And, you made it easier, now pirates don't have to sit in the theater with hand held cameras. You made it easier, because now you don't have to make a deal with some guy in post production to give you a dump of the film. You made it easier because the pirates don't have to get their projectionist buddy to slip them the film over night.
Being that it was impossible for them to lay their hands on "pre-release" copies sent to tame reviewers, to bribe the factory making the DVDs to produce some extra ones, steal a DVD from a warehouse, etc, etc.
......they think laws allowing $200,000 fines and 20 years in jail PER OFFENCE are extreme.....
Depends if the are for copyright infringement or for politicans who tell lies. If the latter then they would probably be reasonable if the convicted paid for their jailing (and if applicable funeral) out of their own pocket.
Any honest, fair and honourable politician would put a review of copyright laws to the public as this is a public issue.
Assuming you can find one...
By the same token, any dishonest, biased and corrupt,
Thing is that many of the current methods of selecting politicans appear to only select the latter. Even a pefectly fair electoral system has the problem that it selects people who are good at getting elected. Without some sort of feedback mechanism to hold politicans to their promises the dishonest (and even outright conmen), who can claim they will do the impossible, are likely to have the advantage over the honest.
I disagree. I think most people found it socially acceptable to copy stuff long before this whole debate got started. Ever since it was easy to copy stuff at home people have been doing it. Why do you think so many games back in the 80s used copy prevention measures?
Some of these were fairly short lived. Because the games producers soon found out that these tended to do more o annoy customers as opposed to stopping "piracy". A lesson which appears more difficult to learn this time around...
Second, presuming it is so common that 'something must be done'
Most likely this isn't the case at all.
then they should have come up with an escalating alarm - like say more than 5 consecutive calls to 911
What if the reason for this is someone hiding from an intruder somewhere with poor coverage on their phone?
more than 10 minutes air-time connected to 911 and the phone plays a short recorded message through the phone so both parties can hear it saying that it is going to start making noise in a few more minutes unless the user - or the 911 operator on the other end - types in a short number to disarm it.
Not a good idea if you are a kidnap victim who has made the call without your kidnapper knowing. The problem with this "solution" is that it could easily result in people being hurt or killed who otherwise wouldn't be.
In the Netherlands we have a similar service (we dial 112 instead of 911), which sometimes gets called accidentally.
112 can also occur accidentally on fixed lines which accept pulse dialing. This was part of the original reason behind the British choice of 999 and the US choice of 911.
I can kind of see the point of this, with all the people who've accidentally dialed 911 while the phone was in their pocket/purse. However, I think this may be the wrong way to go about solving the problem. I don't have any evidence to back up my theory, but I suspect most accidental calls don't actually dial the full 911.
Or the firmware is actually written in such a way that when the keypad is locked the state actually goes "Ignore any keys except 9" "once 9 has been pressed ignore everything except 1", "when 91 has been input ignore everything except 1", when 911 has been input ignore everything except SEND". As opposed to something more like "Ignore any input except 9", "once 9 has been pressed then clear the register if either no key is pressed within 10 seconds or anything other 1 is the next keypress".
Now the article says the FCC doesn't require a loud tone, which is technically true. Unfortunately the Telecommunications Act DOES require a loud noise of some type, so that blind people are aware that they've dialed 911.
Even if someone is blind they generally have perfectly good short term memory. Someone who has already forgotten that they have made an emergency call has most likely also forgotten what the emergency is. Anyway wouldn't a different ring tone or ring cadance do the job...
In this case Congress deserves the blame for passing a law without thinking of the consequences.
Even though that is actually their job.
They demanded that all phones make it clear to blind people that they had dialed 911, and the only way to do that on phones without a Braille interface is a loud noise of some form.
No doubt the majority of blind people would be insulted by the implication that they are also deaf!
Second... on Nokia candy bar phones when the keypad is locked you can key in 911 and it'll automatically come out of the locked mode.
Just so long as it won't allow you to dial 9, long string of random digits, 1, long string of random digits, 1. Or even 9, long pause, 1, long pause, 1.
Also, 112 does the same. Can anyone tell me what 112 is?
The European (and other parts of the world) standard emergency number. Which is in the GSM spec as always treated as an emergency number. (The specs even allow for emergency calls to be made without a SIM present.) Apparently this requirment crosses the "NANP/rest of the planet" divide which exists in much telecoms firmware.
I'm sure the people who designed this feature were bright enough to consider how it might be used, and when. I suspect that there is a great body of evidence showing that attracting attention to a bad situation is a very good strategy: scream for help, wave your arms, sound an alarm. These strategies are effective in a great majority of cases.
Whilst there might be an argument for having a phone be capable of operating as a siren/ELB/etc. It's hard to see any situation where you'd want it to do this at the same time as making a telephone call.
Nobody wants to play the next Mario with a number pad, and nobody wants to have to carry around a cell phone that's larger than necessary.
Actually there is a large potential market for phones with large buttons and/or large clear displays, which is not being well catered for. There is also a minimum size requirement dictated by the requirement for the microphone to be near someone's mouth at the same time as the speaker is near to their ear...
Could you imagine what would happen if Nintendo put out a motion sensing phone. We'd have people walking around the street swinging that thing in the air, looking like they are going to seizure... And I thought it was creepy to see people talking to themselves via hands-free headsets.
Maybe they could use the motion to power the device. Thus you'd see people saying "My battery's getting low" then suddenly start running.
I've done a bit of work on mil-spec hardware in the past and even as an engineer intern I was fully aware that every resistor and capacitor on the circuit board was made to a specification and couldn't be changed without notification.
Presumably to allow a non engineer to check using a photograph.
Do you want your vote counted by people who can't read a contract? We used to have client documentation requirements of two ring binders for some and three ring binders for others. If we did it wrong, we would have lost 10% of the payment for a 20 million dollar machine. You bet the requirements were checked and double checked.
How much could it have cost you if you had messed up, been taken to court and the judge had taken the position "If the defendent can't even get that simple thing right what else might they have got wrong"?
I could understand Cal's concern if different IC's were used, or if code was re-flashed. But if the two machines had the same circuit diagram, same components, and code,
In which case the onus is on the supplier to prove that there has been no change, regardless of the model number being changed. Even if the difference indicates some trivial change, e.g. colour of the casing, then it's up to the supplier to explain this and get the customer's approval for the subsitution.
This particular error on the part of the voting machine company appears to be on the level of a failure to file necessary paperwork.
If it's part of a contract to file necessary paperwork then failing to do so consitutes breach of that contract.
No, the British government are considering a law to punish data loss.
Which IMHO is really the wrong approach. Far better to make the kind of information involved of little value to anyone else. Which means rethinking the concepts of "identity" and "proof of identity". Such that knowing lots of facts about someone is of little use in impersonating them. There already appears to exist a group of people who's biographies are easily available who are not constantly plagued with impersonation.
Obviously, they'll have to block everyone from taking money out of their bank accounts in order to ensure that the bad guys who stole the account numbers can't take money out.
IMHO part of a solution here would be to change things such that the only thing someone can do if they know the bank account details on these records is to put money into these accounts. i.e. that the information is insufficent to take money out of any accounts... Similarly that the only thing that someone can do with your National Insurance number is pay your income tax/state pension contributions. Finally to stop treating such things as knowlage of mother's maiden name, data of birth, past/current addresses, etc as being proof of anything. Let alone "security questions". In all likelyhood alternative ways of doing things, otherwise you'd expect "celebrities" to be the most common victims of "identity theft".
So, is it a small amount, this child benefit? Why not streamline things and just let people keep the money to begin with, instead of collecting it and then giving it back to half the country? What am I missing?
What you are missing is that income tax in the UK is generally deducted from someone's pay by their employer. Thus you might well pay £1,200 as 12 lots of £100 or as 52 lots of £23. But as you have never actually had this money you are unlikely to miss it. In order for an employer to work out how much tax to pay they send their employee's national insurance number to a tax office and get back a "tax code". However some things which can affect someone's tax liability are none of any employer's business (even ofuscated through a tax code). The likes of how many dependent children someone has is one of these. Thus part of the reason for doing things the way they are is personal privacy. Only people who are self employed need to complete a tax return and pay tax in large lump sums.
And these are the clowns I'm supposed to trust with all my personal information in their joined-up-mega-database-and-ID-card scheme?
If anything this is good proof of why the "joined-up-mega-database-and-ID-card" is exact opposite of the way things should be going. This disclosure of information on at least 25% of UK citizens comes on top of such things as losing track of convicted criminals, having no idea how many illegal aliens are working, even having illegal aliens pass security checks.
There are plenty of benefits that would not be considered to be "the dole" such as child benefit which is paid to all parents/guardians. There are also various tax credits which merely reduce the amount of tax paid rather than causing an actual payment to the recipient.
IIRC "child benefit" started off as a tax rebate, only becoming "child benefit" when it was pointed out that there were many parents (mostly mothers) who didn't actually pay any income tax. There is now in addition a "working parents tax credit"... Income tax in the UK is typically Pay As You Earn, with it being the responsibility of an employer to deduct. Thus it is not that uncommon for new employees to need to reclaim tax.
Umm... if you listen to Alistair Darling's statement to the Commons, he actually said they posted them, which implies that they entrusted the discs to the normal Post Office delivery, rather than a courier. Not only that, but when the missing discs didn't arrive, the same department then posted another pair...
Under certain circumstances it can be sensible to send even highly confidential data through the post. These include splitting it between several different packages posted at different times, having in suitably encrypted, in tamper evident packaging which ofuscates the contents and sender, etc.
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And, you made it easier, now pirates don't have to sit in the theater with hand held cameras. You made it easier, because now you don't have to make a deal with some guy in post production to give you a dump of the film. You made it easier because the pirates don't have to get their projectionist buddy to slip them the film over night.
Being that it was impossible for them to lay their hands on "pre-release" copies sent to tame reviewers, to bribe the factory making the DVDs to produce some extra ones, steal a DVD from a warehouse, etc, etc.
......they think laws allowing $200,000 fines and 20 years in jail PER OFFENCE are extreme .....
Depends if the are for copyright infringement or for politicans who tell lies. If the latter then they would probably be reasonable if the convicted paid for their jailing (and if applicable funeral) out of their own pocket.
Any honest, fair and honourable politician would put a review of copyright laws to the public as this is a public issue.
Assuming you can find one...
By the same token, any dishonest, biased and corrupt,
Thing is that many of the current methods of selecting politicans appear to only select the latter.
Even a pefectly fair electoral system has the problem that it selects people who are good at getting elected. Without some sort of feedback mechanism to hold politicans to their promises the dishonest (and even outright conmen), who can claim they will do the impossible, are likely to have the advantage over the honest.
I disagree. I think most people found it socially acceptable to copy stuff long before this whole debate got started. Ever since it was easy to copy stuff at home people have been doing it. Why do you think so many games back in the 80s used copy prevention measures?
Some of these were fairly short lived. Because the games producers soon found out that these tended to do more o annoy customers as opposed to stopping "piracy". A lesson which appears more difficult to learn this time around...
Of course - there is a gray zone where the creator may have died with debts, leaving a spouse behind etc.
This can apply to all sorts of people.
but in general the value of copyright after death of the creator(s) is rather low.
Especially if encouraging them to create new works is a primary idea behind having copyright.
Second, presuming it is so common that 'something must be done'
Most likely this isn't the case at all.
then they should have come up with an escalating alarm - like say more than 5 consecutive calls to 911
What if the reason for this is someone hiding from an intruder somewhere with poor coverage on their phone?
more than 10 minutes air-time connected to 911 and the phone plays a short recorded message through the phone so both parties can hear it saying that it is going to start making noise in a few more minutes unless the user - or the 911 operator on the other end - types in a short number to disarm it.
Not a good idea if you are a kidnap victim who has made the call without your kidnapper knowing.
The problem with this "solution" is that it could easily result in people being hurt or killed who otherwise wouldn't be.
In the Netherlands we have a similar service (we dial 112 instead of 911), which sometimes gets called accidentally.
112 can also occur accidentally on fixed lines which accept pulse dialing. This was part of the original reason behind the British choice of 999 and the US choice of 911.
I can kind of see the point of this, with all the people who've accidentally dialed 911 while the phone was in their pocket/purse. However, I think this may be the wrong way to go about solving the problem. I don't have any evidence to back up my theory, but I suspect most accidental calls don't actually dial the full 911.
Or the firmware is actually written in such a way that when the keypad is locked the state actually goes "Ignore any keys except 9" "once 9 has been pressed ignore everything except 1", "when 91 has been input ignore everything except 1", when 911 has been input ignore everything except SEND". As opposed to something more like "Ignore any input except 9", "once 9 has been pressed then clear the register if either no key is pressed within 10 seconds or anything other 1 is the next keypress".
Now the article says the FCC doesn't require a loud tone, which is technically true. Unfortunately the Telecommunications Act DOES require a loud noise of some type, so that blind people are aware that they've dialed 911.
Even if someone is blind they generally have perfectly good short term memory. Someone who has already forgotten that they have made an emergency call has most likely also forgotten what the emergency is. Anyway wouldn't a different ring tone or ring cadance do the job...
In this case Congress deserves the blame for passing a law without thinking of the consequences.
Even though that is actually their job.
They demanded that all phones make it clear to blind people that they had dialed 911, and the only way to do that on phones without a Braille interface is a loud noise of some form.
No doubt the majority of blind people would be insulted by the implication that they are also deaf!
Second... on Nokia candy bar phones when the keypad is locked you can key in 911 and it'll automatically come out of the locked mode.
Just so long as it won't allow you to dial 9, long string of random digits, 1, long string of random digits, 1. Or even 9, long pause, 1, long pause, 1.
Also, 112 does the same. Can anyone tell me what 112 is?
The European (and other parts of the world) standard emergency number. Which is in the GSM spec as always treated as an emergency number. (The specs even allow for emergency calls to be made without a SIM present.) Apparently this requirment crosses the "NANP/rest of the planet" divide which exists in much telecoms firmware.
I'm sure the people who designed this feature were bright enough to consider how it might be used, and when. I suspect that there is a great body of evidence showing that attracting attention to a bad situation is a very good strategy: scream for help, wave your arms, sound an alarm. These strategies are effective in a great majority of cases.
Whilst there might be an argument for having a phone be capable of operating as a siren/ELB/etc. It's hard to see any situation where you'd want it to do this at the same time as making a telephone call.
The Wii needs a DVD player about as much as my Microwave needs to have a clock.
Ironically my microwave has a clock. Without any kind of power backup and without any of the cooking functions having any connection to it.
Nobody wants to play the next Mario with a number pad, and nobody wants to have to carry around a cell phone that's larger than necessary.
Actually there is a large potential market for phones with large buttons and/or large clear displays, which is not being well catered for. There is also a minimum size requirement dictated by the requirement for the microphone to be near someone's mouth at the same time as the speaker is near to their ear...
The fact that X company should make a phone is indicitive of one thing: THE CURRENT SITUATION OF CELLPHONES (Esp. in the US) is MISERABLE.
But things like poor coverage cannot be addressed by the companies making handsets.
Could you imagine what would happen if Nintendo put out a motion sensing phone. We'd have people walking around the street swinging that thing in the air, looking like they are going to seizure... And I thought it was creepy to see people talking to themselves via hands-free headsets.
Maybe they could use the motion to power the device. Thus you'd see people saying "My battery's getting low" then suddenly start running.
I've done a bit of work on mil-spec hardware in the past and even as an engineer intern I was fully aware that every resistor and capacitor on the circuit board was made to a specification and couldn't be changed without notification.
Presumably to allow a non engineer to check using a photograph.
Do you want your vote counted by people who can't read a contract? We used to have client documentation requirements of two ring binders for some and three ring binders for others. If we did it wrong, we would have lost 10% of the payment for a 20 million dollar machine. You bet the requirements were checked and double checked.
How much could it have cost you if you had messed up, been taken to court and the judge had taken the position "If the defendent can't even get that simple thing right what else might they have got wrong"?
I could understand Cal's concern if different IC's were used, or if code was re-flashed. But if the two machines had the same circuit diagram, same components, and code,
In which case the onus is on the supplier to prove that there has been no change, regardless of the model number being changed. Even if the difference indicates some trivial change, e.g. colour of the casing, then it's up to the supplier to explain this and get the customer's approval for the subsitution.
This particular error on the part of the voting machine company appears to be on the level of a failure to file necessary paperwork.
If it's part of a contract to file necessary paperwork then failing to do so consitutes breach of that contract.
No, the British government are considering a law to punish data loss.
Which IMHO is really the wrong approach. Far better to make the kind of information involved of little value to anyone else.
Which means rethinking the concepts of "identity" and "proof of identity". Such that knowing lots of facts about someone is of little use in impersonating them. There already appears to exist a group of people who's biographies are easily available who are not constantly plagued with impersonation.
Obviously, they'll have to block everyone from taking money out of their bank accounts in order to ensure that the bad guys who stole the account numbers can't take money out.
IMHO part of a solution here would be to change things such that the only thing someone can do if they know the bank account details on these records is to put money into these accounts. i.e. that the information is insufficent to take money out of any accounts... Similarly that the only thing that someone can do with your National Insurance number is pay your income tax/state pension contributions.
Finally to stop treating such things as knowlage of mother's maiden name, data of birth, past/current addresses, etc as being proof of anything. Let alone "security questions". In all likelyhood alternative ways of doing things, otherwise you'd expect "celebrities" to be the most common victims of "identity theft".
So, is it a small amount, this child benefit? Why not streamline things and just let people keep the money to begin with, instead of collecting it and then giving it back to half the country? What am I missing?
What you are missing is that income tax in the UK is generally deducted from someone's pay by their employer. Thus you might well pay £1,200 as 12 lots of £100 or as 52 lots of £23. But as you have never actually had this money you are unlikely to miss it. In order for an employer to work out how much tax to pay they send their employee's national insurance number to a tax office and get back a "tax code". However some things which can affect someone's tax liability are none of any employer's business (even ofuscated through a tax code). The likes of how many dependent children someone has is one of these. Thus part of the reason for doing things the way they are is personal privacy.
Only people who are self employed need to complete a tax return and pay tax in large lump sums.
And these are the clowns I'm supposed to trust with all my personal information in their joined-up-mega-database-and-ID-card scheme?
If anything this is good proof of why the "joined-up-mega-database-and-ID-card" is exact opposite of the way things should be going. This disclosure of information on at least 25% of UK citizens comes on top of such things as losing track of convicted criminals, having no idea how many illegal aliens are working, even having illegal aliens pass security checks.
There are plenty of benefits that would not be considered to be "the dole" such as child benefit which is paid to all parents/guardians. There are also various tax credits which merely reduce the amount of tax paid rather than causing an actual payment to the recipient.
IIRC "child benefit" started off as a tax rebate, only becoming "child benefit" when it was pointed out that there were many parents (mostly mothers) who didn't actually pay any income tax. There is now in addition a "working parents tax credit"...
Income tax in the UK is typically Pay As You Earn, with it being the responsibility of an employer to deduct. Thus it is not that uncommon for new employees to need to reclaim tax.
if there were indeed details of children on the CD then the CD itself would have been protectively marked at a minimum level of "Restricted".
Which from the security POV is actually a bad idea. Since it says to any third party "valuable data on this CD".
Umm... if you listen to Alistair Darling's statement to the Commons, he actually said they posted them, which implies that they entrusted the discs to the normal Post Office delivery, rather than a courier. Not only that, but when the missing discs didn't arrive, the same department then posted another pair...
Under certain circumstances it can be sensible to send even highly confidential data through the post. These include splitting it between several different packages posted at different times, having in suitably encrypted, in tamper evident packaging which ofuscates the contents and sender, etc.