In case of eSports tournaments, streamers and so on the current argument is wether they are doing enough so it could be considered a perfomance. After all the game is nothing without the player. On the other hand the art assets displayed are clearly copyrighted.
Just remember that SEGA and Nintendo JP took down a lot of YouTube videos. They generated a lot of ill will with their target audience.
You know, sometimes matters are too complex for legislation because the matter at hand has so many facets to it that you can't write a comprehensive law that has the intended effect. In too many cases the intended effect is not even stated by the legislative. That's like writing an application without specified requirements.
The whole process is so shambolic and unprofessional it beggars belief.
That propably is also one of its intended purposes. But I reckon the law will be broadly termed, as per usual, so it will catch some unintended fish in its nets.
Laws like this are usually written by lobbyists and introduced into the house by some congressman. Depending on which lobby is writing it you can assume that it will not take other interests into consideration.
Frankly the US and UK legislative has gone far beyond a joke. Some time ago I decided that it propably were best to follow whichever law makes sense and keep a low profile. Try as you may you will always be in violation of some law or provision. Best to ignore them altogether and get on with your life.
Welcome to the eSports scene.
There are a lot of unofficial tournaments for a lot of games. So that could possibly become a felony. Let alone all those YouTube Let's Plays which are also a thing.
I'm sure they intend this for video/music, but as always our lawmakers are a decade behind everybody else.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is a prime example for the overcriminalization in the US. What should be a civil case where some corp should sue a private citizen becomes a thing with a DA and a possible prison sentence.
And people wonder why prisons are overflowing...
A lot of GM detractors don't like it for legal reasons.
I have a hard time buying that one because the opposition to genetic engineering started with the Flavr Savr tomato before Monsanto even got involved, and continues to university produced GE crops like the Rainbow papaya, NGO ones like Golden Rice, and government produced ones like the wheat that CSIRO developed that Greenpeace thugs destroyed.
Also due to their patents you may get sued due to cross-pollination OR if you switch crops and yet a bit of last year's crop still grows on your fields. Which does happen.
No, it doesn't. There has not been a single instance of anyone being sued for simple cross pollination. Cross pollination then knowing and intentional selection and reproduction, yes, but not an accident. That's like saying someone got sued for accidentally receiving a DVD in the mail while conveniently neglecting the part where they were reproducing the DVD in mass quantities.
GM monster things
GM monster things? Sounds like you've got more than just legal reasons on your mind.
Nice selective quoting to completely twist what I've said.
So you are not buying that a lot of GM detractors do that for GM companies shady business practices? That would imply that all GM detractors were luddites. Well I'm not.
Also do not force me to direct you to the Monsanto entry on Wikipedia. There you can read all about them and their colourful litigation history.
I would consider court records facts and those point to Monsanto using patent law to strongarm farmers.
What you just did was shabby and frankly a bit suspicious.
If they do insist on gathering this data they should
a) make all gathered data available by request for each individual citizen
b) disclose who made use of that data and also discolse the reason for it
This level of transparency would be required to make this anywhere near OK. But their underhanded tactics they use make this very unlikely. They don't spy on US citizens(except by accident) but they do get data from the Brits who it turns out have the legal framework to spy on everyone. NSA financed the GCHQ site in Bude and has lots of staff "liaising" with the GCHQ. Which all is perfectly legal.
I wonder why there is no bigger outcry in the UK that the main selling point of the GCHQ to the NSA is the relatively lax legal framework in the UK. It is perfeclty legal, yes. But if questions have been asked about if the laws powering this festering dungheap are ok I have totally missed that. And I'm subscribed to The Guardian which would totally pick this one up.
It seems that the main discussion is happening in Germany and the US. While the biggest culprit, namely the GCHQ, has very little to fear. As always with these leaks, the US reputation isn't as damaged as everybody else's. And I totally buy into the NSA not sharing any data. But I do not buy that FISA courts are actually doing their jobs as this would require blind trust. How should I trust the integrity of secret courts? Their mere existence is a travesty in a democracy.
This is all so wrong on so many levels...
Alas, the geeks in the cubicles of the NSA/GCHQ propably don't even understand this outrage. And when you think about it, it is no mean technological feat. They managed to acquire lots of data, store it and search it. On a massive scale. That's cool and scary at the same time.
A lot of GM detractors don't like it for legal reasons. As long as Monsanto and the rest stick with their current business practices I am one of them. They don't sell their seeds, they license them. You are not allowed to keep a part of this year's crops to use in the next year. Not that that would do any good with F1 hybrids, but still. Also due to their patents you may get sued due to cross-pollination OR if you switch crops and yet a bit of last year's crop still grows on your fields. Which does happen. And you never know what kind of indigenous plants will be threatened by those GM monster things. But this also applies to conventional growing.
This process of generating meat in a lab OTOH does not release anything into the wild and could potentially solve a big problem. Until corporate greed kicks in, that is. I am aware that it will possibly take decades to make the process viable. This is only one of the first steps. I wonder in what way a bunch of lawyers will ruin it for the rest of us.
The luddite health-scare is just narrow-sighted sensationalism while ignoring the true issue.
Surely a jury of "your peers" should understand what you do. Cases that involve technology should have juries that have some understanding of technology...
My thoughts exactly. I shudder to think what other professions have to suffer through. Just imagine all those malpractice suits...
The only profession that seems to be fairly safe is lawyers. Go figure.
I feel physically sick every time I see my password in plain text written down somewhere that isn't an encrypted keystore. I would also have cleared my history as soon as I had seen it in a way that could be reproduced.
That's also a good password policy and that kind of Pavlovian conditioning can be quite useful.
It should have been GS suing him. He broke his NDA and that's a contract thing. Instead it was turned into a criminal offence and netted him 8 years in prison.
Yes and no. He violated his NDA. But that's hardly worth 8 years of prison. The fact that he had cleared his bash history after typing his passord for the off-site Subversion repository was given a lot of weight. Even the name "Subversion" *hushed silence* was given weight. This guy deserved some sort of punishment but not 8 years in prison. What he did shouldn't be a criminal offense. Breaking and NDA is a contractual thing and should be dealt with accordingly.
The US justice system is stupid as is specialised computer law in general.
...a jury of people who aren't smart enough to get out of jury duty.
What baffles me is the stupidity involved. First the poor sap who got jailed. I NEVER take any code with me between two gigs. I NEVER even take my personal notes with me. I tell them to change my passwords the moment I'm through the door. And I do a clean sweep on all my private equipment. While I do have my own tool kit I do inform my employers that this is mine, it will stay mine and I will never charge them to use it in whatever way they please as long as I get to keep using it myself and I give no guarantees for it. It's mostly stuff to copy and paste and example code so there is very little value to it. It is ok to take ideas and concepts with you because it is very hard not to remember those. That's called work experience. But never ever take source with you. Even if you think that it is open source. What you could do is blow the whistle that they are in breach of the OSS license in question and that's it.
The other side of the stupidity is that cleaning your bash history now is considered incriminating. If you have typed your password on the CLI and you don't clear your history then I would consider this criminal negligence. I would very much be surprised if Goldman-Sachs doesn't have a policy for this. Also if their system is such a hairball then it is very unlikely that you can directly integrate any code into another system. You propably don't even want to do so. And he didn't take the predictive stuff. So what he took with him couldn't have been more than general code involving efficient comparison of values, net code, sorting code and so on. Most of which wouldn't even be original enough to be worthy of a software patent.
While he deserved a slap on the wrist for being awefully cavalier with stuff that GS considered their property(rightfully so or not) he certainly didn't deserve 8 years in prison. If a jury can't understand the case and simply goes with the guy with the biggest words and the most expensive suit then it needs to be dismissed.
There a couple of problems I see in the US justice system:
1) DAs get elected which subjects them to a popularity contest and is a high motivator to get your name into the papers. They need to make a lot of noise and they need to get high-profile convictions that impress those who are worthy of impressing. Easy tearjerk cases for the public, specialised cases for campaign contributors.
2) DAs too often have political ambitions beyond the justice branch. This aggravates the problem in 1)
3) The practice to throw as much at a defendant as you can possibly muster makes plea-bargains a very powerful tool. You get a worst case of 136 consecutive years in prison. You get an offer to sign here and only go to prison for 8 years. Given how often plea-bargains are taken this is plain wrong. And it needs to be abolished. If you throw the phone book at a person you should be willing and able to get a conviction for all and also be willing to see it through. Either a person is guilty and deserves 136 years of prison or he is not. Willingness to go for less only demonstrates eagerness to get something but not to the full extent of the law. This practice needs to be banned. Now.
4) He didn't get a jury of his peers. I would have found him guilty of breaching his NDA and nothing more. Those bozos were all high-school graduates who never had a chance to understand a word that was said and went with a presumably flamboyant and sensationalistic prosecutor.
5) He didn't get good counsel. How a jury of high-school graduates got past the selection process we will never know. Why no real expert with practical knowledge was heard we will never know. On the one hand you have the state throwing lots of resources at one guy and on the other hand we have a private person who has not even remotely the means to match that.
The whole thing was lopsided from the start and it will always be.
Regulation is mindless and wants to be followed to the letter. To make allowances for reality and the real world they need to have a lot of supplements and exceptions and then become so complex that no living person(dead or alive) will ever grasp them completely. So you need a lot of persons to manage those regulation and thus bureaucracy was born.
The queen bee of these superfluous bureaucracies has to be the DHS. I've been subjected to what they call CVI. Take a look for yourself: http://www.dhs.gov/training-chemical-terrorism-vulnerability-information
Take that test and tell me what it accomplishes. Tell me what the issued certificate signifies. Tell me what is achieved by requiring such a certificate. This is all silly red tape and nothing more.
On top of that it seems to be implemented with the pinnacle of low-brow web frontend technology: Oracle Application Express. It is targeted at PHBs in yet another glorious effort to get professionals out of IT and let their secretaries do the application implementing stuff. Yet I wager some clever IT consulting business charged megabucks for this particular turd. I tried to break it in all the ways I know how to break bad Apex stuff and left it whimpering in a corner.
Regulations also tend to supplant common sense more and more. Especially if non-compliance is immediately considered a felony. By now it has become uncommon sense and should be put on a list for endangered species.
I would put to you that this is quit unlikely in this case. No matter how far one would take his -or her in this case- virtual and entirely artificial persona created in order to perpetrate a potentially criminal offence one would find it increasingly difficult to have said artificial persona be nicked as a 21 year old male tosspot.
They have cuffed one of those potty mouths. Just yesterday. And they hope to reunite him with his friends quite soon. One way or the other. And in this case I do applaud the rozzers because it is my firm belief that these knob-ends do need slapping down.
But I am quite certain that people have created fake disputes with themselves. Even sent themselves threatening notes. Which would make for a rather schizophrenic day in court. Should be a laff.
I think the current Slashdot quote is appropriate:
Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. -- Albert Einstein
This particular epithet doesn't quite aply to the Zimmerman/Martin case. There is also quite some nastyness flung around in that hairy old chestnut. This is not Twitter. The Slashdot comment system allows for a bit more eloquence than the mere flinging around of one-liners.
So let me counter your Einstein with an apocryphal Eleanor Roosevelt: No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.
This also only applies to this case and not to other victims of cyber-mobs who invoke less sympathy because they in all likelyhood might be scumbags. Yet the core issue is the same.
I really despise the unreflected ricocheting of other peoples words in the vain hope that some of their fame attaches to the flinger.
Clip and compile, and brew
From the leavings of others your ragout,
Of rhetoric, pump from your embers
A few poor sparks that nobody remembers!
That is literally forgettable shit.
That is a matter of perception. Both are cause celebrees and as such will get much more attention. That is a different matter.
The real matter is that this is a pattern. And the pattern is lack of self-restraint while online. And that is a matter beyond specific events or specific people. And that is the matter that should be discussed.
Some argue that the general anonymity on the internet is what causes this lack of restraint. I would argue that while it is not the immediate cause it does facilitate unreflected behaviour. But that is not enough reason to give up our anonymity since it has its uses. I would put forward the hypothesis that egregious utterings are the product of a weak and inexperienced will and that since it is so omnipresent there propably is not much to be done about it. Although the thought of punitive action against these knob-ends in form of 20 lashings on their naked knob-ends does have its attraction. On the other hand enfocring community service might teach them some restraint without damaging their futures. The perpetrators mostly are young men and they should grow out of it once they have assumed some responsibilty and gone through the school of hard knocks that usually follows. No need to damage them any further than by removing dogs droppings and litterings for a couple of fortnights. Most of them would go blubbing to their mommies if they even had to remotely face the multi-syllabic ire they just have unleased onto themselves.
The streets would be much cleaner, too. Propably on multiple levels.
Note to self: No more Yes, Minister marathon sessions for you, bubba.
I'm not so sure. The criticisms came in the form of threats of murder and rape. I doubt the people slinging the mud know who Jane Austen was.
I also doubt this is a rabid mob of Bronte-sisters fanbois.
If I wanted to be crass and idiotic I would resort to applying a quote that has been attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt: Women are like tea bags. You never know how strong they are until you put them in hot water.
This is a crass and idiotic statement because it applies to men and women equally. So break out the popcorn and watch how the idotic seemingly adolescent 21 year old guy that got nicked will be tearfully pleading for mercy in front of a court while she who he had marked out as his victim simply stares him down. That pretty much makes my case.
How is that for hot water?
What do you refer to? Her speeches or the animosity towards her? I assume the latter though hateful as she is she never to my knowledge threatened to have anybody killed unless he was of the beard/brown persuasion. Threatening to kill her during her election campaign might not only have been crimminally discourteous but also stupidly suicidal. IIRC the Secret Service is also looking after campaigning would-be Vice Presidents.
Snarkyness is ok. Murder-death-kill-threats are never.
Threatening to kill somebody is not OK. While Criado-Perez makes it much easier to be sympathetic to her the same courtesies apply to Zimmerman. Even with gnashed teeth. While you have to keep in mind that the Martin case and all sordid little details around it has heated the discussion up quite a bit nobody has the right to kill anybody with premeditation. Actually that lynch-mob of Twatters is a bit ironic when you come to think of it.
The issue with the Criado-Perez mob is a bit different. You can't argue that you were nasty in the heat of the moment because it is very hard to show that you were that passionate about Austen making in on a 20 quid note. And it is quite, quite easy to show that their threats were made out of sheer spite and malice. This is not as easy to show in the Zimmerman mob.
After a couple of beers AND a lot of teary "documentaries" I might have joined the Zimmerman mob myself. I think that highly unlikely due to my self-restraint but definitely not impossible. But no matter how shit-faced drunk I were I would NEVER resort to threaten a woman no matter who or why with rape and murder. The line which I don't cross is quite a bit away from that.
So while both cases are similar and both cases are wrong, the culpability is a bit different. Which is why we need to remember to put "mens rea" back into our laws(even the stupid knee-jerk ones) because the spirit in which the offense was done in should reflect the punitive action.(See that kid who has been in jail for 6 months over threatening a killing spree "lol jk" before he even got his day in court)
Also a little bit of critical thinking would help to find where the different nuances in those cases. One-liners only win discussions in Hollywood. Which makes Twitter so especially pointless.
It applies to everyone. It also applies in this case.
In all fairness the discussion if this is against Twitter's TOS or not is a moot point. Threatening somebody verbally or via Twitter with death and bodily harm is an offense in most jurisdictions and should be prosecuted as such. The problem is that jurisdictions have lost all sense of proportion and forgotten about "mens rea". Although the latter is also a concept lost on our little-esteemed lawmakers.
Is it ok to sentence a particularily bad troll to a couple of hundreds of hours of community service with no prior conviction attached? Yes! Definitely! This seems appropriate in this mad mob threatening death and rape to somebody simply for wanting a woman on a bit of paper.
Is it ok to sentence a particularly egregious troll to a jail sentence but unleash him on the unwelcoming population on probation? Possibly earning him a prior conviction? Depends. The guy who posted nasty stuff on dead teenager's tribute facebook pages would qualify for this.
Is it ok to sentence a definite madman who not only threatens but also prepares to carry out his threats? I'm fairly certain we already have laws to convict somebody for threatening and preparing for murder if we can establish his intent beyond reasonable doubt. We also had those laws before Columbine(and 9/11). So no kneejerk legislation would be needed.
Is it OK to jail a kid for a couple of months before his day in court and to set his bail at a cool 500k bob with a lengthy jail-time dangling over his head to intimidate him into a very bad plea bargain? Have you gone off your rocker? It bloody well isn't!
So much for trolling. The other issue is why people think this is acceptable behaviour. It isn't If you behaved like this in meat-space and then turned up at a police station to complain about your somewhat broken nose they'd might break the other one and send you on your merry way. If you and your broken noses actually faced the guy who smacked you around for a bit in front of a judge the judge would most likely throw the whole case out because your vile behaviour was the main cause for your nose-breakage.
There is a difference between trolling just to take a dump in a discussion and actual hurtful trolling. In this case a young woman campaigned for a cause she felt passionately about but which to the most of us was a cause of supreme indifference. Yet an angry mob slapped her down in a most vile and nasty fashion. And yet we wonder why women don't participate in politics, IT, business and other areas as much as we'd hope for. That's 50% of human-kind not contributing to their fullest potential. Small wonder when the other 50% resorts to this bile or more underhanded methods. In a better world these guys would qualify for Darwin awards by not procreating. Which sometimes makes me wonder...
I really, really hope this guy who got nicked(and the sorry rest of those) gets sentenced to some humiliating community service. Or better still a place where he can actually help ease the excesses this mindset brought forward. I should be "volunteered" to assist in a womans shelter and be thrown into jail if he just as much as utters one snide remark.
This is NOT a freedom of speech issue. This is not a Twitter TOS issue. Shutting down his Twitter account is not quite sufficient. And this is not an issue for new kneejerk legislation that could potentially put him into jail for the next 5 years. But it is an issue for true punitive action. Because it is so wrong on so many levels I wouldn't even know where to stop.
This is hardly new. IIRC Huawei also had similar issues.
Worse is yet still to come. Given the extent of backdoors, data sharing and data sniffing as has been exposed during the last couple of weeks a lot of service providers in the US may suffer a similar fate. All these service providers operate on trust and trust is at an all time low.
Now all I have to say when a customer/PHB talks about "cloud" is to counter their BS bingo with "trust". And trust is easier lost than earned.
The intelligence community in the US, UK and Europe have managed to sow the seed of distrust into everything that is connected to the net. While Joe Public doesn't seem to care, those who do have to care will think twice. The new bonanza will be security/privacy technology while the clouds disperse in the corporate sector.
I too still read traditional newspapers...but not on paper.
Not owning a TV the internet is my primary news source. The most valuable publications on the internet to me are The Guardian and DER SPIEGEL. And even though those two have an excellent and supposedly selfsufficient online presence I can tell the journalistic difference. The online stuff reports mere news. The kind of stuff you can buy off Reuters, AP and other newsbrokers. They focus on speed. The print editions focus on analysis and are a bit more thorough as they can obviously spend more time in the archives. The Guardian gets pumped onto my Kindle via Amazon and even if the legendary lack of editing on The Grauniard sometimes is more than a bit aggravating it does make my daily commute a little bit retarded. DER SPIEGEL on the other hand is a weekly periodical and comes with very lengthy reports.
I do not know of an equal to it worldwide. I also try to read Die Zeit and have been known to do so for the last 20 years but it is a pure opinion piece front to back and it is as thick as your average phone book.
I've given up on Le Monde and the NZZ due to lack of time.
If you compare these newspapers to their online presence or even worse news on TV there is no better way to keep yourself informed. And there is no alternative to reading a lot of newspapers from as many countries you can do. Otherwise you might be lead to the misconception that there is such a thing as a simple truth
Well in this case it was the military. They are quite well know to howl at the moon.
Let me put it to you this way. They require you to follow orders and respect the chain of command. On the other hand the Nuremberg Defense is a thing and will land you in real hot water unless you stick to the party line and get to be tried in a military court. So you are required to follow orders and you will be in trouble if you follow orders which in hindsight prove not to be popular. Which in turn implies to require a certain level of being of two minds while doing one thing and expecting different results while doing the same thing all over.
Joining the armed forces is in my book the very core of the definition of the armed forces. Getting military training and getting out of dodge ASAP propably is the best way to serve your nation if you are interested in being capable of actual defense of the realm. And that is not the same as leaving the forces and prostitute yourself to Blackwater/G4S and other rent-a-nazi fucktard rings.
There will always be preferred customers and I suppose a lot of these reservations are made in person, face to face and way in advance.
Also this is why we can't have good things. Brainless botter suspects brainless botters to be faster than him. Honestly, his behaviour is highly anti-social, egocentric and overly obnoxious. If I where running a successful restaurant I would go to great pains to avoid people like him. the likelyhood of him annoying other patrons is just too much. Do you need another jackass who photographs his food, posts it to Tubeface, starts a loud Skype conversation discussing his food and then complaining that it is not quite as warm as he'd have hoped.
Remember: it is NOT against the law to filter out jerks. That is neither racism nor censorship. It is in fact good business sense. If you want to meet other people with a similarly bad behaviour go to McDonalds.
Nevertheless, the guy is a sleazebag. There are several pointers to this guy operating out of the basement of his mom's house and being a pure troll with no merit whatsoever to his claims:
An Arcor email address. He doesn't have his own domain and uses a consumer-level ISP issued email service.
A German owning an UK Ltd. smells. Smells of destitution. There are a couple of strings attached to a German GmbH. Prior businesses gone bust, outstanding claims and other doubts concerning his reliability will prevent him from forming one.
This guy is all noise and no brawn to back it up. If I'd run a popular EQ2 site I would ask if one of the users was a lawyer and would be willing to represent this guy with a snarky lawyerese snail-mail letter containing substantial speculation about the insubstantial size of his male member. Pro bono(which is legalese for "for the lulz").
Slashdot Mirror
In case of eSports tournaments, streamers and so on the current argument is wether they are doing enough so it could be considered a perfomance. After all the game is nothing without the player. On the other hand the art assets displayed are clearly copyrighted.
Just remember that SEGA and Nintendo JP took down a lot of YouTube videos. They generated a lot of ill will with their target audience.
You know, sometimes matters are too complex for legislation because the matter at hand has so many facets to it that you can't write a comprehensive law that has the intended effect. In too many cases the intended effect is not even stated by the legislative. That's like writing an application without specified requirements.
The whole process is so shambolic and unprofessional it beggars belief.
That propably is also one of its intended purposes. But I reckon the law will be broadly termed, as per usual, so it will catch some unintended fish in its nets.
Laws like this are usually written by lobbyists and introduced into the house by some congressman. Depending on which lobby is writing it you can assume that it will not take other interests into consideration.
Frankly the US and UK legislative has gone far beyond a joke. Some time ago I decided that it propably were best to follow whichever law makes sense and keep a low profile. Try as you may you will always be in violation of some law or provision. Best to ignore them altogether and get on with your life.
Welcome to the eSports scene.
There are a lot of unofficial tournaments for a lot of games. So that could possibly become a felony. Let alone all those YouTube Let's Plays which are also a thing.
I'm sure they intend this for video/music, but as always our lawmakers are a decade behind everybody else.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is a prime example for the overcriminalization in the US. What should be a civil case where some corp should sue a private citizen becomes a thing with a DA and a possible prison sentence.
And people wonder why prisons are overflowing...
A lot of GM detractors don't like it for legal reasons.
I have a hard time buying that one because the opposition to genetic engineering started with the Flavr Savr tomato before Monsanto even got involved, and continues to university produced GE crops like the Rainbow papaya, NGO ones like Golden Rice, and government produced ones like the wheat that CSIRO developed that Greenpeace thugs destroyed.
Also due to their patents you may get sued due to cross-pollination OR if you switch crops and yet a bit of last year's crop still grows on your fields. Which does happen.
No, it doesn't. There has not been a single instance of anyone being sued for simple cross pollination. Cross pollination then knowing and intentional selection and reproduction, yes, but not an accident. That's like saying someone got sued for accidentally receiving a DVD in the mail while conveniently neglecting the part where they were reproducing the DVD in mass quantities.
GM monster things
GM monster things? Sounds like you've got more than just legal reasons on your mind.
Nice selective quoting to completely twist what I've said.
So you are not buying that a lot of GM detractors do that for GM companies shady business practices? That would imply that all GM detractors were luddites. Well I'm not.
Also do not force me to direct you to the Monsanto entry on Wikipedia. There you can read all about them and their colourful litigation history.
I would consider court records facts and those point to Monsanto using patent law to strongarm farmers.
What you just did was shabby and frankly a bit suspicious.
If they do insist on gathering this data they should
a) make all gathered data available by request for each individual citizen
b) disclose who made use of that data and also discolse the reason for it
This level of transparency would be required to make this anywhere near OK. But their underhanded tactics they use make this very unlikely. They don't spy on US citizens(except by accident) but they do get data from the Brits who it turns out have the legal framework to spy on everyone. NSA financed the GCHQ site in Bude and has lots of staff "liaising" with the GCHQ. Which all is perfectly legal.
I wonder why there is no bigger outcry in the UK that the main selling point of the GCHQ to the NSA is the relatively lax legal framework in the UK. It is perfeclty legal, yes. But if questions have been asked about if the laws powering this festering dungheap are ok I have totally missed that. And I'm subscribed to The Guardian which would totally pick this one up.
It seems that the main discussion is happening in Germany and the US. While the biggest culprit, namely the GCHQ, has very little to fear. As always with these leaks, the US reputation isn't as damaged as everybody else's. And I totally buy into the NSA not sharing any data. But I do not buy that FISA courts are actually doing their jobs as this would require blind trust. How should I trust the integrity of secret courts? Their mere existence is a travesty in a democracy.
This is all so wrong on so many levels...
Alas, the geeks in the cubicles of the NSA/GCHQ propably don't even understand this outrage. And when you think about it, it is no mean technological feat. They managed to acquire lots of data, store it and search it. On a massive scale. That's cool and scary at the same time.
A lot of GM detractors don't like it for legal reasons. As long as Monsanto and the rest stick with their current business practices I am one of them. They don't sell their seeds, they license them. You are not allowed to keep a part of this year's crops to use in the next year. Not that that would do any good with F1 hybrids, but still. Also due to their patents you may get sued due to cross-pollination OR if you switch crops and yet a bit of last year's crop still grows on your fields. Which does happen. And you never know what kind of indigenous plants will be threatened by those GM monster things. But this also applies to conventional growing.
This process of generating meat in a lab OTOH does not release anything into the wild and could potentially solve a big problem. Until corporate greed kicks in, that is. I am aware that it will possibly take decades to make the process viable. This is only one of the first steps. I wonder in what way a bunch of lawyers will ruin it for the rest of us.
The luddite health-scare is just narrow-sighted sensationalism while ignoring the true issue.
...and I think this shouldn't have been a criminal case to begin with. He was in breach of his NDA and that's what he should have been sued for.
Surely a jury of "your peers" should understand what you do. Cases that involve technology should have juries that have some understanding of technology ...
My thoughts exactly. I shudder to think what other professions have to suffer through. Just imagine all those malpractice suits...
The only profession that seems to be fairly safe is lawyers. Go figure.
I feel physically sick every time I see my password in plain text written down somewhere that isn't an encrypted keystore. I would also have cleared my history as soon as I had seen it in a way that could be reproduced.
That's also a good password policy and that kind of Pavlovian conditioning can be quite useful.
It should have been GS suing him. He broke his NDA and that's a contract thing. Instead it was turned into a criminal offence and netted him 8 years in prison.
Yes and no. He violated his NDA. But that's hardly worth 8 years of prison. The fact that he had cleared his bash history after typing his passord for the off-site Subversion repository was given a lot of weight. Even the name "Subversion" *hushed silence* was given weight. This guy deserved some sort of punishment but not 8 years in prison. What he did shouldn't be a criminal offense. Breaking and NDA is a contractual thing and should be dealt with accordingly.
The US justice system is stupid as is specialised computer law in general.
...a jury of people who aren't smart enough to get out of jury duty.
What baffles me is the stupidity involved. First the poor sap who got jailed. I NEVER take any code with me between two gigs. I NEVER even take my personal notes with me. I tell them to change my passwords the moment I'm through the door. And I do a clean sweep on all my private equipment. While I do have my own tool kit I do inform my employers that this is mine, it will stay mine and I will never charge them to use it in whatever way they please as long as I get to keep using it myself and I give no guarantees for it. It's mostly stuff to copy and paste and example code so there is very little value to it. It is ok to take ideas and concepts with you because it is very hard not to remember those. That's called work experience. But never ever take source with you. Even if you think that it is open source. What you could do is blow the whistle that they are in breach of the OSS license in question and that's it.
The other side of the stupidity is that cleaning your bash history now is considered incriminating. If you have typed your password on the CLI and you don't clear your history then I would consider this criminal negligence. I would very much be surprised if Goldman-Sachs doesn't have a policy for this. Also if their system is such a hairball then it is very unlikely that you can directly integrate any code into another system. You propably don't even want to do so. And he didn't take the predictive stuff. So what he took with him couldn't have been more than general code involving efficient comparison of values, net code, sorting code and so on. Most of which wouldn't even be original enough to be worthy of a software patent.
While he deserved a slap on the wrist for being awefully cavalier with stuff that GS considered their property(rightfully so or not) he certainly didn't deserve 8 years in prison. If a jury can't understand the case and simply goes with the guy with the biggest words and the most expensive suit then it needs to be dismissed.
There a couple of problems I see in the US justice system:
1) DAs get elected which subjects them to a popularity contest and is a high motivator to get your name into the papers. They need to make a lot of noise and they need to get high-profile convictions that impress those who are worthy of impressing. Easy tearjerk cases for the public, specialised cases for campaign contributors.
2) DAs too often have political ambitions beyond the justice branch. This aggravates the problem in 1)
3) The practice to throw as much at a defendant as you can possibly muster makes plea-bargains a very powerful tool. You get a worst case of 136 consecutive years in prison. You get an offer to sign here and only go to prison for 8 years. Given how often plea-bargains are taken this is plain wrong. And it needs to be abolished. If you throw the phone book at a person you should be willing and able to get a conviction for all and also be willing to see it through. Either a person is guilty and deserves 136 years of prison or he is not. Willingness to go for less only demonstrates eagerness to get something but not to the full extent of the law. This practice needs to be banned. Now.
4) He didn't get a jury of his peers. I would have found him guilty of breaching his NDA and nothing more. Those bozos were all high-school graduates who never had a chance to understand a word that was said and went with a presumably flamboyant and sensationalistic prosecutor.
5) He didn't get good counsel. How a jury of high-school graduates got past the selection process we will never know. Why no real expert with practical knowledge was heard we will never know. On the one hand you have the state throwing lots of resources at one guy and on the other hand we have a private person who has not even remotely the means to match that.
The whole thing was lopsided from the start and it will always be.
Regulation is mindless and wants to be followed to the letter. To make allowances for reality and the real world they need to have a lot of supplements and exceptions and then become so complex that no living person(dead or alive) will ever grasp them completely. So you need a lot of persons to manage those regulation and thus bureaucracy was born.
The queen bee of these superfluous bureaucracies has to be the DHS. I've been subjected to what they call CVI. Take a look for yourself:
http://www.dhs.gov/training-chemical-terrorism-vulnerability-information
Take that test and tell me what it accomplishes. Tell me what the issued certificate signifies. Tell me what is achieved by requiring such a certificate. This is all silly red tape and nothing more.
On top of that it seems to be implemented with the pinnacle of low-brow web frontend technology: Oracle Application Express. It is targeted at PHBs in yet another glorious effort to get professionals out of IT and let their secretaries do the application implementing stuff. Yet I wager some clever IT consulting business charged megabucks for this particular turd. I tried to break it in all the ways I know how to break bad Apex stuff and left it whimpering in a corner.
Regulations also tend to supplant common sense more and more. Especially if non-compliance is immediately considered a felony. By now it has become uncommon sense and should be put on a list for endangered species.
I would put to you that this is quit unlikely in this case. No matter how far one would take his -or her in this case- virtual and entirely artificial persona created in order to perpetrate a potentially criminal offence one would find it increasingly difficult to have said artificial persona be nicked as a 21 year old male tosspot.
They have cuffed one of those potty mouths. Just yesterday. And they hope to reunite him with his friends quite soon. One way or the other. And in this case I do applaud the rozzers because it is my firm belief that these knob-ends do need slapping down.
But I am quite certain that people have created fake disputes with themselves. Even sent themselves threatening notes. Which would make for a rather schizophrenic day in court. Should be a laff.
There's still cavemen in 2013?
I think the current Slashdot quote is appropriate: Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. -- Albert Einstein
This particular epithet doesn't quite aply to the Zimmerman/Martin case. There is also quite some nastyness flung around in that hairy old chestnut. This is not Twitter. The Slashdot comment system allows for a bit more eloquence than the mere flinging around of one-liners.
So let me counter your Einstein with an apocryphal Eleanor Roosevelt:
No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.
This also only applies to this case and not to other victims of cyber-mobs who invoke less sympathy because they in all likelyhood might be scumbags. Yet the core issue is the same.
I really despise the unreflected ricocheting of other peoples words in the vain hope that some of their fame attaches to the flinger.
Clip and compile, and brew
From the leavings of others your ragout,
Of rhetoric, pump from your embers
A few poor sparks that nobody remembers!
That is literally forgettable shit.
That is a matter of perception. Both are cause celebrees and as such will get much more attention. That is a different matter.
The real matter is that this is a pattern. And the pattern is lack of self-restraint while online. And that is a matter beyond specific events or specific people. And that is the matter that should be discussed.
Some argue that the general anonymity on the internet is what causes this lack of restraint. I would argue that while it is not the immediate cause it does facilitate unreflected behaviour. But that is not enough reason to give up our anonymity since it has its uses. I would put forward the hypothesis that egregious utterings are the product of a weak and inexperienced will and that since it is so omnipresent there propably is not much to be done about it. Although the thought of punitive action against these knob-ends in form of 20 lashings on their naked knob-ends does have its attraction. On the other hand enfocring community service might teach them some restraint without damaging their futures. The perpetrators mostly are young men and they should grow out of it once they have assumed some responsibilty and gone through the school of hard knocks that usually follows. No need to damage them any further than by removing dogs droppings and litterings for a couple of fortnights. Most of them would go blubbing to their mommies if they even had to remotely face the multi-syllabic ire they just have unleased onto themselves.
The streets would be much cleaner, too. Propably on multiple levels.
Note to self: No more Yes, Minister marathon sessions for you, bubba.
I'm not so sure. The criticisms came in the form of threats of murder and rape. I doubt the people slinging the mud know who Jane Austen was.
I also doubt this is a rabid mob of Bronte-sisters fanbois.
If I wanted to be crass and idiotic I would resort to applying a quote that has been attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt:
Women are like tea bags. You never know how strong they are until you put them in hot water.
This is a crass and idiotic statement because it applies to men and women equally. So break out the popcorn and watch how the idotic seemingly adolescent 21 year old guy that got nicked will be tearfully pleading for mercy in front of a court while she who he had marked out as his victim simply stares him down. That pretty much makes my case.
How is that for hot water?
What do you refer to? Her speeches or the animosity towards her? I assume the latter though hateful as she is she never to my knowledge threatened to have anybody killed unless he was of the beard/brown persuasion. Threatening to kill her during her election campaign might not only have been crimminally discourteous but also stupidly suicidal. IIRC the Secret Service is also looking after campaigning would-be Vice Presidents.
Snarkyness is ok. Murder-death-kill-threats are never.
Why is this discussion even neccessary?
Threatening to kill somebody is not OK. While Criado-Perez makes it much easier to be sympathetic to her the same courtesies apply to Zimmerman. Even with gnashed teeth. While you have to keep in mind that the Martin case and all sordid little details around it has heated the discussion up quite a bit nobody has the right to kill anybody with premeditation. Actually that lynch-mob of Twatters is a bit ironic when you come to think of it.
The issue with the Criado-Perez mob is a bit different. You can't argue that you were nasty in the heat of the moment because it is very hard to show that you were that passionate about Austen making in on a 20 quid note. And it is quite, quite easy to show that their threats were made out of sheer spite and malice. This is not as easy to show in the Zimmerman mob.
After a couple of beers AND a lot of teary "documentaries" I might have joined the Zimmerman mob myself. I think that highly unlikely due to my self-restraint but definitely not impossible. But no matter how shit-faced drunk I were I would NEVER resort to threaten a woman no matter who or why with rape and murder. The line which I don't cross is quite a bit away from that.
So while both cases are similar and both cases are wrong, the culpability is a bit different. Which is why we need to remember to put "mens rea" back into our laws(even the stupid knee-jerk ones) because the spirit in which the offense was done in should reflect the punitive action.(See that kid who has been in jail for 6 months over threatening a killing spree "lol jk" before he even got his day in court)
Also a little bit of critical thinking would help to find where the different nuances in those cases. One-liners only win discussions in Hollywood. Which makes Twitter so especially pointless.
As long as it apples to everyone. http://twitchy.com/2013/07/13/twitter-lynch-mob-threatens-to-kill-george-zimmerman/
It applies to everyone. It also applies in this case.
In all fairness the discussion if this is against Twitter's TOS or not is a moot point. Threatening somebody verbally or via Twitter with death and bodily harm is an offense in most jurisdictions and should be prosecuted as such. The problem is that jurisdictions have lost all sense of proportion and forgotten about "mens rea". Although the latter is also a concept lost on our little-esteemed lawmakers.
Is it ok to sentence a particularily bad troll to a couple of hundreds of hours of community service with no prior conviction attached? Yes! Definitely! This seems appropriate in this mad mob threatening death and rape to somebody simply for wanting a woman on a bit of paper.
Is it ok to sentence a particularly egregious troll to a jail sentence but unleash him on the unwelcoming population on probation? Possibly earning him a prior conviction? Depends. The guy who posted nasty stuff on dead teenager's tribute facebook pages would qualify for this.
Is it ok to sentence a definite madman who not only threatens but also prepares to carry out his threats? I'm fairly certain we already have laws to convict somebody for threatening and preparing for murder if we can establish his intent beyond reasonable doubt. We also had those laws before Columbine(and 9/11). So no kneejerk legislation would be needed.
Is it OK to jail a kid for a couple of months before his day in court and to set his bail at a cool 500k bob with a lengthy jail-time dangling over his head to intimidate him into a very bad plea bargain? Have you gone off your rocker? It bloody well isn't!
So much for trolling. The other issue is why people think this is acceptable behaviour. It isn't If you behaved like this in meat-space and then turned up at a police station to complain about your somewhat broken nose they'd might break the other one and send you on your merry way. If you and your broken noses actually faced the guy who smacked you around for a bit in front of a judge the judge would most likely throw the whole case out because your vile behaviour was the main cause for your nose-breakage.
There is a difference between trolling just to take a dump in a discussion and actual hurtful trolling. In this case a young woman campaigned for a cause she felt passionately about but which to the most of us was a cause of supreme indifference. Yet an angry mob slapped her down in a most vile and nasty fashion. And yet we wonder why women don't participate in politics, IT, business and other areas as much as we'd hope for. That's 50% of human-kind not contributing to their fullest potential. Small wonder when the other 50% resorts to this bile or more underhanded methods. In a better world these guys would qualify for Darwin awards by not procreating. Which sometimes makes me wonder...
I really, really hope this guy who got nicked(and the sorry rest of those) gets sentenced to some humiliating community service. Or better still a place where he can actually help ease the excesses this mindset brought forward. I should be "volunteered" to assist in a womans shelter and be thrown into jail if he just as much as utters one snide remark.
This is NOT a freedom of speech issue. This is not a Twitter TOS issue. Shutting down his Twitter account is not quite sufficient. And this is not an issue for new kneejerk legislation that could potentially put him into jail for the next 5 years. But it is an issue for true punitive action. Because it is so wrong on so many levels I wouldn't even know where to stop.
This is hardly new. IIRC Huawei also had similar issues.
Worse is yet still to come. Given the extent of backdoors, data sharing and data sniffing as has been exposed during the last couple of weeks a lot of service providers in the US may suffer a similar fate. All these service providers operate on trust and trust is at an all time low.
Now all I have to say when a customer/PHB talks about "cloud" is to counter their BS bingo with "trust". And trust is easier lost than earned.
The intelligence community in the US, UK and Europe have managed to sow the seed of distrust into everything that is connected to the net. While Joe Public doesn't seem to care, those who do have to care will think twice. The new bonanza will be security/privacy technology while the clouds disperse in the corporate sector.
I too still read traditional newspapers...but not on paper.
Not owning a TV the internet is my primary news source. The most valuable publications on the internet to me are The Guardian and DER SPIEGEL. And even though those two have an excellent and supposedly selfsufficient online presence I can tell the journalistic difference. The online stuff reports mere news. The kind of stuff you can buy off Reuters, AP and other newsbrokers. They focus on speed. The print editions focus on analysis and are a bit more thorough as they can obviously spend more time in the archives. The Guardian gets pumped onto my Kindle via Amazon and even if the legendary lack of editing on The Grauniard sometimes is more than a bit aggravating it does make my daily commute a little bit retarded. DER SPIEGEL on the other hand is a weekly periodical and comes with very lengthy reports. I do not know of an equal to it worldwide. I also try to read Die Zeit and have been known to do so for the last 20 years but it is a pure opinion piece front to back and it is as thick as your average phone book.
I've given up on Le Monde and the NZZ due to lack of time.
If you compare these newspapers to their online presence or even worse news on TV there is no better way to keep yourself informed. And there is no alternative to reading a lot of newspapers from as many countries you can do. Otherwise you might be lead to the misconception that there is such a thing as a simple truth
Well in this case it was the military. They are quite well know to howl at the moon.
Let me put it to you this way. They require you to follow orders and respect the chain of command. On the other hand the Nuremberg Defense is a thing and will land you in real hot water unless you stick to the party line and get to be tried in a military court. So you are required to follow orders and you will be in trouble if you follow orders which in hindsight prove not to be popular. Which in turn implies to require a certain level of being of two minds while doing one thing and expecting different results while doing the same thing all over.
Joining the armed forces is in my book the very core of the definition of the armed forces. Getting military training and getting out of dodge ASAP propably is the best way to serve your nation if you are interested in being capable of actual defense of the realm. And that is not the same as leaving the forces and prostitute yourself to Blackwater/G4S and other rent-a-nazi fucktard rings.
There will always be preferred customers and I suppose a lot of these reservations are made in person, face to face and way in advance.
Also this is why we can't have good things. Brainless botter suspects brainless botters to be faster than him. Honestly, his behaviour is highly anti-social, egocentric and overly obnoxious. If I where running a successful restaurant I would go to great pains to avoid people like him. the likelyhood of him annoying other patrons is just too much. Do you need another jackass who photographs his food, posts it to Tubeface, starts a loud Skype conversation discussing his food and then complaining that it is not quite as warm as he'd have hoped.
Remember: it is NOT against the law to filter out jerks. That is neither racism nor censorship. It is in fact good business sense. If you want to meet other people with a similarly bad behaviour go to McDonalds.
Goddamn hipster.
Nevertheless, the guy is a sleazebag. There are several pointers to this guy operating out of the basement of his mom's house and being a pure troll with no merit whatsoever to his claims:
An Arcor email address. He doesn't have his own domain and uses a consumer-level ISP issued email service.
A German owning an UK Ltd. smells. Smells of destitution. There are a couple of strings attached to a German GmbH. Prior businesses gone bust, outstanding claims and other doubts concerning his reliability will prevent him from forming one.
This guy is all noise and no brawn to back it up. If I'd run a popular EQ2 site I would ask if one of the users was a lawyer and would be willing to represent this guy with a snarky lawyerese snail-mail letter containing substantial speculation about the insubstantial size of his male member. Pro bono(which is legalese for "for the lulz").