> this should make an interesting trial case for all the discount PCs that require 1-2 year contracts with AOL or some other
ISP (and end up costing as-much-as twice what the PC alone would have gone for). could these tactics get the same
treatment as Netpliance's?
I don't believe so.
The thing about NPLI was that they didn't, initially, have a contract. You bought the device for $99.00 (plus $40 shipping if you got it direct from Taiwan), and you owned it, free and clear.
It was useless without either (a) h4x0ring it, or (b) using their subscription.
They expected people not to hack it, but to use the subscription, but (as the contract was originally written), you could stop the subscription (rendering the device useless) at any time, and billing wouldn't start until it had phoned home.
(The device, as originally configured, was designed to phone home and activate itself when first plugged in.)
What is at issue is that Netpliance personnel, when asked (I can confirm this, because this was my experience when I ordered mine) about when the subscription charges started, said - point-blank - "No, you won't be charged for the service until it phones home".
When people who bought the devices and never plugged them into a phone line got billed, all hell broke loose, and this is what Netpliance is being LARTed for.
Yes, the hackers who never intended to let them phone home (and who never did let the unit phone home) were exploiting the loss-leader nature of the deal. Although this was, perhaps, acting in bad faith, it was still within the law.
Much later - after Netpliance had adjusted their terms of service to include a contract - purchasers under those terms were legitimately billed.
So this doesn't have much to do with the "Cheap computer with 2 years of MSN/Earthlink" deals, where the ball-and-chain is disclosed up front.
What Netpliance did was attempt to invoke the ball-and-chain without having the "chain" (contract) in place.
"First, the company billed some consumers for Internet service based upon the
date they received their i-openers. These consumers, however, did not owe the
company money because, when they ordered their i-openers, the company had
promised them that they would not be billed until they actually used the
service."
"Second, the company back billed these same consumers for months of Internet
service by charging their credit or debit cards without their consent."
"As part of the settlement,
the company agreed to refund those consumers for the amounts illegally
charged to their accounts."
It appears from my reading that there are two classes of people entitled to
refunds:
1) If they said you wouldn't be billed until it phoned home, and it
didn't phone home, and you got billed.
2) If you got back-billed for multiple months (IIRC there was a thread
where people got hit with multiple months of billing all at once, but
I can't verify that.)
Does anyone know how such refunds are to be administered? (i.e. do
you have to phone NPLI and ask for them, or should you expect that
within a certain timeframe, your credit card will see a pleasant surprise?)
Without getting into the ethics of getting money from a nearly-dead dot-com,
if there's an FTC ruling, and the company has agreed to settle on this basis
- it seems that people in either category have a right to this money, and
they ought to be able to get it if they choose to exercise that right.
Anyone have details on how this sort of thing "usually" works out?
> [...the cameras mistook me for Antonio Banderas, who had an outstanding warrant...] "Yeah, yeah. Your perfectly formed abdominal muscles won't save you now, Antonio."
>
It took two weeks to straighten it out. Ladies and gentlemen, Big Brother is here.
I had perfectly-formed abs once, too. You wouldn't believe the amount of beer and chicken wings it took to get rid of 'em.
(I got this body lifting weights, 12 ounces at a time...)
(What the hell, Slashdot's reposting stories, I'll repost replies... this one to a poster who tried to consolidate all the "great works" in one thread)...
> These are the books I've seen listed on privacy violations so far on the discussions here. I
figured I'd put em all in one place so their easier to find. George Orwell, "1984." Franz Kafka,
"The Trial." William G. Staples, "The Culture of Surveillance: Discipline and Social Control in the
United States." David Brin, "The Transparent Society." If there are any other ones, feel free to
add.
Are you nuts? Do you have any idea what our politicians will do if they read all those books at once? Any idea how many ideas it'll give 'em? (Don't fall back on the fact that most of 'em are sub-literate, they got aides and interns to read the books for them.)
Shit, man, we had to pass antiterrorism laws to keep "The Anarchist's Cookbook" out of the hands of kids, and we had to pass that antidrug law to keep textfiles on methamphetamine manufacturing out of the hands of would-be-crankheads...
Now, thanks to this guy who posted a list of all those books in the last Slashdot article, I gotta get off my ass and lobby for a new law - this time to keep books like "1984" out of the hands of politicians. They use these works of fiction are like.HOWTO files, damnit!
You think I'm gonna trust a politician or a lawyer with a copy of Fahrenheit 451? (I'll see every copy of that book incinerated before I ever let a Congresscritter get his slimy little tentacles on it!:-)
> But as soon as you decide to live in a
society that needs [emphasis poster's] these sorts of measures in order to keep track of the criminals you should realise that this is not a bad thing.
(Nice troll, ya hooked me;)
But are we a society that "needs" such measures?
You've failed to establish that. So have, IMHO, the politicians. "It's for the chillllldrun" and "if it saves one chyyyuld" does not constitute logical argument.
> These are the books I've seen listed on privacy violations so far on the discussions here. I
figured I'd put em all in one place so their easier to find. George Orwell, "1984." Franz Kafka,
"The Trial." William G. Staples, "The Culture of Surveillance: Discipline and Social Control in the
United States." David Brin, "The Transparent Society." If there are any other ones, feel free to
add.
Are you nuts? Do you have any idea what our politicians will do if they read all those books at once? Any idea how many ideas it'll give 'em? (Don't fall back on the fact that most of 'em are sub-literate, they got aides and interns to read the books for them.)
Shit, man, we had to pass antiterrorism laws to keep "The Anarchist's Cookbook" out of the hands of kids, and we had to pass that antidrug law to keep textfiles on methamphetamine manufacturing out of the hands of would-be-crankheads...
Now, thanks to you, I gotta get off my ass and lobby for a new law - this time to keep books like "1984" out of the hands of politicians. They use these works of fiction are like.HOWTO files, damnit!
You think I'm gonna trust a politician or a lawyer with a copy of Fahrenheit 451? (I'll see every copy of that book incinerated before I ever let a Congresscritter get his slimy little tentacles on it!:-)
> CCTVs in public places aren't placed there to infringe on the constitutional rights of you or anyone
else. They can't do that because the Constitution doesn't protect your right to be invisible in a public
place.
Y'know, you had me going here. I mean, who would have a problem if the Tampa PD hired 100 patrolmen (recruiting for people with good memories) to walk the beat and keep their eyes open for anyone on the List Of Naughty Folks.
Unfortunately, you just torpedoed your own argument:
> Watching everyone all of the time takes a lot of resources. The former East German government
tried it back in the days of the Cold War. Eventually, it toppled under the strain that such a machine
placed upon itself and, in turn, so did the Berlin Wall
If I follow your logic here, you mean to say that the society created in East Germany, which enforced compliance with its laws by means of Stasi omnipresence was a Really Swell Idea, and that it's a real shame those poor Stasi leaders didn't have the right tools for the job?
Umm, nothing personal, but... no thanks.
> Paranoia is a healthy thing. In small doses.
But it isn't paranoia when they really are out to get you, is it?
I originally wrote that as a joke. Then I realized that widespread paranoia in a population is a logical consequence of the move towards an omnipresent surveillance / police state.
Consider - the civilians are afraid they'll "get caught" for any of a thousand infractions, and the cops, because they now see so many more infractions, realize there are a lot more criminals than they ever imagined.
Both sides' paranoia escalates as the degree of surveillance increases, each regarding the other as the enemy. The end state is - as in East Germany and the former Soviet Union - a nation of clinical paranoids.
> [Chomsky is a prime example of manufacturing consent, because he] has no problem with an intrusive, heavily socialized government
spreading info on you to various government agencies to detect if you're trying to escape
socialist policies.
...which is precisely why I'm not a Chomsky fan;-)
> > I have the feeling that the cameras, as described, will only be able to pick out the criminals who > >
are "every day joes with less than conservative viewpoints"
> >
Really? Hmmm, and here *I* was thinking they would use it to track down us conservatives. >
You've got an extremely interesting view of modern America.
Actually, the fnord Illuminati fnord are using them to keep track of the conservatives and the liberals. The rest of this thread on Slashdot is just a smokescreen. (Best $3,125 I ever spent!)
> the project, as I understand it to be, in its current form, is extremely
unlikely to result in a safe launch and re-entry.
Well-put.
I hope the guy makes it too, but I think he's toast.
You kiddies out there who've only watched "nice and slow barely-haul-yourself-off-the-pad" shuttle launches - solid rockets are capable of vicious acceleration.
I'm talking "supersonic by the time it's left the launch rail" vicious. Those of you who have ever seen a surface-to-air missile launch, you've got the right idea. (Those of you into model rocketry, scale up 36 or 72 times - as in, a full-size rocket clearing the launch pad in the same time as your model does!;)
I don't know what kind of boosters he's using, but I'd sure like to. If someone this crazy is worried about the G forces on launch, I'm putting $5.00 on "The test vehicle launches, but turns him into a puddle of goo in the first second." (I've got another $5.00 on "The test vehicle crash-lands, but it didn't matter because the occupant was already goo before impact.")
On the off chance (maybe 25%) he survives the test flight, I've got $10.00 on "suffocates because he didn't think he had to test the pressure vessel", which I think is a 90%+ probability.
I think it's incredibly cool that he's got the brass ones to build a rocket and fly in it, and I definitely don't think the government should stop him from trying it (as long as he points the damn thing away from populated areas).
> We got our high-school computer labs admin password the old fashioned way too. By rifling through his desk. Sure enough,
we found the words 'lunch' and 'dinner' written on the inside cover of one of the manuals for no apparent reason. Admin
password? breakfast. From then on we played a lot of networked doom.
Setting the Wayback machine for 15 years ago...
We shoulder-surfed our teacher's r00t password. It didn't change for the next two years.
We had access to 40 megabytes of space for our use (some legit projects, but mostly warez), of which we only used about 5-10, so nobody notice.
On graduation day, we changed the "Mail Waiting" prompt to "Whale Mating", brought in portable tape players, each with an identical copy of a tape cued up to the same point, left the headphones hanging around our necks and volume cranked, and hit "Play" at a predetermined time according to the classroom clock.
The classroom was then filled with the faint strains of "Batman", seemingly coming from every direction.
Teach was confused for a minute about where the music was coming from, but then he put two and two together and started laughing harder than we were.
Confused the hell out of the non-geek students, that's for sure.
> So, then, how much of what you say will really make a difference? Why in the world should I trust I'll get my $100,000 back when
the Fed screwed things up so much last time? Because I know we all trust the government to do the right thing, right? *cough*
Social Security *cough*
Because the Fed (The Federal Reserve) is not the Government.
Because the Fed (2001) is not as dumb as it was in 1929.
Because banks have minimum capital reserve requirements, and if they don't meet them, their shareholders will know about it, and the SEC will come down on them like a ton of bricks.
I've worked in the financial sector. As hard as it may be to believe for an outsider, financial institutions care deeply about their stability. The lessons of the S&L crisis of the 80s have been burned into the minds of today's bank CFOs with red-hot nichrome wire.
> You know, stuff like this will keep getting passed until several (hundred) congresspeople wake up and find that their bank
accounts have been cleaned out, and their credit cards maxed out, because you can buy anyone's personal info for $39.95.
Don't laugh, the guy's right.
The only reason your video store (pr0n!) rental records are protected by law ("Video Privacy Protection Act of 1988") is because Judge Robert Bork's video rentals were published when he was nominated for a seat on the supreme court.
A tip to the black-hat crackers: If you really wanna fight "the establishment" (and are willing to break the law for it), you might want to consider cracking Doubleclick and acquiring the surfing profiles of as many federal judges, prominent politicians, or cabinet nominees as you can. Grep 'em for g0at pr0n and leak one profile per week, simultaneously, to the press and the politician's opposition.
Today's situation is identical to that of 1988. Privacy invasion is all fun and games until a politician loses face.
The monkeys on Capitol Hill will continue to see no need for strong privacy protections until one of them gets hurt. If such a leak happens (maybe an "inside job" from some disgruntled Doubleclick employee), I predict that within six months of such a leak, the US will have strongest privacy protection laws on the face of the earth.
> I remember the end of the Usenet glory days (mid-90s, unfortunately just after the September That Never Ended), before it
was swallowed by spam. Usenet IMHO is the place where net.culture grew up, even if it wasn't part of the Internet in the
beginning.
<AOL>Me too</AOL>
Rest in peace, Jim. Your creation lives on.
Kibo rot-13s, greps the 'net (there's no type, he can't set!) hey there, there goes the Kiboman... and of course Serdar's still Howling Through The Wires, Dick's ARMM'ed (ARMM'd (ARRM'd...))), and I never needed Napster, because I can still get anything I want
on Alice's NNTP server.
UN-altered REPRODUCTION and DISSEMINATION of this
IMPORTANT Information is ENCOURAGED, ESPECIALLY to COMPUTER
BULLETIN BOARDS. Just as long as it's not alt.tasteless and rec.pets.cats at the same time.
> [The Glass-Steagall Act] was one of the most stupid things of the last 60 years.
Absofrigginlutely correct, IMNSHO.
Gramm-Leach-Bliley is a great law when it comes to allowing financial services companies to wear different hats, and it's been a long time coming.
The people objecting to GLB on Slashdot are objecting to the (weak) privacy rider attached to the bill, not the principal reason for the bill itself.
In defence of GLB's weak privacy provisions, better the right to opt-out than no right to opt-out at all.
I believe we need a stronger privacy bill that calls for opt-in practices as opposed to opt-out practices. But I don't have enough money to buy the kinds of campaign finance donations that the DMA lobbyists can, so that'll never happen.
But to your original point, the main thrust of GLB - allowing banks, brokers, and insurance companies to merge - is a great step forward...
It's just not anything the Slashdot crowd gets excited about;-)
> Has anyone tried sending the Nader letter to a financial institution, in place of that institution's preprinted form? What was
your experience? Did you receive any sort of response, positive or negative?
I wrote an opt-out letter to my bank a few weeks ago.
I received no acknowledgement whatsoever. I have no idea whether it was even received, let alone whether my opt-out decision will be honored.
And if my bank decides to ignore my opting-out, how will I prove it? (And even if I could prove it, what good would it do, as GLB doesn't allow for a right of private action, so I can't sue the bastards into compliance.)
This is why I believe opt-out to be a cop-out, and that opt-in is the only acceptable standard.
When dealing with spammers, "remove lists" don't work. Because spammers lie. (Oh, you opted out of HOT T33NZ spam. We'll now spam you on behalf of H0T T3ENS. Opt out of that, and the H0T TE3NZ list will spam you...)
When dealing with DMA marketroids, "opt-out" doesn't work. For precisely the same reasons.
Trade in the overalls for a suit and tie, the KFC and Bud for filet mignon and Cabernet Sauvignon, and the trailer park for an office tower, and you've got the Direct Marketing Association.
Rule #1: Spammers lie.
Rule #2: If you think a spammer is telling the truth, see Rule #1 .
Rule #3: Spammers are St00pid. .
> Isn't there an upside for consumers in letting the companies freely shop the data around? Aren't you more rather than less
likely to become aware of errors companies have in their databases, for example?
But it also means that the database errors are propagated more widely. Meaning that - if I detect the error, which is an iffy proposition - I have to clean it up in more than one place, because it's been resold so many times.
> What is the potential downside of not opting out, if you don't see the companies shopping around your data as a big deal? I
ask this as a guy who has bar-code tags from three different grocery stores hanging off my key ring, so they know every
time I've bought a copy of Maxim from the magazine stand and the two brands of beer I like best.
If you don't see data-shopping as a big deal (and in your case, as you're well aware of the tracking implications, you've effectively opted-in, because your actions and statement constitute informed consent to such data sales), you're absolutely right - you probably don't want to opt-out.
If, however, you're not like the original poster, and you are concerned about privacy, you probably ought to opt out.
My beef isn't with the original poster -- it's with those who fail to opt out because they've been denied (through obfuscatory language) the information required to come to their decisions regarding the sale of their personal data in an informed manner. These people probably would opt-out if they knew what was going on behind their backs, but because they don't know (a) what's going on, and (b) that they can at least slow it down if not stop it, they don't opt-out.
Worse, their silence is taken as assent by the DMA, who then uses this as "evidence" that customers really do want their privacy invaded on a regular basis.
I'm no Chomsky fan, but I love his phrase "Manufactured Consent". This is a prime example.
> > 1) Appoints a lumber lobbyist to head the forest service > > So? Clinton appointed two complete and utter assclowns to
head the DOE... look what happened in California.
Excuse me, Mr. AC. I represent the Assclown Anti-Defamation league. Your comment regarding Clinton's DOE appointees is a foul smear to assclowns the world over, and I call upon you to retract it at once!
> Using a step-by-step by-the-numbers guide published by someone on the Internet to connect two bits of hardware
together just so that you can get something that you would otherwise have to pay for isn't hacking. It isn't even
remotely close to hacking.
It would, however, cut down on the for-profit illegal activity.
I remember a similar controversy over mod chips for the Playstation. 99% of the sites were "selling" mod chips. 0.9% of the sites were selling "kits" with pre-programmed (and read-protected) PICs. Only 0.1% of the sites actually contained some PIC code and told you what was really going on.
I wouldn't call the mod chip I installed in my PS1 "hacking" (I didn't do any of the research), but I had to (a) build my own PIC-burner, (b) burn my own PIC, which was both fun and educational.
Basically, if I couldn't do the engineering, at least I wanted to do the legwork myself.
Pond scum: Guy who sells pre-packaged gadget on which he did no research whatsoever, to Average Joes who just wanna watch "free" TV, for $500. Then charges 'em another $100 for every ECM.
'L33t d00d: Makes all code and design info freely available for anyone who wants to build one from scratch. May sell prebuild gadgets/software at slight premium to finance ongoing research efforts and/or web hosting costs.
Geek: Downloads aforementioned design info and software, sources parts independently, and sees if it works. Plays with it from time to time as the ECMs come out, to see if it still works. In time, may eventually morph into 'l33t d00d or pond scum, depending on ethical proclivities.
(I don't pretend that any of the people in the three categories I've invented are legal... I'm just throwing it out for discussion... IMNSHO, if there were more l33t d00dz, there'd be less pond scum, because the increased availability of the knowledge would increase the number of pond scum to the point that pond-scumming margins would drop.)
In the case of the Playstation, it wasn't that much of a problem. In the case of DirecTV, I admit, building one's own satellite dish from scratch, would be an impressive feat.:)
> Remember, law is not a formal system that you are supposed to find holes in. Law is ment to help the people see the
right from wrong. There is need for human common-sense at some point.
If law isn't a formal system where you find holes, then what the fuck are lawyers for?
> Really, what Linux (and other geek subjects) need is to have a Great Book of Failure Stories -- writeups
like these that detail horrible outages, downtimes, misconfigurations, security hacks, etc., so that we all can
learn from other's mistakes.
What you said.
I did a bit of (very junior-level) sysadminning back in my day.
First thing the BOFH told me was "Buy a hard-cover notebook. Not spiral-bound. Not softcover. Write down everything you do. Feel free to doodle and write obscenities if you like. Someday you'll thank me for this".
I was a bit befuddled, and then he showed me his notebooks. Five years of dramatic fuckups and even more dramatic recoveries. His own personal "deja.google.com" (but it was 1992, and long-term USENET searching hadn't been invented yet, hell our office was using UUCP!) for everything he'd had to work out from first principles on his own.
And thus was the PFY enlightened.
(And yes, I did buy him a beer in late 1992, when something I wrote down in mid-1992 jumped off my page and saved my ass.)
> hey I don't feel like remembering 20
passwords. I mean I have accounts with Slashdot, Linux.com, MSDN, and many others, do you
really think I'm going to remember all those passwords? Hell no
...root password on my home box, root password at work, guest password on the CD-burning machine by the secretary's desk, MSDN subscription password, why the hell should I use different passwords? It's too hard to remember more than one password. I even have a hard time remembering my one password that I use for everything! Maybe I'll just write it on a slip of paper and stick it by my monitor so I can remember.
You, sir, are either an AOLuser or a Micros~1 intern being paid to FUD here, and I claim my 50 quatloos bounty.
Either that, or I'm too old for this modern world of.NET. When I was growing up, I distinctly remember everyone I've ever respected in the field of computer security - from my high school "computer programming" teacher who let me h4x0r the school assignments assembly, to the BOFH at university who let me run "crack" distributed-style on the school's shiny new Sun workstations because I was nice enough to ask him first, to my cow orkers, all saying "Never use the same password for more than one system, because if one system is compromised, the other ones will be too".
Slashdot Mirror
I don't believe so.
The thing about NPLI was that they didn't, initially, have a contract. You bought the device for $99.00 (plus $40 shipping if you got it direct from Taiwan), and you owned it, free and clear.
It was useless without either (a) h4x0ring it, or (b) using their subscription.
They expected people not to hack it, but to use the subscription, but (as the contract was originally written), you could stop the subscription (rendering the device useless) at any time, and billing wouldn't start until it had phoned home.
(The device, as originally configured, was designed to phone home and activate itself when first plugged in.)
What is at issue is that Netpliance personnel, when asked (I can confirm this, because this was my experience when I ordered mine) about when the subscription charges started, said - point-blank - "No, you won't be charged for the service until it phones home".
When people who bought the devices and never plugged them into a phone line got billed, all hell broke loose, and this is what Netpliance is being LARTed for.
Yes, the hackers who never intended to let them phone home (and who never did let the unit phone home) were exploiting the loss-leader nature of the deal. Although this was, perhaps, acting in bad faith, it was still within the law.
Much later - after Netpliance had adjusted their terms of service to include a contract - purchasers under those terms were legitimately billed.
So this doesn't have much to do with the "Cheap computer with 2 years of MSN/Earthlink" deals, where the ball-and-chain is disclosed up front.
What Netpliance did was attempt to invoke the ball-and-chain without having the "chain" (contract) in place.
Blockquoth the FTC:
It appears from my reading that there are two classes of people entitled to refunds:
1) If they said you wouldn't be billed until it phoned home, and it didn't phone home, and you got billed.
2) If you got back-billed for multiple months (IIRC there was a thread where people got hit with multiple months of billing all at once, but I can't verify that.)
Does anyone know how such refunds are to be administered? (i.e. do you have to phone NPLI and ask for them, or should you expect that within a certain timeframe, your credit card will see a pleasant surprise?)
Without getting into the ethics of getting money from a nearly-dead dot-com, if there's an FTC ruling, and the company has agreed to settle on this basis - it seems that people in either category have a right to this money, and they ought to be able to get it if they choose to exercise that right.
Anyone have details on how this sort of thing "usually" works out?
> It took two weeks to straighten it out. Ladies and gentlemen, Big Brother is here.
I had perfectly-formed abs once, too. You wouldn't believe the amount of beer and chicken wings it took to get rid of 'em.
(I got this body lifting weights, 12 ounces at a time...)
(What the hell, Slashdot's reposting stories, I'll repost replies... this one to a poster who tried to consolidate all the "great works" in one thread)...
> These are the books I've seen listed on privacy violations so far on the discussions here. I figured I'd put em all in one place so their easier to find. George Orwell, "1984." Franz Kafka, "The Trial." William G. Staples, "The Culture of Surveillance: Discipline and Social Control in the United States." David Brin, "The Transparent Society." If there are any other ones, feel free to add.
Are you nuts? Do you have any idea what our politicians will do if they read all those books at once? Any idea how many ideas it'll give 'em? (Don't fall back on the fact that most of 'em are sub-literate, they got aides and interns to read the books for them.)
Shit, man, we had to pass antiterrorism laws to keep "The Anarchist's Cookbook" out of the hands of kids, and we had to pass that antidrug law to keep textfiles on methamphetamine manufacturing out of the hands of would-be-crankheads...
Now, thanks to this guy who posted a list of all those books in the last Slashdot article, I gotta get off my ass and lobby for a new law - this time to keep books like "1984" out of the hands of politicians. They use these works of fiction are like .HOWTO files, damnit!
You think I'm gonna trust a politician or a lawyer with a copy of Fahrenheit 451? (I'll see every copy of that book incinerated before I ever let a Congresscritter get his slimy little tentacles on it! :-)
(Nice troll, ya hooked me ;)
But are we a society that "needs" such measures?
You've failed to establish that. So have, IMHO, the politicians. "It's for the chillllldrun" and "if it saves one chyyyuld" does not constitute logical argument.
Are you nuts? Do you have any idea what our politicians will do if they read all those books at once? Any idea how many ideas it'll give 'em? (Don't fall back on the fact that most of 'em are sub-literate, they got aides and interns to read the books for them.)
Shit, man, we had to pass antiterrorism laws to keep "The Anarchist's Cookbook" out of the hands of kids, and we had to pass that antidrug law to keep textfiles on methamphetamine manufacturing out of the hands of would-be-crankheads...
Now, thanks to you, I gotta get off my ass and lobby for a new law - this time to keep books like "1984" out of the hands of politicians. They use these works of fiction are like .HOWTO files, damnit!
You think I'm gonna trust a politician or a lawyer with a copy of Fahrenheit 451? (I'll see every copy of that book incinerated before I ever let a Congresscritter get his slimy little tentacles on it! :-)
Y'know, you had me going here. I mean, who would have a problem if the Tampa PD hired 100 patrolmen (recruiting for people with good memories) to walk the beat and keep their eyes open for anyone on the List Of Naughty Folks.
Unfortunately, you just torpedoed your own argument:
> Watching everyone all of the time takes a lot of resources. The former East German government tried it back in the days of the Cold War. Eventually, it toppled under the strain that such a machine placed upon itself and, in turn, so did the Berlin Wall
If I follow your logic here, you mean to say that the society created in East Germany, which enforced compliance with its laws by means of Stasi omnipresence was a Really Swell Idea, and that it's a real shame those poor Stasi leaders didn't have the right tools for the job?
Umm, nothing personal, but... no thanks.
> Paranoia is a healthy thing. In small doses.
But it isn't paranoia when they really are out to get you, is it?
I originally wrote that as a joke. Then I realized that widespread paranoia in a population is a logical consequence of the move towards an omnipresent surveillance / police state.
Consider - the civilians are afraid they'll "get caught" for any of a thousand infractions, and the cops, because they now see so many more infractions, realize there are a lot more criminals than they ever imagined.
Both sides' paranoia escalates as the degree of surveillance increases, each regarding the other as the enemy. The end state is - as in East Germany and the former Soviet Union - a nation of clinical paranoids.
> > are "every day joes with less than conservative viewpoints"
>
> Really? Hmmm, and here *I* was thinking they would use it to track down us conservatives.
> You've got an extremely interesting view of modern America.
Actually, the fnord Illuminati fnord are using them to keep track of the conservatives and the liberals. The rest of this thread on Slashdot is just a smokescreen. (Best $3,125 I ever spent!)
Well-put.
I hope the guy makes it too, but I think he's toast.
You kiddies out there who've only watched "nice and slow barely-haul-yourself-off-the-pad" shuttle launches - solid rockets are capable of vicious acceleration.
I'm talking "supersonic by the time it's left the launch rail" vicious. Those of you who have ever seen a surface-to-air missile launch, you've got the right idea. (Those of you into model rocketry, scale up 36 or 72 times - as in, a full-size rocket clearing the launch pad in the same time as your model does! ;)
I don't know what kind of boosters he's using, but I'd sure like to. If someone this crazy is worried about the G forces on launch, I'm putting $5.00 on "The test vehicle launches, but turns him into a puddle of goo in the first second." (I've got another $5.00 on "The test vehicle crash-lands, but it didn't matter because the occupant was already goo before impact.")
On the off chance (maybe 25%) he survives the test flight, I've got $10.00 on "suffocates because he didn't think he had to test the pressure vessel", which I think is a 90%+ probability.
I think it's incredibly cool that he's got the brass ones to build a rocket and fly in it, and I definitely don't think the government should stop him from trying it (as long as he points the damn thing away from populated areas).
But I still don't think he's gonna make it.
Now we know what happened to the guy who designed the :Cue:Cat for Digital :Convergence!
> Good luck to him, and I hope that his gigantic phallus works as designed. *snicker*
You hope he gets screwed by a 100-foot dong? Or do you mean "When I die, I wanna be going up like a rocket into ten thousand feet of pussy..."
(Although I suppose depending on your sex and orientation, either interpretation could be a fun way to go... :-)
"clickity-click".
All hail the BOFH!
Setting the Wayback machine for 15 years ago...
We shoulder-surfed our teacher's r00t password. It didn't change for the next two years.
We had access to 40 megabytes of space for our use (some legit projects, but mostly warez), of which we only used about 5-10, so nobody notice.
On graduation day, we changed the "Mail Waiting" prompt to "Whale Mating", brought in portable tape players, each with an identical copy of a tape cued up to the same point, left the headphones hanging around our necks and volume cranked, and hit "Play" at a predetermined time according to the classroom clock.
The classroom was then filled with the faint strains of "Batman", seemingly coming from every direction.
Teach was confused for a minute about where the music was coming from, but then he put two and two together and started laughing harder than we were.
Confused the hell out of the non-geek students, that's for sure.
Because the Fed (The Federal Reserve) is not the Government.
Because the Fed (2001) is not as dumb as it was in 1929.
Because banks have minimum capital reserve requirements, and if they don't meet them, their shareholders will know about it, and the SEC will come down on them like a ton of bricks.
I've worked in the financial sector. As hard as it may be to believe for an outsider, financial institutions care deeply about their stability. The lessons of the S&L crisis of the 80s have been burned into the minds of today's bank CFOs with red-hot nichrome wire.
That oughta do for starters.
Don't laugh, the guy's right.
The only reason your video store (pr0n!) rental records are protected by law ("Video Privacy Protection Act of 1988") is because Judge Robert Bork's video rentals were published when he was nominated for a seat on the supreme court.
A tip to the black-hat crackers: If you really wanna fight "the establishment" (and are willing to break the law for it), you might want to consider cracking Doubleclick and acquiring the surfing profiles of as many federal judges, prominent politicians, or cabinet nominees as you can. Grep 'em for g0at pr0n and leak one profile per week, simultaneously, to the press and the politician's opposition.
Today's situation is identical to that of 1988. Privacy invasion is all fun and games until a politician loses face.
The monkeys on Capitol Hill will continue to see no need for strong privacy protections until one of them gets hurt. If such a leak happens (maybe an "inside job" from some disgruntled Doubleclick employee), I predict that within six months of such a leak, the US will have strongest privacy protection laws on the face of the earth.
<AOL>Me too</AOL>
Rest in peace, Jim. Your creation lives on.
Kibo rot-13s, greps the 'net (there's no type, he can't set!) hey there, there goes the Kiboman... and of course Serdar's still Howling Through The Wires, Dick's ARMM'ed (ARMM'd (ARRM'd...))), and I never needed Napster, because I can still get anything I want on Alice's NNTP server.
UN-altered REPRODUCTION and DISSEMINATION of this IMPORTANT Information is ENCOURAGED, ESPECIALLY to COMPUTER BULLETIN BOARDS. Just as long as it's not alt.tasteless and rec.pets.cats at the same time.
Absofrigginlutely correct, IMNSHO.
Gramm-Leach-Bliley is a great law when it comes to allowing financial services companies to wear different hats, and it's been a long time coming.
The people objecting to GLB on Slashdot are objecting to the (weak) privacy rider attached to the bill, not the principal reason for the bill itself.
In defence of GLB's weak privacy provisions, better the right to opt-out than no right to opt-out at all.
I believe we need a stronger privacy bill that calls for opt-in practices as opposed to opt-out practices. But I don't have enough money to buy the kinds of campaign finance donations that the DMA lobbyists can, so that'll never happen.
But to your original point, the main thrust of GLB - allowing banks, brokers, and insurance companies to merge - is a great step forward... It's just not anything the Slashdot crowd gets excited about ;-)
I wrote an opt-out letter to my bank a few weeks ago.
I received no acknowledgement whatsoever. I have no idea whether it was even received, let alone whether my opt-out decision will be honored.
And if my bank decides to ignore my opting-out, how will I prove it? (And even if I could prove it, what good would it do, as GLB doesn't allow for a right of private action, so I can't sue the bastards into compliance.)
This is why I believe opt-out to be a cop-out, and that opt-in is the only acceptable standard.
When dealing with spammers, "remove lists" don't work. Because spammers lie. (Oh, you opted out of HOT T33NZ spam. We'll now spam you on behalf of H0T T3ENS. Opt out of that, and the H0T TE3NZ list will spam you...)
When dealing with DMA marketroids, "opt-out" doesn't work. For precisely the same reasons.
Trade in the overalls for a suit and tie, the KFC and Bud for filet mignon and Cabernet Sauvignon, and the trailer park for an office tower, and you've got the Direct Marketing Association.
Rule #1: Spammers lie.
Rule #2: If you think a spammer is telling the truth, see Rule #1
. Rule #3: Spammers are St00pid.
.
DMA or chickenboner, they're all the same to me.
But it also means that the database errors are propagated more widely. Meaning that - if I detect the error, which is an iffy proposition - I have to clean it up in more than one place, because it's been resold so many times.
> What is the potential downside of not opting out, if you don't see the companies shopping around your data as a big deal? I ask this as a guy who has bar-code tags from three different grocery stores hanging off my key ring, so they know every time I've bought a copy of Maxim from the magazine stand and the two brands of beer I like best.
If you don't see data-shopping as a big deal (and in your case, as you're well aware of the tracking implications, you've effectively opted-in, because your actions and statement constitute informed consent to such data sales), you're absolutely right - you probably don't want to opt-out.
If, however, you're not like the original poster, and you are concerned about privacy, you probably ought to opt out.
My beef isn't with the original poster -- it's with those who fail to opt out because they've been denied (through obfuscatory language) the information required to come to their decisions regarding the sale of their personal data in an informed manner. These people probably would opt-out if they knew what was going on behind their backs, but because they don't know (a) what's going on, and (b) that they can at least slow it down if not stop it, they don't opt-out.
Worse, their silence is taken as assent by the DMA, who then uses this as "evidence" that customers really do want their privacy invaded on a regular basis.
I'm no Chomsky fan, but I love his phrase "Manufactured Consent". This is a prime example.
>
> So? Clinton appointed two complete and utter assclowns to head the DOE... look what happened in California.
Excuse me, Mr. AC. I represent the Assclown Anti-Defamation league. Your comment regarding Clinton's DOE appointees is a foul smear to assclowns the world over, and I call upon you to retract it at once!
It would, however, cut down on the for-profit illegal activity.
I remember a similar controversy over mod chips for the Playstation. 99% of the sites were "selling" mod chips. 0.9% of the sites were selling "kits" with pre-programmed (and read-protected) PICs. Only 0.1% of the sites actually contained some PIC code and told you what was really going on.
I wouldn't call the mod chip I installed in my PS1 "hacking" (I didn't do any of the research), but I had to (a) build my own PIC-burner, (b) burn my own PIC, which was both fun and educational.
Basically, if I couldn't do the engineering, at least I wanted to do the legwork myself.
Pond scum: Guy who sells pre-packaged gadget on which he did no research whatsoever, to Average Joes who just wanna watch "free" TV, for $500. Then charges 'em another $100 for every ECM.
'L33t d00d: Makes all code and design info freely available for anyone who wants to build one from scratch. May sell prebuild gadgets/software at slight premium to finance ongoing research efforts and/or web hosting costs.
Geek: Downloads aforementioned design info and software, sources parts independently, and sees if it works. Plays with it from time to time as the ECMs come out, to see if it still works. In time, may eventually morph into 'l33t d00d or pond scum, depending on ethical proclivities.
(I don't pretend that any of the people in the three categories I've invented are legal... I'm just throwing it out for discussion... IMNSHO, if there were more l33t d00dz, there'd be less pond scum, because the increased availability of the knowledge would increase the number of pond scum to the point that pond-scumming margins would drop.)
In the case of the Playstation, it wasn't that much of a problem. In the case of DirecTV, I admit, building one's own satellite dish from scratch, would be an impressive feat. :)
If law isn't a formal system where you find holes, then what the fuck are lawyers for?
What you said.
I did a bit of (very junior-level) sysadminning back in my day.
First thing the BOFH told me was "Buy a hard-cover notebook. Not spiral-bound. Not softcover. Write down everything you do. Feel free to doodle and write obscenities if you like. Someday you'll thank me for this".
I was a bit befuddled, and then he showed me his notebooks. Five years of dramatic fuckups and even more dramatic recoveries. His own personal "deja.google.com" (but it was 1992, and long-term USENET searching hadn't been invented yet, hell our office was using UUCP!) for everything he'd had to work out from first principles on his own.
And thus was the PFY enlightened.
(And yes, I did buy him a beer in late 1992, when something I wrote down in mid-1992 jumped off my page and saved my ass.)
You, sir, are either an AOLuser or a Micros~1 intern being paid to FUD here, and I claim my 50 quatloos bounty.
Either that, or I'm too old for this modern world of .NET. When I was growing up, I distinctly remember everyone I've ever respected in the field of computer security - from my high school "computer programming" teacher who let me h4x0r the school assignments assembly, to the BOFH at university who let me run "crack" distributed-style on the school's shiny new Sun workstations because I was nice enough to ask him first, to my cow orkers, all saying "Never use the same password for more than one system, because if one system is compromised, the other ones will be too".
> Good God! The RIAA is pushing them out of helicopters now! Oh, the humanity...
"Goldman Sachs as my witness, I honestly thought those dot-com business plans could fly!"