sensationalists who make it seem like banks just give this stuff away.
My beef is not with banks... They are generally pretty dilligent about customer data--they've been doing this stuff for a while now. MY beef (and I believe the parent poster's beef) is a company he has never done business with acquiring, storing, and failing to secure his personal information. Certainly, we should punish the identity thieves--and severely. But the reality is that, in the case of ChoicePoint, (whom the parent poster cited as contacting him,) they simply didn't have adequate protections in place to keep somebody from pretending to be a "legitimate" buyer of personal information. (We'll leave for another day the argument that there should be no such thing as a "legitimate" sale of my personal information by anyone but me. If Choicepoint wants to PAY ME to list my personal information for their own potential profit, that is another story, of course.)
Bottom line? If ChoicePoint wasn't in the super-sleazy, ethically dubious game of gathering and selling personal information, the data that was "accidentally sold" to these inappropriate persons would never have been divulged--because they never would have had it in the first place to be ABLE To divulge it.
I don't know about you, but the way I become the mime-drummer is much more energetic than any 10,000 step walk could ever be. But I did ask myself what if the kid had a nervous tick where he bounced his knee under his desk all day? Would that cock up the computations? I'd imagine so...
...I supported a large suite of applications that collectively allowed a hospital to buy, pay for, sell to patients, and invoice for every item they used every day written in... Turbo Pascal.
Pascal was already long-since a dinosaur as far as languages went, but that was why I liked it. I'd only been out of college a couple years, and it was a huge raise from my previous job monkeying out installer code for an educational software house. Plus, it really played to my strengths: I took exactly two programming courses in college, and Pascal was both of them--not because I needed more training but because there was a semester I needed an easy "A" and I thoroughly understood and enjoyed programming in the language. If only the two law classes that prompted me to take the second pascal class had gone as well as the pascal class...
Anyway... Ahhhhh.... memories... This was, of course, another life. It is a shame that fraud at the executive level caused us all to find a new definintion pain in the stomach of the Sarlacc as we were digested over a thousand years...
Translation: I was out of work for eighteen months, and it led me to move to the admin side of the house because I'm pretty convinced it is one of the few places there will be IT work left in ten years in the United States.
Though tragic, shortsighted, and shamefully greedy, programming jobs are going overseas in droves. Our future innovations will be limited by handing India all the experience it needs to build its own technological ecomony. We learned about high-tech by doing it ourselves. While I certainly can appreciate Indias desre to improve itself, my tax dollars shouldn't be going towards achieving that end at the expense of my future employment prospects. I want to survive, maybe even thrive a little doing what I love. I still get to do something remotely resembling coding once in a while... Our help desk is home brewed... I get to maintain it with some SQL and a little PHP.
But mostly, I get to screw with computers all day, and solve somewhat complex problems. It is true, I initially started out wanting to do other stuff, but my ambitions have changed. I want to stay in IT long enough, educate myself enough, that I can get my own enterprise going, and maybe turn the outsourcing trend to my advantage.
ex NSA founded Google which harvests your private mail text to show you relevant ads.
Even though the price in dollars is "free," you pay by viewing ads on the web-page. If you don't trust Google, you shouldn't be doing business with them.
What is the difference between this and any other mail server? The message has to be parsed as part of moving it through the mail server, from the incoming SMTP into your mailbox. What is the difference if, with non-identifiable information, Google shows you ads based on what you're talking about using an automated process?
My only objection would be if they were logging the email they parsed if it contained information they found "questionable." I don't work at Google (and even if I did, I'm young, I'd be a peon and probably wouldn't know anything) but I don't believe they are going to compromise everyone's personal messages to the government, or anybody else, because they're an advertising channel. This would not be in their best financial interest.
Advertising channels that lose credibility in the eyes of consumers will become less effective and cost their owners' money.
Bottom line: Google is an advertising business. Unless you can document your NSA claims (not that somebody working at Google was in the NSA, but of some nefarious link where the NSA is spying on Gmail users,) I'm inclined to contine my present use of Gmail.
The built-in popup blocker is more rigorous than anything else I've seen and itself breaks many things (most amusingly Outlook Access for Web), but for the most part is plays fairly nice.
Agree, SP2 for XP is a neccessary evil in any pro IT shop. We're slowly rolling it out with SUS and so far I have had ONE workstation that had post-install problems. The problem was caused by spyware. After I cleaned it all off and reinstalled the service pack, she was just fine.
Moral of the story: The list of programs this breaks is nice to have, but unless you are in a situation where you can't upgrade the program that "breaks" AND you can't possibly disable the windows firewall, Service Pack two is pretty much a piece of cake.
You can't expect a vendor to support platforms the software is not designed to run on.
...And I don't. You are confusing "Actively screwing certain MS Office customers who don't pay the Microsoft OS tax" with "not supporting" a virtualization scheme. There is an enormous difference. Just because something is "not supported" doesn't mean you shouldn't have the right to do it... It just means you shouldn't expect any help when doing it that way blows up in your face. Also, don't forget that Microsoft is a convicted monopoly. The rules are different for them.
Locking out Office users that run WINE is a step designed to protect their existing monopoly, which they are not allowed to do. At this point, Office and Exchange Server are the last parts of the MS lock-in strategy... Various open groupware suites are working to break the exchange lock, and a PC preconfigured with a linux distro and WINE (and a well-educated admin) could conceivably help some companies break the Windows lock.
That Microsoft is taking such dramatic steps to lock-out Office customers who run WINE is indicative of great fear on their part. MS knows that the days of their lock-in are numbered... And once that lock-in breaks down Microsoft will truly be in the jungle... They'll actually have to become a smart, responsive company again that does things that are in their customers best interests too, not just their own.
They're just saying "don't expect to be able to use our bandwidth and download from us without being a customer first".
You don't have to run Windows to be an MS customer... Our corporate Macs all run Office 2004, but not windows. We're considered customers, though.... And I hope this article is merely incomplete, since we don't run Windows and as far as I know ActiveX controls are dodgy at best on IE for the Mac... If we can't patch our machines, we'll likely be in the market for other office suites.
A more likely explanation is that MS offers a (sort of) competing product: Virtual PC. While its true VPC has recently been made useless by intentionally limiting you to only running virtual Windows computers, it is still in the same market. If MS doesn't get "bad PRed" out of doing this, look for VMWare to be similarly targetted in the future.
...Is to make credit bureaus and data aggregators like Choicepoint liable for inappropriate data dissemination.
These companies are in a position of responsibility, but they don't seem to take it very seriously. The credit bureaus have already bribed their way into legislation that makes it your responsibility to correct errors in their data, not them. If we don't act now, they'll bribe (excuse me, I mean "make campaign donations") and get a free pass on handing out your data to the Russian mafia, too. I say make them liable for monetary damages, instead.
Institute it, and watch how fast their security improves. The attitude of: "Oh well, its not our problem" would be a thing of the past. OR somebody would sue them bankrupt. Either way, the consumer wins.
Plus, the idea of suing these bastards into bankruptcy appeals to me because of Choicepoint's role in George W. Bush's 2000 coup.
you'd find MS has a nice toold called SUS server, that will roll them out to your network for you.
While I agree it is a great tool, it needs a few tweaks to be great... Unfortunately, MS doesn't want this to be too good because SMS still costs a lot of money to buy... This is why it doesn't apply Office patches, (the one exception being the critical update for Office XP users running XP sp2) or even anything besides critical and security patches.
An install log might be a nice option too... Of course, once it has been up and running through a couple patch cycles you find it to be pretty much a cake-walk... setup would have been simpler with a log I can enable/disable when I needed to, though.
and to top off originality- an early form of Cloaking technology in a remote control Romulan vessel that uese holograms to mimic other ships
Actually, this idea was in one of the Star Trek realtime combat games from 2000-2002... A radical Klingon faction, in cooperation with the Romulans, used a similar device to forment a war. As the hero, you were required to save the day by building your experience, getting more ships, upgrading their engines, shields, weapons, and exposing the conspiracy by accomplising missions. That most of the missions revolved around smashing all-piss out of alien starships was a little one-dimensional (read: totally,) but it was kind of fun. Inch deep plot, but hey, its a shooter...
So I don't think Windows XP is much more ready for the installing novice than Ubuntu is.
...And while we're on the subject, why the hell is that? Wasn't XP supposed to know just about all the major hardware that was out when it came out? Yet every XP install I've done this (or last) year has been a PITA because the damn on-board NIC in our older Dell systems aren't included. I have downloaded and burned all four (there are four different ones!) to CD, so it isn't a problem ANY MORE, but not as simple as Mandrake.
Having a sealed case (and hense, opening it voiding any warrenty) just makes tracking that easier.
Not so fast there... This might be true for consumer electronics, but computers are different beasts.
Users have the expectation that whatever amount of money they flop out for a PC, they should be able to add parts later when their needs change. If my putting my own RAM sticks into the mini voids my warranty, that is a product I wouldn't buy. I tinker. I modify. Its part of my enjoyment of the device.
Now my mom, this is the perfect machine for her. Turn it on, no noise, few if any virus/worm problems, and it just works. And its inexpensive.
You dont have the right to drive around when you have lost your drivers license and cant prove that you are licensed (ie have no ID they can look up in a database to see if you are).
-1, Not True In All States
Some states give you a time period to present ID if you are stopped and don't have your physical license with you. In Indiana, for example, you're not cited for driving without a license if you present your valid license to the police agency that requested within a certain period (I believe its 24 hours, but I'm not sure since I've never had the problem of being stopped without my license.)
Will harm *him*, but they'll help, for instance, Oracle.
I would say any help to Oracle, Microsoft, et al, would be very short lived.
The benefit would only last until the point that somebody else had a patent on something they wanted to release. Then, their options are 1) Pay, 2) Fight patent, or 3) Abandon their costly research and make a different product.
I don't know about you, but that seems like a prerrt big harm... to me, anyway.
Um, since when did you need their permission? You're a party of the conversation you can record it all you want.
Careful with this assumption! In some states you are required to verbally indicate to the other party you are recording, and still others require an audible "beep" on the line every 8-10 seconds to remind everybody it is being recorded. This is why if you call your stock broker you hear that "Beep" in the background of your call every few seconds--because the SEC requires the brokerages to record their phone calls, and the beeps are there to comply with the laws of the states that require it.
Yup. So Apple "believes" that this is what's happening, and are suing. Unless of course, ThinkSecret can put themselves in the clear and avoid costly lawyer fees by revealing their sources.
Afraid not, friend. You should familiarize yourself with California's journalists shield law, which prevents this sort of extortion game with the first amendment.
Just bring up google and type "California journalist shield law" and have at.
Yeah. That's a very broad interpretation of the first ammendment. The first ammendment does not protect my right to "report" on music by handing out cds of pirate music, does it?
...Except, again, that endless pirated music is not newsworthy. A reporter has the right to report newsworthy information. Burning all your RIAA CDs and passing them out downtown would not be protected speech because there is no news value to benefit the public.
Nice piece of misdirection - but last time I checked, W&B didn't publish any trade secrets.
It is you who have misdirected us down this road that somehow Think Secret is bound by an NDA signed by another person. No, Woodward and Bernstein didn't publish trade secrets. The point is that they published non-classified information that was newsworthy. The same principle applies between Think Secret and Apple whether you choose to acknowledge it or not.
Ah, and now to the personal attacks. Since this doesn't actually say anything, excuse me for moving on.
Your post specifically made a strawman argument. If me pointing that out is offensive to you, stop making strawman arguments. >
You keep conflating civil and criminal law. Handy for you but inappropriate. You do realize that civil law exists, right? Also, last time I checked Apple *is* attempting to sue the leaker - and to sue Think Secret for helping the leaker and refusing to reveal his/her identity.
You do realize YOU were the one who brought up criminal law charges for this civil case? You who mentioned accessory after the fact and "dealing in stolen goods," as I recall.
You can't, on the one hand, say they're "Traffickingin stolen goods" but on the other hand accuse me conflating civil and criminal law to my advantage. Yes, I realize there's a difference. Perhaps you were only made aware of that difference after your first post, but before your second?
So you think there are no limitations to a journalists right to report, eh? So if I film you boinking your SO and I give it to a website to publish on the internet, you have no legal recourse against that site, because they are merely journalists.
I didn't say no limits. YOU, said no limits. Please stop putting words in my mouth. There are no limits that apply to this case. The limits would be if the information was not newsworthy.
It would be, for example, not newsworthy to report Steve Jobs' toilet habits. Doubtful it will affect the company, not newsworthy. It would be not newsworthy to report that the Programmers from the OS X department got loaded and wore lampshades on their heads after work last week. Again, not relevant to the company's future, not newsworthy.
A sub-$500 iMac would directly relate to the company's future. IT would put them in a position to compete for the "web-surfing and e-mail" only PC users who want to escape from the hell of ActiveX control installed spyware and viruses. This information is directly relevant to the future of the company, and thus, newsworthy. If Apple had wanted to keep it secret, they should have done a better job of not telling people about it.
It is interesting to note that Apple has recourse too... They can (and, as you rightly point out, are) going after the leaker. Good luck to them. But that has absolutely no bearing on ThinkSecret.
ThinkSecret, as a journalistic organization, has no ethical imperative to report who gave them the information. In some states, there is no legal imperative either.
Protecting anonymous sources goes directly to the heart of the free press in this country. I suggest you learn the concept of newsworthy-ness. It will help you understand why the press does the things they do. Ultimately, it is little cases like this that, if not defended vigorously, are
Re:So, do these phrases mean anything to you?
on
Apple Sues Think Secret
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· Score: 2, Insightful
How about "accessory after the fact" or "dealing in stolen property"? If Think Secret was reselling goods they bought from a thief would you insist they had done nothing wrong?
Hello oranges... Meet kumquats. (Didn't want to add to the confusion by saying "apples and oranges" in the middle of an Apple story.)
You make several points, all of them wrong:
1) Think Secret isn't "Dealing" in anything, they are journalists reporting the news. First amendment protected their right to publish--regardless of Apple's desire to keep the info private. I'm sure Nixon would've preferred Woodward and Bernstein keep their mouths shut and stop looking into things over at the Watergate, but again, the First Amendment protects their right to publish.
2) Accessory after the fact implies that the reporter at TS had some knowledge that a crime has been comitted. Yet if the info was leaked by somebody who had authorized access to the information, or if the info was left somewhere that anybody could gain access to it, there wasn't any crime. Perhaps a breach of contract on the part of the employee, but not a crime, therefore no "accessory" charge possible.
3) A reporter publishing information and somebody reselling stolen property are total polar opposites--one has nothing to do with the other. Please call a cab for your strawman--he appears to have had too much to drink.
4) Only a government can criminalize disseminating information. A private party doesn't have this option. If they give the information to somebody who hands it to the press, their only redress is with the leaker and not the reporter/newspaper.
Now, if they were suing the person who LEAKED the info for breach of a confidentiality agreement, they would have a case. But the reporter/newspaper who brings the information public is not comitting a crime, he is exercising his rights under the first amendment (and doing his job, to boot.)
Apple doesn't have a leg to stand on. Thinksecret is a news and rumours site. They are in the business of printing information that is newsworthy to their readers.
Unless ThinkSecret broke into Apple (physically or electronically) and stole the info they published, they've done nothing wrong. If Apple sues them in a state with a good reporter's shield law they might not even have to disclose who gave them the information.
Just out of curiousity, what are you going to use those PCI slots for ?
I'm thinking extra ethernet ports for running it as a poor man's (ie. Home LAN/SOHO) OS X Server. Two NICs is pretty standard on basic servers, and that makes a PCI slot very useful. Or you could use it for a card to connect fiber-channel drive arrays to make it the front for an ultimate "TiVo" based on Myth or something.
Your site is a great idea, but the volume of what is out there guarantees you'll need a search function available on the front page sooner or later. While it is easy to use now (because you just started) when your total number of packages gets longer than four or five pages per category, it will be a little hairy. A simple search function would help a lot.
Plus, down the road when you've built some "street credibility," you could do things like partner with download sites with a "Verify This Program Isn't Spyware" link that goes to your search engine... If your search doesn't return a hit, the person knows not to d/l.
Great idea, though. Now all you have to do is get the people who most need the info to click on your link.
As of five minutes ago, Demonoid was returning this for all http requests:
"Server shutdown in progress".
So they might be puking under the weight of thousands of new users an hour no longer able to access SuprNova et al... Too bad there was no warning, this could've been an (almost) smooth transition. Oh well, score one for the lawyers.
We could set our watches by the date when, six months from now, Firefox is arrested with a variety of prescription drugs and marijuana while trying to pick up a hooker that turned out to be an undercover cop.
Slashdot Mirror
My beef is not with banks... They are generally pretty dilligent about customer data--they've been doing this stuff for a while now. MY beef (and I believe the parent poster's beef) is a company he has never done business with acquiring, storing, and failing to secure his personal information. Certainly, we should punish the identity thieves--and severely. But the reality is that, in the case of ChoicePoint, (whom the parent poster cited as contacting him,) they simply didn't have adequate protections in place to keep somebody from pretending to be a "legitimate" buyer of personal information. (We'll leave for another day the argument that there should be no such thing as a "legitimate" sale of my personal information by anyone but me. If Choicepoint wants to PAY ME to list my personal information for their own potential profit, that is another story, of course.)
Bottom line? If ChoicePoint wasn't in the super-sleazy, ethically dubious game of gathering and selling personal information, the data that was "accidentally sold" to these inappropriate persons would never have been divulged--because they never would have had it in the first place to be ABLE To divulge it.
I don't know about you, but the way I become the mime-drummer is much more energetic than any 10,000 step walk could ever be. But I did ask myself what if the kid had a nervous tick where he bounced his knee under his desk all day? Would that cock up the computations? I'd imagine so...
...I supported a large suite of applications that collectively allowed a hospital to buy, pay for, sell to patients, and invoice for every item they used every day written in... Turbo Pascal.
Pascal was already long-since a dinosaur as far as languages went, but that was why I liked it. I'd only been out of college a couple years, and it was a huge raise from my previous job monkeying out installer code for an educational software house. Plus, it really played to my strengths: I took exactly two programming courses in college, and Pascal was both of them--not because I needed more training but because there was a semester I needed an easy "A" and I thoroughly understood and enjoyed programming in the language. If only the two law classes that prompted me to take the second pascal class had gone as well as the pascal class...
Anyway... Ahhhhh.... memories... This was, of course, another life. It is a shame that fraud at the executive level caused us all to find a new definintion pain in the stomach of the Sarlacc as we were digested over a thousand years...
Translation: I was out of work for eighteen months, and it led me to move to the admin side of the house because I'm pretty convinced it is one of the few places there will be IT work left in ten years in the United States.
Though tragic, shortsighted, and shamefully greedy, programming jobs are going overseas in droves. Our future innovations will be limited by handing India all the experience it needs to build its own technological ecomony. We learned about high-tech by doing it ourselves. While I certainly can appreciate Indias desre to improve itself, my tax dollars shouldn't be going towards achieving that end at the expense of my future employment prospects. I want to survive, maybe even thrive a little doing what I love. I still get to do something remotely resembling coding once in a while... Our help desk is home brewed... I get to maintain it with some SQL and a little PHP.
But mostly, I get to screw with computers all day, and solve somewhat complex problems. It is true, I initially started out wanting to do other stuff, but my ambitions have changed. I want to stay in IT long enough, educate myself enough, that I can get my own enterprise going, and maybe turn the outsourcing trend to my advantage.
Even though the price in dollars is "free," you pay by viewing ads on the web-page. If you don't trust Google, you shouldn't be doing business with them.
What is the difference between this and any other mail server? The message has to be parsed as part of moving it through the mail server, from the incoming SMTP into your mailbox. What is the difference if, with non-identifiable information, Google shows you ads based on what you're talking about using an automated process?
My only objection would be if they were logging the email they parsed if it contained information they found "questionable." I don't work at Google (and even if I did, I'm young, I'd be a peon and probably wouldn't know anything) but I don't believe they are going to compromise everyone's personal messages to the government, or anybody else, because they're an advertising channel. This would not be in their best financial interest.
Advertising channels that lose credibility in the eyes of consumers will become less effective and cost their owners' money.
Bottom line: Google is an advertising business. Unless you can document your NSA claims (not that somebody working at Google was in the NSA, but of some nefarious link where the NSA is spying on Gmail users,) I'm inclined to contine my present use of Gmail.
Show me, don't tell me.
Agree, SP2 for XP is a neccessary evil in any pro IT shop. We're slowly rolling it out with SUS and so far I have had ONE workstation that had post-install problems. The problem was caused by spyware. After I cleaned it all off and reinstalled the service pack, she was just fine.
Moral of the story: The list of programs this breaks is nice to have, but unless you are in a situation where you can't upgrade the program that "breaks" AND you can't possibly disable the windows firewall, Service Pack two is pretty much a piece of cake.
I am apparently misinformed...
Locking out Office users that run WINE is a step designed to protect their existing monopoly, which they are not allowed to do. At this point, Office and Exchange Server are the last parts of the MS lock-in strategy... Various open groupware suites are working to break the exchange lock, and a PC preconfigured with a linux distro and WINE (and a well-educated admin) could conceivably help some companies break the Windows lock.
That Microsoft is taking such dramatic steps to lock-out Office customers who run WINE is indicative of great fear on their part. MS knows that the days of their lock-in are numbered... And once that lock-in breaks down Microsoft will truly be in the jungle... They'll actually have to become a smart, responsive company again that does things that are in their customers best interests too, not just their own.
You don't have to run Windows to be an MS customer... Our corporate Macs all run Office 2004, but not windows. We're considered customers, though.... And I hope this article is merely incomplete, since we don't run Windows and as far as I know ActiveX controls are dodgy at best on IE for the Mac... If we can't patch our machines, we'll likely be in the market for other office suites.
A more likely explanation is that MS offers a (sort of) competing product: Virtual PC. While its true VPC has recently been made useless by intentionally limiting you to only running virtual Windows computers, it is still in the same market. If MS doesn't get "bad PRed" out of doing this, look for VMWare to be similarly targetted in the future.
...Is to make credit bureaus and data aggregators like Choicepoint liable for inappropriate data dissemination.
These companies are in a position of responsibility, but they don't seem to take it very seriously. The credit bureaus have already bribed their way into legislation that makes it your responsibility to correct errors in their data, not them. If we don't act now, they'll bribe (excuse me, I mean "make campaign donations") and get a free pass on handing out your data to the Russian mafia, too. I say make them liable for monetary damages, instead.
Institute it, and watch how fast their security improves. The attitude of: "Oh well, its not our problem" would be a thing of the past. OR somebody would sue them bankrupt. Either way, the consumer wins.
Plus, the idea of suing these bastards into bankruptcy appeals to me because of Choicepoint's role in George W. Bush's 2000 coup.
While I agree it is a great tool, it needs a few tweaks to be great... Unfortunately, MS doesn't want this to be too good because SMS still costs a lot of money to buy... This is why it doesn't apply Office patches, (the one exception being the critical update for Office XP users running XP sp2) or even anything besides critical and security patches.
An install log might be a nice option too... Of course, once it has been up and running through a couple patch cycles you find it to be pretty much a cake-walk... setup would have been simpler with a log I can enable/disable when I needed to, though.
Actually, this idea was in one of the Star Trek realtime combat games from 2000-2002... A radical Klingon faction, in cooperation with the Romulans, used a similar device to forment a war. As the hero, you were required to save the day by building your experience, getting more ships, upgrading their engines, shields, weapons, and exposing the conspiracy by accomplising missions. That most of the missions revolved around smashing all-piss out of alien starships was a little one-dimensional (read: totally,) but it was kind of fun. Inch deep plot, but hey, its a shooter...
Not so fast there... This might be true for consumer electronics, but computers are different beasts.
Users have the expectation that whatever amount of money they flop out for a PC, they should be able to add parts later when their needs change. If my putting my own RAM sticks into the mini voids my warranty, that is a product I wouldn't buy. I tinker. I modify. Its part of my enjoyment of the device.
Now my mom, this is the perfect machine for her. Turn it on, no noise, few if any virus/worm problems, and it just works. And its inexpensive.
-1, Not True In All States
Some states give you a time period to present ID if you are stopped and don't have your physical license with you. In Indiana, for example, you're not cited for driving without a license if you present your valid license to the police agency that requested within a certain period (I believe its 24 hours, but I'm not sure since I've never had the problem of being stopped without my license.)
I would say any help to Oracle, Microsoft, et al, would be very short lived.
The benefit would only last until the point that somebody else had a patent on something they wanted to release. Then, their options are 1) Pay, 2) Fight patent, or 3) Abandon their costly research and make a different product.
I don't know about you, but that seems like a prerrt big harm... to me, anyway.
Careful with this assumption! In some states you are required to verbally indicate to the other party you are recording, and still others require an audible "beep" on the line every 8-10 seconds to remind everybody it is being recorded. This is why if you call your stock broker you hear that "Beep" in the background of your call every few seconds--because the SEC requires the brokerages to record their phone calls, and the beeps are there to comply with the laws of the states that require it.
Afraid not, friend. You should familiarize yourself with California's journalists shield law, which prevents this sort of extortion game with the first amendment.
Just bring up google and type "California journalist shield law" and have at.
It is you who have misdirected us down this road that somehow Think Secret is bound by an NDA signed by another person. No, Woodward and Bernstein didn't publish trade secrets. The point is that they published non-classified information that was newsworthy. The same principle applies between Think Secret and Apple whether you choose to acknowledge it or not.
Your post specifically made a strawman argument. If me pointing that out is offensive to you, stop making strawman arguments.
>
You do realize YOU were the one who brought up criminal law charges for this civil case? You who mentioned accessory after the fact and "dealing in stolen goods," as I recall.
You can't, on the one hand, say they're "Traffickingin stolen goods" but on the other hand accuse me conflating civil and criminal law to my advantage. Yes, I realize there's a difference. Perhaps you were only made aware of that difference after your first post, but before your second?
I didn't say no limits. YOU, said no limits. Please stop putting words in my mouth. There are no limits that apply to this case. The limits would be if the information was not newsworthy.
It would be, for example, not newsworthy to report Steve Jobs' toilet habits. Doubtful it will affect the company, not newsworthy. It would be not newsworthy to report that the Programmers from the OS X department got loaded and wore lampshades on their heads after work last week. Again, not relevant to the company's future, not newsworthy.
A sub-$500 iMac would directly relate to the company's future. IT would put them in a position to compete for the "web-surfing and e-mail" only PC users who want to escape from the hell of ActiveX control installed spyware and viruses. This information is directly relevant to the future of the company, and thus, newsworthy. If Apple had wanted to keep it secret, they should have done a better job of not telling people about it.
It is interesting to note that Apple has recourse too... They can (and, as you rightly point out, are) going after the leaker. Good luck to them. But that has absolutely no bearing on ThinkSecret.
ThinkSecret, as a journalistic organization, has no ethical imperative to report who gave them the information. In some states, there is no legal imperative either.
Protecting anonymous sources goes directly to the heart of the free press in this country. I suggest you learn the concept of newsworthy-ness. It will help you understand why the press does the things they do. Ultimately, it is little cases like this that, if not defended vigorously, are
Hello oranges... Meet kumquats. (Didn't want to add to the confusion by saying "apples and oranges" in the middle of an Apple story.)
You make several points, all of them wrong:
1) Think Secret isn't "Dealing" in anything, they are journalists reporting the news. First amendment protected their right to publish--regardless of Apple's desire to keep the info private. I'm sure Nixon would've preferred Woodward and Bernstein keep their mouths shut and stop looking into things over at the Watergate, but again, the First Amendment protects their right to publish.
2) Accessory after the fact implies that the reporter at TS had some knowledge that a crime has been comitted. Yet if the info was leaked by somebody who had authorized access to the information, or if the info was left somewhere that anybody could gain access to it, there wasn't any crime. Perhaps a breach of contract on the part of the employee, but not a crime, therefore no "accessory" charge possible.
3) A reporter publishing information and somebody reselling stolen property are total polar opposites--one has nothing to do with the other. Please call a cab for your strawman--he appears to have had too much to drink.
4) Only a government can criminalize disseminating information. A private party doesn't have this option. If they give the information to somebody who hands it to the press, their only redress is with the leaker and not the reporter/newspaper.
Now, if they were suing the person who LEAKED the info for breach of a confidentiality agreement, they would have a case. But the reporter/newspaper who brings the information public is not comitting a crime, he is exercising his rights under the first amendment (and doing his job, to boot.)
Apple doesn't have a leg to stand on. Thinksecret is a news and rumours site. They are in the business of printing information that is newsworthy to their readers.
Unless ThinkSecret broke into Apple (physically or electronically) and stole the info they published, they've done nothing wrong. If Apple sues them in a state with a good reporter's shield law they might not even have to disclose who gave them the information.
I'm thinking extra ethernet ports for running it as a poor man's (ie. Home LAN/SOHO) OS X Server. Two NICs is pretty standard on basic servers, and that makes a PCI slot very useful. Or you could use it for a card to connect fiber-channel drive arrays to make it the front for an ultimate "TiVo" based on Myth or something.
Lots of cool things, to answer your question...
Your site is a great idea, but the volume of what is out there guarantees you'll need a search function available on the front page sooner or later. While it is easy to use now (because you just started) when your total number of packages gets longer than four or five pages per category, it will be a little hairy. A simple search function would help a lot.
Plus, down the road when you've built some "street credibility," you could do things like partner with download sites with a "Verify This Program Isn't Spyware" link that goes to your search engine... If your search doesn't return a hit, the person knows not to d/l.
Great idea, though. Now all you have to do is get the people who most need the info to click on your link.
As of five minutes ago, Demonoid was returning this for all http requests:
"Server shutdown in progress".
So they might be puking under the weight of thousands of new users an hour no longer able to access SuprNova et al... Too bad there was no warning, this could've been an (almost) smooth transition. Oh well, score one for the lawyers.
We could set our watches by the date when, six months from now, Firefox is arrested with a variety of prescription drugs and marijuana while trying to pick up a hooker that turned out to be an undercover cop.
...Doesn't have a secondary MX declared, or what?
Not a very robust setup...