"We never for a minute thought that anyone would bring any criminal actions against us. We had in-house legal counsel, we had three outside firms working for us who reviewed our sites, and not once had any of them mentioned any form of legal risk, so I wish I had known that there was a risk."
What he was doing may or may not have been legal.
What he didn't evaluate was the risk that the MPAA et al had bought off/co-opted the US government, who decided they were going to go into the business of strong-arming people when they don't have an applicable law.
You can't plan for stuff like that.
From the sounds of it, no NZ law was broken, he's yet to be charged with anything for which there's an actual law in the US, and the US government is seizing his assets before they're proven he's done anything wrong.
You can't fight a nation state acting on behalf of a cartel of corporations.
Because it doesn't matter what the law says at that point.
As I understand it, he never actually committed copyright infringement. So he's being charged with some made up offense which isn't a law anywhere.
"There's no reason for such firms to be willing to cooperate with state agencies over traffic violations, but not over locating individuals who criticize the government".
The scope creep of these things is the biggest problem.
Many terrorism related provisions were implemented, and at the time we were told "oh, don't worry, we won't abuse this, this is purely for terrorism".
And now look at where we are. Parallel construction anybody? You know, where the police have a manual of perjury and how to violate your legal rights by pretending they found you through other means, and then actively conspire to conceal the truth from the legal system.
These things will always get abused over time. So the only real way to stop that is not allow them in the first place.
Joesph McCarthy would have loved all of this stuff.
no reason for such firms to be willing to cooperate with state agencies over child abuse but not over combatting terrorism
Here we go, those two plus fighting copyright infringement are the magic keys to the kingdom. The fascists and despots can use those pretty much anywhere to bypass all laws and protections.
If we don't stop the copyright-infringing terrorist pedophiles the world will end, so as a result, we can get access to everything just to be safe.
The scary thing is these guys either don't understand, or don't care, about how much they're undermining the rest of the law and society. Instead they figure the surveillance state is necessary to protect us from the bad guys.
Sorry, but the governments are becoming the bad guys and the threat to our freedoms. And they don't care.
Face it, the terrorists effectively won, and destroyed our freedoms, and now our own societies are pretty much turning on themselves.
Is it that American Tech workers are demanding more than they are worth, and the companies simply cannot afford to pay that?
I'm not sure "not willing to pay in order to maximize profits" is the same as "simply cannot afford to pay that".
Especially when many of these hi tech companies make zillions of dollars of income which is then shunted through various countries where the banking laws allow them to pay less taxes.
This isn't so much about can't pay, as simply won't -- because these companies want to have their cake and eat it too.
So, when huge multinationals which pay a lower tax rate than you or I do are crying poor... I'm simply not buying it. This is just straight up theft, and skewing the job market to favor the big players.
The real question is will the US gov ever actually do anything to benefit US workers, or are they already too far under the thumbs of the hi tech companies?
Is it limited to just hi tech companies?
One gets the impression that pretty much anything which will increase corporate profits and maximize executive bonuses/shareholder value will get approved, no matter how badly it affects US workers.
In other words, screw the workers and the domestic economy, give any concession to large corporations they ask for. In no small part because some of the politicians have a stake in those companies, or are being 'compensated' for approving these things.
It's almost as if the politicians had a conflict in interest between what's good for themselves and what's good for the rest of us.
You seem to be suggesting a solution in which someone will both cooperatively pass laws spanning multiple nations, and which could be construed as limiting the "free speech" and commercial activities of corporations.
I predict the chance of that happening to be practically non-existent.
Someone with deep pockets will claim that preventing a commercial entity from cold calling you is unfair. And they'll throw a lot of money at this to ensure those laws are watered down so far as to be useless.
Just like the last time.
Those laws are ineffective because people paid to make them that way.
1) Lobbyists for the people who claim to be "legitimate" telemarketers had provisions in the law gutted so they could continue to call us even if we didn't want them to.
2) Since it's so trivial to spoof caller ID (in part for these exact same companies), knowing who is actually calling is almost impossible
3) Many of those callers are calling from another country entirely (again, because those companies who lobbied for exemptions wanted to use offshore call centers)... so what is the FCC going to do?
You have a toothless legislation, designed to give loopholes to telemarketers and politicians (and who knows what else), which has been set up to allow 3rd party contractors to call on your behalf and spoof the caller ID, and people in another country who are doing the calling.
Many of us believe the people doing the fraudulent calls are the exact same offshore call centers used by the "legitimate" organizations.
The law was so crippled to protect commercial interests there's really nothing to enforce.
But since when are profitable short-term goals the only worthwhile ones?
Since the stock market decided that quarterly numbers was the only meaningful metric and corporations stopped having any longer-term goals?
Seriously, for the last decade it seems like long-term thinking is out the window, because people who run corporations only give a damn about the next quarter.
And when the management team gets swapped out, they cancel anything which had been on-going in favor of new short-term measures.
Or, at least, that's how it has seemed to many of us for years now.
Well, while I agree the tone can change things... I'm still hopeful a court will uphold the fact that the 4th amendment exists, and that a stop/search with no probable cause it illegal. Because that's the actual problem here.
Police officers getting paid leave and no actual consequences for ignoring the law has to stop.
Instead, the blue wall circles around when a cop does something illegal, and until the video surfaces, they concoct their own version of events and stick with it until they get proven lying.
That kind of shit need to lead to criminal charges.
Advice I got from a cop: Most cops are great guys and a few are psychopaths with guns. The best place to fight it out is in court where they won't be able to shoot you and get away with it;)
So, the suggestion is that we should allow the police to illegally stop and search us until we can be in a safer environment to tell them they're doing something illegal?
No, sorry.
I propose something else: all police wear cameras and audio recording 100% of the time, and a zero tolerance for police who do not adhere to the law, and dismissal/criminal charges are the outcome. Any police officer who turned off his recording stuff is presumed to be lying.
How about we weed out the assholes and the ones who don't know what the law says instead of making the citizens all act like scared, compliant sheep?
By the time they've dragged your ass into court, they've already fabricated their evidence and come up with the lies they'll all tell.
It really is time to stop giving police the benefit of the doubt, because it's more than a "few" police officers who do this stuff.
The reality is, an increasing number of police either don't know or don't care what the law says. They just do whatever they want because they have the guns and badges.
If retards didn't exist, we wouldn't call them retards.
And if douchebags didn't exist, we wouldn't call them douchebags.
Shall I pencil you in?
See, I'm pushing 50, and while I have a penis I don't define myself in terms of it, and I honestly can't understand the sheer amount of hatred and bile I've seen on Slashdot (and the internet in general) which is directed at women.
To me, it's just a bunch of completely irrational hate by people who feel the need to blame someone else for their problems. I would find it equally idiotic if someone was blaming blacks, Jews, or people with glasses.
So, me I'm more inclined to ascribe this to some mass resurgence of stupidity than some well-reasoned people who have an actual point to make. It's just childish and serves no purpose, and it's like watching a four year old act out to get attention.
I don't care if you're PC or not -- but some people seem to be deliberately acting like loud mouth assholes just for the sake of it.
It's like a bunch of angry 12 year old kids with ADHD is the intellectual level of the discussions around here. And, I'm sorry, but angry 12 year olds with ADHD are annoying little pricks, and not to be given any credibility.
It's almost like there's a bunch of drooling idiots who want to take every possible opportunity to shout down women -- in which case you assume they're bitter, mouth breathing losers with nothing of value to add to the discussion.
Slashdot didn't used to be filled with so many people like this. So either as I get older I'm more sensitive to it, or the level of it is ramping up over time.
So, yeah, if people are going to act like whiny, immature children, I'm going to treat them as such.
I used to think it was just ignorance, but now I'm starting to realize it's actually a campaign my misogynists to try and keep women out of IT for some reason.
I'm not so sure I'd call it a campaign.
That implies ordered and rational thought, and some coherent strategy.
So, what you're offended by is government interference in the economy?
No, what I'm offended by is the magical, bullshit thinking of certain kinds of economics which claims the free market solves problems and achieves optimal outcomes, and the fetishization of the capitalism as some holy and noble goal which contains Higher Truth -- because I think it's a lie and a fairy tale.
It's interesting, by the by, that you seem to have the exact same idea regarding lobbyists and such that Ayn Rand had.
LOL, no... it is my contention that pure free market capitalism is as inherently broken and flawed as pure communism is, and that those who claim either will achieve perfection if only the rest of the world can be forced to follow it are lying bastards and ideologues.
I believe that the invisible hand is always corrupt, and simply cannot achieve the outcomes attributed to it, and that it will always lead to outcomes beneficial only to a handful of players and detrimental to everyone else.
Pretty sure Ayn Rand and I would agree on very little, except mutual contempt.
Slashdot Mirror
What he was doing may or may not have been legal.
What he didn't evaluate was the risk that the MPAA et al had bought off/co-opted the US government, who decided they were going to go into the business of strong-arming people when they don't have an applicable law.
You can't plan for stuff like that.
From the sounds of it, no NZ law was broken, he's yet to be charged with anything for which there's an actual law in the US, and the US government is seizing his assets before they're proven he's done anything wrong.
You can't fight a nation state acting on behalf of a cartel of corporations.
Because it doesn't matter what the law says at that point.
As I understand it, he never actually committed copyright infringement. So he's being charged with some made up offense which isn't a law anywhere.
At that point, it's just a show trial.
Somehow, that doesn't seem like it goes nearly far enough.
So, I don't know, some form of rhyming slang ... rhymes with "stunt" or "hydrant" maybe? Maybe "flashest"?
Eventually:
"There's no reason for such firms to be willing to cooperate with state agencies over traffic violations, but not over locating individuals who criticize the government".
The scope creep of these things is the biggest problem.
Many terrorism related provisions were implemented, and at the time we were told "oh, don't worry, we won't abuse this, this is purely for terrorism".
And now look at where we are. Parallel construction anybody? You know, where the police have a manual of perjury and how to violate your legal rights by pretending they found you through other means, and then actively conspire to conceal the truth from the legal system.
These things will always get abused over time. So the only real way to stop that is not allow them in the first place.
Joesph McCarthy would have loved all of this stuff.
Here we go, those two plus fighting copyright infringement are the magic keys to the kingdom. The fascists and despots can use those pretty much anywhere to bypass all laws and protections.
If we don't stop the copyright-infringing terrorist pedophiles the world will end, so as a result, we can get access to everything just to be safe.
The scary thing is these guys either don't understand, or don't care, about how much they're undermining the rest of the law and society. Instead they figure the surveillance state is necessary to protect us from the bad guys.
Sorry, but the governments are becoming the bad guys and the threat to our freedoms. And they don't care.
Face it, the terrorists effectively won, and destroyed our freedoms, and now our own societies are pretty much turning on themselves.
Neither does the argument they need these due to a "skills shortage" which isn't real.
So, if there's no skill shortage, and this is purely about driving down labor costs ... this is 100% about greed.
The problem is we aren't on equal footing here, so they can screw us over all they want to.
Sorry, but a bunch of millionaire CEOs running multi-billion dollar corporations crying poor is just horseshit.
This is just blatant abuse of the system to give them an unfair advantage in the labor market.
If they can't prove a labor shortage, they shouldn't have this program at all.
I'm not sure "not willing to pay in order to maximize profits" is the same as "simply cannot afford to pay that".
Especially when many of these hi tech companies make zillions of dollars of income which is then shunted through various countries where the banking laws allow them to pay less taxes.
This isn't so much about can't pay, as simply won't -- because these companies want to have their cake and eat it too.
So, when huge multinationals which pay a lower tax rate than you or I do are crying poor ... I'm simply not buying it. This is just straight up theft, and skewing the job market to favor the big players.
Is it limited to just hi tech companies?
One gets the impression that pretty much anything which will increase corporate profits and maximize executive bonuses/shareholder value will get approved, no matter how badly it affects US workers.
In other words, screw the workers and the domestic economy, give any concession to large corporations they ask for. In no small part because some of the politicians have a stake in those companies, or are being 'compensated' for approving these things.
It's almost as if the politicians had a conflict in interest between what's good for themselves and what's good for the rest of us.
This has never been about a skills shortage, it has always been about lowering the market rate for those skills.
Basically these companies are publicly saying they want to go to an external economy to drive down labor costs for tech jobs.
This is entirely about corporate greed and entitlement, and has never been about anything other than driving down wages.
And somehow politicians have bought this hook line and sinker.
Or, more accurately, the politicians have been bought, and the rest of us be damned.
So, Sony isn't just incompetent and unsafe with our data, they're apparently unqualified to run an internal network?
Unbelievable.
I can't think of many instances where a company as big as Sony had to shut down all of their IT stuff on this scale.
Bummer, dudes. But, it's Sony, so I'm not feeling overly bad about it.
Me, I'm less willing to give the benefit of the doubt to Facebook or the people who advertise on it.
In fact, I just assume Facebook is a malicious entity and block it from most browsers.
So either this lady went through a lot of steps to create a profile, or this company is lying and actually created it for her.
I'm far more likely to believe the combination of Facebook and whatever this Zoosk thing is are the culprits.
That's pretty slimy as far as I'm concerned.
So, what is your egg substitute made from, and how have you demonstrated it is safe for human consumption?
If the answer is "we can't tell you", or "we assume it is safe" then I can tell you many people won't go anywhere near it.
You seem to be suggesting a solution in which someone will both cooperatively pass laws spanning multiple nations, and which could be construed as limiting the "free speech" and commercial activities of corporations.
I predict the chance of that happening to be practically non-existent.
Someone with deep pockets will claim that preventing a commercial entity from cold calling you is unfair. And they'll throw a lot of money at this to ensure those laws are watered down so far as to be useless.
Just like the last time.
Those laws are ineffective because people paid to make them that way.
See, the problem with this is that it assumes the people you're trying to have these things act as a deterrent are, in fact, in their right minds.
And many of the people we seem to be having conflict with these days ... they're very much of the opinion of "our way or death to all".
So, what do you do if the people you're concerned about aren't in their right minds, and nothing you do will act as a deterrent?
Assuming a rational adversary is not necessarily a reasonable thing any more.
So, this is to allow mass, warrantless surveillance of the citizens?
Or to allow the expansion of commercial interests?
That seems to be the only two things Congress does these days.
Well, there's several reasons for that ...
1) Lobbyists for the people who claim to be "legitimate" telemarketers had provisions in the law gutted so they could continue to call us even if we didn't want them to.
2) Since it's so trivial to spoof caller ID (in part for these exact same companies), knowing who is actually calling is almost impossible
3) Many of those callers are calling from another country entirely (again, because those companies who lobbied for exemptions wanted to use offshore call centers) ... so what is the FCC going to do?
You have a toothless legislation, designed to give loopholes to telemarketers and politicians (and who knows what else), which has been set up to allow 3rd party contractors to call on your behalf and spoof the caller ID, and people in another country who are doing the calling.
Many of us believe the people doing the fraudulent calls are the exact same offshore call centers used by the "legitimate" organizations.
The law was so crippled to protect commercial interests there's really nothing to enforce.
Since the stock market decided that quarterly numbers was the only meaningful metric and corporations stopped having any longer-term goals?
Seriously, for the last decade it seems like long-term thinking is out the window, because people who run corporations only give a damn about the next quarter.
And when the management team gets swapped out, they cancel anything which had been on-going in favor of new short-term measures.
Or, at least, that's how it has seemed to many of us for years now.
Well, while I agree the tone can change things ... I'm still hopeful a court will uphold the fact that the 4th amendment exists, and that a stop/search with no probable cause it illegal. Because that's the actual problem here.
Police officers getting paid leave and no actual consequences for ignoring the law has to stop.
Instead, the blue wall circles around when a cop does something illegal, and until the video surfaces, they concoct their own version of events and stick with it until they get proven lying.
That kind of shit need to lead to criminal charges.
So, the suggestion is that we should allow the police to illegally stop and search us until we can be in a safer environment to tell them they're doing something illegal?
No, sorry.
I propose something else: all police wear cameras and audio recording 100% of the time, and a zero tolerance for police who do not adhere to the law, and dismissal/criminal charges are the outcome. Any police officer who turned off his recording stuff is presumed to be lying.
How about we weed out the assholes and the ones who don't know what the law says instead of making the citizens all act like scared, compliant sheep?
By the time they've dragged your ass into court, they've already fabricated their evidence and come up with the lies they'll all tell.
It really is time to stop giving police the benefit of the doubt, because it's more than a "few" police officers who do this stuff.
The reality is, an increasing number of police either don't know or don't care what the law says. They just do whatever they want because they have the guns and badges.
It's time to fix that.
Ah, so you actually are a batshit crazy moron, gotcha.
Now I can simply ignore your posts.
God, you're pathetic.
And if douchebags didn't exist, we wouldn't call them douchebags.
Shall I pencil you in?
See, I'm pushing 50, and while I have a penis I don't define myself in terms of it, and I honestly can't understand the sheer amount of hatred and bile I've seen on Slashdot (and the internet in general) which is directed at women.
To me, it's just a bunch of completely irrational hate by people who feel the need to blame someone else for their problems. I would find it equally idiotic if someone was blaming blacks, Jews, or people with glasses.
So, me I'm more inclined to ascribe this to some mass resurgence of stupidity than some well-reasoned people who have an actual point to make. It's just childish and serves no purpose, and it's like watching a four year old act out to get attention.
I don't care if you're PC or not -- but some people seem to be deliberately acting like loud mouth assholes just for the sake of it.
It's like a bunch of angry 12 year old kids with ADHD is the intellectual level of the discussions around here. And, I'm sorry, but angry 12 year olds with ADHD are annoying little pricks, and not to be given any credibility.
It's almost like there's a bunch of drooling idiots who want to take every possible opportunity to shout down women -- in which case you assume they're bitter, mouth breathing losers with nothing of value to add to the discussion.
Slashdot didn't used to be filled with so many people like this. So either as I get older I'm more sensitive to it, or the level of it is ramping up over time.
So, yeah, if people are going to act like whiny, immature children, I'm going to treat them as such.
I'm not so sure I'd call it a campaign.
That implies ordered and rational thought, and some coherent strategy.
No, what I'm offended by is the magical, bullshit thinking of certain kinds of economics which claims the free market solves problems and achieves optimal outcomes, and the fetishization of the capitalism as some holy and noble goal which contains Higher Truth -- because I think it's a lie and a fairy tale.
LOL, no ... it is my contention that pure free market capitalism is as inherently broken and flawed as pure communism is, and that those who claim either will achieve perfection if only the rest of the world can be forced to follow it are lying bastards and ideologues.
I believe that the invisible hand is always corrupt, and simply cannot achieve the outcomes attributed to it, and that it will always lead to outcomes beneficial only to a handful of players and detrimental to everyone else.
Pretty sure Ayn Rand and I would agree on very little, except mutual contempt.
Shouldn't you be crying into your pillow and lamenting how having a tiny penis and a small brain has handicapped you and the world is against you?
Seriously, grow up and get a life.
Were you prepared for the amount of bullshit and misogyny which was unleashed when the trolls around here discovered it was a woman being interviewed?