This blurb tells a little bit more about the prank http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/feb/03/anonymous-hack-met-fbi-call
The press is going to have a field day tomorrow. Is this the sound of a thousand hacks giggling while typing opinion pieces? I shall read the all. Also somebody will have all the headlines tatooed on his foreskin. With a hammer.
These are official agencies that in the past have been proven to act against the public interest. And we as the public are not informed what they are up to.
For example; they discuss setting up a 15 year old kid who shouldn't even be discussed with US authorities lest be extradited. Also the flow of information is very limited into one direction. Why would the Met even tell the Feds so much with NOTHING in return? Why extradite your own folk to a country that wouldn't even extradite their own war criminals to The Hague?
If one thing should come out of this then it should be TEARING UP THOSE CRAZY EXTRADITION TREATIES WITH THE US! You can believe me once the Brit press wakes up this will cause some huge stink as the Met isn't exactly popular at the moment and the extradition thing is currently a hot button.
This type of buggering things up(ok, let's call it buggery because that's what The Met lets the FBI do to them) could very well derail a couple of trials and stop action on a couple of things discussed in this call.
It's so...beautiful. Stuff like this should be released to defense lawyers in court to keep the rozzers/cops(pigs, really) clean as I suspect that half of what they said wasn't even court ordered.
Soo, how many heads of The Met did we go through these last few years? It's like watching an energizer rabbit going on in a hamster wheel.
Besides, the occasional leaking of official documents isn't a bad thing. Lot's of dirty grubby little fingers in lots of cookie jars.
Is this actually as clear cut as the blurb makes it sound? I can't fathom Capitol actually is that stupid...or were they simply not expecting to be caught on something that obvious?
Forgive me but I always thought this is the kind of crap judges throw out of their court rooms. With menaces. I'd be pissed if somebody pulled a stunt like that.
Glenn Beck is amazing in his skill to not see the real issue at hand.
In this case the actor, his descent and his relation to ethnicity which Glenn Beck in his relation to any ethnicity is opposed of contrary to rhyme, reason and the ever so uncommon sense is of little concern whatsoever.
No, the real question is wether we again want to watch Peter Parker being bitten by a genetically atomized engineered and highly allegorical spyder and transform into an Alfa Romeo driven by Dustin Hoffman.
I'm sorry, that's about the only twist they can take on the same old, same old. Another reboot? Pointlessly so? And Glenn Beck missed the horror in that?
*bumps button with fist*
*soundbite of some WASP hobo soccer mom being catholized by space aliens on daytime TV which is where all TV personalities go if they aren't outright fired*
"Shocking!"
...and here's to you, Mr. Glenn Beck
Jesus is indifferent about you, hohohooo
God bless you please, Mr Glenn Beck,
You are tarded so we don't have to be, hehehe
While I never buy second hand I don't like being tethered like that.
DRM is becoming a major hassle and my gaming backlog is long enough to keep me occupied. So I will avoid this, which is a pity because I was quite interested in it.
Every 4 years news gets polluted by the same talking heads and somehow excited news anchors try to sell it off as exciting. At least the Dems are not at it at the moment so it's only half bad, I s'ppose.
What on earth is going on with you guys? Does even more than half of you care? I refuse to think that this represents any meaningful portion of you guys. Somebody who doesn't hold any office whatsoever says something he didn't say before. Ho-hum.
I still have a ton of National Geographic(and Penthouse mags) my dad brought with him when we re-immigrated to Germany. They are from the 70ies and were HIGHLY educational to my teenage self back then. Very good articles.
Just not current affair news. I have yet to find something remotely intersting that comes over the net and the US. Remember: primaries in Europe are filed unde "WTF are they doing?". It's election coverage in a country you don't live in. Or are you interested that the German head of state is under fire for having dodgy friends who helped him with dodgy gifts and services?
Thought so.
We include Israel in the European song contest. As is Turkey and everybody else who bothers to show up.
Also GoG had Jagged Alliance 2 on sale this weekend. Speaking of the good ole P90. But when it comes to blows we still nick the weapons of fallen enemies as does the rest of the world since donkey's years. Grass on the other side I guess.
Yes, I used to think that myself given that I live in a country where you are forced to got to school until you are 16 and you are forced to learn at least another language.
Competently speaking a couple of languages is still a sign of high education. Unless you are English or French.
...unfortunately only half joking even tho the main export of the UK seems to be expats, So I'm unfair to both of them. And the French are especially fickle about their languag(at least officially so).
I really hate dubbed and translated stuff so way before Steam I imported most of my games. Once I uses Amazon.co.uk to buy Fallout. The first one. It had a quest where you had to look for some lost kid in a cave. I spent hours looking for it. Turns out the UK at the time had a problem with kids in games so in the UK version the kid got simply removed.
ALSO:
If you want to point fingers then may I remind you that the UK/US and a couple of other countries are quite squeamish when it comes to bare skin? And what you called "banned" is actually in most cases to be sold in a way so minors don't get their hands on it. Which is quite allright with explody head games. And selling a game like KZ manager in Germany and France will put you in the dock for some time. And rightly so.
Freedom of speech only goes so far as is tolerable. And how far tolerance goes is a cultural thing. And culture varies wildly. In Germany, boobs are considered a pleasant sight, gore, violence and Nazis not quite so.
Half of the matters that are called Freedom Of Speech around here seems to be the catch-all for just about everything. Dffrnt culturz is diffrnt. Respect that.
Fun fact, on of the most respectful weekly news magazines in Germany is DER SPIEGEL. They often get complaints from transatlantic subscribers that they have to take it home in a brown paper bag. Sometimes they have indeed quite a lot of skin on the front page when they run some health related issues as the main piece. Never really noticed it but having transatlantic communication sharpens your boob spotting skills.
I stopped bying it a couple of years ago. A mixture of El Reg, Tom's hardware and other net resources(including Heise online) have made the print issue irrelevant.
Funny thing about Heise and DER SPIEGEL(they insist on all caps...) is that those two seem to do fairly well despite possibly cannibalizing their print mag with their rather excellent online presence. If you want to keep your mad German skillz then I think you should rather go there.
The only printed dead tree stuff I ALWAYs buy is Top Gear mag. For some reason it's usually well hidden amongst ther rest of the porn. And another weird thing is every German train station has it. Which makes you wonder how my beloved, tiny and utterly purple compatriots actually learned of this since it isn't even broadcast here(to my knowledge)...
Nobody in his right mind goes into Heise or Spiegel forums. But I thought Heise was quite well known outside of Germany? They make/. front page at least twice per year...
I read French, English and German fluently and I had been shopping around. I stuck with Der SPIEGEL and The Guardian and DIE ZEIT and Le canard enchaîné. DER SPIEGEL and The Guardian have a very good online site. Especially The Guardian covers transatlantic issues quite touroughly even if I wonder why they cover election circusses in a country we don't live in to such great extent.
Sorry, I haven't found anything in the US that even remotely has this depth in reporting.
Before you say something about these being very liberal papers and you are quite correct about that, if you only read stuff that leans your way then you will miss half the stuff that matters. For a long time I read Die Welt for its conservative(the European commie style) view until I learned to distinguish opinion and interpretation of facts from the real thing.
The problem with the Autobahn is that around bigger cities(so every 50 miles or so) you will run into congestion since it is heavily used by commuters. I double dare you to drive around Stuttgart, München or Frankfurt in the morning or in the evening. Even though I live theoretically only 30 minutes from Frankfurt or Stuttgart I achieve this speed only by train. If more than 25% of the road are actually unrestricted I'd be pleasantly surprised.
The Autobahn has been in a state of constant neglect for the last 20 or so years. There's some heavy east-west truck traffic which erodes the road, congests stuff nad the drivers tend as a group not to be the quickest of cats. Our Eurocrats are even discussing Australian style road trains. God bless their rosy little cheeks.
Also our regular drivers are quite annoying. If you want to see competent drivers who not make congestion worse by stupid behaviour then you will have to go to Switzerland.
You can't compare Central European infrastructure with US. That's plain silly. The US is a really big place and speaking of inhabitants per square mile it's nearly uninhabited. That's why the US needs American soltion for their problems. Suggesting otherwise would be plain silly.
That reason for rejection will most likely not be announced publicly. Rejected is rejected.
Also there's the issue of what gets rejected on non-scientific grounds. What you are suggesting is crapping into the pool to keep the yellow water crowd out. Also, Elsevier has been an annoyance for more than 10 years(that's when I became aware of them). But scientific integrity trumps your short term activism. If I get sent a paper to review(only happened twice) and it is bullcrap or brilliant I will call it just that. Whatever Elsevier's business model is, integrity trumps that.
What we do is long term. Business model talk is for the short sighted.
Which is why somebody else needs to build an open platform for peer review. In the past few years people got stumped by proofs they made that didn't seem right to them and they called for peer reviews. No matter who publishes what for what price if you can falsify something then it is your duty to do so. A commercial platform is not useful for that. Fuck business interests. That's for unthinking Ferengi who will gladly wallop in the primordial soup they just formed in as long as they are the turd that floats to the top.
Failure usually is the best job experience when you understand what goes wrong.
In interviews I usually ask the applicant for his failures caused or experienced by him. Successes are not as interesting.
I prefer people with insight instead of code monkeys. Basically because I'm a lazy bastard who values competent employees over obedient drones.
You know, I'm actually a huge fan of this. We build the tracks, we maintain them and you and your competitors run the actual train services. We lay cable(even the wireless one), we keep it in the ground, let no light escape it, take care of the last mile and you and your competitors own the switches.
If a company goes bust you can at least make sure the cable will not be dug up for scrap metal...which is kind of pointless when it comes to fibre.
Infrastructure is hard to build up from scratch, takes tons of maintenance and is far too important to be subject of the bottom line of a company. Allowing companies to provide services on this infrastructure just takes care of the extra headache the city council isn't particularly good at taking care of.
I was project lead in a similar situation(which involved a tentacle of the federal government) and I similarly shouted wolf once I did not only see a wolf tail but also smelled its hot breath.
For my efforts I got removed from the project which is standard procedure when things go south. But I guess there is no win/win(or at least meh/meh) once federal government is involved.
...but when you are sidelined from a train crash and you get enough popcorn and beer then things like these can be quite entertaining.
I agree with you there that monopolies are bad for customers. State held monopolies are even worse. Without the opening of the telco market in the 90ies the internet would never have taken off like it did in Germany.
But there is a difference between a monopoly enforced by law and a monopoly because, well, you are too small to be serviced in a way that pleases the shareholders.
Utilities and telecommunication was publicly held in Europe for a very long time.
The way starting your own service when the private sector doesn't do it usually works like this:
-build stuff with tax money
-spin it out as a publicly held company
-sell it off with a profit
And this is the right thing to do. If telcos don't want to build up because actually doing buusiness instead of just selling stock is a bit of a hassle then you build it yourself. Towns don't want their folks wander off into the City. If nobody can be arsed to sell electricity, take care of the sewage, take away the trash, keep the taps from running dry and in the 21st century provide telco services then you do it yourself.
A mayor gets voted into office for taking care of the place. As is everybody else.
Companies only have to answer their stockholders who do not give a damn if people in Stinking Dead Rat Creek get teh internets delivered in a series of tubes.
Disallowing providing service to your citizens is that is just absurd. What's next? Not allowing the town to take care of the trash since nobody thinks there's not enough money in it?
Their cases must have been very weak if they only relied on you giving testimony. So I dare say there was quite a lot of confusion and WTFery on both sides.
My experience is that both parties will settle. but only after being ordered by a judge to do so. They really hate when they have to do the Solomon thing awarding damages from a to b and from b to a. Some things are not judgeable.
Slashdot Mirror
...and they keep coming in... :P
http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/0,1518,813224,00.html
http://www.lemonde.fr/technologies/article/2012/02/03/anonymous-met-en-ligne-une-conversation-du-fbi_1638768_651865.html
Le Monde has real trouble to hide the giggles
This blurb tells a little bit more about the prank
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/feb/03/anonymous-hack-met-fbi-call
The press is going to have a field day tomorrow. Is this the sound of a thousand hacks giggling while typing opinion pieces? I shall read the all. Also somebody will have all the headlines tatooed on his foreskin. With a hammer.
This is truly wonderful.
Depends on the motive and the target
These are official agencies that in the past have been proven to act against the public interest. And we as the public are not informed what they are up to.
For example; they discuss setting up a 15 year old kid who shouldn't even be discussed with US authorities lest be extradited. Also the flow of information is very limited into one direction. Why would the Met even tell the Feds so much with NOTHING in return? Why extradite your own folk to a country that wouldn't even extradite their own war criminals to The Hague?
If one thing should come out of this then it should be TEARING UP THOSE CRAZY EXTRADITION TREATIES WITH THE US! You can believe me once the Brit press wakes up this will cause some huge stink as the Met isn't exactly popular at the moment and the extradition thing is currently a hot button.
This type of buggering things up(ok, let's call it buggery because that's what The Met lets the FBI do to them) could very well derail a couple of trials and stop action on a couple of things discussed in this call.
It's so...beautiful. Stuff like this should be released to defense lawyers in court to keep the rozzers/cops(pigs, really) clean as I suspect that half of what they said wasn't even court ordered.
Soo, how many heads of The Met did we go through these last few years? It's like watching an energizer rabbit going on in a hamster wheel.
Besides, the occasional leaking of official documents isn't a bad thing. Lot's of dirty grubby little fingers in lots of cookie jars.
Is this actually as clear cut as the blurb makes it sound? I can't fathom Capitol actually is that stupid...or were they simply not expecting to be caught on something that obvious?
Forgive me but I always thought this is the kind of crap judges throw out of their court rooms. With menaces.
I'd be pissed if somebody pulled a stunt like that.
Bang on, mate.
If this Out of Africa thing is true then...well, being white would be some horrible mutation, wouldn't it?
For no particular reason I choose to blame solar flares. They suck.
Because in World of Warcraft nobody knows you are a dog.
Glenn Beck is amazing in his skill to not see the real issue at hand.
...and here's to you, Mr. Glenn Beck
In this case the actor, his descent and his relation to ethnicity which Glenn Beck in his relation to any ethnicity is opposed of contrary to rhyme, reason and the ever so uncommon sense is of little concern whatsoever.
No, the real question is wether we again want to watch Peter Parker being bitten by a genetically atomized engineered and highly allegorical spyder and transform into an Alfa Romeo driven by Dustin Hoffman.
I'm sorry, that's about the only twist they can take on the same old, same old. Another reboot? Pointlessly so? And Glenn Beck missed the horror in that?
*bumps button with fist*
*soundbite of some WASP hobo soccer mom being catholized by space aliens on daytime TV which is where all TV personalities go if they aren't outright fired*
"Shocking!"
Jesus is indifferent about you, hohohooo
God bless you please, Mr Glenn Beck,
You are tarded so we don't have to be, hehehe
The man is done, so fuck him.
While I never buy second hand I don't like being tethered like that.
DRM is becoming a major hassle and my gaming backlog is long enough to keep me occupied. So I will avoid this, which is a pity because I was quite interested in it.
Every 4 years news gets polluted by the same talking heads and somehow excited news anchors try to sell it off as exciting. At least the Dems are not at it at the moment so it's only half bad, I s'ppose.
What on earth is going on with you guys? Does even more than half of you care? I refuse to think that this represents any meaningful portion of you guys. Somebody who doesn't hold any office whatsoever says something he didn't say before. Ho-hum.
Onward, I say! Sod the lot of them!
OOOOOOH!
I still have a ton of National Geographic(and Penthouse mags) my dad brought with him when we re-immigrated to Germany. They are from the 70ies and were HIGHLY educational to my teenage self back then. Very good articles.
Most of Europe gravitates towards the US.
http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/netzpolitik/0,1518,810131,00.html has some pretty pictures. And that excludes Google stuff. Otherwise it would look even more star and stripey.
Just not current affair news. I have yet to find something remotely intersting that comes over the net and the US. Remember: primaries in Europe are filed unde "WTF are they doing?". It's election coverage in a country you don't live in. Or are you interested that the German head of state is under fire for having dodgy friends who helped him with dodgy gifts and services?
Thought so.
We include Israel in the European song contest. As is Turkey and everybody else who bothers to show up.
Also GoG had Jagged Alliance 2 on sale this weekend. Speaking of the good ole P90. But when it comes to blows we still nick the weapons of fallen enemies as does the rest of the world since donkey's years. Grass on the other side I guess.
Yes, I used to think that myself given that I live in a country where you are forced to got to school until you are 16 and you are forced to learn at least another language.
...unfortunately only half joking even tho the main export of the UK seems to be expats, So I'm unfair to both of them. And the French are especially fickle about their languag(at least officially so).
Competently speaking a couple of languages is still a sign of high education. Unless you are English or French.
Here's the thin.
I really hate dubbed and translated stuff so way before Steam I imported most of my games. Once I uses Amazon.co.uk to buy Fallout. The first one. It had a quest where you had to look for some lost kid in a cave. I spent hours looking for it. Turns out the UK at the time had a problem with kids in games so in the UK version the kid got simply removed.
ALSO:
If you want to point fingers then may I remind you that the UK/US and a couple of other countries are quite squeamish when it comes to bare skin? And what you called "banned" is actually in most cases to be sold in a way so minors don't get their hands on it. Which is quite allright with explody head games. And selling a game like KZ manager in Germany and France will put you in the dock for some time. And rightly so.
Freedom of speech only goes so far as is tolerable. And how far tolerance goes is a cultural thing. And culture varies wildly. In Germany, boobs are considered a pleasant sight, gore, violence and Nazis not quite so.
Half of the matters that are called Freedom Of Speech around here seems to be the catch-all for just about everything. Dffrnt culturz is diffrnt. Respect that.
Fun fact, on of the most respectful weekly news magazines in Germany is DER SPIEGEL. They often get complaints from transatlantic subscribers that they have to take it home in a brown paper bag. Sometimes they have indeed quite a lot of skin on the front page when they run some health related issues as the main piece. Never really noticed it but having transatlantic communication sharpens your boob spotting skills.
:(
I would have otherwise missed them
Half of it being ads...
I stopped bying it a couple of years ago. A mixture of El Reg, Tom's hardware and other net resources(including Heise online) have made the print issue irrelevant.
Funny thing about Heise and DER SPIEGEL(they insist on all caps...) is that those two seem to do fairly well despite possibly cannibalizing their print mag with their rather excellent online presence. If you want to keep your mad German skillz then I think you should rather go there.
The only printed dead tree stuff I ALWAYs buy is Top Gear mag. For some reason it's usually well hidden amongst ther rest of the porn. And another weird thing is every German train station has it. Which makes you wonder how my beloved, tiny and utterly purple compatriots actually learned of this since it isn't even broadcast here(to my knowledge)...
Nobody in his right mind goes into Heise or Spiegel forums. But I thought Heise was quite well known outside of Germany? They make /. front page at least twice per year...
I read French, English and German fluently and I had been shopping around. I stuck with Der SPIEGEL and The Guardian and DIE ZEIT and Le canard enchaîné. DER SPIEGEL and The Guardian have a very good online site. Especially The Guardian covers transatlantic issues quite touroughly even if I wonder why they cover election circusses in a country we don't live in to such great extent.
Sorry, I haven't found anything in the US that even remotely has this depth in reporting.
Before you say something about these being very liberal papers and you are quite correct about that, if you only read stuff that leans your way then you will miss half the stuff that matters. For a long time I read Die Welt for its conservative(the European commie style) view until I learned to distinguish opinion and interpretation of facts from the real thing.
The problem with the Autobahn is that around bigger cities(so every 50 miles or so) you will run into congestion since it is heavily used by commuters. I double dare you to drive around Stuttgart, München or Frankfurt in the morning or in the evening. Even though I live theoretically only 30 minutes from Frankfurt or Stuttgart I achieve this speed only by train. If more than 25% of the road are actually unrestricted I'd be pleasantly surprised.
The Autobahn has been in a state of constant neglect for the last 20 or so years. There's some heavy east-west truck traffic which erodes the road, congests stuff nad the drivers tend as a group not to be the quickest of cats. Our Eurocrats are even discussing Australian style road trains. God bless their rosy little cheeks.
Also our regular drivers are quite annoying. If you want to see competent drivers who not make congestion worse by stupid behaviour then you will have to go to Switzerland.
You can't compare Central European infrastructure with US. That's plain silly. The US is a really big place and speaking of inhabitants per square mile it's nearly uninhabited. That's why the US needs American soltion for their problems. Suggesting otherwise would be plain silly.
That reason for rejection will most likely not be announced publicly. Rejected is rejected.
Also there's the issue of what gets rejected on non-scientific grounds. What you are suggesting is crapping into the pool to keep the yellow water crowd out. Also, Elsevier has been an annoyance for more than 10 years(that's when I became aware of them). But scientific integrity trumps your short term activism. If I get sent a paper to review(only happened twice) and it is bullcrap or brilliant I will call it just that. Whatever Elsevier's business model is, integrity trumps that.
What we do is long term. Business model talk is for the short sighted.
Which is why somebody else needs to build an open platform for peer review. In the past few years people got stumped by proofs they made that didn't seem right to them and they called for peer reviews. No matter who publishes what for what price if you can falsify something then it is your duty to do so. A commercial platform is not useful for that. Fuck business interests. That's for unthinking Ferengi who will gladly wallop in the primordial soup they just formed in as long as they are the turd that floats to the top.
Failure usually is the best job experience when you understand what goes wrong.
In interviews I usually ask the applicant for his failures caused or experienced by him. Successes are not as interesting.
I prefer people with insight instead of code monkeys. Basically because I'm a lazy bastard who values competent employees over obedient drones.
You know, I'm actually a huge fan of this. We build the tracks, we maintain them and you and your competitors run the actual train services. We lay cable(even the wireless one), we keep it in the ground, let no light escape it, take care of the last mile and you and your competitors own the switches.
If a company goes bust you can at least make sure the cable will not be dug up for scrap metal...which is kind of pointless when it comes to fibre.
Infrastructure is hard to build up from scratch, takes tons of maintenance and is far too important to be subject of the bottom line of a company. Allowing companies to provide services on this infrastructure just takes care of the extra headache the city council isn't particularly good at taking care of.
To me, that's win/win.
I was project lead in a similar situation(which involved a tentacle of the federal government) and I similarly shouted wolf once I did not only see a wolf tail but also smelled its hot breath.
...but when you are sidelined from a train crash and you get enough popcorn and beer then things like these can be quite entertaining.
For my efforts I got removed from the project which is standard procedure when things go south. But I guess there is no win/win(or at least meh/meh) once federal government is involved.
I agree with you there that monopolies are bad for customers. State held monopolies are even worse. Without the opening of the telco market in the 90ies the internet would never have taken off like it did in Germany.
But there is a difference between a monopoly enforced by law and a monopoly because, well, you are too small to be serviced in a way that pleases the shareholders.
Utilities and telecommunication was publicly held in Europe for a very long time.
The way starting your own service when the private sector doesn't do it usually works like this:
-build stuff with tax money
-spin it out as a publicly held company
-sell it off with a profit
And this is the right thing to do. If telcos don't want to build up because actually doing buusiness instead of just selling stock is a bit of a hassle then you build it yourself. Towns don't want their folks wander off into the City. If nobody can be arsed to sell electricity, take care of the sewage, take away the trash, keep the taps from running dry and in the 21st century provide telco services then you do it yourself.
A mayor gets voted into office for taking care of the place. As is everybody else.
Companies only have to answer their stockholders who do not give a damn if people in Stinking Dead Rat Creek get teh internets delivered in a series of tubes.
Disallowing providing service to your citizens is that is just absurd. What's next? Not allowing the town to take care of the trash since nobody thinks there's not enough money in it?
Their cases must have been very weak if they only relied on you giving testimony. So I dare say there was quite a lot of confusion and WTFery on both sides.
My experience is that both parties will settle. but only after being ordered by a judge to do so. They really hate when they have to do the Solomon thing awarding damages from a to b and from b to a. Some things are not judgeable.