I think I can say that the techniques employed at present have the theoretical capability of capturing a voip session. I am not sure if there has been a public discussion over the use of that capability.
I know I'm pouring cold water on a lot of geek fantasies, but intercepts are expensive and chew up a lot of resources. Downloading a Madonna CD isn't going to get you one. Buying an eight-ball of coke won't either. You really, really have to work pretty hard to get a couple field agents to fill out the paperwork, a supervisor to sign off on it, a couple of techs to install the equipment, counsel to review both the intercept order and the product of the intercept.
I wonder if this device could be a "lo-jack" for those of us who wince at the $500-700 cost of locator systems, but want to get the insurance break that can come with one. Not what it was really intended for, but, technology often works that way:)
A couple shopping malls found out that classical music drives away younger shoppers. But that's only useful if your store happens to be Needless Markup, Saks, or some other store which caters to older women trying to look like their daughters.
Other marketers (A&F being the current champ) learned that heavy techno beats are a good way to lubricate the wallets of younger shoppers, and lesser retailers can only stand in awe of otherwise intelligent 20-year-olds willingly forking over $24 for a pre-aged T-shirt, without even having to hand over licensing fees to some other company.
It isn't an either/or situation. Any complex product will have some level of defects in design or manufacture. The challenge is to find the balance point between cost, features, and reliability which appeals to the customer. Nintendo hits one sweet spot with the Gameboy SP. Microsoft hits another with the 360.
Judging by the lack of Xboxes in stores, and the absence of a big line to return defective or unwanted units, I think MS has hit a home run.
I bought the original Xbox a year or so after it hit the market, and the price had dropped to where a couple-hours-a-week gamer like me could justify the expense. I expect I'll probably do the same this time around.
You can sue virtually anyone for anything. Winning is another matter. Winning and collecting is still another.
The negligience in these cases can creep in from the edges. If you know that a user is making use of a product in a way that is clearly dangerous, then most legal systems require you to warn the user of the danger. The auto companies have learned to tread this line very successsfully; they make products which kill hundreds of thousands of people worldwide every year, and maim millions more, yet only in very rare cases does anyone try to make the case that they are liable.
MMORPG's are a new area. I would make the case that a large percentage (15-25% at a wild guess) suffer from a compulsive or obsessive psychological disorder. The games, purposely or not, are designed to exploit that disorder, leading to those individuals who have multiple active accounts and even pay other people to play for them.
Do I think Blizzard is legally liable? Well, for one thing, I have almost zero knowledge of tort law in China. Here in the US, I would bet we will be seeing warnings on these games, but the makers may allow the "buzz" to be a marketing tool itself; how much do you need to advertise a game so good that people kill themselves over it?
I think there are a lot of badly messed-up people playing Everquest, Lineage, and WoW. These games feed the obsessive personality type by creating a highly structured social environment combined with very repetitive and predictable interactions.
Buttsecks. Oh, wait, that's what he's going to get, not lose.
So, 20 years old, broke, in jail looking forward to getting out in a few years with a felony conviction and a lifetime of employment sweeping up cigarette butts.
There are sometimes reasons not to go overboard on cooling: If you have a computer room right next to a stairwell for example, you can get a lot of condensation and even mold on the "warm" side. Keeping the difference in temperature to a reasonable amount, you avoid that.
With very dense, high-end computing and network gear, the low temps (65F or so) are needed just because you can only get so much cool air to the inlets at any time. Blade servers are the biggest challenge, a rack full of them can put out several thousands of BTU's and it's really hard to get that much air through any kind of cabinet without making it into a wind tunnel. (My co-workers still kid me about having a contact blown out of my eye by a 20-mph breeze coming off a disk array fan.)
All of my expensive gear - the big cisco switches and servers - will auto-shutdown when they hit trigger temperatures. Remove the cooling or the airflow, and it is like 1 minute with the servers, 3-4 minutes with the big cisco boxes.
I hate to say it but running SETI or Folding@home is a huge power and cooling load. A desktop machine that draws 80-100 watts at idle can pull 250 watts running an app like that, and of course that heat needs to be removed. Not going to make a difference when it's one pc in an office with 500, but a rack full of web servers running seti@home is going to cost a fortune to power and cool.
I would love to NOT have to carry around a bagful of gadgets. I've used both a palmOS and winCE/Mobile PDA, as well as cellphones including both.
Problem is, they didn't do anything particularly well.
My iPod is flawless for playing back music; it holds tons of it, is easy to use, and has a great system - the itunes store - behind it.
My cellphone.. well, ok that one's a compromise. I've got a blackberry - you can see the scar on my chest where they removed my soul, okay? The web browser on it absolutely sucks, but it's a reasonably good and very reliable phone that can survive being bounced around and getting a few drops of coffee on it now and then, and be small enough to fit in my pocket.
I sure do miss the better browser and screen that my Treo had, but I don't miss the frequent crashes, unpredictable behavior, and missed phone calls because the thing locked up.
One of these days someone will get a little closer, and of course I will be parting with another couple hundred bucks when it happens.
Not really, but close. A peering agreement is based upon the premise that there's some business advantage to both parties. I've negotiated agreements with companies - where it was very clear ahead of time that the traffic flow would be hugely lopsided, like 10:1 easily.
In these cases, the companies wanted to get traffic, usually web content, to end users. They could either pay a company like level3 to carry it, or I could get it to a big pool of users. Long story short, both companies save money. The content provider is happy, the customer is happy, and I get a paycheck so I'm happy too.
As with any other business, the market leader will seek to use their scale to make it difficult for other companies to do business. UUnet did the same thing way back when, and the panic and imminent death of the internet was predicted in exactly the same way.
Instead, the cost of bandwidth continued to drop; while Bernie was cooking the books, Level3 and others were busy picking up cheap rights-of-way, and signing up big customers who were willing to give up the UUnet brand for a much better price from what was then a no-name called Level3. But now Level3's business isn't scaling.
This isn't the first time Level3 has pulled a class-A faux pas causing huge outages, and it probably won't be the last. In the meantime, the discomfort that both media companies and end-users are feeling is just the sound of opportunitiy knocking for providers who have better reliability or more competitive pricing. How long would Sprint have lasted if AT&T decided to compete instead of just jacking up long-distance prices on a shrinking customer base of people who didn't know better?
A few years back I was searching for something - a restaurant I think - on yahoo. My room was unexpectedly filled with full-volume screams of someone being tortured. It was an ad for some movie, I don't even remember which one. I have a spare surrroud reciever and reasonably good bookshelf speakers. The noise was painfully loud and completely unexpected.
It freaked me out enough that I downloaded a copy of web washer, learned how to restrict activeX, and realized that something had gone very wrong: A computer is a tool. I use it to get information, to play a game, to listen to music. It is useful ONLY when it does what I ask it to do, promptly and without surprises.
Amen. I have bought two fairly expensive printers over the last couple of years, both brand names and both with good reviews. Both simply "decayed" in a very linear fashion.
What is worrisome for businesses is the fact that HP has gone from being a fairly diverse supplier of mid-to-high-end computing equipment, to basically an office supply company making high-profit consumables, and selling a few servers to keep the name from becoming "Kodak II".
Much like Kodak, HP now has a market which is making all the profit at the bottom end in consumer sales, but they are NOT a company with the marketing expertise of P&G, 3M, or J&J. As they drive the cost of printers down to less than what a tankful of gas costs, they are going to be competing with companies who can simply buy the market out from under HP. With people thinking more about making that extra 20-mile drive to go to CompUSA, they might decide to use the online photo service from Wal-mart (my personal favorite at $.12 for a 4x6) or buy a Safeway brand printer and ink at the grocery store. HP doesn't have 50 years of business relationships with mass-market retailers and will last about 30 seconds in that market.
When I watched the first message get posted to The List Which Shall Not Be Named, I could have sworn it was 1997 all over again, with everyone demanding free intarwebs. Never mind the silly detail of who is going to pay for it.
If it had happened just a couple of days earlier, we could have chalked it down to the Endless September Effect.
While there have been a few exceptions, convicted felons are rarely high on the HR "must have" list.
The exception would be people who are genuine original thinkers that got caught up in something questionable, or have such good personality that they can be used in front of the media.
From the sound of it, this guy will be in prison, then on parole, and then end up doing very unglamorous low-paying jobs for the rest of his life.
When I worked for an ISP, we could always count on seeing the p2p traffic drop off a few percent every time there was a big mass lawsuit. The effect was a lot like seeing someone get pulled over for speeding; everyone slows down for half a mile, then hits the gas on the assumption that it will always be "the other guy" who gets the ticket.
ISP's are wary of having the percieved benefit of getting "free content" get taken away. Most corvette owners would never even notice if their cars were speed-limited to 80mph, but if GM actually announced such an action, it would cause sales to crater. Asymmetrical speeds are a fairly non-invasive way to limit the financial pain caused by the 3-5% of users at the far end of the bell curve.
the **AA's are in a similar bind; if they allow a free-for-all, people will stop buying DVD's and CD's. If they enforce it too heavily, it's bad PR. So they will continue to have mass lawsuits, but the suits will be from defendant pools which are very unlikely to contain "grandma who clicked on the wrong link".
You can want an a la carte system all you like, the fact is that having one isn't going to make it any cheaper, and that has nothing to do with the plumbing that brings it in your door - satellite, fiber, telephone line, coax, they all have to offer the same content.
Yes it's competition. The content is the product, the wire it's coming in on is just a much smaller part of the picture than you think.
It has nothing to do with the type of wire that it comes in on. Time Warner and other cable companies have to pay for the content - ESPN, CNN, USA and so each charge a fat fee. For ESPN, it might be a few bucks per month per household. For Discovery, maybe a buck and change. Many of them - like ESPN, require that in order to carry the network at all, you must include it in your basic service package.
On the other side, they get paid to carry QVC and religion/telemarketing channels, and in some cases, get a cut of the sales. (HSN had an ad in Multichannel News touting the excellent returns from putting their shopping channels on low-numbered channels)
So it doesn't matter if you have a 100gb/s connection to your house (and coax is capable of data rates that boggle my mind). The cost of the transport medium is fairly low since these are long-term investments by the carriers.
For cable modem service, the biggest single expense is external bandwidth, followed by the big-ticket hardware, followed by staff. Verizon is being nice and eating that cost in the interest of getting market share right now (speaking on behalf of those who can't take advantage of it, we hate you people who can!)
Problem is, the one who likely gets stuck with the bill is some poor ISP who finds out a month later that the customer cancelled his credit card five minutes after opening the account. The spammer still gets his $50 for the three or four idiots who ordered some quack remedy.
The good news is that the big guys - yahoo, aol, etc., won't really feel the pinch - just the small shops that provide individual service.
Actually, I have dealt with law enforcement while working for a service provider. Sometimes the requests are informal - usually when they are looking for some third party which was not a customer. When the request is formal, for something which requires a court order, they are, without exception, very clear about what they want, and they are also extremely grateful for ANY help.
The feds are simply the finest people I've met. If you tell them the only time they can do their thing is tonight at 3:00am, they will be there at 2:58 and they will act like you're doing them the greatest favor on earth - and trust me, these are morning people, who have clearly been awake for almost 24 hours.
But what really impressed me was the fact that they do NOT discuss the specifics of a case with anyone. Service providers should respect that, and NOT grep through a customer's mailbox, or run ethereal to see if there's pr0n, bomb threats, or stock tips. That rule was always followed in companies where I worked, I'm not sure how it is others. I trust the courts, legislators (grudgigly), and the good efforts of whistle-blowers at the EFF and ACLU to scream bloody murder when appropriate.
I hesitate to take sides in the rackspace debate, because I wasn't there, and it smells of "he doth protest too much".
The lesson I take away from this is: Know your responsibilities. You don't want to try to read the CALEA regulations and legal opinions *after* you get the court order, and you don't want to compromise your customer's privacy, that of other customers, or hinder a lawful investigation.
I've worked peripherally with some people at eBay, and do hire good people, and obviously they have one of the largest "market caps" in reputation to protect. I was really hoping for a good technical piece on how they busted a multinational group of credit card theieves (which they did, just a few weeks ago) or a good story on the political struggle between the easy thing - denying there is a problem, and the equally dangerous problem of getting lost in the details.
What I got, was a couple paragraphs that read like some bank ad. This was dreck. C'mon, mods, this should not have made the headlines on slashdot.
Close but there's an exception. If I toss a baseball to a friend, and I break a window on your car, you could sue me for the cost of the window plus reasonable expenses - a rental car for a day, and maybe a good car wash and vacuum job.
However, if it can be shown that I deliberately broke the window - I was caught on videotape pointing to it and then carefully throwing the ball, maybe a couple times - then you can sue me for the actual costs, plue punitive damages, to deter myself and others who might decide to do the same thing.
Courts usually allow only actual damages in cases where negligience is the deciding factor: I should have been more careful, but it was a mistake that anyone could have made. In a case where the misconduct was clearly to deprive you of property (I broke the window so you couldn't go to a job interview that I wanted to get), then the court will usually allow punitive damages, which may or may not have limits. Criminal charges are a possibility, but a DA will usually be too busy to pursue them unless I thumb my nose at a civil complaint.
Legally that's a questionable strategy, but, it's a sucker bet to fight it. If you have a choice between cashing in your 401k to get out from under an RIAA lawsuit, or selling the house, car, and losing your job while trying to avoid going to the slammer.........
This reflects, more or less, the actual laws. Those who simply trade copyrighted materials for the enjoyment of trading, or for goods-in-kind, are usually treated as civil offenders, and they are expected to work out a settlement with the infringed party.
The ones who do it as an organized operation and make significant efforts to obtain new material specifically for the purpose of extracting monetary value from it, are usually treated as criminal offenders, and will be arrested rather than sued.
Problem is, there are a dozen ways of notating time, and not every application or system deals well with exceptions handed off by another system. Applications rarely get tested for compatibility with the hundreds of possible combinations they might have to work with, and we all know how rigorous we are about going back and testing that one app we're just going to use for a few days or maybe a month or two but certainly nor more than a year or two at the most.:-/
The tinfoil hat conspiracy nut in me thinks it's just a way of making sure that the great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren of all those y2k consultants have a solid income stream to count on.
I have a mac mini on my desk at home which I use for browsing, downloading pics from my camera, and keeping my ipod full of music.
Still have a PC, of course, I need it for gaming and work, but after realizing how much power that X800 and three SATA drives eats, I turn the thing off except when I'm using it.
Slashdot Mirror
I think I can say that the techniques employed at present have the theoretical capability of capturing a voip session. I am not sure if there has been a public discussion over the use of that capability.
I know I'm pouring cold water on a lot of geek fantasies, but intercepts are expensive and chew up a lot of resources. Downloading a Madonna CD isn't going to get you one. Buying an eight-ball of coke won't either. You really, really have to work pretty hard to get a couple field agents to fill out the paperwork, a supervisor to sign off on it, a couple of techs to install the equipment, counsel to review both the intercept order and the product of the intercept.
I wonder if this device could be a "lo-jack" for those of us who wince at the $500-700 cost of locator systems, but want to get the insurance break that can come with one. Not what it was really intended for, but, technology often works that way :)
A couple shopping malls found out that classical music drives away younger shoppers. But that's only useful if your store happens to be Needless Markup, Saks, or some other store which caters to older women trying to look like their daughters.
Other marketers (A&F being the current champ) learned that heavy techno beats are a good way to lubricate the wallets of younger shoppers, and lesser retailers can only stand in awe of otherwise intelligent 20-year-olds willingly forking over $24 for a pre-aged T-shirt, without even having to hand over licensing fees to some other company.
It isn't an either/or situation. Any complex product will have some level of defects in design or manufacture. The challenge is to find the balance point between cost, features, and reliability which appeals to the customer. Nintendo hits one sweet spot with the Gameboy SP. Microsoft hits another with the 360.
Judging by the lack of Xboxes in stores, and the absence of a big line to return defective or unwanted units, I think MS has hit a home run.
I bought the original Xbox a year or so after it hit the market, and the price had dropped to where a couple-hours-a-week gamer like me could justify the expense. I expect I'll probably do the same this time around.
You can sue virtually anyone for anything. Winning is another matter. Winning and collecting is still another.
The negligience in these cases can creep in from the edges. If you know that a user is making use of a product in a way that is clearly dangerous, then most legal systems require you to warn the user of the danger. The auto companies have learned to tread this line very successsfully; they make products which kill hundreds of thousands of people worldwide every year, and maim millions more, yet only in very rare cases does anyone try to make the case that they are liable.
MMORPG's are a new area. I would make the case that a large percentage (15-25% at a wild guess) suffer from a compulsive or obsessive psychological disorder. The games, purposely or not, are designed to exploit that disorder, leading to those individuals who have multiple active accounts and even pay other people to play for them.
Do I think Blizzard is legally liable? Well, for one thing, I have almost zero knowledge of tort law in China. Here in the US, I would bet we will be seeing warnings on these games, but the makers may allow the "buzz" to be a marketing tool itself; how much do you need to advertise a game so good that people kill themselves over it?
I think there are a lot of badly messed-up people playing Everquest, Lineage, and WoW. These games feed the obsessive personality type by creating a highly structured social environment combined with very repetitive and predictable interactions.
... Your airport is a fucking disaster area and I think your airline is unsafe. *beep* truth.
Looks like sony is also Engaging in price-fixing to keep customers from buying their equipment on-line.
Buttsecks. Oh, wait, that's what he's going to get, not lose.
So, 20 years old, broke, in jail looking forward to getting out in a few years with a felony conviction and a lifetime of employment sweeping up cigarette butts.
All in all, a nice day indeed.
There are sometimes reasons not to go overboard on cooling: If you have a computer room right next to a stairwell for example, you can get a lot of condensation and even mold on the "warm" side. Keeping the difference in temperature to a reasonable amount, you avoid that.
With very dense, high-end computing and network gear, the low temps (65F or so) are needed just because you can only get so much cool air to the inlets at any time. Blade servers are the biggest challenge, a rack full of them can put out several thousands of BTU's and it's really hard to get that much air through any kind of cabinet without making it into a wind tunnel. (My co-workers still kid me about having a contact blown out of my eye by a 20-mph breeze coming off a disk array fan.)
All of my expensive gear - the big cisco switches and servers - will auto-shutdown when they hit trigger temperatures. Remove the cooling or the airflow, and it is like 1 minute with the servers, 3-4 minutes with the big cisco boxes.
I hate to say it but running SETI or Folding@home is a huge power and cooling load. A desktop machine that draws 80-100 watts at idle can pull 250 watts running an app like that, and of course that heat needs to be removed. Not going to make a difference when it's one pc in an office with 500, but a rack full of web servers running seti@home is going to cost a fortune to power and cool.
I would love to NOT have to carry around a bagful of gadgets. I've used both a palmOS and winCE/Mobile PDA, as well as cellphones including both.
Problem is, they didn't do anything particularly well.
My iPod is flawless for playing back music; it holds tons of it, is easy to use, and has a great system - the itunes store - behind it.
My cellphone.. well, ok that one's a compromise. I've got a blackberry - you can see the scar on my chest where they removed my soul, okay? The web browser on it absolutely sucks, but it's a reasonably good and very reliable phone that can survive being bounced around and getting a few drops of coffee on it now and then, and be small enough to fit in my pocket.
I sure do miss the better browser and screen that my Treo had, but I don't miss the frequent crashes, unpredictable behavior, and missed phone calls because the thing locked up.
One of these days someone will get a little closer, and of course I will be parting with another couple hundred bucks when it happens.
Not really, but close. A peering agreement is based upon the premise that there's some business advantage to both parties. I've negotiated agreements with companies - where it was very clear ahead of time that the traffic flow would be hugely lopsided, like 10:1 easily.
In these cases, the companies wanted to get traffic, usually web content, to end users. They could either pay a company like level3 to carry it, or I could get it to a big pool of users. Long story short, both companies save money. The content provider is happy, the customer is happy, and I get a paycheck so I'm happy too.
As with any other business, the market leader will seek to use their scale to make it difficult for other companies to do business. UUnet did the same thing way back when, and the panic and imminent death of the internet was predicted in exactly the same way.
Instead, the cost of bandwidth continued to drop; while Bernie was cooking the books, Level3 and others were busy picking up cheap rights-of-way, and signing up big customers who were willing to give up the UUnet brand for a much better price from what was then a no-name called Level3. But now Level3's business isn't scaling.
This isn't the first time Level3 has pulled a class-A faux pas causing huge outages, and it probably won't be the last. In the meantime, the discomfort that both media companies and end-users are feeling is just the sound of opportunitiy knocking for providers who have better reliability or more competitive pricing. How long would Sprint have lasted if AT&T decided to compete instead of just jacking up long-distance prices on a shrinking customer base of people who didn't know better?
A few years back I was searching for something - a restaurant I think - on yahoo. My room was unexpectedly filled with full-volume screams of someone being tortured. It was an ad for some movie, I don't even remember which one. I have a spare surrroud reciever and reasonably good bookshelf speakers. The noise was painfully loud and completely unexpected.
It freaked me out enough that I downloaded a copy of web washer, learned how to restrict activeX, and realized that something had gone very wrong: A computer is a tool. I use it to get information, to play a game, to listen to music. It is useful ONLY when it does what I ask it to do, promptly and without surprises.
Amen. I have bought two fairly expensive printers over the last couple of years, both brand names and both with good reviews. Both simply "decayed" in a very linear fashion.
What is worrisome for businesses is the fact that HP has gone from being a fairly diverse supplier of mid-to-high-end computing equipment, to basically an office supply company making high-profit consumables, and selling a few servers to keep the name from becoming "Kodak II".
Much like Kodak, HP now has a market which is making all the profit at the bottom end in consumer sales, but they are NOT a company with the marketing expertise of P&G, 3M, or J&J. As they drive the cost of printers down to less than what a tankful of gas costs, they are going to be competing with companies who can simply buy the market out from under HP. With people thinking more about making that extra 20-mile drive to go to CompUSA, they might decide to use the online photo service from Wal-mart (my personal favorite at $.12 for a 4x6) or buy a Safeway brand printer and ink at the grocery store. HP doesn't have 50 years of business relationships with mass-market retailers and will last about 30 seconds in that market.
When I watched the first message get posted to The List Which Shall Not Be Named, I could have sworn it was 1997 all over again, with everyone demanding free intarwebs. Never mind the silly detail of who is going to pay for it.
If it had happened just a couple of days earlier, we could have chalked it down to the Endless September Effect.
While there have been a few exceptions, convicted felons are rarely high on the HR "must have" list.
The exception would be people who are genuine original thinkers that got caught up in something questionable, or have such good personality that they can be used in front of the media.
From the sound of it, this guy will be in prison, then on parole, and then end up doing very unglamorous low-paying jobs for the rest of his life.
When I worked for an ISP, we could always count on seeing the p2p traffic drop off a few percent every time there was a big mass lawsuit. The effect was a lot like seeing someone get pulled over for speeding; everyone slows down for half a mile, then hits the gas on the assumption that it will always be "the other guy" who gets the ticket.
ISP's are wary of having the percieved benefit of getting "free content" get taken away. Most corvette owners would never even notice if their cars were speed-limited to 80mph, but if GM actually announced such an action, it would cause sales to crater. Asymmetrical speeds are a fairly non-invasive way to limit the financial pain caused by the 3-5% of users at the far end of the bell curve.
the **AA's are in a similar bind; if they allow a free-for-all, people will stop buying DVD's and CD's. If they enforce it too heavily, it's bad PR. So they will continue to have mass lawsuits, but the suits will be from defendant pools which are very unlikely to contain "grandma who clicked on the wrong link".
You can want an a la carte system all you like, the fact is that having one isn't going to make it any cheaper, and that has nothing to do with the plumbing that brings it in your door - satellite, fiber, telephone line, coax, they all have to offer the same content.
Yes it's competition. The content is the product, the wire it's coming in on is just a much smaller part of the picture than you think.
It has nothing to do with the type of wire that it comes in on. Time Warner and other cable companies have to pay for the content - ESPN, CNN, USA and so each charge a fat fee. For ESPN, it might be a few bucks per month per household. For Discovery, maybe a buck and change. Many of them - like ESPN, require that in order to carry the network at all, you must include it in your basic service package.
On the other side, they get paid to carry QVC and religion/telemarketing channels, and in some cases, get a cut of the sales. (HSN had an ad in Multichannel News touting the excellent returns from putting their shopping channels on low-numbered channels)
So it doesn't matter if you have a 100gb/s connection to your house (and coax is capable of data rates that boggle my mind). The cost of the transport medium is fairly low since these are long-term investments by the carriers.
For cable modem service, the biggest single expense is external bandwidth, followed by the big-ticket hardware, followed by staff. Verizon is being nice and eating that cost in the interest of getting market share right now (speaking on behalf of those who can't take advantage of it, we hate you people who can!)
Problem is, the one who likely gets stuck with the bill is some poor ISP who finds out a month later that the customer cancelled his credit card five minutes after opening the account. The spammer still gets his $50 for the three or four idiots who ordered some quack remedy.
The good news is that the big guys - yahoo, aol, etc., won't really feel the pinch - just the small shops that provide individual service.
Actually, I have dealt with law enforcement while working for a service provider. Sometimes the requests are informal - usually when they are looking for some third party which was not a customer. When the request is formal, for something which requires a court order, they are, without exception, very clear about what they want, and they are also extremely grateful for ANY help.
The feds are simply the finest people I've met. If you tell them the only time they can do their thing is tonight at 3:00am, they will be there at 2:58 and they will act like you're doing them the greatest favor on earth - and trust me, these are morning people, who have clearly been awake for almost 24 hours.
But what really impressed me was the fact that they do NOT discuss the specifics of a case with anyone. Service providers should respect that, and NOT grep through a customer's mailbox, or run ethereal to see if there's pr0n, bomb threats, or stock tips. That rule was always followed in companies where I worked, I'm not sure how it is others. I trust the courts, legislators (grudgigly), and the good efforts of whistle-blowers at the EFF and ACLU to scream bloody murder when appropriate.
I hesitate to take sides in the rackspace debate, because I wasn't there, and it smells of "he doth protest too much".
The lesson I take away from this is: Know your responsibilities. You don't want to try to read the CALEA regulations and legal opinions *after* you get the court order, and you don't want to compromise your customer's privacy, that of other customers, or hinder a lawful investigation.
I've worked peripherally with some people at eBay, and do hire good people, and obviously they have one of the largest "market caps" in reputation to protect. I was really hoping for a good technical piece on how they busted a multinational group of credit card theieves (which they did, just a few weeks ago) or a good story on the political struggle between the easy thing - denying there is a problem, and the equally dangerous problem of getting lost in the details.
What I got, was a couple paragraphs that read like some bank ad. This was dreck. C'mon, mods, this should not have made the headlines on slashdot.
Close but there's an exception. If I toss a baseball to a friend, and I break a window on your car, you could sue me for the cost of the window plus reasonable expenses - a rental car for a day, and maybe a good car wash and vacuum job.
However, if it can be shown that I deliberately broke the window - I was caught on videotape pointing to it and then carefully throwing the ball, maybe a couple times - then you can sue me for the actual costs, plue punitive damages, to deter myself and others who might decide to do the same thing.
Courts usually allow only actual damages in cases where negligience is the deciding factor: I should have been more careful, but it was a mistake that anyone could have made. In a case where the misconduct was clearly to deprive you of property (I broke the window so you couldn't go to a job interview that I wanted to get), then the court will usually allow punitive damages, which may or may not have limits. Criminal charges are a possibility, but a DA will usually be too busy to pursue them unless I thumb my nose at a civil complaint.
Legally that's a questionable strategy, but, it's a sucker bet to fight it. If you have a choice between cashing in your 401k to get out from under an RIAA lawsuit, or selling the house, car, and losing your job while trying to avoid going to the slammer.........
This reflects, more or less, the actual laws. Those who simply trade copyrighted materials for the enjoyment of trading, or for goods-in-kind, are usually treated as civil offenders, and they are expected to work out a settlement with the infringed party.
The ones who do it as an organized operation and make significant efforts to obtain new material specifically for the purpose of extracting monetary value from it, are usually treated as criminal offenders, and will be arrested rather than sued.
Problem is, there are a dozen ways of notating time, and not every application or system deals well with exceptions handed off by another system. Applications rarely get tested for compatibility with the hundreds of possible combinations they might have to work with, and we all know how rigorous we are about going back and testing that one app we're just going to use for a few days or maybe a month or two but certainly nor more than a year or two at the most. :-/
The tinfoil hat conspiracy nut in me thinks it's just a way of making sure that the great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren of all those y2k consultants have a solid income stream to count on.
I have a mac mini on my desk at home which I use for browsing, downloading pics from my camera, and keeping my ipod full of music.
Still have a PC, of course, I need it for gaming and work, but after realizing how much power that X800 and three SATA drives eats, I turn the thing off except when I'm using it.