How long do you think it will take for someone to hack it and allow them to use whatever battery?
And then you will be subject to being sued for breaking the DRM. In fact, you probably sign something that says you won't do that, and if you do you consent to be sued.
You really don't think they have a bunch of lawyers making sure they've got your options limited, your nuts in a vice, and their hand on your wallet?
It's great! Spray this stuff on an enemy army and you end up in the Hague. Lob it at your citizens and everything is just fine.
Except, the US is explicitly NOT a signatory to anything which would make them subject to the International Criminal Court.
In other words, short of military action against the US to bring someone to justice... nothing can happen. The US has specifically set themselves up to not be under the jurisdiction of anything like this.
So, if they decide to actually do gas their people, stern letters and hand wringing is pretty much all that will happen.
I never understand this thinking. I am under the impression that when a judgement goes against you, you can appeal the decision.
My exceedingly limited understanding (IANAL) is it leaves them open to appeal based on specific points of law not initially addressed in the ruling.
So if someone said "we object to X", and they rule on that, that's what the ruling is about. I think this leaves them room to come back and say "but we can do X because of Y and you're wrong", and then the court can rule if the argument makes sense.
I think very often courts are ruling on a specific point of law, and the ruling only applies to that narrow scope. The broader issue may still be litigated.
Can someone explain to me the benefit of an internet kill switch? And how DHS is the appropriate department for its implementation?
They could tell you, but they'd have to kill you.
I'm sure the official explanation would be that in the event of a widespread terrorist event (or some unspecified threat), they would need to shut down the internet to maintain public order.
Me, I'm sure it's mostly so they can maintain absolute control over everything just in case. It's all part of the plan to actually make 1984 and Brave New World come true.
To my non-lawyer mind, impersonating someone's business sounds like fraud
Except when you do it for national security, then they give themselves an exemption.
You could try, but I suspect the judge would get told that, due to national security reasons, the trial may not proceed and you have no standing to sue.
Suing a government is tough when it's about matters they can control so tightly. And damned near impossible when it's something like the NSA or GCHQ.
Hell, I suspect they'd just charge you as a terrorist if it made it easier for them. Because, you know, clearly what you're doing would be against national security interests.
See, they have secret laws which say what they're doing is legal.
The government would essentially have to consent to being sued, which they won't.
As long as the position of the government is "what we do is legal, and even where we might skirt around the law, it's still legal. And we don't care about the rights of citizens of other countries." -- they can do anything they like and call it legal.
I figure your lawsuit would last about 20 minutes before it got tossed out, or the government basically said "we don't care, we're not showing up, too bad". Short of some pretty heavy diplomatic pressure (still likely to do nothing), my guess is you have absolutely zero recourse.
If you're car is not moving, then technically you're not driving.
If you're on a road, you're driving. If you're in a parking lot or in your driveway, sure. But if you're sitting at an intersection and believe you're not driving, you've lost the plot.
Show of hands, how many of us have had to honk at the motorist in front of us when the light changes because they're still fiddling with their phone? I have to at least 2-3 times a week, and I don't drive more than 5-6 times in an average week.
I'm against throttling as much as the next guy, but I do see the need to manage bandwidth on a large scale.
That's what usage based billing is for. If some users download huge amounts and that costs them money, charge the individual users for that bandwidth.
I thought the 'common carrier' status meant they were required to send everything without preference. Because since if they lost their common carrier status, they'd be responsible for things like child porn.
As usual, these companies are asking for all of the protections of being a common carrier without any of the responsibilities and obligations.
However, throttling the service of someone else (like Netflix) because your customers are using that service (and so they can push you to using their competing service) is a pretty one-sided outcome for the ISPs.
As far as your eye is concerned this is optically identical to normal visual conditions
Fine. You buy one. You wear it several hours per day for several years. You be the one to find out if what they're saying is true, or if there are defects in the technology.
Me, I tend to distrust the "oh, it's perfectly safe until we see evidence to the contrary" type things.
You can say all you want it's safe. But until I see long-term usage studies, I'm going on the assumption that taking the word of the one who stands to make the money from it is a stupid idea. Of course the guy selling it is going to say it's safe, but that doesn't make it true. I don't trust software salesmen either.
How often has big pharma come out with something and said it's "perfectly safe", only to find out a few years down the road it's anything but, and they ignored the evidence which showed that it wasn't?
Often enough to make me think "do I really need an image beamed to my retina because it sounds cool, or can I just skip the whole thing until we've actually got some evidence?" Since I have no pressing need for this device, I'm not losing out on anything by deciding not to be an early adopter of it.
So long as the light levels aren't dangerous, there's no problem
Well, I'm glad that you have implicit faith in technology. I have far less faith and trust, especially where my vision is concerned.
You, however, can stick whatever you like in your eyes, run with scissors, or choose not to wear your seat belt if you so choose. Doesn't make any difference to me.
Images are drawn onto your retina every waking second of your life.
No, images arrive at our retina through means the human body has been using for thousands of years.
Having a piece of technology draw it directly onto your retina is different. And anybody who has ever seen screen burn-in on a monitor will know why it's different.
Maybe, in the future when this is well tested and proven (not assumed) to pose no risks. But in the mean time, I'm not letting someone's science experiment attempt to directly draw onto my retina.
But, hey, if you want to strap this to your head and be among the first generation of people to use it and learn the long-term implications... well, you run wild with that and let us know how it works out.
That's a choice you get to make. But I've already made mine. My initial assumption is this needs a lot of testing (by other people) before I'm even willing to consider it. In the mean time, it won't be me wearing one of these.
All the politicians and their lackies run around with Blackberrys sutured to their hands, texting each other in meetings and rudely breaking off in mid-conversation to answer texts because they're incredibly important people and you're not.
And nothing different will happen if the manufacturer of the device changes, because this has nothing at all to do with BlackBerry.
They'll just be self absorbed people with a different kind of phone.
Microsoft once demanded that its managers place their subordinates on a scale from 'top' to 'poor,' a practice that fueled some epic backstabbing within divisions.
A bunch of years ago a company I worked for was doing something similar.
They essentially demanded it be placed on a bell curve. So, in our group of 5 people, all of whom were good solid people who worked well together and got stuff built, management was insisting there be 1 awesome, 1 pretty good, 1 good, 1 needs work, and 1 terrible -- and that had nothing whatsoever to do with the individual strengths of the team, just some idiots vision of how these things should be managed. My manager didn't feel that anybody belonged below the top 1 or 2 rankings.
If you decide in advance that your ranking has to take on an artificial distribution, you end up with a really pointless management system which really just serves to give people with no knowledge of what really happens a nice easy to read (and often incorrect) metric.
It really does make for a pointless "management by inapplicable metrics" kind of culture. And so often it's all about making managements job easy and something they can point to the formulas -- and seems to offer zero insights into what is actually happening. The more companies blindly use metrics, the less they actually grasp what their organization is actually doing.
At this point, no "good" geek would work for the NSA.
Define 'good' and define 'geek'.
If you think there aren't people who work in the tech field who will say "I'm totally in favor of this, because it protects us from the terrorists", you're likely sadly mistaken.
Geeks aren't some uniform group of people who all believe the same things. Reading Slashdot should show you that quite readily in about 2 minutes.
Many of us might say "yeah, not on your life", but I bet almost as many might say "sure, I'm in, sounds fun".
Funny that the people he duped to obtain some of the information are being relieved of their jobs
Not funny, but arguably well deserved.
If your job is to work with sensitive data which has extremely limited access, providing someone with your password is an epic lapse in judgement, or a downright lack of understanding of basic security protocol.
If the NSA doesn't have a training course which loudly tells you to never give your passwords to anyone, they're idiots. If you didn't listen to that training and do give your password, then you have no business safeguarding sensitive data.
but the people participating in the overreach won't suffer any consequences.
Two different things, really. In their minds, the surveillance was legal and authorized (which, from their perspective is probably technically true). But completely failing to adhere to security policy means that you can't really be trusted.
I should think if you fall for social engineering at the NSA, you've completed a huge faux pas and demonstrated you might be the weakest link.
Hell, most companies routinely do phishing tests and the like, and failing that will get you onto the remedial information security policy -- and repeated lapses might lose you your job. I get fake phishing emails from our security department all the time -- and everyone I report right back to them and get told "congratulations, you did what we hoped you would".
I work in the private sector, and I take security very seriously. I'm often the one making the most noise about security, to the point that I preface many things with "look, I know I say this a lot, but...". How someone in the NSA could be so stupid as to do this boggles the mind.
Snowden may have persuaded between 20 and 25 fellow workers at the NSA regional operations center in Hawaii to give him their logins and passwords by telling them they were needed for him to do his job as a computer systems administrator
If people working with Top Secret/Classified information are so easily manipulated, you more or less have to conclude they had very few policies and controls in place.
This super-duper secret surveillance plan clearly wasn't relying on anything other than good manners to secure the information, and likely it was ripe for being abused by just about anybody there. How many of these people are looking up the information on their friends and family just because it's there?
If my admin came to me and said he needed my password, I'd laugh in his face.
This can only be made better by having a special category for people who have been nominated for an igNobel prize.
Can you imagine the hilarity of interpretive dance about a bra which "in an emergency, can be quickly converted into a pair of protective face masks, one for the brassiere wearer and one to be given to some needy bystander."
I mean, come on, that would be pure comedy gold. I can see entire improv events around just that one thing alone, and the entirety of the igNobels would provide endless hours of entertainment and wackiness.
You could make the home edition and everything. Like charades, but with dance, and the oddest damned things you've ever heard of.
Me, I'm looking forward to dancing the one "for demonstrating that kitchen refuse can be reduced more than 90% in mass by using bacteria extracted from the feces of giant pandas."
Slashdot Mirror
Dude, are you still using one of the old fashioned steam powered mice with the big metal cogs or something? ;-)
But, honestly, would you have without this?
Boycotting a company you wouldn't have bought products from anyway is meaningless.
And then you will be subject to being sued for breaking the DRM. In fact, you probably sign something that says you won't do that, and if you do you consent to be sued.
You really don't think they have a bunch of lawyers making sure they've got your options limited, your nuts in a vice, and their hand on your wallet?
Except, the US is explicitly NOT a signatory to anything which would make them subject to the International Criminal Court.
In other words, short of military action against the US to bring someone to justice ... nothing can happen. The US has specifically set themselves up to not be under the jurisdiction of anything like this.
So, if they decide to actually do gas their people, stern letters and hand wringing is pretty much all that will happen.
My exceedingly limited understanding (IANAL) is it leaves them open to appeal based on specific points of law not initially addressed in the ruling.
So if someone said "we object to X", and they rule on that, that's what the ruling is about. I think this leaves them room to come back and say "but we can do X because of Y and you're wrong", and then the court can rule if the argument makes sense.
I think very often courts are ruling on a specific point of law, and the ruling only applies to that narrow scope. The broader issue may still be litigated.
Or something like that.
They could tell you, but they'd have to kill you.
I'm sure the official explanation would be that in the event of a widespread terrorist event (or some unspecified threat), they would need to shut down the internet to maintain public order.
Me, I'm sure it's mostly so they can maintain absolute control over everything just in case. It's all part of the plan to actually make 1984 and Brave New World come true.
Except when you do it for national security, then they give themselves an exemption.
You could try, but I suspect the judge would get told that, due to national security reasons, the trial may not proceed and you have no standing to sue.
Suing a government is tough when it's about matters they can control so tightly. And damned near impossible when it's something like the NSA or GCHQ.
Hell, I suspect they'd just charge you as a terrorist if it made it easier for them. Because, you know, clearly what you're doing would be against national security interests.
See, they have secret laws which say what they're doing is legal.
The government would essentially have to consent to being sued, which they won't.
As long as the position of the government is "what we do is legal, and even where we might skirt around the law, it's still legal. And we don't care about the rights of citizens of other countries." -- they can do anything they like and call it legal.
I figure your lawsuit would last about 20 minutes before it got tossed out, or the government basically said "we don't care, we're not showing up, too bad". Short of some pretty heavy diplomatic pressure (still likely to do nothing), my guess is you have absolutely zero recourse.
If you're on a road, you're driving. If you're in a parking lot or in your driveway, sure. But if you're sitting at an intersection and believe you're not driving, you've lost the plot.
Show of hands, how many of us have had to honk at the motorist in front of us when the light changes because they're still fiddling with their phone? I have to at least 2-3 times a week, and I don't drive more than 5-6 times in an average week.
Well, if the browser puts up a big warning message saying "anybody can see this, are you sure?" people might understand.
In the last few months, it's been far easier to explain such things to people, because it's suddenly a real thing and is tangible.
That's what usage based billing is for. If some users download huge amounts and that costs them money, charge the individual users for that bandwidth.
I thought the 'common carrier' status meant they were required to send everything without preference. Because since if they lost their common carrier status, they'd be responsible for things like child porn.
As usual, these companies are asking for all of the protections of being a common carrier without any of the responsibilities and obligations.
However, throttling the service of someone else (like Netflix) because your customers are using that service (and so they can push you to using their competing service) is a pretty one-sided outcome for the ISPs.
Fine. You buy one. You wear it several hours per day for several years. You be the one to find out if what they're saying is true, or if there are defects in the technology.
Me, I tend to distrust the "oh, it's perfectly safe until we see evidence to the contrary" type things.
You can say all you want it's safe. But until I see long-term usage studies, I'm going on the assumption that taking the word of the one who stands to make the money from it is a stupid idea. Of course the guy selling it is going to say it's safe, but that doesn't make it true. I don't trust software salesmen either.
How often has big pharma come out with something and said it's "perfectly safe", only to find out a few years down the road it's anything but, and they ignored the evidence which showed that it wasn't?
Often enough to make me think "do I really need an image beamed to my retina because it sounds cool, or can I just skip the whole thing until we've actually got some evidence?" Since I have no pressing need for this device, I'm not losing out on anything by deciding not to be an early adopter of it.
Well, I'm glad that you have implicit faith in technology. I have far less faith and trust, especially where my vision is concerned.
You, however, can stick whatever you like in your eyes, run with scissors, or choose not to wear your seat belt if you so choose. Doesn't make any difference to me.
Hey, like I said ... you want it, run wild.
I don't want it, and I don't as yet see any reason to take on faith the claims that, in theory, it's perfectly safe.
My eyes, however, will not be the ones to prove that assertion. What you do with your eyes is your problem.
Bravo, sir. Well played indeed.
No, images arrive at our retina through means the human body has been using for thousands of years.
Having a piece of technology draw it directly onto your retina is different. And anybody who has ever seen screen burn-in on a monitor will know why it's different.
Maybe, in the future when this is well tested and proven (not assumed) to pose no risks. But in the mean time, I'm not letting someone's science experiment attempt to directly draw onto my retina.
But, hey, if you want to strap this to your head and be among the first generation of people to use it and learn the long-term implications ... well, you run wild with that and let us know how it works out.
That's a choice you get to make. But I've already made mine. My initial assumption is this needs a lot of testing (by other people) before I'm even willing to consider it. In the mean time, it won't be me wearing one of these.
Assuming, of course, you can still see. ;-)
Gee, what could possibly go wrong with that?
Well, someone else can try that technology. Once it's been in use for a decade or so I might think about it.
In the meantime, I am not willing to be the guinea pig for something like this. I've no interest in going blind for the latest shiny toy.
And nothing different will happen if the manufacturer of the device changes, because this has nothing at all to do with BlackBerry.
They'll just be self absorbed people with a different kind of phone.
A bunch of years ago a company I worked for was doing something similar.
They essentially demanded it be placed on a bell curve. So, in our group of 5 people, all of whom were good solid people who worked well together and got stuff built, management was insisting there be 1 awesome, 1 pretty good, 1 good, 1 needs work, and 1 terrible -- and that had nothing whatsoever to do with the individual strengths of the team, just some idiots vision of how these things should be managed. My manager didn't feel that anybody belonged below the top 1 or 2 rankings.
If you decide in advance that your ranking has to take on an artificial distribution, you end up with a really pointless management system which really just serves to give people with no knowledge of what really happens a nice easy to read (and often incorrect) metric.
It really does make for a pointless "management by inapplicable metrics" kind of culture. And so often it's all about making managements job easy and something they can point to the formulas -- and seems to offer zero insights into what is actually happening. The more companies blindly use metrics, the less they actually grasp what their organization is actually doing.
Sadly, one man's traitor is another man's patriot.
I don't doubt that people sincerely believe they're doing the right thing, even if it means skirting around some laws.
I don't agree with their conclusions, but I acknowledge that it's what they believe.
So, you're saying that you're a traitorous whore who would sell out your principles if the money was right?
And this makes you better than anybody working there, how, exactly?
Define 'good' and define 'geek'.
If you think there aren't people who work in the tech field who will say "I'm totally in favor of this, because it protects us from the terrorists", you're likely sadly mistaken.
Geeks aren't some uniform group of people who all believe the same things. Reading Slashdot should show you that quite readily in about 2 minutes.
Many of us might say "yeah, not on your life", but I bet almost as many might say "sure, I'm in, sounds fun".
Not funny, but arguably well deserved.
If your job is to work with sensitive data which has extremely limited access, providing someone with your password is an epic lapse in judgement, or a downright lack of understanding of basic security protocol.
If the NSA doesn't have a training course which loudly tells you to never give your passwords to anyone, they're idiots. If you didn't listen to that training and do give your password, then you have no business safeguarding sensitive data.
Two different things, really. In their minds, the surveillance was legal and authorized (which, from their perspective is probably technically true). But completely failing to adhere to security policy means that you can't really be trusted.
I should think if you fall for social engineering at the NSA, you've completed a huge faux pas and demonstrated you might be the weakest link.
Hell, most companies routinely do phishing tests and the like, and failing that will get you onto the remedial information security policy -- and repeated lapses might lose you your job. I get fake phishing emails from our security department all the time -- and everyone I report right back to them and get told "congratulations, you did what we hoped you would".
I work in the private sector, and I take security very seriously. I'm often the one making the most noise about security, to the point that I preface many things with "look, I know I say this a lot, but ...". How someone in the NSA could be so stupid as to do this boggles the mind.
If people working with Top Secret/Classified information are so easily manipulated, you more or less have to conclude they had very few policies and controls in place.
This super-duper secret surveillance plan clearly wasn't relying on anything other than good manners to secure the information, and likely it was ripe for being abused by just about anybody there. How many of these people are looking up the information on their friends and family just because it's there?
If my admin came to me and said he needed my password, I'd laugh in his face.
Think of the $10 million as a reach-around, and AT&T as a consenting participant.
That's closer to what's happening.
This can only be made better by having a special category for people who have been nominated for an igNobel prize.
Can you imagine the hilarity of interpretive dance about a bra which "in an emergency, can be quickly converted into a pair of protective face masks, one for the brassiere wearer and one to be given to some needy bystander."
I mean, come on, that would be pure comedy gold. I can see entire improv events around just that one thing alone, and the entirety of the igNobels would provide endless hours of entertainment and wackiness.
You could make the home edition and everything. Like charades, but with dance, and the oddest damned things you've ever heard of.
Me, I'm looking forward to dancing the one "for demonstrating that kitchen refuse can be reduced more than 90% in mass by using bacteria extracted from the feces of giant pandas."