I'm curious--do you suppose if the President's motorcade was attacked by a cell-phone detonated bomb, that you would be among those saying "Well, GEEZ, we've known about this for years! Are they so stupid that they didn't consider it?!"
I want you to consider that they might have sources of information that you cannot find on/. or google, and that this might influence their decision to cover the visit with jammers. Just consider it. Thanks.
Nah. I hear they're going to do a spinoff focusing on the zany adventures of one of the private freighters in the fleet and its wisecracking crew. They're going to run dubious cargos and take on odd jobs, all while staying just one step ahead of the Colonials and the Cylons. The tentative title is "Lightning Bug."
Re:Obligatory Planet of the Apes
on
The Human Mutation
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
You didn't refute the OP's point--that humanity is about faith in things that cannot be proven.
It's a concept that refers to social networking sites, blogs, stuff like Slashdot and Fark. I don't know anybody who thinks it's a "technology" but I do wonder how you can get modded insightful for saying "web 2.0 is for mindless drones" while using an example of web 2.0.
Internet Superiority Complex once again rears its ugly head...
I disagree entirely. Dismissing someone and never providing any justification is a great way to get your company sued. At that point they can make up almost ANYTHING and score off of you in the courts. For this reason, most companies will not dismiss at-will employees without some reason--track record of mediocre performance, documented violations of rules & regs, etc.
That said, I think I know this guy's former employers, and they mostly a bunch of unmitigated douchebags...so really no suprise here.
Say you have a data center, essentially a giant MythBackend. Subscribers pay a license fee to stream TV shows, movies, etc. to a MythFrontend appliance in their living room. The license fee in turn goes to pay the networks to let you "re-broadcast" their shows.
Is this essentially what they're doing?
For really good shows, you'd still want to tune in the night of broadcast in order to see it, because say for example you're just obsessed with "Lost" or whatever. But if you miss it, you could always watch it the next night. Or if you just feel like watching a Star Trek marathon then you could do that too.
I really don't know why we don't have this. AT&T promised that I would be able to pull any movie or tv show to my living room back in the 1990s, and still my only options are whatever crap is on Cox's "On Demand" service or bittorent. It seems like the first person to navigate the legalities and set up a data center for this would stand to make really embarrassing amount of money off of it.
You could probably charge a lot for it, too. Right now I pay $30/month or so for Cable TV. I only watch a few shows, and I never watch them before editing out the commercials with Myth. I would gladly pay 2x or 3x this amount if it meant that I was actually getting commercial-free content, plus the whole backlog of shows I hadn't seen yet.
I'm just trying to elucidate the changes in the legal/educational climate in the past thirty years.
Gotcha. FWIW I didn't miss this point, I just wasn't clear on some things.
It's hard for me to decide what activities like this require in terms of "punishment." On the one hand, in a certain sense, the university should be a place where this kind of activity only gets a "wrist-slap" because it is not exactly "the real world." On the other hand, if this kind of thing is wrong, then it's wrong, period. Gripping hand...I dunno. You gotta leave room in life for Merry Pranksters.
Question for you: How do you spin this statement so it doesn't appear as if, using your special knowledge, you in turn shafted all the other users of the system?
And how exactly does this apply in this case? From your story, you did not go to the administration and point out the flaws--you exploited them for personal gain. In TFA the student did not attempt to improve the security of the system and is obviously lying about it. Not very trustworthy, either of you.
Of course, that's just surface impressions.
When I was in school we had metered bandwidth. It was awful...except for the handful of students who figured out how to beat the system and hog bandwidth. So, Jimmy English Major gets dicked because...drum roll...someone is smarter than him.
I know that's how the real world is, but I don't see how power can justify itself. Just a thought.
Not so easy. They're going to go after the DHCP logs.
When I went to school in the late 90s (I remember so well--a 10m ethernet cards strained my budget but it was worth it to play Quake) everyone had to register their MAC address. So if the school is doing this then they at least have a name to point a finger at.
But, DHCP logs fill up pretty fast. Have they been retained all this time? I'm guessing the answer is no.
I belive that one reason is that scientists are still trying to defeat, with evidence and reason, the religious fundamentalists who believe we are the only "intelligent" life in the Universe, and on the only planet that supports life. On this argument, which I personally doubt, conclusive evidence that life existed elsewhere in the universe and could make itself known would cause the collapse of fundamentalist religions, to the enormous benefit of the rest of us.
Oh, that old chestnut.
Y'know, science fiction authors from Kornbluth to Heinlein to Card have been saying for a long time that if we ever discovered aliens, then "religion would collapse." Only, this is not the case, primarily because fundamentalists don't read much sci-fi, and frankly don't care about aliens. In my experience, all religious sects that in any way broach this topic seem to adopt a wait-and-see attitude: aliens may exist, may have a role in the plan of $DEITY, etc. I just re-read Niven/Pournelle's excellent The Mote in God's Eye and they treat the subject quite a bit more thoughtfully than you have here.
I think that was would benefit most of us is if people on either side of this "battle" would stop trying to make every arena hostile to the other side simply out of spite...dig?
Wow, you are really riding this idea to its fiery (hah) end. At this point I think we're at such an impasse that I don't know where else this can go: if you believe your right to drive fast trumps someone else's right to live, simply because they are stupid, then I just don't know what else to say. I do agree with you that the clowns in my building who don't secure their wireless need to get their act together, but I don't see anywhere a principle that says that I'm therefore justified in connecting to anyone's open AP if I'm not sure it's meant to be open.
Anyway, regarding analogies--there is a good reason why I have been trying to minimize their use in this thread. Check out a biologist named John Bodnar sometime. In one of his papers I read how engineering types (physicists, IT types, etc.) tend to argue with analogies rather than actually discussing a premise and its followon logic (the structure of the argument--its homology if you will). I have often found that this is less than productive.
Ok. Now that IS a pretty good analogy, and a great argument in your favor.
However, you have already stated that you would rather commit alpha error than not use the public resource. So, knowing full well that the road you're using has clueless bikers on it, you would rather use it to the full extent that you believe you should--barelling down the road at 55 mph at night--and risk running people over (or, hell, actually run them over) than alter your behavior or choose an alternate route. I don't see how this is a defensible position.
So, yes, the word "resents" is quite appropriate. It doesn't mean you have it out for me or the rest of the bikers, it simply means that you don't care. In this case, you value your travel efficiency over their lives; or, you value your use of wifi over other people's security.
I don't think that in this case you are trying to be disngenuous (in the mode of people who commit hypocrisy for a "good cause"--destroying a village in order to save it, for instance). But I do think there is possibly some cognitive dissonance: would you drive down the road honking at cyclists to teach them to buy reflectors? Wouldn't you be contributing to the unsafe environment on the road, too?
If the "established way of using hotspots" is one in which people do not care if they intrude, then that way is not a very good one. Is it fair to say that you resent the fact that, despite your extensive knowledge, you are restricted by people less knowledgeable than yourself? That you believe that your knowledge of the protocols allows you to reject common courtesy in favor of an "established way" that gives you the freedom to use assets you are not paying for?
You continue to insist that my suggestion that intruding is wrong leads to poor security. This is absolutely not the case; there are plenty of moral positives, some of which are encoded in the law, such as "Don't steal--stealing is wrong." But nobody would think to say "By saying theft is wrong, you're shielding people who are careless with their posessions." If I leave my computer on the table at the coffee shop and go to the restroom, someone might think "Hmm, it's left unattended because it's meant to be taken." But that person also knows that it's not their laptop. It sounds as if you would rather steal than pass up such a great opportunity (although frankly my laptop is not all that great), and ask yourself no questions about how you came to posess the item.
I'm sorry if I offend but it rather sounds as if you feel entitled to something to which you are really not.
My position is that accessing an open access point is legitimate and morally sound, no matter what the intentions of its owner are...I am not trying to exploit anyone.
I am sorry, but this is pure weasel. You cannot reconcile those phrases. It is interesting that we have gone from "I can guess the intentions of the owner by the fact that the AP is open" to "I do not care what the owner wants."
Further, you have continually misrepresented my argument as "defending ignorance" when I am in fact attacking the unethical behavior of people who, like yourself, believe that their knowledge of 802.11 makes it ok for them to intrude--I do not buy your "If we could help everyone it would be great, but meanwhile, by mooching wifi I am helping security."
At this point we are merely going around in circles. I am finished with this thread.
Yep, as I said before I really don't think this should become a legal matter, especially because there are plenty of scenarios for accidental misuse (clueless users cross-connecting or connecting accidentally). But the fact that you recognize these possibilities indicates to me that you KNOW you can't assume the intent of the wrouter's owner.
You argued that the lack of a lock was clear evidence of the owner's intent for you to enter. Analogically, this means you believe that the lack of encryption means the owner of an AP means for you to access it.
I suppose I might think these are weak analogies when the people positing them don't even understand what they're saying.
Now, this, finally, is an interesting argument! Home users need to declare their intentions to avoid interfering with the public use of the frequency band and hotspots. I wonder why it took you so long to formulate it--did this just occur to you?
In fact, I am not proposing what you say I am proposing. I have stated numerous times in this thread that I do not believe the law should protect people who leave their wifi open, and I don't know how you can state "Like you, I try to help people secure their wrouters" followed by "You don't think people should have to secure their wrouters." Your statements are mutually contradictory; please select which one you think describes my position (hint: It's probably what I've explicitly stated).
In fact, what you are doing here is trying to weasel out of the original argument (that it is unethical for you to access a resource without being certain that the owner wishes it to be accessed). If you, like myself, KNOW that most people are clueless, then you KNOW that there is the possibility of making an alpha error; yet you believe it is ok for you to commit, because your desire to use the resource trumps their right to privacy. You believe that the knowledge they lack--which gives you power over them--justifies your exploitation of their resource. Once again, this is a highly unethical position you're espousing and now you're simply throwing up smokescreens.
I will restate, however, that your latest argument is worth looking into (however it does not anywhere address my assertions).
I think you're at least the second person to describe an incident like that--please provide details or link to a news article in which someone accidentally gave their computer an entry on a publicly-facing DNS server, thus allowing people to access their documents. Otherwise, stop bringing these cases up.
As for your points: 1. What exactly does "publicly accessible" mean to you? Does "people can access it" automatically equate to "people should be allowed to access it?"
2. I agree entirely! This is not a case for the courts. Misuse of an AP (for child porn, etc.) shouldn't require additional laws in my opinion.
I also agree that people should learn to secure their wrouters and I try to educate everyone I know who does not. But the fact that YOU KNOW that people simply don't know any better means that you are aware that it's not 100% certain of the owner's intent.
I'd fault them for not making it blatantly obvious. It would be nice if setting up WPA (or explicitly turning it off) was required to set up an AP. Until then, we still have people deliberately ignoring the possibility that they are accessing something against the owner's will (since the owner may not know how to express that will by locking down the wrouter).
Yep, the standard says that. Can we expect Joe Sixpack to have read the standard?
I agree that it would be nice if he did, but I think the fact that there are so many open APs is less an indicator of Joe Sixpack's generosity than of his failure to RTFM.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm curious--do you suppose if the President's motorcade was attacked by a cell-phone detonated bomb, that you would be among those saying "Well, GEEZ, we've known about this for years! Are they so stupid that they didn't consider it?!"
/. or google, and that this might influence their decision to cover the visit with jammers. Just consider it. Thanks.
I want you to consider that they might have sources of information that you cannot find on
Just like the US government granted independence to the Native Americans--from their land.
Nah. I hear they're going to do a spinoff focusing on the zany adventures of one of the private freighters in the fleet and its wisecracking crew. They're going to run dubious cargos and take on odd jobs, all while staying just one step ahead of the Colonials and the Cylons. The tentative title is "Lightning Bug."
You didn't refute the OP's point--that humanity is about faith in things that cannot be proven.
It's a concept that refers to social networking sites, blogs, stuff like Slashdot and Fark. I don't know anybody who thinks it's a "technology" but I do wonder how you can get modded insightful for saying "web 2.0 is for mindless drones" while using an example of web 2.0.
Internet Superiority Complex once again rears its ugly head...
I disagree entirely. Dismissing someone and never providing any justification is a great way to get your company sued. At that point they can make up almost ANYTHING and score off of you in the courts. For this reason, most companies will not dismiss at-will employees without some reason--track record of mediocre performance, documented violations of rules & regs, etc.
That said, I think I know this guy's former employers, and they mostly a bunch of unmitigated douchebags...so really no suprise here.
Say you have a data center, essentially a giant MythBackend. Subscribers pay a license fee to stream TV shows, movies, etc. to a MythFrontend appliance in their living room. The license fee in turn goes to pay the networks to let you "re-broadcast" their shows.
Is this essentially what they're doing?
For really good shows, you'd still want to tune in the night of broadcast in order to see it, because say for example you're just obsessed with "Lost" or whatever. But if you miss it, you could always watch it the next night. Or if you just feel like watching a Star Trek marathon then you could do that too.
I really don't know why we don't have this. AT&T promised that I would be able to pull any movie or tv show to my living room back in the 1990s, and still my only options are whatever crap is on Cox's "On Demand" service or bittorent. It seems like the first person to navigate the legalities and set up a data center for this would stand to make really embarrassing amount of money off of it.
You could probably charge a lot for it, too. Right now I pay $30/month or so for Cable TV. I only watch a few shows, and I never watch them before editing out the commercials with Myth. I would gladly pay 2x or 3x this amount if it meant that I was actually getting commercial-free content, plus the whole backlog of shows I hadn't seen yet.
I'm just trying to elucidate the changes in the legal/educational climate in the past thirty years.
Gotcha. FWIW I didn't miss this point, I just wasn't clear on some things.
It's hard for me to decide what activities like this require in terms of "punishment." On the one hand, in a certain sense, the university should be a place where this kind of activity only gets a "wrist-slap" because it is not exactly "the real world." On the other hand, if this kind of thing is wrong, then it's wrong, period. Gripping hand...I dunno. You gotta leave room in life for Merry Pranksters.
Anyway, good post, sir.
Question for you: How do you spin this statement so it doesn't appear as if, using your special knowledge, you in turn shafted all the other users of the system?
And how exactly does this apply in this case? From your story, you did not go to the administration and point out the flaws--you exploited them for personal gain. In TFA the student did not attempt to improve the security of the system and is obviously lying about it. Not very trustworthy, either of you.
Of course, that's just surface impressions.
When I was in school we had metered bandwidth. It was awful...except for the handful of students who figured out how to beat the system and hog bandwidth. So, Jimmy English Major gets dicked because...drum roll...someone is smarter than him.
I know that's how the real world is, but I don't see how power can justify itself. Just a thought.
This is a structural definition, whereas I expected a million functional definitions here on slashdot. Well put.
Not so easy. They're going to go after the DHCP logs.
When I went to school in the late 90s (I remember so well--a 10m ethernet cards strained my budget but it was worth it to play Quake) everyone had to register their MAC address. So if the school is doing this then they at least have a name to point a finger at.
But, DHCP logs fill up pretty fast. Have they been retained all this time? I'm guessing the answer is no.
I belive that one reason is that scientists are still trying to defeat, with evidence and reason, the religious fundamentalists who believe we are the only "intelligent" life in the Universe, and on the only planet that supports life. On this argument, which I personally doubt, conclusive evidence that life existed elsewhere in the universe and could make itself known would cause the collapse of fundamentalist religions, to the enormous benefit of the rest of us.
Oh, that old chestnut.
Y'know, science fiction authors from Kornbluth to Heinlein to Card have been saying for a long time that if we ever discovered aliens, then "religion would collapse." Only, this is not the case, primarily because fundamentalists don't read much sci-fi, and frankly don't care about aliens. In my experience, all religious sects that in any way broach this topic seem to adopt a wait-and-see attitude: aliens may exist, may have a role in the plan of $DEITY, etc. I just re-read Niven/Pournelle's excellent The Mote in God's Eye and they treat the subject quite a bit more thoughtfully than you have here.
I think that was would benefit most of us is if people on either side of this "battle" would stop trying to make every arena hostile to the other side simply out of spite...dig?
Come on. Didn't you ever take an experimental methods course?
At least half of mine involved thinking up weird but funny questions and inventing outlandish Goldbergian ways to test them.
Wow, you are really riding this idea to its fiery (hah) end. At this point I think we're at such an impasse that I don't know where else this can go: if you believe your right to drive fast trumps someone else's right to live, simply because they are stupid, then I just don't know what else to say. I do agree with you that the clowns in my building who don't secure their wireless need to get their act together, but I don't see anywhere a principle that says that I'm therefore justified in connecting to anyone's open AP if I'm not sure it's meant to be open.
Anyway, regarding analogies--there is a good reason why I have been trying to minimize their use in this thread.
Check out a biologist named John Bodnar sometime. In one of his papers I read how engineering types (physicists, IT types, etc.) tend to argue with analogies rather than actually discussing a premise and its followon logic (the structure of the argument--its homology if you will). I have often found that this is less than productive.
Ok. Now that IS a pretty good analogy, and a great argument in your favor.
However, you have already stated that you would rather commit alpha error than not use the public resource. So, knowing full well that the road you're using has clueless bikers on it, you would rather use it to the full extent that you believe you should--barelling down the road at 55 mph at night--and risk running people over (or, hell, actually run them over) than alter your behavior or choose an alternate route. I don't see how this is a defensible position.
So, yes, the word "resents" is quite appropriate. It doesn't mean you have it out for me or the rest of the bikers, it simply means that you don't care. In this case, you value your travel efficiency over their lives; or, you value your use of wifi over other people's security.
I don't think that in this case you are trying to be disngenuous (in the mode of people who commit hypocrisy for a "good cause"--destroying a village in order to save it, for instance). But I do think there is possibly some cognitive dissonance: would you drive down the road honking at cyclists to teach them to buy reflectors? Wouldn't you be contributing to the unsafe environment on the road, too?
Ok, I just cannot resist :)
If the "established way of using hotspots" is one in which people do not care if they intrude, then that way is not a very good one. Is it fair to say that you resent the fact that, despite your extensive knowledge, you are restricted by people less knowledgeable than yourself? That you believe that your knowledge of the protocols allows you to reject common courtesy in favor of an "established way" that gives you the freedom to use assets you are not paying for?
You continue to insist that my suggestion that intruding is wrong leads to poor security. This is absolutely not the case; there are plenty of moral positives, some of which are encoded in the law, such as "Don't steal--stealing is wrong." But nobody would think to say "By saying theft is wrong, you're shielding people who are careless with their posessions." If I leave my computer on the table at the coffee shop and go to the restroom, someone might think "Hmm, it's left unattended because it's meant to be taken." But that person also knows that it's not their laptop. It sounds as if you would rather steal than pass up such a great opportunity (although frankly my laptop is not all that great), and ask yourself no questions about how you came to posess the item.
I'm sorry if I offend but it rather sounds as if you feel entitled to something to which you are really not.
My position is that accessing an open access point is legitimate and morally sound, no matter what the intentions of its owner are...I am not trying to exploit anyone.
I am sorry, but this is pure weasel. You cannot reconcile those phrases. It is interesting that we have gone from "I can guess the intentions of the owner by the fact that the AP is open" to "I do not care what the owner wants."
Further, you have continually misrepresented my argument as "defending ignorance" when I am in fact attacking the unethical behavior of people who, like yourself, believe that their knowledge of 802.11 makes it ok for them to intrude--I do not buy your "If we could help everyone it would be great, but meanwhile, by mooching wifi I am helping security."
At this point we are merely going around in circles. I am finished with this thread.
Yep, as I said before I really don't think this should become a legal matter, especially because there are plenty of scenarios for accidental misuse (clueless users cross-connecting or connecting accidentally). But the fact that you recognize these possibilities indicates to me that you KNOW you can't assume the intent of the wrouter's owner.
You argued that the lack of a lock was clear evidence of the owner's intent for you to enter.
Analogically, this means you believe that the lack of encryption means the owner of an AP means for you to access it.
I suppose I might think these are weak analogies when the people positing them don't even understand what they're saying.
Now, this, finally, is an interesting argument! Home users need to declare their intentions to avoid interfering with the public use of the frequency band and hotspots. I wonder why it took you so long to formulate it--did this just occur to you?
In fact, I am not proposing what you say I am proposing. I have stated numerous times in this thread that I do not believe the law should protect people who leave their wifi open, and I don't know how you can state "Like you, I try to help people secure their wrouters" followed by "You don't think people should have to secure their wrouters." Your statements are mutually contradictory; please select which one you think describes my position (hint: It's probably what I've explicitly stated).
In fact, what you are doing here is trying to weasel out of the original argument (that it is unethical for you to access a resource without being certain that the owner wishes it to be accessed). If you, like myself, KNOW that most people are clueless, then you KNOW that there is the possibility of making an alpha error; yet you believe it is ok for you to commit, because your desire to use the resource trumps their right to privacy. You believe that the knowledge they lack--which gives you power over them--justifies your exploitation of their resource. Once again, this is a highly unethical position you're espousing and now you're simply throwing up smokescreens.
I will restate, however, that your latest argument is worth looking into (however it does not anywhere address my assertions).
I think you're at least the second person to describe an incident like that--please provide details or link to a news article in which someone accidentally gave their computer an entry on a publicly-facing DNS server, thus allowing people to access their documents. Otherwise, stop bringing these cases up.
As for your points:
1. What exactly does "publicly accessible" mean to you? Does "people can access it" automatically equate to "people should be allowed to access it?"
2. I agree entirely! This is not a case for the courts. Misuse of an AP (for child porn, etc.) shouldn't require additional laws in my opinion.
I also agree that people should learn to secure their wrouters and I try to educate everyone I know who does not. But the fact that YOU KNOW that people simply don't know any better means that you are aware that it's not 100% certain of the owner's intent.
Interesting. So the burden is entirely on the owner of the AP; there is no assumption of responsibility on the part of the owner of the laptop?
I also question this logic:
1. Encryption/turning off broadcast/etc. == "Go Away."
2. Lack thereof == "Come on in!"
There are no other options for you, are there?
I'd fault them for not making it blatantly obvious. It would be nice if setting up WPA (or explicitly turning it off) was required to set up an AP. Until then, we still have people deliberately ignoring the possibility that they are accessing something against the owner's will (since the owner may not know how to express that will by locking down the wrouter).
Yep, the standard says that. Can we expect Joe Sixpack to have read the standard?
I agree that it would be nice if he did, but I think the fact that there are so many open APs is less an indicator of Joe Sixpack's generosity than of his failure to RTFM.
Your laptop doesn't understand it but you sure do.