However, as of yet, the private credit reporting agency doesn't have a police force to arrest citizens, just sell products.
Ruin your credit and it can take seven years to get back on a good footing. There are felony crimes you could commit where you'd be out of jail before your credit was restored. And if you think it's hard to get a car, insurance, or a place to live with a felony conviction... it's easier than getting those with shredded credit.
Actually, if I owned an office building that abutted a freeway, I could legally set up cameras and record the license plate numbers of every car that passed, and no one could do anything. I could even go and sell that information on the internet or charge people to search the database of license plates recorded. And no one could stop me (muahaha?).
If you're out in a public place, overtly displaying identifiable information, there's no law saying I cannot record that. And let's face it, if you're a law abiding citizen, you're in more danger from the databases being kept by private credit reporting agencies than the ones being kept by law enforcement agencies.
I'm sorry, but this is one of the instances where I disagree with the ACLU.
You're out on the open road. You have no reasonable expectation of privacy. No civil right is being violated, IMO.
Is this another example of us basically having less and less privacy when we leave our homes? Yes? Are our movements being recorded more and more and is it getting annoying? Yes? But claim that the police recording license plates on the open highway is unconstitutional? Can't side with you.
A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. -Lao Tzu
It then needs to be followed by a million more. - Me
You cover 5.28 feet in a single step? If not, then it needs to be followed by three to four million more, depending on the length of your stride. If you shuffled, you could actually make it take ten million steps.
Re:You'd expect the poster to have read the articl
on
Facebook In Court
·
· Score: 1
Got any documentation of this to scan and put online, maybe a case number and the court in which the case was filed? Not calling you a liar, just want to know more about them suing the programmers and the grounds.
"Not to defend the RIAA's actions, but I don't know if you can call it entrapment or not. Entrapment, by definition, involves the police persuading you to commit a crime you wouldn't otherwise commit. This is a private entity catching people committing a crime they would otherwise commit. I don't condone their methods, but I doubt you could successfully adopt an entrapment defense."
It's actually an interesting question... The police have successfully put out honeypot cars (attractive and maybe a bit easier to steal than normal) to catch car thieves, and those convictions have been upheld AFAIK.
OTOH, I remember in a community college class on criminal law, they discussed when the cops sent a guy out with 20 dollar bills visibly hanging from his pockets and pretending to be drunk, arresting people who tried to roll him. That was ruled as entrapment because the cops made him such easy pickings as to induce people to commit a crime.
That's why I said I'd have liked to see the site. How much the MPAA/MediaDefender did to lure people to the site and then entice them to download content would determine where it fell on the range from honeypot to entrapment.
How much do you want to bet their EULA spelled out exactly what the program did in obfuscated legalese plus had language making you give up all sorts of legal rights and protections, giving them a baker's dozen of various claims for dismissal of your suit.
But the defense not in the EULA is that if you sued them, the software in question was downloaded expressly for the purpose of committing piracy, so you might have trouble getting sympathy from a jury.
Can you say "entrapment" boys and girls? I knew you could.
OTOH, it's not like the people who would have been caught by this were innocents. I dislike pirates only a bit less than I dislike the scumbag tactics the MPAA and RIAA have been using to try to catch them. I'd have liked to see how they were trying to entice people to pirate movies and how their site was set up before I judged how wrong this was on a scale from 1 to 10.
From TFL: "The University is unable to provide legal services to students who have
violated copyright law through illegal downloading or sharing. If you receive a
letter from the RIAA, we encourage you to engage a personal attorney."
The University will be busy enough providing legal services (and temporary network admin staffing) to itself. AFAIK, any student who says "sue me" can claim "it wasn't me" and depose the university staff who identified them to pick apart their methodology. And if they find any flaw in the methodology, they can sue the University.
"Zap2it must have a source for the information. Where do they get the feed? Does anyone know?"
They have a staff that collects and compiles the data, and maintains the relationships to get it, because they sell the data feed to newspapers and other services. "Zap2It" is just one of the consumer facing facets of a massive media conglomerate that recently reported $1.2 billion in operating revenues during the first quarter of 2007.
"There is no reason that a legal system must be as complex as it is."
Yes, we could have a legal system that could be summed up in one sentence: "Two men enter. One man leaves."
Of course, when you want to live in a society where there are such things as due process, property rights, enforceable contracts, and other niggling details like that, then complexity will creep in despite everyone's best intentions.
"There's a hard limit to how much he can lose, which is probably less than all the advertising revenue he's going to get off of being Slashdotted."
Has your site ever been slashdotted? My blog's been slashdotted twice. On the biggest/best slashdotting, I didn't even make enough in extra ad revenue to pay his court fees.
Assume he gets 100,000 visitors from being slashdotted. If he gets a 2% clickthrough on Google ads and is getting a buck a click (which may be high, given his subject matter), he earns enough to pay off 26% of the judgement. But Slashdot readers aren't known for their penchant to click on pay-per-click ads. He can probably expect 1/4 of that or less in his clickthrough rate. And if he's getting an average of 50 cents a click, he earns enough to pay off 3.33% of the judgement.
Now, let's say he's got a good mix of CPM, CPC, and CPA ads. If he's able to sell the entire CPM inventory, that's 100 x whatever CPM rate he gets. You think he's getting 5, maybe 10 bucks? All right, let's go 15. That pays off 20% of the judgement.
Basically, in a best-possible situation, the guy pays off maybe half the judgement from a slashdotting, but that assumes that his experience is different from most other sites that get slashdotted. In reality, his ad earnings won't top a grand, and he'd be lucky to get close to that much.
Road use funds come from gas taxes as well as vehicle registration fees.
Using phrases like "how he got done for" makes me think you must be British, so you have an excuse for being ignorant of how things work in the U.S.
A good part of the gas tax is federal and goes into the national budget. It's then apportioned out in the annual Federal Highway Bill, which funds interstate highway projects and some totally useless make-work stuff like the now-infamous "bridge to nowhere" in Alaska.
But different states split up their use taxes differently. Washington (the state, not Washington D.C.) used to have very high registration fees, but the voters felt that this was unfair and used the initiative process to get them lowered to a flat $30. So now the state gets most of its highway funds from gas taxes.
"That is a somewhat bogus claim. Through increasing knowledge of materials and electricity the light bulb becomes obvious too. You grossly undervalue the usefulness of the first person to find the answer and the necessity of having a reward for being the first. Software confuses this issue because software advances at a faster rate than previous technologies."
So you're saying that if someone patented "some filament in a glass bulb that glows when an electric current is applied" they should have had the right to sue Edison who had never seen their patent and put in the 99% perspiration to actually make it work?
Furthermore, before 1996, people were doing proximity searches like this. They just didn't do them on the web. This is not original, it is obvious. You can't take something people are already doing, add "on a computer" or "on the Internet". In hundreds of words, they've basically said "put a bunch of yellow pages into an RDBMS". They just obfuscated it in a lot of complicated language to make it seem original.
"If anything, police officers ought to be required by law to wear pickups that record ALL sound and a snapshot every 10 seconds while they are on duty. Ideally, said recordings would also be instantly transmitted to a secured location which nobody in their headquarters has access to for archival purposes."
So the cops should wear something like an airplane black box? Woo hoo!
It's an old saw of photography that in a place where a celebrity does not have a reasonable expectation of privacy, you can take their photo without permission. You can even publish it. When I was handling photos for a major movie site, I had to remind agents and managers of this when they'd try to bluster about how neither they nor their client authorized us to run a photo they didn't like from a premiere or party. We didn't need their authorization.
Now take something that is within the public interest, recording a police officer in the performance of his/her duties in a public place. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? If there isn't an exception to the wiretapping laws when a citizen records the police, but there is an exception when the police record citizens, there is something seriously wrong with that law. This case bears watching.
- Greg
P.S.: And to have some stereotypical/. post elements:
In Soviet Russia, the police record *you*.
1: Record Police Officer
2: Get Arrested For Felony
3: ???
4: Profit!!
I, for one, welcome our new wiretapping overlords.
"Thor Larholm, on the other hand, may well have found a legitimate bug."
And from his statements, the protocol handler command injection is a known attack vector.
Nothing is foolproof. But it just seems to me that they need a "devious little shit" department, where they have guys who do nothing but try to break stuff... not unit testers, not QA analysts, but devious little shits. And nothing goes to a widely publicized public beta until the devious little shits have had their turn with it. Because when it gets out into the wild, the unaffiliated devious little shits are going to have a field day, as demonstrated.
As for the people who say it wasn't hyped because it was at a "developer's conference". There are also developer mailing lists and developer web sites. Jobs put it in his WWDC keynote because he knew that would guarantee it international press. Whether or not the event was technically for developers, the keynote is as much for the press and millions of "Apple Watchers" as it is for the devs. And if that comes as news to you, you're probably going to be shocked to find out that Santa Claus isn't real.
What makes me scratch my head... if these guys can find holes in a few hours, why can't Apple? It's not like these guys spent months to find some really obscure bug. They banged away with known attack vectors and got near-instant results. In a case like that, "it's a beta", particularly when it's been hyped at a big event, rings VERY hollow.
IMO... If you release it quietly, so only the diehards are really pounding it, you can keep the "it's a beta" excuse. If you hype the release, you lose the excuse.
"Welcome to/. This is where a story about someone sitting in a car outside an internet cafe and stealing the wireless connection gets the headline "Poor innocent Linux user arrested for browsing the web." Or a story about a student posting Nazi slogans from a college computer gets the headline "Student suspended for blogging." Misleading propaganda headlines are becoming so common around here that it's becoming one big exercise in reading between the lines."
Let's not forget other hyperbole. Apple sends a C&D letter to someone they feel is violating their iPod trademark and Slashdot says Apple is suing them. Some whacko threatens to file suit if Microsoft does not meet his demands about Halo 3, and Slashdot says he's suing Microsoft. I'd love to go pluck a hair from RMS's beard and see if the Slashdot headline calls it an attempted scalping.
That thing rocks and clunks like a drunk trying to pass a field sobriety test. I got motion sick just watching the video. Of course, now they need three other pieces that form its head/torso/cockpit assembly, and heavily armed upper appendages.
Ummm, does anyone remember the "BlockView" that Amazon's Yellow Pages and A9 offered up until the middle of last year? All this seems to be is an AJAXized integration of Amazon's blockview with Google Maps.
Given, Amazon so missed the boat with this one that they let it die and never found a use for it that justified keeping it alive, so kudos to Google for building it into a successful application that looks to have long term legs.
Still how innovative is this really when Amazon was doing it years before?
Slashdot Mirror
Ruin your credit and it can take seven years to get back on a good footing. There are felony crimes you could commit where you'd be out of jail before your credit was restored. And if you think it's hard to get a car, insurance, or a place to live with a felony conviction... it's easier than getting those with shredded credit.
Actually, if I owned an office building that abutted a freeway, I could legally set up cameras and record the license plate numbers of every car that passed, and no one could do anything. I could even go and sell that information on the internet or charge people to search the database of license plates recorded. And no one could stop me (muahaha?).
If you're out in a public place, overtly displaying identifiable information, there's no law saying I cannot record that. And let's face it, if you're a law abiding citizen, you're in more danger from the databases being kept by private credit reporting agencies than the ones being kept by law enforcement agencies.
- Greg
I'm sorry, but this is one of the instances where I disagree with the ACLU.
You're out on the open road. You have no reasonable expectation of privacy. No civil right is being violated, IMO.
Is this another example of us basically having less and less privacy when we leave our homes? Yes? Are our movements being recorded more and more and is it getting annoying? Yes? But claim that the police recording license plates on the open highway is unconstitutional? Can't side with you.
You cover 5.28 feet in a single step? If not, then it needs to be followed by three to four million more, depending on the length of your stride. If you shuffled, you could actually make it take ten million steps.
Got any documentation of this to scan and put online, maybe a case number and the court in which the case was filed? Not calling you a liar, just want to know more about them suing the programmers and the grounds.
Rachel Ray finds another use for Eee-Vee-Ohh-Ohh.
- Greg
"Not to defend the RIAA's actions, but I don't know if you can call it entrapment or not. Entrapment, by definition, involves the police persuading you to commit a crime you wouldn't otherwise commit. This is a private entity catching people committing a crime they would otherwise commit. I don't condone their methods, but I doubt you could successfully adopt an entrapment defense."
It's actually an interesting question... The police have successfully put out honeypot cars (attractive and maybe a bit easier to steal than normal) to catch car thieves, and those convictions have been upheld AFAIK.
OTOH, I remember in a community college class on criminal law, they discussed when the cops sent a guy out with 20 dollar bills visibly hanging from his pockets and pretending to be drunk, arresting people who tried to roll him. That was ruled as entrapment because the cops made him such easy pickings as to induce people to commit a crime.
That's why I said I'd have liked to see the site. How much the MPAA/MediaDefender did to lure people to the site and then entice them to download content would determine where it fell on the range from honeypot to entrapment.
-- Greg
How much do you want to bet their EULA spelled out exactly what the program did in obfuscated legalese plus had language making you give up all sorts of legal rights and protections, giving them a baker's dozen of various claims for dismissal of your suit.
But the defense not in the EULA is that if you sued them, the software in question was downloaded expressly for the purpose of committing piracy, so you might have trouble getting sympathy from a jury.
- Greg
"I just told all my friends about that site. Knew it was too good to be true."
Well, since it's offline, looks like all they'll get is a billboard of "AdSense For Domain Squatters" ads.
Can you say "entrapment" boys and girls? I knew you could.
OTOH, it's not like the people who would have been caught by this were innocents. I dislike pirates only a bit less than I dislike the scumbag tactics the MPAA and RIAA have been using to try to catch them. I'd have liked to see how they were trying to entice people to pirate movies and how their site was set up before I judged how wrong this was on a scale from 1 to 10.
--Greg
Muahaha!!! Moxie has plenty of calories!!! Hahahaha! Muaha... eh.
From TFL: "The University is unable to provide legal services to students who have violated copyright law through illegal downloading or sharing. If you receive a letter from the RIAA, we encourage you to engage a personal attorney."
The University will be busy enough providing legal services (and temporary network admin staffing) to itself. AFAIK, any student who says "sue me" can claim "it wasn't me" and depose the university staff who identified them to pick apart their methodology. And if they find any flaw in the methodology, they can sue the University.
- Greg
"Zap2it must have a source for the information. Where do they get the feed? Does anyone know?"
They have a staff that collects and compiles the data, and maintains the relationships to get it, because they sell the data feed to newspapers and other services. "Zap2It" is just one of the consumer facing facets of a massive media conglomerate that recently reported $1.2 billion in operating revenues during the first quarter of 2007.
- Greg
"There is no reason that a legal system must be as complex as it is."
Yes, we could have a legal system that could be summed up in one sentence: "Two men enter. One man leaves."
Of course, when you want to live in a society where there are such things as due process, property rights, enforceable contracts, and other niggling details like that, then complexity will creep in despite everyone's best intentions.
- Greg
"There's a hard limit to how much he can lose, which is probably less than all the advertising revenue he's going to get off of being Slashdotted."
Has your site ever been slashdotted? My blog's been slashdotted twice. On the biggest/best slashdotting, I didn't even make enough in extra ad revenue to pay his court fees.
Assume he gets 100,000 visitors from being slashdotted. If he gets a 2% clickthrough on Google ads and is getting a buck a click (which may be high, given his subject matter), he earns enough to pay off 26% of the judgement. But Slashdot readers aren't known for their penchant to click on pay-per-click ads. He can probably expect 1/4 of that or less in his clickthrough rate. And if he's getting an average of 50 cents a click, he earns enough to pay off 3.33% of the judgement.
Now, let's say he's got a good mix of CPM, CPC, and CPA ads. If he's able to sell the entire CPM inventory, that's 100 x whatever CPM rate he gets. You think he's getting 5, maybe 10 bucks? All right, let's go 15. That pays off 20% of the judgement.
Basically, in a best-possible situation, the guy pays off maybe half the judgement from a slashdotting, but that assumes that his experience is different from most other sites that get slashdotted. In reality, his ad earnings won't top a grand, and he'd be lucky to get close to that much.
- Greg
"no, road use is what vehicle rego is for."
Road use funds come from gas taxes as well as vehicle registration fees.
Using phrases like "how he got done for" makes me think you must be British, so you have an excuse for being ignorant of how things work in the U.S.
A good part of the gas tax is federal and goes into the national budget. It's then apportioned out in the annual Federal Highway Bill, which funds interstate highway projects and some totally useless make-work stuff like the now-infamous "bridge to nowhere" in Alaska.
But different states split up their use taxes differently. Washington (the state, not Washington D.C.) used to have very high registration fees, but the voters felt that this was unfair and used the initiative process to get them lowered to a flat $30. So now the state gets most of its highway funds from gas taxes.
"That is a somewhat bogus claim. Through increasing knowledge of materials and electricity the light bulb becomes obvious too. You grossly undervalue the usefulness of the first person to find the answer and the necessity of having a reward for being the first. Software confuses this issue because software advances at a faster rate than previous technologies."
So you're saying that if someone patented "some filament in a glass bulb that glows when an electric current is applied" they should have had the right to sue Edison who had never seen their patent and put in the 99% perspiration to actually make it work?
Furthermore, before 1996, people were doing proximity searches like this. They just didn't do them on the web. This is not original, it is obvious. You can't take something people are already doing, add "on a computer" or "on the Internet". In hundreds of words, they've basically said "put a bunch of yellow pages into an RDBMS". They just obfuscated it in a lot of complicated language to make it seem original.
"If anything, police officers ought to be required by law to wear pickups that record ALL sound and a snapshot every 10 seconds while they are on duty. Ideally, said recordings would also be instantly transmitted to a secured location which nobody in their headquarters has access to for archival purposes."
So the cops should wear something like an airplane black box? Woo hoo!
It's an old saw of photography that in a place where a celebrity does not have a reasonable expectation of privacy, you can take their photo without permission. You can even publish it. When I was handling photos for a major movie site, I had to remind agents and managers of this when they'd try to bluster about how neither they nor their client authorized us to run a photo they didn't like from a premiere or party. We didn't need their authorization.
/. post elements:
Now take something that is within the public interest, recording a police officer in the performance of his/her duties in a public place. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? If there isn't an exception to the wiretapping laws when a citizen records the police, but there is an exception when the police record citizens, there is something seriously wrong with that law. This case bears watching.
- Greg
P.S.: And to have some stereotypical
In Soviet Russia, the police record *you*.
1: Record Police Officer
2: Get Arrested For Felony
3: ???
4: Profit!!
I, for one, welcome our new wiretapping overlords.
"Thor Larholm, on the other hand, may well have found a legitimate bug."
And from his statements, the protocol handler command injection is a known attack vector.
Nothing is foolproof. But it just seems to me that they need a "devious little shit" department, where they have guys who do nothing but try to break stuff... not unit testers, not QA analysts, but devious little shits. And nothing goes to a widely publicized public beta until the devious little shits have had their turn with it. Because when it gets out into the wild, the unaffiliated devious little shits are going to have a field day, as demonstrated.
As for the people who say it wasn't hyped because it was at a "developer's conference". There are also developer mailing lists and developer web sites. Jobs put it in his WWDC keynote because he knew that would guarantee it international press. Whether or not the event was technically for developers, the keynote is as much for the press and millions of "Apple Watchers" as it is for the devs. And if that comes as news to you, you're probably going to be shocked to find out that Santa Claus isn't real.
- Greg
What makes me scratch my head... if these guys can find holes in a few hours, why can't Apple? It's not like these guys spent months to find some really obscure bug. They banged away with known attack vectors and got near-instant results. In a case like that, "it's a beta", particularly when it's been hyped at a big event, rings VERY hollow.
IMO... If you release it quietly, so only the diehards are really pounding it, you can keep the "it's a beta" excuse. If you hype the release, you lose the excuse.
- Greg
"Welcome to /. This is where a story about someone sitting in a car outside an internet cafe and stealing the wireless connection gets the headline "Poor innocent Linux user arrested for browsing the web." Or a story about a student posting Nazi slogans from a college computer gets the headline "Student suspended for blogging." Misleading propaganda headlines are becoming so common around here that it's becoming one big exercise in reading between the lines."
Let's not forget other hyperbole. Apple sends a C&D letter to someone they feel is violating their iPod trademark and Slashdot says Apple is suing them. Some whacko threatens to file suit if Microsoft does not meet his demands about Halo 3, and Slashdot says he's suing Microsoft. I'd love to go pluck a hair from RMS's beard and see if the Slashdot headline calls it an attempted scalping.
- Greg
That thing rocks and clunks like a drunk trying to pass a field sobriety test. I got motion sick just watching the video. Of course, now they need three other pieces that form its head/torso/cockpit assembly, and heavily armed upper appendages.
- Greg
"could one day be the basis for"
Of every 100 new technologies posted to the Slashdot homepage, it seems 99 could one day be the basis for vaporware.
- Greg
Ummm, does anyone remember the "BlockView" that Amazon's Yellow Pages and A9 offered up until the middle of last year? All this seems to be is an AJAXized integration of Amazon's blockview with Google Maps.
Given, Amazon so missed the boat with this one that they let it die and never found a use for it that justified keeping it alive, so kudos to Google for building it into a successful application that looks to have long term legs.
Still how innovative is this really when Amazon was doing it years before?
Greg