Sounds fine on Slashdot, alt.politics groups, or black helicopter chat, but in reality you can't even try to go in with that position as a prosecutor. Even a conservative judge will hand you your ass.
If the intention is actually to take a case to court? If the idea is to get a "plea bargin" or simply harrasment then it dosn't matter what a judge would or not do.
Can any kind government access be considered unauthorized anymore? There have been so many executive orders, bending of laws, etc. that just about every form of government access to information is authorized by something.
There's always spying on other parts of government together with there no doubt being some "patrician list" on individuals who should not be spied upon. Especially if there is actually a good reason to be carrying out an investigation on these entities. Given history, just about any government official above a certain level (including police chiefs) actually should be under routine snooping.
The way this works is like this: IFPI (or more likely some contracted-out company) will connect to "Teeney_Spears_best_of.torrent" bittorrent, and will note down the time and IP address of all the other machines in the swarm.
This contractor better have plenty of IPs. Otherwise it won't be long before their clients are black listed. It also may well be possible to spot such a rogue client by its behaviour.
While some systems could definately be improved (CCs come to mind) "improving" does not automatically mean harder identification binding and having to identify yourself more often.
It may even be the case that there are situations where softer "identification binding" actually improves security.
Currently this is what happens and all we get is loss of privacy, civil liberties, protection from increasingly less honest governments, and all at no measurable gain in actual security to the populace.
Itself based on the false premises that security and privacy are inversely related and that governments will automatically use increased powers to protect the public. It's quite possible to argue that reducing police powers and increasing oversight might actually increase security. e.g. if it were necessary for a "wiretap" warrent to be renewed every week (by a different judge/magistrate from the one who previously granted/renewed the warrent) police surveilance would be concentrated towards people who actually were a real danger.
Or the chip got scrambled going through the xray machine.
Or is just out and out defective.
Or the chimp doing database maintenance screwed up.
Or someone has a tampered with the central database.
Or some fool lost a copy of this database they don't even need to lose a portable computer. All they need to lose is a piece of plastic, metal, varnish and dye worth some utterly trivial amount of money.
Nevermind that peoples records get mixed up all the time in the real world databases we already have, not to mention the growing problem of identity theft.
Things get missed up even without people altering the data for criminal reasons. The more such data is used the more criminal reasons will exist.
And once the drug smuggling criminals know they need a passport with iris and fingerprint matching a central authority, then that's what they'll bring. They'll find a way of getting it done. Whether they are wearing somewhat unlikely james bond contacts and fingertips... or just had the foresight of applying for a passport using a stolen, borrowed, or purchased identity, or bribed/blackmailed some flunky somewhere to add them to the database.
They could also use the "feature" intended for undercover police/witness protection to create a completly bogus identity. (But one which even corrupt police officers cannot easily spot as being fiction.)
Oddly, I've begun moving away from Trend not because of these lawsuits, but because of the growing bloat of the client program, something Trend used to be quite good at compared to McAfee and Symantec. My current installs of Trend OfficeScan clients consume about 70MB of RAM
Maybe this is why Trend are suing. They are seeking revenue they have lost by producing a poor product.
Coke could let the recipe out at this point and although some people would try to make their own, not everyone has access to the necessary ingredients or machinery. Existing beverage companies would, but again no real advantage.
If there was then these companies could simply reverse engineer "coke".
The last time I checked, the American Intellectual Property Law Association's Annual Economic Report was quoting USD$3 Million to USD$7 Million for defense in a single software patent case. For individuals and small or medium-sized enterprises, which make up the vast majority of the tech economy, there could only be a Phyrric victory because they'd exhaust their funds.
Or would be forced to go bankrupt before exhausiting their funds because of the effect such spending would have on their cashflow.
Indeed, the language generally used in patent claims is not particularly readable by engineers in the applicable discipline. One need only attempt to read a few patents for this to be clear.
This indicates a failure of the patent issuing process. Were the application to be examined by a suitably qualified person you'd expect it to be rejected on the basis of "this is nonsense", "everyone, in the field, knows this, but it's called...", "I can't understand this", etc. If those examining patents are not suitably qualified it would be fairly trivial to get them to pass applications for "non-inventions".
Patents worked when it was about the small time inventor and they help start up companies. Once the industry giants and well established companies get hold of patents they use them in an anti-competitive manner.
Even having a patent probably isn't of that much use to the "small inventor"/startup. If an established player just takes your invention they probably have enough spare cash to tie the case up in court for a while.
If you want to see how the open source world responds to threats, look no further than SCO. Many Linux fans are also Unix admins at work, and many of them got their employers to switch from SCO to *anything other Unix-like OS* in response to the threats.
This could also have had something to do with SCO not doing much to develop their product and Linux being able to run SCO binaries.
And the Net also has another interesting trait. It seems operate with a variation of Netwon's 3rd law. For every action there is an opposite + magnified reaction.
This has more to do with human behaviour and predates "the Net". Banning (or attempting to ban) just about anything is actually a very good way of advertising something. People who would otherwise never have heard about the whatever wanting to find out what all the fuss is about.
Firstly, that's not really true since buying Windows *with a computer* means an OEM copy, which is substantially cheaper than a "Full Retail" copy.
How much actual difference is there between an "OEM" and a "Full Retail" copy? Certainly the price difference cannot account for a cardboard box and a plastic disk. That's before you even consider that a German court ruled that nothing prevented retail sales of "OEM Software".
Disk space is cheap is a the biggest misunderstood cliche people always use. Yes, 500 gig sata drives a are cheap on newegg. But once you put a bunch of disks together and make a giant filesytem, managing it becomes very clostly.
RAID used to stand for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. Now it stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks. Thing is that even if the disks are fairly cheap you need to multiply by how many you need add in the cost of cradles, possibly also special enclosures, etc, etc.
As a bonus, assuming that each client machine has some software to allow it to 'serve' the files directly - you've just decentralized your file sharing. Having that 10GB pipe in your data center is no longer as crucial, the central server simply tells the machine off the requestor's own switch to serve it.
You'd need this "central server" to know which switch each machine is connected to, which is a single point of failure, so probably you'd need this information to be distributed. The protocol also needs to be capable of handling machines appearing and disappearing randomly. You'd need something like a trackerless bittorrent filesystem with an SNMP agent.
We're basically talking about a distributed filesystem in which subparts may fail without notice. I'm sure there are ways to minimise the problems this will create - you can for instance make sure that any one file is always completely located on one physical hard disk, so if that one goes down you're at least not left with half a file which may still be open in an editor somewhere.
Actually you might want each file spread amongst several disks in some multi layed RAID approach. Which won't leave you with anything like the amount of storage you expect (and eat up a fair bit of bandwidth.)
I guess you can also be clever with redundancy, so that say half the hard disks in your network can go down but you're still left with a working system (provided the right ones go down), but basically, because you cannot guarantee which hard disks will be up at any given time you also cannot guarantee that you're system won't break in horrible ways.
Including due to the likes of power failures. Whilst it might be sensible to UPS your network infrastructure, especially if you have PoE switches which power devices such as WAPs and IP phones, it is unlikely that you will have UPSs for every workstation. (Unless they all happen to be laptops).
ANY inflammable liquid? OK. A 750 ml bottle of pure alcohol, aka molotov cocktail. Set it off. It's not going to breach the wall, the passengers will rush to put it out, the pilot will land the plane ASAP (most any interstate highway will do - they're built for that...) and eveyone will beat the living shit out of the moron who set it off.
Quite possibly noone would even notice if said idiot was thrown out of the plane at around 7 and a half thousand feet either.
On a similar occasion, another suspicious object in my bag turned out to be nothing more than a small pack of pistachio nuts.
IIRC pistachio nuts are actually considered hazardous, but only in very large quantities. It is also possible for both nuts and cheese to be false positives for explosives.
Or, for new aircraft remove the door and give the cockpit its own entrance from the outside, so that there is no way of going in without having to get outside first.
This makes for a much more complex (and heavier) aircraft than simply having a secure door between different parts of the aircraft. There have also been incidents where people being able to get from the main part of the cabin to the cockpit has actually been a good thing. A locked door can always be unlocked (and opened) when appropriate.
Should we break out the gestapo and start making people take off their shoes to do any of the above mentioned activities? Where does it end? I'm more afraid of my own Government at this point then I am of any terrorists.
Notice also that the fear is being carefully directed at "Islamic Terrorists" who are only a minority of terrorists in North America and Europe. With some of the others being a lot more dangerous, e.g. they actually know how to make working bombs.
The worse thing a terrorist can do to me is take away my life. My own Government seems to be working on taking away my freedom.
Consider that there are plenty of corrupt even outright criminal government officials. You are probably at greater risk from "bent coppers" than "terrorists"...
I'm not yet jaded enough to assume that it's by design but that is the end result of all of this.
Are the hostage takers standing? Push the nose down hard for a half-dozen seconds of negative Gs then back up for 2 or 3 positive Gs.
Also apply maximum right roll followed by maximum left roll. Pilots generally fly planes for passenger comfort, which is nowhere near what the plane can handle. Freight versions of the same planes can often be flown differently because cargo dosn't tend to get airsick or complain. This is also what the first officer of FedEx 705 did when faced with a hijack attempt.
he pilot could first announce a codeword so that appropriate cabin crew could get strapped in.
"We are about to encounter some severe turbulence" would mean "The other pilot is about to do some fancy flying..."
Shopping malls, schools, hospitals, movie theaters, churches, stadiums, trains, buses, grocery stores, blah, blah, blah, blah. If two punk teenagers can manage to kill 13 people then what do you suppose a handful of terrorists with the same weapons and basic paramilitary training could accomplish?
Especially if they were to wear something which looked similar to police uniforms.
My pet terrorist attack has always been to dynamite high-tension power lines. Most of them go through un-patrolled forested areas, and it would be trivial to hide a cell phone-triggered bomb in the foundation or supports.
The same applies if terrorists decided to attack trains. It dosn't take much explosive to cause a derailment of either a passenger train or a freight train carrying something really nasty.
Does not allowing you to bring a bottle of water on board the plane make that plane any safer or reduce threat in any significant way? Are you a terrorist? Can you make that bottle of water explode?
Some plastic bottles are a shape to make an improvised club. But if you could bring them on board empty and fill them on the plane they'd still be a 1-2 kilo club...
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds fine on Slashdot, alt.politics groups, or black helicopter chat, but in reality you can't even try to go in with that position as a prosecutor. Even a conservative judge will hand you your ass.
If the intention is actually to take a case to court? If the idea is to get a "plea bargin" or simply harrasment then it dosn't matter what a judge would or not do.
Can any kind government access be considered unauthorized anymore? There have been so many executive orders, bending of laws, etc. that just about every form of government access to information is authorized by something.
There's always spying on other parts of government together with there no doubt being some "patrician list" on individuals who should not be spied upon.
Especially if there is actually a good reason to be carrying out an investigation on these entities. Given history, just about any government official above a certain level (including police chiefs) actually should be under routine snooping.
The way this works is like this: IFPI (or more likely some contracted-out company) will connect to "Teeney_Spears_best_of.torrent" bittorrent, and will note down the time and IP address of all the other machines in the swarm.
This contractor better have plenty of IPs. Otherwise it won't be long before their clients are black listed.
It also may well be possible to spot such a rogue client by its behaviour.
While some systems could definately be improved (CCs come to mind) "improving" does not automatically mean harder identification binding and having to identify yourself more often.
It may even be the case that there are situations where softer "identification binding" actually improves security.
Currently this is what happens and all we get is loss of privacy, civil liberties, protection from increasingly less honest governments, and all at no measurable gain in actual security to the populace.
Itself based on the false premises that security and privacy are inversely related and that governments will automatically use increased powers to protect the public.
It's quite possible to argue that reducing police powers and increasing oversight might actually increase security. e.g. if it were necessary for a "wiretap" warrent to be renewed every week (by a different judge/magistrate from the one who previously granted/renewed the warrent) police surveilance would be concentrated towards people who actually were a real danger.
Or the chip got scrambled going through the xray machine.
Or is just out and out defective.
Or the chimp doing database maintenance screwed up.
Or someone has a tampered with the central database.
Or some fool lost a copy of this database they don't even need to lose a portable computer. All they need to lose is a piece of plastic, metal, varnish and dye worth some utterly trivial amount of money.
Nevermind that peoples records get mixed up all the time in the real world databases we already have, not to mention the growing problem of identity theft.
Things get missed up even without people altering the data for criminal reasons. The more such data is used the more criminal reasons will exist.
And once the drug smuggling criminals know they need a passport with iris and fingerprint matching a central authority, then that's what they'll bring. They'll find a way of getting it done. Whether they are wearing somewhat unlikely james bond contacts and fingertips... or just had the foresight of applying for a passport using a stolen, borrowed, or purchased identity, or bribed/blackmailed some flunky somewhere to add them to the database.
They could also use the "feature" intended for undercover police/witness protection to create a completly bogus identity. (But one which even corrupt police officers cannot easily spot as being fiction.)
Don't see why we just don't put up "Blank" and "Nieblank" and have done with it.
:)
Or even "Patrician" and "Plebeian"
Oddly, I've begun moving away from Trend not because of these lawsuits, but because of the growing bloat of the client program, something Trend used to be quite good at compared to McAfee and Symantec. My current installs of Trend OfficeScan clients consume about 70MB of RAM
Maybe this is why Trend are suing. They are seeking revenue they have lost by producing a poor product.
Coke could let the recipe out at this point and although some people would try to make their own, not everyone has access to the necessary ingredients or machinery. Existing beverage companies would, but again no real advantage.
If there was then these companies could simply reverse engineer "coke".
The last time I checked, the American Intellectual Property Law Association's Annual Economic Report was quoting USD$3 Million to USD$7 Million for defense in a single software patent case. For individuals and small or medium-sized enterprises, which make up the vast majority of the tech economy, there could only be a Phyrric victory because they'd exhaust their funds.
Or would be forced to go bankrupt before exhausiting their funds because of the effect such spending would have on their cashflow.
Indeed, the language generally used in patent claims is not particularly readable by engineers in the applicable discipline. One need only attempt to read a few patents for this to be clear.
...", "I can't understand this", etc.
This indicates a failure of the patent issuing process. Were the application to be examined by a suitably qualified person you'd expect it to be rejected on the basis of "this is nonsense", "everyone, in the field, knows this, but it's called
If those examining patents are not suitably qualified it would be fairly trivial to get them to pass applications for "non-inventions".
Patents worked when it was about the small time inventor and they help start up companies. Once the industry giants and well established companies get hold of patents they use them in an anti-competitive manner.
Even having a patent probably isn't of that much use to the "small inventor"/startup. If an established player just takes your invention they probably have enough spare cash to tie the case up in court for a while.
If you want to see how the open source world responds to threats, look no further than SCO. Many Linux fans are also Unix admins at work, and many of them got their employers to switch from SCO to *anything other Unix-like OS* in response to the threats.
This could also have had something to do with SCO not doing much to develop their product and Linux being able to run SCO binaries.
And the Net also has another interesting trait. It seems operate with a variation of Netwon's 3rd law. For every action there is an opposite + magnified reaction.
This has more to do with human behaviour and predates "the Net".
Banning (or attempting to ban) just about anything is actually a very good way of advertising something. People who would otherwise never have heard about the whatever wanting to find out what all the fuss is about.
Firstly, that's not really true since buying Windows *with a computer* means an OEM copy, which is substantially cheaper than a "Full Retail" copy.
How much actual difference is there between an "OEM" and a "Full Retail" copy? Certainly the price difference cannot account for a cardboard box and a plastic disk.
That's before you even consider that a German court ruled that nothing prevented retail sales of "OEM Software".
Disk space is cheap is a the biggest misunderstood cliche people always use. Yes, 500 gig sata drives a are cheap on newegg. But once you put a bunch of disks together and make a giant filesytem, managing it becomes very clostly.
RAID used to stand for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. Now it stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks. Thing is that even if the disks are fairly cheap you need to multiply by how many you need add in the cost of cradles, possibly also special enclosures, etc, etc.
As a bonus, assuming that each client machine has some software to allow it to 'serve' the files directly - you've just decentralized your file sharing. Having that 10GB pipe in your data center is no longer as crucial, the central server simply tells the machine off the requestor's own switch to serve it.
You'd need this "central server" to know which switch each machine is connected to, which is a single point of failure, so probably you'd need this information to be distributed. The protocol also needs to be capable of handling machines appearing and disappearing randomly.
You'd need something like a trackerless bittorrent filesystem with an SNMP agent.
We're basically talking about a distributed filesystem in which subparts may fail without notice. I'm sure there are ways to minimise the problems this will create - you can for instance make sure that any one file is always completely located on one physical hard disk, so if that one goes down you're at least not left with half a file which may still be open in an editor somewhere.
Actually you might want each file spread amongst several disks in some multi layed RAID approach. Which won't leave you with anything like the amount of storage you expect (and eat up a fair bit of bandwidth.)
I guess you can also be clever with redundancy, so that say half the hard disks in your network can go down but you're still left with a working system (provided the right ones go down), but basically, because you cannot guarantee which hard disks will be up at any given time you also cannot guarantee that you're system won't break in horrible ways.
Including due to the likes of power failures. Whilst it might be sensible to UPS your network infrastructure, especially if you have PoE switches which power devices such as WAPs and IP phones, it is unlikely that you will have UPSs for every workstation. (Unless they all happen to be laptops).
ANY inflammable liquid? OK. A 750 ml bottle of pure alcohol, aka molotov cocktail. Set it off. It's not going to breach the wall, the passengers will rush to put it out, the pilot will land the plane ASAP (most any interstate highway will do - they're built for that...) and eveyone will beat the living shit out of the moron who set it off.
Quite possibly noone would even notice if said idiot was thrown out of the plane at around 7 and a half thousand feet either.
On a similar occasion, another suspicious object in my bag turned out to be nothing more than a small pack of pistachio nuts.
IIRC pistachio nuts are actually considered hazardous, but only in very large quantities. It is also possible for both nuts and cheese to be false positives for explosives.
Or, for new aircraft remove the door and give the cockpit its own entrance from the outside, so that there is no way of going in without having to get outside first.
This makes for a much more complex (and heavier) aircraft than simply having a secure door between different parts of the aircraft. There have also been incidents where people being able to get from the main part of the cabin to the cockpit has actually been a good thing. A locked door can always be unlocked (and opened) when appropriate.
Should we break out the gestapo and start making people take off their shoes to do any of the above mentioned activities? Where does it end? I'm more afraid of my own Government at this point then I am of any terrorists.
Notice also that the fear is being carefully directed at "Islamic Terrorists" who are only a minority of terrorists in North America and Europe. With some of the others being a lot more dangerous, e.g. they actually know how to make working bombs.
The worse thing a terrorist can do to me is take away my life. My own Government seems to be working on taking away my freedom.
Consider that there are plenty of corrupt even outright criminal government officials. You are probably at greater risk from "bent coppers" than "terrorists"...
I'm not yet jaded enough to assume that it's by design but that is the end result of all of this.
It's in the nature of government to expand.
Are the hostage takers standing? Push the nose down hard for a half-dozen seconds of negative Gs then back up for 2 or 3 positive Gs.
Also apply maximum right roll followed by maximum left roll. Pilots generally fly planes for passenger comfort, which is nowhere near what the plane can handle. Freight versions of the same planes can often be flown differently because cargo dosn't tend to get airsick or complain.
This is also what the first officer of FedEx 705 did when faced with a hijack attempt.
he pilot could first announce a codeword so that appropriate cabin crew could get strapped in.
"We are about to encounter some severe turbulence" would mean "The other pilot is about to do some fancy flying..."
Shopping malls, schools, hospitals, movie theaters, churches, stadiums, trains, buses, grocery stores, blah, blah, blah, blah. If two punk teenagers can manage to kill 13 people then what do you suppose a handful of terrorists with the same weapons and basic paramilitary training could accomplish?
Especially if they were to wear something which looked similar to police uniforms.
My pet terrorist attack has always been to dynamite high-tension power lines. Most of them go through un-patrolled forested areas, and it would be trivial to hide a cell phone-triggered bomb in the foundation or supports.
The same applies if terrorists decided to attack trains. It dosn't take much explosive to cause a derailment of either a passenger train or a freight train carrying something really nasty.
Does not allowing you to bring a bottle of water on board the plane make that plane any safer or reduce threat in any significant way? Are you a terrorist? Can you make that bottle of water explode?
Some plastic bottles are a shape to make an improvised club. But if you could bring them on board empty and fill them on the plane they'd still be a 1-2 kilo club...