However, being accessible by even a single machine you don't trust is not one of those places.
A place where it is helpful: Isolated networks such as in a test lab that you control. The fact that it is NOT encrypted can be a great asset in debugging if you are looking at packet-capture logs. Sure, there are other solutions but if telnet/telnetd are readily available and they get the job done without causing any bad side-effects in a particular use case why not use them?
Just like there are different "levels" of theft and manslaughter/murder, there should be different levels of "damaging national security."
The penalty should be based on the harm done, the intent, and if applicable, the degree of recklessness.
Also, existing charges should be used instead of this charge where applicable. For example,if I harm national security with the intent of exposing someone to grave danger and they die as a result, then a murder or similar charge is more appropriate than a charge of "damaging national security."
That said, I can see some rare, hypothetical situations where a crime that comes under the umbrella of "damaging national security" charge could rightfully deserve a life sentence. However, like the various "levels" of a murder charge, the "levels" of a "damaging national security" charge need to be defined as separate crimes with different "elements" that the prosecution would need to prove.
Regarding whistle-blowers - there needs to be some formal process to encourage responsible whistle-blowing, while not encouraging malicious, dubious "whistle-blowing" (e.g. you are mad at your boss, so you look for nit-picky violations knowing that by merely reporting anything your "whistle-blower" status will mean you will win big money in a lawsuit if you are fired in the next year or two).
How many emergency communications systems will go down because a device died right after applying a Microsoft-delivered patch?
How many emergency communications systems will go down because of some recently-patched-by-Microsoft vulnerability got through because the administrator took an extra day or two beyond what he already does to thoroughly validate that Microsoft patches wouldn't brick his system?
In short, how many people will die because of this? Here's hoping the answer is "less than 1".
As I pointed out a few weeks ago, most implants with electronics or metal can be "hacked" by targeting them with microwaves. Sure, so can the human body but you don't need as much power to disable a possibly-life-sustaining electronic device as you to do cook flesh. Even metal parts will heat up (and cook adjacent living tissue) with less power than the human body.
However, if my heart is dying and I have a choice between getting an implantable artificial heart even knowing that I could be killed by someone armed with a microwave gun or dying waiting for a human donor, I'll take the artificial heart.
Money collected as punishment for crimes should be destroyed either literally or as a bookkeeping entry, so nobody* benefits from its collection.
Ditto punitive damages from civil suits.
This would remove the financial incentive for governments to fine people and remove the financial incentive for plaintiffs to seek high punitive damages. The stated "justice/deterrence" purpose of fines and punitive damages would remain.
*I'm ignoring the theoretical, negligible gain in the value of everyone else's dollars as global supply of US dollars shrinks by the amount of the destroyed money and the not-necessarily-theoretical hit to the local or national economy if money that would otherwise be spent on goods and services by the person paying the fine and/or by the government collecting the fine is lost.
If the carriers are marketing "Internet access" then it's deceptive to be anything other than "net-neutral" and the FTC should use its existing powers to force them to at least change their marketing.
National police are concerned that banknotes encourage criminal activity and should therefore be removed from circulation. The head of the your nation's Money Laundering Clearing House says criminals prefer cash because it is harder for police to track. In contrast, a record of electronic money transfers remains in the banking system, which makes the police's job considerably easier. He also says ordinary law-abiding citizens rarely use the banknotes anyway.
As we say on Slashdot, "There, fixed that for you."
says Jose Olberholzer, a professor of bioengineering at the University of Illinois. 'The discovery of insulin was important and certainly saved millions of people, but it just allowed patients to survive but not really to have a normal life....'
Sure, having to test yourself several times a day and shoot yourself at least daily isn't technically normal but people whose diabetes is under control with insulin and who are otherwise healthy can lead productive lives just like the rest of us.
If you want to talk about a medical treatment that " just allowed patients to survive but not really to have a normal life" talk about the iron lung or something along those lines.
Seriously, find a handful of known-high-bandwidth places to download stuff from and download some large files from each of them and use your PC's network-monitoring tools to gauge your bandwidth.
As for as upstream, get some email account from various providers, compose a message, and attach a large-ish file.
Note - if your ISP gives you "burst speed" you will have to "burn through that" before you start getting "real" numbers.
Suppose, just suppose, that the tapes do show something like the ex-employee clearly violating work rules.
Now it becomes a question of free speech - are the work rules enforceable or not? If not, he's got a legitimate gripe with his employer.
On the other hand, if he didn't say anything in the conversation that violates work rules, he definitely has a legitimate gripe with his employer.
In either case, he probably has a case against Comcast and/or the specific Comcast employee for violating his privacy/tortuous interference, etc.
My guess is Comcast's lawyers will try to make the Comcast employee who called the customer's employer out to be a "rogue" and try to pass legal responsibility on to him.
If your typical non-flying-car-driver can't upgrade to a "flying car" license without a bunch of hassle and cost, this will be a niche market at best and likely an economic failure.
Shh, don't tell anyone but part of what makes this joke so funny (IMHO) is that 1) the truth about geek sex lives is far closer to the "average person" than it is to the "can't get a date - ever" stereotype 2) we (geeks) know it, and 3) we are comfortable enough in our own skin to tell this joke about ourselves.
I find it ironic that with a 9+ year old account, I'm still "newer" than either the very-long-time 5-digit-userid Slashdotter Hedrick who criticized my humor or the somewhat-senior-to-me (by userid) editor gurps_npc who made the original sex comment.
I wish I'd realized gurps_nps's lower userid before making my first reply - I might have included a few more "old-timer in-jokes."
Self-deprecating humor can be funny even if it's outdated or for that matter was never completely true in the first place.
Texas A&M University is one of Texas's two flagship universities, and it is highly-ranked in some academic areas not related to agriculture or mechanics. Yet "Aggie Jokes" are common and most Aggies (present tense - there's no such thing as an "ex-Aggie") understand and even partake in the humor value.
The time to stop telling jokes like this is when either 1) a significant percentage of Slashdot regulars no longer think they are funny or 2) the telling of such jokes is causing a non-negligible amount of real-world harm. I'm not seeing either of these happening this year. I would say "or this decade" but technology and life move too fast to predict "Slashdot culture" 5-6 years down the road.
To put things into perspective, if I wanted to kill someone by mucking with their pacemaker, would it be easier to "hack" the pacemaker or just point a tight-beam lethal-to-the-pacemaker microwave at their chest for a few seconds?
The same goes for other implants: If it's electronic or for that matter even just electrical I can probably disable it at a distance of several yards with a high-power narrow-beam microwave or other purpose-selected radio frequency burst that isn't powerful enough to kill or even hurt flesh but which can zap the wires. Even if it's non-powered, if it's metal I can heat up the metal enough to sear the adjoining flesh with a shorter burst than if there was no metal.
If I wasn't out to do serious harm but just wanted to annoy someone or make them waste time and money talking to their doctor, I could turn the power down low enough so it doesn't fry the device but just degrades it or heats it up just enough to cause momentary pain then repeat the burst every few days until he goes to the doctor.
Heck, I can even go one better and a lot cheaper: Go to a populated area and spray an areosol of something that very-slightly damages the coatings found on modern eyeglasses. Everyone around you who wears glasses will go home wondering why their anti-glare or anti-UV or other coating on their glasses isn't as good as it was the day before.
No, I'm not suggesting anyone try this (if you do and get caught, you'll almost certainly face criminal assault or destruction-of-property charges and rightfully so)! My point is that the risk of people using your own medical devices to cause you grief has been around long before they went digital, but it's very rare that you hear about someone maliciously tampering with someone's medical device.
If the FCC doesn't have the authority under current law, what agency should regulate situations like this (assuming for the sake of argument that Congress intended for such situations to be regulated)? The Federal Trade Commission perhaps?
What you were doing was arguably more ethical since you weren't making money off of people using the service, but if it happened today you would be denying other companies (namely, cell phone carriers who sell wifi hotspots and who charge by the byte) the right to conduct business.
While your points about desktops and the web are spot-on, not all Linux or for that matter Windows computers are used as desktops, not all desktops are used for browsing the web, and not all desktops that are used for web browsing are used for general-purpose web browsing.
A server, a desktop computer that isn't used for browsing the web, or a desktop computer that is only used to browse the web for certain web sites that work okay with ancient browsers can work fine with "ancient" video drivers, provided of course that the machine doesn't have a bad security profile (e.g. closed-source non-maintained video drivers, sigh). Ancient "vga" or other generic-video drivers should be fine under such scenarios, and some of these drivers are open-source and likely still maintained.
Here are some examples of special-purpose PCs you may actually touch in everyday life: * ATM machines * Library card catalog or on-site-only-access library database computers * Touch-screen kiosks in stores or hotels that by design only let you do certain tasks * Media players running a general-purpose OS like Linux, BSD, or MS-Windows under the hood * The list goes on
The list above doesn't even count your home media server, the servers at your workplace, your home router, etc. etc., any one of which may run Windows, Linux, or a similar general-purpose operating system behind the scenes.
Possession is sufficient, you don't need any intent, heck, you could be braindead for all the law cares about you.
So all any 17-year-old - or 12-year-old - can get any his bank in trouble by walking up an ATM machine and *fill-in-the-blank*??? NOT.
I seriously doubt the bank would be prosecuted unless they didn't call the police as soon as they were aware that they had under-aged porn on their security cameras.
Oh, and if your reply is "the cops would arrest the 17 year old" yes, they probably would, so substitute "kid still in single digits living in a state where kids that young can't be prosecuted even in juvenile court" (I'm pretty sure the feds don't charge kids in single digits).
People should have the right to record their own lives, subject to not infringing on the privacy and other rights of other people.
The right of adults to share the recordings of their lives even if those recordings were made when they were minors and even if they were made by others without the legal consent of the now-adult participant with other adults who wish to view such recordings should generally fall under free speech protection.
That said, there is an argument to be made that under certain circumstances such as a staged rape scene or a scene that involved animals, if the subject of a pornographic photo appears to be a pre-teen or younger minor, regardless of the actual age of the participant, it might be considered legally obscene even if the same photo would not be considered obscene if the participant appeared to be an adult, even if the participant was in fact a minor.
There is also a strong argument that the wide dissemination of such material is bad for society, and as such it may be in the state's interest to prohibit anyone other than the person depicted in the image from making any money off of it and to prohibit the dissemination of such images to minors.
Slashdot Mirror
However, being accessible by even a single machine you don't trust is not one of those places.
A place where it is helpful: Isolated networks such as in a test lab that you control. The fact that it is NOT encrypted can be a great asset in debugging if you are looking at packet-capture logs. Sure, there are other solutions but if telnet/telnetd are readily available and they get the job done without causing any bad side-effects in a particular use case why not use them?
Just like there are different "levels" of theft and manslaughter/murder, there should be different levels of "damaging national security."
The penalty should be based on the harm done, the intent, and if applicable, the degree of recklessness.
Also, existing charges should be used instead of this charge where applicable. For example,if I harm national security with the intent of exposing someone to grave danger and they die as a result, then a murder or similar charge is more appropriate than a charge of "damaging national security."
That said, I can see some rare, hypothetical situations where a crime that comes under the umbrella of "damaging national security" charge could rightfully deserve a life sentence. However, like the various "levels" of a murder charge, the "levels" of a "damaging national security" charge need to be defined as separate crimes with different "elements" that the prosecution would need to prove.
Regarding whistle-blowers - there needs to be some formal process to encourage responsible whistle-blowing, while not encouraging malicious, dubious "whistle-blowing" (e.g. you are mad at your boss, so you look for nit-picky violations knowing that by merely reporting anything your "whistle-blower" status will mean you will win big money in a lawsuit if you are fired in the next year or two).
How many emergency communications systems will go down because a device died right after applying a Microsoft-delivered patch?
How many emergency communications systems will go down because of some recently-patched-by-Microsoft vulnerability got through because the administrator took an extra day or two beyond what he already does to thoroughly validate that Microsoft patches wouldn't brick his system?
In short, how many people will die because of this? Here's hoping the answer is "less than 1".
As I pointed out a few weeks ago, most implants with electronics or metal can be "hacked" by targeting them with microwaves. Sure, so can the human body but you don't need as much power to disable a possibly-life-sustaining electronic device as you to do cook flesh. Even metal parts will heat up (and cook adjacent living tissue) with less power than the human body.
However, if my heart is dying and I have a choice between getting an implantable artificial heart even knowing that I could be killed by someone armed with a microwave gun or dying waiting for a human donor, I'll take the artificial heart.
Money collected as punishment for crimes should be destroyed either literally or as a bookkeeping entry, so nobody* benefits from its collection.
Ditto punitive damages from civil suits.
This would remove the financial incentive for governments to fine people and remove the financial incentive for plaintiffs to seek high punitive damages. The stated "justice/deterrence" purpose of fines and punitive damages would remain.
*I'm ignoring the theoretical, negligible gain in the value of everyone else's dollars as global supply of US dollars shrinks by the amount of the destroyed money and the not-necessarily-theoretical hit to the local or national economy if money that would otherwise be spent on goods and services by the person paying the fine and/or by the government collecting the fine is lost.
I didn't realize it was only 11000 months old. I thought it was more like 1010 times that age.
Japan has an emperor, therefore ....
If the carriers are marketing "Internet access" then it's deceptive to be anything other than "net-neutral" and the FTC should use its existing powers to force them to at least change their marketing.
National police are concerned that banknotes encourage criminal activity and should therefore be removed from circulation. The head of the your nation's Money Laundering Clearing House says criminals prefer cash because it is harder for police to track. In contrast, a record of electronic money transfers remains in the banking system, which makes the police's job considerably easier. He also says ordinary law-abiding citizens rarely use the banknotes anyway.
As we say on Slashdot, "There, fixed that for you."
says Jose Olberholzer, a professor of bioengineering at the University of Illinois. 'The discovery of insulin was important and certainly saved millions of people, but it just allowed patients to survive but not really to have a normal life. ...'
Sure, having to test yourself several times a day and shoot yourself at least daily isn't technically normal but people whose diabetes is under control with insulin and who are otherwise healthy can lead productive lives just like the rest of us.
If you want to talk about a medical treatment that " just allowed patients to survive but not really to have a normal life" talk about the iron lung or something along those lines.
Seriously, find a handful of known-high-bandwidth places to download stuff from and download some large files from each of them and use your PC's network-monitoring tools to gauge your bandwidth.
As for as upstream, get some email account from various providers, compose a message, and attach a large-ish file.
Note - if your ISP gives you "burst speed" you will have to "burn through that" before you start getting "real" numbers.
Suppose, just suppose, that the tapes do show something like the ex-employee clearly violating work rules.
Now it becomes a question of free speech - are the work rules enforceable or not? If not, he's got a legitimate gripe with his employer.
On the other hand, if he didn't say anything in the conversation that violates work rules, he definitely has a legitimate gripe with his employer.
In either case, he probably has a case against Comcast and/or the specific Comcast employee for violating his privacy/tortuous interference, etc.
My guess is Comcast's lawyers will try to make the Comcast employee who called the customer's employer out to be a "rogue" and try to pass legal responsibility on to him.
If your typical non-flying-car-driver can't upgrade to a "flying car" license without a bunch of hassle and cost, this will be a niche market at best and likely an economic failure.
I'll give up some safety for some freedom.
Oh wait, you mean the other way around? I think subjects of The Crown fought this war once already.
Kids in the back seat begging for attention.
I don't know how I made it through childhood without my parents having a wreck every day.
Shh, don't tell anyone but part of what makes this joke so funny (IMHO) is that 1) the truth about geek sex lives is far closer to the "average person" than it is to the "can't get a date - ever" stereotype 2) we (geeks) know it, and 3) we are comfortable enough in our own skin to tell this joke about ourselves.
I find it ironic that with a 9+ year old account, I'm still "newer" than either the very-long-time 5-digit-userid Slashdotter Hedrick who criticized my humor or the somewhat-senior-to-me (by userid) editor gurps_npc who made the original sex comment.
I wish I'd realized gurps_nps's lower userid before making my first reply - I might have included a few more "old-timer in-jokes."
Cue "get off my lawn" in 3...2...1...
Self-deprecating humor can be funny even if it's outdated or for that matter was never completely true in the first place.
Texas A&M University is one of Texas's two flagship universities, and it is highly-ranked in some academic areas not related to agriculture or mechanics. Yet "Aggie Jokes" are common and most Aggies (present tense - there's no such thing as an "ex-Aggie") understand and even partake in the humor value.
The time to stop telling jokes like this is when either 1) a significant percentage of Slashdot regulars no longer think they are funny or 2) the telling of such jokes is causing a non-negligible amount of real-world harm. I'm not seeing either of these happening this year. I would say "or this decade" but technology and life move too fast to predict "Slashdot culture" 5-6 years down the road.
Hiking, working out, Lhaving sex.[emphasis added]
This is Slashdot. You must be new here.
Denial Of Service, not DeNial of Service. My bad.
To put things into perspective, if I wanted to kill someone by mucking with their pacemaker, would it be easier to "hack" the pacemaker or just point a tight-beam lethal-to-the-pacemaker microwave at their chest for a few seconds?
The same goes for other implants: If it's electronic or for that matter even just electrical I can probably disable it at a distance of several yards with a high-power narrow-beam microwave or other purpose-selected radio frequency burst that isn't powerful enough to kill or even hurt flesh but which can zap the wires. Even if it's non-powered, if it's metal I can heat up the metal enough to sear the adjoining flesh with a shorter burst than if there was no metal.
If I wasn't out to do serious harm but just wanted to annoy someone or make them waste time and money talking to their doctor, I could turn the power down low enough so it doesn't fry the device but just degrades it or heats it up just enough to cause momentary pain then repeat the burst every few days until he goes to the doctor.
Heck, I can even go one better and a lot cheaper: Go to a populated area and spray an areosol of something that very-slightly damages the coatings found on modern eyeglasses. Everyone around you who wears glasses will go home wondering why their anti-glare or anti-UV or other coating on their glasses isn't as good as it was the day before.
No, I'm not suggesting anyone try this (if you do and get caught, you'll almost certainly face criminal assault or destruction-of-property charges and rightfully so)! My point is that the risk of people using your own medical devices to cause you grief has been around long before they went digital, but it's very rare that you hear about someone maliciously tampering with someone's medical device.
If the FCC doesn't have the authority under current law, what agency should regulate situations like this (assuming for the sake of argument that Congress intended for such situations to be regulated)? The Federal Trade Commission perhaps?
What you were doing was arguably more ethical since you weren't making money off of people using the service, but if it happened today you would be denying other companies (namely, cell phone carriers who sell wifi hotspots and who charge by the byte) the right to conduct business.
While your points about desktops and the web are spot-on, not all Linux or for that matter Windows computers are used as desktops, not all desktops are used for browsing the web, and not all desktops that are used for web browsing are used for general-purpose web browsing.
A server, a desktop computer that isn't used for browsing the web, or a desktop computer that is only used to browse the web for certain web sites that work okay with ancient browsers can work fine with "ancient" video drivers, provided of course that the machine doesn't have a bad security profile (e.g. closed-source non-maintained video drivers, sigh). Ancient "vga" or other generic-video drivers should be fine under such scenarios, and some of these drivers are open-source and likely still maintained.
Here are some examples of special-purpose PCs you may actually touch in everyday life:
* ATM machines
* Library card catalog or on-site-only-access library database computers
* Touch-screen kiosks in stores or hotels that by design only let you do certain tasks
* Media players running a general-purpose OS like Linux, BSD, or MS-Windows under the hood
* The list goes on
The list above doesn't even count your home media server, the servers at your workplace, your home router, etc. etc., any one of which may run Windows, Linux, or a similar general-purpose operating system behind the scenes.
Possession is sufficient, you don't need any intent, heck, you could be braindead for all the law cares about you.
So all any 17-year-old - or 12-year-old - can get any his bank in trouble by walking up an ATM machine and *fill-in-the-blank*??? NOT.
I seriously doubt the bank would be prosecuted unless they didn't call the police as soon as they were aware that they had under-aged porn on their security cameras.
Oh, and if your reply is "the cops would arrest the 17 year old" yes, they probably would, so substitute "kid still in single digits living in a state where kids that young can't be prosecuted even in juvenile court" (I'm pretty sure the feds don't charge kids in single digits).
People should have the right to record their own lives, subject to not infringing on the privacy and other rights of other people.
The right of adults to share the recordings of their lives even if those recordings were made when they were minors and even if they were made by others without the legal consent of the now-adult participant with other adults who wish to view such recordings should generally fall under free speech protection.
That said, there is an argument to be made that under certain circumstances such as a staged rape scene or a scene that involved animals, if the subject of a pornographic photo appears to be a pre-teen or younger minor, regardless of the actual age of the participant, it might be considered legally obscene even if the same photo would not be considered obscene if the participant appeared to be an adult, even if the participant was in fact a minor.
There is also a strong argument that the wide dissemination of such material is bad for society, and as such it may be in the state's interest to prohibit anyone other than the person depicted in the image from making any money off of it and to prohibit the dissemination of such images to minors.