Just noticed this response and i thought i'd chime in for Internet posterity.
Documentation does not necessarily include "step by step, screenshots every time you click".
It includes things such as the REASON we opened port 4773 and which application will break next time we upgrade the firewall (four years from now) and forget to open it.
It includes things like... what is the administrator password of that database we haven't touched in 2 years, but still has critical data in it.
It includes things like WHICH subnets route through our Cincinatti office and which subnets route through our Denver office.
it includes things like the static IP addresses at the warehouse and why there is only two computers out there running DHCP when the rest are static.
As for change management, obviously, you've never worked for a large organization.
Shall I relay the things that happened to me THIS WEEK regarding undocumented changes.
Well hmm... Last week, our entire call center (120 staff) was down for 4 hours because some administrator ran some patch on some server somewhere in a different office, that caused back-end process to hang, which led to our telephone database loading dummy values instead of customer information, and then crashing the front end dialer, because of null-terminated values....
Now, it was a 3 minute job to roll back the patch once we realized the problem... but nobody had ANY idea this administrator had messed with the server today and he took off for a long lunch and left us troubleshooting problems on the wrong side of the world.
This week, an administrator changed the IP address on a database server. He tested thoroughly all of the applications that use this database, ensuring they were running from the hostname, rather than the IP address. But he didn't realize that another database had a hard-coded link to the system, which database updates on a different customer database. Had this system been in our newly-implimented change management system, the system administrator of the second system would have been emailed with the change a few hours in advance in order to telephone the guys who were handling the change and coordinate, but it wasn't.
We do have a new change management system in place, and the records are being imported gradually. Just this week, it has saved two major issues with systems changing patch-levels or having downtime that would have been a serious issue without the change-management procedure.
I'll admit that when you have a 1-man IT staff, documentation needs only to be lightweight reminders, and not much more. When you have a 3-man IT staff, documentation gets more important so you don't end up in the situation "I think Bob changed the IP address, but I don't know why or to what".
In an organization such as my company that has over 80 IT staff and 16 locations (about 2500 employees), even using group emails becomes daunting... at any given time, we have 10 or 15 "bits" of work going on with various systems and networks in different locations, it is frankly impossible to coordinate and be informed of changes, unless you have a procedural system such as change-management in place.
the formal procedures for change-management that are defined in something like ITIL are only useful for organizations who's IT structure is too large to have an "all hands" meeting without using a baseball stadium. In that case, it is impossible to address functional requirements of all departments and system groups without using established procedure as a starting-point from which to develop specific aims for your organizational systems.
It's great that you're clairvoyant and can instantly know when one of the other 18 server administrators touches a system that you depend on. I'm happy for you that you are immediately aware when one of the other 9 networking specialists changes a static route or updates a DHCP scope. It's great that you are subconsciously aware when one of the other 14 Desktop support techs pushes out a new, buggy patch to the entire organization and breaks half your applications.
Most people don't have that level of psychic energy and require systems like change-management to inform them of what is going on.
Oh, sorry, to answer your question, murderers deprive someone of something valuable.
Child molesters.. well at least in the traditional sense, also do this.
Now some of the vague "intent to cross state lines to meet a FBI agent who happens to be posing as a 16 year old virgin" when the guy hasn't done anything more than buy a plane ticket.... probably stretching the concept a bit, and it's hard to show who he injured, except that there is the assumption that he likely to injure. Well, I guess the more I think about that, the more i think that is crap too...
not to be controversial, but I could tell you that 90% of xxxx gang members are going to committ a crime this year, but there would be mass outcry if we rounded up the whole gang and jailed them as a "public service" but that seems typical reaction and totally acceptable when the target is a "terrorist" or a "pedophile".
NINTEY PERCENT? "That's an unacceptable risk!!", the people cry, as their children are hauled off to jail.
The applicable parallel to "murderer" is "child molester" and this is what i was pointing out.
therefore, if the participants of this group are presumably "pedophiles" who are dealing with whatever crap is in their head, but NOT going out and diddling little kids, then the conclusion is "let them be, keep an eye on them" but the tone of this sub-thread seems to be "this is great, evict them from the Internet", which I am suggesting is counterproductive to both society's saftey and society's freedom.
Here is a word-for-word copy of their webiste for those unwilling to visit:
Creepy, but doesn't sound illegal to me...
hy does BoyChat exist? Isn't it really about encouraging abuse?
BoyChat is a forum in which boylovers can explore issues related to their sexuality and provide mutual support and companionship - to learn to lead productive lives in ways that help young people rather than harm them.
BoyChat is not a board in which well-meaning social workers firmly guide people the way they think they ought to go. BoyChat is run by boylovers for boylovers. It encourages its posters to work freely through their own issues and questions. Participants will express a wide range of views. No post represents the views of anyone except the poster. No individual post can be considered typical. Occasionally extreme views will be expressed: these do not receive wide support and are usually strongly condemned. Such posts are often deliberately posted by people who wish to discredit the board.
How do boylovers feel about child molestation?
Free Spirits doesn't have official positions because we only exist to provide web sites and foster communication. There is an ethical consensus among the BoyChat community and the keepers of the sites, however, that all forms of non-voluntary sexual contact are to be condemned.
Some participants on BoyChat voice their opinions that men should not have sexual contacts with boys when boys seek it because they don't want to risk society's harmful reaction. Some believe they should never have sex with boys under any circumstances. Others, especially those who sought out relationships with men as boys, say that some boys are harmed when their repeated requests for love and intimacy are rejected without explanation.
Discussions on BoyChat delve deeply into ethical issues. No regular reader could fail to be aware of the ethical issues of his attraction. Victims of sexual abuse find not only support and caring, but also strong condemnation of their abusers. Posters who contemplate anything abusive get very short shrift from the rest.
Participants are also very aware of the legal issues. They understand the extreme penalties for even the slightest physical contact or suspicion of sexual contact between adult and minor. They know about the knock on the door in the middle of the night, the removal of and destruction of property, the planting of evidence and the extraordinary mental and sometimes physical torture of possible victims. They know that boys, even if not already victims, will become so at the hands of the police in the name of child protection. Readers are aware of the bashings and rapes in prison; the informing of neighbours and employers and the sign in the yard, the modern Scarlet Letter. They are aware also of the enforced "therapy" that consists mainly of destroying the offender's sense of self worth with no chance of actually changing sexual orientation.
What does Free Spirits hope to accomplish?
In light of what we know about boylove and the difficulties boylovers face in current society, there must be places where boylovers can communicate positively and find emotional support. BoyChat is safe because it is anonymous. People don't have to show their faces if they don't want to. People who have bottled-up emotions are dangerous to themselves and others. Every once in a while, a non-boylover will read BoyChat and see that boylovers are human beings like all others. We let others watch us interact. This is good.
What kind of people belong to Free Spirits?
Nobody "belongs" to Free Spirits. Free Spirits is just a web site that a bunch of people maintain. The site is accessed by a diverse population from dozens of countries. The pages are used by people who are interested in the issues surrounding boylove. This means not only boylovers, but also many males who have had self-defined positive experiences as boys with men. Other participants include child abuse researchers, internet anti-pedop
The only link in this article is from "the guide" magazine, which IIRC, is a nationally published magazine. I think i saw one on the desk at my dentist's office the other day. Granted, a very liberal neighborhood and a bunch of gay dentists, but still...
We do not, of course, jail people who "think of murder" until they make actions toward doing it, such as threatening someone or errr stabbing someone.
On the same line, when a guy sticks his salami in a 12 year old girl, he goes to jail. when a guys says "I think I might like 12 year old girls", we do not have the justification, nor the right to put him in jail.
there is no implication, suggestion or otherwise HINT that someone is saying that people who molest kids shouldn't be tried for their crime.
The implication you are making is that.... everyone who has ever ONCE harbored the fleeting thought of "mmmmm i'd like to kill him very much" is therefore deemed locked in prison forever.
there is a HUGE logical leap you are making from "pedophile" to "child molester" and your analogy to murders only serves to make it crystal clear.
My peek at this website issue is similar to what you said.
these pervs aren't in theatres propositioning kids (that's the rough equivalent to yelling FIRE in a theatre). They are at their computer discussing the nature of the laws and/or MAYBE how much they would "like" to yell FIRE in a theatre.
As soon as it is illegal for me to say "mmmm fire" on the Internet, I'll move to China. So I guess these pervs might have the right to say "mmmmm young girl" on the Internet in the same light. that changes the minute they walk out into the street and say "come over here little girl"... but that's another topic for another day. The article is about an ISP shutting down a smaller ISP because they don't like their content....
I did some digging and found the "vigilante group" is "Perverted Justice" (www.perverted-justice.com), the makers of the Dateline "to catch a predator" shows. Their status as "vigilante" is debatable during their law-enforcement-supported television shows, but their daily operations definitely slide toward the vigilante area.
I found a site called corrupted-justice.com which is a site critical of Perverted Justice, and discusses a number of cases where they clearly violate the law and most people's ethical standards in a "the ends justify the means" sort of way.
In fact, I also found quotations from Perverted Justice and thier founders saying basically "we have no interest in protecting children, that's not what we're about, we simply hate pervs and want them to suffer miserably". Corrupted Justice seems to imply they use 15-17 year old "minors" in some of their stings as "bait" and tell them to engage older adults in sexual discussions.
I don't know, that sort of "by all means, hell with the law" approach is disheartening.
I also found that the websites hosted by Epifora include sites like www.boychat.org and www.girlchat.org.
Doing some more digging, they seemed to be linked to some sort of organization called "Free Spirits" (www.freespirits.org) which claims it is a "support group" for pedos, but it also says that it is very opposed to illegal content.
Of course, there is absolutely nothing saying that Epifora wasn't hosting child porn on their server, but I have a feeling that the FBI or RCMP or whatever would have beat down the door if there was any evidence of that, rather than Verizon quitely unplugging their upstream. In addition, comments from Canadian law enforcement mentioned elsewhere in this thread seem to lean toward their content having been audited by both law enforcement and MCI's legal team in 2001 and found to be entirely legal.
So a conclusion? Verizon pulled the plug because they didn't want to be listed as a "corporate sex offender" on the perverted-justice.com website. They had a meeting where lawyers said "we choose the better of two evils" and they chose to shut down the Epifora ISP and face the unlikely circumstance their "common carrier" status was put in jeopardy, rather than face the guarantee that "perverted justice" will be posting fliers on their headquarters with pictures of decapitated children or somesuch that say "VERIZON DID THIS".
Sadly, when the case goes to court, GooTube is going to owe someone a lot of money.
The settlements are absolutely absurd. This is a bit like the copyright violation focused on by the RIAA, but orders of magnitude greater.
Do you think Metallica was damaged $25,000 per song when that 14 year old girl downloaded their songs? No. But the court was putting that much up as "damages".
What do you think the damages would amount to if the same group sued GooTube for putting up the same song in video form? don't you think they would argue for multimillion dollar damages for a single crappy video?
This is why they're trying to negotiate beforehand.
In a perfect world, they share content, people find their content shared and phone them up and say "check please" and they get a check for a predetermined amount, in the mail, simple.
But if they work for Sony or BMG, they call their manager who calls their agent who calls their producer who calls their distributor who calls their executive who calls their bigwig legal team who calls Google and demands a billion dollars.
Neat.
Then each one of the guys down the line gets his share and the artist takes the last few pennies and goes home.
Of course for Metallica, it's 30 million pennies, but that just shows you what scale the original numbers must have been.
I'd agree if Youtube were a wholesale clearinghouse of strictly copyrighted material. If it were, for example, like Napster.
However, a large percentage (high 90s) of the content on YouTube is CREATIVE work, that happens to include some instances of licensed content somewhere within it.
Reference a goofy lip sync of a popular song, or a claymation remake of star wars. Both of these technically would need to be "licensed" but sadly, the idea of copyright is to enhance innovation, not stifle it... so in this sense, I feel it is the copyright law itself that is broken, not Google or YouTube's approach to people's desire to be creative with new media.
I'm not a fan of organizations who's goal is not.... "provide a valuable service" or "improve content" or "do something".... their sole purpose of being created is to "extract money" from popular community sources.
Obviously it's not this simple. OBVIOUSLY, content takes time and money to produce... err wait, I guess Youtube sort of proves that wrong.
Still, anyway, existance with the sole purpose of "extracting money" is the capitalist way, but it seems a shady one nonetheless.
I've dealt with too many "three man IT shops" who treat IT work like auto mechanics. "try it, tweak something, try it again, tweak something, try it again, tweak something, try it again, tweak something". All the while, the company is offline. Corporate IT is about establishing procedures BEFORE the issues happen and about having backup plans for WHEN they happen, all of which is designed to minimize downtime.
Working with an office of 2-3 people... if you're diddling with their router for 2 hours, your time is probably worth more than the time the company has lost. But if you diddle with 200 people's connection for 2 hours, you've just cost their company $20,000, possibly more. Imagine what sort of investments could have prevented that downtime, how much cheaper they are than that downtime and why you should have implimented them:-)
FYI, Documentation is more important than you think.
Fair enough, and they (for once) made the right decision, saying they don't have any business twiddling with who operates on unlicensed frequencies in public places.
Everytime I see "FCC" I have this gut reaction that makes me squirm. They should dole out frequencies to proper carriers and then back off and have little more to do with it in my opinion.
Even having them look at appeals regarding frivolous cases like this seems silly.
Well, on the surface this sounds like a great thing. After all, competition is good, right?
Sure!
But then again, isn't this just another case of the FCC being in way too deep with its sticky little tenticles all over things it has no place touching? What right would the FCC have in the first place to shut down publically accessable wireless traffic using approved media? If it's not an FAA issue with ATC communications, and they're using publically available hardware on publically available frequencies, what say AT ALL does the FCC have in who operates networks where and who can decide what is done with their own private property.
Yes, the airport is public property, but not really. It is owned, in the same way a Starbucs is property, and if Starbucs told you do get lost, you would damn well have to do it. If they said "you can't bring that in here", you have to comply or you have to leave.
So again, why is the FCC even remotely involved with this? Again, I'm glad they're NO LONGER involved with this, but... seriously, someone needs to go in and give the smackdown and tell them to GET YOUR STINKING FINGERS OUT OF EVERYTHING!!! haha
This is directly related to the fear that parents face.
Fifty years ago, when my father was 9 years old, he and his friends would hop on their bike and ride 3 miles down to the lake. This was along side of an old highway that occassionally saw OTR truckers. They would leave home at noon with instructions "be home before dinner".
Sometimes HIS dad would walk down there to check on them and toss them in the water a few times. Then, they would ride their bikes home when the sun got low.
When I was 11 years old, my father grugingly allowed me to ride my bike 1 mile to a nearby shopping mall with several friends, but gave me a bag of quarters and instructed me to call every hour.
My youngest brother is 13 and is still not allowed out of the "neighborhood" on his own and my mother was horrified at the thought that he "take the bus" to soccer practice, rather than having me drive across town to come pick him up and drive him the 12 blocks over there.
What's the difference?
Statistical rates of violence, bodily harm and child abduction (outside the family) are all at record lows right now. Why are we afraid? Fifty years ago, it was more dangerous to ride your bike down to the lake than it is now.
Why are we afraid?
We, as a society need to ask ourselves this question and come to the conclusion that it is irrational.
I think you are inferring things where they don't exist.
Studies show that those diagnosed with ADD do, in fact, have higher rates of stimulant addiction... But the same studies show that there is NO difference between the rates of those who have taken prescription stimulants and those who have not.
The running theory is that the stimulants themselves help settle the person's mind and encourage their addiction, rather than it being a prescription->illicit link.
Nuclear Fusion requires enormous heat and power to maintain the reaction and the magnetic containment. It simply collapses without this.
Fission, on the other hand, can cascade into a chain reaction, resulting in meltdown, explosion, etc.
When the control rods of a fission reactor are removed, it melts down and will burn radioactive clouds into the air.
when a fusion reactor looses containment, the reactor core goes "whomp" in a burst of steam and vaporized iron and releases a bunch of hot hydrogen gas... and maybe some helium.... Ultimately, more mild than your average factory set ablaze by teenage thrillseekers.
What sort of parent would let their 13 year old daughter fly out of state on a free ticket given to her by a man from the Internet?
Sheesh...
That's twisted. Again, not your responsibility, but really sad.
What you could have perhaps done is call social services in that girl's county. Assuming you know where she lives. They have an obligation to follow up on any reports, even if they do often find them "unwarranted" due to lack of evidence.
In sting-type operations, the "chain of evidence" is carefully documented and preserved using special software, logging, monitoring and other such methods.
Any chat logs that are turned in from some random person on the Internet are going to immediately be thrown out by any jury because they're so easy to manipulate.
So, they HAVE TO (almost by rule of law) catch the person comitting an illegal act. The mere accusation of such isn't enough, especially if the teen in question refuses to talk....
They're left with "xxx person from the internet said this guy wants to meet young girls. No girls are admitting it, the guy says he's innocent, case dismissed." And we just wasted $15,000 getting a jury, judge, court reporter, police, detention, transportation, documentation, etc.
If I called the police and said "I think there is a 35 year old man in a crowd talking to a teenager in a weird way" they would ask "has a crime taken place? if not, call back when one has". Because of the circumstances, the might ask what his name is and where he lives.
If I said "I have no idea who he is, but he's creepy" they would tell me to go away and come back when I had something more substantial.
They don't investigate people for potentially doing something that at one point might become illegal. Nor do they investigate incidental online contact related to a circumstances in which vague semi-anonymous crimes that may or may not have been comitted at some point or may be comitted in the future (all, assuming that there is no deception or misinterpretation or roleplaying, etc).
If you had given them written evidence where a guy said "my name is xxx and my address is xxx and I had sex with a 13 year old girl who's name is xxx and whos address is xxx and it happened on xxx date." they would STILLLLL have a difficult case, though then they MIGHT be inclined to take it up.
So you understand that they're not exempting your "community" but simply reacting to the fact that they can't be everywhere at once AND it takes real evidence to convict people. It is not their job to go around bullying people into complying, especially if these people haven't actually committed a crime, but instead "may at some point" committ a crime, even if it sounds like they wanted to.
There are FBI task forces for online crimes, but rarely do they investigate individual cases, or there would have to be hundreds of thousands of agents, all computer experts, in every jurisdiction on the planet, all with perfect communication between them and unlimited ability to wire-tap computers and communications to coordinate these investigations.
So, what you describe is an inevitability in an online forum. It will happen. Always. So if everyone viewed it as a "social responsibility" to shut down their resource when it did, the Internet would cease to exist, short of some nifty corporate graphics and a dictionary or two.
Slashdot Mirror
Just noticed this response and i thought i'd chime in for Internet posterity.
Documentation does not necessarily include "step by step, screenshots every time you click".
It includes things such as the REASON we opened port 4773 and which application will break next time we upgrade the firewall (four years from now) and forget to open it.
It includes things like... what is the administrator password of that database we haven't touched in 2 years, but still has critical data in it.
It includes things like WHICH subnets route through our Cincinatti office and which subnets route through our Denver office.
it includes things like the static IP addresses at the warehouse and why there is only two computers out there running DHCP when the rest are static.
As for change management, obviously, you've never worked for a large organization.
Shall I relay the things that happened to me THIS WEEK regarding undocumented changes.
Well hmm... Last week, our entire call center (120 staff) was down for 4 hours because some administrator ran some patch on some server somewhere in a different office, that caused back-end process to hang, which led to our telephone database loading dummy values instead of customer information, and then crashing the front end dialer, because of null-terminated values....
Now, it was a 3 minute job to roll back the patch once we realized the problem... but nobody had ANY idea this administrator had messed with the server today and he took off for a long lunch and left us troubleshooting problems on the wrong side of the world.
This week, an administrator changed the IP address on a database server. He tested thoroughly all of the applications that use this database, ensuring they were running from the hostname, rather than the IP address. But he didn't realize that another database had a hard-coded link to the system, which database updates on a different customer database. Had this system been in our newly-implimented change management system, the system administrator of the second system would have been emailed with the change a few hours in advance in order to telephone the guys who were handling the change and coordinate, but it wasn't.
We do have a new change management system in place, and the records are being imported gradually. Just this week, it has saved two major issues with systems changing patch-levels or having downtime that would have been a serious issue without the change-management procedure.
I'll admit that when you have a 1-man IT staff, documentation needs only to be lightweight reminders, and not much more. When you have a 3-man IT staff, documentation gets more important so you don't end up in the situation "I think Bob changed the IP address, but I don't know why or to what".
In an organization such as my company that has over 80 IT staff and 16 locations (about 2500 employees), even using group emails becomes daunting... at any given time, we have 10 or 15 "bits" of work going on with various systems and networks in different locations, it is frankly impossible to coordinate and be informed of changes, unless you have a procedural system such as change-management in place.
the formal procedures for change-management that are defined in something like ITIL are only useful for organizations who's IT structure is too large to have an "all hands" meeting without using a baseball stadium. In that case, it is impossible to address functional requirements of all departments and system groups without using established procedure as a starting-point from which to develop specific aims for your organizational systems.
It's great that you're clairvoyant and can instantly know when one of the other 18 server administrators touches a system that you depend on. I'm happy for you that you are immediately aware when one of the other 9 networking specialists changes a static route or updates a DHCP scope. It's great that you are subconsciously aware when one of the other 14 Desktop support techs pushes out a new, buggy patch to the entire organization and breaks half your applications.
Most people don't have that level of psychic energy and require systems like change-management to inform them of what is going on.
Stew
How do you say slashdotted in Japanese?
Oh, sorry, to answer your question, murderers deprive someone of something valuable.
Child molesters.. well at least in the traditional sense, also do this.
Now some of the vague "intent to cross state lines to meet a FBI agent who happens to be posing as a 16 year old virgin" when the guy hasn't done anything more than buy a plane ticket.... probably stretching the concept a bit, and it's hard to show who he injured, except that there is the assumption that he likely to injure. Well, I guess the more I think about that, the more i think that is crap too...
not to be controversial, but I could tell you that 90% of xxxx gang members are going to committ a crime this year, but there would be mass outcry if we rounded up the whole gang and jailed them as a "public service" but that seems typical reaction and totally acceptable when the target is a "terrorist" or a "pedophile".
NINTEY PERCENT? "That's an unacceptable risk!!", the people cry, as their children are hauled off to jail.
Stew
the problem with the analogy is the wording:
"murderer" means "someone who has murdered".
pedophile means "someone attracted to children"
The applicable parallel to "murderer" is "child molester" and this is what i was pointing out.
therefore, if the participants of this group are presumably "pedophiles" who are dealing with whatever crap is in their head, but NOT going out and diddling little kids, then the conclusion is "let them be, keep an eye on them" but the tone of this sub-thread seems to be "this is great, evict them from the Internet", which I am suggesting is counterproductive to both society's saftey and society's freedom.
Stew
Creepy, but doesn't sound illegal to me...
The only link in this article is from "the guide" magazine, which IIRC, is a nationally published magazine. I think i saw one on the desk at my dentist's office the other day. Granted, a very liberal neighborhood and a bunch of gay dentists, but still...
I don't regard that as "unsafe"
Stew
Except it makes a seriously stupid comparison.
OF COURSE we jail murderes.
OF COURSE we jail child molesters.
We do not, of course, jail people who "think of murder" until they make actions toward doing it, such as threatening someone or errr stabbing someone.
On the same line, when a guy sticks his salami in a 12 year old girl, he goes to jail. when a guys says "I think I might like 12 year old girls", we do not have the justification, nor the right to put him in jail.
Stew
This makes no sense at all.
there is no implication, suggestion or otherwise HINT that someone is saying that people who molest kids shouldn't be tried for their crime.
The implication you are making is that.... everyone who has ever ONCE harbored the fleeting thought of "mmmmm i'd like to kill him very much" is therefore deemed locked in prison forever.
there is a HUGE logical leap you are making from "pedophile" to "child molester" and your analogy to murders only serves to make it crystal clear.
we jail murderers, not "potential murderers".
Stew
My peek at this website issue is similar to what you said.
these pervs aren't in theatres propositioning kids (that's the rough equivalent to yelling FIRE in a theatre). They are at their computer discussing the nature of the laws and/or MAYBE how much they would "like" to yell FIRE in a theatre.
As soon as it is illegal for me to say "mmmm fire" on the Internet, I'll move to China. So I guess these pervs might have the right to say "mmmmm young girl" on the Internet in the same light. that changes the minute they walk out into the street and say "come over here little girl"... but that's another topic for another day. The article is about an ISP shutting down a smaller ISP because they don't like their content....
Stew
I did some digging and found the "vigilante group" is "Perverted Justice" (www.perverted-justice.com), the makers of the Dateline "to catch a predator" shows. Their status as "vigilante" is debatable during their law-enforcement-supported television shows, but their daily operations definitely slide toward the vigilante area.
I found a site called corrupted-justice.com which is a site critical of Perverted Justice, and discusses a number of cases where they clearly violate the law and most people's ethical standards in a "the ends justify the means" sort of way.
In fact, I also found quotations from Perverted Justice and thier founders saying basically "we have no interest in protecting children, that's not what we're about, we simply hate pervs and want them to suffer miserably". Corrupted Justice seems to imply they use 15-17 year old "minors" in some of their stings as "bait" and tell them to engage older adults in sexual discussions.
I don't know, that sort of "by all means, hell with the law" approach is disheartening.
I also found that the websites hosted by Epifora include sites like www.boychat.org and www.girlchat.org.
Doing some more digging, they seemed to be linked to some sort of organization called "Free Spirits" (www.freespirits.org) which claims it is a "support group" for pedos, but it also says that it is very opposed to illegal content.
Of course, there is absolutely nothing saying that Epifora wasn't hosting child porn on their server, but I have a feeling that the FBI or RCMP or whatever would have beat down the door if there was any evidence of that, rather than Verizon quitely unplugging their upstream. In addition, comments from Canadian law enforcement mentioned elsewhere in this thread seem to lean toward their content having been audited by both law enforcement and MCI's legal team in 2001 and found to be entirely legal.
So a conclusion? Verizon pulled the plug because they didn't want to be listed as a "corporate sex offender" on the perverted-justice.com website. They had a meeting where lawyers said "we choose the better of two evils" and they chose to shut down the Epifora ISP and face the unlikely circumstance their "common carrier" status was put in jeopardy, rather than face the guarantee that "perverted justice" will be posting fliers on their headquarters with pictures of decapitated children or somesuch that say "VERIZON DID THIS".
Stew
This is how it SHOULD work.
Sadly, when the case goes to court, GooTube is going to owe someone a lot of money.
The settlements are absolutely absurd. This is a bit like the copyright violation focused on by the RIAA, but orders of magnitude greater.
Do you think Metallica was damaged $25,000 per song when that 14 year old girl downloaded their songs? No. But the court was putting that much up as "damages".
What do you think the damages would amount to if the same group sued GooTube for putting up the same song in video form? don't you think they would argue for multimillion dollar damages for a single crappy video?
This is why they're trying to negotiate beforehand.
In a perfect world, they share content, people find their content shared and phone them up and say "check please" and they get a check for a predetermined amount, in the mail, simple.
But if they work for Sony or BMG, they call their manager who calls their agent who calls their producer who calls their distributor who calls their executive who calls their bigwig legal team who calls Google and demands a billion dollars.
Neat.
Then each one of the guys down the line gets his share and the artist takes the last few pennies and goes home.
Of course for Metallica, it's 30 million pennies, but that just shows you what scale the original numbers must have been.
Stew
I'd agree if Youtube were a wholesale clearinghouse of strictly copyrighted material. If it were, for example, like Napster.
However, a large percentage (high 90s) of the content on YouTube is CREATIVE work, that happens to include some instances of licensed content somewhere within it.
Reference a goofy lip sync of a popular song, or a claymation remake of star wars. Both of these technically would need to be "licensed" but sadly, the idea of copyright is to enhance innovation, not stifle it... so in this sense, I feel it is the copyright law itself that is broken, not Google or YouTube's approach to people's desire to be creative with new media.
Stew
Copyright law is broken.
It is supposed to stir innovation, but it is now stifles innovation in the name of profit.
Swell.
Google, despite their failings, is still a decent company IMO.
Stew
Ahh yes, it all comes down to one phrase...
"extract money"
I'm not a fan of organizations who's goal is not.... "provide a valuable service" or "improve content" or "do something".... their sole purpose of being created is to "extract money" from popular community sources.
Obviously it's not this simple. OBVIOUSLY, content takes time and money to produce... err wait, I guess Youtube sort of proves that wrong.
Still, anyway, existance with the sole purpose of "extracting money" is the capitalist way, but it seems a shady one nonetheless.
Stew
Hire someone who knows corporate IT.
:-)
Please.
I've dealt with too many "three man IT shops" who treat IT work like auto mechanics. "try it, tweak something, try it again, tweak something, try it again, tweak something, try it again, tweak something". All the while, the company is offline. Corporate IT is about establishing procedures BEFORE the issues happen and about having backup plans for WHEN they happen, all of which is designed to minimize downtime.
Working with an office of 2-3 people... if you're diddling with their router for 2 hours, your time is probably worth more than the time the company has lost. But if you diddle with 200 people's connection for 2 hours, you've just cost their company $20,000, possibly more. Imagine what sort of investments could have prevented that downtime, how much cheaper they are than that downtime and why you should have implimented them
FYI, Documentation is more important than you think.
Stew
Fair enough, and they (for once) made the right decision, saying they don't have any business twiddling with who operates on unlicensed frequencies in public places.
Everytime I see "FCC" I have this gut reaction that makes me squirm. They should dole out frequencies to proper carriers and then back off and have little more to do with it in my opinion.
Even having them look at appeals regarding frivolous cases like this seems silly.
Stew
Well, on the surface this sounds like a great thing. After all, competition is good, right?
Sure!
But then again, isn't this just another case of the FCC being in way too deep with its sticky little tenticles all over things it has no place touching? What right would the FCC have in the first place to shut down publically accessable wireless traffic using approved media? If it's not an FAA issue with ATC communications, and they're using publically available hardware on publically available frequencies, what say AT ALL does the FCC have in who operates networks where and who can decide what is done with their own private property.
Yes, the airport is public property, but not really. It is owned, in the same way a Starbucs is property, and if Starbucs told you do get lost, you would damn well have to do it. If they said "you can't bring that in here", you have to comply or you have to leave.
So again, why is the FCC even remotely involved with this? Again, I'm glad they're NO LONGER involved with this, but... seriously, someone needs to go in and give the smackdown and tell them to GET YOUR STINKING FINGERS OUT OF EVERYTHING!!! haha
Right.
Pfft.
Stew
This is directly related to the fear that parents face.
Fifty years ago, when my father was 9 years old, he and his friends would hop on their bike and ride 3 miles down to the lake. This was along side of an old highway that occassionally saw OTR truckers. They would leave home at noon with instructions "be home before dinner".
Sometimes HIS dad would walk down there to check on them and toss them in the water a few times. Then, they would ride their bikes home when the sun got low.
When I was 11 years old, my father grugingly allowed me to ride my bike 1 mile to a nearby shopping mall with several friends, but gave me a bag of quarters and instructed me to call every hour.
My youngest brother is 13 and is still not allowed out of the "neighborhood" on his own and my mother was horrified at the thought that he "take the bus" to soccer practice, rather than having me drive across town to come pick him up and drive him the 12 blocks over there.
What's the difference?
Statistical rates of violence, bodily harm and child abduction (outside the family) are all at record lows right now. Why are we afraid? Fifty years ago, it was more dangerous to ride your bike down to the lake than it is now.
Why are we afraid?
We, as a society need to ask ourselves this question and come to the conclusion that it is irrational.
Good post.
Stew
I love you.
(not really)
Stew
PS. it helps to grab people by the shoulders and shake them violently when explaining the above referenced ideas.
I think you are inferring things where they don't exist.
Studies show that those diagnosed with ADD do, in fact, have higher rates of stimulant addiction... But the same studies show that there is NO difference between the rates of those who have taken prescription stimulants and those who have not.
The running theory is that the stimulants themselves help settle the person's mind and encourage their addiction, rather than it being a prescription->illicit link.
Stewed
Ummm... i'm not sure how many MP3s would fit on a 5MB hard drive...
Nor where you might find a Pentium D system with an 8-bit ISA slot to run the old MFM controller cards....
nor the drivers for Windows Vista....
But uhhh I guess if you have sensitive uhhh text, maybe you could store a bit of it in something like that.
Provided it doesn't uhhh... crash. Then your sensitive text is uhhh... crashed too.
then again, they can just read the platters in a cleanroom, defeating the whole purpose of this discussion in the first place...
which brings us back to.... booby traps?
Someone bring me some thermite.
Stew
Nuclear Fusion requires enormous heat and power to maintain the reaction and the magnetic containment. It simply collapses without this.
Fission, on the other hand, can cascade into a chain reaction, resulting in meltdown, explosion, etc.
When the control rods of a fission reactor are removed, it melts down and will burn radioactive clouds into the air.
when a fusion reactor looses containment, the reactor core goes "whomp" in a burst of steam and vaporized iron and releases a bunch of hot hydrogen gas... and maybe some helium.... Ultimately, more mild than your average factory set ablaze by teenage thrillseekers.
Stewed
What sort of parent would let their 13 year old daughter fly out of state on a free ticket given to her by a man from the Internet?
Sheesh...
That's twisted. Again, not your responsibility, but really sad.
What you could have perhaps done is call social services in that girl's county. Assuming you know where she lives. They have an obligation to follow up on any reports, even if they do often find them "unwarranted" due to lack of evidence.
Stew
In sting-type operations, the "chain of evidence" is carefully documented and preserved using special software, logging, monitoring and other such methods.
Any chat logs that are turned in from some random person on the Internet are going to immediately be thrown out by any jury because they're so easy to manipulate.
So, they HAVE TO (almost by rule of law) catch the person comitting an illegal act. The mere accusation of such isn't enough, especially if the teen in question refuses to talk....
They're left with "xxx person from the internet said this guy wants to meet young girls. No girls are admitting it, the guy says he's innocent, case dismissed." And we just wasted $15,000 getting a jury, judge, court reporter, police, detention, transportation, documentation, etc.
Stew
If I called the police and said "I think there is a 35 year old man in a crowd talking to a teenager in a weird way" they would ask "has a crime taken place? if not, call back when one has". Because of the circumstances, the might ask what his name is and where he lives.
If I said "I have no idea who he is, but he's creepy" they would tell me to go away and come back when I had something more substantial.
They don't investigate people for potentially doing something that at one point might become illegal. Nor do they investigate incidental online contact related to a circumstances in which vague semi-anonymous crimes that may or may not have been comitted at some point or may be comitted in the future (all, assuming that there is no deception or misinterpretation or roleplaying, etc).
If you had given them written evidence where a guy said "my name is xxx and my address is xxx and I had sex with a 13 year old girl who's name is xxx and whos address is xxx and it happened on xxx date." they would STILLLLL have a difficult case, though then they MIGHT be inclined to take it up.
So you understand that they're not exempting your "community" but simply reacting to the fact that they can't be everywhere at once AND it takes real evidence to convict people. It is not their job to go around bullying people into complying, especially if these people haven't actually committed a crime, but instead "may at some point" committ a crime, even if it sounds like they wanted to.
There are FBI task forces for online crimes, but rarely do they investigate individual cases, or there would have to be hundreds of thousands of agents, all computer experts, in every jurisdiction on the planet, all with perfect communication between them and unlimited ability to wire-tap computers and communications to coordinate these investigations.
So, what you describe is an inevitability in an online forum. It will happen. Always. So if everyone viewed it as a "social responsibility" to shut down their resource when it did, the Internet would cease to exist, short of some nifty corporate graphics and a dictionary or two.
Stewed