You should not break into a network because you can, absolutely. On the other hand, I do not believe that mooching off open wireless connections counts as "breaking in" to a network.
If a person leaves their door unlocked, that doesn't mean that just anybody can walk right in. On the other hand, if they leave their door unlocked AND have a sign on the front yard that says something along the lines of "OPEN HOUSE-WALK RIGHT IN" or "HOSPITALITY CENTER-STEP RIGHT IN" or something of that nature, you can't accuse a person of trespassing. If the people who come in start breaking into locked bedrooms or stealing things or start smoking dope or otherwise do illegal acts inside the home, then yes, you can arrest them.
Similarly, if there is an open network, no hacking of password requires, no guessing at wireless network names, this is an open house with a big sign out front that says come on in. If people come in and start doing illegal acts, like downloading music or kiddie porn or whatnot, then arrest them for that, just like you would the dope fiends or the thiefs in the house example. But merely accessing the free network shouldn't be a crime.
You yourself note that Windows automatically links to open networks. One rule of thumb is the mother test. If my mother could be found guilty of hacking, then the law is too broad. She still calls me periodically to ask how to save documents, since she hasn't quite gotten the concept that if she can do it one program, it's the same process for another. Under Zerbey's definition of hacking, my mother could be a hacker. That's just not right. In virtual life, just like real life, if you want to punish someone for stepping on your lawn, it is your duty to first post a sign that says keep off the grass. If you do not take basic steps to show that you do not want someone accessing your openly broadcasted network, you have no right to a legal remedy.
Exactly! Jason Tomczak filed a lawsuit against two law firms, and he acts outraged when the law firms hired attoneys to defend themselves from his lawsuit. It is one thing for someone to cry foul about being a "sole individual" when they are targets of a lawsuit. But when you are suing someone else, it is disingenious in the extreme to complain when they turn around and get defense counsel.
Students have free speech rights--they are limited for the special circumstances of the school house environment, but it is undeniable that public school students have certain 1st Amendment rights.
A website, written from a home computer, would seem a rather obvious example of free speech that cannot be punished by school administrators, especially if the punished speech was in a guest comments section that the student may not have written himself.
I am not a lawyer, but reading the course of communications between Jack Thompson and Penny Arcade, it seems to me that while Penny Arcade is certainly not guilty of criminal harassment, Jack Thompson has violated the Florida Bar's standard of ethics for attorneys. He is using his status as an attorney, as an officer of the court, to threaten/bully private citizens with obviously frivolous suits. (You cannot sue someone for merely e-mailing you, unless it was obscene, a death threat, causing severe emotional distress, etc.!)
While not rising to the point of a suspendable offense, I believe a public reprimand from the Bar is appropriate and needed.
It's not surprising that students feel that the First Amendment goes too far or that newspapers should be answerable to the Government. Student rights have been steadily curtailed since Tinker v. Des Moines ruled that children don't leave their rights at the schoolhouse gates. School children, high school students included, have a limited First Amendment priviledge and so they will likely equate this with the real world's First Amendment.
What's really scary, though, is that so much of Fourth Amendment law rests on an expectation of privacy. School children can be searched with less than probable cause (reasonable suspicion), can be ordered to give urine samples for mass suspicionless drug tests, etc. When these children enter the real world, how will their perceptions limit our privacy rights due to the lessened expectation of privacy that they have been taught is proper?
It is all well and good for the FBI to have information-sharing software, but the problem with compartmentalized information goes beyond merely agents within the FBI. What is truly neccesary is a system that would be used by many or even most investigatory Government agencies.
When I worked for the Department of Justice, a case might have 5 different case numbers: one case number for the DOJ, one case number for the FBI, one case number for the Defense Criminal Investigative Service, one case number for the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, etc. If I only had the DOJ jacket number, it could take me 15 minutes to get the case number for another agency, just so I could talk to one of the investigating agents.
Spend money to fix that larger-scale problem, before flooding the FBI with money to squander on a software application that they will be terminating and starting afresh on.
One of the reasons I chose Dartmouth College was because of thier outstanding computer facilities... The entire campus is wireless, there is free public printing (which at the time I matriculated was unlimited), network ports in every room, many classrooms, and other buildings, etc. It wasn't the only factor, but it was an important one.
That's a fair point, Harri. I'm one of those people who thinks that providing a service for money isn't immoral. On the other hand, I don't delude myself into thinking that my views are the majority views on that issue.
To respond to the AC, I'm hardly a neocon religious right-winger. I'm a Jewish Democrat who devotes my time defending civil liberties, and I think that the government should keep its nose out of business transactions between consenting adults.
My point was simply thus: mainstream America doesn't consider providing a forum for "Erotic Services" and the posts within to be congruent with operating a business with a staunch moral compass, and the article in the Chronicle was geared towards that mainstream audience.
Go to Craigslist and click on the listings for Erotic Services, and you'll find hundreds of listings for "escorts", "massage artists", or plain and simple prostitutes who aren't hiding beyond another title. Around the same time each month, there are a number of posts for women seeking to raise rent money, and not by working at the local supermarket.
Sure, one can say that Craig's List is just the middleman, holding a forum and all, but when they have a section specifically for "Erotic Services", I'm less then sympathetic with that argument.
I got my legal experience from law classes as well as my time working as a Paralegal Specialist for the Department of Justice, thank you very much.
Yes, you file papers, you have hearings, your opponent responds, the judge decides, but these e-mails are documents that were presumably obtained from IBM, through the discovery process. In that instance, you don't need to show it to your opponent--you got it FROM your opponent. Further, you don't need to show it to the judge until you use it.
I am skeptical, and not just due to SCO's reputation for lying about their evidence and what they can or intend to prove. If SCO truly found a smoking gun, I don't believe they'd be shooting their mouth off to SCOForum or any other source--they'd wait until they got before a judge or jury and then hit IBM with it, so they'd be left scrambling in front of a fact-finder. Now, if there is actually anything to these e-mails, IBM has time to meet with their lawyers and work on spinning them.
The only reason for SCO to release this info to the public now is to help the battle for public opinion, and if you want to do that, you should start with a source a bit higher up the chain then SCOforum, such as, say, the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, or some other well reputed paper.
I have to disagree with you, Jawhawk, about the smartass thing not working with live actors. The TV version of Buffy the Vampire slayer usually had a one-liner of one sort or another, and I don't whether it was Sarah Michelle Geller's acting or the brilliance of Joss Whedon's writing, but I never found the one-liners in BtVS sounding like they were forced.
This doesn't sound like a very good idea. Even if the school itself is trustworthy and doesn't examine student files for content, such as illegally downloaded copyrighted materials, it is far too tempting a target for hackers--a nice centralized system with which he or she can control the entire campus's Windows machines.
I much prefer Dartmouth College's response to the problems of viruses and worms--if something is detected, you'll be kicked off the network and you won't be allowed back on until your computer is clean.
I'm rather shocked by this decision.... While I guess it won't affect me currently because I already have an X-Box, I'll be quite pissed if it breaks and the X-Box 2 can't play my games.
I use PlayStation games in my PlayStation 2 all of the time, and the ability to do so is the primary reason why I bought a PlayStation 2. There are plenty of PlayStation games that, in my opinion, are by far better then their descendants (especially some baseball games).
Finally, there's the obvious point that people who spent lots of money on X-Box games will want to be able to continue playing them--backwards compatibility surely matters to them (and people who spend lots of money on games are the folks Microsoft wants to target!).
I am not qualified to comment on Declan's points about whether the FCC should be dissolved entirely--I don't know a great deal about frequency interference and the like--but I do believe that the FCC should get out of the censorship business.
Since Howard Stern seems to be a popular example of FCC regulation of content, I'll touch on that. While Howard Stern's show is offensive to many and has been so for many years, he has a huge following. He is popular, people tune in to listen. If what he is doing is sufficiently distasteful, ratings will fall and he'll get kicked off the air by the radio stations. This is not an area in which the Government should be dictating what is on the air.
Yes--it's the public's airwaves and all, but hey--the public is listening to it! The public likes it! Not everyone to be sure, but this isn't some guy who broke into a radio station and started shouting obscenities into a microphone. There is substance here, and the Government should not be interfering.
Radio and TV is an area where the free market of ideas should reign. We have V-chips and similar technology to stop your kids from seeing what you don't want them to see. (Without even mentioning that the best. and most appropiate method is to watch TV with them instead of using it as a babysitter).
Again, I can't speak to Declan's main point, as to whether or not the entire FCC should be abolished, but I'd certainly like to see that happen to the division that enforces broadcasting standards...
Standing is given to the Department of Justice via the statute proposed by Senators Hatch and Leahy. Article III, Section 2 of the US Constitution would appy if the DOJ tried to take civil action against pirates without this statute in place.
What this article doesn't mention is how (or if) the code gets around the normal OS X restrictions requiring that one enters an administrator's password. Even if applications can be hidden, I question the amount of damage they can do... Surely nobody will enter an admin password requested by an ".mp3" file.
Besides, this isn't a virus so much as a security flaw. Why pay $60 for software when Apple will surely release a patch soon?
Oh, and for all the PC assholes who are currently saying "In your face, mac zealots" or whatnot--nobody claims that OS X is bulletproof--no computer system is. Nevertheless, it seems to be a lot more secure than, say, Windows, which has security problems all of the time.
The FCC can only regulate broadcast TV, but the impact is not minimal. There are still many, many people who do not have access to cable or satelite. What's worse, though, is the precedent that this sets. Perhaps it is more correct to say that the FCC can only regulate broadcast TV right now...
Once people get used to having the FCC take on a Comstockian role in censoring broadcast television, they are far less likely to protest if Congress expands the scope of the FCC to cover cable, satelite, and other mediums. Congress has already gone after the internet, after all....
Democrats voted for the bill, but the bill and this ruling are two different things. The FCC Comissioners are Republicans, appointed by Dubya, and the Chairman's position is an obvious case of nepotism.
This is a serious blow against freedom of speech and expression. While the airwaves belong to the public and all, it is ludicrous to censor something because it is deemed to be "grossly offensive."
Many people find Howard Stern's show to be grossly offensive, however many other people love it. If Stern's show really stepped over the line, people would stop listening to it. If people stopped listening to it, the show would be canceled, and he would be off the air.
I don't understand how Republicans get away with this level of hypocrisy. They are in favor of privitization and less Government regulation of businesses, except when it comes to what can be said in the media. Republicans are in favor of states' rights, except when it comes to a state choosing to allow same-sex marraige. Republicans are "ultra-moralistic" in their own minds, impeaching President Bill Clinton for lying about a sexual relationship, but when it comes to a Republican aide in the Senate hacking into sensitive Democrat files, only Orin Hatch has the honor to stand against it.
I suppose it depends on how you define the current freedom. I don't believe that it is going to lead to increased censorship. I don't believe it is going to lead to increased tracking or monitoring (although certainly other things, like the recent FBI/DOJ request for increased wiretapping ability may do just that).
I think that it will lead to increased filtering on the ISP side of things. More ISPs will be using Spam Assasin and similar programs behind the scenes. Undoubtedly, some legitimate e-mails will be caught by these SPAM traps, and the end-user might not have access to them.
Personally, since Dartmouth College starting running virus scanners and SPAM filters and the like, I constantly get e-mails where the "suspicious" file was automatically removed, and although most of those removals were viruses, I also lose legitimate files that are sent to me. As an end-user, I don't have access to change the settings or tell the system that a file is, in fact, OK. Instead, I have to e-mail the person back and ask them to resend the file to my AOL account.
I suspect that as more people use cable and DSL and the malware increases, this behind-the-scene tinkering will increase.
A serious blow to current freedoms on the Internet? I'm not sure. A pain in the ass? Absolutely.
The studies showed dissatisfaction with the way that electronics were marketed towards men. Women said that they were treated differently, and in many cases, were assumed to be stupid or unknowledgable, compared to men. Brenda Myers, quoted in the CNN article that the slashdot link in the parent links to, said, "Every time you go these places [national electronics retail stores], they think women don't know anything, and they don't you the same features as they would when my husbands goes with me."
Creating a printer that will be marketed under the theme "printer easy for women to use" is not going to mollify complaints like Myers, instead, it seems to reinforce her argument that electronics retailers and manufacturers think women are stupid. Saying that this printer is easy for women to use is really just saying is that women aren't capable of using all the other printers.
Nope---works just fine with a mac. Better yet, with OS X, it's plug and play, pretty much. Get a compatible cell phone, a USB cable, and you're all set.:)
http://homepage.mac.com/jrc/contrib/mobile_office/
This website will give you detailed instructions on setup, but as I said, it's really simple.
You have a right to privacy, of course, but not when it comes to your shared folder. Why? Because it is shared.
This is very different from looking into one's home or mail. I am no RIAA apologist, but I certainly wouldn't fault them for looking at shared folders on P2P services and the like. When you share a folder, you've made the contents open and available to be downloaded or looked at by anybody.
It's the equivelent of putting a big sign in front of your house saying "Come in, one and all", or opening your mail and tacking it on a bulletin board. In the first example, anyone could walk right in, and in the second, anyone could step right up and read your mail. Why? Because you've made your house and mail public.
The same logic holds true with a shared folder--by sharing it, you've made it public.
Slashdot Mirror
You should not break into a network because you can, absolutely. On the other hand, I do not believe that mooching off open wireless connections counts as "breaking in" to a network. If a person leaves their door unlocked, that doesn't mean that just anybody can walk right in. On the other hand, if they leave their door unlocked AND have a sign on the front yard that says something along the lines of "OPEN HOUSE-WALK RIGHT IN" or "HOSPITALITY CENTER-STEP RIGHT IN" or something of that nature, you can't accuse a person of trespassing. If the people who come in start breaking into locked bedrooms or stealing things or start smoking dope or otherwise do illegal acts inside the home, then yes, you can arrest them. Similarly, if there is an open network, no hacking of password requires, no guessing at wireless network names, this is an open house with a big sign out front that says come on in. If people come in and start doing illegal acts, like downloading music or kiddie porn or whatnot, then arrest them for that, just like you would the dope fiends or the thiefs in the house example. But merely accessing the free network shouldn't be a crime. You yourself note that Windows automatically links to open networks. One rule of thumb is the mother test. If my mother could be found guilty of hacking, then the law is too broad. She still calls me periodically to ask how to save documents, since she hasn't quite gotten the concept that if she can do it one program, it's the same process for another. Under Zerbey's definition of hacking, my mother could be a hacker. That's just not right. In virtual life, just like real life, if you want to punish someone for stepping on your lawn, it is your duty to first post a sign that says keep off the grass. If you do not take basic steps to show that you do not want someone accessing your openly broadcasted network, you have no right to a legal remedy.
Exactly! Jason Tomczak filed a lawsuit against two law firms, and he acts outraged when the law firms hired attoneys to defend themselves from his lawsuit. It is one thing for someone to cry foul about being a "sole individual" when they are targets of a lawsuit. But when you are suing someone else, it is disingenious in the extreme to complain when they turn around and get defense counsel.
Students have free speech rights--they are limited for the special circumstances of the school house environment, but it is undeniable that public school students have certain 1st Amendment rights. A website, written from a home computer, would seem a rather obvious example of free speech that cannot be punished by school administrators, especially if the punished speech was in a guest comments section that the student may not have written himself.
I am not a lawyer, but reading the course of communications between Jack Thompson and Penny Arcade, it seems to me that while Penny Arcade is certainly not guilty of criminal harassment, Jack Thompson has violated the Florida Bar's standard of ethics for attorneys. He is using his status as an attorney, as an officer of the court, to threaten/bully private citizens with obviously frivolous suits. (You cannot sue someone for merely e-mailing you, unless it was obscene, a death threat, causing severe emotional distress, etc.!) While not rising to the point of a suspendable offense, I believe a public reprimand from the Bar is appropriate and needed.
What's really scary, though, is that so much of Fourth Amendment law rests on an expectation of privacy. School children can be searched with less than probable cause (reasonable suspicion), can be ordered to give urine samples for mass suspicionless drug tests, etc. When these children enter the real world, how will their perceptions limit our privacy rights due to the lessened expectation of privacy that they have been taught is proper?
When I worked for the Department of Justice, a case might have 5 different case numbers: one case number for the DOJ, one case number for the FBI, one case number for the Defense Criminal Investigative Service, one case number for the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, etc. If I only had the DOJ jacket number, it could take me 15 minutes to get the case number for another agency, just so I could talk to one of the investigating agents.
Spend money to fix that larger-scale problem, before flooding the FBI with money to squander on a software application that they will be terminating and starting afresh on.
One of the reasons I chose Dartmouth College was because of thier outstanding computer facilities... The entire campus is wireless, there is free public printing (which at the time I matriculated was unlimited), network ports in every room, many classrooms, and other buildings, etc. It wasn't the only factor, but it was an important one.
To respond to the AC, I'm hardly a neocon religious right-winger. I'm a Jewish Democrat who devotes my time defending civil liberties, and I think that the government should keep its nose out of business transactions between consenting adults.
My point was simply thus: mainstream America doesn't consider providing a forum for "Erotic Services" and the posts within to be congruent with operating a business with a staunch moral compass, and the article in the Chronicle was geared towards that mainstream audience.
Go to Craigslist and click on the listings for Erotic Services, and you'll find hundreds of listings for "escorts", "massage artists", or plain and simple prostitutes who aren't hiding beyond another title. Around the same time each month, there are a number of posts for women seeking to raise rent money, and not by working at the local supermarket.
Sure, one can say that Craig's List is just the middleman, holding a forum and all, but when they have a section specifically for "Erotic Services", I'm less then sympathetic with that argument.
Yes, you file papers, you have hearings, your opponent responds, the judge decides, but these e-mails are documents that were presumably obtained from IBM, through the discovery process. In that instance, you don't need to show it to your opponent--you got it FROM your opponent. Further, you don't need to show it to the judge until you use it.
The only reason for SCO to release this info to the public now is to help the battle for public opinion, and if you want to do that, you should start with a source a bit higher up the chain then SCOforum, such as, say, the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, or some other well reputed paper.
I have to disagree with you, Jawhawk, about the smartass thing not working with live actors. The TV version of Buffy the Vampire slayer usually had a one-liner of one sort or another, and I don't whether it was Sarah Michelle Geller's acting or the brilliance of Joss Whedon's writing, but I never found the one-liners in BtVS sounding like they were forced.
This doesn't sound like a very good idea. Even if the school itself is trustworthy and doesn't examine student files for content, such as illegally downloaded copyrighted materials, it is far too tempting a target for hackers--a nice centralized system with which he or she can control the entire campus's Windows machines. I much prefer Dartmouth College's response to the problems of viruses and worms--if something is detected, you'll be kicked off the network and you won't be allowed back on until your computer is clean.
I'm rather shocked by this decision.... While I guess it won't affect me currently because I already have an X-Box, I'll be quite pissed if it breaks and the X-Box 2 can't play my games.
I use PlayStation games in my PlayStation 2 all of the time, and the ability to do so is the primary reason why I bought a PlayStation 2. There are plenty of PlayStation games that, in my opinion, are by far better then their descendants (especially some baseball games).
Finally, there's the obvious point that people who spent lots of money on X-Box games will want to be able to continue playing them--backwards compatibility surely matters to them (and people who spend lots of money on games are the folks Microsoft wants to target!).
Since Howard Stern seems to be a popular example of FCC regulation of content, I'll touch on that. While Howard Stern's show is offensive to many and has been so for many years, he has a huge following. He is popular, people tune in to listen. If what he is doing is sufficiently distasteful, ratings will fall and he'll get kicked off the air by the radio stations. This is not an area in which the Government should be dictating what is on the air.
Yes--it's the public's airwaves and all, but hey--the public is listening to it! The public likes it! Not everyone to be sure, but this isn't some guy who broke into a radio station and started shouting obscenities into a microphone. There is substance here, and the Government should not be interfering.
Radio and TV is an area where the free market of ideas should reign. We have V-chips and similar technology to stop your kids from seeing what you don't want them to see. (Without even mentioning that the best. and most appropiate method is to watch TV with them instead of using it as a babysitter).
Again, I can't speak to Declan's main point, as to whether or not the entire FCC should be abolished, but I'd certainly like to see that happen to the division that enforces broadcasting standards...
Standing is given to the Department of Justice via the statute proposed by Senators Hatch and Leahy. Article III, Section 2 of the US Constitution would appy if the DOJ tried to take civil action against pirates without this statute in place.
What this article doesn't mention is how (or if) the code gets around the normal OS X restrictions requiring that one enters an administrator's password. Even if applications can be hidden, I question the amount of damage they can do... Surely nobody will enter an admin password requested by an ".mp3" file.
Besides, this isn't a virus so much as a security flaw. Why pay $60 for software when Apple will surely release a patch soon?
Oh, and for all the PC assholes who are currently saying "In your face, mac zealots" or whatnot--nobody claims that OS X is bulletproof--no computer system is. Nevertheless, it seems to be a lot more secure than, say, Windows, which has security problems all of the time.
Once people get used to having the FCC take on a Comstockian role in censoring broadcast television, they are far less likely to protest if Congress expands the scope of the FCC to cover cable, satelite, and other mediums. Congress has already gone after the internet, after all....
Democrats voted for the bill, but the bill and this ruling are two different things. The FCC Comissioners are Republicans, appointed by Dubya, and the Chairman's position is an obvious case of nepotism.
Many people find Howard Stern's show to be grossly offensive, however many other people love it. If Stern's show really stepped over the line, people would stop listening to it. If people stopped listening to it, the show would be canceled, and he would be off the air.
I don't understand how Republicans get away with this level of hypocrisy. They are in favor of privitization and less Government regulation of businesses, except when it comes to what can be said in the media. Republicans are in favor of states' rights, except when it comes to a state choosing to allow same-sex marraige. Republicans are "ultra-moralistic" in their own minds, impeaching President Bill Clinton for lying about a sexual relationship, but when it comes to a Republican aide in the Senate hacking into sensitive Democrat files, only Orin Hatch has the honor to stand against it.
The FCC's ruling is really, really fucking awful.
~JISA
I suppose it depends on how you define the current freedom. I don't believe that it is going to lead to increased censorship. I don't believe it is going to lead to increased tracking or monitoring (although certainly other things, like the recent FBI/DOJ request for increased wiretapping ability may do just that).
I think that it will lead to increased filtering on the ISP side of things. More ISPs will be using Spam Assasin and similar programs behind the scenes. Undoubtedly, some legitimate e-mails will be caught by these SPAM traps, and the end-user might not have access to them.
Personally, since Dartmouth College starting running virus scanners and SPAM filters and the like, I constantly get e-mails where the "suspicious" file was automatically removed, and although most of those removals were viruses, I also lose legitimate files that are sent to me. As an end-user, I don't have access to change the settings or tell the system that a file is, in fact, OK. Instead, I have to e-mail the person back and ask them to resend the file to my AOL account.
I suspect that as more people use cable and DSL and the malware increases, this behind-the-scene tinkering will increase.
A serious blow to current freedoms on the Internet? I'm not sure. A pain in the ass? Absolutely.
The studies showed dissatisfaction with the way that electronics were marketed towards men. Women said that they were treated differently, and in many cases, were assumed to be stupid or unknowledgable, compared to men. Brenda Myers, quoted in the CNN article that the slashdot link in the parent links to, said, "Every time you go these places [national electronics retail stores], they think women don't know anything, and they don't you the same features as they would when my husbands goes with me."
Creating a printer that will be marketed under the theme "printer easy for women to use" is not going to mollify complaints like Myers, instead, it seems to reinforce her argument that electronics retailers and manufacturers think women are stupid. Saying that this printer is easy for women to use is really just saying is that women aren't capable of using all the other printers.
http://homepage.mac.com/jrc/contrib/mobile_office/
This website will give you detailed instructions on setup, but as I said, it's really simple.
Finally, microwave and VCR clocks across the country won't be flashing 12:00!
You have a right to privacy, of course, but not when it comes to your shared folder. Why? Because it is shared.
This is very different from looking into one's home or mail. I am no RIAA apologist, but I certainly wouldn't fault them for looking at shared folders on P2P services and the like. When you share a folder, you've made the contents open and available to be downloaded or looked at by anybody.
It's the equivelent of putting a big sign in front of your house saying "Come in, one and all", or opening your mail and tacking it on a bulletin board. In the first example, anyone could walk right in, and in the second, anyone could step right up and read your mail. Why? Because you've made your house and mail public.
The same logic holds true with a shared folder--by sharing it, you've made it public.