I didn't say it was smart, I was telling you that he didn't jeopardize his sources for this - he'd already lost them. And it's unlikely he did this for personal gain as he tried to arrange to remain unnamed.
He had stated a goal of making sure more people saw the documents and debated them. It's pretty likely he was just trying to stir up more attention for the abuses he was blowing the whistle on.
Apparently he found Lamo via a twitter search but Lamo was semi-famous, anti-establishment, and had spoken of donating to wikileaks and his interest in the organization. On the surface he would seem like a good person to contact.
And yes, his mistakes are very clear. I'm pretty sure that between that and how the article showed that "real" journalists are in the pocket of the government anyways that nobody here would bother asking for confidentiality and simply arrange to remain anonymous.
But Bradley Manning's success is also clear. He turned his superiors in for crimes against humanity despite great personal cost to himself. If there were more of him there wouldn't have been Nazis.
You appear to be talking about religion, and values, and artwork of Mo, and cultural difference.
Well one thing that ISN'T a difference is that they've got religious imbeciles in their population who pretend things are a problem when they aren't - like pictures of Mo, or Janet Jackson's nipple - and flip our for everyone. Just like here.
But you're still missing that they don't actually consider it offensive. Or, if they do they've totally invented that anger. This is like a christian who is forbidden from worshiping idols trying to say you shouldn't have likenesses in a wax museum. Their values aren't involved. They've simply drawn some crazy line in the sand and their egos force them to defend it and part of that is acting like it's a big enough deal to care about.
It has no more validity than soccer hooligans. They riot because they're looking for a fight.
He was ordered to use known irrelevant data to frame innocent Iraqis as dissidents. Presumably from stories of Abu Ghraib, to have them rounded up into camps and prisons where many were tortured and died.
We hung Nazis for that sort of thing, yeah... He did what we'd want a "good" Nazi to do. Hopefully we expect as much of good Americans.
This leak is apparently just the tip of the war crimes he's witnessed. With documentation from him they might be able to finally prove the situation in detainee camps (we won't even treat them like POWs) is knowingly inhumane and inflicted on innocents.
Everyone who'd want to did. Every tabloid and many "serious" papers ran news items that were gathered from cellular eves-dropping and the source of the leaks was made clear. There were no technological barriers besides acquiring $100 for the scanner. You could buy one in Radio Shack.
Clearly, people do expect eves-droppers. It's why they lower their voice when speaking confidentially. Even "good" people. At least anyone who's ever met a gossip.
They don't expect them on cell-phone though because it's magic to them and nobody bothered to point out the possibility. Instead we passed delusional laws and pretended they'd stop anything.
You can go on all you want about good and bad people projecting themselves onto the cosmos, but we could actually implement real-world security instead of pretending and praying. Step off to the side to sing Kumbaya, or whatever it is you do, and let the people in touch with the issue discuss it.
Their values place Mohammed's image over human life
That's made up. (Not by you...)
They've got a no idols rule, but that's about all it is. It doesn't seem like it should even prohibit art about Mad Mo in a historical context, etc, it's all about not worshiping it.
And best of all, it only applies to them. It's about proper worship - how not to do it. You're not trying to worship so you're automatically fine.
It's blown out of proportion by their Koran-belt and the KKK-types in it. It's a non-issue to anyone not looking for an excuse to rage.
Of course it's religion and thus stupid anyways, but this particular panic attack more-so than usual.
Maybe to you, but the general public expects privacy when in their homes and typing information into a password box that explicitly hides the keystrokes they type in.
The general public expects a lot...
If they listen to people like you though they'll never get it. You'd have us pass more ineffectual laws, like we have now, that give the appearance of privacy instead of actually getting people to use encryption.
Back when party lines were common on the phone people understood the threat model - the phone was easily "tapped" by those nearby so they either spoke guardedly, in code, or not about private things.
We'd be better off if we went straight to cellphones and wifi from party lines instead of going to single-user phone lines first. The security limitations inherent in the broadcast model would have been apparent to the users and there wouldn't be this unsupportable false expectation of privacy.
How is this even comparable? If you're having a conversation at the mall, you have absolutely no expectation of a private conversation.
Because you know how sound travels...
Doing something from the privacy of your home, however, does give you legal expectations of privacy.
Yeah, unless you were to transmit what you were doing out of your home.
How is this even coherent? I can legally eavesdrop on your conversation just because my technical expertise made it easy to do so? How is this not exactly like wiretapping?
It's exactly how the laws should be written. If I have a hearing aid that amplifies your talking between apartments should that somehow be illegal? Do we ban hearing aids or just require a doctor's permission to buy them?
Wiretapping for one requires access to the wires which are (presumably) not yours, listening to wireless on the other hand does not - it's SHOVED into your radio and it's not until you properly decode it you could even see that it might not be yours. To criminalize that would be like criminalize looking at postcards that got accidentally put into your mailbox - the address is written just above the content, if the content is plaintext it's almost impossible to not read.
The problem with ignoring the issue of difficulty is that it creates a false sense of security. You could listen in on analog cellphone calls with a $100 scanner - and everyone did.
To ignore this is to pretend we can command the tides.
If people had known how much they were being listened to there would have been far more demand for encrypted communications, and end-to-end not merely the on-air encryption that prevents only half the snooping attempts.
Only by forcing people to confront reality can we move forward. Feel-good laws never do later.
I know you aren't justifying that attitude or anything, but for the benefit of those who don't understand what's actually going on...
You contact a webserver and ask it for data, often that data is a file which it sends to you. That file often is (roughly) HTML and includes other links to other files, often on the same webserver.
Skipping or stripping out an element of a webpage is really just not downloading some of the extra files.
"Rewriting" someone's webpage to strip the ads is equivalent to opening the bill from your phone company and not spreading the fliers they include out around the bill on the table while you read the bill.
Also, the idea of permission itself leads to a broken understanding of how the web works.
Linking to something is simply mentioning it, this is a link to today's copy of the NY Post - page 7, all a webbrowser does is highlight that link and make it clickable. To suggest the idea of needing permission to link to something is to suggest that you could need permission to mention its existence.
The only concrete thing that can be said about permissions is that tautologically you have been given permission to possess whatever information they send to you.
If I link to information on the web and someone follows that link (requesting the page) all required permission has been given - the webserver authorized the requester to have the requested resource.
Hopefully this explains why "half" the words in the parent post were in quotes and the utter ridiculousness of the idea of forbidding deep linking.
Wait, I did very explicitly say that. Helps to read what you're responding to.
You said that AFTER what was being referred to and you know it.
Yes, that's theft-if you do it. On the other hand, a duly elected government does have the authority to collect taxes.
As to why taxation is not theft, let's look at what the definition of theft is. [...] unlawful [...]
You now hide behind the tautological nature of a government making law and thus, in that context, its actions being legal. However, in the context you said it you clearly mean morally right - that a duly elected government has the authority (right) to tax, not merely that it's not actionable because of sovereign immunity.
As to calling Godwin, that type of hyperbole fits to the definition what Godwin's Law was made for
There's where you go wrong again, it wasn't made for anything. Especially not to offer trolls like yourself an easy out.
It's merely an observation that in threads the likelihood of a comparison of someone to Hitler or a Nazi increases - it specifically doesn't say anything about the appropriateness of such a comparison.
hysterical references to Nazism and the Holocaust as analogies to things that are nothing like genocide.
You're the closest thing to hysterical here. In your protestations you proceed to get emotional and irrational.
Note the common thread here: theft is an unlawful taking. Taxation is a lawful taking.
No, the common thread here is you falling back to legality thinking it's morality.
By the same logic, or lack thereof, the Holocost too wasn't murder. It was carried out by a duly elected government and therefore not a crime. Sounds absurd doesn't it?
Well, isn't that what you're saying? I mean, if we go by the definition like you insist we find that murder is only unlawful killing - something a state is by definition almost unable to order.
By your insistence on discussing the legality of the action instead of the rightness of it you seem like a faceless cog performing his job of endorsing authority's abuses instead of a useful citizen critically aware of the abuses being done in his name.
Get over your pompous self. And get over calling Godwin like a child in their first thread.
Why don't you instead see what the other poster is trying to point out, that YOU connected this thread to Nazis, if anyone did, by making the argument that what the government says is right simply by definition. That gets you to "just following orders" pretty quickly.
Why do you think taxation isn't theft, not why it might be justified, but that it's not theft, other than some tautological nonsense about the government declaring it not to be?
As the other poster pointed out, governments can say a lot of crazy things...
Yeah, punish them because their script was scripted... And see how many people step forward next time. Doy!
If we want people to publicly disclose vulnerabilities we can't punish them for incidental crimes like trespassing. Had they used the addresses to defraud someone this would be different, but they didn't. They saved these people from fraud by ensuring they knew their email address wasn't a secret between them and Apple/AT&T.
Wah, to a tune of no real damage. You're trying to manufacture a false sense of urgency here. It's not even vandalism, it's peeking through an employees-only door and seeing supposed secrets printed there for everyone to see.
While these ipad owners might get some spam now depending on who got the addresses they won't get deceived by phishing attempts like they would have. And now everyone knows AT&T can't handle basic web security. If you tell a company that does this they'll quietly clean up the one instance (and sue you to prevent you finding any more flaws), if you tell the news the company will be forced to make broader and more useful changes.
Too bad Apple gives you no choice of carriers - suck that lock-in.
There seems to be evidence suggesting that BP knew about significant risks, beyond what they'd described initially, and should have spoken up.
And no, the whole point of our non-democratic system is supposed to be so that the smart politicians can do what needs to be done instead of what the idiot masses want. You know, we'd vote for drilling, or breaded circuses, or to tyranize the minority, and our leaders would do the right thing.
If our politicians instead only pander to this and amplify it we should get rid of them and implement direct democracy.
And that we tolerate them cracking down on reasonable things means we're partly the ones to blame when frustrated hackers - now labeled black-hats by the system for URL rewriting - melt our cell-phone (well, flash them to uselessness) as part of their next demonstration.
I mean, if we blow every little thing up into jail-time they'll blow every quiet security notification up into a hilarious media scandal. Right? Nobody else seeing this?
You're hopelessly emotional and stack the deck. "Push someone through a broken railing"... presumably between them and something deadly.
Oh yeah, that totally compares to snooping.
The scale of this is relevant, because it's a far lesser problem to have your email publicly leaked (as happened) than to be approached in a phishing scam when you thought you were safe.
So yeah, I'd rather some snoopers inconvenience some people (mostly AT&T who need inconveniencing!) than serious fraudsters scam them. And I'd like attention brought to crap security because it's endemic in the industry. Apple presents itself as "just working" and insists that the entire stack, software and hardware will. Now they're discovering the stack includes network providers and other "partners".
If you can say that about looking behind a curtain then sure, the site has been cracked.
But the whistle-blowing far outweighs the "crime". There was a weakness, now there will be one less weakness. Had this not been caught there could have been an actual security breach.
Since the goatse security guys obviously do not actually have a legitimate reason to access any of those pages of info
But the owners of iPads have a legitimate interest in the knowledge they gained.
I am pretty sure it wont have too much trouble nailing these guys for hacking if it so wishes.
Yeah, shoot the messenger and allow the pathetic AT&T to quietly remain so.
I don't see the rule-of-law bound nature of our society. Sure, many things are but far more importantly, many things are not. Or at least, not usefully for the citizens.
For instance, recording police actions. In spite of laws, convention, and common sense multiple judges have upheld crazy-wild cases of wiretapping, interfering with an investigation, etc.
Look at the CEOs of major criminal corporations. All would have been worse off if they'd been caught with a 2oz bag of marijuana.
Massive tent-city jails full of people caught with a small bag a pot, housed with the insane and the violent. More citizens in jail per capita than ANYWHERE.
The wiretapping and telco immunity issue is another example. Bush's signing statements another. Bush leading the country based directly on messages from god... Obama openly professing strong religious beliefs.
Some countries might be significantly different than Saudi Arabia with its religious leaders and its lack of accountability at the higher levels of government, but the USA and Canada differ only by degree, not class. We are not better - just a few years ahead and with much better PR.
The "average" person on SA's streets wouldn't see much of the unreasonableness of Sharia law, just like the average person in Canada won't get hassled for taking photos, or tazered to death, etc. But they'd get just as far trying to remove a thuggish police officer - nowhere.
We'll beat you, declare you a terrorist, ship you overseas for torture or murder, and deny your existence to your family. But then the patriot act (etc) allows for that, so maybe you're right - maybe it is magically lawful.
I appreciate what we have, but we have it because we have a peaceful educated liberal population - the government didn't give it to us. The government isn't the source of justice or liberty, the people who enacted it are - but the entrenched power interests in government are the source of the red tape and cronyism that are our problem.
Government isn't a dog that needs to be petted and rewarded when it does well, it's merely a system that worked. When it fails though it needs to be dissected, examined, diagnosed, and fixed. Giving it any credit leads to cutting it slack, like a person, instead of fixing it like a machine.
There's a need for protection, sure. But do we need monolithic globe-spanning monopolistic groups for it, or could we get by with smaller groups? And perhaps non-governmental groups?
Ideally many overlapping groups. Like not just NATO, but PACNORWESTTO, MyBlockTO, etc. That way while it would be a large safety net for defense it'd be hard to convince many disparate interests to go to war.
What's the matter, you don't like the "free market"?
In a real Libertarian Utopia, we are free to defraud one another,
That's not a free market though, it's one of the most artificial ever. It consists of everyone voluntarily enacting complex and arbitrary laws by which hucksters can con them, and funding a police force to enforce those laws on themselves, etc.
In a real free market the families of the victims would freely market the hucksters' belonging after they shot them.
Anyone who calls anything government run a free market is crazy.
Nice rant. I'll only bother with addressing the parts with content.
Wow, that's like the pot calling later-days Gandalf black.
I never suggested that the public caring about the environment is to blame for lost jobs
Nor did anyone else.
What you suggested is that [...] the sad thing is that the "punish BP" bloodlust is just going to result in thousands of decent Americans who work in the energy industry losing jobs [...].
That's like blaming the courts for punishing a criminal rather than blaming the criminal for doing the crime.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't say it was smart, I was telling you that he didn't jeopardize his sources for this - he'd already lost them. And it's unlikely he did this for personal gain as he tried to arrange to remain unnamed.
He had stated a goal of making sure more people saw the documents and debated them. It's pretty likely he was just trying to stir up more attention for the abuses he was blowing the whistle on.
Apparently he found Lamo via a twitter search but Lamo was semi-famous, anti-establishment, and had spoken of donating to wikileaks and his interest in the organization. On the surface he would seem like a good person to contact.
And yes, his mistakes are very clear. I'm pretty sure that between that and how the article showed that "real" journalists are in the pocket of the government anyways that nobody here would bother asking for confidentiality and simply arrange to remain anonymous.
But Bradley Manning's success is also clear. He turned his superiors in for crimes against humanity despite great personal cost to himself. If there were more of him there wouldn't have been Nazis.
You appear to be talking about religion, and values, and artwork of Mo, and cultural difference.
Well one thing that ISN'T a difference is that they've got religious imbeciles in their population who pretend things are a problem when they aren't - like pictures of Mo, or Janet Jackson's nipple - and flip our for everyone. Just like here.
But you're still missing that they don't actually consider it offensive. Or, if they do they've totally invented that anger. This is like a christian who is forbidden from worshiping idols trying to say you shouldn't have likenesses in a wax museum. Their values aren't involved. They've simply drawn some crazy line in the sand and their egos force them to defend it and part of that is acting like it's a big enough deal to care about.
It has no more validity than soccer hooligans. They riot because they're looking for a fight.
He was ordered to use known irrelevant data to frame innocent Iraqis as dissidents. Presumably from stories of Abu Ghraib, to have them rounded up into camps and prisons where many were tortured and died.
We hung Nazis for that sort of thing, yeah... He did what we'd want a "good" Nazi to do. Hopefully we expect as much of good Americans.
This leak is apparently just the tip of the war crimes he's witnessed. With documentation from him they might be able to finally prove the situation in detainee camps (we won't even treat them like POWs) is knowingly inhumane and inflicted on innocents.
IdiotBoy == You. RTFA
The leaker did leak out of conscience. And he stopped collecting data only after losing his position due to other issues.
He seemed to want attention from the press, for the leaked data though not glory (he expected to remain anonymous).
Everyone who'd want to did. Every tabloid and many "serious" papers ran news items that were gathered from cellular eves-dropping and the source of the leaks was made clear. There were no technological barriers besides acquiring $100 for the scanner. You could buy one in Radio Shack.
Clearly, people do expect eves-droppers. It's why they lower their voice when speaking confidentially. Even "good" people. At least anyone who's ever met a gossip.
They don't expect them on cell-phone though because it's magic to them and nobody bothered to point out the possibility. Instead we passed delusional laws and pretended they'd stop anything.
You can go on all you want about good and bad people projecting themselves onto the cosmos, but we could actually implement real-world security instead of pretending and praying. Step off to the side to sing Kumbaya, or whatever it is you do, and let the people in touch with the issue discuss it.
Data that they're still shoving into their neighbors' houses.
This should be a wake-up call for them to use some security, instead it's an invitation to blame someone and ignore the issue.
Their values place Mohammed's image over human life
That's made up. (Not by you...)
They've got a no idols rule, but that's about all it is. It doesn't seem like it should even prohibit art about Mad Mo in a historical context, etc, it's all about not worshiping it.
And best of all, it only applies to them. It's about proper worship - how not to do it. You're not trying to worship so you're automatically fine.
It's blown out of proportion by their Koran-belt and the KKK-types in it. It's a non-issue to anyone not looking for an excuse to rage.
Of course it's religion and thus stupid anyways, but this particular panic attack more-so than usual.
You say this like it's a bad thing...?
I don't recall their PR making that hypocritical. Is it?
Maybe to you, but the general public expects privacy when in their homes and typing information into a password box that explicitly hides the keystrokes they type in.
The general public expects a lot...
If they listen to people like you though they'll never get it. You'd have us pass more ineffectual laws, like we have now, that give the appearance of privacy instead of actually getting people to use encryption.
Back when party lines were common on the phone people understood the threat model - the phone was easily "tapped" by those nearby so they either spoke guardedly, in code, or not about private things.
We'd be better off if we went straight to cellphones and wifi from party lines instead of going to single-user phone lines first. The security limitations inherent in the broadcast model would have been apparent to the users and there wouldn't be this unsupportable false expectation of privacy.
How is this even comparable? If you're having a conversation at the mall, you have absolutely no expectation of a private conversation.
Because you know how sound travels...
Doing something from the privacy of your home, however, does give you legal expectations of privacy.
Yeah, unless you were to transmit what you were doing out of your home.
How is this even coherent? I can legally eavesdrop on your conversation just because my technical expertise made it easy to do so? How is this not exactly like wiretapping?
It's exactly how the laws should be written. If I have a hearing aid that amplifies your talking between apartments should that somehow be illegal? Do we ban hearing aids or just require a doctor's permission to buy them?
Wiretapping for one requires access to the wires which are (presumably) not yours, listening to wireless on the other hand does not - it's SHOVED into your radio and it's not until you properly decode it you could even see that it might not be yours. To criminalize that would be like criminalize looking at postcards that got accidentally put into your mailbox - the address is written just above the content, if the content is plaintext it's almost impossible to not read.
The problem with ignoring the issue of difficulty is that it creates a false sense of security. You could listen in on analog cellphone calls with a $100 scanner - and everyone did.
To ignore this is to pretend we can command the tides.
If people had known how much they were being listened to there would have been far more demand for encrypted communications, and end-to-end not merely the on-air encryption that prevents only half the snooping attempts.
Only by forcing people to confront reality can we move forward. Feel-good laws never do later.
Yes actually. He's discussing why having a place to look for Pi isn't as good as saying "What's Pi?"
I know you aren't justifying that attitude or anything, but for the benefit of those who don't understand what's actually going on...
You contact a webserver and ask it for data, often that data is a file which it sends to you. That file often is (roughly) HTML and includes other links to other files, often on the same webserver.
Skipping or stripping out an element of a webpage is really just not downloading some of the extra files.
"Rewriting" someone's webpage to strip the ads is equivalent to opening the bill from your phone company and not spreading the fliers they include out around the bill on the table while you read the bill.
Also, the idea of permission itself leads to a broken understanding of how the web works.
Linking to something is simply mentioning it, this is a link to today's copy of the NY Post - page 7, all a webbrowser does is highlight that link and make it clickable. To suggest the idea of needing permission to link to something is to suggest that you could need permission to mention its existence.
The only concrete thing that can be said about permissions is that tautologically you have been given permission to possess whatever information they send to you.
If I link to information on the web and someone follows that link (requesting the page) all required permission has been given - the webserver authorized the requester to have the requested resource.
Hopefully this explains why "half" the words in the parent post were in quotes and the utter ridiculousness of the idea of forbidding deep linking.
Wait, I did very explicitly say that. Helps to read what you're responding to.
You said that AFTER what was being referred to and you know it.
Yes, that's theft-if you do it. On the other hand, a duly elected government does have the authority to collect taxes.
As to why taxation is not theft, let's look at what the definition of theft is. [...] unlawful [...]
You now hide behind the tautological nature of a government making law and thus, in that context, its actions being legal. However, in the context you said it you clearly mean morally right - that a duly elected government has the authority (right) to tax, not merely that it's not actionable because of sovereign immunity.
As to calling Godwin, that type of hyperbole fits to the definition what Godwin's Law was made for
There's where you go wrong again, it wasn't made for anything. Especially not to offer trolls like yourself an easy out.
It's merely an observation that in threads the likelihood of a comparison of someone to Hitler or a Nazi increases - it specifically doesn't say anything about the appropriateness of such a comparison.
hysterical references to Nazism and the Holocaust as analogies to things that are nothing like genocide.
You're the closest thing to hysterical here. In your protestations you proceed to get emotional and irrational.
Note the common thread here: theft is an unlawful taking. Taxation is a lawful taking.
No, the common thread here is you falling back to legality thinking it's morality.
By the same logic, or lack thereof, the Holocost too wasn't murder. It was carried out by a duly elected government and therefore not a crime. Sounds absurd doesn't it?
Well, isn't that what you're saying? I mean, if we go by the definition like you insist we find that murder is only unlawful killing - something a state is by definition almost unable to order.
By your insistence on discussing the legality of the action instead of the rightness of it you seem like a faceless cog performing his job of endorsing authority's abuses instead of a useful citizen critically aware of the abuses being done in his name.
Get over your pompous self. And get over calling Godwin like a child in their first thread.
Why don't you instead see what the other poster is trying to point out, that YOU connected this thread to Nazis, if anyone did, by making the argument that what the government says is right simply by definition. That gets you to "just following orders" pretty quickly.
Why do you think taxation isn't theft, not why it might be justified, but that it's not theft, other than some tautological nonsense about the government declaring it not to be?
As the other poster pointed out, governments can say a lot of crazy things...
Yeah, punish them because their script was scripted... And see how many people step forward next time. Doy!
If we want people to publicly disclose vulnerabilities we can't punish them for incidental crimes like trespassing. Had they used the addresses to defraud someone this would be different, but they didn't. They saved these people from fraud by ensuring they knew their email address wasn't a secret between them and Apple/AT&T.
Wah, to a tune of no real damage. You're trying to manufacture a false sense of urgency here. It's not even vandalism, it's peeking through an employees-only door and seeing supposed secrets printed there for everyone to see.
While these ipad owners might get some spam now depending on who got the addresses they won't get deceived by phishing attempts like they would have. And now everyone knows AT&T can't handle basic web security. If you tell a company that does this they'll quietly clean up the one instance (and sue you to prevent you finding any more flaws), if you tell the news the company will be forced to make broader and more useful changes.
Too bad Apple gives you no choice of carriers - suck that lock-in.
There seems to be evidence suggesting that BP knew about significant risks, beyond what they'd described initially, and should have spoken up.
And no, the whole point of our non-democratic system is supposed to be so that the smart politicians can do what needs to be done instead of what the idiot masses want. You know, we'd vote for drilling, or breaded circuses, or to tyranize the minority, and our leaders would do the right thing.
If our politicians instead only pander to this and amplify it we should get rid of them and implement direct democracy.
That's where the GP seemed headed but he said it wrong.
Protection of freedom requires more than just concern for your physical well-being, you also need to protect against other forms of coercion, etc.
Also fires, hurricanes, and bears...
The treaty organization idea could be used for firefighters, rescue/aid, rewarding inventors, or whatever.
And that we tolerate them cracking down on reasonable things means we're partly the ones to blame when frustrated hackers - now labeled black-hats by the system for URL rewriting - melt our cell-phone (well, flash them to uselessness) as part of their next demonstration.
I mean, if we blow every little thing up into jail-time they'll blow every quiet security notification up into a hilarious media scandal. Right? Nobody else seeing this?
You're hopelessly emotional and stack the deck. "Push someone through a broken railing" ... presumably between them and something deadly.
Oh yeah, that totally compares to snooping.
The scale of this is relevant, because it's a far lesser problem to have your email publicly leaked (as happened) than to be approached in a phishing scam when you thought you were safe.
So yeah, I'd rather some snoopers inconvenience some people (mostly AT&T who need inconveniencing!) than serious fraudsters scam them. And I'd like attention brought to crap security because it's endemic in the industry. Apple presents itself as "just working" and insists that the entire stack, software and hardware will. Now they're discovering the stack includes network providers and other "partners".
If you can say that about looking behind a curtain then sure, the site has been cracked.
But the whistle-blowing far outweighs the "crime". There was a weakness, now there will be one less weakness. Had this not been caught there could have been an actual security breach.
Since the goatse security guys obviously do not actually have a legitimate reason to access any of those pages of info
But the owners of iPads have a legitimate interest in the knowledge they gained.
I am pretty sure it wont have too much trouble nailing these guys for hacking if it so wishes.
Yeah, shoot the messenger and allow the pathetic AT&T to quietly remain so.
That's a good use of court resources.
I don't see the rule-of-law bound nature of our society. Sure, many things are but far more importantly, many things are not. Or at least, not usefully for the citizens.
For instance, recording police actions. In spite of laws, convention, and common sense multiple judges have upheld crazy-wild cases of wiretapping, interfering with an investigation, etc.
Look at the CEOs of major criminal corporations. All would have been worse off if they'd been caught with a 2oz bag of marijuana.
Massive tent-city jails full of people caught with a small bag a pot, housed with the insane and the violent. More citizens in jail per capita than ANYWHERE.
The wiretapping and telco immunity issue is another example. Bush's signing statements another. Bush leading the country based directly on messages from god... Obama openly professing strong religious beliefs.
Some countries might be significantly different than Saudi Arabia with its religious leaders and its lack of accountability at the higher levels of government, but the USA and Canada differ only by degree, not class. We are not better - just a few years ahead and with much better PR.
The "average" person on SA's streets wouldn't see much of the unreasonableness of Sharia law, just like the average person in Canada won't get hassled for taking photos, or tazered to death, etc. But they'd get just as far trying to remove a thuggish police officer - nowhere.
We'll beat you, declare you a terrorist, ship you overseas for torture or murder, and deny your existence to your family. But then the patriot act (etc) allows for that, so maybe you're right - maybe it is magically lawful.
I appreciate what we have, but we have it because we have a peaceful educated liberal population - the government didn't give it to us. The government isn't the source of justice or liberty, the people who enacted it are - but the entrenched power interests in government are the source of the red tape and cronyism that are our problem.
Government isn't a dog that needs to be petted and rewarded when it does well, it's merely a system that worked. When it fails though it needs to be dissected, examined, diagnosed, and fixed. Giving it any credit leads to cutting it slack, like a person, instead of fixing it like a machine.
There's a need for protection, sure. But do we need monolithic globe-spanning monopolistic groups for it, or could we get by with smaller groups? And perhaps non-governmental groups?
Ideally many overlapping groups. Like not just NATO, but PACNORWESTTO, MyBlockTO, etc. That way while it would be a large safety net for defense it'd be hard to convince many disparate interests to go to war.
What's the matter, you don't like the "free market"?
In a real Libertarian Utopia, we are free to defraud one another,
That's not a free market though, it's one of the most artificial ever. It consists of everyone voluntarily enacting complex and arbitrary laws by which hucksters can con them, and funding a police force to enforce those laws on themselves, etc.
In a real free market the families of the victims would freely market the hucksters' belonging after they shot them.
Anyone who calls anything government run a free market is crazy.
Nice rant. I'll only bother with addressing the parts with content.
Wow, that's like the pot calling later-days Gandalf black.
I never suggested that the public caring about the environment is to blame for lost jobs
Nor did anyone else.
What you suggested is that [...] the sad thing is that the "punish BP" bloodlust is just going to result in thousands of decent Americans who work in the energy industry losing jobs [...].
That's like blaming the courts for punishing a criminal rather than blaming the criminal for doing the crime.