Unfortunately, GAIN has tied their right to be a program that modifies the content of an Internet page to basically the way that pop-up blockers do the same. It's hard to write a law that bans one without catching the other...
I just love the ever-expanding L.L. Bean bookbags that keep getting bigger as students are asked to carry more textbooks.
Schools are so concerned about weapons, but they let me carry one on my back all my senior year in 1999. It's a 30 to 40 point dead weight when fully loaded with books... hurl that at somebody not expecting it and you knock them down and seriously hurt them. Drop it over a ledge to the lower floor and it's deadly.
Nearly every senior taking the AP-level courses at my school had one, we needed monogram or some other mark our own so that we didn't confuse them with the same bags of like color in the same room. It's a good thing we were all good kids and nobody snapped that year. We all were getting the physics knowledge to know how much force we could have generated by getting any sort of velocity with that kind of weight.
If accused of a crime, you're innocent until proven guilty. However, if accused of being civially liable, it takes only meeting a "more likely than not" standard of proof that you're at fault. You don't even have to have download it, you just have to be responsible for downloading it...
This guy is behaving just like Comcast. He's the pipe and he doesn't know what goes on in that pipe. Unless the Judge were to determine that the pipe owner is responsible (and Comcast will certainly help him fight _that_ kind of fight) then he's ok.
BUZZ! Comcast already threw him under the bus on that one. The TOS says that he's responsible, not them.
Their lawyers can try to help him now, but that TOS pretty much contradicts anything they could say in his defense.
The editor of the newspaper or the owner of wherever you left your flyers would have a right to mute you by tossing your submission into the trash can...
Not even your own privacy... you are offering to protect the privacy of strangers if you set up a default-settings no-encryption WiFi.
You're still tracable... you're just not bothering to keep the identity of your guests. The investigation will just go cold at you... never a good place to be.
Re:Wow Bigger, heavier, and costs more
on
Safe and Insecure?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Notice that Speakeasy encurages you to share the bandwidth and also share the bill. Suddenly your WiFi leach is now a party to your ISP agreement.:)
Some "security" is based on zigs instead of zags
on
Safe and Insecure?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The concept of "stealthing" network ports is due for a retirement party. It was great as a young kid, but it aged at Internet time speed. Now it's overdue for a retirement party.
See, stealthing is the idea of simply not answering the door when somebody unwanted knocks on it, instead of answering "I'm here but I'm not letting you in." which is what happens when a port is "closed" instead.
It was a great idea when port scanners didn't expect it. The idea being if the first request for a connect never gets a negative reply, the scanner will assume there's no computer at that IP and move onto the next possible victim. It worked against the port scanning threats of the time.
However, today's worms aren't so nice. TCP, by its nature, attempts to retry when a connection request is ignored, figuring the packets got lost in the Internet cloud somewhere. However, if you send the "I don't accept that kind of traffic!" message, the attacking server hears that, and that sends the attacker on to its next potential victim with no further waste of your incoming bandwidth.
"Stealth" is the new "Closed". Yeah, it's one of those fashion things where what's cool to do is just what everybody else isn't doing at the moment. So, keep watching, eventually it'll flip back.
Salon: News writen by Sophomores...
on
Safe and Insecure?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Somebody forgot to read the TOS of their ISP... because absolutely ever ISP out there has something to this effect in thier TOS: As the person who pays the bill, you're responsible for keeping the Internet connection you're buying to yourself and people who you trust with it. The reason why they're warning you to do that is because if you allow your connection to fall into "enemy hands", the usage that goes over your wire will be
By choosing to run the "notoriously vulnerable technology", as the author admited in his confession letter, he admitted that he knowingly chose a piece of technology that could be exploited yielding his internet equipment making a request on behalf of somebody unknown. That's nice... you just gave that unknown person the gift of a liability shield at your expense.
As I just posted last thread, annonymity these days is really achieved by somebody else who had the chance to know who you are intentionally failing notice or promising not to tell. The thing is, that other person is taking on the liablity for what you do.
How nice of you to pay his MPAA/RIAA verdict bill for him, you'll be a hero to copyright pirates everwhere. I'm sure they'll be excited to learn there's still people dumb enough to fall for this trick still out there.
Any company that has to make a marketing effort to declare themselves "professional" most likely is not. Afterall, real professional companies just act that way and everybody else applies that term to them.
Sure OSDN can track you, but that's not going to stop you from astroturfing.
I wonder, should Slashdot have an anti-astroturfing exception in its privacy policy, under which it could potentially flag all posts that have ever come from known JBoss IP space?
What about something like Freenet? Someone in this group of thousands of nodes published this, but none of us can tell you who.
oh, IANAL, but...
The thousands of people behind those nodes end up just sharing the liability. I can't wait for the first lawsuit that forces a cluster of nearly-annoymous people together into a single defendant, finds that joint defendant liable for something one member of the group did, and then gives them the option of either having each member paying their equal share of the verdict, or turning against each other and trying to piece together from any actual clues available who did it.
Oh, you most certainly can't convict a group of people of a crime that way... but slander and libel aren't crimes, they're just a cause for civil liability.
I wonder if they'll end up calling the concept "common law companies." Just like a common law marriage, the law usually has a principle where if you keep doing something you should have filed paperwork for but didn't, we'll just pretend you did and keep going...
You can't really publish anything truely anonymously. You never really could anyway. The closest thing is to find somebody who is willing to know who you are who is willing to accept your writing and publish it without crediting you while disclaiming that somebody else wrote it. Of course, that person has to accept the legal liability that comes with publishing that work as if they wrote it themselves.
Yep, some speech does come with a legal liablity attached. "Free speech" is a great ideal, but it is also subject to the greater ideal of "Your rights end where somebody else's rights begin." That is, you can't use free speech to give instructions that put somebody else into danger or spreads lies about somebody else. That's just not your right to do because it ends up damaging somebody else's rights.
People who oversimplfy the Bill of Rights... such as those who claim that the 1st Amendment protects all expressions of speech from all authorites everywhere, or that the 5th Amendment means you'll never have to tell of your own crimes in court if you don't want to are making sophomoric mistakes. They sound right, but they're not.
The same goes for this suposed "right" to be annonymous. You can try... but there's always somebody who can squeal on you if they want to.
You get what you pay for in free online forums. Here on Slashdot, you're welcome to publish what you want, but if you don't want to be tied to an e-mail-confirmed user account then you have to accept that your username will display as "Anonymous Coward", be penalized in the point-based mod system (assuming the user hasn't overriden the setting from the default), and you'll still be IP and cookie tracked for whatever purposes OSDN wants.
Mainstream media outlets at least do their best to make their commentators and reporters declare any conflicts of interests they have so that viewers can know about it when considering information from that source. But, non-mainstream outlets are more direct... you get "closer" information, but you also take the risk of what happens when a source with conflicts is allowed to speak unchallenged. Which seems to be exactly what happened here.
However, airing a program in eratically scheduled slots (even if there's an "If Baseball then..." logic to it) shakes loose fair-weather fans and hurts the overall rating. TiVos fix this problem, but not everybody has that.
Fox Sports Northwest is the Mariners cable network. KSTW is the biggest station airing Mariners games when they're over-the-air games, which makes them the flagship of the broadcast network.
Cable is still not considered broadcasting in some circles.
Wednesday is at least a guranteed safe spot during baseball. ESPN's deal with MLB prevents any OTA stations from airing games during Wednesday primetime.
But you're right, Basketball is still likely to poke holes on Wednesdays...
Fridays are definitely a death slot on the UPN network. Many UPN affiliates, even some the network owns, have Friday-heavy packages to air games from the local MLB team. Stations affected include...
Boston's WSBK "UPN 38" which airs "Friday Night Baseball" Red Sox Games nearly every Friday night in the season. Connecticut's WCTX "UPN 8" is part of the Mets broadcast network. Seattle's KSTW "UPN 11" is the flagship of the Mariners broadcast network.
In short, it's hard to get anything to work on UPN Fridays during the start of the TV station because about a quarter of the network just plain falls apart on any given Friday night due to baseball coverage when its in season.
Western Union's service has always made itself above board and auditable. They'll collect personal info when the government demands it, or when the money-sender feels like demanding it so that the receiver has to verify that they are the person the money is intended for.
They've got no way to revoke the transaction if it's fraudlent. That's your problem to figure out... they're just about getting the money from point A to point B.
That I think is PayPal's biggest problem... they're oriented to the buyer's advantage at the expense of the seller. However, that sender-side revocation capability esentially requires a credit check to even be possible, which means demanding the social security number upfront from everybody in a way Western Union never has to.
Western Union never cares how good you are at future payments of debt... they've got the cash in hand before they'll do their thing.
Sure people should get security if they're moving 10 grand. But that is THEIR call, not the government's. If they want to, they can take the money and scatter it across a parade.
You need good security for you and the people around you for that too. Otherwise, it's disorderly conduct. Some rich people have tried that already.
I want my financial transactions documented. I want my bank to have no wiggle room about how much money I put in it today. And I don't mind the fact that I can't manage to hide anything from the IRS... they only tax me when I'm making money anyway.
The PATRIOT Act has some rather questionable clauses in it, but the money transfer clauses aren't exactly part of it. Basically, it does is tie up loopholes in the existing money tracking laws.
The law that says any transaction involving $10,000 or more in cash has to be reported is one I don't see too much of a problem. Anybody who's pulling $10,000 out of their wallet deserves police attention... even if they got the money legally they should show that they've got good-enough security to protect them while transporting that much cash!
Think about it... who goes into a car dealership and pays cash for a vehicle? Consumer Reports magazine's testers used to as part of their "We pay cash and buy our test models at stores so we get an untampered unit from the marketplace every time.", but even they gave that up when honest salespeople in the CT region were telling them that they must be Consumer Reports because only they would try to pay cash for a car rather than get a checking account like anybody else who has enough credit to buy a car on loan, or enough money to pay for a car upfront.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, GAIN has tied their right to be a program that modifies the content of an Internet page to basically the way that pop-up blockers do the same. It's hard to write a law that bans one without catching the other...
I just love the ever-expanding L.L. Bean bookbags that keep getting bigger as students are asked to carry more textbooks.
Schools are so concerned about weapons, but they let me carry one on my back all my senior year in 1999. It's a 30 to 40 point dead weight when fully loaded with books... hurl that at somebody not expecting it and you knock them down and seriously hurt them. Drop it over a ledge to the lower floor and it's deadly.
Nearly every senior taking the AP-level courses at my school had one, we needed monogram or some other mark our own so that we didn't confuse them with the same bags of like color in the same room. It's a good thing we were all good kids and nobody snapped that year. We all were getting the physics knowledge to know how much force we could have generated by getting any sort of velocity with that kind of weight.
For those of you wondering "Who's Claria?"... They're the scum formerly known as Gator.
If accused of a crime, you're innocent until proven guilty. However, if accused of being civially liable, it takes only meeting a "more likely than not" standard of proof that you're at fault. You don't even have to have download it, you just have to be responsible for downloading it...
This guy is behaving just like Comcast. He's the pipe and he doesn't know what goes on in that pipe. Unless the Judge were to determine that the pipe owner is responsible (and Comcast will certainly help him fight _that_ kind of fight) then he's ok.
BUZZ! Comcast already threw him under the bus on that one. The TOS says that he's responsible, not them.
Their lawyers can try to help him now, but that TOS pretty much contradicts anything they could say in his defense.
What's the difference. If his he's running one of the routers out there that's based on Linux, it's close enough.
It's his network wire that the illegal traffic is going over, he's on the hook unless he can finger who started it.
The editor of the newspaper or the owner of wherever you left your flyers would have a right to mute you by tossing your submission into the trash can...
Not even your own privacy... you are offering to protect the privacy of strangers if you set up a default-settings no-encryption WiFi.
You're still tracable... you're just not bothering to keep the identity of your guests. The investigation will just go cold at you... never a good place to be.
Notice that Speakeasy encurages you to share the bandwidth and also share the bill. Suddenly your WiFi leach is now a party to your ISP agreement. :)
The concept of "stealthing" network ports is due for a retirement party. It was great as a young kid, but it aged at Internet time speed. Now it's overdue for a retirement party.
See, stealthing is the idea of simply not answering the door when somebody unwanted knocks on it, instead of answering "I'm here but I'm not letting you in." which is what happens when a port is "closed" instead.
It was a great idea when port scanners didn't expect it. The idea being if the first request for a connect never gets a negative reply, the scanner will assume there's no computer at that IP and move onto the next possible victim. It worked against the port scanning threats of the time.
However, today's worms aren't so nice. TCP, by its nature, attempts to retry when a connection request is ignored, figuring the packets got lost in the Internet cloud somewhere. However, if you send the "I don't accept that kind of traffic!" message, the attacking server hears that, and that sends the attacker on to its next potential victim with no further waste of your incoming bandwidth.
"Stealth" is the new "Closed". Yeah, it's one of those fashion things where what's cool to do is just what everybody else isn't doing at the moment. So, keep watching, eventually it'll flip back.
Somebody forgot to read the TOS of their ISP... because absolutely ever ISP out there has something to this effect in thier TOS: As the person who pays the bill, you're responsible for keeping the Internet connection you're buying to yourself and people who you trust with it. The reason why they're warning you to do that is because if you allow your connection to fall into "enemy hands", the usage that goes over your wire will be
By choosing to run the "notoriously vulnerable technology", as the author admited in his confession letter, he admitted that he knowingly chose a piece of technology that could be exploited yielding his internet equipment making a request on behalf of somebody unknown. That's nice... you just gave that unknown person the gift of a liability shield at your expense.
As I just posted last thread, annonymity these days is really achieved by somebody else who had the chance to know who you are intentionally failing notice or promising not to tell. The thing is, that other person is taking on the liablity for what you do.
How nice of you to pay his MPAA/RIAA verdict bill for him, you'll be a hero to copyright pirates everwhere. I'm sure they'll be excited to learn there's still people dumb enough to fall for this trick still out there.
Any company that has to make a marketing effort to declare themselves "professional" most likely is not. Afterall, real professional companies just act that way and everybody else applies that term to them.
Sure OSDN can track you, but that's not going to stop you from astroturfing.
I wonder, should Slashdot have an anti-astroturfing exception in its privacy policy, under which it could potentially flag all posts that have ever come from known JBoss IP space?
What about something like Freenet?
Someone in this group of thousands of nodes published this, but none of us can tell you who.
oh, IANAL, but...
The thousands of people behind those nodes end up just sharing the liability. I can't wait for the first lawsuit that forces a cluster of nearly-annoymous people together into a single defendant, finds that joint defendant liable for something one member of the group did, and then gives them the option of either having each member paying their equal share of the verdict, or turning against each other and trying to piece together from any actual clues available who did it.
Oh, you most certainly can't convict a group of people of a crime that way... but slander and libel aren't crimes, they're just a cause for civil liability.
I wonder if they'll end up calling the concept "common law companies." Just like a common law marriage, the law usually has a principle where if you keep doing something you should have filed paperwork for but didn't, we'll just pretend you did and keep going...
Or the First Amendment... or the Constitution for that matter.
Even though most of us learned the authors of The Federalist Papers in history class, when they distributed them at the time names were not attached.
Anonymous writing with a self-serving agenda has been around for a long time...
You can't really publish anything truely anonymously. You never really could anyway. The closest thing is to find somebody who is willing to know who you are who is willing to accept your writing and publish it without crediting you while disclaiming that somebody else wrote it. Of course, that person has to accept the legal liability that comes with publishing that work as if they wrote it themselves.
Yep, some speech does come with a legal liablity attached. "Free speech" is a great ideal, but it is also subject to the greater ideal of "Your rights end where somebody else's rights begin." That is, you can't use free speech to give instructions that put somebody else into danger or spreads lies about somebody else. That's just not your right to do because it ends up damaging somebody else's rights.
People who oversimplfy the Bill of Rights... such as those who claim that the 1st Amendment protects all expressions of speech from all authorites everywhere, or that the 5th Amendment means you'll never have to tell of your own crimes in court if you don't want to are making sophomoric mistakes. They sound right, but they're not.
The same goes for this suposed "right" to be annonymous. You can try... but there's always somebody who can squeal on you if they want to.
You get what you pay for in free online forums. Here on Slashdot, you're welcome to publish what you want, but if you don't want to be tied to an e-mail-confirmed user account then you have to accept that your username will display as "Anonymous Coward", be penalized in the point-based mod system (assuming the user hasn't overriden the setting from the default), and you'll still be IP and cookie tracked for whatever purposes OSDN wants.
Mainstream media outlets at least do their best to make their commentators and reporters declare any conflicts of interests they have so that viewers can know about it when considering information from that source. But, non-mainstream outlets are more direct... you get "closer" information, but you also take the risk of what happens when a source with conflicts is allowed to speak unchallenged. Which seems to be exactly what happened here.
However, airing a program in eratically scheduled slots (even if there's an "If Baseball then..." logic to it) shakes loose fair-weather fans and hurts the overall rating. TiVos fix this problem, but not everybody has that.
Fox Sports Northwest is the Mariners cable network. KSTW is the biggest station airing Mariners games when they're over-the-air games, which makes them the flagship of the broadcast network.
Cable is still not considered broadcasting in some circles.
Wednesday is at least a guranteed safe spot during baseball. ESPN's deal with MLB prevents any OTA stations from airing games during Wednesday primetime.
But you're right, Basketball is still likely to poke holes on Wednesdays...
UPN in part suffers from being related to CBS in the company food chain. All truely good shows go to CBS, UPN has to eat from the leftovers.
Fridays are definitely a death slot on the UPN network. Many UPN affiliates, even some the network owns, have Friday-heavy packages to air games from the local MLB team. Stations affected include...
Boston's WSBK "UPN 38" which airs "Friday Night Baseball" Red Sox Games nearly every Friday night in the season.
Connecticut's WCTX "UPN 8" is part of the Mets broadcast network.
Seattle's KSTW "UPN 11" is the flagship of the Mariners broadcast network.
In short, it's hard to get anything to work on UPN Fridays during the start of the TV station because about a quarter of the network just plain falls apart on any given Friday night due to baseball coverage when its in season.
Western Union's service has always made itself above board and auditable. They'll collect personal info when the government demands it, or when the money-sender feels like demanding it so that the receiver has to verify that they are the person the money is intended for.
They've got no way to revoke the transaction if it's fraudlent. That's your problem to figure out... they're just about getting the money from point A to point B.
That I think is PayPal's biggest problem... they're oriented to the buyer's advantage at the expense of the seller. However, that sender-side revocation capability esentially requires a credit check to even be possible, which means demanding the social security number upfront from everybody in a way Western Union never has to.
Western Union never cares how good you are at future payments of debt... they've got the cash in hand before they'll do their thing.
Sure people should get security if they're moving 10 grand. But that is THEIR call, not the government's. If they want to, they can take the money and scatter it across a parade.
You need good security for you and the people around you for that too. Otherwise, it's disorderly conduct. Some rich people have tried that already.
I want my financial transactions documented. I want my bank to have no wiggle room about how much money I put in it today. And I don't mind the fact that I can't manage to hide anything from the IRS... they only tax me when I'm making money anyway.
The PATRIOT Act has some rather questionable clauses in it, but the money transfer clauses aren't exactly part of it. Basically, it does is tie up loopholes in the existing money tracking laws.
The law that says any transaction involving $10,000 or more in cash has to be reported is one I don't see too much of a problem. Anybody who's pulling $10,000 out of their wallet deserves police attention... even if they got the money legally they should show that they've got good-enough security to protect them while transporting that much cash!
Think about it... who goes into a car dealership and pays cash for a vehicle? Consumer Reports magazine's testers used to as part of their "We pay cash and buy our test models at stores so we get an untampered unit from the marketplace every time.", but even they gave that up when honest salespeople in the CT region were telling them that they must be Consumer Reports because only they would try to pay cash for a car rather than get a checking account like anybody else who has enough credit to buy a car on loan, or enough money to pay for a car upfront.