So if you're the police and you want to seize some organization's computers and / or logs, just post a death threat on their site.
As long as the warrant only allows you to collect evidence in relation to that (faked) posting, there's no problem with that.
Of course, you have to have strict rules to prevent abuse here. For example, say that if the authorities genuinely have to seize more material than they have a warrant for (e.g., because they need to remove a whole machine to avoid a genuine risk of the data they need being changed/erased) then they must (a) pay compensation to any parties unfairly damaged by the removal of that machine, (b) replace the machine, undamaged and working as it was before, within a very short set period of time, and (c) make good any damage done to innocent parties by the seizure to the best of their abilities, with the maximum delay allowed before return, levels of compensation and actions to make good all being determined by a court. Then (d) make any other evidence found directly or indirectly as a result of the seizure inadmissible.
In other words, make it far too much hassle for them to seize more than they really need, and a danger to both the authorities' accounts and their agents' personal professional standing, and they'll probably think twice about it.
but yea, you should look up what exactly your rights are regarding addresses, etc. I think you will be pretty shocked.
It's kinda sad when people post this sort of nonsense, so I'm not surprised you posted as AC.
In the UK, there are various privacy and data protection laws that do cover the handling of personal information (principally under the Human Rights Act and under the Data Protection Acts), and they are considerably stricter than in some places. There are also laws to deal with how you act based on that information, e.g., protection from harassment or various forms of unsolicited marketing. Oh, and as a topical note, making death threats is illegal, too.
I personally completely disagree with your claim that such information is not personal or private. It is clearly both, and in a world that values freedom, in a world where identity theft is a fast-growing crime, in a world where there is a genuine risk of violence against officials undermining the justice system, it is reasonable and common sense that the information should be protected. There is no free speech argument here, and no censorship: why do you think you have some God-given right to know everything about someone else?
Now, this sort of action should obviously be handled by the book, with the proper warrants issued and the proper data obtained. If that is not the case here, then someone screwed up. But it does seem that a serious crime was committed, and indicated a genuine threat of a much more serious crime, and the police asked for reasonable cooperation from the service provider in order to deal with that. That is their job, and if the provider gave them some cute "freedom of speech" response then I'm not surprised that the police took more direct action, nor do I blame them for doing so. This sort of "defence" of freedom is exactly why the government is now pushing for mandatory logging of all such activities by all ISPs for everyone, which is a far worse thing for freedom than having the police make reasonable requests on a case-by-case basis. The fact that Indymedia seem to be proud of the fact that their service can be used for making anonymous death threats and they won't cooperate with lawful authorities to help identify the source doesn't exactly raise my opinion of them, either.
While the OP has the right to make a police complaint, there's no reason not to go through the school first.
Of course there is: it was an official from the school who committed the crime! Wouldn't it be convenient if more senior officials from the school, faced with damage to their organisation's reputation on their watch, could just hush it all up and brush it under the carpet, probably while black-marking the "trouble maker" student(s) who object to the abuse?
I'm frankly staggered that so many people on this forum think this behaviour was in any way reasonable or acceptable, or not worthy of a criminal report against the offender. The teacher not only stole a student's physical property and invaded their property, they destroyed the records of many weeks of study, something priceless that cannot be replaced.
The teacher concerned is so far beyond what is reasonable or within their authority that they should not only lose their job but be sentenced to a significant penalty and criminal record, to make it abundantly clear to them and their peers that this sort of thing is not acceptable, particularly for someone in a position of trust who is supposed to be a role model for children.
Perhaps a prophetic typo, given the likely effect of allowing government arbitrary access to this sort of information without any incentive not to use it unnecessarily.
When you wrote "adults" there, did you actually mean "children"?
Or are you also talking about more general "child protection" laws made by people who apparently can't see any difference between a loving parent smacking a child lightly as a discplinary measure and an abusive parent seriously injuring a child through repeated beatings?
I think the argument is that it's necessary to make sure any home is properly and safely wired up. If you sell it to someone else and they move in expecting the wiring to match the usual design specifications, and someone ignorant of those specifications has messed around, then... Well, I'm not quite sure what bad stuff they expect to happen, particularly if there is a record of how the new wiring was done, but I'm sure it would be very bad and nasty.
You're right, it probably originated in Brussels. But I bet our own guys pushed for it!
This is why the government should be legally liable for any consequences of a failed investigation, in the same way as anyone else whose defamatory behaviour damages an innocent's reputation, who kidnaps someone and holds them against their will, who steals their money, etc. For example, in cases like this, there should probably be financial compensation, arrangement for sufficient public awareness work to restore the damaged reputation, and provision of any extra security needed in the meantime.
We must never allow a "greater good" argument to be used to justify government destroying unlucky individuals' lives.
Include a CD with 20 web browser installers on it. That will be simple enough for anyone to figure out.
Except for the fact that the overwhelming majority of PC users never install their own operating system and software, that's a really compelling argument.
How about a non-browser dependent package manager? Someone, please introduce Bill Gates to 2009!
Would that be the same 2009 where hosting everything from e-mail clients to word processors in browsers, making far more advanced use of scripting and plug-in systems than anyone dreamed of a few years ago, is one of the dominant trends in the software industry?
But I guess code re-use sucks and we should go back to the days of reinventing the wheel with every new application. Yep, software was much better back then.
Remind me again, do any common Linux distros have used the same front-end to support browsing both local filesystems and the web?
For what it's worth, I think it's a pretty sad reflection on the Slashdot community that a post citing numerous specific cases where Windows might be considered superior to Linux has got hit with enough troll mods to make it disappear for most people, yet there are no replies actually countering the points made in that post. I guess abusing the mod system is easier than making a real argument.
Perhaps not, but I bet they use TCP/IP stacks and such that are built into the OS, and I bet the user interface is displayed using GUI libraries that are supplied as standard. Desktop operating systems didn't always come with TCP/IP stacks and GUI libraries, and people used to sell products that supported such features as add-ons.
It's funny how easy it is to pick a single example of something in a context where you don't like it, and then paint a very black and white picture of its merits. The reality is rarely so simple. I wonder how all the Linux geeks here would feel if several popular distros converged to leave one dominant player that most people used because it came with everything they could possibly want, and then a minor player sued and the main distro was forced to unbundle everything from the Linux kernel and GNU tools.
Whatever the official route my be, EU directives have repeatedly been used as an excuse to push through unpopular legislation that would never fly domestically. That really has to stop.
I meant the guy at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, by the way.
I wish ID cards were a political suicide pill. I really don't understand why both main parties are pushing ahead with them come what may.
One of us has got completely the wrong idea here: I thought the Tory lot had given a pretty much black-and-white statement that they would repeal the Identity Card legislation, and had consistently opposed the introduction of all the biometric nonsense from the start.
I can't see this one going very far. Several of the most influential EU nations have general elections coming up within a year or two, centralised European power is already under the spotlight because of the way the Constitution^WReform Treaty was handled by diktat, and governments already lost at sea over the economic mess won't want to rock the boat any further.
In the UK, in particular, I suspect the NO2ID anti-ID card campaign will pick this up in about ten seconds. At that point, it will become associated with the National Identity Register and National ID Card biometrics programmes, and become a political suicide pill.
With a bit of luck, it'll finally bring down the catastrophe that is centrally dictated European policy, make us aware that we don't have to jump just because some guy at 1600 said so, and restore a little of the democracy we've had stolen from us in recent years along the way.
IIRC, the current UK statutory minimum for a full-time employee works out at 24 days/year, which I'd guess is slightly below average in IT. From later this year, it's due to go up, though, to something like 28 days, which is higher than standard at any organisation where I've ever worked. Should be interesting to see what they all do with that... (I have a feeling the UK still sneakily allows public holidays to be included in this figure, though, so in reality those 28 days could be the 20 days + public holidays that has been the practical minimum since forever.)
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Your company has a very silly policy.
At first glance, it sounds that way, but we have to be careful because we don't know all the details. I've seen companies rejecting all sorts of external software based on apparently permissive licence agreements. One example is companies that produce libraries rather than end-user products, who can't necessarily impose any changes on their entire customer base without rewriting every contract they ever signed; this can be triggered by something as simple as a required attribution clause in the licence of a sub-library.
It's interesting that everyone is implicitly assuming that keeping a 40-hour work week makes sense when it's divided into a different number of days. This almost certainly isn't true, because people's productivity drops after a certain amount of time at work in a single shift. Companies like Ford did a lot of research into this a long time ago, which is why we all work 40-hour weeks now. (Of course, these days, managers who naively assume that extra hours = extra work getting done have pushed it to 40 hours plus breaks, when it often used to be 40 hours including breaks, hence the expression "9–5".) And Ford's people were doing manual work, not jobs that depend primarily on thinking, where the number of productive hours per week, averaged over the long term, is lower for most people.
I think it's both sad and quite telling that no-one seems to be considering that those extra few hours might not really be worth anything anyway, but employees who get an extra day off every couple of weeks are likely to be both better rested/more productive while at work and more loyal to the company. Businesses that have tried radically different working practices have sometimes seen counter-intuitive results, particularly when it came to working much lower hours. I'd like to see a company suck it up and have all their employees working only 9/10 Monday-Fridays over a two-week period without expecting them to turn up for an extra hour on most of those days, and see whether it made things more or less productive.
My company does it - and yes frequently we get hosed out of our day off OR have to travel on our day off.
Then, respectfully, your company doesn't do it. It's just a bad employer screwing you into doing unpaid overtime, with a different excuse for doing it.
This seems to be a very American (and Japanese) phenomenon. In Europe, it wouldn't even be legal to offer only 10 days of vacation time in many countries (possibly all of them, these days). Here in the UK, for someone working in a typical developer or sysadmin role in IT, I'd say somewhere around 25 days +/- 2 is fairly typical, plus the 8 public holidays (which is fewer than most other European countries get).
Some employers do say you lose whatever vacation allowance you don't use by the end of each year, but in reality only the kind of poor managers and die-hard workaholics who think employees who don't take vacations are more productive seem to fail to use up their allowances under these circumstances. IME, it's fairly typical for decent employers to set a cap of, say, 5 days rolling over: this avoids long-term employees building up a huge vacation allowance, but allows some flexibility and avoids everyone taking off half of December and leaving the office near-empty just to use up all their remaining leave.
It's also not as if putting labels on cigarette packets saying "smoking this is going to harm your health" encourages people to start smoking. Kids, on the other hand, are pretty much guaranteed to want products with "no, kids, it's not for you" on the label a lot more than if the label were blank. The "Parental advisory: explicit lyrics" sticker on UK CDs is pretty much a standard marketing tool for the record labels, and has been since about three seconds after some fool invented it.
On the flipside, many of my teeth required some sort of work done on them after a course of treatment by a dubious orthodontist when I was a kid. Since then, even though dentists have always told me I have generally good oral hygiene, it seems like I have to get some filling or something replaced every few months, which is expensive and occasionally painful. I would give a lot to have real, intact teeth again, and articles like this give me some hope that one day it might even be possible. (I hear you on the root surgery thing, though: been there, done that too.)
Well, if there's one thing we learned last century, it was never to bet against the longevity of a Microsoft product so bug-ridden that no sane person would ever use it...
I bought a new machine a year or so back: Core 2 Quad, 4GB RAM, should be a textbook 64-bit machine. I run Windows XP 32-bit on it, even though it means I waste some of the RAM.
The reason is simple: lack of hardware vendor support for 64-bit drivers. It just isn't there for XP 64-bit: in just a few minutes of searching the web, I identified several moderately high-end but not exceptional components in my new system that not only weren't reliably supported on XP64 but also had vendors who openly said they never would be.
Since I had no intention of letting Vista anywhere near any box I owned, that left XP32. If Windows 7 is actually an improvement on XP in some way that is useful to me, I'll consider coughing up the cash for a 64-bit version, but until then, 32-bit it is.
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So if you're the police and you want to seize some organization's computers and / or logs, just post a death threat on their site.
As long as the warrant only allows you to collect evidence in relation to that (faked) posting, there's no problem with that.
Of course, you have to have strict rules to prevent abuse here. For example, say that if the authorities genuinely have to seize more material than they have a warrant for (e.g., because they need to remove a whole machine to avoid a genuine risk of the data they need being changed/erased) then they must (a) pay compensation to any parties unfairly damaged by the removal of that machine, (b) replace the machine, undamaged and working as it was before, within a very short set period of time, and (c) make good any damage done to innocent parties by the seizure to the best of their abilities, with the maximum delay allowed before return, levels of compensation and actions to make good all being determined by a court. Then (d) make any other evidence found directly or indirectly as a result of the seizure inadmissible.
In other words, make it far too much hassle for them to seize more than they really need, and a danger to both the authorities' accounts and their agents' personal professional standing, and they'll probably think twice about it.
but yea, you should look up what exactly your rights are regarding addresses, etc. I think you will be pretty shocked.
It's kinda sad when people post this sort of nonsense, so I'm not surprised you posted as AC.
In the UK, there are various privacy and data protection laws that do cover the handling of personal information (principally under the Human Rights Act and under the Data Protection Acts), and they are considerably stricter than in some places. There are also laws to deal with how you act based on that information, e.g., protection from harassment or various forms of unsolicited marketing. Oh, and as a topical note, making death threats is illegal, too.
I personally completely disagree with your claim that such information is not personal or private. It is clearly both, and in a world that values freedom, in a world where identity theft is a fast-growing crime, in a world where there is a genuine risk of violence against officials undermining the justice system, it is reasonable and common sense that the information should be protected. There is no free speech argument here, and no censorship: why do you think you have some God-given right to know everything about someone else?
Now, this sort of action should obviously be handled by the book, with the proper warrants issued and the proper data obtained. If that is not the case here, then someone screwed up. But it does seem that a serious crime was committed, and indicated a genuine threat of a much more serious crime, and the police asked for reasonable cooperation from the service provider in order to deal with that. That is their job, and if the provider gave them some cute "freedom of speech" response then I'm not surprised that the police took more direct action, nor do I blame them for doing so. This sort of "defence" of freedom is exactly why the government is now pushing for mandatory logging of all such activities by all ISPs for everyone, which is a far worse thing for freedom than having the police make reasonable requests on a case-by-case basis. The fact that Indymedia seem to be proud of the fact that their service can be used for making anonymous death threats and they won't cooperate with lawful authorities to help identify the source doesn't exactly raise my opinion of them, either.
While the OP has the right to make a police complaint, there's no reason not to go through the school first.
Of course there is: it was an official from the school who committed the crime! Wouldn't it be convenient if more senior officials from the school, faced with damage to their organisation's reputation on their watch, could just hush it all up and brush it under the carpet, probably while black-marking the "trouble maker" student(s) who object to the abuse?
I'm frankly staggered that so many people on this forum think this behaviour was in any way reasonable or acceptable, or not worthy of a criminal report against the offender. The teacher not only stole a student's physical property and invaded their property, they destroyed the records of many weeks of study, something priceless that cannot be replaced.
The teacher concerned is so far beyond what is reasonable or within their authority that they should not only lose their job but be sentenced to a significant penalty and criminal record, to make it abundantly clear to them and their peers that this sort of thing is not acceptable, particularly for someone in a position of trust who is supposed to be a role model for children.
Any chills protection agency
Perhaps a prophetic typo, given the likely effect of allowing government arbitrary access to this sort of information without any incentive not to use it unnecessarily.
When you wrote "adults" there, did you actually mean "children"?
Or are you also talking about more general "child protection" laws made by people who apparently can't see any difference between a loving parent smacking a child lightly as a discplinary measure and an abusive parent seriously injuring a child through repeated beatings?
I think the argument is that it's necessary to make sure any home is properly and safely wired up. If you sell it to someone else and they move in expecting the wiring to match the usual design specifications, and someone ignorant of those specifications has messed around, then... Well, I'm not quite sure what bad stuff they expect to happen, particularly if there is a record of how the new wiring was done, but I'm sure it would be very bad and nasty.
You're right, it probably originated in Brussels. But I bet our own guys pushed for it!
This is why the government should be legally liable for any consequences of a failed investigation, in the same way as anyone else whose defamatory behaviour damages an innocent's reputation, who kidnaps someone and holds them against their will, who steals their money, etc. For example, in cases like this, there should probably be financial compensation, arrangement for sufficient public awareness work to restore the damaged reputation, and provision of any extra security needed in the meantime.
We must never allow a "greater good" argument to be used to justify government destroying unlucky individuals' lives.
Include a CD with 20 web browser installers on it. That will be simple enough for anyone to figure out.
Except for the fact that the overwhelming majority of PC users never install their own operating system and software, that's a really compelling argument.
How about a non-browser dependent package manager? Someone, please introduce Bill Gates to 2009!
Would that be the same 2009 where hosting everything from e-mail clients to word processors in browsers, making far more advanced use of scripting and plug-in systems than anyone dreamed of a few years ago, is one of the dominant trends in the software industry?
But I guess code re-use sucks and we should go back to the days of reinventing the wheel with every new application. Yep, software was much better back then.
Remind me again, do any common Linux distros have used the same front-end to support browsing both local filesystems and the web?
For what it's worth, I think it's a pretty sad reflection on the Slashdot community that a post citing numerous specific cases where Windows might be considered superior to Linux has got hit with enough troll mods to make it disappear for most people, yet there are no replies actually countering the points made in that post. I guess abusing the mod system is easier than making a real argument.
Perhaps not, but I bet they use TCP/IP stacks and such that are built into the OS, and I bet the user interface is displayed using GUI libraries that are supplied as standard. Desktop operating systems didn't always come with TCP/IP stacks and GUI libraries, and people used to sell products that supported such features as add-ons.
It's funny how easy it is to pick a single example of something in a context where you don't like it, and then paint a very black and white picture of its merits. The reality is rarely so simple. I wonder how all the Linux geeks here would feel if several popular distros converged to leave one dominant player that most people used because it came with everything they could possibly want, and then a minor player sued and the main distro was forced to unbundle everything from the Linux kernel and GNU tools.
I hear that depends on which ship you're serving on. Some of them have these crazy computer systems, and they can't work out what's wrong.
Whatever the official route my be, EU directives have repeatedly been used as an excuse to push through unpopular legislation that would never fly domestically. That really has to stop.
I meant the guy at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, by the way.
I wish ID cards were a political suicide pill. I really don't understand why both main parties are pushing ahead with them come what may.
One of us has got completely the wrong idea here: I thought the Tory lot had given a pretty much black-and-white statement that they would repeal the Identity Card legislation, and had consistently opposed the introduction of all the biometric nonsense from the start.
Yep, here we go: ID cards on the Conservatives' web site is pretty clearly against them.
I can't see this one going very far. Several of the most influential EU nations have general elections coming up within a year or two, centralised European power is already under the spotlight because of the way the Constitution^WReform Treaty was handled by diktat, and governments already lost at sea over the economic mess won't want to rock the boat any further.
In the UK, in particular, I suspect the NO2ID anti-ID card campaign will pick this up in about ten seconds. At that point, it will become associated with the National Identity Register and National ID Card biometrics programmes, and become a political suicide pill.
With a bit of luck, it'll finally bring down the catastrophe that is centrally dictated European policy, make us aware that we don't have to jump just because some guy at 1600 said so, and restore a little of the democracy we've had stolen from us in recent years along the way.
IIRC, the current UK statutory minimum for a full-time employee works out at 24 days/year, which I'd guess is slightly below average in IT. From later this year, it's due to go up, though, to something like 28 days, which is higher than standard at any organisation where I've ever worked. Should be interesting to see what they all do with that... (I have a feeling the UK still sneakily allows public holidays to be included in this figure, though, so in reality those 28 days could be the 20 days + public holidays that has been the practical minimum since forever.)
Your company has a very silly policy.
At first glance, it sounds that way, but we have to be careful because we don't know all the details. I've seen companies rejecting all sorts of external software based on apparently permissive licence agreements. One example is companies that produce libraries rather than end-user products, who can't necessarily impose any changes on their entire customer base without rewriting every contract they ever signed; this can be triggered by something as simple as a required attribution clause in the licence of a sub-library.
It's interesting that everyone is implicitly assuming that keeping a 40-hour work week makes sense when it's divided into a different number of days. This almost certainly isn't true, because people's productivity drops after a certain amount of time at work in a single shift. Companies like Ford did a lot of research into this a long time ago, which is why we all work 40-hour weeks now. (Of course, these days, managers who naively assume that extra hours = extra work getting done have pushed it to 40 hours plus breaks, when it often used to be 40 hours including breaks, hence the expression "9–5".) And Ford's people were doing manual work, not jobs that depend primarily on thinking, where the number of productive hours per week, averaged over the long term, is lower for most people.
I think it's both sad and quite telling that no-one seems to be considering that those extra few hours might not really be worth anything anyway, but employees who get an extra day off every couple of weeks are likely to be both better rested/more productive while at work and more loyal to the company. Businesses that have tried radically different working practices have sometimes seen counter-intuitive results, particularly when it came to working much lower hours. I'd like to see a company suck it up and have all their employees working only 9/10 Monday-Fridays over a two-week period without expecting them to turn up for an extra hour on most of those days, and see whether it made things more or less productive.
My company does it - and yes frequently we get hosed out of our day off OR have to travel on our day off.
Then, respectfully, your company doesn't do it. It's just a bad employer screwing you into doing unpaid overtime, with a different excuse for doing it.
This seems to be a very American (and Japanese) phenomenon. In Europe, it wouldn't even be legal to offer only 10 days of vacation time in many countries (possibly all of them, these days). Here in the UK, for someone working in a typical developer or sysadmin role in IT, I'd say somewhere around 25 days +/- 2 is fairly typical, plus the 8 public holidays (which is fewer than most other European countries get).
Some employers do say you lose whatever vacation allowance you don't use by the end of each year, but in reality only the kind of poor managers and die-hard workaholics who think employees who don't take vacations are more productive seem to fail to use up their allowances under these circumstances. IME, it's fairly typical for decent employers to set a cap of, say, 5 days rolling over: this avoids long-term employees building up a huge vacation allowance, but allows some flexibility and avoids everyone taking off half of December and leaving the office near-empty just to use up all their remaining leave.
It's also not as if putting labels on cigarette packets saying "smoking this is going to harm your health" encourages people to start smoking. Kids, on the other hand, are pretty much guaranteed to want products with "no, kids, it's not for you" on the label a lot more than if the label were blank. The "Parental advisory: explicit lyrics" sticker on UK CDs is pretty much a standard marketing tool for the record labels, and has been since about three seconds after some fool invented it.
"...call this premium rate number, where you will be put on hold for at least ten minutes until an operator becomes available!"
On the flipside, many of my teeth required some sort of work done on them after a course of treatment by a dubious orthodontist when I was a kid. Since then, even though dentists have always told me I have generally good oral hygiene, it seems like I have to get some filling or something replaced every few months, which is expensive and occasionally painful. I would give a lot to have real, intact teeth again, and articles like this give me some hope that one day it might even be possible. (I hear you on the root surgery thing, though: been there, done that too.)
Well, if there's one thing we learned last century, it was never to bet against the longevity of a Microsoft product so bug-ridden that no sane person would ever use it...
I bought a new machine a year or so back: Core 2 Quad, 4GB RAM, should be a textbook 64-bit machine. I run Windows XP 32-bit on it, even though it means I waste some of the RAM.
The reason is simple: lack of hardware vendor support for 64-bit drivers. It just isn't there for XP 64-bit: in just a few minutes of searching the web, I identified several moderately high-end but not exceptional components in my new system that not only weren't reliably supported on XP64 but also had vendors who openly said they never would be.
Since I had no intention of letting Vista anywhere near any box I owned, that left XP32. If Windows 7 is actually an improvement on XP in some way that is useful to me, I'll consider coughing up the cash for a 64-bit version, but until then, 32-bit it is.