Really, I was thinking more of the media exposure doing harm to the MPAA/RIAA. Kinda like lifting a rock and watching the bugs scurrying around trying to find places to hide. So far, the MPAA/RIAA are "winning" every case, because they've been able to use their "settle for this low, low figure and we won't sue" tactic. OK, there has been *some* media attention, but not enough to really do much damage. If just one person wins and gets the **AA information gathering techniques ruled illegal, that'll be a big setback. If he gets a big award in a countersuit, there'll be more people (and lawyers) willing to fight back.
Even if the MPAA backs down from their case and concedes his counterclaim, he can still get a lot of milage out of it. Such as full page ads in newspapers stating the facts of the case. He could probably discuss it on TV with Letterman or Leno too.
You're not one of the David Nelsons are you?? Personally, I think it would be interesting to watch the TSA meltdown when 30 or 40 David Nelsons show up for the same flight. Picture the chaos after boarding when they announce, "Would David Nelson please exit the plane". Be really funny if one of them was the pilot, with a license to carry a handgun in the cockpit... I wonder if potential Air Marshalls are checked against the No Fly list?? There could be an armed David Nelson legitimately on a flight, writing bogus reports about random strangers.:)
It seems as if there's already a check and balance: the flight crew.
See the story a little way above your comment, about the commercial airline pilot who has difficulties flying as a passenger due to being on a No Fly list. That could happen to any flight crew that reported an Air Marshall for goofing off on the job.
ah, but as everybody knows, the secret government black helicopters can see you right through the walls, so it would hover *above* the aircraft, out of sight.
Garbage in garbage out, the more garbage they toss into the Federal database the less useful it is and the more likely real terrorists will actually get through./i>
I think maybe they're working on an "infinite number of monkeys" basis. You know - the "infinite number of monkeys banging on typewriters, and one of them will produce all the works of Shakespeare" theory. Except in this case they're collecting an infinite amount of crap in the Federal databases so that one day they can ask it, "Where's Bin Laden??" and get the right answer. Of course, the answers they're getting at the moment are on the order of "a curious shade of lilac", and "a fish", so they *know* they need to keep piling the crap up...
Well, there was that one guy in New Zealand who designed and built a cruise missile for about $5000. I believe he got most of the electronics for the guidance system from eBay and possibly some of the other hardware too. OK, so it wasn't going to carry a big payload, and it was going to be launched from on top of a vehicle doing 70mph, but it had a range of 100 miles or so. It wouldn't need to carry much to cause mass hysteria. A few pounds of anthrax or nuclear waste in the middle of Wall Street, for example...
Dunno about the Mont Blanc tunnel, but your story sounds plausible. Around here, there's a feed store that occasionally sells blue 50 gallon plastic barrels for about $12 each, and a friend recently told me he picked some up from a concrete company, free for the asking. A bunch of those filled with gas in the back of a Ryder truck, or an RV, or any kind of van, would be easy enough to get into a tunnel. Hit the midpoint in heavy traffic and light it up... You wouldn't even need explosives, unless you wanted to crack the barrels before they exploded anyway. As someone else has already pointed out, Walmart sells black powder, which ought to do the trick.
It's McVeigh's scenario all over again, only this time using gasoline instead of fertilizer. Much more difficult to track, as almost *everyone* buys gas, but only a relative few buy commercial fertilizer in large quantities...
The Romans didn't have a problem with Augustus but they sure did have a problem with Caligula.
Hey! Caligula did have a couple of good ideas, such as making his horse a Senator. I think both the US Senate *and* Congress could benefit from a bit of horse sense...
A big hydraulic press seems about right... Squish 'em flat and there'll be *some* kind of juice coming out, though I'll grant you it might not be blood.
And having some crack-smoking Wall Street analyst "accidentally" downgrade EDS stock is completely irrelevant, right?? After all, he *did* apologise *after* the stock tumbled, but somehow "wups, didn't mean it" just doesn't cut it.
Reminds me of an old joke: A guy is driving around somewhere out in the country when a very large, six-legged chicken runs past. Curious, he follows the chicken until it goes into a farm yard. He knocks on the farmhouse door and talks to the farmer:
Driver: "Did I really just see a six-legged chicken run in here?? I was doing 50mph and it passed me like I was standing still!"
Farmer: "Yep. We figured everyone likes drumsticks, so we started a special breeding program."
Driver: "So, what do they taste like??"
Farmer: "Dunno. We haven't been able to catch one..."
It'll be completely screwed over by the "Net Neutrality" thing, if that isn't settled properly. If the bandwidth providers start charging different rates for connecting to different services all hell breaks loose.
They should be charging the agent as well as the consultant. The way lawyers game the legal system in the US, any investigation that agent has ever been involved in could be jeopardized.
Ah, secretaries... I remember hearing about one who was given the task of backing up a computer system. She was told to make a copy of the production disk every night and store it in the safe. This was back in the days when the disks were those big white frisbee types with the single hard platter inside. Well, one day there was a problem in the system and the admin wanted to restore something, so he went to the safe, but all the disks he looked at were blank. He checked with the secretary, who showed him the copies she had made. Photocopies... She'd been religiously pulling the disk every night and copying it the only way she knew how.
A little more basic than connectors - I once supported a company with a Pyramid OSx unix system and a whole bunch of ASCII terminals for word processing and such. One day I got a call from HR: "my display doesn't work". After about 30 seconds fiddling with it, I saw that it wasn't getting power because the wall socket was switched off...
BPI: "OK, we've proved in court that you're illegal. Shut that site down or we raise the price of CDs shipped to Russia. Maybe we'll even *stop* shipping CDs to Russia!"
AllOfMp3: "Oooh, we're scared!! Just kidding!! Go ahead and shut down shipments. People will buy more downloads and we could use the extra revenue..."
I heard about the Cookie Monster program from a Honywell/Multics engineer while he was installing our system. He said that in one case, someone had managed to get it to run on the system console, which in those days was a paper printer/keyboard, not video. Every so often it would print out "I wanna a cookie!". The operators would just laugh and type in "cookie" to make it stop. But *this* particular implementation shortened the time delay every time it demanded a cookie, and before long it was demanding cookies faster than the operators could type... I think the fix was to deliberately crash the system, then bring it up in the bootloader to clean out the cookie program.
A lot of people here seem to think he's screwed because of the audio portion of the recording. I guess that's due to "wiretap" traditionally referring to tapping into a phone line or other cable.
I wonder how the police would react to a video screen & camera mounted on the front door, with a sign saying "please speack clearly into the microphone"?? When someone rings the doorbell, you wouldn't have to actually open the door, you'd just fire up the inside camera and talk to them. That would eliminate the "foot in the door until we get a warrant" thing that happened to this guy. It would make it substantially harder for them to gain entry if the door wasn't ever opened... In fact, if I were setting up a system like that I might even mount a bogus front door on a brick wall. Legitimate visitors could be invited in through the garage, say, or around the back. If the police *really* wanted in and brought along the guy with the battering ram, he could pound away all day.
Note, I haven't yet had a bad experience with the police, and I don't expect to as I'm a mostly law-abiding non-citizen. I might still install the video thing, just because I can. And if I was the kind of person who *would* expect to have the door pounded open by the police, my video link would go over broadband to a different house...:)
How about intentionally running in a VM?? Shove the parent OS into firmware, like a smarter-than-usual BIOS, and let *it* watch the system. Make it smart enough and it could detect the virtualising rootkit and seal it off in its own little world, kinda like a chroot jail... That could be loads of fun for a honeypot system - dozens of infected VMs, each thinking it's at the top of the heap, owning the hardware and talking to all the other infected VMs. Botnet in a box...:)
Note that the argument "but Microsoft would only shut off illegitimate versions of Windows" doesn't make any difference.
I can see that this use would be OK - if it's an illegal copy Microsoft would be within their rights to prosecute. Instead, they just shut down the illegal copy. The problem that *I* have is that it keeps on checking and calling home, supposedly just in case a legal copy of Windows magically becomes illegal overnight. WTF?? *That's* just not justifiable. It should only check once, then shut itself off and maybe even remove itself.
The guy had a sign posted. I don't think the article says what is written on the sign, but if it's really prominent and says something like "By standing on my porch you consent to being recorded" I'd say he's covered.
Most people would say, "Only $50/year??" They wouldn't do the math and scale it up by the number of people in town to get a figure worth paying attention to. Now, if the line item were changed to say something like: "Police misconduct cost the city $10M in settlements last year, and you're paying $50 of that" then you might see voters taking notice.
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Really, I was thinking more of the media exposure doing harm to the MPAA/RIAA. Kinda like lifting a rock and watching the bugs scurrying around trying to find places to hide. So far, the MPAA/RIAA are "winning" every case, because they've been able to use their "settle for this low, low figure and we won't sue" tactic. OK, there has been *some* media attention, but not enough to really do much damage. If just one person wins and gets the **AA information gathering techniques ruled illegal, that'll be a big setback. If he gets a big award in a countersuit, there'll be more people (and lawyers) willing to fight back.
Even if the MPAA backs down from their case and concedes his counterclaim, he can still get a lot of milage out of it. Such as full page ads in newspapers stating the facts of the case. He could probably discuss it on TV with Letterman or Leno too.
You're not one of the David Nelsons are you?? Personally, I think it would be interesting to watch the TSA meltdown when 30 or 40 David Nelsons show up for the same flight. Picture the chaos after boarding when they announce, "Would David Nelson please exit the plane". Be really funny if one of them was the pilot, with a license to carry a handgun in the cockpit... I wonder if potential Air Marshalls are checked against the No Fly list?? There could be an armed David Nelson legitimately on a flight, writing bogus reports about random strangers. :)
ah, but as everybody knows, the secret government black helicopters can see you right through the walls, so it would hover *above* the aircraft, out of sight.
I think maybe they're working on an "infinite number of monkeys" basis. You know - the "infinite number of monkeys banging on typewriters, and one of them will produce all the works of Shakespeare" theory. Except in this case they're collecting an infinite amount of crap in the Federal databases so that one day they can ask it, "Where's Bin Laden??" and get the right answer. Of course, the answers they're getting at the moment are on the order of "a curious shade of lilac", and "a fish", so they *know* they need to keep piling the crap up...
It's to protect those delicate pilots' eyes from kiddies with $10 laser pointers. Duh...
Petty cash?? Naaah, just flip BillG's sofas over and shake 'em.
Well, there was that one guy in New Zealand who designed and built a cruise missile for about $5000. I believe he got most of the electronics for the guidance system from eBay and possibly some of the other hardware too. OK, so it wasn't going to carry a big payload, and it was going to be launched from on top of a vehicle doing 70mph, but it had a range of 100 miles or so. It wouldn't need to carry much to cause mass hysteria. A few pounds of anthrax or nuclear waste in the middle of Wall Street, for example...
It's McVeigh's scenario all over again, only this time using gasoline instead of fertilizer. Much more difficult to track, as almost *everyone* buys gas, but only a relative few buy commercial fertilizer in large quantities...
Hey! Caligula did have a couple of good ideas, such as making his horse a Senator. I think both the US Senate *and* Congress could benefit from a bit of horse sense...
A big hydraulic press seems about right... Squish 'em flat and there'll be *some* kind of juice coming out, though I'll grant you it might not be blood.
And having some crack-smoking Wall Street analyst "accidentally" downgrade EDS stock is completely irrelevant, right?? After all, he *did* apologise *after* the stock tumbled, but somehow "wups, didn't mean it" just doesn't cut it.
Driver: "Did I really just see a six-legged chicken run in here?? I was doing 50mph and it passed me like I was standing still!"
Farmer: "Yep. We figured everyone likes drumsticks, so we started a special breeding program."
Driver: "So, what do they taste like??"
Farmer: "Dunno. We haven't been able to catch one..."
It'll be completely screwed over by the "Net Neutrality" thing, if that isn't settled properly. If the bandwidth providers start charging different rates for connecting to different services all hell breaks loose.
They should be charging the agent as well as the consultant. The way lawyers game the legal system in the US, any investigation that agent has ever been involved in could be jeopardized.
Ah, secretaries... I remember hearing about one who was given the task of backing up a computer system. She was told to make a copy of the production disk every night and store it in the safe. This was back in the days when the disks were those big white frisbee types with the single hard platter inside. Well, one day there was a problem in the system and the admin wanted to restore something, so he went to the safe, but all the disks he looked at were blank. He checked with the secretary, who showed him the copies she had made. Photocopies... She'd been religiously pulling the disk every night and copying it the only way she knew how.
A little more basic than connectors - I once supported a company with a Pyramid OSx unix system and a whole bunch of ASCII terminals for word processing and such. One day I got a call from HR: "my display doesn't work". After about 30 seconds fiddling with it, I saw that it wasn't getting power because the wall socket was switched off...
BPI: "OK, we've proved in court that you're illegal. Shut that site down or we raise the price of CDs shipped to Russia. Maybe we'll even *stop* shipping CDs to Russia!"
AllOfMp3: "Oooh, we're scared!! Just kidding!! Go ahead and shut down shipments. People will buy more downloads and we could use the extra revenue..."
I heard about the Cookie Monster program from a Honywell/Multics engineer while he was installing our system. He said that in one case, someone had managed to get it to run on the system console, which in those days was a paper printer/keyboard, not video. Every so often it would print out "I wanna a cookie!". The operators would just laugh and type in "cookie" to make it stop. But *this* particular implementation shortened the time delay every time it demanded a cookie, and before long it was demanding cookies faster than the operators could type... I think the fix was to deliberately crash the system, then bring it up in the bootloader to clean out the cookie program.
I wonder how the police would react to a video screen & camera mounted on the front door, with a sign saying "please speack clearly into the microphone"?? When someone rings the doorbell, you wouldn't have to actually open the door, you'd just fire up the inside camera and talk to them. That would eliminate the "foot in the door until we get a warrant" thing that happened to this guy. It would make it substantially harder for them to gain entry if the door wasn't ever opened... In fact, if I were setting up a system like that I might even mount a bogus front door on a brick wall. Legitimate visitors could be invited in through the garage, say, or around the back. If the police *really* wanted in and brought along the guy with the battering ram, he could pound away all day.
Note, I haven't yet had a bad experience with the police, and I don't expect to as I'm a mostly law-abiding non-citizen. I might still install the video thing, just because I can. And if I was the kind of person who *would* expect to have the door pounded open by the police, my video link would go over broadband to a different house... :)
How about intentionally running in a VM?? Shove the parent OS into firmware, like a smarter-than-usual BIOS, and let *it* watch the system. Make it smart enough and it could detect the virtualising rootkit and seal it off in its own little world, kinda like a chroot jail... That could be loads of fun for a honeypot system - dozens of infected VMs, each thinking it's at the top of the heap, owning the hardware and talking to all the other infected VMs. Botnet in a box... :)
I can see that this use would be OK - if it's an illegal copy Microsoft would be within their rights to prosecute. Instead, they just shut down the illegal copy. The problem that *I* have is that it keeps on checking and calling home, supposedly just in case a legal copy of Windows magically becomes illegal overnight. WTF?? *That's* just not justifiable. It should only check once, then shut itself off and maybe even remove itself.
The guy had a sign posted. I don't think the article says what is written on the sign, but if it's really prominent and says something like "By standing on my porch you consent to being recorded" I'd say he's covered.
Most people would say, "Only $50/year??" They wouldn't do the math and scale it up by the number of people in town to get a figure worth paying attention to. Now, if the line item were changed to say something like: "Police misconduct cost the city $10M in settlements last year, and you're paying $50 of that" then you might see voters taking notice.