It's a nuanced point, but the 4th Amendment usually applies to the subject of a criminal investigation, not witnesses.
The guy with the meth lab could claim 4th Amendment rights since he was being investigated for a criminal act.
But the Tattered Cover, technically, was a witness whether he legally purchased a legally published book on criminal acts. They were not, and could never be, charged with any crime. Since they weren't in jeopardy, the 4th Amendment doesn't apply.
In contrast, had the "anti-pornography" amendment passed a few years ago then they could be charged with a criminal act for selling certain books, and the 4th Amendment would apply. Fortunately that Amendment was shot down, in part due to the efforts of the owner of the Tattered Cover.
I've gotten much less flexible in my advancing age. If they insist on that information, I tell them to forget it and walk away. Let them put the stuff back on the shelves, while the people behind me in line get a lesson that it is possible to say "no."
This is a modest hassle, but far less than you would think.
If the state can't harass speakers, but can harass listeners, then the right to speak is pretty worthless.
That's why the right to listen (or read) in peace is considered an integral part of the freedoms of speech and press. The government can't send the cops to harass listeners, or the FD to hit them with a fire hose, or even the FBI with sound gear they used in Waco.
For a counterpoint, you should still be able to find people with living memory of fascist and communist regimes which had "freedom of speech"... but anyone foolish enough to be caught listening would be sent to the Gulag. Or the death camps.
Let's get this straight - if the government gives you the right to speak on the corner soapbox but sends jackbooted thugs to beat anyone who dares to listen to you to a bloody pulp before dragging them off to jail, YOUR FREEDOM OF SPEECH IS WORTHLESS. The right to speech includes, as a necessary component, the right of others to listen to you in peace.
That's Civil Liberties 101, and should be familiar to anyone arguing this case.
That's why the American Library Association (ALA) has long held that patron's reading selections should be considered Constitutionally protected. Just as it is unconstitutional for the government to prevent the publication or distribution of a book, it should be considered unconstitutional for the government to post a cop in the stacks whose icy stare and hand on the butt of his gun must be endured to pick up a book, and even the threat of the cops reviewing a list of who has read a book should be done with great caution.
The Tattered Cover sells books, instead of just lending them out, but the same arguments apply. IMHO, the ONLY reason this case has gotten as far as it has is that the Thornton police are asking for records about a specific purchase with evidence left at a crime scene, not just asking for a list of all purchasers of a specific book.
Nobody is arguing that the micronutrients aren't important, or that there's no need to go with whole-grain breads instead of the refined crap whenever possible.
Our concern (excluding everyone who still believes in the FDA food pyramid) is that this causes people to focus on the wrong thing. They eat the whole-grain bread and think that they're doing something healthy, while in fact the main effect is still the sugar and insulin spike from consuming a large quantity of high GI food. They would be better off eliminating most of the bread and getting their micronutrients from vegetables.
Wheat bread is still bread. Brown rice is still rice. The whole-grain products are essentially identical to the "refined" products at the macronutrient level (protein, carbs and fat), where they differ is the micronutrients (vitamins, minerals, etc.)
Somewhat surprisingly, the same analysis applies to frosted vs. unfrosted cereal. Unfrosted "corn flakes" have a little less sugar than "frosted flakes," but the glycemic index of corn is so high that the frosting really doesn't make much of a difference.
When you take the time to look at what we actually eat, as opposed to what we think we're eating, it's scary.
All long tunnels are rail-only. There are several problems with letting people operate their own vehicles in long tunnels:
1) you have to vent the exhaust fumes. You can use forced air on short tunnels under rivers, and vent tunnels under mountains, but the Bering Strait tunnel is far too long for that.
2) individually operated vehicles mean that you'll have accidents. It's difficult to send emergency crews 20 miles into a tunnel.
3) individually operated vehicles mean that you'll have idiots who run out of gas, or have mechanical breakdowns, etc.
Customs is also much easier with rail systems on either side. Each country can handle customs at the rail station on its own side, there's never any concern about traffic backing up into the tunnel if you only have a limited number of electric trains that shuttle back and forth through the tunnel. With vehicular traffic, you would really need to have each country operate its customs offices in the other country, with a clear shot on the other side.
That's a standard practice already, e.g., US Customs clears passengers at many Canadian airports instead of clearing them stateside, but it's always preferable to operate customs on your own territory due to jurisdictional issues.
Adult children can "find their own damn way," but what about young children? Even unborn children, e.g., several of the children born after their fathers died on 9/11?
In recent years, it's also been the source of funds for the old-age care of the surviving spouse.
But both cases should be easily handled by "death + 20 years"
High sounding language, but the intent of such escape clauses is to allow Congress to normalize laws to reflect changes in the rest of the world. E.g., if everyone else has standardized on 50-year non-renewable patents, then US inventors are at a sharp disadvantage if they lose patent protection after a 20-year non-renewable term.
But note well that 20 years is well within the expected lifetime of the inventor, and even 50 years is well within the expected lifetime of his immediate family. The recent extension to copyright law is so long (75 years after the death of the author, IIRC, which could translate to well over a century after first publication) that heirs born long after the deaths of the author and his immediately family still own the copyright.
It is hard to identify much difference between this and the Titles Of Nobility explicitly prohibited in the Constitution. The main difference between the Duke of New Jersy and the Duke of Disney is that there can only be a single Duke of New Jersey, whereas the Dukes of Disney may number in the hundreds and have such diluted interest in their 'property' that it is essentially abandoned yet still denied to others.
The problem isn't that the RIAA and MPAA want to make it impossible to copy their product, it's that they want to make it impossible to copy *ANY* product because their schemes implicitly assume that all "legitimate" files are under their umbrella.
That's nonsense. I think we all have friends with their own bands - the RIAA proposals would make it impossible for them to share their own music. We all have friends with young children, the MPAA would make it impossible for them to share video footage with friends. It would make it impossible for older kids to put together video domentaries for "what I did this summer."
If the RIAA actually succeeded in making it impossible to copy their product, provided that it didn't interfere with other legitimate copies, I would cheer. I would see this as bringing us one day closer to a day when real diversity returns to the music store and airwaves because the non-RIAA players could get their voices heard.
But the current proposals would lock in the RIAA and the MPAA as THE arbitrators of their respective arts in this country. If you don't sign a deal with a major label under terms even worse than today, you would be forced to live in the technological gutter. On countercultural-friendly college campus it may become cool to go analog, but everywhere else it would be an insurmountable barrier.
Actually, much of the "mountain" states is on high plateaus and is relatively flat. Especially if you stay on interstates, which largely follow old railroad lines which were deliberately routed on flat terrain.
However you still hit "hiccups" of mountain ranges. I-90 through Montana is especially noteworthy in this regard. If only the RV drivers understood that they might climb hills faster than semis and other RVs, but a sports car over the horizon can maintain 80 MPH even when climbing and *will* soon be on their ass if thet get in the left-most lane.
If I had run a camera like that, I would have only shown pictures of high plains and the back end of RVs.
You think that's bad, I went Denver, Calgary, Vancouver (the scenic way through Jasper, not straight across), then down to Portland and back in about the same time.
Since I was only in Calgary overnight, I had driven over 3000 miles with relatively little vehicular traffic between Denver and Calgary. (I highly recommend I-15 in southern Montana in a sports car.) Once I left Banff, I started filling up at every station because there was no guarantee that the next station was open, that the road wasn't closed due to a landslide or avalanche, etc.
I'm a glutton for punishment - this was actually a test run for a drive to Alaska in a non-RV - but I agree that the people who stay in cities have no idea of just how empty much of this continent is. Or just how large the large cities are - it can take hours to cross Vancouver or Seattle even if traffic is going at full speed.
1) NDA contrary to public interest. One of the fundamental principals of contract law is that no contract requiring a person to break the law is enforceable. Cooperation with authorities in investigating a crime is a grey area, but few judges will be quick to enforce an NDA that interferes with legitimate law enforcement actions.
2) NDA too broad. An NDA should cover specific things that that would cause harm to the other party, but it can't be a blanket ban on all speech. If an NDA tries to cover too much, e.g., if you can't even discuss why Sen. Disney's bill is a bad idea, then it's likely to be unenforceable since you can no more surrender your right to free speech (subject to *modest* restrictions) than you can agree to sell yourself and your children into slavery or you can agree to be murdered.
3) NDAs can't cover common knowledge.
I think there may be other limitations as well, but the point is clear. A NDA, like all other contracts, only means what a court decides it means.
I hate to say it, but where are the countersuits here? Hell, where's the DoJ nailing this bastard for violation of civil liberties?
The courts have ruled time and again that the public welfare requires that discussion of civil and criminal cases trumps ALL other rights. There is absolutely no way any suit for "trademark infringement" against a defense fund because it bore the trademark name of the company suing would last 5 seconds before a judge.
What's the alternative - "We're collecting money for unnamed people to fight an unnamed company in an unnamed state for reasons we can't discuss (and can't warn you to avoid repeating). Please be generous!"?
The ONLY reason this even got before the court was buried deep in the article - Novak was representing himself. Probably because no lawyer would touch this case with a 10-foot pole.
I'm a firm believer in the right of people to represent themselves (and equally hostile to the "YANAL, shut up!" posts we see here). Countries where access to the courts are restricted to a privileged few who must always fear the possibility of having that access revoked tend to be less free than countries where the courts are open to all. But that must come at a price - you use this access to trample the rights of others, either as a pro se asshole or a corporate SLAPPer then you need to pay a hefty price for it.
Despite what the lawyers want you to think, almost anything you do still has to pass a "reasonable person" test.
Would a reasonable person expect a CD purchased (or received as a gift) to destroy a computer that has successfully played hundreds of other CDs? Of course not, they won't even read the disclaimer, and if they do they will interpret "may not play in computers" as "it may play in computers, why don't you give it a try" not as "will cause temporary or permanent damage."
In other words, that disclaimer is worthless at best, and an active inducement to try playing it in vulnerable hardware at worse.
As for your example, there's the same issue with the reasonable person test. Bigots may think they can identify homosexuals at a glance, but they can't and that policy is both unenforceable and arbitrarily enforced against innocent parties.
The *data* on the CD can't cause physical damage to your computer. Even if it tried to apply a constant DC signal to your speakers, the hardware would prevent that.
The first-order *meta-data* is the TOC that's been corrupted in the past. It makes a disc unusable without correction, but it usually won't cause physical harm unless the drive manufacturer was unusually dumb.
But some of the second-order metadata is another story. That's the information that the drive uses to adjust stepping motors and signal levels, and it's possible that some combinations would cause damage to some hardware.
I don't know what bits a CD encode, but I know it encodes *some* data that CD burners can't touch. I know that blank CD-R media includes bits that indicate media type, etc.
The problem is that there's a huge difference between a CD that passively fails to play and one that actively disables the system.
Think about it - if it "merely" disables the eject tray, forcing the user to manually eject the disc, you're going to have some number of users (1%?) who damage their systems in the attempt to extract the disc so they can continue to use the system to read data CDs and other music CDs.
Some will hire lawyers, and you'll soon be hit with suits demanding you to restore their systems *and data* since the loss of the systems was not an unforeseeable accident. Maybe you'll win, maybe you'll lose, but it will cost money.
Worse, some will contact their local governments. Some prosecutors will see boxes damaged in the attempt to extract these discs, and after looking at the disclaimer they'll have no doubt that it was a deliberate, premeditated attempt to damage computer hardware when the owner attempted to do a perfectly reasonable and legal act. You'll soon be facing criminal charges.
News of this so close to April 1st, especially with the FOAF nature (German? CDs, not American ones) makes me think that this was prank with legs.
There are very few spammers who aren't involved in some level of scam or fraud.
There's the obvious scams - pyramid schemes, cancer cures, etc.
Then there's the forged headers, something that causes real problems when domain names are hijacked. This also causes real problems when the spammers have technical problems - I once got over 20 MB of spam in less than an hour because a spammer (or virus) kept hitting my address with a large unwanted message. With bogus headers, it was impossible to notify the sender and difficult to notify the originating ISP.
A related problem is the increased use of misleading, even abusive, subject lines. The issue isn't (just) that some spam has subject lines warning of past-due accounts, bounced checks, etc., but that this deceptive practice makes legitimate communications regarding such matters much more likely to be dismissed unread.
Finally, there's the common practice of the spammer interpreting an "opt out" message as address validation, not as a true opt-out message.
When you eliminate spam with forged headers or "repurposed" opt-out lists, there's very little left.
You are absolutely correct except for one small thing.
MS is a predatory monopoly. This isn't just rhetoric, it's been the case of an earlier consent decree and the recent criminal conviction.
Predatory monopolies are the free market equivalence of singularities (black holes) in physics. They change all of the rules around them.
E.g., let's say I'm an OEM and I know that 5% of my customers want a non-MS OS. In a free market, I could offer the alternative at a reasonable price (including overhead for the cost of maintaining a second product line) and the alternative will sink or swim on its own.
But since MS is a predatory monopoly, it has written contracts that say the sale of a single non-MS system puts the OEM in a new category and ALL licenses cost an extra $10. The price of this license has nothing to do with the what's offered for sale, for volume, or any other purpose of any economic value to anyone. (MS does not gain from it since it never expects the clause to be enforced.)
No - the sole purpose for that clause is to artifically raise the entry barrier to the competition. It's the difference between a natural monopoly because, gosh darn it, every time we hear that Windows chime we have spontaneous orgasms because the software is such an incredible joy to work with and a predatory monopoly where the software is universally condemned as one of the worst products on the market yet it's impossible for most people to find alternatives.
The problem, of course, is that this is no longer a free market. A free market may have a Gateway offering a Linux box for 50% more than a Windows box because of the need to avoid the cheap win-hardware, and to cover additional overhead costs. A free market would never tolerate an OEM being forced to pay a third party uninvolved in the transaction in any way tens of millions of dollars in penalties.
In the past Slashdot has managed to mix the jokes with real stories. But it seems that as Linux becomes important, it seems to have been declared completely irrelevant one day per year.
The thing that pisses us off isn't (just) the remarkably lame stories, it's the deliberate decision to suppress all other stories.
But life doesn't play by our rules, and some news is too important to ignore.
As a horrific example, imagine some stalker killed Bill Gates today. Or Sen. Disney (Fritz Holling) died in plane crash. It could happen, and the universe is perverse enough to make it happen on April 1st. This would certainly be newsworthy enough to warrant breaking the "jokes only" rules, yet imagine the inevitable response as many posters mistook this news as a joke.
In fact, I'm not absolutely sure some of these "jokes" were intended as such. The Debian rootkit, in particular, is a reference to a very real problem that both Red Hat and Debian developers have been struggling with for some time - how do you protect users from compromized binary packages? Get a compromized core package on the Debian or RedHat website and the automated installers will install that rootkit on a *lot* of systems. If this doesn't keep you awake at night, you don't understand the problem.
Yet now most people will be unable to see any discussion of this issue without thinking of the April Fools submission.
Besides, all this does is push around what needs to be compromised. Compromise the keyring containing the public keys used to check the packages. If you're using a local repository (e.g., because your site rebuilds packages to include localization, e.g., the 'lprng' package installs a fully configured/etc/printcap file) then compromise those keys or packages.
Still sleeping at night? Remember all it takes is _one_ trojaned package, e.g., something downloaded from SourceForge or Freshmeat, with an installation script that illicitly adds a black hat key to the keyring for packagers. You can't require all updates be signed by a master key without killing off all local and independent packagers.
(It is left as an exercise for the reader why you can't just have Debian maintain a master key used to sign independent developer keys. They can and should sign their own, but not Joe Smith who just wants to modify lprng so he doesn't have to reconfigure each system by hand.)
This is a surprisingly difficult problem to solve even when there's only one permitted code signer. With an unlimited universe of independent signers, I think the most you can hope for is to contain the damage.
I don't recall the details any more, but there was a Clinton-era indictment or ruling or something that came out on April 1st.
EVERYONE I talked to thought it was a sick joke when they first heard it. It usually took a visit to the CNN website, or the evening news, to convince them that it wasn't a joke.
Unfortunately, there's some news that can't be putt off for a day or two. Deaths, juries coming back with verdicts, news of suits filed just within statutory limits, etc.
Or compromise the servers where you get your.debs.
Remember, a lot of people have cron jobs that update their system. It's intended to ensure security patches are applied soon after they're made available, but for practical reasons some sites use local repositories that might not have the same level of security.
Compromise that, and every other system that updates against it also compromised.
Obviously nobody would have installed (and be updating) a package called "rootkit," but the scripts could be piggybacked on any security update.
While I'm sure the ITP announcement is a joke, it's a real issue that we shouldn't dismiss casually.
How do we determine whether a system has been compromised? One good way is to check the package information - one of my backburner projects is a configuration management tool that reads the installed package list, rips apart published.deb files to determine the equivalence of tripwire data, and then compares what the.deb file says the files should look like against what's actually on the system.
(In practice, I only rip the data once and create a Berkeley DB file mapping full path to a snapshot of the expected "struct stat" and the crypto hashes. Subsequent checks just walk the FS tree.)
It even cross-references what's on the disk under/usr,/bin,/sbin,/lib and/etc (excluding/usr/local and/usr/src), and lists both unexpected and missing files in addition to modified files.
But if somebody has installed a package using registered diversions to redirect standard programs, my CM tool won't issue any warnings. Why should it? The local administrator has to have the final word, and an unexplained symlink is flagged. But a registered diversion (since I also check some of the system Debian databases) isn't.
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It's a nuanced point, but the 4th Amendment usually applies to the subject of a criminal investigation, not witnesses.
The guy with the meth lab could claim 4th Amendment rights since he was being investigated for a criminal act.
But the Tattered Cover, technically, was a witness whether he legally purchased a legally published book on criminal acts. They were not, and could never be, charged with any crime. Since they weren't in jeopardy, the 4th Amendment doesn't apply.
In contrast, had the "anti-pornography" amendment passed a few years ago then they could be charged with a criminal act for selling certain books, and the 4th Amendment would apply. Fortunately that Amendment was shot down, in part due to the efforts of the owner of the Tattered Cover.
This is "civil liberties," and this case is relatively tame. You should be able to find a decent introductory textbook on any large college campus.
I've gotten much less flexible in my advancing age. If they insist on that information, I tell them to forget it and walk away. Let them put the stuff back on the shelves, while the people behind me in line get a lesson that it is possible to say "no."
This is a modest hassle, but far less than you would think.
If the state can't harass speakers, but can harass listeners, then the right to speak is pretty worthless.
That's why the right to listen (or read) in peace is considered an integral part of the freedoms of speech and press. The government can't send the cops to harass listeners, or the FD to hit them with a fire hose, or even the FBI with sound gear they used in Waco.
For a counterpoint, you should still be able to find people with living memory of fascist and communist regimes which had "freedom of speech"... but anyone foolish enough to be caught listening would be sent to the Gulag. Or the death camps.
Let's get this straight - if the government gives you the right to speak on the corner soapbox but sends jackbooted thugs to beat anyone who dares to listen to you to a bloody pulp before dragging them off to jail, YOUR FREEDOM OF SPEECH IS WORTHLESS. The right to speech includes, as a necessary component, the right of others to listen to you in peace.
That's Civil Liberties 101, and should be familiar to anyone arguing this case.
That's why the American Library Association (ALA) has long held that patron's reading selections should be considered Constitutionally protected. Just as it is unconstitutional for the government to prevent the publication or distribution of a book, it should be considered unconstitutional for the government to post a cop in the stacks whose icy stare and hand on the butt of his gun must be endured to pick up a book, and even the threat of the cops reviewing a list of who has read a book should be done with great caution.
The Tattered Cover sells books, instead of just lending them out, but the same arguments apply. IMHO, the ONLY reason this case has gotten as far as it has is that the Thornton police are asking for records about a specific purchase with evidence left at a crime scene, not just asking for a list of all purchasers of a specific book.
But at what cost?
Nobody is arguing that the micronutrients aren't important, or that there's no need to go with whole-grain breads instead of the refined crap whenever possible.
Our concern (excluding everyone who still believes in the FDA food pyramid) is that this causes people to focus on the wrong thing. They eat the whole-grain bread and think that they're doing something healthy, while in fact the main effect is still the sugar and insulin spike from consuming a large quantity of high GI food. They would be better off eliminating most of the bread and getting their micronutrients from vegetables.
Get thee to a nutritionist!
Wheat bread is still bread. Brown rice is still rice. The whole-grain products are essentially identical to the "refined" products at the macronutrient level (protein, carbs and fat), where they differ is the micronutrients (vitamins, minerals, etc.)
Somewhat surprisingly, the same analysis applies to frosted vs. unfrosted cereal. Unfrosted "corn flakes" have a little less sugar than "frosted flakes," but the glycemic index of corn is so high that the frosting really doesn't make much of a difference.
When you take the time to look at what we actually eat, as opposed to what we think we're eating, it's scary.
All long tunnels are rail-only. There are several problems with letting people operate their own vehicles in long tunnels:
1) you have to vent the exhaust fumes. You can use forced air on short tunnels under rivers, and vent tunnels under mountains, but the Bering Strait tunnel is far too long for that.
2) individually operated vehicles mean that you'll have accidents. It's difficult to send emergency crews 20 miles into a tunnel.
3) individually operated vehicles mean that you'll have idiots who run out of gas, or have mechanical breakdowns, etc.
Customs is also much easier with rail systems on either side. Each country can handle customs at the rail station on its own side, there's never any concern about traffic backing up into the tunnel if you only have a limited number of electric trains that shuttle back and forth through the tunnel. With vehicular traffic, you would really need to have each country operate its customs offices in the other country, with a clear shot on the other side.
That's a standard practice already, e.g., US Customs clears passengers at many Canadian airports instead of clearing them stateside, but it's always preferable to operate customs on your own territory due to jurisdictional issues.
Adult children can "find their own damn way," but what about young children? Even unborn children, e.g., several of the children born after their fathers died on 9/11?
In recent years, it's also been the source of funds for the old-age care of the surviving spouse.
But both cases should be easily handled by "death + 20 years"
High sounding language, but the intent of such escape clauses is to allow Congress to normalize laws to reflect changes in the rest of the world. E.g., if everyone else has standardized on 50-year non-renewable patents, then US inventors are at a sharp disadvantage if they lose patent protection after a 20-year non-renewable term.
But note well that 20 years is well within the expected lifetime of the inventor, and even 50 years is well within the expected lifetime of his immediate family. The recent extension to copyright law is so long (75 years after the death of the author, IIRC, which could translate to well over a century after first publication) that heirs born long after the deaths of the author and his immediately family still own the copyright.
It is hard to identify much difference between this and the Titles Of Nobility explicitly prohibited in the Constitution. The main difference between the Duke of New Jersy and the Duke of Disney is that there can only be a single Duke of New Jersey, whereas the Dukes of Disney may number in the hundreds and have such diluted interest in their 'property' that it is essentially abandoned yet still denied to others.
You're overlooking a key point here.
The problem isn't that the RIAA and MPAA want to make it impossible to copy their product, it's that they want to make it impossible to copy *ANY* product because their schemes implicitly assume that all "legitimate" files are under their umbrella.
That's nonsense. I think we all have friends with their own bands - the RIAA proposals would make it impossible for them to share their own music. We all have friends with young children, the MPAA would make it impossible for them to share video footage with friends. It would make it impossible for older kids to put together video domentaries for "what I did this summer."
If the RIAA actually succeeded in making it impossible to copy their product, provided that it didn't interfere with other legitimate copies, I would cheer. I would see this as bringing us one day closer to a day when real diversity returns to the music store and airwaves because the non-RIAA players could get their voices heard.
But the current proposals would lock in the RIAA and the MPAA as THE arbitrators of their respective arts in this country. If you don't sign a deal with a major label under terms even worse than today, you would be forced to live in the technological gutter. On countercultural-friendly college campus it may become cool to go analog, but everywhere else it would be an insurmountable barrier.
Actually, much of the "mountain" states is on high plateaus and is relatively flat. Especially if you stay on interstates, which largely follow old railroad lines which were deliberately routed on flat terrain.
However you still hit "hiccups" of mountain ranges. I-90 through Montana is especially noteworthy in this regard. If only the RV drivers understood that they might climb hills faster than semis and other RVs, but a sports car over the horizon can maintain 80 MPH even when climbing and *will* soon be on their ass if thet get in the left-most lane.
If I had run a camera like that, I would have only shown pictures of high plains and the back end of RVs.
You think that's bad, I went Denver, Calgary, Vancouver (the scenic way through Jasper, not straight across), then down to Portland and back in about the same time.
Since I was only in Calgary overnight, I had driven over 3000 miles with relatively little vehicular traffic between Denver and Calgary. (I highly recommend I-15 in southern Montana in a sports car.) Once I left Banff, I started filling up at every station because there was no guarantee that the next station was open, that the road wasn't closed due to a landslide or avalanche, etc.
I'm a glutton for punishment - this was actually a test run for a drive to Alaska in a non-RV - but I agree that the people who stay in cities have no idea of just how empty much of this continent is. Or just how large the large cities are - it can take hours to cross Vancouver or Seattle even if traffic is going at full speed.
Judges can (and do) set aside NDAs.
The reasons are:
1) NDA contrary to public interest. One of the fundamental principals of contract law is that no contract requiring a person to break the law is enforceable. Cooperation with authorities in investigating a crime is a grey area, but few judges will be quick to enforce an NDA that interferes with legitimate law enforcement actions.
2) NDA too broad. An NDA should cover specific things that that would cause harm to the other party, but it can't be a blanket ban on all speech. If an NDA tries to cover too much, e.g., if you can't even discuss why Sen. Disney's bill is a bad idea, then it's likely to be unenforceable since you can no more surrender your right to free speech (subject to *modest* restrictions) than you can agree to sell yourself and your children into slavery or you can agree to be murdered.
3) NDAs can't cover common knowledge.
I think there may be other limitations as well, but the point is clear. A NDA, like all other contracts, only means what a court decides it means.
I hate to say it, but where are the countersuits here? Hell, where's the DoJ nailing this bastard for violation of civil liberties?
The courts have ruled time and again that the public welfare requires that discussion of civil and criminal cases trumps ALL other rights. There is absolutely no way any suit for "trademark infringement" against a defense fund because it bore the trademark name of the company suing would last 5 seconds before a judge.
What's the alternative - "We're collecting money for unnamed people to fight an unnamed company in an unnamed state for reasons we can't discuss (and can't warn you to avoid repeating). Please be generous!"?
The ONLY reason this even got before the court was buried deep in the article - Novak was representing himself. Probably because no lawyer would touch this case with a 10-foot pole.
I'm a firm believer in the right of people to represent themselves (and equally hostile to the "YANAL, shut up!" posts we see here). Countries where access to the courts are restricted to a privileged few who must always fear the possibility of having that access revoked tend to be less free than countries where the courts are open to all. But that must come at a price - you use this access to trample the rights of others, either as a pro se asshole or a corporate SLAPPer then you need to pay a hefty price for it.
Despite what the lawyers want you to think, almost anything you do still has to pass a "reasonable person" test.
Would a reasonable person expect a CD purchased (or received as a gift) to destroy a computer that has successfully played hundreds of other CDs? Of course not, they won't even read the disclaimer, and if they do they will interpret "may not play in computers" as "it may play in computers, why don't you give it a try" not as "will cause temporary or permanent damage."
In other words, that disclaimer is worthless at best, and an active inducement to try playing it in vulnerable hardware at worse.
As for your example, there's the same issue with the reasonable person test. Bigots may think they can identify homosexuals at a glance, but they can't and that policy is both unenforceable and arbitrarily enforced against innocent parties.
You're confusing the data and the meta-data.
The *data* on the CD can't cause physical damage to your computer. Even if it tried to apply a constant DC signal to your speakers, the hardware would prevent that.
The first-order *meta-data* is the TOC that's been corrupted in the past. It makes a disc unusable without correction, but it usually won't cause physical harm unless the drive manufacturer was unusually dumb.
But some of the second-order metadata is another story. That's the information that the drive uses to adjust stepping motors and signal levels, and it's possible that some combinations would cause damage to some hardware.
I don't know what bits a CD encode, but I know it encodes *some* data that CD burners can't touch. I know that blank CD-R media includes bits that indicate media type, etc.
This has got to be a late April Fool's joke.
The problem is that there's a huge difference between a CD that passively fails to play and one that actively disables the system.
Think about it - if it "merely" disables the eject tray, forcing the user to manually eject the disc, you're going to have some number of users (1%?) who damage their systems in the attempt to extract the disc so they can continue to use the system to read data CDs and other music CDs.
Some will hire lawyers, and you'll soon be hit with suits demanding you to restore their systems *and data* since the loss of the systems was not an unforeseeable accident. Maybe you'll win, maybe you'll lose, but it will cost money.
Worse, some will contact their local governments. Some prosecutors will see boxes damaged in the attempt to extract these discs, and after looking at the disclaimer they'll have no doubt that it was a deliberate, premeditated attempt to damage computer hardware when the owner attempted to do a perfectly reasonable and legal act. You'll soon be facing criminal charges.
News of this so close to April 1st, especially with the FOAF nature (German? CDs, not American ones) makes me think that this was prank with legs.
There are very few spammers who aren't involved in some level of scam or fraud.
There's the obvious scams - pyramid schemes, cancer cures, etc.
Then there's the forged headers, something that causes real problems when domain names are hijacked. This also causes real problems when the spammers have technical problems - I once got over 20 MB of spam in less than an hour because a spammer (or virus) kept hitting my address with a large unwanted message. With bogus headers, it was impossible to notify the sender and difficult to notify the originating ISP.
A related problem is the increased use of misleading, even abusive, subject lines. The issue isn't (just) that some spam has subject lines warning of past-due accounts, bounced checks, etc., but that this deceptive practice makes legitimate communications regarding such matters much more likely to be dismissed unread.
Finally, there's the common practice of the spammer interpreting an "opt out" message as address validation, not as a true opt-out message.
When you eliminate spam with forged headers or "repurposed" opt-out lists, there's very little left.
You are absolutely correct except for one small thing.
MS is a predatory monopoly. This isn't just rhetoric, it's been the case of an earlier consent decree and the recent criminal conviction.
Predatory monopolies are the free market equivalence of singularities (black holes) in physics. They change all of the rules around them.
E.g., let's say I'm an OEM and I know that 5% of my customers want a non-MS OS. In a free market, I could offer the alternative at a reasonable price (including overhead for the cost of maintaining a second product line) and the alternative will sink or swim on its own.
But since MS is a predatory monopoly, it has written contracts that say the sale of a single non-MS system puts the OEM in a new category and ALL licenses cost an extra $10. The price of this license has nothing to do with the what's offered for sale, for volume, or any other purpose of any economic value to anyone. (MS does not gain from it since it never expects the clause to be enforced.)
No - the sole purpose for that clause is to artifically raise the entry barrier to the competition. It's the difference between a natural monopoly because, gosh darn it, every time we hear that Windows chime we have spontaneous orgasms because the software is such an incredible joy to work with and a predatory monopoly where the software is universally condemned as one of the worst products on the market yet it's impossible for most people to find alternatives.
The problem, of course, is that this is no longer a free market. A free market may have a Gateway offering a Linux box for 50% more than a Windows box because of the need to avoid the cheap win-hardware, and to cover additional overhead costs. A free market would never tolerate an OEM being forced to pay a third party uninvolved in the transaction in any way tens of millions of dollars in penalties.
I agree wholeheartedly with this poster.
In the past Slashdot has managed to mix the jokes with real stories. But it seems that as Linux becomes important, it seems to have been declared completely irrelevant one day per year.
The thing that pisses us off isn't (just) the remarkably lame stories, it's the deliberate decision to suppress all other stories.
But life doesn't play by our rules, and some news is too important to ignore.
As a horrific example, imagine some stalker killed Bill Gates today. Or Sen. Disney (Fritz Holling) died in plane crash. It could happen, and the universe is perverse enough to make it happen on April 1st. This would certainly be newsworthy enough to warrant breaking the "jokes only" rules, yet imagine the inevitable response as many posters mistook this news as a joke.
In fact, I'm not absolutely sure some of these "jokes" were intended as such. The Debian rootkit, in particular, is a reference to a very real problem that both Red Hat and Debian developers have been struggling with for some time - how do you protect users from compromized binary packages? Get a compromized core package on the Debian or RedHat website and the automated installers will install that rootkit on a *lot* of systems. If this doesn't keep you awake at night, you don't understand the problem.
Yet now most people will be unable to see any discussion of this issue without thinking of the April Fools submission.
"once that's in place".... Famous last words.
/etc/printcap file) then compromise those keys or packages.
Besides, all this does is push around what needs to be compromised. Compromise the keyring containing the public keys used to check the packages. If you're using a local repository (e.g., because your site rebuilds packages to include localization, e.g., the 'lprng' package installs a fully configured
Still sleeping at night? Remember all it takes is _one_ trojaned package, e.g., something downloaded from SourceForge or Freshmeat, with an installation script that illicitly adds a black hat key to the keyring for packagers. You can't require all updates be signed by a master key without killing off all local and independent packagers.
(It is left as an exercise for the reader why you can't just have Debian maintain a master key used to sign independent developer keys. They can and should sign their own, but not Joe Smith who just wants to modify lprng so he doesn't have to reconfigure each system by hand.)
This is a surprisingly difficult problem to solve even when there's only one permitted code signer. With an unlimited universe of independent signers, I think the most you can hope for is to contain the damage.
I don't recall the details any more, but there was a Clinton-era indictment or ruling or something that came out on April 1st.
EVERYONE I talked to thought it was a sick joke when they first heard it. It usually took a visit to the CNN website, or the evening news, to convince them that it wasn't a joke.
Unfortunately, there's some news that can't be putt off for a day or two. Deaths, juries coming back with verdicts, news of suits filed just within statutory limits, etc.
Or compromise the servers where you get your .debs.
Remember, a lot of people have cron jobs that update their system. It's intended to ensure security patches are applied soon after they're made available, but for practical reasons some sites use local repositories that might not have the same level of security.
Compromise that, and every other system that updates against it also compromised.
Obviously nobody would have installed (and be updating) a package called "rootkit," but the scripts could be piggybacked on any security update.
While I'm sure the ITP announcement is a joke, it's a real issue that we shouldn't dismiss casually.
.deb files to determine the equivalence of tripwire data, and then compares what the .deb file says the files should look like against what's actually on the system.
/usr, /bin, /sbin, /lib and /etc (excluding /usr/local and /usr/src), and lists both unexpected and missing files in addition to modified files.
How do we determine whether a system has been compromised? One good way is to check the package information - one of my backburner projects is a configuration management tool that reads the installed package list, rips apart published
(In practice, I only rip the data once and create a Berkeley DB file mapping full path to a snapshot of the expected "struct stat" and the crypto hashes. Subsequent checks just walk the FS tree.)
It even cross-references what's on the disk under
But if somebody has installed a package using registered diversions to redirect standard programs, my CM tool won't issue any warnings. Why should it? The local administrator has to have the final word, and an unexplained symlink is flagged. But a registered diversion (since I also check some of the system Debian databases) isn't.