The single company named was the Hosting company, which RENTED computers to a lot of other people. As such, you can see they exercised a lot of restraint, by not taking ALL the computers.
They did not destroy the entire data center. You made that up.
You are exactly right, I'm afraid. Its far more extensive than just software patents. And the solution will probably make it worse for everyone.
The problem isn't that patents took too long to get. The problem is that they are too easy to get when prior art is readily available, and once granted, you have to pull teeth to get them voided even when art is found.
Used to be that you had to produce a some kind of a model, working or not. Now all you have to do is describe something in the most vaguest of terms, and years later decide it applies to something in a totally different field, and they owe you tons of money.
I suspect they will come up with a first to file system, where you don't actually have to prove anything just file paperwork and file it early and often.
Except that normal Deduplication of storage is exactly the same thing as a private music locker. You don't seriously believe that Google or Amazon is storing 17 million copies of the same Lada Gaga song do you? Seriously?
You pretend to upload, they pretend to store it, and in fact their engine simply scans it to make sure its identical to what they have already and points you to that one next time you ask for it.
You proved you had it already. You gave the cloud a copy to "hold". How they "hold" is none of anyone's business.
Really? Hardware encryption modules on a rented colo box hosting blogs and web traffic?
Who are you trying to kid. This was your typical rent-a-blade operation, where you as the user have no idea exactly what you are renting, real hardware, virtual hardware, or cloud service. This was not your in-house datacenter. Nobody bothers to encrypt storage on non-mission-critical public facing rented web servers that they don't even have physical access to.
The government won't step in. They will simply point to FTCA exemption (a), and your suit is tossed with prejudice. One letter from one junior assistant attorney general. You can't sue a federal employee doing his job. He had a warrant. He had orders. He acted in good faith, even if misguided. Did you not pay any attention in JR. High civics?
Seems to me I predicted your arrival in my original post.
Suggesting we have any semblance of uniformity is laughable. You've simply used that ridiculous example to justify the very mess I was lamenting, and in doing so, you once again proved my main point.
Actually the terms of the warrant are not in evidence anywhere I can find. We don't even know upon WHOM the warrant was served. If it was served on the colo site, then chances are ALL the servers physically belong to them, and they lease them to customers. Its also possible many of these customers were actually hosted on virtual hardware.
We've only seen one side of this issue so far.
I would fully expect it to say things like "any or all" equipment used in furtherance of.... It then becomes up to you prove that your web server was NOT hacked and used...
Just because you put it there, doesn't mean you have to play it from there. Wifi is dirt cheap. Put your stuff on the cloud and sync it to ALL your devices on wifi.
... but it requires iTunes (same as iCloud) AND it's slower (you've got to upload all your music) AND it costs about twice as much ($47.88/year vs. $25) AND it comes from a (I'll be kind here) not especially well-regarded company, as opposed to one that scores very highly in just about every customer satisfaction rating there is?
Ah, but on the other side of the coin,...
If Apple, and Amazon, and Google, and Best Buy and who-ever-is-next can set up music cloud services it says the death grip of the music industry is essentially broken. The cat is out of the bag and they will never re-establish the level of control they once had.
Uploading isn't all that bad with Amazon or Google. Chews up bandwidth, but its Step One. Step Two will follow soon. Then they will just SAMPLE your music files like Shazam, and make a database entry on their cloud saying yes, Sootman owns that song, add it to his cloud library, and let him download it to any device he wants.
RIAA is having conniptions as we speak.
So hooray for the lame cloud services breeding like rabbits. Too many for them to attack.
Sounds like wild speculation to me. And a great deal of fantasizing. If you physically have the server, you simply power it down, even by yanking the cord, (not nearly as harmful to a modern server as you've been lead to believe) then pull the hard drives and clone those, and deal with their content as mere data. Taking the entire cabinet is the sign of fools and novices.
Responding to your title, "Does the constitution still mean anything", the answer is NO.
Just about here is where I get jumped on by everybody who supports the Constitution and hold it dear. Who doesn't?
But the point is, nothing written in the constitution means anything any more, and hasn't for a long time. Every sentence and every clause has been violated and circumvented by a web of laws and rulings such that any citizen who points to the constitution in his defense is laughed out of court. In the legal profession, an appeal to the constitution is a huge inside joke. The sign of a rube. A target to be fleeced.
You can try to file a suit, but you probably wouldn't get anywhere.
The Federal Tort Claims Act was enacted by Congress in 1946 to allow citizens to sue the federal government. Prior to that you had to get something passed by congress in order to sue the government.
While the passage of the FTCA constitutes a limited waiver of sovereign immunity, Congress specifically limited the government's amenability to suit in a variety of different circumstances. In 28 U.S.C. 2680, Congress specified that its limited waiver of immunity would not apply to the following claims:
(a) any claim based upon an act or omission of an employee of the government, exercising due care, in the execution of a statute or regulation, whether or not such statute or regulation be valid, or based upon the exercise of performance or the failure to exercise or perform a discretionary function or duty on the part of a federal agency or an employee of the government, whether or not the dis- cretion involved be abused;...
So you see, you are effectively shut down before you get to the courthouse steps. All they need do is say "We had evidence that all servers we took were involved" and there is nothing more you can do. You will not be granted the ability to examine that evidence.
Well I suspect walking in and taking every server in site is not going to go over well in the long run. Group punishment is hardly constitutional, and as soon as some deep pockets fight back this process will stop.
Still these lulzsec clowns need to be reined in and perp walked. If they had a point to make they've already made it, now its time to pay the piper.
Fire rapidly is key here. Time to first shot is pretty important, but time to second shot is even more important.
Too often in the prior generations of this device the time to subsequent shots was way too long. Because nobody attacks with only ONE anti-ship missile, and even gunnery sends more rounds down range than can be hit with a slow resetting laser. The power needed for this is enormous, it needs to be instantaneous and repeatable for long periods of time, especially if you intend to make good on your promise of shooting down artillery shells.
With a dispersed battery of HAND LOADED field artillery you can send down range on average 1.5 rounds per minute per gun or better. With 5 to 8 pieces to contend with, you better be prepared to absorb some hits while you skedaddle out of range.
Luckily, no navy has gun boats like those in the past:
From James Grace's "The Naval Battle of Guadalcanal", the Helena is described during its initial firing that night. "Officially the Helena's fifteen six-inch guns fired at a rate of ten rounds per minute at rapid continuous fire, but the ship had reached seventeen. To Lieutenant Luehman, the shooting resembled fifteen fireflies converging on the same spot, or fifteen streams of liquid fire."
As I've posted elsewhere, China is a factory, and Factories need work. Low skill stamping and molding jobs may go elsewhere, but manufacturing of machinery and electronics is going to stay in China. They can't afford to lose that because those workers aren't going to move back to the farm.
The cities are modern in their core areas, and atrocious in their dense beyond belief housing areas. And almost everywhere the streets and highways are empty. This is not a mobile population that has anywhere to go, or any means to get there. They will stay and work for what ever wage is offered.
When you consider the vastness of China and difference in economic conditions its hard to make general statements about "wages of manufacturing work" applicable to the country as a whole.
With modern, and mostly new, cities which are as up to date (at least in their core areas) as anything in the US or Europe, you also must consider that a great deal of the rural country people are still sleeping with their animals, and don't show up in any wage survey.
These rural people provide a steady flow of new recruits to work in Foxconn model factories, then shipped back home when they start making too many demands. Its unlikely this workforce will be soon exhausted, but what might be seen is a glut of ex-employees of such firms who don't want to return to rural areas, but really don't have any marketable skills.
Put your cursor on any portion of central china and zoom to the maximum extent of Google Earth. Farms and terraced hill sides as far as you can see, with very small dense villages situated close by. Most of these farms are not very mechanized, and while the labor demand is high, there are still millions of excess workers in these areas, which end up being warehoused in cities.
Not even around the coastal manufacturing cities do you see housing developments that indicate the inhabitants have anything but cheek by jowl housing in the most densely packed neighborhoods imaginable. You can almost count the private swimming pools in all of China on your fingers.
These people need something to do, and no signification portion of the manufacturing done in China will move very far before prices will come down. China is a factory, and factories have to have work.
Calm down big guy, I only threw it out there only as a half baked Idea.
Personally, I do trust Microsoft more than Apple, they are far more open and less restrictive. But that's a side topic.
Microsoft does not have a 30% share of the handset market. They don't make any phones. So they would be hard pressed to implement this even if they wanted to.
Apple could implement it on their own phones but only by doing a certain amount of damage to their brand.
The whole thing makes no sense, UNLESS it was going to be MANDATORY across all cell phones.
The only way that could happen is if it was built into the camera module themselves, which are typically manufactured by third parties, not by phone manufacturers themselves. If someone wanted to make it mandatory, then Apple holding the patent stands to make a lot of money, or block the deal with patent fights.
All I'm really saying is Apple would be unlikely to add this to their phones and damage their brand unless all phones were to have it.
But as other posters up thread have pointed out, the simplest of these don't rely on the cloud at all. SSH is a perfect example, but so is any other package you can install on your own server.
Google would have found that for him in 30 seconds. I'm pretty sure this was just a way to whore some Karma by posting it on slashdot rather than taking his question to a more productive source.
If you had someone else's credit card why not just give it to the supplier in exchange for the hack, and let them sell it on to someone else rather than trigger a transaction that leaves a paper trail.
However what could happen with all the small guys going away there is less competition for the big ones and then they can monopolize the market...
Do these guys really compete at all?
I've never seen shoplifters or bunglers compete. There are simply too many soft targets out there.
But the rest of your analysis is otherwise pretty good, and the reduction of organizations might be mostly in the script kiddie market, with the few really good (bad) organizations being pretty much unaffected.
When the truth emerges about the current deluge of hackers it will probably be a huge mob of semi-literate kiddies running scripts and purchased hacks, mostly for harassment and diversion of government resources while the big boys break into money pits or marketable secretinformation sites.
While the harassment and dossing have been with us for some time, the tempo has been ramped up. Why are these people concentrating on government agencies like the FBI? My guess is they are being organized to act as a diversion by other governmental agencies or those guys after the big bucks. Maybe Iran is getting back at the west for wrecking their centrifuges. Who knows.
Personally I suspect its the same organizations helping themselves to the money and their government employers to the secrets.
Slashdot Mirror
How is that possibly germane?
Theft is theft. If you can't understand that there is no point in continuing the discussion.
Yes it does make sense, in fact the gp hit the nail on the head.
The file does not offend, illegal use or possession is the offense.
Same as you stealing my car. It's the same car, but illegal for you and legal for me.
Exactly.
Two rips bck to back on the same machine and the same cd give different md5s for me. Any time you are downsampling you can expect this.
The single company named was the Hosting company, which RENTED computers to a lot of other people.
As such, you can see they exercised a lot of restraint, by not taking ALL the computers.
They did not destroy the entire data center. You made that up.
You are exactly right, I'm afraid.
Its far more extensive than just software patents. And the solution will probably make it worse for everyone.
The problem isn't that patents took too long to get.
The problem is that they are too easy to get when prior art is readily available,
and once granted, you have to pull teeth to get them voided even when art is found.
Used to be that you had to produce a some kind of a model, working or not. Now all you have to do is describe something
in the most vaguest of terms, and years later decide it applies to something in a totally different field, and they owe you tons of
money.
I suspect they will come up with a first to file system, where you don't actually have to prove anything just file paperwork
and file it early and often.
Except that normal Deduplication of storage is exactly the same thing as a private music locker.
You don't seriously believe that Google or Amazon is storing 17 million copies of the same Lada Gaga song do you? Seriously?
You pretend to upload, they pretend to store it, and in fact their engine simply scans it to make sure its identical to what they have
already and points you to that one next time you ask for it.
You proved you had it already. You gave the cloud a copy to "hold". How they "hold" is none of anyone's business.
Really?
Hardware encryption modules on a rented colo box hosting blogs and web traffic?
Who are you trying to kid. This was your typical rent-a-blade operation, where you as the user
have no idea exactly what you are renting, real hardware, virtual hardware, or cloud service.
This was not your in-house datacenter. Nobody bothers to encrypt storage on non-mission-critical
public facing rented web servers that they don't even have physical access to.
Just stop, OK?
The government won't step in.
They will simply point to FTCA exemption (a), and your suit is tossed with prejudice. One letter from one junior assistant attorney general.
You can't sue a federal employee doing his job. He had a warrant. He had orders. He acted in good faith, even if misguided.
Did you not pay any attention in JR. High civics?
They can also freeze the circuitry on the motherboard (with a liquid-nitrogen-like spray)
Oh, Please!!!
Stop, Just stop. Ok?
Seems to me I predicted your arrival in my original post.
Suggesting we have any semblance of uniformity is laughable.
You've simply used that ridiculous example to justify the very mess I was lamenting, and in doing so, you once
again proved my main point.
Actually the terms of the warrant are not in evidence anywhere I can find.
We don't even know upon WHOM the warrant was served. If it was served on the colo site,
then chances are ALL the servers physically belong to them, and they lease them to customers.
Its also possible many of these customers were actually hosted on virtual hardware.
We've only seen one side of this issue so far.
I would fully expect it to say things like "any or all" equipment used in furtherance of....
It then becomes up to you prove that your web server was NOT hacked and used...
Just because you put it there, doesn't mean you have to play it from there.
Wifi is dirt cheap. Put your stuff on the cloud and sync it to ALL your devices on wifi.
... but it requires iTunes (same as iCloud) AND it's slower (you've got to upload all your music) AND it costs about twice as much ($47.88/year vs. $25) AND it comes from a (I'll be kind here) not especially well-regarded company, as opposed to one that scores very highly in just about every customer satisfaction rating there is?
Ah, but on the other side of the coin,...
If Apple, and Amazon, and Google, and Best Buy and who-ever-is-next can set up music cloud services it says the death grip
of the music industry is essentially broken. The cat is out of the bag and they will never re-establish the level of control they
once had.
Uploading isn't all that bad with Amazon or Google. Chews up bandwidth, but its Step One. Step Two will follow
soon. Then they will just SAMPLE your music files like Shazam, and make a database entry on their cloud saying yes, Sootman owns that
song, add it to his cloud library, and let him download it to any device he wants.
RIAA is having conniptions as we speak.
So hooray for the lame cloud services breeding like rabbits. Too many for them to attack.
As a federal agent (non-FBI) you should have been trained that the "entire hard drive" does not extend to the entire RACK of servers.
Sounds like wild speculation to me. And a great deal of fantasizing.
If you physically have the server, you simply power it down, even by yanking the cord, (not nearly as harmful to a modern server as you've been lead to believe) then pull the hard drives and clone those, and deal with their content as mere data. Taking the entire cabinet is the sign of fools and novices.
Responding to your title, "Does the constitution still mean anything", the answer is NO.
Just about here is where I get jumped on by everybody who supports the Constitution and hold it dear. Who doesn't?
But the point is, nothing written in the constitution means anything any more, and hasn't for a long time.
Every sentence and every clause has been violated and circumvented by a web of laws and rulings such that any citizen who points to the constitution in his defense is laughed out of court. In the legal profession, an appeal to the constitution is a huge inside joke. The sign of a rube. A target to be fleeced.
You can try to file a suit, but you probably wouldn't get anywhere.
The Federal Tort Claims Act was enacted by Congress in 1946 to allow citizens to sue the federal government. Prior to that you had to get something
passed by congress in order to sue the government.
From http://www.finchmccranie.com/refresher.htm
While the passage of the FTCA constitutes a limited waiver of sovereign immunity, Congress specifically limited the government's amenability to suit in a variety of different circumstances. In 28 U.S.C. 2680, Congress specified that its limited waiver of immunity would not apply to the following claims:
(a) any claim based upon an act or omission of an employee of the government, exercising due care, in the execution of a statute or regulation, whether or not such statute or regulation be valid, or based upon the exercise of performance or the failure to exercise or perform a discretionary function or duty on the part of a federal agency or an employee of the government, whether or not the dis- cretion involved be abused; ...
So you see, you are effectively shut down before you get to the courthouse steps. All they need do is say "We had evidence that all servers we took were involved" and there is nothing more you can do. You will not be granted the ability to examine that evidence.
Well I suspect walking in and taking every server in site is not going to go over well
in the long run. Group punishment is hardly constitutional, and as soon as some deep pockets
fight back this process will stop.
Still these lulzsec clowns need to be reined in and perp walked. If they had a point to
make they've already made it, now its time to pay the piper.
Fire rapidly is key here. Time to first shot is pretty important, but time to second shot is even more important.
Too often in the prior generations of this device the time to subsequent shots was way too long. Because nobody attacks with only ONE anti-ship missile, and even gunnery sends more rounds down range than can be hit with a slow resetting laser. The power needed for this is enormous, it needs to be instantaneous and repeatable for long periods of time, especially if you intend to make good on your promise of shooting down artillery shells.
With a dispersed battery of HAND LOADED field artillery you can send down range on average 1.5 rounds per minute per gun or better. With 5 to 8 pieces to contend with, you better be prepared to absorb some hits while you skedaddle out of range.
Luckily, no navy has gun boats like those in the past:
From James Grace's "The Naval Battle of Guadalcanal", the Helena is described during its initial firing that night.
"Officially the Helena's fifteen six-inch guns fired at a rate of ten rounds per minute at rapid continuous fire, but the ship had reached seventeen. To Lieutenant Luehman, the shooting resembled fifteen fireflies converging on the same spot, or fifteen streams of liquid fire."
Exactly right.
As I've posted elsewhere, China is a factory, and Factories need work. Low skill stamping and molding jobs may go elsewhere, but manufacturing of machinery and electronics is going to stay in China. They can't afford to lose that because those workers aren't going to move back to the farm.
The cities are modern in their core areas, and atrocious in their dense beyond belief housing areas. And almost everywhere the streets and highways are empty. This is not a mobile population that has anywhere to go, or any means to get there. They will stay and work for what ever wage is offered.
I'm not so sure I believe this.
When you consider the vastness of China and difference in economic conditions its hard to make general statements about "wages of manufacturing work" applicable to the country as a whole.
With modern, and mostly new, cities which are as up to date (at least in their core areas) as anything in the US or Europe, you also must consider that a great deal of the rural country people are still sleeping with their animals, and don't show up in any wage survey.
These rural people provide a steady flow of new recruits to work in Foxconn model factories, then shipped back home when they start making too many demands. Its unlikely this workforce will be soon exhausted, but what might be seen is a glut of ex-employees of such firms who don't want to return to rural areas, but really don't have any marketable skills.
Put your cursor on any portion of central china and zoom to the maximum extent of Google Earth. Farms and terraced hill sides as far as you can see, with very small dense villages situated close by. Most of these farms are not very mechanized, and while the labor demand is high, there are still millions of excess workers in these areas, which end up being warehoused in cities.
Not even around the coastal manufacturing cities do you see housing developments that indicate the inhabitants have anything but cheek by jowl housing in the most densely packed neighborhoods imaginable. You can almost count the private swimming pools in all of China on your fingers.
These people need something to do, and no signification portion of the manufacturing done in China will move very far before prices will come down. China is a factory, and factories have to have work.
Calm down big guy, I only threw it out there only as a half baked Idea.
Personally, I do trust Microsoft more than Apple, they are far more open and less restrictive. But that's a side topic.
Microsoft does not have a 30% share of the handset market. They don't make any phones.
So they would be hard pressed to implement this even if they wanted to.
Apple could implement it on their own phones but only by doing a certain amount of damage to their brand.
The whole thing makes no sense, UNLESS it was going to be MANDATORY across all
cell phones.
The only way that could happen is if it was built into the camera module themselves, which are
typically manufactured by third parties, not by phone manufacturers themselves.
If someone wanted to make it mandatory, then Apple holding the patent stands to make a lot of
money, or block the deal with patent fights.
All I'm really saying is Apple would be unlikely to add this to their phones and damage their brand
unless all phones were to have it.
Its really not needed, because there are other ways.
But as other posters up thread have pointed out, the simplest of these don't rely on the cloud at all.
SSH is a perfect example, but so is any other package you can install on your own server.
Google would have found that for him in 30 seconds. I'm pretty sure this was just a way to whore some Karma by posting it on slashdot rather than
taking his question to a more productive source.
Seems AC is making up stories.
If you had someone else's credit card why not just give it to the supplier in exchange for the hack, and let them sell it on to someone else rather than trigger a transaction that leaves a paper trail.
However what could happen with all the small guys going away there is less competition for the big ones and then they can monopolize the market...
Do these guys really compete at all?
I've never seen shoplifters or bunglers compete. There are simply too many soft targets out there.
But the rest of your analysis is otherwise pretty good, and the reduction of organizations might be mostly in the script kiddie market, with the few really good (bad) organizations being pretty much unaffected.
When the truth emerges about the current deluge of hackers it will probably be a huge mob of semi-literate kiddies running scripts and purchased hacks, mostly for harassment and diversion of government resources while the big boys break into money pits or marketable secretinformation sites.
While the harassment and dossing have been with us for some time, the tempo has been ramped up. Why are these people concentrating on government agencies like the FBI? My guess is they are being organized to act as a diversion by other governmental agencies or those guys after the big bucks. Maybe Iran is getting back at the west for wrecking their centrifuges. Who knows.
Personally I suspect its the same organizations helping themselves to the money and their government employers to the secrets.