Ouch. I feel for ya. Worst I've had to deal with is obscure, uncommented OCaml scripts created to do things I didn't fully understand by people that weren't my co workers any more. I have heard some horror stories though, and there's always more on The Daily WTF.
I'll have to follow this case, see what shakes out. And I'll have to make sure to read the original documents, as the EFF reports seem a little misleading...
I agree with you; it's quite plausible for this guy to inform on Riccardo because of some dispute.
My reasoning is like this: he feels strongly about this, since he brought the police into it. Also, he described the crashed machine as "brand new" but says that Riccardo helped him set it up and therefore could have access, so their falling-out must have been recent.
Given that, I don't think it's out of the question that he'd try to embellish the charges. Hence my skepticism of the implication that Riccardo installed some arcane back-door by which he crashed Mr. Redacted's system, as opposed to putting loads of... uh, "alternative," porn on it, or sending the emails from THAT computer instead of his own, et cetera. It seems a little far-fetched.
Basically they have some evidence that appears to incriminate Calixte for "outing" Mr. Redacted, but the rest of it seems like hearsay or exaggeration. "He implicated himself in several computer crimes" could just have been Calixte bullshitting. It seems he was a prankster.
Like you said, it's common for former friends of criminals to rat them out. According to my computer security professor, it's not so uncommon for "hackers" to be painted like unstable demigods that might wreak havoc if given access to a touch-tone phone. This could be more of the same.
The EFF article seems FUDdy, I'll warrant (pun intended).
EXHIBIT-A.pdf is well worth the read. Check the Basis of Probable Cause especially. Item b) establishes some usernames/aliases that Calixte is supposed to use, which comes back into play in item e) and f) where the relevant DHCP and DNS log entries are posted. The hostnames, IP address, Operating System (unfortunately ubuntu 8.04 it seems) and DNS activity logs all point to Calixte. It's not like this was warrant was cooked up ad hoc.
Item b) does say that he jailbreaks cellphones... dunno what's supposed to be wrong with that. It may be a breach of contract if you bought your iphone through AT&T somehow, but how is it illegal?
It seems from the warrant, though that the person accusing Riccardo Calixte is the same person who he "outed." Even if that person had been a useful source of information before, wouldn't that cast some doubt on his veracity? That he crashed Mr. Redacted's computer, and cracked the school's grading system? I only saw the accusations of these, not the evidence. "Implicating himself" in illegal activities might be just empty bragging.
In particular, the accusation that Calixte crashed Mr. Redacted's computer: is the fact that several experts couldn't fix his computer on his machine supposed to indicate Calixte's devious hackeriness? Is there supposed to be a second user account? A back door? If he simply knows the password, why couldn't "several experts" help Mr. Redacted change it?
The warrant was probably justified, in my own unqualified opinion, but I'm skeptical of some of the charges.
So when Carl Sagan said, "we are each of us a multitude," he was possibly more right than he knew...
But then again, I think I was exposed to this notion in High School Biology when we covered mitochondria. The process by which separate organisms like mitochondria became inextricably paired with animal cells need not have stopped, I suppose. If that actually IS what's happening here, anyway. But so long as there's uncertainty, we're free to speculate wildly.
Well, if you try to identify yourself as a pro-science Christian you generally get misidentified as belonging to the Church of Christian Science. That's not fun.
Also, many kids nowadays are getting cell-phones, pdas, and the like (though hopefully not guns). Your gait changes as you grow; are kids going to find themselves unable to send each other inane text-messages because they're in a growth spurt?
More seriously, if there's an emergency, and you're running away, is the phone going to lock you out so you have to enter your password before you dial 911?
Is that true? I figured there was a threshold for converting some of the air friction against you into lift or thrust in a direction other than down before you would be considered to be "gliding."
Re:Why money is enough
on
Space Tourism?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
"If letting a space tourist go up can attract media attention, then that's great. Its even nice that the customer pays the organization to create good marketing for the organization."
I guess; it works for brand-name jeans ans slogan t-shirts.
I'm not sure this is going to be a viable income source in the long term, though. That is, we can't depend on conspicuous consumption to keep our space agencies solvent. As for participating in experiments, when a university does a psychological study, they pay the participants, not the other way around. Eventually, the new is going to wear off and NASA will be back to begging from Uncle Sam.
I think that when it comes right down to it, most will just go to the brink of breaking away and then pull back, thinking they've proved something. The economic consequences of actually fragmenting the Internet are going to be too great for most countries to ignore.
Either way, and I'm looking reeeeeally far ahead on this, when we eventually colonize the Moon and Mars, we'll probably end up with new networks springing up there as well. I imagine lunar networks would be able to access the Earth Internet by means of satellite ISPs and creating LANs, but what about the red planet?
a) "Canadians between 12 and 24 years of age are responsible for 78 per cent of illegal music downloading, even though they make up only 21 per cent of the population, it says."
b) "Nearly 27 per cent of younger people surveyed said they would consider cheating on a test or exam, compared with 10 per cent of the general population."
c) "Of those asked, 6 per cent of younger Canadians said they would leave a store without paying for a piece of clothing, compared with 2 per cent of the population at large."
and, as we all know, a+b+c=
d) "Canadians between the ages of 18 and 29 are much more willing than other age groups to make illegal copies of software programs, cheat on exams or even shoplift, an Environics poll suggests."
Okay. Besides that b) is ludicrously insignificant for reasons already mentioned, all of them lean on the assumption that if you say you would do something, you're more likely to do it, as opposed to lying about it and hiding your motives. Because people always tell survey people the truth.
Furthermore, without challenging the numbers they've come up with, they argue that because young people account for 78 percent of illegal music downloading, and that 27 percent of younger people surveyed said they would consider cheating on a test, that somehow that 78% and 27% have an overlap of 100%.
Riight. Care to buy a bridge? Prices are rock bottom right now, and it's a great solid asset as a hedge against inflation!
Yeah. Pull the plug on iTunes, and what's left? Hmm? A lot of disgruntled customers who'll go back to stealing your music instead of paying for it, that's what. And that's if they're NOT new customers who will now TURN TO illegal downloading to get their fix. Yes Napoleon, I hear Russia's lovely this time of year....
The same thing happens in miniature when you start raising your prices.
The whole strength of online music stores is that it makes the music accessible. It's worked like a charm; people (myself included) now take great pains not to get out of reach of their iPods. What happens when you remove the accessibility of music through the Internet by raising prices or stopping your service, leaving only the illegal (but convenient) method of downloading from a P2P network?
Adding a head does make sense. You can cut down on the number of expensive video and audio devices you have to use if you only have an articulated platform for them, that can be reoriented without moving the robot itself (sort of like tanks vs. mobile guns; the latter must turn, the former only moves its turret). Also, if it is a remote robot designed to be operated by only one person, having more than one camera would be sort of hard to manage. It's probably more power efficient too.
Come to think of it, most robots we see in service today have a sort of stalk or crane with a camera mounted on it.
Also, there's the argument that giving the robots anthropomorphic features can be helpful in relating to humans through the robot. Police controlled bots when negotiating with a hostage taker or armed drunk & disorderly would be easier for a negotiator operating through a humanlike avatar, as the suspect would likely make "eye contact" out of instinct, thus allowing the negotiator to read his facial expressions and body language.
It might also facilitate understanding it when learning its operation (although obfuscated robot design might be useful to prevent sabotage in combat situations), and designing weapons specifically for it. This last is popular among mecha-anime enthusiasts, who argue that scaling up human-designed weapons for use by anthropomorphic robots is the least problematic approach, much like France's standardization of nuclear energy plants, making workers interchangeable between (gotta love it when your job skills are portable).
There are some robots which are adirectional on their z-axis (vertically, that is; they flip like pancakes). In fact many of these things have shown up on robot melee shows like BattleBots and Robot Wars, not to mention in the market for RC cars, which has been dominated by gimmicks rather than performance (righting mechanisms, unconventional steering schema, et cetera).
Wars would be pointless without people, and except in specific instances (robots running interdiction?) these seem to be designed to attack humans. It's entirely possible that, like some commando units in WWII, meetings between robots will follow a skirmish, break-contact-and-continue-mission pattern.
"If we don't stand up together and fight against this very real threat to the impurity of our nations willies the terrorists will have won! You don't see them wanking off in their spare time! No! They are taking up hobbies, such as flying!"
Combine this with DRM and you get "This penis has performed an illegal erection and will be shut down."
I suppose I can understand an anti-bestiality crackdown. But where's the harm in watching a grown man eat poop?
Some might say the harm had already been done.
On a more serious note, I don't like this one bit. As a person, especially a male, who has an Internet connection and some free time, I have obviously looked at porn in the past, sometimes from curiosity and sometimes for gratification. I don't generally do that anymore. I have studying to get done, and/. articles to read.
Okay, I think I've sufficently prefaced my comments.
I do not trust the FBI to police the "wild frontier" that is the Internet. Their track record shows a lot of sloppy work:
Operation Sundevil, where the GURPS Cyberpunk sourcebook and other materials were confiscated as "manuals for computer crime".
Operation Candyman, in which many suspects pled guilty to not only consuming but distributing child pronography in order to avoid publicity.
Not to mention certain other incidents that we're eminently familiar with.
I think it might be interesting to watch the FBI's employment statistics for a little while, now that they're paying some of their agents to surf for porn. Will there be a ban on hankies and picture-phones in the archives room now?
A casual glance reveals two types of shows; popular hits and "gems." I'd assume these results were glarked from respondants to a survey, who likely were either writing in to sound off like the rest of the herd or champion their pet one-season, brilliant-but-cancelled show. They obviously didn't bother to choose a definition of what "science fiction" meant, but instead relied upon the respondent's personal definition, casually moderated by the compilers of this list.
Lord, deliver us from politicians, pop-psychobabblers and other users of imprecise terms in their "research."
Or not, as you seem to be on vacation this time of the eon.
To the public, possibly because of the Sci-Fi channel, perhaps because of willful ignorance, and most likely a brilliant (sarcasm) combination of both, anything that is not straight slice-'o-life in content is "scifi."
As to clearly delineating what science fiction is and isn't, I read one helpful definition, dependant on the prescence and quality of Suspension of Disbelief. While mainstream literature doesn't need it, and Fantasy demands it, Science Fiction sets itself apart from other brands of imaginative literature in attempting to create it, foster it and encourage it.
But until a sufficently clear definition, like the above, is adopted, "science fiction" will remain a label for marketing and advertising, unworthy of the enterprise it describes.
I don't think it's fair of you to paint Kero as being opposed to all lawsuits; all you can really infer is that there there is some lawsuit X in the category of lawsuits that he disapproves of. He was speaking in broad, general terms, to which there are always exceptions.
Slashdot Mirror
Ouch. I feel for ya. Worst I've had to deal with is obscure, uncommented OCaml scripts created to do things I didn't fully understand by people that weren't my co workers any more. I have heard some horror stories though, and there's always more on The Daily WTF.
I'll have to follow this case, see what shakes out. And I'll have to make sure to read the original documents, as the EFF reports seem a little misleading...
I agree with you; it's quite plausible for this guy to inform on Riccardo because of some dispute.
My reasoning is like this: he feels strongly about this, since he brought the police into it. Also, he described the crashed machine as "brand new" but says that Riccardo helped him set it up and therefore could have access, so their falling-out must have been recent.
Given that, I don't think it's out of the question that he'd try to embellish the charges. Hence my skepticism of the implication that Riccardo installed some arcane back-door by which he crashed Mr. Redacted's system, as opposed to putting loads of... uh, "alternative," porn on it, or sending the emails from THAT computer instead of his own, et cetera. It seems a little far-fetched.
Basically they have some evidence that appears to incriminate Calixte for "outing" Mr. Redacted, but the rest of it seems like hearsay or exaggeration. "He implicated himself in several computer crimes" could just have been Calixte bullshitting. It seems he was a prankster.
Like you said, it's common for former friends of criminals to rat them out. According to my computer security professor, it's not so uncommon for "hackers" to be painted like unstable demigods that might wreak havoc if given access to a touch-tone phone. This could be more of the same.
The EFF article seems FUDdy, I'll warrant (pun intended).
EXHIBIT-A.pdf is well worth the read. Check the Basis of Probable Cause especially. Item b) establishes some usernames/aliases that Calixte is supposed to use, which comes back into play in item e) and f) where the relevant DHCP and DNS log entries are posted. The hostnames, IP address, Operating System (unfortunately ubuntu 8.04 it seems) and DNS activity logs all point to Calixte. It's not like this was warrant was cooked up ad hoc.
Item b) does say that he jailbreaks cellphones... dunno what's supposed to be wrong with that. It may be a breach of contract if you bought your iphone through AT&T somehow, but how is it illegal?
It seems from the warrant, though that the person accusing Riccardo Calixte is the same person who he "outed." Even if that person had been a useful source of information before, wouldn't that cast some doubt on his veracity? That he crashed Mr. Redacted's computer, and cracked the school's grading system? I only saw the accusations of these, not the evidence. "Implicating himself" in illegal activities might be just empty bragging.
In particular, the accusation that Calixte crashed Mr. Redacted's computer: is the fact that several experts couldn't fix his computer on his machine supposed to indicate Calixte's devious hackeriness? Is there supposed to be a second user account? A back door? If he simply knows the password, why couldn't "several experts" help Mr. Redacted change it?
The warrant was probably justified, in my own unqualified opinion, but I'm skeptical of some of the charges.
So when Carl Sagan said, "we are each of us a multitude," he was possibly more right than he knew...
But then again, I think I was exposed to this notion in High School Biology when we covered mitochondria. The process by which separate organisms like mitochondria became inextricably paired with animal cells need not have stopped, I suppose. If that actually IS what's happening here, anyway. But so long as there's uncertainty, we're free to speculate wildly.
Well, if you try to identify yourself as a pro-science Christian you generally get misidentified as belonging to the Church of Christian Science. That's not fun.
...where is the clone baby?
Quit P'ander-ing to the Trekkies.
Thanks. Now I know.
And knowing is half the battle.
Just because they flap doesn't make them wings.
Also, many kids nowadays are getting cell-phones, pdas, and the like (though hopefully not guns). Your gait changes as you grow; are kids going to find themselves unable to send each other inane text-messages because they're in a growth spurt?
More seriously, if there's an emergency, and you're running away, is the phone going to lock you out so you have to enter your password before you dial 911?
Is that true? I figured there was a threshold for converting some of the air friction against you into lift or thrust in a direction other than down before you would be considered to be "gliding."
"If letting a space tourist go up can attract media attention, then that's great. Its even nice that the customer pays the organization to create good marketing for the organization."
I guess; it works for brand-name jeans ans slogan t-shirts.
I'm not sure this is going to be a viable income source in the long term, though. That is, we can't depend on conspicuous consumption to keep our space agencies solvent. As for participating in experiments, when a university does a psychological study, they pay the participants, not the other way around. Eventually, the new is going to wear off and NASA will be back to begging from Uncle Sam.
Eyeballs?
I think that when it comes right down to it, most will just go to the brink of breaking away and then pull back, thinking they've proved something. The economic consequences of actually fragmenting the Internet are going to be too great for most countries to ignore.
Either way, and I'm looking reeeeeally far ahead on this, when we eventually colonize the Moon and Mars, we'll probably end up with new networks springing up there as well. I imagine lunar networks would be able to access the Earth Internet by means of satellite ISPs and creating LANs, but what about the red planet?
EA. Challenge Everything.
From TFA:
a) "Canadians between 12 and 24 years of age are responsible for 78 per cent of illegal music downloading, even though they make up only 21 per cent of the population, it says."
b) "Nearly 27 per cent of younger people surveyed said they would consider cheating on a test or exam, compared with 10 per cent of the general population."
c) "Of those asked, 6 per cent of younger Canadians said they would leave a store without paying for a piece of clothing, compared with 2 per cent of the population at large."
and, as we all know, a+b+c=
d) "Canadians between the ages of 18 and 29 are much more willing than other age groups to make illegal copies of software programs, cheat on exams or even shoplift, an Environics poll suggests."
Okay. Besides that b) is ludicrously insignificant for reasons already mentioned, all of them lean on the assumption that if you say you would do something, you're more likely to do it, as opposed to lying about it and hiding your motives. Because people always tell survey people the truth.
Furthermore, without challenging the numbers they've come up with, they argue that because young people account for 78 percent of illegal music downloading, and that 27 percent of younger people surveyed said they would consider cheating on a test, that somehow that 78% and 27% have an overlap of 100%.
Riight. Care to buy a bridge? Prices are rock bottom right now, and it's a great solid asset as a hedge against inflation!
Hey, if I were being taken to court by the RIAA, I'd swear the oath with my hand on this book.
I think they're trying to prove Darwin wrong.
Yeah. Pull the plug on iTunes, and what's left? Hmm? A lot of disgruntled customers who'll go back to stealing your music instead of paying for it, that's what. And that's if they're NOT new customers who will now TURN TO illegal downloading to get their fix. Yes Napoleon, I hear Russia's lovely this time of year....
The same thing happens in miniature when you start raising your prices.
The whole strength of online music stores is that it makes the music accessible. It's worked like a charm; people (myself included) now take great pains not to get out of reach of their iPods. What happens when you remove the accessibility of music through the Internet by raising prices or stopping your service, leaving only the illegal (but convenient) method of downloading from a P2P network?
I'll leave that as a exercise for the class _
See Amiga Persecution Complex. It's not really their fault, you see.
Adding a head does make sense. You can cut down on the number of expensive video and audio devices you have to use if you only have an articulated platform for them, that can be reoriented without moving the robot itself (sort of like tanks vs. mobile guns; the latter must turn, the former only moves its turret). Also, if it is a remote robot designed to be operated by only one person, having more than one camera would be sort of hard to manage. It's probably more power efficient too.
Come to think of it, most robots we see in service today have a sort of stalk or crane with a camera mounted on it.
Also, there's the argument that giving the robots anthropomorphic features can be helpful in relating to humans through the robot. Police controlled bots when negotiating with a hostage taker or armed drunk & disorderly would be easier for a negotiator operating through a humanlike avatar, as the suspect would likely make "eye contact" out of instinct, thus allowing the negotiator to read his facial expressions and body language.
It might also facilitate understanding it when learning its operation (although obfuscated robot design might be useful to prevent sabotage in combat situations), and designing weapons specifically for it. This last is popular among mecha-anime enthusiasts, who argue that scaling up human-designed weapons for use by anthropomorphic robots is the least problematic approach, much like France's standardization of nuclear energy plants, making workers interchangeable between (gotta love it when your job skills are portable).
There are some robots which are adirectional on their z-axis (vertically, that is; they flip like pancakes). In fact many of these things have shown up on robot melee shows like BattleBots and Robot Wars, not to mention in the market for RC cars, which has been dominated by gimmicks rather than performance (righting mechanisms, unconventional steering schema, et cetera).
Wars would be pointless without people, and except in specific instances (robots running interdiction?) these seem to be designed to attack humans. It's entirely possible that, like some commando units in WWII, meetings between robots will follow a skirmish, break-contact-and-continue-mission pattern.
"If we don't stand up together and fight against this very real threat to the impurity of our nations willies the terrorists will have won! You don't see them wanking off in their spare time! No! They are taking up hobbies, such as flying!"
Combine this with DRM and you get "This penis has performed an illegal erection and will be shut down."
Someone mod parent Interesting, please?
Some might say the harm had already been done.
On a more serious note, I don't like this one bit. As a person, especially a male, who has an Internet connection and some free time, I have obviously looked at porn in the past, sometimes from curiosity and sometimes for gratification. I don't generally do that anymore. I have studying to get done, and /. articles to read.
Okay, I think I've sufficently prefaced my comments.
I do not trust the FBI to police the "wild frontier" that is the Internet. Their track record shows a lot of sloppy work:
I think it might be interesting to watch the FBI's employment statistics for a little while, now that they're paying some of their agents to surf for porn. Will there be a ban on hankies and picture-phones in the archives room now?
A casual glance reveals two types of shows; popular hits and "gems." I'd assume these results were glarked from respondants to a survey, who likely were either writing in to sound off like the rest of the herd or champion their pet one-season, brilliant-but-cancelled show. They obviously didn't bother to choose a definition of what "science fiction" meant, but instead relied upon the respondent's personal definition, casually moderated by the compilers of this list.
Lord, deliver us from politicians, pop-psychobabblers and other users of imprecise terms in their "research."
Or not, as you seem to be on vacation this time of the eon.
To the public, possibly because of the Sci-Fi channel, perhaps because of willful ignorance, and most likely a brilliant (sarcasm) combination of both, anything that is not straight slice-'o-life in content is "scifi."
As to clearly delineating what science fiction is and isn't, I read one helpful definition, dependant on the prescence and quality of Suspension of Disbelief. While mainstream literature doesn't need it, and Fantasy demands it, Science Fiction sets itself apart from other brands of imaginative literature in attempting to create it, foster it and encourage it.
But until a sufficently clear definition, like the above, is adopted, "science fiction" will remain a label for marketing and advertising, unworthy of the enterprise it describes.
I believe you're forgetting the other answer.
Pistols at dawn.
I don't think it's fair of you to paint Kero as being opposed to all lawsuits; all you can really infer is that there there is some lawsuit X in the category of lawsuits that he disapproves of. He was speaking in broad, general terms, to which there are always exceptions.
Mod me offtopic if you will; I've said my peice.