I'll preface this by saying I generally support Wikileaks, although I quite accept that some criticisms of their operation are reasonable.
If Assange really believes that his goal is to help the American people deal with a govt that supposedly is no longer responsive to their needs, how does it help the American people to publish a list of sensitive infrastructure sites?
I thought their stated goal was to provide a secure and anonymous means for secret data to be published, with the secondary aim of ensuring it is not only published but widely reported. The impression I've been given is that they do not discriminate on what information they will take (although there is some inherent bias in courting different amounts of 'publicity' for different stories).
How does it help to embarrass key allies?
I guess one could call the embarrassment 'collateral damage', a necessary evil in exposing corruption. I'm not sure that I entirely believe that argument, though - I'm more on the fence about these latest releases than I was about the war documents, but I can't think of any reasonable way for Wikileaks to selectively censor without compromising their very ideals.
How does it help to threaten the US State Department - the representatives of the American people to the world, staffed by dedicated career diplomats - with a full un-redacted dump?
That's entirely understandable self-defence. Obviously if you don't think the cables should've been released at all then you won't agree with that policy, but within the Wikileaks mindset that radical transparency is a good thing it is reasonable to have a backup policy in place; the fact that they're un-redacted is a necessity of time.
If they want war with the American people, then don't expect to have the rights and privileges they enjoy - in this case, their banking system.
These are amoral global companies with no particular national loyalty. Talking about 'war with the American people' and proudly calling these companies American is just using shallow feel-good nationalism in place of reasoned debate. Not to mention the fact that even if you do insist on ascribing nationality to these impersonal global entities, one of the banks was Swiss, and caved under US pressure.
I like Wikileaks in principle, but Assange is an egomaniacal narcissist that has corrupted it at it's inception.
I agree that Assange is a bit of a drama queen, but I'm wondering in what sense you do like Wikileaks - you think they should self-censor, but on what impartial criteria do you suggest they do so? Most information kept secret by the government is done so to protect someone's interests; who gets to decide which interests should be protected?
They may well be able to have Apple's policy overturned by a European court. It's not like they could file a case on the basis that "they'd probably reject us if we applied", thus they sent their app in and now have solid evidence of rejection to show the court.
Of course, it may also just be publicity hunting, but simply knowing beforehand that they would be rejected isn't anything to hold against them.
I'm really not intending to push any particular ideology (given the choice I'll take the impersonal city, even with its problems), and (according to Google) I'm using both words correctly. If you think they make the post sound biased, replace them with "greater urban population" and "greater corporate power" - both factual descriptions from the data I can see.
I put forward a (IMO reasonable) hypothesis on why these changes can lead to a lowered sense of personal responsibility - pick on the logic, if you think it's flawed, not the language.
Since I wasn't around in the 'old days' (for any reasonable definition of the term, anyway), I can't comment first-hand, but I'd theorise that the changes are based on urbanisation and corporatisation destroying the small community groups that people used to inhabit. If your action has a negative consequence to you personally, or someone you know, that obviously serves as a disincentive - basically, a person only has a direct incentive to be considerate if their actions are likely to affect someone within their 'monkeysphere'. It used to be the case that most of the people you regularly interacted with had some level of connection to you personally, so no problem there. In general, people don't immediately default to 'asshat' as soon as they think nobody they know is watching (although there are exceptions), but there's a secondary driving factor: this level of disaffection doesn't just appear spontaneously, it's engendered by the fact that those who shape the society we do live in do so in a largely impersonal manner - when the organisations we deal with every day don't care about whether they're screwing us over, it tends to rub off. People are left with no disincentive against bad behaviour, and little incentive for good behaviour. I'm not saying this excuses the people being asshats, of course, but it does provide some reasonable explanation of "what the hell happened to us" (which was quite possible meant to be rhetorical, but anyway...).
It's not all bad, though. The flipside is that the socially-enforced conformism of small communities is much more conducive to discrimination, repression of the 'out group', and ostracism of those who fail to follow the (often unwritten and/or illogical) 'rules'. Small communities protect the status quo, for better or worse. Whether it's a worthwhile trade off is a matter of personal opinion.
Google is failing me, and it was a while ago that I heard this one, but I kinda hope it's true; the story goes that a cable company, tired of hackers getting free service, started pushing out weekly updates that disabled the hackers' workarounds. This went on for some time, the hackers having to use increasingly convoluted measures to get around the latest updates, but always succeeding relatively quickly. After a while the boxes stop working altogether, and the company points out that they fully expected each week's update to be circumvented, but that they were designed in such a way that the cumulative workarounds disabled the box altogether.
It certainly has a bit of an urban legend sound to it now that I come to retell it, though...
That's probably not how the insurance company sees it. There's every likelihood that the landlord was covered against 'damage by tenant', but not 'seizure by government'.
Frankly, I am tired of everyone wanting to be a gov't welfare case.
In general: the system's broken, it'd be naive to expect people not to take advantage. That said, I really don't think that's applicable here - market value reimbursement for seized property is hardly welfare.
No it isn't. The closest thing I could find to an explanation was this Reuters article, and even that isn't much to go on. Both mention that the guy is "anxious to tell his side of the story", though. It'll be pretty interesting to see what he comes out with.
Also of interest is the fact that, according to Yahoo, "The home has been declared a public nuisance and therefore the county does not have to reimburse the owners, who were renting the house to Jakubec."
If I hadn't already posted, I'd give you all my mod points for the next month! I sincerely hope that most companies (and governmental organisations) realise the wisdom in this line of thinking.
Although superficially logical, I dislike this attitude. Relaxed, happy workers are generally more productive and of greater value to the company - showing them respect (and giving them the chance to blow off a little steam) by simply stating that they must maintain an acceptable level of productivity (hard to quantify, I know, but decent management should be able to roughly gauge how much work someone's getting done) is likely to work a lot better in the long run. Basic rules about illegal downloading and the like should obviously be in place, and if an employee is messing about online to the extent that it's detrimental to their work then of course disciplinary measures are in order, but telling your workers exactly how they must behave breeds resentment - telling them what they have to achieve and leaving it up to them to decide how to do so is a far more sensible tactic.
Even if there is something to hide (and let's face it, there always will be - that's not necessarily a bad thing), it surprises me that the government wants their potential employees to be less informed than the general public. The cat is out of the bag, surely it makes more sense to inform oneself as much as possible rather than looking for the earplugs and humming loudly.
Just out of interest, how does having an area code from one place affect your use of the phone in another? I know US mobile phones have geographic area codes (as opposed to the UK ones which have a specific '07' area code prefix signifying mobile) but I thought it was just for administrative convenience?
It is determined by supply and demand, what the market will bare, and what competitors are charging.
Yes, and articles like this do an excellent job of informing the customers, thus altering what the market will bare and altering the price. Although setting the price of a commodity (and any unit of data within a given carrier's network is identical, even if data service in general is not precisely so) based on who's buying it and for what purpose might increase profits for a while, but it hurts the brand image once customers start finding out - that's a big part of the free market too.
If we start getting into telling businesses what to charge, according to OUR ideas of what is fair, well, that isn't capitalism.
Enforcing it by law isn't capitalism, but I don't see anyone suggesting that. Demanding it as customers is entirely reasonable - the companies don't have to listen, of course, but then the customer can follow your advice and change carrier.
Assuming the organisation is being treated exactly the same as a secular one, I don't see the issue. In the same way that religion should get no special benefits (I know that religious groups do get some benefits over similar secular ones, and I'm strongly against that), it equally shouldn't be singled out as 'untouchable' by community funding.
Assuming the organisation is being treated exactly the same as a secular one, I don't see the issue. In the same way that religion should get no special benefits (I know that religious groups do get some benefits over similar secular ones, and I'm strongly against that), it equally shouldn't be singled out as 'untouchable' by community funding.
Apparently the next big release will cause scandal and humiliation in major banks, and it's killing me that the release of such information could depend on Assange's life.
I'd be almost certain that there are others in the organisation with access to the data and instructions to release it in the event of his death. Hell, the fact that they made a public show of releasing the 'insurance' file was pretty much a way of saying "attacking us directly will be dangerous" - an organisation that takes that view is unlikely to have any of its data resting on only one person.
I think killing him really would make him a martyr to the cause. One of the things very much in his favour is that anything that happens now will be viewed with suspicion - even if the rape allegations are, in fact, 100% true, there are plenty of people who will always believe it was a scheme to discredit him (which, again, may well be the case - that's why it's so compelling).
I'd say the easiest form of attack at this stage would be to provide realistic (but untrue) data to the site, wait for it to be released in a storm of publicity, and then show it to be false - even that has flaws, but it would go some way to discrediting the other information they provide. Not that I want to see that happen, but it seems worthwhile to speculate on what he might be up against.
Neither the article or the one subsequently linked from there mentions that, but I guess I stand corrected. Looks like everybody's trying to spin it a as a victory for the DMCA, with their own bias one way or the other, and more or less ignoring the actual case.
I suppose most of what I said is still generally applicable, but this case is not the place to argue it.
You miss the key point: there was no contract, these were prepaid handsets from Tracfone. If he'd signed anything saying that he would use only their service, or would pay them a certain amount per month, or whatever, then this would be a simple breach of contract case and there wouldn't be a problem.
I agree that the law should enforce your hypothetical contract, and that's how most carriers do it, but do you really think the law should protect the subsidising company when nothing was signed and no agreement was made?
Actually it's much more akin to selling your unencrypted backup alongside the original disc. Selling the backup without the original disc would be a clear violation because you're selling a copy while retaining the original, at which point the copy ceases to be defined as a backup.
As a separate issue, it seems to me dubious whether this should come under copyright law at all. The 'anti-circumvention' measures here aren't to prevent you from copying the software, but to prevent you from using it in a particular way. Whether that is a legitimate use of the DMCA can very reasonably be brought into question.
You cross the line when you do such things for profit vs. for yourself. Buy doing this for profit and in bulk he is abusing one companies business model to create his own.
Last I checked it wasn't the court's job to prop up business models. He was unlocking phones that he owned. If Tracfone didn't want him to do so, they should've made him sign a contract - as they didn't, their business model was nothing more than a gamble, and he called them on it.
Jail Breaking your iPhone which you paid for either full price or after paying a termination fee, to go on a different network is up to you. But selling that phone is the problem.
Again, why? Even the carriers don't mind this - that's what the contract's there for in the first place, to ensure the subsidy is paid. Once that's done you can resell it, keep using it, or bury it under a small mound in the garden for all they care. The reason Tracfone is getting so pissy is that they didn't bother with a contract, and now they're trying to leverage the law into protecting their subsidy instead.
He owned the phones. He chose to unlock them. He then sold the phones. Sure, Tracfone got screwed over in the process, but if they'd wanted to retain control over the phones after the sale then a simple contract would do the job quite easily - just a little 'sign here' after a few lines about only using the handset to access Tracfone approved services.
He was running his business to the letter of the law. Tracfone was running theirs on a gamble that the subsidised phones would pay for themselves. Majed owned the phones and was well within his rights to do what he liked with them - dump them in the ocean, if he wanted - with no regard to repaying Tracfone's subsidy; if they'd wanted the terms to be different, a simple contract at the time of sale would've solved all their problems (and made Majed's business immediately untenable by virtue of breaching that contract).
Slashdot Mirror
I'll preface this by saying I generally support Wikileaks, although I quite accept that some criticisms of their operation are reasonable.
If Assange really believes that his goal is to help the American people deal with a govt that supposedly is no longer responsive to their needs, how does it help the American people to publish a list of sensitive infrastructure sites?
I thought their stated goal was to provide a secure and anonymous means for secret data to be published, with the secondary aim of ensuring it is not only published but widely reported. The impression I've been given is that they do not discriminate on what information they will take (although there is some inherent bias in courting different amounts of 'publicity' for different stories).
How does it help to embarrass key allies?
I guess one could call the embarrassment 'collateral damage', a necessary evil in exposing corruption. I'm not sure that I entirely believe that argument, though - I'm more on the fence about these latest releases than I was about the war documents, but I can't think of any reasonable way for Wikileaks to selectively censor without compromising their very ideals.
How does it help to threaten the US State Department - the representatives of the American people to the world, staffed by dedicated career diplomats - with a full un-redacted dump?
That's entirely understandable self-defence. Obviously if you don't think the cables should've been released at all then you won't agree with that policy, but within the Wikileaks mindset that radical transparency is a good thing it is reasonable to have a backup policy in place; the fact that they're un-redacted is a necessity of time.
If they want war with the American people, then don't expect to have the rights and privileges they enjoy - in this case, their banking system.
These are amoral global companies with no particular national loyalty. Talking about 'war with the American people' and proudly calling these companies American is just using shallow feel-good nationalism in place of reasoned debate. Not to mention the fact that even if you do insist on ascribing nationality to these impersonal global entities, one of the banks was Swiss, and caved under US pressure.
I like Wikileaks in principle, but Assange is an egomaniacal narcissist that has corrupted it at it's inception.
I agree that Assange is a bit of a drama queen, but I'm wondering in what sense you do like Wikileaks - you think they should self-censor, but on what impartial criteria do you suggest they do so? Most information kept secret by the government is done so to protect someone's interests; who gets to decide which interests should be protected?
They may well be able to have Apple's policy overturned by a European court. It's not like they could file a case on the basis that "they'd probably reject us if we applied", thus they sent their app in and now have solid evidence of rejection to show the court.
Of course, it may also just be publicity hunting, but simply knowing beforehand that they would be rejected isn't anything to hold against them.
I'm really not intending to push any particular ideology (given the choice I'll take the impersonal city, even with its problems), and (according to Google) I'm using both words correctly. If you think they make the post sound biased, replace them with "greater urban population" and "greater corporate power" - both factual descriptions from the data I can see.
I put forward a (IMO reasonable) hypothesis on why these changes can lead to a lowered sense of personal responsibility - pick on the logic, if you think it's flawed, not the language.
Since I wasn't around in the 'old days' (for any reasonable definition of the term, anyway), I can't comment first-hand, but I'd theorise that the changes are based on urbanisation and corporatisation destroying the small community groups that people used to inhabit. If your action has a negative consequence to you personally, or someone you know, that obviously serves as a disincentive - basically, a person only has a direct incentive to be considerate if their actions are likely to affect someone within their 'monkeysphere'. It used to be the case that most of the people you regularly interacted with had some level of connection to you personally, so no problem there. In general, people don't immediately default to 'asshat' as soon as they think nobody they know is watching (although there are exceptions), but there's a secondary driving factor: this level of disaffection doesn't just appear spontaneously, it's engendered by the fact that those who shape the society we do live in do so in a largely impersonal manner - when the organisations we deal with every day don't care about whether they're screwing us over, it tends to rub off. People are left with no disincentive against bad behaviour, and little incentive for good behaviour. I'm not saying this excuses the people being asshats, of course, but it does provide some reasonable explanation of "what the hell happened to us" (which was quite possible meant to be rhetorical, but anyway...).
It's not all bad, though. The flipside is that the socially-enforced conformism of small communities is much more conducive to discrimination, repression of the 'out group', and ostracism of those who fail to follow the (often unwritten and/or illogical) 'rules'. Small communities protect the status quo, for better or worse. Whether it's a worthwhile trade off is a matter of personal opinion.
Google is failing me, and it was a while ago that I heard this one, but I kinda hope it's true; the story goes that a cable company, tired of hackers getting free service, started pushing out weekly updates that disabled the hackers' workarounds. This went on for some time, the hackers having to use increasingly convoluted measures to get around the latest updates, but always succeeding relatively quickly. After a while the boxes stop working altogether, and the company points out that they fully expected each week's update to be circumvented, but that they were designed in such a way that the cumulative workarounds disabled the box altogether.
It certainly has a bit of an urban legend sound to it now that I come to retell it, though...
The tenant did the destruction.
That's probably not how the insurance company sees it. There's every likelihood that the landlord was covered against 'damage by tenant', but not 'seizure by government'.
Frankly, I am tired of everyone wanting to be a gov't welfare case.
In general: the system's broken, it'd be naive to expect people not to take advantage. That said, I really don't think that's applicable here - market value reimbursement for seized property is hardly welfare.
Are you serious? The tenant is responsible, the landlord did nothing wrong.
No it isn't. The closest thing I could find to an explanation was this Reuters article, and even that isn't much to go on. Both mention that the guy is "anxious to tell his side of the story", though. It'll be pretty interesting to see what he comes out with.
Also of interest is the fact that, according to Yahoo, "The home has been declared a public nuisance and therefore the county does not have to reimburse the owners, who were renting the house to Jakubec."
If I hadn't already posted, I'd give you all my mod points for the next month! I sincerely hope that most companies (and governmental organisations) realise the wisdom in this line of thinking.
Although superficially logical, I dislike this attitude. Relaxed, happy workers are generally more productive and of greater value to the company - showing them respect (and giving them the chance to blow off a little steam) by simply stating that they must maintain an acceptable level of productivity (hard to quantify, I know, but decent management should be able to roughly gauge how much work someone's getting done) is likely to work a lot better in the long run. Basic rules about illegal downloading and the like should obviously be in place, and if an employee is messing about online to the extent that it's detrimental to their work then of course disciplinary measures are in order, but telling your workers exactly how they must behave breeds resentment - telling them what they have to achieve and leaving it up to them to decide how to do so is a far more sensible tactic.
Even if there is something to hide (and let's face it, there always will be - that's not necessarily a bad thing), it surprises me that the government wants their potential employees to be less informed than the general public. The cat is out of the bag, surely it makes more sense to inform oneself as much as possible rather than looking for the earplugs and humming loudly.
Because the government has tried to use it on us many times - throwing it back at them is just a way of helping to show their hypocrisy.
Just out of interest, how does having an area code from one place affect your use of the phone in another? I know US mobile phones have geographic area codes (as opposed to the UK ones which have a specific '07' area code prefix signifying mobile) but I thought it was just for administrative convenience?
It is determined by supply and demand, what the market will bare, and what competitors are charging.
Yes, and articles like this do an excellent job of informing the customers, thus altering what the market will bare and altering the price. Although setting the price of a commodity (and any unit of data within a given carrier's network is identical, even if data service in general is not precisely so) based on who's buying it and for what purpose might increase profits for a while, but it hurts the brand image once customers start finding out - that's a big part of the free market too.
If we start getting into telling businesses what to charge, according to OUR ideas of what is fair, well, that isn't capitalism.
Enforcing it by law isn't capitalism, but I don't see anyone suggesting that. Demanding it as customers is entirely reasonable - the companies don't have to listen, of course, but then the customer can follow your advice and change carrier.
Assuming the organisation is being treated exactly the same as a secular one, I don't see the issue. In the same way that religion should get no special benefits (I know that religious groups do get some benefits over similar secular ones, and I'm strongly against that), it equally shouldn't be singled out as 'untouchable' by community funding.
To quote myself from slightly further up:
Assuming the organisation is being treated exactly the same as a secular one, I don't see the issue. In the same way that religion should get no special benefits (I know that religious groups do get some benefits over similar secular ones, and I'm strongly against that), it equally shouldn't be singled out as 'untouchable' by community funding.
Apparently the next big release will cause scandal and humiliation in major banks, and it's killing me that the release of such information could depend on Assange's life.
I'd be almost certain that there are others in the organisation with access to the data and instructions to release it in the event of his death. Hell, the fact that they made a public show of releasing the 'insurance' file was pretty much a way of saying "attacking us directly will be dangerous" - an organisation that takes that view is unlikely to have any of its data resting on only one person.
I think killing him really would make him a martyr to the cause. One of the things very much in his favour is that anything that happens now will be viewed with suspicion - even if the rape allegations are, in fact, 100% true, there are plenty of people who will always believe it was a scheme to discredit him (which, again, may well be the case - that's why it's so compelling).
I'd say the easiest form of attack at this stage would be to provide realistic (but untrue) data to the site, wait for it to be released in a storm of publicity, and then show it to be false - even that has flaws, but it would go some way to discrediting the other information they provide. Not that I want to see that happen, but it seems worthwhile to speculate on what he might be up against.
*facepalm*
Neither the article or the one subsequently linked from there mentions that, but I guess I stand corrected. Looks like everybody's trying to spin it a as a victory for the DMCA, with their own bias one way or the other, and more or less ignoring the actual case.
I suppose most of what I said is still generally applicable, but this case is not the place to argue it.
You miss the key point: there was no contract, these were prepaid handsets from Tracfone. If he'd signed anything saying that he would use only their service, or would pay them a certain amount per month, or whatever, then this would be a simple breach of contract case and there wouldn't be a problem.
I agree that the law should enforce your hypothetical contract, and that's how most carriers do it, but do you really think the law should protect the subsidising company when nothing was signed and no agreement was made?
Actually it's much more akin to selling your unencrypted backup alongside the original disc. Selling the backup without the original disc would be a clear violation because you're selling a copy while retaining the original, at which point the copy ceases to be defined as a backup.
As a separate issue, it seems to me dubious whether this should come under copyright law at all. The 'anti-circumvention' measures here aren't to prevent you from copying the software, but to prevent you from using it in a particular way. Whether that is a legitimate use of the DMCA can very reasonably be brought into question.
Interesting. Any chance of a link?
You cross the line when you do such things for profit vs. for yourself. Buy doing this for profit and in bulk he is abusing one companies business model to create his own.
Last I checked it wasn't the court's job to prop up business models. He was unlocking phones that he owned. If Tracfone didn't want him to do so, they should've made him sign a contract - as they didn't, their business model was nothing more than a gamble, and he called them on it.
Jail Breaking your iPhone which you paid for either full price or after paying a termination fee, to go on a different network is up to you. But selling that phone is the problem.
Again, why? Even the carriers don't mind this - that's what the contract's there for in the first place, to ensure the subsidy is paid. Once that's done you can resell it, keep using it, or bury it under a small mound in the garden for all they care. The reason Tracfone is getting so pissy is that they didn't bother with a contract, and now they're trying to leverage the law into protecting their subsidy instead.
Why?
He owned the phones. He chose to unlock them. He then sold the phones. Sure, Tracfone got screwed over in the process, but if they'd wanted to retain control over the phones after the sale then a simple contract would do the job quite easily - just a little 'sign here' after a few lines about only using the handset to access Tracfone approved services.
He was running his business to the letter of the law. Tracfone was running theirs on a gamble that the subsidised phones would pay for themselves. Majed owned the phones and was well within his rights to do what he liked with them - dump them in the ocean, if he wanted - with no regard to repaying Tracfone's subsidy; if they'd wanted the terms to be different, a simple contract at the time of sale would've solved all their problems (and made Majed's business immediately untenable by virtue of breaching that contract).
These are prepaid phones. No contract signed, no fraud.