None of that seems to explain though why the trolls win in this lower court so often? Especially in stupid cases like this where on appeals all the judges are looking at each other like "HOW did this possibly make it to us? no. just NO. Now go away."
If it all came down to "they have the time to deal with it and have the most experience", you'd expect better and more consistent judgements. Or are some of the defendants just doing stupid things? (I can't imagine Apple/IBM/MS sending incompetent lawyers to a patent trial)
From someone that manages computers, not being able to do things like set the default homepage would be a problem for me. Windows admins can change things like this using Group Policy. That doesn't "use the gui" but I bet it still works with chrome.
I'm curious to know why the east district of texas has gotten this notorious for being a patent troll's best friend? Not the statistics, we've seen the statistics. I want to know why it keeps happening?
My first kneejerk expectation is that money is somehow at work here. Are there kickbacks? Are the trolls paying someone upfront (and/or under the table) that's in a position of power? Or are they funneling money into the TX court systems somehow? Keeping an otherwise very unnecessarily large panel of judges employed? Have some sort of strong patent troll lobby or PAC in TX? Comedically high filing fees for these cases? What's the angle here?
And after that's sorted... is there anything the feds can do about this? I'd imagine the US Court of Appeals is just as tired of this BS as we are - moreso probably. They're systematically wasting the appeals court's time. Can they do anything to stop it? Somehow sanction judges? Mess with their funding somehow in an effective way? Affect their decisions or their power somehow? Get these (elected?) judges impeached or at least start some formal inquiries that could lead to impeachment? "Send a message" somehow? (but messages do little good if you have no teeth and they know it)
Or are there some folks down sahth that just enjoy being a spectacle and are hamming it up for all all the media attention they keep getting every time this happens?
Apple's iChat uses (used?) OSCAR/AIM for chat and initiating video conferencing. I'm not sure if that's still the case, as they've been through several major changes more recently. (to messages and facetime apps)
There's a difference here between criminal and civil action. There's a fairly good chance she's going to sue him in civil court, (and settle for doctor bills, time off work, maybe some pain and suffering compensation etc) and that alone could be quite punishing. Don't think of this criminal sentence as the retribution for the crime, that will come later.
This is all about the criminal case. Try to keep in mind it is supposed to weigh things like criminal intent, deliberate as well as actual negligence with respect to the public, etc. There certainly was negligence here, but is the punishment appropriate?
If I'm riding my bicycle down the sidewalk (which is illegal in this city btw, you're supposed to keep to the streets to avoid hitting peds) and I am talking with my friend behind me and don't see that ped on the sidewalk and run into them, knock them down, I'm likely to do more damage to them than most drones. Maybe I even give the 'ol gal a mild concussion when she hits the sidewalk. There was no criminal intent, I didn't intend to be negligent but in the end I was. (and in this case I was even breaking a law, which here is used primarily simply to make the collision undeniably my fault, rather than to ticket or arrest me) Now, in addition to any civil case she may file against me, do I deserve a month in jail?
I think his chances on appeal are quite justified, and quite good. That judge needs some perspective rather than a knee-jerk response. He will probably get his sentence replaced with some sort of citation, pay a $350 ticket or so for some related offense. And that makes a heck of a lot more sense than jail time. (I'm assuming this is his first offense - obviously jail time starts becoming appropriate on repeat offenders in cases like this)
" from a guy in a white coat and the entire backdrop is full of cops."
such amazing bullshit.
the sentry hotline phones into dispatch through the normal channels which then goes to the person(s) assigned at that time and turns into a call to squad cars in the area to investigate at their discretion.
source: i worked dispatch for 7 years.
No this was actually what happened. She was stunned that there were cops everywhere, wondering why her alarm company didn't call her. (she'd forgotten / dumbthumbed the code a few times and had been called at least a few times in the past) "they don't call when you put in your DURESS code".. "oh, ok, that makes sense."
If that's not how it works in your neck of the woods, *shrug*. That's what happened here and everyone seemed to agree it was SOP. The purpose of the duress code is "someone has a gun to your head and is making you punch in the code to turn off the alarm. Go in soft but heavy, treat it as a hostage situation."
1. Duress codes are a dumb idea that sounds cool. Why ? By definition you almost never use them.
Let me just throw out a few other "dumb ideas" you almost never use... Airbags. Fire Extinguishers. Life insurance. Parachutes. Seatbelts. Fire Departments. Just because they're an extreme response and you don't use them very often doesn't make them a "dumb idea".
Home alarm systems don't have them any more for a reason.
Friend of mine proved you wrong last year. His wife got home after a craaazy day at work and put in the wrong PIN on her home alarm. 15 minutes later there's a knock on the door from a guy in a white coat and the entire backdrop is full of cops. "What is this? I disarmed my alarm?" "yes, m'am but you used the *duress code* to do it." "oh..." So a bunch of boys in blue came in and swept the entire house while she was outside talking with the cops. Yes there will be false alarms, but the feature serves a function. They had that option enabled because someone they knew a few years back had been forced to disarm their car alarm at knifepoint so they knew the risk was real.
2. On iPhone if you use TouchID, it's 4 taps to "erase all contents and settings". Any duress code would be longer to enter than that.
At first I thought you meant "four taps on the home button" but I don't find that feature anywhere. (link?) If you mean going into settings to erase it, I'm pretty sure any competent LEA will grab the phone out of your hands the instant they see you've finished unlocking the phone. You don't just leave volatile evidence in the hands of a suspect to meddle with before confiscating it. If you have touch id, they can actually use the federally-allowed fingerprints they took from you when you were booked to create a silicon finger and use THAT to unlock the phone, you never get near it again to nuke it. (and yes, there's been at least one documented case of that being done) I'd much rather have two fingers that unlock it and eight that nuke it, let them play routlette if they're feeling froggy. And there's no way a 4 digit nuke code takes any longer to enter than a 4 digit unlock code??
If you have your phone synced with your computer or cloud, if you accidentally erase it you can restore it from there. If they're THAT aggressively pursuing you that they will get search warrants for your house or cloud data, okay, you can have it. I think this discussion is more aimed at discouraging "fishing expeditions" of "We have just barely enough evidence to arrest them and take them to jail for an hour, lets see if we can find anything on their phone that will convince a judge to give us some search warrants..." To me anyway this is more about curbing illegal search and seizure than it is about trying to bypass the lawful search warrant process.
You made a mistake in your math there. For the most part, criminals in the US only have guns because they are so widely available legally.
The fallacy here is that "criminals only obtain guns legally". They're criminals, and surprise! they don't mind breaking the law to get something that makes their "job" more successful and lowers their odds of being caught.
Restricting access to guns affects law-abiding citizens a lot more than criminals. You end up with an imbalance like in Chicago, where many criminals have guns and very few citizens do. That's the worst-case scenario for the citizen, for more than one reason. A survey of inmates jailed for B&E ("breaking and entering") reported their number one concern was "homeowner with gun". It's a credible, powerful, proven deterrent. In the endgame, a criminal would MUCH rather stare down the barrel of a gun held by a law enforcement officer than their victim, because the victim is much more likely to actually pull the trigger. Officers have restraint and training, try to justify their actions, and know what they can legally do or not do. Joe public is rattled and twitchy in that situation and often shoots even unarmed burglars because they're focused exclusively on their own personal safety. We can debate the legality of the citizen with the gun later, the point is it's a serious deterrent for the criminals.
Criminals in Chicago have a much lower risk of encountering a homeowner with a gun, and if you're the only one with a gun in a gunfight, you generally come out way ahead. Chicago is THE place to rob people right now, because they're unlikely to be able to defend themselves if you have a gun - your risk as a criminal is very low. And if your argument is that gun control limits the guns in circulation, no it does not. Every time the government tries to dial up control, there's a run at the gun stores. Lately they've been trying the other angle of limiting the availability of ammunition. That's resulted in popular ammunition FLYING off the shelves every time a store gets their allotment in. It's too late to restrict availability, there's too much already in circulation and trying to tighten the belt just leads to more panic hoarding.
TL;DR: "Make guns illegal, and only ones left with guns will be the criminals." (both by definition, and in practice)
Reminds me of a recent incident. I've had so many problems here that I keep a motion-activated wildlife cam trained on my mailbox 24/7. Got an email while at work, "package delivered, left at side door".
Get home. No package. Check camera. Postman never even stopped at my mailbox let alone my door.
Called USPS 800#. "Sorry sir the carrier logged your package as delivered, so that means it absolutely WAS left at your house, it must have been stolen, you need to contact your local police to report a stolen package." No amount of arguing would move them from this position.
Dug up the phone number of the local postmaster and talked with him the next day from work. No, the carrier never even stopped at my house. He'll call me back. Got a call an hour later. He personally took the carrier with him in his car to my house. Carrier looked at my side door and thankfully says "I remember delivering that package, but that doesn't look like the door I left it at". Postmaster is familiar with this problem, it probably means he left it at my house number on some other street on his route.
So they spend the next half hour checking adjacent blocks houses for my address number. Finally found it half a mile away, thankfully still leaning against the house by the door. My package was waiting for me at the depot when I got off work.
I got my package ONLY because the postmaster went above and beyond at his job, while everyone else around him was going full retard at their jobs. This is a system where if something goes wrong, you have to pray for a miracle, because it's rigged to "not be their problem". If the carrier logs it "delivered", you're screwed. That's gospel and they won't lift a finger, the burden of proof is left with you. In this case, if the owner of that house had taken in the package, that'd be it, I lose.
After lengthy discussion with my postmaster, I now have standing orders with the post office, "leave no unattended packages at this address" order is posted in dayglow yellow (LAMINATED even!) by the bundle box for my block at the post office. It's literally the only defense I have left to exercise. About 50% of my packages (I get a lot) are still left at my house. But next time one disappears, I will be back with "I don't care if they marked it 'delivered', it wasn't SUPPOSED to be delivered. It's YOUR screw-up, now go find it." The ball stays in their court until it's physically in my hands now.
Oh and for all the "don't ship with USPS!", yeah that works great if you're the sender. Not all sellers offer options. In the above lost package issue, I had no choice. It would definitely not have been my first pick!
I have been to the USA often and have friends there. The one thing I know is you can not have a rational discussion with them about gun control. They genuinely believe that the right to bear arms is a good thing and the deaths that result, while tragic, are the price of freedom.
Please try to keep in mind that you, or your culture, don't get the privilege of defining what is "rational" for the whole world, or specifically in someone else's culture. "Rational" is defined by the culture it is being considered within.
the right to bear arms is a good thing and the deaths that result, while tragic, are the price of freedom.
I strongly agree with that, as does a large percentage of the american people. It was an early amendment to the constitution and is still there because it's a strong belief within our culture.
The basic principle at work here is "You have a default right to do whatever you want to do. But there are laws that place restrictions on cases where your right to this freedom infringes unfairly on someone else's right of freedom." We try not to make things illegal "just because we don't like them". When we do, those laws are often struck down later. (prohibition, women's suffrage, slavery, etc) We still have some dumb laws on the books (suicide, marijuana, etc) but they too will go away eventually, because they aren't protecting the freedoms of the right people in the right way. I see the second amendment as a statement that reminds lawmakers that this specific freedom is appropriate here. My freedom to own a firearm creates a certain risk to the public. Criminals with firearms create a risk to the public too, which includes ME. (and there are other factors) When the risks are calculated and compared, allowing me to continue owning a firearm for personal defense against armed criminals results in the greatest preservation of the public's freedom . It's just simple math.
In your culture, the variables are different. Different percentage of criminals, criminals with firearms, odds of random citizens causing harm, etc. It may not work for you where you live, in your culture. England seems to be doing better with gun control, but now look, a lot of police are armed, and that didn't used to be the case. Its clearly slowly sliding downhill as their culture changes. Now look over here at Chicago, one of the most gun-restrictive places in the country. LOOK at all the gun crimes. A total disaster of policy over there, and a perfect example of why "gun control" doesn't work in our culture. So don't come over here and tell us "You're doing it wrong!", because you really have no idea what you're talking about, not here.
regardless of whether or not this was the optimal time to sell, you can't buy groceries with stocks. Gotta cash out at some point. He's just decided he's ready to quit growing his money and start spending it.
Chemical addiction stinks. If you're truly hooked, "whether or not you can afford it" isn't really a question that's up for debate. It's like air, you have a hunger for it that can't be ignored, and causes a person great distress when denied. Other "less important" things like utilities and clothing and food will have to step aside to feed the chemical dependence.
Though I'm not arguing against it, raising the price while still making it legal in ever-shrinking situations is probably the most effective way to wean people off their drugs.
The money raised can also be plowed back into the social services that are there to help provide support for the addicts. In the end, the tobacco companies will see their "profit from the misery of the public" shrink into nothingness over time. We can't get there fast enough.
It's actually not all that difficult to spot vpn traffic. Run some DPI and just simply look at the size of the packets being exchanged. L2TP/IPSEC/etc will all have very regular size exchanges that virtually uniquely identify them. Doesn't matter how you encrypt or tunnel it if you don't change the payload sizes.
It's like saying "You can't block my bittorrent client if I just change my port!" Actually, yes we can. And we do. Quiet easily actually.
I haven't looked closely into TOR to see if it pads with random size data, (betting they DO) but that's what they need to do with vpn to seriously defend against traffic analysis.
Even with that, it's still not bulletproof, but it dramatically increases the work and false positives on the detection side of the fence.
If his account wasn't the controlling account, and the school really did lock themselves out, they started the problem. If he used rng for a good strong master organizational email password, and it got wiped as the laptop got returned, he may not have it to return. (one wonders about the state of the school's backups...) As an employee you can't just assume the school is going to go retard on you and require you to provide copies of stuff they ought to already have. To the school's credit, he ought not to have wiped the computer before returning it, that's his bad.
When I last changed jobs, it was well known that I had copies of work-related data on personal drives, as I mirrored them to several around the shop for everyone to use the tools and data on. I was asked to delete that data on my personal drives when I left, which I did. I found out months later that the GM went on a wiping spree, intent on nuking ALL the service drives. (bright lad, that one) I was asked later by the SM if I had that data. nope. The SM finally found one last service drive in an old service machine that had been replaced and mothballed, saving enormous headaches. If they'd have lost that data for good, tough. NOT my problem.
It does sound like Williams isn't going out of his way to be cooperative, but it also sounds like the school is expecting more than they are entitled to in the way of cooperation. Will need to get more details on both sides. Even if he "violated policy" while he was working there, that'll be tough to find any legal liability over. You fired him, that's what you do when they violate policy. That doesn't also mean you're allowed to fine, sue, or break his knuckles after you've parted ways.
This appears to be an attack on the fundamental principle of the "walled garden". I don't think this is a good idea. You may not like it, but then fine don't buy it. Apple sells this as a feature, that benefits the users by improving quality control, a problem that non-walled appstores have to deal with more all the time. It's not bulletproof, nothing is, it just improves it quite a bit. I find it reassuring that I don't have to sweat it when browsing the app store, "I wonder if this app is legit?"
You are shitting us right? Nobody is that incompetent.
We were all at a loss for words. On a related note, we've had SEVERAL pc techs over the years that were ex-best buy techs. We hired the ones that honestly knew what they were doing, after they'd gotten sick of having their hands tied, wrapped in duct tape, and coated with epoxy when trying to actually work on a machine in the store.
The basic rule they have, and by "rule" I mean "do this and we will fire you on the spot", was "if the GeekSquad CD doesn't fix the problem, tell the customer we have to ship it to our service center for $$$ to fix the problem." Techs that went outside these bounds, or god forbid, used their own tool (like malwarebytes) would be fired. See, it's all about the money. Good techs can't tolerate being told to NOT fix something when they know how to fix it and have the tool on their flash drive to do it.
It frustrates them to no end, and they find work elsewhere. And that's why Best Buy has idiots for techs, they insist on it. There's a youtube video of a tv channel unplugging an IDE cable on a new computer and taking it to various repair shops to look at. Most of them told the undercover crew they needed a new hard drive or power supply and quoted big money to fix it. Just one hole-in-the-wall shop said "this cable was unplugged, here it's fixed now, no charge for something silly like that!" The tech at best buy may have even seen the unplugged cable, but wasn't allowed to report that as the problem nor fix it. Corporate policy.
I was proud to work at a popular repair shop in my town where we focused ourselves on customer loyalty rather than milking the illiterate. Honest service all the time lightly salted with free service like the cable above gets you loyal return customers and excellent word-of-mouth. (good thing too, they rarely advertised, we got new customers all the time saying they had no idea we existed before today) Many of our loyal and returning customers were ex-best-buy customers that had been burned a time or two before either looking elsewhere or getting a referral to try us instead. Though TBH, if we had advertised much more we would have had to turn people down, we were just a 7-person shop.
To witness the disgusting state of compute repair in many towns, google for: computer repair undercover
This is standard procedure at most comp repair shops. I was the lead tech at one for a decade. If a customer didn't want to give us their password, we had them create a dummy account so we could login and test our repairs. Any good repair shop goes through these steps, either by habit or by policy:
1. gather information 2. verify or diagnose problem 3. if necessary, authorize repair with customer 4. repair 5. VERIFY complaint is resolved 6. return equipment to customer
Step 5 is very important. Surprisingly to some, our first job is not to fix what we consider broken. Our first responsibility is to resolve the reason the customer brought it in. It's an easy mistake to make to check in a machine, see an obvious problem, fix it, return it, and have the customer come back upset that we didn't fix the problem they checked it in for. This happens when steps are skipped above. One example of this is getting a computer checked in during a storm of recall checkins to fix a widespread issue. Techs can get in a rut and just plow through another recall and out the door without paying enough attention to it, only to get an angry call from a customer that checked it in for some OTHER reason and wasn't even aware of the recall, and their reason for checking it in wasn't addressed. They often don't give two hoots that we fixed something else, their main beef is we didn't fix what they asked us to fix. Sometimes they have a long drive or its otherwise very inconvenient to drop off and pick up, and this just winds them up more when they have to make a second trip.
I know in our case we considered a mistake like that to be totally our failure, and would at the very least allow the customer to bring it back in and get free rush service to fix the actual problem. The service manager usually paid extra close attention to it at that point, and would personally verify with the customer that the complaint was resolved when they picked it up. Often they were credited or totally refunded the original service charge also. Free service makes GM frown and tends to get techs yelled at later.
So cut them some slack when they ask for your password. If that bothers you, make a test account for them to use. They won't mind. Oh, and more OT, the geek squad ransacking people's computers... wow. At a loss for words. But, we LOVE the geek squad, they are a constant source of revenue for us. They attract business to our area, burn customers and drive them to us, and on rare occasion they even have to check in machines to us that they themselves have broken worse. (that's my favorite... I recall a wireless antenna cAX on a new just-out-of-the-box computer getting cut during a memory upgrade, as well as a computer getting checked in for no boot because they'd upgraded ram by installing a sodimm in a PCI slot...)
Pretty sure that's why all the big voice-responders out there have chosen activation phrases that are incredibly unlikely to trigger a false activation. "Siri" isn't a name or word anywhere afaik. Nobody says "okay google" in a normal conversation. "Cortana" is an original also afaik.
"Alexa" on the other hand.... that one's in use. Not terribly common, but it's out there. And was a bad choice for that reason. So if you have a voice assistant that responds to "Alexa", I suggest you either find a way to change the activation trigger or leave it off when you're not using it. It's perfectly acceptable in most cases to have to press and/or hold a button to trigger voice activation, and really that's the best way to go imho, regardless of how carefully chosen the activation trigger is. It's not really intended to be a hands-free feature so much as it is intended to save you from having to type in your query or tap a bunch of buttons for a command.
If they were just trying to bolster funding, one would expect that they would inflate checkout rates for more popular titles then so as not to draw suspicion. Despite there being other possible options for "ulterior motive", "looking for a fix to offset a stupid decision by upper management" (or what someone passionately believed was a bad decision) looks like the frontrunner.
The policy's primary reasoning/justification was probably "clearing shelf space to make room for new books", so ultimately the need for that will end up getting re-examined. That's the risk you take when going behind management's back. You have to be sure that when your actions finally get exposed (and they almost always DO), you not only need to be right, but you need to be show to be unambiguously right. (and sometimes that's not even enough - they're management after all, and just like you they're allowed to make mistakes occasionally) Sometimes managers have a caretaker above them that will shelter them from fallout due to ineptitude, so either it doesn't matter or they don't care if they're wrong.
So it's difficult to defend what may have been a very well-intentioned act without substantial evidence to show that it was justified or perhaps necessary. I just don't think we have enough evidence at this point. Maybe later.
that causes a problem later when you try to search your document for and it can't find it because your "smart word processor" changed the quote to a smart start-quote and now you have no way to type that as part of the search string.
The other problem being they aren't ascii so they have to be represented by unicode. Basic text editors are hit-and-miss on their support for unicode, causing a litany of problems. Screwing up character counts and indexing, right/left arrows attempting to step over the ansii one byte at a time, etc.
The first thing I do before using a "smart" word processor is to turn off those smart quotes, hyphens (the double long -) and hyperlink auto embedding. Oh, and try copying some code out of a word processor or website that has "educated" your quotes, into your IDE. oh, those just LOVE smart quotes... (and LOVE to blow up with creative and unhelpful errors, at often incorrectly offset locations as a result of your pasting in garbage)
It almost sounds like they listened to reason for once? Hearing the expert testimony of many experts in the field, enduring the BS babble of the FBI, and came to a logical conclusion?
Now I'm worried that the bodysnatchers have gotten into congress...
that's not how botnets generally work. They're more like timehare services, and typically you can even get time on just a specific number of machines at a time - you pay by the hour by the cpu time. So if you rent a botnet and don't use it, you're just throwing your money away and someone else will use your time and pay for it too, making the bot herder more money.
This article is a little surprising in that it sounds like the FBI going after these people is a *new* thing. I thought it was part of their mandate to deal with interstate crime, and that botnets would be right up their alley?
Should be interesting to see what he gets for his crime. I personally see taking control over thousands or even hundreds of thousands of computers is deserving of some pretty severe punishment and I don't think the criminals or the law for that matter takes it as seriously as they should. This sort of crime is just going to continue to grow until we start throwing the book at them. Traditionally it's been a low-risk, low punishment, high-gain crime that's only been restricted by the technical requirements, which is proving to be a lower and lower bar as time passes.
I can't believe I had to scroll through THAT much whining to see this post. Do all those people honestly expect any manufacturer to replace a product for free if you lose it? (curious that, I didn't see a single example being compared against Apple's policy) Are they really that retarded?
Slashdot Mirror
None of that seems to explain though why the trolls win in this lower court so often? Especially in stupid cases like this where on appeals all the judges are looking at each other like "HOW did this possibly make it to us? no. just NO. Now go away."
If it all came down to "they have the time to deal with it and have the most experience", you'd expect better and more consistent judgements. Or are some of the defendants just doing stupid things? (I can't imagine Apple/IBM/MS sending incompetent lawyers to a patent trial)
From someone that manages computers, not being able to do things like set the default homepage would be a problem for me. Windows admins can change things like this using Group Policy. That doesn't "use the gui" but I bet it still works with chrome.
I'm curious to know why the east district of texas has gotten this notorious for being a patent troll's best friend? Not the statistics, we've seen the statistics. I want to know why it keeps happening?
My first kneejerk expectation is that money is somehow at work here. Are there kickbacks? Are the trolls paying someone upfront (and/or under the table) that's in a position of power? Or are they funneling money into the TX court systems somehow? Keeping an otherwise very unnecessarily large panel of judges employed? Have some sort of strong patent troll lobby or PAC in TX? Comedically high filing fees for these cases? What's the angle here?
And after that's sorted... is there anything the feds can do about this? I'd imagine the US Court of Appeals is just as tired of this BS as we are - moreso probably. They're systematically wasting the appeals court's time. Can they do anything to stop it? Somehow sanction judges? Mess with their funding somehow in an effective way? Affect their decisions or their power somehow? Get these (elected?) judges impeached or at least start some formal inquiries that could lead to impeachment? "Send a message" somehow? (but messages do little good if you have no teeth and they know it)
Or are there some folks down sahth that just enjoy being a spectacle and are hamming it up for all all the media attention they keep getting every time this happens?
That's pretty much a universal truth lately, isn't it?
Apple's iChat uses (used?) OSCAR/AIM for chat and initiating video conferencing. I'm not sure if that's still the case, as they've been through several major changes more recently. (to messages and facetime apps)
Anyone have more information on this?
There's a difference here between criminal and civil action. There's a fairly good chance she's going to sue him in civil court, (and settle for doctor bills, time off work, maybe some pain and suffering compensation etc) and that alone could be quite punishing. Don't think of this criminal sentence as the retribution for the crime, that will come later.
This is all about the criminal case. Try to keep in mind it is supposed to weigh things like criminal intent, deliberate as well as actual negligence with respect to the public, etc. There certainly was negligence here, but is the punishment appropriate?
If I'm riding my bicycle down the sidewalk (which is illegal in this city btw, you're supposed to keep to the streets to avoid hitting peds) and I am talking with my friend behind me and don't see that ped on the sidewalk and run into them, knock them down, I'm likely to do more damage to them than most drones. Maybe I even give the 'ol gal a mild concussion when she hits the sidewalk. There was no criminal intent, I didn't intend to be negligent but in the end I was. (and in this case I was even breaking a law, which here is used primarily simply to make the collision undeniably my fault, rather than to ticket or arrest me) Now, in addition to any civil case she may file against me, do I deserve a month in jail?
I think his chances on appeal are quite justified, and quite good. That judge needs some perspective rather than a knee-jerk response. He will probably get his sentence replaced with some sort of citation, pay a $350 ticket or so for some related offense. And that makes a heck of a lot more sense than jail time. (I'm assuming this is his first offense - obviously jail time starts becoming appropriate on repeat offenders in cases like this)
No this was actually what happened. She was stunned that there were cops everywhere, wondering why her alarm company didn't call her. (she'd forgotten / dumbthumbed the code a few times and had been called at least a few times in the past) "they don't call when you put in your DURESS code".. "oh, ok, that makes sense."
If that's not how it works in your neck of the woods, *shrug*. That's what happened here and everyone seemed to agree it was SOP. The purpose of the duress code is "someone has a gun to your head and is making you punch in the code to turn off the alarm. Go in soft but heavy, treat it as a hostage situation."
Let me just throw out a few other "dumb ideas" you almost never use... Airbags. Fire Extinguishers. Life insurance. Parachutes. Seatbelts. Fire Departments. Just because they're an extreme response and you don't use them very often doesn't make them a "dumb idea".
Friend of mine proved you wrong last year. His wife got home after a craaazy day at work and put in the wrong PIN on her home alarm. 15 minutes later there's a knock on the door from a guy in a white coat and the entire backdrop is full of cops. "What is this? I disarmed my alarm?" "yes, m'am but you used the *duress code* to do it." "oh..." So a bunch of boys in blue came in and swept the entire house while she was outside talking with the cops. Yes there will be false alarms, but the feature serves a function. They had that option enabled because someone they knew a few years back had been forced to disarm their car alarm at knifepoint so they knew the risk was real.
At first I thought you meant "four taps on the home button" but I don't find that feature anywhere. (link?) If you mean going into settings to erase it, I'm pretty sure any competent LEA will grab the phone out of your hands the instant they see you've finished unlocking the phone. You don't just leave volatile evidence in the hands of a suspect to meddle with before confiscating it. If you have touch id, they can actually use the federally-allowed fingerprints they took from you when you were booked to create a silicon finger and use THAT to unlock the phone, you never get near it again to nuke it. (and yes, there's been at least one documented case of that being done) I'd much rather have two fingers that unlock it and eight that nuke it, let them play routlette if they're feeling froggy. And there's no way a 4 digit nuke code takes any longer to enter than a 4 digit unlock code??
If you have your phone synced with your computer or cloud, if you accidentally erase it you can restore it from there. If they're THAT aggressively pursuing you that they will get search warrants for your house or cloud data, okay, you can have it. I think this discussion is more aimed at discouraging "fishing expeditions" of "We have just barely enough evidence to arrest them and take them to jail for an hour, lets see if we can find anything on their phone that will convince a judge to give us some search warrants..." To me anyway this is more about curbing illegal search and seizure than it is about trying to bypass the lawful search warrant process.
Yeah, it's hard to answer emails with those handcuffs on like that.
Here's hoping you get extradited, successfully prosecuted, and turned into a good example for aspiring black-hats.
The fallacy here is that "criminals only obtain guns legally". They're criminals, and surprise! they don't mind breaking the law to get something that makes their "job" more successful and lowers their odds of being caught.
Restricting access to guns affects law-abiding citizens a lot more than criminals. You end up with an imbalance like in Chicago, where many criminals have guns and very few citizens do. That's the worst-case scenario for the citizen, for more than one reason. A survey of inmates jailed for B&E ("breaking and entering") reported their number one concern was "homeowner with gun". It's a credible, powerful, proven deterrent. In the endgame, a criminal would MUCH rather stare down the barrel of a gun held by a law enforcement officer than their victim, because the victim is much more likely to actually pull the trigger. Officers have restraint and training, try to justify their actions, and know what they can legally do or not do. Joe public is rattled and twitchy in that situation and often shoots even unarmed burglars because they're focused exclusively on their own personal safety. We can debate the legality of the citizen with the gun later, the point is it's a serious deterrent for the criminals.
Criminals in Chicago have a much lower risk of encountering a homeowner with a gun, and if you're the only one with a gun in a gunfight, you generally come out way ahead. Chicago is THE place to rob people right now, because they're unlikely to be able to defend themselves if you have a gun - your risk as a criminal is very low. And if your argument is that gun control limits the guns in circulation, no it does not. Every time the government tries to dial up control, there's a run at the gun stores. Lately they've been trying the other angle of limiting the availability of ammunition. That's resulted in popular ammunition FLYING off the shelves every time a store gets their allotment in. It's too late to restrict availability, there's too much already in circulation and trying to tighten the belt just leads to more panic hoarding.
TL;DR: "Make guns illegal, and only ones left with guns will be the criminals." (both by definition, and in practice)
Reminds me of a recent incident. I've had so many problems here that I keep a motion-activated wildlife cam trained on my mailbox 24/7. Got an email while at work, "package delivered, left at side door".
Get home. No package. Check camera. Postman never even stopped at my mailbox let alone my door.
Called USPS 800#. "Sorry sir the carrier logged your package as delivered, so that means it absolutely WAS left at your house, it must have been stolen, you need to contact your local police to report a stolen package." No amount of arguing would move them from this position.
Dug up the phone number of the local postmaster and talked with him the next day from work. No, the carrier never even stopped at my house. He'll call me back. Got a call an hour later. He personally took the carrier with him in his car to my house. Carrier looked at my side door and thankfully says "I remember delivering that package, but that doesn't look like the door I left it at". Postmaster is familiar with this problem, it probably means he left it at my house number on some other street on his route.
So they spend the next half hour checking adjacent blocks houses for my address number. Finally found it half a mile away, thankfully still leaning against the house by the door. My package was waiting for me at the depot when I got off work.
I got my package ONLY because the postmaster went above and beyond at his job, while everyone else around him was going full retard at their jobs. This is a system where if something goes wrong, you have to pray for a miracle, because it's rigged to "not be their problem". If the carrier logs it "delivered", you're screwed. That's gospel and they won't lift a finger, the burden of proof is left with you. In this case, if the owner of that house had taken in the package, that'd be it, I lose.
After lengthy discussion with my postmaster, I now have standing orders with the post office, "leave no unattended packages at this address" order is posted in dayglow yellow (LAMINATED even!) by the bundle box for my block at the post office. It's literally the only defense I have left to exercise. About 50% of my packages (I get a lot) are still left at my house. But next time one disappears, I will be back with "I don't care if they marked it 'delivered', it wasn't SUPPOSED to be delivered. It's YOUR screw-up, now go find it." The ball stays in their court until it's physically in my hands now.
Oh and for all the "don't ship with USPS!", yeah that works great if you're the sender. Not all sellers offer options. In the above lost package issue, I had no choice. It would definitely not have been my first pick!
Please try to keep in mind that you, or your culture, don't get the privilege of defining what is "rational" for the whole world, or specifically in someone else's culture. "Rational" is defined by the culture it is being considered within.
I strongly agree with that, as does a large percentage of the american people. It was an early amendment to the constitution and is still there because it's a strong belief within our culture.
The basic principle at work here is "You have a default right to do whatever you want to do. But there are laws that place restrictions on cases where your right to this freedom infringes unfairly on someone else's right of freedom." We try not to make things illegal "just because we don't like them". When we do, those laws are often struck down later. (prohibition, women's suffrage, slavery, etc) We still have some dumb laws on the books (suicide, marijuana, etc) but they too will go away eventually, because they aren't protecting the freedoms of the right people in the right way. I see the second amendment as a statement that reminds lawmakers that this specific freedom is appropriate here. My freedom to own a firearm creates a certain risk to the public. Criminals with firearms create a risk to the public too, which includes ME. (and there are other factors) When the risks are calculated and compared, allowing me to continue owning a firearm for personal defense against armed criminals results in the greatest preservation of the public's freedom . It's just simple math.
In your culture, the variables are different. Different percentage of criminals, criminals with firearms, odds of random citizens causing harm, etc. It may not work for you where you live, in your culture. England seems to be doing better with gun control, but now look, a lot of police are armed, and that didn't used to be the case. Its clearly slowly sliding downhill as their culture changes. Now look over here at Chicago, one of the most gun-restrictive places in the country. LOOK at all the gun crimes. A total disaster of policy over there, and a perfect example of why "gun control" doesn't work in our culture. So don't come over here and tell us "You're doing it wrong!", because you really have no idea what you're talking about, not here.
regardless of whether or not this was the optimal time to sell, you can't buy groceries with stocks. Gotta cash out at some point. He's just decided he's ready to quit growing his money and start spending it.
Chemical addiction stinks. If you're truly hooked, "whether or not you can afford it" isn't really a question that's up for debate. It's like air, you have a hunger for it that can't be ignored, and causes a person great distress when denied. Other "less important" things like utilities and clothing and food will have to step aside to feed the chemical dependence.
Though I'm not arguing against it, raising the price while still making it legal in ever-shrinking situations is probably the most effective way to wean people off their drugs.
The money raised can also be plowed back into the social services that are there to help provide support for the addicts. In the end, the tobacco companies will see their "profit from the misery of the public" shrink into nothingness over time. We can't get there fast enough.
It's actually not all that difficult to spot vpn traffic. Run some DPI and just simply look at the size of the packets being exchanged. L2TP/IPSEC/etc will all have very regular size exchanges that virtually uniquely identify them. Doesn't matter how you encrypt or tunnel it if you don't change the payload sizes.
It's like saying "You can't block my bittorrent client if I just change my port!" Actually, yes we can. And we do. Quiet easily actually.
I haven't looked closely into TOR to see if it pads with random size data, (betting they DO) but that's what they need to do with vpn to seriously defend against traffic analysis.
Even with that, it's still not bulletproof, but it dramatically increases the work and false positives on the detection side of the fence.
If his account wasn't the controlling account, and the school really did lock themselves out, they started the problem. If he used rng for a good strong master organizational email password, and it got wiped as the laptop got returned, he may not have it to return. (one wonders about the state of the school's backups...) As an employee you can't just assume the school is going to go retard on you and require you to provide copies of stuff they ought to already have. To the school's credit, he ought not to have wiped the computer before returning it, that's his bad.
When I last changed jobs, it was well known that I had copies of work-related data on personal drives, as I mirrored them to several around the shop for everyone to use the tools and data on. I was asked to delete that data on my personal drives when I left, which I did. I found out months later that the GM went on a wiping spree, intent on nuking ALL the service drives. (bright lad, that one) I was asked later by the SM if I had that data. nope. The SM finally found one last service drive in an old service machine that had been replaced and mothballed, saving enormous headaches. If they'd have lost that data for good, tough. NOT my problem.
It does sound like Williams isn't going out of his way to be cooperative, but it also sounds like the school is expecting more than they are entitled to in the way of cooperation. Will need to get more details on both sides. Even if he "violated policy" while he was working there, that'll be tough to find any legal liability over. You fired him, that's what you do when they violate policy. That doesn't also mean you're allowed to fine, sue, or break his knuckles after you've parted ways.
This appears to be an attack on the fundamental principle of the "walled garden". I don't think this is a good idea. You may not like it, but then fine don't buy it. Apple sells this as a feature, that benefits the users by improving quality control, a problem that non-walled appstores have to deal with more all the time. It's not bulletproof, nothing is, it just improves it quite a bit. I find it reassuring that I don't have to sweat it when browsing the app store, "I wonder if this app is legit?"
We were all at a loss for words. On a related note, we've had SEVERAL pc techs over the years that were ex-best buy techs. We hired the ones that honestly knew what they were doing, after they'd gotten sick of having their hands tied, wrapped in duct tape, and coated with epoxy when trying to actually work on a machine in the store.
The basic rule they have, and by "rule" I mean "do this and we will fire you on the spot", was "if the GeekSquad CD doesn't fix the problem, tell the customer we have to ship it to our service center for $$$ to fix the problem." Techs that went outside these bounds, or god forbid, used their own tool (like malwarebytes) would be fired. See, it's all about the money. Good techs can't tolerate being told to NOT fix something when they know how to fix it and have the tool on their flash drive to do it.
It frustrates them to no end, and they find work elsewhere. And that's why Best Buy has idiots for techs, they insist on it. There's a youtube video of a tv channel unplugging an IDE cable on a new computer and taking it to various repair shops to look at. Most of them told the undercover crew they needed a new hard drive or power supply and quoted big money to fix it. Just one hole-in-the-wall shop said "this cable was unplugged, here it's fixed now, no charge for something silly like that!" The tech at best buy may have even seen the unplugged cable, but wasn't allowed to report that as the problem nor fix it. Corporate policy.
I was proud to work at a popular repair shop in my town where we focused ourselves on customer loyalty rather than milking the illiterate. Honest service all the time lightly salted with free service like the cable above gets you loyal return customers and excellent word-of-mouth. (good thing too, they rarely advertised, we got new customers all the time saying they had no idea we existed before today) Many of our loyal and returning customers were ex-best-buy customers that had been burned a time or two before either looking elsewhere or getting a referral to try us instead. Though TBH, if we had advertised much more we would have had to turn people down, we were just a 7-person shop.
To witness the disgusting state of compute repair in many towns, google for: computer repair undercover
This is standard procedure at most comp repair shops. I was the lead tech at one for a decade. If a customer didn't want to give us their password, we had them create a dummy account so we could login and test our repairs. Any good repair shop goes through these steps, either by habit or by policy:
1. gather information
2. verify or diagnose problem
3. if necessary, authorize repair with customer
4. repair
5. VERIFY complaint is resolved
6. return equipment to customer
Step 5 is very important. Surprisingly to some, our first job is not to fix what we consider broken. Our first responsibility is to resolve the reason the customer brought it in. It's an easy mistake to make to check in a machine, see an obvious problem, fix it, return it, and have the customer come back upset that we didn't fix the problem they checked it in for. This happens when steps are skipped above. One example of this is getting a computer checked in during a storm of recall checkins to fix a widespread issue. Techs can get in a rut and just plow through another recall and out the door without paying enough attention to it, only to get an angry call from a customer that checked it in for some OTHER reason and wasn't even aware of the recall, and their reason for checking it in wasn't addressed. They often don't give two hoots that we fixed something else, their main beef is we didn't fix what they asked us to fix. Sometimes they have a long drive or its otherwise very inconvenient to drop off and pick up, and this just winds them up more when they have to make a second trip.
I know in our case we considered a mistake like that to be totally our failure, and would at the very least allow the customer to bring it back in and get free rush service to fix the actual problem. The service manager usually paid extra close attention to it at that point, and would personally verify with the customer that the complaint was resolved when they picked it up. Often they were credited or totally refunded the original service charge also. Free service makes GM frown and tends to get techs yelled at later.
So cut them some slack when they ask for your password. If that bothers you, make a test account for them to use. They won't mind. Oh, and more OT, the geek squad ransacking people's computers... wow. At a loss for words. But, we LOVE the geek squad, they are a constant source of revenue for us. They attract business to our area, burn customers and drive them to us, and on rare occasion they even have to check in machines to us that they themselves have broken worse. (that's my favorite... I recall a wireless antenna cAX on a new just-out-of-the-box computer getting cut during a memory upgrade, as well as a computer getting checked in for no boot because they'd upgraded ram by installing a sodimm in a PCI slot...)
Pretty sure that's why all the big voice-responders out there have chosen activation phrases that are incredibly unlikely to trigger a false activation. "Siri" isn't a name or word anywhere afaik. Nobody says "okay google" in a normal conversation. "Cortana" is an original also afaik.
"Alexa" on the other hand.... that one's in use. Not terribly common, but it's out there. And was a bad choice for that reason. So if you have a voice assistant that responds to "Alexa", I suggest you either find a way to change the activation trigger or leave it off when you're not using it. It's perfectly acceptable in most cases to have to press and/or hold a button to trigger voice activation, and really that's the best way to go imho, regardless of how carefully chosen the activation trigger is. It's not really intended to be a hands-free feature so much as it is intended to save you from having to type in your query or tap a bunch of buttons for a command.
If they were just trying to bolster funding, one would expect that they would inflate checkout rates for more popular titles then so as not to draw suspicion. Despite there being other possible options for "ulterior motive", "looking for a fix to offset a stupid decision by upper management" (or what someone passionately believed was a bad decision) looks like the frontrunner.
The policy's primary reasoning/justification was probably "clearing shelf space to make room for new books", so ultimately the need for that will end up getting re-examined. That's the risk you take when going behind management's back. You have to be sure that when your actions finally get exposed (and they almost always DO), you not only need to be right, but you need to be show to be unambiguously right. (and sometimes that's not even enough - they're management after all, and just like you they're allowed to make mistakes occasionally) Sometimes managers have a caretaker above them that will shelter them from fallout due to ineptitude, so either it doesn't matter or they don't care if they're wrong.
So it's difficult to defend what may have been a very well-intentioned act without substantial evidence to show that it was justified or perhaps necessary. I just don't think we have enough evidence at this point. Maybe later.
that causes a problem later when you try to search your document for and it can't find it because your "smart word processor" changed the quote to a smart start-quote and now you have no way to type that as part of the search string.
The other problem being they aren't ascii so they have to be represented by unicode. Basic text editors are hit-and-miss on their support for unicode, causing a litany of problems. Screwing up character counts and indexing, right/left arrows attempting to step over the ansii one byte at a time, etc.
The first thing I do before using a "smart" word processor is to turn off those smart quotes, hyphens (the double long -) and hyperlink auto embedding. Oh, and try copying some code out of a word processor or website that has "educated" your quotes, into your IDE. oh, those just LOVE smart quotes... (and LOVE to blow up with creative and unhelpful errors, at often incorrectly offset locations as a result of your pasting in garbage)
It almost sounds like they listened to reason for once? Hearing the expert testimony of many experts in the field, enduring the BS babble of the FBI, and came to a logical conclusion?
Now I'm worried that the bodysnatchers have gotten into congress...
that's not how botnets generally work. They're more like timehare services, and typically you can even get time on just a specific number of machines at a time - you pay by the hour by the cpu time. So if you rent a botnet and don't use it, you're just throwing your money away and someone else will use your time and pay for it too, making the bot herder more money.
This article is a little surprising in that it sounds like the FBI going after these people is a *new* thing. I thought it was part of their mandate to deal with interstate crime, and that botnets would be right up their alley?
Should be interesting to see what he gets for his crime. I personally see taking control over thousands or even hundreds of thousands of computers is deserving of some pretty severe punishment and I don't think the criminals or the law for that matter takes it as seriously as they should. This sort of crime is just going to continue to grow until we start throwing the book at them. Traditionally it's been a low-risk, low punishment, high-gain crime that's only been restricted by the technical requirements, which is proving to be a lower and lower bar as time passes.
I can't believe I had to scroll through THAT much whining to see this post. Do all those people honestly expect any manufacturer to replace a product for free if you lose it? (curious that, I didn't see a single example being compared against Apple's policy) Are they really that retarded?