Lets assume for a second that he is actually guilty (I don't know that he is or isn't). He is a smart man who can afford a lawyer. Do you really think its likely that they could gather enough solid evidence to convict him by jury here, if he wants to press it?
It may cost him some money, but I would bet dollars to donuts that such a prosecution would go nowhere. Though, it still might happen, all you need is a prosecutor who cares about getting his name in the papers.
Oh and its probably cheaper than that since keeping the records could easily be "on tape at iron mountain"....so they take a few hours to recall.... hell of a lot cheaper than an array.
Doubtful. You mention "multiple terabytes" like its expensive. An SMS is 160 chars. Add... lets call it 15 digits for the phone number (to cover various international exchanges etc) 2 numbers.... plus the time, which can easily be stored in 32 bits if done cleverly, but lets call it 30 chars (the current output of date | wc -c) Thats.... 220 chars tops per text message. Shit, lets round that up to 256 bytes, just to make things easy and allow for tower IDs or whatever.
Now lets figure all 310 million people in the US, send 16 text messages a day. That is 4k per person, 310 million times.... or about ~1.2 terabytes per day x 2 years... call it 1 PB (~840 TB) and goes down to as little as 53 TB at 1 sms per day per person.
I know that sounds like a lot, but how much is 1 PB of storage? A little digging says $120k could build a 1 PB array in 2009, but the same article called it a $2.8M array. (http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/09/09/02/138209/build-your-own-28m-petabyte-disk-array-for-117k)
So lets assume that this hasn't seriously changed (prices per unit storage tend to drop pretty reliably). ~$3M for a machine to store every text by every person in the US, assuming the average person sends less than 16 messages per day (I am pretty sure its way less than that)....not too shabby really....but still a bit pricey....
Now remember this gets to be broken up amongst how many carriers? The cost per carrier per user here is nearly nothing. They EASILY pay for this, its not even that expensive.
Julian Assange's recent "World Tomorow" show where he held a round table for his cipherpunk buddies, they said that units designed for "countrywide surveillance" (scraping ALL SMS, emails etc) for a small country runs in the $30M range....which really is cheap (maybe not for me, but for most governments). ( http://assange.rt.com/cypherpunks-episode-eight-full-version-pt1/ )
And yet, you are totally missing the point. Its not a question of whether they should be able to obtain the messages, legally, with a warrant (which, incidentally, they currently don't actually need as far as I know). Thats totally off topic, if its there, of course they can get at it with cause.
The question is, why should it be retained. Why should the phone company be REQUIRED to store data, from everyone, all the time, based on their assertion that they might need to request it later?
My phone calls are not recorded, why should they not also be required to retain the audio of the calls? Why, other than current details of old laws, should the two types of personal data, be in in any way, treated differently?
Do you think they should be able to get the audio of any phone conversation up to a month old? Why should one kind of data be retained, for no other reason than its easy and cheap to retain, but not another?
Why should text recieve, in any way, less protection than audio, other than due to a side effect of the technical details of how it is implemented?
5. They are neither warlike, nor stupid. Their intelligence apparatus has already inserted itself, albeit only superficially within our own government. Upon finding that we would allow such plans as the destruction of their people (laughable as it is) to be put in the hands of someone picked for qualification through a process designed to refine sociopaths, they have determined our total extermination is the only safe course.
Incidentally this means we are not being recomended to the United Plantes Comittees to fight poverty in third world planets, or possibly being nominated for eminent domain to make room for a new hyperspace bypass
You are, of course, correct that "pay up or go somewhere else" is not "the solution to rampant corruption". It is not.
That said, when confronted with a corrupt official, you probably have problems much bigger and more personally relevant to your life than "the solution to rampant corruption", and it is quite possible that the aims of ending corruption overall, and coming out of the situation unharmed are at odds with eachother.
Someone once pointed out, I forget what country/city/conflict it was but the point was "If X troops had met with resistance in every house they came to, their numbers, as large as they were, would have quickly dwindled to nothing". Which is a fine theory, but, has the obvious problem that it only works if you can convince everyone to, essentially, commit to suicide.
Not everyone wants to solve corruption more than they want to live in peace...or even...just live.
actually, you have a perfect example of something else.... how people actually get jobs.... who you know matters.
Why? Because who you know will get you passed the initial resume scan better than a degree will. This is why studies have shown that social drinkers make more money.... or as the people at the "career center" that I went to while I out of work several years back put it:
"90% of jobs never get posted publically"
so yes, all you folks out there complaining about how hard it is to even get an interview...thats likely because you are competing for the 10% of jobs that everybody sees, and most of the time, probably getting filtered before you ever reach a hiring manager.
People doing hiring have to filter. The more applicants per job, the more they have to filter. Lots of people get filtered out for stupid reasons, and as you show here, sometimes its just a bad filter.
When you get down to it...even the degree is a case of bad filtering. They want certain attributes that often come with the degree, but its just a convinenet filter really. I have never held a job that didn't list a degree as a requirement. Clearly, since I don't have one, it never was really a requirement.... the requirement was that I find some way to get passed the filters.
Hence, I get my jobs from recomendations by friends. Got my previous one after talking to an ex-coworker who let me know about a position opening, and this one by an old friend who just started in a new group that needed an experienced linux admin.
In 5 jobs, 4 of them came to me through people I knew, one of them came from a cold application to a place that had advertised.
> Anyway I just wanted to say that. I don't actually care about the story.
Care about? No..... me neither, but, it sure is amusing to watch it unfold.
I particularly like this last bit about the Koran double not being able to stay in jail due to Mexican indifference. That could be a story in and of itself. I want to hear the Koran "double"s story, I bet it is at least fun.
I mean can you imagine.... being in Mexico with the intention of going to jail, and then finding out you ca't do anything that they care enough about to actually keep you? ROTFL what did he do? Kill someone?:)
> I don't know how that particular person has his email client set up. But my email clients open the > message in the lower pane at the same time as I click on it in the list for any reason - even to > delete. It can be argued that viewing of the message is automatic.
I thinkl your missing the point in your first comments, THIS is really what my entire criticizm comes down to, and this is a very good point. However, I am still leaning towards dismissing it, and here is why....
Yes, I too have an email client that does this, its not my prefered one but, hey thats neither here nor there. I don't discount that such an argument COULD hold water. To my mind, that comes down to the format of the message as much as anything.
If he opened it up, and it immediately said across the top "Potential child porn" or anything indicating a something worth investigating, then certainly, it holds water. Its incidental. I wont argue that, it falls right back into, as I said, "Shit happens".
However, if he had to actually peruse through the links, and check them out, to see that it may have been child porn.... thats not very incidental. So, for me, the real question as to his ethics comes down to that.... was his discovery of the crime incidental, or was he taking advantage of his incidental posession of the information and that lead to the discovery?
Not to belabor the point but, I am talking about an ethical point, not necissarily a legal one, though, it could be one. Afterall, if the third party ownership doctrine applies to the school administrator, what does that say about his install of the spyware, on a third party owned machine not issued to him, by the FBi Father? Is he a "hacker" now?
This should, perhaps, go down in history as one of the mostly diplomatically worded posts ever on/.
> What I *will* say is that none of those feelings are what this trial or the charges against him > are about.
And this is a statement also founded on opinion. It may be an opinion shared by the prosecution, and many people. as you say, I get it:)
However, for me, that is indeed what its about and all it will be about, as the people who are prosecuting this, in my eyes, lost their legitimacy a long time ago.... the very idea that they feel they have some moral authority to torture and try him for releasing documents, while they murder people the world over.... laughable.
I don't just feel he shouldn't be punished, I applaud his actions as a decent human being.
If we are to be honest when it comes to application of the law, and we are going to say the laptop, since it belong to a third party that didn't issue it to him, he has no expectation of privacy.... don't we also have to rewind and apply similar tests to his original action?
Did he really have any right to install the software on a machine that was owned by a third party and not issued to him? he was spying on his own kid, and I can see exceptions made for that, but he wasn't doing it with his own machine, he was, installing unauthorized software on a third parties machine...
In any other circumstance, would we be calling him a hacker?
I am of two minds on this. I mean I agree entirely with that part of the assessment. However, one part of it really bothers me, as I put on my dusty old IT Professional in Healthcare hat.
as it happens, there is a doctor with the same name as myself. As it also happens, he worked at the same healthcare organization as I did, and at the same time. As such, I regularly got emails containing information that I shouldn't have (actually, pages were more common)... information which was not JUST federally protected PII, but, even without that law, was someone elses personal and very private information.
Simply, he knew, from the moment he saw the sender and subject line, that he was handling someone elses information, which he likely had no legitimate reason to even have, much less look at.
The fact that he had it doesn't bother me, since he got it through accident of technical bungling and NOT a malicious act. I would file that under the "Shit happens" doctrine.
That said, upon receiving such information, the fact that he went a step further and looked at the contents of the file....I find that disturbing. Upon realizing what he had, and before looking at it, he should have done two, things.
1. Deleted the message without reading it. It wasn't his information to know, think of the things that could have been in there, all manner of private information. It could have revealed political leanings, private details, it could even contain session IDs that could be use to hijack sessions and expose his email or other private information.
2. Made an attempt to inform whoever has the laptop or whoever is responsible for issuing it to people, of the situation and the dangers of allowing it to continue unabated.
From an ethical standpoint, the moment he opened that email, he was crossing a very clear line into unethical (if not illegal) behaviour.
The rest, I have little issue with. Once he knows, acting on that knowledge... the rest seems reasonable.
> We should all see the problem with that last sentence, which I had no idea was true until now. > Especially because we use legitimate software that DOES get flagged
My favorite was trying to bring a copy of clamav (definitions) into our internal lab. I didn't realize the linux desktop build here had a virus scanner installed (I have never installed one on a linux box except to scan incoming file for other environments).
I copied it down to my transfer directory, then I went to copy it into the lab. Permission denied. I check the permissions, its owned by me, mode 750, so far so good. I try again.... permission denied. I shake my head, make it 777, and try again... permission denied. I try to open the file just to see if I can.... permission denied. I become root and try... permission denied. I check if SELINUX is on.... its permissive....
In the end, I go back to the machine that I first downloaded it to, use openssl to encrypt the file... transfer it through with no problems... then decrypt it with openssl on the target machine.... finally.
> by having FBI agents scrub the computer and by taking it > to a computer repair shop to be re-imaged.
wow..... um.... I am really curious as to how it did this. Something smells fishy. I can understand it surviving a "scrub", since anyone who does systems work should know that there are many places in a modern os to hide, and unless you know exactly what it does and how it hides, its impossible to say for sure a system has been cleaned.
However, the pc shop? maybe they didn't really "re-image" it, but instead did their own quick "scrub" and ran something like sysprep?
Otherwise maybe they just did a reinstall from a hidden factory reinstall partition? I could see something hiding up in there but....
I dunno, it seems like it HAS to be something along one of those lines. Aside from that...if it really was incidental...well.... accidents do happen, and sometimes they end up biting the best possible people.
In any case, I think the circumstances do sound fishy, and in no way should what he caught excuse what he did if it wasn't accidental, so there should be serious investigation into that too....but I could see that just turning up technical incompetence rather than malfeasance....
That is, unless it turns up fraud on the part of the PC Repair shop.... very likely they did not do the job they were paid to do.
and if any forensics investigators under the age of 40 do end up combing my equipment....all the incriminating data is on the old looking machine in the basement labeled "VT100". Keep looking, I am sure you will find where its hidden.
Maybe but you don't know how many of them even have a second core, how many of them are non-ultra sparcs or alphas, and how many of them are an i586
Which gets me thinking.... if I ever do start running an exit node at home (again...I found it to be a bit too limiting once craigslist decided they didn't like posts from my home ip)... maybe I should start up all my old systems that I keep meaning to toss.
I bet the state would just love trying to sort out 4 different architectures, including SCSI drives with the old centronix connectors and a GS/OS filesystem:)
All checks out, very true. I just assumed the GP remembered better than I did what group it was, I only remembered their name and the story (which, I always found quite amusing).
> You're conflating two different issues. One is whether the conditions of his confinement were > acceptable or appropriate, the other is whether he did something sufficiently inappropriate as to be > considered treason.
He did agree to fight in a clearly unjustified war.....thats pretty treasonous in my book. Those releases were the only positive thing he did for the people of this country, which is who his allegiance is supposed to be to, above and beyond the leadership.
> When you are in the military, you agree to follow the chain of command. If you don't like it, don't > work for the military and then start complaining about the rules.
However you also trust that that chain of command is working in the best interests of the people. When it becomes obvious that they are not, like when they are not actively prosecuting incidents like we saw in collateral murder, then I would say they broke the trust first.
Allow me to respond you your humerous chat log with a real one.
I know little of Dell.... This is the second time an employer has issued me a Dell laptop in over a decade of carrying work issued laptops for 3 different employers. So far, the only issue has been a broken screen and.... I can't blame dell for that.... my laptop bag took a major hit from a falling object....broke the laptop screen and a jar in another bag.
Anyway, I never called them but their support site connected me with someone via a text chat, and emailed me a log afterwards, so... their current support script, at least in text chat is more like this (names/URLS/Dates have been removed... however it is from September of this year) ============= This is an automated email sent from Dell Chat. The following information is a log of your session. Please save the log for your records. Your session ID for this incident is XXXXXXXX. Time Details
URL Shown: "https://chatadengine.dell.com/chatadsengine/adengine/Default.aspx?Queue=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX"
Session Started with Agent (ProSupport XXXXXX)
Agent (ProSupport XXX ): "Thank you for contacting Dell ProSupport Chat, my name is XXX XXX How can I help you today?"
Me: "Greetings XXX, well quite simple one today i would think... laptop screen is physically broken"
Agent (ProSupport XXX): "Greetings XXX I do apologize for the inconvenience of the broken screen. I will be happy to assist you with that."
Agent (ProSupport XXX): "This is on the Latitude XXXXXX and your best contact email is XXX@XXX.com ?"
Me: "yes and yes"
Agent (ProSupport XXX): "Unfortunately this system does not have the complete care warranty, we would be unable to replace it for you. You would have to purchase the replacement part"
Me: "unfortunate, how much would that cost? Can you send me the info so I can forward it to my boss for approval?"
Agent (ProSupport XXX): "Is it just the screen or plastics as well?"
Me: "just the screen"
Agent (ProSupport XXX XXX): "Let me get a quote created for you."
Me: "thanks"
Agent (ProSupport XXX XXX): "Just sent you a quote to your email address"
Me: "whew I thought it woould cost a lot more"
Agent (ProSupport XXX XXX): "Anything else I can do for you?"
Me: "no thanks, think thats all I need" ============
Admittedly, this says nothing of their support beyond simple hardware issues, and certainly not Linux support but.... its clearly appropriate for the issue.
> Every time they start making inroads with Linux, the community bitches about price. I'm surprised > they even try at this point.
Well.... the community isn't putting up the cash to buy laptops, individuals are, and they are quite likely not the people bitching about price. You can't really take comments in online forum threads as an accurate meter of the community, since we know posting is done by a small and self-selected group....and overrepresents negative views.
I am pretty sure there are people at dell sitting back thinking... gee thats not what all the people buying our laptops say.
Now, I am typing this....on a dell laptop running linux. Not installed by them, and not purchased by me, I have it by accident of what company I work for (as is the flavor of Linux on it...sigh...I prefer Debian based distros....). However, having had to replace the laptop screen, where they simply shipped me out a new one, and I installed it myself in about 15 minutes with nothing more than a screwdriver and youtube video.... i have to say.... they make a damned easy laptop to work on.
In fact, so far the only complaints I have (about the hardware, complaints about the old Redh8 based distro are not Dell's fault) are related to the docking station and how hard it is to line up (after 8 months I still have trouble some mornings) and that it sits loose on the dock so any bump disconnects it. I have mostly solved this by pushing it as far back on the desk, under the monitor arms as I can.... but every once in a while, I still manage to bump it with something.
Perhaps, but I just assumed it was other costs. For example.... if yopu sell windows laptops, and someone calls with a problem, support staff has to make the call as to whether this is a defect or not, and may have to help the user fix it, depending on the details.
Generally speaking, everything I have seen says that support staff for linux and other unix-like OSs get paid more than the windows folks. Not to mention whatever R&D they have to put into it.
This is just an apples to oranges comparison and the OEM cost of windows vs a free OS has little to do with it.
Those anarchists killed 1 guy, in the most inept fuckup got lucky assasination of ALL TIME. They had already failed their attempt when the Archduke's car went down a street right by one of the bungling assasains. If not for this random set of circumstances, it would have been little more than a failure.
To blame the entire WW on such an event is ludicris. Throwing a match into a powder keg may START an explosion, but, does a lit match alone cause an explosion? The system of alliances that had built up had allowed the entire european region to turn into a powder keg, just waiting for something to touch it off. And we are not talking about a powder keg deep in a safe ammo dump. We are talking about a powder keg out in front right next to the sign that says "smoking area".
No left wing philosophy built those military alliances. No left wing philosophy caused them to fall into war like a house of cards into disorder.
To use an analogy.... imagine some guy was mad at you and kicks your newly built house. Now imagine the house actually collapsed after he kicked it. Who is to blame? The guy kicking the house, or the people who designed and built a house that couldn't withstand one asshole kicking it?
(yes clearly they are both in the wrong, but one is clearly did far worst than the other)
Slashdot Mirror
Lets assume for a second that he is actually guilty (I don't know that he is or isn't). He is a smart man who can afford a lawyer. Do you really think its likely that they could gather enough solid evidence to convict him by jury here, if he wants to press it?
It may cost him some money, but I would bet dollars to donuts that such a prosecution would go nowhere. Though, it still might happen, all you need is a prosecutor who cares about getting his name in the papers.
Oh and its probably cheaper than that since keeping the records could easily be "on tape at iron mountain"....so they take a few hours to recall.... hell of a lot cheaper than an array.
Doubtful. You mention "multiple terabytes" like its expensive. An SMS is 160 chars. Add... lets call it 15 digits for the phone number (to cover various international exchanges etc) 2 numbers.... plus the time, which can easily be stored in 32 bits if done cleverly, but lets call it 30 chars (the current output of date | wc -c) Thats.... 220 chars tops per text message. Shit, lets round that up to 256 bytes, just to make things easy and allow for tower IDs or whatever.
Now lets figure all 310 million people in the US, send 16 text messages a day. That is 4k per person, 310 million times.... or about ~1.2 terabytes per day x 2 years ... call it 1 PB (~840 TB) and goes down to as little as 53 TB at 1 sms per day per person.
I know that sounds like a lot, but how much is 1 PB of storage? A little digging says $120k could build a 1 PB array in 2009, but the same article called it a $2.8M array. (http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/09/09/02/138209/build-your-own-28m-petabyte-disk-array-for-117k)
So lets assume that this hasn't seriously changed (prices per unit storage tend to drop pretty reliably). ~$3M for a machine to store every text by every person in the US, assuming the average person sends less than 16 messages per day (I am pretty sure its way less than that)....not too shabby really....but still a bit pricey....
Now remember this gets to be broken up amongst how many carriers? The cost per carrier per user here is nearly nothing. They EASILY pay for this, its not even that expensive.
Julian Assange's recent "World Tomorow" show where he held a round table for his cipherpunk buddies, they said that units designed for "countrywide surveillance" (scraping ALL SMS, emails etc) for a small country runs in the $30M range....which really is cheap (maybe not for me, but for most governments). ( http://assange.rt.com/cypherpunks-episode-eight-full-version-pt1/ )
And yet, you are totally missing the point. Its not a question of whether they should be able to obtain the messages, legally, with a warrant (which, incidentally, they currently don't actually need as far as I know). Thats totally off topic, if its there, of course they can get at it with cause.
The question is, why should it be retained. Why should the phone company be REQUIRED to store data, from everyone, all the time, based on their assertion that they might need to request it later?
My phone calls are not recorded, why should they not also be required to retain the audio of the calls? Why, other than current details of old laws, should the two types of personal data, be in in any way, treated differently?
Do you think they should be able to get the audio of any phone conversation up to a month old? Why should one kind of data be retained, for no other reason than its easy and cheap to retain, but not another?
Why should text recieve, in any way, less protection than audio, other than due to a side effect of the technical details of how it is implemented?
5. They are neither warlike, nor stupid. Their intelligence apparatus has already inserted itself, albeit only superficially within our own government. Upon finding that we would allow such plans as the destruction of their people (laughable as it is) to be put in the hands of someone picked for qualification through a process designed to refine sociopaths, they have determined our total extermination is the only safe course.
Incidentally this means we are not being recomended to the United Plantes Comittees to fight poverty in third world planets, or possibly being nominated for eminent domain to make room for a new hyperspace bypass
You are, of course, correct that "pay up or go somewhere else" is not "the solution to rampant corruption". It is not.
That said, when confronted with a corrupt official, you probably have problems much bigger and more personally relevant to your life than "the solution to rampant corruption", and it is quite possible that the aims of ending corruption overall, and coming out of the situation unharmed are at odds with eachother.
Someone once pointed out, I forget what country/city/conflict it was but the point was "If X troops had met with resistance in every house they came to, their numbers, as large as they were, would have quickly dwindled to nothing". Which is a fine theory, but, has the obvious problem that it only works if you can convince everyone to, essentially, commit to suicide.
Not everyone wants to solve corruption more than they want to live in peace...or even...just live.
actually, you have a perfect example of something else.... how people actually get jobs.... who you know matters.
Why? Because who you know will get you passed the initial resume scan better than a degree will. This is why studies have shown that social drinkers make more money.... or as the people at the "career center" that I went to while I out of work several years back put it:
"90% of jobs never get posted publically"
so yes, all you folks out there complaining about how hard it is to even get an interview...thats likely because you are competing for the 10% of jobs that everybody sees, and most of the time, probably getting filtered before you ever reach a hiring manager.
People doing hiring have to filter. The more applicants per job, the more they have to filter. Lots of people get filtered out for stupid reasons, and as you show here, sometimes its just a bad filter.
When you get down to it...even the degree is a case of bad filtering. They want certain attributes that often come with the degree, but its just a convinenet filter really. I have never held a job that didn't list a degree as a requirement. Clearly, since I don't have one, it never was really a requirement.... the requirement was that I find some way to get passed the filters.
Hence, I get my jobs from recomendations by friends. Got my previous one after talking to an ex-coworker who let me know about a position opening, and this one by an old friend who just started in a new group that needed an experienced linux admin.
In 5 jobs, 4 of them came to me through people I knew, one of them came from a cold application to a place that had advertised.
> Anyway I just wanted to say that. I don't actually care about the story.
Care about? No..... me neither, but, it sure is amusing to watch it unfold.
I particularly like this last bit about the Koran double not being able to stay in jail due to Mexican indifference. That could be a story in and of itself. I want to hear the Koran "double"s story, I bet it is at least fun.
I mean can you imagine.... being in Mexico with the intention of going to jail, and then finding out you ca't do anything that they care enough about to actually keep you? ROTFL what did he do? Kill someone? :)
> I don't know how that particular person has his email client set up. But my email clients open the
> message in the lower pane at the same time as I click on it in the list for any reason - even to
> delete. It can be argued that viewing of the message is automatic.
I thinkl your missing the point in your first comments, THIS is really what my entire criticizm comes down to, and this is a very good point. However, I am still leaning towards dismissing it, and here is why....
Yes, I too have an email client that does this, its not my prefered one but, hey thats neither here nor there. I don't discount that such an argument COULD hold water. To my mind, that comes down to the format of the message as much as anything.
If he opened it up, and it immediately said across the top "Potential child porn" or anything indicating a something worth investigating, then certainly, it holds water. Its incidental. I wont argue that, it falls right back into, as I said, "Shit happens".
However, if he had to actually peruse through the links, and check them out, to see that it may have been child porn.... thats not very incidental. So, for me, the real question as to his ethics comes down to that.... was his discovery of the crime incidental, or was he taking advantage of his incidental posession of the information and that lead to the discovery?
Not to belabor the point but, I am talking about an ethical point, not necissarily a legal one, though, it could be one. Afterall, if the third party ownership doctrine applies to the school administrator, what does that say about his install of the spyware, on a third party owned machine not issued to him, by the FBi Father? Is he a "hacker" now?
This should, perhaps, go down in history as one of the mostly diplomatically worded posts ever on /.
> What I *will* say is that none of those feelings are what this trial or the charges against him
> are about.
And this is a statement also founded on opinion. It may be an opinion shared by the prosecution, and many people. as you say, I get it :)
However, for me, that is indeed what its about and all it will be about, as the people who are prosecuting this, in my eyes, lost their legitimacy a long time ago.... the very idea that they feel they have some moral authority to torture and try him for releasing documents, while they murder people the world over.... laughable.
I don't just feel he shouldn't be punished, I applaud his actions as a decent human being.
Another thought on this....
If we are to be honest when it comes to application of the law, and we are going to say the laptop, since it belong to a third party that didn't issue it to him, he has no expectation of privacy.... don't we also have to rewind and apply similar tests to his original action?
Did he really have any right to install the software on a machine that was owned by a third party and not issued to him? he was spying on his own kid, and I can see exceptions made for that, but he wasn't doing it with his own machine, he was, installing unauthorized software on a third parties machine...
In any other circumstance, would we be calling him a hacker?
I am of two minds on this. I mean I agree entirely with that part of the assessment. However, one part of it really bothers me, as I put on my dusty old IT Professional in Healthcare hat.
as it happens, there is a doctor with the same name as myself. As it also happens, he worked at the same healthcare organization as I did, and at the same time. As such, I regularly got emails containing information that I shouldn't have (actually, pages were more common)... information which was not JUST federally protected PII, but, even without that law, was someone elses personal and very private information.
Simply, he knew, from the moment he saw the sender and subject line, that he was handling someone elses information, which he likely had no legitimate reason to even have, much less look at.
The fact that he had it doesn't bother me, since he got it through accident of technical bungling and NOT a malicious act. I would file that under the "Shit happens" doctrine.
That said, upon receiving such information, the fact that he went a step further and looked at the contents of the file....I find that disturbing. Upon realizing what he had, and before looking at it, he should have done two, things.
1. Deleted the message without reading it. It wasn't his information to know, think of the things that could have been in there, all manner of private information. It could have revealed political leanings, private details, it could even contain session IDs that could be use to hijack sessions and expose his email or other private information.
2. Made an attempt to inform whoever has the laptop or whoever is responsible for issuing it to people, of the situation and the dangers of allowing it to continue unabated.
From an ethical standpoint, the moment he opened that email, he was crossing a very clear line into unethical (if not illegal) behaviour.
The rest, I have little issue with. Once he knows, acting on that knowledge... the rest seems reasonable.
Confucius said "please stop giving Lincoln credit for my sayings."
> We should all see the problem with that last sentence, which I had no idea was true until now.
> Especially because we use legitimate software that DOES get flagged
My favorite was trying to bring a copy of clamav (definitions) into our internal lab. I didn't realize the linux desktop build here had a virus scanner installed (I have never installed one on a linux box except to scan incoming file for other environments).
I copied it down to my transfer directory, then I went to copy it into the lab.
Permission denied. I check the permissions, its owned by me, mode 750, so far so good. I try again.... permission denied. I shake my head, make it 777, and try again...
permission denied. I try to open the file just to see if I can....
permission denied. I become root and try...
permission denied. I check if SELINUX is on.... its permissive....
In the end, I go back to the machine that I first downloaded it to, use openssl to encrypt the file... transfer it through with no problems... then decrypt it with openssl on the target machine.... finally.
> by having FBI agents scrub the computer and by taking it
> to a computer repair shop to be re-imaged.
wow..... um.... I am really curious as to how it did this. Something smells fishy. I can understand it surviving a "scrub", since anyone who does systems work should know that there are many places in a modern os to hide, and unless you know exactly what it does and how it hides, its impossible to say for sure a system has been cleaned.
However, the pc shop? maybe they didn't really "re-image" it, but instead did their own quick "scrub" and ran something like sysprep?
Otherwise maybe they just did a reinstall from a hidden factory reinstall partition? I could see something hiding up in there but....
I dunno, it seems like it HAS to be something along one of those lines. Aside from that...if it really was incidental...well.... accidents do happen, and sometimes they end up biting the best possible people.
In any case, I think the circumstances do sound fishy, and in no way should what he caught excuse what he did if it wasn't accidental, so there should be serious investigation into that too....but I could see that just turning up technical incompetence rather than malfeasance....
That is, unless it turns up fraud on the part of the PC Repair shop.... very likely they did not do the job they were paid to do.
and if any forensics investigators under the age of 40 do end up combing my equipment....all the incriminating data is on the old looking machine in the basement labeled "VT100". Keep looking, I am sure you will find where its hidden.
Maybe but you don't know how many of them even have a second core, how many of them are non-ultra sparcs or alphas, and how many of them are an i586
Which gets me thinking.... if I ever do start running an exit node at home (again...I found it to be a bit too limiting once craigslist decided they didn't like posts from my home ip)... maybe I should start up all my old systems that I keep meaning to toss.
I bet the state would just love trying to sort out 4 different architectures, including SCSI drives with the old centronix connectors and a GS/OS filesystem :)
All checks out, very true. I just assumed the GP remembered better than I did what group it was, I only remembered their name and the story (which, I always found quite amusing).
> You're conflating two different issues. One is whether the conditions of his confinement were
> acceptable or appropriate, the other is whether he did something sufficiently inappropriate as to be
> considered treason.
He did agree to fight in a clearly unjustified war.....thats pretty treasonous in my book. Those releases were the only positive thing he did for the people of this country, which is who his allegiance is supposed to be to, above and beyond the leadership.
> When you are in the military, you agree to follow the chain of command. If you don't like it, don't
> work for the military and then start complaining about the rules.
However you also trust that that chain of command is working in the best interests of the people. When it becomes obvious that they are not, like when they are not actively prosecuting incidents like we saw in collateral murder, then I would say they broke the trust first.
Allow me to respond you your humerous chat log with a real one.
I know little of Dell.... This is the second time an employer has issued me a Dell laptop in over a decade of carrying work issued laptops for 3 different employers. So far, the only issue has been a broken screen and.... I can't blame dell for that.... my laptop bag took a major hit from a falling object....broke the laptop screen and a jar in another bag.
Anyway, I never called them but their support site connected me with someone via a text chat, and emailed me a log afterwards, so... their current support script, at least in text chat is more like this (names/URLS/Dates have been removed... however it is from September of this year)
=============
This is an automated email sent from Dell Chat. The following information is a log of your session. Please save the log for your records.
Your session ID for this incident is XXXXXXXX.
Time Details
URL Shown: "https://chatadengine.dell.com/chatadsengine/adengine/Default.aspx?Queue=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX"
Session Started with Agent (ProSupport XXXXXX)
Agent (ProSupport XXX ): "Thank you for contacting Dell ProSupport Chat, my name is XXX XXX How can I help you today?"
Me: "Greetings XXX, well quite simple one today i would think... laptop screen is physically broken"
Agent (ProSupport XXX): "Greetings XXX I do apologize for the inconvenience of the broken screen. I will be happy to assist you with that."
Agent (ProSupport XXX): "This is on the Latitude XXXXXX and your best contact email is XXX@XXX.com ?"
Me: "yes and yes"
Agent (ProSupport XXX): "Unfortunately this system does not have the complete care warranty, we would be unable to replace it for you. You would have to purchase the replacement part"
Me: "unfortunate, how much would that cost? Can you send me the info so I can forward it to my boss for approval?"
Agent (ProSupport XXX): "Is it just the screen or plastics as well?"
Me: "just the screen"
Agent (ProSupport XXX XXX): "Let me get a quote created for you."
Me: "thanks"
Agent (ProSupport XXX XXX): "Just sent you a quote to your email address"
Me: "whew I thought it woould cost a lot more"
Agent (ProSupport XXX XXX): "Anything else I can do for you?"
Me: "no thanks, think thats all I need"
============
Admittedly, this says nothing of their support beyond simple hardware issues, and certainly not Linux support but.... its clearly appropriate for the issue.
> Every time they start making inroads with Linux, the community bitches about price. I'm surprised
> they even try at this point.
Well.... the community isn't putting up the cash to buy laptops, individuals are, and they are quite likely not the people bitching about price. You can't really take comments in online forum threads as an accurate meter of the community, since we know posting is done by a small and self-selected group....and overrepresents negative views.
I am pretty sure there are people at dell sitting back thinking... gee thats not what all the people buying our laptops say.
Now, I am typing this....on a dell laptop running linux. Not installed by them, and not purchased by me, I have it by accident of what company I work for (as is the flavor of Linux on it...sigh...I prefer Debian based distros....). However, having had to replace the laptop screen, where they simply shipped me out a new one, and I installed it myself in about 15 minutes with nothing more than a screwdriver and youtube video.... i have to say.... they make a damned easy laptop to work on.
In fact, so far the only complaints I have (about the hardware, complaints about the old Redh8 based distro are not Dell's fault) are related to the docking station and how hard it is to line up (after 8 months I still have trouble some mornings) and that it sits loose on the dock so any bump disconnects it. I have mostly solved this by pushing it as far back on the desk, under the monitor arms as I can.... but every once in a while, I still manage to bump it with something.
Perhaps, but I just assumed it was other costs. For example.... if yopu sell windows laptops, and someone calls with a problem, support staff has to make the call as to whether this is a defect or not, and may have to help the user fix it, depending on the details.
Generally speaking, everything I have seen says that support staff for linux and other unix-like OSs get paid more than the windows folks. Not to mention whatever R&D they have to put into it.
This is just an apples to oranges comparison and the OEM cost of windows vs a free OS has little to do with it.
Yah no shit.
Those anarchists killed 1 guy, in the most inept fuckup got lucky assasination of ALL TIME. They had already failed their attempt when the Archduke's car went down a street right by one of the bungling assasains. If not for this random set of circumstances, it would have been little more than a failure.
To blame the entire WW on such an event is ludicris. Throwing a match into a powder keg may START an explosion, but, does a lit match alone cause an explosion? The system of alliances that had built up had allowed the entire european region to turn into a powder keg, just waiting for something to touch it off. And we are not talking about a powder keg deep in a safe ammo dump. We are talking about a powder keg out in front right next to the sign that says "smoking area".
No left wing philosophy built those military alliances. No left wing philosophy caused them to fall into war like a house of cards into disorder.
To use an analogy.... imagine some guy was mad at you and kicks your newly built house. Now imagine the house actually collapsed after he kicked it. Who is to blame? The guy kicking the house, or the people who designed and built a house that couldn't withstand one asshole kicking it?
(yes clearly they are both in the wrong, but one is clearly did far worst than the other)