The customs agents of all countries have the right to search anyone - that does include bags, pockets, purses, etc. They always have. While they have always had the right to open envelopes, I am unaware that US customs agents were permitted to copy the contents of documents they found. If they were, then this is a legitimate extension of that action. If they do not have permission to copy paper documents, then this is bogus.
In either case, it is rather stupid on their part - the likelyhood of them actually catching some incriminating document is so minuscule as to make winning the lottery seem like a good retirement plan. As an outside guess, it's related to sidestepping attorney privilege and intimidating people who travel with sensative documents - security researchers, reporters, and the like.
No, that would be seizing it. They need a reason to seize it. Customs can search without cause, but they cannot seize things without cause.
Actually, they can 'detain' the laptop without cause/warrant/etc. If you would like to wait with it that's your option ---- going on 2 years for some of the people who've filed the suits that resulted in the ruling so you might want to make sure you have some vacation time stored up.
There are a bunch of links, posted up higher... the pic that grabbed my attention was the one showing the platters, with an IC chip that had sheared off due to the stresses. You have to hit something pretty damn hard & fast to have inertia shear off an IC chip with 48+ pins.
I may be wrong, but when making a DMCA notice don't you have to swear under penalty of perjury that it's correct? Can you just 'apologise' when you get caught sending out bad ones? Or do CoreCodec potentially face legal action now?
You swear that 'on belief and in good faith' the material violates your copyright. Essentially, 'we think that it's a violation and we want it to stop'. Now, if you have a history of sending DMCA notices for things you don't own, well then you expose yourself to loosing on the good faith issue and are in a very bad position.
On a side note, this is all you have to swear to get any lawsuit started - if it's BS & gets in front of a judge, well people have been smacked hard for wasting a judges time. Countersuits for SLAPP violations include penalties for time, expense, punitive damages, etc.
Go be a sysadmin on a domain that's gotten onto one of these lists. Now go do it in a company that has to preserve all of it's Email. I'd say it's safe to say you'd probably spend 9 years in carrier of admining email servers just coping with spam.
Yeah, and it's the often the same people who will complain about penalties for copyright infringement.
Um, why is the statutory penalty for copying a single song $150,000, while the penalty for stealing the song from the store is $1000?.
Why is the potential criminal penalty for copying that song up to 10 years in jail, while rape is 6-10?
Do we as a society agree that copying something is equivalent to rape or more severe than theft? In general we do not, and thus we find that the penalties for copyright infringement are not equitable to the severity of the crime.
Until they start locking up the directors of capital-one and other similar companies (that do snail mail spam), what right do they have to lock up email spammers? I hate spam as much as the next person, but it is no different.
You're right, but not for the reasons you think:
Spam as defined by the law is unsolicited electronic commercial communication.
Junk Mail is defined as unsolicited commercial snail mail.
Note that SPAM is legal as long as you don't engage in forging headers, provide a valid subject, & you provide a functional method of opting out. The reason this guy was convicted is because he was forging headers, using deceptive subject lines, and using the opt out as a validation tool for email addresses.
If a company issued junk mail with a false return address, included false advertising, or sent more mail after receiving an opt out request, then they would be hammered with postal fraud charges and get some club fed time also.
Why not skip the tasing and jump right to:
"cops jump on the [suspect] and cuff him/her."
Because jumping on a struggling suspect is more likely to permanently injure them than tasing them & then cuffing them. Overall, anecdotal evidence suggests that major injuries are down during arrests where cops are using tasers as opposed to wrestle/beat suspects into submission.
Guy got himself the death penalty for "corrupting the youth".
According to the law at the time, the plaintiff & the defendant got to propose a penalty, and the assembly chose one.
The plaintiff chose death, Socrates suggested he be fed and clothed at the expense of the state for the rest of his life. Even then, had he just left the city in exile, nobody would have stopped him or come after him - it was, in fact, a rather traditional thing to do. One can only conclude that his death was as much a political statement by him as it was a statement by the State for conformity.
Never ran across that one, but I know what our policy was: "I'm sorry, that's a hardware issue. Not our responsibility. Get the crazy glue cleaned out if you can or a new port put in. Have a nice day!"
A sane person would recognize that using superglue to glue a phone cord into the modem & then cutting the line would ruin the modem before actually doing it. Thus the fact that they did it, and are subsequently calling for assistance in getting back online shows they lack even the most basic comprehension of cause & effect. The distinction between hardware & software is not relevant to this type of person, they are paying $19 for the internet & by god you need to get them back online! (Yes this woman called back 4 times that I know of)
Again, however, it's not our problem because we were leasing our DSL from local telcos. If there's an outage like that, we report it and it's out of our hands. Oddly enough, almost all customers understand that we can't fix equipment we don't control and that the phone company's doing its best.
Obviously you had a different customer base than we did, on 9/11 we had residential customers in Manhattan screaming about how much money they were loosing day trading because of inconsistent connections. I've been threatened with physical violence by people who's email was being rejected by AOL - bad address bounces. I have been threatened with lawsuits because I couldn't retrieve an email a lawyer deleted. I got to cancel the account of a woman who locked a field tech in the basement when he told her the problem was her NIC not the modem - refused to let him out until he 'fixed' the problem. People understand that their need for immediate gratification isn't being met and obviously it's your fault because they are paying you to meet it.
I will admit that the majority of callers to a help desk are not of the utter nutjob type. There are, however, enough of them to make make you wonder how we ever got beyond the bashing-things-with-rocks stage. AFAIK, only fast food jobs have a higher turnover rate than tech support call centers. When I got out, it was down to 4 months on a national average, that alone tells you that they are in fact - hell desks.
because I'd come to realize that I actually liked doing it
You are one sick masochistic nutjob.
The trouble-shooting was a constant challenge because no matter how fool-proof you make your software, nature keeps coming up with fools who can manage to mess things up
Why yes, after you read off 5 minutes of scripts & calmed the customer down because the 3 HD people in front of you just slammed them off the phone as quickly as possible, it was possible to find the problem & solve it as one of the basic 3:
The customer's stupid
The customer fucked it up
One of the previous 'techs' fucked it up before realizing the customer is stupid
For me, at least, it was a very satisfying job because every day I could go home knowing that there were at least twenty or so people who's days were a little better because I'd helped them.
Gods I wish it was 20 people - 10 minute target times on the call w/ a 15 deep queue all day - probably half of them repeat calls because people got them off the phone to meet the 10 minute target time. As for better off, most of them would be better off if they boxed up their computer & got out a deck of cards, a pencil & a piece of paper - some I think would be better off counting money on a corner in Brooklyn at midnight.
Not everybody can think that way, but if you can, the help desk doesn't have to become the hell desk.
As long as people are allowed to call up after using super glue to plug the modem port to keep kids from surfing porn & scream at you that it's your job to get them back online; help desk is going to be hell desk. As long as people are allowed to call up in the middle of disasters & scream at you that the modem is slow (Manhattan customers on 9/11); help desk is going to be hell desk. As long as CxO's look at help desks as a cost center to be staffed as minimally as possible with the cheapest people possible, help desk is going to be hell desk.
We're talking about archived emails (i.e. years old), not the thousands of email you have in your inbox folder which are at most one year old.
Um, no, we are talking about a 7 year laps in the proper archiving of our national history as required by Federal Law. Note that last bit, Federal Law mandates that the Presidents Emails be properly archived for historical purposes. The Shrub's administration is now into it's 7th year of violating Federal Law. Not only that, they are aware of it & have been from the beginning. The GAO has already complained, as have the departments responsible for actually maintaining the archives.
If I was 6 months late in delivering a solution like this, I would be shitcanned & deservedly so. To be 7 years late and in violation of Federal Law is an act of criminal negligence at best. I will not cut them some slack because they deserve none. A short lapse due to a conversion issue might be understandable - after 3 months, all slack has been used; after 7 years? get the tar, I'll get the feathers.
However, it may in fact not be intentional malice from the start but more likely an existing state of incompetence that was taken advantage of to hide traces or misdeeds or at least to make finding any evidence difficult.
Except the existing state was a fully functional backup system with appropriate safeguards and redundancy. The replacement was an utter clusterfuck that had at least one fix squashed just before implementation. Per the article, the guy in charge quit because they kept blocking proper solutions.
One can only read that there is deliberate stonewalling & willful incompetence because if they were actually so incompetent as to not be able to archive email with a sane solution after 7 years, then the Whitehouse network would have crashed & burned long ago. They did not, ergo, they cannot be as incompetent as would be required for this to be true incompetence.
There is a big difference between being brought up on charges and convicted... i'm not sure if a court would convict a married couple so long as their intention is to make some erotica for private viewing.
May I direct your attention to Florida - where they prosecuted & convicted a 16 year old girl of creating child porn, for using her cell camera to send her boyfriend a picture of herself topless?
Shouldn't all porn be banned, since regular porn actresses could be getting exploited too? Oh, and while we're at it, we should require women to wear burqas since men might get naughty impulses just by looking at them.
I actually believe we should pull out the table skirts & re-cover the tables & chairs, lest week willed men become so infatuated that they are inspired to perform lewd acts with them.
There is almost definatly a correlation between rape and possesion of rape porn, there is no correlation between rape and water.
I think that I can guarantee that the correlation between rapists & the consumption of water that approaches 1. A correlation between rapists & porn is less certain.
I believe what you are describing is what the UK courts call Perversion of Justice. Basically trying to game the court or the system can result in a 6 year vacation.
In the US, contempt of court can get you jailed indefinitely - one schmoe has been in jail for his divorce for 15 years.
I thought the main point of a SSL cert for most people was session encryption.
Depends entirely on the reason you're putting together a cert. Cert's on web services are much more than just for encryption, they are the primary means of secure verification. Verizon, for instance, will only accept Verisign Certs for their automated repair services and the cert information has to match what was sent to Verizon in the setup process.
Google's excuse for not complying with court order, you ask? Well, google told the Brazilian justice system that since the order wasn't isued within the USA they couldn't do a thing about it.
So that's it, folks, do panic for the same thing that's happening in Brazil has been happening in the US for quite a long time. The only difference is that google has kind of a hard time respecting Brazil's sovereigny
Mostly right except you are forgetting several things:
Google US is a US based company and is subject to US law
Google BR is a Brazilian company and is subject to Brazilian law
Google BR is not subject to US law - despite what US judges may think
Google US is not subject to Brazilian law - despite what Brazilian judges may think
Google BR was served with a legal request for data they did not posses - it resided in the states under the auspice of Google US.
Google US was requested to turn over the data - without a US warrant - they refused.
Had Brazil requested help from the FBI they probably would have gotten their data. By trying to force a company to produce something it didn't have, they just created an impasse. Handling cases involving international corps isn't as simplistic as people try to make it out to be. In this case - Google US couldn't just acknowledge Brazil's sovereignty without disregarding the US', and Google BR just couldn't comply with the request because they didn't have the data to give up.
The problem with that is that somewhere, someone had to take the photo. The child in the photo was abused/hurt so that people could trade the photo.
Not really, people used to take pictures of their kids running around the yard naked all the time. Also bathing babies in the kitchen sink was considered cute & momentous enough to be captured on film. These are now 'child pornography'.
IIRC they have successfully prosecuted people for child porn - where the images were clippings from catalogs.
Go look at any major art museum & you will see paintings of nude children - replicate that composition with a camera & it's child porn nowadays.
Just to make it clear - nude != porn. In no way does this advocate child porn/abuse/etc. What it advocates is a rational approach to this rather than it's an adult with a picture of children - lynch him. If a nutjob is going to get his jollies from looking at kids, he's got plenty to look at down at the local mall - charging kids with taking pictures of themselves isn't going to stop it, nor is it going to do anything to 'protect the children'
They use the word "suspects" but they really have probable cause and Google has being trying not to comply with DA's subpoenas for a long time now.
Not really, they have been trying to find a way to satisfy the privacy laws in both the US & Brazil simultaneously. Had Brazil gone to the FBI & requested assistance in a joint task force, the FBI would have produced a US subpoena to serve the US operations of Orkut. Google BR couldn't comply with the Brazilian subpoena because they didn't have the data, and the Google US couldn't comply because of US laws on providing data on customers (It generally requires a subpoena unless the customer has released the info).
Best guess: either Google has played legal distribution games with the data, or BR will be going through some legal channel in the US - with specific data points pre-arranged to avoid any future disputes.
The last time I heard, call center employees have an average of about 6 months of shelf life - w/ fewer than 10% surviving 2 years. When I did it, I was being paid dick to be yelled at for 8 hours a day & solve an average of 48 tech support calls a day. (3 minutes of mandatory script reading/user verification & 7 minutes to do a full phone diagnosis on why Bambi Bubbles & her 2 braincells can't get on line)
As tech support I got a total of 3 death threats & at least 1 threat of violence weekly. Anyone who has any hope in the tech world won't stay there longer than needed to find another job, which is why call centers are full of phone drones who can't do anything but read a script.
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The customs agents of all countries have the right to search anyone - that does include bags, pockets, purses, etc. They always have. While they have always had the right to open envelopes, I am unaware that US customs agents were permitted to copy the contents of documents they found. If they were, then this is a legitimate extension of that action. If they do not have permission to copy paper documents, then this is bogus.
In either case, it is rather stupid on their part - the likelyhood of them actually catching some incriminating document is so minuscule as to make winning the lottery seem like a good retirement plan. As an outside guess, it's related to sidestepping attorney privilege and intimidating people who travel with sensative documents - security researchers, reporters, and the like.
Actually, they can 'detain' the laptop without cause/warrant/etc. If you would like to wait with it that's your option ---- going on 2 years for some of the people who've filed the suits that resulted in the ruling so you might want to make sure you have some vacation time stored up.
There are a bunch of links, posted up higher ... the pic that grabbed my attention was the one showing the platters, with an IC chip that had sheared off due to the stresses. You have to hit something pretty damn hard & fast to have inertia shear off an IC chip with 48+ pins.
You swear that 'on belief and in good faith' the material violates your copyright. Essentially, 'we think that it's a violation and we want it to stop'. Now, if you have a history of sending DMCA notices for things you don't own, well then you expose yourself to loosing on the good faith issue and are in a very bad position.
On a side note, this is all you have to swear to get any lawsuit started - if it's BS & gets in front of a judge, well people have been smacked hard for wasting a judges time. Countersuits for SLAPP violations include penalties for time, expense, punitive damages, etc.
Go be a sysadmin on a domain that's gotten onto one of these lists. Now go do it in a company that has to preserve all of it's Email. I'd say it's safe to say you'd probably spend 9 years in carrier of admining email servers just coping with spam.
Why is the potential criminal penalty for copying that song up to 10 years in jail, while rape is 6-10?
Do we as a society agree that copying something is equivalent to rape or more severe than theft? In general we do not, and thus we find that the penalties for copyright infringement are not equitable to the severity of the crime.
Spam as defined by the law is unsolicited electronic commercial communication.
Junk Mail is defined as unsolicited commercial snail mail.
Note that SPAM is legal as long as you don't engage in forging headers, provide a valid subject, & you provide a functional method of opting out. The reason this guy was convicted is because he was forging headers, using deceptive subject lines, and using the opt out as a validation tool for email addresses.
If a company issued junk mail with a false return address, included false advertising, or sent more mail after receiving an opt out request, then they would be hammered with postal fraud charges and get some club fed time also.
The plaintiff chose death, Socrates suggested he be fed and clothed at the expense of the state for the rest of his life. Even then, had he just left the city in exile, nobody would have stopped him or come after him - it was, in fact, a rather traditional thing to do. One can only conclude that his death was as much a political statement by him as it was a statement by the State for conformity.
A sane person would recognize that using superglue to glue a phone cord into the modem & then cutting the line would ruin the modem before actually doing it. Thus the fact that they did it, and are subsequently calling for assistance in getting back online shows they lack even the most basic comprehension of cause & effect. The distinction between hardware & software is not relevant to this type of person, they are paying $19 for the internet & by god you need to get them back online! (Yes this woman called back 4 times that I know of)
Obviously you had a different customer base than we did, on 9/11 we had residential customers in Manhattan screaming about how much money they were loosing day trading because of inconsistent connections. I've been threatened with physical violence by people who's email was being rejected by AOL - bad address bounces. I have been threatened with lawsuits because I couldn't retrieve an email a lawyer deleted. I got to cancel the account of a woman who locked a field tech in the basement when he told her the problem was her NIC not the modem - refused to let him out until he 'fixed' the problem. People understand that their need for immediate gratification isn't being met and obviously it's your fault because they are paying you to meet it.
I will admit that the majority of callers to a help desk are not of the utter nutjob type. There are, however, enough of them to make make you wonder how we ever got beyond the bashing-things-with-rocks stage. AFAIK, only fast food jobs have a higher turnover rate than tech support call centers. When I got out, it was down to 4 months on a national average, that alone tells you that they are in fact - hell desks.
You are one sick masochistic nutjob.
Why yes, after you read off 5 minutes of scripts & calmed the customer down because the 3 HD people in front of you just slammed them off the phone as quickly as possible, it was possible to find the problem & solve it as one of the basic 3:
Gods I wish it was 20 people - 10 minute target times on the call w/ a 15 deep queue all day - probably half of them repeat calls because people got them off the phone to meet the 10 minute target time. As for better off, most of them would be better off if they boxed up their computer & got out a deck of cards, a pencil & a piece of paper - some I think would be better off counting money on a corner in Brooklyn at midnight.
As long as people are allowed to call up after using super glue to plug the modem port to keep kids from surfing porn & scream at you that it's your job to get them back online; help desk is going to be hell desk. As long as people are allowed to call up in the middle of disasters & scream at you that the modem is slow (Manhattan customers on 9/11); help desk is going to be hell desk. As long as CxO's look at help desks as a cost center to be staffed as minimally as possible with the cheapest people possible, help desk is going to be hell desk.
Um, no, we are talking about a 7 year laps in the proper archiving of our national history as required by Federal Law. Note that last bit, Federal Law mandates that the Presidents Emails be properly archived for historical purposes. The Shrub's administration is now into it's 7th year of violating Federal Law. Not only that, they are aware of it & have been from the beginning. The GAO has already complained, as have the departments responsible for actually maintaining the archives.
If I was 6 months late in delivering a solution like this, I would be shitcanned & deservedly so. To be 7 years late and in violation of Federal Law is an act of criminal negligence at best. I will not cut them some slack because they deserve none. A short lapse due to a conversion issue might be understandable - after 3 months, all slack has been used; after 7 years? get the tar, I'll get the feathers.
Except the existing state was a fully functional backup system with appropriate safeguards and redundancy. The replacement was an utter clusterfuck that had at least one fix squashed just before implementation. Per the article, the guy in charge quit because they kept blocking proper solutions.
One can only read that there is deliberate stonewalling & willful incompetence because if they were actually so incompetent as to not be able to archive email with a sane solution after 7 years, then the Whitehouse network would have crashed & burned long ago. They did not, ergo, they cannot be as incompetent as would be required for this to be true incompetence.
I actually believe we should pull out the table skirts & re-cover the tables & chairs, lest week willed men become so infatuated that they are inspired to perform lewd acts with them.
I think that I can guarantee that the correlation between rapists & the consumption of water that approaches 1. A correlation between rapists & porn is less certain.
I believe what you are describing is what the UK courts call Perversion of Justice. Basically trying to game the court or the system can result in a 6 year vacation.
In the US, contempt of court can get you jailed indefinitely - one schmoe has been in jail for his divorce for 15 years.
Depends entirely on the reason you're putting together a cert. Cert's on web services are much more than just for encryption, they are the primary means of secure verification. Verizon, for instance, will only accept Verisign Certs for their automated repair services and the cert information has to match what was sent to Verizon in the setup process.
Mostly right except you are forgetting several things:
Had Brazil requested help from the FBI they probably would have gotten their data. By trying to force a company to produce something it didn't have, they just created an impasse. Handling cases involving international corps isn't as simplistic as people try to make it out to be. In this case - Google US couldn't just acknowledge Brazil's sovereignty without disregarding the US', and Google BR just couldn't comply with the request because they didn't have the data to give up.
Not really, people used to take pictures of their kids running around the yard naked all the time. Also bathing babies in the kitchen sink was considered cute & momentous enough to be captured on film. These are now 'child pornography'.
IIRC they have successfully prosecuted people for child porn - where the images were clippings from catalogs.
Go look at any major art museum & you will see paintings of nude children - replicate that composition with a camera & it's child porn nowadays.
Just to make it clear - nude != porn. In no way does this advocate child porn/abuse/etc. What it advocates is a rational approach to this rather than it's an adult with a picture of children - lynch him. If a nutjob is going to get his jollies from looking at kids, he's got plenty to look at down at the local mall - charging kids with taking pictures of themselves isn't going to stop it, nor is it going to do anything to 'protect the children'
Not really, they have been trying to find a way to satisfy the privacy laws in both the US & Brazil simultaneously. Had Brazil gone to the FBI & requested assistance in a joint task force, the FBI would have produced a US subpoena to serve the US operations of Orkut. Google BR couldn't comply with the Brazilian subpoena because they didn't have the data, and the Google US couldn't comply because of US laws on providing data on customers (It generally requires a subpoena unless the customer has released the info).
Best guess: either Google has played legal distribution games with the data, or BR will be going through some legal channel in the US - with specific data points pre-arranged to avoid any future disputes.
Hmm, when I was doing 8bit assembly, we called it a wedge .... crazy kids ... and get off my lawn
Oh yeah, and when we have mutant congresscritters with 2 heads making twice as many stupid laws that's going to be an improvement how?
The last time I heard, call center employees have an average of about 6 months of shelf life - w/ fewer than 10% surviving 2 years. When I did it, I was being paid dick to be yelled at for 8 hours a day & solve an average of 48 tech support calls a day. (3 minutes of mandatory script reading/user verification & 7 minutes to do a full phone diagnosis on why Bambi Bubbles & her 2 braincells can't get on line)
As tech support I got a total of 3 death threats & at least 1 threat of violence weekly. Anyone who has any hope in the tech world won't stay there longer than needed to find another job, which is why call centers are full of phone drones who can't do anything but read a script.