Because the government provides services all year, so it needs money all year, not all in one lump at the end. It also makes it much harder to evade taxes.
It is not will pay it is did pay. That's why it is called a tax refund.
"Will have paid" is probably the best tense for what I was trying to get at.
There is a huge psychological difference between having the money in hand and then having to give some of it away immediately versus never having that amount in hand in the first place.
OK, but that doesn't explain how this difference is annulled by having things separately stated on a receipt.
With-holding is literally a way to with-hold the sucker-punch to the gut feeling people would experience if they had to pay their income taxes directly.
I'd say it has more of an effect of shifting the blame from the government to the employer. After all, your employer is the one paying that measily salary, the government actually gives you money back every year. In any case, this isn't the primary purpose of withholding. The primary purpose is that the income tax system is pay-as-you-go, and it'd be far too much hassle to have each individual pay her taxes weekly or monthly like businesses are required to do with withholding.
The rest of your comments don't even deserve a reply. I don't know why I both replying to anonymous trolls.
You've got to eat. You gotta live somewhere. I suppose you could rely on your parents or sugar-momma, or whatever to pay for all that, but it's pretty hard to get through life without ever paying for anything.
It would all be a business expense and owned by my LLC.
Your personal residence is not a business expense. Neither are the meals you eat (even if you rely on lunch meetings you can only deduct 1/2).
Not only that, but I would buy everything using pre-tax dollars, and only pay taxes on the adjusted income of my LLC.
If you lived very frugally you could get away with paying yourself a minimal income, low enough to pay nothing but FICA and unemployment taxes (the latter through your LLC), and then only if your LLC itself was losing money or or making a very small amount. Of course, these taxes owed by your LLC would pass through to your personal income taxes unless you elected to be treated as a C-corp, in which case the corp would probably be declared a "personal service corporation" and subject to a flat tax at a 35% tax rate.
That's a pretty standard practice, in fact I have several friends with businesses who do that already.
And I work in a CPA firm which handles several LLCs and I can tell you that if your friends businesses are making a significant amount of money, that they haven't elected to be treated as a personal service C-corporation and subject themselves to a 35% tax rate, and that they aren't paying themselves any income, then they are committing tax evasion. Besides all this, I'm not sure why you'd choose an LLC. There are very few benefits and numerous expenses. For a profitable closely held corporation which is primarily in the business of performing personal services the S-corporation is usually the most advantageous tax-wise, but even then if you don't pay yourself any salary and make more than a little bit of money you are almost guaranteed to be audited.
Internships don't pay that much, and apparently either you or your two friends are incredibly rich anyway. So forget the internship, and spend your time and talent working on an open source project or two. If it's your friends that are rich and not you, convince them to set up the company now and hire you as an intern for a measly salary.
I don't think anyone on slashdot has ever thrown a computer away..
Heh, I've even bought computers which others might have thrown away. Instead of paying $3 to that thrift store I guess I should have gotten them to pay me!
Almost everyone uses computers now, and they're integral to the economy. So even if some people end up subsidizing others, it wouldn't be horribly unjust
Subsidizing Google $1,000,000 for its 100,000 computers and subsidizing some random Joe $10 for his 1 computer would be horribly unjust.
If you want to recycle, that's great. But why should we encourage people by paying them to do something that costs us money to begin with?
Depends on the item. If it's something relatively harmless, like aluminum, then fine. Sure, we might start to run out of aluminum, but if we do then the value of aluminum will go up and we can just go mining for it in our landfills. But lead is not harmless, in fact, it is considered hazardous waste. If lead gets into our drinking water supplies, it can cause many harmful health effects.
Well then, using your system, I would just create my own LLC, put all my assets into it, have a personal income of $0, and get everything for free.
If you had a personal income of $0, then you couldn't buy anything for your own personal use. If your LLC bought stuff for you, then that'd be considered a distribution, and hence income.
The customer knows what they are paying for, it isn't hidden away in the total price.
OTOH, it lets the retailer get away with advertising a price which is different from the price the consumer actually has to pay, which in my opinion is worse.
This knowledge helps to prevent the fees being raised as an arbitrary form of taxation - income tax gets taken out of most people's paychecks before they ever even see the money, thus obscuring the direct impact of the tax.
Umm, I don't see how that's at all the case with people's paychecks. Sure, you get paid in one net check, but all the companies I've worked for have also provided me with a statement saying what my gross pay is, and what the taxes are. And in fact, for most people that statement actually overestimates the actual taxes the people will pay.
If you charge the consumer the tax, they're still going to write a single check. They'll just (most likely) receive an itemized receipt which states which part of the cost is actually a tax. I really don't see the difference.
If the fees were directly assesed to the distributor or manufacturer, then they would be inflated with each step in the process just as the price of the system is. In effect, paying the fee at point of sale is like paying the "wholesale" cost but charging the manufacturer the fee would result in it being marked up to "retail" pricing by the time the end-consumer pays for it, possibly even doubling the original "wholesale" fee level for no added benefit to the environment or the consumer.
That's not the way supply and demand curves work. The vast majority of markups are not percentage based, they're based on the efforts and value of the middleman. Raising the cost of the item doesn't significantly raise the costs to or value provided by the middlemen (maybe if it's a credit card purchase there'd be an exception for that portion of the markup representing the credit card fees, but that's an exception not the rule).
When I do a search on google I get a page linking directly to the site urls, so google doesn't even know which selections I'm making. Looks like they aren't doing this.
Heh, so in the future, we'll have to worry about how long we can go without plugging in our devices to uncharge them, rather than to charge them. At least uncharging is something that can be done without being connected to a grid.
Don't forget the most popular portable device of all - the automobile. Just a tenfold increase in battery life (without a corresponding increase in cost) would probably make electric cars a viable option, as well as increase the viability of a plug-in hybrid. In fact, the electric car would probably have a greater range between "refills" than the gasoline car.
In a story I read just today on Forbes.com, three major U.S. auto manufacturers have already created cars powered by fuel cells. Apparently the House of Representatives has passed a bill to "subsidize 15% of the price of fuel cell technology bought by private entities." I'm not sure how easily this technology can be adapted to smaller portable devices, but surely there will be at least some parts of the research which can be reused.
Maybe one improvement which is needed is the electric car batteries need to be more easily removable. Those of us who live in apartments or houses without garages would have quite a bit of trouble with an electric or even a plug-in hybrid without some major infrastructure changes. If the battery were light enough for me to take inside every night, then the only thing stopping me from using an electric is the cost and the range (both battery limitations). As for the plug-in hybrid, the cost of the batteries would be the only problem remaining. And hey, hydrogen is light, so maybe fuel cells is the answer to that:).
The only reason PGP was introduced was to create uncertainity in the minds of the jury that there might have been encrypted files transfered via that computer
Maybe. More likely the prosecution was just stupid enough to believe that him/herself.
I don't know exactly what your point is.
My point was that I think you were incorrect about the reasoning.
The prosecution being stupid is not a valid reason to allow prejudical evidence to be introduced.
I never said it was.
You and I have absolutely no idea whether or not he used it in relation to the crime. He might have, he might not have.
He did not. Remember that 'innocent until proven guilty' thing? Well, it works on all levels.
Just because someone is presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law doesn't mean the person actually is innocent until proven guilty. In any case, this person was proven guilty in a court of law.
Until the state proves that he used PGP to encrypt pictures, he didn't. As they didn't even suggest that, we must assume he didn't.
No, you're absolutely incorrect. I don't have to assume anything. Besides, in the case of an appeal, the burden of proof lies on the person bringing the appeal.
And, BTW, we do know he didn't use PGP, or there would have been other computer evidence introduced. Like wiped areas of the hard drive, or encrypted files.
Do you have a transcript of the trial somewhere? Because I don't know that there wasn't other computer evidence introduced. Even if I did, I wouldn't take the fact that evidence wasn't introduced as proof that the thing never happened.
Geez, first you say there's no evidence of any pictures, then you admit that there is.
And this is arguing semantics, which I should expect from you. There is no evidence that pictures were taken.
But surely there is. You don't think the jury convicted a man of taking pictures without any evidence whatsoever, do you?
Testimony is not, in fact, 'evidence'
While we're arguing semantics, yes it is. In fact, testimony is the most common example of direct evidence.
There's no evidence or testimony that these hypothetical pictures were on a computer. There's no evidence or testimony that PGP or even the computer was used in relation to this crime at all.
Hey, can you send me the URL of the transcript of the trial where you're getting all this information from?
No one's even vaguely suggesting he go free. People are saying was a mistrial because the state introduce irrelevant and prejudical evidence implying something that wasn't true. A mistrial, of course, results in another trial.
Fine (of course, the purpose of having a new trial is that he might in fact wind up going free). But I'm not going to argue semantics. Let's just declare a mistrial whenever the prosecution lawyer says anything that doesn't directly prove a person's guilt.
You should never have a password appear in a publically readable "hash" or URL parameter, even if it's one-way encrypted
This hash wasn't exactly "publically readable". It was readable by anyone with developer access.
High-security passwords for banking, etc (these are different for each site, and I write them down and keep the list in my safe.)
For most banking sites, anyone with access to your email can change your password to your banking site. So in my opinion the password to your email account is the one which needs to be the most secure.
Personally I use a hash of the site's domain name concated with my "master password". This has the disadvantage that it allows someone who can guess my hash scheme and has my hashed password to run an offline brute force attack on my master password, but has the advantage of not having to ever write anything down (and thus not risking forgetting or losing anything as long as I remember the master password). I actually use two different passwords for my master password - one for banks and shit like that and one for sites with clown admins like Slashdot and Wikipedia. Anyway, I certainly wouldn't trust my life to this scheme or anything, but it's good enough for stuff like online banking - if someone actually compromised my online banking password they'd probably get caught if they tried to actually use that password to steal anything.
Unfortunately, Tim at the time didn't run a password checker against the hashes, which could have thrown weak passwords out of the list and thereby prevented legitimate accounts from being included with reasonable effectiveness.
That's a horrible solution. What's unfortunate is that Tim had access to the hashed passwords in the first place. Sure, by any trivial implementation *someone* has to have access to it, but that should be a person who can be trusted never to actually use that access.
No similar lookup has taken place since July 2004, so this story is a tempest in a teapot.
How can you be so sure of this? Are you the only one who has access to the passwords? From what Brion said, the hash mechanism hasn't changed at all. Sure, no similar lookup has been published since July, but that doesn't mean that it hasn't happened.
Sure, you should always assume that all administrators of any particular system have full access to your cleartext password, but it's still quite a shock when you find out that an admin is actually using that access.
Of course, if they're hashing the passwords without a salt, hashing them is likely quite useless, as anyone who can get ahold of the password hashes will have a significantly easier time than they should.
Hashing in this type of situation protects you from inadvertantly seeing someone's password, that's about it. It doesn't protect you from someone doing something actively evil, like Tim Starling did. Even if you have a salt, it doesn't really matter because somewhere you have to store the salt. Sure, using a salt will slow down a dictionary attack, so you can't crack multiple passwords at once, but it doesn't slow down the time it takes to crack one password.
And of course, anyone who has access to the machines, like Tim Starling does, could easily obtain the clear text password anyway, by simple sniffing the traffic or otherwise capturing the password before it gets hashed in the first place.
Anyone storing passwords in plaintext in this day & age, or hashing them without a salt deserves a knock upside the head. It's just not right:(
I suppose, but any time you type a password into a system you should assume the system operators have access to that cleartext password. The only way to completely avoid this would be some sort of client-side javascript hashing or the use of public/private keys.
As far as I can tell, there's no evidence of any pictures at all, much less ones in his computer.
A girl said that she was made to pose nude for him, and presumably said that he then took pictures of her. That's evidence. Now the story doesn't go very deeply into that evidence, because that's not what the story is about, but I'm sure the jury didn't base its entire case on the possession of PGP.
The evidence is that a girl testified he'd taken pictures of her.
Geez, first you say there's no evidence of any pictures, then you admit that there is.
I have to agree with this guy's lawyer. The only reason PGP was introduced was to create uncertainity in the minds of the jury that there might have been encrypted files transfered via that computer, when there was absolutely no evidence of that at all, or that it was in any way involved in the crime.
Maybe. More likely the prosecution was just stupid enough to believe that him/herself.
It's completely absurd to introduce something as evidence and say 'He did this in advance so his crime would be easier to hide' when he did not, in fact, use that in relation to the crime at all!
You and I have absolutely no idea whether or not he used it in relation to the crime. He might have, he might not have.
Oh, but I forgot, he's an evil child molestor, so obviously we should just make up crap so he gets a longer sentence.
Of course not, we should let him go free because some prosecution lawyer told the jury that he owns PGP.
I suppose you could take out the hard drive and sell me the hard drive with the OS on it, and that'd fall under first sale. But not many people want to install their own hard drives, and Apple would probably put part of the OS in the ROMs anyway.
What everyone's forgetting is this guy has been charged with taking pictures of children, and even assuming that his use of PGP was to hide stuff, it could easily be to hide downloaded porn.
I don't see how that's at all relevant to the matter we're discussing.
They're trying to use this as evidence he took pictures, which is just stupid.
Actually, if you read anything, you'd realize that they're using it as evidence that when he took those pictures he did so with criminal intent.
Slashdot Mirror
And just why is it pay-as-you-go?
Because the government provides services all year, so it needs money all year, not all in one lump at the end. It also makes it much harder to evade taxes.
It is not will pay it is did pay. That's why it is called a tax refund.
"Will have paid" is probably the best tense for what I was trying to get at.
There is a huge psychological difference between having the money in hand and then having to give some of it away immediately versus never having that amount in hand in the first place.
OK, but that doesn't explain how this difference is annulled by having things separately stated on a receipt.
With-holding is literally a way to with-hold the sucker-punch to the gut feeling people would experience if they had to pay their income taxes directly.
I'd say it has more of an effect of shifting the blame from the government to the employer. After all, your employer is the one paying that measily salary, the government actually gives you money back every year. In any case, this isn't the primary purpose of withholding. The primary purpose is that the income tax system is pay-as-you-go, and it'd be far too much hassle to have each individual pay her taxes weekly or monthly like businesses are required to do with withholding.
The rest of your comments don't even deserve a reply. I don't know why I both replying to anonymous trolls.
Why would I buy anything for my personal use?
You've got to eat. You gotta live somewhere. I suppose you could rely on your parents or sugar-momma, or whatever to pay for all that, but it's pretty hard to get through life without ever paying for anything.
It would all be a business expense and owned by my LLC.
Your personal residence is not a business expense. Neither are the meals you eat (even if you rely on lunch meetings you can only deduct 1/2).
Not only that, but I would buy everything using pre-tax dollars, and only pay taxes on the adjusted income of my LLC.
If you lived very frugally you could get away with paying yourself a minimal income, low enough to pay nothing but FICA and unemployment taxes (the latter through your LLC), and then only if your LLC itself was losing money or or making a very small amount. Of course, these taxes owed by your LLC would pass through to your personal income taxes unless you elected to be treated as a C-corp, in which case the corp would probably be declared a "personal service corporation" and subject to a flat tax at a 35% tax rate.
That's a pretty standard practice, in fact I have several friends with businesses who do that already.
And I work in a CPA firm which handles several LLCs and I can tell you that if your friends businesses are making a significant amount of money, that they haven't elected to be treated as a personal service C-corporation and subject themselves to a 35% tax rate, and that they aren't paying themselves any income, then they are committing tax evasion. Besides all this, I'm not sure why you'd choose an LLC. There are very few benefits and numerous expenses. For a profitable closely held corporation which is primarily in the business of performing personal services the S-corporation is usually the most advantageous tax-wise, but even then if you don't pay yourself any salary and make more than a little bit of money you are almost guaranteed to be audited.
Internships don't pay that much, and apparently either you or your two friends are incredibly rich anyway. So forget the internship, and spend your time and talent working on an open source project or two. If it's your friends that are rich and not you, convince them to set up the company now and hire you as an intern for a measly salary.
I don't think anyone on slashdot has ever thrown a computer away..
Heh, I've even bought computers which others might have thrown away. Instead of paying $3 to that thrift store I guess I should have gotten them to pay me!
Almost everyone uses computers now, and they're integral to the economy. So even if some people end up subsidizing others, it wouldn't be horribly unjust
Subsidizing Google $1,000,000 for its 100,000 computers and subsidizing some random Joe $10 for his 1 computer would be horribly unjust.
Sorry I didn't RTFA
It's OK. I just looked, and apparently there is no FA.
If you want to recycle, that's great. But why should we encourage people by paying them to do something that costs us money to begin with?
Depends on the item. If it's something relatively harmless, like aluminum, then fine. Sure, we might start to run out of aluminum, but if we do then the value of aluminum will go up and we can just go mining for it in our landfills. But lead is not harmless, in fact, it is considered hazardous waste. If lead gets into our drinking water supplies, it can cause many harmful health effects.
Well then, using your system, I would just create my own LLC, put all my assets into it, have a personal income of $0, and get everything for free.
If you had a personal income of $0, then you couldn't buy anything for your own personal use. If your LLC bought stuff for you, then that'd be considered a distribution, and hence income.
The customer knows what they are paying for, it isn't hidden away in the total price.
OTOH, it lets the retailer get away with advertising a price which is different from the price the consumer actually has to pay, which in my opinion is worse.
This knowledge helps to prevent the fees being raised as an arbitrary form of taxation - income tax gets taken out of most people's paychecks before they ever even see the money, thus obscuring the direct impact of the tax.
Umm, I don't see how that's at all the case with people's paychecks. Sure, you get paid in one net check, but all the companies I've worked for have also provided me with a statement saying what my gross pay is, and what the taxes are. And in fact, for most people that statement actually overestimates the actual taxes the people will pay.
If you charge the consumer the tax, they're still going to write a single check. They'll just (most likely) receive an itemized receipt which states which part of the cost is actually a tax. I really don't see the difference.
If the fees were directly assesed to the distributor or manufacturer, then they would be inflated with each step in the process just as the price of the system is. In effect, paying the fee at point of sale is like paying the "wholesale" cost but charging the manufacturer the fee would result in it being marked up to "retail" pricing by the time the end-consumer pays for it, possibly even doubling the original "wholesale" fee level for no added benefit to the environment or the consumer.
That's not the way supply and demand curves work. The vast majority of markups are not percentage based, they're based on the efforts and value of the middleman. Raising the cost of the item doesn't significantly raise the costs to or value provided by the middlemen (maybe if it's a credit card purchase there'd be an exception for that portion of the markup representing the credit card fees, but that's an exception not the rule).
When I do a search on google I get a page linking directly to the site urls, so google doesn't even know which selections I'm making. Looks like they aren't doing this.
Heh, so in the future, we'll have to worry about how long we can go without plugging in our devices to uncharge them, rather than to charge them. At least uncharging is something that can be done without being connected to a grid.
Don't forget the most popular portable device of all - the automobile. Just a tenfold increase in battery life (without a corresponding increase in cost) would probably make electric cars a viable option, as well as increase the viability of a plug-in hybrid. In fact, the electric car would probably have a greater range between "refills" than the gasoline car.
In a story I read just today on Forbes.com, three major U.S. auto manufacturers have already created cars powered by fuel cells. Apparently the House of Representatives has passed a bill to "subsidize 15% of the price of fuel cell technology bought by private entities." I'm not sure how easily this technology can be adapted to smaller portable devices, but surely there will be at least some parts of the research which can be reused.
Maybe one improvement which is needed is the electric car batteries need to be more easily removable. Those of us who live in apartments or houses without garages would have quite a bit of trouble with an electric or even a plug-in hybrid without some major infrastructure changes. If the battery were light enough for me to take inside every night, then the only thing stopping me from using an electric is the cost and the range (both battery limitations). As for the plug-in hybrid, the cost of the batteries would be the only problem remaining. And hey, hydrogen is light, so maybe fuel cells is the answer to that :).
No, the hash isn't in the URL. Why would it be there?
How good is Skype over the dialup speeds? I thought about using this, but it's only worth it if I can make calls through it too.
Just a misunderstanding, then. I was talking about clones. In other words, non-Apple computers with the OS installed on them.
I don't know exactly what your point is.
My point was that I think you were incorrect about the reasoning.
The prosecution being stupid is not a valid reason to allow prejudical evidence to be introduced.
I never said it was.
He did not. Remember that 'innocent until proven guilty' thing? Well, it works on all levels.
Just because someone is presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law doesn't mean the person actually is innocent until proven guilty. In any case, this person was proven guilty in a court of law.
Until the state proves that he used PGP to encrypt pictures, he didn't. As they didn't even suggest that, we must assume he didn't.
No, you're absolutely incorrect. I don't have to assume anything. Besides, in the case of an appeal, the burden of proof lies on the person bringing the appeal.
And, BTW, we do know he didn't use PGP, or there would have been other computer evidence introduced. Like wiped areas of the hard drive, or encrypted files.
Do you have a transcript of the trial somewhere? Because I don't know that there wasn't other computer evidence introduced. Even if I did, I wouldn't take the fact that evidence wasn't introduced as proof that the thing never happened.
And this is arguing semantics, which I should expect from you. There is no evidence that pictures were taken.
But surely there is. You don't think the jury convicted a man of taking pictures without any evidence whatsoever, do you?
Testimony is not, in fact, 'evidence'
While we're arguing semantics, yes it is. In fact, testimony is the most common example of direct evidence.
There's no evidence or testimony that these hypothetical pictures were on a computer. There's no evidence or testimony that PGP or even the computer was used in relation to this crime at all.
Hey, can you send me the URL of the transcript of the trial where you're getting all this information from?
No one's even vaguely suggesting he go free. People are saying was a mistrial because the state introduce irrelevant and prejudical evidence implying something that wasn't true. A mistrial, of course, results in another trial.
Fine (of course, the purpose of having a new trial is that he might in fact wind up going free). But I'm not going to argue semantics. Let's just declare a mistrial whenever the prosecution lawyer says anything that doesn't directly prove a person's guilt.
You should never have a password appear in a publically readable "hash" or URL parameter, even if it's one-way encrypted
This hash wasn't exactly "publically readable". It was readable by anyone with developer access.
High-security passwords for banking, etc (these are different for each site, and I write them down and keep the list in my safe.)
For most banking sites, anyone with access to your email can change your password to your banking site. So in my opinion the password to your email account is the one which needs to be the most secure.
Personally I use a hash of the site's domain name concated with my "master password". This has the disadvantage that it allows someone who can guess my hash scheme and has my hashed password to run an offline brute force attack on my master password, but has the advantage of not having to ever write anything down (and thus not risking forgetting or losing anything as long as I remember the master password). I actually use two different passwords for my master password - one for banks and shit like that and one for sites with clown admins like Slashdot and Wikipedia. Anyway, I certainly wouldn't trust my life to this scheme or anything, but it's good enough for stuff like online banking - if someone actually compromised my online banking password they'd probably get caught if they tried to actually use that password to steal anything.
Unfortunately, Tim at the time didn't run a password checker against the hashes, which could have thrown weak passwords out of the list and thereby prevented legitimate accounts from being included with reasonable effectiveness.
That's a horrible solution. What's unfortunate is that Tim had access to the hashed passwords in the first place. Sure, by any trivial implementation *someone* has to have access to it, but that should be a person who can be trusted never to actually use that access.
No similar lookup has taken place since July 2004, so this story is a tempest in a teapot.
How can you be so sure of this? Are you the only one who has access to the passwords? From what Brion said, the hash mechanism hasn't changed at all. Sure, no similar lookup has been published since July, but that doesn't mean that it hasn't happened.
Sure, you should always assume that all administrators of any particular system have full access to your cleartext password, but it's still quite a shock when you find out that an admin is actually using that access.
Of course, if they're hashing the passwords without a salt, hashing them is likely quite useless, as anyone who can get ahold of the password hashes will have a significantly easier time than they should.
Hashing in this type of situation protects you from inadvertantly seeing someone's password, that's about it. It doesn't protect you from someone doing something actively evil, like Tim Starling did. Even if you have a salt, it doesn't really matter because somewhere you have to store the salt. Sure, using a salt will slow down a dictionary attack, so you can't crack multiple passwords at once, but it doesn't slow down the time it takes to crack one password.
And of course, anyone who has access to the machines, like Tim Starling does, could easily obtain the clear text password anyway, by simple sniffing the traffic or otherwise capturing the password before it gets hashed in the first place.
Anyone storing passwords in plaintext in this day & age, or hashing them without a salt deserves a knock upside the head. It's just not right :(
I suppose, but any time you type a password into a system you should assume the system operators have access to that cleartext password. The only way to completely avoid this would be some sort of client-side javascript hashing or the use of public/private keys.
What pictures?
The ones he took of the 9-year-old girl.
As far as I can tell, there's no evidence of any pictures at all, much less ones in his computer.
A girl said that she was made to pose nude for him, and presumably said that he then took pictures of her. That's evidence. Now the story doesn't go very deeply into that evidence, because that's not what the story is about, but I'm sure the jury didn't base its entire case on the possession of PGP.
The evidence is that a girl testified he'd taken pictures of her.
Geez, first you say there's no evidence of any pictures, then you admit that there is.
I have to agree with this guy's lawyer. The only reason PGP was introduced was to create uncertainity in the minds of the jury that there might have been encrypted files transfered via that computer, when there was absolutely no evidence of that at all, or that it was in any way involved in the crime.
Maybe. More likely the prosecution was just stupid enough to believe that him/herself.
It's completely absurd to introduce something as evidence and say 'He did this in advance so his crime would be easier to hide' when he did not, in fact, use that in relation to the crime at all!
You and I have absolutely no idea whether or not he used it in relation to the crime. He might have, he might not have.
Oh, but I forgot, he's an evil child molestor, so obviously we should just make up crap so he gets a longer sentence.
Of course not, we should let him go free because some prosecution lawyer told the jury that he owns PGP.
I suppose you could take out the hard drive and sell me the hard drive with the OS on it, and that'd fall under first sale. But not many people want to install their own hard drives, and Apple would probably put part of the OS in the ROMs anyway.
I don't think introducing the fact that you had good door locks into a case would be reversible error though, do you?
What everyone's forgetting is this guy has been charged with taking pictures of children, and even assuming that his use of PGP was to hide stuff, it could easily be to hide downloaded porn.
I don't see how that's at all relevant to the matter we're discussing.
They're trying to use this as evidence he took pictures, which is just stupid.
Actually, if you read anything, you'd realize that they're using it as evidence that when he took those pictures he did so with criminal intent.
What if he was using a Windows-encrypted disk volume to store data?
They would have tacked on a negligence charge.