According to what I know of those cases, only the hard drives have been removed by ISP technicans at all ISPs at about the same time, those ISPs were asked to copy those drives and reinstall the copy, so that the customer still gets access back to their server. After that, only the source disks for those copies have been seized. So probably the police knew that any claims due to any damage by non-experienced technicans are definitely to avoid.
Sidenote: if you were running a TOR node on a dedicated server (a server you're paying at least 50 bucks per month plus traffic and so on), why would you do so? Public wellfare to those who wish to remain anonymous?
About 20% of world-wide public CCTV equipment is installed in the UK. Compared to the country's size in respect of the rest of the world, this is simply ridiculous. But due to the IRA bombings, UK police is expected to be good in "anti-terrorist" actions and "shoot on questionable move" is accepted within large parts of UK society. Well, life adopts to the situation when any public waste baskets are being removed (as possible bomb containers) and announcements in your average metro station ask you to check for and report any unattended luggage. People actually do feel sort of "more secure", no matter how silly those things actually are.
Back to airport security:-)
The screening staff in airports is usually trained and tested quite hard, there are also often rumors that in most places they're fired when they miss something potentially dangerous in a screening test, no matter how well it is hidden. Online games like MSNBC Airport Screener give you an impression on "2 minutes in the life of a security screener". In some places, incoming luggage is being screened as well for food and not only for weapons, so those screeners actually do have quite a hard job.
Until now, those guys had better ways to check back on any electronic devices, as anyone caring about their electronic or sensitve equipment took notebooks, mobile phones or cameras with them as hand luggage, leaving mainly clothing in their checked-in baggage. The weight- and dimensions-restricted hand luggage is quite easy to check with the owner in front of you ("please turn on that notebook - ok, it's a working computer and unlikely a bomb container"), so any screener-flagged hand luggage can actually be quite quickly checked.
If everything has to go with the checked-in baggage, you can't really run such checks. Checked-in baggage usually allows about 4-5 times the weight and there are way more possibilities to hide things, while any extra electronic devices in that large suitcase do distract the screener. Especially for now I wouldn't rely on those screeners, as they haven't been trained to be distracted any extra electronic devices in those large suitcases that often.
It's only a matter of time until people see that an assasin, who would like to blast a hole into the cabin, for sure doesn't mind checking in a much bigger, well-concealed time bomb in a suitcase while enjoying the flight. So, what's next? Should we start flying in complete nudity, while any luggage is shipped in a separate freight-only plane?
Those "poor corperations" are usually corporations like IBM (e.g. progress bar) or Sun (shopping cart in web shops).
The majority of those patents have been filed by non-EU-companies, and even most of their claims are just based on the line "we managed to patent this in the US, so acknowledge this patent for the EU as well". As the european patent office gets money for issuing patents and not for giving out legal advisories, they issued those patents.
If those patents were actually set in place, most EU companies who relied on the more than 30 years old laws forbidding to patent computer programs or math algorithms are deep in trouble: they would face a new legal situation and market, where the non-EU-companies who filed those EU-patents are definitely in advantage.
See swpat.ffii.org for more information on the situation of software patents in the EU.
The really good part is that this time proxy spammers are being caught by help of a fake proxy network.
Usually proxy spammers aren't being caught because the open proxies don't have any useful logs at all.
This time a fake proxy network created the illusion of an open proxy to the spammers, but really captured the incoming traffic with source ip adresses into logfiles, so the federal agents had some ip adresses to investigate into as well as spam samples to use for evidence.
Together with those logfiles and the spam samples, it's pretty easy to catch the bad guys, but without such information, it's almost impossible to get them.
Slashdot Mirror
According to what I know of those cases, only the hard drives have been removed by ISP technicans at all ISPs at about the same time, those ISPs were asked to copy those drives and reinstall the copy, so that the customer still gets access back to their server. After that, only the source disks for those copies have been seized. So probably the police knew that any claims due to any damage by non-experienced technicans are definitely to avoid.
Sidenote: if you were running a TOR node on a dedicated server (a server you're paying at least 50 bucks per month plus traffic and so on), why would you do so? Public wellfare to those who wish to remain anonymous?
istalix
Merely the idea of seeing Steve Ballmer digging through the contents of a garbage can "borrowed" from Infinite Loop 1's boardwalk is priceless
About 20% of world-wide public CCTV equipment is installed in the UK. Compared to the country's size in respect of the rest of the world,
:-)
this is simply ridiculous. But due to the IRA bombings, UK police is expected to be good in "anti-terrorist" actions and "shoot on questionable
move" is accepted within large parts of UK society. Well, life adopts to the situation when any public waste baskets are being removed
(as possible bomb containers) and announcements in your average metro station ask you to check for and report any unattended luggage.
People actually do feel sort of "more secure", no matter how silly those things actually are.
Back to airport security
The screening staff in airports is usually trained and tested quite hard, there are also often rumors that in most places they're fired when they miss something potentially
dangerous in a screening test, no matter how well it is hidden. Online games like MSNBC Airport Screener give you an impression on "2 minutes in the life of a security screener". In some places, incoming luggage is being screened as well for food and not only for weapons, so those screeners actually do have quite a hard job.
Until now, those guys had better ways to check back on any electronic devices, as anyone caring about their electronic or sensitve equipment
took notebooks, mobile phones or cameras with them as hand luggage, leaving mainly clothing in their checked-in baggage. The weight- and
dimensions-restricted hand luggage is quite easy to check with the owner in front of you ("please turn on that notebook - ok, it's a working
computer and unlikely a bomb container"), so any screener-flagged hand luggage can actually be quite quickly checked.
If everything has to go with the checked-in baggage, you can't really run such checks. Checked-in baggage usually allows about 4-5 times the weight
and there are way more possibilities to hide things, while any extra electronic devices in that large suitcase do distract the screener. Especially for now
I wouldn't rely on those screeners, as they haven't been trained to be distracted any extra electronic devices in those large suitcases that often.
It's only a matter of time until people see that an assasin, who would like to blast a hole into the cabin, for sure doesn't mind checking in a much bigger,
well-concealed time bomb in a suitcase while enjoying the flight. So, what's next?
Should we start flying in complete nudity, while any luggage is shipped in a separate freight-only plane?
Those "poor corperations" are usually corporations like IBM (e.g. progress bar) or Sun (shopping cart in web shops).
The majority of those patents have been filed by non-EU-companies, and even most of their claims are just based on the line "we managed to patent this in the US, so acknowledge this patent for the EU as well".
As the european patent office gets money for issuing patents and not for giving out legal advisories, they issued those patents.
If those patents were actually set in place, most EU companies who relied on the more than 30 years old laws forbidding to patent computer programs or math algorithms are deep in trouble: they would face a new legal situation and market, where the non-EU-companies who filed those EU-patents are definitely in advantage.
See swpat.ffii.org for more information on the situation of software patents in the EU.
The really good part is that this time proxy spammers are being caught by help of a fake proxy network.
Usually proxy spammers aren't being caught because the open proxies don't have any useful logs at all.
This time a fake proxy network created the illusion of an open proxy to the spammers, but really captured the incoming traffic with source ip adresses into logfiles, so the federal agents had some ip adresses to investigate into as well as spam samples to use for evidence.
Together with those logfiles and the spam samples, it's pretty easy to catch the bad guys, but without such information, it's almost impossible to get them.