If it is the same Johannes Buchner that I found through Google, then he lives in Austria, so that specific law doesn't apply to him.
You make a good point that US law shouldn't necessarily be his first worry, but even if his own country doesn't have a similar law against making malware, then there's always the possibility of extradition.
(See the case of Gary McKinnon for one example of a UK citizen that we're working to extradite for hacking charges, and the case of Sholam Weiss (on fraud and money laundering charges) for proof that we do have an extradition treaty with Austria.)
It might however result in precedent freeing them of an obligation to press charges in similar situations in the future, saving untold amounts of future work.
Sorry for the late reply, but what obligation? If they had any sort of obligation, they'd be taking the case right now. The decision not to take the case shows that the obligation doesn't even exist.
Why exactly? I know you're right, but I'd love to know the reason why. A law has been broken. The police have been notified. They aren't in the revenue stream for content producers, so there is no financial motive for them to ignore it. And yet we both know that this will come to naught.
That's quite the financial motive to ignore it right there. Cops, prosecutors, and courts have limited budget to address crime. The last thing anyone in a position to enforce these laws really wants is a huge, expensive hassle that won't result in any offender going to prison -- especially for something that hasn't really harmed society in any big way. I mean, as someone outside of the revenue stream for producers, the police & prosecutors are going to find this far less important than a murderer or even a petty shoplifter.
This guy has basically announced his intent to bleed the system of money until he gets a law overturned. Why accommodate him when there's better things to do?
Selective enforcement of laws is allowed in Denmark :
For criminal law - no (like everywhere else, including the US)
Actually, in the US, prosecutorial discretion provides a nigh-unreviewable power for prosecutors to decide whether or not to bring charges. About the only way to challenge a selective prosecution in the US is to prove that their is a discriminatory motive and effect in prosecuting decisions.
I don't know how Denmark compares, but I've seen several references to Denmark having "discretionary prosecution." I don't know what that really means, though.
I think you win the crazy Libertarian strawman contest for this discussion. I was going to say something about GP going too far, but... wow, that's just amazing.
They're freaking pirates! This woman is an idiot if she expects any money from this. It's not like she's seeding a movie!
One man's pirate is another's Robin Hood of the High Seas.
It's not necessarily true that you should expect a person who commits some crimes against some people (even violent crimes) to commit any crime against any person. Cultures across human history have survived off of raiding fat, rich neighbors and have not collapsed due to infighting and lack of ability to trust your neighbor. These "stock exchanges" were people contribute weapons for money are not necessarily any less reliable than a Scythian making a family member a good saddle before they rode off to sack the Romans, hoping for a cut of the pillage. People can be utterly trustworthy to their neighbors while being utter bastards to outsiders. It's really the historical norm.
Now, if these people were criminals that attacked their own people, then it would be pretty strange to expect fair dealing, but as long as "investors" and "entrepreneurs" see themselves as part of the same group, then there's no reason for an "investor" to expect to be treated as poorly as the pirates' victims. After all, they aren't "criminals" within their community.
You might also really want to talk to a lawyer who knows the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. At a minimum, you may need to worry about 18 USC 1030(a)(5). Pay attention to the definition of "damage" and "loss" in 18 USC 1030(e)(8),(11).
[I]n October last year a Japanese woman was arrested by police after allegedly hacking her virtual husband "to death".
It sounds like she performed some kind of violent action, but in truth she just logged into his account (using info from when they were in a relationship) and destroyed his character. This got billed as "virtual murder" a lot back when the story broke to make it more salacious, but it's just the equivalent of logging into someone's webmail who made the mistake of telling you their password and deleting the entire history and address book.
Not much in the way of "hacking to death" in either sense, really.
Like I keep up with the "digerati" of the 7-digit UID users. What is there some Perez Hilton site to keep up with / cyber-stalk all the trolls on Slashdot?
(Heck, I can't even readily pick out my friends/foes at a glance anymore since Slashdot revamped things so that the little icons don't show up with JavaScript turned off, so I don't usually pay attention to users at all.)
You went to all that trouble to transcribe the PDF without reading the summaries noting that it had to do something else entirely? The takedown letter was for explaining a mechanism to post fake transactions to Bing Cashback, which could reasonably be described as telling people how to exploit Bing for money.
This is completely separate from telling people that merchants charge Bing customers more.
Man, someone needs to tell Sony, MS, and Nintendo that! Seems like they all think a console or game that sells for X dollars should sell for X pounds. I don't know how gamers even survive across the pond.
Yes, but what's the cheapest NEW (not refurb, not factory-remanufactured, or open-box special) cell phone you can buy without a plan, unlocked, not tied to a provider? It's going to be a lot more than $10.
Interesting. When did person you were responding to claim that they got a new phone?
That aside, TracFone sells three Motorola phones for $9.99 each, brand new. TracFone is a pre-paid service, so there's no contract. They are locked to help subsidize the cost, but if you drop one in the toilet and have to get a new one, it's still $10, because there's no contract to require you to pay off the old one. That's their loss, not yours AFAIK. All that matters for purposes of the debate between whether watches are cheaper than phones is what the customer has to pay.
Personally i can't stand wearing a wristwatch, or any kind of jewellery, i hate having things like that clinging to my skin - it's a foreign object stuck to my skin that feels like it needs to be removed.
You get over it in a couple of weeks to a month. After that, it's hard to forget your watch because you feel uncomfortable stepping out of the house without it on, just like you'd feel weird without a shirt on.
So basically, you're pissed that the guy doesn't trust our oh so wonderful rulers. Gotcha, all I needed to know. If you'd had a reason other than that, your argument wouldn't keep going back to "I disagree with him, therefore he must be trolling".
See, you must understand what I'm saying. After all, the straw man is a wonderful example of trolling blurring the line between being stupid and being disingenuous.
But demonstrations aside, I never said that I disagreed with him. I just said that he's being Captain Obvious by reacting sarcastically to something that's already sarcastic as if it's not sarcastic and pretending to have "wit" in the process.
And then I just have to point back to the fact that this ignores the consequences of such a definition. Courts almost never set a definition or interpretation without considering the consequences of such an action, and no court or tribunal is going to accept your definition if it has the impact that it will.
Sorry, but that's all that matters for considerations of "collective punishment" which is the topic we're all talking about in this article. If you want to imagine that war means something else in other contexts, feel free, but don't waste people's time having them chase down rabbit holes only to find out that the whole argument has been pointlessly off-topic.
So let's say this guy thought the submitted was serious and though he was being funny - that's still not trolling, or do we have a new rule here where anyone who doesn't get a joke gets modded down?
Putting aside for a moment that the most effective trolling is that which only pretends to be stupid, he sure as hell doesn't deserve to be modded up to +5, Insightful for being clueless. Any preventative or curative moderation to take care of that is fine in my book, though admittedly futile since nearly any comment close enough to the top of the thread will get positive moderation, especially if it has a lot of comments attached to it. Even clueless, insight-free, one-word karma whoring posts like that one.
Except that the line in the summary could be taken either way. We don't know the person who wrote the summary - they could be being sarcastic or they could be dumb enough to actually think that the government would only use it for legal purposes.
Doubtful. That's a perfect deadpan line. Especially if you read the article.
Honestly, which is more likely? That the person who brought this to Slashdot's attention is totally trusting of the government or that someone on the internet was unable to recognize sarcasm and thought that they were funny?
Re:Where do you draw the line?
on
Less Than Free
·
· Score: 1
So what? It's not clearly illegal tying. I'm quite certain it is in fact not illegal, but IANAL (sounds like you aren't either.)
Did I say that it was illegal tying? I just said it was tying.
Uh what? They're squeezing competitors out of the market by providing a superior product. If their business model is inherently superior, they deserve to succeed.
If their product is superior largely because of price advantages that come from leveraging another market (i.e. advertising), then they don't deserve to succeed -- no more than IE deserved to beat out Netscape just because MS could pre-install it and give it away for free. If MS had to sell IE starting from the same level playing field as Netscape, there's no way they would've crushed Netscape.
There's nothing stopping anyone else from using the very same model, so their competitors aren't being squeezed out of the market at all; the market is changing, and they may change with it, or cease to exist.
Google might have a superior product on technical merits alone (which would justify they taking marketshare), but their real advantage is getting their product on devices by offering it for less than $0 by actually paying some of their advertising revenue to people who bundle their product with their own. They are paying other companies to use their product because those payouts encourage people to make use of Google's core business -- their ad services.
That's pretty unfair competition with other map services providers who can't get away with wrapping their product in money on the way out the door. That's not competition in any traditional sense of the market.
Question: How does this get modded troll? Slashdot is known for it's blatant distrust of government surveillance, so how does pointing out that there's no reason to believe the government's claims that they won't use this for cracking anything but legally seized computers amount to trolling?
Because the mandatory sarcastic response pointing this fact out was already taken care of in the article summary. That's the line that the GP decided to quote and redundantly react sarcastically to, as if they were the only person smart enough to see the truth. This could be either Captain Obvious stupidity, a clumsy attempt to express a "Me too!" sentiment, or someone trolling by pretending to be really dense. I think we can forgive the moderator for going with the last one.
Slashdot Mirror
You mean the same moderating system that hasn't given me mod points in 4 or 5 years?
I don't know what's up with you, but I get mod points about 1-2 per week.
Hmm... Maybe this is a sign of Slashdot's quality, after all!
If it is the same Johannes Buchner that I found through Google, then he lives in Austria, so that specific law doesn't apply to him.
You make a good point that US law shouldn't necessarily be his first worry, but even if his own country doesn't have a similar law against making malware, then there's always the possibility of extradition.
(See the case of Gary McKinnon for one example of a UK citizen that we're working to extradite for hacking charges, and the case of Sholam Weiss (on fraud and money laundering charges) for proof that we do have an extradition treaty with Austria.)
So what you're saying is that it's stars all the way down?
It might however result in precedent freeing them of an obligation to press charges in similar situations in the future, saving untold amounts of future work.
Sorry for the late reply, but what obligation? If they had any sort of obligation, they'd be taking the case right now. The decision not to take the case shows that the obligation doesn't even exist.
That would be awesome without the crowd noise. As is, meh.
Why exactly? I know you're right, but I'd love to know the reason why. A law has been broken. The police have been notified. They aren't in the revenue stream for content producers, so there is no financial motive for them to ignore it. And yet we both know that this will come to naught.
That's quite the financial motive to ignore it right there. Cops, prosecutors, and courts have limited budget to address crime. The last thing anyone in a position to enforce these laws really wants is a huge, expensive hassle that won't result in any offender going to prison -- especially for something that hasn't really harmed society in any big way. I mean, as someone outside of the revenue stream for producers, the police & prosecutors are going to find this far less important than a murderer or even a petty shoplifter.
This guy has basically announced his intent to bleed the system of money until he gets a law overturned. Why accommodate him when there's better things to do?
Selective enforcement of laws is allowed in Denmark :
For criminal law - no (like everywhere else, including the US)
Actually, in the US, prosecutorial discretion provides a nigh-unreviewable power for prosecutors to decide whether or not to bring charges. About the only way to challenge a selective prosecution in the US is to prove that their is a discriminatory motive and effect in prosecuting decisions.
I don't know how Denmark compares, but I've seen several references to Denmark having "discretionary prosecution." I don't know what that really means, though.
I think you win the crazy Libertarian strawman contest for this discussion.
I was going to say something about GP going too far, but... wow, that's just amazing.
They're freaking pirates! This woman is an idiot if she expects any money from this. It's not like she's seeding a movie!
One man's pirate is another's Robin Hood of the High Seas.
It's not necessarily true that you should expect a person who commits some crimes against some people (even violent crimes) to commit any crime against any person. Cultures across human history have survived off of raiding fat, rich neighbors and have not collapsed due to infighting and lack of ability to trust your neighbor. These "stock exchanges" were people contribute weapons for money are not necessarily any less reliable than a Scythian making a family member a good saddle before they rode off to sack the Romans, hoping for a cut of the pillage. People can be utterly trustworthy to their neighbors while being utter bastards to outsiders. It's really the historical norm.
Now, if these people were criminals that attacked their own people, then it would be pretty strange to expect fair dealing, but as long as "investors" and "entrepreneurs" see themselves as part of the same group, then there's no reason for an "investor" to expect to be treated as poorly as the pirates' victims. After all, they aren't "criminals" within their community.
Behold the mighty reach of Capitalism! The waves crash and the seas may boil, but the market reaches into the hearts of even the most desperate!
Who is John Smith?
You might also really want to talk to a lawyer who knows the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. At a minimum, you may need to worry about 18 USC 1030(a)(5). Pay attention to the definition of "damage" and "loss" in 18 USC 1030(e)(8),(11).
Wrong name for the MMO.
[I]n October last year a Japanese woman was arrested by police after allegedly hacking her virtual husband "to death".
It sounds like she performed some kind of violent action, but in truth she just logged into his account (using info from when they were in a relationship) and destroyed his character. This got billed as "virtual murder" a lot back when the story broke to make it more salacious, but it's just the equivalent of logging into someone's webmail who made the mistake of telling you their password and deleting the entire history and address book.
Not much in the way of "hacking to death" in either sense, really.
Like I keep up with the "digerati" of the 7-digit UID users. What is there some Perez Hilton site to keep up with / cyber-stalk all the trolls on Slashdot?
(Heck, I can't even readily pick out my friends/foes at a glance anymore since Slashdot revamped things so that the little icons don't show up with JavaScript turned off, so I don't usually pay attention to users at all.)
You went to all that trouble to transcribe the PDF without reading the summaries noting that it had to do something else entirely? The takedown letter was for explaining a mechanism to post fake transactions to Bing Cashback, which could reasonably be described as telling people how to exploit Bing for money.
This is completely separate from telling people that merchants charge Bing customers more.
1. GBP 10 is not $10.
Man, someone needs to tell Sony, MS, and Nintendo that! Seems like they all think a console or game that sells for X dollars should sell for X pounds. I don't know how gamers even survive across the pond.
Yes, but what's the cheapest NEW (not refurb, not factory-remanufactured, or open-box special) cell phone you can buy without a plan, unlocked, not tied to a provider? It's going to be a lot more than $10.
Interesting. When did person you were responding to claim that they got a new phone?
That aside, TracFone sells three Motorola phones for $9.99 each, brand new. TracFone is a pre-paid service, so there's no contract. They are locked to help subsidize the cost, but if you drop one in the toilet and have to get a new one, it's still $10, because there's no contract to require you to pay off the old one. That's their loss, not yours AFAIK. All that matters for purposes of the debate between whether watches are cheaper than phones is what the customer has to pay.
Personally i can't stand wearing a wristwatch, or any kind of jewellery, i hate having things like that clinging to my skin - it's a foreign object stuck to my skin that feels like it needs to be removed.
You get over it in a couple of weeks to a month. After that, it's hard to forget your watch because you feel uncomfortable stepping out of the house without it on, just like you'd feel weird without a shirt on.
So basically, you're pissed that the guy doesn't trust our oh so wonderful rulers. Gotcha, all I needed to know. If you'd had a reason other than that, your argument wouldn't keep going back to "I disagree with him, therefore he must be trolling".
See, you must understand what I'm saying. After all, the straw man is a wonderful example of trolling blurring the line between being stupid and being disingenuous.
But demonstrations aside, I never said that I disagreed with him. I just said that he's being Captain Obvious by reacting sarcastically to something that's already sarcastic as if it's not sarcastic and pretending to have "wit" in the process.
I'm trying to define war. Nothing more.
And then I just have to point back to the fact that this ignores the consequences of such a definition. Courts almost never set a definition or interpretation without considering the consequences of such an action, and no court or tribunal is going to accept your definition if it has the impact that it will.
Sorry, but that's all that matters for considerations of "collective punishment" which is the topic we're all talking about in this article. If you want to imagine that war means something else in other contexts, feel free, but don't waste people's time having them chase down rabbit holes only to find out that the whole argument has been pointlessly off-topic.
So let's say this guy thought the submitted was serious and though he was being funny - that's still not trolling, or do we have a new rule here where anyone who doesn't get a joke gets modded down?
Putting aside for a moment that the most effective trolling is that which only pretends to be stupid, he sure as hell doesn't deserve to be modded up to +5, Insightful for being clueless. Any preventative or curative moderation to take care of that is fine in my book, though admittedly futile since nearly any comment close enough to the top of the thread will get positive moderation, especially if it has a lot of comments attached to it. Even clueless, insight-free, one-word karma whoring posts like that one.
Except that the line in the summary could be taken either way. We don't know the person who wrote the summary - they could be being sarcastic or they could be dumb enough to actually think that the government would only use it for legal purposes.
Doubtful. That's a perfect deadpan line. Especially if you read the article.
Honestly, which is more likely? That the person who brought this to Slashdot's attention is totally trusting of the government or that someone on the internet was unable to recognize sarcasm and thought that they were funny?
So what? It's not clearly illegal tying. I'm quite certain it is in fact not illegal, but IANAL (sounds like you aren't either.)
Did I say that it was illegal tying? I just said it was tying.
Uh what? They're squeezing competitors out of the market by providing a superior product. If their business model is inherently superior, they deserve to succeed.
If their product is superior largely because of price advantages that come from leveraging another market (i.e. advertising), then they don't deserve to succeed -- no more than IE deserved to beat out Netscape just because MS could pre-install it and give it away for free. If MS had to sell IE starting from the same level playing field as Netscape, there's no way they would've crushed Netscape.
There's nothing stopping anyone else from using the very same model, so their competitors aren't being squeezed out of the market at all; the market is changing, and they may change with it, or cease to exist.
Google might have a superior product on technical merits alone (which would justify they taking marketshare), but their real advantage is getting their product on devices by offering it for less than $0 by actually paying some of their advertising revenue to people who bundle their product with their own. They are paying other companies to use their product because those payouts encourage people to make use of Google's core business -- their ad services.
That's pretty unfair competition with other map services providers who can't get away with wrapping their product in money on the way out the door. That's not competition in any traditional sense of the market.
Question: How does this get modded troll? Slashdot is known for it's blatant distrust of government surveillance, so how does pointing out that there's no reason to believe the government's claims that they won't use this for cracking anything but legally seized computers amount to trolling?
Because the mandatory sarcastic response pointing this fact out was already taken care of in the article summary. That's the line that the GP decided to quote and redundantly react sarcastically to, as if they were the only person smart enough to see the truth. This could be either Captain Obvious stupidity, a clumsy attempt to express a "Me too!" sentiment, or someone trolling by pretending to be really dense. I think we can forgive the moderator for going with the last one.
Naturally this is only being used to break encryption on computers seized with a warrant and suspected of harboring child pornography.
... suuuuuure.
Oooh, meta-sarcasm! How impressive!