OMG. That is just TOO FUNNY. I can totally appreciate the irony of that given all of the pontificating I have done in this thread about how slashdot quality is going down.
For what it's worth, I am sure I used to post before I had an ID, back when you just typed whatever nickname you wanted to show up next to your post, for every post. But, my posts back then probably weren't any more worthwhile than the drivel I have posted since.
How do you tell what year comments or articles come from? Whenever I do a google search and end up on a Slashdot article, or go back and read old articles or comments, I can never tell what year they are from. Neither the page nor the URL contain anything that I can identify as the year. How do you tell?
Well, it's not that my memory for detail is very good - it isn't - but for some reason at the time (in 1998 apparently) I did notice the change when it happened, I can't remember why, probably because there were so many changes going on to the site back then as it evolved into its current state, and I was very in tune with the site at the time and the direction it was taking. Remember that this used to be in big letters on the front page logo, so it was pretty easy to notice back then. You probably noticed it but long since forgot.
And I've always referred back to that memory when I think about how Slashdot "isn't as good as it used to be", with the crappy editors (zonk and kdawson come to mind) posting stories that constantly make me wish I could break the habit of reading slashdot. So whereas I would normally forget such trivia, I remembered this because it's close to an issue that I care about (and honestly, I do care about the quality of Slashdot because I've been reading it for a long time, I've enjoyed it most of that time, and I don't want to see the quality of the site degrade any further).
All that being said, I still think Slashdot is on balance worth reading, which is why I still read it. I gave up on it for a couple of months last year but I came back...
Thanks for the great response, the points you make are very good.
But it was indeed "Slashdot: News for Nerds on the Stuff That Matters" at one point. If you look at this link from archive.org:
http://web.archive.org/web/19980113191222/http://s lashdot.org/... which is the oldest slashdot.org link there (from Jan 13, 1998), you can see this. On my browser the logo at the top of the page is just a grey blob which I am sure was at one point a picture reading "Slashdot: News for Nerds on the Stuff that Matters". If you look at the HTML source, you can see that the alt text for this image is the old slogan.
The next oldest link that works from archive.org is from Nov. 11, 1998, and the logo and the alt text at that point had already been changed to "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters."
My memory was wrong, I thought that the change happened in late 1999 or 2000 sometime, around the time that Slashdot's parent company (Andover.net) went public. I guess it was sometime in 1998 that the slogan was changed.
That was a very good reply to my rant. I appreciate the info.
Yes, it really was "News for Nerds on the Stuff that Matters" at one time, I just searched on archive.org and found some references to this slogan in 1998 but couldn't find it after that. I guess it wasn't around as long as I thought, I remember the change happening in like 2000 or something but I guess I am wrong.
And yes, I was just being cranky in my post about this story. I hate lame stories on Slashdot, they waste my time. But yeah I know, I don't get to choose the stories that they post. But to further state the obvious, I am allowed to post my comments on the article as well, which I did. And of course, people are allowed to mod me down too, and they did, last time I looked I was at 0: Troll. Oh well.
As you can see from my user number, I've been around a while, and I've seen some really lame stories posted here. But this one is execptional in its worthlessness.
"News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters." Anyone else remember when that was "News for Nerds ON THE Stuff that Matters?" A subtle change but taking out the "on the" would seem to allow the site to post stories that have nothing to do with geek interests anymore, as long as it's "stuff that matters" - basically opening the door for any story that the editor thinks "matters" regardless of how irrrelevent it is to nerd interests.
But I digress. This story is stupid and uninteresting. The editorial introduction to the story posted above is completely unhelpful in describing the relevent details of the story (who is this Jack Thompson person? Am I just supposed to know which of the thousands of Jack Thompsons in the world this person is or why I should care about them?).
To save you some time (although if you're still reading this post clearly your time isn't that important to you): the Jack Thompson in question was one of the lawyers involved in the case in which "an 18-year old in Alabama was allegedly under the influence of Grand Theft Auto when he murdered two police officers and a police dispatcher in 2004". I guess his relationship to a gaming-related trial is what makes this "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters." Aside from that, the article is just an explanation about how he's trying to subpoena a bunch of seemingly ireelevent people to support his case against being disbarred for conduct in that case. Don't bother reading the story. It is pretty uninteresting.
One could try to say that this is relevent to gaming, but it really isn't. The case was relevent, its outcome was relevent. This dude going off the deep end after the trial in a way that has nothing to do with gaming, is certainly not.
What you link to is interesting, but it only applies to individuals acting "under color of law", and it goes on to give as examples police officers, judges, and the like. I don't think that store employees really fall into this category, since working at a store gives you no additional authority of law whatsoever.
Looking back in the original post, I can see your point.
The original poster mixed some talk both about how a sign posted at the front of a store could be construed as a valid contract, with some talk about giving up your rights.
I think that you are correct, you cannot give up your rights by entering into such a contract, and if that's what the original poster was implying, then he is wrong about that part. And I think that I am correct, that there is some validity to such a claim that the contract is valid, and you can be sued and lose for breaching the contract by refusing to allow your bags to be searched, and if that's what the original poster was implying, then he is right about that part.
What we're talking about are not your inalienable rights. What we're talking about is whether or not you can enter into a contract with a store by reading to and implicitly agreeing to their terms to enter their store. You cannot be arrested for ignoring their terms. You are not giving up your right to refuse to be searched and to walk peacefully out of the store. But you are also not getting a free ticket to violate the store's rules; it is a civil matter and you could be sued for breach of contract. You won't go to jail, but you could be found guilty of violating the contract and have to pay damages. This is what we're talking about. Nobody brought criminal law and unalienable rights into this except you. I suspect that you misunderstood what the original poster was talking about, which was contracts, not criminal laws.
Thinking about it some more, I believe that most programs would in fact show a different message to the user in the blocked packets vs. forged RST cases.
For blocked packets, I would expect the program to tell the user "the remote peer could not be reached". In which case the user would believe that the remote peer either doesn't exist anymore, or for some reason temporarily could not be contacted.
For forged RST packets, I would expect the program to tell the user "Connection established" and then immediately thereafter "Remote peer disconnected". In the user's eyes this would probably look alot more like the remote peer either is broken, or is exlicitly refusing to talk to them, but in either case, exists and is reachable.
These are different user experiences, but I fail to see how the second case (which presents false information to the user) can be construed as damaging to them. Had Comcast done the former, the user would have concluded that they can't talk to the remote peer. Had Comcast done the latter, the user would have concluded that they can't talk to the remote peer.
I think that the only reason that the mail forging you are talking about was prosecuted successfully was because of a precedent in which such mail forging was known to have been damaging to the affected servers. To put it simply: there was indeed harm being caused to the servers by this type of forgery, so there was a good reason to award a judgement and damages to the affected parties.
On the other hand, what damages are an individual user suffering from this type of forging? Keep in mind that the only *additional* effect of the forging is that instead of the connection just being blocked (as it would be if the Comcast servers just dropped the packets), it's being blocked in a way that makes the originating program think that the remote peer explicitly closed down a connection, rather than the remote peer having been unreachable. In either case, the TCP/IP connection is not made and I doubt that any such program would even distinguish between these two cases in its report of the failure back to the user.
So I can't see any explicit harm being done to anyone by this type of packet forging, in which case, I don't think that any prosecution of Comcast would be successful (exactly what harm did they do?). Once again I think it corresponds pretty closely with my baseball bat vs. toothpick analogy.
Your Alice and Bob thing is *almost* a much better anology. Instead you should have said, Alice and Bob haven't started talking yet. Alice says "hi, can we talk?", and you, hiding around a corner, mimic Bob's voice and shout "No!".
I think mimic is a good choice of words here. When does a very minor act of mimicking someone else become a full-blown act of impersonation? I think of impersonation as implicitly involving a back-and-forth communication wherein the mimicking of the impersonated party continues to be convincing and establishes a tangible stream of communication in which relevent information is conveyed. I think of my revised Alice and Bob example, and the RST packet spoofing, as a very minor act of mimicking. Obviously it's a grey area where you draw the line, but I really feel like even if you grant that this tiny bit of mimicking is impersonation, it is so minor as to be basically inconsequential and without sufficient damage to the impersonated party to warrant a judgement in their favor.
OK, but if that was the point you were trying to make, I don't think your counter-example made it because it didn't address any of the fundamental points points he made in defense of his position. He quite clearly stated that such signs are "typically considered valid contracts" and gave some points about why they are considered valid contracts when shrinkwrap licenses are not. Then you gave a counter-example which was essentially the epitomy of an invalid shrinkwrap-type license, which doesn't address his point at all (he already admitted that shrinkwrap-type licenses are not valid). His points are about the ways that a sign that you could read while entering a store could be considered valid. But you don't address those points other than to say that you disagree with them ("that's just not how it works" is not a convincing argument).
I think that what he said sounds pretty sound. The store puts a big sign up that you'd have a hard time missing. Clearly it's something they want you to read. The sign tells you ahead of time that you're not allowed in their store unless you agree to allow them to search your bags on the way out. The reason that this is acceptable is that the store is a) giving you an opportunity to read the terms ahead of time (contrast with a sign at the exit which you could not read ahead of time), b) allowing you to disagree by declining to enter the store (contrast with a note on your receipt that said that because you bought a product you agree to be searched - you never got an opportunity to disagree before making your purchase), and c) giving you something in exchange for agreeing to these terms: the right to enter the store (the store owner is certainly allowed to bar your entry, it is private property after all).
All of these things are the original poster's points and you haven't yet refuted any of them explicitly.
The original poster even went on to clarify a way in which such a sign could be argued to NOT be effective in establishing a "contract" between you and the store: you might not understand the sign, even if you did read it, so in effect no contract was established. But the original poster went on to make a very good point that if you understand your rights well enough to challenge a police officer, then you would have understood the sign as well.
The original poster made good points, and so far, I haven't seen you make any reasonable rebuttal to them except to just say "he's flat out wrong". Do you have any justification for your statements at all?
You're talking about an entire mail message with real content delivered to an end user who sees the mail, which is itself clearly attempting to deceive the user into believing that its specific and detailed message came from another party than the true originator. There is so much more content involved here than just a single RST packet that the user will never see, that it is absolutely not even close to the same thing.
Saying that these two cases are not materially different is like saying that hitting someone with a baseball bat is not materially different from hitting them with a toothpick. OK we might say that both are assault in principle because in both cases the victim is being struck against their will with a foreign object. But would a judge/jury ever really decide that hitting someone with a toothpick is an act worthy of being called "assault"?
Similarly, is a single RST packet forged by an ISP automatically and without intent to harm a specific individual, and with no data payload that would ever be seen by an end-user, really likely to be called forgery (or impersonation) by a court?
No end user ever sees the contents of TCP/IP RST packets. This makes your analogy with the letters flawed, because they contain specific communication directed at the user which the user will see and interpret.
Obviously we disagree about whether or not an RST packet contains information sufficient to be deemed communication to the end-user. Even if I grant you that there is information in an RST packet, I still don't think that it's enough to be called "impersonation". That's like me "impersonating" you by saying the letter "M" and then you claiming that you begin many sentences with the letter "M" so I must have been trying to impersonate you with that tiny utterance.
The packets in question are just part of the handshake process of setting up a TCP/IP connection. I am pretty sure that they don't have any data in them at all. But I could be wrong, and if I am, please correct me.
You are comparing TCP/IP packets with letterhead? An end-user will never see any of the contents of a TCP RST or ACK packet. The data contained therein aren't really even part of the meaningful communication channel of the network connection.
The packets in question are more like the bag that the mail carrier delivers your mail in. He doesn't give you the bag, you never get to see it, it just facilitates the delivery of your mail. It's not part of the communication itself. It just facilitates the communication.
I cannot even imagine what the point of your original post was if not to try to provide a (poorly conceived) counter-example. Except for a bad counter-example that missed his point completely, your post would have had no content whatosever.
Even if it *is* impersonation (and I don't agree that it is, because the packets in question are part of a networking protocol and not messages being sent by one person to another), it's impersonation of one computer by another computer. I don't think it necessarily follows that this can be construed as impersonation of an individual, especially when the mechanism for this supposed impersonation is a low-level networking protocol packet, not a user-generated message.
Bad analogy. Letters contain tangible information: messages that one person intends to convey to another. TCP/IP packets that are part of the handshake necessary to establish a network connection, do not contain any tangible information that originated with the sender. They are part of a low-level network protocol. They contain no meaningful data. They are just part of the process of establishing a TCP/IP connection. Very different from letters containing written words.
But it's not a "message being sent". It is part of a low-level networking protocol. It contains no data other than that necessary to facilitate the communication mechanism, i.e. a TCP/IP connection.
We could try to split hairs and define whether or not the act of your computer refusing someone else's attempts to communicate with it is a form of communication or not, and ponder the question of whether you can really say anything by refusing to speak, but I think this is an extremely tenous way to try to define impersonation. And I agree with the GP that no court would call this type of thing impersonation.
Not obedient to me, no. I guess maybe obedience is the wrong word. It's more an intense desire to avoid confrontation. She won't do what I want her to, but she won't confront me about it either.
Thank you also for your thoughtful reply. I aplogize for implying that you are like the cops or the store employees.
Unfortunately for me, my wife feels the same way about these things as you do, so I get alot of grief from her about this stuff. I'm not as polite as you and my first course is to completely ignore people asking for my receipt on the way out. If they press the issue I say, "if you think I've stolen something please feel free to call the police, if not, please get out of my way as you have no right to stop me." My wife hates that. She doesn't understand why anyone would choose confrontation over obedience. I think it's her upbringing in a pretty strict Chinese family. But that's neither here nor there.
So in a sense I guess that I defend the actions of people like the guy who is at the center of this story, because in a way it's like defending my own actions.
As to the side effects that you mention (getting arrested, father bailing him out), I think that probably he regrets them in a sense, but feels pretty confident that they were worth the sacrifice for standing up for his rights. He probably perceives that only he was hurt by the arrest itself, and that it wasn't that painful. I think it's very telling that he *does* specifically mention regretting that the experience was upsetting to his siblings, because that is real pain being felt by persons completely uninvolved in the situation. My point being, he's made a pretty clear distinction between regretful aspects of the situation that either aren't that big of a deal to him or those involved, and regretful aspects that were truly troubling to innocent third parties.
I have to agree with you that he's not unhappy with how things turned out. Sounds like the worst that happened were some inconveniences to him (especially with regards to losing some hours of time and missing all or part of a family reunion) and his dad's posting of bail. Also it upset his siblings. All in all, no irreparable harm of any kind. So what's to be so unhappy about? Perhaps he doesn't realize the full implications of having been arrested (I know I wouldn't, since I never have been) - someone else posted in a comment that if you are arrested, regardless of the outcome, you lose your visa-less privilege for travel to many countries friendly to the U.S. That sounds like it would suck, and I would definitely regret that if it were me, and I'm guessing he doesn't know about this consequence of his arrest.
On the other hand, he gets to feel good about having stood up for his rights in the face of false arrest by a police officer and unlawful detainment by some store employees. He gets to believe that he is helping to protect the rights of U.S. citizens. He gets to "fight the good fight", at least as he perceives it.
Much like the store employee and the police officer who assumed that because he stood up for his rights, he must be guilty of theft, you are assuming that because he stood up for his rights, he is guilty of exploiting the situation for monetary benefit. You really are no different from the store owner or cops in that regard, and I guess it explains why you are so hostile to his position. On the other hand, like him I have stood up to store employees who try to search me on the way out of stores (mostly because I want to fight against this system because I don't want unauthorized searches to become the "norm" in our society), so I guess that explains why I am so sympathetic to his position.
Did you even read the guy's page where he described what happened? If you did I cannot see how you can possibly come to the conclusions that you have. My guess is that instead you have made a knee-jerk reaction based on your vague understanding of what happened and a personal belief that only you are justified in defending yourself, and when others do it, they're just being unreasonable.
There was no disrespect. There was only a guy refusing to be coerced into being searched by a store employee. He tried to walk away from the situation, but he was barred from leaving (illegally) by the store employees. He tried to get the cops to rectify this and instead they arrested him. If he knew that the cops were going to arrest *him* I don't think he would have called them. Maybe he would have, only because he knows that they would be wrong and that in the end it wouldn't be so bad for him, but I nothing about his story suggests that he called the cops specifically so that they would arrest him. I'm guessing he expected the cop to know the law and to apply it, but that's not what happened.
Seriously, rm999, you should read and understand the story you are commenting on before posting.
Slashdot Mirror
OMG. That is just TOO FUNNY. I can totally appreciate the irony of that given all of the pontificating I have done in this thread about how slashdot quality is going down.
For what it's worth, I am sure I used to post before I had an ID, back when you just typed whatever nickname you wanted to show up next to your post, for every post. But, my posts back then probably weren't any more worthwhile than the drivel I have posted since.
How do you tell what year comments or articles come from? Whenever I do a google search and end up on a Slashdot article, or go back and read old articles or comments, I can never tell what year they are from. Neither the page nor the URL contain anything that I can identify as the year. How do you tell?
Well, it's not that my memory for detail is very good - it isn't - but for some reason at the time (in 1998 apparently) I did notice the change when it happened, I can't remember why, probably because there were so many changes going on to the site back then as it evolved into its current state, and I was very in tune with the site at the time and the direction it was taking. Remember that this used to be in big letters on the front page logo, so it was pretty easy to notice back then. You probably noticed it but long since forgot.
...
And I've always referred back to that memory when I think about how Slashdot "isn't as good as it used to be", with the crappy editors (zonk and kdawson come to mind) posting stories that constantly make me wish I could break the habit of reading slashdot. So whereas I would normally forget such trivia, I remembered this because it's close to an issue that I care about (and honestly, I do care about the quality of Slashdot because I've been reading it for a long time, I've enjoyed it most of that time, and I don't want to see the quality of the site degrade any further).
All that being said, I still think Slashdot is on balance worth reading, which is why I still read it. I gave up on it for a couple of months last year but I came back
Thanks for the great response, the points you make are very good.
s lashdot.org/ ... which is the oldest slashdot.org link there (from Jan 13, 1998), you can see this. On my browser the logo at the top of the page is just a grey blob which I am sure was at one point a picture reading "Slashdot: News for Nerds on the Stuff that Matters". If you look at the HTML source, you can see that the alt text for this image is the old slogan.
But it was indeed "Slashdot: News for Nerds on the Stuff That Matters" at one point. If you look at this link from archive.org:
http://web.archive.org/web/19980113191222/http://
The next oldest link that works from archive.org is from Nov. 11, 1998, and the logo and the alt text at that point had already been changed to "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters."
My memory was wrong, I thought that the change happened in late 1999 or 2000 sometime, around the time that Slashdot's parent company (Andover.net) went public. I guess it was sometime in 1998 that the slogan was changed.
That was a very good reply to my rant. I appreciate the info.
Yes, it really was "News for Nerds on the Stuff that Matters" at one time, I just searched on archive.org and found some references to this slogan in 1998 but couldn't find it after that. I guess it wasn't around as long as I thought, I remember the change happening in like 2000 or something but I guess I am wrong.
And yes, I was just being cranky in my post about this story. I hate lame stories on Slashdot, they waste my time. But yeah I know, I don't get to choose the stories that they post. But to further state the obvious, I am allowed to post my comments on the article as well, which I did. And of course, people are allowed to mod me down too, and they did, last time I looked I was at 0: Troll. Oh well.
As you can see from my user number, I've been around a while, and I've seen some really lame stories posted here. But this one is execptional in its worthlessness.
"News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters." Anyone else remember when that was "News for Nerds ON THE Stuff that Matters?" A subtle change but taking out the "on the" would seem to allow the site to post stories that have nothing to do with geek interests anymore, as long as it's "stuff that matters" - basically opening the door for any story that the editor thinks "matters" regardless of how irrrelevent it is to nerd interests.
But I digress. This story is stupid and uninteresting. The editorial introduction to the story posted above is completely unhelpful in describing the relevent details of the story (who is this Jack Thompson person? Am I just supposed to know which of the thousands of Jack Thompsons in the world this person is or why I should care about them?).
To save you some time (although if you're still reading this post clearly your time isn't that important to you): the Jack Thompson in question was one of the lawyers involved in the case in which "an 18-year old in Alabama was allegedly under the influence of Grand Theft Auto when he murdered two police officers and a police dispatcher in 2004". I guess his relationship to a gaming-related trial is what makes this "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters." Aside from that, the article is just an explanation about how he's trying to subpoena a bunch of seemingly ireelevent people to support his case against being disbarred for conduct in that case. Don't bother reading the story. It is pretty uninteresting.
One could try to say that this is relevent to gaming, but it really isn't. The case was relevent, its outcome was relevent. This dude going off the deep end after the trial in a way that has nothing to do with gaming, is certainly not.
Awesome post. Very informative.
What you link to is interesting, but it only applies to individuals acting "under color of law", and it goes on to give as examples police officers, judges, and the like. I don't think that store employees really fall into this category, since working at a store gives you no additional authority of law whatsoever.
Looking back in the original post, I can see your point.
The original poster mixed some talk both about how a sign posted at the front of a store could be construed as a valid contract, with some talk about giving up your rights.
I think that you are correct, you cannot give up your rights by entering into such a contract, and if that's what the original poster was implying, then he is wrong about that part. And I think that I am correct, that there is some validity to such a claim that the contract is valid, and you can be sued and lose for breaching the contract by refusing to allow your bags to be searched, and if that's what the original poster was implying, then he is right about that part.
We both get to be right. Yay.
What we're talking about are not your inalienable rights. What we're talking about is whether or not you can enter into a contract with a store by reading to and implicitly agreeing to their terms to enter their store. You cannot be arrested for ignoring their terms. You are not giving up your right to refuse to be searched and to walk peacefully out of the store. But you are also not getting a free ticket to violate the store's rules; it is a civil matter and you could be sued for breach of contract. You won't go to jail, but you could be found guilty of violating the contract and have to pay damages. This is what we're talking about. Nobody brought criminal law and unalienable rights into this except you. I suspect that you misunderstood what the original poster was talking about, which was contracts, not criminal laws.
Thinking about it some more, I believe that most programs would in fact show a different message to the user in the blocked packets vs. forged RST cases.
For blocked packets, I would expect the program to tell the user "the remote peer could not be reached". In which case the user would believe that the remote peer either doesn't exist anymore, or for some reason temporarily could not be contacted.
For forged RST packets, I would expect the program to tell the user "Connection established" and then immediately thereafter "Remote peer disconnected". In the user's eyes this would probably look alot more like the remote peer either is broken, or is exlicitly refusing to talk to them, but in either case, exists and is reachable.
These are different user experiences, but I fail to see how the second case (which presents false information to the user) can be construed as damaging to them. Had Comcast done the former, the user would have concluded that they can't talk to the remote peer. Had Comcast done the latter, the user would have concluded that they can't talk to the remote peer.
Exactly what harm is done to the user?
Those are very good and interesting points.
I think that the only reason that the mail forging you are talking about was prosecuted successfully was because of a precedent in which such mail forging was known to have been damaging to the affected servers. To put it simply: there was indeed harm being caused to the servers by this type of forgery, so there was a good reason to award a judgement and damages to the affected parties.
On the other hand, what damages are an individual user suffering from this type of forging? Keep in mind that the only *additional* effect of the forging is that instead of the connection just being blocked (as it would be if the Comcast servers just dropped the packets), it's being blocked in a way that makes the originating program think that the remote peer explicitly closed down a connection, rather than the remote peer having been unreachable. In either case, the TCP/IP connection is not made and I doubt that any such program would even distinguish between these two cases in its report of the failure back to the user.
So I can't see any explicit harm being done to anyone by this type of packet forging, in which case, I don't think that any prosecution of Comcast would be successful (exactly what harm did they do?). Once again I think it corresponds pretty closely with my baseball bat vs. toothpick analogy.
In short: no harm, no foul.
Your Alice and Bob thing is *almost* a much better anology. Instead you should have said, Alice and Bob haven't started talking yet. Alice says "hi, can we talk?", and you, hiding around a corner, mimic Bob's voice and shout "No!".
I think mimic is a good choice of words here. When does a very minor act of mimicking someone else become a full-blown act of impersonation? I think of impersonation as implicitly involving a back-and-forth communication wherein the mimicking of the impersonated party continues to be convincing and establishes a tangible stream of communication in which relevent information is conveyed. I think of my revised Alice and Bob example, and the RST packet spoofing, as a very minor act of mimicking. Obviously it's a grey area where you draw the line, but I really feel like even if you grant that this tiny bit of mimicking is impersonation, it is so minor as to be basically inconsequential and without sufficient damage to the impersonated party to warrant a judgement in their favor.
OK, but if that was the point you were trying to make, I don't think your counter-example made it because it didn't address any of the fundamental points points he made in defense of his position. He quite clearly stated that such signs are "typically considered valid contracts" and gave some points about why they are considered valid contracts when shrinkwrap licenses are not. Then you gave a counter-example which was essentially the epitomy of an invalid shrinkwrap-type license, which doesn't address his point at all (he already admitted that shrinkwrap-type licenses are not valid). His points are about the ways that a sign that you could read while entering a store could be considered valid. But you don't address those points other than to say that you disagree with them ("that's just not how it works" is not a convincing argument).
I think that what he said sounds pretty sound. The store puts a big sign up that you'd have a hard time missing. Clearly it's something they want you to read. The sign tells you ahead of time that you're not allowed in their store unless you agree to allow them to search your bags on the way out. The reason that this is acceptable is that the store is a) giving you an opportunity to read the terms ahead of time (contrast with a sign at the exit which you could not read ahead of time), b) allowing you to disagree by declining to enter the store (contrast with a note on your receipt that said that because you bought a product you agree to be searched - you never got an opportunity to disagree before making your purchase), and c) giving you something in exchange for agreeing to these terms: the right to enter the store (the store owner is certainly allowed to bar your entry, it is private property after all).
All of these things are the original poster's points and you haven't yet refuted any of them explicitly.
The original poster even went on to clarify a way in which such a sign could be argued to NOT be effective in establishing a "contract" between you and the store: you might not understand the sign, even if you did read it, so in effect no contract was established. But the original poster went on to make a very good point that if you understand your rights well enough to challenge a police officer, then you would have understood the sign as well.
The original poster made good points, and so far, I haven't seen you make any reasonable rebuttal to them except to just say "he's flat out wrong". Do you have any justification for your statements at all?
It absolutely is materially different.
You're talking about an entire mail message with real content delivered to an end user who sees the mail, which is itself clearly attempting to deceive the user into believing that its specific and detailed message came from another party than the true originator. There is so much more content involved here than just a single RST packet that the user will never see, that it is absolutely not even close to the same thing.
Saying that these two cases are not materially different is like saying that hitting someone with a baseball bat is not materially different from hitting them with a toothpick. OK we might say that both are assault in principle because in both cases the victim is being struck against their will with a foreign object. But would a judge/jury ever really decide that hitting someone with a toothpick is an act worthy of being called "assault"?
Similarly, is a single RST packet forged by an ISP automatically and without intent to harm a specific individual, and with no data payload that would ever be seen by an end-user, really likely to be called forgery (or impersonation) by a court?
No end user ever sees the contents of TCP/IP RST packets. This makes your analogy with the letters flawed, because they contain specific communication directed at the user which the user will see and interpret.
Obviously we disagree about whether or not an RST packet contains information sufficient to be deemed communication to the end-user. Even if I grant you that there is information in an RST packet, I still don't think that it's enough to be called "impersonation". That's like me "impersonating" you by saying the letter "M" and then you claiming that you begin many sentences with the letter "M" so I must have been trying to impersonate you with that tiny utterance.
The packets in question are just part of the handshake process of setting up a TCP/IP connection. I am pretty sure that they don't have any data in them at all. But I could be wrong, and if I am, please correct me.
You are comparing TCP/IP packets with letterhead? An end-user will never see any of the contents of a TCP RST or ACK packet. The data contained therein aren't really even part of the meaningful communication channel of the network connection.
The packets in question are more like the bag that the mail carrier delivers your mail in. He doesn't give you the bag, you never get to see it, it just facilitates the delivery of your mail. It's not part of the communication itself. It just facilitates the communication.
I cannot even imagine what the point of your original post was if not to try to provide a (poorly conceived) counter-example. Except for a bad counter-example that missed his point completely, your post would have had no content whatosever.
Even if it *is* impersonation (and I don't agree that it is, because the packets in question are part of a networking protocol and not messages being sent by one person to another), it's impersonation of one computer by another computer. I don't think it necessarily follows that this can be construed as impersonation of an individual, especially when the mechanism for this supposed impersonation is a low-level networking protocol packet, not a user-generated message.
Bad analogy. Letters contain tangible information: messages that one person intends to convey to another. TCP/IP packets that are part of the handshake necessary to establish a network connection, do not contain any tangible information that originated with the sender. They are part of a low-level network protocol. They contain no meaningful data. They are just part of the process of establishing a TCP/IP connection. Very different from letters containing written words.
But it's not a "message being sent". It is part of a low-level networking protocol. It contains no data other than that necessary to facilitate the communication mechanism, i.e. a TCP/IP connection.
We could try to split hairs and define whether or not the act of your computer refusing someone else's attempts to communicate with it is a form of communication or not, and ponder the question of whether you can really say anything by refusing to speak, but I think this is an extremely tenous way to try to define impersonation. And I agree with the GP that no court would call this type of thing impersonation.
I agree. This is exactly what I thought when I read the article submitter's summary. If I had mod points I would mod you up.
Not obedient to me, no. I guess maybe obedience is the wrong word. It's more an intense desire to avoid confrontation. She won't do what I want her to, but she won't confront me about it either.
Thank you also for your thoughtful reply. I aplogize for implying that you are like the cops or the store employees.
Unfortunately for me, my wife feels the same way about these things as you do, so I get alot of grief from her about this stuff. I'm not as polite as you and my first course is to completely ignore people asking for my receipt on the way out. If they press the issue I say, "if you think I've stolen something please feel free to call the police, if not, please get out of my way as you have no right to stop me." My wife hates that. She doesn't understand why anyone would choose confrontation over obedience. I think it's her upbringing in a pretty strict Chinese family. But that's neither here nor there.
So in a sense I guess that I defend the actions of people like the guy who is at the center of this story, because in a way it's like defending my own actions.
As to the side effects that you mention (getting arrested, father bailing him out), I think that probably he regrets them in a sense, but feels pretty confident that they were worth the sacrifice for standing up for his rights. He probably perceives that only he was hurt by the arrest itself, and that it wasn't that painful. I think it's very telling that he *does* specifically mention regretting that the experience was upsetting to his siblings, because that is real pain being felt by persons completely uninvolved in the situation. My point being, he's made a pretty clear distinction between regretful aspects of the situation that either aren't that big of a deal to him or those involved, and regretful aspects that were truly troubling to innocent third parties.
I have to agree with you that he's not unhappy with how things turned out. Sounds like the worst that happened were some inconveniences to him (especially with regards to losing some hours of time and missing all or part of a family reunion) and his dad's posting of bail. Also it upset his siblings. All in all, no irreparable harm of any kind. So what's to be so unhappy about? Perhaps he doesn't realize the full implications of having been arrested (I know I wouldn't, since I never have been) - someone else posted in a comment that if you are arrested, regardless of the outcome, you lose your visa-less privilege for travel to many countries friendly to the U.S. That sounds like it would suck, and I would definitely regret that if it were me, and I'm guessing he doesn't know about this consequence of his arrest.
On the other hand, he gets to feel good about having stood up for his rights in the face of false arrest by a police officer and unlawful detainment by some store employees. He gets to believe that he is helping to protect the rights of U.S. citizens. He gets to "fight the good fight", at least as he perceives it.
Much like the store employee and the police officer who assumed that because he stood up for his rights, he must be guilty of theft, you are assuming that because he stood up for his rights, he is guilty of exploiting the situation for monetary benefit. You really are no different from the store owner or cops in that regard, and I guess it explains why you are so hostile to his position. On the other hand, like him I have stood up to store employees who try to search me on the way out of stores (mostly because I want to fight against this system because I don't want unauthorized searches to become the "norm" in our society), so I guess that explains why I am so sympathetic to his position.
Cynical much?
Did you even read the guy's page where he described what happened? If you did I cannot see how you can possibly come to the conclusions that you have. My guess is that instead you have made a knee-jerk reaction based on your vague understanding of what happened and a personal belief that only you are justified in defending yourself, and when others do it, they're just being unreasonable.
There was no disrespect. There was only a guy refusing to be coerced into being searched by a store employee. He tried to walk away from the situation, but he was barred from leaving (illegally) by the store employees. He tried to get the cops to rectify this and instead they arrested him. If he knew that the cops were going to arrest *him* I don't think he would have called them. Maybe he would have, only because he knows that they would be wrong and that in the end it wouldn't be so bad for him, but I nothing about his story suggests that he called the cops specifically so that they would arrest him. I'm guessing he expected the cop to know the law and to apply it, but that's not what happened.
Seriously, rm999, you should read and understand the story you are commenting on before posting.