This is probaby good for you and everyone else with your sirname too, I have an odd sirname but it's not odd enough that I can always use my sirname as a login and everyone knows don't use a dictionary word for anything you want to be secure, don't they?
You're ignoring the fact that I'm having to change my preferred E-mail username, the usage of which predates spamming, because of the spammers. And as far as using a dictionary word being insecure, yes it is if you use it for a password. Using a dictionary word for a username isn't a security problem as long as you have strong passwords.
Do you run Windows? do you or have you ever have a bot using your email address, do friends that you have given you email address to run Windows? Security holes in Windows + baggage may be part of your problem.
Well now, that's a rather unrealistic viewpoint you have there. I use both Windows and Linux at home, the few friends and family that knew that address are also a mixture. None of us have ever been infected with a bot/virus/etc. Security holes in any OS isn't part of the problem here, at least as far as my address being used. I'm sure there are plenty of compromised systems, both Windows _and_ Linux, out there that the spam's being shoved through that causes the bounces but that's not anything I can control.
I don't run Windows and I live behind a firewall so it's never been an issue, I surprised all those zombies are still running Windows.
I'm behind a firewall/NAT router and also use software firewalls on all my systems (both Windows & Linux). All of them are kept patched, have antivirus software on them, etc. I've had not a single infection/infestation of virii/worms/adware/spyware/malware. Also not all zombie PCs are running Windows, there are machines running Linux/*BSD/*NIX as well. The majority seem to be Windows machines but they aren't the sole problem. Unsecured machines running any OS will become spam conduits. Spammers will try shoving E-mails through any scripts they can find on websites, hoping they might find a way to break them and get spam through. I just had some asshole try to send spam through the Shoutbox code on my blog. There's no way it COULD send E-mail but this didn't stop them from hitting it multiple times from 5-6 different IPs trying various methods.
Your lucky if you only get spam, some of the junk mail posted through my door uses a composite material that doesn't compost or recycle well so it ends up taking up REAL WORLD space in land-fill !!FOREVER!! (well almost).
I don't get any junk mail that can't be recycled. I may shred it if it's a credit card offer with my name/address on it but I take all of it to a recycling center along with magazines I've finished reading, plastics, etc. I don't even have to deal with the recycling part since it's handled by the recycling center. I've also yet to receive a single piece of bounced junk mail that pretended to be from my address.
Well, if you run Windows then your going to get all kinds of problems, spammers being just one of them.
Actually I don't have any problems at all with my Windows machines or my Linux machines. Windows, especially XP, is quite stable if properly setup and secured. Windows isn't the problem, the spammers are the problem.
I don't think the NZ law WON'T DO ANYTHING TO STOP ZOMBIES since in most countries it is already illegal to take over someones PC without their conscent, I suppose it's the graffiti of the advertising world.
I find it quite odd that you assume that the problem has to be my fault because I run a certain OS and criticize me for it then admit that it's illegal to take over someone's PC without consent in most countries. You're not being consistant here, even if I my machine had been compromised and that was what was resulting in my getting so many fake bounces it's STILL the fault of scummy spammers using dictionary attacks, false retur
I think this isn't really a problem, every time I've signed up for a reputable mailing list I get a very brief E-mail that basically says
"someone from IP xxx.yyy.zzz.000 requested that this address be added to our list. If this was you click below/reply to this E-mail to confirm that you want to subscribe. If you didn't request this you don't need to do anything, your address will not be added to the list and you won't hear from us again."
Now if ACME decides to stray from something that simple and include ads for their products then they might have a problem, but if they keep it simple and short they'll be fine. I can't see any judge or jury defining the example message above as spam, and if anyone is going to get in trouble it will be the person who was using the IP that requested the bogus signup.
I'm not saying I support spam, just that spam is another form of advertising. If other forms of advertising come unsolicited from companies.
Why is spam any worse than someone wearing a krappa t-shirt, drinking a can of Koke and eating a MukDonalds, why is spam any worse than traditional junk mail?
Traditional junk mail isn't slipped into your house through any small crevace the marketers can find that a letter will fit through for one thing. For another you don't receive junk mail that pretends to be from a different company/person. You also don't get returned mail sent out by some junk mailer using your return address.
Starting to get the picture? If you haven't yet then please allow me to forward you the 40+ false bounces I get a day where spammers have used an E-mail address I have. I have the strange misfortune of having a last name that's a common english word (but not as common for a name) and I had been in the habit of getting my E-mail addresses to be lastname@domain long before spam became a problem. Thanks to the spammers I've had to move away from my preferred E-mail usernames to avoid both dictionary attack spam and bounces. The account I mentioned is with Comcast and up until a year ago it only got a few spams a month. Nothing changed on my end, I have other accounts I use to sign up for things (actually I just use Spam Gourmet) and only a very few family and friends had that address. About a year ago the level of spam jumped up a bit but what really made the account useless was the sudden influx of bounced spam messages that pretended to be from MY account.
I no longer use that Comcast account but I do download and delete the mail in it periodically. It's up to over 40 false bounces and "my mailbox is protected by _____ and you need to do ____ to prove you're not a spammer" messages. The amount of spam is much lower, about 20 a week and the Baysian filter catches most of it.
An interesting side effect is that I can see that sending bounces for E-mails flagged as spam only makes the problem worse. Most of the bounces are from mail servers saying "sorry your message was flagged as spam and not delivered". Well hell, if you think it's spam then why send a bounce? If it was just the spam it would be manageable but it's all the bounces that have made the account unusable.
In any case spam is much, much different than other form of advertising. Other forms of advertising don't hijack resources and try to do whatever sneaky, scummy things possible to make you see them. Frankly the actions spammers take to send out their spam tell you all you need to know. Do you know of any legit company that uses hijacked zombie PCs, open proxies, etc. to send out their advertising? Spammers do. They know their messages are unwanted, perhaps even illegal but they don't give a shit. Hell they even advertise false and illegal products!
How anyone could think it's "just" another form of advertising is beyond me. Perhaps marketers act like spammers where you are?
I don't know much about Anime culture per se, but I think this is a pretty enlightened move.
Not really, all they're distributing is promo matierial, in other words commercials. So now you get to help pay for ADV to distribute its promos to the Internet at large. It would be fair to say this is taking advantage of Anime fans.
Now if they were distributing full episodes and working on a model that allowed them to do that and make money as well that would be enlightened. Now all you really have is the anime equivalent of Apple's Quicktime trailers site except it's only one company's trailers and the consumers get to help pay for the distribution.
With promotional freebies, distributing via BitTorrent gets you free publicity and lowers your distribution costs to practically nothing. Furthermore, doing it through your own trackers is likely to give you realistic download statistics, which are very valuable in themselves. (And why go to, say, Pirate Bay if the publisher itself is seeding?)
Free Publicity, free statistics and a huge amount of "free" (to ADV) bandwidth just to let people download trailers.
Why go to Pirate Bay? Because they'll have full episodes if not entire seasons and ADV's site will only have trailers. Not much of a comparison there.
For commercial products you'd rather sell, there's also something to be said for BitTorrent distribution. If you know that a significant portion of your customers are going to trade the files on P2P anyway, and you realize there's *nothing* you can do to stop it, why not get some love by seeding the things yourself?
This is a great idea but it's _not_ what ADV is doing at this time. They are only providing promo matierial (trailers/commercials) and not complete episodes or series. Maybe they will in the future but I have my doubts given ADV's history and how it has treated fans in the past.
That leaves the question of how to turn that good will into a buck (or Yen), which I admit is not easy. But as it stands Hollywood isn't even interested in trying, so it's nice to see someone inching down a new path.
ADV's not inching down that path at all, they're just getting anime fans to foot the bandwidth bills to distribute promo matierials. This is not enlightened, this is not embracing Bittorrent. This is simply distribuing promos in another way.
Now if they said they were going to test the waters with providing episodes/series by Bittorrent, even if you have to pay to gain access to the tracker, _then_ it would be something to talk about. As it is it's all just marketing fluff.
Because what the guys in the article want is to get "halo effect" from the games. An example they cited in the article, "Get bronze in London with X suntan lotion", is clearly trying to benefit from the Olympics. Whether they should be allowed to is a whole separate issue, but I still say that they're blowing this out of proportion so that they can benefit from the games without paying (or at least, paying more than they have, since London is spending a buttload of money. I think spending all that money on sporting events is always stupid, but that's just me.)
There's a good reason that businesses complain about not being able to take advantage of the halo effect. One of the reasons always given for bring the Olympics to town is the financial boon it will (supposedly) bring to the area. If local businesses are so restricted that they can't even call attention to themselves while the games are in session then the _only_ people who will profit are the official sponsors. Those sponsors are far more likely to be non-local than local. Meanwhile the locals (both citizens and businesses) have paid dearly for the Olympics to come to their area in the form of new venues and infrastructure upgrades.
Perhaps if the IOC wants advertising rights locked down so tightly they should start footing the bill to build all the new venues needed for each game.
As to holding rights to 'gold', 'silver', 'bronze'... can I copyright 'steel', 'oxygen', 'water' and 'copyright'?
Probably not but I hear the US Patent office will let you patent them.;)
Think about it. If you're Coca-Cola (or some other huge multinational) that's spending 8-9 figures to be the "official whatever of the Olympics", you're going to want to be pretty sure that your competitor isn't going to just say the same thing unofficially. Pretty sure in this case means contractual language with teeth. Hence, the IOC turning around and doing the same thing.
Sure, and it's reasonable to expect that your competitors can't imply they're official sponsors. But this is going way beyond that, a quote from the article:
But the new bill will make it illegal to combine words like "games", "medals", "gold", "2012", "sponsor" or "summer" in any form of advertising.
Heaven help you if you're having a conference of some kind in London in the summer of 2012, you might get heavily fined when you try to promote it, even if it has _nothing_ to do with the Olympics, occurs at a different time (well it'd kind of have to since the city will likely be packed because of the Olympics) or date.
If you make games for children better make sure you don't inadvertantly advertise any as summer games, you'll break this law. Again, you could be advertising a glorified lawn sprinkler for kids to play games under in the summer heat but since you "combined" summer and games in your ad the law applies and you're screwed.
I'm sure you'll say "but they'll be reasonable and won't pursue those types of cases" but we already know how well that type of stuff works. You can find many cases of the RIAA & MPAA sending out Cease & Desist letters because they found files containing words that also are used in songs/movies they own but had nothing to do with them. I seem to remember one where the C&D referred to a file that was around 500kb in size, but the MPAA thought it was one of their movies. Rationality won't enter into the enforcement of this law, it'll get the same treatment, anything that looks like it applies will get slapped with at least a lawyergram and likely charges levied. Even if they company ends up off the hook they'll have paid a penalty for defending themselves for doing nothing wrong.
No matter how you look at it this is a very bad law, and very bad precedent. Why should the IOC be given sole ownership of common words beyond Olympic/Olympics? Most of those words are used a lot, and in non-olympic references. Even if you think the words are defensible, including the damn year is insane. I suppose everyone in London will have to be sure to avoid mentioning the year in advertising in 2012 just to be on the safe side.
Coming soon to your bittorrent sites. I wonder how the Olympics will handle torrents of their events. DMCA?
Given the direction they seem to be taking they'll not have any problems because everyone will be so fed up with the restrictions that the stands will be near empty and everyone will find something else to watch on TV. I seem to remember stories from the Athens games where spectators weren't allowed to carry in even bottles of water if they weren't the brand of the official sponsor that provided the Olympics bottled water, now they're trying to get laws passed so they can restrict things even further.
I've always loved the Olympics, I remember looking forward to them even as a child, but this type of crap is quickly making me lose all interest in them. I used to tape what aired while I was at work (or school in the past) so I could watch all the coverage, last Olympics I didn't tape a thing. I didn't watch as much either and the whole Death Grip on Advertising (tm) wasn't quite as bad as this sounds.
So congrats to the IOC and their over-zealous "official" sponsors. It's not just anyone that can completely destroy something as special as the Olympics once were. Oh and just a tip for those official sponsors -- I don't tend to buy products from companies who encourage this type of behaivor, even if you are supporting the Olympics, so you might want to rethink your marketing strategies.
I'll agree that a.xxx domain isn't going to magically segregate adult content but the issue, as I see it, is why the US and other governments are fighting the creation of the.xxx domain. Just look at some of the logic used by groups opposing it:
The Family Research Council, for instance, warned that "pornographers will be given even more opportunities to flood our homes, libraries and society with pornography through the.xxx domain."
Last time I checked the Internet doesn't "flood [my] home" with ANY content. I get the content I seek out. I do occasionally get hit with a fake entry on Google that's a porn site instead of what it claimed to be when Google indexed it but a.xxx domain won't make that more common. In fact it'd make it _less_ common since you could see the URL in question was at a.xxx domain and therefore unlikely to have the info you were seeking (unless it was porn but then it'd be a valid search response anyway).
Another Gem:
"The Department of Commerce has received nearly 6,000 letters and e-mails from individuals expressing concern about the impact of pornography on families and children," Gallagher said in a letter that was made public on Monday.
...
"The volume of correspondence opposed to creation of a.xxx (domain) is unprecedented," according to the Commerce Department's Gallagher.
According to the US Census Bureau's Population Clock there are currently 296,908,022 people in the US. Out of those 6000 wrote the Commerce Department to complain about the.xxx domain. That's around.003% of the population. If that's unprecedented then American's apathy about political issues is far worse than any of us thought!
Brazil has a bit stronger argument:
At a recent United Nations summit on the Internet, Brazil's representative charged that ICANN was not responsive enough to the needs of developing countries: "For those that are still wondering what triple-X means, let's be specific, Mr. Chairman. They are talking about pornography. These are things that go very deep in our values in many of our countries. In my country, Brazil, we are very worried about this kind of decision-making process where they simply decide upon creating such new top-level generic domain names."
While I'm sure different countries view pornography from different value standpoints, I fail to see why creating a top level domain for adult sites is a major problem. It's not like having a.xxx domain will suddenly open the floodgates of hell and every man, woman and child will be deluged with vast amounts of pornography. All it means is there's a different top level domain that adult sites can use (and I believe are encouraged to use, but I haven't checked). The porn sites will exist whether the.xxx TLD is created or not!
And the final lunacy:
ICANN's vote this year represents an abrupt turnabout from the group's earlier stance. In November 2000, the ICANN staff objected to the.xxx domain and rejected ICM Registry's first application.
At the time, politicians lambasted ICANN's move. Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., demanded to know why ICANN didn't approve.xxx "as a means of protecting our kids from the awful, awful filth, which is sometimes widespread on the Internet." Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., told a federal commission that.xxx was necessary to force adult Webmasters to "abide by the same standard as the proprietor of an X-rated movie theater."
So 5 years ago the fact that ICANN didn't approve a.xxx TLD was a catastrophy but now that they HAVE approved it, it's also a catastrophy. Even for politics that's one hell of a flip-flop.
Take medications, for example. IANAL, but my take on it would be that (for example), if I come up with, say, a new class of painkillers that are different from those we have today, then that's patentable, because it wouldn't be obvious that substances of the new class do function as painkillers, or that if you wanted a painkiller, using that class of substances would be the natural way to go.
On the other hand, if I take an established kind of painkillers and modify it slightly (for example, by replacing a hydrogen atom with a CH3 group somewhere) to get a new substance, then that's not patentable, since I didn't do anything fundamentally new and non-obvious.
Except they do get away with just that, or something close to it. When Clariten was approved for over the counter sales the company who makes it came up with Clarinex. Clarinex is essentially the same thing, just a slight modification. You can take either just fine and they work the same. The brand name is different but it's not a unique drug, it's a small modification of an existing drug (Clariten).
That's not a unique case either, when Paxil went generic the company making it came up with a slightly modified version that has stayed prescription only. Again it's a small modification, and the drug has a different brand name, but it's not a completely unique drug. It's just a modification of an existing drug.
So it would appear that small changes can qualify for a patent, at least as far as drugs are concerned.
Familiar to what?
To what every spammer under the sun already tries to claim -- that you opted into their mailing list so they're not spamming you (even though the account receiving the spam has never been used anywhere or even listed anywhere). Richter himself made these claims, ended up settling for a rather hefty amount here, and is making them again. No bets on whether he keeps them this time or not.
I don't think that being a spammer should get you locked up
Why not? We give people jail time for hacking, for stealing (even petty shoplifting) and spammers use hacked machines, stealing their bandwidth and resources. Even if they didn't do it themselves they _KNOW_ that the access they're buying isn't legit (if you're legit why do you need to buy dial-up lines & servers from some far away foreign country to send your spam for example.)
I'm certainly not saying they should get as much jail time as a murderer but they _are_ criminals and they should be treated as such. They're not just petty criminals either, think about how much of your own personal time has been spent cleaning up after spammers (and those that support spamming) and you'll see the dollar amount adds up fast. There's plenty to indicate that organized crime is now involved in spamming and phishing (more the latter) as well. This isn't a petty crime anymore and small-time punishments aren't appropriate.
It's the CORPORATE desktop. Microsoft does NOT want to break that.
And they have users locked DEEP into Exchange, Outlook, and Outlook Web Access (OWA). They have also had corporate users develop custom ActiveX controls, yadda yadda.
OWA looks GREAT on IE on Windows. It looks EXACTLY like Outlook 2003, and behaves almost exactly like IE. Which is amazing for a browser! What really sucks, is that it's totally proprietary, which means it works in nothing else, but IT departments STANDARDIZE on it, which means their users are all using it. They are hopelessly dependent on it.
So untie the browser from the core OS and offer IE6 as a seperate app that corporate users can use for their IE-dependent stuff. Given what's available now with group policies and security settings in IE6 it shouldn't be hard to allow corporate IT departments to lock down the IE6 compatability app to only access approved internal sites. For regular net browsing IE7 (or Firefox or Opera) is used. It's not the most graceful solution perhaps but it'd work. That's allow MS to put out IE7 for XP Home and fix all the major security issues that would break corporate custom apps.
Note that this would also work with non-internal sites, just add them to the allowed sites for the IE6 compatability app.
And they cannot use Macs (because Safari, Firefox, Opera, and IE 5 for Mac all render it like crap)
I'm not sure how often you've tried Safari but it renders just fine. I have to use Macs at work and Safari renders pages quite well. Often they look no different than they would from a Windows box using IE. Safari is prone to random crashes more than IE/Firefox/Opera for some reason, but it renders just fine.
Firefox, Opera and IE for Mac definitely render horribly on Macs as you say, they're not viable browser replacements at all.
I usually take the network administrators for granted and I think that's a testament to the great work that they do. Like the best technology, the best system administrators run so smoothly that you don't even think about them.
Speaking from personal experience, we don't get noticed unless there's something wrong, and when that happens it's _always_ our fault. Even if it's not our fault (someone cut some cables and we can't reach the Internet thanks to that) it's still our fault. You ran that attachment in that E-mail you got from someone you didn't know and now your system's slower than a 286? Our fault of course.:P
It may vary from place to place but so far everywhere I've worked the IT department as a whole is one very thankless job. Where I'm at now it's really bad, if it takes us more than 5 minutes to troubleshoot and fix a computer problem the users will complain to our boss saying we're just sitting there doing nothing! (No shit, this happens daily, the boss just ignores them.) I do systems & network administration so I don't get quite as much crap, but all the techs don't seem to understand what I do so they complain that I'm not doing anything. That's starting to get a bit better now that the infrastructure's getting built up and they've started to realize who built it, but it's still a pain.
I've been lucky in that every company that I've worked at has had very professional and very knowledgeable system administrators. I know there are a lot of system administrators on this site. I'd like to take this opportunity to say Thank you.
I know all of us appreciate the thanks, but you might want to do it more than one day a year. Remember who has the root passwords.;)
I'll be sure to kick the ethernet cable out of the wall and "forget" my password just for them.
Bad day for that, they're likely to show up with a very large LART to solve the problem once and for all.;)
Didn't they say this ten years ago?
Depends on how you define "they". I've been reading some old collections of Isaac Asmiov's short sci-fi stories recently (we're talking books copyright 1957 here) and many of them deal with what he calls Multivac, or some variation thereof. In many of the stories Multivac takes care of the world, even individuals. It can predict what will occur in advance (there's a great one about a future where Multivac can even predict crimes before they happen, allowing government corrections offices to prevent the crime from occurring, stopping both the harm and the necessity to punish the criminal (since the crime was never consummated)), and so on. Frankly reading just the quote in the summary here my first thought was "someone's been reading Asimov lately..."
The idea that there are several places where you can drive a half-mile down the road and have to change your clock to support such an arbitrary convention is more than illogical and annoying. It's downright stupid.
I live very near the border between Eastern and Central time so I have some experience with this. Amusingly there's a bridge going up the mountain on the old highway where the time changes in the middle of it. It's not a very long bridge so it takes an hour to cross it one way and a negative hour the other.
I can't imagine what folks do who live near a time zone demarcation line do
Since the change occurs mostly in the mountains near here it's not a big deal. There are areas that are technically Central Time but they go to school or work in the city on the Eastern Time side of the mountain so they just go by Eastern Time. It's not a big hassle, more amusing than anything.
Just like how everybody laughs at our school systems due to the fact that zero of the American school systems teach any foreign languages until high school
On the off chance you're just misinformed and would like to learn, here's some concrete proof that you're very wrong. Here is a listing of all
Foreign Language Education programs in the state of Tennessee. I happen to know the professor whose site this comes from, this list is updated regularly as she receives information on changes/additions. From that you can see that we're so backwards here in Tennessee that we even have a few pre-Kindegarten foreign language programs in the state. Some areas have foreign language classes K-12.
I realize you don't want to end up jobless but think about these things in regards to the clauses you mentioned:
I cannot use a computer for two years after I leave.
If you sign this contract and ever have to leave the company for any reason you'll be jobless for two years. You're a programmer, if you can't use a computer for two years you're going to be flipping burgers. How confident are you that you'll stay with this company for life? If you aren't, then keep those two years not being able to work in your field in mind. Even if you survive them OK, you're going to have fun explaining that gap to a future employer.
The contract never expires.
Willing to sell your soul? That's basically what this is going to do. You'll be bound to this contract until you die. Actually since it never expires you might be bound to it _after_ you die as long as the company's still around.
Anything I do on my computer, at my own home, on my time, belongs to the company.
Putting aside the obvious personal projects you might want to work on, how do you feel about your company owning your banking records (if you use a computer program to balance your checkbook/etc.) your tax returns (if you do them on your computer), all your personal E-mails (by this clause they own them and can demand you produce them at any time. If you signed the contract the courts very well may side with them), pictures of your family, your vacation, etc. Do you want your company to own everything about you for eternity? That's what they're demanding here, not just programs and such, _everything_.
If I get another job on a computer, I have to notify them, and the company has a right to send my new employer a copy of the contract.
Add this to the last clause and you can forget ever working anywhere else ever again. Think about it from a company's point of view. They plan to hire you to do programming for them. They get a copy of this contract and see you agreed to it and the last two clauses. Now if you happen to work on a work project on your home computer, it belongs to the old company. They can't risk the chance that you'll do this, so they won't hire you. It's a lot simpler to just skip hiring you than fight some company with a legal claim to everything you ever do on your home computer.
Should I sign it?
Hell no. This is not a contract that an honest company draws up. These kinds of clauses are NOT the norm, even in contracts for executives of huge companies. They're demanding you sign over your entire life to them for eternity.
As others have suggested you should bring these clauses to the attention of your coworkers. If all of you refuse to agree to those terms they'll either change the contract to something normal, or they'll show their true colors. Frankly it smells highly fishy to me, I doubt this is just a simple contract renogtisation. Someone's after something else, and those clauses prove it.
Just set the NTFS permissions on that file/folder/branch so the file(s) can be written by the "Users" group.
Except that XP Home edition defaults to simple permissions and you have to know where to turn that off before you can change NTFS permissions like you mention above. Also it'll likely break all the default shares and printer shares on your home network when you do it.
It's the _right_ way to do things, but Microsoft has made it so difficult that even IT professionals are at a loss sometimes. What the hell were they thinking when they created the simple permissions, much less made it default? SP2 does not change this behaivor either, it's still the default.
As to where to change it, you have to run an explorer window, click on Tools, click on Options, click on the View tab, and at the very bottom of the advanced list you'll find a checkbox for "Use simple file sharing (Recommended)". I believe it's truly an on/off switch (not per-folder) so turning it off anywhere kills it for all shares. If not, well, then you get to turn it on for every folder you want real permissions in, or do an apply to all folders.
If XP's in a domain then it defaults to having normal permissions. Most home setups won't have a domain though so they get stuck with simple permissions by default.
If you reply in writing that you don't believe that the debt is legit, as in they say you owe them for a mag subscription, but you never signed up for such, they have to stop pending further investigation. Usually, it ends here.
Just make sure you send it certified mail with return receipt. If you can't prove they got the letter, they'll ignore it. Otherwise you're right, most collection agencies won't even try to verify it, they'll just drop the bill and move on to another one where they can bully/harrass/etc. someone into paying it, legit or not.
Know your rights, and don't be afraid to push back. Even if a collection agency is after you for legit debt, there are limits to what they are allowed to do.
Sadly many will happily break the law and abuse your rights. They count on you not knowing your rights. When they encounter someone who does they generally hang up on you. (Sad but true.) They'll still keep calling, but they won't talk to you because they know their "normal" tactics won't work.
This site is a good place to learn what they can and can't do.
I actually had a run-in with a real ass of a debt collector many years ago when I was living in university-owned apartments. At that time (maybe still, I don't know) phone numbers were tied to location in all dorms and apartments, so it was far from uncommon to get calls trying to reach someone who'd lived there before. Apparently some guy who had lived there in the past defaulted on a lot of debt. I was getting calls on my answering machine from a bank that they had their student loans with (I forget the name of it, but the name alone was enough to tell it was about a student loan) and one collection agency. I had already managed to be home once when the bank called and told them the situation and even gave them the numbers at the school they needed to try and find out if they knew where this guy had gone. They were quite nice and never called again. So I did the same when I happened to be home when the collection agency called.
Boy was that a mistake! The guy told me I was lying. Flat out, not polite, bluntly said "you're lying." He said he knew I was really the guy he was trying to reach and that he was going to continue calling every day and he'd have the police sent to get me. About that point I hung up on him. At this point in time I didn't realize how many laws he'd broken in that short conversation, but I did know something had to be done about it. I called up the campus police. Man were they pissed! I did have the phone number for the collection agency since they'd left it on the answering machine before and I gave it to them. The campus police turned it over to the state attorney general's office, who contacted the state AG where the collection agency was based (California). That took about a week but suddenly they stopped calling. I don't know what happened to them but I seriously doubt the California's AG office was nice to them.
You'll also get attempts to collect invalid debts sometimes. I had a bank call me up over a year after I'd paid my car off claiming I owed them $600+ because they'd made an accounting mistake. I was flabbergasted and had to call my lawyer to see what to do. He told me to tell them to go to hell, that I didn't owe them anything. (In fact I didn't even own the car anymore, I'd traded it in about 6 months after they sent me the title.) The guy with the bank was really nice about it, he couldn't believe the bank was doing this either. They sent it to a collection agency but I disputed it and that's the last I ever heard of it. It never did go on my credit report, I'm sure they knew they were in the wrong.
As with all products and services it's all about marketing. In this case they have an advantage that most consumers don't know their rights so they can bully them (illegal), harrass them (illegal), etc.
One thing that's important to know if you're in financial trouble is that rarely will you get sued. It's too costly to even bother with on most small bills, and even if they do, they may not get anywhere. If you can show you've made attempts to pay, or are flat out unable to pay (and this includes situations where you're only making enough money to pay the necessities) they'll end up with just a larger bill you owe that they still can't collect. Judges won't allow wages to be garnished if it'll make you or your family starve for instance, and they frown on companies that bring suits when they knew the debtee had tried to pay and/or was unable to pay. Collection agencies are well aware of this too, so while they're bluster about it, they won't actually do it. They'll just eventually sell the debt to another company or just give up on it.
Also it's illegal for them to threaten to sue. If they say they're going to sue you, they must, by federal law, actually follow through with it. This won't stop many debt collectors from threatening though, they know that they're unlikely to get caught since so many people don't know their rights.
I'm not quite sure but from RTFA, I think it says the the adware modifies the incoming files. They aren't spreading fake files with adware in them.
I agree it's not completely clear but I looked at the site of the security guy too, and in the photos it shows him downloading a torrent of a Family Guy episode, then running what was downloaded which prompts to install shit, then proceeds to go apeshit popping up advertising stuff, quite a bit of which would be innappropriate for a 12yo (much less younger). The download was a self-executing rar file, obviously wrapped with some installer shit first. He noted that if you cancel out of the install prompt (multiple times) eventuallly it'll give up and give you the WinRAR self-executable extrator display and let you extract the file _without_ installing the adware. That's why he was so critical of them, they're misrepresenting things to make it look like you _must_ install their adware before you can extract the file but it's not true.
Even if you're right the points still stand, the adware install doesn't prompt for age so they could easily get hit with COPPA violations. Even if they're modifying the file after it comes down they're still using downloads of illegally pirated stuff to profit from, something I really doubt the MPAA/RIAA will think highly of (unless they're supporting this little endeavor behind the scenes, but I doubt that, it could jeopardize their goals of making P2P illegal).
Why do I get the feeling that suddenly there are a few extra terabytes of free disk space across the country?
No no, that should have been "I feel a great disturbance in the force as if thousands of browser caches cried out in pain and were then silenced.":)
Whether he knew the copies would remain on his computer is irrelevant if he intentionally accessed them, knowing they were pornographic images of children.
OK, IANAL, and I realize you are, but based on the information in the article (which I suspect is way short of the full truth) the guy only did one large-scale porn viewing session, lasting 4 hours in total. They found a total of 450 porn photos, all in his browser cache, of these 156 were considered child porn. So right at 34% illegal, 66% legal stuff in there.
That alone bugs me, it sounds like he hit some free porn site that had illegal mixed in with legal stuff and was looking for the legal stuff. The article leaves out information on image size (which I suspect could be crucial) or the layout of the page(s) these photos came from (if the photos were still in the cache the html files more than likely were still around too). It _sounds_ based on the available info like he was browsing a thumbnailed site and clicking on what he liked, there's a good possibility here that the 156 child porn images were all thumbnails. That bothers me a lot. Even as careful as I am, I occasionally hit a porn site that's disguised itself so that it's info in Google pretends to be something else entirely. (I don't, believe it or not, look at porn online willingly, ever.) From what I've read here if I happen to get scammed into hitting some porn site with child porn on it I could still go to jail for 20+ years even if I immediately left the site. That's scary, very scary.
If there was no evidence that he intentionally accessed them, knowing what they were, then he should get off.
Again, IANAL, but the statute applies to possession with a limited exception for accidental posession that is limited to having three or fewer photos, immediately informing law enforcement about them and making a good faith effort to destroy them. Anything beyond 3 and intent isn't part of the equation. In a sane society yes, intent would be considered, but there seems to be a real push to make examples of anyone possible in this area because it is such an intractable problem to stop and law enforcement is desperate to appear to be doing "something" to stop it. That's what this sounds like, it doesn't sound like they've even made an effort to go after the site the photos came from, just to make an example of this guy so they can point to him and say "see, we're making progress stopping child porn!"
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Do you run Windows? do you or have you ever have a bot using your email address, do friends that you have given you email address to run Windows? Security holes in Windows + baggage may be part of your problem.
Well now, that's a rather unrealistic viewpoint you have there. I use both Windows and Linux at home, the few friends and family that knew that address are also a mixture. None of us have ever been infected with a bot/virus/etc. Security holes in any OS isn't part of the problem here, at least as far as my address being used. I'm sure there are plenty of compromised systems, both Windows _and_ Linux, out there that the spam's being shoved through that causes the bounces but that's not anything I can control.I don't run Windows and I live behind a firewall so it's never been an issue, I surprised all those zombies are still running Windows.
I'm behind a firewall/NAT router and also use software firewalls on all my systems (both Windows & Linux). All of them are kept patched, have antivirus software on them, etc. I've had not a single infection/infestation of virii/worms/adware/spyware/malware. Also not all zombie PCs are running Windows, there are machines running Linux/*BSD/*NIX as well. The majority seem to be Windows machines but they aren't the sole problem. Unsecured machines running any OS will become spam conduits. Spammers will try shoving E-mails through any scripts they can find on websites, hoping they might find a way to break them and get spam through. I just had some asshole try to send spam through the Shoutbox code on my blog. There's no way it COULD send E-mail but this didn't stop them from hitting it multiple times from 5-6 different IPs trying various methods.Your lucky if you only get spam, some of the junk mail posted through my door uses a composite material that doesn't compost or recycle well so it ends up taking up REAL WORLD space in land-fill !!FOREVER!! (well almost).
I don't get any junk mail that can't be recycled. I may shred it if it's a credit card offer with my name/address on it but I take all of it to a recycling center along with magazines I've finished reading, plastics, etc. I don't even have to deal with the recycling part since it's handled by the recycling center. I've also yet to receive a single piece of bounced junk mail that pretended to be from my address.Well, if you run Windows then your going to get all kinds of problems, spammers being just one of them.
Actually I don't have any problems at all with my Windows machines or my Linux machines. Windows, especially XP, is quite stable if properly setup and secured. Windows isn't the problem, the spammers are the problem.I don't think the NZ law WON'T DO ANYTHING TO STOP ZOMBIES since in most countries it is already illegal to take over someones PC without their conscent, I suppose it's the graffiti of the advertising world.
I find it quite odd that you assume that the problem has to be my fault because I run a certain OS and criticize me for it then admit that it's illegal to take over someone's PC without consent in most countries. You're not being consistant here, even if I my machine had been compromised and that was what was resulting in my getting so many fake bounces it's STILL the fault of scummy spammers using dictionary attacks, false returNow if ACME decides to stray from something that simple and include ads for their products then they might have a problem, but if they keep it simple and short they'll be fine. I can't see any judge or jury defining the example message above as spam, and if anyone is going to get in trouble it will be the person who was using the IP that requested the bogus signup.
Starting to get the picture? If you haven't yet then please allow me to forward you the 40+ false bounces I get a day where spammers have used an E-mail address I have. I have the strange misfortune of having a last name that's a common english word (but not as common for a name) and I had been in the habit of getting my E-mail addresses to be lastname@domain long before spam became a problem. Thanks to the spammers I've had to move away from my preferred E-mail usernames to avoid both dictionary attack spam and bounces. The account I mentioned is with Comcast and up until a year ago it only got a few spams a month. Nothing changed on my end, I have other accounts I use to sign up for things (actually I just use Spam Gourmet) and only a very few family and friends had that address. About a year ago the level of spam jumped up a bit but what really made the account useless was the sudden influx of bounced spam messages that pretended to be from MY account.
I no longer use that Comcast account but I do download and delete the mail in it periodically. It's up to over 40 false bounces and "my mailbox is protected by _____ and you need to do ____ to prove you're not a spammer" messages. The amount of spam is much lower, about 20 a week and the Baysian filter catches most of it.
An interesting side effect is that I can see that sending bounces for E-mails flagged as spam only makes the problem worse. Most of the bounces are from mail servers saying "sorry your message was flagged as spam and not delivered". Well hell, if you think it's spam then why send a bounce? If it was just the spam it would be manageable but it's all the bounces that have made the account unusable.
In any case spam is much, much different than other form of advertising. Other forms of advertising don't hijack resources and try to do whatever sneaky, scummy things possible to make you see them. Frankly the actions spammers take to send out their spam tell you all you need to know. Do you know of any legit company that uses hijacked zombie PCs, open proxies, etc. to send out their advertising? Spammers do. They know their messages are unwanted, perhaps even illegal but they don't give a shit. Hell they even advertise false and illegal products!
How anyone could think it's "just" another form of advertising is beyond me. Perhaps marketers act like spammers where you are?
Now if they were distributing full episodes and working on a model that allowed them to do that and make money as well that would be enlightened. Now all you really have is the anime equivalent of Apple's Quicktime trailers site except it's only one company's trailers and the consumers get to help pay for the distribution.
With promotional freebies, distributing via BitTorrent gets you free publicity and lowers your distribution costs to practically nothing. Furthermore, doing it through your own trackers is likely to give you realistic download statistics, which are very valuable in themselves. (And why go to, say, Pirate Bay if the publisher itself is seeding?) Free Publicity, free statistics and a huge amount of "free" (to ADV) bandwidth just to let people download trailers.Why go to Pirate Bay? Because they'll have full episodes if not entire seasons and ADV's site will only have trailers. Not much of a comparison there.
For commercial products you'd rather sell, there's also something to be said for BitTorrent distribution. If you know that a significant portion of your customers are going to trade the files on P2P anyway, and you realize there's *nothing* you can do to stop it, why not get some love by seeding the things yourself? This is a great idea but it's _not_ what ADV is doing at this time. They are only providing promo matierial (trailers/commercials) and not complete episodes or series. Maybe they will in the future but I have my doubts given ADV's history and how it has treated fans in the past. That leaves the question of how to turn that good will into a buck (or Yen), which I admit is not easy. But as it stands Hollywood isn't even interested in trying, so it's nice to see someone inching down a new path. ADV's not inching down that path at all, they're just getting anime fans to foot the bandwidth bills to distribute promo matierials. This is not enlightened, this is not embracing Bittorrent. This is simply distribuing promos in another way.Now if they said they were going to test the waters with providing episodes/series by Bittorrent, even if you have to pay to gain access to the tracker, _then_ it would be something to talk about. As it is it's all just marketing fluff.
Perhaps if the IOC wants advertising rights locked down so tightly they should start footing the bill to build all the new venues needed for each game.
As to holding rights to 'gold', 'silver', 'bronze'... can I copyright 'steel', 'oxygen', 'water' and 'copyright'? Probably not but I hear the US Patent office will let you patent them. ;)
Heaven help you if you're having a conference of some kind in London in the summer of 2012, you might get heavily fined when you try to promote it, even if it has _nothing_ to do with the Olympics, occurs at a different time (well it'd kind of have to since the city will likely be packed because of the Olympics) or date.
If you make games for children better make sure you don't inadvertantly advertise any as summer games, you'll break this law. Again, you could be advertising a glorified lawn sprinkler for kids to play games under in the summer heat but since you "combined" summer and games in your ad the law applies and you're screwed.
I'm sure you'll say "but they'll be reasonable and won't pursue those types of cases" but we already know how well that type of stuff works. You can find many cases of the RIAA & MPAA sending out Cease & Desist letters because they found files containing words that also are used in songs/movies they own but had nothing to do with them. I seem to remember one where the C&D referred to a file that was around 500kb in size, but the MPAA thought it was one of their movies. Rationality won't enter into the enforcement of this law, it'll get the same treatment, anything that looks like it applies will get slapped with at least a lawyergram and likely charges levied. Even if they company ends up off the hook they'll have paid a penalty for defending themselves for doing nothing wrong.
No matter how you look at it this is a very bad law, and very bad precedent. Why should the IOC be given sole ownership of common words beyond Olympic/Olympics? Most of those words are used a lot, and in non-olympic references. Even if you think the words are defensible, including the damn year is insane. I suppose everyone in London will have to be sure to avoid mentioning the year in advertising in 2012 just to be on the safe side.
I've always loved the Olympics, I remember looking forward to them even as a child, but this type of crap is quickly making me lose all interest in them. I used to tape what aired while I was at work (or school in the past) so I could watch all the coverage, last Olympics I didn't tape a thing. I didn't watch as much either and the whole Death Grip on Advertising (tm) wasn't quite as bad as this sounds.
So congrats to the IOC and their over-zealous "official" sponsors. It's not just anyone that can completely destroy something as special as the Olympics once were. Oh and just a tip for those official sponsors -- I don't tend to buy products from companies who encourage this type of behaivor, even if you are supporting the Olympics, so you might want to rethink your marketing strategies.
Last time I checked the Internet doesn't "flood [my] home" with ANY content. I get the content I seek out. I do occasionally get hit with a fake entry on Google that's a porn site instead of what it claimed to be when Google indexed it but a .xxx domain won't make that more common. In fact it'd make it _less_ common since you could see the URL in question was at a .xxx domain and therefore unlikely to have the info you were seeking (unless it was porn but then it'd be a valid search response anyway).
Another Gem:
"The Department of Commerce has received nearly 6,000 letters and e-mails from individuals expressing concern about the impact of pornography on families and children," Gallagher said in a letter that was made public on Monday....
"The volume of correspondence opposed to creation of a .xxx (domain) is unprecedented," according to the Commerce Department's Gallagher.
According to the US Census Bureau's Population Clock there are currently 296,908,022 people in the US. Out of those 6000 wrote the Commerce Department to complain about the .xxx domain. That's around .003% of the population. If that's unprecedented then American's apathy about political issues is far worse than any of us thought!
Brazil has a bit stronger argument:
At a recent United Nations summit on the Internet, Brazil's representative charged that ICANN was not responsive enough to the needs of developing countries: "For those that are still wondering what triple-X means, let's be specific, Mr. Chairman. They are talking about pornography. These are things that go very deep in our values in many of our countries. In my country, Brazil, we are very worried about this kind of decision-making process where they simply decide upon creating such new top-level generic domain names."While I'm sure different countries view pornography from different value standpoints, I fail to see why creating a top level domain for adult sites is a major problem. It's not like having a .xxx domain will suddenly open the floodgates of hell and every man, woman and child will be deluged with vast amounts of pornography. All it means is there's a different top level domain that adult sites can use (and I believe are encouraged to use, but I haven't checked). The porn sites will exist whether the .xxx TLD is created or not!
And the final lunacy:
ICANN's vote this year represents an abrupt turnabout from the group's earlier stance. In November 2000, the ICANN staff objected to theAt the time, politicians lambasted ICANN's move. Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., demanded to know why ICANN didn't approve .xxx "as a means of protecting our kids from the awful, awful filth, which is sometimes widespread on the Internet." Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., told a federal commission that .xxx was necessary to force adult Webmasters to "abide by the same standard as the proprietor of an X-rated movie theater."
So 5 years ago the fact that ICANN didn't approve a .xxx TLD was a catastrophy but now that they HAVE approved it, it's also a catastrophy. Even for politics that's one hell of a flip-flop.
Ack, didn't catch that before submitting, not Paxil, Prozac. I get all the names confused sometimes.
On the other hand, if I take an established kind of painkillers and modify it slightly (for example, by replacing a hydrogen atom with a CH3 group somewhere) to get a new substance, then that's not patentable, since I didn't do anything fundamentally new and non-obvious.
Except they do get away with just that, or something close to it. When Clariten was approved for over the counter sales the company who makes it came up with Clarinex. Clarinex is essentially the same thing, just a slight modification. You can take either just fine and they work the same. The brand name is different but it's not a unique drug, it's a small modification of an existing drug (Clariten).That's not a unique case either, when Paxil went generic the company making it came up with a slightly modified version that has stayed prescription only. Again it's a small modification, and the drug has a different brand name, but it's not a completely unique drug. It's just a modification of an existing drug.
So it would appear that small changes can qualify for a patent, at least as far as drugs are concerned.
Familiar to what? To what every spammer under the sun already tries to claim -- that you opted into their mailing list so they're not spamming you (even though the account receiving the spam has never been used anywhere or even listed anywhere). Richter himself made these claims, ended up settling for a rather hefty amount here, and is making them again. No bets on whether he keeps them this time or not.
I'm certainly not saying they should get as much jail time as a murderer but they _are_ criminals and they should be treated as such. They're not just petty criminals either, think about how much of your own personal time has been spent cleaning up after spammers (and those that support spamming) and you'll see the dollar amount adds up fast. There's plenty to indicate that organized crime is now involved in spamming and phishing (more the latter) as well. This isn't a petty crime anymore and small-time punishments aren't appropriate.
And they have users locked DEEP into Exchange, Outlook, and Outlook Web Access (OWA). They have also had corporate users develop custom ActiveX controls, yadda yadda.
OWA looks GREAT on IE on Windows. It looks EXACTLY like Outlook 2003, and behaves almost exactly like IE. Which is amazing for a browser! What really sucks, is that it's totally proprietary, which means it works in nothing else, but IT departments STANDARDIZE on it, which means their users are all using it. They are hopelessly dependent on it.
So untie the browser from the core OS and offer IE6 as a seperate app that corporate users can use for their IE-dependent stuff. Given what's available now with group policies and security settings in IE6 it shouldn't be hard to allow corporate IT departments to lock down the IE6 compatability app to only access approved internal sites. For regular net browsing IE7 (or Firefox or Opera) is used. It's not the most graceful solution perhaps but it'd work. That's allow MS to put out IE7 for XP Home and fix all the major security issues that would break corporate custom apps.Note that this would also work with non-internal sites, just add them to the allowed sites for the IE6 compatability app.
And they cannot use Macs (because Safari, Firefox, Opera, and IE 5 for Mac all render it like crap) I'm not sure how often you've tried Safari but it renders just fine. I have to use Macs at work and Safari renders pages quite well. Often they look no different than they would from a Windows box using IE. Safari is prone to random crashes more than IE/Firefox/Opera for some reason, but it renders just fine.Firefox, Opera and IE for Mac definitely render horribly on Macs as you say, they're not viable browser replacements at all.
It may vary from place to place but so far everywhere I've worked the IT department as a whole is one very thankless job. Where I'm at now it's really bad, if it takes us more than 5 minutes to troubleshoot and fix a computer problem the users will complain to our boss saying we're just sitting there doing nothing! (No shit, this happens daily, the boss just ignores them.) I do systems & network administration so I don't get quite as much crap, but all the techs don't seem to understand what I do so they complain that I'm not doing anything. That's starting to get a bit better now that the infrastructure's getting built up and they've started to realize who built it, but it's still a pain.
I've been lucky in that every company that I've worked at has had very professional and very knowledgeable system administrators. I know there are a lot of system administrators on this site. I'd like to take this opportunity to say Thank you. I know all of us appreciate the thanks, but you might want to do it more than one day a year. Remember who has the root passwords.Didn't they say this ten years ago? Depends on how you define "they". I've been reading some old collections of Isaac Asmiov's short sci-fi stories recently (we're talking books copyright 1957 here) and many of them deal with what he calls Multivac, or some variation thereof. In many of the stories Multivac takes care of the world, even individuals. It can predict what will occur in advance (there's a great one about a future where Multivac can even predict crimes before they happen, allowing government corrections offices to prevent the crime from occurring, stopping both the harm and the necessity to punish the criminal (since the crime was never consummated)), and so on. Frankly reading just the quote in the summary here my first thought was "someone's been reading Asimov lately..."
The idea that there are several places where you can drive a half-mile down the road and have to change your clock to support such an arbitrary convention is more than illogical and annoying. It's downright stupid. I live very near the border between Eastern and Central time so I have some experience with this. Amusingly there's a bridge going up the mountain on the old highway where the time changes in the middle of it. It's not a very long bridge so it takes an hour to cross it one way and a negative hour the other. I can't imagine what folks do who live near a time zone demarcation line do Since the change occurs mostly in the mountains near here it's not a big deal. There are areas that are technically Central Time but they go to school or work in the city on the Eastern Time side of the mountain so they just go by Eastern Time. It's not a big hassle, more amusing than anything.
Just like how everybody laughs at our school systems due to the fact that zero of the American school systems teach any foreign languages until high school On the off chance you're just misinformed and would like to learn, here's some concrete proof that you're very wrong. Here is a listing of all Foreign Language Education programs in the state of Tennessee. I happen to know the professor whose site this comes from, this list is updated regularly as she receives information on changes/additions. From that you can see that we're so backwards here in Tennessee that we even have a few pre-Kindegarten foreign language programs in the state. Some areas have foreign language classes K-12.
As others have suggested you should bring these clauses to the attention of your coworkers. If all of you refuse to agree to those terms they'll either change the contract to something normal, or they'll show their true colors. Frankly it smells highly fishy to me, I doubt this is just a simple contract renogtisation. Someone's after something else, and those clauses prove it.
It's the _right_ way to do things, but Microsoft has made it so difficult that even IT professionals are at a loss sometimes. What the hell were they thinking when they created the simple permissions, much less made it default? SP2 does not change this behaivor either, it's still the default.
As to where to change it, you have to run an explorer window, click on Tools, click on Options, click on the View tab, and at the very bottom of the advanced list you'll find a checkbox for "Use simple file sharing (Recommended)". I believe it's truly an on/off switch (not per-folder) so turning it off anywhere kills it for all shares. If not, well, then you get to turn it on for every folder you want real permissions in, or do an apply to all folders.
If XP's in a domain then it defaults to having normal permissions. Most home setups won't have a domain though so they get stuck with simple permissions by default.
Sadly many will happily break the law and abuse your rights. They count on you not knowing your rights. When they encounter someone who does they generally hang up on you. (Sad but true.) They'll still keep calling, but they won't talk to you because they know their "normal" tactics won't work.
This site is a good place to learn what they can and can't do.
I actually had a run-in with a real ass of a debt collector many years ago when I was living in university-owned apartments. At that time (maybe still, I don't know) phone numbers were tied to location in all dorms and apartments, so it was far from uncommon to get calls trying to reach someone who'd lived there before. Apparently some guy who had lived there in the past defaulted on a lot of debt. I was getting calls on my answering machine from a bank that they had their student loans with (I forget the name of it, but the name alone was enough to tell it was about a student loan) and one collection agency. I had already managed to be home once when the bank called and told them the situation and even gave them the numbers at the school they needed to try and find out if they knew where this guy had gone. They were quite nice and never called again. So I did the same when I happened to be home when the collection agency called.
Boy was that a mistake! The guy told me I was lying. Flat out, not polite, bluntly said "you're lying." He said he knew I was really the guy he was trying to reach and that he was going to continue calling every day and he'd have the police sent to get me. About that point I hung up on him. At this point in time I didn't realize how many laws he'd broken in that short conversation, but I did know something had to be done about it. I called up the campus police. Man were they pissed! I did have the phone number for the collection agency since they'd left it on the answering machine before and I gave it to them. The campus police turned it over to the state attorney general's office, who contacted the state AG where the collection agency was based (California). That took about a week but suddenly they stopped calling. I don't know what happened to them but I seriously doubt the California's AG office was nice to them.
You'll also get attempts to collect invalid debts sometimes. I had a bank call me up over a year after I'd paid my car off claiming I owed them $600+ because they'd made an accounting mistake. I was flabbergasted and had to call my lawyer to see what to do. He told me to tell them to go to hell, that I didn't owe them anything. (In fact I didn't even own the car anymore, I'd traded it in about 6 months after they sent me the title.) The guy with the bank was really nice about it, he couldn't believe the bank was doing this either. They sent it to a collection agency but I disputed it and that's the last I ever heard of it. It never did go on my credit report, I'm sure they knew they were in the wrong.
One thing that's important to know if you're in financial trouble is that rarely will you get sued. It's too costly to even bother with on most small bills, and even if they do, they may not get anywhere. If you can show you've made attempts to pay, or are flat out unable to pay (and this includes situations where you're only making enough money to pay the necessities) they'll end up with just a larger bill you owe that they still can't collect. Judges won't allow wages to be garnished if it'll make you or your family starve for instance, and they frown on companies that bring suits when they knew the debtee had tried to pay and/or was unable to pay. Collection agencies are well aware of this too, so while they're bluster about it, they won't actually do it. They'll just eventually sell the debt to another company or just give up on it.
Also it's illegal for them to threaten to sue. If they say they're going to sue you, they must, by federal law, actually follow through with it. This won't stop many debt collectors from threatening though, they know that they're unlikely to get caught since so many people don't know their rights.
Even if you're right the points still stand, the adware install doesn't prompt for age so they could easily get hit with COPPA violations. Even if they're modifying the file after it comes down they're still using downloads of illegally pirated stuff to profit from, something I really doubt the MPAA/RIAA will think highly of (unless they're supporting this little endeavor behind the scenes, but I doubt that, it could jeopardize their goals of making P2P illegal).
Why do I get the feeling that suddenly there are a few extra terabytes of free disk space across the country? No no, that should have been "I feel a great disturbance in the force as if thousands of browser caches cried out in pain and were then silenced." :)
That alone bugs me, it sounds like he hit some free porn site that had illegal mixed in with legal stuff and was looking for the legal stuff. The article leaves out information on image size (which I suspect could be crucial) or the layout of the page(s) these photos came from (if the photos were still in the cache the html files more than likely were still around too). It _sounds_ based on the available info like he was browsing a thumbnailed site and clicking on what he liked, there's a good possibility here that the 156 child porn images were all thumbnails. That bothers me a lot. Even as careful as I am, I occasionally hit a porn site that's disguised itself so that it's info in Google pretends to be something else entirely. (I don't, believe it or not, look at porn online willingly, ever.) From what I've read here if I happen to get scammed into hitting some porn site with child porn on it I could still go to jail for 20+ years even if I immediately left the site. That's scary, very scary.
If there was no evidence that he intentionally accessed them, knowing what they were, then he should get off. Again, IANAL, but the statute applies to possession with a limited exception for accidental posession that is limited to having three or fewer photos, immediately informing law enforcement about them and making a good faith effort to destroy them. Anything beyond 3 and intent isn't part of the equation. In a sane society yes, intent would be considered, but there seems to be a real push to make examples of anyone possible in this area because it is such an intractable problem to stop and law enforcement is desperate to appear to be doing "something" to stop it. That's what this sounds like, it doesn't sound like they've even made an effort to go after the site the photos came from, just to make an example of this guy so they can point to him and say "see, we're making progress stopping child porn!"