And if your neighbor's kid was abducted or wife raped or any other heinous thing by the person you chose to ignore, even tho he wasn't a normal part of your neighborhood, what do you say to that neighbor when he finds out you saw this guy and did nothing?
The same thing you would say to your neighbour downtown after his kid was abducted from a playground with 100 passers-by every minute. Or an apartament building with a similiar scenario. You simply cannot treat everyone you do not like as a criminal just because there is a 1 in 10000 or even in 1 in 10 chance that he might be up to something.
If you follow your reasoning to its logical conclusion, the cops should set up checkpoints at each entrance to your neighbourhood and strip search anyone trying to enter, arresting those who took a wrong turn late at night because they did not have a "valid" reason to be there. Because they might be coming to rape your neighbour's wife. Or something.
It is a sick, fearful, paranaoid, perpetual-victim mentality which leads to all sorts of evil and is slowly consuming the American society like a cancer. A malaise whose clear impression can be seen in USA's belligerent activities abroad.
Calling the cops does nothing to expose you to civil suits for this, thats just stupid.
If you had called cops on me in this scenario and I had a legitimate reason to be there and the cops were (like in the case of the wireless AP article) stupid about it and arrested me, leading to malicious prosecution, you can bet your ass that I would be the new owner of that house of yours after my lawyers were done with you.
If you take a typical suburban developement, and someone is hanging around for many hours, then yes they should either be confronted or law enforcement should be called.
As I just described to the poster above, there are possible legitmate reasons, a "public" AP hub run by one of your neighbours being one of them.
And no, "confronting" someone or calling cops is tantamount to crime pre-emption as opposed to crime prevention, a very, very serious difference. The proper course of action in crime prevention is to make it known to the individuals in the car that they are being watched. Either by flashing your camera flash through the window and waving or some similiar non-confrontational measure conducted from a safe distance, followed by setting the house alarm system and going back to sleep. Crime prevention seeks to reduce crime by making crooks jittery and doubtful of a possibility of a successful heist. Crime pre-emption on the other hand is the twin of vigilantism and usually leads to a crime being commited (harrasment and unwarranted prosecution for starters) by the vigilantes themselves.
In your example, the "confrontation" could easily turn ugly if the person in the car took his rights seriously and tempers flaired or to you simply getting shot, were he really a criminal. Calling cops on him exposes you to civil lawsuits from him and ties up the cops who could have been doing something more useful, not to mention waking up the whole street (wanting to be a "hero" of the street is a non-trivial motivation to a vigilante).
No, I don't own the street, but there is no reason for someone to be sitting outside my house like that.
Other then, say, your closest neighbour's teenage son running a "public" wireless AP from his bedroom or something of the sort.
You are prefectly within your rights to be concerned about your safety or property but the presumption is (or at least it used to be) of "innocent until proven guilty". A mere presence of someone in a car -- even in your circumstances -- is not an evidence of a crime. What you are doing is called "pre-emption" and while it can lead to discovery of malicious intent, it is also a tool of paranoid maniacs to persecute anyone in sight whose behaviour they deem "suspicious", arbitrarily, based on "he is not behaving/looking like me!". Apply this widely as a rule and you'll get a nasty, antisocial, itchy-trigger-finger "community", ready to either call the cops on every stranger they see or just open fire with a Magnum 44 on him pre-emptively and ask questions later (an image Texas has already, although Peairs shot Hattori in Louisiana in 1992, not in Texas).
Elect a president with that attitude and you would get the present fun in Iraq.
From a downtown park bench? Or parked across the street in your Chevy Blazer, in the middle of a residential area, for what appears to be several hours.
As many, many posters have already mentioned, a lot of well meaning people setup "open" APs wherever, including residential neighbourhoods. All that is required is a bit of youthful idealism, an internet connection and a wireless hub. Which is a very low threshold. I would think there are a huge number of "open" hubs intended to be "public", but never really used, all over the place.
I don't know how the law is in the US, but in Canada, for a crime to be comitted you need two things: an illegal act, and intent.
How would you determine "intent" given above? "I was looking for an open, public hub, Your Honor, and I found one!" would be a perfectly reasonable defense.
It's like using a service that someone else is paying for without their knowledge, or consent, with no intention to reimburse, ("Then the man noticed Dinon and snapped his computer shut.") to do who-knows-what with. He could have been doing anything with that internet connection. Anything.
Or he could have been simply afraid of a gnarly looking, erratically behaving, wild eyed individual running up and down the street with a baseball bat, which is how it strikes me "the man" looked like from the general attitude he displayed. Faced with someone like that, I would close the laptop too and have my foot on the gas pedal, just in case the crazy wild man gets too close.
Frankly, the motives of the SUV person (which could have been ulterior), are outside the discussion because of the simple fact that there is no external technical difference possible between an "open, public" and "accidentally open" APs. Given that, the SUV dude was perfectly within his rights to use one, at 4am, in the middle of a cornfield. If he used it to spam or conduct some criminal activity, that is a completely separate issue. If the hub owner was charging that he noticed the SUV occupant downloading child porn and called the cops, I would side with the AP owner. As it is, he is simply either a total moron or a vigilante with an agenda.
Should his not securing it be construed as an open invitation to use it? That's the question, now, isn't it?
Yes it should because its users have no way of telling what was the owner's intent. "Assumed innocent" and all that increasingly unpopular in America jazz.
Does I think Benjamin Smith was taking the "moral high ground," parked out front using that private citizen's internet connection? Absolutely not.
You have absolutely no idea what was his intent and thereofore no way of knowing. He could have been trying, sweating and with shaking hands, to find a public AP nearest to his residence to send some whistle-blower data about his employer for all we know. The police simpy treated him as "guilty, until proven innocent" of something. "Ok, buster, we got you now. Don't know yet for what, but be sure we find something to pin on you, now that we have you!".
Sounds to me like the Statue of Liberty has a tear or two in her eyes these days.
Some of you will laugh at my incompetence in what is probably a simple skill, but I say manufacturers should not aide these so-called criminals.
This is nothing to laugh at. You were sold a product, which was presented to you as designed specifically for your class of users. Not everyone driving a car has to be a car mechanic. The manufacturer made a representation of his product as useable by you with your current skill level and thus assumed responsibility for its not performing as advertised.
It is as simple as that.
If the manufacturer instead of "Easy to use!", "Set it up automagically in 4 easy steps!" made a presentation of "Warning, technical skills required in the area of public-key security systems!" they would have a case against you. As it stands, its all their fault.
Also note that one other poster in this sub-thread proposed a truly brilliant and simple idea of having a pair of buttons, one on the AP and one on the laptop card to press together to get them to "synchronize" their security keys auto-magically. No software to install, no hassle and you could make the thing run on military-grade security protocols with 4096 bit keys with no effort by the user whatsoever. Alas, the manufacturers do not give a flying shit. It is way cheaper to put out crap and blame the user.
It is none of YOUR fucking business to be hanging out in front of my house late at night for no good reason.
Depending on the area you live in, there could be a very large number of perfectly good reasons to do so. In many urban areas, on a street with 4 story condos back to back, you can't even tell whose house the person is standing near to. Yours? The dude's upstairs? Across the street? One window over? Etc.
Even in a sparsely populated (i.e. USA style urban sprawl) area there could be many legitimate reasons, such as your house having characteristics of a local landmark (or being near covenient cross-roads), which people use to meet each other by when without a vehicle. Which could easily result in someone standing there for 30 minutes at 6am, waiting for his idiot carpool buddy who overslept. And so on.
Your attitude is typical though of many people who are violently and pathologically territorial and consider not only their house, the lawn in front of it but 200 meters of public road in any direction "their Gawd given property, dammit!". You know, the kind who has a semi-automatic rifle collection, 360 degree security cameras on the roof, barbed wire fence and four pit-bulls with spiked collars for pets (and more often then not a meth lab in the basement).
Pushing a button on the phone and base so they accept each other or powering up the base with the phone in the cradle sets up the session.
Brilliant idea indeed!
It might be sniffed
I would simply add a cheap, short range (a few cm) infra-red transmitter/receiver pair and use that to exchange keys making it practically unsniffable.
This is a very good example of how the corporations are screwing people up here by marketing improperly designed consumer (i.e. for technological illiterates) gear and then pretending that if anything goes wrong (which is inevietable of course) it is not their fault but either the dumb user's or some "hacker's". Typical corporate sleaze. I am a great believer in some basic regulation which is required in the case of complex and technologically advanced equipment being specifically marketed and sold to uninformed consumers, in order to beat some common sense into this mess.
If you make the access point have the maximum security enabled by default it will be completely unusable to 90% of your customers. It's hard enough getting the minimum amount of security to work, let alone the crazy shit you can enable on an access point.
That is a commerce problem, to be solved by manufacturers and technology experts getting together and designing the shit properly. And issuing recalls if it doesn't work the first time. Barring that, government commerce regulators kicking ass.
There is nothing that pisses me off more then people whining about "personal responsibility" and "its the user's fault" and then completely, unconditionally excusing actions of the manufacturers and sellers. If there was a will among the Linksyses, Ciscos, Netgears and Acers of the world, there would be a way. Unfortunately, because corporations are amoral (or downright immoral) profit seekers, the only way this can happen is either via a consumer revolt (unlikely because consumers are bamboozled into believing that everything is the fault of "hackers" and "pirates"), huge losses in lawsuits or regulation. Regulation is a pro-active measure but usually prompts cries of "commies are coming", "sky-is-falling", "they are robbing us!" followed by lots of hand waving on FOX and similiar outlets. It also runs some risk of abuse by the buearaucrats. Lawsuits are reactive and require sacrifices of blood of innocent victims and 10 year long litigations, usually won by the corporations simply due to their financial resources. I think regulation in some obvious and clear cut cases has far more merit. Counting on "market forces" might work in many cases, long-term but usually a massive social cost has to be incurred first.
Blaming a "dumb" consumer in the case of highly complex and technical product specifcially marketed to the said uninformed consumer, is just pure nonsense. If the product requires a certain minimum amount of knowledge to use and otherwise creates danger for society if used improperly, it should require a license to operate. Like heavy equipment and cars. You simply cannot have it both ways, selling dangerous, complex machinery to any idiot and then shruging your shoulders with a smirk when he fucks up and levels a nursery with it, killing 50.
So there you have it: either the AP use has to be made idiot proof by the makers (who have to be forced to do so) or the users have to be licensed. Otherwise the blame goes to the manufacturers by default, unless you can prove that the user was sophisticated and knowledgeable enough to know better. And never to the person using an open AP who has no way of knowing what scenario is at play.
At what point does common sense outweigh laziness for this jackass?
My personal vibe is that he did this on purpose, rather then from lazines. The excuse is just that, to lend an aura of legitimacy to his activities. What he was really after was some vigilante action.
Think about it. If you have some "suspicious" character in an SUV with a laptop appearing and your "lazilly" setup WLAN activity goes through the roof shortly afterwards, what does a sane person do? Well, lock down the AP of course. Chasing people on the street and calling cops is the sort of activity an unhinged, mentally unstable individual would engage into. Could be worse though, it could have been a rabid, private property nut and a member of the NRA. The dude in the SUV is lucky that the "victim" didn't try to organize a lynch mob or try to add some superfluous ventilation to his truck via large amounts of shotgun pellets.
I find the "victim" here far more reprehensible then the supposed "perpetrator", regardless of the motives of the laptop user.
Even though it was an unsecured network, he was still stealing network bandwidth & accessing something he shouldn't be, its fair that he was caught & should be punished for it.
No. You do forget that we are discussing radio technology. The AP actually broadcasts an invitation beacon for wifi client devices to join the network. It is like having someone put up a big pile of things on a table, stand by it shouting "Here take some" and then calling cops if you do.
If you still have doubts, ponder this educational question: How can you tell a difference between a "public" open AP and one opened by mistake, while trying to browse the web from your laptop on a park bench downtown?
A: Unless the ESSID is "SEKRIT!" or "DONT_YOU_DARE!" you can't.
QED.
I wonder how long before we see a suit where a customer sues a manufacturer for not making security clear & easy enough to set up when they purchased & installed a router.
This is in fact a much wiser course of action. The wireless gear should come with maximum security on by default and require multiple prompts to lower the protection level. But blaming the "nefarious" "hacker" is far more sexy and easier for brain-dead prosecutors then going against a large multinational.
Then if the gear is left wide open, no idiot can claim "I didn't mean to do this, honest!". Otherwise (and from the vague statements of the "victim" in this case a likely scenario) it is simply an entrapment, vigilante excercise, a.k.a leaving a wallet on a sidewalk and then shooting anyone who tries to pick it up for "attempted roberry".
Yes it is amusing how the Republicans of old used to stand for most of the things "liberal"-Democrats stand for these days. Rebublican was the party of Lincoln who said for example: "Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration". Or John Quincy Adams: "America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She well knows that she might become dictatress of the world but she would no longer be the ruler of her own spirit."
You're a fanatic who can't keep up a decent discussion...
Fanatical? Yes, I guess refusing to abandon reason in order to follow you down some rabbit hole to the Never-Never Land of Make-Believe Wonders of Personally Responsible Greed might in your eyes count as fanatical addiction to reality. A nasty vice, I am sure.
... without name-calling.
Yes, particularly when assaulted with some weird sexual innuendo and truly inane "arguments" lacking even a modicum of internal consistency.
EOT.
Indeed. Farewell to thee, Oh Gender-Confused Polish Knight of Glorious Illogic in the Service of Avarice-At-Someone-Else's-Expense. May your pantyhose remain untangled underneath your armor in your Campaign To Spank the Naughty French Until They Cry "Oui!".
That does not stop me from having access to macroeconomic data. You can step-dance all you want but you cannot hide from numbers.
Stop propagating such falsehoods about my country...
As I already explained, the "falsehoods" are based on statistics and reports from friends with families in the fray. Multiple sources corroborating each other. On the other hand I have you, claiming that things are going so peachy that the French should have jumped with joy on the prospect of opening up wide. Apparently the French thought otherwise too. Funny, that.
..or I'll drop a line or two about those filthy Canadians which cannot see a furry animal without beating it to death with a club and peeling it's skin, sometimes in reverse order. How nice is that?
Try that with one of
these.
People will pay money to watch you try.
On a serious note, this is not about bashing Poland but it is rather hard to point out to people full of national pride that their country needs a lot of work before it can be considered a reasonable partner for "unification". This is the sort of discussion I could have with someone from Indonesia who would be all bristling with indignation on a suggestion that Canadians would not fancy "unifying" with Indonesia in order to promote "free trade". I would probably get a diatribe about seal hunts from him too. Keep in mind seals are animals, and as much as animal rights advocates cry about it, there is a really looong way from a seal cub to an elderly person who worked all her life only to see her country to kick her into the gutter as a reward.
As I said, we have problems. Nobody is satisfied totally with the current state of affairs.
I am glad that you are at least not quite totally satisfied!
Hell, the biggest part of Polish state budget expenditure is pensions and welfare.
Which is true of most countries. Your government spends 18% of the GDP on programs, compared to say, UK at 21%. Compare their corporate tax of 30% to your 19% and you can easily see you are actually more neo-liberal then Britain is. A monster as far as the French are concerned, for sure, considering that both the Germans and the French see Britain as a scary hive of neo-liberalism.
We'd like very much to have a shiny welfare system which takes good care of everyone who really need it, but sorry, we currently just can't afford it.
It is all a matter of priorities, thats all.
Let me tell you that Poland, with its 'shock therapy' was the first post-communist country to come out of depression caused by the collapse of artificial communist economy.
And the fact that the socialist government of Poland -- unlike the others -- allowed all sorts of small businesses to flourish long before the collapse of "communism" had nothing to do with it, yes?
[ copious volumes of hand waving skipped ] So painting Poland as an IMF puppet is only a product of your imagination.
Based on your own argument that it (supposedly) defied IMF... (cue drum roll)... once... well, uhmmm.... yes it is an IMF puppet!
But when the French government proposed a "Solidarity Day", to scrap one irrelevant holiday so that the day's earnings would be directed towards the care of elder people, the French public revolted. So I guess it's solidarity and shame as long as someone else pays for it. Typical socialist thinking
Ah I see! That is how "socialist thinking" works! Lemme see, a corrupt prime-minister proposes a "working holiday", in a bill full of double-talk and corporate handouts "to pay for the elderly", with a new bureaucratic program while at the same time reducing income to existing funds such as the "Caisse nationale d'assurance mala
From your sudden attack on Poland I gather you are a Pole;-)
Canadian actually.
... and for a fraction of the living costs, to add.
So are the living costs for people in Indonesia. Then, by your logic, the French should have gleefully accepted the wage of an Indonesian farmer, to be "competetive". I fear that this is precisely the plan, for all the workers in industrialized Western nations to equalize with India in their incomes. Poles should take note, because there is always the "next, cheaper" workforce waiting in the wings, in Lithuania, Kazakhstan or Nigeria, ready to take their place given a chance. I can already see Warsaw papers going on about the dastardly "Nigerian plumber".
in a country that has 50% income taxes for the richest people
The official top rate is supposedly 40% and if you are paying it, you should consider buying a bridge in Brooklyn I happen to have for sale. The regular rate for the wealthy, as elsewhere in most of the world is of course 0%. The law is specifically drafted to allow variety of exceptions, loopholes and various other techniques to wiggle out of paying taxes (if you are wealthy enough that is). Nothing new here really. What was new, for example, are the facts that national assets were privatized in fire-sales ala USSR and that 100% foreign ownership of most corporate assets in the country is allowed. Combine these and you get the idea of the state of affairs as to most large companies. Corporate rate is 19% (on paper) which is lower then, say, Canada at 22%.
and a government that keeps its hands on every aspect of ppls lives.
You confuse corruption with governance.
..I think that what a parent says is a pure nonsense.
You are entitled to your own opinion, I will just stick to the facts though, thank you.
And in Poland, old people at least do not die like flies in hot summer.
You might find it interesting that while old people in France did indeed fare poorly in that hot summer, most of those who died had no immediate family. Yet they could afford their own places to live, albait they apparently did not think much of air-conditioning. I am told air-conditioning is not as popular in Europe as it is in North-America, particularly among techno-phobic elderly. Next thing you will blame the French for not going door to door and trying to see whats up with old recluses... something they eventually did anyhow. Note also that for the French this was a national point of shame, complete with resignations of ministers and emergency measures. The garbage can dwellers of Poland on the other hand seem an insignificant "collateral casualty" of the "lets get rich quick!" mentality which seems to become the leading force over there.
This is absurd. Poland has national health care and quite affordable (I'm not earning much but I can afford a private -- no insurance -- dentist who does a really good job) private sector. We have a whole lot of problems in health care, corruption and low payment to doctors being the biggest, but the OP suggested Poland has not national health care; this is a lie.
Really? You mean to tell me that the national healthcare actually has doctors on duty in public hospitals, fully equipped? Not closing continuously due to lack of supplies or telling patients to bring in their own families to care for them due to lack of funds? I must have been hearing this from some other Poland then.
As to "affordable", it is in the eye of the beholder. In the USA, a visit to a doctor with a broken pinkie might be actually "affordable" for the uninsured too. Try the same with an injured spine.
Speaking of lies, I happen to know people with families in Poland whose elderly parents would find the care certainly and decidedly unaffordable, were it not for a constant stream of money being sent their way from their children abroad. Hell, they would find milk unaffordable, given that their two room apartament rent, gas and electricity exceed their pension.
This treaty was heavily influenced by the French from the beginning.
You mean the French bureaucrats, wholly owned by multinational corporations, whom the French public wanted nothing to do with?
It *was* a compromise, which the French later rejected, opting, apparently, for 100% compliance with their wishes or not at all.
A compromise among wolves dividing the prey? And the prey refused to go along quietly. I am shocked!
If the French do not want to make compromises, let the give away CAP subsidies, since the rest of Europe does not see any sense in subsidising the richest farmers on the continent.
Personally I do not see much sense in the concept of EU if the general idea seems to be to make ultra-rich richer and permanent masters to the serfs via convoluted 400+ page paper chains, average citizens of wealthy countries poorer and to make everyone who is not a corporate lordling work harder then the shoe-shines in Bangladore -- in order to "outcompete" the Chinas and the Indias of the world in the race-to-the-bottom.
Once some people pull their heads out of their asses and realize that the whole purpose of the excercise is to improve living conditions for all, that they should strive to lower their working hours to match the French not the other way around, that they should try to get their economies working for all the inhabitants of their countries instead of the priviledged 1%, then maybe a "constitution" or some other treaty can be drafted, one which a baker or a plumber -- be it in France or Poland -- can actually read, understand and agree with.
Until then, the king-makers, crooks, thieves and snakes of various sorts will do their "neo-liberal market" voodoo dance and woe onto anyone who falls for their lures
The French said they voted "no" to protect their social model. Well guess what, not everyone in the EU is so enchanted with their way of life. If we ever are to have a common Europe, we must make some compromises. The French people declared they do not want to make compromises. So much about their will of integration.
Right. The French decided that working like dogs for a fraction of their pay (see: Poland), having elderly people siff through garbage for food after their pensions are deflated to the point of the absurd (see: Poland), having medical care only for the rich (see: Poland) and a long list of other "world's worst social ideas" straight from Utah imported oh-so-gleefully by the Poles is not a compromise. It would be a total surrender to vicious greed and corporatism. That is what the nutty "free-market constitution" meant for Europe, turning the whole place into Poland/Utah (replace Mormon madness with Catholic one) with a Truly Undemocratic and Fully Bureucratic Hell thrown in just as an icing on the cake. Contrary to some popular opinion in the USA, the French do not seem too eager to surrender. Good for them.
For those not in the know: Poland's economy is a brainchild of the neocons and was shaped chiefly by Goeffrey Sachs, the idiot who thought up the "economic shock therapy" (think Russian Oligarchs and Yeltsin). It is at present a wholly owned and operated subsidiary of the IMF. Imagine a far-out right-wing economic idea and chances are Poland has implemented it. And it has worked wonders! (if you don't mind elderly people sleeping amongst thrash-cans all over the place, organized crime that makes the Mafia resemble a nursery and politicians so corrupt that they make Nixon look like a paragon of integrity and honesty).
What's even harder to explain is how 1 person from 1 keyboard has the power to kill a company. Do they have to seize the moment that desperately that even a simple check cannot be done?
Actually as someone has already pointed out upthread the whole thing is most likely a scam by the company, cooked up to hide some far deeper shenaningas.
No one makes a typo involving 262 (count them) separate purchase orders for 262 different stocks from various companies.
The poor woman (if she exists at all and is not merely a figment of the crook's imagination) is an incredulous scapegoat for the scheme.
When you're really going to quit your job, distinguishing between someone who hijacks proxies and someone who wears a tie will seem a lot more sensible.
No it is not. My point is that any corporate serf is equally exposed and vulnerable to the type of persecution this dude was subjected to. The corporation is not to be trusted at any time, more so if you work for it. "wearing a tie" is not a sufficient criterion to evoke trust and loyalty, if anything it is a warning label saying "I am a member of a wolfpack. I strive for servitude and conformity and I shall treat you as an enemy of my wolf pack, on a command from my superior alfa wolf". That is why people wear constraining jackets with matching piece of cloth hanging from their necks, originally a uniform of Croatian thugs, appropriated so neatly to wipe snoot and food remnants from the face of a "sophisticated" parasite dweller of the Louvre palace when King Louis XIV was farting about. An article of clothing quite poetically fitting the mindset of the corporate world.
reverses the meaning of what I presume is your intention, "well heeled conmen".
A typo indeed.
But most large companies are not run by obvious scumbags because they would be destroyed by the scumbags running the company into the ground. Adelphia is an example of what happens eventually.
Unfortunately that is not true. Large companies, especially the so-called "multinationals" enjoy immense support from politicians and national governments. Partly because politicians of all stripe are corrupt, but mostly because politicians fear large scale job losses and thus engage in various forms of corporate welfare, handing out tax breaks, government-guaranteed loans or outright grants and in many cases alter national laws to suit the mega-corporations. Add to this the fact that crookery can go on for a very long time undetected, masked by phony, on-paper "profits", masquerading as "growth" due to never ending cycle of "buy now, pay later" acquisitions of other companies and in some cases the crooks actually manage to make money for the corporation, if they corrupt the local government sufficiently and are allowed to establish an effective monopoly. Only in the most obvious and extremely unsustainable cases do the businesses actually implode. One has to have to literally levitate the whole company on thin air and have debt to income ratio of hundreds to one before something gives. That is why it took super-human efforts to make Enron fail and that is why the airlines (who lose money continuously, since anyone can remember) are still in operation. Running a business into the ground is only an option for a small operation where there is no way to hide the crookery or obtain government bailouts for any length of time. Note also even the very collapse of a behemoth like Enron managed to generate money for the crooks in form of, literally, hundreds of millions of dollars in "legal and consulting fees". Try that with your mom-and-pop shop.
I do agree that small businesses are not exempt from connivery, but my logic is simply this: if business size is kept in check, so is its power and the impact of individual businesses going rogue or simply failing. An IBM can in one fell swoop throw 16000 families into the gutter without even blinking in order to make a few more bucks for the managment, a 50 employee firm can at most harm 50.
But even deeper then that, there is simply a realization that large corporations are corrupting capitalism by reducing its potency to benefit society as a whole. A cornerstone of the system, the very mechanism by which the "invisible hand" is supposed to do its work is competition. If a company size increases and the number of viable companies in a particular field decreases, this in turn reduces competition and leads to oligopoly or outright monopoly situations, effectively destroying any benefits of the system to consumers, not to mention all the disastrously negative political side-effects. This process is in fact the most serious weakness of capitalism as it appears that the system is incapable of self-correcting this situation, contrary to its tenets.
Simply look around and see how many of the everyday products you use are manufactured by companies which have at most one or two viable competitors: Coke/Pepsi; Intel/AMD; Nvidia/ATI; Boeing/Airbus; etc. There are at most a dozen of car manufactuers whose vehicles you will see (many more brands but they all belong to few parent companies). There are just as few oil companies. The list goes on and on.
There are many such -- by now proven to the point of the absurd -- errors in the Adam Smith's plan which require alterations and overrides to save the whole process from reverting to an essentially feudal/mercantile scenario. Unfortunately it would seem that people either refuse to see the obvious or are more then happy to play along in hopes of securing for themselves a place in the ranks of the new "nobility".
2) Working for obvious scumbags is going to burn you in the end.
Minor difficulty: This would exclude 90% of corporations -- worldwide -- as it appears that being a "scumbag" is a pre-requisite to "corporate success". One has to only take look at the current CEO/CFO lineups, their views on society, their history of "ethics" and their inexplicable inter-dependencies with each other to see that quite clearly. These are the proponents of "globalization" where wealth is to be shuffled around the planet and no attention is to be paid to societal consequences of it. These are the promoters of taxation of individual consumption (via sales taxes) and no taxation of their own vast fortunes to "promote economic growth". These are the people who profit from wars and (in the case of Chip's nemesis) from illness and misery. Or slave labor. List an evil and chances are you can name a large corporation involved.
On a side, off-topic note, the problem is systematic to any large corporation. Larger the size, more attractive the operation becomes to conmen. Well healed conmen with dynastical family connections or self-made conmen who grease the right palms, it doesn't really matter. Sooner or later any company of value is run by them. Honest people do not stand a "snowball's in Hell" chance because the corporate game is rigged hopelesly against them, mostly due to the fact that the whole "free market" charade is run by the said hustlers, but also due to the fact that these thieves use the most powerful weapon known to blind and stupify their prey: greed. Thus they constantly talk about "growth" and "share value" to separate shareholders from their senses and grant themselves all the powers they need. A honest person, when put beside a pack of these howling wolves, appears timid and meek. Which is seen by the shareholders, themselves whipped to a frenzy, lusting for mega-profits to dismiss a down-to-earth, objective and realistic candidate out-of-hand and replace him/her with a snake who will promise them "profits beyond your wildest dreams". And the rest is history.
Three or four topics up, someone said that it was the "Yellow Journalists" that got it banned. Now you say it was the rope making industry. Which was it? You guys want a moment to get your stories stright?
Actually they are both right. Hemp had many enemies for various economic reasons and when a possibility of inducing a prohibition-style hysteria was added into the mix the rest was inevietable. In addition to DuPoint and Hearst there were other powerful people who had stakes in destroying the hemp industry. On the other hand the industry's proponents were mostly farmers and small time processed hemp products operations. Unlike alcohol, the hemp manufacturers did not have competing robber-barron families on their side and therefore they did not get "rehabilitated" with vast illegal fortunes ala the Kennedy and Seagrams dynasties.
Drug laws have absolutely nothing to do with addictions and social impact of dangerous substances and everything to do with power, money and control of populations by the ruling elites. If the concerns about drug use were truly socially motivated they would be confined to the domain of medicine and not law enforcement. As it is, the "war on drugs" serves beautifully as a mechanism to enrich the drug lords, awesomely empower vast police aparatus complete with wholesale destruction of citizen rights and to vastly enrich the associated securocracy industrial complex.
The people who would be the most outraged by drugs returning to the domain of medical profession are... the drug lords, police, power hungry politicians, fundamentalist warmongers of various religions and the private prison industry. This fact alone should tell anybody sane everything they need to know about this issue.
The "war on drugs" -- awesomely named in an Orwellian Newspeak -- is so successful a totalitarian tool that new kinds of "war on inanimate things and abstract concepts" are being put into action. Witness "war on terror" complete with Gulags, torture centers, "extraordinary renditions", indefinite detention without trial based on a whim of a CIA opeartive, etc.
Already you show a lack of understand for how Freenet works. You're an ignorant ass, a troll, and a fool.
Sigh. Freenet as it stands, makes easily detectable connections to other freenet clients, IP addresses of wich can be trivialy ascertained by running such a client. All one has to do is to collect IP addresses of all clients connecting to the cancer node and arrest everyone whose computer made a connection, but allow their computers to run for a while and collect all the addresses of their connections etc. Since from the point of view of Chinese authorities there are no legitimate reasons to be using Freenet, you are toast as soon as you are found using it. I won't even mention more sophisticated methods of tracking down Freenet use becasue they are so clearly beyond you.
Freenet isn't about encryption so much as it is about anonymity. You can't publish to the world with PGP email and an SSL web connect you brainfucked idiot troll.
Riight. I will skip for the moment the prepostrous idea of Scientology being able to monitor all traffic at all ISPs and having access to their internal logs. Not to mention that people running The Operation Clambake are all sooo dead already, murdered by Scientologists, no? I will bypass the obvious conundrum of who are these mythical ex-Scientologists addressing exactly, while hiding on a medium which reaches 0.01% of the Internet and exactly 0% of people to whom such messages would be important. I will only ask this: posting to usenet while using a throw-away handle via news.google.com (from a net-cafe if you are really paranoid) is not anonymous enough for this purpose how precisely? E-mailing Operation Clambake anonymously using a throw-away web-mail account does expose you in what way? Unless of course you do claim that Scientology does have super-xenu-powers of remote Net-cafe and ISP Packet Tracking Xray vision!
As a followup question, brought on by your reaction: do you have any clue how the Internet works?
Ian has already listed the public site of the folks in China who use Freenet daily to safely communicate with one another, you crack baby ignorant bastard
No he did link to a site registered and run in the USA, very access of which would set off alarms at the Great Firewall Of China and whose viability to the dissident movement is extremely questionable in the light of the basic, unavoidable, workings of the Internet (even if one were to use the Freenet key of the site only - see above). That link proves absolutely nothing. I do know some Chinese dissidents in exile over here and they find this nonsense just as laughable as I do. But then again they are real life people and not some misguided techno nerds. I hate to break it to you but political movements are composed of people who for the most part see Freenet just about as useful as an exaust pipe on a donkey.
Again, not a terrible trolling attempt. Keep working on it, sport. Maybe the GNAA will let you join up.
Right. If you have no factual ground to stand on, all that is left are impotent insults.
whose activity is oooh so invisible to the Chinese authorities because everyone knows that no Communists have ever figured out how to use a packet sniffer... that and of course there are other, legal, "feedom of speech" protected uses of Freenet clients in China... oh wait.
the former Scientologists here in US
Riiight. And they need a darknet because Scientology is capable of decrypting PGP email and cracking SSL web connections with its evil super-xenu-powers! Puhleeeze.
whose lives you've saved with this technology
Now I would normally think this just a nutty hyperbole from someone who either has no clue what is involved or he does and finds Freenet very useful to satisfy his... err.. desires. But this crap about "saving lives" is starting to get to me. The use of Freenet is a guaranteed way to get yourself on the official list of dissidents to watch/persecute in places like China who have no qualms about monitoring traffic. Freenet endangers lives so that morons can try to use "free speech" defense when they get investigated for their porn collections. You people are despicable. You would get people killed because you think yourself so important and infallable. If you were really concerned about "freedom" you would not have promoted this imbecilic solution. And I can see you are getting worried that judges in the west are beginning to see through you charade. Hence the "darknet".
You know, you are fooling less and less people as time goes and come to think of it, the "darknet" mode might actually be a good idea. I know for sure that it will make life easier for the kiddie porn RCMP division here in Canada. Because the use of a "darknet" Freenet will be so easily shown to be facilitating mere criminal activity that the "free speech" smokescreen will no longer be plausible.
Slashdot Mirror
The same thing you would say to your neighbour downtown after his kid was abducted from a playground with 100 passers-by every minute. Or an apartament building with a similiar scenario. You simply cannot treat everyone you do not like as a criminal just because there is a 1 in 10000 or even in 1 in 10 chance that he might be up to something.
If you follow your reasoning to its logical conclusion, the cops should set up checkpoints at each entrance to your neighbourhood and strip search anyone trying to enter, arresting those who took a wrong turn late at night because they did not have a "valid" reason to be there. Because they might be coming to rape your neighbour's wife. Or something.
It is a sick, fearful, paranaoid, perpetual-victim mentality which leads to all sorts of evil and is slowly consuming the American society like a cancer. A malaise whose clear impression can be seen in USA's belligerent activities abroad.
Calling the cops does nothing to expose you to civil suits for this, thats just stupid.
If you had called cops on me in this scenario and I had a legitimate reason to be there and the cops were (like in the case of the wireless AP article) stupid about it and arrested me, leading to malicious prosecution, you can bet your ass that I would be the new owner of that house of yours after my lawyers were done with you.
As I just described to the poster above, there are possible legitmate reasons, a "public" AP hub run by one of your neighbours being one of them.
And no, "confronting" someone or calling cops is tantamount to crime pre-emption as opposed to crime prevention, a very, very serious difference. The proper course of action in crime prevention is to make it known to the individuals in the car that they are being watched. Either by flashing your camera flash through the window and waving or some similiar non-confrontational measure conducted from a safe distance, followed by setting the house alarm system and going back to sleep. Crime prevention seeks to reduce crime by making crooks jittery and doubtful of a possibility of a successful heist. Crime pre-emption on the other hand is the twin of vigilantism and usually leads to a crime being commited (harrasment and unwarranted prosecution for starters) by the vigilantes themselves.
In your example, the "confrontation" could easily turn ugly if the person in the car took his rights seriously and tempers flaired or to you simply getting shot, were he really a criminal. Calling cops on him exposes you to civil lawsuits from him and ties up the cops who could have been doing something more useful, not to mention waking up the whole street (wanting to be a "hero" of the street is a non-trivial motivation to a vigilante).
Other then, say, your closest neighbour's teenage son running a "public" wireless AP from his bedroom or something of the sort.
You are prefectly within your rights to be concerned about your safety or property but the presumption is (or at least it used to be) of "innocent until proven guilty". A mere presence of someone in a car -- even in your circumstances -- is not an evidence of a crime. What you are doing is called "pre-emption" and while it can lead to discovery of malicious intent, it is also a tool of paranoid maniacs to persecute anyone in sight whose behaviour they deem "suspicious", arbitrarily, based on "he is not behaving/looking like me!". Apply this widely as a rule and you'll get a nasty, antisocial, itchy-trigger-finger "community", ready to either call the cops on every stranger they see or just open fire with a Magnum 44 on him pre-emptively and ask questions later (an image Texas has already, although Peairs shot Hattori in Louisiana in 1992, not in Texas).
Elect a president with that attitude and you would get the present fun in Iraq.
As many, many posters have already mentioned, a lot of well meaning people setup "open" APs wherever, including residential neighbourhoods. All that is required is a bit of youthful idealism, an internet connection and a wireless hub. Which is a very low threshold. I would think there are a huge number of "open" hubs intended to be "public", but never really used, all over the place.
I don't know how the law is in the US, but in Canada, for a crime to be comitted you need two things: an illegal act, and intent.
How would you determine "intent" given above? "I was looking for an open, public hub, Your Honor, and I found one!" would be a perfectly reasonable defense.
It's like using a service that someone else is paying for without their knowledge, or consent, with no intention to reimburse, ("Then the man noticed Dinon and snapped his computer shut.") to do who-knows-what with. He could have been doing anything with that internet connection. Anything.
Or he could have been simply afraid of a gnarly looking, erratically behaving, wild eyed individual running up and down the street with a baseball bat, which is how it strikes me "the man" looked like from the general attitude he displayed. Faced with someone like that, I would close the laptop too and have my foot on the gas pedal, just in case the crazy wild man gets too close.
Frankly, the motives of the SUV person (which could have been ulterior), are outside the discussion because of the simple fact that there is no external technical difference possible between an "open, public" and "accidentally open" APs. Given that, the SUV dude was perfectly within his rights to use one, at 4am, in the middle of a cornfield. If he used it to spam or conduct some criminal activity, that is a completely separate issue. If the hub owner was charging that he noticed the SUV occupant downloading child porn and called the cops, I would side with the AP owner. As it is, he is simply either a total moron or a vigilante with an agenda.
Should his not securing it be construed as an open invitation to use it? That's the question, now, isn't it?
Yes it should because its users have no way of telling what was the owner's intent. "Assumed innocent" and all that increasingly unpopular in America jazz.
Does I think Benjamin Smith was taking the "moral high ground," parked out front using that private citizen's internet connection? Absolutely not.
You have absolutely no idea what was his intent and thereofore no way of knowing. He could have been trying, sweating and with shaking hands, to find a public AP nearest to his residence to send some whistle-blower data about his employer for all we know. The police simpy treated him as "guilty, until proven innocent" of something. "Ok, buster, we got you now. Don't know yet for what, but be sure we find something to pin on you, now that we have you!".
Sounds to me like the Statue of Liberty has a tear or two in her eyes these days.
No but consider the combination of "collections" I mentioned.
This is nothing to laugh at. You were sold a product, which was presented to you as designed specifically for your class of users. Not everyone driving a car has to be a car mechanic. The manufacturer made a representation of his product as useable by you with your current skill level and thus assumed responsibility for its not performing as advertised.
It is as simple as that.
If the manufacturer instead of "Easy to use!", "Set it up automagically in 4 easy steps!" made a presentation of "Warning, technical skills required in the area of public-key security systems!" they would have a case against you. As it stands, its all their fault.
Also note that one other poster in this sub-thread proposed a truly brilliant and simple idea of having a pair of buttons, one on the AP and one on the laptop card to press together to get them to "synchronize" their security keys auto-magically. No software to install, no hassle and you could make the thing run on military-grade security protocols with 4096 bit keys with no effort by the user whatsoever. Alas, the manufacturers do not give a flying shit. It is way cheaper to put out crap and blame the user.
Depending on the area you live in, there could be a very large number of perfectly good reasons to do so. In many urban areas, on a street with 4 story condos back to back, you can't even tell whose house the person is standing near to. Yours? The dude's upstairs? Across the street? One window over? Etc.
Even in a sparsely populated (i.e. USA style urban sprawl) area there could be many legitimate reasons, such as your house having characteristics of a local landmark (or being near covenient cross-roads), which people use to meet each other by when without a vehicle. Which could easily result in someone standing there for 30 minutes at 6am, waiting for his idiot carpool buddy who overslept. And so on.
Your attitude is typical though of many people who are violently and pathologically territorial and consider not only their house, the lawn in front of it but 200 meters of public road in any direction "their Gawd given property, dammit!". You know, the kind who has a semi-automatic rifle collection, 360 degree security cameras on the roof, barbed wire fence and four pit-bulls with spiked collars for pets (and more often then not a meth lab in the basement).
Brilliant idea indeed!
It might be sniffed
I would simply add a cheap, short range (a few cm) infra-red transmitter/receiver pair and use that to exchange keys making it practically unsniffable.
This is a very good example of how the corporations are screwing people up here by marketing improperly designed consumer (i.e. for technological illiterates) gear and then pretending that if anything goes wrong (which is inevietable of course) it is not their fault but either the dumb user's or some "hacker's". Typical corporate sleaze. I am a great believer in some basic regulation which is required in the case of complex and technologically advanced equipment being specifically marketed and sold to uninformed consumers, in order to beat some common sense into this mess.
That is a commerce problem, to be solved by manufacturers and technology experts getting together and designing the shit properly. And issuing recalls if it doesn't work the first time. Barring that, government commerce regulators kicking ass.
There is nothing that pisses me off more then people whining about "personal responsibility" and "its the user's fault" and then completely, unconditionally excusing actions of the manufacturers and sellers. If there was a will among the Linksyses, Ciscos, Netgears and Acers of the world, there would be a way. Unfortunately, because corporations are amoral (or downright immoral) profit seekers, the only way this can happen is either via a consumer revolt (unlikely because consumers are bamboozled into believing that everything is the fault of "hackers" and "pirates"), huge losses in lawsuits or regulation. Regulation is a pro-active measure but usually prompts cries of "commies are coming", "sky-is-falling", "they are robbing us!" followed by lots of hand waving on FOX and similiar outlets. It also runs some risk of abuse by the buearaucrats. Lawsuits are reactive and require sacrifices of blood of innocent victims and 10 year long litigations, usually won by the corporations simply due to their financial resources. I think regulation in some obvious and clear cut cases has far more merit. Counting on "market forces" might work in many cases, long-term but usually a massive social cost has to be incurred first.
Blaming a "dumb" consumer in the case of highly complex and technical product specifcially marketed to the said uninformed consumer, is just pure nonsense. If the product requires a certain minimum amount of knowledge to use and otherwise creates danger for society if used improperly, it should require a license to operate. Like heavy equipment and cars. You simply cannot have it both ways, selling dangerous, complex machinery to any idiot and then shruging your shoulders with a smirk when he fucks up and levels a nursery with it, killing 50.
So there you have it: either the AP use has to be made idiot proof by the makers (who have to be forced to do so) or the users have to be licensed. Otherwise the blame goes to the manufacturers by default, unless you can prove that the user was sophisticated and knowledgeable enough to know better. And never to the person using an open AP who has no way of knowing what scenario is at play.
My personal vibe is that he did this on purpose, rather then from lazines. The excuse is just that, to lend an aura of legitimacy to his activities. What he was really after was some vigilante action.
Think about it. If you have some "suspicious" character in an SUV with a laptop appearing and your "lazilly" setup WLAN activity goes through the roof shortly afterwards, what does a sane person do? Well, lock down the AP of course. Chasing people on the street and calling cops is the sort of activity an unhinged, mentally unstable individual would engage into. Could be worse though, it could have been a rabid, private property nut and a member of the NRA. The dude in the SUV is lucky that the "victim" didn't try to organize a lynch mob or try to add some superfluous ventilation to his truck via large amounts of shotgun pellets.
I find the "victim" here far more reprehensible then the supposed "perpetrator", regardless of the motives of the laptop user.
Even though it was an unsecured network, he was still stealing network bandwidth & accessing something he shouldn't be, its fair that he was caught & should be punished for it.
No. You do forget that we are discussing radio technology. The AP actually broadcasts an invitation beacon for wifi client devices to join the network. It is like having someone put up a big pile of things on a table, stand by it shouting "Here take some" and then calling cops if you do.
If you still have doubts, ponder this educational question: How can you tell a difference between a "public" open AP and one opened by mistake, while trying to browse the web from your laptop on a park bench downtown?
A: Unless the ESSID is "SEKRIT!" or "DONT_YOU_DARE!" you can't.
QED.
I wonder how long before we see a suit where a customer sues a manufacturer for not making security clear & easy enough to set up when they purchased & installed a router.
This is in fact a much wiser course of action. The wireless gear should come with maximum security on by default and require multiple prompts to lower the protection level. But blaming the "nefarious" "hacker" is far more sexy and easier for brain-dead prosecutors then going against a large multinational.
Then if the gear is left wide open, no idiot can claim "I didn't mean to do this, honest!". Otherwise (and from the vague statements of the "victim" in this case a likely scenario) it is simply an entrapment, vigilante excercise, a.k.a leaving a wallet on a sidewalk and then shooting anyone who tries to pick it up for "attempted roberry".
Yes it is amusing how the Republicans of old used to stand for most of the things "liberal"-Democrats stand for these days. Rebublican was the party of Lincoln who said for example: "Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration". Or John Quincy Adams: "America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She well knows that she might become dictatress of the world but she would no longer be the ruler of her own spirit."
Very very sad really.
Fanatical? Yes, I guess refusing to abandon reason in order to follow you down some rabbit hole to the Never-Never Land of Make-Believe Wonders of Personally Responsible Greed might in your eyes count as fanatical addiction to reality. A nasty vice, I am sure.
Yes, particularly when assaulted with some weird sexual innuendo and truly inane "arguments" lacking even a modicum of internal consistency.
EOT.
Indeed. Farewell to thee, Oh Gender-Confused Polish Knight of Glorious Illogic in the Service of Avarice-At-Someone-Else's-Expense. May your pantyhose remain untangled underneath your armor in your Campaign To Spank the Naughty French Until They Cry "Oui!".
That does not stop me from having access to macroeconomic data. You can step-dance all you want but you cannot hide from numbers.
Stop propagating such falsehoods about my country ...
As I already explained, the "falsehoods" are based on statistics and reports from friends with families in the fray. Multiple sources corroborating each other. On the other hand I have you, claiming that things are going so peachy that the French should have jumped with joy on the prospect of opening up wide. Apparently the French thought otherwise too. Funny, that.
Try that with one of these. People will pay money to watch you try.
On a serious note, this is not about bashing Poland but it is rather hard to point out to people full of national pride that their country needs a lot of work before it can be considered a reasonable partner for "unification". This is the sort of discussion I could have with someone from Indonesia who would be all bristling with indignation on a suggestion that Canadians would not fancy "unifying" with Indonesia in order to promote "free trade". I would probably get a diatribe about seal hunts from him too. Keep in mind seals are animals, and as much as animal rights advocates cry about it, there is a really looong way from a seal cub to an elderly person who worked all her life only to see her country to kick her into the gutter as a reward.
As I said, we have problems. Nobody is satisfied totally with the current state of affairs.
I am glad that you are at least not quite totally satisfied!
Hell, the biggest part of Polish state budget expenditure is pensions and welfare.
Which is true of most countries. Your government spends 18% of the GDP on programs, compared to say, UK at 21%. Compare their corporate tax of 30% to your 19% and you can easily see you are actually more neo-liberal then Britain is. A monster as far as the French are concerned, for sure, considering that both the Germans and the French see Britain as a scary hive of neo-liberalism.
We'd like very much to have a shiny welfare system which takes good care of everyone who really need it, but sorry, we currently just can't afford it.
It is all a matter of priorities, thats all.
Let me tell you that Poland, with its 'shock therapy' was the first post-communist country to come out of depression caused by the collapse of artificial communist economy.
And the fact that the socialist government of Poland -- unlike the others -- allowed all sorts of small businesses to flourish long before the collapse of "communism" had nothing to do with it, yes?
[ copious volumes of hand waving skipped ] So painting Poland as an IMF puppet is only a product of your imagination.
Based on your own argument that it (supposedly) defied IMF ... (cue drum roll) ... once ... well, uhmmm .... yes it is an IMF puppet!
But when the French government proposed a "Solidarity Day", to scrap one irrelevant holiday so that the day's earnings would be directed towards the care of elder people, the French public revolted. So I guess it's solidarity and shame as long as someone else pays for it. Typical socialist thinking
Ah I see! That is how "socialist thinking" works! Lemme see, a corrupt prime-minister proposes a "working holiday", in a bill full of double-talk and corporate handouts "to pay for the elderly", with a new bureaucratic program while at the same time reducing income to existing funds such as the "Caisse nationale d'assurance mala
From your sudden attack on Poland I gather you are a Pole ;-)
Canadian actually.
So are the living costs for people in Indonesia. Then, by your logic, the French should have gleefully accepted the wage of an Indonesian farmer, to be "competetive". I fear that this is precisely the plan, for all the workers in industrialized Western nations to equalize with India in their incomes. Poles should take note, because there is always the "next, cheaper" workforce waiting in the wings, in Lithuania, Kazakhstan or Nigeria, ready to take their place given a chance. I can already see Warsaw papers going on about the dastardly "Nigerian plumber".
The official top rate is supposedly 40% and if you are paying it, you should consider buying a bridge in Brooklyn I happen to have for sale. The regular rate for the wealthy, as elsewhere in most of the world is of course 0%. The law is specifically drafted to allow variety of exceptions, loopholes and various other techniques to wiggle out of paying taxes (if you are wealthy enough that is). Nothing new here really. What was new, for example, are the facts that national assets were privatized in fire-sales ala USSR and that 100% foreign ownership of most corporate assets in the country is allowed. Combine these and you get the idea of the state of affairs as to most large companies. Corporate rate is 19% (on paper) which is lower then, say, Canada at 22%.
and a government that keeps its hands on every aspect of ppls lives.
You confuse corruption with governance.
You are entitled to your own opinion, I will just stick to the facts though, thank you.
You might find it interesting that while old people in France did indeed fare poorly in that hot summer, most of those who died had no immediate family. Yet they could afford their own places to live, albait they apparently did not think much of air-conditioning. I am told air-conditioning is not as popular in Europe as it is in North-America, particularly among techno-phobic elderly. Next thing you will blame the French for not going door to door and trying to see whats up with old recluses ... something they eventually did anyhow. Note also that for the French this was a national point of shame, complete with resignations of ministers and emergency measures. The garbage can dwellers of Poland on the other hand seem an insignificant "collateral casualty" of the "lets get rich quick!" mentality which seems to become the leading force over there.
This is absurd. Poland has national health care and quite affordable (I'm not earning much but I can afford a private -- no insurance -- dentist who does a really good job) private sector. We have a whole lot of problems in health care, corruption and low payment to doctors being the biggest, but the OP suggested Poland has not national health care; this is a lie.
Really? You mean to tell me that the national healthcare actually has doctors on duty in public hospitals, fully equipped? Not closing continuously due to lack of supplies or telling patients to bring in their own families to care for them due to lack of funds? I must have been hearing this from some other Poland then.
As to "affordable", it is in the eye of the beholder. In the USA, a visit to a doctor with a broken pinkie might be actually "affordable" for the uninsured too. Try the same with an injured spine.
Speaking of lies, I happen to know people with families in Poland whose elderly parents would find the care certainly and decidedly unaffordable, were it not for a constant stream of money being sent their way from their children abroad. Hell, they would find milk unaffordable, given that their two room apartament rent, gas and electricity exceed their pension.
This treaty was heavily influenced by the French from the beginning.
You mean the French bureaucrats, wholly owned by multinational corporations, whom the French public wanted nothing to do with?
It *was* a compromise, which the French later rejected, opting, apparently, for 100% compliance with their wishes or not at all.
A compromise among wolves dividing the prey? And the prey refused to go along quietly. I am shocked!
If the French do not want to make compromises, let the give away CAP subsidies, since the rest of Europe does not see any sense in subsidising the richest farmers on the continent.
Personally I do not see much sense in the concept of EU if the general idea seems to be to make ultra-rich richer and permanent masters to the serfs via convoluted 400+ page paper chains, average citizens of wealthy countries poorer and to make everyone who is not a corporate lordling work harder then the shoe-shines in Bangladore -- in order to "outcompete" the Chinas and the Indias of the world in the race-to-the-bottom.
Once some people pull their heads out of their asses and realize that the whole purpose of the excercise is to improve living conditions for all, that they should strive to lower their working hours to match the French not the other way around, that they should try to get their economies working for all the inhabitants of their countries instead of the priviledged 1%, then maybe a "constitution" or some other treaty can be drafted, one which a baker or a plumber -- be it in France or Poland -- can actually read, understand and agree with.
Until then, the king-makers, crooks, thieves and snakes of various sorts will do their "neo-liberal market" voodoo dance and woe onto anyone who falls for their lures
Right. The French decided that working like dogs for a fraction of their pay (see: Poland), having elderly people siff through garbage for food after their pensions are deflated to the point of the absurd (see: Poland), having medical care only for the rich (see: Poland) and a long list of other "world's worst social ideas" straight from Utah imported oh-so-gleefully by the Poles is not a compromise. It would be a total surrender to vicious greed and corporatism. That is what the nutty "free-market constitution" meant for Europe, turning the whole place into Poland/Utah (replace Mormon madness with Catholic one) with a Truly Undemocratic and Fully Bureucratic Hell thrown in just as an icing on the cake. Contrary to some popular opinion in the USA, the French do not seem too eager to surrender. Good for them.
For those not in the know: Poland's economy is a brainchild of the neocons and was shaped chiefly by Goeffrey Sachs, the idiot who thought up the "economic shock therapy" (think Russian Oligarchs and Yeltsin). It is at present a wholly owned and operated subsidiary of the IMF. Imagine a far-out right-wing economic idea and chances are Poland has implemented it. And it has worked wonders! (if you don't mind elderly people sleeping amongst thrash-cans all over the place, organized crime that makes the Mafia resemble a nursery and politicians so corrupt that they make Nixon look like a paragon of integrity and honesty).
Actually as someone has already pointed out upthread the whole thing is most likely a scam by the company, cooked up to hide some far deeper shenaningas.
No one makes a typo involving 262 (count them) separate purchase orders for 262 different stocks from various companies.
The poor woman (if she exists at all and is not merely a figment of the crook's imagination) is an incredulous scapegoat for the scheme.
No it is not. My point is that any corporate serf is equally exposed and vulnerable to the type of persecution this dude was subjected to. The corporation is not to be trusted at any time, more so if you work for it. "wearing a tie" is not a sufficient criterion to evoke trust and loyalty, if anything it is a warning label saying "I am a member of a wolfpack. I strive for servitude and conformity and I shall treat you as an enemy of my wolf pack, on a command from my superior alfa wolf". That is why people wear constraining jackets with matching piece of cloth hanging from their necks, originally a uniform of Croatian thugs, appropriated so neatly to wipe snoot and food remnants from the face of a "sophisticated" parasite dweller of the Louvre palace when King Louis XIV was farting about. An article of clothing quite poetically fitting the mindset of the corporate world.
A typo indeed.
But most large companies are not run by obvious scumbags because they would be destroyed by the scumbags running the company into the ground. Adelphia is an example of what happens eventually.
Unfortunately that is not true. Large companies, especially the so-called "multinationals" enjoy immense support from politicians and national governments. Partly because politicians of all stripe are corrupt, but mostly because politicians fear large scale job losses and thus engage in various forms of corporate welfare, handing out tax breaks, government-guaranteed loans or outright grants and in many cases alter national laws to suit the mega-corporations. Add to this the fact that crookery can go on for a very long time undetected, masked by phony, on-paper "profits", masquerading as "growth" due to never ending cycle of "buy now, pay later" acquisitions of other companies and in some cases the crooks actually manage to make money for the corporation, if they corrupt the local government sufficiently and are allowed to establish an effective monopoly. Only in the most obvious and extremely unsustainable cases do the businesses actually implode. One has to have to literally levitate the whole company on thin air and have debt to income ratio of hundreds to one before something gives. That is why it took super-human efforts to make Enron fail and that is why the airlines (who lose money continuously, since anyone can remember) are still in operation. Running a business into the ground is only an option for a small operation where there is no way to hide the crookery or obtain government bailouts for any length of time. Note also even the very collapse of a behemoth like Enron managed to generate money for the crooks in form of, literally, hundreds of millions of dollars in "legal and consulting fees". Try that with your mom-and-pop shop.
I do agree that small businesses are not exempt from connivery, but my logic is simply this: if business size is kept in check, so is its power and the impact of individual businesses going rogue or simply failing. An IBM can in one fell swoop throw 16000 families into the gutter without even blinking in order to make a few more bucks for the managment, a 50 employee firm can at most harm 50.
But even deeper then that, there is simply a realization that large corporations are corrupting capitalism by reducing its potency to benefit society as a whole. A cornerstone of the system, the very mechanism by which the "invisible hand" is supposed to do its work is competition. If a company size increases and the number of viable companies in a particular field decreases, this in turn reduces competition and leads to oligopoly or outright monopoly situations, effectively destroying any benefits of the system to consumers, not to mention all the disastrously negative political side-effects. This process is in fact the most serious weakness of capitalism as it appears that the system is incapable of self-correcting this situation, contrary to its tenets.
Simply look around and see how many of the everyday products you use are manufactured by companies which have at most one or two viable competitors: Coke/Pepsi; Intel/AMD; Nvidia/ATI; Boeing/Airbus; etc. There are at most a dozen of car manufactuers whose vehicles you will see (many more brands but they all belong to few parent companies). There are just as few oil companies. The list goes on and on.
There are many such -- by now proven to the point of the absurd -- errors in the Adam Smith's plan which require alterations and overrides to save the whole process from reverting to an essentially feudal/mercantile scenario. Unfortunately it would seem that people either refuse to see the obvious or are more then happy to play along in hopes of securing for themselves a place in the ranks of the new "nobility".
Minor difficulty: This would exclude 90% of corporations -- worldwide -- as it appears that being a "scumbag" is a pre-requisite to "corporate success". One has to only take look at the current CEO/CFO lineups, their views on society, their history of "ethics" and their inexplicable inter-dependencies with each other to see that quite clearly. These are the proponents of "globalization" where wealth is to be shuffled around the planet and no attention is to be paid to societal consequences of it. These are the promoters of taxation of individual consumption (via sales taxes) and no taxation of their own vast fortunes to "promote economic growth". These are the people who profit from wars and (in the case of Chip's nemesis) from illness and misery. Or slave labor. List an evil and chances are you can name a large corporation involved.
On a side, off-topic note, the problem is systematic to any large corporation. Larger the size, more attractive the operation becomes to conmen. Well healed conmen with dynastical family connections or self-made conmen who grease the right palms, it doesn't really matter. Sooner or later any company of value is run by them. Honest people do not stand a "snowball's in Hell" chance because the corporate game is rigged hopelesly against them, mostly due to the fact that the whole "free market" charade is run by the said hustlers, but also due to the fact that these thieves use the most powerful weapon known to blind and stupify their prey: greed. Thus they constantly talk about "growth" and "share value" to separate shareholders from their senses and grant themselves all the powers they need. A honest person, when put beside a pack of these howling wolves, appears timid and meek. Which is seen by the shareholders, themselves whipped to a frenzy, lusting for mega-profits to dismiss a down-to-earth, objective and realistic candidate out-of-hand and replace him/her with a snake who will promise them "profits beyond your wildest dreams". And the rest is history.
Actually they are both right. Hemp had many enemies for various economic reasons and when a possibility of inducing a prohibition-style hysteria was added into the mix the rest was inevietable. In addition to DuPoint and Hearst there were other powerful people who had stakes in destroying the hemp industry. On the other hand the industry's proponents were mostly farmers and small time processed hemp products operations. Unlike alcohol, the hemp manufacturers did not have competing robber-barron families on their side and therefore they did not get "rehabilitated" with vast illegal fortunes ala the Kennedy and Seagrams dynasties.
Drug laws have absolutely nothing to do with addictions and social impact of dangerous substances and everything to do with power, money and control of populations by the ruling elites. If the concerns about drug use were truly socially motivated they would be confined to the domain of medicine and not law enforcement. As it is, the "war on drugs" serves beautifully as a mechanism to enrich the drug lords, awesomely empower vast police aparatus complete with wholesale destruction of citizen rights and to vastly enrich the associated securocracy industrial complex.
The people who would be the most outraged by drugs returning to the domain of medical profession are ... the drug lords, police, power hungry politicians, fundamentalist warmongers of various religions and the private prison industry. This fact alone should tell anybody sane everything they need to know about this issue.
The "war on drugs" -- awesomely named in an Orwellian Newspeak -- is so successful a totalitarian tool that new kinds of "war on inanimate things and abstract concepts" are being put into action. Witness "war on terror" complete with Gulags, torture centers, "extraordinary renditions", indefinite detention without trial based on a whim of a CIA opeartive, etc.
Sigh. Freenet as it stands, makes easily detectable connections to other freenet clients, IP addresses of wich can be trivialy ascertained by running such a client. All one has to do is to collect IP addresses of all clients connecting to the cancer node and arrest everyone whose computer made a connection, but allow their computers to run for a while and collect all the addresses of their connections etc. Since from the point of view of Chinese authorities there are no legitimate reasons to be using Freenet, you are toast as soon as you are found using it. I won't even mention more sophisticated methods of tracking down Freenet use becasue they are so clearly beyond you.
Freenet isn't about encryption so much as it is about anonymity. You can't publish to the world with PGP email and an SSL web connect you brainfucked idiot troll.
Riight. I will skip for the moment the prepostrous idea of Scientology being able to monitor all traffic at all ISPs and having access to their internal logs. Not to mention that people running The Operation Clambake are all sooo dead already, murdered by Scientologists, no? I will bypass the obvious conundrum of who are these mythical ex-Scientologists addressing exactly, while hiding on a medium which reaches 0.01% of the Internet and exactly 0% of people to whom such messages would be important. I will only ask this: posting to usenet while using a throw-away handle via news.google.com (from a net-cafe if you are really paranoid) is not anonymous enough for this purpose how precisely? E-mailing Operation Clambake anonymously using a throw-away web-mail account does expose you in what way? Unless of course you do claim that Scientology does have super-xenu-powers of remote Net-cafe and ISP Packet Tracking Xray vision!
As a followup question, brought on by your reaction: do you have any clue how the Internet works?
Ian has already listed the public site of the folks in China who use Freenet daily to safely communicate with one another, you crack baby ignorant bastard
No he did link to a site registered and run in the USA, very access of which would set off alarms at the Great Firewall Of China and whose viability to the dissident movement is extremely questionable in the light of the basic, unavoidable, workings of the Internet (even if one were to use the Freenet key of the site only - see above). That link proves absolutely nothing. I do know some Chinese dissidents in exile over here and they find this nonsense just as laughable as I do. But then again they are real life people and not some misguided techno nerds. I hate to break it to you but political movements are composed of people who for the most part see Freenet just about as useful as an exaust pipe on a donkey.
Again, not a terrible trolling attempt. Keep working on it, sport. Maybe the GNAA will let you join up.
Right. If you have no factual ground to stand on, all that is left are impotent insults.
whose activity is oooh so invisible to the Chinese authorities because everyone knows that no Communists have ever figured out how to use a packet sniffer ... that and of course there are other, legal, "feedom of speech" protected uses of Freenet clients in China ... oh wait.
the former Scientologists here in US
Riiight. And they need a darknet because Scientology is capable of decrypting PGP email and cracking SSL web connections with its evil super-xenu-powers! Puhleeeze.
whose lives you've saved with this technology
Now I would normally think this just a nutty hyperbole from someone who either has no clue what is involved or he does and finds Freenet very useful to satisfy his... err.. desires. But this crap about "saving lives" is starting to get to me. The use of Freenet is a guaranteed way to get yourself on the official list of dissidents to watch/persecute in places like China who have no qualms about monitoring traffic. Freenet endangers lives so that morons can try to use "free speech" defense when they get investigated for their porn collections. You people are despicable. You would get people killed because you think yourself so important and infallable. If you were really concerned about "freedom" you would not have promoted this imbecilic solution. And I can see you are getting worried that judges in the west are beginning to see through you charade. Hence the "darknet".
You know, you are fooling less and less people as time goes and come to think of it, the "darknet" mode might actually be a good idea. I know for sure that it will make life easier for the kiddie porn RCMP division here in Canada. Because the use of a "darknet" Freenet will be so easily shown to be facilitating mere criminal activity that the "free speech" smokescreen will no longer be plausible.