you might be surprised to know that what you consider technically private is not necessairly what the courts or the common person considers private.
There is a difference between "private" and "top secret". Saying something is private does not imply it's impossible for someone to read it.
If you address some communication to an individual, and it's not in a place where the general public can access, it's generally considered private. There is a reasonable expectation of privacy.
If you are shouting in a restaurant, you have no expectation of privacy. If you are whispering to someone outside, you DO have an expectation of privacy.. the fact that someone can listen in with a parabolic microphone because you are "emitting sound waves" does not negate your right to privacy. With regards to SECURITY, yes, you should treate email like a postcard; that does not imply it's the legal equivalent of one.
And if we forget technical details.. knowingly publishing something you KNOW was not meant for you to read, how can you say there was no expectation of privacy?
Just a bit of a differnet look. The problem with this whole file sharing music p2p blah blah fiasco is that, well, the logistics surrounding "copying" were very different when copyright law was drafted. This here is a whole other situation.
I think we can all agree, more or less on a few things.
1) You can't just look at the act of copying anymore, to determine if something is morally correct or not. My web browser caching stuff, or my making a backup of my own stuff and putting it in a safe place, nobody with any common sense would tell me that it should be illegal, or that I'm harmful to society for doing it.
2) I should be able to let my buddy listen to my music, regardless of whether that mechanism involves a "copy" or not.
3) I should NOT be allowed to give away or sell copies of my music so that others don't have to purchase music, ever.
So.. the problem is we have no way to really define what's allowed and what's not.. digital makes it so easy to move music around, that we can't just look at 'copies' or 'streaming -vs- non streaming' or whatever.. we have to look at someone's overall actions. Perhaps, like some, sorry to say, drug laws, it should depend on the amount of copyrighted material you are trafficking in. Personal use woudl be a valid defence. Perhaps we should ban IP altogether, and go for purely technical solutions. I'm for the other.. having strong laws, and open technology.
Really? I thought the AHRA just said you can't be charged with making copies using equipment covered by the act for non commercial use.
That's regarding the act of making the copies only.. distribution is another matter.
ie: If you use some equipment to make copies for your commercial cd pirating ring, you can be charged with both distribution, AND for the act of the copying itself.
If you make copies for a non-commercial purpose, the act of copying is legal. The act of distribution to your friends, howver, may not be.
Then, I look at a successful online music sales like Apples iTunes Store... okay
You grab a track. It's not CD quality, but it's good, akin to a well encoded 160kbps mp3 or therabouts from what I've seen/heard. It does use a proprietary apple codec. Okay.
There is some DRM. So.. what does Apple say (granted, they are not the copyright holder).
iTunes lets you transfer it ot other computers a few times before it forbids it. It lets you burn a CD from teh same playlist 5 times before refusing again... and hey, you can always burn a CD from the music you grabbed, and just make copies all you want.
The point is.. it has casual DRM, and it's purpose is to bring the music they sell down to the same level as a CD in terms of piracy.. sure you can pirate it. They aren't making it easier for you to pirate music, tha'ts all... they also aren't really making it hard. They are just making it so that joe average who doesn't really care sees a few restirctions that probably keep honest people honest.
This is the kind of drm I don't mind... they aren't trying to re-invent the world, they are just taking some good-faith measures with regards to how they handle content.. and they are very up-front about what you can and cannot do. For some reason, I don' find it offensive at all. What bugs me more is the idea of paying a whopping $1 per song. Knock that back to 50c or gimme some special deals, and we're in business.
Make it easy... like this. Offer deals... after all, your incremental costs are small. Make it cheap enough, and we won't even be whining about our "rights" so much.. after all, us consumers only whine when things get inconvenient. We get pissed becuase they are trying to sell us broken CDs with DRM and other shit on them for $20, and then call us thieves for doing a little swapping... not just because DRM is there at all. If my choice is pay full price for a CD, or pay much less for online mp3-quality tracks with some restrictions that aren't too draconian, i'll probably spend way more online.
as you will see, buying a CD in the store is NOT a "licensing" purchase, you sign no license agreement. IT's not about a license.. it's about COPYRIGHT LAW.
Copyright law gives you some freedoms with the work you just purchased. You are not required to keep your proof of purchase around forever, sorry we're not talking about corporate software licensing here, we're talking about buying cds and records in the store, which is a standard, normal sale...
I repeat, there is no license agreement... implied or otherwise. The only reason you cannot make copies of the product you bought and sell them to others is because copyright law says you can't, as you aren't the holder of the copyright.
Let me repeat that. I don't have to keep my receipts around. I can make a copy of a CD I bought, and throw the original in the garbage. I'm not breaking some law.
But receiving and publishing private correspondence that's destined for someone else is not. When you purchase a domain someone els used, it's NOT the same thing as purchasing their business from them.. it doesn't automatically entitle you to anything.. other than the domain.
Pretend you moved into an office, and got mail delivered to the previous occupant... it's still a federal crime for you to open that mail if it's not addressed to you. Now, I'm not saying it's necessarily as clear cut with email, but it's the same general thing, and it is immoral.
If I move out of the house I rent, and you move in.. the junkmail is yours.. but anything addressed to ME, personally, is not, and the law agrees.
I think it's safe to say that this IS a morally questionable act.. though so is SPAM. I won't go screaming that they did this in a bad way.. but if it was anyone other than spammers.. say it was, I don't know, a doctor's website, and it was a patient mailing.. would taking that mail and publishing it be morally correct? I think we would all agree no.
In that what you call somethign is arbitrary. You say "netBSD and FreeBSD and OpenBSD kernels are similar" or "You only call it linux becaues of the kernel".
Yes, these are all true statements.. but unfortunately, it means more than that, at least to many of us out here.
When someone describes a system as "BSD" I expect to find the bsd style tools I expect on a bsd system.. and that is FAR more important to me than the innards of the kernel I may never ever get to even see. There are many more real world implications of calling it BSD than the kernel.
GUI is not OS, as you say. Couldn't agree more.
If you don't want to call OSX BSD, that's fine.. I guess BSD has different meanings for you. It probably means "FreeBSD or NetBSD or OpenBSD.
Personally, I have a problem calling FreeBSD BSD or OpneBSD BSD.. as none of them are actually BDS, they are derivations of it.
If you think "Linux" Just means the kernel... well, sure, that's technically correct, I surely understand that... but when people talk about a "linux server" you know damn well they are talking about more than just the kernel.. the same goes for when people in general speak about bsd.
Not everyone is a kernel developer.
Recompilation doesn't bring a lot of issues; porting is rather easy. Does that make it simpler?
Although disorders like this have, at least in some cases, definite biochemical causes, we don't just say "Paranoid" "Not paranoid" "Schizophrenic" "Not schizophrenic" "ADD" "NOT ADD"
All of these are just tools to help us understand. If we show that there is a link between people with attention span problems, and the way their brains react to new information, how is that not science, or not important?
Some people are taller than others. Some people have dark skin. When you drop a hammer it falls. If we don't investigate why, and always look for a deeper understanding of what's going on.. what's the point ?
1 "The OSX desktop isn't networked, so this isn't a remote exploit, so it doesn't matter, anyone with physical access can break in anyway" 2 "OSX is not real bsd / not real unix" 3 "This is what you get for having closed source"
1 - Yes, it's more or less a local exploit. So what? Does that mean it doesn't matter? 2 - Yes, it is. 3 - Lots of open source apps have had security vulnerabilities. Let's wait and see how apple deals with it.
Having used BSD in most of it's incarnations over the years, as well as many other unix and unix like systems, I would very MUCH call OSX a flavor of BSD. Since when does using mach disqualify it? IF by "some re-used bsd pieces" you mean "an entire BSD system" then yeah, I guess so.
If you rip aqua off, which you can certainly do, (or hey, you could just grab darwin and build your own), sure, you could say it's not osx.. you'd call it darwin, probably. Then again, if I take Mandrake Linux, ditch KDE, Gnome, and X, and use one of the lightweight framebuffer based non-x GUIS, is it still linux? What if I take another unix, say Solaris, take off X, and write a gui app that uses the framebuffer directly.. is it still unix?
Trying to say "it has a custom gui so it's not unix" is rediculous... unix has no requirement for any particular gui. X is available in several formats for OSX.... in fact, it's Xfree86 even.
As a unix user, developer, fanatic... I have no problem calling OSX "unix" or "bsd" or whatever.. those are both words that accurately describe what's going on inside.
It's been shelved, the microswitch on Button1 died.. but it's fixable.
I don't find the same things happen, at all.. I did on the first MS Intellimouse Opticals.. but I can lift my logitech opticals no problem..... as for sensitivity.... I found the razor not really that much more sensitive. I can execute all the same manoevers with my logitech dual optical that I could with the boomslang.
I can turn or reposition the mouse with no more error than I got with the boomslang.
In all honesty, I would use the boomslang if the button worked again.. but probably only cause it's weird, and I blew a hundred bucks on it.
And that's just the problem.. you don't.. but then again, you don't know. Who's to say some semi organized types don't sit around, sniffing, looking for the right information that they can profit from. Think it won't happen?
It's not just wireless... I stayed at a hotel near a major american airport recently, they had free broadband in the room.. provided over ethernet. Know how many other businesspersons computers showed up in a quick scan of that lan? Lots. Know how insecure they were? Quite. It occurred to me that, hey, all some geek has to do is get a couple laptops ready to gather data automatically, book a room for the night, enjoy the movies and room service, and gather all night. By morning, you'd have password to all KINDS of good stuff.
Saying "It's not realistic, it won't happen" is just as extreme as saying "There are evil hackers everywhere". The truth is that there IS a significant risk, and the more connected we get without fixing it, the larger the risk is.
That's kind of invalid at this point.. nobody disputes that at a time in the not too distant past, growing hemp was not illegal in any way. It was just a plant.
Yeah, I mean it's not like home users access services at work, bank accounts, online shopping, credit cards, in house file sharing, personal financial correspondence, IP phone calls, and so on... they really have nothing to worry about.
Hey.. why not stick your filing cabinet in the front yard with all the papers in it and say "free shit!" too!
Home users don't treat security as a big deal because they don't KNOW the issues, because they are a bit too technical.. because joe average doesn't have time to get into the details.. not because he doesn't care about security.
the point of WEP is misunderstood, as well. Yes, it was poorly implemented.. but it was not supposed to be the data security layer anyway... just "wired equivalent" That means.. it was supposed to be roughly as hard to get access to the actual network packets as it is when someone has a wired lan.
The wire is not secure, as you know. Wires can be tapped numerous ways, invasively, or passively. Yes, the logic is kind of flawed, the situation is different.. but it just makes it harder to sniff, not impossible.
IT wasn't supposed to be a replacement for using secure protocols.
but not as trivial as sniffing on an unswitched network.
Furthermore... if I'm the sysadmin, and I catch you running a sniffer, well, I probably won't care.
If I catch you doing arp poisoning in order to intercept traffic on a switched lan, I'm going to yank your connection / get you fired / expelled / press charges for hacking. One involves listening. The other involves messing with stuff and deliberately breaking how things work.
And with some patience, very little in fact, your car door can be opened, and your car stolen, or your house door opened, and your house cleaned out... but that doens't mean we run around leaving our doors unlocked and open.
Furthermore... there are legal implications. Is sniffing out POP passwords in this way illegal? Probably, but maybe not.. but is doing so off an encrypted channel illegal? Most certainly... as there is no logical way you can deny that you kneew the signal was supposed to be private.
Now, if you are the 1 in a million, so that might narrow it down to, say, 300 people in the US of A who have the same profile as you more or less, when they go to court and say well honorably jurors, Mr. Smith was in the club on the night of the murder, was banging the deceased's wife, and they were heard having an argument outside earlier that night, and there is no alibi. Also, the DNA evidence matches.
The fact that some others might also have the same dna is about as valid as saying there were 300 other people in the nightclub.. both are just one point leading up to a case.
Investigation is investigation. We're talking about the murder of a young girl here.. if the cops want to follow you, they CAN. If they have reason to follow everyone in the neighborhood, which they were probably going to do ANYWAY, because they had a strong reason to suspect someone from the neighborhood, asking everyone to submit a DNA sample to clear themselves is NOT a bad thing, it's your chance to simply help them out, and not have to waste time following you. IT's your way of saying "I didn't do it" and having them believe you.
Notice they didn't ask everyone in Canada.. just those who were in the neighborhood, and hence, already suspects.
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you might be surprised to know that what you consider technically private is not necessairly what the courts or the common person considers private.
There is a difference between "private" and "top secret". Saying something is private does not imply it's impossible for someone to read it.
If you address some communication to an individual, and it's not in a place where the general public can access, it's generally considered private. There is a reasonable expectation of privacy.
If you are shouting in a restaurant, you have no expectation of privacy. If you are whispering to someone outside, you DO have an expectation of privacy.. the fact that someone can listen in with a parabolic microphone because you are "emitting sound waves" does not negate your right to privacy.
With regards to SECURITY, yes, you should treate email like a postcard; that does not imply it's the legal equivalent of one.
And if we forget technical details.. knowingly publishing something you KNOW was not meant for you to read, how can you say there was no expectation of privacy?
Just a bit of a differnet look.
The problem with this whole file sharing music p2p blah blah fiasco is that, well, the logistics surrounding "copying" were very different when copyright law was drafted. This here is a whole other situation.
I think we can all agree, more or less on a few things.
1) You can't just look at the act of copying anymore, to determine if something is morally correct or not. My web browser caching stuff, or my making a backup of my own stuff and putting it in a safe place, nobody with any common sense would tell me that it should be illegal, or that I'm harmful to society for doing it.
2) I should be able to let my buddy listen to my music, regardless of whether that mechanism involves a "copy" or not.
3) I should NOT be allowed to give away or sell copies of my music so that others don't have to purchase music, ever.
So.. the problem is we have no way to really define what's allowed and what's not.. digital makes it so easy to move music around, that we can't just look at 'copies' or 'streaming -vs- non streaming' or whatever.. we have to look at someone's overall actions. Perhaps, like some, sorry to say, drug laws, it should depend on the amount of copyrighted material you are trafficking in. Personal use woudl be a valid defence. Perhaps we should ban IP altogether, and go for purely technical solutions. I'm for the other.. having strong laws, and open technology.
Really? I thought the AHRA just said you can't be charged with making copies using equipment covered by the act for non commercial use.
That's regarding the act of making the copies only.. distribution is another matter.
ie: If you use some equipment to make copies for your commercial cd pirating ring, you can be charged with both distribution, AND for the act of the copying itself.
If you make copies for a non-commercial purpose, the act of copying is legal.
The act of distribution to your friends, howver, may not be.
Copyright law already prevents such uses.
Just as with a CD you buy at the store.
Then, I look at a successful online music sales like Apples iTunes Store... okay
You grab a track. It's not CD quality, but it's good, akin to a well encoded 160kbps mp3 or therabouts from what I've seen/heard. It does use a proprietary apple codec. Okay.
There is some DRM. So.. what does Apple say (granted, they are not the copyright holder).
iTunes lets you transfer it ot other computers a few times before it forbids it. It lets you burn a CD from teh same playlist 5 times before refusing again... and hey, you can always burn a CD from the music you grabbed, and just make copies all you want.
The point is.. it has casual DRM, and it's purpose is to bring the music they sell down to the same level as a CD in terms of piracy.. sure you can pirate it. They aren't making it easier for you to pirate music, tha'ts all... they also aren't really making it hard. They are just making it so that joe average who doesn't really care sees a few restirctions that probably keep honest people honest.
This is the kind of drm I don't mind... they aren't trying to re-invent the world, they are just taking some good-faith measures with regards to how they handle content.. and they are very up-front about what you can and cannot do. For some reason, I don' find it offensive at all. What bugs me more is the idea of paying a whopping $1 per song. Knock that back to 50c or gimme some special deals, and we're in business.
Make it easy... like this. Offer deals... after all, your incremental costs are small. Make it cheap enough, and we won't even be whining about our "rights" so much.. after all, us consumers only whine when things get inconvenient. We get pissed becuase they are trying to sell us broken CDs with DRM and other shit on them for $20, and then call us thieves for doing a little swapping... not just because DRM is there at all. If my choice is pay full price for a CD, or pay much less for online mp3-quality tracks with some restrictions that aren't too draconian, i'll probably spend way more online.
as you will see, buying a CD in the store is NOT a "licensing" purchase, you sign no license agreement. IT's not about a license.. it's about COPYRIGHT LAW.
Copyright law gives you some freedoms with the work you just purchased. You are not required to keep your proof of purchase around forever, sorry
we're not talking about corporate software licensing here, we're talking about buying cds and records in the store, which is a standard, normal sale...
I repeat, there is no license agreement... implied or otherwise. The only reason you cannot make copies of the product you bought and sell them to others is because copyright law says you can't, as you aren't the holder of the copyright.
Let me repeat that. I don't have to keep my receipts around. I can make a copy of a CD I bought, and throw the original in the garbage. I'm not breaking some law.
They didn't hijack the domain.
But receiving and publishing private correspondence that's destined for someone else is not. When you purchase a domain someone els used, it's NOT the same thing as purchasing their business from them.. it doesn't automatically entitle you to anything.. other than the domain.
Pretend you moved into an office, and got mail delivered to the previous occupant... it's still a federal crime for you to open that mail if it's not addressed to you. Now, I'm not saying it's necessarily as clear cut with email, but it's the same general thing, and it is immoral.
If I move out of the house I rent, and you move in.. the junkmail is yours.. but anything addressed to ME, personally, is not, and the law agrees.
I think it's safe to say that this IS a morally questionable act.. though so is SPAM. I won't go screaming that they did this in a bad way.. but if it was anyone other than spammers.. say it was, I don't know, a doctor's website, and it was a patient mailing.. would taking that mail and publishing it be morally correct? I think we would all agree no.
In that what you call somethign is arbitrary. .
You say "netBSD and FreeBSD and OpenBSD kernels are similar" or "You only call it linux becaues of the kernel"
Yes, these are all true statements.. but unfortunately, it means more than that, at least to many of us out here.
When someone describes a system as "BSD" I expect to find the bsd style tools I expect on a bsd system.. and that is FAR more important to me than the innards of the kernel I may never ever get to even see. There are many more real world implications of calling it BSD than the kernel.
GUI is not OS, as you say. Couldn't agree more.
If you don't want to call OSX BSD, that's fine.. I guess BSD has different meanings for you. It probably means "FreeBSD or NetBSD or OpenBSD.
Personally, I have a problem calling FreeBSD BSD or OpneBSD BSD.. as none of them are actually BDS, they are derivations of it.
If you think "Linux" Just means the kernel... well, sure, that's technically correct, I surely understand that... but when people talk about a "linux server" you know damn well they are talking about more than just the kernel.. the same goes for when people in general speak about bsd.
Not everyone is a kernel developer.
Recompilation doesn't bring a lot of issues; porting is rather easy. Does that make it simpler?
Good thing that's not what science is about.
Although disorders like this have, at least in some cases, definite biochemical causes, we don't just say "Paranoid" "Not paranoid" "Schizophrenic" "Not schizophrenic" "ADD" "NOT ADD"
All of these are just tools to help us understand. If we show that there is a link between people with attention span problems, and the way their brains react to new information, how is that not science, or not important?
Some people are taller than others. Some people have dark skin. When you drop a hammer it falls. If we don't investigate why, and always look for a deeper understanding of what's going on.. what's the point ?
Great....in that case...
Can I have back my passport, laptop, mp3 player, and my residency permit before they throw my gringo ass in jail?
Does that mean you run with all local passwords disabled? I mean, if they have physical access, what's the point?
1 "The OSX desktop isn't networked, so this isn't a remote exploit, so it doesn't matter, anyone with physical access can break in anyway"
2 "OSX is not real bsd / not real unix"
3 "This is what you get for having closed source"
1 - Yes, it's more or less a local exploit. So what? Does that mean it doesn't matter?
2 - Yes, it is.
3 - Lots of open source apps have had security vulnerabilities. Let's wait and see how apple deals with it.
Having used BSD in most of it's incarnations over the years, as well as many other unix and unix like systems, I would very MUCH call OSX a flavor of BSD. Since when does using mach disqualify it?
IF by "some re-used bsd pieces" you mean "an entire BSD system" then yeah, I guess so.
If you rip aqua off, which you can certainly do, (or hey, you could just grab darwin and build your own), sure, you could say it's not osx.. you'd call it darwin, probably. Then again, if I take Mandrake Linux, ditch KDE, Gnome, and X, and use one of the lightweight framebuffer based non-x GUIS, is it still linux? What if I take another unix, say Solaris, take off X, and write a gui app that uses the framebuffer directly.. is it still unix?
Trying to say "it has a custom gui so it's not unix" is rediculous... unix has no requirement for any particular gui. X is available in several formats for OSX.... in fact, it's Xfree86 even.
As a unix user, developer, fanatic... I have no problem calling OSX "unix" or "bsd" or whatever.. those are both words that accurately describe what's going on inside.
It's been shelved, the microswitch on Button1 died.. but it's fixable.
I don't find the same things happen, at all.. I did on the first MS Intellimouse Opticals.. but I can lift my logitech opticals no problem..... as for sensitivity.... I found the razor not really that much more sensitive. I can execute all the same manoevers with my logitech dual optical that I could with the boomslang.
I can turn or reposition the mouse with no more error than I got with the boomslang.
In all honesty, I would use the boomslang if the button worked again.. but probably only cause it's weird, and I blew a hundred bucks on it.
And that's just the problem.. you don't.. but then again, you don't know. Who's to say some semi organized types don't sit around, sniffing, looking for the right information that they can profit from. Think it won't happen?
It's not just wireless... I stayed at a hotel near a major american airport recently, they had free broadband in the room.. provided over ethernet. Know how many other businesspersons computers showed up in a quick scan of that lan? Lots. Know how insecure they were? Quite. It occurred to me that, hey, all some geek has to do is get a couple laptops ready to gather data automatically, book a room for the night, enjoy the movies and room service, and gather all night. By morning, you'd have password to all KINDS of good stuff.
Saying "It's not realistic, it won't happen" is just as extreme as saying "There are evil hackers everywhere". The truth is that there IS a significant risk, and the more connected we get without fixing it, the larger the risk is.
They stole my car from a crowded, busy parking lot in the middle of business from a well guarded mall.
That's kind of invalid at this point.. nobody disputes that at a time in the not too distant past, growing hemp was not illegal in any way. It was just a plant.
If you have a legit corporate license, and XP Pro, you don't have to activate it.. PA only applies to the home version.
By saying "as unsecure as they say it is" implies that perhaps you doubt part of this.
Which part is it?
Pop3 sends your username and password in cleartext.. so anyone with a sniffer can find out your name/password, easily.
HTTPS access over yahoo mail or hotmail is indeed more secure in this respect.
Yeah, I mean
it's not like home users access services at work, bank accounts, online shopping, credit cards, in house file sharing, personal financial correspondence, IP phone calls, and so on... they really have nothing to worry about.
Hey.. why not stick your filing cabinet in the front yard with all the papers in it and say "free shit!" too!
Home users don't treat security as a big deal because they don't KNOW the issues, because they are a bit too technical.. because joe average doesn't have time to get into the details.. not because he doesn't care about security.
the point of WEP is misunderstood, as well. Yes, it was poorly implemented.. but it was not supposed to be the data security layer anyway... just "wired equivalent"
That means.. it was supposed to be roughly as hard to get access to the actual network packets as it is when someone has a wired lan.
The wire is not secure, as you know. Wires can be tapped numerous ways, invasively, or passively. Yes, the logic is kind of flawed, the situation is different.. but it just makes it harder to sniff, not impossible.
IT wasn't supposed to be a replacement for using secure protocols.
but not as trivial as sniffing on an unswitched network.
Furthermore... if I'm the sysadmin, and I catch you running a sniffer, well, I probably won't care.
If I catch you doing arp poisoning in order to intercept traffic on a switched lan, I'm going to yank your connection / get you fired / expelled / press charges for hacking.
One involves listening. The other involves messing with stuff and deliberately breaking how things work.
And with some patience, very little in fact, your car door can be opened, and your car stolen, or your house door opened, and your house cleaned out... but that doens't mean we run around leaving our doors unlocked and open.
Furthermore... there are legal implications. Is sniffing out POP passwords in this way illegal? Probably, but maybe not.. but is doing so off an encrypted channel illegal? Most certainly... as there is no logical way you can deny that you kneew the signal was supposed to be private.
Thank you. Excatly.
Now, if you are the 1 in a million, so that might narrow it down to, say, 300 people in the US of A who have the same profile as you more or less, when they go to court and say
well honorably jurors, Mr. Smith was in the club on the night of the murder, was banging the deceased's wife, and they were heard having an argument outside earlier that night, and there is no alibi. Also, the DNA evidence matches.
The fact that some others might also have the same dna is about as valid as saying there were 300 other people in the nightclub.. both are just one point leading up to a case.
Investigation is investigation. We're talking about the murder of a young girl here.. if the cops want to follow you, they CAN. If they have reason to follow everyone in the neighborhood, which they were probably going to do ANYWAY, because they had a strong reason to suspect someone from the neighborhood, asking everyone to submit a DNA sample to clear themselves is NOT a bad thing, it's your chance to simply help them out, and not have to waste time following you. IT's your way of saying "I didn't do it" and having them believe you.
Notice they didn't ask everyone in Canada.. just those who were in the neighborhood, and hence, already suspects.