Bet you a nickel the police would need a warrant before such surveillance.
Yes, that's how police helicopter pilots fly in general, they take off in their helicopter and they shut their eyes for fear of seeing anything without a warrant.
But if you're using Skype, that is using P2P technology to get across, so when they're throttling P2P, they're throttling Skype. And since many P2P users also encrypt their packets and use the same port as Microsoft Messenger, Microsoft Messenger also becomes collateral damage for P2P throttling.
In a way, Apple has been wise to wait on 4G to catch up to the point where... well, where it actually means something because it doesn't mean anything right now.
By your backwards-rationalization, I bet it must have also been good for US consumers that the iPhone was available exclusively to AT&T for so long. It's not like the carrier you have and the location you're in would affect the service you're getting in the least.
It's not ironic. It's a direct response to Google's claims:
The team’s goal is to show Google is lying because the search giant already indexes all public information on social networks, and there’s no reason why it can’t use that data as well.
Personally, I do not know who's telling the truth, and I can't say I like Facebook very much, but I'm hoping that more people actually read the article before rehashing Google's claims (which the article is already responding to).
If this type of service was only meant for personal backups and not illegal file sharing, this would have been the standard in the first place.
Why would anyone ever have to "share" backup files with anyone else.
You're making a strawman argument. No where does it say on that site that it's for making backups.
I assume they're only making the files available to the original uploaders (so that no one can come and later claim that they've lost important files because of them). You know how people are. If gmail were to suddenly shut down tomorrow and allow no one to retrieve anything from their account. 100% of all gmail users would claim that they had lost irreplaceable files and data on it (even if they hadn't).
...and this facade (of legal file sharing) will be completely stopped...
Sure, the facade of illegal file sharing may shut down, but at the cost of the legal file sharing as well. I don't know about you, but for me if everyone of those filesharing sites shuts down, that means I'm relegated to using gmail for sharing files (and that usually means a limit of 5 MB to 25 MB depending on who I'm emailing the attachment to). Either that, or I can use meetup.com site which has a limit of 10 MB (plus I think they manually inspects each upload, even for paid customers, so that means there is a delay there as well before anything actually shows up).
If these sites can be shut down with lawsuits now, why do we need SOPA and PIPA?
Like I said, I hope this doesn't shut down all file-sharing web sites, which would make my life difficult, but I think that was the original point of SOPA and PIPA, and that was to eventually shut down without due process any and all user file-sharing web sites that are easy to use (no matter what collateral damage this would create on the legitimate and legal usage that goes on there).
To be fair, in this case their prison sentences seem to be somewhat proportional to the money they made from the site.
The site made a total of $505,000 in ads and donations in the approximate 2+ years that it ran. Smith received 14 months and made $172,387 (I assume this is the amount he made, because in the case of Dedemko, the amount Dedemko was ordered to pay was the same as the amount he was supposed to have made) Hana received 22 months and I believe made $210,000 Dedemko made $58,004 (and won't get sentenced until Feb) And as to the two or three other ninja-pirates, the articles don't really say.
In the case of the TSA agents, the take was $40,000, but we should assume that they probably split the money between themselves so it's probably more like each got $20,000 and then each was sentenced 6 months of prison (along with 5 years of probation). Now this is not to say that the TSA agents didn't steal a lot more on other days (they probably did). And this is not to say that those TSA agents didn't abuse the special privileges they were given (which in my mind makes it a lot worse). Also, the original $505,000 figure I quoted for the ninja video site is probably misleading as well, since a video site like that will have significant expenses for the hardware they're using and the bandwidth they were consuming each month.
So I still agree that the TSA agents got off easy compared to the ninja-pirates, but at least in this case, it doesn't seem like the judge just pulled imaginary numbers completely out of thin air. The ninja-pirates did make some real money from their venture (at least two of them did). And unlike a site like Megaupload, they copied and uploaded 100% of the infringing videos themselves.
Journalism has a lower unemployment rate than engineering? Wow.
I think that's because you can't receive unemployment benefits for a job you've never even had. Otherwise, all of us on Slashdot would be referring to ourselves as unemployed porn stars or as unemployed jet fighter pilots (never mind that many of us are probably still virgins and probably scared of heights).
I see co-workers utterly lacking critical thinking skills or any curiosity, passively accepting whatever the mainstream media or the software vendors tell them, and who get insanely defensive when you poke holes in the wet toilet paper of their core political/cultural/technical/economic/religious beliefs.
I know several people with Masters in liberal arts (one of which has a Masters in Philosophy) that behave the same exact way you describe.
This is not to say that that this kind of education can't be life-changing or positively transformative, it's just that for those people at least (plus I'm sure you can come up with your own examples in your own life) -- this kind of education didn't help them as much as it should have.
It's the uploader that pays for file upload space just like with web hosting, and he (nor Dropbox) cannot make money by uploading pirated content.
Yes, Dropbox provides no incentive for users to upload copyrighted content, and you have to pay to upload content (aside from the 2GB of free space you get with a free account).
But technically one could argue that Dropbox itself profits more heavily from the users uploading copyrighted content (than the users who are just uploading their personal stuff). If you host a file-sharing site that's cashflow-positive and that has a scalable business model, any super popular (most likely copyrighted) content that is uploaded on your servers will most likely be a better Return On Investment than the non-popular kind.
After all, Dropbox profits from converting free users (even free downloaders) into paid customers, so the more they can increase the throughput of eye balls to their site, the more they'll profit from the free publicity they're getting. And also, super popular content needs to be only stored once, even if it's downloaded a million times, so if you're just caring about the number of eye balls you're getting, it will be cheaper for you to get that same number eye balls through the more popular (usually copyrighted) content out there than the non-popular content.
And that's what is so insidious about the new logic the FBI is using. A previously legal activity doesn't magically become illegal overnight, just because the FBI thinks somebody has been taking advantage of the flaws in our system. That's not how our legal system works (unless the Congress says it does). Just take our financial system as an example, that system is flawed too, and thousands of financial industry executives and mortgage brokers have taken advantage of that fact, but you don't see the FBI or the Federal Reserve suddenly storming those guy's mansions with SWAT teams and throwing them in jail.
Get a load of that coincidence. it 'coincides' just 2 days after sopa protests, and involves almost all major technology companies that have major stakes on internet. Just like how the megaupload bust 'coincided' a day after sopa protests, yesterday.
I don't think Apple, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, or Lucas Film were involved in the SOPA/PIPA protest.
So that leaves Google and Adobe, but if you just take a look at the dates of the numerous subpoenas on the document itself. There is no sign that the DOJ was going to let up in this case.
The project also seems to have suffered from scope creep.
Initially, the original project was about making the communication systems more inter-operable and easier to use between agencies, departments, and jurisdictions.
Then, somehow it also became about making the systems more secure and encrypted (which in my mind is a completely opposite constraint than making a system more inter-operable and easier to use).
And now, the system is being criticized for not being able to withstand natural disasters, since it relies too much on 3G or 4G towers (which is a fine idea of course, but that requirement seems to have been tacked on just now). It's kind of late to change the requirements so late in the game.
The story says that he's Chinese, not that he's a Chinese citizen. Usually, the FBI labels Chinese non-US citizens as "Chinese nationals". In this case, since only the "Chinese" label is being used, it probably only means that he's of Chinese born, or of Chinese origin, but nothing else.
Also, since he "stole" the code for his own private training business, I wonder if it's not just the code he authored that he stole. I'm not trying to excuse his actions, I'm just trying to explain why would someone be so cavalier about teaching a class with such materials (usually, programmers teaching classes have to list the examples they're going to use in the agenda they advertise, otherwise nobody shows up).
Zhang faces up to 10 years in prison and a fine up to $250,000, or twice the financial gain derived from the offense or twice the gross financial loss to the victims.
Also, I wonder how they're going to calculate the gross financial loss to the victim (unless the real victim here is the middleman between the government and the individual doing the work, not the government itself). It's not like the government was planning to sell that software. So even if it paid 9 million dollars to get that code written, it doesn't sound like they lost anything by his actions (unless they can prove they have to do additional work trying to make it more secure because of him).
And in other news, the X-ray apps on the iPhone are seeing skyrocketing sales, as shrewd Canadian consumers learn to X-ray their shrink-wrapped iPad boxes before taking them to the checkout.
Just as expected, you just linked to an article by an Apple fanboy. Apple Television? What's that? Didn't this product already come out five or ten years ago?
Not to mention that this was Microsoft's last appearance at CES and that trade shows in general are on the decline. It just makes me wonder if CES is still worth it.
It's probably not worth it for Microsoft. Microsoft is clearly not getting the Marketshare it was hoping to get against Android (even with the help of Nokia).
and that trade shows in general are on the decline.
That statement is true enough. Just take a look at the last MacWorld. Not getting the iPhone 5 was a let down for everyone who went to it.
Is it because girls are bad at programming? I see no reason to think there's a gender-related basis for programming... do you?
It could be. So far, you haven't eliminated that possibility.
I know it's not politically correct to say, but there is probably a biological reason why males are much more likely to be diagnosed as color-blind, stutterers, autistic, or as having aspergers syndrome, than women.
...but you've got a long way to go to establish any sort of *biological* reason for the disparity.
But that's the thing, I don't have to prove anything. You're the one who's claiming that the gender gap in computer programming is not natural. So you're the one who has to prove your case.
Besides, it's not like society really wants us to study this too closely. As soon as the President of Harvard said he wanted to study if women were not as good in Math as men, he was vilified in the press and fired from his post.
Re:Part of a money conflict within the King family
on
A Copyright Nightmare
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· Score: 1
How can an speech that occurs in public be "copyrighted"?
Technically, anybody could transcribe the speech, slap their own copyright on it, and sell it themselves. That's how ridiculous copyright law is.
This is similar to the way Google offers reports on search trends based on its users’ aggregate search activities.
In fact, all of this is public information too. You can look at search amounts for specific searches here.
"Number of Global Searches" and "Number of Local Searches"? That's not a lot of information.
So you're telling us that Politico won't be getting Facebook's users age/birthday, gender information, party affiliation, and zip code, along with the number of times they mentioned a candidate's name positively or negatively?
Now I agree that this slashdot headline is mostly just for click-bait purposes, but personally, I would still love to see the specific report Politico was getting. The same goes for Google, if Google delivers any report privately to any company out there, I would love to see that private report as well (to make sure it only matches what's listed in the public adwords web page you just linked us to).
Why was Google not able to make this successful? Is it because people aren't interested in being accountable for their information?
No, that's not it. Here is what I heard from the grapevine.
Centralizing health records a high risk area for Google. There are many privacy implications that come with it. For very good reasons, people value the privacy of their medical records. And many people would just love to sue Google, if it were to ever make a mistake in that area. On one hand, Google has very deep pockets, so it already makes for a very large target. And on the other hand, since Google is deriving almost all of its revenue from advertising, Google is much less likely to be given the benefit of the doubt if it ever does make that kind of mistake.
Or it could just create an underground gray market for the stuff, and we'd be left with do-it-yourself copper foundries, copper home hoarders, copper traffickers that drive/ship the stuff abroad (or to a State/County where the enforcement is not as strict as where it was originally stolen from), and copper laundering facilities (where the copper is given a new clean title and resold on the legal copper market).
That's what PR departments and governments do, they use words that mean the opposite of what they mean.
After all, there is nothing more undemocratic than a single puppeteer dictating who has a voice among the millions of people that do not have one, and pretending that the voice was completely chosen at random -- when clearly it was not (each one is too perfect and too politically correct for that).
Slashdot Mirror
Bet you a nickel the police would need a warrant before such surveillance.
Yes, that's how police helicopter pilots fly in general, they take off in their helicopter and they shut their eyes for fear of seeing anything without a warrant.
I don't know about the other VOIP solutions.
But if you're using Skype, that is using P2P technology to get across, so when they're throttling P2P, they're throttling Skype. And since many P2P users also encrypt their packets and use the same port as Microsoft Messenger, Microsoft Messenger also becomes collateral damage for P2P throttling.
They SHOULD allow titles.
They SHOULDN'T allow titles. There, I just won my argument by using all caps.
My iPad and my iPhone get their connections from my Android phone's hotspot. Doesn't everyone's?
In a way, Apple has been wise to wait on 4G to catch up to the point where... well, where it actually means something because it doesn't mean anything right now.
By your backwards-rationalization, I bet it must have also been good for US consumers that the iPhone was available exclusively to AT&T for so long. It's not like the carrier you have and the location you're in would affect the service you're getting in the least.
I actually like these rules.
Not that they will help much in this regard, since Canada can easily be bullied by US politicians.
It's not ironic. It's a direct response to Google's claims:
The team’s goal is to show Google is lying because the search giant already indexes all public information on social networks, and there’s no reason why it can’t use that data as well.
Personally, I do not know who's telling the truth, and I can't say I like Facebook very much, but I'm hoping that more people actually read the article before rehashing Google's claims (which the article is already responding to).
If this type of service was only meant for personal backups and not illegal file sharing, this would have been the standard in the first place.
Why would anyone ever have to "share" backup files with anyone else.
You're making a strawman argument. No where does it say on that site that it's for making backups.
I assume they're only making the files available to the original uploaders (so that no one can come and later claim that they've lost important files because of them). You know how people are. If gmail were to suddenly shut down tomorrow and allow no one to retrieve anything from their account. 100% of all gmail users would claim that they had lost irreplaceable files and data on it (even if they hadn't).
...and this facade (of legal file sharing) will be completely stopped...
Sure, the facade of illegal file sharing may shut down, but at the cost of the legal file sharing as well. I don't know about you, but for me if everyone of those filesharing sites shuts down, that means I'm relegated to using gmail for sharing files (and that usually means a limit of 5 MB to 25 MB depending on who I'm emailing the attachment to). Either that, or I can use meetup.com site which has a limit of 10 MB (plus I think they manually inspects each upload, even for paid customers, so that means there is a delay there as well before anything actually shows up).
If these sites can be shut down with lawsuits now, why do we need SOPA and PIPA?
Like I said, I hope this doesn't shut down all file-sharing web sites, which would make my life difficult, but I think that was the original point of SOPA and PIPA, and that was to eventually shut down without due process any and all user file-sharing web sites that are easy to use (no matter what collateral damage this would create on the legitimate and legal usage that goes on there).
To be fair, in this case their prison sentences seem to be somewhat proportional to the money they made from the site.
The site made a total of $505,000 in ads and donations in the approximate 2+ years that it ran.
Smith received 14 months and made $172,387 (I assume this is the amount he made, because in the case of Dedemko, the amount Dedemko was ordered to pay was the same as the amount he was supposed to have made)
Hana received 22 months and I believe made $210,000
Dedemko made $58,004 (and won't get sentenced until Feb)
And as to the two or three other ninja-pirates, the articles don't really say.
In the case of the TSA agents, the take was $40,000, but we should assume that they probably split the money between themselves so it's probably more like each got $20,000 and then each was sentenced 6 months of prison (along with 5 years of probation). Now this is not to say that the TSA agents didn't steal a lot more on other days (they probably did). And this is not to say that those TSA agents didn't abuse the special privileges they were given (which in my mind makes it a lot worse). Also, the original $505,000 figure I quoted for the ninja video site is probably misleading as well, since a video site like that will have significant expenses for the hardware they're using and the bandwidth they were consuming each month.
So I still agree that the TSA agents got off easy compared to the ninja-pirates, but at least in this case, it doesn't seem like the judge just pulled imaginary numbers completely out of thin air. The ninja-pirates did make some real money from their venture (at least two of them did). And unlike a site like Megaupload, they copied and uploaded 100% of the infringing videos themselves.
Why dont the top 100 odd tech firms just get their boards together and buy out the entertainment industry,
Because most tech firms have bigger fishes to fry (and better ways to spend/invest their money).
Journalism has a lower unemployment rate than engineering? Wow.
I think that's because you can't receive unemployment benefits for a job you've never even had. Otherwise, all of us on Slashdot would be referring to ourselves as unemployed porn stars or as unemployed jet fighter pilots (never mind that many of us are probably still virgins and probably scared of heights).
I see co-workers utterly lacking critical thinking skills or any curiosity, passively accepting whatever the mainstream media or the software vendors tell them, and who get insanely defensive when you poke holes in the wet toilet paper of their core political/cultural/technical/economic/religious beliefs.
I know several people with Masters in liberal arts (one of which has a Masters in Philosophy) that behave the same exact way you describe.
This is not to say that that this kind of education can't be life-changing or positively transformative, it's just that for those people at least (plus I'm sure you can come up with your own examples in your own life) -- this kind of education didn't help them as much as it should have.
It's the uploader that pays for file upload space just like with web hosting, and he (nor Dropbox) cannot make money by uploading pirated content.
Yes, Dropbox provides no incentive for users to upload copyrighted content, and you have to pay to upload content (aside from the 2GB of free space you get with a free account).
But technically one could argue that Dropbox itself profits more heavily from the users uploading copyrighted content (than the users who are just uploading their personal stuff). If you host a file-sharing site that's cashflow-positive and that has a scalable business model, any super popular (most likely copyrighted) content that is uploaded on your servers will most likely be a better Return On Investment than the non-popular kind.
After all, Dropbox profits from converting free users (even free downloaders) into paid customers, so the more they can increase the throughput of eye balls to their site, the more they'll profit from the free publicity they're getting. And also, super popular content needs to be only stored once, even if it's downloaded a million times, so if you're just caring about the number of eye balls you're getting, it will be cheaper for you to get that same number eye balls through the more popular (usually copyrighted) content out there than the non-popular content.
And that's what is so insidious about the new logic the FBI is using. A previously legal activity doesn't magically become illegal overnight, just because the FBI thinks somebody has been taking advantage of the flaws in our system. That's not how our legal system works (unless the Congress says it does). Just take our financial system as an example, that system is flawed too, and thousands of financial industry executives and mortgage brokers have taken advantage of that fact, but you don't see the FBI or the Federal Reserve suddenly storming those guy's mansions with SWAT teams and throwing them in jail.
Get a load of that coincidence. it 'coincides' just 2 days after sopa protests, and involves almost all major technology companies that have major stakes on internet. Just like how the megaupload bust 'coincided' a day after sopa protests, yesterday.
I don't think Apple, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, or Lucas Film were involved in the SOPA/PIPA protest.
So that leaves Google and Adobe, but if you just take a look at the dates of the numerous subpoenas on the document itself. There is no sign that the DOJ was going to let up in this case.
The project also seems to have suffered from scope creep.
Initially, the original project was about making the communication systems more inter-operable and easier to use between agencies, departments, and jurisdictions.
Then, somehow it also became about making the systems more secure and encrypted (which in my mind is a completely opposite constraint than making a system more inter-operable and easier to use).
And now, the system is being criticized for not being able to withstand natural disasters, since it relies too much on 3G or 4G towers (which is a fine idea of course, but that requirement seems to have been tacked on just now). It's kind of late to change the requirements so late in the game.
The story says that he's Chinese, not that he's a Chinese citizen. Usually, the FBI labels Chinese non-US citizens as "Chinese nationals". In this case, since only the "Chinese" label is being used, it probably only means that he's of Chinese born, or of Chinese origin, but nothing else.
Also, since he "stole" the code for his own private training business, I wonder if it's not just the code he authored that he stole. I'm not trying to excuse his actions, I'm just trying to explain why would someone be so cavalier about teaching a class with such materials (usually, programmers teaching classes have to list the examples they're going to use in the agenda they advertise, otherwise nobody shows up).
Zhang faces up to 10 years in prison and a fine up to $250,000, or twice the financial gain derived from the offense or twice the gross financial loss to the victims.
Also, I wonder how they're going to calculate the gross financial loss to the victim (unless the real victim here is the middleman between the government and the individual doing the work, not the government itself). It's not like the government was planning to sell that software. So even if it paid 9 million dollars to get that code written, it doesn't sound like they lost anything by his actions (unless they can prove they have to do additional work trying to make it more secure because of him).
And in other news, the X-ray apps on the iPhone are seeing skyrocketing sales, as shrewd Canadian consumers learn to X-ray their shrink-wrapped iPad boxes before taking them to the checkout.
And it also seems like the most important products don't even show up there
Just as expected, you just linked to an article by an Apple fanboy. Apple Television? What's that? Didn't this product already come out five or ten years ago?
Not to mention that this was Microsoft's last appearance at CES and that trade shows in general are on the decline. It just makes me wonder if CES is still worth it.
It's probably not worth it for Microsoft. Microsoft is clearly not getting the Marketshare it was hoping to get against Android (even with the help of Nokia).
and that trade shows in general are on the decline.
That statement is true enough. Just take a look at the last MacWorld. Not getting the iPhone 5 was a let down for everyone who went to it.
Is it because girls are bad at programming? I see no reason to think there's a gender-related basis for programming... do you?
It could be. So far, you haven't eliminated that possibility.
I know it's not politically correct to say, but there is probably a biological reason why males are much more likely to be diagnosed as color-blind, stutterers, autistic, or as having aspergers syndrome, than women.
...but you've got a long way to go to establish any sort of *biological* reason for the disparity.
But that's the thing, I don't have to prove anything. You're the one who's claiming that the gender gap in computer programming is not natural. So you're the one who has to prove your case.
Besides, it's not like society really wants us to study this too closely. As soon as the President of Harvard said he wanted to study if women were not as good in Math as men, he was vilified in the press and fired from his post.
How can an speech that occurs in public be "copyrighted"?
Technically, anybody could transcribe the speech, slap their own copyright on it, and sell it themselves. That's how ridiculous copyright law is.
Here are some numbers to get you started on your calculations. That test was done indoors.
Even the article mentions it:
This is similar to the way Google offers reports on search trends based on its users’ aggregate search activities.
In fact, all of this is public information too. You can look at search amounts for specific searches here.
"Number of Global Searches" and "Number of Local Searches"? That's not a lot of information.
So you're telling us that Politico won't be getting Facebook's users age/birthday, gender information, party affiliation, and zip code, along with the number of times they mentioned a candidate's name positively or negatively?
Now I agree that this slashdot headline is mostly just for click-bait purposes, but personally, I would still love to see the specific report Politico was getting. The same goes for Google, if Google delivers any report privately to any company out there, I would love to see that private report as well (to make sure it only matches what's listed in the public adwords web page you just linked us to).
Why was Google not able to make this successful? Is it because people aren't interested in being accountable for their information?
No, that's not it. Here is what I heard from the grapevine.
Centralizing health records a high risk area for Google. There are many privacy implications that come with it. For very good reasons, people value the privacy of their medical records. And many people would just love to sue Google, if it were to ever make a mistake in that area. On one hand, Google has very deep pockets, so it already makes for a very large target. And on the other hand, since Google is deriving almost all of its revenue from advertising, Google is much less likely to be given the benefit of the doubt if it ever does make that kind of mistake.
Or it could just create an underground gray market for the stuff, and we'd be left with do-it-yourself copper foundries, copper home hoarders, copper traffickers that drive/ship the stuff abroad (or to a State/County where the enforcement is not as strict as where it was originally stolen from), and copper laundering facilities (where the copper is given a new clean title and resold on the legal copper market).
Democratic? You keep using that word.
That's what PR departments and governments do, they use words that mean the opposite of what they mean.
After all, there is nothing more undemocratic than a single puppeteer dictating who has a voice among the millions of people that do not have one, and pretending that the voice was completely chosen at random -- when clearly it was not (each one is too perfect and too politically correct for that).