There's a simple rule: Don't violate copyrights and don't get blamed for it. It's so simple. There's another simple rule that nearly everyone ignored in this discussion: don't shout and wave your arms when speaking softly and rationally will do just as well.
Michael: should have emailed OpenBSD folks privately, pointing out the similarity of the code and determining whether the similarity is a coincidence, a bad idea of using GPL code as a placeholder (as seems to be the actual event), or outright theft. If there's inadequate response to the inquiry, only then should Michael have sent email to hundreds and hundreds of people about it.
Theo: should have taken the whole matter off-line as quickly as possible.
everyone: let tempers cool. Wait a few minutes before firing off the next salvo.
The whole thing could have been resolved with a few emails, and everyone would probably have felt OK about any outcome. Instead, the outcome is (from the outsider's perspective) the worst possible, and no one is happy about it.
Be careful about who you call a thief. Defaulting to a conclusion of theft when there could be an innocent explanation ("fair use," anyone?) is a terribly pessimistic way to go through life. Default to a belief that there is a reasonable explanation for the circumstances, and investigate further.
When asked why we have the senate [sic], a very un-democratic institution, it was explained that it was cream to mellow the coffee.
WTF does that mean?
The House and Senate exist in their forms to balance the interests of large states and small states. Large states would most like to have a legislative branch with representation by population, and small states would most like to have a legislative branch with each state being equal. By having a bicameral legislature, it's difficult for one group to impose its will on the other. In theory, California, New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Ohio could dominate the business of the House, even though they are only five states. In the Senate, the 26 least populated states could pass any bill they like, even though their combined population is a small fraction of the total. By requiring both houses to pass the same bill, there is more likely to be compromise between states that have disparate interests.
A Wal-Mart guy asked someone how much they could save on electricity by replacing the four incandescent bulbs in the ceiling fan display in each store. The answer given was six million dollars a year!! He didn't believe that number could be correct, so he had it double-checked, and that was the answer.
The most important factoid in this article for me is that the bulbs pay for themselves in energy savings in about five months. I don't live in a particularly frugal fashion, but who doesn't like free money? If it reduces my energy consumption too, that's fine with me.
I'm moving in about 7-8 months, so I'm not going to go on a replacement jag in this house. However, I'll probably buy a couple of CFLs for the bulbs I use the most and slowly use up my most recent multi-pack of incandescents on lamps that I don't use very often.
When I visit my parents next month in their big house, I'll probably replace some of their bulbs too. Their electric bills are astonishingly high.
I'm absolutely stunned by the number of people who are on one hand saying "This is evil! We must protect privacy!" and yet at the same time have downloaded the list and commented on the information therein.
There's nothing hypocritical about it. I'm certainly going to download it and take a look, partly to see if I can find any search terms that might allow someone to identify any of my not-so-tech-savvy friends who use AOL. I'll probably look for funny searches, and I'll probably email those results to other friends.
But at the same time, I can say, without being a hypocrite, that AOL was wrong to publish this data and deserves whatever consequences occur. How can I say this without being a hypocrite? Easy. AOL had an agreement with all these people to keep their private information private, and I don't. AOL took money from these people and had a duty to conduct the business relationship in an ethical way, and I don't. AOL could have published the data in a more intelligent way such that bona fide researchers could have benefitted from the data without violating their privacy agreement with anyone, but they didn't. The result is that casual snoops, in the best case, can be nosy others, and in the worst case, that various lowlifes will try to exploit the data one way or another. That's all on AOL, not on me.
Anyone is quite free to criticize the government on his own time using his own property. If I give you a contract to test my software, that doesn't mean you get to use my computers to blog about your perceptions of my shortcomings, regardless of whether I'm Joe the Donut Maker or CIA.
Freedom of speech doesn't equal freedom from consequences. If I go to your house and start shouting about how I don't like the US's foreign policy, the government cannot (usually) put me in jail because of it. You, however, can ask me to shut up or leave. My freedom of speech doesn't trump any consequences of my speech, namely that I have been asked to leave your house.
My point is just as valid if I say, As a contractor to Coca Cola, she should have just known better than to blog about how much she loves Pepsi on a Coca Cola intranet.
The woman in question was working for a CIA contractor, and the duties for which she was given access were software testing.
FYI, just having a security clearance is not enough to work at a particular facility. You need the requisite clearance AND access. Access is at the absolute discretion of whoever is running the facility.
Contractors in such a setting are always in a precarious circumstance. In many ways, they're encouraged to feel like part of the team, but they're not. Contractors who become nuisances or whose choices require the customer to spend time and effort usually get their access yanked.
At one place I worked, incoming contractors were explicitly cautioned about all the way in which some of their predecessors had gotten their access yanked. Because our customer was the only one the company had, losing your access to the customer's facitily meant you got fired. Some of the reasons that had resulted in losing access seemed incredibly petty.
I can think of many reasons this woman lost her access. The biggest problem is that she used her customer's computer system to criticize that very customer! As a contractor to the US government, she should have just known better than to critique foreign policy on a CIA intranet. A secondary problem is that she based her opinions on an interrogation transcript for which she apparently had need-to-know at some point. However, it's inappropriate in that setting to share even the fact that she had access to the transcript with anyone who didn't have a need to know about that.
Contractors who think independently and who aren't willing to follow even the most picayune of the customer's rules are problems (from the customer's point of view) that are very easily solved.
I'm not saying that I disagree with her comments or that I don't think this is all much ado about nothing. However, she should have seen that extending her comments from funny discussions about the cafeteria food to her opinion of the country's foreign policy was turning her into a nail that was sticking up. If there's one thing that places like the CIA can do very well, it's knowing how to hammer down any nail that sticks up.
I just happened to watch a television show last night exploring effects of a future Yellowstone supervolcano eruption. In discussing previous supervolcanoes, the show suggested that Lake Toba reduced the human population closer to 90-95% than merely two-thirds. I don't have the interest level to research which estimate is more likely.
You couldn't even wait until midnight GMT, could you?
April 1 is quickly becoming my least favorite day because almost everyone with a website tries to make up for a scarcity of subtle cleverness with an extreme overabundance of in-your-face April 1 foolery.
It's not supposed to be the case that readers should sift through the obvious "jokes" to find the occasional valid story. To the contrary, it should be a regular news day with a subtle prank THAT COULD PLAUSIBLY BE TRUE. The goal is to convince at least one rube to make some panicked post to the tune of THAT'S HORRIBLE, WHY IS THIS HAPPENING.
A much funnier prank than OMG PONIES might have been some incredibly obnoxious EULA that must be clicked to read a story, with some claim that the Eolas patent is forcing you to take these measures.
I completely eliminated monster.com from my life over the follow pattern. I had a "job agent" that would send me email when a job showed up in Nevada that included the word "perl." Not that I am actively looking for a new job, but it's prudent to know what's going on.
Any number of recruiters will post their jobs in other states just to trigger job agent emails to people like me. I got an email about a job in "San Antonio, NV" that was posted by a guy who posted a job for San Antonio, FL, San Antonio, PA, and maybe a few other states.
I'd always politely complained to monster.com about this practice and got nowhere. I emailed the recruiter giving him my opinion that he was not really helping himself. (He actually replied that his idea about geographic spamming must be working right, because I had read his job ad!)
I always got very generic responses from monster.com about the problem, and this incident broke the camel's back. I deleted my job agents, turned all my email preferences completely off. Thanks for nothing, monster.com.
It's easy to understand the conflict here. Of all people, scholars of religion are going to see how different religions absorb ideas from one another. I guess it tends to make them rather skeptical that any particular religion has access to some unique revelation. When you combine this skepticism with Christian fundamentalism in general and intelligent design in particular, there's going to be some discord.
However, it's very myopic to reach any kind of opinion that all of this reflects poorly on Christian fundamentalists, Kansas, or religion in the United States. Consider that for his heresy, this guy got a beating that 99.99% of his fellow countrymen think was unjustified. Compare that to Iran, for instance, where writing a book that others consider disrespectful to Islam will get you a giant-sized can of fatwa.
And you care if the police know your location... why?
Because the police have been known to judge guilt by association based on a person's location. 1960s monitoring of groups with unpopular politics comes to mind, as does 1970s enemies lists.
It's easier for a government to crush dissent when it knows where the journalists are.
Try being a whistleblower on government impropriety when the government knows the location of every automobile to which you have access.
Good luck attending a meeting of the Sons of Liberty when King George has GPS tracking devices on your horses. Attention! The horse of suspected traitor REVERE, PAUL has shown up on the console as moving west from Boston. Stop and detain.
If you think the use of data from mandatory GPS units in privately-owned automobiles would be limited to collecting "user fees," you're being incredibly naive. Some well-meaning legislator would next decide that we ought to be keeping tabs on where sex offenders are going during school hours. Someone else will decide that we ought to know where people convicted of multiple DUIs are going.
Respect the temptation that power gives to well-meaning men. Respect the likelihood that given enough power, any of us would become a tyrant. Limit the power you, as a sovereign citizen, give to your fellow man.
This is exactly why I have a second unsecured access point in my apartment piped to the internet. Plausible denyabilty. Who know who's using it? My modem's IP address could be connected to any one of the 50 apartments in my building.
This is called "willful blindness," and it is much more likely to increase your exposure to liability rather than eliminate it. It's one thing for a person who doesn't know any better to inadvertently establish an unsecured access point. It's entirely another matter for someone who knows what he's doing to knowingly create an unsecured access point. If another person uses this AP to spam the world, download kiddy porn, etc., you're going to find yourself in a lot of hot water.
If you really want plausible deniability, provide some acquaintances or co-workers with the key to your access point. List their MACs in your filter. This is just in case they stop by your place to hang out with their laptops in hand. The larger the number of technically-knowlegable persons who could have plausibly betrayed your trust to infringe upon someone else's copyright, the harder it is to establish, even upon the preponderance of the evidence, that it was either you or your computer that was involved in any particular alleged activity.
Of course, the best plausible deniability of all is actual deniability. I don't worry about the RIAA suing me, because I don't infringe upon the copyrights of the companies whom they represent.
I do feel sorry for the less-than-knowledgeable people who swapped music without being quite aware of the liability to which they were exposing themselves. But if you are tech-savvy enough to be setting up multiple access points in such a way that you think you are covering yourself AND dumb enough to post about it, you probably deserve whatever happens to you.
I've been thinking about Chip's circumstances since someone sent me a link to it the other day.
Here's my take: sending such a letter to an employer who is acting illegally and/or unethically is basically saying, "I am thinking about crushing your shit, would you like to crush my shit first?" Not surprisingly, such employers will proceed to crush the employee's shit.
Yourdon once gave excellent advice about dealing with employers whose software development practices sucked: vote with your feet. One person alone cannot fight an entire company's inertia. Make a bona fide effort to get them to change, and then move on.
It goes multiply so for employers who are doing Wrong Things. They aren't going to come to a moral awakening just because the Noble Programmer has pointed out their failings.
If your employer is doing something wrong, illegal, immoral, or whatever, you have two choices: live with it and become party to whatever it is they're doing or Get. The. Fuck. Out. If you leave, you can either be quiet about what you know or rat them out.
I wouldn't blame anyone for keeping quiet about such things -- it's for everyone to decide on his own. In Chip's case, I think a sober analysis should have led him to stay quiet. The upside of rocking the boat was that HMS would stop being mean people about scraping data. The downside, as he has unfortunately discovered, is $40K in legal bills. I'm sure the owners of open proxies will someday thank you for your sacrifice!
But if you do decide to rat the bastards out, you've got to get ready for all-out war. They're going to come after you hard. Make backups of all your data. Get your computers out of the house.
[If you're really bored, find some broken hard drives and put them in your computers in place on the real hard drives. The computer foresnics guys will have loads of fun racking up many hours at your former employer's expense trying to make them work.]
Practical example: I worked for about a month for a particular company, first as a contractor and then as a W-2 employee. They wanted me to do something unwise and risky that had the potential of considerable civil liability. The moment I saw what was going on, I stopped what I was doing, appraised them of the risks, and told them I wasn't willing to accept personal liability for what they wanted me to do. The outcome of that discussion is that I became a full-time employee which gave me a little bit more protection from any fallout. After a few days of this, however, I decided it was all too stupid for this to be going on. I knew they didn't share my opinions about the (un)wisdom and risk about this, so I just quit. No threats, no angry retribution, no reason for anyone to crush my shit.
Using a credit card online is much safer than using it at any restaurant in which someone takes it out of your sight, using it at a store at which an imprint is taken, or giving its number to someone on the telephone.
I do all of these, and like the vast majority of everyone else, I've never had a problem.
Many, if not most, online merchants, don't ever store your credit card number. The exceptions would be those who have a recurring charge capability and those who explicitly have the capability to store it.
Being aware of the security of your information is fine, but rejecting convenience without adquately weighing the relative risk is damned silly.
This isn't to say that the original poster doesn't have good practices when it comes to using his credit card at restaurants as well. However, nearly everyone I know who won't use a credit card online will pony it up at a restaurant without a second thought.
You can choose either the terms of the version of the GPL that you got or any later version. RMS cannot change your licensing terms. All the stuff you are copying and modifying under the terms of Version 2 can continued to be copied and modified under those terms. OR. If you would prefer to copy and modify the software under the terms of any later version, you can use that one.
Without any particular skill in making stuff, I cut out a few pieces of cardboard, taped them together, then taped some aluminum foil to the back. Signal received at my desktop increased about 16 dB.
Router is a Linksys WRT54G, network adapter is some Microsoft 802.11g PCI card, distance about 30 feet through a couple of walls and close to washer/dryer.
And guess what, he was the guy who throws the ball. He says that he could throw the ball with such a precision that it would fall within a very small range of numbers from the target and most of the time it would fall onto whatever number he wanted. There are at least a few folks like this in any casino. Floor manager brings them in when someone starts winning REAL big to "reduce the odds".
Utter, utter bullshit.
First, there are metal studs on the wheel into which the ball occasionally runs. These pop the ball up a little bit and cause it to run down to the numbers more quickly.
Secondly, the ball is launched before betting begins. Unless the mark always bets on the same numbers, how is the dealer supposed to know on what number to put the ball?
A casino has nearly guaranteed profit, and lots of it, from a perfectly honest wheel. Every bet available has a house edge of 5.26%. Why would you cheat the guy who is "winning REAL big" when you can chip away at his winnings gradually perfectly legally?
Finally, the last place a casino would put such a person is anywhere near a roulette wheel. Such a person could have a confederate making bets on pre-selected numbers in a completely undetectable way.
Re:I don't see what's wrong here
on
Who Owns The Facts?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
What's wrong here is that it makes it easy for big corporations with deep pockets to keep the little guy from being a nuisance/competitor.
Who can afford to litigate against a Fortune 500 company whether his database is or is not misappropriated from theirs? How can you ever establish that you independently generated your database?
When ownership of fact can be the basis of a civil suit, the individual is shut out. Like software patents, the big corporations will own portfolios of databases that they will cross-license to each other while they collectively collude to keep everyone else out.
When I see that the phone company and building-code associations are going out of business because bad guys have misappropriated their "databases," it may be time for such a law. Until then, what's the rush?
I wish legislators would include at least a token discussion on exactly what the problem for which they're providing a "solution." Whose databases are currently being misappropriated?
Slashdot Mirror
Michael: should have emailed OpenBSD folks privately, pointing out the similarity of the code and determining whether the similarity is a coincidence, a bad idea of using GPL code as a placeholder (as seems to be the actual event), or outright theft. If there's inadequate response to the inquiry, only then should Michael have sent email to hundreds and hundreds of people about it.
Theo: should have taken the whole matter off-line as quickly as possible.
everyone: let tempers cool. Wait a few minutes before firing off the next salvo.
The whole thing could have been resolved with a few emails, and everyone would probably have felt OK about any outcome. Instead, the outcome is (from the outsider's perspective) the worst possible, and no one is happy about it.
Be careful about who you call a thief. Defaulting to a conclusion of theft when there could be an innocent explanation ("fair use," anyone?) is a terribly pessimistic way to go through life. Default to a belief that there is a reasonable explanation for the circumstances, and investigate further.
WTF does that mean?
The House and Senate exist in their forms to balance the interests of large states and small states. Large states would most like to have a legislative branch with representation by population, and small states would most like to have a legislative branch with each state being equal. By having a bicameral legislature, it's difficult for one group to impose its will on the other. In theory, California, New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Ohio could dominate the business of the House, even though they are only five states. In the Senate, the 26 least populated states could pass any bill they like, even though their combined population is a small fraction of the total. By requiring both houses to pass the same bill, there is more likely to be compromise between states that have disparate interests.
A Wal-Mart guy asked someone how much they could save on electricity by replacing the four incandescent bulbs in the ceiling fan display in each store. The answer given was six million dollars a year!! He didn't believe that number could be correct, so he had it double-checked, and that was the answer.
The most important factoid in this article for me is that the bulbs pay for themselves in energy savings in about five months. I don't live in a particularly frugal fashion, but who doesn't like free money? If it reduces my energy consumption too, that's fine with me.
I'm moving in about 7-8 months, so I'm not going to go on a replacement jag in this house. However, I'll probably buy a couple of CFLs for the bulbs I use the most and slowly use up my most recent multi-pack of incandescents on lamps that I don't use very often.
When I visit my parents next month in their big house, I'll probably replace some of their bulbs too. Their electric bills are astonishingly high.
There's nothing hypocritical about it. I'm certainly going to download it and take a look, partly to see if I can find any search terms that might allow someone to identify any of my not-so-tech-savvy friends who use AOL. I'll probably look for funny searches, and I'll probably email those results to other friends.
But at the same time, I can say, without being a hypocrite, that AOL was wrong to publish this data and deserves whatever consequences occur. How can I say this without being a hypocrite? Easy. AOL had an agreement with all these people to keep their private information private, and I don't. AOL took money from these people and had a duty to conduct the business relationship in an ethical way, and I don't. AOL could have published the data in a more intelligent way such that bona fide researchers could have benefitted from the data without violating their privacy agreement with anyone, but they didn't. The result is that casual snoops, in the best case, can be nosy others, and in the worst case, that various lowlifes will try to exploit the data one way or another. That's all on AOL, not on me.
Anyone is quite free to criticize the government on his own time using his own property. If I give you a contract to test my software, that doesn't mean you get to use my computers to blog about your perceptions of my shortcomings, regardless of whether I'm Joe the Donut Maker or CIA.
Freedom of speech doesn't equal freedom from consequences. If I go to your house and start shouting about how I don't like the US's foreign policy, the government cannot (usually) put me in jail because of it. You, however, can ask me to shut up or leave. My freedom of speech doesn't trump any consequences of my speech, namely that I have been asked to leave your house.
My point is just as valid if I say, As a contractor to Coca Cola, she should have just known better than to blog about how much she loves Pepsi on a Coca Cola intranet.
The woman in question was working for a CIA contractor, and the duties for which she was given access were software testing.
FYI, just having a security clearance is not enough to work at a particular facility. You need the requisite clearance AND access. Access is at the absolute discretion of whoever is running the facility.
Contractors in such a setting are always in a precarious circumstance. In many ways, they're encouraged to feel like part of the team, but they're not. Contractors who become nuisances or whose choices require the customer to spend time and effort usually get their access yanked.
At one place I worked, incoming contractors were explicitly cautioned about all the way in which some of their predecessors had gotten their access yanked. Because our customer was the only one the company had, losing your access to the customer's facitily meant you got fired. Some of the reasons that had resulted in losing access seemed incredibly petty.
I can think of many reasons this woman lost her access. The biggest problem is that she used her customer's computer system to criticize that very customer! As a contractor to the US government, she should have just known better than to critique foreign policy on a CIA intranet. A secondary problem is that she based her opinions on an interrogation transcript for which she apparently had need-to-know at some point. However, it's inappropriate in that setting to share even the fact that she had access to the transcript with anyone who didn't have a need to know about that.
Contractors who think independently and who aren't willing to follow even the most picayune of the customer's rules are problems (from the customer's point of view) that are very easily solved.
I'm not saying that I disagree with her comments or that I don't think this is all much ado about nothing. However, she should have seen that extending her comments from funny discussions about the cafeteria food to her opinion of the country's foreign policy was turning her into a nail that was sticking up. If there's one thing that places like the CIA can do very well, it's knowing how to hammer down any nail that sticks up.
I just happened to watch a television show last night exploring effects of a future Yellowstone supervolcano eruption. In discussing previous supervolcanoes, the show suggested that Lake Toba reduced the human population closer to 90-95% than merely two-thirds. I don't have the interest level to research which estimate is more likely.
Uh, it's my April Fool's joke to pretend that I don't know that it's still 8 hours difference between PT and GMT. Yeah, that's it.
You couldn't even wait until midnight GMT, could you?
April 1 is quickly becoming my least favorite day because almost everyone with a website tries to make up for a scarcity of subtle cleverness with an extreme overabundance of in-your-face April 1 foolery.
It's not supposed to be the case that readers should sift through the obvious "jokes" to find the occasional valid story. To the contrary, it should be a regular news day with a subtle prank THAT COULD PLAUSIBLY BE TRUE. The goal is to convince at least one rube to make some panicked post to the tune of THAT'S HORRIBLE, WHY IS THIS HAPPENING.
A much funnier prank than OMG PONIES might have been some incredibly obnoxious EULA that must be clicked to read a story, with some claim that the Eolas patent is forcing you to take these measures.
Right on!
I completely eliminated monster.com from my life over the follow pattern. I had a "job agent" that would send me email when a job showed up in Nevada that included the word "perl." Not that I am actively looking for a new job, but it's prudent to know what's going on.
Any number of recruiters will post their jobs in other states just to trigger job agent emails to people like me. I got an email about a job in "San Antonio, NV" that was posted by a guy who posted a job for San Antonio, FL, San Antonio, PA, and maybe a few other states.
I'd always politely complained to monster.com about this practice and got nowhere. I emailed the recruiter giving him my opinion that he was not really helping himself. (He actually replied that his idea about geographic spamming must be working right, because I had read his job ad!)
I always got very generic responses from monster.com about the problem, and this incident broke the camel's back. I deleted my job agents, turned all my email preferences completely off. Thanks for nothing, monster.com.
It's easy to understand the conflict here. Of all people, scholars of religion are going to see how different religions absorb ideas from one another. I guess it tends to make them rather skeptical that any particular religion has access to some unique revelation. When you combine this skepticism with Christian fundamentalism in general and intelligent design in particular, there's going to be some discord.
However, it's very myopic to reach any kind of opinion that all of this reflects poorly on Christian fundamentalists, Kansas, or religion in the United States. Consider that for his heresy, this guy got a beating that 99.99% of his fellow countrymen think was unjustified. Compare that to Iran, for instance, where writing a book that others consider disrespectful to Islam will get you a giant-sized can of fatwa.
And you care if the police know your location... why?
Because the police have been known to judge guilt by association based on a person's location. 1960s monitoring of groups with unpopular politics comes to mind, as does 1970s enemies lists.
It's easier for a government to crush dissent when it knows where the journalists are.
Try being a whistleblower on government impropriety when the government knows the location of every automobile to which you have access.
Good luck attending a meeting of the Sons of Liberty when King George has GPS tracking devices on your horses. Attention! The horse of suspected traitor REVERE, PAUL has shown up on the console as moving west from Boston. Stop and detain.
If you think the use of data from mandatory GPS units in privately-owned automobiles would be limited to collecting "user fees," you're being incredibly naive. Some well-meaning legislator would next decide that we ought to be keeping tabs on where sex offenders are going during school hours. Someone else will decide that we ought to know where people convicted of multiple DUIs are going.
Respect the temptation that power gives to well-meaning men. Respect the likelihood that given enough power, any of us would become a tyrant. Limit the power you, as a sovereign citizen, give to your fellow man.
This is exactly why I have a second unsecured access point in my apartment piped to the internet. Plausible denyabilty. Who know who's using it? My modem's IP address could be connected to any one of the 50 apartments in my building.
This is called "willful blindness," and it is much more likely to increase your exposure to liability rather than eliminate it. It's one thing for a person who doesn't know any better to inadvertently establish an unsecured access point. It's entirely another matter for someone who knows what he's doing to knowingly create an unsecured access point. If another person uses this AP to spam the world, download kiddy porn, etc., you're going to find yourself in a lot of hot water.
If you really want plausible deniability, provide some acquaintances or co-workers with the key to your access point. List their MACs in your filter. This is just in case they stop by your place to hang out with their laptops in hand. The larger the number of technically-knowlegable persons who could have plausibly betrayed your trust to infringe upon someone else's copyright, the harder it is to establish, even upon the preponderance of the evidence, that it was either you or your computer that was involved in any particular alleged activity.
Of course, the best plausible deniability of all is actual deniability. I don't worry about the RIAA suing me, because I don't infringe upon the copyrights of the companies whom they represent.
I do feel sorry for the less-than-knowledgeable people who swapped music without being quite aware of the liability to which they were exposing themselves. But if you are tech-savvy enough to be setting up multiple access points in such a way that you think you are covering yourself AND dumb enough to post about it, you probably deserve whatever happens to you.
I've been thinking about Chip's circumstances since someone sent me a link to it the other day.
Here's my take: sending such a letter to an employer who is acting illegally and/or unethically is basically saying, "I am thinking about crushing your shit, would you like to crush my shit first?" Not surprisingly, such employers will proceed to crush the employee's shit.
Yourdon once gave excellent advice about dealing with employers whose software development practices sucked: vote with your feet. One person alone cannot fight an entire company's inertia. Make a bona fide effort to get them to change, and then move on.
It goes multiply so for employers who are doing Wrong Things. They aren't going to come to a moral awakening just because the Noble Programmer has pointed out their failings.
If your employer is doing something wrong, illegal, immoral, or whatever, you have two choices: live with it and become party to whatever it is they're doing or Get. The. Fuck. Out. If you leave, you can either be quiet about what you know or rat them out.
I wouldn't blame anyone for keeping quiet about such things -- it's for everyone to decide on his own. In Chip's case, I think a sober analysis should have led him to stay quiet. The upside of rocking the boat was that HMS would stop being mean people about scraping data. The downside, as he has unfortunately discovered, is $40K in legal bills. I'm sure the owners of open proxies will someday thank you for your sacrifice!
But if you do decide to rat the bastards out, you've got to get ready for all-out war. They're going to come after you hard. Make backups of all your data. Get your computers out of the house.
[If you're really bored, find some broken hard drives and put them in your computers in place on the real hard drives. The computer foresnics guys will have loads of fun racking up many hours at your former employer's expense trying to make them work.]
Practical example: I worked for about a month for a particular company, first as a contractor and then as a W-2 employee. They wanted me to do something unwise and risky that had the potential of considerable civil liability. The moment I saw what was going on, I stopped what I was doing, appraised them of the risks, and told them I wasn't willing to accept personal liability for what they wanted me to do. The outcome of that discussion is that I became a full-time employee which gave me a little bit more protection from any fallout. After a few days of this, however, I decided it was all too stupid for this to be going on. I knew they didn't share my opinions about the (un)wisdom and risk about this, so I just quit. No threats, no angry retribution, no reason for anyone to crush my shit.
Come on, now.
Using a credit card online is much safer than using it at any restaurant in which someone takes it out of your sight, using it at a store at which an imprint is taken, or giving its number to someone on the telephone.
I do all of these, and like the vast majority of everyone else, I've never had a problem.
Many, if not most, online merchants, don't ever store your credit card number. The exceptions would be those who have a recurring charge capability and those who explicitly have the capability to store it.
Being aware of the security of your information is fine, but rejecting convenience without adquately weighing the relative risk is damned silly.
This isn't to say that the original poster doesn't have good practices when it comes to using his credit card at restaurants as well. However, nearly everyone I know who won't use a credit card online will pony it up at a restaurant without a second thought.
RTFGPL.
You can choose either the terms of the version of the GPL that you got or any later version. RMS cannot change your licensing terms. All the stuff you are copying and modifying under the terms of Version 2 can continued to be copied and modified under those terms. OR. If you would prefer to copy and modify the software under the terms of any later version, you can use that one.
I did that!
Without any particular skill in making stuff, I cut out a few pieces of cardboard, taped them together, then taped some aluminum foil to the back. Signal received at my desktop increased about 16 dB.
Router is a Linksys WRT54G, network adapter is some Microsoft 802.11g PCI card, distance about 30 feet through a couple of walls and close to washer/dryer.
Utter, utter bullshit.
First, there are metal studs on the wheel into which the ball occasionally runs. These pop the ball up a little bit and cause it to run down to the numbers more quickly.
Secondly, the ball is launched before betting begins. Unless the mark always bets on the same numbers, how is the dealer supposed to know on what number to put the ball?
A casino has nearly guaranteed profit, and lots of it, from a perfectly honest wheel. Every bet available has a house edge of 5.26%. Why would you cheat the guy who is "winning REAL big" when you can chip away at his winnings gradually perfectly legally?
Finally, the last place a casino would put such a person is anywhere near a roulette wheel. Such a person could have a confederate making bets on pre-selected numbers in a completely undetectable way.
What's wrong here is that it makes it easy for big corporations with deep pockets to keep the little guy from being a nuisance/competitor.
Who can afford to litigate against a Fortune 500 company whether his database is or is not misappropriated from theirs? How can you ever establish that you independently generated your database?
When ownership of fact can be the basis of a civil suit, the individual is shut out. Like software patents, the big corporations will own portfolios of databases that they will cross-license to each other while they collectively collude to keep everyone else out.
When I see that the phone company and building-code associations are going out of business because bad guys have misappropriated their "databases," it may be time for such a law. Until then, what's the rush?
I wish legislators would include at least a token discussion on exactly what the problem for which they're providing a "solution." Whose databases are currently being misappropriated?