I join you in frustration that the more things change... the more they stay the same. Look at all the countries in East Europe after the "fall" of the USSR./ALL/ the leaders are the same, they just traded the Communist party for another one with more money and power.
Most of the former soviet bloc countries in Eastern Europe now have a convertible currency, freedom of speech, freedom to leave the country, freedom to take their money or assets with them, freedom to elect new leaders, freedom of worship, membership of the EU... But apart from that, things have not changed at all.
But, it doesn't stop me from memorizing things like youtube, last.fm, etc. And I get even more annoyed at everyone's insistence on putting 'www' in front of everything. I still see people type http://www.foo.com.../
It's nearly as annoying as the people who set up their site on www.example.com (or whatever) and don't bother making example.com point to the same place. Half-wits!
If the terms and conditions ban that sort of usage, then the customer has little to complain about (other than the lack of notice).
If there is nothing in the terms and conditions about such usage, then the supplier is clearly in breach of contract. That might suggest the customer could sue (was there any financial loss, time and cost of equipment while investigating, etc)?
Or maybe, if this is a pattern of behaviour, or company policy not mentioned in T&C, the local trading standards authorities might take an interest? Or it could constitute some sort of fraud, or false advertising?
Is there such a thing as a private prosecution in your jurisdiction?
You don't go to another country and bad mouth your home country. It's in bad taste.
On the contrary, sometimes it's necessary. I have no time for the "My country, right or wrong" attitude that some promote - whether explicitly, or by complicit silence in certain company.
The answer is not so much to highlight the domain name (it can be very long in some spoofing URLs). It is to show clearly the [most significant parts of the] top level domain - if necesary in a separate area. HOW it's done is a matter for the browser developers, but the INFORMATION needs to be made clear to users. Highlighting the domain name MAY be one way to do that, but teh answer depends on screen real estate available, user expertise, and other factors.
The end result is no more confusing MyBank.blah.blah.blah.stop.reading.by.here.hacker.com domains.
This information (the domain a link REALLY points at) could also be part of the mouseover for a link (or a link that goes offsite, anyway). Even mail clients that allow you to open links should let users know the domain a link is going to.... never understood why they didn't.
Lots of other countries may well be worse, and we may well not be in a police state yet. But you concede that civil liberties are being threatened by some in the government.
Thus we are moving towards a police state, even if we are a long way off.
Two obvious questions are:
how close should we get to a police state before you think it is dangerous? (or, less contentiously, how much government snooping is reasonable, for the greater good?)
And should we encourage people to get used to asking questions about new surveillance proposals before we reach the threshold of police statehood?
The average consumer may not understand DRM - but they do understand "I need to buy a new TV" and "It won't even play on my next PC unless I buy a new monitor as well".
I saw my first sub GBP 20 HD movie (UK prices are a ripoff) in HMV the other day. I'd have considered buying it - if I didn't also need a new drive (understandable) AND a new monitor for my PC (inexcusable). Not going to replace my 26", no-HDCP monitor any time soon.
forgot to add this: It absolutely is a problem that someone can install a key logger on the machines that the university expects you to type your password into, especially when this password and id allows your money to be spent.
First reaction: it's not news that a key-logger will let someone snoop passwords.
After a moment's thought: It absolutely is a problem that someone can install a key logger on the machines that the university expects you to type your password into.
These machines should be locked down, but are not. That's a risk. Students should be made aware of the risk (the Uni knew, or were negligently unaware, but said nothing).
A more likely scenario is that students install games or other software with a trojan keylogger, or that they visit a website with the resident IE and get keyloggers as they surf. Either way, there is a plausible mechanism (verging on the inevitable) for such keyloggers to be there right now, without this guy.
Mr Moufid's actions may not have been the best way to highlight the problem, but according to TFA, he was asking the uni to improve security.
And, for all those "what did he expect for not being anonymous" folk - he did this under a pseudonym.
Where he really messed up was (a) mailing people's passwords to other people - this was stupid, (b) using email in a way that was traceable back to him, (c) admitting to using the passwords, rather than just collecting them, (d) having an "islamic terrorist" name, (e) underestimating the vengefulness of the administration, and probably (f) talking to the police without a lawyer - even when he thought he'd done nothing wrong.
As for "but he used the passwords" - I submit that the only way he could demonstrate that real passwords were being exposed was to log in to a less sensitive part of the system (avoiding the sensitive data and money handling parts). There is no evidence here that he did any more than this verification step.
Remember - the uni was hacked back in July. Many students will have been concerned about security. This guy will have realised that there were still problems, and that students' personal information and money were at risk from the insecure terminals that read student debit cards.
Here are three questions: how should he have highlighted the problem, what should he have done if the authorities ignored this, and (whatever the technical legalities, rights and wrongs) is it a sensible use of someone's life and the state's tax money to send someone to prison who was trying to help - or would a less extreme response be appropriate?
I see why the court decided as it did.
But why not enact a law which applies similar penalties to unprotected commercial speech?
The problem of spam exists on the scale it does because spammers make a profit from the messages they send, and the victims pay most of the costs of processing the email. There is no US constitutional right to freedom of advertising.
So ban commercial spam, and the greater part of the problem can be tackled.
Best of all, if this slimeball carries on spamming, he can get his 9 years in jail after all.
Everything that unions were formed to do (wages, overtime, safety, etc.) were signed into law decades ago (minimum wage, 40hr work week, OSHA). Unions now seem to exist solely to squeeze as much money out of a company for as little work as possible (thus driving US industries into the ground), all the while making the union bosses richer and more powerful.
Yes.... and no.
I'm in the UK, and we may even have better legal employee protection than the US. The problem is that lots of things that company management try to do are legal, but not necessarily moral, in the interests of the employees, or even in the interests of the company on a timescale longer than it takes to get the manager a promotion.
So there is a need for someone to stand up to shortsighted and clueless management. That would be where a good Union comes in.
There are companies with enlightened management, just as there are ones with Wally-like engineers, and lazy, self-serving teamster-style union officials.
But it's the existence of managers who'll do anything to claw their way up the greasy pole, and sacrifice anyone (even the company) for their next bonus, that makes unions useful - and in some cases necessary.
A good union understands that if the company does well, then the employees can do well - they will take a pragmatic view, rather than trying to bleed the company at every opportunity, or weaselling away to build an alternative power structure. It's not clear why the US seems to have such bad unions. Maybe someone is exaggerating a little?
You make a very good point. The REASON behind the demand for source code in the GPL, I believe, is to ensure that improvements are made available to other users.
The GPL-mandated method of making source code available on demand is one way of achieving the goal. But submitting patches upstream is a very useful way of achieving the same goal (assuming upstream developers don't just reject people's patches).
It's probably unrealistic for a version of the GPL to mandate that users submit patches upstream though.
If completely new functionality is bolted into GPL'd code (rather than just a few tweaks or fixes being made), then the source for the "derived work" is more useful, and patches sent upstream may not do the job.
But it's good to see people following the spirit of the rules.
In the UK, silence cannot be taken as an admission of guilt, as such.
It's just that, as they say when cautioning you, if you fail to mention something when you are questioned, and that thing turns out to be a significant part of your defence, the jury may be entitled to wonder why you did not mention it at the time you were questioned. They will NOT be prevented from using their common sense - if, for example, it was the sort of detail that might have slipped your mind at the time.
The caution states: You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention, when questioned, something you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.
No one is fooled by the indignation of those who wave the banner of "fair use".
Fair use (or "fair dealing" in some jurisdictions) is an important set of exceptions to copyright owners' right to control copying. It means that copyright does not trump free speech, by allowing parody. It helps the public by allowing reviewers to criticise dreadful works, without fear of spurious copyright lawsuits. It promotes research, education and the spread of knowledge by allowing limited private copying for such purposes.
Even though in some countries fair use also allows you to make compilations of your CDs to listen to in your car, fair use is not just for pirates.
In fact, what pirates do is generally NOT fair use.
The summary (and the artiicle, for all I know) is not quite right when it says:
By and large, music fans think that music is too expensive, and that much of what is available isn't very good
He's just fallen foul of Fingals First Law [*] of chart music - the widely observed principle that the charts always turn to complete rubbish within 5 years of quitting full time education. The cool kids will always be listening to something completely different from what we listened to, and we'll just think the new stuff isn't like music used to be, in the good old days. In turn the cool kids will grow up, and find that the music they like has been superseded.
The point is, it's older fans who think that much of what's available now is rubbish. There is a constant supply of new fans ready to be programmed with the new stuff.
Of course, not all of them will buy the new stuff, but that's another issue - and the posters above have covered that pretty well!
[*] I just made that law up right there! Don't expect to find it in the textbooks till next week at least. We're only at Internet 2.0, you know.
Yes, because those militant Buddhists are everywhere
Actually, you do get some pretty militant Buddhists in Sri Lanka. And a few years ago there were, well, difficulties with Sikh militants in the Golden temple in Amritsar. I'm not here to criticise Sikhs or followers of the Buddha - I'm just pointing out that pretty much any cause attracts some militant folk, somewhere. For goodness sake, you get holy wars about the right source code editor, or the correct place to put curly brackets in C.
11 years - sure he deserves it. He and his ilk between them have all but destroyed usenet, and made the email system vastly less useful to society as a whole. Email has gone from an almost-always works system to one where messages are very likely to be buried in a flood of spam, or automatically deleted by imperfect spam filters.
I counted at least 5 declensions of nouns - but the first three were the most commmon. And yes, the nouns could (as in english) be singular or plural in number, and could have one of six cases (there was also the locative, but I never got the hang of that).
Then there were the verbs, which came in four regular conjugations, and were subjunctive, indicative or imperative in mood; active or passive in voice; and varied in tense.
Lookup tables to gladden the heart of any programmer (many of them orthogonal).
And we still have a few latin plurals in English: formula/formulae (1st declension), cactus/cacti (2nd declension), bacterium/bacteria and erratum/errata (a neuter form), and index/indices, etcetera, etcetera, ad nauseum.
Slashdot Mirror
Most of the former soviet bloc countries in Eastern Europe now have a convertible currency, freedom of speech, freedom to leave the country, freedom to take their money or assets with them, freedom to elect new leaders, freedom of worship, membership of the EU... But apart from that, things have not changed at all.
It's nearly as annoying as the people who set up their site on www.example.com (or whatever) and don't bother making example.com point to the same place. Half-wits!
If the terms and conditions ban that sort of usage, then the customer has little to complain about (other than the lack of notice).
If there is nothing in the terms and conditions about such usage, then the supplier is clearly in breach of contract. That might suggest the customer could sue (was there any financial loss, time and cost of equipment while investigating, etc)?
Or maybe, if this is a pattern of behaviour, or company policy not mentioned in T&C, the local trading standards authorities might take an interest? Or it could constitute some sort of fraud, or false advertising?
Is there such a thing as a private prosecution in your jurisdiction?
On the contrary, sometimes it's necessary. I have no time for the "My country, right or wrong" attitude that some promote - whether explicitly, or by complicit silence in certain company.
That would be Alpha Quadrant.
The Maharashtrians are an ethnic group from the west of India, a state on the planet known as Earth. You know where that is.
The answer is not so much to highlight the domain name (it can be very long in some spoofing URLs). It is to show clearly the [most significant parts of the] top level domain - if necesary in a separate area. HOW it's done is a matter for the browser developers, but the INFORMATION needs to be made clear to users. Highlighting the domain name MAY be one way to do that, but teh answer depends on screen real estate available, user expertise, and other factors.
The end result is no more confusing MyBank.blah.blah.blah.stop.reading.by.here.hacker.com domains.
This information (the domain a link REALLY points at) could also be part of the mouseover for a link (or a link that goes offsite, anyway). Even mail clients that allow you to open links should let users know the domain a link is going to.... never understood why they didn't.
Sounds like terrorism to me!
The average consumer may not understand DRM - but they do understand "I need to buy a new TV" and "It won't even play on my next PC unless I buy a new monitor as well".
I saw my first sub GBP 20 HD movie (UK prices are a ripoff) in HMV the other day. I'd have considered buying it - if I didn't also need a new drive (understandable) AND a new monitor for my PC (inexcusable). Not going to replace my 26", no-HDCP monitor any time soon.
forgot to add this: It absolutely is a problem that someone can install a key logger on the machines that the university expects you to type your password into, especially when this password and id allows your money to be spent.
First reaction: it's not news that a key-logger will let someone snoop passwords.
After a moment's thought: It absolutely is a problem that someone can install a key logger on the machines that the university expects you to type your password into.
These machines should be locked down, but are not. That's a risk. Students should be made aware of the risk (the Uni knew, or were negligently unaware, but said nothing).
A more likely scenario is that students install games or other software with a trojan keylogger, or that they visit a website with the resident IE and get keyloggers as they surf. Either way, there is a plausible mechanism (verging on the inevitable) for such keyloggers to be there right now, without this guy.
Mr Moufid's actions may not have been the best way to highlight the problem, but according to TFA, he was asking the uni to improve security.
And, for all those "what did he expect for not being anonymous" folk - he did this under a pseudonym.
Where he really messed up was (a) mailing people's passwords to other people - this was stupid, (b) using email in a way that was traceable back to him, (c) admitting to using the passwords, rather than just collecting them, (d) having an "islamic terrorist" name, (e) underestimating the vengefulness of the administration, and probably (f) talking to the police without a lawyer - even when he thought he'd done nothing wrong.
As for "but he used the passwords" - I submit that the only way he could demonstrate that real passwords were being exposed was to log in to a less sensitive part of the system (avoiding the sensitive data and money handling parts). There is no evidence here that he did any more than this verification step.
Remember - the uni was hacked back in July. Many students will have been concerned about security. This guy will have realised that there were still problems, and that students' personal information and money were at risk from the insecure terminals that read student debit cards.
Here are three questions: how should he have highlighted the problem, what should he have done if the authorities ignored this, and (whatever the technical legalities, rights and wrongs) is it a sensible use of someone's life and the state's tax money to send someone to prison who was trying to help - or would a less extreme response be appropriate?
I see why the court decided as it did. But why not enact a law which applies similar penalties to unprotected commercial speech?
The problem of spam exists on the scale it does because spammers make a profit from the messages they send, and the victims pay most of the costs of processing the email. There is no US constitutional right to freedom of advertising.
So ban commercial spam, and the greater part of the problem can be tackled.
Best of all, if this slimeball carries on spamming, he can get his 9 years in jail after all.
Yes.... and no.
I'm in the UK, and we may even have better legal employee protection than the US. The problem is that lots of things that company management try to do are legal, but not necessarily moral, in the interests of the employees, or even in the interests of the company on a timescale longer than it takes to get the manager a promotion.
So there is a need for someone to stand up to shortsighted and clueless management. That would be where a good Union comes in.
There are companies with enlightened management, just as there are ones with Wally-like engineers, and lazy, self-serving teamster-style union officials.
But it's the existence of managers who'll do anything to claw their way up the greasy pole, and sacrifice anyone (even the company) for their next bonus, that makes unions useful - and in some cases necessary.
A good union understands that if the company does well, then the employees can do well - they will take a pragmatic view, rather than trying to bleed the company at every opportunity, or weaselling away to build an alternative power structure. It's not clear why the US seems to have such bad unions. Maybe someone is exaggerating a little?
Still, it's quite a courageous move - he had no guarantee of a good price. Was there a reserve price in this auction?
You make a very good point. The REASON behind the demand for source code in the GPL, I believe, is to ensure that improvements are made available to other users. The GPL-mandated method of making source code available on demand is one way of achieving the goal. But submitting patches upstream is a very useful way of achieving the same goal (assuming upstream developers don't just reject people's patches).
It's probably unrealistic for a version of the GPL to mandate that users submit patches upstream though.
If completely new functionality is bolted into GPL'd code (rather than just a few tweaks or fixes being made), then the source for the "derived work" is more useful, and patches sent upstream may not do the job.
But it's good to see people following the spirit of the rules.
Can you imagine the possibilities if it really could read your mind?
- Think yes to accept the EULA (and donate your firstborn to us...)
- I know you didn't read it. Go back and read the licence properly...
Next, the brain powered keyboard!
So is this where the Sony BMG rootkit and auto-updating malware was supposed to be controlled from?
In the UK, silence cannot be taken as an admission of guilt, as such.
It's just that, as they say when cautioning you, if you fail to mention something when you are questioned, and that thing turns out to be a significant part of your defence, the jury may be entitled to wonder why you did not mention it at the time you were questioned. They will NOT be prevented from using their common sense - if, for example, it was the sort of detail that might have slipped your mind at the time.
The caution states: You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention, when questioned, something you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.
You make some excellent points, right up to
Fair use (or "fair dealing" in some jurisdictions) is an important set of exceptions to copyright owners' right to control copying. It means that copyright does not trump free speech, by allowing parody. It helps the public by allowing reviewers to criticise dreadful works, without fear of spurious copyright lawsuits. It promotes research, education and the spread of knowledge by allowing limited private copying for such purposes.Even though in some countries fair use also allows you to make compilations of your CDs to listen to in your car, fair use is not just for pirates.
In fact, what pirates do is generally NOT fair use.
Organisation says "Paper trails aren't enough to ensure accurate vote counts" (on their own, anyway?) - Next week we'll tell you why!
No news here. Not until next week, anyway.
The summary (and the artiicle, for all I know) is not quite right when it says:
He's just fallen foul of Fingals First Law [*] of chart music - the widely observed principle that the charts always turn to complete rubbish within 5 years of quitting full time education. The cool kids will always be listening to something completely different from what we listened to, and we'll just think the new stuff isn't like music used to be, in the good old days. In turn the cool kids will grow up, and find that the music they like has been superseded.
The point is, it's older fans who think that much of what's available now is rubbish. There is a constant supply of new fans ready to be programmed with the new stuff.
Of course, not all of them will buy the new stuff, but that's another issue - and the posters above have covered that pretty well!
[*] I just made that law up right there! Don't expect to find it in the textbooks till next week at least. We're only at Internet 2.0, you know.
Actually, you do get some pretty militant Buddhists in Sri Lanka. And a few years ago there were, well, difficulties with Sikh militants in the Golden temple in Amritsar. I'm not here to criticise Sikhs or followers of the Buddha - I'm just pointing out that pretty much any cause attracts some militant folk, somewhere. For goodness sake, you get holy wars about the right source code editor, or the correct place to put curly brackets in C.
It's human nature!
That deserves to be punished.
I counted at least 5 declensions of nouns - but the first three were the most commmon. And yes, the nouns could (as in english) be singular or plural in number, and could have one of six cases (there was also the locative, but I never got the hang of that).
Then there were the verbs, which came in four regular conjugations, and were subjunctive, indicative or imperative in mood; active or passive in voice; and varied in tense.
Lookup tables to gladden the heart of any programmer (many of them orthogonal).
And we still have a few latin plurals in English: formula/formulae (1st declension), cactus/cacti (2nd declension), bacterium/bacteria and erratum/errata (a neuter form), and index/indices, etcetera, etcetera, ad nauseum.