Probably that the law is one sided. It's difficult to get a universal respect for the law if it only applies to "the little people".
I have to say, with Obama's decision to focus on criminalizing whistleblowers and protecting governmental torturers, killers, and kidnappers, I can't say I see respect for the law increasing over the next few years. About the best we can hope for is that the Teabaggers will actually come up with something concrete that is (1) illegal, (2) something they oppose and (3) something Obama has actually done, and that they force Boehner to actually act. I don't see that as particularly likely though, as that particular trifecta is going to be hard to come by.
Well, OK, I'm sure it does occasionally do multiple writes (we don't care about multiple reads), but it would have to do an awfully large number of them for anyone to notice!
100,000 is the minimum rated rewrite cycle for an average flash memory component (in practice it's usually a lot higher.) If a user changes game ten times a day (I think you'd agree that's abnormally large - most people only do more than two or three if they're showing the console off, and this doesn't even affect all games, merely those the user has downloaded - heavy gamers play the same game over and over again), and if Nintendo are doing no balancing whatsoever, if Nintendo are using cheap components (ie memory close to the 100,000 cycle limit) and if the game really is being rewritten multiple times, then we're talking about the Wii's flash memory failing after 27 years. Yes, multiple writes of the same game is going to reduce that somewhat, but against that is the fact that an average of ten game switches a day is supremely improbable.
I'd be very, very, surprised if we see a noticeable increase in Wii flash memory failures as a result of this move.
Because the US itself, the nation, doesn't stand for those things, but it has a government that's, frankly, out of control, and a populace unable to rein it back in. On top of which, it's not the worst country in the world, but it's also far from being the best. Many, many, countries do not do any of these things with the exception of the odd occasion a low level government agent does something genuinely not sanctioned by higher ups. Even countries that do some of these things, such as Britain, routinely draw back after seeing the backlash - internment, for example, has not been retried. The US government, by comparison, seems to be getting worse.
Add to that the power the US government wields, and you have an unholy combination that's widely resented even by people who love the nation of the United States itself.
The word app certainly was used widely before Apple used it, as a shorter version of the word "application". As others have pointed out, we talk about "killer apps" not "killer applications", a common phrase before 2006. Even restricted to mobile applications, I've been using phones that run applications since 1997 (Nokia 9000 FTW!) and apps/programs/applications were words used interchangeably back then. I'm really not sure where this thing that "Apple invented the word app" comes from, they most certainly didn't!
Not that I necessarily agree with Microsoft's lawsuit, although it depends upon the context. If someone calls their mobile application payment and installation utility "App Store", then yeah, I see Apple's trademark as having merit as that might creation confusion. On the other hand, if someone writes "The Superdooperphone has an app store called Superdooperphone App Exchange", and gets hit with a trademark lawsuit, I think the trademark is being misused. Certainly the scope of the trademark needs to be as limited as possible, as the word "app" followed by the word "store" is something that will reasonably appear in English speech when describing a tool that performs the task the App Store does.
People whose car breaks down in the middle of nowhere are renowned for their ability to remain calm and logically think every step through in advance...;-)
Beyond identifying the fact I found some kind of lie in Amazon.com's "explanation" as to why they did what they did, your comment is completely unrelated to anything I wrote. There is no way to read my original comment as being about anything other than Amazon.com's assertion that Wikileaks is publishing 250,000 wires.
Extraordinarily, not only did you miss that, but you managed to quote every other part of Amazon.com's explanation except the publishing 250,000 wires part in defending Bezos's truthiness!
Especially as the statement you quote is an outright lie by Amazon. While this "fact" is a standard pro-Government talking point, it simply is utterly untrue that Wikileaks is releasing 250,000 leaked cables. They are, indeed, only releasing those that have gone through a review process (and they're involving a small group of selected, highly respected, journalists, who are familiar with the redacting process, to do this review.)
The fact Amazon.com needs to resort to a bald-faced lie to distance itself from the allegations of government pressure says a great deal about the truth here.
How is it not the height of journalistic integrity to protect the identity of your sources that wish to remain anonymous?
That ship sailed when Lamo and Poulson shopped Manning to the feds. Besides, nobody at Wired is coming up with this argument. It's safe to say that if the issue was "protecting sources", we'd have heard that excuse from the horse's mouth by now.
Some on-topic stuff from Wikipedia, just to fill time because four minutes is not enough time to write a Slashdot reply, according to that idiot CmdrTaco.
Chats with Adrian Lamo Adrian Lamo passed Manning's chat logs to the authorities because he feared lives were at risk.[10]
On May 21, Manning went online to chat with Adrian Lamo, a former hacker. The Washington Post writes that Lamo had recently been profiled by Wired magazine, and Manning had e-mailed Lamo, introducing himself as "an army intelligence analyst, deployed to eastern baghdad, pending discharge for 'adjustment disorder.'" In a series of chats over a period of a week, he told Lamo what he had done. He asked Lamo: "If you had unprecedented access to classified networks 14 hours a day 7 days a week for 8+ months, what would you do?" He told Lamo that he felt isolated and ignored at work, and was angered by some of the classified material he had read. He said he was a "wreck": "Ive been isolated so long... i just wanted to figure out ways to survive... smart enough to know whats going on, but helpless to do anything... no-one took any notice of me," he wrote. He said he had been leaking files to a "white haired aussie," Julian Assange of Wikileaks. He said: "i'm exhausted... in desperation to get somewhere in life... i joined the army... and that's proven to be a disaster now... and now i'm quite possibly on the verge of being the most notorious 'hacktivist' or whatever you want to call it... its all a big mess i've created."[10]
On May 25, he told Lamo he had taken CD-RWs containing music to work, erased them and rewrote them with the downloaded documents. According to Wired, he wrote that he "listened and lip-synced to Lady Gaga's 'Telephone' while exfiltrating possibly the largest data spillage in American history... pretty simple, and unglamorous..." Of the security he wrote: "it was vulnerable as fuck... no-one suspected a thing... =L kind of sad... weak servers, weak logging, weak physical security, weak counter-intelligence, inattentive signal analysis... a perfect storm ". He asked Lamo "i mean what if i were someone more malicious," writing that he could have sold the material to Russia or China. When asked why he had not done that, he wrote: "it belongs in the public domain... information should be free."[13]
He said he had leaked the Baghdad airstrike video, a video of the Granai airstrike, and 260,000 diplomatic cables, and hoped the release of the material would lead to "worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms... if not... than [sic] we're doomed... as a species... i will officially give up on the society we have if nothing happens." He told Lamo he felt encouraged by the response to the Baghdad airstrike video: "the reaction to the video gave me immense hope... CNN's iReport was overwhelmed... Twitter exploded..."[13] He said Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and several thousand diplomats were "going to have a heart attack" when they discovered that an "entire repository of classified foreign policy is available, in searchable format to the public... everywhere there's a US post... there's a diplomatic scandal that will be revealed."[10] He wrote: "I want people to se
As others have pointed out, Wired is clearly not interested in "protecting sources": It was Lamo and Poulson who shopped their source, Manning, to the government.
And now, let's waste some of Slashdot's bandwidth with some on-topic stuff about Lamo/Manning, from Wikipedia. I wouldn't post it, but apparently 3 minutes is just not long enough to write a comment, according to Tacoidiot.
Chats with Adrian Lamo
Adrian Lamo passed Manning's chat logs to the authorities because he feared lives were at risk.[10]
On May 21, Manning went online to chat with Adrian Lamo, a former hacker. The Washington Post writes that Lamo had recently been profiled by Wired magazine, and Manning had e-mailed Lamo, introducing himself as "an army intelligence analyst, deployed to eastern baghdad, pending discharge for 'adjustment disorder.'" In a series of chats over a period of a week, he told Lamo what he had done. He asked Lamo: "If you had unprecedented access to classified networks 14 hours a day 7 days a week for 8+ months, what would you do?" He told Lamo that he felt isolated and ignored at work, and was angered by some of the classified material he had read. He said he was a "wreck": "Ive been isolated so long... i just wanted to figure out ways to survive... smart enough to know whats going on, but helpless to do anything... no-one took any notice of me," he wrote. He said he had been leaking files to a "white haired aussie," Julian Assange of Wikileaks. He said: "i'm exhausted... in desperation to get somewhere in life... i joined the army... and that's proven to be a disaster now... and now i'm quite possibly on the verge of being the most notorious 'hacktivist' or whatever you want to call it... its all a big mess i've created."[10]
On May 25, he told Lamo he had taken CD-RWs containing music to work, erased them and rewrote them with the downloaded documents. According to Wired, he wrote that he "listened and lip-synced to Lady Gaga's 'Telephone' while exfiltrating possibly the largest data spillage in American history... pretty simple, and unglamorous..." Of the security he wrote: "it was vulnerable as fuck... no-one suspected a thing... =L kind of sad... weak servers, weak logging, weak physical security, weak counter-intelligence, inattentive signal analysis... a perfect storm ". He asked Lamo "i mean what if i were someone more malicious," writing that he could have sold the material to Russia or China. When asked why he had not done that, he wrote: "it belongs in the public domain... information should be free."[13]
He said he had leaked the Baghdad airstrike video, a video of the Granai airstrike, and 260,000 diplomatic cables, and hoped the release of the material would lead to "worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms... if not... than [sic] we're doomed... as a species... i will officially give up on the society we have if nothing happens." He told Lamo he felt encouraged by the response to the Baghdad airstrike video: "the reaction to the video gave me immense hope... CNN's iReport was overwhelmed... Twitter exploded..."[13] He said Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and several thousand diplomats were "going to have a heart attack" when they discovered that an "entire repository of classified foreign policy is available, in searchable format to the public... everywhere there's a US post... there's a diplomatic scandal that will be revealed."[10] He wrote: "I want people to see the truth regardless of who they are because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public."[14]
One of Greenwald's many recurring themes is the lack of integrity by journalists who spout an establishment line and stick to it, in the face of overwhelming evidence the line contradicts reality. The media's handling of Wikileaks has been a topic of interest for the last few months because it demonstrates the extreme lack of integrity that Greenwald has been highlighting, notably:
The repeating of government talking points that are, in fact, counter-factual (such as the commonly repeated untruth that Wikipedia has published 250,000 leaked diplomatic cables.)
The refusal to address the actual scandals raised by the leaks (in part because many of them implicate the media as well - see the Dyncorp child rape scandal as an example of where press collusion using the "Lives will be lost" excuse is virtually an aside by the diplomats involved.)
The side lining of government critics and concentration on talking heads that buttress the pro-government position
And in this case, an ex-con with a history of mental illness has his, contradictory, accounts of his role in the capture of the alleged leaker published, uncritically and with no health warning, as a lead New York Times story, with a refusal by those who have the logs that show what actually happened to publish that information.
Those are the four that spring to mind just off the top of my head. Read Greenwald's blog for a more in depth analysis with appropriate links to articles discussing it.
General background: Greenwald is a fairly respected anti-establishment left-wing constitutionalist media critic whose entries frequently result in upset amongst the media establishment. Reportedly, Barack Obama considers Greenwald his critic of conscience because of Greenwald's related attacks on Obama's continuation of many of Bush's executive-supremacy policies. Despite the subjective nature of many of his subjects, his articles tend to be well researched, linked to supporting evidence, albeit with a tone that puts many people off.
Yes, but you speak for yourself, not for the majority. Given the relative efficiency (in building costs and land use) of inner-city apartments, it's fair to say they'd be considerably cheaper than standalone homes if it wasn't for their much higher demand. Most major cities that fill the criteria of livability are having enormous problems producing affordable housing, any many, from Key West to New York, are having to combine price controls and special, restricted, housing systems just to ensure critical personnel like firefighters and EMTs can afford to live nearby.
While you may like living in the middle of nowhere, having to walk over a mile just to get to a convenience store (don't even think about the distance to the local supermarket), being required to drive, at great cost, to do the most trivial things, the majority of people really don't like it, even if they claim to. Cities didn't come out of nowhere, they exist because people prefer to have what they need close by.
People do like living "stacked on top of one another" if it implies easy access to local resources, but convince themselves otherwise because of the lack of such housing. If there's any doubt that people prefer to live in cities, price a Manhattan apartment compared to, say, a suburban home in Long Island an hour or two from the city.
I think Google's choice of the Apache license over the GPL shows that they're not keen to impose conditions upon manufacturers, however reasonable and fair. Indeed, right now Google's sole leverage, quite deliberately, is based upon making the Market a closed application and refusing to license it to manufacturers who don't produce devices to their specifications - but if they imposed a condition, like "The operating system shall be replaceable by the user", that most manufacturers would reject, the likely result is that the Android Market would lose relevance, not that manufacturers would try to find a way to play ball.
At this point I believe Google is trying to push for manufacturers to do the right thing, rather than force them to. The first step was creating an operating system that is the anti-iOS - one where the user is fully in charge of deciding what applications may be installed, not the maker of the phone or the cellular network. With some minor exceptions (such pre-installed non-removable crapware, some minor skirmishes early on with carriers about, say, tethering apps in the Market, that no longer occur, and I think Motorola does one phone that you can't install non-Market apps onto), they've won that battle; this blog entry shows what the next front will be.
And I've said it before but it's worth repeating: the need to "root" an Android phone is generally infinitely less necessary than the need to "jailbreak" an iOS device. Most people jailbreak iOS devices so they can run software that isn't approved by Apple. Android phones can generally run anything the user permits. Rooting is generally done by people wanting to implement features not built-in to the operating system that require OS-level support (such as tethering prior to Froyo), or by people wanting to upgrade their operating system before the manufacturer issues an official build.
The big companies don't really care if small, product-less, patent trolls sue them because they're large companies and can afford to pay out for dubious patents occasionally. And those companies also have the resources to make it an expensive process to sue them, which reduces the number of potential lawsuits to begin with, as patent trolls have to be absolutely sure they're going to win before filing the lawsuits.
So, alas, don't expect IBM et al to suddenly turn their pro-patent positions around. From their point of view, the system works for them, the patent trolls are more of a convenient annoyance (convenient because they also sue their smaller competitors) than a major problem.
Be aware that almost every device that plays Ogg also plays MP3. There's little reason for Fraunhoffer et al to sue a manufacturer for violating their patents when that manufacturer is already licensing their patents for a different part of the same product. They're getting their cut, they're only going to get upset if Samsung et al stop licensing the patents, using as an excuse that having removed MP3 support from their players, they no longer need to license the technologies.
Did these patents come out of nowhere, landing in the lawyer's laps? Did they just submit random gibberish to the USPTO in the hope that something would apply to something someone actually creates?
Or did an inventor, somewhere, come up with an idea which they patented and then decided to raise money by, directly or indirectly, selling the patents to this bunch of lawyers?
The FBI weren't engaged in "debt collection", they were investigating allegations of fraud.
There are two contradictory stories here, one from Faulkner, and one from the FBI, but assuming the FBI was, at least originally, acting in good faith (and there's no reason to believe they weren't, the FBI doesn't usually make a habit of inventing stories against random people):
The FBI believed Faulkner was setting up front companies to sell telecom services. The front companies would collect the money from their subscribers, run the services for as long as they could get away with without paying their suppliers, and then when the suppliers cut them off, they'd go bust - while the money itself had been pocketed by the people running the scam. If I understand it correctly, the money was funnelled out of these front companies by having them pay one, and only one, supplier, the operators of the datacenter - who happened to be themselves.
Why did the FBI think they were shell companies set up specifically to defraud the suppliers? Well, like I said, only the data center was getting any funds (if these companies were acting in good faith, there's no reason why only the data center would ever get paid), and there was deliberate obscufication being done to hide the true identities of those operating the front companies - for example, the FBI saw an email allegedly from Faulkner describing a process of bribing homeless people with $100 and drink to sign their names as directors. Faulkner's name wouldn't appear to be associated with the front companies, despite the fact he was apparently running them.
So, there you go: fraud, not debt collection. It's not that Faulkner owed money, it's that he allegedly invented a scheme to obtain services by deception, for profit. And, again, assuming the FBI were acting in good faith, it's not hard to understand why the FBI believed they needed every computer in the data center, given that they believed a significant number of the data center's "clients" were actually fake businesses that were part of the fraud.
They don't actually emit RF all that often, unless you're actually using them. Mobile phones, when idle, generally only transmit every few minutes or if the phone moves a substantial enough distance to make re-registration worth it.
Most Android phones most certainly can be upgraded to Froyo, if that's what you mean, either through an official update (some are waiting for the official update but it is coming) or via third party projects (and as Android is open source this is a reasonable option)
Wikileaks doesn't technically "own" the data, and Amazon doesn't want to be involved in distributing unauthorized material. Amazon also mentioned that there wasn't much attempt at redaction for purposes of keeping individuals safe (which is debatable). Why attack them when they aren't comfortable hosting the data?
There's a lot wrong with that paragraph, so...
1. Wikileaks doesn't "own" the data, but nor does Canonical "own" 90% of the stuff it publishes. Would it be legitimate to ban Ubuntu? What about a forum like Slashdot? The material published by Wikileaks is public domain - it's produced by government, not private entities. Wikileaks doesn't have to "own" it to publish it.
2. As I understand it, Wikileaks wasn't actually using Amazon.com to publish the cables, merely to provide the starting point.
3. Amazon is plain lying about the redaction claim. Wikileaks is only publishing cables that have been vetted by the various respected news organizations involved, and yes, those cables are being redacted based on the advice they're getting. Amazon is well aware of that but continues to put up their statement claiming otherwise.
4. "Why attack them when they aren't comfortable hosting the data" isn't an appropriate question: Those of us criticizing Amazon are doing so for various reasons, the "discomfort" Amazon might have had is not one of them. Amazon took pro-active steps not merely to deny Wikileaks a service at a whim, but they've lied about it since, choosing to smear Wikileaks rather than posting the real reasons. Maybe those real reasons were "We thought these lies about WL were true", perhaps they were "Lieberman threatened us", perhaps they were "We personally don't think anyone should be held accountable when private contractors rape and kill on the public dime", or perhaps they were "Isn't the government about to announce a move to cloud services for all of its IT services? KERCHING!!!?!1!! Let's get in on that!"
But either way, Amazon did more than simply tell Wikileaks they didn't want to have anything to do with them, they smeared Wikileaks, and continue to do so today. So yes, they deserve criticism.
Visa and Mastercard are a duopoly. They don't get to decide "who they do business with", because the decision they make is actually "Who you are allowed to do business with".
Amazon has every right to not do business with Wikileaks. It doesn't, however, have the right to terminate service on a whim without notice. Nor, more importantly, does it have a right to smear Wikileaks when explaining its actions.
Slashdot Mirror
Probably that the law is one sided. It's difficult to get a universal respect for the law if it only applies to "the little people".
I have to say, with Obama's decision to focus on criminalizing whistleblowers and protecting governmental torturers, killers, and kidnappers, I can't say I see respect for the law increasing over the next few years. About the best we can hope for is that the Teabaggers will actually come up with something concrete that is (1) illegal, (2) something they oppose and (3) something Obama has actually done, and that they force Boehner to actually act. I don't see that as particularly likely though, as that particular trifecta is going to be hard to come by.
Well, OK, I'm sure it does occasionally do multiple writes (we don't care about multiple reads), but it would have to do an awfully large number of them for anyone to notice!
100,000 is the minimum rated rewrite cycle for an average flash memory component (in practice it's usually a lot higher.) If a user changes game ten times a day (I think you'd agree that's abnormally large - most people only do more than two or three if they're showing the console off, and this doesn't even affect all games, merely those the user has downloaded - heavy gamers play the same game over and over again), and if Nintendo are doing no balancing whatsoever, if Nintendo are using cheap components (ie memory close to the 100,000 cycle limit) and if the game really is being rewritten multiple times, then we're talking about the Wii's flash memory failing after 27 years. Yes, multiple writes of the same game is going to reduce that somewhat, but against that is the fact that an average of ten game switches a day is supremely improbable.
I'd be very, very, surprised if we see a noticeable increase in Wii flash memory failures as a result of this move.
Yep, it only needs you to play over 100,000 games and then your internal storage is shredded... ;-)
Because the US itself, the nation, doesn't stand for those things, but it has a government that's, frankly, out of control, and a populace unable to rein it back in. On top of which, it's not the worst country in the world, but it's also far from being the best. Many, many, countries do not do any of these things with the exception of the odd occasion a low level government agent does something genuinely not sanctioned by higher ups. Even countries that do some of these things, such as Britain, routinely draw back after seeing the backlash - internment, for example, has not been retried. The US government, by comparison, seems to be getting worse.
Add to that the power the US government wields, and you have an unholy combination that's widely resented even by people who love the nation of the United States itself.
The word app certainly was used widely before Apple used it, as a shorter version of the word "application". As others have pointed out, we talk about "killer apps" not "killer applications", a common phrase before 2006. Even restricted to mobile applications, I've been using phones that run applications since 1997 (Nokia 9000 FTW!) and apps/programs/applications were words used interchangeably back then. I'm really not sure where this thing that "Apple invented the word app" comes from, they most certainly didn't!
Not that I necessarily agree with Microsoft's lawsuit, although it depends upon the context. If someone calls their mobile application payment and installation utility "App Store", then yeah, I see Apple's trademark as having merit as that might creation confusion. On the other hand, if someone writes "The Superdooperphone has an app store called Superdooperphone App Exchange", and gets hit with a trademark lawsuit, I think the trademark is being misused. Certainly the scope of the trademark needs to be as limited as possible, as the word "app" followed by the word "store" is something that will reasonably appear in English speech when describing a tool that performs the task the App Store does.
People whose car breaks down in the middle of nowhere are renowned for their ability to remain calm and logically think every step through in advance... ;-)
What. The. Fuck?
Beyond identifying the fact I found some kind of lie in Amazon.com's "explanation" as to why they did what they did, your comment is completely unrelated to anything I wrote. There is no way to read my original comment as being about anything other than Amazon.com's assertion that Wikileaks is publishing 250,000 wires.
Extraordinarily, not only did you miss that, but you managed to quote every other part of Amazon.com's explanation except the publishing 250,000 wires part in defending Bezos's truthiness!
Especially as the statement you quote is an outright lie by Amazon. While this "fact" is a standard pro-Government talking point, it simply is utterly untrue that Wikileaks is releasing 250,000 leaked cables. They are, indeed, only releasing those that have gone through a review process (and they're involving a small group of selected, highly respected, journalists, who are familiar with the redacting process, to do this review.)
The fact Amazon.com needs to resort to a bald-faced lie to distance itself from the allegations of government pressure says a great deal about the truth here.
That ship sailed when Lamo and Poulson shopped Manning to the feds. Besides, nobody at Wired is coming up with this argument. It's safe to say that if the issue was "protecting sources", we'd have heard that excuse from the horse's mouth by now.
Some on-topic stuff from Wikipedia, just to fill time because four minutes is not enough time to write a Slashdot reply, according to that idiot CmdrTaco.
Chats with Adrian Lamo
Adrian Lamo passed Manning's chat logs to the authorities because he feared lives were at risk.[10]
On May 21, Manning went online to chat with Adrian Lamo, a former hacker. The Washington Post writes that Lamo had recently been profiled by Wired magazine, and Manning had e-mailed Lamo, introducing himself as "an army intelligence analyst, deployed to eastern baghdad, pending discharge for 'adjustment disorder.'" In a series of chats over a period of a week, he told Lamo what he had done. He asked Lamo: "If you had unprecedented access to classified networks 14 hours a day 7 days a week for 8+ months, what would you do?" He told Lamo that he felt isolated and ignored at work, and was angered by some of the classified material he had read. He said he was a "wreck": "Ive been isolated so long ... i just wanted to figure out ways to survive ... smart enough to know whats going on, but helpless to do anything ... no-one took any notice of me," he wrote. He said he had been leaking files to a "white haired aussie," Julian Assange of Wikileaks. He said: "i'm exhausted ... in desperation to get somewhere in life ... i joined the army ... and that's proven to be a disaster now ... and now i'm quite possibly on the verge of being the most notorious 'hacktivist' or whatever you want to call it ... its all a big mess i've created."[10]
On May 25, he told Lamo he had taken CD-RWs containing music to work, erased them and rewrote them with the downloaded documents. According to Wired, he wrote that he "listened and lip-synced to Lady Gaga's 'Telephone' while exfiltrating possibly the largest data spillage in American history ... pretty simple, and unglamorous ..." Of the security he wrote: "it was vulnerable as fuck ... no-one suspected a thing ... =L kind of sad ... weak servers, weak logging, weak physical security, weak counter-intelligence, inattentive signal analysis... a perfect storm ". He asked Lamo "i mean what if i were someone more malicious," writing that he could have sold the material to Russia or China. When asked why he had not done that, he wrote: "it belongs in the public domain ... information should be free."[13]
He said he had leaked the Baghdad airstrike video, a video of the Granai airstrike, and 260,000 diplomatic cables, and hoped the release of the material would lead to "worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms ... if not ... than [sic] we're doomed ... as a species ... i will officially give up on the society we have if nothing happens." He told Lamo he felt encouraged by the response to the Baghdad airstrike video: "the reaction to the video gave me immense hope ... CNN's iReport was overwhelmed ... Twitter exploded ..."[13] He said Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and several thousand diplomats were "going to have a heart attack" when they discovered that an "entire repository of classified foreign policy is available, in searchable format to the public ... everywhere there's a US post ... there's a diplomatic scandal that will be revealed."[10] He wrote: "I want people to se
As others have pointed out, Wired is clearly not interested in "protecting sources": It was Lamo and Poulson who shopped their source, Manning, to the government.
And now, let's waste some of Slashdot's bandwidth with some on-topic stuff about Lamo/Manning, from Wikipedia. I wouldn't post it, but apparently 3 minutes is just not long enough to write a comment, according to Tacoidiot.
Chats with Adrian Lamo
Adrian Lamo passed Manning's chat logs to the authorities because he feared lives were at risk.[10]
On May 21, Manning went online to chat with Adrian Lamo, a former hacker. The Washington Post writes that Lamo had recently been profiled by Wired magazine, and Manning had e-mailed Lamo, introducing himself as "an army intelligence analyst, deployed to eastern baghdad, pending discharge for 'adjustment disorder.'" In a series of chats over a period of a week, he told Lamo what he had done. He asked Lamo: "If you had unprecedented access to classified networks 14 hours a day 7 days a week for 8+ months, what would you do?" He told Lamo that he felt isolated and ignored at work, and was angered by some of the classified material he had read. He said he was a "wreck": "Ive been isolated so long ... i just wanted to figure out ways to survive ... smart enough to know whats going on, but helpless to do anything ... no-one took any notice of me," he wrote. He said he had been leaking files to a "white haired aussie," Julian Assange of Wikileaks. He said: "i'm exhausted ... in desperation to get somewhere in life ... i joined the army ... and that's proven to be a disaster now ... and now i'm quite possibly on the verge of being the most notorious 'hacktivist' or whatever you want to call it ... its all a big mess i've created."[10]
On May 25, he told Lamo he had taken CD-RWs containing music to work, erased them and rewrote them with the downloaded documents. According to Wired, he wrote that he "listened and lip-synced to Lady Gaga's 'Telephone' while exfiltrating possibly the largest data spillage in American history ... pretty simple, and unglamorous ..." Of the security he wrote: "it was vulnerable as fuck ... no-one suspected a thing ... =L kind of sad ... weak servers, weak logging, weak physical security, weak counter-intelligence, inattentive signal analysis... a perfect storm ". He asked Lamo "i mean what if i were someone more malicious," writing that he could have sold the material to Russia or China. When asked why he had not done that, he wrote: "it belongs in the public domain ... information should be free."[13]
He said he had leaked the Baghdad airstrike video, a video of the Granai airstrike, and 260,000 diplomatic cables, and hoped the release of the material would lead to "worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms ... if not ... than [sic] we're doomed ... as a species ... i will officially give up on the society we have if nothing happens." He told Lamo he felt encouraged by the response to the Baghdad airstrike video: "the reaction to the video gave me immense hope ... CNN's iReport was overwhelmed ... Twitter exploded ..."[13] He said Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and several thousand diplomats were "going to have a heart attack" when they discovered that an "entire repository of classified foreign policy is available, in searchable format to the public ... everywhere there's a US post ... there's a diplomatic scandal that will be revealed."[10] He wrote: "I want people to see the truth regardless of who they are because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public."[14]
Journalistic integrity.
One of Greenwald's many recurring themes is the lack of integrity by journalists who spout an establishment line and stick to it, in the face of overwhelming evidence the line contradicts reality. The media's handling of Wikileaks has been a topic of interest for the last few months because it demonstrates the extreme lack of integrity that Greenwald has been highlighting, notably:
Those are the four that spring to mind just off the top of my head. Read Greenwald's blog for a more in depth analysis with appropriate links to articles discussing it.
General background: Greenwald is a fairly respected anti-establishment left-wing constitutionalist media critic whose entries frequently result in upset amongst the media establishment. Reportedly, Barack Obama considers Greenwald his critic of conscience because of Greenwald's related attacks on Obama's continuation of many of Bush's executive-supremacy policies. Despite the subjective nature of many of his subjects, his articles tend to be well researched, linked to supporting evidence, albeit with a tone that puts many people off.
Yes, but you speak for yourself, not for the majority. Given the relative efficiency (in building costs and land use) of inner-city apartments, it's fair to say they'd be considerably cheaper than standalone homes if it wasn't for their much higher demand. Most major cities that fill the criteria of livability are having enormous problems producing affordable housing, any many, from Key West to New York, are having to combine price controls and special, restricted, housing systems just to ensure critical personnel like firefighters and EMTs can afford to live nearby.
While you may like living in the middle of nowhere, having to walk over a mile just to get to a convenience store (don't even think about the distance to the local supermarket), being required to drive, at great cost, to do the most trivial things, the majority of people really don't like it, even if they claim to. Cities didn't come out of nowhere, they exist because people prefer to have what they need close by.
People do like living "stacked on top of one another" if it implies easy access to local resources, but convince themselves otherwise because of the lack of such housing. If there's any doubt that people prefer to live in cities, price a Manhattan apartment compared to, say, a suburban home in Long Island an hour or two from the city.
No, because they wouldn't consider this message as piracy, despite the links at the bottom. Can you guess why?
Napster pay service
Rhapsody
iMesh
I think Google's choice of the Apache license over the GPL shows that they're not keen to impose conditions upon manufacturers, however reasonable and fair. Indeed, right now Google's sole leverage, quite deliberately, is based upon making the Market a closed application and refusing to license it to manufacturers who don't produce devices to their specifications - but if they imposed a condition, like "The operating system shall be replaceable by the user", that most manufacturers would reject, the likely result is that the Android Market would lose relevance, not that manufacturers would try to find a way to play ball.
At this point I believe Google is trying to push for manufacturers to do the right thing, rather than force them to. The first step was creating an operating system that is the anti-iOS - one where the user is fully in charge of deciding what applications may be installed, not the maker of the phone or the cellular network. With some minor exceptions (such pre-installed non-removable crapware, some minor skirmishes early on with carriers about, say, tethering apps in the Market, that no longer occur, and I think Motorola does one phone that you can't install non-Market apps onto), they've won that battle; this blog entry shows what the next front will be.
And I've said it before but it's worth repeating: the need to "root" an Android phone is generally infinitely less necessary than the need to "jailbreak" an iOS device. Most people jailbreak iOS devices so they can run software that isn't approved by Apple. Android phones can generally run anything the user permits. Rooting is generally done by people wanting to implement features not built-in to the operating system that require OS-level support (such as tethering prior to Froyo), or by people wanting to upgrade their operating system before the manufacturer issues an official build.
The big companies don't really care if small, product-less, patent trolls sue them because they're large companies and can afford to pay out for dubious patents occasionally. And those companies also have the resources to make it an expensive process to sue them, which reduces the number of potential lawsuits to begin with, as patent trolls have to be absolutely sure they're going to win before filing the lawsuits.
So, alas, don't expect IBM et al to suddenly turn their pro-patent positions around. From their point of view, the system works for them, the patent trolls are more of a convenient annoyance (convenient because they also sue their smaller competitors) than a major problem.
Be aware that almost every device that plays Ogg also plays MP3. There's little reason for Fraunhoffer et al to sue a manufacturer for violating their patents when that manufacturer is already licensing their patents for a different part of the same product. They're getting their cut, they're only going to get upset if Samsung et al stop licensing the patents, using as an excuse that having removed MP3 support from their players, they no longer need to license the technologies.
Did these patents come out of nowhere, landing in the lawyer's laps? Did they just submit random gibberish to the USPTO in the hope that something would apply to something someone actually creates?
Or did an inventor, somewhere, come up with an idea which they patented and then decided to raise money by, directly or indirectly, selling the patents to this bunch of lawyers?
The FBI weren't engaged in "debt collection", they were investigating allegations of fraud.
There are two contradictory stories here, one from Faulkner, and one from the FBI, but assuming the FBI was, at least originally, acting in good faith (and there's no reason to believe they weren't, the FBI doesn't usually make a habit of inventing stories against random people):
The FBI believed Faulkner was setting up front companies to sell telecom services. The front companies would collect the money from their subscribers, run the services for as long as they could get away with without paying their suppliers, and then when the suppliers cut them off, they'd go bust - while the money itself had been pocketed by the people running the scam. If I understand it correctly, the money was funnelled out of these front companies by having them pay one, and only one, supplier, the operators of the datacenter - who happened to be themselves.
Why did the FBI think they were shell companies set up specifically to defraud the suppliers? Well, like I said, only the data center was getting any funds (if these companies were acting in good faith, there's no reason why only the data center would ever get paid), and there was deliberate obscufication being done to hide the true identities of those operating the front companies - for example, the FBI saw an email allegedly from Faulkner describing a process of bribing homeless people with $100 and drink to sign their names as directors. Faulkner's name wouldn't appear to be associated with the front companies, despite the fact he was apparently running them.
So, there you go: fraud, not debt collection. It's not that Faulkner owed money, it's that he allegedly invented a scheme to obtain services by deception, for profit. And, again, assuming the FBI were acting in good faith, it's not hard to understand why the FBI believed they needed every computer in the data center, given that they believed a significant number of the data center's "clients" were actually fake businesses that were part of the fraud.
They don't actually emit RF all that often, unless you're actually using them. Mobile phones, when idle, generally only transmit every few minutes or if the phone moves a substantial enough distance to make re-registration worth it.
Most Android phones most certainly can be upgraded to Froyo, if that's what you mean, either through an official update (some are waiting for the official update but it is coming) or via third party projects (and as Android is open source this is a reasonable option)
...then it wasn't even part of the post 9/11 hysteria.
There's a lot wrong with that paragraph, so...
1. Wikileaks doesn't "own" the data, but nor does Canonical "own" 90% of the stuff it publishes. Would it be legitimate to ban Ubuntu? What about a forum like Slashdot? The material published by Wikileaks is public domain - it's produced by government, not private entities. Wikileaks doesn't have to "own" it to publish it.
2. As I understand it, Wikileaks wasn't actually using Amazon.com to publish the cables, merely to provide the starting point.
3. Amazon is plain lying about the redaction claim. Wikileaks is only publishing cables that have been vetted by the various respected news organizations involved, and yes, those cables are being redacted based on the advice they're getting. Amazon is well aware of that but continues to put up their statement claiming otherwise.
4. "Why attack them when they aren't comfortable hosting the data" isn't an appropriate question: Those of us criticizing Amazon are doing so for various reasons, the "discomfort" Amazon might have had is not one of them. Amazon took pro-active steps not merely to deny Wikileaks a service at a whim, but they've lied about it since, choosing to smear Wikileaks rather than posting the real reasons. Maybe those real reasons were "We thought these lies about WL were true", perhaps they were "Lieberman threatened us", perhaps they were "We personally don't think anyone should be held accountable when private contractors rape and kill on the public dime", or perhaps they were "Isn't the government about to announce a move to cloud services for all of its IT services? KERCHING!!!?!1!! Let's get in on that!"
But either way, Amazon did more than simply tell Wikileaks they didn't want to have anything to do with them, they smeared Wikileaks, and continue to do so today. So yes, they deserve criticism.
What the hell else would you do with MP3s?
You're not getting them transcribed and then reading them are you, Google Voice voicemail style? That'd be the ultimate in laziness!
Visa and Mastercard are a duopoly. They don't get to decide "who they do business with", because the decision they make is actually "Who you are allowed to do business with".
Amazon has every right to not do business with Wikileaks. It doesn't, however, have the right to terminate service on a whim without notice. Nor, more importantly, does it have a right to smear Wikileaks when explaining its actions.
Frankly I don't give a rat's ass about Paypal.