The first modern computers took up entire rooms, were programmed with punchcards and were much less powerfull than the average 1990's cell phone.
I usually compare them with an average pocket calculator from the early 80's when they were all the rage among geeks. They did basic calculus and arithmetic and some trigonometry, and on the advanced ones you could create macro programs. Still just numbers and some letters, no graphs or similar.
now the lad is on day and night medication which has worked fucking wonders on him... Ritalin by day and something called melatonin by night.
You never mention the age of the kid and thus weather he can be prosecuted. In my opinion these afflictions has been severely abused as an excuse for not prosecuting offenders. This is wrong on every level. They need to to be prosecuted and we need to make it clear that if you are suffering from something that make you dangerous to others you must be medicated to such an extent as to eliminate the danger to others. If this isn't possible (sometimes the medication have little or no effect - indicating that it's really a different affliction masquerading as ADHD) the only acceptable solution is the remove the dangerous from the general public, i.e. lock him/her up in a mental institution.
Basically it comes down to this: If someone attacks you with violence, you'd expect the same punishment regardless of the reason behind the attack. Mental problems should not change the punishment except for where time is to be served. In my opinion, known mental problems should increase the severity of the punishment if the defendant has failed to use the prescribed medication or similar. If someone is a danger to others and cannot be reliably medicated, the only solution is a straitjacket in a padded cell indefinitely.
Oh, and I hinted as this above... The diagnosis of ADHD is *severely* abused these days. Unless we're seeing an epidemic during the past decade, a lot of people is being diagnosed with this in error. The number of people with diagnosis has exploded and it makes no sense. It seems like all behavioral problems are symptoms of ADHD these days. A growing number of doctors are questioning this development and estimate that less than 1% of the people with a ADHD diagnosis actually suffer from anything except bad parenting or similar. It is the impulse control aspect that's the most mis-diagnosed part. Just because someone easily gets very upset and perhaps violent doesn't mean that this person has ADHD.
Often it's just a bad temper combined with a lack of social limits. As a child I used to be very hot headed with a nasty temper for instance, but a person in my daycare caught this early and through simple talks with or without parents instilled the limits I needed and I've never since been truly angry (throwing things, hitting people etc.) and I don't even get upset much at all these days. But had I been a child today I'd have been medicated out of my mind, despite it obviously not being necessary.
Out of interest, in what way were his family threatened? He sold out for a reduced jail sentence. Its still a betrayal, no matter what way you look at it, and whether you agree or not. I probably would have done the same thing.
Read TFA... He sold out because the FBI lied to him and told him that they could make sure he'd never see his family again, at least while he was in prison.
In reality the FBI does not have any power over what happens after sentencing. They can make recommendations to the DA's office, and the DA can present it at the trial and the judge can take that into consideration when doing the sentencing, but it's highly unlikely that the judge would include anything about family visitation rights in the verdict in a case about simple hacking.
The FBI cannot prevent someone from having visitors in prison - it's just an empty threat used along with other lies and 'games' (good cop, bad cop for instance) to intimidate their suspects.
The judge can and the prison can, given proper justification. Preventing children from visiting is even harder as they have a right to visit their father, a right that can only be removed if the father is convicted of something directly involving the children (violence, incest etc.).
Can't believe that that people still fall for this. Bad lawyers perhaps?
A good lawyer would advise the defendant to shut up and not do anything until a written plea is on the table. If no plea is offered, continue to say nothing no matter what. Make the FBI work for every inch. Agreeing to work as as informant is a defacto admission of guilt which means that once he's in, there' no way out - ever.
Finally, this guy has killed his career here. Nobody would ever trust him, especially in the hacker environment.
A guy like Kevin Mitnick can work as a security consultant these days and is also still respected in the hacker community because he didn't sell out. He stood his ground and it has since become evident that he didn't give away anything the authorities hadn't already figured out. He still has active backdoors here and there and he can still do his magic. Oh, and the technical part of his work is just a minor thing. His true force is the ability to manipulate people to do his bidding ("social engineering"). The book "The Art of Deception" hold many examples, all supposedly something somebody else did, but rest assured that some of his own work hides in there. The message being that any system that includes humans can be broken with very little effort if you know what you're doing. Anonymous did just that when they hacked HBGary, and combined with a classic lack of security protocols (and revisions that would have caught it), they completely owned everything - mails, servers, social media accounts etc. - and the feat has been repeated a dozen times now with targets including both security firms and the FBI itself, and it's still incredibly efficient.
Oh, and social engineering in itself isn't illegal. It's only if you use the information/access you are given that you start breaking laws, i.e. using obtained names and letterhead paper (found legally in a dumpster) to forge a document, or use acquired login credentials to gain access to resources you're not authorized to use.
Just put up a picture of Chuck Norris and the words "Protected by" and the asteroid will turn around and run, not stopping until it has left the galaxy...
Actually given enough repeated orbit measurements the impact can be predicted with second/meter accuracy. A large object like this is not affected significantly by dust, solar wind, aerodynamic shape etc. and will generally just follow its orbit no matter what.
It doesn't require much to do these calculations as it's just Kepler dynamics (assuming the asteroid/meteor/comet doesn't move with relativistic speeds). Calculate the exact orbit of both objects and calculate when the two orbits intersects within the diameter of the two bodies. Now calculate the impact ground zero assuming no atmospheric deflection and convert impact time to local time. We did something similar in the equivalent of high-school here, playing with a slightly modified orbit of Halley's Comet (because it was near the Sun at the time) and let that impact the Earth. We ended up with a nighttime north Pacific impact that caused zero damage to anything populated by the way. Would have been awesome to witness... from a safe distance of course...
Regular cell phone chatter don't really annoy me, except for those morons that YELLS into their phone. Quite often this also happens to be foreigners or immigrants speaking an annoying and not understandable language, adding to the annoyance factor. One should think they would know that with all the yelling they could save the call and just yell back and forth from tall buildings or similar...:)
What really annoys me are those morons with super-loud 'music' in crappy headphones. I quote 'music' here because it always seems to be the worst no-talent hip-hop they play (you can hear it clearly far away) and that doesn't qualify as music in my humble opinion... Now if someone sold a small portable EMP-generator that could kill the players of those morons, I'd line up to buy one...
Good because their business (based in Canada) should be out of reach of other countries, and the blatant abuse by the US authorities shown here is to be condemned in the strongest possible terms.
Bad because it undermines the demonstrative loss that could be used in a lawsuit against their registrar DomainClip, that in turn could sue Verisign that in turn could sue the US government. We need that a major company (like Verisign) with decent legal muscle is forced to sue for millions (or billions) against the US government for actions like this. Would be fun if they end up being prevented from doing abuse like this for economic reasons (and are forced to pay dearly for this one).
And then we need all domain responsibility moved back to ICANN and relocated to UN ground where US law cannot touch it.
The abuse still continues - recently they confiscated all the domains they could get their hands on belonging to Hong Kong based MegaUpload.
I'd recommend the duology "The Host" (1991) and "Shortblade" (1992) by Peter R. Emshwiller. The first was Nebula-nominated by the way and both have movie rights optioned but currently no concrete movie projects exists. Both are out of print but available through Amazon's merchants.
Some places are installing cameras everywhere in public places due to a criminal paranoia. Even if you don't technically have privacy in most public places, the cameras just make this even worse. They're not comparable at all to normal humans spotting you because these cameras are everywhere at once and can (and do) record everything they see (unlike a human's faulty memory, the cameras won't forget anything).
Actually cameras are good in my opinion. First of all, the great majority have nothing to hide and should not fear the cameras.
The criminals do have something to hide and should fear the cameras. In the beginning there was only cameras when crime most often were committed, i.e. at the bank, the convenience store etc. - but the criminals simply disguised themselves while at the crime scene and the cameras were mostly defeated.
Now there's enough cameras to actually catch the criminal putting on his disguise and thus how he really looks.
Sometimes it is even possible to backtrack the actions prior to the crime. One case I heard of had a bank robbery where the robbers carefully got rid of their getaway vehicle and left no trace. But they didn't think it though because they didn't consider the time before the robbery. it was possible using traffic cams to backtrack from the arrival at the bank to the car park where they switched from own vehicles to the getaway car, acting natural and not trying to hide in order to avoid attracting suspicion ahead of time - and there both faces and license plates were available... Needless to say, they were caught fast. But it was only because the density of cameras were high enough to follow a car with certainty all the way from A to B.
With all that profiling... How long does it have to take before they figure out that I'm using ad-blockers and script-blockers because I don't want their stupid ads?!!
Stop wasting resources trying to give them to me! - I don't want them! - Get it, log it, understand it and act on it! - Thank you.
There a huge difference. You can indeed steal Internet service - you are not making a copy - you are actually taking something someone else paid for, i.e. theft.
When it comes to 'stealing' intellectual property - you are not taking anything away, nor are you taking something someone else paid for. You are making a copy that detracts nothing from the original. Any loss would come from the loss of a potential sale, but as must file sharing either is done by people who would never pay for the stuff they download (no lost sale) or by people that buys the downloaded material later when it becomes available, there's usually no loss involved and thus no theft.
If this guy could build a business, complete with websites, forums and so on, it must have gone on for quite a while (6 years it turns out), so it is obvious that:
1) The ISP didn't know enough about their business to realize the giant holes this guy was exploiting. 2) The ISP was incompetent enough to let this guy and his customers steal service (which the ISP's other customers paid for) for a long time.
Any sentencing here should include a heavy fine to the ISP for technical incompetence.
1) The police rings the bell and are invited in. 2) The police have a warrant and either ring the bell or kick down the door. 3) The police have exigent circumstances and they most likely kick down the door. A variant of this have the door left open (which it shouldn't be) when they arrive.
Combined they make it so that if they want to enter, they can do so regardless.
It's all too easy to do the following exchange between police partners heard on a crime show: "I think I hear a woman screaming" "Me too" (BLAM! - door getting kicked in). They probably won't do it if they except to find evidence to be used in court, but if they're just looking for someone, all bets are off. After all, a seagull in the distance can always be perceived as a muffled scream so it's an honest mistake...
The feds should be going after the users that upload the content, not the hosts.
The uploaders did very little wrong either. They just re-uploaded data found elsewhere on the net, and that's basically just copying a lot of ones and zeros. They have no way of knowing it's actually copyrighted material - they have never seen the source and its attached copyright notices.
No, it's the scene groups that do the actually ripping - those are the ones with copyrighted material in hand that actually infringe on copyrights.
That's even worse! It is completely UNACCEPTABLE that a private company spies on the common public!
If anyone should spy on regular people it must be someone who can be held publicly accountable for any abuse of the information collected, and good luck doing that with a private company.
In the ideal world it should be completely illegal to spy on anyone without a warrant. Basically I cannot see any reason why it isn't like that in civilized countries already. I mean if you for instance want to secretly investigate someone for terrorism ties, what's wrong with getting a warrant? - You could be using special judges working for the intelligence community to secrecy can be preserved, and later you'd have a audit log of who, why and where. This way you wouldn't have run-away spying and everybody suspected for something, the traditional trademark of fascism.
Oh, and if you try to keep track of too many things at the same time, you'll severely degrade the usability of the efforts. It's basic cognition science and the effect is commonly known as "information overload". Automated systems can to some extent correlate and reduce the pile of information, but you always run the risk of important stuff getting disregarded/overlooked, so you need to check and double check... and before you know it you have quadrupled the work and is still not sure...
Just stick to the relevant suspects and do a proper job with them. That'll get you much father.
There were constant battles between the marketing and academic departments about blocking and unblocking social media sites. In the end the marketing department won and they were unblocked. The tutors didn't like it because they relied so much on computers for their lessons rather than using good old fashioned methods like lecturing and demonstrating.
Why was that a problem? - That people might use (gasp!) their computers for more that just the lessons?
Sounds like narrow-minded tutors with a feeble grasp on reality.
Besides, why should the tutors care? - If people waste the lessons updating Facebook instead of getting smart, they'll simply fail and thus have wasted their tuition. I hope Facebook was worth it, but the tutors shouldn't care less if the students are that stupid.
The French built the "Maginot Line" of fortifications along their border with Germany--at enormous expense--between World War I and World War II. The Germans simply went around it through Belgium and defeated France in a few days. The TSA is our Maginot Line.
Except that the Maginot Line didn't cause major annoyances and intrusions into very private areas for the general public traveling between France and Germany.
The TSA have designed their security theater to be as intrusive as possible, even though such intrusion isn't relevant nor effective in catching weapons and/or explosives. The scanners miss A LOT (70-80% misses) even where they are designed to find it, and body cavities are not scanned in any way. And none of the current measures would have spotted the 9/11 terrorists as a carbon fiber box-cutter won't be detected if hidden in the structural parts of the carry-on luggage or in body cavities.
They could do with a lot less. Drop the expensive porn scanners and the grope search. Keep the old portal metal scanners and the carry-on x-ray machines. Use pre-arrival profiling and observation during airport presence. That would catch at least 50% of the wannabe terrorists and other lunatics.
Pat down? - Are you referring to the infamous 'Grope Search'?
It's an amazing thing that Grope Search. It's not a cavity search and yet they examine the crotch area extremely carefully, as well as the chest area on women...
The Swedish authorities already raided The Pirate Bay and found nothing, zip, zitch, zero infringing files on their servers. So how can it breach any copyright laws?
Sure, it facilitates file sharing and those files shared may be copyrighted... but it plays no larger role than for instance roads do in various other crimes. I mean, a road is used to facilitate almost all crimes, either as the crime scene itself or as a means of getting there or escaping afterwards. Sure, roads have legitimate uses but given that almost all crimes involve them, they do play an instrumental role.
So... if roads are not put on trial for their involvement in all those other crimes (they're just passive means, but they're there), why persecute The Pirate Bay for copyright infringement as they're also just passive means. The Pirate Bay is simply a portal, nothing more. There's no content, no hashes, no trackers. All content resides elsewhere. They have no access to hashes of the complete files shared and also have no reference hashes to verify against in order to eliminate copyrighted content, so in essence they want to ban the principle of file sharing just because you may be sharing something copyrighted.
The conclusion for the courts: Censorship for no other purpose than to quench the concept of file sharing. Possibly infringing files are not transferred through The Pirate Bay in any way and yet it must be banned?
No, intolerance is the problem. There are tolerant religious people like Martin Luther King and Gandhi. There are intolerant religious people like Bin Laden and Benito Mussolini. There are tolerant atheists like Andrei Sakharov and Vaclav Havel. And there are intolerant atheists like Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong.
Correct, but intolerant atheists include those that are intolerant precisely because they fight intolerant religious people and don't accept their right to be intolerant.
For instance a lot of the motivation behind many anti-Islamic groups are the behavior of the Muslims. Not only have they rallied behind exterminations attacks against a then peaceful nation of Israel. These continued attacks have hardened Israel and made them intolerant which unfortunately is the obvious and unavoidable result of never-ending threats backed up by violence and terrorism. And the Muslims have taken terror to whole new levels actively seeking to hurt and kill westerners for no other reason that we have opinions or freedoms they don't like.
There's more than a dozen independent people/groups jailed for terror (attempts) against the Mohammad cartoonists and they quite literary did nothing wrong and hurt nobody. They made a drawing meant for a local newspaper, a drawing nobody would find offensive for any reason other than it depicted Mohammad. But still they went bananas and rallied to kill and hurt people. That's intolerance intruding on pure insanity and we should never tolerate that.
I support intolerant atheism like that. I don't mind people practicing a religion in their home, but keep it out of the public space in any way, shape or form. No religious symbols or clothing, no missioning, no public indoctrination of children, no visible praying. Basically we need to exterminate religion in all its forms within a generation or two. Religion has caused enough damage on every level for many thousands of years and enough is enough. We need to get rid of it now and it can only happen too slowly.
It's kind of scary how they're escalating a petty offense into a 'serious crime'...
First they repeat the gross misnomer that illegal file sharing is theft - it's not, neither semantically nor legally.
Then they hunt pirates using an agency with the equally grossly misname "Serious Organized Crime Agency". File sharing was never organized, nor was it a crime. Theft barely is, and only if the stuff you're stealing is valuable enough, and as we just said - file sharing is not even theft.
WAKE UP!
File sharing does not become theft, or even a crime, no matter how many times you repeat it!
And the organized thing - the only relevance is from the indictment against MegaUpload where the US law enforcement entities actually introduced "The Mega Conspiracy" in order to activate enough judicial power to reach across borders through the activation of Interpol! - It's pure bullshit of course but they wanted someone to prosecute and MegaUpload became it.
And when they find something really bad, they create "The Really Serious Organized Crime Agency"... Yes, we're serious and this time we really, really, really mean it!
The primary problem in Copenhagen (and London) was delivery vans/trucks parking for a few minutes in bus lanes. If this happens while the other lanes are full, the busses encountering these parked vans/trucks will become (even more) delayed.
For some reason these guy driving these vans/trucks seem to be severely retarded and unable to fathom what their action is doing, and a system like TFA talks about is necessary.
An example of just how stupid they can be is this I personally experienced about 10 years ago in Store Kongensgade in central Copenhagen. It is a one-way street with three lanes where this happened, one (leftmost) used for short term curb parking outside rush hours (as this was), one (rightmost) is a bus lane with a bus stop and the last (center) is available for through traffic. Now, outside rush hours there's a lot of deliveries and the curb lane is full almost all the time. Now, along comes two separate deliveries, one uses the bus lane, the other actually stops in the middle of the center lane and starts unloading goods. All traffic is halted. Now, this would be bad enough, but as incredible as it sounds, these delivery guy completely missed (or ignored) the sirens of emergency vehicles. Two cars behind them was an ambulance with a police escort, siren going, lights flashing and everything. The police went to them and ordered them away in very harsh words, and they started arguing with the police! - One of the delivery guys (the one in the bus lane) actually moved his wan quickly, but the backed up traffic prevented this from allowing the ambulance through. So they need the one in the center to move. But he still refuses while continuing to unload goods. The police finally have had enough and arrested the guy, then proceed to move the truck about 10 meters around a corner which wouldn't have been much of a problem for the delivery guy to do himself. But for some reason he felt that he had a right to make his delivery as close to the recipient as physically possible, no matter what, completely oblivious to everything else. Hopefully he got a proper punishment. Double parking is illegal. Blocking traffic is illegal. Blocking emergency vehicles with sirens and lights even more illegal. Not following police orders illegal too. So there should be be a nice hefty fine for him so he can learn from it.
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The first modern computers took up entire rooms, were programmed with punchcards and were much less powerfull than the average 1990's cell phone.
I usually compare them with an average pocket calculator from the early 80's when they were all the rage among geeks. They did basic calculus and arithmetic and some trigonometry, and on the advanced ones you could create macro programs. Still just numbers and some letters, no graphs or similar.
now the lad is on day and night medication which has worked fucking wonders on him... Ritalin by day and something called melatonin by night.
You never mention the age of the kid and thus weather he can be prosecuted. In my opinion these afflictions has been severely abused as an excuse for not prosecuting offenders. This is wrong on every level. They need to to be prosecuted and we need to make it clear that if you are suffering from something that make you dangerous to others you must be medicated to such an extent as to eliminate the danger to others. If this isn't possible (sometimes the medication have little or no effect - indicating that it's really a different affliction masquerading as ADHD) the only acceptable solution is the remove the dangerous from the general public, i.e. lock him/her up in a mental institution.
Basically it comes down to this: If someone attacks you with violence, you'd expect the same punishment regardless of the reason behind the attack. Mental problems should not change the punishment except for where time is to be served. In my opinion, known mental problems should increase the severity of the punishment if the defendant has failed to use the prescribed medication or similar. If someone is a danger to others and cannot be reliably medicated, the only solution is a straitjacket in a padded cell indefinitely.
Oh, and I hinted as this above... The diagnosis of ADHD is *severely* abused these days. Unless we're seeing an epidemic during the past decade, a lot of people is being diagnosed with this in error. The number of people with diagnosis has exploded and it makes no sense. It seems like all behavioral problems are symptoms of ADHD these days. A growing number of doctors are questioning this development and estimate that less than 1% of the people with a ADHD diagnosis actually suffer from anything except bad parenting or similar. It is the impulse control aspect that's the most mis-diagnosed part. Just because someone easily gets very upset and perhaps violent doesn't mean that this person has ADHD.
Often it's just a bad temper combined with a lack of social limits. As a child I used to be very hot headed with a nasty temper for instance, but a person in my daycare caught this early and through simple talks with or without parents instilled the limits I needed and I've never since been truly angry (throwing things, hitting people etc.) and I don't even get upset much at all these days. But had I been a child today I'd have been medicated out of my mind, despite it obviously not being necessary.
He didn't sell out. His family was threatened.
He made a mistake.
Out of interest, in what way were his family threatened? He sold out for a reduced jail sentence. Its still a betrayal, no matter what way you look at it, and whether you agree or not. I probably would have done the same thing.
Read TFA... He sold out because the FBI lied to him and told him that they could make sure he'd never see his family again, at least while he was in prison.
In reality the FBI does not have any power over what happens after sentencing. They can make recommendations to the DA's office, and the DA can present it at the trial and the judge can take that into consideration when doing the sentencing, but it's highly unlikely that the judge would include anything about family visitation rights in the verdict in a case about simple hacking.
The FBI cannot prevent someone from having visitors in prison - it's just an empty threat used along with other lies and 'games' (good cop, bad cop for instance) to intimidate their suspects.
The judge can and the prison can, given proper justification. Preventing children from visiting is even harder as they have a right to visit their father, a right that can only be removed if the father is convicted of something directly involving the children (violence, incest etc.).
Can't believe that that people still fall for this. Bad lawyers perhaps?
A good lawyer would advise the defendant to shut up and not do anything until a written plea is on the table. If no plea is offered, continue to say nothing no matter what. Make the FBI work for every inch. Agreeing to work as as informant is a defacto admission of guilt which means that once he's in, there' no way out - ever.
Finally, this guy has killed his career here. Nobody would ever trust him, especially in the hacker environment.
A guy like Kevin Mitnick can work as a security consultant these days and is also still respected in the hacker community because he didn't sell out. He stood his ground and it has since become evident that he didn't give away anything the authorities hadn't already figured out. He still has active backdoors here and there and he can still do his magic. Oh, and the technical part of his work is just a minor thing. His true force is the ability to manipulate people to do his bidding ("social engineering"). The book "The Art of Deception" hold many examples, all supposedly something somebody else did, but rest assured that some of his own work hides in there. The message being that any system that includes humans can be broken with very little effort if you know what you're doing. Anonymous did just that when they hacked HBGary, and combined with a classic lack of security protocols (and revisions that would have caught it), they completely owned everything - mails, servers, social media accounts etc. - and the feat has been repeated a dozen times now with targets including both security firms and the FBI itself, and it's still incredibly efficient.
Oh, and social engineering in itself isn't illegal. It's only if you use the information/access you are given that you start breaking laws, i.e. using obtained names and letterhead paper (found legally in a dumpster) to forge a document, or use acquired login credentials to gain access to resources you're not authorized to use.
Just put up a picture of Chuck Norris and the words "Protected by" and the asteroid will turn around and run, not stopping until it has left the galaxy...
Actually given enough repeated orbit measurements the impact can be predicted with second/meter accuracy. A large object like this is not affected significantly by dust, solar wind, aerodynamic shape etc. and will generally just follow its orbit no matter what.
It doesn't require much to do these calculations as it's just Kepler dynamics (assuming the asteroid/meteor/comet doesn't move with relativistic speeds). Calculate the exact orbit of both objects and calculate when the two orbits intersects within the diameter of the two bodies. Now calculate the impact ground zero assuming no atmospheric deflection and convert impact time to local time. We did something similar in the equivalent of high-school here, playing with a slightly modified orbit of Halley's Comet (because it was near the Sun at the time) and let that impact the Earth. We ended up with a nighttime north Pacific impact that caused zero damage to anything populated by the way. Would have been awesome to witness... from a safe distance of course...
Regular cell phone chatter don't really annoy me, except for those morons that YELLS into their phone. Quite often this also happens to be foreigners or immigrants speaking an annoying and not understandable language, adding to the annoyance factor. One should think they would know that with all the yelling they could save the call and just yell back and forth from tall buildings or similar... :)
What really annoys me are those morons with super-loud 'music' in crappy headphones. I quote 'music' here because it always seems to be the worst no-talent hip-hop they play (you can hear it clearly far away) and that doesn't qualify as music in my humble opinion... Now if someone sold a small portable EMP-generator that could kill the players of those morons, I'd line up to buy one...
This is both good and bad.
Good because their business (based in Canada) should be out of reach of other countries, and the blatant abuse by the US authorities shown here is to be condemned in the strongest possible terms.
Bad because it undermines the demonstrative loss that could be used in a lawsuit against their registrar DomainClip, that in turn could sue Verisign that in turn could sue the US government. We need that a major company (like Verisign) with decent legal muscle is forced to sue for millions (or billions) against the US government for actions like this. Would be fun if they end up being prevented from doing abuse like this for economic reasons (and are forced to pay dearly for this one).
And then we need all domain responsibility moved back to ICANN and relocated to UN ground where US law cannot touch it.
The abuse still continues - recently they confiscated all the domains they could get their hands on belonging to Hong Kong based MegaUpload.
I'd recommend the duology "The Host" (1991) and "Shortblade" (1992) by Peter R. Emshwiller. The first was Nebula-nominated by the way and both have movie rights optioned but currently no concrete movie projects exists. Both are out of print but available through Amazon's merchants.
Some places are installing cameras everywhere in public places due to a criminal paranoia. Even if you don't technically have privacy in most public places, the cameras just make this even worse. They're not comparable at all to normal humans spotting you because these cameras are everywhere at once and can (and do) record everything they see (unlike a human's faulty memory, the cameras won't forget anything).
Actually cameras are good in my opinion. First of all, the great majority have nothing to hide and should not fear the cameras.
The criminals do have something to hide and should fear the cameras. In the beginning there was only cameras when crime most often were committed, i.e. at the bank, the convenience store etc. - but the criminals simply disguised themselves while at the crime scene and the cameras were mostly defeated.
Now there's enough cameras to actually catch the criminal putting on his disguise and thus how he really looks.
Sometimes it is even possible to backtrack the actions prior to the crime. One case I heard of had a bank robbery where the robbers carefully got rid of their getaway vehicle and left no trace. But they didn't think it though because they didn't consider the time before the robbery. it was possible using traffic cams to backtrack from the arrival at the bank to the car park where they switched from own vehicles to the getaway car, acting natural and not trying to hide in order to avoid attracting suspicion ahead of time - and there both faces and license plates were available... Needless to say, they were caught fast. But it was only because the density of cameras were high enough to follow a car with certainty all the way from A to B.
With all that profiling... How long does it have to take before they figure out that I'm using ad-blockers and script-blockers because I don't want their stupid ads?!!
Stop wasting resources trying to give them to me! - I don't want them! - Get it, log it, understand it and act on it! - Thank you.
There a huge difference. You can indeed steal Internet service - you are not making a copy - you are actually taking something someone else paid for, i.e. theft.
When it comes to 'stealing' intellectual property - you are not taking anything away, nor are you taking something someone else paid for. You are making a copy that detracts nothing from the original. Any loss would come from the loss of a potential sale, but as must file sharing either is done by people who would never pay for the stuff they download (no lost sale) or by people that buys the downloaded material later when it becomes available, there's usually no loss involved and thus no theft.
Understand it now?
If this guy could build a business, complete with websites, forums and so on, it must have gone on for quite a while (6 years it turns out), so it is obvious that:
1) The ISP didn't know enough about their business to realize the giant holes this guy was exploiting.
2) The ISP was incompetent enough to let this guy and his customers steal service (which the ISP's other customers paid for) for a long time.
Any sentencing here should include a heavy fine to the ISP for technical incompetence.
Basically there are three variations:
1) The police rings the bell and are invited in.
2) The police have a warrant and either ring the bell or kick down the door.
3) The police have exigent circumstances and they most likely kick down the door. A variant of this have the door left open (which it shouldn't be) when they arrive.
Combined they make it so that if they want to enter, they can do so regardless.
It's all too easy to do the following exchange between police partners heard on a crime show: "I think I hear a woman screaming" "Me too" (BLAM! - door getting kicked in). They probably won't do it if they except to find evidence to be used in court, but if they're just looking for someone, all bets are off. After all, a seagull in the distance can always be perceived as a muffled scream so it's an honest mistake...
The feds should be going after the users that upload the content, not the hosts.
The uploaders did very little wrong either. They just re-uploaded data found elsewhere on the net, and that's basically just copying a lot of ones and zeros. They have no way of knowing it's actually copyrighted material - they have never seen the source and its attached copyright notices.
No, it's the scene groups that do the actually ripping - those are the ones with copyrighted material in hand that actually infringe on copyrights.
Stratfor is a PRIVATE company
That's even worse! It is completely UNACCEPTABLE that a private company spies on the common public!
If anyone should spy on regular people it must be someone who can be held publicly accountable for any abuse of the information collected, and good luck doing that with a private company.
In the ideal world it should be completely illegal to spy on anyone without a warrant. Basically I cannot see any reason why it isn't like that in civilized countries already. I mean if you for instance want to secretly investigate someone for terrorism ties, what's wrong with getting a warrant? - You could be using special judges working for the intelligence community to secrecy can be preserved, and later you'd have a audit log of who, why and where. This way you wouldn't have run-away spying and everybody suspected for something, the traditional trademark of fascism.
Oh, and if you try to keep track of too many things at the same time, you'll severely degrade the usability of the efforts. It's basic cognition science and the effect is commonly known as "information overload". Automated systems can to some extent correlate and reduce the pile of information, but you always run the risk of important stuff getting disregarded/overlooked, so you need to check and double check... and before you know it you have quadrupled the work and is still not sure...
Just stick to the relevant suspects and do a proper job with them. That'll get you much father.
What does credit cards and cash have to do with DoS and Anonymous?!
Do they really think that Anonymous pays people for performing attacks or what? - They seriously need to look up what Anonymous is.
There were constant battles between the marketing and academic departments about blocking and unblocking social media sites. In the end the marketing department won and they were unblocked. The tutors didn't like it because they relied so much on computers for their lessons rather than using good old fashioned methods like lecturing and demonstrating.
Why was that a problem? - That people might use (gasp!) their computers for more that just the lessons?
Sounds like narrow-minded tutors with a feeble grasp on reality.
Besides, why should the tutors care? - If people waste the lessons updating Facebook instead of getting smart, they'll simply fail and thus have wasted their tuition. I hope Facebook was worth it, but the tutors shouldn't care less if the students are that stupid.
The French built the "Maginot Line" of fortifications along their border with Germany--at enormous expense--between World War I and World War II. The Germans simply went around it through Belgium and defeated France in a few days. The TSA is our Maginot Line.
Except that the Maginot Line didn't cause major annoyances and intrusions into very private areas for the general public traveling between France and Germany.
The TSA have designed their security theater to be as intrusive as possible, even though such intrusion isn't relevant nor effective in catching weapons and/or explosives. The scanners miss A LOT (70-80% misses) even where they are designed to find it, and body cavities are not scanned in any way. And none of the current measures would have spotted the 9/11 terrorists as a carbon fiber box-cutter won't be detected if hidden in the structural parts of the carry-on luggage or in body cavities.
They could do with a lot less. Drop the expensive porn scanners and the grope search. Keep the old portal metal scanners and the carry-on x-ray machines. Use pre-arrival profiling and observation during airport presence. That would catch at least 50% of the wannabe terrorists and other lunatics.
Pat down? - Are you referring to the infamous 'Grope Search'?
It's an amazing thing that Grope Search. It's not a cavity search and yet they examine the crotch area extremely carefully, as well as the chest area on women...
The Swedish authorities already raided The Pirate Bay and found nothing, zip, zitch, zero infringing files on their servers. So how can it breach any copyright laws?
Sure, it facilitates file sharing and those files shared may be copyrighted... but it plays no larger role than for instance roads do in various other crimes. I mean, a road is used to facilitate almost all crimes, either as the crime scene itself or as a means of getting there or escaping afterwards. Sure, roads have legitimate uses but given that almost all crimes involve them, they do play an instrumental role.
So... if roads are not put on trial for their involvement in all those other crimes (they're just passive means, but they're there), why persecute The Pirate Bay for copyright infringement as they're also just passive means. The Pirate Bay is simply a portal, nothing more. There's no content, no hashes, no trackers. All content resides elsewhere. They have no access to hashes of the complete files shared and also have no reference hashes to verify against in order to eliminate copyrighted content, so in essence they want to ban the principle of file sharing just because you may be sharing something copyrighted.
The conclusion for the courts: Censorship for no other purpose than to quench the concept of file sharing. Possibly infringing files are not transferred through The Pirate Bay in any way and yet it must be banned?
No, intolerance is the problem. There are tolerant religious people like Martin Luther King and Gandhi. There are intolerant religious people like Bin Laden and Benito Mussolini. There are tolerant atheists like Andrei Sakharov and Vaclav Havel. And there are intolerant atheists like Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong.
Correct, but intolerant atheists include those that are intolerant precisely because they fight intolerant religious people and don't accept their right to be intolerant.
For instance a lot of the motivation behind many anti-Islamic groups are the behavior of the Muslims. Not only have they rallied behind exterminations attacks against a then peaceful nation of Israel. These continued attacks have hardened Israel and made them intolerant which unfortunately is the obvious and unavoidable result of never-ending threats backed up by violence and terrorism. And the Muslims have taken terror to whole new levels actively seeking to hurt and kill westerners for no other reason that we have opinions or freedoms they don't like.
There's more than a dozen independent people/groups jailed for terror (attempts) against the Mohammad cartoonists and they quite literary did nothing wrong and hurt nobody. They made a drawing meant for a local newspaper, a drawing nobody would find offensive for any reason other than it depicted Mohammad. But still they went bananas and rallied to kill and hurt people. That's intolerance intruding on pure insanity and we should never tolerate that.
I support intolerant atheism like that. I don't mind people practicing a religion in their home, but keep it out of the public space in any way, shape or form. No religious symbols or clothing, no missioning, no public indoctrination of children, no visible praying. Basically we need to exterminate religion in all its forms within a generation or two. Religion has caused enough damage on every level for many thousands of years and enough is enough. We need to get rid of it now and it can only happen too slowly.
It's kind of scary how they're escalating a petty offense into a 'serious crime'...
First they repeat the gross misnomer that illegal file sharing is theft - it's not, neither semantically nor legally.
Then they hunt pirates using an agency with the equally grossly misname "Serious Organized Crime Agency". File sharing was never organized, nor was it a crime. Theft barely is, and only if the stuff you're stealing is valuable enough, and as we just said - file sharing is not even theft.
WAKE UP!
File sharing does not become theft, or even a crime, no matter how many times you repeat it!
And the organized thing - the only relevance is from the indictment against MegaUpload where the US law enforcement entities actually introduced "The Mega Conspiracy" in order to activate enough judicial power to reach across borders through the activation of Interpol! - It's pure bullshit of course but they wanted someone to prosecute and MegaUpload became it.
And when they find something really bad, they create "The Really Serious Organized Crime Agency"... Yes, we're serious and this time we really, really, really mean it!
The primary problem in Copenhagen (and London) was delivery vans/trucks parking for a few minutes in bus lanes. If this happens while the other lanes are full, the busses encountering these parked vans/trucks will become (even more) delayed.
For some reason these guy driving these vans/trucks seem to be severely retarded and unable to fathom what their action is doing, and a system like TFA talks about is necessary.
An example of just how stupid they can be is this I personally experienced about 10 years ago in Store Kongensgade in central Copenhagen. It is a one-way street with three lanes where this happened, one (leftmost) used for short term curb parking outside rush hours (as this was), one (rightmost) is a bus lane with a bus stop and the last (center) is available for through traffic. Now, outside rush hours there's a lot of deliveries and the curb lane is full almost all the time. Now, along comes two separate deliveries, one uses the bus lane, the other actually stops in the middle of the center lane and starts unloading goods. All traffic is halted. Now, this would be bad enough, but as incredible as it sounds, these delivery guy completely missed (or ignored) the sirens of emergency vehicles. Two cars behind them was an ambulance with a police escort, siren going, lights flashing and everything. The police went to them and ordered them away in very harsh words, and they started arguing with the police! - One of the delivery guys (the one in the bus lane) actually moved his wan quickly, but the backed up traffic prevented this from allowing the ambulance through. So they need the one in the center to move. But he still refuses while continuing to unload goods. The police finally have had enough and arrested the guy, then proceed to move the truck about 10 meters around a corner which wouldn't have been much of a problem for the delivery guy to do himself. But for some reason he felt that he had a right to make his delivery as close to the recipient as physically possible, no matter what, completely oblivious to everything else. Hopefully he got a proper punishment. Double parking is illegal. Blocking traffic is illegal. Blocking emergency vehicles with sirens and lights even more illegal. Not following police orders illegal too. So there should be be a nice hefty fine for him so he can learn from it.