Neither is encryption a paper shredder or a bonfire, but evidence of destroying evidence and the presence of the means to destroy that evidence can be admitted as evidence.
The guy wasn't under investigation because he was using encryption. I don't know where you came up with the idea that encryption == intent to commit a crime. I didn't say that.
However, evidence that he used encryption to commit a crime does show an attempt to "destroy" evidence and is wholly relevant to the case at hand.
The analogy with the gun is that criminal charges can be augmented by the evidence of certain tools found in the investigation.
According to this page, the only condition that separates "robbery" from "armed robbery" is Armed robbery means the offender is carrying a real or imitation firearm or explosive or offensive weapon
I struggled with this question, and in some ways regret specifying Conspiracy. However the answer I came up with was whomever he was sending these encrypted files to.
And obstruction of justice is, as you say, another appropriate charge.
On the other hand, if he never sent the files and kept them for his own private use, then the conspiracy charge doesn't make sense.
And with other evidence, why shouldn't it be? In fact, the presence of it ought to lead prosecutors to tack on the charge of conspiracy.
Just like the presence of a gun during a robbery lifts the crime to armed robbery, the presence of encryption ought to imply not only that the culprit intended to commit the crime but also intended to cover it up as well.
It should be pointed out, of course, that the ERRF is designed to be a means of protecting the EU member states from external invasion (whether in the form of a foreign army or single terrorists). It is not in place to act as Customs agents.
As you say, enforcement is a condition of membership in the EU. However, the EU is not composed of a culturally homogenous people (America, for the most part, is) and each country's national interest is historically different from their neighbors. In many matters, cooperation and bending to the will of the majority is beneficial in the long run to the well-being of the member state as well as to the health of the Union.
However, in a case such as this Microsoft issue, the final decision of the EC may be in direct opposition to the fundamental national interest of a member state. Obviously, such a decision would be highly unlikely, but as in my (admittedly extreme) example in my earlier post, not wholly out of the realm of possibility.
The EU is not able to make judgements that essentially destroy the economies of its own members. In such a case the members would leave of their own will. And with no standing federal army there is no method of preventing the secession of discontent member states.
So the upshot of this is that the EC is relegated to a very limited role and may only make strong regulations against weak business opponents. A strong company such as a Microsoft or IBM is able to force their way out of the harshest penalties because the EU member states can't afford to lose access to their products.
This is not to say that MS would refuse to cooperate at all, and as we have seen thus far, they have cooperated to the extent required of them. However, as is the case with any monopoly, they hold all the cards. A fragile, multi-national confederation of states with no power to keep member states from seceding is the EU's key weakness here.
It's up to any local government to regulate the behavior of local companies. This extends even to the Internet.
Normally it'd just be a matter of saying "Route around damage" and using an auction site in another country. However, as Australia is actually disconnected from every other country, it is not such a simple matter. By attempting to bypass the tax, the buyer would have to pay for overseas shipping and customs charges which may actually end up being more than the tax itself.
Seems that the Oz government has found a nice source of revenue. Not that they weren't entitled to the money before (all transactions should be taxed, even internet ones), but that it was easy to hide these transactions on the Web.
I would agree with you that to a certain degree the current EU is akin to the early Confederation of the American colonies.
The primary difference between the American constitutional republic as it exists today (and arguably since before the American Civil War) is that there has always been a standing army controlled by the Federal branch of government. The EU has no such thing, and there does not seem to be a provision for the establishment of such an army in the EU constitution. It is primarily an immigration and trade agreement rather than some formation of a true continental government.
However, it acts as a continental government. So again, I ask what is their actual power to enforce member compliance to an EC decision? If (as an extremely unlikely example) they bar Microsoft from doing business in the EU, how will they enforce that? If England or Denmark say, "No, we want to import Microsoft products. The economic cost to retool 80% of our computing industry is prohibitive and would ruin us," how would the EU respond to that?
In the American system, borders are controlled at the Federal level, so preventng (say) California from importing a banned product is fairly straightforward. It is illegal, for example, to import any product from an embargoed country like Cuba, so the Federal government is empowered and able through the use of the Armed Forces to physically prevent the importation of such goods.
The EU, without an actual enforcement force, must rely on the goodwill and willingness of a member state to implement and follow the regulations and decisions of the EC. However, as we've seen in the UN Iraq Oil for Food debacle, states that have no willingness to follow the toothless laws (France, Russia) will circumvent the system to their own gain.
So in our hypothetical situation, if Britain or Denmark decide to import Microsoft goods against the decision of an EU court, what do they stand to lose? EU membership? Massive sanctions? If the EU were to eject a large state such as Britain, how much credibility as a whole would the EU retain?
The EU is not a country, it is a conglomeration of countries. What is their actual power to enforce these laws? Especially seeing as how banning Microsoft on a continent-wide level would be an infringement of each country's right to self-determination.
I think that someone is going to get a huge wakeup call and I doubt it is going to be Microsoft this time.
Not just a single loony, but a whole family! This kind of thing goes on all across the world with loonies deciding that enough government-sponsored bombardment of their brain is enough and takes the radical step of putting shielding up to prevent further abuse. This is the first time I've heard of a whole family going insane at once.
Not to say that they aren't right, though. Radio waves from all directions are constantly bombarding every single one of us all the time. Moreso if you are a ham radio or CB operator because those waves are originating from you. And in some special cases, it may even be possible that the metal fillings in someone's teeth are picking up those radio waves and affecting the person in a strange way. But mostly, the radio waves that pass through us are mostly harmless.
Should they be forced to remove the shielding because neighbors don't like it and find it an eyesore? I suppose that's about as legitimate as the family demanding the cessation of radio wave production from the neighbors. It's another form of gentrification and morally repugnant.
While my cottage is fully serviced by a fleet of Roombas, I think this Scooba might be useful in the kitchen area with all that linoleum. No mention of how much linoleum-damaging chemical solution is in that Clorox cleaner.
But more than just those two robots, I think that keeping the elves at bay with this thing might be useful as well
I'm all for violating the spirit of the GPL at every turn, but the extent of actual violations of the license by Maui-X is incomprehensible to me. It's one thing to restrict source code to licensees who ask for it (who would obviously have the extended but rarely-used right of redistributing it to 3rd parties), it's a completely different thing to simply claim that the GPL code is all fresh, non-GPL work and that anyone claiming otherwise can go screw themselves.
There are a handful of ways around GPL licensing and Maui-X simply doesn't take any of those tacks.
This is a community problem, but it's really more of a problem of a company willing to break the law to accomplish their ends.
(tangent) Say what you will about Microsoft and their heavy-handed tactics, but for every action they take they usually have at least a smidgen of legal reasoning to back them up.
I've been giving some thought to this whole phenomenon and find myself being able to compare the sitting in line for a movie only to the desire to climb a very difficult mountain. It isn't really akin to the dedication of sports fans because sports fans do not put their entire lives on hold for weeks on end to buy tickets. Maybe it is because sports fans have a better, more efficient system of getting tickets than movie fans, but that doesn't seem right considering such outlets as Fandango.
Mountain climbers, especially those who attempt the most difficult, are definitely a different breed. They put themselves at the mercy of the environment for weeks on end for the thrill of reaching the summit. At the end, there is no tangible benefit for doing so (disregarding any funding from sponsors). They achieve their goal for themselves.
I suppose that is similar to the mindset of the typical movie camper. To be the first in line to see the movie. Unfortunately for them, it is seen as frivolous and stupid by the vast majority of people. When we laugh at the geeks shown on the evening news, it's not because we associate ourselves with them, rather it is because we see them as something wholly foreign and strange and idiotic.
On the other hand, we see those mountain climbers as heroic and praiseworthy.
The difference is that society puts value in pushing one's self to the limit and braving the elements to accomplish something that very few can do. Society does not put any value in sitting around in a line, in a tent, eating Doritos and drinking Coke.
Of course being a Star Wars fan is not a disease and I didn't mean to imply that such was the case.
Rather I meant that rates of diseases like autism seem to run pretty high in the geek community. Aspergers is the most commonly mentioned mental handicap around Slashdot, and it is closely related with autism. The people who have Aspergers typically withdraw from normal interaction and as a result get pigeonholed by "normal" people as being weird and strange. Rather than being seen as victims of a disease, they are treated like monsters, avoided and mocked.
Anecdotal evidence aside, I'd love to see the rates of Aspergers/autism among those camping out to see Star Wars/LOTR/etc compared to the general populace. It would even be enlightening to see those rates compared with those who work in the IT industry at large.
You're quite right, of course. It shouldn't be much trouble to use an eVC makefile as a guide to building your own application without the need for the IDE. It also isn't too hard to search through the MSDN documentation for parameter and API behavior information. Auto-complete is something that Man has lived without for decades.
But the automation and inclusion of those things makes working with an IDE for a platform really nice. "$299 nice"? I don't know about that, though.
But as you've noted, the tools aren't going to stop working suddenly because you haven't upgraded to the next version. However even that statement isn't 100% correct. At some point the ARM4 binary that you are building with clarm.exe isn't going to work with the ARM5-built OS bits.
It seems that a year ago Pingtel had its doubts about SIP as the sole technology for VoIP. And they are right, of course.
The key to making this work is a combination of SIP and other related technologies, but most of all, VoIP needs a solid business plan to work. Despite good technologies and intentions, without a business plan that is well-designed, the project will be doomed to failure. Pingtel thinks they have the right business model. Time will tell
I know it's probably a bad thing to look down on some of these people and quite a bit hypocritical seeing as I'm posting on a site billed as "News for Nerds", but I feel really bad for some of these people. Not all of them, mind you, but there are a handful of people who seem so far removed from reality and that actually fit into the "35-year old unbathed computer nerd living in parents' basement" stereotype that it makes one wonder where we as a society have let these people down.
Do I have better things to do than criticize Star Wars/Star Trek/LOTR fans? Yes, of course. And that's what I think sets me apart from these (for lack of a better term) "losers".
But their "loser"-status can't be all their fault. At some point, we as a society have turned them into these monsters by shunning them, excluding them, or mocking them for their odd and sometimes strange behavior. Perhaps it's some mild autism that they suffer from, or maybe some other neural disease that makes them "different" from most of us (and I use the word loosely) "normals".
A quarter of a century ago many people lined up to see Star Wars. The theaters were sold out. But they were sold out to relatively normal people. This week's Star Wars opening was sold out to a group of weirdoes who have lost touch with reality.
But perhaps it is us, the rest of the world, who has lost touch with them. And that is the real shame, I think.
For those of you who don't know anything about LP
on
George Dantzig, 1914-2005
·
· Score: 5, Informative
What is most interesting about LP is not that it is just a method of finding the solution to a problem, but that it extends in range over many diverse fields from (obviously) computer programming to fields such as economics and even business planning.
Before the eMbedded Visual Tools v3.0 came out, the toolset was actually a set of Visual Studio 5.0 add-ons that integrated with a base VS installation. From 3.0 until now, the tools have been separate from Visual Studio (mostly because of major compatibility problems with the internal eVC database and VC6).
However, the plug-in architecture seems to have been fixed in the latest VS.Net bits, so the original plan (to let the VS team do all the heavy lifting and the Mobile team to reap the benefits of a dedicated IDE team while concentrating on the OS) seems to have been reborn.
While it is a pain for developers, in that they will now be required to own a copy of VS, this actually bodes well for the Mobile team and its products.
It's an interesting concept, much like a news-on-command type of system where you can basically get the media feed you want any time you want it. However, because of the limitations in compression and the limitations in bandwidth, each podcast media file is simply too large for the average dial-up internet user. Text files of a few kilobytes can be downloaded relatively quickly, but a media file of several hundred kilobytes will be prohibitively expensive in terms of bandwidth.
Naturally, once the file is downloaded, that cost disappears. So the key is to make the download cost negligble, but in terms of download time it is still pretty rough for all those 56K-ers out there.
Slashdot Mirror
Right. Which is why I titled this thread Update wiki with new information.
But yes, thank you for paying attention and telling me what I've already said.
The wikipedia entry claims that The Voyager I spacecraft is believed to have passed termination shock in February 2003.
I'd do it, but my wiki privileges have been revoked temporarily. I can't imagine why.
Neither is encryption a paper shredder or a bonfire, but evidence of destroying evidence and the presence of the means to destroy that evidence can be admitted as evidence.
The guy wasn't under investigation because he was using encryption. I don't know where you came up with the idea that encryption == intent to commit a crime. I didn't say that.
However, evidence that he used encryption to commit a crime does show an attempt to "destroy" evidence and is wholly relevant to the case at hand.
The analogy with the gun is that criminal charges can be augmented by the evidence of certain tools found in the investigation.
According to this page, the only condition that separates "robbery" from "armed robbery" is Armed robbery means the offender is carrying a real or imitation firearm or explosive or offensive weapon
The law may be different where you live.
So who is the co-conspiritor?
I struggled with this question, and in some ways regret specifying Conspiracy. However the answer I came up with was whomever he was sending these encrypted files to.
And obstruction of justice is, as you say, another appropriate charge.
On the other hand, if he never sent the files and kept them for his own private use, then the conspiracy charge doesn't make sense.
And with other evidence, why shouldn't it be? In fact, the presence of it ought to lead prosecutors to tack on the charge of conspiracy.
Just like the presence of a gun during a robbery lifts the crime to armed robbery, the presence of encryption ought to imply not only that the culprit intended to commit the crime but also intended to cover it up as well.
It should be pointed out, of course, that the ERRF is designed to be a means of protecting the EU member states from external invasion (whether in the form of a foreign army or single terrorists). It is not in place to act as Customs agents.
As you say, enforcement is a condition of membership in the EU. However, the EU is not composed of a culturally homogenous people (America, for the most part, is) and each country's national interest is historically different from their neighbors. In many matters, cooperation and bending to the will of the majority is beneficial in the long run to the well-being of the member state as well as to the health of the Union.
However, in a case such as this Microsoft issue, the final decision of the EC may be in direct opposition to the fundamental national interest of a member state. Obviously, such a decision would be highly unlikely, but as in my (admittedly extreme) example in my earlier post, not wholly out of the realm of possibility.
The EU is not able to make judgements that essentially destroy the economies of its own members. In such a case the members would leave of their own will. And with no standing federal army there is no method of preventing the secession of discontent member states.
So the upshot of this is that the EC is relegated to a very limited role and may only make strong regulations against weak business opponents. A strong company such as a Microsoft or IBM is able to force their way out of the harshest penalties because the EU member states can't afford to lose access to their products.
This is not to say that MS would refuse to cooperate at all, and as we have seen thus far, they have cooperated to the extent required of them. However, as is the case with any monopoly, they hold all the cards. A fragile, multi-national confederation of states with no power to keep member states from seceding is the EU's key weakness here.
It's up to any local government to regulate the behavior of local companies. This extends even to the Internet.
Normally it'd just be a matter of saying "Route around damage" and using an auction site in another country. However, as Australia is actually disconnected from every other country, it is not such a simple matter. By attempting to bypass the tax, the buyer would have to pay for overseas shipping and customs charges which may actually end up being more than the tax itself.
Seems that the Oz government has found a nice source of revenue. Not that they weren't entitled to the money before (all transactions should be taxed, even internet ones), but that it was easy to hide these transactions on the Web.
I would agree with you that to a certain degree the current EU is akin to the early Confederation of the American colonies.
The primary difference between the American constitutional republic as it exists today (and arguably since before the American Civil War) is that there has always been a standing army controlled by the Federal branch of government. The EU has no such thing, and there does not seem to be a provision for the establishment of such an army in the EU constitution. It is primarily an immigration and trade agreement rather than some formation of a true continental government.
However, it acts as a continental government. So again, I ask what is their actual power to enforce member compliance to an EC decision? If (as an extremely unlikely example) they bar Microsoft from doing business in the EU, how will they enforce that? If England or Denmark say, "No, we want to import Microsoft products. The economic cost to retool 80% of our computing industry is prohibitive and would ruin us," how would the EU respond to that?
In the American system, borders are controlled at the Federal level, so preventng (say) California from importing a banned product is fairly straightforward. It is illegal, for example, to import any product from an embargoed country like Cuba, so the Federal government is empowered and able through the use of the Armed Forces to physically prevent the importation of such goods.
The EU, without an actual enforcement force, must rely on the goodwill and willingness of a member state to implement and follow the regulations and decisions of the EC. However, as we've seen in the UN Iraq Oil for Food debacle, states that have no willingness to follow the toothless laws (France, Russia) will circumvent the system to their own gain.
So in our hypothetical situation, if Britain or Denmark decide to import Microsoft goods against the decision of an EU court, what do they stand to lose? EU membership? Massive sanctions? If the EU were to eject a large state such as Britain, how much credibility as a whole would the EU retain?
This is a great step, if only in spirit.
When the spammers and spyware makers start getting fined and sent to jail I think we'll have something to crow about.
Until then, it's just a feelgood law.
Obviously this is up for amendment at any time, but "Although the amount of fine should act as a sufficient deterrent to firms, it may not under any circumstances exceed 10% of their worldwide turnover."
The appropriate Guidelines
The one that can't even get member states to vote for the body's Constitution?
The EU is not a country, it is a conglomeration of countries. What is their actual power to enforce these laws? Especially seeing as how banning Microsoft on a continent-wide level would be an infringement of each country's right to self-determination.
I think that someone is going to get a huge wakeup call and I doubt it is going to be Microsoft this time.
Not just a single loony, but a whole family! This kind of thing goes on all across the world with loonies deciding that enough government-sponsored bombardment of their brain is enough and takes the radical step of putting shielding up to prevent further abuse. This is the first time I've heard of a whole family going insane at once.
Not to say that they aren't right, though. Radio waves from all directions are constantly bombarding every single one of us all the time. Moreso if you are a ham radio or CB operator because those waves are originating from you. And in some special cases, it may even be possible that the metal fillings in someone's teeth are picking up those radio waves and affecting the person in a strange way. But mostly, the radio waves that pass through us are mostly harmless.
Should they be forced to remove the shielding because neighbors don't like it and find it an eyesore? I suppose that's about as legitimate as the family demanding the cessation of radio wave production from the neighbors. It's another form of gentrification and morally repugnant.
While my cottage is fully serviced by a fleet of Roombas, I think this Scooba might be useful in the kitchen area with all that linoleum. No mention of how much linoleum-damaging chemical solution is in that Clorox cleaner.
But more than just those two robots, I think that keeping the elves at bay with this thing might be useful as well
I'm all for violating the spirit of the GPL at every turn, but the extent of actual violations of the license by Maui-X is incomprehensible to me. It's one thing to restrict source code to licensees who ask for it (who would obviously have the extended but rarely-used right of redistributing it to 3rd parties), it's a completely different thing to simply claim that the GPL code is all fresh, non-GPL work and that anyone claiming otherwise can go screw themselves.
There are a handful of ways around GPL licensing and Maui-X simply doesn't take any of those tacks.
This is a community problem, but it's really more of a problem of a company willing to break the law to accomplish their ends.
(tangent) Say what you will about Microsoft and their heavy-handed tactics, but for every action they take they usually have at least a smidgen of legal reasoning to back them up.
I've been giving some thought to this whole phenomenon and find myself being able to compare the sitting in line for a movie only to the desire to climb a very difficult mountain. It isn't really akin to the dedication of sports fans because sports fans do not put their entire lives on hold for weeks on end to buy tickets. Maybe it is because sports fans have a better, more efficient system of getting tickets than movie fans, but that doesn't seem right considering such outlets as Fandango.
Mountain climbers, especially those who attempt the most difficult, are definitely a different breed. They put themselves at the mercy of the environment for weeks on end for the thrill of reaching the summit. At the end, there is no tangible benefit for doing so (disregarding any funding from sponsors). They achieve their goal for themselves.
I suppose that is similar to the mindset of the typical movie camper. To be the first in line to see the movie. Unfortunately for them, it is seen as frivolous and stupid by the vast majority of people. When we laugh at the geeks shown on the evening news, it's not because we associate ourselves with them, rather it is because we see them as something wholly foreign and strange and idiotic.
On the other hand, we see those mountain climbers as heroic and praiseworthy.
The difference is that society puts value in pushing one's self to the limit and braving the elements to accomplish something that very few can do. Society does not put any value in sitting around in a line, in a tent, eating Doritos and drinking Coke.
Of course being a Star Wars fan is not a disease and I didn't mean to imply that such was the case.
Rather I meant that rates of diseases like autism seem to run pretty high in the geek community. Aspergers is the most commonly mentioned mental handicap around Slashdot, and it is closely related with autism. The people who have Aspergers typically withdraw from normal interaction and as a result get pigeonholed by "normal" people as being weird and strange. Rather than being seen as victims of a disease, they are treated like monsters, avoided and mocked.
Anecdotal evidence aside, I'd love to see the rates of Aspergers/autism among those camping out to see Star Wars/LOTR/etc compared to the general populace. It would even be enlightening to see those rates compared with those who work in the IT industry at large.
You're quite right, of course. It shouldn't be much trouble to use an eVC makefile as a guide to building your own application without the need for the IDE. It also isn't too hard to search through the MSDN documentation for parameter and API behavior information. Auto-complete is something that Man has lived without for decades.
But the automation and inclusion of those things makes working with an IDE for a platform really nice. "$299 nice"? I don't know about that, though.
But as you've noted, the tools aren't going to stop working suddenly because you haven't upgraded to the next version. However even that statement isn't 100% correct. At some point the ARM4 binary that you are building with clarm.exe isn't going to work with the ARM5-built OS bits.
It seems that a year ago Pingtel had its doubts about SIP as the sole technology for VoIP. And they are right, of course.
The key to making this work is a combination of SIP and other related technologies, but most of all, VoIP needs a solid business plan to work. Despite good technologies and intentions, without a business plan that is well-designed, the project will be doomed to failure. Pingtel thinks they have the right business model. Time will tell
I know it's probably a bad thing to look down on some of these people and quite a bit hypocritical seeing as I'm posting on a site billed as "News for Nerds", but I feel really bad for some of these people. Not all of them, mind you, but there are a handful of people who seem so far removed from reality and that actually fit into the "35-year old unbathed computer nerd living in parents' basement" stereotype that it makes one wonder where we as a society have let these people down.
Do I have better things to do than criticize Star Wars/Star Trek/LOTR fans? Yes, of course. And that's what I think sets me apart from these (for lack of a better term) "losers".
But their "loser"-status can't be all their fault. At some point, we as a society have turned them into these monsters by shunning them, excluding them, or mocking them for their odd and sometimes strange behavior. Perhaps it's some mild autism that they suffer from, or maybe some other neural disease that makes them "different" from most of us (and I use the word loosely) "normals".
A quarter of a century ago many people lined up to see Star Wars. The theaters were sold out. But they were sold out to relatively normal people. This week's Star Wars opening was sold out to a group of weirdoes who have lost touch with reality.
But perhaps it is us, the rest of the world, who has lost touch with them. And that is the real shame, I think.
Here's a FAQ: http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/otc/Guide/faq/linear-p rogramming-faq.html
What is most interesting about LP is not that it is just a method of finding the solution to a problem, but that it extends in range over many diverse fields from (obviously) computer programming to fields such as economics and even business planning.
Before the eMbedded Visual Tools v3.0 came out, the toolset was actually a set of Visual Studio 5.0 add-ons that integrated with a base VS installation. From 3.0 until now, the tools have been separate from Visual Studio (mostly because of major compatibility problems with the internal eVC database and VC6).
However, the plug-in architecture seems to have been fixed in the latest VS.Net bits, so the original plan (to let the VS team do all the heavy lifting and the Mobile team to reap the benefits of a dedicated IDE team while concentrating on the OS) seems to have been reborn.
While it is a pain for developers, in that they will now be required to own a copy of VS, this actually bodes well for the Mobile team and its products.
It's not really a podcast or anything, and it's in RealAudio format, but BNW occasionally has some interesting things on their online media page.
It's an interesting concept, much like a news-on-command type of system where you can basically get the media feed you want any time you want it. However, because of the limitations in compression and the limitations in bandwidth, each podcast media file is simply too large for the average dial-up internet user. Text files of a few kilobytes can be downloaded relatively quickly, but a media file of several hundred kilobytes will be prohibitively expensive in terms of bandwidth.
Naturally, once the file is downloaded, that cost disappears. So the key is to make the download cost negligble, but in terms of download time it is still pretty rough for all those 56K-ers out there.