In fact, you shouldn't. You should just have a bit-flag on the accounts saying that they're not allowed to log in... you never know when somebody's coming back to the company and would need their account reactivated.
Same goes if Joe Smith user gets a virus on his computer that spamms the heck out of an ISP and the ISP gets on blacklists. Joe Smith user is ultimately responsible for the spam, and should be booted from the ISP (assuming the TOS allows it) for letting the spamer (knowingly or otherwise) use his account to send spam.
But that's the key... the TOS needs to have a "thou shalt not spam" clause in order for spamming to be considered an abuse.
The airline would have had to see this datamining coming in order to post a "no datamining" sign anywhere on the site. If they didn't, then there's a vacuum where they should have been such a policy... and that could make all the difference.
They're a great deal for the employees, but revealing which routes have space-available seats shortly before takeoff is highly valuable data. That shouldn't be in trusted the hands of an ex-employee.
Had they simply upgraded him to a regular coach seat, there'd be no need to be giving him access to the employee-side site. This was a case of being cheap in the near term costing more in the long run...
I'm currently working on a project like this as we speak. My company's website is getting nailed from a handful of IP addresses that do nothing but datamining. We've come to the conclusion that captchas would penalize joe user and we're going to move forward with some applications that throttle requests by IP. We don't keep private information outside of account specific data...?
The best defense against dataminers is garbage data...
Instead of giving the overzealous IP a limit as to how much they can download, instead start including non-existant datapoints, or bot-tempting links in browser-invisible color schemes. Once you've identified your boggie... give them nothing but random numbers in place of data.
Actually "vulture capital" is a legitimate term for people that buy failing companies in order to asset strip and so on. Quite literally picking over the bones of the corporate carcass for stray morsels of value. If you are in Utah you can see some circling over Salt Lake City waiting for SCO to finally croak.
Wait a sec... you're saying that after Darl gives up the charade, there's gonna be assets left in SCO?
The airline alleges Lafond's identification number was used 243,630 times between May 15, 2003, and March 19, 2004, to access the website
It took more than 10 months to realize that this account was hitting the site roughly 750 times per day? Somebody didn't bother to check the logs regularly... this should have smelled funny much faster than that.
We may see an interesting test case for the validity of website terms of serivce here, or maybe even what happens when a website forgets to cover a form of abuse in the TOS.
Afterall, the site that was involved here was designed for an internal audience, one that'd not dream of feeding info to a competitor.
But they couldn't simply delete this guy's account because he was entitled to use that site for the next five years to book free air travel as part of his severance package. If he was told not to give the information to his new employer, that's one thing. But if he wasn't, then who can say that infomation given to an ex-employee without any contract still counts as a trade secret?
So, if there isn't a TOS on the page in question... things could get really interesting.
Some of Canada's largest pension funds as well as Toronto conglomerate Onex Corp. and several U.S. vulture funds have been mentioned as possible replacement investors in the airline.
Was that a typo... or is The Globe and Mail public on it's low opinion of venture capital operations?
To airlines, a space-available ticket is something that's being plucked out of the garbage. It represents what they allow most of their employees to do... fly for free when there's an empty seat that's going to be going to be going somewhere. Of course, the critical mistake was that in order for somebody to know if there's going to be space-availalbe, they have to publish on this site how full or not full the plane currently is.
So there's where the dumb idea play comes in. If they had just let him have some free coach tickets through the customer side the operation then all they'd have to do is give him some limited-use coupon codes. Or they could have given him cash in his severance package. But no, they had had to go with these theoretically near-zero-cost cost tickets... and now look where they are.
I'm trying to find on the StarROMs site... is it legal to use game ROMs obtained through them in a commercial arcade setting where a customer actually puts a quarter through to get past the "insert coin" prompt? The license terms seem to say nothing about that one way or the other...
By implication, are folks who violate copyright by downloading various roms more legally liable if StarROMs' business model succeeds?
I'd imagine so, and I don't like it.
Nope. Copyright infingement is still copyright infingement. It's just now there's going to be an easier reference point for how much value you've been taking instead of the court having to throw darts to pick a number.
I told you all last Thursday that Michael didn't have to do anything special to pick his April Fool's Day stories. He'll post nonsense any day of the year!
Then again, how can we verify the results claimed by a human scientist? Usually, it's by documenting the step-by-step process so that the entire experiment can be replicated.
So, while one computer's output might certainly be possible to contain a mistake, like the early-generation Pentium computers with their legendary division table mistake, if several different computers using drastically different hardware all give the same output, that should be enough cross-verification to say that the problem is solved correctly.
How could you not keep some little, vital secrets? How could you not allow critical misconceptions to go uncorrected?
How could you not ensure the backup fails for a couple weeks and then use your root password to destroy the database?
When dealing with IT workers, you often cannot leave them with any access to the system at the moment they discover that they're out of a job. Even though such an act of distruction would be very illegal... it's kinda hard to sue an unemployed guy for everything he has and recover what you've lost.
A lot of planning needs to go into this by the managers, because it's very easy for a company's reputation to get ruined when it loses track of a week's worth of orders. Eventually, you know we're going to end up reading about a company that gets screwed back by an employee they're trying to screw because they left him with too much access...
In most cases, when your job has no training responsiblity and suddenly gets that resposibility, it's a leverage with which to demand a pay raise or a contract that makes a comittment to keep you around. If they don't give that to you, then you haven't been fired... your old job has ceased to exist and you declined the new one they tried to offer you because it's an unacceptable offer. That's the difference between a logic that disqualifies you from unemployment to one that qualifies you.
I think they're relying on the fear of workers not familiar with the local unemployment laws to not see that they can get their unemployment benefits even if they refuse to train their replacements, and if everybody on a staff refuses to be the trainer than the "send the jobs overseas" plan suddenly gets a whole lot more expensive to the point it tips over...
Train My Replacement? Sorry, it's not in my job description.
Seriously, in most states a sudden take-it-or-leave-it change in your job requirements is a "just cause" to quit your job and still claim unemployment.
If you weren't in the business of training people in India... and you don't want to get into that business, you shouldn't have to.
If they can threaten to disqualify you from unemployment for refusing to train your own replacement, then there's a problem with unemployment law.
In most states, they have a short list of "good reasons" why you can quit your job and still get unemployment, such as your employer requiring an abusive number of overtime hours. If this situation isn't on those lists yet, it should be.
Didn't they say the same thing about 9/11? The human need to blame stuff on other stuff is unstoppable isn't it.
Yep. Becuase nothing is truely pre-destined. Everything that happens is the effect of some other cause. And, the more we understand the causes, the easier it becomes to keep the bad effects from happening...
Slashdot Mirror
Linux good, outsource baddddd!
What's the difference? Neither are run by Americans...
Remember, IBM never gets into a business that others haven't already proven profitable.
In fact, you shouldn't. You should just have a bit-flag on the accounts saying that they're not allowed to log in... you never know when somebody's coming back to the company and would need their account reactivated.
Same goes if Joe Smith user gets a virus on his computer that spamms the heck out of an ISP and the ISP gets on blacklists. Joe Smith user is ultimately responsible for the spam, and should be booted from the ISP (assuming the TOS allows it) for letting the spamer (knowingly or otherwise) use his account to send spam.
But that's the key... the TOS needs to have a "thou shalt not spam" clause in order for spamming to be considered an abuse.
The airline would have had to see this datamining coming in order to post a "no datamining" sign anywhere on the site. If they didn't, then there's a vacuum where they should have been such a policy... and that could make all the difference.
They're a great deal for the employees, but revealing which routes have space-available seats shortly before takeoff is highly valuable data. That shouldn't be in trusted the hands of an ex-employee.
Had they simply upgraded him to a regular coach seat, there'd be no need to be giving him access to the employee-side site. This was a case of being cheap in the near term costing more in the long run...
A closed-access site that's offering not-for-publication data isn't a "major site". They eventually caught onto this, but it took them 10 months.
I'm currently working on a project like this as we speak. My company's website is getting nailed from a handful of IP addresses that do nothing but datamining. We've come to the conclusion that captchas would penalize joe user and we're going to move forward with some applications that throttle requests by IP. We don't keep private information outside of account specific data...?
The best defense against dataminers is garbage data...
Instead of giving the overzealous IP a limit as to how much they can download, instead start including non-existant datapoints, or bot-tempting links in browser-invisible color schemes. Once you've identified your boggie... give them nothing but random numbers in place of data.
Actually "vulture capital" is a legitimate term for people that buy failing companies in order to asset strip and so on. Quite literally picking over the bones of the corporate carcass for stray morsels of value. If you are in Utah you can see some circling over Salt Lake City waiting for SCO to finally croak.
Wait a sec... you're saying that after Darl gives up the charade, there's gonna be assets left in SCO?
The airline alleges Lafond's identification number was used 243,630 times between May 15, 2003, and March 19, 2004, to access the website
It took more than 10 months to realize that this account was hitting the site roughly 750 times per day? Somebody didn't bother to check the logs regularly... this should have smelled funny much faster than that.
We may see an interesting test case for the validity of website terms of serivce here, or maybe even what happens when a website forgets to cover a form of abuse in the TOS.
Afterall, the site that was involved here was designed for an internal audience, one that'd not dream of feeding info to a competitor.
But they couldn't simply delete this guy's account because he was entitled to use that site for the next five years to book free air travel as part of his severance package. If he was told not to give the information to his new employer, that's one thing. But if he wasn't, then who can say that infomation given to an ex-employee without any contract still counts as a trade secret?
So, if there isn't a TOS on the page in question... things could get really interesting.
Some of Canada's largest pension funds as well as Toronto conglomerate Onex Corp. and several U.S. vulture funds have been mentioned as possible replacement investors in the airline.
Was that a typo... or is The Globe and Mail public on it's low opinion of venture capital operations?
To airlines, a space-available ticket is something that's being plucked out of the garbage. It represents what they allow most of their employees to do... fly for free when there's an empty seat that's going to be going to be going somewhere. Of course, the critical mistake was that in order for somebody to know if there's going to be space-availalbe, they have to publish on this site how full or not full the plane currently is.
So there's where the dumb idea play comes in. If they had just let him have some free coach tickets through the customer side the operation then all they'd have to do is give him some limited-use coupon codes. Or they could have given him cash in his severance package. But no, they had had to go with these theoretically near-zero-cost cost tickets... and now look where they are.
Okay... found it... to answer my own question:
This License allows you
to use the Software on a single personal
computer for non-commercial
entertainment purposes only,
I'm trying to find on the StarROMs site... is it legal to use game ROMs obtained through them in a commercial arcade setting where a customer actually puts a quarter through to get past the "insert coin" prompt? The license terms seem to say nothing about that one way or the other...
By implication, are folks who violate copyright by downloading various roms more legally liable if StarROMs' business model succeeds?
I'd imagine so, and I don't like it.
Nope. Copyright infingement is still copyright infingement. It's just now there's going to be an easier reference point for how much value you've been taking instead of the court having to throw darts to pick a number.
I told you all last Thursday that Michael didn't have to do anything special to pick his April Fool's Day stories. He'll post nonsense any day of the year!
Michael,
April Fools Day was last Thursday, you insenstive clod!
Then again, how can we verify the results claimed by a human scientist? Usually, it's by documenting the step-by-step process so that the entire experiment can be replicated.
So, while one computer's output might certainly be possible to contain a mistake, like the early-generation Pentium computers with their legendary division table mistake, if several different computers using drastically different hardware all give the same output, that should be enough cross-verification to say that the problem is solved correctly.
How could you not keep some little, vital secrets? How could you not allow critical misconceptions to go uncorrected?
How could you not ensure the backup fails for a couple weeks and then use your root password to destroy the database?
When dealing with IT workers, you often cannot leave them with any access to the system at the moment they discover that they're out of a job. Even though such an act of distruction would be very illegal... it's kinda hard to sue an unemployed guy for everything he has and recover what you've lost.
A lot of planning needs to go into this by the managers, because it's very easy for a company's reputation to get ruined when it loses track of a week's worth of orders. Eventually, you know we're going to end up reading about a company that gets screwed back by an employee they're trying to screw because they left him with too much access...
You're exactly right on.
In most cases, when your job has no training responsiblity and suddenly gets that resposibility, it's a leverage with which to demand a pay raise or a contract that makes a comittment to keep you around. If they don't give that to you, then you haven't been fired... your old job has ceased to exist and you declined the new one they tried to offer you because it's an unacceptable offer. That's the difference between a logic that disqualifies you from unemployment to one that qualifies you.
I think they're relying on the fear of workers not familiar with the local unemployment laws to not see that they can get their unemployment benefits even if they refuse to train their replacements, and if everybody on a staff refuses to be the trainer than the "send the jobs overseas" plan suddenly gets a whole lot more expensive to the point it tips over...
But still, your involvement sometimes makes it possible for the job to job to go off shore, where without it the whole plan would have failed.
Train My Replacement?
Sorry, it's not in my job description.
Seriously, in most states a sudden take-it-or-leave-it change in your job requirements is a "just cause" to quit your job and still claim unemployment.
If you weren't in the business of training people in India... and you don't want to get into that business, you shouldn't have to.
If they can threaten to disqualify you from unemployment for refusing to train your own replacement, then there's a problem with unemployment law.
In most states, they have a short list of "good reasons" why you can quit your job and still get unemployment, such as your employer requiring an abusive number of overtime hours. If this situation isn't on those lists yet, it should be.
Didn't they say the same thing about 9/11? The human need to blame stuff on other stuff is unstoppable isn't it.
Yep. Becuase nothing is truely pre-destined. Everything that happens is the effect of some other cause. And, the more we understand the causes, the easier it becomes to keep the bad effects from happening...
Any form of Microsoft Office document can contain VBA code, and therefore possibly a virus.
VBA can even be in complied form within an Access Database.