I was merely responding to the GP who alleged it was a criminal act.
If there was a finding that they did violate specific laws, even if by a civil jury, you can expect it will go to precedence if the inevitable appeal is upheld.
Well, I wonder if Aereo is really Singlecasting. Knowing how poorly singlecasting scales, they would go bankrupt paying bandwidth. MultiCast is designed for this, and unless you do some packet inspection you wouldn't know the difference.
One multicast stream for each channel vs one unique TCPIP stream for each receiver. Which way would you do it?
2) Your analogy fails because the car operates no matter who has a "key". Same with a phone, right? Sort of. The difference is, is the device has to AUTHENTICATE with the carriers servers *before* the device is even put 'on the network.' So, no, the two are not the same. The authentication isn't some sort of magical ether. It happens every time you make a call, every time you turn on your phone and every time your cell goes in or out of range of a tower. Just because that authentication cant "be seen" doesn't mean it's automatic or granted.
Wrong-o me bucko.
You can (and I have) removed my sim from one phone and put it in another phone, (totally different make and model that never once crossed AT&Ts doorstep), fired up the phone and it works out of the gate. The beauty of GSM.
As long as the SIM is good, the carrier does not care about the phone's serial number. You are confusing the authentication between the carrier and the Sim card, with the unique serial number burned into the phone. I ran that new phone for a year, when AT&T only had the IMEI from the old phone in their records.
Sprint phones don't have IMEIs. They have IMEDs. I should have stopped reading your reply as soon as you started talking IMEIs with Sprint. Its clear you have no clue.
I seriously doubt you worked as a system engineer if you don't know the difference between an IMSI and and IMEI.
IMSI = International Mobile Subscriber Identity, allows you to find out information about the account hold. Its on the sim. It allows you to violate people's privacy, which is why Joe Tech should not be able to look this up, not without a warrant.
IMEI = International Mobile Equipment Identity, a unique number built into the hardware. It can be used to block service to the device. That will bring the user in to complain. No warrant needed.
If I call AT&T or its agent and tell them that my phone has been stolen, then they are engaging in a criminal act when they reactivate that phone.
NO, they are not engaged in a criminal act. You made that up. If these plaintiffs win their case, then it might be considered a criminal act, but until then there is no specific law that covers this.
Its not just AT&T, its ALL carriers that do not block IMEIs. (MEIDs for CDMA phones).
“Plaintiffs have been told by AT&T representatives that they will not, and ‘cannot,’ block and effectively kill usage of such stolen cell phones by thieves and criminal organization, however, such representations are false and fraudulent,” states the complaint.
Law Suits is what happen when you finally admit it is possible to disable a phone by knowing its IMEI (as is common in many other countries), after years of denying they had that ability. AT&T now joins other carriers to put it in place. (As simple as tying their stolen phone database to the GSM infrastructure, since this capability has long been part of the GSM spec.
Without proof in writing that AT&T said they could not do this, I suspect it will be hard to prove they lied. That leaves the aiding and abetting claims. The legal team is composed of personal injury lawyers, so unless they get some better hired guns, I don't think this goes too far. Can Shell or Exxon be sued for selling you gas for your stolen car, or Ford be sued for selling you spare parts, simply because they don't want to look up every license plate or VIN?
I suspect this is going to be a very difficult case to win.
A hardware tuner does way better than GNU Radio. The quality simply can't be compared when you have 20 or 30 HD broadcast stations. For the best reception of OTA broadcasts you still need to align your antennas to the tower.
But after reception, the feed has to be processed thru your tuners, and doing that with a single radio isn't worth the monkeying around when you realize that tuners can be had for $20. Then you have to encode to video packets, and put it on the network. That too can take a little computing power. (Or it might be built into the tuners these days, I haven't been paying attention for a few months).
The fiction that they are renting you an individual antenna basically doesn't sound believable to me. I think its all for show, and they actually use a single antenna per station, and a single tuner/encoder per station. Then they show you a picture of some hightech soldering job and say See, totally new technology! Precisely who has ever inspected this equipment?
From the article (heresy, I know, that's why I remain anonymous), the largest portion of the complaint seems to be that Aereo is bypassing the license fees that satellite and cable redistributors pay. There are a number of potential angles of attack that the broadcasters will attempt, but the motive appears to be that Aereo is avoiding the redistribution fees.
They could care less about the fees. (The increased reach of the advertising revenue offsets that by a lot).
If this goes viral, they lose all control of anything broadcast-ed OTA in every city, and every country.
A portion of this lawsuit is actually about how it is being streamed; specifically, there is a 1:1 ratio of antennas and users,
A legal lillypad at best.
You know that if this court challenge is shot down, that there will be one antenna per station, and one Singe-cast TCP/IP feed per end user (for a little while), and then there will be one Multicast TCP/IP feed per station. (Single-Cast does not scale).
This is market killing technology. The gene is out of the bottle (again). Big Media might as well try negotiations, or settle for the increased advertising reach.
You have to ask if their transmission constitutes a broadcast.
After all, with AEREO you rent an antenna in NYC, and send it by TCP/IP over the internet. Its not that much different than sending it from the roof to your basement lair over a wire. You just have a really long antenna lead. Its exactly the same thins as a Slingbox hooked up to your roof antenna.
Big media doesn't care about this as long as Aereo stays in one market, but they know that the internet gives Aereo a long antenna lead to anyplace.
So yeah, its market control, but really its the fact that someone else found a way to make money off of the OTA feed. We can't have that now can we?
They are on uncharted legal ground here, mostly because they employ new technology.
From TFA:
Instead, Aereo has deployed a small forest of baby antennas, which users rent from Aereo. Chet Kanojia, the company’s chief executive, said the business model of providing a remote antenna for a user is “consistent with over-the-air broadcasting.” He said “it doesn’t require licensing.”
The thing is, even a Cable Company needs permission to pick up a local station and rebroadcast it. There are fees involved, even for mandatory must-carry stations. But Aereo is claiming they are exempt from these because they just capture over the air broadcasts that anyone could pick up. Presumably they transmit it, ads and all in real time.
Broadcasters claim they lose control of their content. After all, if this goes viral, time-zones and markets mean nothing any more. There is no technical reason you couldn't watch a NYC show/event in Tokyo, or London. The internet has a long reach. Local Licensing deals are now world wide in scope.
An Example: Major League Baseball may not broadcast that Yankee's home game on any given Saturday, but someone living in Tampa may want to watch it. Because of national contracts MLB has signed, only local broadcasts of local games are allowed on some Saturdays. Or maybe the Yankees suck so bad they can't fill their seats. (ok, it could happen I suppose), and because of this they locally black-out the game. In an Aereo world, NYC subscribers could just pick up the feed from visiting team's city.
Aereo could not get that programming from any other source. But they can pick it up over the air and transport it beyond licensed markets or into embargoed markets.
So that's the rational for the challenge. (not saying its right).
Never mind that a private slingbox that you set up in NYC market could already give you the same capabilities, the mere fact that someone is doing this as a business model (they eventually plan to charge for it) and doing it on a grand scale is just more than big media can swallow. You know damn well that if the big media companies had developed this technology it would be fine, but because someone else did it, they have to rush in and stomp it out.
They don't have much experience with Missile launches either. It appears the launch failed, the second and third stage as well as the payload fell into the sea..
You don't need to add an engine noise to the car. Use tires that generate a little more noise, most noise is made by the tires anyway, unless you got the pedal to the metal. When I'm walking around town I always hear the tire noise before the engine (if I hear the engine at all.) Unless it's a pimply-faced kid with a Honda and a fart-can muffler.
Exactly.
Most modern cars are so quiet, especially at parking lot speeds that they are indistinguishable from electric vehicles. When they put noise makers on electric vehicles, the blind or the foolish will simply be hit by regular cars because they will be listening for the loud ones.
If everything gets quieter, and we stop imposing a huge noise burden on society it will be easy to hear the tires. Deliberately going the opposite way is silly. We can teach a three year old to look both ways before crossing a street. Why can't we teach an adult?
Code can only be created by intellectuals, like/. readers; therefore, it is Intellectual Property, not some ho-hum, run-of-the-mill property...
Seems like your attempt at snark was almost as successful as your spelling in the title.
But, perhaps by accident you've hit the nail on the head. This should have been charged with a copyright or trade secrets violation, or some security breach, not theft of property. Most states have laws covering criminal use of computers, as does the federal government. There was never a need to base these charges on the theft statutes.
But the bigger question is how many others have been charged with simple Property Theft under federal law in the past for this same sort of breach (downloading source code) and paid the penalty or served the time?
To what extent does this change the landscape for computer break-ins?
But I think adding more available suffixes is going to cause more problems by public confusion than it solves for the website owners. I wish there were an option C.
Explain this confusion you worry about?
Most people seldom type in a url anyway. They click links, or book marks. Or they just type pepsi in the url bar and let the system deal with it, popping up a search with the desired target listed first in most instances Would not pepsi also own pepsi.com, and pepsi.co.uk so if users fell into old habits they still arrive at the right place?
How long will this confusion last? Will it in any way be debilitating?
Personally, I fail to see any risk here, as long as the domain name can only be sold to the true owner of that registered trademark or brand name, and not just Joe Domain Squatter.
The students plan to patent their invention, so they won't divulge their exact formulation,
Exact formulation isn't necessary for this application, as every 7th grade science class learns it by trial and error with a $1.29 box of corn starch. You can do this in your kitchen in 10 minutes, and the stuff is fun to play with but nobody has found a real good application for it in over a hundred years.
The trick in keeping the right proportions of water and starch, something that rain and sun will contrive to disrupt. Burst their bag and you have a big mess.
If you stop with a tire one of these, such as at a traffic light, you will sink into it, because given constant pressure, it will flow. It only resists changing pressure, or active kneading, not static weights.
But the beauty here is the rapidity with which these can be thrown down, and they fact that they flow into the pothole, conform to its shape, and thereby resist being ejected by cars.
P.S. It will be a cold day in hell before you find Police patching potholes.
Your carrier probably knows the IMEI of the phone you used, especially if you bought it from them. And its on the invoice, and its on the box, and its on your on-line account. Really no reason not to have this number somewhere, but I suppose some people manage to lose all if those sources.
Still, it seems phone theft is still a big problem in the UK for some reason. Probably because I would wager the UK IMEI blocking system does not extend to the continent, and perhaps not to other carriers either. So stolen IK phones get send to France and work just fine there.
If you own the account, you can see the IMEI in your account settings on most GSM carrier's web site. If you don't own the account, you have no way to get your friend's IMEI to pull the prank, unless he leaves his phone sitting around.
Slashdot Mirror
I was merely responding to the GP who alleged it was a criminal act.
If there was a finding that they did violate specific laws, even if by a civil jury, you can expect it will go to precedence if the inevitable appeal is upheld.
Well, I wonder if Aereo is really Singlecasting. Knowing how poorly singlecasting scales, they would go bankrupt paying bandwidth.
MultiCast is designed for this, and unless you do some packet inspection you wouldn't know the difference.
One multicast stream for each channel vs one unique TCPIP stream for each receiver. Which way would you do it?
2) Your analogy fails because the car operates no matter who has a "key". Same with a phone, right? Sort of. The difference is, is the device has to AUTHENTICATE with the carriers servers *before* the device is even put 'on the network.' So, no, the two are not the same. The authentication isn't some sort of magical ether. It happens every time you make a call, every time you turn on your phone and every time your cell goes in or out of range of a tower. Just because that authentication cant "be seen" doesn't mean it's automatic or granted.
Wrong-o me bucko.
You can (and I have) removed my sim from one phone and put it in another phone, (totally different make and model that never once crossed AT&Ts doorstep), fired up the phone and it works out of the gate. The beauty of GSM.
As long as the SIM is good, the carrier does not care about the phone's serial number. You are confusing the authentication between the carrier and the Sim card, with the unique serial number burned into the phone. I ran that new phone for a year, when AT&T only had the IMEI from the old phone in their records.
Sprint phones don't have IMEIs. They have IMEDs. I should have stopped reading your reply as soon as you started talking IMEIs with Sprint. Its clear you have no clue.
Would the DMV be liable if they licensed a car that was reported stolen....I think so
The DMV is required to do this by law, because they are creating a title to real property of significant value.
AT&T isn't required to do that.
They are not granting you a title simply because they are selling you a service.
I seriously doubt you worked as a system engineer if you don't know the difference between an IMSI and and IMEI.
IMSI = International Mobile Subscriber Identity, allows you to find out information about the account hold. Its on the sim. It allows you to violate people's privacy, which is why Joe Tech should not be able to look this up, not without a warrant.
IMEI = International Mobile Equipment Identity, a unique number built into the hardware. It can be used to block service to the device. That will bring the user in to complain. No warrant needed.
If I call AT&T or its agent and tell them that my phone has been stolen, then they are engaging in a criminal act when they reactivate that phone.
NO, they are not engaged in a criminal act. You made that up.
If these plaintiffs win their case, then it might be considered a criminal act, but until then there is no specific law that covers this.
Its not just AT&T, its ALL carriers that do not block IMEIs. (MEIDs for CDMA phones).
Quote TFA:
“Plaintiffs have been told by AT&T representatives that they will not, and ‘cannot,’ block and effectively kill usage of such stolen cell phones by thieves and criminal organization, however, such representations are false and fraudulent,” states the complaint.
Law Suits is what happen when you finally admit it is possible to disable a phone by knowing its IMEI (as is common in many other countries),
after years of denying they had that ability.
AT&T now joins other carriers to put it in place. (As simple as tying their stolen phone database to the GSM infrastructure, since this capability has long been part of the GSM spec.
Without proof in writing that AT&T said they could not do this, I suspect it will be hard to prove they lied.
That leaves the aiding and abetting claims. The legal team is composed of personal injury lawyers, so unless they get some better hired guns, I don't think this goes too far. Can Shell or Exxon be sued for selling you gas for your stolen car, or Ford be sued for selling you spare parts, simply because they don't want to look up every license plate or VIN?
I suspect this is going to be a very difficult case to win.
Because of quality.
A hardware tuner does way better than GNU Radio. The quality simply can't be compared when you have 20 or 30 HD broadcast stations. For the best reception of OTA broadcasts you still need to align your antennas to the tower.
But after reception, the feed has to be processed thru your tuners, and doing that with a single radio isn't worth the monkeying around when you realize that tuners can be had for $20. Then you have to encode to video packets, and put it on the network. That too can take a little computing power. (Or it might be built into the tuners these days, I haven't been paying attention for a few months).
The fiction that they are renting you an individual antenna basically doesn't sound believable to me. I think its all for show, and they actually use a single antenna per station, and a single tuner/encoder per station. Then they show you a picture of some hightech soldering job and say See, totally new technology!
Precisely who has ever inspected this equipment?
From the article (heresy, I know, that's why I remain anonymous), the largest portion of the complaint seems to be that Aereo is bypassing the license fees that satellite and cable redistributors pay. There are a number of potential angles of attack that the broadcasters will attempt, but the motive appears to be that Aereo is avoiding the redistribution fees.
They could care less about the fees. (The increased reach of the advertising revenue offsets that by a lot).
If this goes viral, they lose all control of anything broadcast-ed OTA in every city, and every country.
This is about control.
A portion of this lawsuit is actually about how it is being streamed; specifically, there is a 1:1 ratio of antennas and users,
A legal lillypad at best.
You know that if this court challenge is shot down, that there will be one antenna per station, and one Singe-cast TCP/IP feed per end user (for a little while), and then there will be one Multicast TCP/IP feed per station. (Single-Cast does not scale).
This is market killing technology. The gene is out of the bottle (again). Big Media might as well try negotiations, or settle for the increased advertising reach.
Failed.
Shot down.
Same difference I guess.
There were threats by SK to shoot it down but, launched in broad daylight with the world press watching, you know that didn't happen.
Instead of shooting it down, I wouldn't be surprised to find some guy with a flash drive was involved.
(It would be a great deterrent to let it be known that "All your missiles are belong to U.S.")
Just saying...
You have to ask if their transmission constitutes a broadcast.
After all, with AEREO you rent an antenna in NYC, and send it by TCP/IP over the internet. Its not that much different than sending it from the roof to your basement lair over a wire. You just have a really long antenna lead. Its exactly the same thins as a Slingbox hooked up to your roof antenna.
Big media doesn't care about this as long as Aereo stays in one market, but they know that the internet gives Aereo a long antenna lead to anyplace.
So yeah, its market control, but really its the fact that someone else found a way to make money off of the OTA feed. We can't have that now can we?
They are on uncharted legal ground here, mostly because they employ new technology.
From TFA:
Instead, Aereo has deployed a small forest of baby antennas, which users rent from Aereo. Chet Kanojia, the company’s chief executive, said the business model of providing a remote antenna for a user is “consistent with over-the-air broadcasting.” He said “it doesn’t require licensing.”
The thing is, even a Cable Company needs permission to pick up a local station and rebroadcast it. There are fees involved, even for mandatory must-carry stations.
But Aereo is claiming they are exempt from these because they just capture over the air broadcasts that anyone could pick up. Presumably they transmit it, ads and all in real time.
Broadcasters claim they lose control of their content. After all, if this goes viral, time-zones and markets mean nothing any more. There is no technical reason you couldn't watch a NYC show/event in Tokyo, or London. The internet has a long reach. Local Licensing deals are now world wide in scope.
An Example: Major League Baseball may not broadcast that Yankee's home game on any given Saturday, but someone living in Tampa may want to watch it. Because of national contracts MLB has signed, only local broadcasts of local games are allowed on some Saturdays. Or maybe the Yankees suck so bad they can't fill their seats. (ok, it could happen I suppose), and because of this they locally black-out the game. In an Aereo world, NYC subscribers could just pick up the feed from visiting team's city.
Aereo could not get that programming from any other source. But they can pick it up over the air and transport it beyond licensed markets or into embargoed markets.
So that's the rational for the challenge. (not saying its right).
Never mind that a private slingbox that you set up in NYC market could already give you the same capabilities, the mere fact that someone is doing this as a business model (they eventually plan to charge for it) and doing it on a grand scale is just more than big media can swallow. You know damn well that if the big media companies had developed this technology it would be fine, but because someone else did it, they have to rush in and stomp it out.
They don't have much experience with Missile launches either.
It appears the launch failed, the second and third stage as well as the payload fell into the sea..
You don't need to add an engine noise to the car. Use tires that generate a little more noise, most noise is made by the tires anyway, unless you got the pedal to the metal. When I'm walking around town I always hear the tire noise before the engine (if I hear the engine at all.) Unless it's a pimply-faced kid with a Honda and a fart-can muffler.
Exactly.
Most modern cars are so quiet, especially at parking lot speeds that they are indistinguishable from electric vehicles.
When they put noise makers on electric vehicles, the blind or the foolish will simply be hit by regular cars because they will
be listening for the loud ones.
If everything gets quieter, and we stop imposing a huge noise burden on society it will be easy to hear the tires.
Deliberately going the opposite way is silly. We can teach a three year old to look both ways before crossing a street. Why can't we teach an adult?
There are bound to be some corner cases, but it seems to me that pepsi is probably pepsi everywhere on earth.
Beyond that, it may come down to first come first serve like most other things in domain registration.
Code can only be created by intellectuals, like /. readers; therefore, it is Intellectual Property, not some ho-hum, run-of-the-mill property...
Seems like your attempt at snark was almost as successful as your spelling in the title.
But, perhaps by accident you've hit the nail on the head. This should have been charged with a copyright or trade secrets violation, or some security breach, not theft of property. Most states have laws covering criminal use of computers, as does the federal government. There was never a need to base these charges on the theft statutes.
In California (by way of example) there are specific laws concerning taking information from a computer in an unauthorized way. (Penal Code Section 499c 2.)
But the bigger question is how many others have been charged with simple Property Theft under federal law in the past for this same sort of breach (downloading source code) and paid the penalty or served the time?
To what extent does this change the landscape for computer break-ins?
But I think adding more available suffixes is going to cause more problems by public confusion than it solves for the website owners. I wish there were an option C.
Explain this confusion you worry about?
Most people seldom type in a url anyway. They click links, or book marks.
Or they just type pepsi in the url bar and let the system deal with it, popping up a search with the desired target listed first in most instances
Would not pepsi also own pepsi.com, and pepsi.co.uk so if users fell into old habits they still arrive at the right place?
How long will this confusion last?
Will it in any way be debilitating?
Personally, I fail to see any risk here, as long as the domain name can only be sold to the true owner of that registered trademark or brand name, and not just Joe Domain Squatter.
The students plan to patent their invention, so they won't divulge their exact formulation,
Exact formulation isn't necessary for this application, as every 7th grade science class learns it by trial and error with a $1.29 box of corn starch.
You can do this in your kitchen in 10 minutes, and the stuff is fun to play with but nobody has found a real good application for it in over a
hundred years.
The trick in keeping the right proportions of water and starch, something that rain and sun will contrive to disrupt. Burst their bag and you have a big mess.
If you stop with a tire one of these, such as at a traffic light, you will sink into it, because given constant pressure, it will flow. It only resists changing pressure, or active kneading, not static weights.
But the beauty here is the rapidity with which these can be thrown down, and they fact that they flow into the pothole, conform to its shape, and thereby resist being ejected by cars.
P.S. It will be a cold day in hell before you find Police patching potholes.
Your carrier probably knows the IMEI of the phone you used, especially if you bought it from them. And its on the invoice, and its on the box, and its on your on-line account. Really no reason not to have this number somewhere, but I suppose some people manage to lose all if those sources.
Still, it seems phone theft is still a big problem in the UK for some reason. Probably because I would wager the UK IMEI blocking system does not extend to the continent, and perhaps not to other carriers either. So stolen IK phones get send to France and work just fine there.
this is mentioned. In the UK this has been available for as long as i have been using some form of mobile phone
Perhaps you can shed some light on the degree to which this helps prevent phone theft in the UK.
The BBC seems to think the problem of stolen phones is still rampant.
If you own the account, you can see the IMEI in your account settings on most GSM carrier's web site.
If you don't own the account, you have no way to get your friend's IMEI to pull the prank, unless he leaves his phone sitting around.
The GSM (by which, I assume you mean the sim card) does not hold the IMEI, a unique id of the handset, which is fixed at date of manufacture.
If that were the actual reason, then it should follow that it would not ever get implemented in the USA. Except that it *IS*.
By government edict.
But since all the CDMA carriers are adopting LTE, which pretty much included GSM, won't this problem be solved for the newer LTE phones anyway?
Just askin, I have no real knowledge on this point.