How exactly are "crack, PCP, etc" automatically liabilities to others?
Do you pay taxes? Then there you have it. The users of those drugs, pretty much without exception, are headed into a tailspin of declining health and the inability to support themselves. That puts immediate pressure on those agencies, institutions, and programs that are automatically called into action by the wake that these drugs leave behind. Now, if our culture was indeed comfortable leaving crack-addled people to just rot in the street, or actually could turn them away from an emergency room (nope!), or didn't care if a literally crazy PCP user was beating the snot out of someone on the bus... then no big deal. But knowing the likely behaviorial issues that result from the use of those drugs, we gear up (and fund) all sorts of programs. That is a liability we all (at least, those who make enough to pay taxes) pay for. I'd guess that the truly isolated, no-impact-having cases of people using crack or PCP are so rare as to be statistically insignificant. Perhaps a nice, productive, crack-smoking slashdotter can chime in to the contrary, and counter my notion that their hobby ultimately drives up insurance rates, hospital costs, and so on... but I'm doubting it.
And before anyone tells me that alcohol is just as bad, I'm inclined to say that the glass of cabernet that I enjoy with some roast venison doesn't really have counterpart in the form of some nice, moderate PCP appertizer or non-addictive after-dinner crack pipe.
I, personally, do not want to receive any commercial, marketing-related, or sales-driven e-mails. Not a single blessed one. I do receive many, of course. I wonder how many of those I've "solicited"?
For example: you just paid your dues as member of a non-profit wildlife conservation organization. That was yesterday. While doing so online, you checked a box that says: "Yes, please remind me when the annual conference is coming up, and send me an invitation, and don't send me any more e-mails about anything else, ever." OK, we're 8 weeks away from the event, and we send you an e-mail. No more, no less. That is a solicited e-mail, it's hoping you'll pay to attend an event hosted by an organization you've said you support, and to which you've explicitly stated that you want to receive the message in question when the time comes. I can think, personally, of several scenarios like that which apply to me. Can't comment on your experiences.
doubt it would be all that difficult to identify bulk mail messages from single-use ones, even a small mailing list to friends and family
But I've built systems for my customers that send out 10-20,000 messages at a time, and each one is substantially different (different subject, altered body, different reply-to). Totally legit, completely solicited by the recipients, but definately marketing-related and sales driven (invitations to an event sent to all the members of a trade association, for example, or follow-up messages sent to everyone that bought a service during a promotion - that sort of thing). Who would be identifying them? I send directly from a farm of servers to the recipients' MX entries. Would all mail have to get sniffed by some central authority? Would I have to apply in advance for a permit? Yes, it would be hard to figure this out, as you say. I say impossible without huge taxpayer supported bureaucracy and privacy loss.
I agree with you that the money tied to unwanted spam approach is absurd. The real solution is to go after the people that are abusing affiliate relationships, and shutting down the shady businesses selling the nonsense products. Really, actually going after them is going to put a stop to the worst of this. Good filtering takes care of the rest.
But should I have to pay to send you an e-mail you just asked for (i.e., "I forgot my password")? Or should my brother's e-mail of a link to pictures of my niece's birthday party cost him money to send? And, who's collecting? The point is that you'll be unable to make the distinction between commercial and private messages. It's not the same as buying an ad in the yellow pages.
No, you're getting more of something at someone else's expense. If there was no money involved, a whole lot of expensively produced recordings would be produced in the first place. And gee, I don't think that the people getting massively pirated here are the little indy recording artists who are desparate for attention to their work. Opportunity cost is not free.
Mark Cuban is the best? At what? Giving you a completely irrational basis on which to not feel so bad for ripping people off? As many, many comments above have indicated, he's not even talking about what's actually happening, or about who the typical suits and settlements address. If your idea of how a Dairy Queen should be run includes caving to everyone who shows up at the door demanding free wares because everyone else is doing it... then you couldn't manage a Dairy Queen either.
So, if the kid gets sued when he's 18, then lives to be 80, that's 62 years * 12 mo/yr * $5 = $3720.
This seems comparable to their current settlement amount.
But the settlements cover what the pirate has already done, and is intended to stop it. No doubt a term of the typical settlement is that the infringement will stop. So, if the guy just starts right back up again and they do this little dance until he's 80 years old, that's a lot more money. Though, you'd think he might figure out, perhaps when he's about 60, that he's being an idiot. Or maybe by then one of his grandkids will be a recording artist and he'll get a clue.
This makes perfect sense. Why should they be able to sue for more than the "damages" would even have been?
Because as nice as it would be to get all of those people who are too cheap to pay for their entertainment to actually, well, pay for their entertainment, that's not what the suits are about. They don't sue the guy who downloaded a song, they sue the guy who could have a virtually unlimited number of people grabbing the song from him, because he's illegally providing it to them ("sharing" it). The most noticeable suits are against the people who are taking thousands of songs and essentially making copies for untold thousands of people. That's a lot more than $5 worth of activity.
They're only overfilled if there isn't actually room for them, which is a separate issue from why they're there.
People who commit a crime, face a judge/jury as a first-time offender of a not-too-horrible offense, almost always get off very lightly. They may do parole, or provide some sort of community service, make reparation to whomever they harmed, etc. Many, even most of those people learn from this - either they learn not to do it again, or (if they're smart but still mal-intented), they learn not to get caught again. But the people that demonstrate, through a repetition of their crimes, that they can't seem to muster the judgement or discipline to stop hurting people, stealing, etc... those are your repeat offenders, and that's who starts spending time in prison.
We've got a cultural problem (lack of personal accountability) that must be addressed in order to stop the endless cycle of parents producing kids like that, who in turn become more parents like that. Education is the key. But if you haven't got a kid's sense of basic right and wrong drilled into them by elementary school, it's pretty much too late. You might refine that person, scare them out of being a career criminal... but critical thinking skills, an ingrained sense of ethics, a moral compass if you will - that's early, developmental stuff. I'm not saying it's hopeless, but people who are already in their late teens and twenties (and older) who repeatedly demonstrate their contempt for you and me (and our property, our money, our businesses, etc) by stealing, mugging, threatening, or even by spending all day on a computer looking for ways to hijack someone's credit rating... it may not be too late for those people to eventually turn themselves around, but by repeatedly being busted for crap like that, they're showing us that they can't be trusted not to keep doing more of the same.
Consequnces can be dealt with quietly.
Not saying they can't be. I'm saying that other would-be offenders still have to know that there are consequences. For most young people, telling them that abstractly (in the form of anonymous case studies, for example) simply never connects.
But, "Hey, did you hear about Billy? You know how he hacked into the school computers and took the faculty payroll info? Well now he's got to pay a $5000 fine, and since he doesn't have it, his parents are going to have to pay it, and he'll be working it off all the way through next summer. Probation, too, and he's not allowed to go to any school events or get his driver's license until he's 19!" can really connect with people who think Billy's "cool" or somehow glamorous.
Lets say your kid does something stupid that costs millions in damages, however, at home, everything had always seemed to be normal
That's what judges are juries are for. But kids are called minors for a reason. They don't have a mature point of view, and don't think through what they're doing. That's why a strong deterrent is a big thing, but parents with a vested interest in hot having a hoodlum of a kid is an even better thing. Obviously a parent that can show how they were involved with Junior's daily life, and show that no reasonable person could have known that Junior was spending hours every day visiting web sites run by L334 Swedish H@XX0R5 looking for info on how to be a more effective script kiddie... well, a judge would have to agree that the parent has no culpability. Hence the word Judgement. But there are absolutely times when a kid's actions and general behavior is out of control, and the parents are simply uninterested in doing anything about it, leaving it up to academic instructors to be the parents. It's unacceptable. If the parents' attitude is that "we don't care what Junior does," then they also have to stipulate that they're essentially endorsing everything he does.
I wonder if the people in North Korea and Lybia say the same thing about the US and the CIA?
What... that we patrol African villages, chopping the hands off of young boys that don't work themselves to death in diamond mines so that the diamonds can be sold to pay for Chinese-made AK-47s that are then used to slaughter entire villages for being from the wrong tribe, or not being Muslim enough, or for wanting to be able to vote in peace?
No, all you have to do is actually listen to the transcripts of what North Korea does say, even as they put thousands upon thousands of their people in slave labor camps and starve the rest so they can support a Stalinist regime run by an actually crazy person. Follow the trail of drug shipments out of NK on freighters going all over the world, SCUDs going to places like Iran, and diamonds going in and out to avoid banking scrutiny, and you'll see that's a lot different than how most of the west does business.
So, of course, the logical course of action is punishment?
The logical course of action is consequences, and they sure don't deserve a reward. If they were looking for a reward, they'd be able to point out the paper trail they left while alerting the school system's IT people about the vulnerability. Or they'd be able to mention the time and date that they told their schools' principal about something just as bad as seeing the A/V storage room left unlocked by careless faculty. There are no such things to reference, because their intentions were not to defend the integrity of sensitive data, but to get a laugh and bragging rights out of taking it, with no intention of getting caught (classic high school hubris).
If every time a kid broke into a house, a car, a purse, or a computer network, we handled it quietly, we'd lose the deterrent effect of the punishment. Plenty of rationality-challenged kids will still resist some activities because "that other kid in my school" got time/fine/whatever for doing the same, and it was known that's what happened. The last thing I personally want to see is the glorification of this sort of thing... but I sure as hell want the bored kid in the high school computer lab to think of lifting lists of social security numbers or other sensitive (and potentially very damaging materials) to be just as wrong (and full of consequence) as taking a not-bolted-down laptop out of that computer lab "just to show that he can" or "to demonstrate that people can steal things."
Murderers get fame, too. There will always be people that, through a twisting of their sense of the world, will admire people who break into things, steal things, or take chances on a dare. Just like there are kids who think that the two twits who shot up Columbine are some sort of darkly attractive saints.
Breaking into a school computer system, no matter how well or weakly defended, is a deliberate act. There is absolutely no ambiguity about it, and I doubt that the kids are going to use the defense that they are so dumb - to the point of being mentally defective - that they don't have the capacity for understanding right/wrong. Attempting to use the "it was for your own good" argument only after being caught, illustrates their ongoing hope that they can game the system. That attitude is exactly what requires the punishment.
Personally, I think their punishment should be the random placement of their families' personal and financial data into places where honor and integrity play a role in protecting it, and then letting the families know that the information may (or may not) have been compromised. This way their parents can explain to the them that the erosion of their credit and the exhaustion of their time as they fight back from identity theft is one of the reasons they can't afford to send them anywhere prestigious for those computer science degrees. That way they'd get a sense of the anxiety that the faculty of the school (all people making not nearly enough money) are feeling (and now, must continue to feel), now that two idiots claim to have deleted their personal information after having been caught stealing it.
That's the mentality that will put more people into a prison system that cannot sustain them.
Most people actually doing time in actual prisons are repeat offenders. The longer they spend in, the lower the rate of recidivism, and the lower the crime rates tend to be. I don't think these two clowns would benefit from prison time - but they should feel the consequences of this sort of crap. Like, doing a few years' unpaid work for people who have lost money (or even careers) because of the side effects of identity theft.
Do you want to bet how long it will take for a certain criminal, monopolistic, little-african-children abusing cartel to have the research grants revoked, and if that fails, to have an accident happen to the scientists in question?
Bah. Not DeBeers, but all of the middlemen, especially the ones down the food chain.
But never mind that. The folks who will be really upset are the ones that hijack the diamonds at the source (say, in Africa) and use them as essentially untraceable, undetectable, very compact currency that is used in all sorts of unsavory transactions. Hardcore Islamist terrorist-types, as well as people doing business with North Korea, Lybia, and the more corrupt elements in places like Liberia, have been known to get into this game in Africa, and to use the transportability (just swallow, and get on a plane!) to fuel the black market of weapons, drugs, and other naughty bits. Never mind the formal cartel - it's the bandits/land-pirates that are working on behalf of actual want-to-kill bad guys that are enjoying the high street price of diamonds for more insidious reasons.
I was given to understand that the particular configuration seen in the shot was more commonly associated with a nuke... but, assume I'm an ass, which is very likely. Same thing applies, though: I'm thinking that our increasing thoughtfulness about infrastructure protection would make any shenanigans near any power plant not so smart.
I live in Montgomery County, which, indeed, feels like a Mafia-owned town when it comes to wine sales. It's incredible that my trips to Virginia (where my data center is) double as opportunities to get real wine at real prices, but make me a felon as I drive back to my house. From what I can tell, this will make all of that moot (as long as I'm willing to pay freight to my door - I don't know that this will help with TJs!). About. Freaking. Time.
I don't get why it even matters. I mean, why should wine be any different than computer equipment, condoms, flowers or pepperidge farms gift baskets? Why should any of them be restricted (or for that matter, why shouldn't ALL of them be restricted).
It doesn't matter, and that's the point that the Supreme Court just hammered home. The real essence of this is that a state can do a lot of things to regulate what (and how) things can be sold in their state, but they can't do so in a way that discriminates against people in other states (people, in this case, being winemakers selling across the border). So, you can let everyone sell wine, or no one. But the patchwork of crazy regulations was definately restricting commerce in an asymmetrical (and unconstitutional) way.
Its obviously more important than things like..say..not letting completely unrelated 'riders' along on bills for something like..you know..helping our troops to survive in a battlefield environment.
Ah, the old "government can only do one thing at a time" and "the citizenry can only think about one thing at a time" argument. Regardless, this was in front of the Supreme Court because it was brought there by people who wanted to see it resolved. If you think you can make a lucid case for congress not welding multiple topics into single bills/acts... have fun! That will never happen without an amendment, and that won't happen because it would completely paralyze the legislative process. Many bills, by definition and out of practical necessity, address several, dozens, or hundreds of "issues" at once. Constitutional language that would split the hairs on what is or is not a separate (enough) issue would be nearly impossible.
How about just voting for people that will carry on in a way more to your liking? And how about pursuading more people to do the same? That beats the hell out of during the legislative process into an unworkable stream of micro-incremental bits and pieces.
Actually, if you live in Maryland (or many of the other impacted states), this is a long overdue, worthy development. I'm just waiting for the state to cut its own nose off, and ban the shipment of wine including that of the (marginal) local wineries.
Never the less, I expect that those of us that build e-commerce web sites will have a few hundred brand new - if slightly tipsy - customers. With the patchwork shipping problem gone, many of the smaller operations will now consider it worth getting into the game. Thank you, Supreme Court, for doing the right thing on this. Cheers!
You mean those cooling towers in the background...:)
OK, reactor complex. Where there are cooling towers, there's a reactor. Still, sending odd-looking flying contraptions, sprouting antenna, into the air anywhere near one... it's seems like you're asking for a little scrutiny, don't you think?
Other that the whole issue of where it comes down (say, in the front yard of that reactor in the background, completely freaking out the security people), doesn't this sort of thing pose a hazard to commercial aviation? Like, say, jet engine ingestion, that sort of thing? I know the odds of an intersection are slim, but I seem to recall that the high altitude model rocket folks have to get some clearances and permission, and all that sort of thing. Just curious what the drill is. No doubt some balloon enthusiasts will chime in - but 52k feet means you're passing through (twice!) many, many common through-flight altitudes.
Full credit on the geek factor, but if this had gone wrong somehow or been perceived as an inbound Scary Payload coming down in the wrong place, it would make the idiots that get busted pointing mid-power lasers at aircraft cockpits look like they're not the only guys not thinking the whole thing through...
No, my analogy is spot on. Pretending that cracking into a system is just a benign way to demonstrate the vulnerability of that system - out of the sweetness of the students' innocent little hearts - is BS. Nothing would have come of this if they hadn't been caught. The man hours than have to be spent evaluating whether any data was corrupted or exposed to the wrong people (and the enduring risk that it was, even it can't be detected) is every bit as damaging as the man hours that will have to be spent repairing the broken window. In both cases, the students set off a damaging/costly chain of events. The difference is that once they replace the window, there isn't really any dangling question of whether or not even more future damage will occur from the original event. With stolen SSNs, the damage could be very costly, career/finances-ruining, and so on.
We're not talking about infringing on someone's copyrights here... we're talking about unlawful access to and use of a system, which is treated just like trespass and theft for a reason. Having a legal copy of media, and doing something illegal with it (such as giving it to 1000 people) is infringing. And even though that's every bit as bad a stealing something physically if the assigner of the copyright doesn't want you to do it, it's handled differently than theft. But when the person has their hands on something (like faculty social security numbers and private information) that they had no permission to access, they're in completely different territory.
Those are separate points though: my analogy was intended to illustrate the absurdity of claiming a get-out-of-jail-free-card just because (after getting caught) the crackers said they were exposing a vulnerability. You could make the same argument about picking the lock on a teachers car door, or (by any means) gaining access to something or someplace you're not supposed to be. And that makes the argument BS. It's even more BS when you take something (which, Gee!, they claim to have later deleted) to somehow prove your point. Except, they weren't planning on making a point - because they weren't planning on getting caught.
Breaking through the security on the school's IT system, or breaking through a lock on the office's doors, are the same thing. Getting caught should result in the same thing. When a student notices an unlocked door to an A/V storage room... are they doing the right thing when they tell a school official, or are they doing the right thing when they grab a laptop and a video projector and stay quiet, claiming later, when someone discovers the loss (and their fingerprints) that they were being good citizens and helping the school see a vulnerability? If you go to a lot of trouble to split hairs over the granularity of this analogy, rather than simply seeing the basic ethical truth of it... then you're just exercising that part of your brain that makes you feel better about pirating music. That's my guess, anyway, Mr. Anonymous Coward.
Point is, they didn't notify someone of a vulnerability... they took private info, and got caught (rather than stepping up). This wasn't about them being good sports.
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How exactly are "crack, PCP, etc" automatically liabilities to others?
Do you pay taxes? Then there you have it. The users of those drugs, pretty much without exception, are headed into a tailspin of declining health and the inability to support themselves. That puts immediate pressure on those agencies, institutions, and programs that are automatically called into action by the wake that these drugs leave behind. Now, if our culture was indeed comfortable leaving crack-addled people to just rot in the street, or actually could turn them away from an emergency room (nope!), or didn't care if a literally crazy PCP user was beating the snot out of someone on the bus... then no big deal. But knowing the likely behaviorial issues that result from the use of those drugs, we gear up (and fund) all sorts of programs. That is a liability we all (at least, those who make enough to pay taxes) pay for. I'd guess that the truly isolated, no-impact-having cases of people using crack or PCP are so rare as to be statistically insignificant. Perhaps a nice, productive, crack-smoking slashdotter can chime in to the contrary, and counter my notion that their hobby ultimately drives up insurance rates, hospital costs, and so on... but I'm doubting it.
And before anyone tells me that alcohol is just as bad, I'm inclined to say that the glass of cabernet that I enjoy with some roast venison doesn't really have counterpart in the form of some nice, moderate PCP appertizer or non-addictive after-dinner crack pipe.
recent versions of netscape are gecko engine browsers which support XHTML just fine
I still see about 1-2% Netscape v2/3 visiting some of the sites I host for my customers. Pretty amazing.
I, personally, do not want to receive any commercial, marketing-related, or sales-driven e-mails. Not a single blessed one. I do receive many, of course. I wonder how many of those I've "solicited"?
For example: you just paid your dues as member of a non-profit wildlife conservation organization. That was yesterday. While doing so online, you checked a box that says: "Yes, please remind me when the annual conference is coming up, and send me an invitation, and don't send me any more e-mails about anything else, ever." OK, we're 8 weeks away from the event, and we send you an e-mail. No more, no less. That is a solicited e-mail, it's hoping you'll pay to attend an event hosted by an organization you've said you support, and to which you've explicitly stated that you want to receive the message in question when the time comes. I can think, personally, of several scenarios like that which apply to me. Can't comment on your experiences.
You can take my tagged list of named fonts when you pry it out of my cold, dead, single-get static files.
Well, maybe not. But I'll be damned if I'll switch from <B> to <strong>. Why store and transmit all those extra characters? It's just silly.
doubt it would be all that difficult to identify bulk mail messages from single-use ones, even a small mailing list to friends and family
But I've built systems for my customers that send out 10-20,000 messages at a time, and each one is substantially different (different subject, altered body, different reply-to). Totally legit, completely solicited by the recipients, but definately marketing-related and sales driven (invitations to an event sent to all the members of a trade association, for example, or follow-up messages sent to everyone that bought a service during a promotion - that sort of thing). Who would be identifying them? I send directly from a farm of servers to the recipients' MX entries. Would all mail have to get sniffed by some central authority? Would I have to apply in advance for a permit? Yes, it would be hard to figure this out, as you say. I say impossible without huge taxpayer supported bureaucracy and privacy loss.
I agree with you that the money tied to unwanted spam approach is absurd. The real solution is to go after the people that are abusing affiliate relationships, and shutting down the shady businesses selling the nonsense products. Really, actually going after them is going to put a stop to the worst of this. Good filtering takes care of the rest.
When you advertise, you have to pay for it
But should I have to pay to send you an e-mail you just asked for (i.e., "I forgot my password")? Or should my brother's e-mail of a link to pictures of my niece's birthday party cost him money to send? And, who's collecting? The point is that you'll be unable to make the distinction between commercial and private messages. It's not the same as buying an ad in the yellow pages.
Thus, you're getting more value for NO money
No, you're getting more of something at someone else's expense. If there was no money involved, a whole lot of expensively produced recordings would be produced in the first place. And gee, I don't think that the people getting massively pirated here are the little indy recording artists who are desparate for attention to their work. Opportunity cost is not free.
The RIAA couldn't manage a Dairy Queen.
Mark Cuban is the best? At what? Giving you a completely irrational basis on which to not feel so bad for ripping people off? As many, many comments above have indicated, he's not even talking about what's actually happening, or about who the typical suits and settlements address. If your idea of how a Dairy Queen should be run includes caving to everyone who shows up at the door demanding free wares because everyone else is doing it... then you couldn't manage a Dairy Queen either.
So, if the kid gets sued when he's 18, then lives to be 80, that's 62 years * 12 mo/yr * $5 = $3720.
This seems comparable to their current settlement amount.
But the settlements cover what the pirate has already done, and is intended to stop it. No doubt a term of the typical settlement is that the infringement will stop. So, if the guy just starts right back up again and they do this little dance until he's 80 years old, that's a lot more money. Though, you'd think he might figure out, perhaps when he's about 60, that he's being an idiot. Or maybe by then one of his grandkids will be a recording artist and he'll get a clue.
This makes perfect sense. Why should they be able to sue for more than the "damages" would even have been?
Because as nice as it would be to get all of those people who are too cheap to pay for their entertainment to actually, well, pay for their entertainment, that's not what the suits are about. They don't sue the guy who downloaded a song, they sue the guy who could have a virtually unlimited number of people grabbing the song from him, because he's illegally providing it to them ("sharing" it). The most noticeable suits are against the people who are taking thousands of songs and essentially making copies for untold thousands of people. That's a lot more than $5 worth of activity.
Don't forget that damages also arise from the cost having to deal with the losses (court time, loss of business from the distraction, etc).
they're overfilled with repeat offenders
They're only overfilled if there isn't actually room for them, which is a separate issue from why they're there.
People who commit a crime, face a judge/jury as a first-time offender of a not-too-horrible offense, almost always get off very lightly. They may do parole, or provide some sort of community service, make reparation to whomever they harmed, etc. Many, even most of those people learn from this - either they learn not to do it again, or (if they're smart but still mal-intented), they learn not to get caught again. But the people that demonstrate, through a repetition of their crimes, that they can't seem to muster the judgement or discipline to stop hurting people, stealing, etc... those are your repeat offenders, and that's who starts spending time in prison.
We've got a cultural problem (lack of personal accountability) that must be addressed in order to stop the endless cycle of parents producing kids like that, who in turn become more parents like that. Education is the key. But if you haven't got a kid's sense of basic right and wrong drilled into them by elementary school, it's pretty much too late. You might refine that person, scare them out of being a career criminal... but critical thinking skills, an ingrained sense of ethics, a moral compass if you will - that's early, developmental stuff. I'm not saying it's hopeless, but people who are already in their late teens and twenties (and older) who repeatedly demonstrate their contempt for you and me (and our property, our money, our businesses, etc) by stealing, mugging, threatening, or even by spending all day on a computer looking for ways to hijack someone's credit rating... it may not be too late for those people to eventually turn themselves around, but by repeatedly being busted for crap like that, they're showing us that they can't be trusted not to keep doing more of the same.
Consequnces can be dealt with quietly.
Not saying they can't be. I'm saying that other would-be offenders still have to know that there are consequences. For most young people, telling them that abstractly (in the form of anonymous case studies, for example) simply never connects.
But, "Hey, did you hear about Billy? You know how he hacked into the school computers and took the faculty payroll info? Well now he's got to pay a $5000 fine, and since he doesn't have it, his parents are going to have to pay it, and he'll be working it off all the way through next summer. Probation, too, and he's not allowed to go to any school events or get his driver's license until he's 19!" can really connect with people who think Billy's "cool" or somehow glamorous.
Lets say your kid does something stupid that costs millions in damages, however, at home, everything had always seemed to be normal
That's what judges are juries are for. But kids are called minors for a reason. They don't have a mature point of view, and don't think through what they're doing. That's why a strong deterrent is a big thing, but parents with a vested interest in hot having a hoodlum of a kid is an even better thing. Obviously a parent that can show how they were involved with Junior's daily life, and show that no reasonable person could have known that Junior was spending hours every day visiting web sites run by L334 Swedish H@XX0R5 looking for info on how to be a more effective script kiddie... well, a judge would have to agree that the parent has no culpability. Hence the word Judgement. But there are absolutely times when a kid's actions and general behavior is out of control, and the parents are simply uninterested in doing anything about it, leaving it up to academic instructors to be the parents. It's unacceptable. If the parents' attitude is that "we don't care what Junior does," then they also have to stipulate that they're essentially endorsing everything he does.
This is so arbitrary, because li
I wonder if the people in North Korea and Lybia say the same thing about the US and the CIA?
What... that we patrol African villages, chopping the hands off of young boys that don't work themselves to death in diamond mines so that the diamonds can be sold to pay for Chinese-made AK-47s that are then used to slaughter entire villages for being from the wrong tribe, or not being Muslim enough, or for wanting to be able to vote in peace?
No, all you have to do is actually listen to the transcripts of what North Korea does say, even as they put thousands upon thousands of their people in slave labor camps and starve the rest so they can support a Stalinist regime run by an actually crazy person. Follow the trail of drug shipments out of NK on freighters going all over the world, SCUDs going to places like Iran, and diamonds going in and out to avoid banking scrutiny, and you'll see that's a lot different than how most of the west does business.
So, of course, the logical course of action is punishment?
The logical course of action is consequences, and they sure don't deserve a reward. If they were looking for a reward, they'd be able to point out the paper trail they left while alerting the school system's IT people about the vulnerability. Or they'd be able to mention the time and date that they told their schools' principal about something just as bad as seeing the A/V storage room left unlocked by careless faculty. There are no such things to reference, because their intentions were not to defend the integrity of sensitive data, but to get a laugh and bragging rights out of taking it, with no intention of getting caught (classic high school hubris).
If every time a kid broke into a house, a car, a purse, or a computer network, we handled it quietly, we'd lose the deterrent effect of the punishment. Plenty of rationality-challenged kids will still resist some activities because "that other kid in my school" got time/fine/whatever for doing the same, and it was known that's what happened. The last thing I personally want to see is the glorification of this sort of thing... but I sure as hell want the bored kid in the high school computer lab to think of lifting lists of social security numbers or other sensitive (and potentially very damaging materials) to be just as wrong (and full of consequence) as taking a not-bolted-down laptop out of that computer lab "just to show that he can" or "to demonstrate that people can steal things."
Murderers get fame, too. There will always be people that, through a twisting of their sense of the world, will admire people who break into things, steal things, or take chances on a dare. Just like there are kids who think that the two twits who shot up Columbine are some sort of darkly attractive saints.
Breaking into a school computer system, no matter how well or weakly defended, is a deliberate act. There is absolutely no ambiguity about it, and I doubt that the kids are going to use the defense that they are so dumb - to the point of being mentally defective - that they don't have the capacity for understanding right/wrong. Attempting to use the "it was for your own good" argument only after being caught, illustrates their ongoing hope that they can game the system. That attitude is exactly what requires the punishment.
Personally, I think their punishment should be the random placement of their families' personal and financial data into places where honor and integrity play a role in protecting it, and then letting the families know that the information may (or may not) have been compromised. This way their parents can explain to the them that the erosion of their credit and the exhaustion of their time as they fight back from identity theft is one of the reasons they can't afford to send them anywhere prestigious for those computer science degrees. That way they'd get a sense of the anxiety that the faculty of the school (all people making not nearly enough money) are feeling (and now, must continue to feel), now that two idiots claim to have deleted their personal information after having been caught stealing it.
That's the mentality that will put more people into a prison system that cannot sustain them.
Most people actually doing time in actual prisons are repeat offenders. The longer they spend in, the lower the rate of recidivism, and the lower the crime rates tend to be. I don't think these two clowns would benefit from prison time - but they should feel the consequences of this sort of crap. Like, doing a few years' unpaid work for people who have lost money (or even careers) because of the side effects of identity theft.
Do you want to bet how long it will take for a certain criminal, monopolistic, little-african-children abusing cartel to have the research grants revoked, and if that fails, to have an accident happen to the scientists in question?
Bah. Not DeBeers, but all of the middlemen, especially the ones down the food chain.
But never mind that. The folks who will be really upset are the ones that hijack the diamonds at the source (say, in Africa) and use them as essentially untraceable, undetectable, very compact currency that is used in all sorts of unsavory transactions. Hardcore Islamist terrorist-types, as well as people doing business with North Korea, Lybia, and the more corrupt elements in places like Liberia, have been known to get into this game in Africa, and to use the transportability (just swallow, and get on a plane!) to fuel the black market of weapons, drugs, and other naughty bits. Never mind the formal cartel - it's the bandits/land-pirates that are working on behalf of actual want-to-kill bad guys that are enjoying the high street price of diamonds for more insidious reasons.
I was given to understand that the particular configuration seen in the shot was more commonly associated with a nuke... but, assume I'm an ass, which is very likely. Same thing applies, though: I'm thinking that our increasing thoughtfulness about infrastructure protection would make any shenanigans near any power plant not so smart.
I live in Montgomery County, which, indeed, feels like a Mafia-owned town when it comes to wine sales. It's incredible that my trips to Virginia (where my data center is) double as opportunities to get real wine at real prices, but make me a felon as I drive back to my house. From what I can tell, this will make all of that moot (as long as I'm willing to pay freight to my door - I don't know that this will help with TJs!). About. Freaking. Time.
I don't get why it even matters. I mean, why should wine be any different than computer equipment, condoms, flowers or pepperidge farms gift baskets? Why should any of them be restricted (or for that matter, why shouldn't ALL of them be restricted).
It doesn't matter, and that's the point that the Supreme Court just hammered home. The real essence of this is that a state can do a lot of things to regulate what (and how) things can be sold in their state, but they can't do so in a way that discriminates against people in other states (people, in this case, being winemakers selling across the border). So, you can let everyone sell wine, or no one. But the patchwork of crazy regulations was definately restricting commerce in an asymmetrical (and unconstitutional) way.
Its obviously more important than things like..say..not letting completely unrelated 'riders' along on bills for something like..you know..helping our troops to survive in a battlefield environment.
Ah, the old "government can only do one thing at a time" and "the citizenry can only think about one thing at a time" argument. Regardless, this was in front of the Supreme Court because it was brought there by people who wanted to see it resolved. If you think you can make a lucid case for congress not welding multiple topics into single bills/acts... have fun! That will never happen without an amendment, and that won't happen because it would completely paralyze the legislative process. Many bills, by definition and out of practical necessity, address several, dozens, or hundreds of "issues" at once. Constitutional language that would split the hairs on what is or is not a separate (enough) issue would be nearly impossible.
How about just voting for people that will carry on in a way more to your liking? And how about pursuading more people to do the same? That beats the hell out of during the legislative process into an unworkable stream of micro-incremental bits and pieces.
Actually, if you live in Maryland (or many of the other impacted states), this is a long overdue, worthy development. I'm just waiting for the state to cut its own nose off, and ban the shipment of wine including that of the (marginal) local wineries.
Never the less, I expect that those of us that build e-commerce web sites will have a few hundred brand new - if slightly tipsy - customers. With the patchwork shipping problem gone, many of the smaller operations will now consider it worth getting into the game. Thank you, Supreme Court, for doing the right thing on this. Cheers!
You mean those cooling towers in the background... :)
OK, reactor complex. Where there are cooling towers, there's a reactor. Still, sending odd-looking flying contraptions, sprouting antenna, into the air anywhere near one... it's seems like you're asking for a little scrutiny, don't you think?
I figured that since birds can take down large aircraft, other low-mass, chunky things can too. Really unlinkely, though, certainly.
Other that the whole issue of where it comes down (say, in the front yard of that reactor in the background, completely freaking out the security people), doesn't this sort of thing pose a hazard to commercial aviation? Like, say, jet engine ingestion, that sort of thing? I know the odds of an intersection are slim, but I seem to recall that the high altitude model rocket folks have to get some clearances and permission, and all that sort of thing. Just curious what the drill is. No doubt some balloon enthusiasts will chime in - but 52k feet means you're passing through (twice!) many, many common through-flight altitudes.
Full credit on the geek factor, but if this had gone wrong somehow or been perceived as an inbound Scary Payload coming down in the wrong place, it would make the idiots that get busted pointing mid-power lasers at aircraft cockpits look like they're not the only guys not thinking the whole thing through...
No, my analogy is spot on. Pretending that cracking into a system is just a benign way to demonstrate the vulnerability of that system - out of the sweetness of the students' innocent little hearts - is BS. Nothing would have come of this if they hadn't been caught. The man hours than have to be spent evaluating whether any data was corrupted or exposed to the wrong people (and the enduring risk that it was, even it can't be detected) is every bit as damaging as the man hours that will have to be spent repairing the broken window. In both cases, the students set off a damaging/costly chain of events. The difference is that once they replace the window, there isn't really any dangling question of whether or not even more future damage will occur from the original event. With stolen SSNs, the damage could be very costly, career/finances-ruining, and so on.
We're not talking about infringing on someone's copyrights here... we're talking about unlawful access to and use of a system, which is treated just like trespass and theft for a reason. Having a legal copy of media, and doing something illegal with it (such as giving it to 1000 people) is infringing. And even though that's every bit as bad a stealing something physically if the assigner of the copyright doesn't want you to do it, it's handled differently than theft. But when the person has their hands on something (like faculty social security numbers and private information) that they had no permission to access, they're in completely different territory.
Those are separate points though: my analogy was intended to illustrate the absurdity of claiming a get-out-of-jail-free-card just because (after getting caught) the crackers said they were exposing a vulnerability. You could make the same argument about picking the lock on a teachers car door, or (by any means) gaining access to something or someplace you're not supposed to be. And that makes the argument BS. It's even more BS when you take something (which, Gee!, they claim to have later deleted) to somehow prove your point. Except, they weren't planning on making a point - because they weren't planning on getting caught.
Breaking through the security on the school's IT system, or breaking through a lock on the office's doors, are the same thing. Getting caught should result in the same thing. When a student notices an unlocked door to an A/V storage room... are they doing the right thing when they tell a school official, or are they doing the right thing when they grab a laptop and a video projector and stay quiet, claiming later, when someone discovers the loss (and their fingerprints) that they were being good citizens and helping the school see a vulnerability? If you go to a lot of trouble to split hairs over the granularity of this analogy, rather than simply seeing the basic ethical truth of it... then you're just exercising that part of your brain that makes you feel better about pirating music. That's my guess, anyway, Mr. Anonymous Coward.
Point is, they didn't notify someone of a vulnerability... they took private info, and got caught (rather than stepping up). This wasn't about them being good sports.