Or maybe they're just tired of the harrass-a-grams from the riaa and mpaa pointing out the never ending stream of students in their dorms serving up copyright violations that the university is now obligated to spend resources to go stamp on?
We get them constantly. Our policy has been, so far, that we assume, until proven otherwise, that our users are obeying our AUP, which, honestly, breaks down to "dont break the law using our network" (which would include copyright violations), and "don't run a business using our network." When we get one of the "make them cease and desist" letters we inform the student, give them something like 24-48 hours (I forget exactly how much) to terminate the activity, or their port will be turned off, and file the action with the student judicial affairs office, which then takes them to student court for violating university rules. Generally they'll just get probation on a first offense. This takes an awful lot of staff time and energy, and I can see the attraction of just making a general preemptive strike... USC's probably been through the same thing and their fuse has run out.
Universities, being big on the publishing of ideas and such, are also big on defending copyright... I doubt there was any particular pressure that needed to be placed on USC by the riaa and mpaa.
Some contracts are like that. Years ago, I worked for Honeywell Information Systems. They had policy HIS-14, which we liked to call the "Body and Soul" clause. Basically, if they had the remotest chance of showing that you might have thought about it during the period of time that you were on their books as an employee, it was theirs.
Except for people who worked for Honeywell Sweeden. (We had some software engineers and such there. I forget *why* we had them there, but anyway). The courts there struck HIS-14 down when it was challenged.
The reason? They pointed out that Slavery had been illegal in Sweeden for some time now.
No. We're only protected if we innocently didn't realize it was an issue. If we *knew* people were doing things from there, and do nothing to stop it, we open ourselves up to cival liability.
Secondly, some of those attacks are against our own systems - people trying to crack admin systems, or just own systems, and the "oops, we can't track that" gets very old...
If it was an environment where I knew that kind of crap *couldn't* come from the boxes, but they were still useful for what they were intended for, I wouldn't worry.
No, if you'd get your head out of your ass, and read the actual post, instead of just deciding what it said, your post would have been far more useful.
And no, my job isn't to protect ebay. But my job *is* to cooperate with legal authorities tracking actual wrongdoing. If crimes are commited with services we provide, and we don't have any clue who was doing it, we start getting smeared with liability.
Given I have *plenty* of evidence of the number of events that come from public labs (be they libraries or what) I have *plenty* of justification for my stance, despite your pathetic knee jerk response to it. Over 80% of crap that we deal with comes from those labs. I'm not assuming everyone will be committing a crime. If the criminals would register at the door, I'd leave the rest alone. But I am assuming that those 1% that are need to be tracked.
As I clearly stated, I don't care *what* they were doing, and I don't want to be logging that. But, if it turns out that they were doing something illegal at the time, and it's tracked back to a particular PC, I want to know who was sitting there at the time.
Because you're not thinking straight. Knowing that, at any moment, the gov't could walk into the library and demand a list of everything everyone has been reading, or searching on the internet, is incredibly chilling to people's willingness to read, or search, materials that aren't "popular."
It's our responsibility as citizens to remain informed, that's the point of the whole "Informed Democracy" thing. Nowadays, we have the govt regularly telling us "You don't need to know these things, we'll know them for you."
Lets take the current anti-terrorism campaigns. If you oppose the way the detainments and trials (or lack thereof) are going on, then it behooves you to do research to be sure you know all the facts. But wait, our own presidents press secretary has been more than hinting that asking those kinds of questions is unamerican "in this time of war". So the feds raid your library and add you to the list. Next thing you know a friendly FBI team comes by your house, or place of employement because "they have concerns about your reading habits."
As another example, there are plenty of reasons to read up on bomb making, other then planning on actually making one. I'll ignore completely the concept that you might actually be hoping to get into a job involving pyrotechnics, or might be taking a class in it. But I've heard some extraordinary things come out of the mouths of officials about what a particular device built by someone could have done or not done. If I had no idea what the facts were, I'd have to take their word for it, and allow my opinion to be shaped by my own lack of knowledge.
Also, who says the Feds will protect that information right? What if a loved one is HIV positive, and you're researching it for them. Now the FBI has that you've been reading on that topic, and eventually that slips out, and eventually your insurance company gets hold of a 4th hand database, that implies you're hiding that you're hiv positive, and finds an excuse to cancel *your* insurance... Then just the concept that you might be dieing gets to the credit agencies, and all your creditors cancel your credit. Just because you read a book in the library.
Read John Varley's "Press Enter" for a view of a world taking to the logical end of this nibbling away by the "well, if you don't have anything to hide, why do you care?" folks...
... not requiring login's (there-fore not knowning where anyone that comes into the library was sitting)
You see, that's the part that annoys me. Yes, protect the privacy of what they were searching for, but dammit, keep track of who they are and where they were working. Crackers aren't idiots, they know damn well where the anonymous computers are. We have this trouble with library labs all the damn time. I don't care if they were reading info on HIV, downloading insurrectionist pamphlets, or searching any number of embarrasing topics, but when ebay shows up at our door step with proof of credit card fraud coming from that pc, I damn well want you to be able to tell me who was sitting there...
Re:Changes the dynamic of the business
on
Borrowing ROMs
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· Score: 1
It would be perfectly legal for them to *mail* you the roms, then you return it. That's just a library. Although the software *on* the roms might have a licensing agreement that precludes that.
However, they're making complete copies of the rom images to another media, and loaning that out, which is where they, like mp3.com, will get burned, because they don't have a license to do that. That boils back to the kinko's problem. You can fair use copy something for yourself at kinko's, but they can't do it *for* you..
Actually, seems perfectly reasonable. I've been seeing the occasional car show story about the auto-adjusting seat trick for a couple of years now; I suspect much of the hardware and electronics have been underdevelopment since before 2000. Realize, this article is about a demo vehicle that's now touring the country; it probably hasn't had any active development for upwards of a year.
I'm willing to bet that when they *started* work on it, 98 was the most stable, and accessible in terms of fiddling, of their choices. The others likely being NT, which often causes non computer people heartburn dealing with privilege issues, and probably ME. Given those choices, I'd probably go with 98 too; they knew how to code for it. Even if they started after w2k was out, they probably didn't want to waste time on the learning curve. Remember, these are a bunch of engineers who likely started fiddling with things themselves, and brought programmers in later.
Having started with a platform, they were unlikely to be interested in upgrading just for the sake of upgrading; they're not putting this into production, this is a demo unit, and if the software works, they wouldn't care if it was running win 3.1 at the time, it works.
If they go production with this stuff, they'll likely revist their options, probably opting for a more rommable embedable windows, or wince or some such.
As for why not linux, at the time while they'd probably heard of linux, the likely wouldn't have actually *had* a box, or had really much clue of what to do with one; again, a lot of the options that could make linux attractive for that type of application likely happened *after* they started the project.
Check out spamgourmet.com. It institutionalizes that idea. Once you're registered you can create self-destructing email accounts, that accept N number of messages. The slick thing is that it creates them on the fly, the first time you send email to it, so after having visited them, you never have to go there again to actually create these accounts.
They had asked her for a copy of the note they needed. She claimed it was deleted. They asked to examine her system to try to recover the deleted message. The message in question claimed responsibility for about $10K in vandalism on campus. She refused to give them access to the system. (Now she claims she had offered to give them access when she came back into town, which she only recently started saying.)
Given they were trying to access deleted files time was of the essence. It was a state owned machine, and both commonwealth law, and her employee contract specifically prohibit her from denying the state access to it, so after exhausting all the polite recourses, they had no choice but to grab the machine, so they could examine it for the file they needed. And even then they went through the extra hoop of getting a search warrant.
She's lucky that it was the campus cops, who *want* to interact well with the university. If it'd been, oh, a message claiming responsibility for a death threat to the president, after she got out of jail, the secret service and the fbi computer lab *might* have given her the machine back in a couple of years.
Personally, I think it was a lot more in our best interest for the administration to make it clear that it was inappropriate for faculty members to harbor criminals than it was to worry about what impressions people who have no damn idea of what was going on might get.
They *did* ask for her cooperation first. They also had a search warrant. She refused to allow them to access the information they needed. She'd received an email from someone claiming responsibility for about $10,000 worth of vandalism on campus, and forwarded it to some listservs. They wanted the original message to try to track it. She claimed it was deleted, and that she refused to let them look at her machine to see if they could recover it. Given the machine is state property, and she's not allowed to refuse to cooperate, they ended up taking it, and cloning it. All the administrators *above* her agree she was in the wrong.
She now claims that she had left the police voice mail offering full cooperation, but only after she went out of town for the weekend, which is a complete 180 from the original story, and particularly interesting given that she physically tried to prevent the police from touching the computer. I've met the cops in question; they're nice guys, and not inclined to histrionics. They wouldn't have done this if she had given them a choice.
Slashdot Mirror
Or maybe they're just tired of the harrass-a-grams from the riaa and mpaa pointing out the never ending stream of students in their dorms serving up copyright violations that the university is now obligated to spend resources to go stamp on?
We get them constantly. Our policy has been, so far, that we assume, until proven otherwise, that our users are obeying our AUP, which, honestly, breaks down to "dont break the law using our network" (which would include copyright violations), and "don't run a business using our network." When we get one of the "make them cease and desist" letters we inform the student, give them something like 24-48 hours (I forget exactly how much) to terminate the activity, or their port will be turned off, and file the action with the student judicial affairs office, which then takes them to student court for violating university rules. Generally they'll just get probation on a first offense. This takes an awful lot of staff time and energy, and I can see the attraction of just making a general preemptive strike... USC's probably been through the same thing and their fuse has run out.
Universities, being big on the publishing of ideas and such, are also big on defending copyright... I doubt there was any particular pressure that needed to be placed on USC by the riaa and mpaa.
I find it entertaining that after all these years, someone is finally re-implementing Multics...
Some contracts are like that. Years ago, I worked for Honeywell Information Systems. They had policy HIS-14, which we liked to call the "Body and Soul" clause. Basically, if they had the remotest chance of showing that you might have thought about it during the period of time that you were on their books as an employee, it was theirs.
Except for people who worked for Honeywell Sweeden. (We had some software engineers and such there. I forget *why* we had them there, but anyway). The courts there struck HIS-14 down when it was challenged.
The reason? They pointed out that Slavery had been illegal in Sweeden for some time now.
No. We're only protected if we innocently didn't realize it was an issue. If we *knew* people were doing things from there, and do nothing to stop it, we open ourselves up to cival liability.
Secondly, some of those attacks are against our own systems - people trying to crack admin systems, or just own systems, and the "oops, we can't track that" gets very old...
If it was an environment where I knew that kind of crap *couldn't* come from the boxes, but they were still useful for what they were intended for, I wouldn't worry.
No, if you'd get your head out of your ass, and read the actual post, instead of just deciding what it said, your post would have been far more useful. And no, my job isn't to protect ebay. But my job *is* to cooperate with legal authorities tracking actual wrongdoing. If crimes are commited with services we provide, and we don't have any clue who was doing it, we start getting smeared with liability. Given I have *plenty* of evidence of the number of events that come from public labs (be they libraries or what) I have *plenty* of justification for my stance, despite your pathetic knee jerk response to it. Over 80% of crap that we deal with comes from those labs. I'm not assuming everyone will be committing a crime. If the criminals would register at the door, I'd leave the rest alone. But I am assuming that those 1% that are need to be tracked. As I clearly stated, I don't care *what* they were doing, and I don't want to be logging that. But, if it turns out that they were doing something illegal at the time, and it's tracked back to a particular PC, I want to know who was sitting there at the time.
Because you're not thinking straight. Knowing that, at any moment, the gov't could walk into the library and demand a list of everything everyone has been reading, or searching on the internet, is incredibly chilling to people's willingness to read, or search, materials that aren't "popular."
It's our responsibility as citizens to remain informed, that's the point of the whole "Informed Democracy" thing. Nowadays, we have the govt regularly telling us "You don't need to know these things, we'll know them for you."
Lets take the current anti-terrorism campaigns. If you oppose the way the detainments and trials (or lack thereof) are going on, then it behooves you to do research to be sure you know all the facts. But wait, our own presidents press secretary has been more than hinting that asking those kinds of questions is unamerican "in this time of war". So the feds raid your library and add you to the list. Next thing you know a friendly FBI team comes by your house, or place of employement because "they have concerns about your reading habits."
As another example, there are plenty of reasons to read up on bomb making, other then planning on actually making one. I'll ignore completely the concept that you might actually be hoping to get into a job involving pyrotechnics, or might be taking a class in it. But I've heard some extraordinary things come out of the mouths of officials about what a particular device built by someone could have done or not done. If I had no idea what the facts were, I'd have to take their word for it, and allow my opinion to be shaped by my own lack of knowledge.
Also, who says the Feds will protect that information right? What if a loved one is HIV positive, and you're researching it for them. Now the FBI has that you've been reading on that topic, and eventually that slips out, and eventually your insurance company gets hold of a 4th hand database, that implies you're hiding that you're hiv positive, and finds an excuse to cancel *your* insurance... Then just the concept that you might be dieing gets to the credit agencies, and all your creditors cancel your credit. Just because you read a book in the library.
Read John Varley's "Press Enter" for a view of a world taking to the logical end of this nibbling away by the "well, if you don't have anything to hide, why do you care?" folks...
... not requiring login's (there-fore not knowning where anyone that comes into the library was sitting) You see, that's the part that annoys me. Yes, protect the privacy of what they were searching for, but dammit, keep track of who they are and where they were working. Crackers aren't idiots, they know damn well where the anonymous computers are. We have this trouble with library labs all the damn time. I don't care if they were reading info on HIV, downloading insurrectionist pamphlets, or searching any number of embarrasing topics, but when ebay shows up at our door step with proof of credit card fraud coming from that pc, I damn well want you to be able to tell me who was sitting there...
It would be perfectly legal for them to *mail* you the roms, then you return it. That's just a library. Although the software *on* the roms might have a licensing agreement that precludes that. However, they're making complete copies of the rom images to another media, and loaning that out, which is where they, like mp3.com, will get burned, because they don't have a license to do that. That boils back to the kinko's problem. You can fair use copy something for yourself at kinko's, but they can't do it *for* you..
I'm willing to bet that when they *started* work on it, 98 was the most stable, and accessible in terms of fiddling, of their choices. The others likely being NT, which often causes non computer people heartburn dealing with privilege issues, and probably ME. Given those choices, I'd probably go with 98 too; they knew how to code for it. Even if they started after w2k was out, they probably didn't want to waste time on the learning curve. Remember, these are a bunch of engineers who likely started fiddling with things themselves, and brought programmers in later.
Having started with a platform, they were unlikely to be interested in upgrading just for the sake of upgrading; they're not putting this into production, this is a demo unit, and if the software works, they wouldn't care if it was running win 3.1 at the time, it works.
If they go production with this stuff, they'll likely revist their options, probably opting for a more rommable embedable windows, or wince or some such.
As for why not linux, at the time while they'd probably heard of linux, the likely wouldn't have actually *had* a box, or had really much clue of what to do with one; again, a lot of the options that could make linux attractive for that type of application likely happened *after* they started the project.
Check out spamgourmet.com. It institutionalizes that idea. Once you're registered you can create self-destructing email accounts, that accept N number of messages. The slick thing is that it creates them on the fly, the first time you send email to it, so after having visited them, you never have to go there again to actually create these accounts.
They had asked her for a copy of the note they needed. She claimed it was deleted. They asked to examine her system to try to recover the deleted message. The message in question claimed responsibility for about $10K in vandalism on campus. She refused to give them access to the system. (Now she claims she had offered to give them access when she came back into town, which she only recently started saying.) Given they were trying to access deleted files time was of the essence. It was a state owned machine, and both commonwealth law, and her employee contract specifically prohibit her from denying the state access to it, so after exhausting all the polite recourses, they had no choice but to grab the machine, so they could examine it for the file they needed. And even then they went through the extra hoop of getting a search warrant. She's lucky that it was the campus cops, who *want* to interact well with the university. If it'd been, oh, a message claiming responsibility for a death threat to the president, after she got out of jail, the secret service and the fbi computer lab *might* have given her the machine back in a couple of years.
Personally, I think it was a lot more in our best interest for the administration to make it clear that it was inappropriate for faculty members to harbor criminals than it was to worry about what impressions people who have no damn idea of what was going on might get.
They *did* ask for her cooperation first. They also had a search warrant. She refused to allow them to access the information they needed. She'd received an email from someone claiming responsibility for about $10,000 worth of vandalism on campus, and forwarded it to some listservs. They wanted the original message to try to track it. She claimed it was deleted, and that she refused to let them look at her machine to see if they could recover it. Given the machine is state property, and she's not allowed to refuse to cooperate, they ended up taking it, and cloning it. All the administrators *above* her agree she was in the wrong. She now claims that she had left the police voice mail offering full cooperation, but only after she went out of town for the weekend, which is a complete 180 from the original story, and particularly interesting given that she physically tried to prevent the police from touching the computer. I've met the cops in question; they're nice guys, and not inclined to histrionics. They wouldn't have done this if she had given them a choice.