Everyone knows being pregnant makes it impossible for you to commit a crime. Your hormones won't let you. Therefore it is an outrage that she is being investigated. Won't someone think of the child!
It works the same with being disabled in any way, or being a grandmother. They are not so much "get out of jail free" cards as "certifiably pure as driven snow innocent" cards.
What does credit cards and cash have to do with DoS and Anonymous?!
What does DoS and Anonymous have to do with the arrests? Anonymous is not an illegal organisation.
These people were not arrested because they are allegedly members of Anonymous (membership in this case being a vague concept), but because they were allegedly involved in crime involving computers and communications. Therefore it is not unreasonable to investigate whether they were involved in computer crime involving bank account, cash and credit cards. The police would be foolish not to take what may be important evidence.
Your analogy is totally flawed. If a road is built for a legitimate purpose then clearly it is not at fault if it is also used for illegal purposes.
But if someone built a road up the back of a bank, for no other reason that it helped stage a robbery and fast get-away, would you be surprised if the police wanted to talk to those who built it? Would you be outraged if they ripped it up? Blocked access to it? After all it's just a road. Roads aren't illegal. It's not as if they steal money.
Intent is everything. If you create something with the obvious intent that it be used for a crime, then there are laws regarding facilitating and plotting said crime. And even if laws don't quite cover it, claiming innocence of everything that your creation does is plain dumb ignorance of your moral responsibilities.
It means nothing. Absolutely nothing. Even supposing SOCA knew that users had "deleted their download histories", why would they care? Why would they tell everyone?
Either someone doesn't know what they are talking about, or they are trying to scare people by suggesting that they may know more than they think they do. My estimation is that either is a good possibility.
I doubt that the law sees any difference to you running a program that loads random websites (your noise application), and you running a program that loads websites (a web browser). They are both software under your control on your computer.
Try this one at court and see how well it goes;
"Mr Doe, can you explain your reasons for speeding through this 20 mph residential street near your home on these 137 occasions?"
"Yeah, I fitted a modification to my car that randomly hits the gas pedal. Wanna see? Can I go now?"
The problem with the argument that Google isn't doing evil with this data, "it's just advertising, what's the problem?", is that you are placing an awful lot of trust in an organisation that has little invested in keeping you happy. When the day comes (as it may) that Google uses your information in a way that you don't like, it will be too late. The data will be out of the bottle. You can leave any time you like, but you can't take it with you.
This is why anyone with any sense maintains multiple Google accounts for their different services That way email doesn't get cross referenced with android apps, cross referenced with Youtube subscriptions, cross referenced with googling.
That can be a headache to keep track of, and they can probably draw their own conclusions based on IP numbers. But it's one way of fighting back against the insidious integration of the entire internet into a single account that google can tattoo onto your (virtual) forehead for their own convenience.
I think the OP is quite clear why he wants a separate IT department. He doesn't say, but I wouldn't be exactly staggered if it turns out that he is in charge of IT. Having a separate IT department would give him his own budget, and get the Head of Engineering off his back.
The OP therefore wishes a separate IT department for his own benefit. This may be as good a reason as any, but not one that's likely to cut it with the company. Particularly not the Head of Engineering. So he wants us to invent some plausible sounding reasons that he can sell to the company.
The people always in the front line are the bank's customers. They are the ones that get all the inconvenience and hassle of their money disappearing. They are the ones robbed, no matter how quickly the banks rectify things. For the banks it's just another day in the banking business. It's not like it's their money.
So how do you think the banks are going to explain to their pissed-off customers that, actually, they asked hackers to steal from them? Never mind, it's for charity?
This just illustrates the folly of all the companies co-operating in the creation of a walled-garden internet controlled by a single company, who often has no understanding or care about individual company's needs or desires. The more companies jump on board the idea of Facebook being their primary internet presence, (like many don't put their URL on adverts, they put their Facebook page) the more they are handing over to Facebook key control of their business.
This is the kind of business model that companies like Compuserve and AOL used to be based on in the 90s, and people couldn't wait to vacate them. Nothing has changed, Facebook has just succeeded in sugar-coating the pill better so that no-one's complaining yet.
But half the usefulness of a smart phone is in the locational data. There's just no need for anyone to be building a profile of your movements from it.
And you still need a google account if you want to purchase anything on the Android Marketplace. Solution is to set up an account just for your phone, then tell the phone to never sync information with it.
It's not easy though. Slightest slip up while you're getting the hang of things and you'll find it start to sync. Everything you do on the phone assumes you want Google to suck up all your contacts/calendar/notes/anything else it can get its hands on, and you're constantly having to stop it.
You know, I was with you right up to this point. But this seems such a ridiculous cliche I have to question the truth of it, and hence the truth of everything else you say.
Do they also keep all the cash in Euro notes so they can roll about in it during the parties in their offices?
Well fortunately you are not in the business of being a multi-national corp. So it doesn't need to make sense to you.
Facebook don't allow German people accounts simply to be nice and have a global presence. They do it to make money from companies who want to advertise to those users. If you want to make money in a country, particularly one with a big economy like Germany, it's a whole lot easier if you have a registered company in that country. That usually means employing people and having an office.
Once you want to make money in a country, you will usually find that the country itself has some very definite laws you have to follow before they will allow that to happen. It rarely works to say "We're American, just give us the cash and don't bother us with your quaint laws and customs."
Yeah, it's puzzling the way the contributor has posed the question. It's phrased like, of course, everyone would like to dump Windows and move to Linux, but something is stopping them, damn it!
This is a false premise.
Windows does what I need. It is what I'm most used to. I can be reasonably assured that for every computing need I have, there's a Window based solution for it. Linux is a excellent server environment, but is still a long behind Windows in providing what I require from a desktop computer. Too many of its fringe applications and products suck big time, either in functionality, usability or stability. It would simply be giving me extra work and hassle to change to Linux, now and for all the foreseeable future. So why on earth would I want to do that?
I am not financially strapped, nor am I fanatical masochist who will never, ever use propriety software, even if my life depended on it. So whether it is open source or free does determine my choice of OS or software. I try to pick what's best for the job.
Talk of Wine and other compatibility products is foolishness. Why would I want something that's kind of sort of like Windows, sometimes, when I can have the actual Windows. I don't want to spend any of my time struggling to get a Windows application functioning correctly on not-Windows.
Why can't banking work to the same principles of incentives that any other industry uses?
Do a good job and you'll get well paid. Do an average job and you don't get so well paid. Do a bad job and we fire you.
Banking's problem is that there is no upper limit on the "well paid" and they can become astronomical bonuses. The possible personal rewards far outweighed the personal risks. If you have a 1 in 10 chance of making a million, with a 1 in 15 risk that it may go wrong and you you may be fired (until you get a new job), then many people are going to think it's worth a try.
Solution is that the bonuses should be capped. If the possible bonus is 20k, then it's not worth the same gamble. But the incentive to earn that 20k is still not necessarily a bad thing.
Well does anyone? But you'd be amazed how careless you can get about using resources efficiently when the resources aren't yours to begin with. Most spam gets sent by compromised spambots, i.e. the resources used are stolen CPU cycles, stolen disk space and stolen bandwidth.
If they had infinite resources, they would be just spamming random email addresses.
Am I missing the sarcasm here? Spamming random email addresses is exactly what spammers do. Ask anyone with an email domain the amount of spam bounced addressed to email addresses that do not exist, and have never existed. They have been randomly generated simply on the oft chance.
Allowing input in multiple languages is not the same as translating multiple languages. Google could be allowing input through every and any language on the planet, and it still wouldn't be translating anything.
But seriously, the current Google voice input can't even handle accents, never mind handle any language. It's laughably useless in at least 50% of its attempts, which makes it totally useless. If they're being honest with their description here it will be a massive step forward.
The Coldplay standard has been well established in the study of coma inducement for some years now.
It's roughly logarithmic. 1 Coldpay is equivalent to the coma induced by band itself. 2 Coldplay is brain stem death induced by prolonged exposure. 3 Coldplay is clinical death. 4 Coldplay is sudden death at a Coldplay concert.
"11% more relaxing" is therefore around 1.05 Coldplay. Will leave you woozy, but you'll be fine after a few cups of coffee and some fresh air.
Just as importantly; how does anyone prove they actually calculated all this? How does anyone know that the additional 5 trillion digits aren't just random crap?
"Most users get hacked at high rates even when they do not think they are engaging in risky behavior,"
'Most users' do not get hacked. Therefore this article's very first statement is total nonsense. What the article meant to say is either;
"Users get hacked at high rates even when they do not think they are engaging in risky behavior,"
or
"Of Users who have been hacked, most do not think they are engaging in risky behavior,"
What "at high rates" means is a mystery that isn't explained in the article. There is no ratio of hacked email accounts to not-hacked email accounts quoted, so how has it been determined to be a "high rate"?
Hands up everyone who chooses what game to buy based on speculation on what the second hand games market may value it, once they've finished. Hands up who has decided to not buy a game because, no matter how great a game it may be, they don't think there's much of a second hand market for it. Hands up everyone who has bought a game they weren't so keen on, but they were sure it would have a good re-sale value.
Well, to be fair, the Improbable Research web page is car-crash of a website that says "The webcast begins at 7:30 PM Eastern Time" half way down, in ugly white on red text.
Why would anyone want to be removed from this list if they didn't have something to hide?
They want off the list. Therefore they find the attention being on the list attracts unwelcome. Therefore they are hiding something. Therefore they are guilty of something.
Create a Facebook account purely for use with Spotify. Populate the profile with misinformation and nonsense. Log into Spotify with it. 'Like' anything and everything you can see at random.
If commerce on the internet continues to increasingly demand my life story before I can be their customer, (all the better to profile and sell things to me) then I am going to increasingly tell them lies about my life.
I only wish more people would do the same. Mass poisoning of the information stream until it becomes worthless will make them quit trying to pull this crap.
Slashdot Mirror
Everyone knows being pregnant makes it impossible for you to commit a crime. Your hormones won't let you. Therefore it is an outrage that she is being investigated. Won't someone think of the child!
It works the same with being disabled in any way, or being a grandmother. They are not so much "get out of jail free" cards as "certifiably pure as driven snow innocent" cards.
What does credit cards and cash have to do with DoS and Anonymous?!
What does DoS and Anonymous have to do with the arrests? Anonymous is not an illegal organisation.
These people were not arrested because they are allegedly members of Anonymous (membership in this case being a vague concept), but because they were allegedly involved in crime involving computers and communications. Therefore it is not unreasonable to investigate whether they were involved in computer crime involving bank account, cash and credit cards. The police would be foolish not to take what may be important evidence.
I have to agree with the article. I am shocked and disgusted beyond measure.
I'm just not sure why. Maybe I need further desensitising against run of the mill tech news.
Your analogy is totally flawed. If a road is built for a legitimate purpose then clearly it is not at fault if it is also used for illegal purposes.
But if someone built a road up the back of a bank, for no other reason that it helped stage a robbery and fast get-away, would you be surprised if the police wanted to talk to those who built it? Would you be outraged if they ripped it up? Blocked access to it? After all it's just a road. Roads aren't illegal. It's not as if they steal money.
Intent is everything. If you create something with the obvious intent that it be used for a crime, then there are laws regarding facilitating and plotting said crime. And even if laws don't quite cover it, claiming innocence of everything that your creation does is plain dumb ignorance of your moral responsibilities.
It means nothing. Absolutely nothing. Even supposing SOCA knew that users had "deleted their download histories", why would they care? Why would they tell everyone?
Either someone doesn't know what they are talking about, or they are trying to scare people by suggesting that they may know more than they think they do. My estimation is that either is a good possibility.
I doubt that the law sees any difference to you running a program that loads random websites (your noise application), and you running a program that loads websites (a web browser). They are both software under your control on your computer.
Try this one at court and see how well it goes;
"Mr Doe, can you explain your reasons for speeding through this 20 mph residential street near your home on these 137 occasions?"
"Yeah, I fitted a modification to my car that randomly hits the gas pedal. Wanna see? Can I go now?"
The problem with the argument that Google isn't doing evil with this data, "it's just advertising, what's the problem?", is that you are placing an awful lot of trust in an organisation that has little invested in keeping you happy. When the day comes (as it may) that Google uses your information in a way that you don't like, it will be too late. The data will be out of the bottle. You can leave any time you like, but you can't take it with you.
This is why anyone with any sense maintains multiple Google accounts for their different services That way email doesn't get cross referenced with android apps, cross referenced with Youtube subscriptions, cross referenced with googling.
That can be a headache to keep track of, and they can probably draw their own conclusions based on IP numbers. But it's one way of fighting back against the insidious integration of the entire internet into a single account that google can tattoo onto your (virtual) forehead for their own convenience.
I think the OP is quite clear why he wants a separate IT department. He doesn't say, but I wouldn't be exactly staggered if it turns out that he is in charge of IT. Having a separate IT department would give him his own budget, and get the Head of Engineering off his back.
The OP therefore wishes a separate IT department for his own benefit. This may be as good a reason as any, but not one that's likely to cut it with the company. Particularly not the Head of Engineering. So he wants us to invent some plausible sounding reasons that he can sell to the company.
Here's hoping the company don't read slashdot.
So North Korea is literally streets ahead in the fight against light pollution and needless waste of energy.
Long live the revolution!
Dumb idea.
The people always in the front line are the bank's customers. They are the ones that get all the inconvenience and hassle of their money disappearing. They are the ones robbed, no matter how quickly the banks rectify things. For the banks it's just another day in the banking business. It's not like it's their money.
So how do you think the banks are going to explain to their pissed-off customers that, actually, they asked hackers to steal from them? Never mind, it's for charity?
This just illustrates the folly of all the companies co-operating in the creation of a walled-garden internet controlled by a single company, who often has no understanding or care about individual company's needs or desires. The more companies jump on board the idea of Facebook being their primary internet presence, (like many don't put their URL on adverts, they put their Facebook page) the more they are handing over to Facebook key control of their business.
This is the kind of business model that companies like Compuserve and AOL used to be based on in the 90s, and people couldn't wait to vacate them. Nothing has changed, Facebook has just succeeded in sugar-coating the pill better so that no-one's complaining yet.
But half the usefulness of a smart phone is in the locational data. There's just no need for anyone to be building a profile of your movements from it.
And you still need a google account if you want to purchase anything on the Android Marketplace. Solution is to set up an account just for your phone, then tell the phone to never sync information with it.
It's not easy though. Slightest slip up while you're getting the hang of things and you'll find it start to sync. Everything you do on the phone assumes you want Google to suck up all your contacts/calendar/notes/anything else it can get its hands on, and you're constantly having to stop it.
and buy seconds yachts and huge mansions.
You know, I was with you right up to this point. But this seems such a ridiculous cliche I have to question the truth of it, and hence the truth of everything else you say.
Do they also keep all the cash in Euro notes so they can roll about in it during the parties in their offices?
Well fortunately you are not in the business of being a multi-national corp. So it doesn't need to make sense to you.
Facebook don't allow German people accounts simply to be nice and have a global presence. They do it to make money from companies who want to advertise to those users. If you want to make money in a country, particularly one with a big economy like Germany, it's a whole lot easier if you have a registered company in that country. That usually means employing people and having an office.
Once you want to make money in a country, you will usually find that the country itself has some very definite laws you have to follow before they will allow that to happen. It rarely works to say "We're American, just give us the cash and don't bother us with your quaint laws and customs."
Yeah, it's puzzling the way the contributor has posed the question. It's phrased like, of course, everyone would like to dump Windows and move to Linux, but something is stopping them, damn it!
This is a false premise.
Windows does what I need. It is what I'm most used to. I can be reasonably assured that for every computing need I have, there's a Window based solution for it. Linux is a excellent server environment, but is still a long behind Windows in providing what I require from a desktop computer. Too many of its fringe applications and products suck big time, either in functionality, usability or stability. It would simply be giving me extra work and hassle to change to Linux, now and for all the foreseeable future. So why on earth would I want to do that?
I am not financially strapped, nor am I fanatical masochist who will never, ever use propriety software, even if my life depended on it. So whether it is open source or free does determine my choice of OS or software. I try to pick what's best for the job.
Talk of Wine and other compatibility products is foolishness. Why would I want something that's kind of sort of like Windows, sometimes, when I can have the actual Windows. I don't want to spend any of my time struggling to get a Windows application functioning correctly on not-Windows.
Why can't banking work to the same principles of incentives that any other industry uses?
Do a good job and you'll get well paid. Do an average job and you don't get so well paid. Do a bad job and we fire you.
Banking's problem is that there is no upper limit on the "well paid" and they can become astronomical bonuses. The possible personal rewards far outweighed the personal risks. If you have a 1 in 10 chance of making a million, with a 1 in 15 risk that it may go wrong and you you may be fired (until you get a new job), then many people are going to think it's worth a try.
Solution is that the bonuses should be capped. If the possible bonus is 20k, then it's not worth the same gamble. But the incentive to earn that 20k is still not necessarily a bad thing.
Spammers don't have infinite resources
Well does anyone? But you'd be amazed how careless you can get about using resources efficiently when the resources aren't yours to begin with. Most spam gets sent by compromised spambots, i.e. the resources used are stolen CPU cycles, stolen disk space and stolen bandwidth.
If they had infinite resources, they would be just spamming random email addresses.
Am I missing the sarcasm here? Spamming random email addresses is exactly what spammers do. Ask anyone with an email domain the amount of spam bounced addressed to email addresses that do not exist, and have never existed. They have been randomly generated simply on the oft chance.
Allowing input in multiple languages is not the same as translating multiple languages. Google could be allowing input through every and any language on the planet, and it still wouldn't be translating anything.
But seriously, the current Google voice input can't even handle accents, never mind handle any language. It's laughably useless in at least 50% of its attempts, which makes it totally useless. If they're being honest with their description here it will be a massive step forward.
And can I switch language mid stream?
The Coldplay standard has been well established in the study of coma inducement for some years now.
It's roughly logarithmic. 1 Coldpay is equivalent to the coma induced by band itself. 2 Coldplay is brain stem death induced by prolonged exposure. 3 Coldplay is clinical death. 4 Coldplay is sudden death at a Coldplay concert.
"11% more relaxing" is therefore around 1.05 Coldplay. Will leave you woozy, but you'll be fine after a few cups of coffee and some fresh air.
Just as importantly; how does anyone prove they actually calculated all this? How does anyone know that the additional 5 trillion digits aren't just random crap?
"Most users get hacked at high rates even when they do not think they are engaging in risky behavior,"
'Most users' do not get hacked. Therefore this article's very first statement is total nonsense. What the article meant to say is either;
"Users get hacked at high rates even when they do not think they are engaging in risky behavior,"
or
"Of Users who have been hacked, most do not think they are engaging in risky behavior,"
What "at high rates" means is a mystery that isn't explained in the article. There is no ratio of hacked email accounts to not-hacked email accounts quoted, so how has it been determined to be a "high rate"?
Hands up everyone who chooses what game to buy based on speculation on what the second hand games market may value it, once they've finished. Hands up who has decided to not buy a game because, no matter how great a game it may be, they don't think there's much of a second hand market for it. Hands up everyone who has bought a game they weren't so keen on, but they were sure it would have a good re-sale value.
As I thought; absolutely no-one.
Well, to be fair, the Improbable Research web page is car-crash of a website that says "The webcast begins at 7:30 PM Eastern Time" half way down, in ugly white on red text.
Why would anyone want to be removed from this list if they didn't have something to hide?
They want off the list. Therefore they find the attention being on the list attracts unwelcome. Therefore they are hiding something. Therefore they are guilty of something.
We just don't know what yet.
There is only one way to respond;
Create a Facebook account purely for use with Spotify. Populate the profile with misinformation and nonsense. Log into Spotify with it. 'Like' anything and everything you can see at random.
If commerce on the internet continues to increasingly demand my life story before I can be their customer, (all the better to profile and sell things to me) then I am going to increasingly tell them lies about my life.
I only wish more people would do the same. Mass poisoning of the information stream until it becomes worthless will make them quit trying to pull this crap.