That's not my argument in the slightest. Your post claimed that customers were not technically sophisticated enough to be sold a service of cheap bandwidth in exchange for caps. I'm giving you a concrete example of exactly that market.
The rest of your reply is just complete bollocks and has no relation to any point that I made.
I don't normally post advert links to slashdot, but if cellular adoption trends stay the same then you should have deals like this in the US in 2-3 years. That 10/month top-up they require, is just enough to pay for 1GB/30 days, or if you want more bandwidth it's 25/month for 10GB. Just to let you drool a bit...
I take it that Three don't operate in your area? They offer a range of services based on cheap bandwidth - but it is metered and you get silly charges if you go over. They provide a simple display of how much has been used that the customer can access and leave it up to them.
Their 3Pay dongle service has lots of different pricing plans, but the best low-usage one is 10euro for 1GB/data. The top-up lasts for 30 days. If you have higher usage they sell 5/10GB plans on a monthly basis.
The business model is based around being a cheap carrier of data. It means a reasonable price for permanent mobile "broadband"* connection. Of course, they got shafted in the 3G license bids and so are perpetually the underdog trying to beat the incumbent players in the market - maybe you don't have that type of competition where you are? They were the first company to effectively make all voice traffic free (by offering 500mins of xnet traffic for a stupidly low amount a month) and pushed the other carriers into going the same way.
I'm not sure about how their costs stack up across Europe, but in the UK they have one massive sunk cost (their license fee) that is so large in comparison to their running costs that they have to pile it high and sell it cheap. As a result don't expect functional support. Their Indian support lines are terrible, and I had to work out how to get their dongle working in the first place as it shipped with the wrong settings and it didn't feature on their tech support flowchart. But they currently sell mobiles with pre-configured Skype access that can be used effectively for free... if people want a Walmart for mobile data they are positioned to provide it.
*100KB/s is better than my first broadband connection, but it's not the 3Mb/s promised for the tech.
There is no way the prosecution can prove your intent, because everything you do to the machine can be replicated by intelligent software.
That's the way that I would see it, because as a computer geek it seems natural that would be the way it works. But the world is full of people who are not computer geeks. Two of my lawyer geek friends have berated me on this point many times.
In the end the fudging of intent between man and machine is irrelevant. The case will be tried by a person and it will come down to whether or not they believe you. Kind of like throwing the legal system back a 1000 years. Busted using nmap to look for hosts to add to a botnet (ie the one case that they would want to cover) - fine, as there is no distribution, but screwed on pre-existing law. Busted using nmap to scan your own network - fine. Busted in a hypothetical case where nmap is distributed by malware on our machine - hope you get a smart court that understands the distinction.
Don't me wrong - the security tools law was unnecessary and draconian. We already have enough laws to handle what we think of as computer crimes - there was no hole for this to patch in the law. This was a simple case of "we'll get them for something".
Your interpretation of what he wrote / intended those words to mean is very generous, but raises an interesting point. And because you are capable of forming a valid argument without help I won't respond completely like an arrogant nitpicker:)
It is entirely correct that possession is required before distribution can occur. I'm sure the RIAA would argue differently, especially in the case of sitting in a torrent swarm, but I'll stick to current legislative fact. So yes, possession is dangerous in the sense that once you are in possession of X, you can then choose to distribute X.
This argument can be split into two parts; is possession dangerous if it can lead to something dangerous, and can distribution occur without intent (as in your malware example). For the first point breathing oxygen would be a counter-example, in real-life, and the links that the GGP provided would be a legal counter-example. In that the guidelines for the interpretation of the law indicate that possession by itself is insufficient grounds, and that distribution must occur. For the second point I'll just mention that in the uk distribution must be intentional - you cannot be charged of a distribution offense without the prosecution showing that you engaged in distribution wilfully.
I'm not sure how the wilfull aspect translates into other jurisdictions, ie in America you may be boned regardless. This is where things get interesting - we've introduced some laws recently that are stupid, but there is a large body of precedent that shows that you should be ok. Also we tend to interpret our laws as necessary (according to the common sense of the judge & jury) rather than attempting to apply a strict literal interpretation. Recent abuses of the new anti-terror legislation show that this approach can and does break down.
I would say that being nice is worthy in its own right, karma be damned. But when someone is stupid enough to try and switch their argument rather than admit that their own sources prove them wrong it does require a bit of a verbal slapdown.
Do you have a link for this? It sounds interesting as that was the original standard that caused the debate / argument from the security industry in the first place.
Ok so you did read it. And I'll assume that you are aware of what you wrote the first time. And I'll assume that you read my response. The only possible logical conclusions are either a) you don't know the different between possession and distribution (thanks blueg3), or b) you are an idiot. I'm not as generous as blueg3, I think you lack the intellectual faculties to post on slashdot. It's a low bar, but by god you've hit it.
I'm going to try though, and see if you could understand with a little coaching, and help with the big words. You claimed:
But isn't possession of "hacker tools" such as nmap legally questionable in the UK and Germany?
Quite straightforward. If we ignore the claim about Germany, which may be correct, you have explicitly claimed that possession of "hacker tools" can be dodgy under uk law. You've reinforced this claim with:
So if you use nmap to clean your network, you may be open to criminal charges.
Note, this is identical to the first claim - that possession of "hack tools" is legally iffy in the uk. As this this claim is wrong, and it's explained to be wrong in the links that you provided, I have pointed out to you:
The prosecution have to show that you intended to use the tool to commit a crime - possession is not enough.
Ok, you claimed possession is legally iffy. I've explained that it is not, according to your own sources. Now, here is where you failed the slashdot iq test:
According to the linked article, if you distribute a "hacker tool" that somebody else then uses for an illegal purpose, you're on the hook under UK law.
A completely different claim. So it doesn't back up your original claim - this is an interesting property of brand new claims that you would do well to memorise. As it is generally understood by a small partially retarded child that you can't win an argument by insisting that something completely irrelevant is true - I would beg you to seek the help of an older bigger child to read your posts before you submit them. And when necessary, to be the one responsible for battering you with the clue stick until you understand.
And so you had the chance to learn a valuable lesson. If you had kept reading you would have learnt what the word meant from the context. Oddly enough this is what most people do rather than reaching for google as a crutch straight away. I think you'll find it is the technique used by the vast majority of slashdot readers who had not heard of it but were not bothered enough to whine about their ignorance in the comments.
Because most viruses do not change the network behaviour of a host. Because most viruses are not visible from outside a host. Because this is a very rare case of a worm that actually changes the fingerprint of a host.
Not in the UK, according to the articles that you linked to. The prosecution have to show that you intended to use the tool to commit a crime - possession is not enough. Did you actually read the links that you posted?
And we will win because we are legion. If there is any issue where enough people disagree with us to make it a worthwhile fight, then we shall go to war to stop them. This is how decent people behave.
Oh dear. The first thing that any game (apart from a couple of exceptions) would do was disable the interrupts. This froze exec and disabled multitasking. Then they would rewrite the interrupt chains with their own routines and re-enable them. At this point the system is gone. The game runs directly on the bare metal.
I thought this until I played with AppleScript and Automater. It has the same level of support that AREXX used to have, and is good for the same sort of tasks.
Sadly most research is behind a paywall. It doesn't make it a slashvertisment though - there was enough detail in the linked article to see that the researchers are talking bollocks, and that the actual paper is unnecessary.
GPS uses time of flight between known landmarks. The fact that the landmarks are actually moving in orbit is irrelevant. The researchers argue that chimps don't use landmarks as reference points, but instead use a geometric layout of their territory. This is called dead-reckoning.
Edit: Preview suggests that I may be a little harsh. Their research itself may be valid and worthy. But their attempt to dumb it down for "the kids" without understanding the comparison that they are making is stupid.
How many web-applications are not client-server apps, and why are they written in such an inefficient style if not to support client-server operations?
Although Tolkien's knowledge of the FOSS scene was pretty substandard he did, at least, know how to make poetry scan. That is butchery on an industrial scale
No it isn't, and if you had read the article instead of the summary before you tried to pump your own blog you would realise that what you describe is not the issue here at all. This is *not* the side-channel attack that your post talks about.
Here are some basic clues: 1. It's a worm 2. It can spread from device to device over the network 3. No external hardware is required, the exploit is purely software (see points 1 & 2). 4. Goodspeed is not mentioned in connection with his side-channel attack on AES, but for some theoretical work on possible vulnerabilities.
MAD assumes that both parties have something to lose, which prevents them from playing. The biggest patent threat now is patent trolls. Because these are shell companies with nothing but IP that they can litigate over MAD is not a good deterrent against them.
Red Hat are clearly talking bollocks about a defensive position though. That is exactly the position that Microsoft and IBM started with, and it slowly evolved into their current patent arsenals. If Red Hat really want a defensive portfolio then they should give it up - patent whatever they want and gift the patents to the EFF.
Or some other nominated third party. A shell company could be setup with a charter that any company that had donated at least one patent is indemnified against the entire portfolio. It would be a very simple way to defuse the patent escalation that we are seeing because companies started out with the MAD assumption, not realising that a more fitting game would be NUTS.
Here's some more appropriate prior art. The article was published 20th Jan 2000 and the patent was not filed until August. I suspect that the patent was written after reading the article. The main claim of the patent is a "scalable" system because updates are not total. That is exactly what is described in that series of articles going back to the first one.
True. When you combine that sad fact with the inevitable proliferation that the commoditisation of technology produces... We are all screwed, sooner or later. Carter Catastrophe anyone?
Who knows? Perhaps if there were some sort of giant unification project that had started with the express aim of avoiding a third world war in europe then we could point to that. Something so successful that previous enemies now form one political block within that union. Something that has spawned the currency that will probably replace the dollar as the world reserve over time....
Nah, you're right. It must be the US troops. Of course they've worked as well everywhere else they've been stationed in the 20th century...
Slashdot Mirror
That's not my argument in the slightest. Your post claimed that customers were not technically sophisticated enough to be sold a service of cheap bandwidth in exchange for caps. I'm giving you a concrete example of exactly that market.
The rest of your reply is just complete bollocks and has no relation to any point that I made.
I don't normally post advert links to slashdot, but if cellular adoption trends stay the same then you should have deals like this in the US in 2-3 years. That 10/month top-up they require, is just enough to pay for 1GB/30 days, or if you want more bandwidth it's 25/month for 10GB. Just to let you drool a bit...
I take it that Three don't operate in your area? They offer a range of services based on cheap bandwidth - but it is metered and you get silly charges if you go over. They provide a simple display of how much has been used that the customer can access and leave it up to them.
Their 3Pay dongle service has lots of different pricing plans, but the best low-usage one is 10euro for 1GB/data. The top-up lasts for 30 days. If you have higher usage they sell 5/10GB plans on a monthly basis.
The business model is based around being a cheap carrier of data. It means a reasonable price for permanent mobile "broadband"* connection. Of course, they got shafted in the 3G license bids and so are perpetually the underdog trying to beat the incumbent players in the market - maybe you don't have that type of competition where you are? They were the first company to effectively make all voice traffic free (by offering 500mins of xnet traffic for a stupidly low amount a month) and pushed the other carriers into going the same way.
I'm not sure about how their costs stack up across Europe, but in the UK they have one massive sunk cost (their license fee) that is so large in comparison to their running costs that they have to pile it high and sell it cheap. As a result don't expect functional support. Their Indian support lines are terrible, and I had to work out how to get their dongle working in the first place as it shipped with the wrong settings and it didn't feature on their tech support flowchart. But they currently sell mobiles with pre-configured Skype access that can be used effectively for free ... if people want a Walmart for mobile data they are positioned to provide it.
*100KB/s is better than my first broadband connection, but it's not the 3Mb/s promised for the tech.
You middle-class commie scum :)
(can't really talk, I tend to read the Independent myself. Just makes me middle-class liberal scum)
No. You are completely wrong, and not willing to answer using your account I see.
Citation please.
That's the way that I would see it, because as a computer geek it seems natural that would be the way it works. But the world is full of people who are not computer geeks. Two of my lawyer geek friends have berated me on this point many times.
In the end the fudging of intent between man and machine is irrelevant. The case will be tried by a person and it will come down to whether or not they believe you. Kind of like throwing the legal system back a 1000 years. Busted using nmap to look for hosts to add to a botnet (ie the one case that they would want to cover) - fine, as there is no distribution, but screwed on pre-existing law. Busted using nmap to scan your own network - fine. Busted in a hypothetical case where nmap is distributed by malware on our machine - hope you get a smart court that understands the distinction.
Don't me wrong - the security tools law was unnecessary and draconian. We already have enough laws to handle what we think of as computer crimes - there was no hole for this to patch in the law. This was a simple case of "we'll get them for something".
It would be funny, yes, life is like that.
Your interpretation of what he wrote / intended those words to mean is very generous, but raises an interesting point. And because you are capable of forming a valid argument without help I won't respond completely like an arrogant nitpicker :)
It is entirely correct that possession is required before distribution can occur. I'm sure the RIAA would argue differently, especially in the case of sitting in a torrent swarm, but I'll stick to current legislative fact. So yes, possession is dangerous in the sense that once you are in possession of X, you can then choose to distribute X.
This argument can be split into two parts; is possession dangerous if it can lead to something dangerous, and can distribution occur without intent (as in your malware example). For the first point breathing oxygen would be a counter-example, in real-life, and the links that the GGP provided would be a legal counter-example. In that the guidelines for the interpretation of the law indicate that possession by itself is insufficient grounds, and that distribution must occur. For the second point I'll just mention that in the uk distribution must be intentional - you cannot be charged of a distribution offense without the prosecution showing that you engaged in distribution wilfully.
I'm not sure how the wilfull aspect translates into other jurisdictions, ie in America you may be boned regardless. This is where things get interesting - we've introduced some laws recently that are stupid, but there is a large body of precedent that shows that you should be ok. Also we tend to interpret our laws as necessary (according to the common sense of the judge & jury) rather than attempting to apply a strict literal interpretation. Recent abuses of the new anti-terror legislation show that this approach can and does break down.
I would say that being nice is worthy in its own right, karma be damned. But when someone is stupid enough to try and switch their argument rather than admit that their own sources prove them wrong it does require a bit of a verbal slapdown.
Do you have a link for this? It sounds interesting as that was the original standard that caused the debate / argument from the security industry in the first place.
Ok so you did read it. And I'll assume that you are aware of what you wrote the first time. And I'll assume that you read my response. The only possible logical conclusions are either a) you don't know the different between possession and distribution (thanks blueg3), or b) you are an idiot. I'm not as generous as blueg3, I think you lack the intellectual faculties to post on slashdot. It's a low bar, but by god you've hit it.
I'm going to try though, and see if you could understand with a little coaching, and help with the big words. You claimed:
Quite straightforward. If we ignore the claim about Germany, which may be correct, you have explicitly claimed that possession of "hacker tools" can be dodgy under uk law. You've reinforced this claim with:
Note, this is identical to the first claim - that possession of "hack tools" is legally iffy in the uk. As this this claim is wrong, and it's explained to be wrong in the links that you provided, I have pointed out to you:
Ok, you claimed possession is legally iffy. I've explained that it is not, according to your own sources. Now, here is where you failed the slashdot iq test:
A completely different claim. So it doesn't back up your original claim - this is an interesting property of brand new claims that you would do well to memorise. As it is generally understood by a small partially retarded child that you can't win an argument by insisting that something completely irrelevant is true - I would beg you to seek the help of an older bigger child to read your posts before you submit them. And when necessary, to be the one responsible for battering you with the clue stick until you understand.
And so you had the chance to learn a valuable lesson. If you had kept reading you would have learnt what the word meant from the context. Oddly enough this is what most people do rather than reaching for google as a crutch straight away. I think you'll find it is the technique used by the vast majority of slashdot readers who had not heard of it but were not bothered enough to whine about their ignorance in the comments.
Because most viruses do not change the network behaviour of a host. Because most viruses are not visible from outside a host. Because this is a very rare case of a worm that actually changes the fingerprint of a host.
Not in the UK, according to the articles that you linked to. The prosecution have to show that you intended to use the tool to commit a crime - possession is not enough. Did you actually read the links that you posted?
And we will win because we are legion. If there is any issue where enough people disagree with us to make it a worthwhile fight, then we shall go to war to stop them. This is how decent people behave.
Oh dear. The first thing that any game (apart from a couple of exceptions) would do was disable the interrupts. This froze exec and disabled multitasking. Then they would rewrite the interrupt chains with their own routines and re-enable them. At this point the system is gone. The game runs directly on the bare metal.
I thought this until I played with AppleScript and Automater. It has the same level of support that AREXX used to have, and is good for the same sort of tasks.
Sadly most research is behind a paywall. It doesn't make it a slashvertisment though - there was enough detail in the linked article to see that the researchers are talking bollocks, and that the actual paper is unnecessary.
GPS uses time of flight between known landmarks. The fact that the landmarks are actually moving in orbit is irrelevant. The researchers argue that chimps don't use landmarks as reference points, but instead use a geometric layout of their territory. This is called dead-reckoning.
Edit: Preview suggests that I may be a little harsh. Their research itself may be valid and worthy. But their attempt to dumb it down for "the kids" without understanding the comparison that they are making is stupid.
How many web-applications are not client-server apps, and why are they written in such an inefficient style if not to support client-server operations?
Although Tolkien's knowledge of the FOSS scene was pretty substandard he did, at least, know how to make poetry scan. That is butchery on an industrial scale
No it isn't, and if you had read the article instead of the summary before you tried to pump your own blog you would realise that what you describe is not the issue here at all. This is *not* the side-channel attack that your post talks about.
Here are some basic clues:
1. It's a worm
2. It can spread from device to device over the network
3. No external hardware is required, the exploit is purely software (see points 1 & 2).
4. Goodspeed is not mentioned in connection with his side-channel attack on AES, but for some theoretical work on possible vulnerabilities.
You fail.
MAD assumes that both parties have something to lose, which prevents them from playing. The biggest patent threat now is patent trolls. Because these are shell companies with nothing but IP that they can litigate over MAD is not a good deterrent against them.
Red Hat are clearly talking bollocks about a defensive position though. That is exactly the position that Microsoft and IBM started with, and it slowly evolved into their current patent arsenals. If Red Hat really want a defensive portfolio then they should give it up - patent whatever they want and gift the patents to the EFF.
Or some other nominated third party. A shell company could be setup with a charter that any company that had donated at least one patent is indemnified against the entire portfolio. It would be a very simple way to defuse the patent escalation that we are seeing because companies started out with the MAD assumption, not realising that a more fitting game would be NUTS.
Here's some more appropriate prior art. The article was published 20th Jan 2000 and the patent was not filed until August. I suspect that the patent was written after reading the article. The main claim of the patent is a "scalable" system because updates are not total. That is exactly what is described in that series of articles going back to the first one.
Given that Sun design their boxes around their own custom hardware (Niagra, Sparc etc) who exactly are you buying the same specification from?
True. When you combine that sad fact with the inevitable proliferation that the commoditisation of technology produces... We are all screwed, sooner or later. Carter Catastrophe anyone?
Who knows? Perhaps if there were some sort of giant unification project that had started with the express aim of avoiding a third world war in europe then we could point to that. Something so successful that previous enemies now form one political block within that union. Something that has spawned the currency that will probably replace the dollar as the world reserve over time....
Nah, you're right. It must be the US troops. Of course they've worked as well everywhere else they've been stationed in the 20th century...
In a game between rational adversaries. In a game between irrational adversaries it would be better to lose the nukes entirely.