Can someone explain how nearly 250 years of common law has managed to change the definition of a "person" to include US companies, but not foreign citizens utilizing services within the US?
Terrorism, copyright, and child porn. Those are the magic 3 that will allow them to pretty much bypass everything.
But don't worry, those 3 can circumvent the rights of citizens as well.
Somewhere along the line, it must be technically possible to identify that the number isn't coming from where it claims to be.
Most of the obvious fraudulent crap is all using fake caller IDs and they're calling another country.
If I could simply tell the phone company that I'm not willing to accept numbers which don't match their origin, that would kill off all of the crap I get. And I don't care about the legitimate ones, because by masking their real phone number they're no better than the scammers.
Unfortunately, these guys lobby hard enough that they make sure nobody could pass anything which cut into their business -- because they feel it's their legitimate right to call us.
It's gotten to the point where even the ones with legal exemptions like charities and political parties usually get an earful of profanity.
Really? What gets patented is ideas, not math (because you can't actually patent that).
Nobody patented the mathematical formula for swipe to unlock. Nobody patented the mathematics of the Zev-Limpel algorithm, they patented the idea of using it for compression of data.
Other than the fact that it's describable in math, if I patented something like file-sharing, I'm not patenting a single mathematical concept. I'm patenting an implementation, or the idea for an implementation of a NON MATHEMATICAL concept, but done on a computer.
Almost every thing we do in computers involves trying to come up with a digital analog for a real world thing. Nobody says "Hey, I have this mathematical equation, let's patent it"... they say "hey, let's patent doing this with a computer".
Sorry, but I've been writing code for almost 25 years, and despite the fact that my output can be expressed in math, usually in my day to day life, the fact that there is a connection to mathematics is either irrelevant or secondary.
Comp. Sci is no more a strict subset of mathematics than engineering is, because there's other things that come into play that the mathematicians don't factor in.
Debugging software isn't like solving an equation -- nor is writing it, and nobody writes out a mathematical equation for a piece of enterprise software and says the rest is just an exercise for the reader (unless you're Donald Knuth).
Only mathematicians believe that even most aspects of software is math.
You know, my degree is in math and comp. sci, and while it's all expressable as math, writing software is in most ways nothing at all like math.
I've known several mathematicians who couldn't ever grasp the basics of programming, and I've known more than a few guys with Master's degrees in comp. sci who didn't know much more -- because all they learned was math for theoretical stuff.
Knowing which libraries to use, writing readable code, release management, configuration management, debugging, and dozens of other things involved in writing code takes it beyond being "just math".
You can't separate it from math, but I disagree that it all boils down to math.
All computing has a foundation in math, but not all patents relate to mathematical things. They relate to trying to map physical analogs to digital things.
Swipe to unlock? Pretty much no math there except the graphics libraries. It's a concept, but there's not exactly some mathematical formula for swipe to unlock.
I've never subscribed to the argument that all computing is math, because as much as it affects how efficient your algorithms are, software is not mathematics.
The problem with patents is they seem to be patenting the idea, and it takes so long for the USPTO to process the claims that by the time to they do it's an industry standard practice.
She's been underwhelmed with her PlayBook and found it a little flaky, prone to losing its network, or locking up and needing a hard boot.
The last upgrade fixed the rather pathetic battery life, so maybe this will improve it even more.
I'm tired of the scowls from her since I'm the one who bought it for her. We know a couple of people with them, and they seem to have the same kind of results -- though, I certainly know people who say theirs are the most stable things ever. To us, it's failed to live up to expectations.
Something sane and civilized. Life in prison for causing embarassment is neither.
You're missing the point -- the felonies he had to commit before he could even attempt to embarrass someone is what he's charged for. The fact that he committed crimes for something as puerile as seeing tits is irrelevant. He did the illegal things, and now he's being charged for it.
They're not charging him on the basis that he might have damaged someone's modesty, they're charging him for the illegal things he did to get there.
Accessing someone else's computer when you're not authorized, and using someone else's login credentials to do it is a felony, and he's being charged with that. What he did after breaking the law is irrelevant (well, I'm sure the ladies in question would feel otherwise) to what he's being charged with.
Just a cursory fact check should inform the "editors" of this article that international students are cash cows in many universities and actually keep many colleges open.
Yeah, no kidding. My first thought is that the reason the US is investing billions in bringing in foreign students is because the tuition is lucrative.
Every university seeks out international students -- it's not like the government is paying for their education, they're all paying tuition.
On the contrary, those students have to buy housing, food, clothing... and more than a few I knew when I was in school had parents of some means, so they often had cars and disposable income. And they payed several times more in tuition than any local did.
At my school, there was at least 15-20% foreign students, maybe more.
Something about this assertion sounds like it's been spun to make a point.
This stuff always amazes me. About 20 years ago when I hung out with astrophysics geeks, we were just on the cusp of being able to be in a position to start identifying exoplanets.
Now we find them all over the place, surrounding stars we never thought would be able to have them. Hell, I think the estimates for the number of planets which would exist was vastly smaller than what we know now.
The universe is far more vast and complex than we've ever guessed... and we just keep finding new stuff. And that's friggin' awesome.
Not really. The only possible damage is a little embarrassment.
Well, the act of breaking into the accounts is illegal.. he's not being charged with embarrassing people, he's charged with criminally accessing systems and identity theft.
What he subsequently did is irrelevant, because he's being charged with "15 counts of computer intrusion and 15 counts of aggravated identity theft", not 350 counts of asking to see someone's boobs.
He broke the law to do this, and he's being charged with the laws he broke. I'm long past any sympathy for these script kiddies and self-professed hax0rs... don't want your life destroyed by criminal charges? Don't do things you bloody well know are illegal.
I don't care if all he did was to post pictures of unicorns on their Facebook wall, getting to that point involved several felonies.
Tell that to the US military or go on TPB and watch the flood of information that has freed itself.
No, people want information to be free... information in and of itself doesn't "want" anything, and it doesn't like it when you anthropomorphize it.
Information doesn't spontaneously decide it wants to be free and take steps to that end. People decide they want to liberate information and release it.
At the end of the day, what this guy did is illegal -- and while I agree they're looking at ridiculously long jail terms for this, I don't think he should get off with a mere slap on the wrist either. Fraudulently gaining access to computers and people's email is a federal crime, and it should be.
'We are trying to create a movement where people are willing to share their network for the common good,' says Adi Kamdar, an activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. 'It's a neighborly thing to do.'
If my neighbors want an internet connection, they can buy their own, dammit.
In a world where you can be sued for downloading files based on an IP address, or where you can be investigated for things like child pornography... there's no way in hell I'd be willing to open my network for everybody to use. I know what my wife and I download. That guy down the street? No idea.
And, since my ISP charges me based on my used bandwidth, I'm not subsidizing your internet access.
Sure, it's possible noble and altruistic. But it also carries some legal risks.
Some sort of small fine seems appropriate here. Maybe $500 that should be enough to discourage most people from this type of behavior.
Why? Then you just trivialize what he did and make it so other people can do this. If it's only going to cost $500 to make it go away, then you'd see an awful lot of people doing it.
Essentially he committed several serious crimes ("The indictment charges Kazaryan with 15 counts of computer intrusion and 15 counts of aggravated identity theft") in the process of this.
Gone are the days where someone says "oh, how cute" and just moves on. A prison term of 105 years is excessive, but a $500 fine for criminally using someone else's account? No way.
Sorry, but those are federal offenses, and this is no longer legally some childhood prank. We may need to find a better legal middle ground, but a small fine and a slap on the wrist won't do.
Information doesn't "want" to be free, and just because you feel entitled to it doesn't make it ok.
Not in most places, it doesn't. By uploading it to a site where the normal result is for uploaded code to be available via a public viewer, you are giving your implicit consent for people to view it that way, just like anyone visiting any other web site.
Unfortunately, in most legal jurisdictions, things are copyrighted out of the gate, and can only become more open with an explicit act.
If you upload code to a web site, it's publicly available, but that doesn't mean public domain. And many code samples I see say "copyright" on them.
If you don't explicitly grant a license, then that stuff is in a gray area where you may not legally be able to work with it.
And then there's the whole issue of if you can grant rights on someone else's stuff. If you took the code for, say, Windows, and published it -- even though you've made it publicly accessible, it wasn't your code to give away so anybody downloading it has no protections.
I certainly wouldn't use the availability on a web site as any meaningful level of "implied consent", because copyright law doesn't really allow for it. There is no implied consent, there is copyright, and explicit consent. Copyright all rights reserved is the "implied" here, because that's how the laws are written.
And people tend to forget that the open source licenses only really work by leveraging the principles of copyright to grant an explicit exemption.
This is why early integration is a good idea and is part of the philosophy of release early, release often
For software, sure... but when you're talking about physical things, "release early release often" falls apart.
With something like a 787, you'd sure as heck never be able to do things like that.
By the time you have your first version, you expect to be able to put a pilot into it and at least taxi it around and look at flying.
Rapid release cycles of partly completed software is fine, but it just doesn't apply to an aircraft I don't think. In software, we know we'll release shit intermediate versions only meant for us -- I don't think you can do that with an aircraft.
Wow, they crowd-sourced the design of a wide body aircraft?
So it's their reputation on the line, and likely a lot of the legal liability.. but they gave the suppliers reign to design their own parts?
That sounds like an epic fail in engineering to me. The 777 was a marvel in that every part had been designed and modeled in a computer before they ever built anything -- this sounds like a hodge-podge of parts.
At around $200 million a pop or so, that sounds awfully risky.
For reference, my 64GB iPad 1 had something like 58GB free when new and empty.
iOS is a lighter weight OS meant for phones and tablets, I suspect MS has shoe-horned their full desktop OS into a tablet.
That's fairly heavy weight if it's taking up half the device, and makes one wonder how bloated their phones are unless that's an entirely different OS.
People wrote off the Playbook in 2011 but it outsold the latest generation of iPad in the UK for the last few months of 2012.
I wonder if that's related to the fire-sale pricing -- for a while you could buy a playbook for something like $99. It was crashy and didn't have a lot of software, but it was cheap. That's why I bought one for the wife.
I'm not convinced RIM is down and out just yet.
I'm not suggesting they are, I'm saying that for a lot of consumers, they might as well be; and if they can't convince people to give them a second look, they may well be.
It may be an absolutely awesome platform, but if they focus on the ability to connect to your corporate Exchange server instead of what most non-business users are doing with it -- well, then they will only get the business users.
We've already established that most of the growth in smart phones in the last few years has been with consumers, not business. If they have all of the features a consumer wants, they should be marketing the hell out of that.
Why would you ever design a product that's completely and utterly dependent on a service provided by someone else
Because that's where the users are. Facebook has, what, a billion users? If you can shoehorn into some of those, there's opportunity.
If they go it alone, they'd have to build up all of those users on their own. They're just chasing the money.
I don't disagree that they run the risk of being screwed by Facebook, but that's hardly new in the tech industry -- Microsoft has taken other products and built them into the OS for years, and the frequently do the same to their partners, team up until they can steal your lunch.
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Terrorism, copyright, and child porn. Those are the magic 3 that will allow them to pretty much bypass everything.
But don't worry, those 3 can circumvent the rights of citizens as well.
Somewhere along the line, it must be technically possible to identify that the number isn't coming from where it claims to be.
Most of the obvious fraudulent crap is all using fake caller IDs and they're calling another country.
If I could simply tell the phone company that I'm not willing to accept numbers which don't match their origin, that would kill off all of the crap I get. And I don't care about the legitimate ones, because by masking their real phone number they're no better than the scammers.
Unfortunately, these guys lobby hard enough that they make sure nobody could pass anything which cut into their business -- because they feel it's their legitimate right to call us.
It's gotten to the point where even the ones with legal exemptions like charities and political parties usually get an earful of profanity.
Actually, I think he was pointing out that between us we know 6 out of 5 owners of the playbook.
I think it's meant to be a whoosh. ;-)
Really? What gets patented is ideas, not math (because you can't actually patent that).
Nobody patented the mathematical formula for swipe to unlock. Nobody patented the mathematics of the Zev-Limpel algorithm, they patented the idea of using it for compression of data.
Other than the fact that it's describable in math, if I patented something like file-sharing, I'm not patenting a single mathematical concept. I'm patenting an implementation, or the idea for an implementation of a NON MATHEMATICAL concept, but done on a computer.
Almost every thing we do in computers involves trying to come up with a digital analog for a real world thing. Nobody says "Hey, I have this mathematical equation, let's patent it" ... they say "hey, let's patent doing this with a computer".
Sorry, but I've been writing code for almost 25 years, and despite the fact that my output can be expressed in math, usually in my day to day life, the fact that there is a connection to mathematics is either irrelevant or secondary.
Comp. Sci is no more a strict subset of mathematics than engineering is, because there's other things that come into play that the mathematicians don't factor in.
Debugging software isn't like solving an equation -- nor is writing it, and nobody writes out a mathematical equation for a piece of enterprise software and says the rest is just an exercise for the reader (unless you're Donald Knuth).
Only mathematicians believe that even most aspects of software is math.
You know, my degree is in math and comp. sci, and while it's all expressable as math, writing software is in most ways nothing at all like math.
I've known several mathematicians who couldn't ever grasp the basics of programming, and I've known more than a few guys with Master's degrees in comp. sci who didn't know much more -- because all they learned was math for theoretical stuff.
Knowing which libraries to use, writing readable code, release management, configuration management, debugging, and dozens of other things involved in writing code takes it beyond being "just math".
You can't separate it from math, but I disagree that it all boils down to math.
All computing has a foundation in math, but not all patents relate to mathematical things. They relate to trying to map physical analogs to digital things.
Swipe to unlock? Pretty much no math there except the graphics libraries. It's a concept, but there's not exactly some mathematical formula for swipe to unlock.
I've never subscribed to the argument that all computing is math, because as much as it affects how efficient your algorithms are, software is not mathematics.
The problem with patents is they seem to be patenting the idea, and it takes so long for the USPTO to process the claims that by the time to they do it's an industry standard practice.
No, trust me, I know 3 of those 5 users ... and they'll all be interested in hearing this.
She's been underwhelmed with her PlayBook and found it a little flaky, prone to losing its network, or locking up and needing a hard boot.
The last upgrade fixed the rather pathetic battery life, so maybe this will improve it even more.
I'm tired of the scowls from her since I'm the one who bought it for her. We know a couple of people with them, and they seem to have the same kind of results -- though, I certainly know people who say theirs are the most stable things ever. To us, it's failed to live up to expectations.
You're missing the point -- the felonies he had to commit before he could even attempt to embarrass someone is what he's charged for. The fact that he committed crimes for something as puerile as seeing tits is irrelevant. He did the illegal things, and now he's being charged for it.
They're not charging him on the basis that he might have damaged someone's modesty, they're charging him for the illegal things he did to get there.
Accessing someone else's computer when you're not authorized, and using someone else's login credentials to do it is a felony, and he's being charged with that. What he did after breaking the law is irrelevant (well, I'm sure the ladies in question would feel otherwise) to what he's being charged with.
Yeah, no kidding. My first thought is that the reason the US is investing billions in bringing in foreign students is because the tuition is lucrative.
Every university seeks out international students -- it's not like the government is paying for their education, they're all paying tuition.
On the contrary, those students have to buy housing, food, clothing ... and more than a few I knew when I was in school had parents of some means, so they often had cars and disposable income. And they payed several times more in tuition than any local did.
At my school, there was at least 15-20% foreign students, maybe more.
Something about this assertion sounds like it's been spun to make a point.
This stuff always amazes me. About 20 years ago when I hung out with astrophysics geeks, we were just on the cusp of being able to be in a position to start identifying exoplanets.
Now we find them all over the place, surrounding stars we never thought would be able to have them. Hell, I think the estimates for the number of planets which would exist was vastly smaller than what we know now.
The universe is far more vast and complex than we've ever guessed ... and we just keep finding new stuff. And that's friggin' awesome.
Well, the act of breaking into the accounts is illegal .. he's not being charged with embarrassing people, he's charged with criminally accessing systems and identity theft.
What he subsequently did is irrelevant, because he's being charged with "15 counts of computer intrusion and 15 counts of aggravated identity theft", not 350 counts of asking to see someone's boobs.
He broke the law to do this, and he's being charged with the laws he broke. I'm long past any sympathy for these script kiddies and self-professed hax0rs ... don't want your life destroyed by criminal charges? Don't do things you bloody well know are illegal.
I don't care if all he did was to post pictures of unicorns on their Facebook wall, getting to that point involved several felonies.
No, people want information to be free ... information in and of itself doesn't "want" anything, and it doesn't like it when you anthropomorphize it.
Information doesn't spontaneously decide it wants to be free and take steps to that end. People decide they want to liberate information and release it.
At the end of the day, what this guy did is illegal -- and while I agree they're looking at ridiculously long jail terms for this, I don't think he should get off with a mere slap on the wrist either. Fraudulently gaining access to computers and people's email is a federal crime, and it should be.
If my neighbors want an internet connection, they can buy their own, dammit.
In a world where you can be sued for downloading files based on an IP address, or where you can be investigated for things like child pornography ... there's no way in hell I'd be willing to open my network for everybody to use. I know what my wife and I download. That guy down the street? No idea.
And, since my ISP charges me based on my used bandwidth, I'm not subsidizing your internet access.
Sure, it's possible noble and altruistic. But it also carries some legal risks.
Why? Then you just trivialize what he did and make it so other people can do this. If it's only going to cost $500 to make it go away, then you'd see an awful lot of people doing it.
Essentially he committed several serious crimes ("The indictment charges Kazaryan with 15 counts of computer intrusion and 15 counts of aggravated identity theft") in the process of this.
Gone are the days where someone says "oh, how cute" and just moves on. A prison term of 105 years is excessive, but a $500 fine for criminally using someone else's account? No way.
Sorry, but those are federal offenses, and this is no longer legally some childhood prank. We may need to find a better legal middle ground, but a small fine and a slap on the wrist won't do.
Information doesn't "want" to be free, and just because you feel entitled to it doesn't make it ok.
No, it's in their best interest that you never know they're doing it and they use it for free.
Think of all the situations where someone essentially violates the GPL by sneaking code they didn't write into something and not telling anybody.
Companies often assume they can use it freely, or figure nobody is around to enforce it.
Unfortunately, in most legal jurisdictions, things are copyrighted out of the gate, and can only become more open with an explicit act.
If you upload code to a web site, it's publicly available, but that doesn't mean public domain. And many code samples I see say "copyright" on them.
If you don't explicitly grant a license, then that stuff is in a gray area where you may not legally be able to work with it.
And then there's the whole issue of if you can grant rights on someone else's stuff. If you took the code for, say, Windows, and published it -- even though you've made it publicly accessible, it wasn't your code to give away so anybody downloading it has no protections.
I certainly wouldn't use the availability on a web site as any meaningful level of "implied consent", because copyright law doesn't really allow for it. There is no implied consent, there is copyright, and explicit consent. Copyright all rights reserved is the "implied" here, because that's how the laws are written.
And people tend to forget that the open source licenses only really work by leveraging the principles of copyright to grant an explicit exemption.
Does it get tiring demonstrating to people that the magic powers they claim to have are bunk? Or is it still fun?
And speaking of those wild claims, what's the goofiest one you've ever seen?
I would love to know what kind of battery life they're getting ... a full-on desktop OS on a tablet likely isn't going to translate into much.
Sounds odd for a tablet.
For software, sure ... but when you're talking about physical things, "release early release often" falls apart.
With something like a 787, you'd sure as heck never be able to do things like that.
By the time you have your first version, you expect to be able to put a pilot into it and at least taxi it around and look at flying.
Rapid release cycles of partly completed software is fine, but it just doesn't apply to an aircraft I don't think. In software, we know we'll release shit intermediate versions only meant for us -- I don't think you can do that with an aircraft.
Wow, they crowd-sourced the design of a wide body aircraft?
So it's their reputation on the line, and likely a lot of the legal liability .. but they gave the suppliers reign to design their own parts?
That sounds like an epic fail in engineering to me. The 777 was a marvel in that every part had been designed and modeled in a computer before they ever built anything -- this sounds like a hodge-podge of parts.
At around $200 million a pop or so, that sounds awfully risky.
I don't think you do ... I think you shove a desktop OS into a tablet, and graft touch onto it.
I suspect Microsoft didn't create a mobile OS, they just put it onto a mobile device.
For reference, my 64GB iPad 1 had something like 58GB free when new and empty.
iOS is a lighter weight OS meant for phones and tablets, I suspect MS has shoe-horned their full desktop OS into a tablet.
That's fairly heavy weight if it's taking up half the device, and makes one wonder how bloated their phones are unless that's an entirely different OS.
I wonder if that's related to the fire-sale pricing -- for a while you could buy a playbook for something like $99. It was crashy and didn't have a lot of software, but it was cheap. That's why I bought one for the wife.
I'm not suggesting they are, I'm saying that for a lot of consumers, they might as well be; and if they can't convince people to give them a second look, they may well be.
It may be an absolutely awesome platform, but if they focus on the ability to connect to your corporate Exchange server instead of what most non-business users are doing with it -- well, then they will only get the business users.
We've already established that most of the growth in smart phones in the last few years has been with consumers, not business. If they have all of the features a consumer wants, they should be marketing the hell out of that.
Because that's where the users are. Facebook has, what, a billion users? If you can shoehorn into some of those, there's opportunity.
If they go it alone, they'd have to build up all of those users on their own. They're just chasing the money.
I don't disagree that they run the risk of being screwed by Facebook, but that's hardly new in the tech industry -- Microsoft has taken other products and built them into the OS for years, and the frequently do the same to their partners, team up until they can steal your lunch.