I kind of agree with you, but many people don't care about the public good, know there is little chance of being caught, and so will jam for a small financial or personal gain, or to maintain their privacy. This undermines the stability of the GPS, arguably, but no government can stamp out low-level abuses like this, except by removing the impetus that is leading human nature to the abuse. People are people and will ignore inconvenient laws if they feel it's in their interest.
The GPS is more important than some petty car mileage fraud though. Apparently our whole civilisation is threatened if the GPS becomes unreliable. If the integrity of the GPS is threatened by this epidemic of people trying to fiddle their mileage, then the only real solution is to remove the root cause of the threat (corporate snooping) because people will always find ways to fiddle their mileage. The companies doing the snooping are effectively crowd-sourcing a DDOS on GPS.
The problem is that it is easy to imagine a general purpose radio transmitter with configurable output frequency that could be tuned to broadcast whatever signal is required, within a given range. You can't really legislate against people building this sort of thing, because intent is all.
Jamming GPS is not like shooting down a plane. Planes have people on board (usually) and financial value which is destroyed in the crash. The GPS is a military installation that beams radio waves from space, so jamming it does not damage it, not kill any pilots or passengers.
Jammers are the only way to prevent this invasion of privacy though. Until laws are mading forcing corporations to back off and stop tracking people, people will use whatever tools are available. If you find the general population start jamming GPS (rather than criminals on some kind of heist) then the only way to realistic defend the GPS is to remove the threat to it - invasion of privacy by corporations. Don't get me wrong, I understand why they want to hijack GPS for their own financial gain, but this is not its purpose, and criminalising people who legitimately want privacy will not protec the GPS.
So someone called up your brother, told him they were from the ISP, and manipulated him to run some software on his computer? That all sounds rather dangerous to me. How did he know he could trust this person?
tl/dr but just a thought: maybe you should have a single message at the top about why the person's account is broken and who they have to call to get it fixed.
Probably most people jam GPS so that organisations cannot spy on their vehicles through trackers, and it has nothing to do with criminality - they just want a bit of privacy while they go about their business in the company vehicle, and don't want someone snooping on them. The simple way to stop this would be to make it illegal to track people in this way, or mandatory for them to have a privacy switch which undetectably turned off the snooper.
Anything Russia and China are in favour of is more likely to happen. Didn't you notice who has economic growth and is currently buying the west? Our bankers screwed up so badly we lost the cold war.
I will never buy music again. You have shown yourselves unworthy of my money. There is already enough music, and enough people willing to make new music for their own pleasure and that of their audience, and to sell it through their own online channels. We have our own delivery mechanism and payment mechanism thank you. We don't need a music industry any more.
Or someone may have changed the timezone in the OS they used to construct the PDF, inadvertently or deliberately, or they may not have changed the timezone in the OS since the default it came with which differed from that of HI.
I am not alleging that anyone has been convicted. I wasn't aware anyone has even been near a court. SOCA alleged in their original message that they had been investigating the actions of individual filesharers. This may have been a mistake a lie, or the truth. None of these options give me comfort that they are either acting both professionally and within their proper authority. Recent history of relations between police and media companies, and the lack of charges and prosecutions for the many serious offences which have come to light on both sides, makes me question whether this new investigation is in the public interest, or in the interest of corporations, and whether the police understand the difference, whether they care, and who they are really working for.
There is plenty of history here of failures to investigate, whether through bungling, outright criminality, or a combination, when the police get in bed with media corporations. You only have to look at the endemic (alleged) bribery of police officers by media corporations, and failure to prosecute those involved. Alternatively, the failure to investigate (alleged) criminal phone hacking by media corporations for years, despite widespread knowledge of its occurrence, and the inability or unwillingness to this day to prosecute those who (allegedly) profited. Just because an organisation is large does not make it any less susceptible to mistakes or criminality, nor does the fact that the organisation is the police. In this case I think it is quite a simple thing. SOCA wants to detect e-crime, the corporations want to clamp down on their competition, and the two got together and concocted a half-baked investigation/judgement/jury/conviction process, with half-baked legal justifications. Both know there is no realistic chance of either being prosecuted for anything they do, so are willing to ignore what the actual laws are for the sake of a few collars and some publicity. I'll feel much happy when the police are reigned in and the courts and due process are involved before people's businesses are attacked in this way, and their names slandered.
Just to address your point about mutual incompatibility, perhaps I could have been clearer. It is almost impossible to prove prejudice beyond reasonable doubt, as you said. Causing prejudice is a crime. File sharing is not a crime unless it leads to prejudice.
I read the events a little differently. It sounds more likely to me that they posted a message about what they did, at the same time threatening individuals on behalf of the corporate interests that are behind the raid in the first place. Then they realised that they had overstepped both their own authority and the law of the land, and withdrew their confession. I have no intimate working knowledge of SOCA either, but I can't think of any other plausible reason why they would have posted that message. The message is either a lie about what they did, in which case posting the message was possibly a criminal act, and possibly with civil implications for the individuals involved, or the message is true, in which case it was an abuse of their powers, and also possibly criminal in terms of the threats.
So it sounds like we more or less agree that file sharing itself is not a crime then. The difficulty of proving prejudice, beyond reasonable doubt, from any individual instance of file sharing makes it sound almost impossible that anyone would be tried for file sharing, let alone convicted in court, unless they shared vast amounts of material to many people. So what is the e-crime agency doing investigating the non-criminal activities of file sharers? SOCA's own statement on the censored website claimed that they had been investigating individual users of the site to the extent that they were aware they had cleared their browsing histories. It all sounds fishy, and rather like abuse of pawer, or at the very least misdirection of powers, and a waste of public resources investigating non-crimes. Meanwhile the directors of companies which profited from routinely hacking the phones of victims of crime go scot-free.
I hear what you are saying, but I disagree that sharing a song is of a sufficient extent to prejudicially affect anyone. Have the courts made case law on when sharing becomes prejudicial?
I took time to learn something new (genetics and genomics) and found my skills were applicable and the work and learning very interesting. Don't expect to make this kind of real change in your life without seriously downsizing all the crap you don't really need (house, car, holidays etc.). These things are a large part of what is tying you to doing something you don't want to.
Slashdot Mirror
'might indirectly cause damage' is different from 'kills people and writes off million dollar plane'
I kind of agree with you, but many people don't care about the public good, know there is little chance of being caught, and so will jam for a small financial or personal gain, or to maintain their privacy. This undermines the stability of the GPS, arguably, but no government can stamp out low-level abuses like this, except by removing the impetus that is leading human nature to the abuse. People are people and will ignore inconvenient laws if they feel it's in their interest.
The GPS is more important than some petty car mileage fraud though. Apparently our whole civilisation is threatened if the GPS becomes unreliable. If the integrity of the GPS is threatened by this epidemic of people trying to fiddle their mileage, then the only real solution is to remove the root cause of the threat (corporate snooping) because people will always find ways to fiddle their mileage. The companies doing the snooping are effectively crowd-sourcing a DDOS on GPS.
The problem is that it is easy to imagine a general purpose radio transmitter with configurable output frequency that could be tuned to broadcast whatever signal is required, within a given range. You can't really legislate against people building this sort of thing, because intent is all.
Jamming GPS is not like shooting down a plane. Planes have people on board (usually) and financial value which is destroyed in the crash. The GPS is a military installation that beams radio waves from space, so jamming it does not damage it, not kill any pilots or passengers.
Jammers are the only way to prevent this invasion of privacy though. Until laws are mading forcing corporations to back off and stop tracking people, people will use whatever tools are available. If you find the general population start jamming GPS (rather than criminals on some kind of heist) then the only way to realistic defend the GPS is to remove the threat to it - invasion of privacy by corporations. Don't get me wrong, I understand why they want to hijack GPS for their own financial gain, but this is not its purpose, and criminalising people who legitimately want privacy will not protec the GPS.
So someone called up your brother, told him they were from the ISP, and manipulated him to run some software on his computer? That all sounds rather dangerous to me. How did he know he could trust this person?
unless virus uses vpn and tricky routing
tl/dr but just a thought: maybe you should have a single message at the top about why the person's account is broken and who they have to call to get it fixed.
s/criminals/people sleeping with the boss's wife? might not want to get tracked.
or by corporations
Probably most people jam GPS so that organisations cannot spy on their vehicles through trackers, and it has nothing to do with criminality - they just want a bit of privacy while they go about their business in the company vehicle, and don't want someone snooping on them. The simple way to stop this would be to make it illegal to track people in this way, or mandatory for them to have a privacy switch which undetectably turned off the snooper.
Anything Russia and China are in favour of is more likely to happen. Didn't you notice who has economic growth and is currently buying the west? Our bankers screwed up so badly we lost the cold war.
Communists will soon be running everything. Didn't you notice who is buying the bits left over from the fail capitalism? China is winning.
anon will look after anon's internet. It doesn't belong to the US or anyone else.
I will never buy music again. You have shown yourselves unworthy of my money. There is already enough music, and enough people willing to make new music for their own pleasure and that of their audience, and to sell it through their own online channels. We have our own delivery mechanism and payment mechanism thank you. We don't need a music industry any more.
Or someone may have changed the timezone in the OS they used to construct the PDF, inadvertently or deliberately, or they may not have changed the timezone in the OS since the default it came with which differed from that of HI.
Institute chooses names it thinks sounds reassuring but falls into uncanny valley and ends up sounding a bit creepy.
I am not alleging that anyone has been convicted. I wasn't aware anyone has even been near a court. SOCA alleged in their original message that they had been investigating the actions of individual filesharers. This may have been a mistake a lie, or the truth. None of these options give me comfort that they are either acting both professionally and within their proper authority. Recent history of relations between police and media companies, and the lack of charges and prosecutions for the many serious offences which have come to light on both sides, makes me question whether this new investigation is in the public interest, or in the interest of corporations, and whether the police understand the difference, whether they care, and who they are really working for.
There is plenty of history here of failures to investigate, whether through bungling, outright criminality, or a combination, when the police get in bed with media corporations. You only have to look at the endemic (alleged) bribery of police officers by media corporations, and failure to prosecute those involved. Alternatively, the failure to investigate (alleged) criminal phone hacking by media corporations for years, despite widespread knowledge of its occurrence, and the inability or unwillingness to this day to prosecute those who (allegedly) profited. Just because an organisation is large does not make it any less susceptible to mistakes or criminality, nor does the fact that the organisation is the police. In this case I think it is quite a simple thing. SOCA wants to detect e-crime, the corporations want to clamp down on their competition, and the two got together and concocted a half-baked investigation/judgement/jury/conviction process, with half-baked legal justifications. Both know there is no realistic chance of either being prosecuted for anything they do, so are willing to ignore what the actual laws are for the sake of a few collars and some publicity. I'll feel much happy when the police are reigned in and the courts and due process are involved before people's businesses are attacked in this way, and their names slandered.
Just to address your point about mutual incompatibility, perhaps I could have been clearer. It is almost impossible to prove prejudice beyond reasonable doubt, as you said. Causing prejudice is a crime. File sharing is not a crime unless it leads to prejudice.
I read the events a little differently. It sounds more likely to me that they posted a message about what they did, at the same time threatening individuals on behalf of the corporate interests that are behind the raid in the first place. Then they realised that they had overstepped both their own authority and the law of the land, and withdrew their confession. I have no intimate working knowledge of SOCA either, but I can't think of any other plausible reason why they would have posted that message. The message is either a lie about what they did, in which case posting the message was possibly a criminal act, and possibly with civil implications for the individuals involved, or the message is true, in which case it was an abuse of their powers, and also possibly criminal in terms of the threats.
So it sounds like we more or less agree that file sharing itself is not a crime then. The difficulty of proving prejudice, beyond reasonable doubt, from any individual instance of file sharing makes it sound almost impossible that anyone would be tried for file sharing, let alone convicted in court, unless they shared vast amounts of material to many people. So what is the e-crime agency doing investigating the non-criminal activities of file sharers? SOCA's own statement on the censored website claimed that they had been investigating individual users of the site to the extent that they were aware they had cleared their browsing histories. It all sounds fishy, and rather like abuse of pawer, or at the very least misdirection of powers, and a waste of public resources investigating non-crimes. Meanwhile the directors of companies which profited from routinely hacking the phones of victims of crime go scot-free.
I hear what you are saying, but I disagree that sharing a song is of a sufficient extent to prejudicially affect anyone. Have the courts made case law on when sharing becomes prejudicial?
I took time to learn something new (genetics and genomics) and found my skills were applicable and the work and learning very interesting. Don't expect to make this kind of real change in your life without seriously downsizing all the crap you don't really need (house, car, holidays etc.). These things are a large part of what is tying you to doing something you don't want to.