Thus is the birth of Skunkworks projects. There's often political reasons that work can't be just done when you have spare time, and it could be that your boss is shielding you from the politics.
Produce something on your own for yourself to teach yourself a new technology. Either do it as something which will help you with your job (IE create software tool sets for problems you expect to encounter in the future, or something to help you manage data you're responsible for tracking), or something which is a personal project (just be sure you know what any contracts say about who owns what, and don't be surprised if they want to own something you made while on the clock for them).
Employment is a situation where both parties are supposed to benefit. You get a paycheck, and become more marketable. They get the product of your work. If you're getting a paycheck and not making yourself more marketable / advancing your career, then you're only getting half what you have coming to you in that job.
The question isn't whether I signed, but what I signed. It can be reasonably assumed that a point of sale credit card signature pad states essentially, "I agree to the terms of my cardholder's agreement." If that signature shows up on anything other than such a document, they won't have a way to prove that the signature is original to that document.
The point isn't to get out of your obligations, the point is to not be bound by obligations to which you didn't agree.
I've stopped shopping at stores that use my credit card as a way to get me on their mailing list.
On vacation, we bought some chocolates at Harry & David. When we got back, there was a catalog from them in our mail with my name (not "Resident") in the address. I haven't shopped there since.
Bought some exercise clothes from the local Nike factory outlet. A few days later I got a flier about an upcoming sale. I haven't shopped there since.
On a related note, I use a modified version of my signature whenever I sign one of those digital signature pads they have in Home Depot, Target, and other chain stores. It's my regular signature with two lines through the first letter of my name. I started doing this when my mom had used something similar while signing up for some kind of insurance or cell phone or something. She discovered that the printed copy of the agreement that she was given - complete with her signature on it - differed from the version which had been displayed to her on the screen before she signed it.
If my signature shows up on something and has those extra marks on it, I have at least a little better leverage to make the case that my signature was never attached to any physical agreement, and there's no way to prove that the terms with my signature were the same as the terms to which I agreed. Those marks mean they never had a physical signature attached to a document, and thus it's wholly unenforceable.
Honestly how they think they can accomplish anything with those pads, I don't get. It's akin to asking you to sign a blank sheet of paper that they can then staple to whatever agreement they want. And the courts would probably find it carries about as much weight as that should it ever become an issue.
I thought this eBill thing was a neat idea when it first came out years ago for one of my monthly services. So I signed up for it. There was an error in my billing a few months later, and I called and had it corrected. Instead of showing up as a correction on my following billing statement, they had changed the original incorrect bill. Looking at my online account, everything seemed as if it had never had an error.
I canceled eBill immediately and refuse it from all other vendors now. I want this information for my own records, and I don't want them being the one who controls it and gets to rewrite history in case there was a problem.
I'd consider it if they could email me a PDF of the same document that comes as a paper bill. They can put all those other bells and whistles on too if they want, but I want a copy in my possession that they don't have access to change, without having to remember to save it out by hand every month, and in a format that gives me the legal leverage I need to be able to prove the document came from them (eg, email headers on the email with the attachment on a 3rd party mail server such as GMail).
EBilling is a way for your service provider to control history, and to deny you access to information which might condemn them should they screw up in some serious way. I need better control over this than ebilling provides.
That's kind of silly. It's called theater because it's not real. It's not actually secure, and it doesn't even really look all that secure except to people who don't think past, "Geeze this is inconvenient, it must be that way for a very good reason."
All that is needed to hijack a plane is the threat of a bomb. Give a note to a stewardess that you have a two-way radio (walkie talkie) connected to a bomb in the checked baggage; if she makes any sudden moves or calls out, boom. Your note indicates that all you have to do is activate it by pressing the button on the radio and BOOM the plane goes down.
You don't even have to have a real bomb, you only have to have the credible threat of a real bomb.
And even if you did want to have a real bomb, with current security measures this would be trivial. Why is it that you can't carry liquids on, but you can check them? It would be trivial to make a mix-on-demand device with the sort of materials which are permissible in checked baggage such as shampoo bottles and a butane lighter.
Anybody seriously considering committing an act of terrorism on a plane today would be wholly capable of doing so with only a very small amount of effort. The only people who would be deterred by security theater are insincere about it, or are acting rashly or out of anger or mental illness. Exactly the same sort of person who wouldn't be deterred by security theater because they didn't think ahead.
Security theater is not a deterrent, and it is not a preventative. This is why it's called security theater and not just "security."
At best it's used to catch people with an outstanding warrant who are also too stupid to realize their name is going to come up on a list and can't afford a fake ID but still want to travel by plane for some reason. This is actually no better than pre-911, the measures used to catch those guys are not new.
Mostly the purpose is to keep terrorism in the forefront of average citizens' minds. This terrorism thing is exactly the lever some folks in positions of power have been looking for in order to increase their power, and to get away with things they otherwise would not have been able to. It's a mantra that when incanted excuses otherwise inexcusable behavior.
In fact, what it really is is exactly what the terrorists wanted. Keeping people living in fear - hence terrorism.
Security theater is the loss of the war on terrorism.
Personally I expect them to uphold this promise of more songs being priced at $0.69 than $1.29. However I expect 99% of the $0.69 songs to be Cindy Lauper, Vanilla Ice, or a 70's Swedish Dance Band remix done with traditional medieval instruments.
The point is they can offer a lot of utter crap at the lower price point. Things that they expect to sell maybe 7 copies of - and as gag gifts at that - and not violate this promise.
I'm not saying they will. I'm just saying that this promise is wholly meaningless.
I wouldn't use JD if it was storing on or went through RackSpace's servers - I dislike them for probably the same reasons as you.
However JD predated RackSpace's acquisition. Being owned by a crappy corporation doesn't retroactively make their software suck. If it were owned by Microsoft, I'd make sure I had a good copy of the current software version which I could keep around because I'd assume that future versions were about to suck.
JD stores the data in your Amazon S3 account, not one of theirs. Rackspace couldn't get access to this information if they wanted it unless Amazon was cooperating in some way, and even then it's encrypted with a key you provide. The monthly fees go to Amazon, not to JD, which is a one-time purchase.
I'm having a hard time, even believing RackSpace is a shoddy corporation, finding a reason that this plays a role in making software they own - but which was not developed by or for them - into a bad decision; they're entirely out of the loop except that they receive future profits (notably I had a license before RackSpace acquired them, so I made the original developers a little better off, and not even RackSpace).
To boot, there's a free version such that you don't even have to give RackSpace any money at all, and you still get access to your files. If you're concerned that future versions will suck, make sure you keep a copy of the current installer around.
$100 1TB drives, and $50 500GB drives fail with amazing alacrity. These are a really bad backup solution. I have owned 4 such drives in the past year and a half or so. Only one still works. Their only good use is for file transfer when network transfer is out of the question (such as taking raw video footage from one location to another).
JungleDisk offers the option to encrypt your data before it is stored on S3. So it's secure in the sense that it can't be snooped upon by Amazon, Jungledisk, or LEO's unless you choose a bad password.
It's also automatically off-site every day. Not many home users will realistically do off-site backups even if they have the hardware to do so. Actually a lot of small and mid-sized businesses have "off-site" backup policies which they get lazy about after a few months too.
Anyway, as stated in a different reply of mine in this same thread, GP post said he was looking for online storage, and I provided what I found to be a cost effective, reliable, convenient solution to this. If you're looking for local storage, buy a network SAN; they have them as stand-alone devices with redundant hot-swappable disks now. This is my primary backup, and my JungleDisk/S3 is my offsite.
Plus $16 and change (just got my billing statement, $16.14 this month) is the cheapest form of insurance I currently own. Car, house, etc all costs a lot more than $0.50/day, and since it's usage based, how much you have to protect determines how much you pay, and it's less than pretty much any other bill I have coming in at home, including for things I'd be way less devastated if they were lost.
Convenience of access from anywhere (only needing to install the client if I really needed access to a file from a remote location), plus the convenience of effort-free off-site backup.
$16/mo to safely and effortlessly back up 8 years of photography seems like an incredibly good deal to me. I pay way the heck more than this for my homeowner's insurance, and this is just another form of personal property insurance. The only monthly bill that regularly falls under this dollar amount, in fact, is my credit cards, mostly because they're an emergency tool only for me. Everything else costs more. Land line, cell phone, TV service, electric, gas, security system, etc - all much more than this, and I'd be way less devastated if any of these services were lost.
GP said he was shopping for storage, and I recommended a reliable, fast, easy, convenient, and inexpensive option =). A common lament from people who have lost their house and all their possessions in a fire is that they cannot get back their photographs. Everything else they can eventually (assuming no deaths), but the photos are gone forever. And the point is you pay per usage. $0.15 (rates have gone down since I signed up for this apparently) per gb per month is a good rate IMO.
I have a local NAS box w/ redundant disks too. That NAS also backs itself up to external USB disks. I work locally, and back up to the NAS automatically at night. It backs itself up automatically the following night (it runs a few hours before my desktop->NAS backup) giving me 2 days local recovery time, plus 7 more days (how I have it configured in JungleDisk) online should I accidentally delete or corrupt something. Plus in the event of a catastrophic failure (house fire, massive power surge, etc), I have the online backup I can fall back on.
FWIW, I've not found inexpensive external drives to be even remotely reliable as a backup. $100 1TB drives (or similarly discounted drives) have a ridiculously high failure rate. Good if you're transferring some files to a buddy, but a really bad idea as a backup solution. Those things tend to fail as a brick. The whole device just quits some day leaving your data trapped, maybe there, maybe not. Maybe reported writing successfully when it didn't. Maybe it wrote successfully, just can't be read again. That's the sort of drive my NAS backs itself up to, and by this point I've replaced enough of those that I really should have bought better ones out the gate, it would have been cheaper.
S3 (a developer platform) coupled with a consumer front end (such as JungleDisk which works on Win/OS X/Lin) makes a great storage/backup solution. With JungleDisk's ability to keep old versions and deleted versions for a specified interval, you don't even have to worry so much that your only backup solution is mirroring (as you'll be able to recover point in time with a little effort). It's great for personal use in this sense.
JungleDisk can even encrypt your files before uploading them, and transparently decrypt them when you retrieve them (3des I believe, with a user-provided private key), so there's no worry about their contents being snooped on by Amazon or overzealous LEO's.
I use this as one of my tiers for backing up my photography and music library (about 43 gig of photography and 30 gig of music). Monthly billing from Amazon is per gb, and it's something really reasonable like $0.16/gb/mo. My billing comes out to under $17 (I've got some other stuff in there too, but the photos and the music would be the hardest to replace).
Only if you fully log out first (or use a different browser that you're not logged in from in the first place). If you just tick, "Post Anonymously," it'll still undo your mods.
This new attack is a coordinated brute force from tens or hundreds of thousands of IP addresses. Each one is only hitting you a few times, so they won't trip per-ip blocking thresholds, but collectively they perform a brute force in the same way that a single host would be able to if you had no blocking threshold in place at all.
Port knocking is a good solution to this, but it's not super portable; I would be unable for example to ssh in from most corporate networks which would block my knocking ports.
I've been thinking about setting up a web page which requires a client TLS certificate to authenticate against it. If the right cert is sent, it opens SSH to the originating IP (or maybe asks me for an IP to allow - this would get me past a corporate http proxy having a different IP from my public IP issue). https://servername.com/openports?ip=aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd. It's easy to configure Apache to reject connections without a properly signed client cert. I can let well-tested portable public/private cryptography handle granting connectivity that way.
You're right, the adults do not have mouth parts. The adult stage is however a very tiny portion of their life, composing around up to two weeks of their 1-17 year life cycle. They spend the majority of their life as a nymph, and the nymph does have mouth parts. When underground the nymph feeds on root juices; above ground they climb onto trees, and may require additional water content to swell enough to break out of their nymphal skin, thus prompting them to eat things high in water content such as tender tips from oak trees.
Last spring was a big year for cicadas (sometimes called locusts); several of the multi-year cicada cycles lined up at once. Plus at least around here it had been several years of mild winters, meaning that more of the larval cicadas survived to maturity.
It takes two years to produce an acorn, so the heavy cicada year last year explains low acorn production this year.
I emailed my mom who lives in Pennsylvania (which was mentioned in the article), and who owns 5 acres of oak trees (terrible for raking in the fall - these leaves decay very slowly and lay very flat - each missed leaf is a dead bit of grass come the spring). She also lives on the edge of ~100 acres of forest composed largely of oak.
Yes, we have lots of acorns - acorns are on a two-year cycle. It takes two years for an acorn to mature; so one year there are lots and the next year there are not very many. Our trees are not synchronized with each other, so we have pretty many acorns every year.
The cicadas this year ate the tender tips of a lot of oak trees - that is where the acorns form.
BUT the oak trees are in trouble. There is a disease called "Sudden Oak Death" that is doing a lot of damage and we have lost at least seven trees in our yard.
She's a zoologist and not a botanist, though botany is a bit of a hobby of hers. This explanation sounds as plausible as any other, and more plausible than most.
So I think that alarmism about this is overboard until there's more information. That said though, environmental concern under the guise of global warming is overall a good thing - it's causing people to pay attention to the impact of their actions on the world.
Just like most main stream causes, the only way to maintain the public attention the cause requires is to either federally mandate the attention, or to engage in a lot of alarmism. The only way to get the federal mandate is to convince politicians that doing so is in their political career's best interest, so you need to engage the public with... alarmism.
Diversity is definitely a good thing. The reason a lot of people get a shiver up their spine when Microsoft is the new diversification partner is that Microsoft is very anti-diversification, and very single-platform. They will pour a lot of money into a market right up until they are sufficiently top to be the ones controlling the decisions made in that market, then their monetary investment will dry up.
It takes a market years to recover from that; I mean it's been said many times, but look at how slow the growth of obviously superior browsers are over IE. This is not a free market, it's Microsoft holding the market share, and resisting all market change. It's the opposite of diversity, and that's typically what they bring to the table under the guise of diversity.
Just out of curiosity, how do you guarantee that home chemists don't dump the results of their failed experiments down the drain into their septic system, contaminating my well water?
When I was growing up, a friend's dad had gotten a hold of a couple of pints of mercury (zounds, it was heavy!). When he decided he was done with whatever it is he had it for (probably scientific curiosity), he dug a hole and poured it out in the back yard. Today that same event would be a major hazmat operation. The tiny amount of mercury in a CFL bulb technically qualifies for hazmat response if you break one.
I know there's no guarantee that companies don't do this either, but at least there's a chance of a whistle blower there (even though we're also talking about a much larger scale).
That's my biggest concern with home chemists - that they won't dispose of their waste products and surplus chemicals correctly, and that they'll contaminate the local environment perhaps irrevocably.
My guess is that it would depend on how much fiber they have to run. If there's available nearby connectivity, it could be quick. If not, it could take a while.
Non-fiber lines tend to be quicker because they typically attach to infrastructure which is already very nearby. Of course you lose the SLA on those lines.
Who compelled anyone to lie? I'm not seeing that connection. They are only incited to lie if they want to give an inaccurate depiction of the facts, and that's completely irrelevant to whether or not they searched his goods without a right.
My position on the 4th amendment is that it stands on its own merits, and is legally inviolable.
My question to you is, if the evidence was viable, why didn't the police get a search warrant? Broken custody and viability of evidence are considerations in the issuing of a search warrant. You can have reasonable cause to search, but if the thing you're searching for offers no value to the case at hand, the search won't be granted. Even when searches are granted, they are granted with restrictions on what may be searched, and what evidence may be obtained. If the search warrant says "house", and there is a detached garage that is not part of the house, then it's off limits. Judges do this because they are limiting the search as much as possible to things which will be relevant to the case.
We're wandering far astray here though. The issue I'm responding to you on (and I waited until today because I know you lost a lot of points on your other comments in this thread, but I'm genuinely interested in debating this with you without it necessarily costing you so much karma), is whether 1) the discovery of evidence justifies an illegal search, and 2) illegally obtained evidence should be considered anyway.
As to #1, I say: never unless there is an immediate threat to someone's safety, and then only as far as is necessary to mitigate the immediate circumstances.
As to #2, I say: again, never. The 4th amendment exists to protect innocent citizens from abuse by authority figures. These authority figures have been granted extraordinary powers, and as with all power, that will corrupt some people ("power corrupts," etc). The 4th amendment acknowledges that there are times when search and seizure are sometimes reasonable, such as when there is sufficient evidence of a crime to merit further investigation. The warrant system has been created to facilitate establishing reasonability. When someone is suspected of having committed a crime, there is a clear procedure in place for the police or other authority figures to be granted access to this "reasonable" clause. It's done with judicial oversight because that is the check and balance which protects against (though arguably doesn't completely eliminate) abuse.
If the search is conducted without this check/balance, a citizen's 4th amendment right has been violated. Whether or not that citizen turns out to have actually been guilty of the crime which was being investigated is not material to whether or not the search was legal, because it presupposes that you know whether the search will turn up convincing evidence. If you accept illegally obtained evidence, then there is no motivation to ever obtain evidence legally. Then finally if there's no reason to ever obtain evidence legally, police officers or others with similar authority would in effect have free reign to search anyone or anything at any time; only claiming that it was part of an investigation. You've stripped the reasonability requirement from searches.
I think you may be suggesting that the motivation to legally obtain evidence should be solely in the form of punishing abuses. The downside to that is that either you make the punishment sufficiently unsevere that sometimes LEO's accept that as simply the cost of performing an illegal search. Or you make it sufficiently high that no LEOs would ever make the decision that the cost was worth it - but in that case you will end up destroying the lives or careers of LEO's who made an honest mistake while acting in good faith. Anywhere in between those two ends, you end up with one consequence or the other becoming more common as you move across the continuum.
I agree, cops who are found to have knowingly and intentionally violated the privacy of a suspect outside of due process deserve to be punished for such in exactly the same way as non-cops doing the same. I believe there's some sort of law about digital trespass which could be applied.
Cops tend to get a free ride when they screw up. To a certain extent, I think there's an occupational hazard there, and I think things should be a little more lenient because honest mistakes in the course of doing their job has greater consequences than the consequences of honest mistakes by ordinary citizens. At the same time though, their honest mistakes have greater consequences such that incorrectly accused innocent citizens can have their life completely ruined - lose their job, friends, wife, family, all because a cop made a mistake.
Where that balancing act lies exactly I'm not sure I'm qualified to say, but I think it would have a lot to do with a consideration of good faith on the part of the police officer. If he legitimately thought he was doing the right thing, consequences should be substantially mitigated (though repeat offenses such as through ineptitude should eventually carry consequences such as loss of status as a police officer).
Here's the problem with admitting the evidence even though it was illegally obtained. If you do this, then there might as well be no 4th amendment at all. Cops would just search whatever they wanted whenever they wanted. They get their wrist slapped, but get to carry away the evidence anyway. Admitting illegally obtained evidence is equivalent to removing all private citizen privacy, it just raises the cost of obtaining it slightly.
Yes, it's a real shame that a person who turns out to have possibly been guilty, but even this does not change for better or for worse the damage which was done to the children in the pornography.
Finally, the details of this case are not as clear-cut as you might like to believe. The computer was in the possession of two other individuals before it arrived to the Police. At least one or both of these individuals had motive for framing the defendant by planting the images on the laptop which was in their control. The chain of custody is broken on this evidence, and there's no sure way to know whether the evidence was planted or not. This is possibly why they didn't obtain a search warrant - because if I were a judge, I would have concluded that any incriminating evidence would not be trustworthy unless it was backed up by enough external supporting evidence (such as prints of the images in question in the defendants house) that the evidence gained from the computer was unnecessary anyway.
So let me be clear about this. Your argument is that the guy is now proven to be guilty, so that justifies the search the cops couldn't or didn't bother to get a warrant for. My argument is that maybe the reason they couldn't or didn't bother to get this warrant is because the evidence wasn't trustworthy anyway.
This is exactly the scenario that is the reason you can't let cops just violate a citizen's rights then still reap all of the benefits.
Also just because your client advertises that it downloaded a file doesn't mean you 1) seeded at all (hence would not have been distributing) and 2) don't have a fair use right to a copy of that file (such as if you had already purchased it through another channel but lost the original somehow). Then finally 3) downloaded a file whose contents are what the file name implies.
You're speaking in the past-perfect tense. You're speaking only with perfect knowledge of what transpired.
The problem is that is not how decisions are made. Decisions are made with imperfect future knowledge. When they decided to search this guy's computer, the did not know if they would find evidence of child pornography. Whether or not they found anything, once again, is completely irrelevant to whether they should have looked at all, because you cannot know before hand if you will find anything; you can only suspect you will.
I agree, there is a balancing act, and we should balance the rights of victims with the rights of criminals, but also with the rights of non-criminals. Fortunately exactly how we balance that is very clearly defined for us by the legal system. When you suspect someone has committed a crime, and you need to violate their 4th amendment rights to prove it, we have this excellent system already set up to facilitate it. It's called the warrant system, and its whole purpose is to balance the rights of victims with the rights of citizens which we do not yet know to be a criminal or not.
You're completely ignoring an entire class of citizen. There's victims, criminals, but most significantly there are people who are neither. THAT is the purpose of the 4th amendment.
I'm not saying, "4th amendment, therefore you can never search," I'm saying, "4th amendment, therefore you need to follow the procedures we have in place which provide checks and balances to protect innocent citizens from abuse by people in authority."
If this guy wasn't a criminal, he still would have had people searching his stuff. Or maybe you don't believe in privacy for innocent citizens at all. If that's the case, then you and the 4th amendment are incompatible, and you should return to Tudor England and stop taking advantage of the freedoms the blood of patriots have purchased for you.
They didn't know that when they violated his constitutional rights. I'm not talking about whether or not he was guilty... I'm talking about whether or not they had a right to look at all - and without a warrant, they didn't.
The 4th amendment doesn't get suspended just because you incant the word, "children."
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Thus is the birth of Skunkworks projects. There's often political reasons that work can't be just done when you have spare time, and it could be that your boss is shielding you from the politics.
Produce something on your own for yourself to teach yourself a new technology. Either do it as something which will help you with your job (IE create software tool sets for problems you expect to encounter in the future, or something to help you manage data you're responsible for tracking), or something which is a personal project (just be sure you know what any contracts say about who owns what, and don't be surprised if they want to own something you made while on the clock for them).
Employment is a situation where both parties are supposed to benefit. You get a paycheck, and become more marketable. They get the product of your work. If you're getting a paycheck and not making yourself more marketable / advancing your career, then you're only getting half what you have coming to you in that job.
The question isn't whether I signed, but what I signed. It can be reasonably assumed that a point of sale credit card signature pad states essentially, "I agree to the terms of my cardholder's agreement." If that signature shows up on anything other than such a document, they won't have a way to prove that the signature is original to that document.
The point isn't to get out of your obligations, the point is to not be bound by obligations to which you didn't agree.
I've stopped shopping at stores that use my credit card as a way to get me on their mailing list.
On vacation, we bought some chocolates at Harry & David. When we got back, there was a catalog from them in our mail with my name (not "Resident") in the address. I haven't shopped there since.
Bought some exercise clothes from the local Nike factory outlet. A few days later I got a flier about an upcoming sale. I haven't shopped there since.
On a related note, I use a modified version of my signature whenever I sign one of those digital signature pads they have in Home Depot, Target, and other chain stores. It's my regular signature with two lines through the first letter of my name. I started doing this when my mom had used something similar while signing up for some kind of insurance or cell phone or something. She discovered that the printed copy of the agreement that she was given - complete with her signature on it - differed from the version which had been displayed to her on the screen before she signed it.
If my signature shows up on something and has those extra marks on it, I have at least a little better leverage to make the case that my signature was never attached to any physical agreement, and there's no way to prove that the terms with my signature were the same as the terms to which I agreed. Those marks mean they never had a physical signature attached to a document, and thus it's wholly unenforceable.
Honestly how they think they can accomplish anything with those pads, I don't get. It's akin to asking you to sign a blank sheet of paper that they can then staple to whatever agreement they want. And the courts would probably find it carries about as much weight as that should it ever become an issue.
I thought this eBill thing was a neat idea when it first came out years ago for one of my monthly services. So I signed up for it. There was an error in my billing a few months later, and I called and had it corrected. Instead of showing up as a correction on my following billing statement, they had changed the original incorrect bill. Looking at my online account, everything seemed as if it had never had an error.
I canceled eBill immediately and refuse it from all other vendors now. I want this information for my own records, and I don't want them being the one who controls it and gets to rewrite history in case there was a problem.
I'd consider it if they could email me a PDF of the same document that comes as a paper bill. They can put all those other bells and whistles on too if they want, but I want a copy in my possession that they don't have access to change, without having to remember to save it out by hand every month, and in a format that gives me the legal leverage I need to be able to prove the document came from them (eg, email headers on the email with the attachment on a 3rd party mail server such as GMail).
EBilling is a way for your service provider to control history, and to deny you access to information which might condemn them should they screw up in some serious way. I need better control over this than ebilling provides.
That's kind of silly. It's called theater because it's not real. It's not actually secure, and it doesn't even really look all that secure except to people who don't think past, "Geeze this is inconvenient, it must be that way for a very good reason."
All that is needed to hijack a plane is the threat of a bomb. Give a note to a stewardess that you have a two-way radio (walkie talkie) connected to a bomb in the checked baggage; if she makes any sudden moves or calls out, boom. Your note indicates that all you have to do is activate it by pressing the button on the radio and BOOM the plane goes down.
You don't even have to have a real bomb, you only have to have the credible threat of a real bomb.
And even if you did want to have a real bomb, with current security measures this would be trivial. Why is it that you can't carry liquids on, but you can check them? It would be trivial to make a mix-on-demand device with the sort of materials which are permissible in checked baggage such as shampoo bottles and a butane lighter.
Anybody seriously considering committing an act of terrorism on a plane today would be wholly capable of doing so with only a very small amount of effort. The only people who would be deterred by security theater are insincere about it, or are acting rashly or out of anger or mental illness. Exactly the same sort of person who wouldn't be deterred by security theater because they didn't think ahead.
Security theater is not a deterrent, and it is not a preventative. This is why it's called security theater and not just "security."
At best it's used to catch people with an outstanding warrant who are also too stupid to realize their name is going to come up on a list and can't afford a fake ID but still want to travel by plane for some reason. This is actually no better than pre-911, the measures used to catch those guys are not new.
Mostly the purpose is to keep terrorism in the forefront of average citizens' minds. This terrorism thing is exactly the lever some folks in positions of power have been looking for in order to increase their power, and to get away with things they otherwise would not have been able to. It's a mantra that when incanted excuses otherwise inexcusable behavior.
In fact, what it really is is exactly what the terrorists wanted. Keeping people living in fear - hence terrorism.
Security theater is the loss of the war on terrorism.
Personally I expect them to uphold this promise of more songs being priced at $0.69 than $1.29. However I expect 99% of the $0.69 songs to be Cindy Lauper, Vanilla Ice, or a 70's Swedish Dance Band remix done with traditional medieval instruments.
The point is they can offer a lot of utter crap at the lower price point. Things that they expect to sell maybe 7 copies of - and as gag gifts at that - and not violate this promise.
I'm not saying they will. I'm just saying that this promise is wholly meaningless.
I wouldn't use JD if it was storing on or went through RackSpace's servers - I dislike them for probably the same reasons as you.
However JD predated RackSpace's acquisition. Being owned by a crappy corporation doesn't retroactively make their software suck. If it were owned by Microsoft, I'd make sure I had a good copy of the current software version which I could keep around because I'd assume that future versions were about to suck.
JD stores the data in your Amazon S3 account, not one of theirs. Rackspace couldn't get access to this information if they wanted it unless Amazon was cooperating in some way, and even then it's encrypted with a key you provide. The monthly fees go to Amazon, not to JD, which is a one-time purchase.
I'm having a hard time, even believing RackSpace is a shoddy corporation, finding a reason that this plays a role in making software they own - but which was not developed by or for them - into a bad decision; they're entirely out of the loop except that they receive future profits (notably I had a license before RackSpace acquired them, so I made the original developers a little better off, and not even RackSpace).
To boot, there's a free version such that you don't even have to give RackSpace any money at all, and you still get access to your files. If you're concerned that future versions will suck, make sure you keep a copy of the current installer around.
$100 1TB drives, and $50 500GB drives fail with amazing alacrity. These are a really bad backup solution. I have owned 4 such drives in the past year and a half or so. Only one still works. Their only good use is for file transfer when network transfer is out of the question (such as taking raw video footage from one location to another).
JungleDisk offers the option to encrypt your data before it is stored on S3. So it's secure in the sense that it can't be snooped upon by Amazon, Jungledisk, or LEO's unless you choose a bad password.
It's also automatically off-site every day. Not many home users will realistically do off-site backups even if they have the hardware to do so. Actually a lot of small and mid-sized businesses have "off-site" backup policies which they get lazy about after a few months too.
Anyway, as stated in a different reply of mine in this same thread, GP post said he was looking for online storage, and I provided what I found to be a cost effective, reliable, convenient solution to this. If you're looking for local storage, buy a network SAN; they have them as stand-alone devices with redundant hot-swappable disks now. This is my primary backup, and my JungleDisk/S3 is my offsite.
Plus $16 and change (just got my billing statement, $16.14 this month) is the cheapest form of insurance I currently own. Car, house, etc all costs a lot more than $0.50/day, and since it's usage based, how much you have to protect determines how much you pay, and it's less than pretty much any other bill I have coming in at home, including for things I'd be way less devastated if they were lost.
JungleDisk stores data on Amazon's S3 servers, not RackSpace's.
Convenience of access from anywhere (only needing to install the client if I really needed access to a file from a remote location), plus the convenience of effort-free off-site backup.
$16/mo to safely and effortlessly back up 8 years of photography seems like an incredibly good deal to me. I pay way the heck more than this for my homeowner's insurance, and this is just another form of personal property insurance. The only monthly bill that regularly falls under this dollar amount, in fact, is my credit cards, mostly because they're an emergency tool only for me. Everything else costs more. Land line, cell phone, TV service, electric, gas, security system, etc - all much more than this, and I'd be way less devastated if any of these services were lost.
GP said he was shopping for storage, and I recommended a reliable, fast, easy, convenient, and inexpensive option =). A common lament from people who have lost their house and all their possessions in a fire is that they cannot get back their photographs. Everything else they can eventually (assuming no deaths), but the photos are gone forever. And the point is you pay per usage. $0.15 (rates have gone down since I signed up for this apparently) per gb per month is a good rate IMO.
I have a local NAS box w/ redundant disks too. That NAS also backs itself up to external USB disks. I work locally, and back up to the NAS automatically at night. It backs itself up automatically the following night (it runs a few hours before my desktop->NAS backup) giving me 2 days local recovery time, plus 7 more days (how I have it configured in JungleDisk) online should I accidentally delete or corrupt something. Plus in the event of a catastrophic failure (house fire, massive power surge, etc), I have the online backup I can fall back on.
FWIW, I've not found inexpensive external drives to be even remotely reliable as a backup. $100 1TB drives (or similarly discounted drives) have a ridiculously high failure rate. Good if you're transferring some files to a buddy, but a really bad idea as a backup solution. Those things tend to fail as a brick. The whole device just quits some day leaving your data trapped, maybe there, maybe not. Maybe reported writing successfully when it didn't. Maybe it wrote successfully, just can't be read again. That's the sort of drive my NAS backs itself up to, and by this point I've replaced enough of those that I really should have bought better ones out the gate, it would have been cheaper.
S3 (a developer platform) coupled with a consumer front end (such as JungleDisk which works on Win/OS X/Lin) makes a great storage/backup solution. With JungleDisk's ability to keep old versions and deleted versions for a specified interval, you don't even have to worry so much that your only backup solution is mirroring (as you'll be able to recover point in time with a little effort). It's great for personal use in this sense.
JungleDisk can even encrypt your files before uploading them, and transparently decrypt them when you retrieve them (3des I believe, with a user-provided private key), so there's no worry about their contents being snooped on by Amazon or overzealous LEO's.
I use this as one of my tiers for backing up my photography and music library (about 43 gig of photography and 30 gig of music). Monthly billing from Amazon is per gb, and it's something really reasonable like $0.16/gb/mo. My billing comes out to under $17 (I've got some other stuff in there too, but the photos and the music would be the hardest to replace).
Only if you fully log out first (or use a different browser that you're not logged in from in the first place). If you just tick, "Post Anonymously," it'll still undo your mods.
This new attack is a coordinated brute force from tens or hundreds of thousands of IP addresses. Each one is only hitting you a few times, so they won't trip per-ip blocking thresholds, but collectively they perform a brute force in the same way that a single host would be able to if you had no blocking threshold in place at all.
Port knocking is a good solution to this, but it's not super portable; I would be unable for example to ssh in from most corporate networks which would block my knocking ports.
I've been thinking about setting up a web page which requires a client TLS certificate to authenticate against it. If the right cert is sent, it opens SSH to the originating IP (or maybe asks me for an IP to allow - this would get me past a corporate http proxy having a different IP from my public IP issue). https://servername.com/openports?ip=aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd. It's easy to configure Apache to reject connections without a properly signed client cert. I can let well-tested portable public/private cryptography handle granting connectivity that way.
You're right, the adults do not have mouth parts. The adult stage is however a very tiny portion of their life, composing around up to two weeks of their 1-17 year life cycle. They spend the majority of their life as a nymph, and the nymph does have mouth parts. When underground the nymph feeds on root juices; above ground they climb onto trees, and may require additional water content to swell enough to break out of their nymphal skin, thus prompting them to eat things high in water content such as tender tips from oak trees.
Last spring was a big year for cicadas (sometimes called locusts); several of the multi-year cicada cycles lined up at once. Plus at least around here it had been several years of mild winters, meaning that more of the larval cicadas survived to maturity.
It takes two years to produce an acorn, so the heavy cicada year last year explains low acorn production this year.
I emailed my mom who lives in Pennsylvania (which was mentioned in the article), and who owns 5 acres of oak trees (terrible for raking in the fall - these leaves decay very slowly and lay very flat - each missed leaf is a dead bit of grass come the spring). She also lives on the edge of ~100 acres of forest composed largely of oak.
She's a zoologist and not a botanist, though botany is a bit of a hobby of hers. This explanation sounds as plausible as any other, and more plausible than most.
So I think that alarmism about this is overboard until there's more information. That said though, environmental concern under the guise of global warming is overall a good thing - it's causing people to pay attention to the impact of their actions on the world.
Just like most main stream causes, the only way to maintain the public attention the cause requires is to either federally mandate the attention, or to engage in a lot of alarmism. The only way to get the federal mandate is to convince politicians that doing so is in their political career's best interest, so you need to engage the public with... alarmism.
Diversity is definitely a good thing. The reason a lot of people get a shiver up their spine when Microsoft is the new diversification partner is that Microsoft is very anti-diversification, and very single-platform. They will pour a lot of money into a market right up until they are sufficiently top to be the ones controlling the decisions made in that market, then their monetary investment will dry up.
It takes a market years to recover from that; I mean it's been said many times, but look at how slow the growth of obviously superior browsers are over IE. This is not a free market, it's Microsoft holding the market share, and resisting all market change. It's the opposite of diversity, and that's typically what they bring to the table under the guise of diversity.
Just out of curiosity, how do you guarantee that home chemists don't dump the results of their failed experiments down the drain into their septic system, contaminating my well water?
When I was growing up, a friend's dad had gotten a hold of a couple of pints of mercury (zounds, it was heavy!). When he decided he was done with whatever it is he had it for (probably scientific curiosity), he dug a hole and poured it out in the back yard. Today that same event would be a major hazmat operation. The tiny amount of mercury in a CFL bulb technically qualifies for hazmat response if you break one.
I know there's no guarantee that companies don't do this either, but at least there's a chance of a whistle blower there (even though we're also talking about a much larger scale).
That's my biggest concern with home chemists - that they won't dispose of their waste products and surplus chemicals correctly, and that they'll contaminate the local environment perhaps irrevocably.
My guess is that it would depend on how much fiber they have to run. If there's available nearby connectivity, it could be quick. If not, it could take a while.
Non-fiber lines tend to be quicker because they typically attach to infrastructure which is already very nearby. Of course you lose the SLA on those lines.
Who compelled anyone to lie? I'm not seeing that connection. They are only incited to lie if they want to give an inaccurate depiction of the facts, and that's completely irrelevant to whether or not they searched his goods without a right.
My position on the 4th amendment is that it stands on its own merits, and is legally inviolable.
My question to you is, if the evidence was viable, why didn't the police get a search warrant? Broken custody and viability of evidence are considerations in the issuing of a search warrant. You can have reasonable cause to search, but if the thing you're searching for offers no value to the case at hand, the search won't be granted. Even when searches are granted, they are granted with restrictions on what may be searched, and what evidence may be obtained. If the search warrant says "house", and there is a detached garage that is not part of the house, then it's off limits. Judges do this because they are limiting the search as much as possible to things which will be relevant to the case.
We're wandering far astray here though. The issue I'm responding to you on (and I waited until today because I know you lost a lot of points on your other comments in this thread, but I'm genuinely interested in debating this with you without it necessarily costing you so much karma), is whether 1) the discovery of evidence justifies an illegal search, and 2) illegally obtained evidence should be considered anyway.
As to #1, I say: never unless there is an immediate threat to someone's safety, and then only as far as is necessary to mitigate the immediate circumstances.
As to #2, I say: again, never. The 4th amendment exists to protect innocent citizens from abuse by authority figures. These authority figures have been granted extraordinary powers, and as with all power, that will corrupt some people ("power corrupts," etc). The 4th amendment acknowledges that there are times when search and seizure are sometimes reasonable, such as when there is sufficient evidence of a crime to merit further investigation. The warrant system has been created to facilitate establishing reasonability. When someone is suspected of having committed a crime, there is a clear procedure in place for the police or other authority figures to be granted access to this "reasonable" clause. It's done with judicial oversight because that is the check and balance which protects against (though arguably doesn't completely eliminate) abuse.
If the search is conducted without this check/balance, a citizen's 4th amendment right has been violated. Whether or not that citizen turns out to have actually been guilty of the crime which was being investigated is not material to whether or not the search was legal, because it presupposes that you know whether the search will turn up convincing evidence. If you accept illegally obtained evidence, then there is no motivation to ever obtain evidence legally. Then finally if there's no reason to ever obtain evidence legally, police officers or others with similar authority would in effect have free reign to search anyone or anything at any time; only claiming that it was part of an investigation. You've stripped the reasonability requirement from searches.
I think you may be suggesting that the motivation to legally obtain evidence should be solely in the form of punishing abuses. The downside to that is that either you make the punishment sufficiently unsevere that sometimes LEO's accept that as simply the cost of performing an illegal search. Or you make it sufficiently high that no LEOs would ever make the decision that the cost was worth it - but in that case you will end up destroying the lives or careers of LEO's who made an honest mistake while acting in good faith. Anywhere in between those two ends, you end up with one consequence or the other becoming more common as you move across the continuum.
I agree, cops who are found to have knowingly and intentionally violated the privacy of a suspect outside of due process deserve to be punished for such in exactly the same way as non-cops doing the same. I believe there's some sort of law about digital trespass which could be applied.
Cops tend to get a free ride when they screw up. To a certain extent, I think there's an occupational hazard there, and I think things should be a little more lenient because honest mistakes in the course of doing their job has greater consequences than the consequences of honest mistakes by ordinary citizens. At the same time though, their honest mistakes have greater consequences such that incorrectly accused innocent citizens can have their life completely ruined - lose their job, friends, wife, family, all because a cop made a mistake.
Where that balancing act lies exactly I'm not sure I'm qualified to say, but I think it would have a lot to do with a consideration of good faith on the part of the police officer. If he legitimately thought he was doing the right thing, consequences should be substantially mitigated (though repeat offenses such as through ineptitude should eventually carry consequences such as loss of status as a police officer).
Here's the problem with admitting the evidence even though it was illegally obtained. If you do this, then there might as well be no 4th amendment at all. Cops would just search whatever they wanted whenever they wanted. They get their wrist slapped, but get to carry away the evidence anyway. Admitting illegally obtained evidence is equivalent to removing all private citizen privacy, it just raises the cost of obtaining it slightly.
Yes, it's a real shame that a person who turns out to have possibly been guilty, but even this does not change for better or for worse the damage which was done to the children in the pornography.
Finally, the details of this case are not as clear-cut as you might like to believe. The computer was in the possession of two other individuals before it arrived to the Police. At least one or both of these individuals had motive for framing the defendant by planting the images on the laptop which was in their control. The chain of custody is broken on this evidence, and there's no sure way to know whether the evidence was planted or not. This is possibly why they didn't obtain a search warrant - because if I were a judge, I would have concluded that any incriminating evidence would not be trustworthy unless it was backed up by enough external supporting evidence (such as prints of the images in question in the defendants house) that the evidence gained from the computer was unnecessary anyway.
So let me be clear about this. Your argument is that the guy is now proven to be guilty, so that justifies the search the cops couldn't or didn't bother to get a warrant for. My argument is that maybe the reason they couldn't or didn't bother to get this warrant is because the evidence wasn't trustworthy anyway.
This is exactly the scenario that is the reason you can't let cops just violate a citizen's rights then still reap all of the benefits.
Also just because your client advertises that it downloaded a file doesn't mean you 1) seeded at all (hence would not have been distributing) and 2) don't have a fair use right to a copy of that file (such as if you had already purchased it through another channel but lost the original somehow). Then finally 3) downloaded a file whose contents are what the file name implies.
Thank you, that is an excellent point.
You're speaking in the past-perfect tense. You're speaking only with perfect knowledge of what transpired.
The problem is that is not how decisions are made. Decisions are made with imperfect future knowledge. When they decided to search this guy's computer, the did not know if they would find evidence of child pornography. Whether or not they found anything, once again, is completely irrelevant to whether they should have looked at all, because you cannot know before hand if you will find anything; you can only suspect you will.
I agree, there is a balancing act, and we should balance the rights of victims with the rights of criminals, but also with the rights of non-criminals. Fortunately exactly how we balance that is very clearly defined for us by the legal system. When you suspect someone has committed a crime, and you need to violate their 4th amendment rights to prove it, we have this excellent system already set up to facilitate it. It's called the warrant system, and its whole purpose is to balance the rights of victims with the rights of citizens which we do not yet know to be a criminal or not.
You're completely ignoring an entire class of citizen. There's victims, criminals, but most significantly there are people who are neither. THAT is the purpose of the 4th amendment.
I'm not saying, "4th amendment, therefore you can never search," I'm saying, "4th amendment, therefore you need to follow the procedures we have in place which provide checks and balances to protect innocent citizens from abuse by people in authority."
If this guy wasn't a criminal, he still would have had people searching his stuff. Or maybe you don't believe in privacy for innocent citizens at all. If that's the case, then you and the 4th amendment are incompatible, and you should return to Tudor England and stop taking advantage of the freedoms the blood of patriots have purchased for you.
They didn't know that when they violated his constitutional rights. I'm not talking about whether or not he was guilty... I'm talking about whether or not they had a right to look at all - and without a warrant, they didn't.
The 4th amendment doesn't get suspended just because you incant the word, "children."