I'm not talking about harassing them, I'm talking about identifying them in the real world through their online connections and turning them in to be arrested. Some kind of distributed tracking system. I would love to volunteer to help with such a project if somebody came up with a method of doing it.
Has anybody thought about starting a project to track down these scammers with aggressive geek wizard techniques? Collecting a database of email headers strikes me as a good starting place, but I have no idea what would come next. Assuming you had unlimited computer power and a legion of volunteers willing to go out on a limb in terms of hacking/cracking, how would you go about identifying Nigerian Spam Scammers?
Good point. As amazing as it is that he fell for it to the extent he did, you gotta feel sorry for the guy. We can only hope that the scammers nuts get nailed to the wall so future victims will be fewer.
Unbelievable as it may be that anybody would go to the lengths Sessions did -- buying the scammers cell phones and other things, travelling halfway across the world, etc -- the most unbelievable thing is that he somehow managed not to get the word that this is a fraud. As the article says, almost everyone with an in-box has received these messages. I would think almost everyone who surfs the web would also have run across the phrase "Nigerian Spam Scam" and get a clue.
My first computer was a homebuilt
on
First Computers
·
· Score: 1
Z80 machine based on the popular "Big Board," one of the first single-board computers, circa 1981. A maxxed out system with a whopping 64k RAM and TWO 8-inch floppies, running CPM. Case made out of particle board and hand-cut sheet aluminum. It's still in my basement but has not been turned on in many years, since the Zenith monochrome monitor died.
My fondest memory was powering it up for the first time and nothing happened, or nothing seemed to happen. After a frustrating half hour checking connections and repeated reboots, I finally thought to turn up the Brightness knob on the monitor, and beheld the glowing green characters of success.
You do live in such a country if you live in the USA, where ANYONE can drag you back into court and successfully sue you for something you've been acquitted of (ask OJ).
"a panel of three professional judges backed up by four lay judges, two of whom had technical expertise relevant to the case."
In the USA, cases like this end up before our Supreme Court -- 7 judges, none of whom has any technical expertise whatsoever, and who are appointed for life by whichever political regime is in power when one of them dies.
No wonder our tech laws favor owners at the expense of innovators.
From a real-world perspective this out-of-game trading is simply cheating, and on that level it might ruin the game for some people. But putting aside the fact that Ultima is a game, from an in-game point of view the real world is a sort of otherworldly plane, where strange things can happen. For example, the game gets recompiled. I mean, if the idea of divine intervention is acceptable in RPGs then I see no problem with mysterious ethereal benefactors compelling characters to give each other stuff.
Here's an attractive theory: SCO's situation is a sign that the practice of petty litigation in lieu of actually doing something productive has inflated beyond the world's ability to sustain it. SCO will be the first in a series of companies to go bankrupt through irresponsible litigation, lawsuits will subside to a rational level, and thousands of lawyers will be working for porn sites to feed their families.
Based on the review, I would say this book illustrates my theory that many people we think of as "great" are actually aberrant personalities, driven by abnormal extremes of ambition, greed, insecurity, resentment, etc. Whether we shower them with riches or hunt them down and kill them depends mostly on whether their behavior happens to produce side effects that we like. A Larry Ellison and a Saddam Husseins aren't fundamentally very far apart.
1. Each of the 235,396 laid off programmers gets a girlfriend. Okay, the hardest part is done. 2. Move to Wyoming, displacing the current population (all of whom are in the witness protection program anyway). 3. Secede from the US and form a Geek Nation. 4. Hack NORAD and hold the world hostage, demanding ONE MILLION... er, ONE HUNDRED BILLION dollars. 5. Profit!
Lawyers are supposed to learn something about ethics during their time in law school. If the RIAA's lawyers entered arguments are so patently groundless that a judge calls them "silly," I would like to see those jackasses fined for wasting the court's time and my tax dollars. How about a charge of creating a public nuisance?
One solution to that problem would be for the diminished life of the patent to revert to the originator and to become nontransferrable. For example, if I sell my rights to company X, then say that takes 2 years off the lifetime of the patent, then when it expires for company X it reverts to me for 2 years before it expires. Then if X sells it to Y, 2 more years revert to me. People actually producing and selling whatever it is I invented would still be making money doing that and paying royalties to me, but there would be less of a market for simply buying and selling the rights.
Does anybody else think it would be a good idea if the life of a patent were shortened by a specific amount every time the rights changed hands? The idea would be to discourage companies that exist only to acquire rights to things without actually creating anything.
After all, the original purpose of the patents and trademarks system was, "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries (United States Constitution, Section 8)."
It doesn't say anything about promoting or supporting a "rights market" for clever business people.
The ISPs specifically mentioned on the mailing list I was talking about were Comcast, NTL (England, Ireland, Wales) and CFaith.
One guy thinks maybe buried in the Comcast legalese it says "unlimited access" means access at any time, but not for an unlimited length of time.
I've never received any complaints myself, but as an avid DC++ user I am waiting for it to happen and wondering what the highest odds outcome is if I ignore the warning.
Here is an idea to thwart these pirate lawsuits. I call them pirate lawsuits because I see companies using a deliberate strategy of waiting for others to do the hard work of developing businesses around a technology, then swooping in, with government backing, to steal the profits. It's like the days when piracy on the high seas was sometimes sanctioned by kings.
One solution would be a statue of limitation for infringement. If patent holders had a one- or two-year time limit for filing infringement suits, they wouldn't be able to wait for billion dollar industries to develop before asserting their rights. People with technology they consider worthwhile would have to protect it in a timely fashion.
An actual lawsuit shouldn't be necessary as a first step, as the cost of litigation might be prohibitive to fledgling innovators. But a patent holder should have to lodge a complaint within the time period. There would be no injunction against the party using the technology. The complaint would be like a building permit, and would have its own expiration date of a year or two before the holder would have to take legal action or drop the complaint.
Essentially this is merely a new way to distribute banner ads, with possible discount points for spamming your friends. The freely downloadable files are merely promos with BUY buttons. Strangely, the article does not mention at all that the content itself will be pay downloads. Who wrote this, the RIAA? Not that it's wrong to pay for something, but the article makes it sound like the industry is giving something away, which they definitely aren't.
Since I haven't been following this issue at all, and since it probably doesn't matter what any of us think about it anyway because our elected representatives don't actually represent us anymore, my only contribution is to point out that the Hormel Meat Company operates an actual Museum of SPAM near their corporate hq in Austin, Minnesota. Anybody been there? How about a mini-review?
Minor technical point... You can already make a citizen's arrest whenever you see fit. But you better be sure you're right, and maybe have a good headlock. This law doesn't change that, it only defines a new crime.
Making everybody who has a hand in transporting "stolen" music liable would set a precedent making truck drivers, warehousers, retailers and everybody along the way liable for anything illegal that is shipped or stored anywhere. IANAL but this seems like an absolute no-brainer to me.
The irony is that copyright is not even "property," it is a "right" that is granted by a government and temporarily "held," not "owned." Here we have record companies, first conning the public into thinking of copyrights as property, and now thinking they can elevate their mythical property above real property.
Notice that the Justice system isn't as much about Justice as it is about Tactics and Strategy? And that Democracy in America isn't as much about Democracy as it is about Bribery and Influence. It may be a cynical point of view, but the system we pretend to live in is pretty different from the system we pretend to live in. Maybe the Matrix doesn't require a giant computer network. The clever and wealthy are progressively converting the rest of us into a battery pack. The goal of the political system seems to be to get the public to produce the greatest power output with the least input.
Anybody surprised to see Tauzin's name here? Add these to your list of corporate lapdogs.
Sponsor: Rep Coble, Howard [NC-6]
Co-sponsors: Rep Delahunt, William D. - 11/20/2003 [MA-10] Rep Greenwood, James C. - 10/8/2003 [PA-8] Rep Hobson, David L. - 10/8/2003 [OH-7] Rep Portman, Rob - 11/20/2003 [OH-2] Rep Sensenbrenner, F. James, Jr. - 10/8/2003 [WI-5] Rep Smith, Lamar - 10/8/2003 [TX-21] Rep Tauzin, W. J. (Billy) - 10/8/2003 [LA-3] Rep Turner, Michael R. - 11/20/2003 [OH-3] Rep Wexler, Robert - 11/20/2003 [FL-19]
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not talking about harassing them, I'm talking about identifying them in the real world through their online connections and turning them in to be arrested. Some kind of distributed tracking system. I would love to volunteer to help with such a project if somebody came up with a method of doing it.
Has anybody thought about starting a project to track down these scammers with aggressive geek wizard techniques? Collecting a database of email headers strikes me as a good starting place, but I have no idea what would come next. Assuming you had unlimited computer power and a legion of volunteers willing to go out on a limb in terms of hacking/cracking, how would you go about identifying Nigerian Spam Scammers?
Good point. As amazing as it is that he fell for it to the extent he did, you gotta feel sorry for the guy. We can only hope that the scammers nuts get nailed to the wall so future victims will be fewer.
Unbelievable as it may be that anybody would go to the lengths Sessions did -- buying the scammers cell phones and other things, travelling halfway across the world, etc -- the most unbelievable thing is that he somehow managed not to get the word that this is a fraud. As the article says, almost everyone with an in-box has received these messages. I would think almost everyone who surfs the web would also have run across the phrase "Nigerian Spam Scam" and get a clue.
Z80 machine based on the popular "Big Board," one of the first single-board computers, circa 1981. A maxxed out system with a whopping 64k RAM and TWO 8-inch floppies, running CPM. Case made out of particle board and hand-cut sheet aluminum. It's still in my basement but has not been turned on in many years, since the Zenith monochrome monitor died.
My fondest memory was powering it up for the first time and nothing happened, or nothing seemed to happen. After a frustrating half hour checking connections and repeated reboots, I finally thought to turn up the Brightness knob on the monitor, and beheld the glowing green characters of success.
You do live in such a country if you live in the USA, where ANYONE can drag you back into court and successfully sue you for something you've been acquitted of (ask OJ).
Being from Belgium makes you Belgian, but does drinking Belgian beer make you Belch?
"a panel of three professional judges backed up by four lay judges, two of whom had technical expertise relevant to the case."
In the USA, cases like this end up before our Supreme Court -- 7 judges, none of whom has any technical expertise whatsoever, and who are appointed for life by whichever political regime is in power when one of them dies.
No wonder our tech laws favor owners at the expense of innovators.
From a real-world perspective this out-of-game trading is simply cheating, and on that level it might ruin the game for some people. But putting aside the fact that Ultima is a game, from an in-game point of view the real world is a sort of otherworldly plane, where strange things can happen. For example, the game gets recompiled. I mean, if the idea of divine intervention is acceptable in RPGs then I see no problem with mysterious ethereal benefactors compelling characters to give each other stuff.
Here's an attractive theory: SCO's situation is a sign that the practice of petty litigation in lieu of actually doing something productive has inflated beyond the world's ability to sustain it. SCO will be the first in a series of companies to go bankrupt through irresponsible litigation, lawsuits will subside to a rational level, and thousands of lawyers will be working for porn sites to feed their families.
At least we can hope.
Based on the review, I would say this book illustrates my theory that many people we think of as "great" are actually aberrant personalities, driven by abnormal extremes of ambition, greed, insecurity, resentment, etc. Whether we shower them with riches or hunt them down and kill them depends mostly on whether their behavior happens to produce side effects that we like.
A Larry Ellison and a Saddam Husseins aren't fundamentally very far apart.
1. Each of the 235,396 laid off programmers gets a girlfriend. Okay, the hardest part is done. ... er, ONE HUNDRED BILLION dollars.
2. Move to Wyoming, displacing the current population (all of whom are in the witness protection program anyway).
3. Secede from the US and form a Geek Nation.
4. Hack NORAD and hold the world hostage, demanding ONE MILLION
5. Profit!
Lawyers are supposed to learn something about ethics during their time in law school. If the RIAA's lawyers entered arguments are so patently groundless that a judge calls them "silly," I would like to see those jackasses fined for wasting the court's time and my tax dollars. How about a charge of creating a public nuisance?
Wold has spent 30 years working on this. Hardly a "knockoff."
One solution to that problem would be for the diminished life of the patent to revert to the originator and to become nontransferrable. For example, if I sell my rights to company X, then say that takes 2 years off the lifetime of the patent, then when it expires for company X it reverts to me for 2 years before it expires. Then if X sells it to Y, 2 more years revert to me. People actually producing and selling whatever it is I invented would still be making money doing that and paying royalties to me, but there would be less of a market for simply buying and selling the rights.
Does anybody else think it would be a good idea if the life of a patent were shortened by a specific amount every time the rights changed hands? The idea would be to discourage companies that exist only to acquire rights to things without actually creating anything.
After all, the original purpose of the patents and trademarks system was, "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries (United States Constitution, Section 8)."
It doesn't say anything about promoting or supporting a "rights market" for clever business people.
The ISPs specifically mentioned on the mailing list I was talking about were Comcast, NTL (England, Ireland, Wales) and CFaith.
One guy thinks maybe buried in the Comcast legalese it says "unlimited access" means access at any time, but not for an unlimited length of time.
I've never received any complaints myself, but as an avid DC++ user I am waiting for it to happen and wondering what the highest odds outcome is if I ignore the warning.
Here is an idea to thwart these pirate lawsuits. I call them pirate lawsuits because I see companies using a deliberate strategy of waiting for others to do the hard work of developing businesses around a technology, then swooping in, with government backing, to steal the profits. It's like the days when piracy on the high seas was sometimes sanctioned by kings.
One solution would be a statue of limitation for infringement. If patent holders had a one- or two-year time limit for filing infringement suits, they wouldn't be able to wait for billion dollar industries to develop before asserting their rights. People with technology they consider worthwhile would have to protect it in a timely fashion.
An actual lawsuit shouldn't be necessary as a first step, as the cost of litigation might be prohibitive to fledgling innovators. But a patent holder should have to lodge a complaint within the time period. There would be no injunction against the party using the technology. The complaint would be like a building permit, and would have its own expiration date of a year or two before the holder would have to take legal action or drop the complaint.
Pre-descent Checklist
Item 87: Make sure nothing fell off during ascent.
Hmmm.
Essentially this is merely a new way to distribute banner ads, with possible discount points for spamming your friends. The freely downloadable files are merely promos with BUY buttons.
Strangely, the article does not mention at all that the content itself will be pay downloads. Who wrote this, the RIAA? Not that it's wrong to pay for something, but the article makes it sound like the industry is giving something away, which they definitely aren't.
Since I haven't been following this issue at all, and since it probably doesn't matter what any of us think about it anyway because our elected representatives don't actually represent us anymore, my only contribution is to point out that the Hormel Meat Company operates an actual Museum of SPAM near their corporate hq in Austin, Minnesota. Anybody been there? How about a mini-review?
Minor technical point... You can already make a citizen's arrest whenever you see fit. But you better be sure you're right, and maybe have a good headlock. This law doesn't change that, it only defines a new crime.
Making everybody who has a hand in transporting "stolen" music liable would set a precedent making truck drivers, warehousers, retailers and everybody along the way liable for anything illegal that is shipped or stored anywhere. IANAL but this seems like an absolute no-brainer to me.
The irony is that copyright is not even "property," it is a "right" that is granted by a government and temporarily "held," not "owned." Here we have record companies, first conning the public into thinking of copyrights as property, and now thinking they can elevate their mythical property above real property.
Notice that the Justice system isn't as much about Justice as it is about Tactics and Strategy? And that Democracy in America isn't as much about Democracy as it is about Bribery and Influence. It may be a cynical point of view, but the system we pretend to live in is pretty different from the system we pretend to live in. Maybe the Matrix doesn't require a giant computer network. The clever and wealthy are progressively converting the rest of us into a battery pack. The goal of the political system seems to be to get the public to produce the greatest power output with the least input.
Anybody surprised to see Tauzin's name here? Add these to your list of corporate lapdogs.
Sponsor:
Rep Coble, Howard [NC-6]
Co-sponsors:
Rep Delahunt, William D. - 11/20/2003 [MA-10]
Rep Greenwood, James C. - 10/8/2003 [PA-8]
Rep Hobson, David L. - 10/8/2003 [OH-7]
Rep Portman, Rob - 11/20/2003 [OH-2]
Rep Sensenbrenner, F. James, Jr. - 10/8/2003 [WI-5]
Rep Smith, Lamar - 10/8/2003 [TX-21]
Rep Tauzin, W. J. (Billy) - 10/8/2003 [LA-3]
Rep Turner, Michael R. - 11/20/2003 [OH-3]
Rep Wexler, Robert - 11/20/2003 [FL-19]