than any kind of moral duty to have justice for the people involved.
Based on conversations later with the jury pool and judge, it seems a surprising number of people consider "justice" as a concept to be entirely based on written words codified as law.
Me, like most every reasonable person in the world, certainly does not want to have You Tube, general web browsing, email, IRC, streaming music, game playing, or any of a number of other services negatively affected because Joe down the street is downloading his fifth illegal movie for the day, especially when he's likely to watch it later, or getting his next WoW updat
What if I'm Joe down the street, waiting on my linux iso to download, or waiting on my game to update? You are saying your ability to watch Justin Beiber clips on Youtube is MORE important than my ability to play my game? That is an unreasonable position to me. My traffic, whatever type it is, is no less important to me, than yours is to you. If you want to start throwing in usage patterns, and start penalizing me after a certain volume, I'm ok with that idea, and feel it is reasonable to throttle high volume users if you spell out terms and conditions when signing up for the service.
"[HBGary] proposed services to clients like a law firm working with Bank of America and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that included cyberattacks and misinformation campaigns, phishing emails and fake social networking profiles, pressuring journalists and intimidating the financial donors to clients’ enemies including WikiLeaks, unions and non-profits that opposed the Chamber."
"HBGary Federal’s Barr offered tactics like mining Classmates.com for information about a target individual’s friends, then building fake Facebook pages to gain access to subject’s personal details. He and Hoglund also discussed using spear phishing, a technique that typically plants malicious software on a user’s machine with a carefully spoofed email message."
Barr's company regularly engaged in criminal hacking behavior, working for the highest bidder and fighting against freedom. The hackers who broke into their systems and exposed this did in fact break the law also. But, they were targeting criminals. HBGary seemingly targets innocent people who have ideals about the freedom of information, journalists, and people in charities and non-profits who challenge the authority of big business. Their business is built on intimidating the weak & suppressing information.
So you think there are folks cheering for the anonymous "bad guys" who exposed all of this? You are damn right there are.
the sign potentially serves as a last warning: Let Anonymous ravage whatever they want, or die.
A sign that says, 'in it for the lulz' is a death threat? Do you really think that? If so, you must also think that Nelson on the Simpsons, going 'Ha Ha' is a death threat.
I live in Texas. On my order from Amazon from last week, I can see quite clearly on this receipt that they did not collect sales tax which they have a legal obligation to do. Your argument might hold weight if they were collecting taxes now, but they never have, and still aren't.
The law is absolutely clear, and written in black in white. No court in Texas will side with Amazon, I can assure you. Amazon has been violating state law, defrauding the citizens of Texas, and probably will be hit with a massive additional fine.
I have worked with the Texas State comptrollers office, because my company has been audited by the TX state comptrollers office several times, and I was heavily involved in the process. Audits are not fun. They aren't my favorite people, and I love ordering from Amazon.
However, Amazon is very blatantly breaking state law. The company needs to pay this fine, or it's executives will end up going to jail. It really is that simple.
We know from leaked emails that security companies hired by Bank of America and working with the FBI explicitly had the following plan to destroy wikileaks: Turn wikileaks insiders against each other, and spread FUD to dissuade people from trusting wikileaks as both a source of information, and as a safe haven to give information to.
Fast forward six months after those emails, and we have: Wikileaks insiders fighting against each other, splitting off due to distrust, and spreading information about a compromised safe upload system, and spreading various rumors and personal attacks against the frontman for the group.
Now, those rumors may or may not be true, but they certainly are an amazing coincidence considering the the leaked emails from HBGary. I'd personally wager that 99% of news stories about wikileaks have some level of disinformation involved to try to negate the impact on existing power structures. They have after all, decided to take on every government and multinational corporation in the world.
Res ipsa loquitur
In March it was shot down, in May, the US "accidentally" bombed the Chinese Embassy. There was widespread speculation the next day that it was to destroy stealth material. It wasn't a random bomb that fell onto Embassy grounds, but the most precise bomb that was available, with GPS coordinates given by the CIA rather than military intelligence, and dropped right on top of a specific foreign agents office, 5 times.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._bombing_of_the_Chinese_embassy_in_Belgrade
This is actually a huge reason why otherwise talented kids abandon learning how to play a musical instrument. Cheap mass produced instruments are difficult to keep in tune, and it is nearly impossible to produce a high quality sound.
They may be played the same way, but it is very discouraging spending thousands of hours practicing on an instrument when the best result you can get is a mediocre sound quality. Most kids will give up if they can't play on a quality instrument after they learn the fundamentals.
Maybe you should tell that to the iphone app developers that got kicked out of the App store for being "porn" despite only showing girls in bikinis.
Well, almost everyone has experienced a system crash or BSOD or similar computer failure. I can't even count the number of times I've heard non-technical people curse Bill Gates when their application crashed, whether it is an MS product or not.
When Toyota had its brake issue recently, did you ever hear anyone blame the company founder? Have you ever heard anyone blame Kiichiro Toyoda when their car had to be taken to the shop?
A large amount of people legitimately blame Bill Gates for everything that goes wrong on their computer, and hate him for that. Slashdotters hate him because of his business ethics. Some people hate him for the simple reason that he is rich. I don't know if "most" people hate him, but a lot do.
if the earth gets both hotter and cooler, does it matter?
If you look at the top grains that are used as the primary foodsource for feeding the majority of the worlds population, they have pretty specific temperature and moisture requirements for optimal growth. (Rice, Corn, Wheat, Soy, etc)
Genetic modification of crops has led to higher yields, but it has also led to a world dominated by those top producing crops, with a population dependent on being able to sustain that output. Variations in climate directly impact food output.
You might as well be asking if it matters if we lose 25% of the worlds food supply.
In reality, less than 5% of those who plead insanity are successful in the attempt. When they do succeed in their insanity plea, it doesn't let them off the hook. They are remanded to a mental hospital instead of a prison, and spend on average, a longer time in the hospital than they would in a prison for the same crime.
The insanity plea isn't a get out of jail free card. It means rather than jail, you spend years of your life in a padded room, possibly strapped down or restrained in jackets, and fed high doses of anti-psychotic narcotics.
The fact that Palin & the GOP's rhetoric included references to reloading, using the ammo box instead of the ballot box, "taking out" bad politicians, removing the liberal disease, and putting targetting crosshairs on a map while listed the name of the politican who just happened to be shot in the head, are a complete coincidence.
So, since it is a total coincidence, should we stop examining violent rhetoric that has been said by politicians or should we take a moment to reflect? Why should we be concerned about the words that politicians use, knowing that there are disturbed people who might engage in violence?
I think there is a great deal of difference between playing a game like Grand theft auto, and listening to a politician say that their opponent is destroying this country and ending our way of life. The infamous crosshairs map may not be to blame in any way, but it is still irresponsible. Personally, I have a very hard time believing that this guy was obsessed with a member of congress to the point of attacking her, yet had never read a blog post about her.
Why is a person a bad employee if they are willing to point out poor leadership in their company? Isn't that a positive contribution to the company, if the bosses can be replaced with better leadership? The article seems to think that pointing out flaws in the company that can be corrected are ok, but pointing out flaws in leadership shouldn't normally be allowed. I guess this article is directed at PHB's...
I think this quote from the article is an interesting explanation:
"Nevertheless," says Kaptchuk, "these findings suggest that rather than mere positive thinking, there may be significant benefit to the very performance of medical ritual. "
Sure it may be a sugar pill, but the people in the study are focusing on their disease, considering their symptoms, actively wanting the symptoms to lessen, and performing a "pill ritual". And they are doing all of this, twice a day.
Compare this to the control group, which basically only thinks about the issue when symptoms flares up.
It's amusing to me that the first comparison I thought of was Aleister Crowley, and others in the ritual magick field, who basically advocate writing your desires on a piece of paper and focusing on it once or twice a day, as the way to perform a "spell".
I'm aware that the situation only applies to my own experience. This is why I said, "in my company", and listed my business type, because you are right in environment playing a key factor. My numbers don't apply to everyone.
Personally, I do believe that banks face greater threat of theft internally than externally. Again, based on my own experiences- A guy I know was facing major medical bills for his child, while working as a teller, and skimmed money from the bank. Its not right, but he did it, and he got away with it and thousands of dollars. Second example, in my current business where we give various banks nightly deposits, we have twice pinned down shortages to the bank which led to their own internal investigations and firing/prosecuting their employees for stealing from our nightly deposits. Do you think banks are eager to publish statistics on how much internal theft they have?
I strongly suspect that CompUSA faced theft from its own employees beyond the $5 scenarios, that went undetected. But, that's just an opinion.
I would estimate the actual number at much higher than 9 out of 10. In my business (restaurant chain) I'm in charge of a approx 100 cameras at a couple dozen locations.
Company wide-
We fire at least 100-200 employees per year for theft.
We generally get burglarized a few times a year.
We've been robbed at gunpoint twice in the past decade.
Of the burglaries and robberies that I know of, at least half were inside jobs, with former or current employees to blame. So well over 99% of theft is internal, in my company. Camera positioning definitely reflects that.
You do realize that only ~1k out of ~250k have been released right? That is less than one percent.
I for one would prefer for DPRK to know it won't have allies if push comes to shove. Generally speaking, when little guys realize their big brother won't help them in a fight, they act less aggressively. But of course posturing plays an important role in negotiating a better deal.
There is the risk that information might destabilize their control and lead to violence. There is also the risk that the US and China plotting in secret to overthrow a nuclear power would lead to violence as well. Which situation is more dangerous, who can say?