... with Bluetooth a cell phone can... be made smaller and just stay in the pocket... not have an ear piece or mouth piece. And have it come with a Bluetooth head set.
Great. Then when the obnoxious guy next to you in the restaurant, airplane, or [wherever you can't escape] starts talking loudly on his cell phone, at least you can hear BOTH sides of the conversation.
gun companies held responsible for crimes committed by their customers
If you'd said "gun companies held responsible for crimes committed using their products" you'd have been dead on.
But PLEASE let's not talk about "their customers" in this context.
- MOST of the guns legally obtained from gun companies and the legal distribution network are NEVER used for crime.
- MOST of the guns used in crime have been transferred at least once through an illegal channel (typically stolen and/or bought on the black market - often from a cop who lifted it from an evidence locker), so the misuser is NOT a customer of the gun manufacturer.
Crimes committed using automatic weapons differ greatly from pirated movies/music being transferred via P2P. Stop using that comparison.
Since the issue is whether the maker of a product or service that is misused by a lawbreaker is legally liable for the damage caused by the lawbreaker's misuse, the cases are exactly equivalent.
The nature of the damages doesn't alter the nature of the issue. It only changes the amount and type of liability that is assigned to the maker.
Once a precedent is established which destroys the principle that the lawbreaker is liable and the maker of a misused tool is not, its application is easily extended from one tool to others.
You can't lose a little of your virginity. Neither can the legal system.
If the court holds technology companies liable for how their customers use the tech companies' products, then couldn't the same liability apply to gun manufacturers?
That works both ways:
"If the court holds gun manufacturers liable for how their customers use the tech companies' products, then couldn't the same liability apply to tech companies?"
Yep.
Think about than the next time you're considering suporting an organization that supports such litigation.
If companies are responsible for their customers... then most weapons manufacturers must be considered to be criminal organisations.
Since most guns are NOT used in crime, and most of the guns that ARE used in crime are NOT purchased by the crook from gun companies or through normal and legal distribution channels, your statement is incorrect.
Ok this one could involve killing, but only in retaliation.
If it involves killing in retaliation, you're doing it wrong. Self-defense involves attempting to stop an attack. If you then hold the perpetrator you've crossed the line into citizen's arrest - part of law enforcement. If you hunt him down and shoot him after he runs, or shoot him once he's stopped attacking and threatening, you've crossed another line into vigilantism.
Usually you can stop an attack by drawing and aiming the gun. (Crooks are often stupid but most aren't SO stupid as to keep attacking once they're on the wrong end of a gun. But some are.)
If you DO have to shoot, you shoot to stop the attack - which means to disable him in the most effective way - which usually means shooting for core body (sometimes head) rather than trying to wing him. (Indeed, shooting to wing him is evidence that you WEREN'T in immediate fear for life or limb, which means you WEREN'T justified in using deadly force.) Once the attack is stopped, you are generally NO LONGER JUSTIFIED in firing again (YMMV depending on jurisdiction).
If you shot at him and hit him badly enough to stop an ongoing attack, maybe one in four he dies as a result. This is an unfortunate side effect. But HE's the one who chose to put both your lives at risk - you were just keeping yours intact, which is your right.
Unfortunately, human bodies are sturdy, so disabling them in mid-attack often means doing enough damage to bring on a total system crash. "Non-lethal" (now renamed "less-lethal") weapons have been tried, but so far they also remain "less effective" at the primary purpose. Until until someone invents phasers with a "stun" setting, a pistol remains the most effective way to stop an ongoing attack.
On the otherhand, the copies of MyDoom that have been pummelling my mail server since the start ceased entirely just after 01:00 GMT this morning, yet normal email continues to flow... Coincidence, or is there more to this story than just a hoax or confusion?
Mydoom, like several previous spam-forwarder viruses and/or worms, is reported to have a spread-shutdown date.
The claim is (if I read the fish babble correctly) that they were turned on to SCO by tracking the initial spread of the virus to SCO as an early focus.
Others are already suggesting that the DoS on SCO is a red herring by the spammers - playing a game of "let's you and him fight" between two of their enemies: The anti-virus people (mainly commercial and law enforcement) and the anti-spammers (expert users and sysadmins, high cross-membership with the open source community).
The worm's structure is consistent with this. It is a spam-forwarder and backdoor installer, of a similar form to earlier spam tools (including function shutdown dates). And the DoS is relatively low-intensity (one ding per second per zombie), which is consistent with not screwing up the spam forwarder by consuming too many of its resources in a DoS attack.
If the DoS on SCO IS a red-herring, doing an initial release by mailing a few copies to SCO and maybe Microsoft (so it spreads from there and gets them blamed) is also consistent: Further social engineering to escalate the distraction.
If this is true, you'd have to examine SCO's mail logs to find the next step closer to the real source. (And infecting SCO would even let you use the backdoor to plant more inciminating evidence on them.)
Nevertheless, it IS in SCO's interest to be perceived as a target. And it can also give them an excuse to take down systems with evidence weakening their case. So taking a known spam virus and hacking it into this form is also consistent with the "attack yourself and blame your opponent" model. So it will be ineteresting to see if there's anything behind the rumor. B-)
Indian giver: a person who gives something to another and then takes it back or expects an equivalent in return.
The term "indian giver" is the result of a misunderstanding of the property law of an east-coast tribe, early in the settlement of former Europeans in North America.
Short form: The colonists thought they were buying the land. The Indians thought they were leasing it, with anual rent payments and lease renewals.
Needless to say, this led to considerable confusion and indignation when the indians came back for the next year's lease negotiations.
The colonists won. The winners get to write the history. The authors of the history get to embed their propaganda from the conflict (such as the term "indian giver") in future generation's language.
remember the judge wont be deciding anything. its the jury
But the judge WILL decide if it's admissable, and the jury is instructed to ignore it (or shielded from even hearing about it) if it's not.
Fortunately, digital signatures were explicitly designed for proving authorship in the digital world of generally untracable bits, and governments, including both the executive (by regs) and legislative (by law) branches of the Fed, are moving to make them legal proof. (See SEAL, E-SIGN, Millennium Digital Commerce Act, etc.) They're already recognized by Utah (not that it matters in a federal court...)
Since this is a civil case, where the standard is a "preponderance of evidence", and the signatures are being introduced by the defense, I'd be surprised if the judge excludes such evidence. (Think about it - what non-digital evidence is there of ANYTHING related to the case?)
If there is no direction from law or precedent, I'd expect him to let it in and let the experts from both sides argue the difficulties of forgery.
(IANAL, your mileage may vary, take this with a grain of salt, etc.)
It does seem odd that the worm has a trigger to stop spreading on Feb 12. If SCO were to unleash a self-attacking worm, wouldn't they likely include such a provision?
There has been a series of spam forwarder viruses published, each with a stop-spreading date and one or more further self-destruct or stop-working dates.
The idea seems to be that after a while the anti-virus community will get it cleaned out anyhow. So the virus conveniently dies out to take the heat off and clear the field for the next version.
Without this mechanism the spammer is dependent on the old verion, which is gradually cleared out (reducing his zombie population) AND the remainders watched for his usage, eventually leading his discovery and capture. With it, he presents much like a mutating virus - flu or common cold - constantly changing slightly to re-infect the same population of victims and distract its "immune system" (the antivirus companies and security/law-enforcement community).
When you go to a drug dealer to buy oregano, don't be surprised when the cops knock your door down. These people were buying hardware from places they KNEW were not entirely above board.
"Above board"? Are you claiming that the programmers were built with stolen parts? That the sale itself was breaking some law?
No, you're not claiming any such thing. In your view they're ONLY "shady" because many of their customers intended to use the devices to steal service.
That's EXACTLY the same argument as banning all peer-to-peer protocols - napster, gnutella, FTP, etc. - because SOME people use them to infringe copyrights. Or banning DAT tape drives, VCRs, casette tape drives, reel-to-reel tape drives, and photocopiers for the same reason. Or banning search engines because they index copyrighted files, thus facilitating copyright infringement.
It's also the same issue as banning aluminum foil because some people use it to line hashish pipes. Or banning "tire thumpers" (used by truckers to prevent dangerous blowouts on the road by quickly checking tire pressure) because they're usable as a billyclub. Or blocking under-21 boaters from possessing distress flare guns (thus killing some of them in high-wave coastal waters where a handheld distress flare will not be seen) because of their similarity to a pistol.
The courts are clear on this. A dual-use technology is legal if ANY of its common uses are legal, even if MOST times it's used a law is broken. This leaves DirecTV in the position of an extortionist, using the high cost of defending onself in court to impose penalties for strictly legal actions in an attempt to intimidate their victims.
Yes, DTV caught a few dolphins in with their tuna, but you don't hear about all those tuna.
So do you also propose a final solution to the "Palestinian Problem" by killing all the Palestinians? Or maybe all the Israelis?
If you want a martcard programmer for a legal project, they can be obtained from proper, reputable, legal venders. (and yes, they're more expensive than the 20$ hacker junk.)
So people should have to pay enormously more money for a less-functional product, even though the product is LEGAL, simply because SOME (maybe even MOST) of the OTHER purchasers use their new purchase for a crime?
What happened to the free market? What happened to price competition and innovation? What happened to small entrepeneurs beating the large corporations at their own business? Do you oppose those as well?
This is no different from buying guns from a guy in an alley.
Yes it is different. SELLING that gun in the alley, without the appropriate federal and state paperwork, is on the books as a felony - which also makes buying it a crime.
(And I'll leave the issue of whether even THOSE laws are valid under the 2nd Amendment to some other thread.)
Freedom means letting other people do things you don't like. So get over it.
Is it really invasion if the store where they signed up for this card notifies them of various things?
If they gave me separate check boxes:
[x] Notify of product recalls.
[ ] Spam you with special offers.
[ ] Give your data to our hundreds of affiliates.
[ ] Sell your data to spammers.
[ ] Give your data to the government upon request.
[x] Lose your data if the government demands it.
[x] Destroy your data rather than giving it to the our successors in a merger (unless the "merger" is US eating some small fry).
[x] Destroy your data rather than auctioning it off in a bankruptcy.
there wouldn't be a question of whether they had permission, would there?
Of course there WOULD still be the question of whether they'd actually DO WHAT THEY SAID they'd do.
Personally I'm not too concerned about product recalls. It's nice that they notified the customers. But for things like fresh food products (especially food products with mad cow contamination) there's not much that can be done. By the time they find out where it went, it's already been eaten.
"I'm sorry, Mr & Mrs consumer. That meat you ate last month may have been contaminated with mad cow disease. Maybe you're infected and in the next couple decades your brain will turn into a sponge as you suffer horribly and there's nothing that can be done." Yeah, that will sure do a lot of good.
Ditto something more immediate in fresh food. If you get food poisoning you'll know it within hours - and again by the time they figure out what was contaminated
Now for canned, bottled, or frozen food, or fresh food the customer froze and hasn't eaten yet, it might make a difference. But as long as such incidents are rare and newsworthy, the media flap is more likely to be effective at notifying you of a problem than hoping your store's database is up to date and you pick up your voicemail in time.
Which bring up the question: WHY do your hands get cold, when you have a perfectly good heat-transfer medium built in?
Answer: Evolutionarily, when your environment gets cold it's important to maintain the temperature of your brain and core body organs, to keep you alive. When those are in jepoardy, your body may sacrifice heating, first of your hands and feet, then of your arms and legs, and risk damaging them, as a better tradeoff than risking DYING, or brain or organ damage, from hypothermia.
It's possible that in some current situations the tradeoff setpoint is no longer correct or appropriate, and the for some people (for instance, with circulatory system damage) the heat transfer is impaired and needs suplementation.
But I'd bet that, at least for for normal healthy people under about age 35, the setpoint IS right, and use of these devices might provide comfort at the cost of significantly raising risk to health.
So I'd avoid them in favor of high-quality insulting clothing, to keep me warm enough that my body isn't tempted to start conserving heat by courting frostbite.
It is within the legitimate scope of Congressional authority to restict what any corporation may do as long as said corporation is directly involved in interstate commerce.
Which just about everything Microsoft does is. (For instance, it's located in Washington and most of the companies it screwed over in contracts are located in other states.)
Unfortunately, the current congress and courts have forgotten the word "directly" in that quote, when interpreting the underlying constitutional authorization. Thus the "commerce clause" (along with the "elastic clause" - '... necessary and proper") has been stretched into a nearly unlimited excuse for lawmaking and regulation.
If you read the Asset Purchase Agreement over at Groklaw, it's fairly clear that Novell is correct.
Much as I hate the idea, I can see how the SCO execs could read the Asset Purchase Agreement to mean that they DID buy the copyrights:
Schedule 1.1(a) Assets
1. All rights and ownership of UNIX and UnixWare and Auxiliary Products, including but not limited to all versions of UNIX and UnixWare and Auxiliary Products [...] including source code, [...]
Schedule 1.1(b) Excluded Assets
V. Intellectual Property:
A. All copyrights and trademarks, except for the [...] copyrights and trademarks owned by Novell as of the date of the Agreement required for SCO to exercise its rights with respect to the acquisition of UNIX and UnixWare technologies.
SCO could easily read this as "You now own the source code. That includes all of Novell's copyrights on the source code that you need to enforce your ownership of the source code."
Also Novell has claimed in the past that SCO has asked them to transfer the copyrights, but they (Novell) refused. If they can bring hard evidence of this out (and I would bet they can) then that proves SCO knew Novell retained the copyrights.
But SCO can argue that this was just a request for confirmation of what they believed the contract meant, in preparation for their suit to enforce their copyrights. Then they could argue that Novell's refusal to give that "confirmation" was just Novell trying to back out the deal once they discovered they'd given away the store to someone who was actually going to KEEP it.
(None of which, even if the court upholds SCO's interpretation, in any way releases them from promptly identifying the alleged infringing code in Linux, so the open source community can expunge it, end the alleged infringement, and minimize the alleged damages.)
To prove your age, you have to prove your IDENTITY. This gives the ISP, and thus the government, the IDENTITY of each adult user who choses to certify his age. And THAT lets them track the browsing (and other internet activity) of all such users, and target those who engage in any activity they dislike.
Goodbye anonymity.
Imagine this in the hands of a repressive regime.
Now imagine that YOUR government has suddenly gone bad...
"So the "content" industry would want operators of P2P software to store 100 MD5 hashes of EVERY PIECE OF COPYRIGHTED WORK IN DIGITAL FORM"
You forget: the content industry don't define "copyrighted work" like we do. In their dictionary, it means "copyrighted by them work"
Even cutting it down to just the members of the evil empire: How many copyrighted works does Time-Warner publish EVERY DAY? Then add in the rest of 'em...
It's STILL enough to swamp any attempt to do what was proposed.
Of course it's doubly nuts because your proposal is trivial to beat. Add an extra random-sized bit of silence / blackscreen at the start and end. That changes the file size and shifts the hashed regions, causing all the hashes to come out different.
You've looked at this too naively... Take around a hundred MD5s of nonoverlapping chunks of the file. If 90% of these match, you have near certainty that the files match except for exactly such tampering as you suggest.
So the "content" industry would want operators of P2P software to store 100 MD5 hashes of EVERY PIECE OF COPYRIGHTED WORK IN DIGITAL FORM, and compare EVERY SET OF THEM against EVERY FILE TRANSFERRED.
That is just wacko.
For starters you'd requre every peer machine to have a copy of all those hashes and/or every indexing service to actually transfer the indexed files to compare them. How big would that be? How much bandwidth would it take to update it, or to do an extraupload of everything that gets indexed (possibly by many indexers)? WHO PAYS FOR THE BANDWIDTH AND STORAGE? Note that the BENEFIT goes entirely to the copyright holder, not the P2P user.
The onus of detecting copyright violation and proving their case is, and properly should be, on the copyright holders, who are the recipients of the benefit.
Yes, it's hard. Which means that the copyright holders only catch a few of the violators. But it's ALWAYS been that way. That's why the copyright law provides draconian penalties for the ones they DO catch - to balance the equation and deter violators.
(And THAT'S why you see hundred grand fines laid on little old ladies whose underage grandkids used their computer to download some MP3s.)
Slashdot Mirror
... with Bluetooth a cell phone can ... be made smaller and just stay in the pocket... not have an ear piece or mouth piece. And have it come with a Bluetooth head set.
Great. Then when the obnoxious guy next to you in the restaurant, airplane, or [wherever you can't escape] starts talking loudly on his cell phone, at least you can hear BOTH sides of the conversation.
And even chime in. B-)
gun companies held responsible for crimes committed by their customers
If you'd said "gun companies held responsible for crimes committed using their products" you'd have been dead on.
But PLEASE let's not talk about "their customers" in this context.
- MOST of the guns legally obtained from gun companies and the legal distribution network are NEVER used for crime.
- MOST of the guns used in crime have been transferred at least once through an illegal channel (typically stolen and/or bought on the black market - often from a cop who lifted it from an evidence locker), so the misuser is NOT a customer of the gun manufacturer.
We must have some separation here.
Nope.
Crimes committed using automatic weapons differ greatly from pirated movies/music being transferred via P2P. Stop using that comparison.
Since the issue is whether the maker of a product or service that is misused by a lawbreaker is legally liable for the damage caused by the lawbreaker's misuse, the cases are exactly equivalent.
The nature of the damages doesn't alter the nature of the issue. It only changes the amount and type of liability that is assigned to the maker.
Once a precedent is established which destroys the principle that the lawbreaker is liable and the maker of a misused tool is not, its application is easily extended from one tool to others.
You can't lose a little of your virginity. Neither can the legal system.
If the court holds technology companies liable for how their customers use the tech companies' products, then couldn't the same liability apply to gun manufacturers?
That works both ways:
"If the court holds gun manufacturers liable for how their customers use the tech companies' products, then couldn't the same liability apply to tech companies?"
Yep.
Think about than the next time you're considering suporting an organization that supports such litigation.
If companies are responsible for their customers ... then most weapons manufacturers must be considered to be criminal organisations.
Since most guns are NOT used in crime, and most of the guns that ARE used in crime are NOT purchased by the crook from gun companies or through normal and legal distribution channels, your statement is incorrect.
B-)
Self Defense.
Ok this one could involve killing, but only in retaliation.
If it involves killing in retaliation, you're doing it wrong. Self-defense involves attempting to stop an attack. If you then hold the perpetrator you've crossed the line into citizen's arrest - part of law enforcement. If you hunt him down and shoot him after he runs, or shoot him once he's stopped attacking and threatening, you've crossed another line into vigilantism.
Usually you can stop an attack by drawing and aiming the gun. (Crooks are often stupid but most aren't SO stupid as to keep attacking once they're on the wrong end of a gun. But some are.)
If you DO have to shoot, you shoot to stop the attack - which means to disable him in the most effective way - which usually means shooting for core body (sometimes head) rather than trying to wing him. (Indeed, shooting to wing him is evidence that you WEREN'T in immediate fear for life or limb, which means you WEREN'T justified in using deadly force.) Once the attack is stopped, you are generally NO LONGER JUSTIFIED in firing again (YMMV depending on jurisdiction).
If you shot at him and hit him badly enough to stop an ongoing attack, maybe one in four he dies as a result. This is an unfortunate side effect. But HE's the one who chose to put both your lives at risk - you were just keeping yours intact, which is your right.
Unfortunately, human bodies are sturdy, so disabling them in mid-attack often means doing enough damage to bring on a total system crash. "Non-lethal" (now renamed "less-lethal") weapons have been tried, but so far they also remain "less effective" at the primary purpose. Until until someone invents phasers with a "stun" setting, a pistol remains the most effective way to stop an ongoing attack.
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of quarter-inch tapes."
--Dennis Ritchie (attr.)
Or in this case "... a saddlebag full of hard drives."
On the otherhand, the copies of MyDoom that have been pummelling my mail server since the start ceased entirely just after 01:00 GMT this morning, yet normal email continues to flow... Coincidence, or is there more to this story than just a hoax or confusion?
Mydoom, like several previous spam-forwarder viruses and/or worms, is reported to have a spread-shutdown date.
I don't buy it.
Same here, for a different reason:
The claim is (if I read the fish babble correctly) that they were turned on to SCO by tracking the initial spread of the virus to SCO as an early focus.
Others are already suggesting that the DoS on SCO is a red herring by the spammers - playing a game of "let's you and him fight" between two of their enemies: The anti-virus people (mainly commercial and law enforcement) and the anti-spammers (expert users and sysadmins, high cross-membership with the open source community).
The worm's structure is consistent with this. It is a spam-forwarder and backdoor installer, of a similar form to earlier spam tools (including function shutdown dates). And the DoS is relatively low-intensity (one ding per second per zombie), which is consistent with not screwing up the spam forwarder by consuming too many of its resources in a DoS attack.
If the DoS on SCO IS a red-herring, doing an initial release by mailing a few copies to SCO and maybe Microsoft (so it spreads from there and gets them blamed) is also consistent: Further social engineering to escalate the distraction.
If this is true, you'd have to examine SCO's mail logs to find the next step closer to the real source. (And infecting SCO would even let you use the backdoor to plant more inciminating evidence on them.)
Nevertheless, it IS in SCO's interest to be perceived as a target. And it can also give them an excuse to take down systems with evidence weakening their case. So taking a known spam virus and hacking it into this form is also consistent with the "attack yourself and blame your opponent" model. So it will be ineteresting to see if there's anything behind the rumor. B-)
Indian giver: a person who gives something to another and then takes it back or expects an equivalent in return.
The term "indian giver" is the result of a misunderstanding of the property law of an east-coast tribe, early in the settlement of former Europeans in North America.
Short form: The colonists thought they were buying the land. The Indians thought they were leasing it, with anual rent payments and lease renewals.
Needless to say, this led to considerable confusion and indignation when the indians came back for the next year's lease negotiations.
The colonists won. The winners get to write the history. The authors of the history get to embed their propaganda from the conflict (such as the term "indian giver") in future generation's language.
remember the judge wont be deciding anything. its the jury
But the judge WILL decide if it's admissable, and the jury is instructed to ignore it (or shielded from even hearing about it) if it's not.
Fortunately, digital signatures were explicitly designed for proving authorship in the digital world of generally untracable bits, and governments, including both the executive (by regs) and legislative (by law) branches of the Fed, are moving to make them legal proof. (See SEAL, E-SIGN, Millennium Digital Commerce Act, etc.) They're already recognized by Utah (not that it matters in a federal court...)
Since this is a civil case, where the standard is a "preponderance of evidence", and the signatures are being introduced by the defense, I'd be surprised if the judge excludes such evidence. (Think about it - what non-digital evidence is there of ANYTHING related to the case?)
If there is no direction from law or precedent, I'd expect him to let it in and let the experts from both sides argue the difficulties of forgery.
(IANAL, your mileage may vary, take this with a grain of salt, etc.)
1) Annoy Microsoft (or other high-profile company).
2) Get sent a cease-and-desist letter.
3) Sell it on E-bay.
4) PROFIT!
It does seem odd that the worm has a trigger to stop spreading on Feb 12. If SCO were to unleash a self-attacking worm, wouldn't they likely include such a provision?
There has been a series of spam forwarder viruses published, each with a stop-spreading date and one or more further self-destruct or stop-working dates.
The idea seems to be that after a while the anti-virus community will get it cleaned out anyhow. So the virus conveniently dies out to take the heat off and clear the field for the next version.
Without this mechanism the spammer is dependent on the old verion, which is gradually cleared out (reducing his zombie population) AND the remainders watched for his usage, eventually leading his discovery and capture. With it, he presents much like a mutating virus - flu or common cold - constantly changing slightly to re-infect the same population of victims and distract its "immune system" (the antivirus companies and security/law-enforcement community).
Look, we know that worm isn't from the open source community.
It's obvious - it doesn't even come with a copy of the BSD license, let alone the GPL!
Not funny. Because some of the people writing DDoS tools and the like already DO put a GPL or other open-source license notice on 'em. B-(
And you can bet that there will be more of that now that the subject has been discussed.
[actually] Lots and lots of people said that about the Muslim community
Actually, I think that was his point. B-)
I'd have modded it 'funny' if I had points just now. (And I wish there was a "funny/tragic/black humor" moderation.)
Uh... 20% is 1/5. 1/5 is 3/15. That's 3 companies.
Right.
Microsoft, Sun, and SCO.
Wasn't number 3 HP?
When you go to a drug dealer to buy oregano, don't be surprised when the cops knock your door down. These people were buying hardware from places they KNEW were not entirely above board.
"Above board"? Are you claiming that the programmers were built with stolen parts? That the sale itself was breaking some law?
No, you're not claiming any such thing. In your view they're ONLY "shady" because many of their customers intended to use the devices to steal service.
That's EXACTLY the same argument as banning all peer-to-peer protocols - napster, gnutella, FTP, etc. - because SOME people use them to infringe copyrights. Or banning DAT tape drives, VCRs, casette tape drives, reel-to-reel tape drives, and photocopiers for the same reason. Or banning search engines because they index copyrighted files, thus facilitating copyright infringement.
It's also the same issue as banning aluminum foil because some people use it to line hashish pipes. Or banning "tire thumpers" (used by truckers to prevent dangerous blowouts on the road by quickly checking tire pressure) because they're usable as a billyclub. Or blocking under-21 boaters from possessing distress flare guns (thus killing some of them in high-wave coastal waters where a handheld distress flare will not be seen) because of their similarity to a pistol.
The courts are clear on this. A dual-use technology is legal if ANY of its common uses are legal, even if MOST times it's used a law is broken. This leaves DirecTV in the position of an extortionist, using the high cost of defending onself in court to impose penalties for strictly legal actions in an attempt to intimidate their victims.
Yes, DTV caught a few dolphins in with their tuna, but you don't hear about all those tuna.
So do you also propose a final solution to the "Palestinian Problem" by killing all the Palestinians? Or maybe all the Israelis?
If you want a martcard programmer for a legal project, they can be obtained from proper, reputable, legal venders. (and yes, they're more expensive than the 20$ hacker junk.)
So people should have to pay enormously more money for a less-functional product, even though the product is LEGAL, simply because SOME (maybe even MOST) of the OTHER purchasers use their new purchase for a crime?
What happened to the free market? What happened to price competition and innovation? What happened to small entrepeneurs beating the large corporations at their own business? Do you oppose those as well?
This is no different from buying guns from a guy in an alley.
Yes it is different. SELLING that gun in the alley, without the appropriate federal and state paperwork, is on the books as a felony - which also makes buying it a crime.
(And I'll leave the issue of whether even THOSE laws are valid under the 2nd Amendment to some other thread.)
Freedom means letting other people do things you don't like. So get over it.
If they gave me separate check boxes:
[x] Notify of product recalls.
[ ] Spam you with special offers.
[ ] Give your data to our hundreds of affiliates.
[ ] Sell your data to spammers.
[ ] Give your data to the government upon request.
[x] Lose your data if the government demands it.
[x] Destroy your data rather than giving it to the our successors in a merger (unless the "merger" is US eating some small fry).
[x] Destroy your data rather than auctioning it off in a bankruptcy.
there wouldn't be a question of whether they had permission, would there?
Of course there WOULD still be the question of whether they'd actually DO WHAT THEY SAID they'd do.
Personally I'm not too concerned about product recalls. It's nice that they notified the customers. But for things like fresh food products (especially food products with mad cow contamination) there's not much that can be done. By the time they find out where it went, it's already been eaten.
"I'm sorry, Mr & Mrs consumer. That meat you ate last month may have been contaminated with mad cow disease. Maybe you're infected and in the next couple decades your brain will turn into a sponge as you suffer horribly and there's nothing that can be done." Yeah, that will sure do a lot of good.
Ditto something more immediate in fresh food. If you get food poisoning you'll know it within hours - and again by the time they figure out what was contaminated
Now for canned, bottled, or frozen food, or fresh food the customer froze and hasn't eaten yet, it might make a difference. But as long as such incidents are rare and newsworthy, the media flap is more likely to be effective at notifying you of a problem than hoping your store's database is up to date and you pick up your voicemail in time.
But belt and suspenders.
Great... now my upper arms are cold.
Which bring up the question: WHY do your hands get cold, when you have a perfectly good heat-transfer medium built in?
Answer: Evolutionarily, when your environment gets cold it's important to maintain the temperature of your brain and core body organs, to keep you alive. When those are in jepoardy, your body may sacrifice heating, first of your hands and feet, then of your arms and legs, and risk damaging them, as a better tradeoff than risking DYING, or brain or organ damage, from hypothermia.
It's possible that in some current situations the tradeoff setpoint is no longer correct or appropriate, and the for some people (for instance, with circulatory system damage) the heat transfer is impaired and needs suplementation.
But I'd bet that, at least for for normal healthy people under about age 35, the setpoint IS right, and use of these devices might provide comfort at the cost of significantly raising risk to health.
So I'd avoid them in favor of high-quality insulting clothing, to keep me warm enough that my body isn't tempted to start conserving heat by courting frostbite.
It is within the legitimate scope of Congressional authority to restict what any corporation may do as long as said corporation is directly involved in interstate commerce.
Which just about everything Microsoft does is. (For instance, it's located in Washington and most of the companies it screwed over in contracts are located in other states.)
Unfortunately, the current congress and courts have forgotten the word "directly" in that quote, when interpreting the underlying constitutional authorization. Thus the "commerce clause" (along with the "elastic clause" - '... necessary and proper") has been stretched into a nearly unlimited excuse for lawmaking and regulation.
Much as I hate the idea, I can see how the SCO execs could read the Asset Purchase Agreement to mean that they DID buy the copyrights:
SCO could easily read this as "You now own the source code. That includes all of Novell's copyrights on the source code that you need to enforce your ownership of the source code."
Also Novell has claimed in the past that SCO has asked them to transfer the copyrights, but they (Novell) refused. If they can bring hard evidence of this out (and I would bet they can) then that proves SCO knew Novell retained the copyrights.
But SCO can argue that this was just a request for confirmation of what they believed the contract meant, in preparation for their suit to enforce their copyrights. Then they could argue that Novell's refusal to give that "confirmation" was just Novell trying to back out the deal once they discovered they'd given away the store to someone who was actually going to KEEP it.
(None of which, even if the court upholds SCO's interpretation, in any way releases them from promptly identifying the alleged infringing code in Linux, so the open source community can expunge it, end the alleged infringement, and minimize the alleged damages.)
IMHO, the age limit is a red herring.
To prove your age, you have to prove your IDENTITY. This gives the ISP, and thus the government, the IDENTITY of each adult user who choses to certify his age. And THAT lets them track the browsing (and other internet activity) of all such users, and target those who engage in any activity they dislike.
Goodbye anonymity.
Imagine this in the hands of a repressive regime.
Now imagine that YOUR government has suddenly gone bad...
"So the "content" industry would want operators of P2P software to store 100 MD5 hashes of EVERY PIECE OF COPYRIGHTED WORK IN DIGITAL FORM"
You forget: the content industry don't define "copyrighted work" like we do. In their dictionary, it means "copyrighted by them work"
Even cutting it down to just the members of the evil empire: How many copyrighted works does Time-Warner publish EVERY DAY? Then add in the rest of 'em...
It's STILL enough to swamp any attempt to do what was proposed.
Of course it's doubly nuts because your proposal is trivial to beat. Add an extra random-sized bit of silence / blackscreen at the start and end. That changes the file size and shifts the hashed regions, causing all the hashes to come out different.
You've looked at this too naively... Take around a hundred MD5s of nonoverlapping chunks of the file. If 90% of these match, you have near certainty that the files match except for exactly such tampering as you suggest.
So the "content" industry would want operators of P2P software to store 100 MD5 hashes of EVERY PIECE OF COPYRIGHTED WORK IN DIGITAL FORM, and compare EVERY SET OF THEM against EVERY FILE TRANSFERRED.
That is just wacko.
For starters you'd requre every peer machine to have a copy of all those hashes and/or every indexing service to actually transfer the indexed files to compare them. How big would that be? How much bandwidth would it take to update it, or to do an extraupload of everything that gets indexed (possibly by many indexers)? WHO PAYS FOR THE BANDWIDTH AND STORAGE? Note that the BENEFIT goes entirely to the copyright holder, not the P2P user.
The onus of detecting copyright violation and proving their case is, and properly should be, on the copyright holders, who are the recipients of the benefit.
Yes, it's hard. Which means that the copyright holders only catch a few of the violators. But it's ALWAYS been that way. That's why the copyright law provides draconian penalties for the ones they DO catch - to balance the equation and deter violators.
(And THAT'S why you see hundred grand fines laid on little old ladies whose underage grandkids used their computer to download some MP3s.)