Don't get me wrong, I'm with most of/. on here but you have to understand that it's not really all that controversial in the context of the vast majority of American voters -- i.e. in the context that ultimately counts. We tend to surround ourselves with people that are ideologically similar to ourselves (not a bad thing) but when we then mistake our particular choice for the populace at large we get a myopic view of the whole political spectrum (bad).
This isn't a partisan complaint. I used to live in rural Idaho and was shocked to be confronted by some (not all) residents there didn't realize how far to the left of them much of the rest of the country was. Similarly in Boston I am continually shocked not by the lefty politics but by the complete lack of perspective that some (not all) on the far left have regarding how far out of the mainstream they are.
I wouldn't for the world give up having a country with widely diverse viewpoints, which I think are essential to a healthy democracy -- I'm not out to make us all fickle and bland. Rather, I just want people to get a realistic handle on where there views on a particular topic fall relative to the other electorate. This is descriptive/empirical matter, not a normative/evaluative one -- it doesn't make you wrong to be to the left or right of 70% of the country on some topic but it is foolish not to be aware of where you stand.
See, http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1893/poll-patriot-act-renewal for details on where Americans actually stand. Of course, I would still like to see it defeated, but I'm skeptical that will happen given the poll numbers -- after all, it is a representative government (modulo some unconstitutional elements enjoined by the courts) and even if the votes aren't directly related to poll numbers, there is strong coupling.
What's unfortunate about the new OS is that rather than being entirely new, BlackBerry 7 is just an upgrade to the existing BlackBerry 6 OS.
Yeah, I was looking forward to replacing all my apps and app developers must have been really looking forward to supporting two different sets of APIs. Given the hate for "forward" Android fragmentation (i.e. apps that require Android >= X.Y) I can't imagine how much fury would befall RIM if they "backwards" fragmented by making an entirely-new OS.
I'm not saying that total-rewrites are always wrong but they have to be damn well justified (WinMo6.5 comes to mind) because they incur a huge cost on both the rewriters and the entire ecosystem. Those asking for an 'entirely new' OS need to be careful what they wish for.
Why does everything have to be monetized? Why can't ARIN just reclaim blocks that are not well utilized and reissue them? Does HP really need two/8 blocks?
Because I'm more comfortable with buyers and sellers coming to mutually-agreeable terms for the transfer rather than some centralized bureaucracy decided what constitutes "well-utilized" and seizing them against the consent of the owners. Besides the general dislike for top-down authority, the decentralized decision-making process will likely yield (overall) better results for determining what is "well-utilized" and what isn't based on the preferences of the stakeholders.
Money isn't the object of the game, it's just a convenient metric for keeping score -- in this case, the monetization of IP addresses is a reasonable (not perfect, but remember neither is ARIN -- we are choosing between two flawed solutions) way to determine whether or not a particular user needs or would part with it given the proper incentive. That is, it functions as a damn good way to do price discovery.
[ The astute will recognize that the initial distribution of IPs is patently absurd, largely, I would argue, because ARIN gave them out willy-nilly instead of charging $1/ea at the outset. To the extent that this damaged the prior allocation, I think ARIN should encourage (with incentives) technological measures to reclaim as much as possible funded out of current revenue. ]
It's not hard to imagine that a party to a lawsuit might break into the computers of the other party. It's also not hard to imagine that a party to a lawsuit might accuse the opposing party of having done so.
Your key question doesn't need to be refuted... it needs to be answered by the people who asked for the arrest and extradition in the first place.
Indeed. The entire purpose of the extradition is for him to stand trial where we get to figure out if there is sufficient evidence to believe that he did the crime. I'm not short-circuiting that step, I'm saying that Cisco is well within their rights to ask for him to be arrested and tried given that there is at least a plausible case for it.
I don't buy it. YOU nor does anybody else have any evidence that would convince me that it was him who hacked Cisco regardless of it it happened. Hacking isn't something that you can prove. It is something that happens and then is said to have happened by somebody. Without evidence beyond "our logs show xyz" you have no idea if or who hacked Cisco. It could just as well be fabricated.
I don't buy that either in the same sense that I don't believe that he necessarily did it. It coudl have been someone else. What I do think is that in such cases we should have a trial to figure out if there is evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that it was him (and that his action was criminal).
You cite a bunch of doubts -- those are perfectly good doubts and I would hope that they would get properly aired. What you can't say is that those doubts mean that they shouldn't even arrest him and put him on trial because there are alternative explanations. That's for the jury to decide.
Because if he had a cisco login id, he didn't break in.
According to TFA (or linked from TFA), he is alleged to have used a login belonging to his former coworker (he used to work at Cisco).
Using someone else's credentials is fairly clearly an unauthorized use of a computer system, at least in such cases where the owner does not give that user permission to let others use his or her login.
If there was evidence, it would have been provided to the Canadian authorities by now. 10 months is a damn long time to rot in a cell.
Reading comprehension is key -- he was bailed out and is free to go anywhere he wants in Canada.
It's routine for foreign citizens from non-extraditing countries (he is Nigerian) to be barred from foreign travel while criminal proceedings pend. The presumption of bail does mean the right to skip the country to avoid charges.
Where "the article" is statements from Multiven executives.
At the same time Cisco also identified to a US prosecutor that a hacker had broken into there computers and was fleeing to Canada- indicating that they had evidence.
And the DoJ and State seemed to think that the evidence had merit. Are you disputing that the evidence suggests he committed the crime or merely insinuating that?
I want to make clear that I'm not stating that I think he did it. I'm just saying there is a normal extradition/trial process that we ought to follow to figure out whether he did the crime, same as any other criminal that is accused of a crime. He does not deserve special protection merely because he is involved in a civil suit with the potential victim.
This is why we have procedures for arrest/extradition/trial -- so that we don't have to judge individual cases on an ad-hoc basis but instead have a formal system of justice. Canadian procedural protections in the extradition process are relatively strong, so I really don't get the complaint.
The US prosecutor has not been able to present the evidence of this hacking attempt so that Canadian authorities can send him to the united states to face trial, and they have been so slow at responding to this statement that the Canadian authorities are accusing the US prosecutor of having grossly exaggerated the concreteness of the charges.
No, the guy's attorney has made that accusation -- the Crown maintains they acted within the scope of the extradition treaty. From an article linked by TFA:
U.S. prosecutors colluded with computer giant Cisco Systems, Inc., to mislead the Canadian government and B.C. courts into invoking emergency extradition powers to jail a British computer entrepreneur, B.C. Supreme Court heard Monday. [...] "Almost nothing in the U.S. attorney's letter was true," Vancouver lawyer Marilyn Sandford told Justice Ronald McKinnon Monday. She called the U.S. conduct careless, cavalier and Kafkaesque in her application to halt the extradition so Adekeye can return home to his wife and child in Switzerland.
Of course, if that accusation is true then it would be damning. On the other hand, if the Crown/DoJ's accusations are true, the guy is guilty of hundreds of felonies. This is why we have a procedure to sort out which (if any) set of charges is true and which are false -- because a priori there's just a bunch of unproven statements.
The orchestrating part is where the evidence of the crime (required for the extradition) hasn't been sent to the Canadians yet. They've had 10 months to provide evidence of the crime, but have not been able to produce it. So, the civil case, which was getting close to going to a Jury trial, got settled because the guy got arrested. This is one heck of a coincidence.
It's not a heck of a coincidence to imagine that a party to a lawsuit might break into a protected computer system owned by their opponent for the purpose of gathering evidence to use at trial. It is not a coincidence at all, in fact, that these things would come to light at the same time either since the first Cisco might have learned about the break-in was precisely when some non-publicly available document was entered into evidence. So "10 months" might have been a few weeks from when Cisco was actually aware of the crime. You will need more that circumstantial evidence to establish that Cisco intentionally withheld evidence -- at least if you want that claim to be at all credible. Accusations are pretty cheap.
I'll also note that you haven't at all refuted the key question, which is whether there is sufficient evidence to believe the individual whose extradition is sought committed the crime and merits a trial. Honestly, it's hard for me to imagine any other question that's relevant.
OK, this guy is a Cisco competitor involved in some legal dispute with the company that's being resolved in a civil court. He also is suspected on reasonable grounds to have committed a bona-fide crime against the company at the same time -- Cisco asks law enforcement to investigate the crime and arrest the criminal. That's not 'orchestrating' anything, nor does his status as a competitor that's suing the company have anything to do with the matter. Lawsuit or not, no one is entitled to break into Cisco computer systems -- the law doesn't say "You cannot gain unauthorized access to a computer system unless it is owned by a douchebag corporation that overcharges and dicks over the used market".
There is no mention in TFM (which is largely sourced from unnamed "Multiven Execs" -- unlikely to be objective) that Cisco fabricated the evidence of the break-in or conspired to entrap the guy. He committed a crime, they sought his arrest which is 100% within their rights. They don't surrender protection of criminal law just because they are douchebags.
Since/. loves car analogies, suppose we got in a car accident that was totally your fault but you dispute that and want a trial. Then on the night before the responsibility hearing, I throw a brick through your windshield. Does the merits of the civil trial have anything to do with whether I can be arrested? Would it matter if you were universally considered to be a jerk that screws everyone over?
Why in the name of all that is GNU would Android re-implement a DHCP client when every Linux system since forever has had good DHCP client support already there?
It's not clear that the Linux DHCP client would play nice with the power-management shininess that Google bolted on to Android (and were never accepted into the kernel mainline). This is bolstered by the fact that the steps for reproducing the issue involved connecting to wifi, letting the device lock/sleep and observing wonkiness when it wakes up (search for 'STEPS TO REPRODUCE THE BEHAVIOR' in the OP, I don't want to copypasta too much).
My guess is that the lion's share of the issues have to do with timers that are not sleep-safe or other subtle timing issues and not with the DHCP client logic itself. Soft-realtime plus sleepy CPUs often means screwups of this sort.
I'm pretty sure that if I were to follow you around with a camera every minute of the day that you were in public spaces, you'd be able to get a restraining order against me.
You are incorrect, at least as far as my State (MA) goes. As always, State laws vary. Here, stalking requires "a threat with the intent to place the person in imminent fear of death or bodily injury". Stalking requires that the crime would cause"a reasonable person to suffer substantial emotional distress". In both cases, merely passively following someone around a safe distance and not disturbing their activities is perfectly legal. http://www.malegislature.gov/Laws/GeneralLaws/PartIV/TitleI/Chapter265/Section43
In fact, I do some tech work for a divorce litigation firm, they have investigators that do precisely this to collect evidence to counter claims of insolvency. Protip: if you are at an expensive club 5 nights a week, the court will not take well your claim that you cannot pay child support.
Moreover, as interpreted by some courts here, photographers have an affirmative right to take a photo from anywhere they can legally stand and provided they do not intrude upon a private space. Anyone standing in public anywhere in the State of MA is fair game for any photographer that wants to shoot you.
Yet the strategy for the use of the license plate readers... She said it was hard to tell whether interest in âoeeffective and efficient law enforcementâ was being balanced with the âoevalues of privacy and freedom.â
What possible interest of privacy could you have while on the public street? Hint: when you are out on the public streets everyone can see you.
Don't get me wrong, I'm very pro civil liberties in the context of private spaces. I just don't understand how anything I do on the street -- where I have the full expectation that other people can observe what I'm doing -- merits protections on the basis of privacy. That expectation informs me of the boundary between private and public. A citizen cannot reasonably claim to keep private his activities in public anymore than citizens have the right to publicize the private activities of others.
If anything, I see the blurring of this boundary as being quite destructive to privacy because it erodes the logical distinction between activities that take place inside a private space and ones outside. That is, attempts to extend the privacy of the home outside by making false equivalences are just as likely to erode the protections inside as they are to bolster protections outside.
The US Courts have a very strong tendency to take matters of standing seriously -- nearly every opinion will start with the question "Does this court have the jurisdiction (either by the Constitution or by statute) to take up this case?". In most cases, this is a good thing since it grounds the scope of the courts to their intended purpose. (BTW, the notion of limited scope is distinct from curtailing the power of the courts, which is quite wide provided that the matter is within their purview at all -- many seem to forget the distinction).
Since the case is statutory under the APA and the APA provides for judicial review of "final actions" (which makes some sense - Congress wanted the court to have oversight over agency policy not agency procedure), Verizon cannot appeal the decision to adopt net neutrality rules until they become final.
Since the FCC is very likely to go through with publishing the rules, Verizon will get a chance to challenege them on the merits as not being within the power granted to the FCC by Congress. Eventually, anyway.
However, as long as that tax is lower than whatever the US income tax rate is, you would then have to pay the difference to the US government. In effect, the tax rate you are paying is the maximum of whatever the local income tax rate is and the US income tax rate. In that sense, as long as you keep your US citizenship, you cannot evade those taxes by moving abroad.
Actually, I don't pay any US taxes on profits that I do not repatriate. So long as I keep the money in the Ecuadorian corporation, the US government does not ask for any of it.
All I'm saying is that it would be both possible and fair - and remove a lot of the tax evasion incentives - to apply similar rules to the taxes that a US-owned company has to pay.
That would discourage US-owned companies from selling in Ecuador (as they would be taxes much higher than their domestic competitors) ending up with there being fewer choices for Ecuadorian purchasers.
Basically, let the tax rate that applies to a company be the maximum of the rate of the country where it operates and the rate of the country of citizenship of its owners. Yes, there are details that need to be worked out - and they can be. It's the big picture that counts.
We have partial owners from 3 different countries. How is that even supposed to work?
I agree with you that e.g. sales taxes should simply be based on whatever country the sale happens in. But when you're talking about corporate taxes that are essentially the corporate equivalent of a person's income tax, then there is really no reason not to apply a similar system.
But the corporation lives in Ecuador, not the US. There is absolutely no connection between it and the US except that a fraction (not even a majority!) of it is owned by a US citizen.
I don't know why you're doing business in Ecuador. If it is indeed purely for tax reasons as you seemed to imply, then you might disagree with me because you have vested interests. That's okay - but please at least be man enough to admit that, instead of making up some fake "reasons".
I'm doing business in Ecuador because I sell goods and services to the people of Ecuador and hence it became necessary to incorporate in that jurisdiction. In fact, I could not legally do business in the country without setting up some official presence -- if I partially-owned a US corporation we'd still have to set up a local subsidiary.
As for vested interests, it's a small company and it accounts for a negligible fraction of my assets. As I see it, it's in the interest of the Ecuadorian people to have a lively and competitive market instead of locking out foreign competitors with protectionist schemes. More choices for them can only be better.
In reality, actual founders (as opposed to those mythical creatures in the economists' dream world) do not choose the place where they set up a new company based on tax rates.
As an American part owner of a corporation set up in Ecuador, I can assure you that this is utter nonsense.
Please show me all those mythical Brits who give up their citizenship and become let's say Taiwanese, because the tax rates there are better for them, otherwise your argument has no basis in reality.
I didn't have to give up my American citizenship to set up a corporation elsewhere....
As for your point on international tax treaties - such treaties are changed all the time when parties feel that the terms are no longer beneficial. If both the US and the UK required income from assets to be taxed at their respective rates, then things naturally balance out again, and your argument on investment becomes moot.
No, both parties lose out because of lower trade. If you have to pay double-tax to import a car from the US but only a single-tax for a UK one, then the UK car becomes more appealing by comparison even if they are (let's say by assumption) equal in terms of quality and cost of inputs.
So what? Then the corporation would perhaps be able to make a higher profit and if - as I originally suggested - existing tax loopholes were closed, this would result in them actually paying more taxes domestically. The composition of the work force would change, but these things can be dealt with.
You can't tax the corporation if they move out of your country. If Rockstar (an American company) relocates their UK office to Canada, the UK government has no "loophole" to close because the UK can't do anything about it. At worst they can try to tax Rockstar's game imports to make up for the difference, but given that the UK domestic market is small, that's not a great move.
Essentially, for this to work, you need to have all the governments cooperating by implementing the same tax policy at the same time. You just can't force other countries to do things like that -- the UK has to make the best policy for the UK, not to start dictating to the rest of the world how we are going to do things.
What's this obsession with competitiveness? The entire point of why we come together as a society to form states, to form a government, what legitimises the whole system, is that it should work towards the benefit of the public. Competitiveness may be a useful tool to achieve that end, but it can never be an end in itself. If, in the pursuit of competitiveness, we are actually hurting the well-being of the general population, then I say screw competitiveness.
Competitiveness is the the well-being of the public. If you can make a car or a building with fewer inputs that means more of society's limited resources can go towards other things that people want like games and planes.
Taking a step back, I think the thing that baffles me is that you seem to want the wealthy and corporations to have privileges that are not accessible to the vast majority of the population in terms of taxation. Is that what you want? If so, why?
What privileges? The right to do business in other countries? Everyone has that. I'm not a wealthy man and I set up a partnership elsewhere. If the Ecuadorian government decides to jack up my taxes, I'll move shop elsewhere. I provide a useful service to my customers (evidence: they voluntarily give me money in exchange for goods) so it's their loss if they end up with fewer choices.
It's quite the contrary, actually -- the more complicated and draconian the tax code, the harder it is for an individual to compete against a corporation that has an in-house legal team and tax specialists. Complexity favors large organizations that can distribute the cost of dealing with the red-tape over
Of course, you are missing the point that under the current system, the point of corporations is to make profits for their owners. If a corporation and its owners currently exist in the UK and are paying UK taxes, then it is totally feasible to set up a system of taxation and tariffs that prevent this ownership from moving around, or eliminates the benefits of moving it around.
Which make UK corporations less competitive with respect to those in other jurisdictions and encourages anyone setting up a new corporation to chose those jurisdictions instead of the UK.
Just like the US government requires its citizens to pay income taxes for income from their employment, a government could easily require its citizens to pay income taxes/capital gains taxes on assets they are holding around the world.
I believe they have obligations under bilateral tax treaties that prevent this.
Of course, the UK could withdraw from the US-UK tax treaty but the net result would be significantly lower investment and business in the UK, driving up prices for UK consumers and businesses. That is, the UK benefits from allowing US corporations to sell shit in the UK and pay only UK taxes but we would not grant the UK that privilege unless they allowed UK corps to sell shit in the US and pay only US taxes.
IOW, you are mixing up the concession and the benefit. The UK concedes that it will not require its citizens to pay income tax on assets elsewhere because it wants the benefit of having the citizens of other countries' citizens doing business in the UK on the same terms.
This would not prevent founders from changing citizenship and then creating new corporations abroad, but that is not a very credible threat anyway - people don't change their citizenship on a whim
No, but corporations do move entire offices around if they think they are getting a raw deal.
However, it would effectively stop domestically owned corporations from evading taxes by moving abroad.
Back to point one: now domestically owned corporations are at a material disadvantage and their market-share will shrink accordingly. Meanwhile, some more business-friendly jurisdiction eats your lunch. Heck, the worst case the corporation can dissolve itself and reform in another place under foreign ownership, nearly intact.
Conceptually, it is really not that difficult to set up a tax system in which there is no real threat of corporations moving abroad due to taxation (the devil's in the details of course). The problem is a political one. Nobody in power really wants to set up such a system because of vested interests.
The devil's in the fact that you can't force everyone to cooperate with your scheme, and so either the corporation moves or their foreign competition has a favorable cost-basis.
The more rules you make, the less competitive you become relative to everyone else. No one that buys a video game cares if it's made in the UK or Canada, and if the latter has lower costs and can therefore deliver better games, consumers will chose them. Maybe UK game developers are intrinsically so much better than Canadian ones that they will still compete but I doubt it.
Stupid argument. Attorneys are allowed to be biased in favour of their customers' interests. Judges should be impartial. You do know that there is a difference between an attorney and a judge?
You do know that nearly all judges are appointed from the ranks of practicing attorneys.
What right does an English citizen who wants to make video games have to move to the US or Canada?
The absolute right. England is not a prison, you can't hold people against their will.
I'm not denying them the right to move or pay taxes in my preferred locality but in effect the argument is shifted onto the government to be held hostage by corporations when it should be on the corporations to deal with their locality and accept that taxation is part of the system.
I don't see any argument being shifted by anyone. A company is free to set up wherever they please. England cannot force an American company to set up shop in London, never could, never will. You are arguing about what has always been the case -- that companies will chose to do business in friendly jurisdictions and that the citizens of those jurisdictions have the right to set those policies in accordance with their preferences.
The contrary position -- that one national government can coerce a corporation headquartered elsewhere -- is internally unworkable in the case of >2 governments anyway.
For the record, if a UK game company moved to the US over taxation the best answer would be to simply charge them an additional surcharge to place their games on the shelves.
Leaving aside that it is totally illegal under existing law to charge different import taxes to different companies importing the same good, the UK isn't a large enough market that this would make a difference.
In essence it would be passed onto the citizens of your own country but it would be a perfect way to execute protectionism which is definitively different from socialism.
Given the elasticity of videogame purchases, the cost of a high tax is born by the supplier not the consumer.
Slashdot Mirror
I wish you were right but so far you have been wrong.
Don't get me wrong, I'm with most of /. on here but you have to understand that it's not really all that controversial in the context of the vast majority of American voters -- i.e. in the context that ultimately counts. We tend to surround ourselves with people that are ideologically similar to ourselves (not a bad thing) but when we then mistake our particular choice for the populace at large we get a myopic view of the whole political spectrum (bad).
This isn't a partisan complaint. I used to live in rural Idaho and was shocked to be confronted by some (not all) residents there didn't realize how far to the left of them much of the rest of the country was. Similarly in Boston I am continually shocked not by the lefty politics but by the complete lack of perspective that some (not all) on the far left have regarding how far out of the mainstream they are.
I wouldn't for the world give up having a country with widely diverse viewpoints, which I think are essential to a healthy democracy -- I'm not out to make us all fickle and bland. Rather, I just want people to get a realistic handle on where there views on a particular topic fall relative to the other electorate. This is descriptive/empirical matter, not a normative/evaluative one -- it doesn't make you wrong to be to the left or right of 70% of the country on some topic but it is foolish not to be aware of where you stand.
See, http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1893/poll-patriot-act-renewal for details on where Americans actually stand. Of course, I would still like to see it defeated, but I'm skeptical that will happen given the poll numbers -- after all, it is a representative government (modulo some unconstitutional elements enjoined by the courts) and even if the votes aren't directly related to poll numbers, there is strong coupling.
Could just not use the phone in the bath....
http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2225
What's unfortunate about the new OS is that rather than being entirely new, BlackBerry 7 is just an upgrade to the existing BlackBerry 6 OS.
Yeah, I was looking forward to replacing all my apps and app developers must have been really looking forward to supporting two different sets of APIs. Given the hate for "forward" Android fragmentation (i.e. apps that require Android >= X.Y) I can't imagine how much fury would befall RIM if they "backwards" fragmented by making an entirely-new OS.
I'm not saying that total-rewrites are always wrong but they have to be damn well justified (WinMo6.5 comes to mind) because they incur a huge cost on both the rewriters and the entire ecosystem. Those asking for an 'entirely new' OS need to be careful what they wish for.
Why does everything have to be monetized? Why can't ARIN just reclaim blocks that are not well utilized and reissue them? Does HP really need two /8 blocks?
Because I'm more comfortable with buyers and sellers coming to mutually-agreeable terms for the transfer rather than some centralized bureaucracy decided what constitutes "well-utilized" and seizing them against the consent of the owners. Besides the general dislike for top-down authority, the decentralized decision-making process will likely yield (overall) better results for determining what is "well-utilized" and what isn't based on the preferences of the stakeholders.
Money isn't the object of the game, it's just a convenient metric for keeping score -- in this case, the monetization of IP addresses is a reasonable (not perfect, but remember neither is ARIN -- we are choosing between two flawed solutions) way to determine whether or not a particular user needs or would part with it given the proper incentive. That is, it functions as a damn good way to do price discovery.
[ The astute will recognize that the initial distribution of IPs is patently absurd, largely, I would argue, because ARIN gave them out willy-nilly instead of charging $1/ea at the outset. To the extent that this damaged the prior allocation, I think ARIN should encourage (with incentives) technological measures to reclaim as much as possible funded out of current revenue. ]
It's not hard to imagine that a party to a lawsuit might break into the computers of the other party.
It's also not hard to imagine that a party to a lawsuit might accuse the opposing party of having done so.
Your key question doesn't need to be refuted ... it needs to be answered by the people who asked for the arrest and extradition in the first place.
Indeed. The entire purpose of the extradition is for him to stand trial where we get to figure out if there is sufficient evidence to believe that he did the crime. I'm not short-circuiting that step, I'm saying that Cisco is well within their rights to ask for him to be arrested and tried given that there is at least a plausible case for it.
I don't buy it. YOU nor does anybody else have any evidence that would convince me that it was him who hacked Cisco regardless of it it happened. Hacking isn't something that you can prove. It is something that happens and then is said to have happened by somebody. Without evidence beyond "our logs show xyz" you have no idea if or who hacked Cisco. It could just as well be fabricated.
I don't buy that either in the same sense that I don't believe that he necessarily did it. It coudl have been someone else. What I do think is that in such cases we should have a trial to figure out if there is evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that it was him (and that his action was criminal).
You cite a bunch of doubts -- those are perfectly good doubts and I would hope that they would get properly aired. What you can't say is that those doubts mean that they shouldn't even arrest him and put him on trial because there are alternative explanations. That's for the jury to decide.
Because if he had a cisco login id, he didn't break in.
According to TFA (or linked from TFA), he is alleged to have used a login belonging to his former coworker (he used to work at Cisco).
Using someone else's credentials is fairly clearly an unauthorized use of a computer system, at least in such cases where the owner does not give that user permission to let others use his or her login.
If there was evidence, it would have been provided to the Canadian authorities by now. 10 months is a damn long time to rot in a cell.
Reading comprehension is key -- he was bailed out and is free to go anywhere he wants in Canada.
It's routine for foreign citizens from non-extraditing countries (he is Nigerian) to be barred from foreign travel while criminal proceedings pend. The presumption of bail does mean the right to skip the country to avoid charges.
Were they really broken into? Or did he download bugfixed IOS images for redistribution to his customers with cisco gear?
Why 'or' and not 'and/or'? He could have accessed their system without authorization and used that access to download IOS images.
There's still nothing about any particular content on any computer system that entitles an individual to access it without permission from the owner.
The issue here from the article is twofold:
Where "the article" is statements from Multiven executives.
At the same time Cisco also identified to a US prosecutor that a hacker had broken into there computers and was fleeing to Canada- indicating that they had evidence.
And the DoJ and State seemed to think that the evidence had merit. Are you disputing that the evidence suggests he committed the crime or merely insinuating that?
I want to make clear that I'm not stating that I think he did it. I'm just saying there is a normal extradition/trial process that we ought to follow to figure out whether he did the crime, same as any other criminal that is accused of a crime. He does not deserve special protection merely because he is involved in a civil suit with the potential victim.
This is why we have procedures for arrest/extradition/trial -- so that we don't have to judge individual cases on an ad-hoc basis but instead have a formal system of justice. Canadian procedural protections in the extradition process are relatively strong, so I really don't get the complaint.
The US prosecutor has not been able to present the evidence of this hacking attempt so that Canadian authorities can send him to the united states to face trial, and they have been so slow at responding to this statement that the Canadian authorities are accusing the US prosecutor of having grossly exaggerated the concreteness of the charges.
No, the guy's attorney has made that accusation -- the Crown maintains they acted within the scope of the extradition treaty. From an article linked by TFA:
U.S. prosecutors colluded with computer giant Cisco Systems, Inc., to mislead the Canadian government and B.C. courts into invoking emergency extradition powers to jail a British computer entrepreneur, B.C. Supreme Court heard Monday. [...]
"Almost nothing in the U.S. attorney's letter was true," Vancouver lawyer Marilyn Sandford told Justice Ronald McKinnon Monday. She called the U.S. conduct careless, cavalier and Kafkaesque in her application to halt the extradition so Adekeye can return home to his wife and child in Switzerland.
http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Cisco+prosecutors+duped+court+extradition+lawyer+says/4638201/story.html
Of course, if that accusation is true then it would be damning. On the other hand, if the Crown/DoJ's accusations are true, the guy is guilty of hundreds of felonies. This is why we have a procedure to sort out which (if any) set of charges is true and which are false -- because a priori there's just a bunch of unproven statements.
The orchestrating part is where the evidence of the crime (required for the extradition) hasn't been sent to the Canadians yet. They've had 10 months to provide evidence of the crime, but have not been able to produce it. So, the civil case, which was getting close to going to a Jury trial, got settled because the guy got arrested. This is one heck of a coincidence.
It's not a heck of a coincidence to imagine that a party to a lawsuit might break into a protected computer system owned by their opponent for the purpose of gathering evidence to use at trial. It is not a coincidence at all, in fact, that these things would come to light at the same time either since the first Cisco might have learned about the break-in was precisely when some non-publicly available document was entered into evidence. So "10 months" might have been a few weeks from when Cisco was actually aware of the crime. You will need more that circumstantial evidence to establish that Cisco intentionally withheld evidence -- at least if you want that claim to be at all credible. Accusations are pretty cheap.
I'll also note that you haven't at all refuted the key question, which is whether there is sufficient evidence to believe the individual whose extradition is sought committed the crime and merits a trial. Honestly, it's hard for me to imagine any other question that's relevant.
OK, this guy is a Cisco competitor involved in some legal dispute with the company that's being resolved in a civil court. He also is suspected on reasonable grounds to have committed a bona-fide crime against the company at the same time -- Cisco asks law enforcement to investigate the crime and arrest the criminal. That's not 'orchestrating' anything, nor does his status as a competitor that's suing the company have anything to do with the matter. Lawsuit or not, no one is entitled to break into Cisco computer systems -- the law doesn't say "You cannot gain unauthorized access to a computer system unless it is owned by a douchebag corporation that overcharges and dicks over the used market".
There is no mention in TFM (which is largely sourced from unnamed "Multiven Execs" -- unlikely to be objective) that Cisco fabricated the evidence of the break-in or conspired to entrap the guy. He committed a crime, they sought his arrest which is 100% within their rights. They don't surrender protection of criminal law just because they are douchebags.
Since /. loves car analogies, suppose we got in a car accident that was totally your fault but you dispute that and want a trial. Then on the night before the responsibility hearing, I throw a brick through your windshield. Does the merits of the civil trial have anything to do with whether I can be arrested? Would it matter if you were universally considered to be a jerk that screws everyone over?
Why in the name of all that is GNU would Android re-implement a DHCP client when every Linux system since forever has had good DHCP client support already there?
It's not clear that the Linux DHCP client would play nice with the power-management shininess that Google bolted on to Android (and were never accepted into the kernel mainline). This is bolstered by the fact that the steps for reproducing the issue involved connecting to wifi, letting the device lock/sleep and observing wonkiness when it wakes up (search for 'STEPS TO REPRODUCE THE BEHAVIOR' in the OP, I don't want to copypasta too much).
My guess is that the lion's share of the issues have to do with timers that are not sleep-safe or other subtle timing issues and not with the DHCP client logic itself. Soft-realtime plus sleepy CPUs often means screwups of this sort.
I'm pretty sure that if I were to follow you around with a camera every minute of the day that you were in public spaces, you'd be able to get a restraining order against me.
You are incorrect, at least as far as my State (MA) goes. As always, State laws vary. Here, stalking requires "a threat with the intent to place the person in imminent fear of death or bodily injury". Stalking requires that the crime would cause"a reasonable person to suffer substantial emotional distress". In both cases, merely passively following someone around a safe distance and not disturbing their activities is perfectly legal. http://www.malegislature.gov/Laws/GeneralLaws/PartIV/TitleI/Chapter265/Section43
In fact, I do some tech work for a divorce litigation firm, they have investigators that do precisely this to collect evidence to counter claims of insolvency. Protip: if you are at an expensive club 5 nights a week, the court will not take well your claim that you cannot pay child support.
Moreover, as interpreted by some courts here, photographers have an affirmative right to take a photo from anywhere they can legally stand and provided they do not intrude upon a private space. Anyone standing in public anywhere in the State of MA is fair game for any photographer that wants to shoot you.
Obviously you need to not park near crime scenes...it's not rocket science. Do you really have any business being near crime scenes?
Obviously all 100 people parking near there couldn't have all committed the same crime.
Yet the strategy for the use of the license plate readers ... She said it was hard to tell whether interest in âoeeffective and efficient law enforcementâ was being balanced with the âoevalues of privacy and freedom.â
What possible interest of privacy could you have while on the public street? Hint: when you are out on the public streets everyone can see you.
Don't get me wrong, I'm very pro civil liberties in the context of private spaces. I just don't understand how anything I do on the street -- where I have the full expectation that other people can observe what I'm doing -- merits protections on the basis of privacy. That expectation informs me of the boundary between private and public. A citizen cannot reasonably claim to keep private his activities in public anymore than citizens have the right to publicize the private activities of others.
If anything, I see the blurring of this boundary as being quite destructive to privacy because it erodes the logical distinction between activities that take place inside a private space and ones outside. That is, attempts to extend the privacy of the home outside by making false equivalences are just as likely to erode the protections inside as they are to bolster protections outside.
Replying to undue accidental 'redundant' instead of 'informative'.
Doh. Also poster is right. Different data have different security requirements -- think about that for a while.
The US Courts have a very strong tendency to take matters of standing seriously -- nearly every opinion will start with the question "Does this court have the jurisdiction (either by the Constitution or by statute) to take up this case?". In most cases, this is a good thing since it grounds the scope of the courts to their intended purpose. (BTW, the notion of limited scope is distinct from curtailing the power of the courts, which is quite wide provided that the matter is within their purview at all -- many seem to forget the distinction).
Since the case is statutory under the APA and the APA provides for judicial review of "final actions" (which makes some sense - Congress wanted the court to have oversight over agency policy not agency procedure), Verizon cannot appeal the decision to adopt net neutrality rules until they become final.
Since the FCC is very likely to go through with publishing the rules, Verizon will get a chance to challenege them on the merits as not being within the power granted to the FCC by Congress. Eventually, anyway.
However, as long as that tax is lower than whatever the US income tax rate is, you would then have to pay the difference to the US government. In effect, the tax rate you are paying is the maximum of whatever the local income tax rate is and the US income tax rate. In that sense, as long as you keep your US citizenship, you cannot evade those taxes by moving abroad.
Actually, I don't pay any US taxes on profits that I do not repatriate. So long as I keep the money in the Ecuadorian corporation, the US government does not ask for any of it.
All I'm saying is that it would be both possible and fair - and remove a lot of the tax evasion incentives - to apply similar rules to the taxes that a US-owned company has to pay.
That would discourage US-owned companies from selling in Ecuador (as they would be taxes much higher than their domestic competitors) ending up with there being fewer choices for Ecuadorian purchasers.
Basically, let the tax rate that applies to a company be the maximum of the rate of the country where it operates and the rate of the country of citizenship of its owners. Yes, there are details that need to be worked out - and they can be. It's the big picture that counts.
We have partial owners from 3 different countries. How is that even supposed to work?
I agree with you that e.g. sales taxes should simply be based on whatever country the sale happens in. But when you're talking about corporate taxes that are essentially the corporate equivalent of a person's income tax, then there is really no reason not to apply a similar system.
But the corporation lives in Ecuador, not the US. There is absolutely no connection between it and the US except that a fraction (not even a majority!) of it is owned by a US citizen.
I don't know why you're doing business in Ecuador. If it is indeed purely for tax reasons as you seemed to imply, then you might disagree with me because you have vested interests. That's okay - but please at least be man enough to admit that, instead of making up some fake "reasons".
I'm doing business in Ecuador because I sell goods and services to the people of Ecuador and hence it became necessary to incorporate in that jurisdiction. In fact, I could not legally do business in the country without setting up some official presence -- if I partially-owned a US corporation we'd still have to set up a local subsidiary.
As for vested interests, it's a small company and it accounts for a negligible fraction of my assets. As I see it, it's in the interest of the Ecuadorian people to have a lively and competitive market instead of locking out foreign competitors with protectionist schemes. More choices for them can only be better.
In reality, actual founders (as opposed to those mythical creatures in the economists' dream world) do not choose the place where they set up a new company based on tax rates.
As an American part owner of a corporation set up in Ecuador, I can assure you that this is utter nonsense.
Please show me all those mythical Brits who give up their citizenship and become let's say Taiwanese, because the tax rates there are better for them, otherwise your argument has no basis in reality.
I didn't have to give up my American citizenship to set up a corporation elsewhere ....
As for your point on international tax treaties - such treaties are changed all the time when parties feel that the terms are no longer beneficial. If both the US and the UK required income from assets to be taxed at their respective rates, then things naturally balance out again, and your argument on investment becomes moot.
No, both parties lose out because of lower trade. If you have to pay double-tax to import a car from the US but only a single-tax for a UK one, then the UK car becomes more appealing by comparison even if they are (let's say by assumption) equal in terms of quality and cost of inputs.
So what? Then the corporation would perhaps be able to make a higher profit and if - as I originally suggested - existing tax loopholes were closed, this would result in them actually paying more taxes domestically. The composition of the work force would change, but these things can be dealt with.
You can't tax the corporation if they move out of your country. If Rockstar (an American company) relocates their UK office to Canada, the UK government has no "loophole" to close because the UK can't do anything about it. At worst they can try to tax Rockstar's game imports to make up for the difference, but given that the UK domestic market is small, that's not a great move.
Essentially, for this to work, you need to have all the governments cooperating by implementing the same tax policy at the same time. You just can't force other countries to do things like that -- the UK has to make the best policy for the UK, not to start dictating to the rest of the world how we are going to do things.
What's this obsession with competitiveness? The entire point of why we come together as a society to form states, to form a government, what legitimises the whole system, is that it should work towards the benefit of the public. Competitiveness may be a useful tool to achieve that end, but it can never be an end in itself. If, in the pursuit of competitiveness, we are actually hurting the well-being of the general population, then I say screw competitiveness.
Competitiveness is the the well-being of the public. If you can make a car or a building with fewer inputs that means more of society's limited resources can go towards other things that people want like games and planes.
Taking a step back, I think the thing that baffles me is that you seem to want the wealthy and corporations to have privileges that are not accessible to the vast majority of the population in terms of taxation. Is that what you want? If so, why?
What privileges? The right to do business in other countries? Everyone has that. I'm not a wealthy man and I set up a partnership elsewhere. If the Ecuadorian government decides to jack up my taxes, I'll move shop elsewhere. I provide a useful service to my customers (evidence: they voluntarily give me money in exchange for goods) so it's their loss if they end up with fewer choices.
It's quite the contrary, actually -- the more complicated and draconian the tax code, the harder it is for an individual to compete against a corporation that has an in-house legal team and tax specialists. Complexity favors large organizations that can distribute the cost of dealing with the red-tape over
Of course, you are missing the point that under the current system, the point of corporations is to make profits for their owners. If a corporation and its owners currently exist in the UK and are paying UK taxes, then it is totally feasible to set up a system of taxation and tariffs that prevent this ownership from moving around, or eliminates the benefits of moving it around.
Which make UK corporations less competitive with respect to those in other jurisdictions and encourages anyone setting up a new corporation to chose those jurisdictions instead of the UK.
Just like the US government requires its citizens to pay income taxes for income from their employment, a government could easily require its citizens to pay income taxes/capital gains taxes on assets they are holding around the world.
I believe they have obligations under bilateral tax treaties that prevent this.
Of course, the UK could withdraw from the US-UK tax treaty but the net result would be significantly lower investment and business in the UK, driving up prices for UK consumers and businesses. That is, the UK benefits from allowing US corporations to sell shit in the UK and pay only UK taxes but we would not grant the UK that privilege unless they allowed UK corps to sell shit in the US and pay only US taxes.
IOW, you are mixing up the concession and the benefit. The UK concedes that it will not require its citizens to pay income tax on assets elsewhere because it wants the benefit of having the citizens of other countries' citizens doing business in the UK on the same terms.
This would not prevent founders from changing citizenship and then creating new corporations abroad, but that is not a very credible threat anyway - people don't change their citizenship on a whim
No, but corporations do move entire offices around if they think they are getting a raw deal.
However, it would effectively stop domestically owned corporations from evading taxes by moving abroad.
Back to point one: now domestically owned corporations are at a material disadvantage and their market-share will shrink accordingly. Meanwhile, some more business-friendly jurisdiction eats your lunch. Heck, the worst case the corporation can dissolve itself and reform in another place under foreign ownership, nearly intact.
Conceptually, it is really not that difficult to set up a tax system in which there is no real threat of corporations moving abroad due to taxation (the devil's in the details of course). The problem is a political one. Nobody in power really wants to set up such a system because of vested interests.
The devil's in the fact that you can't force everyone to cooperate with your scheme, and so either the corporation moves or their foreign competition has a favorable cost-basis.
The more rules you make, the less competitive you become relative to everyone else. No one that buys a video game cares if it's made in the UK or Canada, and if the latter has lower costs and can therefore deliver better games, consumers will chose them. Maybe UK game developers are intrinsically so much better than Canadian ones that they will still compete but I doubt it.
Stupid argument. Attorneys are allowed to be biased in favour of their customers' interests. Judges should be impartial. You do know that there is a difference between an attorney and a judge?
You do know that nearly all judges are appointed from the ranks of practicing attorneys.
...we'll have to grab twelve random schmoes off the street to decide cases for us.
Even those 12 shmoes can't run a courtroom or rule on motions for themselves. There is a role for a judge and a role for a jury.
NB that in TFA we are still in the preliminary phase before a jury is ever empaneled or evidence presented.
What right does an English citizen who wants to make video games have to move to the US or Canada?
The absolute right. England is not a prison, you can't hold people against their will.
I'm not denying them the right to move or pay taxes in my preferred locality but in effect the argument is shifted onto the government to be held hostage by corporations when it should be on the corporations to deal with their locality and accept that taxation is part of the system.
I don't see any argument being shifted by anyone. A company is free to set up wherever they please. England cannot force an American company to set up shop in London, never could, never will. You are arguing about what has always been the case -- that companies will chose to do business in friendly jurisdictions and that the citizens of those jurisdictions have the right to set those policies in accordance with their preferences.
The contrary position -- that one national government can coerce a corporation headquartered elsewhere -- is internally unworkable in the case of >2 governments anyway.
For the record, if a UK game company moved to the US over taxation the best answer would be to simply charge them an additional surcharge to place their games on the shelves.
Leaving aside that it is totally illegal under existing law to charge different import taxes to different companies importing the same good, the UK isn't a large enough market that this would make a difference.
In essence it would be passed onto the citizens of your own country but it would be a perfect way to execute protectionism which is definitively different from socialism.
Given the elasticity of videogame purchases, the cost of a high tax is born by the supplier not the consumer.