Actually yes, there has been a massive global campaign against shark finning over the years (the practice of catching them, cutting off their fins, and throwing them back in finless to die) and has had great success in places like Europe.
Yes you're right, and it's the same as Fox hunting and badger culls in the UK and so on and so forth. But in the UK we have got a legal ban in place on Fox hunting now and the cove killings are unusually crawl and brutal creating days of extended suffering.
So just because other countries have poor wildlife practices doesn't mean this should go unspoken of. It's an exceptionally atrocious event that happens every year.
There's no faith involved, it's a statement of fact that religious belief does not adhere to the scientific method because it explicitly requires that you put your belief in the unprovable.
The real problem here is that you can't tell the difference between faith and fact, but that's a problem with you, not with me.
If you're saying I put a lot of faith in fact, yes, I do, because fact is fact, faith is not. I'm sorry you can't tell the difference.
Do you have any examples? The only thing I can think of is dionaea muscipula or some of the bladderworts but their actions aren't striking back any more than a potassium burn if I drop some of it into water is potassium consciously attacking me because it doesn't like getting wet.
It sounds like you've taken the Wikipedia article you linked and interpreted it more like the nonsense described in this one:
"How can you affirm that their subjective interpretation of bodily damage is not similar to e.g. a fish's one?"
Easy, because as the AC explained to you, contrary to your assertion, plants don't have a nervous system. The AC didn't misinterpret your original post, he answered it quite effectively.
Right, but where conflict occurs those religions do insist that the bible overrides science and similarly as most "theories" in such religious texts do not fit the scientific method then you have to cast aside the scientific method to be a believer in the first place.
So as I said to the other guy, yes, there are cases where science and religion can cooperate, but ultimately religion requires by definition that you cast aside the scientific method which means if you have any religious belief then you inherently have to cast aside fact and reason where it conflicts with that belief.
It's a gradient for sure, but those with religious beliefs are always going to be inherently more prone to ignoring science than those without because it's a simple requirement of belief. That doesn't mean all science, but it does mean ignoring the scientific method, and it does mean ignoring science that conflicts with those beliefs.
Anti-science works in gradients. It's possible to support some science but ignore that which is in conflict of religious teachings.
So yes, religion has to be inherently anti-science to some degree because religious believe fundamentally requires you to cast out the scientific method, but this doesn't mean they're wholly anti-science.
Looking at history it's in fact demonstrably true, because there are cases where science conflicted with religion in every case, and those with religious beliefs sided with religion, ignoring the science.
It's not an either-or like you seem to think it is. The world isn't that black or white.
Even if it's a tenet of numerically few religions then it's not simply that those religions have been loud, but that they make up the vast majority of the world's population.
The world's population is 7bn and Christians and Muslims combined make up 4.09bn of that alone. Hinduism has the Vedas, that bumps it up to 5.09bn, and Buddhism has the Tipitaka which is at least another 0.5bn taking it to 5.59bn. Atheists make up about 1.1bn, so of the global population of 5.9bn religious folk, 5.59bn at least have a holy book or scripture that they adhere to.
So what you're really saying is that 300m of 7bn people may not have a religious scripture to adhere to, but even that could be wrong because frankly I don't know enough about those religions but wouldn't be surprised if they also had religious texts at their core. So unless you're going to pretend that you were just referring to the Koran and that the bible doesn't exist or whatever then I don't really understand where you're coming from.
I think you paint a misleading picture by suggesting that those religions that follow a holy scripture are simply loud. They're not, they're the vast majority of religious folk, in fact, the vast majority of people in the world, by a wide margin.
Actually my local Borders used to be better because it helped me find things that I didn't know I wanted.
Unfortunately through a combination of tax dodging and other anti-competitive measures it pushed them out of business in the UK, so now all I'm stuck with is what Amazon "thinks" I want.
It's an interesting tale, but does it matter in practice? Assange had to turn to Ecuador and Snowden to Russia.
It doesn't really matter what your country does or doesn't say if your populace wont enforce it.
Far better to focus on ensuring healthy leadership, than to ignore the growing incompetence of leadership whilst quibbling about "what if" scenarios that will happen regardless of what the law says if you let that dictator rise to power.
Germany doesn't need to worry about what some theoretical dictator may or may not do with a law, because it's already focussed on the more important task of ensuring such bad leaders wont rise to power in the first place, precisely because it learnt the hard way how bad a thing that is. If only those of us in the UK and US - the supposed "victors" had learnt the same lesson with our stasi like security services spying on each and every citizen.
I'm all for free speech as a fundamental right, but I'm concerned that the fixation here on Slashdot of suggesting that whether or not it's enshrined in law is the be all and end all solution to achieving it, it's really not, again, it's completely irrelevant if it's not enforced.
Forgot to say, as an aside it's worth noting that even the people of Hong Kong that was British administered for 100 years have been outright protesting at the same cultural clash, so even the most westernised Chinese recognise the issue.
It's not about rudeness it's just that that demographic of the Chinese population That is older and travels to UK tourist hotspots almost in its entirety outright lack the concept of cultural sensitivity when traveling compared to the younger generations. It does in itself seen to be a clash of cultures rather than an issue of inherent respect. The younger generations are much more westernised so cope with the transition better.
I think generation matters too, I find the Chinese students around here an absolute dream, they're smart, pleasant, polite, and put my native British brethren to shame but in some tourist cities like York you get a lot of older Chinese visitors that bring their habits with them, which are a bit of a culture shock for us Brits - spitting into tissues/cups all the time, refusing to queue and pushing past everyone waiting to be served and so forth.
The younger Chinese in University towns seem far more aware of cultural sensitivities and are treated with far more respect as a result than the older Chinese are in tourist towns where people perceive them as rude and having nasty habits.
Statcounter is imperfect, but better because it at least eliminates bias even if it's not a completely statistically accurate measure. It also helps that although far from identical, it at least tallies a lot more closely with smaller scale independent studies like the one W3Schools.
We don't have a perfect measure, but just because no measure is perfect doesn't mean there aren't grossly different levels of quality, and it's meaningless to refer to a completely unverifiable study like NetApp's that's produced by a company that is openly and unquestionably biased and pursuing an agenda of skewed stats for financial gain, especially when there are much more objective alternatives out there that all paint a much closer picture to each other than the drastic nonsensical outlier that is NetApp.
Um, yes, if you listen to a source that's entire business model revolves around being paid by companies like Microsoft to give favourable results, that has openly admitted it's results are skewed, and that does not provide the underlying data for their calculations.
Meanwhile, in the real world, Chrome is still the most popular browser.
Because Javascript is the only ubiquitous cross browser application engine?
Of course they want to go further than that (and afaik Chrome can execute it natively?) but getting Microsoft, Mozilla, and Apple to accept that maybe Google, their arch enemy, kind of has a point and hence implementing a Google born technology, is an impossible task.
It took long enough to get Microsoft to accept HTML5 and that was with Apple, Mozilla, and Google all working together with it.
It's a chicken and egg scenario, Google needs it to reach critical mass to force them to implement support but it can't reach critical mass without support, but they're trying anyway. I guess they figure with Chrome being the most popular browser there's just a slight chance and at least in the meantime the other browsers can still execute code written in it using Javascript.
Fundamentally, by itself, it doesn't. But given that the standard of evidence was met it implies there's more to it than him simply forgetting and remembering. At the end of the day our judiciary found his excuse implausible based on the evidence and they have to justify that or face losing on appeal but this guy isn't even bothering to appeal which in itself implies he knows they got him bang to rights.
I'm absolutely for ensuring things like forgetting passwords don't get you sent to jail, but pretending this is the case here is silly. There have been similar RIPA cases that have been dropped precisely because the police couldn't prove their case that the defendant knew the password which shows that the safeguard seems to be working as intended so again in the cases where prosecution has been successful the defendants have thus far always been stupid enough to implicate themselves, or get caught using the password during a period when they deny knowing it.
The problem here is that because it's a law that isn't popular amongst tech circles that we a) have an excessive level of FUD spread about the law and b) that every successful prosecution under it is unfair. The reality is that sometimes, just sometimes, criminals are stupid enough to allow the strict legal standards required for prosecution to be met and if you have a problem with that, you may as well equally claim that all law is unjust and let's have a world of anarchy. I mean, so what if you found a suspect's DNA at a murder scene, recordings of the murder on the suspects computer, eyewitnesses placing him at the scene, and the murder weapon buried in his garden? All of it could just be planted from the DNA to the recordings, to the eyewitnesses, to the murder weapon. So what if the speed camera caught you fair and square? what if the camera was hacked and a photoshopped picture and records injected? Those are the sorts of argument being made, and that's why beyond reasonable doubt exists, because conclusive proof does not exist, we have to go on the overbearing weight of the evidence in every case. Of course it sometimes goes wrong, that's a statistical certainty, but we don't have anything better and this law is no more unjust than any other in this respect and the standard of evidence required.
The reason for that is because we, the tech community, lobbied hard to neuter the fuck out of the law when it was originally being written in the 90s, and we actually won these massive concessions precisely to ensure it does meet the strict legal standards of most pre-existing law. Sure we didn't completely defeat the law, but unless you want to live in a dictatorship where a minority dictate to the majority then compromise is necessary, and we got that massively in our favour in this particular case. We're lucky in this respect that the law was drafted pre-9/11 else we'd likely never have got these concessions. Post 9/11 law on technology and terrorism is a far bigger problem and far worse than this particular clause and so deserves far more attention, hell, even other provisions of RIPA such as those that let any public authority including local councils spy on private individuals were far far worse, but thankfully even that has been neutered now.
Honestly? No I've never forgotten a password when it's in my interest to hide illegal activity, and I've never suddenly remembered it again when it gives me a legal advantage.
The problem is that we don't know what was said, we don't know that he didn't outright admit that he knew it all along, that bit isn't being reported.
At the end of the day the rigorous standard of evidence was met, which means it's not as simplistic as you make out.
To be fair it also has a provision that the police have to provide probable cause for needing the password, so if you're innocent it shouldn't concern you any more than the police turning up with a random search warrant.
A police officer can't just walk up to you in the street and demand your password and send you to jail if you refuse, they still have to build up the same amount of justification they'd need to obtain a search warrant. It doesn't have the same degree of judicial oversight as a search warrant but it does have the backing of the law, such that if any such demand didn't have a sound case behind it it would be quickly killed by the European Court of Human Rights - which is why we should be more concerned the Tories and UKIP want to pull us out of that than we should that laws like this exist as it's a far bigger threat as it puts control of such safeguards in the hands of grossly biased politicians rather than an objective external judiciary meaning they're no longer safeguards.
But fundamentally it's really not too dissimilar to the digital concept of a search warrant, the police still have to provide evidence of a need to search the data, and a strong degree of evidence that you know the password.
It's not as if the beyond reasonable doubt test is a new thing, it's a well established legal principle and this guy had to be tried by the courts using that principle and was found guilty.
The problem is you're speculating, and the news stories are light on detail, for all we know he was given months to remember the password and never did then when he ultimately did perhaps he incriminated himself by also admitting he knew it all along. The fact is he was deemed guilty by our legal system and there's no evidence that the decision was an unjust one only half assed reporting of this law as usual.
Yes I know it's a lame law but that doesn't mean it's okay to pretend it's something it's not and that there is injustice without evidence of any such thing.
Do I have full faith in our justice system? Not at all, but I've yet to see a single case where this law has been used to jail someone who wasn't stupid enough to incriminate themselves and we have seen cases dropped where police couldn't prove their case precisely because it takes a special amount of stupidity or massively expensive forensic investigation to reach the high standards use of this law to prosecute requires.
I'm not saying it doesn't concern me that this law is open to injustice if that standard isn't asked for by the courts, but this far it's far cry from the "Give me your password", Forgotten it", "Right you're going to jail" that lie publications like The Register have pretended over the years.
The irony is it's so difficult for the police to use precisely as a compromise as the result of strong lobbying by many of those of us that care about technology in the first place. It was us that got that strong reasonable doubt clause there to start with, now we have people in the technology world pretending it doesn't exist.
Just because the law is sometimes used isn't evidence of abuse, it's so far just evidence that sometimes there are idiots that implicate themselves, sometimes through protest, sometimes through simple stupidity.
Reporting on this provision of RIPA is always wrong, and the Slashdot discussion is even worse.
To face conviction for failing to disclose a password in the UK the police have to be able to prove beyond reasonable doubt (and that's specifically stated in the legislation itself) that you knew the password at the time.
This case is no different. The guy was arrested for terror plots, asked to divulge a password but then claimed he didn't know it, the police couldn't prove he did know it so nothing came of it, the guy was jailed anyway under all the other evidence they had.
The police then found it seemed he'd been involved in card fraud. Turns out incriminating evidence of this was on the memory stick and that's why he didn't want the police acting it, because he clearly hoped if he got off with the terrorism charge they'd never find out about the card fraud charge, so he had nothing to lose. Once they had found out about it he hoped for further sentencing leniency over the card fraud for admitting the password and hence helping the police. The problem for him is by admitting it he gave the police the "beyond reasonable doubt" that they needed all along to do him for failing to disclose the password.
So to this day, if you don't know the password, if you pretend you don't know the password, then there's fuck all the police can do to you with this legislation, hence it's not half as bad as people make out.
To date the only people getting done by it are those admitting they know the password and explicitly refusing to hand it over, those who do stupid things like this guy, and for example, more complex scenarios where someone pretends they've lost a password and the police can't cracking, but then they manage to crack, say, weaker encryption such as that used for his desktop login to find his desktop password which they can confirm forensically that he has entered and used since denying knowing his encrypted USB password and if it matches the encrypted USB password they can claim, well, he knew his desktop password, he logged in, and it was the same as his encrypted USB password, and hence beyond reasonable doubt...
Really, it's not the worst law in the world, the police have to hit a pretty high standard of evidence, or the accused has to fuck up and basically admit their own guilt to ever become victim of this. If you genuinely don't know your password, or if you deny knowing it and the police can't prove otherwise, then you're fine. You have to explicitly and provably obstruct a police investigation to get done by this law.
The person the guy you responded to spoke specifically about skin colour, he spoke specifically about race. The person you responded to pointed out correctly that there was no evidence for that, you told that person they were wrong, therefore I can only assume you're agreeing with the original post that it's about race and skin colour. If you don't agree with that then that's fine, but why did you post in defence of it?
Fundamentally no one's disagreeing that what happened is wrong, but there's absolutely no evidence it's about race or skin colour as one guy further up the thread - a guy it appears you're agreeing with from the content and positioning of your post - claimed.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually yes, there has been a massive global campaign against shark finning over the years (the practice of catching them, cutting off their fins, and throwing them back in finless to die) and has had great success in places like Europe.
Yes you're right, and it's the same as Fox hunting and badger culls in the UK and so on and so forth. But in the UK we have got a legal ban in place on Fox hunting now and the cove killings are unusually crawl and brutal creating days of extended suffering.
So just because other countries have poor wildlife practices doesn't mean this should go unspoken of. It's an exceptionally atrocious event that happens every year.
There's no faith involved, it's a statement of fact that religious belief does not adhere to the scientific method because it explicitly requires that you put your belief in the unprovable.
The real problem here is that you can't tell the difference between faith and fact, but that's a problem with you, not with me.
If you're saying I put a lot of faith in fact, yes, I do, because fact is fact, faith is not. I'm sorry you can't tell the difference.
"unless it was to serve a purpose, such as killing a coyote."
What purpose is that exactly?
"Yes, they can strike back. Do your research."
Do you have any examples? The only thing I can think of is dionaea muscipula or some of the bladderworts but their actions aren't striking back any more than a potassium burn if I drop some of it into water is potassium consciously attacking me because it doesn't like getting wet.
It sounds like you've taken the Wikipedia article you linked and interpreted it more like the nonsense described in this one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
You asked the question in your previous post:
"How can you affirm that their subjective interpretation of bodily damage is not similar to e.g. a fish's one?"
Easy, because as the AC explained to you, contrary to your assertion, plants don't have a nervous system. The AC didn't misinterpret your original post, he answered it quite effectively.
Right, but where conflict occurs those religions do insist that the bible overrides science and similarly as most "theories" in such religious texts do not fit the scientific method then you have to cast aside the scientific method to be a believer in the first place.
So as I said to the other guy, yes, there are cases where science and religion can cooperate, but ultimately religion requires by definition that you cast aside the scientific method which means if you have any religious belief then you inherently have to cast aside fact and reason where it conflicts with that belief.
It's a gradient for sure, but those with religious beliefs are always going to be inherently more prone to ignoring science than those without because it's a simple requirement of belief. That doesn't mean all science, but it does mean ignoring the scientific method, and it does mean ignoring science that conflicts with those beliefs.
Anti-science works in gradients. It's possible to support some science but ignore that which is in conflict of religious teachings.
So yes, religion has to be inherently anti-science to some degree because religious believe fundamentally requires you to cast out the scientific method, but this doesn't mean they're wholly anti-science.
Looking at history it's in fact demonstrably true, because there are cases where science conflicted with religion in every case, and those with religious beliefs sided with religion, ignoring the science.
It's not an either-or like you seem to think it is. The world isn't that black or white.
Even if it's a tenet of numerically few religions then it's not simply that those religions have been loud, but that they make up the vast majority of the world's population.
The world's population is 7bn and Christians and Muslims combined make up 4.09bn of that alone. Hinduism has the Vedas, that bumps it up to 5.09bn, and Buddhism has the Tipitaka which is at least another 0.5bn taking it to 5.59bn. Atheists make up about 1.1bn, so of the global population of 5.9bn religious folk, 5.59bn at least have a holy book or scripture that they adhere to.
So what you're really saying is that 300m of 7bn people may not have a religious scripture to adhere to, but even that could be wrong because frankly I don't know enough about those religions but wouldn't be surprised if they also had religious texts at their core. So unless you're going to pretend that you were just referring to the Koran and that the bible doesn't exist or whatever then I don't really understand where you're coming from.
I think you paint a misleading picture by suggesting that those religions that follow a holy scripture are simply loud. They're not, they're the vast majority of religious folk, in fact, the vast majority of people in the world, by a wide margin.
Actually my local Borders used to be better because it helped me find things that I didn't know I wanted.
Unfortunately through a combination of tax dodging and other anti-competitive measures it pushed them out of business in the UK, so now all I'm stuck with is what Amazon "thinks" I want.
It's an interesting tale, but does it matter in practice? Assange had to turn to Ecuador and Snowden to Russia.
It doesn't really matter what your country does or doesn't say if your populace wont enforce it.
Far better to focus on ensuring healthy leadership, than to ignore the growing incompetence of leadership whilst quibbling about "what if" scenarios that will happen regardless of what the law says if you let that dictator rise to power.
Germany doesn't need to worry about what some theoretical dictator may or may not do with a law, because it's already focussed on the more important task of ensuring such bad leaders wont rise to power in the first place, precisely because it learnt the hard way how bad a thing that is. If only those of us in the UK and US - the supposed "victors" had learnt the same lesson with our stasi like security services spying on each and every citizen.
I'm all for free speech as a fundamental right, but I'm concerned that the fixation here on Slashdot of suggesting that whether or not it's enshrined in law is the be all and end all solution to achieving it, it's really not, again, it's completely irrelevant if it's not enforced.
Forgot to say, as an aside it's worth noting that even the people of Hong Kong that was British administered for 100 years have been outright protesting at the same cultural clash, so even the most westernised Chinese recognise the issue.
It's not about rudeness it's just that that demographic of the Chinese population That is older and travels to UK tourist hotspots almost in its entirety outright lack the concept of cultural sensitivity when traveling compared to the younger generations. It does in itself seen to be a clash of cultures rather than an issue of inherent respect. The younger generations are much more westernised so cope with the transition better.
I think generation matters too, I find the Chinese students around here an absolute dream, they're smart, pleasant, polite, and put my native British brethren to shame but in some tourist cities like York you get a lot of older Chinese visitors that bring their habits with them, which are a bit of a culture shock for us Brits - spitting into tissues/cups all the time, refusing to queue and pushing past everyone waiting to be served and so forth.
The younger Chinese in University towns seem far more aware of cultural sensitivities and are treated with far more respect as a result than the older Chinese are in tourist towns where people perceive them as rude and having nasty habits.
"Have you considered that the problem might actually be with yourself?"
No, this is Slashdot, that never happens here, everyone's flawless. Especially me.
Statcounter is imperfect, but better because it at least eliminates bias even if it's not a completely statistically accurate measure. It also helps that although far from identical, it at least tallies a lot more closely with smaller scale independent studies like the one W3Schools.
We don't have a perfect measure, but just because no measure is perfect doesn't mean there aren't grossly different levels of quality, and it's meaningless to refer to a completely unverifiable study like NetApp's that's produced by a company that is openly and unquestionably biased and pursuing an agenda of skewed stats for financial gain, especially when there are much more objective alternatives out there that all paint a much closer picture to each other than the drastic nonsensical outlier that is NetApp.
Um, yes, if you listen to a source that's entire business model revolves around being paid by companies like Microsoft to give favourable results, that has openly admitted it's results are skewed, and that does not provide the underlying data for their calculations.
Meanwhile, in the real world, Chrome is still the most popular browser.
"They can certainly target any software they like by the same methods."
Not really, all the malicious software has to do going forward is block any incoming updates from Microsoft for their security products.
Because Javascript is the only ubiquitous cross browser application engine?
Of course they want to go further than that (and afaik Chrome can execute it natively?) but getting Microsoft, Mozilla, and Apple to accept that maybe Google, their arch enemy, kind of has a point and hence implementing a Google born technology, is an impossible task.
It took long enough to get Microsoft to accept HTML5 and that was with Apple, Mozilla, and Google all working together with it.
It's a chicken and egg scenario, Google needs it to reach critical mass to force them to implement support but it can't reach critical mass without support, but they're trying anyway. I guess they figure with Chrome being the most popular browser there's just a slight chance and at least in the meantime the other browsers can still execute code written in it using Javascript.
See my post here:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4675915&cid=45983627
Fundamentally, by itself, it doesn't. But given that the standard of evidence was met it implies there's more to it than him simply forgetting and remembering. At the end of the day our judiciary found his excuse implausible based on the evidence and they have to justify that or face losing on appeal but this guy isn't even bothering to appeal which in itself implies he knows they got him bang to rights.
I'm absolutely for ensuring things like forgetting passwords don't get you sent to jail, but pretending this is the case here is silly. There have been similar RIPA cases that have been dropped precisely because the police couldn't prove their case that the defendant knew the password which shows that the safeguard seems to be working as intended so again in the cases where prosecution has been successful the defendants have thus far always been stupid enough to implicate themselves, or get caught using the password during a period when they deny knowing it.
The problem here is that because it's a law that isn't popular amongst tech circles that we a) have an excessive level of FUD spread about the law and b) that every successful prosecution under it is unfair. The reality is that sometimes, just sometimes, criminals are stupid enough to allow the strict legal standards required for prosecution to be met and if you have a problem with that, you may as well equally claim that all law is unjust and let's have a world of anarchy. I mean, so what if you found a suspect's DNA at a murder scene, recordings of the murder on the suspects computer, eyewitnesses placing him at the scene, and the murder weapon buried in his garden? All of it could just be planted from the DNA to the recordings, to the eyewitnesses, to the murder weapon. So what if the speed camera caught you fair and square? what if the camera was hacked and a photoshopped picture and records injected? Those are the sorts of argument being made, and that's why beyond reasonable doubt exists, because conclusive proof does not exist, we have to go on the overbearing weight of the evidence in every case. Of course it sometimes goes wrong, that's a statistical certainty, but we don't have anything better and this law is no more unjust than any other in this respect and the standard of evidence required.
The reason for that is because we, the tech community, lobbied hard to neuter the fuck out of the law when it was originally being written in the 90s, and we actually won these massive concessions precisely to ensure it does meet the strict legal standards of most pre-existing law. Sure we didn't completely defeat the law, but unless you want to live in a dictatorship where a minority dictate to the majority then compromise is necessary, and we got that massively in our favour in this particular case. We're lucky in this respect that the law was drafted pre-9/11 else we'd likely never have got these concessions. Post 9/11 law on technology and terrorism is a far bigger problem and far worse than this particular clause and so deserves far more attention, hell, even other provisions of RIPA such as those that let any public authority including local councils spy on private individuals were far far worse, but thankfully even that has been neutered now.
Honestly? No I've never forgotten a password when it's in my interest to hide illegal activity, and I've never suddenly remembered it again when it gives me a legal advantage.
The problem is that we don't know what was said, we don't know that he didn't outright admit that he knew it all along, that bit isn't being reported.
At the end of the day the rigorous standard of evidence was met, which means it's not as simplistic as you make out.
To be fair it also has a provision that the police have to provide probable cause for needing the password, so if you're innocent it shouldn't concern you any more than the police turning up with a random search warrant.
A police officer can't just walk up to you in the street and demand your password and send you to jail if you refuse, they still have to build up the same amount of justification they'd need to obtain a search warrant. It doesn't have the same degree of judicial oversight as a search warrant but it does have the backing of the law, such that if any such demand didn't have a sound case behind it it would be quickly killed by the European Court of Human Rights - which is why we should be more concerned the Tories and UKIP want to pull us out of that than we should that laws like this exist as it's a far bigger threat as it puts control of such safeguards in the hands of grossly biased politicians rather than an objective external judiciary meaning they're no longer safeguards.
But fundamentally it's really not too dissimilar to the digital concept of a search warrant, the police still have to provide evidence of a need to search the data, and a strong degree of evidence that you know the password.
It's not as if the beyond reasonable doubt test is a new thing, it's a well established legal principle and this guy had to be tried by the courts using that principle and was found guilty.
The problem is you're speculating, and the news stories are light on detail, for all we know he was given months to remember the password and never did then when he ultimately did perhaps he incriminated himself by also admitting he knew it all along. The fact is he was deemed guilty by our legal system and there's no evidence that the decision was an unjust one only half assed reporting of this law as usual.
Yes I know it's a lame law but that doesn't mean it's okay to pretend it's something it's not and that there is injustice without evidence of any such thing.
Do I have full faith in our justice system? Not at all, but I've yet to see a single case where this law has been used to jail someone who wasn't stupid enough to incriminate themselves and we have seen cases dropped where police couldn't prove their case precisely because it takes a special amount of stupidity or massively expensive forensic investigation to reach the high standards use of this law to prosecute requires.
I'm not saying it doesn't concern me that this law is open to injustice if that standard isn't asked for by the courts, but this far it's far cry from the "Give me your password", Forgotten it", "Right you're going to jail" that lie publications like The Register have pretended over the years.
The irony is it's so difficult for the police to use precisely as a compromise as the result of strong lobbying by many of those of us that care about technology in the first place. It was us that got that strong reasonable doubt clause there to start with, now we have people in the technology world pretending it doesn't exist.
Just because the law is sometimes used isn't evidence of abuse, it's so far just evidence that sometimes there are idiots that implicate themselves, sometimes through protest, sometimes through simple stupidity.
Reporting on this provision of RIPA is always wrong, and the Slashdot discussion is even worse.
To face conviction for failing to disclose a password in the UK the police have to be able to prove beyond reasonable doubt (and that's specifically stated in the legislation itself) that you knew the password at the time.
This case is no different. The guy was arrested for terror plots, asked to divulge a password but then claimed he didn't know it, the police couldn't prove he did know it so nothing came of it, the guy was jailed anyway under all the other evidence they had.
The police then found it seemed he'd been involved in card fraud. Turns out incriminating evidence of this was on the memory stick and that's why he didn't want the police acting it, because he clearly hoped if he got off with the terrorism charge they'd never find out about the card fraud charge, so he had nothing to lose. Once they had found out about it he hoped for further sentencing leniency over the card fraud for admitting the password and hence helping the police. The problem for him is by admitting it he gave the police the "beyond reasonable doubt" that they needed all along to do him for failing to disclose the password.
So to this day, if you don't know the password, if you pretend you don't know the password, then there's fuck all the police can do to you with this legislation, hence it's not half as bad as people make out.
To date the only people getting done by it are those admitting they know the password and explicitly refusing to hand it over, those who do stupid things like this guy, and for example, more complex scenarios where someone pretends they've lost a password and the police can't cracking, but then they manage to crack, say, weaker encryption such as that used for his desktop login to find his desktop password which they can confirm forensically that he has entered and used since denying knowing his encrypted USB password and if it matches the encrypted USB password they can claim, well, he knew his desktop password, he logged in, and it was the same as his encrypted USB password, and hence beyond reasonable doubt...
Really, it's not the worst law in the world, the police have to hit a pretty high standard of evidence, or the accused has to fuck up and basically admit their own guilt to ever become victim of this. If you genuinely don't know your password, or if you deny knowing it and the police can't prove otherwise, then you're fine. You have to explicitly and provably obstruct a police investigation to get done by this law.
To be fair that doesn't make it not about gun regulation, it just means gun regulation also has to start affecting nutjob retired cops :)
The person the guy you responded to spoke specifically about skin colour, he spoke specifically about race. The person you responded to pointed out correctly that there was no evidence for that, you told that person they were wrong, therefore I can only assume you're agreeing with the original post that it's about race and skin colour. If you don't agree with that then that's fine, but why did you post in defence of it?
Fundamentally no one's disagreeing that what happened is wrong, but there's absolutely no evidence it's about race or skin colour as one guy further up the thread - a guy it appears you're agreeing with from the content and positioning of your post - claimed.