I never repeated an activity that I was told was wrong. Some of the reports imply that I did action X, was told "don't do X" and I did X again. That was never the case. The version of "gate" that was forbidden was never run again.
I'm not stupid. When I'm told "don't do this", I don't do it.
As for the "illegal" and "frowned upon", those came from the police reports. I'm still amazed at how much information they have in those reports that I didn't say, or said in a context that doesn't fit how the reports played them back.
They took about ten lines of cryptic notes from a two hour conversation. They had tape recorders in the car, they didn't use them. They had video cameras at the police station. They didn't use them. I'm told it's common practice to allow interrogators to "play loose".
As an example, please answer the question honestly:
"Have you ever done anything against company policy?".
If you can answer that with "no", you are in the minority, or have never worked for a large company. You mean you've never called a personal call on the PBX? That's against the corporate policy of every large company I've worked for, and yet every day, people are calling their wife, kids, doctor, car dealer, sports ticket vendor, etc.
So I answered "yes" to that. Now how does it show up in the report:
"Mr. Schwartz knowingly violated Intel policy".
Crap. How am I supposed to get a story across when things are taken and presented that far out of context?
That's the mess that this case is. I answered very honestly and broadly during the interrogation, but the only parts that were written down were the parts when taken out of context imply that I knew that I was harming Intel. Nothing of the sort. Just a bunch of out-of-context remarks by skillful interrogators.
If my case remains unchallenged, the law that convicted me remains, and even gets strengthened. This is a danger to other Oregonians.
So I continue the challenges not so much for me (although getting
my weapons and free-travel rights back would be nice), but for my fellow Oregonians who are now even more at risk because of my case.
The money is not the issue. Yeah, I could always use a few extra bucks, but instead I've dedicated a significant amount of my income toward having justice show up in this case, rather than the confusion that has come out so far.
Yes, half my community service time was commuted to a fine. This was done by a judge on a letter from my probation officer, with the entire history of the case available to him. He had every option to say no, or to change the rate of hours-to-fine at something other than the conventional $5/hr. He accepted my probation officer's proposal as requested.
So, instead of doing 480 hours of service, I did 240, and paid a $1200 fine. With the judges approval. This is public record.
I couldn't have said this better myself. Thank you.
I was stupidly naive. I had been rewarded in the past for finding "item 11" on the "1 to 10 list" and doing it. I was trying to do that here, both in setting up the mail gateway to read my Intel mail while I was offsite, and revealing how much the admins at SSD had lowered their standards since I had left that group a year earlier. Yes, neither of these were expicitly requested activities, but I also hadn't been explicity requested to type "ls". It was just a judgement call, bad judgement in hindsight.
So, I suffer from having been overenthusiastic in my job in an enviroment that had a hair trigger for anything out of the ordinary, and being prosecuted under a law that makes it a felony to change the background colors on a screen.
I had no criminal intent. I was just trying to do my job the best way I knew how. And for that, I've lost $300K and gained a permanent status as a triple-felon (unable to get expunged, by the way), not to mention the time and energy that have gone into this case for the past seven years that could have been directed toward something more productive.
(Why do you think my name isn't on the third edition of the camel?)
This should have remained a civil matter. I'd not be whining (as much {grin}) if I'd merely lost the contract and gotten blackballed for performing acts that Intel believed were off-contract. But the law shouldn't have permitted this to be a criminal matter, and Intel shouldn't have optioned to take this to the police without willing to be fully responsible for the consequences. Recall also that Intel is the largest private employer in Oregon, and you'll see the inequity here; I bet if I had been working for a 10-person software house in Oregon that they'd not have gotten the attention of the DA.
It's important because due to a recent Oregonian anti-hacking law, I was tried and convicted in a criminal court over what was, essentially a civil matter.
In the words of Jello Biafra, "Welcome to Oregon, land of tolerance." And to think I often dreamed of bringing Heidi here, and living a peaceful, Oregonian life together.
Basically, internal politics at intel played an important role. Intel is a very large company with many divisions, and some of them get along about as well as the Israelis and Palestinians.
I made the mistake of getting involved in helping a group of sysadmins in another division. This was a fatal error. Ordinarily I would not have suffered such a lapse in judgement, but I was busy thinking about that sweet, divine piece of blonde femininity, Heidi Wall, and wasn't thinking too clearly.
My friends, I had hoped to win on this appeal, but alas, I have failed.
This means the failure of all my precious hopes and dreams. Now that I am branded a convicted felon for life, there is no way Heidi Wall will ever go out with me.
Truly, this is a sad day, but perhaps it is for the best. Far too many hours have I spent daydreaming about Heidi instead of doing actual work. And it has been truly uncomfortable for me to talk to Larry about Perl when all I can think about is his hot little daughter.
More importantly, I think Larry and Tom found out about my attraction to Heidi (although I have been circumspect) and decided to cut me out of the royalties on the latest version of the Camel book. I could just be being paranoid here though, since Tom has alway hated me, and he has a strange, unholy control over Larry.
As much as it pains me to say it, I must admit that this is in Heidi's best interest too. Now that she has Shoeboy, why would she want a repulsive old man like me? I could never hope to compete with Shoeboy's wit, charm and gorgeous body. (I'm not gay, but damn, the dude is hot.) Shoeboy can make her truly happy, and I wish them the best.
One thing is for certain though, I'm recommending that no one ever work for Intel.
--Randal Schwartz
Re:We already have software to prevent linking
on
Unwanted Linking
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· Score: 3
Wow, you're either really stupid or really naieve.
Well, not to feed the trolls too much, but yes, at the time, I was probably a bit of both, at least about how I would be perceived. And perception is everything in this game.
I was not asked not to crack the password file either.
and it was against Intel's policy,
Quite the contrary. System administrators (such as I was at the time)
are required to run crack. My fault was that I was acting as a system administrator in an attempt to help my former system administrator buddies in a different group. That was stupid, but I presumed that as long as I was still wearing an Intel badge, I was working "for the company" and not for a particular division. Little did I know how the division politics would play into this case.
My ongoing legal case (documented for the most part at
the Friends of Randal Schwartz site) involved a badly
written port reflector, which I'm sad to say was embarassingly the first Perl code to be placed in the public record.
Unfortunately, I had a much different outcome from this student. I'm still in the process of demonstrating that the law under which I was tried was constitutionally flawed, turning the activities of dozens of Oregonians every day into unwitting felonies.
Perl is being developed by the Perl community, and there's been no change in this (except the size {grin}) since 1987.
Larry Wall has been "employed" by O'Reilly for the past few years, at one time in the now defunct Software Division, but is now basically on an independent task of sorting out and guiding the architecture for Perl6 through a community development process.
Larry's relationship with O'Reilly is unaffected by this latest move (so he tells me in email a short time ago).
Re:A flaw in the book? Or the review?
on
Rebel Code
·
· Score: 1
or actively hostile to it (Perl, BSD)
Please cite your reference for where Perl is "hostile" to the "Free Software" people.
This is patently false. Perl itself is released under the GPL version 1, ever since I can recall.
I accept the responsibility and subsequent actions regarding many things around my case. I should have told my supervisor what I was working on. I should have reported the problems sooner, instead of trying to be more thorough in my reporting, and being embarassed for my former colleagues.
But the fact of the matter is that ORS 164.377 is overbroad and vague, and that the police and judge created a search warrant out of speculation. We are arguing that in court right now, and the jury is still out. Until that matter is resolved, the fat lady hasn't sang yet.
And in the meanwhile, Oregonians (and residents of many other states with very similar overbroad and vague laws) are at risk, for doing their job. I've had dozens of people come up to me and say "there but for the grace of God go I" over the past seven years.
Yes, I did stupid things, even with good intentions. Perhaps I should have gotten fired or worse. But being made a triple felon (and losing a cumulative year of work and a quarter million dollars) in the framework of bad legislation and bad implementation doesn't fly, and I won't bow down to it.
Sounds like parallel elements to my
ongoing legal case where I was trying to determine the extent of potential leakage for my client at the time, Intel.
I'd be happy just to see something in "standard" email that captured more of the metadata than just "to" "from" and "subject". For example, why can't "standard" email also capture:
My role in sending it (am I sending as friend, owner of Stonehenge, fellow Perl hacker, resident of Oregon, or what)
Your role in recieving it (ditto)
Precisely what thread this is in reply to, if any
My emotional tone (smiley face doesn't cut it)
subthread markings for different paragraphs of an aggregate message (perhaps even shifts in role)
My alternate roles for your information (you are talking to me because of my Perl training skills, but I also am a snowboarder)
If we just started capturing some of that, perhaps as some XML payload attached to the message, 75% of the mail load of the 400 email messages I get a day would be terribly simplified.
RFC822 is like what, 20 years old? Isn't it time we raised the bar a bit for email? And it needs to be vendor-neutral, with good opensource implementations, but extensible to be able to carry vendor-private stuff as well. XML fits that role well, and is prevalent enough today to start making sense.
Is anyone interested in working with me on this, or can someone point me to people who are already doing this? I'd appreciate some email. (Ick, what am I saying? {grin})
I think my biggest problem will be getting it into AOL browser and Outlook. Maybe some people from these two arenas can talk to me about a unified strategy.
mod_perl can provide computed configuration files on the fly, directly from any database supported by DBI, for example, or even just computationally derived. There's examples of such in the mod_perl docs.
Re:And you can't turn it off...
on
Perl and .NET
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· Score: 1
Hate to burst your bubble, but the O'Reilly book "Learning Perl on Win32" was written by the founder of ActiveState.
Hate to burst your bubble, but that's patently false.
The author information is available
on O'Reilly's web site. Dick Hardt wrote a foreword, but had nothing to do with the rest of the book.
Re:Much better than Sixth Sense (SPOILERS FOR BOTH
on
Review: "Unbreakable"
·
· Score: 1
Uh, no, I'm just using Occam's Razor. We don't see the boy, or have any indication he exists (I listened to the dialog carefully a few times when I got the DVD) until after the shooting. Occam's Razor tells me it's simpler to believe the entire middle of the movie was the doctor hallucinating on his deathbed than to even postulate that there's a boy who sees dead people. There was no boy! You were snookered in, face it. This was just a remake of Jacob's Ladder, or the Dallas Dream Season.
Much better than Sixth Sense (SPOILERS FOR BOTH)
on
Review: "Unbreakable"
·
· Score: 1
OK, I'm probably the only person in the world who screamed
"This is a rip-off of Jacob's Ladder" at the very end.
But that's the way I was left after seeing
Sixth Sense. The moment we "flash back" at the end, I saw the whole middle of the movie as nothing more than a hallucination on his death bed, beginning when Dr Crowe was shot in the first reel. And I kept screaming to my
friends "THERE IS NO BOY!", because we don't see or hear about the
boy until after the shooting. Unfortunately, none of my friends
"get it", probably because most of them hadn't seen Jacob's Ladder.
Now comes along a movie for which we don't have a "Dallas dream season" possible interpretation. Yes, I suppose if I had paid closer
attention to the clues, I'd have figured out Elijah's "secret identity"
before the last reel, but I didn't, and I was wonderfully shocked, right
along with David Dunn. That was good cinema. As was the unusual cinematography that just kept pulling me in. I also felt David's frustration at not knowing his own power or strength, and the tension during the gun scene. Marvellous stuff (pun intended).
I most certainly will get this movie on DVD when it comes out.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not stupid. When I'm told "don't do this", I don't do it.
As for the "illegal" and "frowned upon", those came from the police reports. I'm still amazed at how much information they have in those reports that I didn't say, or said in a context that doesn't fit how the reports played them back.
They took about ten lines of cryptic notes from a two hour conversation. They had tape recorders in the car, they didn't use them. They had video cameras at the police station. They didn't use them. I'm told it's common practice to allow interrogators to "play loose".
As an example, please answer the question honestly:
If you can answer that with "no", you are in the minority, or have never worked for a large company. You mean you've never called a personal call on the PBX? That's against the corporate policy of every large company I've worked for, and yet every day, people are calling their wife, kids, doctor, car dealer, sports ticket vendor, etc.So I answered "yes" to that. Now how does it show up in the report: "Mr. Schwartz knowingly violated Intel policy".
Crap. How am I supposed to get a story across when things are taken and presented that far out of context?
That's the mess that this case is. I answered very honestly and broadly during the interrogation, but the only parts that were written down were the parts when taken out of context imply that I knew that I was harming Intel. Nothing of the sort. Just a bunch of out-of-context remarks by skillful interrogators.
So I continue the challenges not so much for me (although getting my weapons and free-travel rights back would be nice), but for my fellow Oregonians who are now even more at risk because of my case.
The money is not the issue. Yeah, I could always use a few extra bucks, but instead I've dedicated a significant amount of my income toward having justice show up in this case, rather than the confusion that has come out so far.
Yes, half my community service time was commuted to a fine. This was done by a judge on a letter from my probation officer, with the entire history of the case available to him. He had every option to say no, or to change the rate of hours-to-fine at something other than the conventional $5/hr. He accepted my probation officer's proposal as requested.
So, instead of doing 480 hours of service, I did 240, and paid a $1200 fine. With the judges approval. This is public record.
I was stupidly naive. I had been rewarded in the past for finding "item 11" on the "1 to 10 list" and doing it. I was trying to do that here, both in setting up the mail gateway to read my Intel mail while I was offsite, and revealing how much the admins at SSD had lowered their standards since I had left that group a year earlier. Yes, neither of these were expicitly requested activities, but I also hadn't been explicity requested to type "ls". It was just a judgement call, bad judgement in hindsight.
So, I suffer from having been overenthusiastic in my job in an enviroment that had a hair trigger for anything out of the ordinary, and being prosecuted under a law that makes it a felony to change the background colors on a screen.
I had no criminal intent. I was just trying to do my job the best way I knew how. And for that, I've lost $300K and gained a permanent status as a triple-felon (unable to get expunged, by the way), not to mention the time and energy that have gone into this case for the past seven years that could have been directed toward something more productive. (Why do you think my name isn't on the third edition of the camel?)
This should have remained a civil matter. I'd not be whining (as much {grin}) if I'd merely lost the contract and gotten blackballed for performing acts that Intel believed were off-contract. But the law shouldn't have permitted this to be a criminal matter, and Intel shouldn't have optioned to take this to the police without willing to be fully responsible for the consequences. Recall also that Intel is the largest private employer in Oregon, and you'll see the inequity here; I bet if I had been working for a 10-person software house in Oregon that they'd not have gotten the attention of the DA.
Keep spoofing, shoeboy. Someone might believe you some day. The real password was much more secure.
But the perpetrator just gave it back to me (THANK YOU). Ignore the few articles
that have references to Heidi Wall, but the rest are mine.
OK... This was not me. But this now is!
It's important because due to a recent Oregonian anti-hacking law, I was tried and convicted in a criminal court over what was, essentially a civil matter.
In the words of Jello Biafra, "Welcome to Oregon, land of tolerance." And to think I often dreamed of bringing Heidi here, and living a peaceful, Oregonian life together.
Basically, internal politics at intel played an important role. Intel is a very large company with many divisions, and some of them get along about as well as the Israelis and Palestinians.
I made the mistake of getting involved in helping a group of sysadmins in another division. This was a fatal error. Ordinarily I would not have suffered such a lapse in judgement, but I was busy thinking about that sweet, divine piece of blonde femininity, Heidi Wall, and wasn't thinking too clearly.
My friends, I had hoped to win on this appeal, but alas, I have failed.
This means the failure of all my precious hopes and dreams. Now that I am branded a convicted felon for life, there is no way Heidi Wall will ever go out with me.
Truly, this is a sad day, but perhaps it is for the best. Far too many hours have I spent daydreaming about Heidi instead of doing actual work. And it has been truly uncomfortable for me to talk to Larry about Perl when all I can think about is his hot little daughter.
More importantly, I think Larry and Tom found out about my attraction to Heidi (although I have been circumspect) and decided to cut me out of the royalties on the latest version of the Camel book. I could just be being paranoid here though, since Tom has alway hated me, and he has a strange, unholy control over Larry.
As much as it pains me to say it, I must admit that this is in Heidi's best interest too. Now that she has Shoeboy, why would she want a repulsive old man like me? I could never hope to compete with Shoeboy's wit, charm and gorgeous body. (I'm not gay, but damn, the dude is hot.) Shoeboy can make her truly happy, and I wish them the best.
One thing is for certain though, I'm recommending that no one ever work for Intel.
--Randal Schwartz
Yes, I've had code to do this in Perl on my website since late 1997. It's really not that difficult.
Unfortunately, I had a much different outcome from this student. I'm still in the process of demonstrating that the law under which I was tried was constitutionally flawed, turning the activities of dozens of Oregonians every day into unwitting felonies.
Larry Wall has been "employed" by O'Reilly for the past few years, at one time in the now defunct Software Division, but is now basically on an independent task of sorting out and guiding the architecture for Perl6 through a community development process.
Larry's relationship with O'Reilly is unaffected by this latest move (so he tells me in email a short time ago).
This is patently false. Perl itself is released under the GPL version 1, ever since I can recall.
But the fact of the matter is that ORS 164.377 is overbroad and vague, and that the police and judge created a search warrant out of speculation. We are arguing that in court right now, and the jury is still out. Until that matter is resolved, the fat lady hasn't sang yet.
And in the meanwhile, Oregonians (and residents of many other states with very similar overbroad and vague laws) are at risk, for doing their job. I've had dozens of people come up to me and say "there but for the grace of God go I" over the past seven years.
Yes, I did stupid things, even with good intentions. Perhaps I should have gotten fired or worse. But being made a triple felon (and losing a cumulative year of work and a quarter million dollars) in the framework of bad legislation and bad implementation doesn't fly, and I won't bow down to it.
For more details on my ongoing case, visit the FORS archive.
Sounds like parallel elements to my ongoing legal case where I was trying to determine the extent of potential leakage for my client at the time, Intel.
perl -pi.bak -0777 -e 's/NETSCAPE2.0/NO_ANIM_GIF/; s/ANIMEXTS1.0/NO_ANIM_GIF/;' \
/usr/lib/netscape/netscape-communicator
A backup file will be created with .bak appended.
- My role in sending it (am I sending as friend, owner of Stonehenge, fellow Perl hacker, resident of Oregon, or what)
- Your role in recieving it (ditto)
- Precisely what thread this is in reply to, if any
- My emotional tone (smiley face doesn't cut it)
- subthread markings for different paragraphs of an aggregate message (perhaps even shifts in role)
- My alternate roles for your information (you are talking to me because of my Perl training skills, but I also am a snowboarder)
If we just started capturing some of that, perhaps as some XML payload attached to the message, 75% of the mail load of the 400 email messages I get a day would be terribly simplified.RFC822 is like what, 20 years old? Isn't it time we raised the bar a bit for email? And it needs to be vendor-neutral, with good opensource implementations, but extensible to be able to carry vendor-private stuff as well. XML fits that role well, and is prevalent enough today to start making sense.
Is anyone interested in working with me on this, or can someone point me to people who are already doing this? I'd appreciate some email. (Ick, what am I saying? {grin})
I think my biggest problem will be getting it into AOL browser and Outlook. Maybe some people from these two arenas can talk to me about a unified strategy.
mod_perl can provide computed configuration files on the fly, directly from any database supported by DBI, for example, or even just computationally derived. There's examples of such in the mod_perl docs.
Uh, no, I'm just using Occam's Razor. We don't see the boy, or have any indication he exists (I listened to the dialog carefully a few times when I got the DVD) until after the shooting. Occam's Razor tells me it's simpler to believe the entire middle of the movie was the doctor hallucinating on his deathbed than to even postulate that there's a boy who sees dead people. There was no boy! You were snookered in, face it. This was just a remake of Jacob's Ladder, or the Dallas Dream Season.
But that's the way I was left after seeing Sixth Sense. The moment we "flash back" at the end, I saw the whole middle of the movie as nothing more than a hallucination on his death bed, beginning when Dr Crowe was shot in the first reel. And I kept screaming to my friends "THERE IS NO BOY!", because we don't see or hear about the boy until after the shooting. Unfortunately, none of my friends "get it", probably because most of them hadn't seen Jacob's Ladder.
Now comes along a movie for which we don't have a "Dallas dream season" possible interpretation. Yes, I suppose if I had paid closer attention to the clues, I'd have figured out Elijah's "secret identity" before the last reel, but I didn't, and I was wonderfully shocked, right along with David Dunn. That was good cinema. As was the unusual cinematography that just kept pulling me in. I also felt David's frustration at not knowing his own power or strength, and the tension during the gun scene. Marvellous stuff (pun intended).
I most certainly will get this movie on DVD when it comes out.