"We demand that the White House demand the Librarian of Congress to..." would, IMO, be far more effective; especially if you throw in something about First Amendment grounds.
Given that this petition system does nothing to force anyone to do anything but "respond", and given that past "responses" have been along the lines of the one from TSA regarding a petition to disband TSA ("TSA is great, we're doing great, thanks for asking, have a nice day."), you can 'demand' all you want, but you'll still get a nonresponsive response. You can even toss in a reference to eight of the ten amendments in the Bill of Rights and you won't improve the odds.
And clearly objecting to this kind of thing is something only a terrorist would do.
No, but working out a method to cause crashes of drones being used to survey power lines or railroads or interstate highways or dams or bridges is probably something a terrorist would do.
Did we consider that there is a significant difference between objecting to something and actively causing it to fail, thus creating the problem that you hypothesized?
Although first noticed and generally illustrated using sound waves, Doppler applies to waves from moving objects (in your reference frame) in general, including electromagnetic. E.g., Doppler radar for weather observations. Radar is an em wave, similar to light.
Which in turn cross pollinates ad nauseum until there are no fertile seeds. Far fetched perhaps but not unthinkable.
Imagine that these seeds wake up one night and start pillaging every town within 100 miles of where they were planted, eating the brains of any human they come across. Far fetched perhaps, but not unthinkable. We must ban the seeds!
Under the Big Bang theory, the universe will eventually collapse in on itself, likely at the speed of light. The tell-tale sign will be redshift instead of blueshift being observed from Earth to various astronomical bodies.
Is this what you get when you learn your astrophysics from a mass-market broadcast TV show that uses the name of a physics theory as a double entendre and focuses more on sex than science? Or rather, the alleged inability of scientists to understand sex or even behave like normal humans?
As has already been pointed out, the big bang theory does not require a subsequent collapse.
And we're already seeing redshift as the universe expands. It's blueshift we'll be seeing when it contracts. The Doppler effect lowers the apparent frequency of waves as the source moves away from us, and red is lower than blue in frequency.
Chrome is a virus that attaches itself to various other useful programs and hopes that you don't notice the "install Chrome, too" box is checked by default when you are doing something like updating java. It makes itself your default web software without asking. And then when you try to uninstall it, you are left with cruft that breaks how Firefox behaves, like getting an obscure error text about some missing or undefined variable in line X of something displayed instead of a simple 404 failure report.
It managed to weasel its way onto a laptop I administer because apparently it attached itself to something useful that I allowed a user to install. I fired it up to see how it did at browsing the web and the first thing it did was demand that I log into the google cloud using a gmail account. That's before I even tried to load any web pages with it. Why do I need to HAVE a cloud account just to use a web browser, much less be forced to log into it before I am allowed to go anywhere?
As far as the 5 million dollar theft scenario the owner could probably get it back from the casino once it was shown to be stolen money.
You're clueless. What makes you think the casino is liable for the $5 million of your money that I lose at one of their poker tables? They didn't get the money (except for whatever rake they have). Why do they owe you all the money back? Do you not realize how easily they could be taken for millions by someone who drops a bundle, and then has a friend come claim "that's stolen money, give it back to me"?
Here's an example perfectly on point. A local startup hi-tech company got a large investment from an east coast investor. Several million dollars, as I recall. Not long after, the investor was convicted of stealing that money from one of his other clients. I.e., he stole the money that he gave to the hi-tech startup firm. The COURT ruled that the hi-tech startup could keep the money. The person the money was stolen from? SOL. Too bad, so sad, you may get restitution from the investor if he every gets any more money of his own and you can win a civil suit to recoup the loss. But do the simple, honest thing and take the money back from the startup firm and give it back to the rightful owner? Nope. Not possible.
I never said "an eye for an eye".
You said if the loss was monetary, then a fine would be appropriate. That is a real-world example of the "an eye for an eye" principle. You didn't use the word "eye", you used money instead. Same concept. Same issue. What can you do when a blind man pokes both your eyes out? Nothing. What can you do when a poor person steals money from you and loses it gambling? Some wishful thinking that the casino will make you whole because you say so. Sure.
In this case it was nothing more than a minor inconvenience that Swartz caused.
And in other cases hackers have shut down commercial operations and caused much more than "minor inconvenience" to a lot of people. "It was just hacking" covers a lot of activities, more than just the one case you want to limit it to.
If you are sitting next to someone in a class and they reach over and hit the clear button on your calculator or if you are listening to a radio and someone changes the station you wouldn't advocate life in prison or anything even remotely close to it. Well maybe you would, but that certainly wouldn't seem justified to me.
And if that person is sitting in a room full of people who are attending a seminar on how to live life better by using their newly implanted insulin pumps, and he knows and makes use of a security flaw to force everyone's pumps to push a massive bolus of insulin, and half a dozen people die from the resulting confusion and diabetic comas that take place, he's just causing a minor inconvenience and doesn't deserve to be punished at all, right? He's just hacking, after all, and computers aren't people and pushing the "reset" button on someone else's computer is just a harmless prank, right?
The question I responded to initially was along the lines of "would you execute a hacker?", and in the insulin example I'd be very tempted to say "of course." I'm pointing out that "just a hacker" isn't an honest way of referring to every crime committed using a computer.
As for computer "access" being a right, that is just silly. There is no such thing as a right that someone else must provide for you.
Wow, you really don't get out much, do you, nor do you read/. on a regular basis. Such a right is exactly what people are arguing should exist, and it doesn't matter if someone else has to pay for it. Another example of a right that someone must provide for you? Universal health care. It's a basic human right, according to some, even though it is paid for by everyone else so you can have it.
The point stands. If "it's just hacking" is a defense against punish
I don't want a heavy smoker to have a heart attack while I'm on the road, but I'm not going to call for them to be banned.
The difference is that a heavy smoker isn't necessarily going to have a heart attack AT ALL, much less while on the road, and an epileptic is called an epileptic because he has ALREADY HAD SEIZURES. One person, it may never happen at all, the other, it has already happened and is likely to happen again.
At some point, can't we just say "Don't drive". Some handicaps can be accommodated. But an epileptic seizure while driving down the highway? Please, not while I'm on the road.
Well, he must be an exceptional driver. According to those who RTFA, he had not one but two seizures during this incident. If you can have even one epileptic seizure while driving at 125MPH and stay on the road, you're NASCAR/LeMans material.
If no one is hurt physically then the punishment shouldn't be physical either. If money is taken then a fine would be appropriate.
So, I steal five million dollars from you and blow it on a gambling spree in Las Vegas. Sorry, I have no money to pay the fine, you don't get anything. In the meantime, you've not been able to pay your mortgage or car loan so your home and car have been repossessed. All I took was money, all I owe you is a fine. So, where is the punishment, and more important, where is the prevention?
It's nice to say "an eye for an eye", but what do you do if a blind man pokes your eyes out?
If inconvenience was caused as in this case then imposing a larger inconvenience would be appropriate. For instance losing his drivers license or getting his computer confiscated for a few months.
Your "inconvenience" has turned into physical punishment.
Life in prison for causing a minor inconvenience gives sadists a great big hard-on,
I think my point was, calling something "hacking" doesn't mean it is just a minor inconvenience. If "hacking" a computer system is a minor inconvenience, then it is hard to claim that access to computer systems should be a basic human right.
I'd say one of the biggest problems in our country is that sadists seem to be in charge. Torture? Hell, yes!
Hell, no. What you've missed is that the entire debate hinges on just how you define "torture", not whether actual torture is good or bad. Everyone can agree that "torture" is bad, n'kay? We pretty much all do. What we don't all agree on is what constitutes torture. An argument like "you think waterboarding is ok, I say that waterboarding is torture, so YOU think torture is ok" is quite dishonest.
Torture, suffering, death is what this country is all about.
It is this sort of hyperbole that makes discussing anything here so pleasant and productive.
Why do you think we like war so much?
"We" don't. Some of us understand that war is sometimes necessary, and others don't. Those that don't understand accuse the others of loving war, when that isn't the truth at all.
Hurting the citizens of other countries is just as enjoyable as hurting our own.
That's certainly not true, but there is nothing I can say that will correct this misconception, so I'll stop.
Love me some SMT. All you need is a good heat gun, oven, or even a cold-solder tool.
And, of course, a supply of the replacement part. When that part is a BGA FPGA or ASIC made specifically for that device, and unavailable from any source other than the manufacturer who won't sell you one, or contains code specific for that application that isn't open source, you might be able to get the old one off without destroying the board but you ain't gonna fix nothing.
We just had a radio break. Sent it to the local radio shop. They said the radio was in almost perfect condition (wear and tear), but they had to send it to the factory to repair it. In this case, "no user or repair shop serviceable parts inside".
What are you doing with a spreadsheet that you find the built-in functionality so limiting?
When the only tool you have is a hammer, every screw looks like a nail. When the only tool you know how to use is a hammer, it is the screw's fault that it won't go in like a nail when you hit it.
I remember many many years ago, the entire corporate sales database where I worked was kept in a text editor. When I pointed out that there was something called "ingres" and that maybe it would be better to keep the data in that, I was told that the person who managed the "database" knew how to use the text editor and didn't want to learn anything else. I was also told that I wasn't hired to write database code for the administration of the company, I was hired to write scientific data processing code.
Part of the problem was that DEC supplied the text editor with the system. That made it the tool of choice, even for problems it was very poor at handling. Likewise, if "large computer company" provides few or no real programming tools other than extensions to a spreadsheet, then the spreadsheet becomes the programming tool of choice. I've had several recent projects that I've had to code in javascript/HTML simply because I couldn't expect them to be used if they were programmed in perl, because web browsers come with the system and perl does not.
And they thank him by basically letting the entire media declare him a snitch, an informant, and make him out to be horrible.
In the US, the "media" operates under the first amendment, and it would be hard for the government to prevent the media from declaring him to be whatever they wanted to declare him to be. Would you want the government to be able to silence the media upon request, or to demand that they publish only happy, positive thoughts about certain people?
...where does this leave the hacker community? It's a sad state of affairs but I think it's because the government has no understanding of certain necessary aspects of the hacker community.
Is it necessary to break the law for there to be "a hacker community"? Is there no legal means of learning/practicing cybersecurity skills? Does every hacker need to send figurative boxes of "secret" materials to be published on a website in order to detect and report security flaws? Does every hacker need to DDoS large commercial operations in order to learn how to defend against such attacks?
Is it only a matter of time before the government demands the authority to use lethal force against hackers?
I don't know. Will the term "hacker" continue to be applied to every person who uses a computer in the commission of a crime? Will the cry be "he was executed for being a hacker" when someone reprograms a certain brand of insulin pump so that the users all receive fatal doses, and the legal system catches and punishes him?
On one hand, we have many people who argue that computers and the internet are so pervasive, ubiquitous, and critical to modern life as to consider access a basic human right. On the other hand, we have people who argue that crimes against those systems are "just hacking" and don't deserve much of a penalty, if any. People must have the right to access the Internet because that is becoming the main way of doing things like paying bills and managing bank accounts, but people who attempt to shut down bank and commercial uses of the internet should be lauded as heroes and not punished.
I'm not saying any of those programs are perfect or not subject to abuse. But it most certainly is NOT correct to say that starvation and homelessness were nearly unheard of prior to the "welfare state."
Good thing I didn't say that, isn't it?
And isn't it great that starvation and homelessness are nearly unheard of now that the state runs the programs? Oh wait. Maybe there will always be starvation and homelessness no matter who runs the programs?
What I said was that people were more willing to be the source of charity when charity wasn't mandatory and enforced at the point of a gun or threats of a sheriffs sale for failure to pay your taxes. The "libertopian" view that it could work is true because it has in the past, but will never work again because of the reasons I gave.
You know, back before governments ran all the charity, when someone saw a problem they'd either start a volunteer program or offer to help one. Today, the only people who try starting things on their own are naive kids. The adults say "isn't that cute" and then rant at the government that the government should be doing more. It's the government's responsibility, after all. I see this on a weekly basis as I read the local activist newspaper. Homeless in the streets of Eugene? The city council is at fault because they haven't done enough. The city needs to do more. Never "we should all pitch in and do this for our neighbors without the city forcing us to pay for it."
Not once have I seen anyone who is complaining that the city of Eugene isn't doing enough for homeless people and the public parks should be turned into open campgrounds for them offer their own backyards to help out. It's always "use the land that other people have set aside for recreation and other uses" and always, literally, "not in my backyard". But back in the "Great Depression" when someone had spare rooms they rented them out. Yes, it helped them pay the bills, but it also helped out the people who could no longer afford their own houses. Hear of that happening much anymore?
A "concrete box time", someone asked for? US, prior to 1900.
Hostages of the church, someone else complained. Hardly. Not even today do most churches require you to be a member of their congregation before they'll allow you to participate in the charity they offer. Oh, my, you might have to go to a church building to get free food. How awful. What a disaster. If you spend the night in a church-run shelter, you might not be allowed to drink yourself into a stupor, smoke pot, or have a few girlfriends over for a fun time. How awful. Unconscionable. Fiendish, even. How dare they try to provide a safe place for other people when you want a place to party?
Every year many of the local churches gather used furniture for incoming foreign students. Not once have I heard of a student being turned away because he was an atheist or heathen or didn't belong to the right church, and not once have I heard any students complain about getting free furniture from the parking lot of a church. Every year many of the same churches collect school supplies and let the teachers come haul away everything they can carry. Not one principal has stopped them from doing this because of the awful taint of religion attached to the stuff.
It's time to stop complaining that OMG a CHURCH is involved in this charity so it has to stop, and just say "thanks" for people who are doing what you think the government is supposed to be doing but are doing it completely voluntarily.
I've heard (in a podcast about advances in diabetes monitoring) that there are both implanted and external sensors. The implants suffer from biofouling (icky sticky oozy coatings messing up the reading). The external sensors are skin-contact and still being developed. The latter also don't measure blood glucose but tissue glucose, which can be much different.
I miss the days of MST3K, Farscape, BSG and Star Trek reruns on Sci Fi.
Star Trek and BSG reruns are now on BBC America. Who knew that Star Trek and BSG were actually British-made television shows?
ST yes, those reruns serve a purpose. But BSG the second/third/etc time around is just violence without purpose. Once you know who all the human-looking Cylons are, it's really no fun anymore. It is kinda funny, though, a machine with an alcohol problem, who had his eye poked out by another machine.
Isn't that the official website of celebrated comedian and all-round nice guy Andrew "Dice" Clay? I mean, they can't have the domain name for a trademarked person and not be the official site, can they?
Someone who is a libertarian ought to complain to the UN/WIPO/ICANN/whatever and try to get it taken away.
I can't speak to an iPhone, but I know my cell phone takes its time from the actual carrier.
So it's well within the bounds of reason that yours is doing the same -- and if your carrier is using a clock which is slightly different from your NTP-synced computer, that could account for the drift.
I can't imagine a cell phone not getting its time from the carrier. I also can't imagine that they'd be a minute off of real time. I do remember that T-Mobile in my area was about six seconds off, though, just enough to piss me off and make me turn off automatic time updates. Perhaps the iPhone in question has had automatic time updating turned off?
Sony came out with this kind of thing several years ago for the Ericsson phones, called Liveview. It was basically a remote display for the phone using bluetooth. I bought one assuming it would work on Android phones in general, and of course it didn't.
It was supposed to support things like Facebook and show you email alerts, along with being a basic watch. It came with a watchband and a clip housing, one of which (I forget which) completely covered the USB charging port and you had to pop it out to plug it in. It was almost working as a watch, but the limited button UI was a mess and difficult to remember/use.
Interesting concept, poor implementation.
What is most important is that it show the time (synced to the local phone network so it is accurate). Second would be incoming SMS/email (so you don't have to pull a phone out of your pocket to get messages.) Music player control. It has to have an inductive charger plus a standard USB, so you can recharge it away from home or just drop it on the charging pad at night when you aren't.
This has been the history of cable channels since the beginning. Cable networks were initially created with the idea of providing lots of niche programming so that everyone could have something. Kinda like "Spatula City" and the Scotch Tape Store at the mall. Specialized.
Unfortunately, mass media means mass, and every niche channel thinks they need to grow and get more viewers. That, and the grand view of someday cable would be 500 channels of everything going away as the truth was realized: it costs money to pay for the niche programming and not many people would pay for 490 channels that they never watch. (Ala carte was not a possibility then; the dream died before the technology was available. The dream has now moved to the Internet.)
I remember MTV when it was music. I remember TNN when it was Nashville music. AMC when it was actually classic movies. TV Land when it was actually reruns of classic TV. Sci-Fi. Bravo. BBC America was all about British TV shows! PBS was actually advertising-free. Too many others to mention.
And what is fascinating to watch is the cycle repeating. METv has shown up in my parent's area, and they're TV Land reborn. I wish they were out here.
If you read the SF novels detailing life in Libertopia, you'll find that, as if by magic, citizens voluntarily donate enough of their income to feed, clothe, and house those that are poor through no fault of their own. They purchase, build, and staff a full parks system out of the goodness of their hearts.
This is how things used to be done.
The fact that it probably won't work today is not because people don't care or don't have a heart. It is because the government has, in very large part, assumed the task of collecting money involuntarily, and people quite naturally think "I'm already paying for the government to do this, why should I pay again?"
You could cancel all government welfare (which includes parks and rec, IMHO) tomorrow, but it would take a long time before people realized that the government wasn't doing it anymore, or since they've grown up under a system where the government did it they think it is a natural function of a government and demand that it start up again.
I suspect even many people who don't think it is a natural function of the government to forcibly take money from people who have so it can be given to those who don't, when faced with a decision for the government to get completely out of the loop would allow the nose of the camel that would result in a return to today's camel in the tent problem. "Oh, well, to make sure that 'group X' is taken care of, the government should do it..." leads to a rapid increase in the number of "group Xs". Or, as deTouqueville says, a democracy lasts only as long as it takes for people to realize they can tax other people to get things they want, or words to that effect.
(The nose of the camel is how income taxes started. "We need them to pay for the war..." See how that turned out? It's how the welfare morass started. It's how every large government system started out. And even today, people keep proposing "small" government programs either completely oblivious to history or deliberately lying about it.)
If you want a current example of the "the government does it, why should I" attitude, listen to any PBS pledge break. (Or just read this and save yourself twenty minutes of your life you'd never get back.) They repeatedly have to remind their potential donors that the government really doesn't pay for PBS and they need to send in their money. "If we don't do it, who will?" (Discovery, The Science Channel, The History Channel, Animal Planet, etc....)
But it should come down equally as hard, if not more so, on those who accepted public money to build a secure system
First you need to know if that is what they were paid to do or not. What was the intended level of security and did they meet that requirement? "Oh noes, a hacker broke in and made a fake announcement!" Was preventing that part of the original requirements? Easy to see in 20/20 hindsight.
And second, the people who accepted the money to build the system locally didn't design it or generate the requirements. They got money to buy something that worked with everything else being used. They could have refused to buy anything that wasn't secured better than everything else, but then they'd not be getting any alerts from anyone because their system would not be interoperable.
so that when an emergency makes it impossible to travel by road, then someone has to travel by road to key in an alert about it?
I dunno about other states, but I assume they are the same as here. We have a statewide network of stations who listen (via radio) to other stations to get their alert notifications. There are portal stations that get out-of-state alerts.
I think it was done this way to avoid issues of network (internet) outages preventing notices from going out. Of course, the last major test was an utter fail -- except in the eyes of those who think that finding out that the system was a failure at actually notifying anyone of anything is a "successful test result". A test that is successful in showing that a system is a complete failure means the system still failed miserably.
This is an obvious prank, and is unlikely to cause any harm, except to embarrass those who ought to be embarrassed.
I doubt that. If you are referring to the local officials who implemented the system or maintain it, then no, they have nothing to be embarrassed about. They didn't design the system, they just installed what was compatible with everyone else. Those who designed the system will probably not be overly embarrassed, either.
I doubt you're referring to the prankster, who certainly won't be embarrassed at all, even though such public displays should be embarrassing to him. It's like finding a mailing list and sending a bunch of spam to it to prove how insecure it is; annoying everyone on the list who can do nothing about it and really changing nothing.
The only likely result of this will be a confirmation in the minds of the public that hackers are nutcases who need to be put in jail for doing stupid things, not a sudden realization that hackers are here to save us from our mistakes.
Oh, and good luck getting a calculator to tell you what went wrong when a number you get isn't right.
This.
When I was in graduate school I was TA for a chem lab. For one of the quizzes, a student said he'd forgotten his calculator and asked to borrow mine.
His: TI.
Mine: HP.
Grading him extra points off when he came back with the answer "1.000" for a concentration problem: Priceless.
He knew how to operate his calculator, probably. He didn't know how to operate mine ( "number enter number enter divide" is different than "number enter number divide"). And he demonstrated a complete lack of feeling for the concentration of hydrogen ions in a solution. Unfortunately, it was the latter that he was supposed to learn in this class, not the former. By going with the answer 1.0 "because the calculator said so", he screwed himself and showed a failure to grasp the course material. Had he not been dependent on the calculator, he could have realized that "1.0" is a really really really strong acid, and the buffer he was calculating would never be that strong. The correct answer was five orders of magnitude away, at least.
The sad part of today's "find a calculator" climate is that people have lost the ability to ballpark anything.
Slashdot Mirror
"We demand that the White House demand the Librarian of Congress to..." would, IMO, be far more effective; especially if you throw in something about First Amendment grounds.
Given that this petition system does nothing to force anyone to do anything but "respond", and given that past "responses" have been along the lines of the one from TSA regarding a petition to disband TSA ("TSA is great, we're doing great, thanks for asking, have a nice day."), you can 'demand' all you want, but you'll still get a nonresponsive response. You can even toss in a reference to eight of the ten amendments in the Bill of Rights and you won't improve the odds.
And clearly objecting to this kind of thing is something only a terrorist would do.
No, but working out a method to cause crashes of drones being used to survey power lines or railroads or interstate highways or dams or bridges is probably something a terrorist would do.
Did we consider that there is a significant difference between objecting to something and actively causing it to fail, thus creating the problem that you hypothesized?
I don't think Doppler applies to light.
Although first noticed and generally illustrated using sound waves, Doppler applies to waves from moving objects (in your reference frame) in general, including electromagnetic. E.g., Doppler radar for weather observations. Radar is an em wave, similar to light.
Which in turn cross pollinates ad nauseum until there are no fertile seeds. Far fetched perhaps but not unthinkable.
Imagine that these seeds wake up one night and start pillaging every town within 100 miles of where they were planted, eating the brains of any human they come across. Far fetched perhaps, but not unthinkable. We must ban the seeds!
Under the Big Bang theory, the universe will eventually collapse in on itself, likely at the speed of light. The tell-tale sign will be redshift instead of blueshift being observed from Earth to various astronomical bodies.
Is this what you get when you learn your astrophysics from a mass-market broadcast TV show that uses the name of a physics theory as a double entendre and focuses more on sex than science? Or rather, the alleged inability of scientists to understand sex or even behave like normal humans?
As has already been pointed out, the big bang theory does not require a subsequent collapse.
And we're already seeing redshift as the universe expands. It's blueshift we'll be seeing when it contracts. The Doppler effect lowers the apparent frequency of waves as the source moves away from us, and red is lower than blue in frequency.
Chrome is fine,
Chrome is a virus that attaches itself to various other useful programs and hopes that you don't notice the "install Chrome, too" box is checked by default when you are doing something like updating java. It makes itself your default web software without asking. And then when you try to uninstall it, you are left with cruft that breaks how Firefox behaves, like getting an obscure error text about some missing or undefined variable in line X of something displayed instead of a simple 404 failure report.
It managed to weasel its way onto a laptop I administer because apparently it attached itself to something useful that I allowed a user to install. I fired it up to see how it did at browsing the web and the first thing it did was demand that I log into the google cloud using a gmail account. That's before I even tried to load any web pages with it. Why do I need to HAVE a cloud account just to use a web browser, much less be forced to log into it before I am allowed to go anywhere?
As far as the 5 million dollar theft scenario the owner could probably get it back from the casino once it was shown to be stolen money.
You're clueless. What makes you think the casino is liable for the $5 million of your money that I lose at one of their poker tables? They didn't get the money (except for whatever rake they have). Why do they owe you all the money back? Do you not realize how easily they could be taken for millions by someone who drops a bundle, and then has a friend come claim "that's stolen money, give it back to me"?
Here's an example perfectly on point. A local startup hi-tech company got a large investment from an east coast investor. Several million dollars, as I recall. Not long after, the investor was convicted of stealing that money from one of his other clients. I.e., he stole the money that he gave to the hi-tech startup firm. The COURT ruled that the hi-tech startup could keep the money. The person the money was stolen from? SOL. Too bad, so sad, you may get restitution from the investor if he every gets any more money of his own and you can win a civil suit to recoup the loss. But do the simple, honest thing and take the money back from the startup firm and give it back to the rightful owner? Nope. Not possible.
I never said "an eye for an eye".
You said if the loss was monetary, then a fine would be appropriate. That is a real-world example of the "an eye for an eye" principle. You didn't use the word "eye", you used money instead. Same concept. Same issue. What can you do when a blind man pokes both your eyes out? Nothing. What can you do when a poor person steals money from you and loses it gambling? Some wishful thinking that the casino will make you whole because you say so. Sure.
In this case it was nothing more than a minor inconvenience that Swartz caused.
And in other cases hackers have shut down commercial operations and caused much more than "minor inconvenience" to a lot of people. "It was just hacking" covers a lot of activities, more than just the one case you want to limit it to.
If you are sitting next to someone in a class and they reach over and hit the clear button on your calculator or if you are listening to a radio and someone changes the station you wouldn't advocate life in prison or anything even remotely close to it. Well maybe you would, but that certainly wouldn't seem justified to me.
And if that person is sitting in a room full of people who are attending a seminar on how to live life better by using their newly implanted insulin pumps, and he knows and makes use of a security flaw to force everyone's pumps to push a massive bolus of insulin, and half a dozen people die from the resulting confusion and diabetic comas that take place, he's just causing a minor inconvenience and doesn't deserve to be punished at all, right? He's just hacking, after all, and computers aren't people and pushing the "reset" button on someone else's computer is just a harmless prank, right?
The question I responded to initially was along the lines of "would you execute a hacker?", and in the insulin example I'd be very tempted to say "of course." I'm pointing out that "just a hacker" isn't an honest way of referring to every crime committed using a computer.
As for computer "access" being a right, that is just silly. There is no such thing as a right that someone else must provide for you.
Wow, you really don't get out much, do you, nor do you read /. on a regular basis. Such a right is exactly what people are arguing should exist, and it doesn't matter if someone else has to pay for it. Another example of a right that someone must provide for you? Universal health care. It's a basic human right, according to some, even though it is paid for by everyone else so you can have it.
The point stands. If "it's just hacking" is a defense against punish
I don't want a heavy smoker to have a heart attack while I'm on the road, but I'm not going to call for them to be banned.
The difference is that a heavy smoker isn't necessarily going to have a heart attack AT ALL, much less while on the road, and an epileptic is called an epileptic because he has ALREADY HAD SEIZURES. One person, it may never happen at all, the other, it has already happened and is likely to happen again.
At some point, can't we just say "Don't drive". Some handicaps can be accommodated. But an epileptic seizure while driving down the highway? Please, not while I'm on the road.
Well, he must be an exceptional driver. According to those who RTFA, he had not one but two seizures during this incident. If you can have even one epileptic seizure while driving at 125MPH and stay on the road, you're NASCAR/LeMans material.
If no one is hurt physically then the punishment shouldn't be physical either. If money is taken then a fine would be appropriate.
So, I steal five million dollars from you and blow it on a gambling spree in Las Vegas. Sorry, I have no money to pay the fine, you don't get anything. In the meantime, you've not been able to pay your mortgage or car loan so your home and car have been repossessed. All I took was money, all I owe you is a fine. So, where is the punishment, and more important, where is the prevention?
It's nice to say "an eye for an eye", but what do you do if a blind man pokes your eyes out?
If inconvenience was caused as in this case then imposing a larger inconvenience would be appropriate. For instance losing his drivers license or getting his computer confiscated for a few months.
Your "inconvenience" has turned into physical punishment.
Life in prison for causing a minor inconvenience gives sadists a great big hard-on,
I think my point was, calling something "hacking" doesn't mean it is just a minor inconvenience. If "hacking" a computer system is a minor inconvenience, then it is hard to claim that access to computer systems should be a basic human right.
I'd say one of the biggest problems in our country is that sadists seem to be in charge. Torture? Hell, yes!
Hell, no. What you've missed is that the entire debate hinges on just how you define "torture", not whether actual torture is good or bad. Everyone can agree that "torture" is bad, n'kay? We pretty much all do. What we don't all agree on is what constitutes torture. An argument like "you think waterboarding is ok, I say that waterboarding is torture, so YOU think torture is ok" is quite dishonest.
Torture, suffering, death is what this country is all about.
It is this sort of hyperbole that makes discussing anything here so pleasant and productive.
Why do you think we like war so much?
"We" don't. Some of us understand that war is sometimes necessary, and others don't. Those that don't understand accuse the others of loving war, when that isn't the truth at all.
Hurting the citizens of other countries is just as enjoyable as hurting our own.
That's certainly not true, but there is nothing I can say that will correct this misconception, so I'll stop.
Love me some SMT. All you need is a good heat gun, oven, or even a cold-solder tool.
And, of course, a supply of the replacement part. When that part is a BGA FPGA or ASIC made specifically for that device, and unavailable from any source other than the manufacturer who won't sell you one, or contains code specific for that application that isn't open source, you might be able to get the old one off without destroying the board but you ain't gonna fix nothing.
We just had a radio break. Sent it to the local radio shop. They said the radio was in almost perfect condition (wear and tear), but they had to send it to the factory to repair it. In this case, "no user or repair shop serviceable parts inside".
What are you doing with a spreadsheet that you find the built-in functionality so limiting?
When the only tool you have is a hammer, every screw looks like a nail. When the only tool you know how to use is a hammer, it is the screw's fault that it won't go in like a nail when you hit it.
I remember many many years ago, the entire corporate sales database where I worked was kept in a text editor. When I pointed out that there was something called "ingres" and that maybe it would be better to keep the data in that, I was told that the person who managed the "database" knew how to use the text editor and didn't want to learn anything else. I was also told that I wasn't hired to write database code for the administration of the company, I was hired to write scientific data processing code.
Part of the problem was that DEC supplied the text editor with the system. That made it the tool of choice, even for problems it was very poor at handling. Likewise, if "large computer company" provides few or no real programming tools other than extensions to a spreadsheet, then the spreadsheet becomes the programming tool of choice. I've had several recent projects that I've had to code in javascript/HTML simply because I couldn't expect them to be used if they were programmed in perl, because web browsers come with the system and perl does not.
And they thank him by basically letting the entire media declare him a snitch, an informant, and make him out to be horrible.
In the US, the "media" operates under the first amendment, and it would be hard for the government to prevent the media from declaring him to be whatever they wanted to declare him to be. Would you want the government to be able to silence the media upon request, or to demand that they publish only happy, positive thoughts about certain people?
...where does this leave the hacker community? It's a sad state of affairs but I think it's because the government has no understanding of certain necessary aspects of the hacker community.
Is it necessary to break the law for there to be "a hacker community"? Is there no legal means of learning/practicing cybersecurity skills? Does every hacker need to send figurative boxes of "secret" materials to be published on a website in order to detect and report security flaws? Does every hacker need to DDoS large commercial operations in order to learn how to defend against such attacks?
Is it only a matter of time before the government demands the authority to use lethal force against hackers?
I don't know. Will the term "hacker" continue to be applied to every person who uses a computer in the commission of a crime? Will the cry be "he was executed for being a hacker" when someone reprograms a certain brand of insulin pump so that the users all receive fatal doses, and the legal system catches and punishes him?
On one hand, we have many people who argue that computers and the internet are so pervasive, ubiquitous, and critical to modern life as to consider access a basic human right. On the other hand, we have people who argue that crimes against those systems are "just hacking" and don't deserve much of a penalty, if any. People must have the right to access the Internet because that is becoming the main way of doing things like paying bills and managing bank accounts, but people who attempt to shut down bank and commercial uses of the internet should be lauded as heroes and not punished.
I'm not saying any of those programs are perfect or not subject to abuse. But it most certainly is NOT correct to say that starvation and homelessness were nearly unheard of prior to the "welfare state."
Good thing I didn't say that, isn't it?
And isn't it great that starvation and homelessness are nearly unheard of now that the state runs the programs? Oh wait. Maybe there will always be starvation and homelessness no matter who runs the programs?
What I said was that people were more willing to be the source of charity when charity wasn't mandatory and enforced at the point of a gun or threats of a sheriffs sale for failure to pay your taxes. The "libertopian" view that it could work is true because it has in the past, but will never work again because of the reasons I gave.
You know, back before governments ran all the charity, when someone saw a problem they'd either start a volunteer program or offer to help one. Today, the only people who try starting things on their own are naive kids. The adults say "isn't that cute" and then rant at the government that the government should be doing more. It's the government's responsibility, after all. I see this on a weekly basis as I read the local activist newspaper. Homeless in the streets of Eugene? The city council is at fault because they haven't done enough. The city needs to do more. Never "we should all pitch in and do this for our neighbors without the city forcing us to pay for it."
Not once have I seen anyone who is complaining that the city of Eugene isn't doing enough for homeless people and the public parks should be turned into open campgrounds for them offer their own backyards to help out. It's always "use the land that other people have set aside for recreation and other uses" and always, literally, "not in my backyard". But back in the "Great Depression" when someone had spare rooms they rented them out. Yes, it helped them pay the bills, but it also helped out the people who could no longer afford their own houses. Hear of that happening much anymore?
A "concrete box time", someone asked for? US, prior to 1900.
Hostages of the church, someone else complained. Hardly. Not even today do most churches require you to be a member of their congregation before they'll allow you to participate in the charity they offer. Oh, my, you might have to go to a church building to get free food. How awful. What a disaster. If you spend the night in a church-run shelter, you might not be allowed to drink yourself into a stupor, smoke pot, or have a few girlfriends over for a fun time. How awful. Unconscionable. Fiendish, even. How dare they try to provide a safe place for other people when you want a place to party?
Every year many of the local churches gather used furniture for incoming foreign students. Not once have I heard of a student being turned away because he was an atheist or heathen or didn't belong to the right church, and not once have I heard any students complain about getting free furniture from the parking lot of a church. Every year many of the same churches collect school supplies and let the teachers come haul away everything they can carry. Not one principal has stopped them from doing this because of the awful taint of religion attached to the stuff.
It's time to stop complaining that OMG a CHURCH is involved in this charity so it has to stop, and just say "thanks" for people who are doing what you think the government is supposed to be doing but are doing it completely voluntarily.
I've heard (in a podcast about advances in diabetes monitoring) that there are both implanted and external sensors. The implants suffer from biofouling (icky sticky oozy coatings messing up the reading). The external sensors are skin-contact and still being developed. The latter also don't measure blood glucose but tissue glucose, which can be much different.
I miss the days of MST3K, Farscape, BSG and Star Trek reruns on Sci Fi.
Star Trek and BSG reruns are now on BBC America. Who knew that Star Trek and BSG were actually British-made television shows?
ST yes, those reruns serve a purpose. But BSG the second/third/etc time around is just violence without purpose. Once you know who all the human-looking Cylons are, it's really no fun anymore. It is kinda funny, though, a machine with an alcohol problem, who had his eye poked out by another machine.
Someone who is a libertarian ought to complain to the UN/WIPO/ICANN/whatever and try to get it taken away.
I can't speak to an iPhone, but I know my cell phone takes its time from the actual carrier. So it's well within the bounds of reason that yours is doing the same -- and if your carrier is using a clock which is slightly different from your NTP-synced computer, that could account for the drift.
I can't imagine a cell phone not getting its time from the carrier. I also can't imagine that they'd be a minute off of real time. I do remember that T-Mobile in my area was about six seconds off, though, just enough to piss me off and make me turn off automatic time updates. Perhaps the iPhone in question has had automatic time updating turned off?
It was supposed to support things like Facebook and show you email alerts, along with being a basic watch. It came with a watchband and a clip housing, one of which (I forget which) completely covered the USB charging port and you had to pop it out to plug it in. It was almost working as a watch, but the limited button UI was a mess and difficult to remember/use.
Interesting concept, poor implementation.
What is most important is that it show the time (synced to the local phone network so it is accurate). Second would be incoming SMS/email (so you don't have to pull a phone out of your pocket to get messages.) Music player control. It has to have an inductive charger plus a standard USB, so you can recharge it away from home or just drop it on the charging pad at night when you aren't.
Unfortunately, mass media means mass, and every niche channel thinks they need to grow and get more viewers. That, and the grand view of someday cable would be 500 channels of everything going away as the truth was realized: it costs money to pay for the niche programming and not many people would pay for 490 channels that they never watch. (Ala carte was not a possibility then; the dream died before the technology was available. The dream has now moved to the Internet.)
I remember MTV when it was music. I remember TNN when it was Nashville music. AMC when it was actually classic movies. TV Land when it was actually reruns of classic TV. Sci-Fi. Bravo. BBC America was all about British TV shows! PBS was actually advertising-free. Too many others to mention.
And what is fascinating to watch is the cycle repeating. METv has shown up in my parent's area, and they're TV Land reborn. I wish they were out here.
If you read the SF novels detailing life in Libertopia, you'll find that, as if by magic, citizens voluntarily donate enough of their income to feed, clothe, and house those that are poor through no fault of their own. They purchase, build, and staff a full parks system out of the goodness of their hearts.
This is how things used to be done.
The fact that it probably won't work today is not because people don't care or don't have a heart. It is because the government has, in very large part, assumed the task of collecting money involuntarily, and people quite naturally think "I'm already paying for the government to do this, why should I pay again?"
You could cancel all government welfare (which includes parks and rec, IMHO) tomorrow, but it would take a long time before people realized that the government wasn't doing it anymore, or since they've grown up under a system where the government did it they think it is a natural function of a government and demand that it start up again.
I suspect even many people who don't think it is a natural function of the government to forcibly take money from people who have so it can be given to those who don't, when faced with a decision for the government to get completely out of the loop would allow the nose of the camel that would result in a return to today's camel in the tent problem. "Oh, well, to make sure that 'group X' is taken care of, the government should do it..." leads to a rapid increase in the number of "group Xs". Or, as deTouqueville says, a democracy lasts only as long as it takes for people to realize they can tax other people to get things they want, or words to that effect.
(The nose of the camel is how income taxes started. "We need them to pay for the war..." See how that turned out? It's how the welfare morass started. It's how every large government system started out. And even today, people keep proposing "small" government programs either completely oblivious to history or deliberately lying about it.)
If you want a current example of the "the government does it, why should I" attitude, listen to any PBS pledge break. (Or just read this and save yourself twenty minutes of your life you'd never get back.) They repeatedly have to remind their potential donors that the government really doesn't pay for PBS and they need to send in their money. "If we don't do it, who will?" (Discovery, The Science Channel, The History Channel, Animal Planet, etc....)
But it should come down equally as hard, if not more so, on those who accepted public money to build a secure system
First you need to know if that is what they were paid to do or not. What was the intended level of security and did they meet that requirement? "Oh noes, a hacker broke in and made a fake announcement!" Was preventing that part of the original requirements? Easy to see in 20/20 hindsight.
And second, the people who accepted the money to build the system locally didn't design it or generate the requirements. They got money to buy something that worked with everything else being used. They could have refused to buy anything that wasn't secured better than everything else, but then they'd not be getting any alerts from anyone because their system would not be interoperable.
so that when an emergency makes it impossible to travel by road, then someone has to travel by road to key in an alert about it?
I dunno about other states, but I assume they are the same as here. We have a statewide network of stations who listen (via radio) to other stations to get their alert notifications. There are portal stations that get out-of-state alerts.
I think it was done this way to avoid issues of network (internet) outages preventing notices from going out. Of course, the last major test was an utter fail -- except in the eyes of those who think that finding out that the system was a failure at actually notifying anyone of anything is a "successful test result". A test that is successful in showing that a system is a complete failure means the system still failed miserably.
This is an obvious prank, and is unlikely to cause any harm, except to embarrass those who ought to be embarrassed.
I doubt that. If you are referring to the local officials who implemented the system or maintain it, then no, they have nothing to be embarrassed about. They didn't design the system, they just installed what was compatible with everyone else. Those who designed the system will probably not be overly embarrassed, either.
I doubt you're referring to the prankster, who certainly won't be embarrassed at all, even though such public displays should be embarrassing to him. It's like finding a mailing list and sending a bunch of spam to it to prove how insecure it is; annoying everyone on the list who can do nothing about it and really changing nothing.
The only likely result of this will be a confirmation in the minds of the public that hackers are nutcases who need to be put in jail for doing stupid things, not a sudden realization that hackers are here to save us from our mistakes.
Oh, and good luck getting a calculator to tell you what went wrong when a number you get isn't right.
This.
When I was in graduate school I was TA for a chem lab. For one of the quizzes, a student said he'd forgotten his calculator and asked to borrow mine.
His: TI.
Mine: HP.
Grading him extra points off when he came back with the answer "1.000" for a concentration problem: Priceless.
He knew how to operate his calculator, probably. He didn't know how to operate mine ( "number enter number enter divide" is different than "number enter number divide"). And he demonstrated a complete lack of feeling for the concentration of hydrogen ions in a solution. Unfortunately, it was the latter that he was supposed to learn in this class, not the former. By going with the answer 1.0 "because the calculator said so", he screwed himself and showed a failure to grasp the course material. Had he not been dependent on the calculator, he could have realized that "1.0" is a really really really strong acid, and the buffer he was calculating would never be that strong. The correct answer was five orders of magnitude away, at least.
The sad part of today's "find a calculator" climate is that people have lost the ability to ballpark anything.