Are you honestly claiming that taking off your clothes in front of a web cam is indistinguishable from someone forcing you to have sex with them? I would be willing to bet that if you polled those women a significant percentage of them would not believe it is the same as rape and would not want to see the guy get life in prison for seeing them naked. As far as the so called blackmail they should have just told the guy to fuck off. That's what I would advocate to a female friend. I mean, who gives a shit if a nude photo gets posted somewhere? It doesn't mean anything. There isn't anything wrong with nudity. We're animals. That is what we look like. The whole thing is ridiculous. Getting a nude photo posted isn't going to ruin anyone's life. Nor is it a serious crime in any way. The whole thing is laughable. In a civilized society this would maybe result in some lawsuits, although even that is a stretch IMO.
But let's not say that just because it wasn't murder, it doesn't deserve a harsher sentence than murder.
Why not? That is exactly what I would say. I would go further and advocate that a punishment must be reasonable and fit the crime. The crimes this guy allegedly committed are minor in my view. If I were one of these women I sure as hell wouldn't want to see the guy get life in prison.
(we're talking serious crimes here, not the 'steal a thousand songs be a thousand times guilty' crap that record labels are pulling)
After what you just wrote you have absolutely no leg to stand on here. How do you define a crime as 'serious'? I dont' think this guy's crimes were serious at all. He just caused a bit of embarrassment for some women who were overly trusting. I have a high speed connection. I could upload a thousand songs an hour with enough seeds. What if I uploaded a million songs? Should I be hanged? Because that's where this is heading.
So if I steal 1000 candy bars from 1000 drugstores does that mean I should be executed? How about a habitual j-walker? I guess I should be impressed with your humanity that you aren't also advocating torture. Americans in general are such enthusiastic executioners. I'm sure the introduction of death via torture would be even more popular and put smiles on so many faces.
Here's a hint. Start at mass murder or genocide. Work your way down to murder. Then manslaughter. Then rape. But here's the thing. Work your way down from the mass murderer. Not up.
What makes you think charges with up to 105 years in prison will result in a 1 year plea bargain? Are you a lawyer? I think it would be more reasonable to assume that the prosecutor will offer something like 20 years. Incidentally the prosecutor doesn't have to offer anything at all. If they feel the evidence is strong enough they may not offer anything or they might offer something like 40 years without possibility of parole. My understanding is that the really good bargains are only offered for weak cases. The evidence in this case doesn't sound weak. There are too many witnesses.
Your point? None of those things warrant a life sentence. Maybe a year at most, but it would be more appropriate just to fine him and get him to pay restitution to his 'victims' (and I use that term loosely). The US justice system is insane. It's all just bloodlust and the old thrill of watching a hanging. It certainly isn't justice.
Tell that to the US military or go on TPB and watch the flood of information that has freed itself. Information does want to be free and there is nothing that you or anyone else can do about it. And, yes, it is okay. It's just the way the world works.
Pinning Swartz' suicide on overzealous prosecutors is as fair as pinning Jacintha Saldanha's suicide [dailymail.co.uk] on the radio hosts. It may be a contributing factor, but not the only one.
Contributing factor? I'll take that. Probably a major contributing factor. If he had had a choice to avoid prison he almost certainly wouldn't have killed himself. If you don't kill yourself when you are facing 35 years in prison, well, then you probably never will. I see it as pretty similar to killing yourself when you have untreatable cancer.
You don't attempt suicide (successfully or otherwise) if you're not mentally ill, be it temporary, short term, long term or chronic.
Bullshit. People kill themselves for many reasons. If it's a dumb reason I might agree. This was definitely not a dumb reason. Was the guy depressed and unhappy in general? Probably. Lots of people are.
Even if he were 'mentally ill' in some way, by some definition, it doesn't change the fact that Ortiz pushed him over the edge. His death can be directly attributable to her actions.
It would be one thing if he deserved to die for what he did. Like if he had raped and murdered a family or something. But all he did was put a laptop in a closet and download some files that should have been freely available anyway, which was kind of the whole point. Technically his major crime was violating a ToS, which I think a lot of us don't believe should even be a crime in any circumstance.
Well he really only had two choices. One was to flee to a country without an extradition treaty. The other was to kill himself. He must have had his own reasons for choosing the latter without even trying to flee from this giant prison of a country. Probably because he was already unhappy and didn't think he would be happy as a fugitive for the rest of his life. For some people prison simply is not an option. Death is preferable. I certainly would choose death over even a year in prison. Let alone 5-35 years. Death is a no-brainer in that situation.
Nowhere does it mention anything about using a fictitious name. I couldn't help but notice that it also mentions intent. The intent to defraud or obtain money or property. That was clearly not the case. The charge is absurd. However the charge against Miss Ortiz for malicious prosecution would not be absurd. She knew very well that Swartz was not guilty of even half of what she charged him with. She had political ambitions and Swartz was nothing more than a bug to squash. She is a sociopath and a bad person. Frankly she belongs in prison.
IIRC, the burden of proof lies with the prosecution. If *they* were to start stacking up charges, I'd say let them!
Talk is cheap. Let's see how you feel when those stacked up charges could result in you spending the rest of your life in prison based on the opinions of 6-12 strangers you know nothing about and whom the prosecutor has had a chance to dismiss for being too sympathetic to 'innocent-until-proven-guilty" and "cops sometimes lie". Your innocence and their lack of evidence will not necessarily keep you out of prison.
You are the one who suggested that if a person is innocent then they have nothing to worry about. It is such a ridiculous thing to say I was trying to decide if my sarcasm detector was faulty. So, yes, I do agree that no system is perfect and that our system is very, very far from perfect. Therefore innocent people definitely have a lot to worry about when they are accused. I know this very well as I was one of them.
In my view the Swartz case has more to do with ambitious, unethical, sociopathic, overcharging prosecutors than it does with some fundamental flaw in our so called justice system. Our justice system is definitely unjust, but the problem in this case is human and it stinks. In my view Ortis is far more guilty of a serious crime than Swartz. The problem isn't plea bargains per se. It is what unethical prosecutors are willing to do in order to negotiate more favorable (for them) plea bargains that is the problem. Prosecutors with no sense of right or wrong themselves are the problem.
Not that the prosecutors are the only ones to blame. It is also the public, the potential juror pool, who so desperately want to believe in the fairness of the justice system that they want to convict anyone accused just because they have been accused. My lack of faith in my 'peers' was one of the reasons I took a plea bargain despite both my innocence and the lack of evidence against me. People pay lip service to innocent until proven guilty only until they make it to a jury. Then they worry more about the possibility of allowing a potentially guilty person go free. After all if he hadn't done anything wrong why would the police say he did? Surely the police would never lie. That sort of thing. I see ample evidence of such people here on slashdot.
The part you may be missing is that prosecutors intentionally go for charges as serious and scary as possible which they know they are unlikely to win in a jury trial for the sole purpose of intimidating the accused into a plea bargain. The problem is when innocent people plead guilty to a crime they haven't committed in order to avoid the possibility of being found guilty of everything they are accused of by a simple minded, 'where there is smoke there is fire' jury or an all to common "if a cop says it it must be true" judge.
Prosecutors have nothing to lose and everything to gain (assuming they are soiciopaths without a conscience of course) by throwing everything imaginable at you. They can always drop the more ridiculous charges later if they are afraid of looking silly to the trial judge or whatever. They can choose to let the jury decide whether j-walking is actually a form of attempted murder or whether it was really possible that you emotionally injured the 30 policed officers by hitting their nightsticks with your head and getting your blood all over their uniforms. No one thinks much of the juror pool. Especially after voir dire. So anything is possible.
The one thing missed is that if the defendant is really innocent it does not matter what sentence he is threatened with as it will never be imposed.
Huh?! Not sure if you are serious or not, but this is certainly not the case. Somehow I'm guessing you've never been anywhere near the American injustice system. Fair it is not and attorneys are often the first ones to admit that. Even prosecutors admit it.
As has already been pointed out, the submitter doesn't seem to understand the bittorrent protocol. Three minutes with google would have sufficed for such understanding.
The scheme is not fundamentally different from Tor or I2p or ANts P2P in concept. The reason Tor/I2p/ANtsP2P BT swarms have not caught on and become dominant already is not because no one has bothered to write such an application or because they do not provide sufficient plausible deniability, but because all such schemes are inherently slow. Generally orders of magnitude slower.
For me and probably for many others the herd itself is sufficient defense against the copyright cartels. Those unlucky few at the edge of the herd will be taken, but the vast majority of the herd will go on torrenting. Since herd protection seems adequate for most people, any anonymizing swarm system will have to be sufficiently fast as to be able to at least compete with the swarms relying only on herd protection.
In order for that to have any chance of happening you would want to be able to match the upload and download bandwidth of every peer in a given chain as much as possible. All it takes is one dialup or badly asymmetric DSL peer to essentially sever the chain. Perhaps a small test file could be downloaded from each peer in the chain before assembling it. These speed tests would obviously introduce even more overhead, but I see them as a necessary first step in creating a usable anonymizing network. Another useful idea might be to be certain that at least one peer in every chain is outside the borders of the US before sending any data along it. Of course the best protection is an offshore VPN.
If North Korea is not a threat then surely China wouldn't be either. Admittedly the Chinese seem to hold a grudge for a very long time over the Nanking Massacre, but I cannot imagine them attacking Japan.
I started working at around the age of 10, but no one was forcing me. I had saved up several thousand dollars by the age of 13. I could work as much or as little as I wanted, and I was able to keep the money. As long as the child has the freedom to refuse and is allowed to keep the money for themselves (if they want) I actually think forbidding child labor is what is wrong. Like adults, children tend to be happier when allowed to do what they want to do. If they want to do some useful work to buy themselves stuff (i.e. food) and learn about the real world at a young age I don't see anything wrong with it. I think some of you are forgetting what it is actually like to be a kid. Either that or you don't want kids stealing your job.
In this example I would just want to make sure that working is not something that the parents are forcing on the child. When I lived in Asia there was a small family owned Chinese restaurant that I went to most days. The owner's little girl, a tween, often took orders and accepted payment. She was a cute little thing and perfectly capable of those tasks. As long as she wasn't being forced I don't see anything wrong with it.
Ah. Sometimes denial of service attacks are a good thing then. Locking away pure information in such a way that only rich people from rich countries can view them is so not the way for science to move forward.
Interesting analysis. So basically for a small retailer cash is king. For any transaction more than a few dollars debit cards are the next best. Credit cards suck for any large purchase and Amex sucks the most.
I have an Amex cc. Not the charge card, but an actual credit card which is currently maxed out. What I like about the card is it offers the best extended warranty protection I've heard of. Great for purchasing hard drives. And they are known for siding with the customer in disputes. Maybe not as much as Paypal, but a lot. Yet another reason for you to not accept them I guess. Now I get why Amex is not accepted as much as Visa/MC.
You forgot about my favorite one: the 'courtesy' fee. I guess that must be a fee for their politeness. It would be nice if I could skip the courtesy fee and just deal with rude employees instead.
I'm more than a bit surprised the same system doesn't exist in the US, but then banking is one of the few industries in the UK where we do get generally top class service.
But with chip and pin don't the banks over there hold you responsible for fraudulent transactions? That would scare me enough that I probably would only use cash locally and only temporary credit card numbers online. Although I guess the pin number would make online fraud a lot less common.
Over here across the Atlantic, most of the big stores don't charge for using credit cards anyway. Smaller shops and pub normally have a minimum amount before paying by card, and only a few places charge a credit card fee.
Same situation on this side of the Atlantic. That's what this news story was about. A possible, albeit somewhat unlikely, change to the current situation.
Sort of a mutually assured destruction strategy then? You are wasting as much of your time as you are of theirs. For this reason I don't see that strategy really catching on. For stores that price cc transactions higher people will decide on whether the extra charge is worth the extra convenience/security. Basically rich people won't care. Poor people like me will go out of their way to make sure we have cash for such stores. Well I won't be able to because I don't live in a state that allows it.
Also the highest speed limits, no sobriety checkpoints, reasonable gun laws, best no-alimony divorce laws (by far the best state to live if you are male and married), and good bbq and (presumably) Mexican food. I've never lived in Texas, but it does have some nice features.
OTOH Texas has a 6.25% sales tax and property taxes. It also has more permanent border patrol checkpoints than any other state and Homeland Security's 100 mile constitution free zone. And it's too hot and people talk funny.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you honestly claiming that taking off your clothes in front of a web cam is indistinguishable from someone forcing you to have sex with them? I would be willing to bet that if you polled those women a significant percentage of them would not believe it is the same as rape and would not want to see the guy get life in prison for seeing them naked. As far as the so called blackmail they should have just told the guy to fuck off. That's what I would advocate to a female friend. I mean, who gives a shit if a nude photo gets posted somewhere? It doesn't mean anything. There isn't anything wrong with nudity. We're animals. That is what we look like. The whole thing is ridiculous. Getting a nude photo posted isn't going to ruin anyone's life. Nor is it a serious crime in any way. The whole thing is laughable. In a civilized society this would maybe result in some lawsuits, although even that is a stretch IMO.
But let's not say that just because it wasn't murder, it doesn't deserve a harsher sentence than murder.
Why not? That is exactly what I would say. I would go further and advocate that a punishment must be reasonable and fit the crime. The crimes this guy allegedly committed are minor in my view. If I were one of these women I sure as hell wouldn't want to see the guy get life in prison.
(we're talking serious crimes here, not the 'steal a thousand songs be a thousand times guilty' crap that record labels are pulling)
After what you just wrote you have absolutely no leg to stand on here. How do you define a crime as 'serious'? I dont' think this guy's crimes were serious at all. He just caused a bit of embarrassment for some women who were overly trusting. I have a high speed connection. I could upload a thousand songs an hour with enough seeds. What if I uploaded a million songs? Should I be hanged? Because that's where this is heading.
So if I steal 1000 candy bars from 1000 drugstores does that mean I should be executed? How about a habitual j-walker? I guess I should be impressed with your humanity that you aren't also advocating torture. Americans in general are such enthusiastic executioners. I'm sure the introduction of death via torture would be even more popular and put smiles on so many faces.
Here's a hint. Start at mass murder or genocide. Work your way down to murder. Then manslaughter. Then rape. But here's the thing. Work your way down from the mass murderer. Not up.
Although 20 years seems relatively mild
Are you insane?! I'd prefer death to even a year or two in prison let alone 20 years. 20 years may as well be life as far as I'm concerned.
What makes you think charges with up to 105 years in prison will result in a 1 year plea bargain? Are you a lawyer? I think it would be more reasonable to assume that the prosecutor will offer something like 20 years. Incidentally the prosecutor doesn't have to offer anything at all. If they feel the evidence is strong enough they may not offer anything or they might offer something like 40 years without possibility of parole. My understanding is that the really good bargains are only offered for weak cases. The evidence in this case doesn't sound weak. There are too many witnesses.
Your point? None of those things warrant a life sentence. Maybe a year at most, but it would be more appropriate just to fine him and get him to pay restitution to his 'victims' (and I use that term loosely). The US justice system is insane. It's all just bloodlust and the old thrill of watching a hanging. It certainly isn't justice.
Information doesn't "want" to be free
Tell that to the US military or go on TPB and watch the flood of information that has freed itself. Information does want to be free and there is nothing that you or anyone else can do about it. And, yes, it is okay. It's just the way the world works.
Pinning Swartz' suicide on overzealous prosecutors is as fair as pinning Jacintha Saldanha's suicide [dailymail.co.uk] on the radio hosts. It may be a contributing factor, but not the only one.
Contributing factor? I'll take that. Probably a major contributing factor. If he had had a choice to avoid prison he almost certainly wouldn't have killed himself. If you don't kill yourself when you are facing 35 years in prison, well, then you probably never will. I see it as pretty similar to killing yourself when you have untreatable cancer.
You don't attempt suicide (successfully or otherwise) if you're not mentally ill, be it temporary, short term, long term or chronic.
Bullshit. People kill themselves for many reasons. If it's a dumb reason I might agree. This was definitely not a dumb reason. Was the guy depressed and unhappy in general? Probably. Lots of people are.
Even if he were 'mentally ill' in some way, by some definition, it doesn't change the fact that Ortiz pushed him over the edge. His death can be directly attributable to her actions.
It would be one thing if he deserved to die for what he did. Like if he had raped and murdered a family or something. But all he did was put a laptop in a closet and download some files that should have been freely available anyway, which was kind of the whole point. Technically his major crime was violating a ToS, which I think a lot of us don't believe should even be a crime in any circumstance.
Well he really only had two choices. One was to flee to a country without an extradition treaty. The other was to kill himself. He must have had his own reasons for choosing the latter without even trying to flee from this giant prison of a country. Probably because he was already unhappy and didn't think he would be happy as a fugitive for the rest of his life. For some people prison simply is not an option. Death is preferable. I certainly would choose death over even a year in prison. Let alone 5-35 years. Death is a no-brainer in that situation.
Nowhere does it mention anything about using a fictitious name. I couldn't help but notice that it also mentions intent. The intent to defraud or obtain money or property. That was clearly not the case. The charge is absurd. However the charge against Miss Ortiz for malicious prosecution would not be absurd. She knew very well that Swartz was not guilty of even half of what she charged him with. She had political ambitions and Swartz was nothing more than a bug to squash. She is a sociopath and a bad person. Frankly she belongs in prison.
IIRC, the burden of proof lies with the prosecution. If *they* were to start stacking up charges, I'd say let them!
Talk is cheap. Let's see how you feel when those stacked up charges could result in you spending the rest of your life in prison based on the opinions of 6-12 strangers you know nothing about and whom the prosecutor has had a chance to dismiss for being too sympathetic to 'innocent-until-proven-guilty" and "cops sometimes lie". Your innocence and their lack of evidence will not necessarily keep you out of prison.
You are the one who suggested that if a person is innocent then they have nothing to worry about. It is such a ridiculous thing to say I was trying to decide if my sarcasm detector was faulty. So, yes, I do agree that no system is perfect and that our system is very, very far from perfect. Therefore innocent people definitely have a lot to worry about when they are accused. I know this very well as I was one of them.
In my view the Swartz case has more to do with ambitious, unethical, sociopathic, overcharging prosecutors than it does with some fundamental flaw in our so called justice system. Our justice system is definitely unjust, but the problem in this case is human and it stinks. In my view Ortis is far more guilty of a serious crime than Swartz. The problem isn't plea bargains per se. It is what unethical prosecutors are willing to do in order to negotiate more favorable (for them) plea bargains that is the problem. Prosecutors with no sense of right or wrong themselves are the problem.
Not that the prosecutors are the only ones to blame. It is also the public, the potential juror pool, who so desperately want to believe in the fairness of the justice system that they want to convict anyone accused just because they have been accused. My lack of faith in my 'peers' was one of the reasons I took a plea bargain despite both my innocence and the lack of evidence against me. People pay lip service to innocent until proven guilty only until they make it to a jury. Then they worry more about the possibility of allowing a potentially guilty person go free. After all if he hadn't done anything wrong why would the police say he did? Surely the police would never lie. That sort of thing. I see ample evidence of such people here on slashdot.
The part you may be missing is that prosecutors intentionally go for charges as serious and scary as possible which they know they are unlikely to win in a jury trial for the sole purpose of intimidating the accused into a plea bargain. The problem is when innocent people plead guilty to a crime they haven't committed in order to avoid the possibility of being found guilty of everything they are accused of by a simple minded, 'where there is smoke there is fire' jury or an all to common "if a cop says it it must be true" judge.
Prosecutors have nothing to lose and everything to gain (assuming they are soiciopaths without a conscience of course) by throwing everything imaginable at you. They can always drop the more ridiculous charges later if they are afraid of looking silly to the trial judge or whatever. They can choose to let the jury decide whether j-walking is actually a form of attempted murder or whether it was really possible that you emotionally injured the 30 policed officers by hitting their nightsticks with your head and getting your blood all over their uniforms. No one thinks much of the juror pool. Especially after voir dire. So anything is possible.
The one thing missed is that if the defendant is really innocent it does not matter what sentence he is threatened with as it will never be imposed.
Huh?! Not sure if you are serious or not, but this is certainly not the case. Somehow I'm guessing you've never been anywhere near the American injustice system. Fair it is not and attorneys are often the first ones to admit that. Even prosecutors admit it.
As has already been pointed out, the submitter doesn't seem to understand the bittorrent protocol. Three minutes with google would have sufficed for such understanding.
The scheme is not fundamentally different from Tor or I2p or ANts P2P in concept. The reason Tor/I2p/ANtsP2P BT swarms have not caught on and become dominant already is not because no one has bothered to write such an application or because they do not provide sufficient plausible deniability, but because all such schemes are inherently slow. Generally orders of magnitude slower.
For me and probably for many others the herd itself is sufficient defense against the copyright cartels. Those unlucky few at the edge of the herd will be taken, but the vast majority of the herd will go on torrenting. Since herd protection seems adequate for most people, any anonymizing swarm system will have to be sufficiently fast as to be able to at least compete with the swarms relying only on herd protection.
In order for that to have any chance of happening you would want to be able to match the upload and download bandwidth of every peer in a given chain as much as possible. All it takes is one dialup or badly asymmetric DSL peer to essentially sever the chain. Perhaps a small test file could be downloaded from each peer in the chain before assembling it. These speed tests would obviously introduce even more overhead, but I see them as a necessary first step in creating a usable anonymizing network. Another useful idea might be to be certain that at least one peer in every chain is outside the borders of the US before sending any data along it. Of course the best protection is an offshore VPN.
If North Korea is not a threat then surely China wouldn't be either. Admittedly the Chinese seem to hold a grudge for a very long time over the Nanking Massacre, but I cannot imagine them attacking Japan.
I started working at around the age of 10, but no one was forcing me. I had saved up several thousand dollars by the age of 13. I could work as much or as little as I wanted, and I was able to keep the money. As long as the child has the freedom to refuse and is allowed to keep the money for themselves (if they want) I actually think forbidding child labor is what is wrong. Like adults, children tend to be happier when allowed to do what they want to do. If they want to do some useful work to buy themselves stuff (i.e. food) and learn about the real world at a young age I don't see anything wrong with it. I think some of you are forgetting what it is actually like to be a kid. Either that or you don't want kids stealing your job.
In this example I would just want to make sure that working is not something that the parents are forcing on the child. When I lived in Asia there was a small family owned Chinese restaurant that I went to most days. The owner's little girl, a tween, often took orders and accepted payment. She was a cute little thing and perfectly capable of those tasks. As long as she wasn't being forced I don't see anything wrong with it.
Ah. Sometimes denial of service attacks are a good thing then. Locking away pure information in such a way that only rich people from rich countries can view them is so not the way for science to move forward.
Interesting analysis. So basically for a small retailer cash is king. For any transaction more than a few dollars debit cards are the next best. Credit cards suck for any large purchase and Amex sucks the most.
I have an Amex cc. Not the charge card, but an actual credit card which is currently maxed out. What I like about the card is it offers the best extended warranty protection I've heard of. Great for purchasing hard drives. And they are known for siding with the customer in disputes. Maybe not as much as Paypal, but a lot. Yet another reason for you to not accept them I guess. Now I get why Amex is not accepted as much as Visa/MC.
You forgot about my favorite one: the 'courtesy' fee. I guess that must be a fee for their politeness. It would be nice if I could skip the courtesy fee and just deal with rude employees instead.
I'm more than a bit surprised the same system doesn't exist in the US, but then banking is one of the few industries in the UK where we do get generally top class service.
But with chip and pin don't the banks over there hold you responsible for fraudulent transactions? That would scare me enough that I probably would only use cash locally and only temporary credit card numbers online. Although I guess the pin number would make online fraud a lot less common.
Over here across the Atlantic, most of the big stores don't charge for using credit cards anyway. Smaller shops and pub normally have a minimum amount before paying by card, and only a few places charge a credit card fee.
Same situation on this side of the Atlantic. That's what this news story was about. A possible, albeit somewhat unlikely, change to the current situation.
Sort of a mutually assured destruction strategy then? You are wasting as much of your time as you are of theirs. For this reason I don't see that strategy really catching on. For stores that price cc transactions higher people will decide on whether the extra charge is worth the extra convenience/security. Basically rich people won't care. Poor people like me will go out of their way to make sure we have cash for such stores. Well I won't be able to because I don't live in a state that allows it.
Also the highest speed limits, no sobriety checkpoints, reasonable gun laws, best no-alimony divorce laws (by far the best state to live if you are male and married), and good bbq and (presumably) Mexican food. I've never lived in Texas, but it does have some nice features.
OTOH Texas has a 6.25% sales tax and property taxes. It also has more permanent border patrol checkpoints than any other state and Homeland Security's 100 mile constitution free zone. And it's too hot and people talk funny.