I'd say that if you are a sysadmin who somehow doesn't allow iPhones on any networks under your control, then within a week you will either have your mind changed or let go.
While I agree that the taxi industry is not the illuminati, I don't understand how Uber is a commercial vehicle for hire. Then again, I might not fully understand the extent of what Uber does that's applicable under law.
Uber is a taxi service. Except that it doesn't officially employ drivers and pays them a wage, it depends on drivers who have no employment that they can rely upon and who have to carry all the cost of running a car, while taking a hire cut than any other taxi company.
They try to create the illusion that they are a high tech firm connecting clients and drivers, when in reality they are just exploiting the weakest people in the job market and deliberately flout any regulations that protect their employees or customers.
Well since you are so against guns, then kindly please hang yourself. You are what is wrong with this country.
In the USA, many more people kill themselves by using guns than by hanging themselves. That's probably because using a gun doesn't require one bit of brain or one bit of courage.
How can they catch you at the payment point? If I make a request for uber, unless the government is monitoring the app, which now may be encrypted, the uber or lyft car arrives, and money goes from my previously set up account into Uber's coffers. In what way can the government stop this?
Call for a driver, wait for him to turn up, and fine them. Easy enough. If there's a criminal court case, we know you can be forced to decrypt your data. If it's a civil court case, you provide the decrypted data or the judge assumes that it speaks against you.
Where do you draw the line? If your neighbor pays you for a car ride to town, should that be illegal? How about if he does it every day? How about carpooling arrangements where not all people have cars? How about a mom who provides transportation services for her friends, in return for (food/landscaping/snowplowing/money)?
There was a link to the UK rules, which are very clear. If you provide a car with a driver, for profit beyond just expenses, to transport people from A to B, and the transport is not just a minor part of the operation, then you need a license.
In this case: Driving the neighbour for money, once or repeatedly, and mom providing transportation services, would need a license. Carpooling doesn't, because the driver wants to go from A to B himself.
Um, it's already illegal to do those things. Call the police when it happens. You know, on that phone you just used to order the taxi.
Sure, cheating/robbing/harming passengers is illegal. However, calling the police doesn't help much if the driver cannot pay for the damage that they caused. That's why I would want to make absolutely sure that Uber can be held responsible for any damage that their drivers cause, just like any other business is responsible for their employers, and that Uber cannot just claim it's non of their business, when it is exactly all of their business.
My question is how insurance companies are dealing with it. I am pretty sure if I was a driver and got in an accident they would pretty much drop me like a hot potato. Unless your insurance policy includes driving as part of working there is no bloody way I would even think of taking this on.
The real problem for Uber when this happens is that they will most likely get sued and found liable. In Germany, because the contracts between Uber and the drivers don't really matter; Uber is a taxi company, no matter what it claims. In the USA, because you only need to be a tiny tiny bit responsible for the damages and you are on the hook for all of it.
Having driven carefully for a while in the UK, my car insurance is quite low nowadays. However, it doesn't cover commercial use of the car. So if I drive a paying passenger, neither the car, nor I, nor the passenger, nor anyone I hit, will be insured. That's driving without insurance.
I can get commercial insurance, but it's _expensive_. Very expensive. Not sure if I need a special license to be allowed to drive paying passengers. So the sting operation that was mentioned is absolutely fine with me. If they drive without insurance, they should be fined very, very hard. I'd also look forward to a court case where Uber is found liable in such a case.
Copyright restricts _any_ copying, and the exclusive rights of the copyright holder, like the creation of derivative works. You may be confused by the GPL which allows you to create derivative works for your own usage.
In principle, even running a program without a license means the program gets copied to RAM, and therefore is copyright infringement. (Microsoft, Apple, Google etc. could probably sue anyone stealing a computer or smartphone or tablet for copyright infringement if the thief ever used the computer).
Then when lawyers request it, they are boned. Depending on your country, that is, and the possibility of the obligatory wrench (xkcd).
Totally wrong in a civil lawsuit. In a civil suit, the judge asks you politely for the information, and you supply it or you don't. If you don't supply it, the judge will assume that you had good reasons. For example, if the insurance says you were running marathons while you claim you are bedridden, and they ask for your encrypted fitbit data, and you don't supply it, then it is assumed that the insurance was right and you are indeed running marathons.
There's one big problem with trying to use fitbit data. There's no way to prove that the device was actually attached to a person that is allegedly producing the data.
In a civil lawsuit, it's not necessary. Say you claim on your insurance because you can't walk 10 metres after an accident and "your" fitbit proves this isn't true. They don't have to _prove_ that it is yours, they have to convince the judge that it is more likely yours than not. In civil cases, there is no right to remain silent, and there is no innocent until proven guilty.
They aren't. But it seems like there's a new trend in town - when a foreign tech company could potentially have guessed that someone using their service might potentially have done something bad, they're automatically at fault. See: Facebook and Lee Rigby in the UK.
That one is totally different. And we don't know actually if it's true. If you were looking for terrorists, the best situation would be to publicly scream at Facebook for not reporting suspicious post, so that the stupid bastards go on posting their plans on Facebook, while Facebook actually reports any suspicious post to the government so they can get arrested in time.
But in most places companies are responsible for the actions of their employees as long as they represent the company. There may be more responsibility if they didn't do reasonable checks, but the employer/employee relationship alone is enough to make them responsible.
If that is the case, and the guy came up clean but yet still went on to do X, how is Uber any more culpable than a taxi company hiring a cabbie with no record, who subsequently goes out and does X, or a tour company hiring a bus driver with a spotless background, who nonetheless does X?
I wouldn't say they are more culpable, but obviously a company hiring taxi drivers should be on the hook for damages that their drivers cause as part of their taxi driving job, and Uber should be just as much on the hook. With the difference that apparently the company is valued as something over forty billion dollars, so I would suggest a high seven digit dollar payout to that lady.
It obviously depends on the situation. In Germany, a company is responsible for paying damages if an employee does something that in the widest sense is "doing their job". For example, if the driver picks up a woman who needs a taxi, and drops her off and drives away some time later, the taxi company would be responsible for anything happening in between. Whether they did safety checks or not; just because they employed him.
Uber. It means super in German. That's misleading. It should be called Rides with Strangers Without Background Checks.
It doesn't. Uber means "I am stupid fucker who tries to impress by using fake German but I'm too stupid to add an umlaut where it belongs". Well, the correct spelling is Ãoeber, but it's anyone guess what slashdot will make of it.
Take it up with the poster above that wrote "targets a person and convinces that person to do something he would not normally have done" if you disagree with such a definition. It certainly fits that definition if you hold the definition to be valid.
It's tricky. An obvious situation is car theft - if the police places a car somewhere with the keys visible inside, that's not entrapment. That's a normal situation that can happen in anyone's life. Telling you to steal the car makes it entrapment.
In this case the whole crime consists of being asked for information and giving it. The person offering money for information is the same as the car with the keys inside offering a free ride. I'd say that on its own is not entrapment.
Actually, it's common across the board In Europe for manufacturers and retails to lie to consumers about their warranty rights.
It's also common for people claiming this and not knowing what they are talking about. First, the manufacturer has nothing to do with this because all rights you have as a consumer (not as a business) is against the seller, not the manufacturer. Second, the five years that you talk about are the time when your legal relationship with the retailer ends; that doesn't mean that after 4 years and 11 months you would have any automatic right to get problems fixed. Items must last a reasonable amount of time; for computers this is typically two years. And you will have to _prove_ that the defect was there when you bought the item after six months.
or perhaps, allegedly, Apple's legal team put these people (the plaintiffs) up to it just so they could easily dismiss future suits of this type. I wouldn't put it past them.
What you are saying is pretty idiotic. Just because lawyer A sues and makes some idiotic mistakes that get the case thrown out doesn't create any precedence for anyone else.
Someone in that company must have thought this is a good idea. Being in that line of business, they should have known that even with a user clicking on "consent", a health care provider giving them the information would be acting illegally. And then I wonder why did they want this information in the first place? You can't use it for anything that isn't again highly illegal.
So, if I loaded all of those MP3s that I made myself onto my iPod, you're saying that it's ok for Apple to delete them?
You wouldn't load them onto the iPod. You would import them into iTunes, and iTunes makes sure that the music you told it to be put onto the iPod will be put onto the iPod, and nothing else. And if you import all your.mp3s into iTunes, they are absolutely safe there.
That's how iTunes and iPod have always worked: In iTunes, you set up what music you want on your iPod, and iTunes puts it there. Take any music you want, add it to iTunes, and it's fine.
Let's be serious here. You say "they are depriving you". That's not the case. What is correct is "some lawyer claims that some time about ten years ago, Apple deprived you, but if you read what he claims, it doesn't actually make any sense, except if you assume that he is a lawyer who would twist anything that Apple ever might have said to make them look guilty and claim damages".
Right now, the situation is: 1. The iTunes database is an ordinary.plist file that you can read with a single method call, it's not difficult to manipulate it and write it back correctly. Of course it's even easier to break it if you are careless. 2. There is a folder somewhere deep in the iTunes folder named "Automatically add to library" or something like that. Any music file added to that folder will automatically be added to the iTunes library. That's what Amazon does with purchases.
More so, if a bank robbers getaway vehicle went on a toll road then the roads operator should be charged with profiting from the proceeds of crime, they clearly facilitated the crime.
Actually, the QE2 bridge / Dartford tunnel in Essex, England are the perfect spot to catch criminals in a car and have been used that way. Close the toll booths and there is just no way to escape. Bit inconvenient for everyone else.
The Justice Department feels that having an embedded back door into the devices' crypto is very "reasonable" and has been pushing for just that. Now they need a judge to rule on their version of the word and the corporations will fall in line.
That might be reasonable if say Apple could add a backdoor to the phone of a suspected criminal. But Apple can't do that, and adding a backdoor or the ability of adding a backdoor to the phones of millions of law-abiding citizens, including our honourable and law-abiding judges, politicians etc. , nobody can force Apple to do this.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd say that if you are a sysadmin who somehow doesn't allow iPhones on any networks under your control, then within a week you will either have your mind changed or let go.
While I agree that the taxi industry is not the illuminati, I don't understand how Uber is a commercial vehicle for hire. Then again, I might not fully understand the extent of what Uber does that's applicable under law.
Uber is a taxi service. Except that it doesn't officially employ drivers and pays them a wage, it depends on drivers who have no employment that they can rely upon and who have to carry all the cost of running a car, while taking a hire cut than any other taxi company.
They try to create the illusion that they are a high tech firm connecting clients and drivers, when in reality they are just exploiting the weakest people in the job market and deliberately flout any regulations that protect their employees or customers.
Well since you are so against guns, then kindly please hang yourself. You are what is wrong with this country.
In the USA, many more people kill themselves by using guns than by hanging themselves. That's probably because using a gun doesn't require one bit of brain or one bit of courage.
How can they catch you at the payment point? If I make a request for uber, unless the government is monitoring the app, which now may be encrypted, the uber or lyft car arrives, and money goes from my previously set up account into Uber's coffers. In what way can the government stop this?
Call for a driver, wait for him to turn up, and fine them. Easy enough. If there's a criminal court case, we know you can be forced to decrypt your data. If it's a civil court case, you provide the decrypted data or the judge assumes that it speaks against you.
Where do you draw the line? If your neighbor pays you for a car ride to town, should that be illegal? How about if he does it every day? How about carpooling arrangements where not all people have cars? How about a mom who provides transportation services for her friends, in return for (food/landscaping/snowplowing/money)?
There was a link to the UK rules, which are very clear. If you provide a car with a driver, for profit beyond just expenses, to transport people from A to B, and the transport is not just a minor part of the operation, then you need a license.
In this case: Driving the neighbour for money, once or repeatedly, and mom providing transportation services, would need a license. Carpooling doesn't, because the driver wants to go from A to B himself.
Excellent link. Seems like Uber drivers fall absolutely into the category where you need a "Private Hire Vehicle" license.
Um, it's already illegal to do those things. Call the police when it happens. You know, on that phone you just used to order the taxi.
Sure, cheating/robbing/harming passengers is illegal. However, calling the police doesn't help much if the driver cannot pay for the damage that they caused. That's why I would want to make absolutely sure that Uber can be held responsible for any damage that their drivers cause, just like any other business is responsible for their employers, and that Uber cannot just claim it's non of their business, when it is exactly all of their business.
My question is how insurance companies are dealing with it. I am pretty sure if I was a driver and got in an accident they would pretty much drop me like a hot potato. Unless your insurance policy includes driving as part of working there is no bloody way I would even think of taking this on.
The real problem for Uber when this happens is that they will most likely get sued and found liable. In Germany, because the contracts between Uber and the drivers don't really matter; Uber is a taxi company, no matter what it claims. In the USA, because you only need to be a tiny tiny bit responsible for the damages and you are on the hook for all of it.
Having driven carefully for a while in the UK, my car insurance is quite low nowadays. However, it doesn't cover commercial use of the car. So if I drive a paying passenger, neither the car, nor I, nor the passenger, nor anyone I hit, will be insured. That's driving without insurance.
I can get commercial insurance, but it's _expensive_. Very expensive. Not sure if I need a special license to be allowed to drive paying passengers. So the sting operation that was mentioned is absolutely fine with me. If they drive without insurance, they should be fined very, very hard. I'd also look forward to a court case where Uber is found liable in such a case.
Copyright restricts _any_ copying, and the exclusive rights of the copyright holder, like the creation of derivative works. You may be confused by the GPL which allows you to create derivative works for your own usage.
In principle, even running a program without a license means the program gets copied to RAM, and therefore is copyright infringement. (Microsoft, Apple, Google etc. could probably sue anyone stealing a computer or smartphone or tablet for copyright infringement if the thief ever used the computer).
Then when lawyers request it, they are boned. Depending on your country, that is, and the possibility of the obligatory wrench (xkcd).
Totally wrong in a civil lawsuit. In a civil suit, the judge asks you politely for the information, and you supply it or you don't. If you don't supply it, the judge will assume that you had good reasons. For example, if the insurance says you were running marathons while you claim you are bedridden, and they ask for your encrypted fitbit data, and you don't supply it, then it is assumed that the insurance was right and you are indeed running marathons.
There's one big problem with trying to use fitbit data. There's no way to prove that the device was actually attached to a person that is allegedly producing the data.
In a civil lawsuit, it's not necessary. Say you claim on your insurance because you can't walk 10 metres after an accident and "your" fitbit proves this isn't true. They don't have to _prove_ that it is yours, they have to convince the judge that it is more likely yours than not. In civil cases, there is no right to remain silent, and there is no innocent until proven guilty.
They aren't. But it seems like there's a new trend in town - when a foreign tech company could potentially have guessed that someone using their service might potentially have done something bad, they're automatically at fault. See: Facebook and Lee Rigby in the UK.
That one is totally different. And we don't know actually if it's true. If you were looking for terrorists, the best situation would be to publicly scream at Facebook for not reporting suspicious post, so that the stupid bastards go on posting their plans on Facebook, while Facebook actually reports any suspicious post to the government so they can get arrested in time.
But in most places companies are responsible for the actions of their employees as long as they represent the company. There may be more responsibility if they didn't do reasonable checks, but the employer/employee relationship alone is enough to make them responsible.
If that is the case, and the guy came up clean but yet still went on to do X, how is Uber any more culpable than a taxi company hiring a cabbie with no record, who subsequently goes out and does X, or a tour company hiring a bus driver with a spotless background, who nonetheless does X?
I wouldn't say they are more culpable, but obviously a company hiring taxi drivers should be on the hook for damages that their drivers cause as part of their taxi driving job, and Uber should be just as much on the hook. With the difference that apparently the company is valued as something over forty billion dollars, so I would suggest a high seven digit dollar payout to that lady.
It obviously depends on the situation. In Germany, a company is responsible for paying damages if an employee does something that in the widest sense is "doing their job". For example, if the driver picks up a woman who needs a taxi, and drops her off and drives away some time later, the taxi company would be responsible for anything happening in between. Whether they did safety checks or not; just because they employed him.
Uber. It means super in German. That's misleading. It should be called Rides with Strangers Without Background Checks.
It doesn't. Uber means "I am stupid fucker who tries to impress by using fake German but I'm too stupid to add an umlaut where it belongs". Well, the correct spelling is Ãoeber, but it's anyone guess what slashdot will make of it.
Take it up with the poster above that wrote "targets a person and convinces that person to do something he would not normally have done" if you disagree with such a definition. It certainly fits that definition if you hold the definition to be valid.
It's tricky. An obvious situation is car theft - if the police places a car somewhere with the keys visible inside, that's not entrapment. That's a normal situation that can happen in anyone's life. Telling you to steal the car makes it entrapment.
In this case the whole crime consists of being asked for information and giving it. The person offering money for information is the same as the car with the keys inside offering a free ride. I'd say that on its own is not entrapment.
Actually, it's common across the board In Europe for manufacturers and retails to lie to consumers about their warranty rights.
It's also common for people claiming this and not knowing what they are talking about. First, the manufacturer has nothing to do with this because all rights you have as a consumer (not as a business) is against the seller, not the manufacturer. Second, the five years that you talk about are the time when your legal relationship with the retailer ends; that doesn't mean that after 4 years and 11 months you would have any automatic right to get problems fixed. Items must last a reasonable amount of time; for computers this is typically two years. And you will have to _prove_ that the defect was there when you bought the item after six months.
Gee, how generous of them of them to replace faulty parts. I should go thank GM for their generosity in the latest wave of recalls.
Replacing faulty parts 5 years after the warranty expired _is_ generous, since non-faulty parts often don't last five years.
or perhaps, allegedly, Apple's legal team put these people (the plaintiffs) up to it just so they could easily dismiss future suits of this type. I wouldn't put it past them.
What you are saying is pretty idiotic. Just because lawyer A sues and makes some idiotic mistakes that get the case thrown out doesn't create any precedence for anyone else.
Someone in that company must have thought this is a good idea. Being in that line of business, they should have known that even with a user clicking on "consent", a health care provider giving them the information would be acting illegally. And then I wonder why did they want this information in the first place? You can't use it for anything that isn't again highly illegal.
So, if I loaded all of those MP3s that I made myself onto my iPod, you're saying that it's ok for Apple to delete them?
You wouldn't load them onto the iPod. You would import them into iTunes, and iTunes makes sure that the music you told it to be put onto the iPod will be put onto the iPod, and nothing else. And if you import all your .mp3s into iTunes, they are absolutely safe there.
That's how iTunes and iPod have always worked: In iTunes, you set up what music you want on your iPod, and iTunes puts it there. Take any music you want, add it to iTunes, and it's fine.
Let's be serious here. You say "they are depriving you". That's not the case. What is correct is "some lawyer claims that some time about ten years ago, Apple deprived you, but if you read what he claims, it doesn't actually make any sense, except if you assume that he is a lawyer who would twist anything that Apple ever might have said to make them look guilty and claim damages".
Right now, the situation is: 1. The iTunes database is an ordinary .plist file that you can read with a single method call, it's not difficult to manipulate it and write it back correctly. Of course it's even easier to break it if you are careless. 2. There is a folder somewhere deep in the iTunes folder named "Automatically add to library" or something like that. Any music file added to that folder will automatically be added to the iTunes library. That's what Amazon does with purchases.
More so, if a bank robbers getaway vehicle went on a toll road then the roads operator should be charged with profiting from the proceeds of crime, they clearly facilitated the crime.
Actually, the QE2 bridge / Dartford tunnel in Essex, England are the perfect spot to catch criminals in a car and have been used that way. Close the toll booths and there is just no way to escape. Bit inconvenient for everyone else.
The Justice Department feels that having an embedded back door into the devices' crypto is very "reasonable" and has been pushing for just that. Now they need a judge to rule on their version of the word and the corporations will fall in line.
That might be reasonable if say Apple could add a backdoor to the phone of a suspected criminal. But Apple can't do that, and adding a backdoor or the ability of adding a backdoor to the phones of millions of law-abiding citizens, including our honourable and law-abiding judges, politicians etc. , nobody can force Apple to do this.