OK so that metaphor wasn't water-tight. However note that I absolutely did not say that he did not commit a crime. He found vulnerabilities and a lack of passwords protecting remote administration services (that should never have been left running) on the space agency and air force computers belonging to a foreign power.
He failed to report them, and he continued to access them. Fair enough. He's nicked. It's a fair cop etc.
I have no problem with him being fairly prosecuted. If you read my post again you'll see that my problem is rather that we simply can't trust the United States to fairly prosecute him any more. His charges are likely to be inflated, dramatised and exaggerated - in fact if you listen to the hype we know this to be the case already. Quoting one of his prosecutors: "the biggest military computer hack of all time" Riiiiight. Just like Richard Reid was an elite Al Qaeda special agent, Moussaoui was a criminal mastermind and Saddam Hussein had deadly global threat anthrax super-powers.
It's very difficult for us Brits to trust people that say stuff like this, even when they're supposed to be representing your biggest ally.
If the real threats are regarded as uncatchable, untreatable or inexplicable - i.e. Osama, Kim Jong Il, Sudanese government etc. - and the hangers on and wannabe anti-Americans are treated as serious threats, absolutely nothing is being done to improve US security.
I'd just like the US authorities to stop vilifying relatively harmless nutters and to instead focus on the real serious threats, which I accept may be a little more complicated and a little harder to media manage.
Until then it's probably safest for trans-Atlantic relations if British subjects are tried in British courts whether or not the U.S. considers them terr'rists.
"...when in truth as we all know the entire tech community has agreed that Mr Mckinnon is not only an idiot but a deluded attention seeker".
I'm sorry but you can sod right off.
I'm both a member of the "tech community" and a "UK hacker" and I certainly do not consider him either an idiot or an attention seeker.
Clearly the guy has some pretty outlandish views. But apart from that his only crime was proving how incredibly poor federal computer security is in the US even long after their biggest ever attack on home soil.
The only real crime worth talking about here is the lack of security. If I was walking down a street in London and saw a door marked "Ministry of Defence. Top Secret. UFO archive." I'd probably keep on walking - unless the door was wide open. Then I might just peek inside out of curiosity. Now if it turned out to be the real deal how the hell could anyone with a brain and a conscience prosecute me for that?
Mr McKinnon is not entirely innocent but he is quite right to be concerned about being extradited to a country that seems to feel that it can suspend the rule of law in order to best fit the fear-mongering 'everyone that's not with us is against us', "we'll get the terr'rists" mentality.
Perhaps if the US didn't have such a ghastly recent history this wouldn't be a problem. But the fact is that noone outside the US is ignorant of Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, the foreign torture flights - you name it. And the type of people currently running the Pentagon, NSA, CIA and indeed Whitehouse are hardly grounds for giving the US justice system the benefit of any doubt whatsoever.
We know these people have little or no regard for equal human rights. We know these people will happily bend, ignore or entirely circumvent their own laws to suit their own needs.
We know that innocents have been mistreated, tortured or killed during this administration's watch.
We also know that Gary McKinnon is pretty harmless, and unsurprisingly didn't actually manage to do any harm to the world's biggest military and technical power.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that if us Brits could still trust americans to practise what they preach then we wouldn't have a problem sending him over for his wrist-slapping. But sadly we can't. And we don't want to see another British subject subjected to media-friendly kangaroo courts that do little more than to quench the american right's thirst for heads to roll - whether they're the right heads or not.
I don't understand why you're oligated to fix this person's computer.
It's called being considerate. Some people still seem to think that's quite a worthwhile trait believe it or not.
Facetiousness aside, I believe the OP didn't need to be told that 'no' was an option; rather how best to let people down.
The Escapist covered this topic recently. There's a fascinating alternative perspective presented in an interview with the president of RedBedlam, the team behind Roma Victor - another virtual economics-based VW due to launch in July. The interview is here.
Did he have to escape from a group of brownshirts in jackboots? Was he convicted as an enemy spy "attacking the Capitalist State and Social Order" and sent to a labor camp for 15 years? Perhaps, a fatwa was issued calling on the faithful to kill him?
No? None of that? Damn, this lousy government of ours. They can't even silence anyone!
Well that's hardly fair is it? After all you're not really in a position to keep a count of all the people that they have successfully silenced. Just because the brownshirts don't patrol your street doesn't mean that your country is free. Read some Orwell for clues.
I have a bias but Roma Victor has a crafting system a lot like, if not better than ATITD's and also has real-time pvp combat amongst other things. There's no subscription fee and it's been in testing since May.
My that is a fanboi rant. The ATi card that this 7800 is being compared with is priced at around $400 vs nVidia's $650 for a card that marginally beats it in performance. Your words sound a lot like those of the folk that used to proclaim that one day 3dfx would be a "lone wolf in the graphics industry" and we all know how that turned out. Just like AMD and Intel or any other big component manufacture you will always see a performance see-saw between iterations of their products. But when one of them has to charge >1.5 times the price of the other, it's simply not a valid comparison.
Slightly offtopic. I notice you mention Britain and Europe, then follow it up with 'we'. Being from the US, I obviously ignore the rest of the world. Is the European Union really becoming a single entity? In the US, people have a slight allegiance to their states, some stronger, like Texas, however we usually identify ourselves as Americans. Is Europe following the same path?
Given that you admit to ignoring the rest of the world it'd take me quite a while to explain the fundamentals of human cooperation and peaceful coexistence in spite of considerable outstanding disagreements. Indeed I think Europe is currently probably more unified (yes including the U.S.-controlled province of Britain) than the so called 'United' States at the moment. As I understand it there's a red state/blue state rift in your home country that's about as close to civil war as it's been since its last one. In fact I think I'd go so far as to say that the U.S. is currently closer to civil war than the European nations are to internal international war.
Anyway I'll grossly oversimplify things by answering your original question with a straighforward 'yes'. Frankly, most of Europe would rather be doing business with China right now. What does that tell you about the views of 'the rest of the world'? Now I have to get the disclaimer in before I get nailed for simply being flamebait. I'm not anti-american etc. etc. In fact it's because I'm really rather fond of many Americans and a great deal of America's culture that I feel quite so frustrated by the direction that the nation has taken since WWII - particularly in the last few years. IMHO your own stated 'ignore the rest of the world' attitude combined with a general culture of arrogance and supremacism is unwarranted, inappropriate, irresponsible and downright dangerous.
A bit of a rant there I know and I really do apologise but as I say, my anger is that of a disappointed friend; not an enemy. These subtle nuanced relationships are common on a continent like ours that has been ravaged by hundreds of years of serious wars - all fought over and on home territory, which is an important factor many USians easily overlook.
As for me personally, I don't want a tri-polar world with a Chinese bloc, a European bloc and an Oceania^H^H, I mean U.S. bloc. What I want is for the U.S. to put the gun down and come back home to humanity, which is actually the only alliance I really give a damn about. It seems that sometimes there really is no avoiding cliché.;-)
But I love my country, and this is something we made. No foreign bureaucrat has the right to decide it's not ours anymore.
Dodgy logic. Tim Berners-Lee is British. He invented the Web while working at CERN (that's in Europe by the way). Can we have our web back then please?
And mod grandparent down. For the sake of all the decent Americans that a) realise there's a world outside the United States of Arrogance and b) can read subtitles without feeling alienated.
Us Brits were just lucky I guess. Blake's 7 was the ultimate anti-Star Trek. Here Blake and his dubious crew of criminals and freedom fighters/terrorists took on the all-powerful Big-Brother-esque Federation.
In the first episode our hero is set up as a post mind-wipe former rabble rouser that witnesses the mass murder of a secret meeting of dissidents. The authorities have him set up as a child molester, destroy him and his reputation and then ship him off to a penal colony (after having his lawyer and the lawyer's wife killed off because they were getting in the way).
Dark enough for you? That's just the first episode. Written by Terry Nation, mind behind the better Doctor Who stories amongst many other things, this series has all the depth and tension that you could possibly hope for. Of course the special effects look very dated and they seemed to find every last disused quarrry and scrap of wasteland left in England to film in.
Even if you're not much of a sci-fi fan, I highly recommend it.
C'mon this isn't news. BBC was reporting it yesterday FFS, and as other pointed out the Wikipedia page on the CEV has a lot of detailed info on the launchers, mission plans etc.
It would be interesting to see this in action in an MMORPG. Stats and levels are completely hidden, and the only knowledge of a characters ability is indirect. (I.E. - I can kill these rabbits twice as fast as last week, lets try something harder) The same would go for mobs and NPC's. You don't know how tough someone is until you take them on. Throw this into a PvP game, and it would be very interesting. No more "I'm lvl 60 and he's lvl 55. I'm gonna win" mentality.
heck, I'd play it in a heartbeat.
RV is an historically authentic PVP MMORPG with no player-visible numbers. See sig for disclaimer.:)
Here's a few facts tho:
Sony hired at least one person from the emulator community that many considered to be the best addition to the team ever. The emulated service is not the same as the non-emulated service. A few hundred people (300-400? hah!) is a drop in the bucket. People on emulated servers are fans of the game but not fans of the service. Embracing the community of player auctions (selling in-game items for real world cash) is more damaging to their game, as well as the entire MMOG industry, than anything an emulated service could do (specially since the service was provided free).
You were doing fine until you started to throw some opinion into your "facts" paragraph.;-
)
Don't worry I'm quite even-handed in my disapproval. Anyone who sanctions the militarisation of space I consider to be, at the very least, a philosophical opponent.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah thanks. It was a joke. Believe it or not most people always knew the difference. ;-)
Sounds like an Irwin Allen sci-fi series.
OK so that metaphor wasn't water-tight. However note that I absolutely did not say that he did not commit a crime. He found vulnerabilities and a lack of passwords protecting remote administration services (that should never have been left running) on the space agency and air force computers belonging to a foreign power.
He failed to report them, and he continued to access them.
Fair enough. He's nicked. It's a fair cop etc.
I have no problem with him being fairly prosecuted. If you read my post again you'll see that my problem is rather that we simply can't trust the United States to fairly prosecute him any more. His charges are likely to be inflated, dramatised and exaggerated - in fact if you listen to the hype we know this to be the case already. Quoting one of his prosecutors: "the biggest military computer hack of all time"
Riiiiight. Just like Richard Reid was an elite Al Qaeda special agent, Moussaoui was a criminal mastermind and Saddam Hussein had deadly global threat anthrax super-powers.
It's very difficult for us Brits to trust people that say stuff like this, even when they're supposed to be representing your biggest ally.
If the real threats are regarded as uncatchable, untreatable or inexplicable - i.e. Osama, Kim Jong Il, Sudanese government etc. - and the hangers on and wannabe anti-Americans are treated as serious threats, absolutely nothing is being done to improve US security.
I'd just like the US authorities to stop vilifying relatively harmless nutters and to instead focus on the real serious threats, which I accept may be a little more complicated and a little harder to media manage.
Until then it's probably safest for trans-Atlantic relations if British subjects are tried in British courts whether or not the U.S. considers them terr'rists.
"...when in truth as we all know the entire tech community has agreed that Mr Mckinnon is not only an idiot but a deluded attention seeker".
I'm sorry but you can sod right off.
I'm both a member of the "tech community" and a "UK hacker" and I certainly do not consider him either an idiot or an attention seeker.
Clearly the guy has some pretty outlandish views. But apart from that his only crime was proving how incredibly poor federal computer security is in the US even long after their biggest ever attack on home soil.
The only real crime worth talking about here is the lack of security. If I was walking down a street in London and saw a door marked "Ministry of Defence. Top Secret. UFO archive." I'd probably keep on walking - unless the door was wide open. Then I might just peek inside out of curiosity. Now if it turned out to be the real deal how the hell could anyone with a brain and a conscience prosecute me for that?
Mr McKinnon is not entirely innocent but he is quite right to be concerned about being extradited to a country that seems to feel that it can suspend the rule of law in order to best fit the fear-mongering 'everyone that's not with us is against us', "we'll get the terr'rists" mentality.
Perhaps if the US didn't have such a ghastly recent history this wouldn't be a problem. But the fact is that noone outside the US is ignorant of Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, the foreign torture flights - you name it. And the type of people currently running the Pentagon, NSA, CIA and indeed Whitehouse are hardly grounds for giving the US justice system the benefit of any doubt whatsoever.
We know these people have little or no regard for equal human rights. We know these people will happily bend, ignore or entirely circumvent their own laws to suit their own needs.
We know that innocents have been mistreated, tortured or killed during this administration's watch.
We also know that Gary McKinnon is pretty harmless, and unsurprisingly didn't actually manage to do any harm to the world's biggest military and technical power.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that if us Brits could still trust americans to practise what they preach then we wouldn't have a problem sending him over for his wrist-slapping. But sadly we can't. And we don't want to see another British subject subjected to media-friendly kangaroo courts that do little more than to quench the american right's thirst for heads to roll - whether they're the right heads or not.
I don't understand why you're oligated to fix this person's computer.
It's called being considerate. Some people still seem to think that's quite a worthwhile trait believe it or not.
Facetiousness aside, I believe the OP didn't need to be told that 'no' was an option; rather how best to let people down.
Mirage Innovations logo looks rather like the one on my Sony Walkman, turned upside down. :)
0 -0515B/logo1.gif
g o.jpg
Wonder how long until they're sued?
http://www.sony.jp/CorporateCruise/Press/200005/0
http://www.tmura.org/images/donor_logos/mirage_lo
Thought I'd look it up since I had no idea what the Walkman logo was like. You're not wrong. That is pretty cheeky.
The Escapist covered this topic recently. There's a fascinating alternative perspective presented in an interview with the president of RedBedlam, the team behind Roma Victor - another virtual economics-based VW due to launch in July. The interview is here.
NB my sig.
That is the dumbest thing I heard all day. And I just watched an interview with Cindy Sheehan.
Now that's the dumbest thing that I've heard all day. And I just RTFA!
Did he have to escape from a group of brownshirts in jackboots? Was he convicted as an enemy spy "attacking the Capitalist State and Social Order" and sent to a labor camp for 15 years? Perhaps, a fatwa was issued calling on the faithful to kill him?
No? None of that? Damn, this lousy government of ours. They can't even silence anyone!
Well that's hardly fair is it? After all you're not really in a position to keep a count of all the people that they have successfully silenced. Just because the brownshirts don't patrol your street doesn't mean that your country is free. Read some Orwell for clues.
This proud first-time father of a baby thought that the one place I was safe from new-Dad-targeting marketing arsehats was here on /.!
/. and what have you done with him!?????
Where's
I have a bias but Roma Victor has a crafting system a lot like, if not better than ATITD's and also has real-time pvp combat amongst other things. There's no subscription fee and it's been in testing since May.
My that is a fanboi rant. The ATi card that this 7800 is being compared with is priced at around $400 vs nVidia's $650 for a card that marginally beats it in performance. Your words sound a lot like those of the folk that used to proclaim that one day 3dfx would be a "lone wolf in the graphics industry" and we all know how that turned out. Just like AMD and Intel or any other big component manufacture you will always see a performance see-saw between iterations of their products. But when one of them has to charge >1.5 times the price of the other, it's simply not a valid comparison.
Now you know why the men in black wear shades.
Stop your geeks from whining in the workplace.
Slightly offtopic. I notice you mention Britain and Europe, then follow it up with 'we'. Being from the US, I obviously ignore the rest of the world. Is the European Union really becoming a single entity? In the US, people have a slight allegiance to their states, some stronger, like Texas, however we usually identify ourselves as Americans. Is Europe following the same path?
Given that you admit to ignoring the rest of the world it'd take me quite a while to explain the fundamentals of human cooperation and peaceful coexistence in spite of considerable outstanding disagreements. Indeed I think Europe is currently probably more unified (yes including the U.S.-controlled province of Britain) than the so called 'United' States at the moment. As I understand it there's a red state/blue state rift in your home country that's about as close to civil war as it's been since its last one. In fact I think I'd go so far as to say that the U.S. is currently closer to civil war than the European nations are to internal international war.
Anyway I'll grossly oversimplify things by answering your original question with a straighforward 'yes'. Frankly, most of Europe would rather be doing business with China right now. What does that tell you about the views of 'the rest of the world'? Now I have to get the disclaimer in before I get nailed for simply being flamebait. I'm not anti-american etc. etc. In fact it's because I'm really rather fond of many Americans and a great deal of America's culture that I feel quite so frustrated by the direction that the nation has taken since WWII - particularly in the last few years. IMHO your own stated 'ignore the rest of the world' attitude combined with a general culture of arrogance and supremacism is unwarranted, inappropriate, irresponsible and downright dangerous.
A bit of a rant there I know and I really do apologise but as I say, my anger is that of a disappointed friend; not an enemy. These subtle nuanced relationships are common on a continent like ours that has been ravaged by hundreds of years of serious wars - all fought over and on home territory, which is an important factor many USians easily overlook.
As for me personally, I don't want a tri-polar world with a Chinese bloc, a European bloc and an Oceania^H^H, I mean U.S. bloc. What I want is for the U.S. to put the gun down and come back home to humanity, which is actually the only alliance I really give a damn about. It seems that sometimes there really is no avoiding cliché.
No it's not, but as another poster pointed out, the Internet would still be an under-funded geek toy if it wasn't for the web. OK I'm paraphrasing.
But I love my country, and this is something we made. No foreign bureaucrat has the right to decide it's not ours anymore.
Dodgy logic. Tim Berners-Lee is British. He invented the Web while working at CERN (that's in Europe by the way). Can we have our web back then please?
I hate posting just "mod parent up" - but that's a good one going unnoticed I'd say.
And mod grandparent down. For the sake of all the decent Americans that a) realise there's a world outside the United States of Arrogance and b) can read subtitles without feeling alienated.
Us Brits were just lucky I guess. Blake's 7 was the ultimate anti-Star Trek. Here Blake and his dubious crew of criminals and freedom fighters/terrorists took on the all-powerful Big-Brother-esque Federation.
In the first episode our hero is set up as a post mind-wipe former rabble rouser that witnesses the mass murder of a secret meeting of dissidents. The authorities have him set up as a child molester, destroy him and his reputation and then ship him off to a penal colony (after having his lawyer and the lawyer's wife killed off because they were getting in the way).
Dark enough for you? That's just the first episode. Written by Terry Nation, mind behind the better Doctor Who stories amongst many other things, this series has all the depth and tension that you could possibly hope for. Of course the special effects look very dated and they seemed to find every last disused quarrry and scrap of wasteland left in England to film in.
Even if you're not much of a sci-fi fan, I highly recommend it.
C'mon this isn't news. BBC was reporting it yesterday FFS, and as other pointed out the Wikipedia page on the CEV has a lot of detailed info on the launchers, mission plans etc.
Took the words right out of my mouth. The briefing and much more all available here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4261522.stm
Couldn't agree more. There are some MMORPG developers with a strong background in MUDs. though.
It would be interesting to see this in action in an MMORPG. Stats and levels are completely hidden, and the only knowledge of a characters ability is indirect. (I.E. - I can kill these rabbits twice as fast as last week, lets try something harder) The same would go for mobs and NPC's. You don't know how tough someone is until you take them on. Throw this into a PvP game, and it would be very interesting. No more "I'm lvl 60 and he's lvl 55. I'm gonna win" mentality.
heck, I'd play it in a heartbeat.
RV is an historically authentic PVP MMORPG with no player-visible numbers. See sig for disclaimer.
Here's a few facts tho:
Sony hired at least one person from the emulator community that many considered to be the best addition to the team ever. The emulated service is not the same as the non-emulated service. A few hundred people (300-400? hah!) is a drop in the bucket. People on emulated servers are fans of the game but not fans of the service. Embracing the community of player auctions (selling in-game items for real world cash) is more damaging to their game, as well as the entire MMOG industry, than anything an emulated service could do (specially since the service was provided free).
You were doing fine until you started to throw some opinion into your "facts" paragraph.
Don't worry I'm quite even-handed in my disapproval. Anyone who sanctions the militarisation of space I consider to be, at the very least, a philosophical opponent.