If somebody empties your bank accounts, empties your retirement accounts, and misappropriates all your title to real property, should they stay free simply because they didn't commit a violent crime (and are mentally unstable and have eczema)?
Stop being an apologist for a script kiddie. It's not a good look, and doing it effectively is apparently beyond your capability.
He'll only do time in Britain if officials there can be bothered to prosecute him, which so far they have not even started to do. Since the Brits were not prosecuting him, the US stepped up to the plate.
1) It doesn't matter "where" he did the crime. Extradition treaties usually only require that the act be criminal in both countries. I would suggest it matters more where the prosecutors have bothered to build a case against him. The court's ruling suggests that no British prosecutor has bothered to do it, and so a fair trial could only be performed in the US, where there is interest in seeing justice done.
Your strawman about jurisdictions that his packets passed through is ridiculous. The US would like to try him because many of his ultimate victims were US entities, including branches of the US government. The prosecution not merely premised on his packets having passed through the US.
2) How often has the US refused an extradition request by the UK? You're really suggesting that the US is at fault because Britain hardly ever asks for extradition -- possibly because the US is much more effective at punishing criminals who have victimized citizens of the UK.
... because he might be upset at the prospect of losing!
Someone needs to remind the Brits that if Love didn't want to do the time, he shouldn't have done the crime. If he can't be responsible for his own actions, he needs to be kept in a facility where someone else is responsible for him.
If you'll believe some anonymous US intelligence source that, contrary to the findings of many courts in copyright infringement lawsuits, an IP address uniquely identifies a person, I have a bridge to sell you. And a prime island in New York City, only occupied by one rather large green lady.
I am shocked, shocked, that fossil fuels, originally formed from biological materials, do not come out of the ground containing significant levels of lead!
Or maybe it was a joke, and just like "wipe the server? like with a cloth?" nobody was supposed to take it literally.
Homeopathy usually argues that the memory of the "disease" will trigger a cure -- so a hundred-quadrillionth of a dose cancels out the effect of a dose of some toxin that produces the same effect(s) as whatever you just didn't drink.
Gasoline is unleaded, but retains the memory of being leaded before. So take a swig of gasoline to wash down your colon-cleansing detergent pods, and detox from lead exposure! The American Homeopathy Board approves this message!
I haven't seen a link to a single article from the Observer. I've seen links to articles on this subject by Carole Cadwalladr, who is described as a reporter for the Observer, but (as far as I've seen) those haven't used the term "malware". So, again, which FA are you talking about?
You are almost right. Facebook isn't upset that this company got so much information about Facebook users. They are upset that this company didn't pay Facebook for that information, and that the company didn't pay them more to used Facebook's targeting services.
Japanese addresses are almost useless for locating a building unless you have the neighborhood's map at hand: Because the numbers are assigned more or less chronologically, standing in front of Naninani-ku 1-3-1 does not mean you are anywhere near Naninani-ku 1-4-1. Unless you're in one of the places that uses a different system, which may be more systematic for coarse locations but not much more helpful for building locations.
"Plus Codes" are just a radix-20 method for expressing latitude and longitude. If you know how far away 38.8039,-77.022 is, that is only because you have a lot of practice using that notation. A "ten digit" Plus Code (which is 11 characters long because they add that plus sign) has resolution of 0.000125 degrees in both latitude and longitude, so it gives more precise location than your 15-character string.
Overall, I would say that Google devised Plus Codes because they didn't know about MGRS, or wanted to make something quasi-proprietary. It is weird that they spend so much space complaining about other lat/long-based locating systems without applying the same rules to Plus Codes.
W3W's major drawbacks are that it is proprietary and that it needs a huge database to translate locations. A minor drawback is that it breaks down at sea.
The authors of these books have been dead for 60+ years. I don't they have valid contacts with anyone, not that the existence of such contacts has anything to do with the enforceability of copyrights.
Shocking news: Russian trolls will try to make their exploits seem bigger and more impactful than they really were, especially if they can stoke partisan divisions at the same time. Like other megalomaniacs, they like talking about themselves, talking about other people talking about them, etc.
That's kind of a dumb argument. "These things are using classic addiction mechanisms to encourage users become habitual users. We need a new name for this!"
In Germany are basically all new phone lines using weird providers that allow their customers to lie about their address, and then the provider passes that false address for emergency calls?
If so, then my proposed hoax detection might not work well in Germany, but I suspect that Germans are not so foolish as to allow companies with significant market share to behave like that.
Right. Almost no legitimate emergency call will involve people "trying to be tricky". If a VoIP call comes in to an emergency dispatcher with any "someone is trying to be tricky" indicator, that is a strong hint that it's a hoax. Identifying the call as a likely hoax should reduce the risk of the hoax getting anyone hurt.
After we make sure no one is hurt by the emergency response, the question becomes tracking down the hoaxer. Maybe the company or service that connected the VoIP call to the emergency dispatcher should face fines if they cannot accurately identify the caller in the event of a hoax. Those questions are harder to answer in a way that addresses all the concerns about 911 access, but they are easily separated from the question of identifying a SWATing attempt.
(I am not trying to save the world, just the targets of these hoaxes -- without compromising responses to real emergencies.)
I think your #2 is too hard to practically solve. The problem is underdetermined: There are too many possible variables and too few training cases. This means that your #3 will give unreliable numbers.
That is why I only suggested the equivalent of your #1, which may depend on parts of #4: If VoIP is appropriately standardized, #1 becomes relatively simple and very robust, leading to reliable information for people to factor into their judgment about the situation at hand. It is better to provide simple, reliable information rather than the result of a complex but opaque and unreliable decision process.
Next you'll be telling me that I can't trust (warning: autoplay video) Michael Bloomberg's pet anti-gun group when it comes to statistics about how often school shootings occur!
To stop people from using these dangerous phones to SWAT other people, we must ban assault phones. Any phone with a collapsible antenna, removable battery, customizable software, screen visibility suppressor, pistol grip or bayonet mount is FAR too dangerous to allow in civilian hands.
Write your Congressperson today to tell them you support the Assault Phone Ban!
Guess what: People could die in response to any 911 call. The point is to reduce how often people unjustly or preventably die.
I am not proposing that 911 automatically treat any VoIP call as a hoax, or that they not respond if a VoIP call is placed using a shady service that has been known to falsify caller locations. I am only pointing out that many (most?) SWATing incidents actually do have a fact pattern that sets them apart, even a priori, from legitimate calls; that emergency dispatchers should have the tools to detect that fact pattern; and that responders could use the presence of that fact pattern to dial back their response rather than go in with guns blazing.
SWATing would be a lot less of a problem if the problem was restricted to "we can only tell roughly what area of a cell sector this call was made from". It means that hoaxes could only be perpetrated from the target's neighborhood, and that the mobile operator could record the calling phone's identity (IMEI) and perhaps the subscriber (from the SIM's IMSI, if the caller left a SIM in the phone -- and if they didn't, that would be another pointer to a hoax). Between those identifiers and cell site location records, it would be pretty easy to track and identify the hoaxer.
That is the kind of thing I was trying to address with my statement about calls from "outside the local area through a commercial VoIP service". Mobile phone companies are probably sufficiently careful with e911 to be trusted. So are incumbent and competitive local carriers.
How does a 911 call work with SIP? Exactly which services relay from SIP to the emergency dispatch service? That's the point where I think there needs to be sufficient authentication of the originator, and where their location should be made reasonably clear.
See, if someone calls 911 from a cell phone in your basement, it should not matter who they claim to be. The emergency response should head towards your basement, because that is where the call was made from. If someone in your basement calls 911 using a services that falsely says the caller is a thousand miles away, that is the problem that should be attacked.
If someone makes an emergency report to a non-emergency number, that would be another good indicator.
My understanding was that SWAT hoaxers typically use (somewhat shady) VoIP services because VoIP effectively hides both their identity and their actual location, so that they could call 911 and make it appear as if they were really at the location they want to be SWATted.
Slashdot Mirror
If somebody empties your bank accounts, empties your retirement accounts, and misappropriates all your title to real property, should they stay free simply because they didn't commit a violent crime (and are mentally unstable and have eczema)?
Stop being an apologist for a script kiddie. It's not a good look, and doing it effectively is apparently beyond your capability.
He'll only do time in Britain if officials there can be bothered to prosecute him, which so far they have not even started to do. Since the Brits were not prosecuting him, the US stepped up to the plate.
1) It doesn't matter "where" he did the crime. Extradition treaties usually only require that the act be criminal in both countries. I would suggest it matters more where the prosecutors have bothered to build a case against him. The court's ruling suggests that no British prosecutor has bothered to do it, and so a fair trial could only be performed in the US, where there is interest in seeing justice done.
Your strawman about jurisdictions that his packets passed through is ridiculous. The US would like to try him because many of his ultimate victims were US entities, including branches of the US government. The prosecution not merely premised on his packets having passed through the US.
2) How often has the US refused an extradition request by the UK? You're really suggesting that the US is at fault because Britain hardly ever asks for extradition -- possibly because the US is much more effective at punishing criminals who have victimized citizens of the UK.
... because he might be upset at the prospect of losing!
Someone needs to remind the Brits that if Love didn't want to do the time, he shouldn't have done the crime. If he can't be responsible for his own actions, he needs to be kept in a facility where someone else is responsible for him.
If you'll believe some anonymous US intelligence source that, contrary to the findings of many courts in copyright infringement lawsuits, an IP address uniquely identifies a person, I have a bridge to sell you. And a prime island in New York City, only occupied by one rather large green lady.
I am shocked, shocked, that fossil fuels, originally formed from biological materials, do not come out of the ground containing significant levels of lead!
Or maybe it was a joke, and just like "wipe the server? like with a cloth?" nobody was supposed to take it literally.
This. If the publishers don't own the platform, they are not running their own business, they are serving Google's.
Homeopathy usually argues that the memory of the "disease" will trigger a cure -- so a hundred-quadrillionth of a dose cancels out the effect of a dose of some toxin that produces the same effect(s) as whatever you just didn't drink.
Gasoline is unleaded, but retains the memory of being leaded before. So take a swig of gasoline to wash down your colon-cleansing detergent pods, and detox from lead exposure! The American Homeopathy Board approves this message!
I haven't seen a link to a single article from the Observer. I've seen links to articles on this subject by Carole Cadwalladr, who is described as a reporter for the Observer, but (as far as I've seen) those haven't used the term "malware". So, again, which FA are you talking about?
Which FA calls it malware? Or is that your embellishment?
You are almost right. Facebook isn't upset that this company got so much information about Facebook users. They are upset that this company didn't pay Facebook for that information, and that the company didn't pay them more to used Facebook's targeting services.
Japanese addresses are almost useless for locating a building unless you have the neighborhood's map at hand: Because the numbers are assigned more or less chronologically, standing in front of Naninani-ku 1-3-1 does not mean you are anywhere near Naninani-ku 1-4-1. Unless you're in one of the places that uses a different system, which may be more systematic for coarse locations but not much more helpful for building locations.
"Plus Codes" are just a radix-20 method for expressing latitude and longitude. If you know how far away 38.8039,-77.022 is, that is only because you have a lot of practice using that notation. A "ten digit" Plus Code (which is 11 characters long because they add that plus sign) has resolution of 0.000125 degrees in both latitude and longitude, so it gives more precise location than your 15-character string.
Overall, I would say that Google devised Plus Codes because they didn't know about MGRS, or wanted to make something quasi-proprietary. It is weird that they spend so much space complaining about other lat/long-based locating systems without applying the same rules to Plus Codes.
W3W's major drawbacks are that it is proprietary and that it needs a huge database to translate locations. A minor drawback is that it breaks down at sea.
The authors of these books have been dead for 60+ years. I don't they have valid contacts with anyone, not that the existence of such contacts has anything to do with the enforceability of copyrights.
Shocking news: Russian trolls will try to make their exploits seem bigger and more impactful than they really were, especially if they can stoke partisan divisions at the same time. Like other megalomaniacs, they like talking about themselves, talking about other people talking about them, etc.
That's kind of a dumb argument. "These things are using classic addiction mechanisms to encourage users become habitual users. We need a new name for this!"
Okay, then catch up with the story and let us know when you have a clue.
In Germany are basically all new phone lines using weird providers that allow their customers to lie about their address, and then the provider passes that false address for emergency calls?
If so, then my proposed hoax detection might not work well in Germany, but I suspect that Germans are not so foolish as to allow companies with significant market share to behave like that.
Right. Almost no legitimate emergency call will involve people "trying to be tricky". If a VoIP call comes in to an emergency dispatcher with any "someone is trying to be tricky" indicator, that is a strong hint that it's a hoax. Identifying the call as a likely hoax should reduce the risk of the hoax getting anyone hurt.
After we make sure no one is hurt by the emergency response, the question becomes tracking down the hoaxer. Maybe the company or service that connected the VoIP call to the emergency dispatcher should face fines if they cannot accurately identify the caller in the event of a hoax. Those questions are harder to answer in a way that addresses all the concerns about 911 access, but they are easily separated from the question of identifying a SWATing attempt.
(I am not trying to save the world, just the targets of these hoaxes -- without compromising responses to real emergencies.)
I think your #2 is too hard to practically solve. The problem is underdetermined: There are too many possible variables and too few training cases. This means that your #3 will give unreliable numbers.
That is why I only suggested the equivalent of your #1, which may depend on parts of #4: If VoIP is appropriately standardized, #1 becomes relatively simple and very robust, leading to reliable information for people to factor into their judgment about the situation at hand. It is better to provide simple, reliable information rather than the result of a complex but opaque and unreliable decision process.
Next you'll be telling me that I can't trust (warning: autoplay video) Michael Bloomberg's pet anti-gun group when it comes to statistics about how often school shootings occur!
To stop people from using these dangerous phones to SWAT other people, we must ban assault phones. Any phone with a collapsible antenna, removable battery, customizable software, screen visibility suppressor, pistol grip or bayonet mount is FAR too dangerous to allow in civilian hands.
Write your Congressperson today to tell them you support the Assault Phone Ban!
Guess what: People could die in response to any 911 call. The point is to reduce how often people unjustly or preventably die.
I am not proposing that 911 automatically treat any VoIP call as a hoax, or that they not respond if a VoIP call is placed using a shady service that has been known to falsify caller locations. I am only pointing out that many (most?) SWATing incidents actually do have a fact pattern that sets them apart, even a priori, from legitimate calls; that emergency dispatchers should have the tools to detect that fact pattern; and that responders could use the presence of that fact pattern to dial back their response rather than go in with guns blazing.
SWATing would be a lot less of a problem if the problem was restricted to "we can only tell roughly what area of a cell sector this call was made from". It means that hoaxes could only be perpetrated from the target's neighborhood, and that the mobile operator could record the calling phone's identity (IMEI) and perhaps the subscriber (from the SIM's IMSI, if the caller left a SIM in the phone -- and if they didn't, that would be another pointer to a hoax). Between those identifiers and cell site location records, it would be pretty easy to track and identify the hoaxer.
That is the kind of thing I was trying to address with my statement about calls from "outside the local area through a commercial VoIP service". Mobile phone companies are probably sufficiently careful with e911 to be trusted. So are incumbent and competitive local carriers.
How does a 911 call work with SIP? Exactly which services relay from SIP to the emergency dispatch service? That's the point where I think there needs to be sufficient authentication of the originator, and where their location should be made reasonably clear.
See, if someone calls 911 from a cell phone in your basement, it should not matter who they claim to be. The emergency response should head towards your basement, because that is where the call was made from. If someone in your basement calls 911 using a services that falsely says the caller is a thousand miles away, that is the problem that should be attacked.
If someone makes an emergency report to a non-emergency number, that would be another good indicator.
My understanding was that SWAT hoaxers typically use (somewhat shady) VoIP services because VoIP effectively hides both their identity and their actual location, so that they could call 911 and make it appear as if they were really at the location they want to be SWATted.