Actually, if the employee was selling Amtrak's proprietary information without Amtrak's consent and was keeping the money, they are guilty of embezzlement and DEA employees may be guilty of crimes related to arranging that activity, e.g. conspiracy or solicitation.
If the employee was selling Amtrak's proprietary information and giving the money to Amtrak, the DEA was breaching its contract with Amtrak. The DEA has to share the proceeds of drug busts based on information that comes from Amtrak with Amtrak, and this method circumvented that deal.
And, recording or not, they'll soon just start ditching "troublemaking" customers, like the hospitals do.
So, let's all be troublemaking customers. Let's make it as unpleasant and difficult as possible for Comcast to do business. We will be doing the world a service.
You will be punishing the service reps, not the people who make policy.
Why is it considered okay to do this until you get caught? Then you apologize? How about not stealing the information in the first place for starters. Fuckwads!
When an institution or a person does something right, I find it useful to commend them for it.
There may be many other things they can do right in the future, that they are doing wrong now. And there may be things done in the past that were profoundly wrong.
But they've still done a good thing.
In the United States, communications professionals (and the people they coach, like our politicians) avoid admitting when they are wrong, avoid even *engaging* in serious discussion, precisely because people so easily latch onto any words acknowledging another position and turn it into a sound byte. Attacking people who do the right thing for not doing more encourages them *not* to do the right thing in the first place.
Here, a company admitted it was wrong and apologized. It may or may not be disinformation to distract us from spying on behalf of the Chinese Government; and the company may or may not still be doing things we consider wrong. But the company's message was the right one, and they deserve praise for taking responsibility for a foul-up and acting to correct it.
Patent examiners review applications and grant patents on inventions that are new and unique. They are experts in their fields, often with master's and doctoral degrees.
If thats true then anyone should be able to get a job there, seeing all of the idiotic patents they allow. Thus the funny parts were "masters" and "doctoral degrees"
Examiners are not experts in their field. You could be approving Apple's patents based on the mere fact that you own an iPhone. Examiners do not judge the technical merits of a patent, nor are they expected to.
Patent examiners are not experts in the sense that we think of experts--they are not, for example, in the top 100 people in the world working in a given space, nor do they even have lots of professional experience in the space.
They are also not laypeople. They need to have a technical degree, and the degree they have is generally but not always relevant to the patents the office has them review.
So while they are not experts and not supposed to be experts, they are also not the clerk from your supermarket--unless the clerk happens to have studied engineering.
Nothing is going to happen until (1) a senior officer at GM has his car hacked, (2) a very public hacking makes security a point on which automakers compete, or (3) they get sued.
This would help cut down on the stupidity that "news" outlets in the US spread to the uneducated and or uninformed population
Yes. Freedom of Speech, as conceived in many nations, includes the freedom to speak irresponsibly. These nations may be destroyed by that freedom, which creates an ecosystem of mostly-stupid ideas that it is very, very hard for wiser minds to change. Or they may be saved by it, if nations such as China tighten their grip on information far enough that they overly limit the free flow of innovative ideas and legitimate idea-generating-and-analyzing debate.
There are people on both sides of the political spectrum who should never be allowed to publicly speak to the American public about politics again. Not because we may disagree with them, but because they are obviously wrong, and alarmist, and they are hurting America by their false contributions to the debate. So it is in many free nations.
Which is all well and good. From what I hear, people who actually have to look at the images to verify them end up having psych problems. When the agencies are doing it right, I think they rotate those agents through counseling on a regular basis. As soon as the image is recognized, hash it so nobody else has to look at it again, store the original bits and if the computer does a bit-for-bit match on the image that should be evidence enough without anybody having to look at it again.
This. The pictures I've heard described would give me psych problems, too: I would have the immediate urge to hunt down the person taking the photographs and beat them senseless.
If I had cells of 5 people in a few states.... I could cause wide spread chaos and fear.
If you owned TV networks, newspapers and such you could do it very efficiently. You don't need to directly hurt anyone or mess around with bombs to cause terror.
The biggest problem is the lack of effective propaganda. There are some good propaganda campaigns out there--Big Oil has some amazing people who do that, for example--but I have a sneaking suspicion that the largely unregulated market forces we have in place in determining news outlet content is actually incredibly destabilizing.
Besides handling the uploading of completed exam questions, ExamSoft locks down the computer on which it runs, so Wikipedia is not an option.
Yeah, that'll work, because nobody has internet capable cellphones, secondary machines or even Virtual Machines.
It doesn't need to be perfect, just decent enough to make it harder to cheat. Things like the consequences of getting caught also apply--law is a highly regulated profession, and getting caught would keep a person from ever becoming a lawyer. Failing the bar exam generally just means you retake it six months later and study more.
Cellphones are not permitted in the exam room; so are second computers; and I believe the software is designed not to run on at least some class of virtual machines.
This is like being accused of overeating by the world's biggest fat man.
Yes, it is. It is about security rather than monopoly. Both discouraging Chinese citizens from using Microsoft (this lets state media trash talk them for a little while) and trying to get their hands on source code or other references to flaws in the OS.
Students weren't unable to complete exams; they were unable to upload the exams, which you need to do after you get home (or to a hotel) after the exam. It gets stores on your laptop (presumably with public key encryption) in the meantime. Examsoft's servers ran at least 50% slower than they had in the past; the company hasn't announced why.
The only trick is that some jurisdictions required you to upload the exam within a few hours, so Examsoft had to contact those jurisdictions and get them to extend the deadlines.
The only other issue is stress. If it takes law students a lot of time to deal with Examsoft's incompetence and they have to take day 2 of the exam the next day, people who needed just another hour of studying (Not many where an hour would make a difference, but there will be some who just barely fail)... the result, predictably, will be lawsuits.
China is in a state of de facto war with every military R&D project in the world. Any defense contractor not locked down six ways from Sunday should be punished (or they should get a bonus for best practices.)
Sounds like security clearance language. That is an odd sieve to use.
Not at all. "Reasonable suspicion" is legal language, which is why they use it in both contexts. It is the minimum amount of information that a police officer (or other federal agent) can have to stop you on the street, even if they lack a warrant, without violating the Constitution. It basically means they have to point to specific facts that under the circumstances suggest you may be up to something criminal. (They don't have to identify those facts to you when they stop you, necessarily, but they can make a reasonable inquiry to dispel their suspicion.) Otherwise they have violated the Constitution, which doesn't help you a lot sometimes, but still sometimes results in either evidence they find being excluded or you being able to sue them.
Whether it should be the standard here is a different question, but the government wants it to be because it's a pretty low standard.
So Microsoft employees must choose between flying to Ireland, breaking the law and facing possible arrest or losing the case in the US. They could ask their Irish subsidiary for the data but I somehow doubt any of those people will be willing to go to jail to satisfy a US court that has no jurisdiction over them.
There is a question in "breaking the law and facing possible arrest[.]" First, there has been no indication that Irish laws will be broken. Second, there is no reason to believe there would be an arrest if they were broken by a corporation acting in good faith to comply with the laws of another country. Third, most laws around data storage privacy have an exception for disclosure pursuant to a valid court order or warrant. Fourth, it is a multibillion dollar company more likely to face a fine than to have its employees arrested. Fifth, nobody needs to *fly to ireland* unless Microsoft wants them too--MSFT has people there. And flying to Ireland is not a big deal for an employee of a multibillion dollar corporation.
The messed up thing here is *NOT* requiring MSFT to turn over their data where electrons are located in Dublin. It's the scope of material they can get without a showing of probable cause under the 1986 law that determines privacy for email.
does that mean I'm no longer an extremist for demanding my Constitutional rights be respected?
No.
The UN has stated that this probably violated Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which, together with the ICCPR and ICESCR, serve as the "International Bill of Rights." While international law is part of the law of the United States, it is rarely looked to in the United States, and the Universal Declaration is more aspirational than really binding. It doesn't invalidate our laws on its own; we don't have a policy as striking things down because they violate it.
This has *nothing* to do with the United States Constitution. You can demand your Constitutional rights be respected as much as you want; most people demand that without having an understanding of what the Constitution guarantees, instead using it (without legal basis) to rationalize a position that the government shouldn't interfere in X, where X is what they want to do.
IIRC, information in the possession, custody, or control of a US party is subject to discovery in a civil suit, regardless of where it is located. The company can provide it or lose the case.
collusion, n., secret or illegal cooperation or conspiracy, especially in order to cheat or deceive others.
It is not secret.
Can you point to an illegality? I suppose you can argue that they are restraining trade. But I think most courts would be okay with it. (All contracts restrain trade on some level; the motives behind this one aren't colluding to prevent competition so much as agreeing not to engage in an unproductive patent war.)
The patent system has a lot of problems. But just because we disagree with parts of it or how it's used doesn't make the people who are using it criminals.
Markets compete on quality until the cheap stuff becomes good enough; then they compete on reliability; ultimately they compete on price. So long as there's a market people will keep making expensive high-quality stuff, but they'll *never* be a part of the mainstream market again.
Lets say me and my friends decide to harass you, so I grab your iPhone and spike it on the pavement. You threaten to sue so I peel off a couple 20s and a 10, stuff it in your shirt pocket and say get lost. Do you feel compensated or insulted further?
Class actions are usually more about incentivizing the company not to do it again than they are about paying people a few bucks.
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Actually, if the employee was selling Amtrak's proprietary information without Amtrak's consent and was keeping the money, they are guilty of embezzlement and DEA employees may be guilty of crimes related to arranging that activity, e.g. conspiracy or solicitation.
If the employee was selling Amtrak's proprietary information and giving the money to Amtrak, the DEA was breaching its contract with Amtrak. The DEA has to share the proceeds of drug busts based on information that comes from Amtrak with Amtrak, and this method circumvented that deal.
And, recording or not, they'll soon just start ditching "troublemaking" customers, like the hospitals do.
So, let's all be troublemaking customers. Let's make it as unpleasant and difficult as possible for Comcast to do business. We will be doing the world a service.
You will be punishing the service reps, not the people who make policy.
The problem with this kind of tech is a combination of false positive and police harassment of false positives.
Suddenly anyone with high blood pressure is a suspect.
I wonder if when tech will get deployed at customs.
Why is it considered okay to do this until you get caught? Then you apologize? How about not stealing the information in the first place for starters. Fuckwads!
When an institution or a person does something right, I find it useful to commend them for it.
There may be many other things they can do right in the future, that they are doing wrong now. And there may be things done in the past that were profoundly wrong.
But they've still done a good thing.
In the United States, communications professionals (and the people they coach, like our politicians) avoid admitting when they are wrong, avoid even *engaging* in serious discussion, precisely because people so easily latch onto any words acknowledging another position and turn it into a sound byte. Attacking people who do the right thing for not doing more encourages them *not* to do the right thing in the first place.
Here, a company admitted it was wrong and apologized. It may or may not be disinformation to distract us from spying on behalf of the Chinese Government; and the company may or may not still be doing things we consider wrong. But the company's message was the right one, and they deserve praise for taking responsibility for a foul-up and acting to correct it.
Patent examiners review applications and grant patents on inventions that are new and unique. They are experts in their fields, often with master's and doctoral degrees.
If thats true then anyone should be able to get a job there, seeing all of the idiotic patents they allow. Thus the funny parts were "masters" and "doctoral degrees"
Examiners are not experts in their field. You could be approving Apple's patents based on the mere fact that you own an iPhone. Examiners do not judge the technical merits of a patent, nor are they expected to.
Patent examiners are not experts in the sense that we think of experts--they are not, for example, in the top 100 people in the world working in a given space, nor do they even have lots of professional experience in the space.
They are also not laypeople. They need to have a technical degree, and the degree they have is generally but not always relevant to the patents the office has them review.
So while they are not experts and not supposed to be experts, they are also not the clerk from your supermarket--unless the clerk happens to have studied engineering.
Nothing is going to happen until they get sued.
Nothing is going to happen until (1) a senior officer at GM has his car hacked, (2) a very public hacking makes security a point on which automakers compete, or (3) they get sued.
Education isn't about getting jobs or any other such nonsense; it's about furthering people's understanding of the universe.
That is one goal. Another goal is having students be employable when they graduate. These are not mutually exclusive.
This would help cut down on the stupidity that "news" outlets in the US spread to the uneducated and or uninformed population
Yes. Freedom of Speech, as conceived in many nations, includes the freedom to speak irresponsibly. These nations may be destroyed by that freedom, which creates an ecosystem of mostly-stupid ideas that it is very, very hard for wiser minds to change. Or they may be saved by it, if nations such as China tighten their grip on information far enough that they overly limit the free flow of innovative ideas and legitimate idea-generating-and-analyzing debate.
There are people on both sides of the political spectrum who should never be allowed to publicly speak to the American public about politics again. Not because we may disagree with them, but because they are obviously wrong, and alarmist, and they are hurting America by their false contributions to the debate. So it is in many free nations.
I designed and built a custom CPU in college. And it had to be somewhat Turing complete.
Computer science isn't what it used to be.
I had to build my infinite tape drive so that it stretched uphill in the snow...
Nope. Just the hashes.
Which is all well and good. From what I hear, people who actually have to look at the images to verify them end up having psych problems. When the agencies are doing it right, I think they rotate those agents through counseling on a regular basis. As soon as the image is recognized, hash it so nobody else has to look at it again, store the original bits and if the computer does a bit-for-bit match on the image that should be evidence enough without anybody having to look at it again.
This. The pictures I've heard described would give me psych problems, too: I would have the immediate urge to hunt down the person taking the photographs and beat them senseless.
If I had cells of 5 people in a few states.... I could cause wide spread chaos and fear.
If you owned TV networks, newspapers and such you could do it very efficiently. You don't need to directly hurt anyone or mess around with bombs to cause terror.
The biggest problem is the lack of effective propaganda. There are some good propaganda campaigns out there--Big Oil has some amazing people who do that, for example--but I have a sneaking suspicion that the largely unregulated market forces we have in place in determining news outlet content is actually incredibly destabilizing.
"Samsung voluntarily entered into a legally binding contract..."
As opposed to what, being forced to sign under threat of listening to executive Karaoke?
Besides handling the uploading of completed exam questions, ExamSoft locks down the computer on which it runs, so Wikipedia is not an option.
Yeah, that'll work, because nobody has internet capable cellphones, secondary machines or even Virtual Machines.
It doesn't need to be perfect, just decent enough to make it harder to cheat. Things like the consequences of getting caught also apply--law is a highly regulated profession, and getting caught would keep a person from ever becoming a lawyer. Failing the bar exam generally just means you retake it six months later and study more.
Cellphones are not permitted in the exam room; so are second computers; and I believe the software is designed not to run on at least some class of virtual machines.
This is like being accused of overeating by the world's biggest fat man.
Yes, it is. It is about security rather than monopoly. Both discouraging Chinese citizens from using Microsoft (this lets state media trash talk them for a little while) and trying to get their hands on source code or other references to flaws in the OS.
Students weren't unable to complete exams; they were unable to upload the exams, which you need to do after you get home (or to a hotel) after the exam. It gets stores on your laptop (presumably with public key encryption) in the meantime. Examsoft's servers ran at least 50% slower than they had in the past; the company hasn't announced why.
The only trick is that some jurisdictions required you to upload the exam within a few hours, so Examsoft had to contact those jurisdictions and get them to extend the deadlines.
The only other issue is stress. If it takes law students a lot of time to deal with Examsoft's incompetence and they have to take day 2 of the exam the next day, people who needed just another hour of studying (Not many where an hour would make a difference, but there will be some who just barely fail)... the result, predictably, will be lawsuits.
China is in a state of de facto war with every military R&D project in the world. Any defense contractor not locked down six ways from Sunday should be punished (or they should get a bonus for best practices.)
Won't someone think of the racists?
Also, it doesn't say they don't take down racist comments against Palestinians.
Sounds like security clearance language. That is an odd sieve to use.
Not at all. "Reasonable suspicion" is legal language, which is why they use it in both contexts. It is the minimum amount of information that a police officer (or other federal agent) can have to stop you on the street, even if they lack a warrant, without violating the Constitution. It basically means they have to point to specific facts that under the circumstances suggest you may be up to something criminal. (They don't have to identify those facts to you when they stop you, necessarily, but they can make a reasonable inquiry to dispel their suspicion.) Otherwise they have violated the Constitution, which doesn't help you a lot sometimes, but still sometimes results in either evidence they find being excluded or you being able to sue them.
Whether it should be the standard here is a different question, but the government wants it to be because it's a pretty low standard.
So Microsoft employees must choose between flying to Ireland, breaking the law and facing possible arrest or losing the case in the US. They could ask their Irish subsidiary for the data but I somehow doubt any of those people will be willing to go to jail to satisfy a US court that has no jurisdiction over them.
There is a question in "breaking the law and facing possible arrest[.]" First, there has been no indication that Irish laws will be broken. Second, there is no reason to believe there would be an arrest if they were broken by a corporation acting in good faith to comply with the laws of another country. Third, most laws around data storage privacy have an exception for disclosure pursuant to a valid court order or warrant. Fourth, it is a multibillion dollar company more likely to face a fine than to have its employees arrested. Fifth, nobody needs to *fly to ireland* unless Microsoft wants them too--MSFT has people there. And flying to Ireland is not a big deal for an employee of a multibillion dollar corporation.
The messed up thing here is *NOT* requiring MSFT to turn over their data where electrons are located in Dublin. It's the scope of material they can get without a showing of probable cause under the 1986 law that determines privacy for email.
Yes. 1986.
does that mean I'm no longer an extremist for demanding my Constitutional rights be respected?
No.
The UN has stated that this probably violated Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which, together with the ICCPR and ICESCR, serve as the "International Bill of Rights." While international law is part of the law of the United States, it is rarely looked to in the United States, and the Universal Declaration is more aspirational than really binding. It doesn't invalidate our laws on its own; we don't have a policy as striking things down because they violate it.
This has *nothing* to do with the United States Constitution. You can demand your Constitutional rights be respected as much as you want; most people demand that without having an understanding of what the Constitution guarantees, instead using it (without legal basis) to rationalize a position that the government shouldn't interfere in X, where X is what they want to do.
IIRC, information in the possession, custody, or control of a US party is subject to discovery in a civil suit, regardless of where it is located. The company can provide it or lose the case.
Check for uncanny puts and calls on the market before earnings reports come out that can be traced to related parties...
collusion, n., secret or illegal cooperation or conspiracy, especially in order to cheat or deceive others.
It is not secret.
Can you point to an illegality? I suppose you can argue that they are restraining trade. But I think most courts would be okay with it. (All contracts restrain trade on some level; the motives behind this one aren't colluding to prevent competition so much as agreeing not to engage in an unproductive patent war.)
The patent system has a lot of problems. But just because we disagree with parts of it or how it's used doesn't make the people who are using it criminals.
Markets compete on quality until the cheap stuff becomes good enough; then they compete on reliability; ultimately they compete on price. So long as there's a market people will keep making expensive high-quality stuff, but they'll *never* be a part of the mainstream market again.
Lets say me and my friends decide to harass you, so I grab your iPhone and spike it on the pavement. You threaten to sue so I peel off a couple 20s and a 10, stuff it in your shirt pocket and say get lost. Do you feel compensated or insulted further?
Class actions are usually more about incentivizing the company not to do it again than they are about paying people a few bucks.