making it harder for young people to accidentally come across online pornography
Is this really such a common occurrence?
The vast majority of accidental porn I've come across was from folks intentionally posting it to public forums, like the ever-popular goatse on here. Do we now consider that all discourse is pornographic? I'll note there are also a few look-alike domains that are easy to stumble across, but I think those are adequately blocked with client-side filters.
I would imagine even making some suggestion to Manning how to do it would likely qualify as conspiracy, even if nothing more than stating "I have my own set of rainbow tables"
Assange allegedly said "we have rainbow tables for Im". 10 minutes later, he said he'd "passed it onto our Im guy".
As for whether it's enough to prove the allegations, that's precisely what the court has to determine.
But now they're saying they don't have evidence of a crime.
Try reading TFS:
"For purposes of a conspiracy charge, it is not necessary for the action to be successful. All that is needed is an overt action in furtherance of the conspiracy, namely Assange's efforts to crack the password for Manning," Bradley [Moss], a lawyer at the Mark Zaid P.C law firm in Washington, DC, told Motherboard via email. "That he failed is irrelevant."
They're saying they have evidence (to the point of proof) that he attempted to crack the password. They don't have any evidence that he succeeded, but they don't need it for this charge.
You seem to be trying very hard to find an argument to win.
What specific charge of "mishandling" data are you suggesting he was not charged with?
Section 793(e) would seem to apply as it covers those who have unauthorized possession of documents, but that's not the point. My original comment was in response to the assumption that the US is going to prosecute Assange for things Manning did. Manning has plenty of espionage charges, but those are largely irrelevant to Assange's case, other than the simple fact that they are "an offense".
Manning is the party mentioned to be the person that Assange conspired with under 18 U.S. Code 371
That makes Manning potentially a party to Assange's alleged crime (though Manning is not included in the current indictment, I believe she could be added later), but it does not make Assange a party to Manning's already-charged crimes.
Everything you've described Assange doing is either legal or traditionally-protected journalism. Assange was certainly an asshole about it, but there's nothing that would have been successfully prosecuted in the US...
The part you didn't mention, which is what Assange is actually charged with, is that at some point in the events, he allegedly offered to help crack a password for Manning. That's not "anonymous collection" anymore. That's a conspiracy to commit an offense (the offense being Manning accessing a computer without authorization in furtherance of a crime (that crime being Manning's espionage)).
He is alleged to have possessed classified material, but that's not the same as being charged with the mishandling or publishing of that material.
The indictment consists of a list of alleged circumstances around the violation, then the charged violation itself. In this case, the allegations cover precisely what material Assange (allegedly) had, and what he was (allegedly) trying to obtain by committing his (alleged) crime of conspiring to crack a password without authorization. The charges themselves do not rely on the information being classified, though that is material information that might ultimately be useful in any sentencing.
Assange is still not being added as "a party to Manning's crimes", though from reading that list, I'm not sure if Assange's indictment would be in reference to a particular one of Manning's crimes.
Assange definitely curated the documents he released. He just did it for political favor, rather than any sense of commonly-accepted ethics.
As for Snowden, the people who praise him tend to have little understanding of what exactly he did, instead relying on the narratives that his supporters have fabricated.
whether he should be being charged by the US as a party to Manning's "crimes" (probably not on that, no.)
It bears repeating that at this time, the only crime the US has charged him with is offering to help crack a password, knowing that Manning didn't have authorization to have that password. He is not being charged with anything related to the mishandling or publishing of classified material.
My personal opinion is that Ecuador's releasing these statements to wash their hands of ties to Assange.
He was their guest, and recipient of asylum. When they revoked that asylum, he became the martyr he's spent a decade claiming to be. He has an army of unscrupulous followers with no qualms about attacking governments that Assange doesn't like.
There's been a slew of articles lately about how much it cost to house him, how bad a guest he was, how much he offended Ecuador... it doesn't seem to be aimed much at being relevant to his hacking or bail-related charges, but more to explain why Ecuador kicked him out. I suspect they're hoping to avoid an expensive and troublesome feud with hacktivists (not that Anonymous is really active anymore, but if anything would stir up the group for one last riot, this is it) and the rest of Assange's fan club.
It annoys me that after all these years that Assange was ridiculized for his claims that the US was after him, that finally gets arrested with a US warrant of extradition and instantly all this denial disappears and the US warrant is considered entirely justified and there is no problem at all with it.
Not quite. I always ridiculed Assange because he's always been playing for sympathy as the ever-persecuted underdog. He flouts every rule, then acts so terribly surprised and hurt when he gets caught. The US is the big power, so of course Assange would claim they were hunting him, regardless of whether they were or not. As it turns out, no, the US wasn't actually hunting him for the first 6 years he was in his self-imposed bail-skipping exile, despite the assertions he makes in his fantasies.
The issue at hand here is that this is an attack on the press, saying that whenever the press publishes something the government (or other players) disapprove of, they will find a way to get back at them.
Again, no, that's not actually the case. It's saying that if you conspire to commit a crime, you'll be punished for that crime, and you can't use your press card as a shield. Nobody is above the law.
And that is how every journalist who investigates government business will understand it and will feel that their freedom of movement is shrinking fast.
That's quite the assumption. The SPJ's ethics code says journalists should "recognize that legal access to information differs from an ethical justification to publish or broadcast." Again, the only freedom being curtailed is that journalists shouldn't consider themselves to be above the law.
I know what it is to catch someone on a technicality and that is what this is.... The practice of requesting more information from leakers is entirely standard practice with any journalist who functions.
Requesting is fine. There's even some debate about the ethics of paying for information. Once a journalist crosses the line into offering to help steal documents, that's not just a "technicality"... that's a crime.
Your vision of what a journalist should do is deeply flawed. I'm familiar with it, the impartial/objective neutralist journalist.
I've never said that a journalist should be impartial or objective. The SPJ says journalists should "never deliberately distort facts or context", and that's all I ask as well. Go ahead and be partial. Put a subjective spin on your reporting like any other human... that's perfectly fine.
You want the journalist to be reliable and complete when he tells you what he is looking at. But a true neutral journalist looks where he is told to look and that makes him effectively neutered.
You're making a leap there again, avoiding the point. A journalist can indeed look anywhere that he's lawfully allowed to look, regardless of the desires of his sources or anyone else. He can then report with whatever opinion or direction he wants. However, that looking must be done lawfully. Go ahead and take pictures in public places. That's (usually) legal. Go undercover and lie about who you are to get more access. That's sneaky and underhanded (and gently discouraged by the SPJ), but usually doesn't run afoul of any laws in itself.
Unfortunately, breaking a password without authorization is not lawful. Conspiring to break the laws set by the CFAA is not lawful. It's not a petty crime, either. It's a federal felony, severe enough to warrant 5 years in prison. There's certainly still debate whether the CFAA is too harsh, but for now, it's on par with manslaughter. Again, it's not something you can ignore just because you're a journalist. Journalists can't break this law without consequences any more than they can commit manslaughter with impunity.
Your depiction of the... journalist is... journalism as extension of power. And that is a head-on attack on the press as watchdog over power.
That is neither how the system presently works, nor how it should work.
The singular job of a journalist is to inform the public. It is the public that is the watchdog, and holds power over the laws in a republic, and those laws hold power over the government. To make a journalist exempt from laws is a threat to rule of law itself. Anyone with a press card becomes a tyrant, able to trample others' rights in the name of an unchecked and unaccountable investigation.
A journalist must observe the world, and publish information given to him. Between those events, though, there's far more than the unthinking mechanisms of a Tannoy (and today I've learned a new word - thanks!). The journalist collects information, understands it, and presents it in such a way that the public can more clearly see the truth as the journalist sees it. With apologies to Orwell, it is the journalist's job to say "hey, last week we were at war with Eurasia, but now we're allies fighting Eastasia."
However, it is not the job of a journalist to actually go visit the enemy soldiers and ask where they're from. It's not the journalist who should maintain a record of who was fighting or when. If another citizen showed up at the journalist's desk with all of the required material information, the same story could be published by the journalist. The journalist role is still to simply collect and combine bits of information into the story.
Now, if a regular citizen (or any other role) wants to go visit a war zone, they can. They can also keep whatever lists they want, or hack whatever computers they want, or break into whatever secured facilities they want. If those actions are illegal, they can be prosecuted. That doesn't change if the regular citizen (or investigator, or any other role) also plays a journalist role. The journalist is subject to the rule of law, just like anybody else.
With that in mind, consider that this isn't a charge against Julian Assange, the publishing journalist. It's a charge against Julian Assange, the guy who offered to crack a password hash for Manning, knowing Manning wasn't authorized to have that password.
Under Obama this event was known, and it was not used (despite their already aggressive anti-press stance) because it would endanger journalism
Not quite. Even if the American government had wanted to press this charge earlier, they couldn't really do anything until Assange's asylum was revoked, or until Ecuador chose to permit extradition, which would have almost certainly revoked the asylum in itself. It's hard to overstate just how much Assange's freedom has been relying on his asylum status. This indictment has been waiting for a year, and the UK's bail-related charges have been waiting even longer. Ecuador's willingness to house Assange and tolerate his annoyance has been all that's protected him.
But here, he's an Australian citizen being extradited for so far unspecified crimes committed against a country he apparently wasn't in and isn't a citizen of.
The indictment's unsealed. The crimes are very clearly specified. Despite what Hollywood would have you believe about jurisdiction, it's not so much a question of physical location, but whose rules apply in the pursuit of justice.
Imagine if the US turned over to China everybody who spoke ill of the Chinese government, or shipped off to North Korea the people who released documents that North Korea deemed offensive.
Well, that's certainly possible. China or North Korea could request extradition (even without a treaty, though that helps), and for whatever reason, we could agree. In almost all cases (including this one), the alleged crime must be a crime in both jurisdictions, and the country that would release the accused would need to be convinced that their suitable due process would be adequately followed. That's why several countries will not extradite to the US for anything where the death penalty is an option if their own laws wouldn't allow it, and it's also why the US won't usually extradite to places it sees as having corrupt courts.
Again, the extradition is really just changing whose rules are followed during the trial. Extradition does not change the facts of a case, including what was or wasn't legal at the time the alleged crime was committed.
Yes, this technically means you're subject to the laws of every country at all times. If a German citizen is in Germany speaking ill of the Chinese government, then visits China tomorrow, they could be prosecuted there for their crimes. If they get arrested in Germany before getting to China, China could request extradition.
From what I've read, his only ties to the US are that he offended politicians there, and published documents the government (which was a foreign government for him) didn't want published.
He also (allegedly, with enough evidence for an indictment) committed a crime against the American owners of a computer system.
As I understand, he can't really be prosecuted for espionage, and the bar for that charge is far higher than what is publicly known about Assange's activities. The short version is that he's a journalist, and not a US citizen, so it's expected that he'd try to publish American secrets.
Where he runs afoul of the CFAA is that he apparently offered to help. Journalists can't do that. As a journalist, Assange must be a passive observer of the world, publishing information given to him. He shouldn't have any active role in obtaining the information. However, it looks like he crossed that line, and he's getting hit for it.
Now, this isn't to say that journalists can't ever have an active role... but they do so as citizens, not journalists. They can use FOIA to force the release of government information, or they can go out and solicit interviews. They can pay sources for information, or participate in illegal activities... but they do all of that as private citizens, and they face all the same consequences as anyone else that does so. Anyone who offers to help crack a password to a system they aren't authorized to access would face the same charges that Assange does, journalist or not.
That's important, because it means this case isn't an attack on free press, or political retribution, or any kind of threat to rule-following journalists. It's a hacker-for-hire getting caught for hacking, and nothing more.
You have to add in the cost of the internet to get your total cost.
If you use your Internet connection just for streaming, then sure, you should include it. If you also use it for your home office, IoT, telephone, and web surfing, then it's just utilization of an existing cost - you'd be paying for it regardless of whether you had cable TV or YouTube TV.
For an accurate comparison, compare the total cost of living with each option. Include every aspect of your life... The obvious ones are connections needed, consumables (like power consumption running your giant liquid-nitrogen-cooled gaming rig to watch a movie), ancillary costs (if you have cable TV with commercial breaks, are you more likely to eat snacks during those breaks?), and preference (how much would you pay to not have those commercials?)... but there are also the unrelated costs, like mortgage/rent, car payments, food, savings, non-TV entertainment, clothing... All of that should be budgeted together, and compared for each option.
It's not just enough to say "this costs less than that, but this needs another thing". You need to say "With this, my total costs will be X, but with that, my total costs will by Y." That keeps things in perspective.
The ISPs shouldn't be competing with Google, Twitter, or Facebook. The ISPs should compete with other ISPs, to provide improving service in the market of connecting customers to the Internet.
Google and Facebook have become the gatekeepers to an awful lot of the Web, like it or not. The ISP, by physical necessity, is already the gatekeeper to the Internet itself. Having the same entity controlling both is where I start to get very worried.
If they send enough bills, then the GOP will accuse the Democrats of wasting Congress's time by bullying the Senate and refusing to produce workable legislation, while propping up McConnell as a stalwart defender strong enough to resist the onslaught. Whether the bills are popular or not doesn't really matter... the bigger the number, the more it can be spun to look like political pressure.
I'd prefer to avoid the "drivers" analogy, because people cling to the idea that drivers are at the top of the causality chain. Nevermind the effects of dashboard design, maintenance recommendations,
If you want to go with a human analogue, I'd refer to airplane pilots. They're more likely to have a fatal accident in the car driving to the airport than when they're actually flying the plane. That's primarily because every aspect of the piloting experience has been refined (often at the cost of human lives) to minimize errors. Whenever something is more error-prone, the FAA gets involved, headlines are made, and it's generally a Big Deal until the process or tool changes to reduce those errors again.
That's the only way to actually achieve security. Don't just claim that rules are "commonly accepted" and shift the blame to the users, who often don't have any idea what those rules are. Instead, recognize that humans are reactionary components of the system, and start managing the environment they're reacting to.
"Users" are the problem causing security breaches, just like "wheels" are the problem in car accident fatalities. Sure, they're an easily-identifiable point in the causality chain, but there's a lot of underlying factors that need to be considered.
People, including users, generally try to do what's right. In almost every case, the source of the problem falls into one of three categories:
Poor training: The user might not know the risks of opening email attachments, or might not think that their data is worth protecting. In this case, the user is vulnerable to a trust attack, where the user thinks they're doing something correct, but opens the door to a malicious attacker.
Poor tools: The user might need a software tool, or they might need a better process. In either case, they're vulnerable to an impersonation attack, where the attacker offers a simple solution to their problems.
Poor engagement: The user no longer cares whether their actions are right, because they don't value what they are protecting. This means they're open to attacks of coercion, where an attacker can offer a bribe, or even just a sense of vengeance.
There are levels of distinction within each category, but that just changes the difficulty of the attack... how precisely a phishing page needs to be crafted, or how big the bribe needs to be. To raise that difficulty, a company (or individual) must see investing in their environment as an integral part of their security doctrine. Providing users with extra software tools is a security feature. Having an easy change-request process is a security feature. Having a team outing is a security feature, just as much as telling users to pick a complicated password.
Since this is Slashdot, I'll throw in a car analogy, in the time-honored tradition.
You can see my car, a good distance away on level ground. It seems to be moving away from you. With more observations, you can tell it's not just moving, but actually picking up speed.
Since the ground certainly seems level, and you don't see anything else around, it's a safe assumption that my car does indeed have an engine, and someone's driving it away from you.
Now, the problem is that engine doesn't actually create any power. It just transfers the energy from its fuel, so it's also a safe assumption that my car has a fuel tank (or batteries, if electric), and that's providing the energy for the acceleration.
Now back to dark matter...
Galaxies don't have engines or fuel tanks, but we've recently confirmed that they are actually accelerating... and far more than makes sense for the amount of mass and energy we've seen. To use another car analogy, it's like having a horse-drawn cart keeping up with a race car... It's enough to suggest something really fishy is going on.
When something fishy happens in astrophysics, it means either our formulas or our models are wrong. Since our formulas seem to be correct everywhere else, we've started looking for this "dark matter" stuff, under the suspicion that it might hold the energy we're looking for... like finding rockets hidden under the bottom of the horse-drawn cart.
It is still possible that our formulas are wrong... but to match other experiments' results, they'd have to be off by an extremely small amount in some cases, and extremely large amounts in other cases. That means not just a tweak to a scalar value somewhere, but restructuring equations entirely...and we'd still need some kind of reason for the discrepancy. Draft horses don't run at race car speeds, and if they did, they wouldn't look like draft horses.
Looking for dark matter and the dark energy it caries is actually the simpler solution. The theory fits well with our existing observations, and doesn't require completely overhauling our understanding of how the universe works. If we keep running experiments like the one in TFA and finding nothing, we'll start the huge undertaking to figure out what else might be happening, but for now this is the sensible approach.
What the copy-paste summary omits is more informative:
Every time you spend with Apple Card, you get 2 percent cash back — a feature the company calls Daily Cash. Purchases directly from Apple come with 3 percent cash back. That could lift the company’s sales of its own products, providing a greater incentive to pay “full price” at Apple than seek discounted prices elsewhere.
Additionally, the card has no fees: no late fees or international fees, with unspecified lower interest rates than competitors. The absence of late fees is jaw-dropping; whether it will be sustainable for the long term is yet to be seen.
Apple Card will be accepted via MasterCard’s global payment network and backed by Goldman Sachs. While the card will be digital and connected to an iPhone, there will also be a physical card made from titanium that can be used in stores; purchases made with the physical card are only eligible for 1 percent Daily Cash.
Another reason to sign up for Apple Card: greater transaction privacy. Apple has maintained that its customers are “not the product” with its services, which is to say that it doesn’t harvest or sell their personal information to profit off their data.
In short, usually 1% (with the physical card) or 2% (if you're using an iPhone) cash back, no late fees, and it's accepted as MasterCard. the "unspecified lower interest rates" sure sound enticing, but I'll wait until they're specified to actually care. Otherwise, it's a bog-standard credit card, but this time with a shiny Apple logo!
That's not usually true. Video codecs often place a lot of the computation work on the encoding side, since people generally only care about smooth decoding playback. That means encoding often runs far slower. I'm not sure what codecs are standard in the piracy world these days, but I'd be surprised if anything readily available to pirates can encode full-speed 4K with enough effect to make storage feasible.
To my knowledge, there are only some cameras that would have the necessary hardware, but they're rather ridiculously expensive to use for parts. What kind of budget does a pirate have, exactly?
As I said, go ahead and publish, but include the note that the job isn't actually finished. Use the partial result to justify asking for more funding so you can complete the work.
For a while, my job was finding the handful of drug-trial candidates you mentioned. I understand that there are times when you realistically cannot hit a high degree of probability, but that doesn't mean a p-value isn't critically important, and it certainly doesn't mean a p-value should be "banned" from peer-reviewed journals.
If you only ran three trials before funding ran out, that's fine... just make absolutely certain that it's clear that's what happened. In that case, your published result isn't so much a claim that "this is a discovery", but "we did this, and saw this, and more work might show a discovery".
That's how we get the "greater information sharing" that we all love. We don't get it by sweeping poor rigor under the rug.
The editors [of The American Statistician] introduce the collection with the caution “don’t say ‘statistically significant’”. Another article with dozens of signatories also calls on authors and journal editors to disavow those terms.
We agree, and call for the entire concept of statistical significance to be abandoned.
TFA summarizes this as a "ban on p-values".
I'm all in favor of evaluating work on its merits, but the p-value is still a useful tool for measuring one of the most important merits: the chance that the result was completely coincidental.
Slashdot Mirror
making it harder for young people to accidentally come across online pornography
Is this really such a common occurrence?
The vast majority of accidental porn I've come across was from folks intentionally posting it to public forums, like the ever-popular goatse on here. Do we now consider that all discourse is pornographic? I'll note there are also a few look-alike domains that are easy to stumble across, but I think those are adequately blocked with client-side filters.
In all, this seems utterly unnecessary.
I would imagine even making some suggestion to Manning how to do it would likely qualify as conspiracy, even if nothing more than stating "I have my own set of rainbow tables"
Assange allegedly said "we have rainbow tables for Im". 10 minutes later, he said he'd "passed it onto our Im guy".
As for whether it's enough to prove the allegations, that's precisely what the court has to determine.
Not quite. You can read the actual logs in the recently-released affidavit. The relevant section is on page 33.
But now they're saying they don't have evidence of a crime.
Try reading TFS:
"For purposes of a conspiracy charge, it is not necessary for the action to be successful. All that is needed is an overt action in furtherance of the conspiracy, namely Assange's efforts to crack the password for Manning," Bradley [Moss], a lawyer at the Mark Zaid P.C law firm in Washington, DC, told Motherboard via email. "That he failed is irrelevant."
They're saying they have evidence (to the point of proof) that he attempted to crack the password. They don't have any evidence that he succeeded, but they don't need it for this charge.
You seem to be trying very hard to find an argument to win.
What specific charge of "mishandling" data are you suggesting he was not charged with?
Section 793(e) would seem to apply as it covers those who have unauthorized possession of documents, but that's not the point. My original comment was in response to the assumption that the US is going to prosecute Assange for things Manning did. Manning has plenty of espionage charges, but those are largely irrelevant to Assange's case, other than the simple fact that they are "an offense".
Manning is the party mentioned to be the person that Assange conspired with under 18 U.S. Code 371
That makes Manning potentially a party to Assange's alleged crime (though Manning is not included in the current indictment, I believe she could be added later), but it does not make Assange a party to Manning's already-charged crimes.
You have it partly wrong.
Everything you've described Assange doing is either legal or traditionally-protected journalism. Assange was certainly an asshole about it, but there's nothing that would have been successfully prosecuted in the US...
The part you didn't mention, which is what Assange is actually charged with, is that at some point in the events, he allegedly offered to help crack a password for Manning. That's not "anonymous collection" anymore. That's a conspiracy to commit an offense (the offense being Manning accessing a computer without authorization in furtherance of a crime (that crime being Manning's espionage)).
He is alleged to have possessed classified material, but that's not the same as being charged with the mishandling or publishing of that material.
The indictment consists of a list of alleged circumstances around the violation, then the charged violation itself. In this case, the allegations cover precisely what material Assange (allegedly) had, and what he was (allegedly) trying to obtain by committing his (alleged) crime of conspiring to crack a password without authorization. The charges themselves do not rely on the information being classified, though that is material information that might ultimately be useful in any sentencing.
Assange is still not being added as "a party to Manning's crimes", though from reading that list, I'm not sure if Assange's indictment would be in reference to a particular one of Manning's crimes.
Assange definitely curated the documents he released. He just did it for political favor, rather than any sense of commonly-accepted ethics.
As for Snowden, the people who praise him tend to have little understanding of what exactly he did, instead relying on the narratives that his supporters have fabricated.
whether he should be being charged by the US as a party to Manning's "crimes" (probably not on that, no.)
It bears repeating that at this time, the only crime the US has charged him with is offering to help crack a password, knowing that Manning didn't have authorization to have that password. He is not being charged with anything related to the mishandling or publishing of classified material.
My personal opinion is that Ecuador's releasing these statements to wash their hands of ties to Assange.
He was their guest, and recipient of asylum. When they revoked that asylum, he became the martyr he's spent a decade claiming to be. He has an army of unscrupulous followers with no qualms about attacking governments that Assange doesn't like.
There's been a slew of articles lately about how much it cost to house him, how bad a guest he was, how much he offended Ecuador... it doesn't seem to be aimed much at being relevant to his hacking or bail-related charges, but more to explain why Ecuador kicked him out. I suspect they're hoping to avoid an expensive and troublesome feud with hacktivists (not that Anonymous is really active anymore, but if anything would stir up the group for one last riot, this is it) and the rest of Assange's fan club.
It annoys me that after all these years that Assange was ridiculized for his claims that the US was after him, that finally gets arrested with a US warrant of extradition and instantly all this denial disappears and the US warrant is considered entirely justified and there is no problem at all with it.
Not quite. I always ridiculed Assange because he's always been playing for sympathy as the ever-persecuted underdog. He flouts every rule, then acts so terribly surprised and hurt when he gets caught. The US is the big power, so of course Assange would claim they were hunting him, regardless of whether they were or not. As it turns out, no, the US wasn't actually hunting him for the first 6 years he was in his self-imposed bail-skipping exile, despite the assertions he makes in his fantasies.
The issue at hand here is that this is an attack on the press, saying that whenever the press publishes something the government (or other players) disapprove of, they will find a way to get back at them.
Again, no, that's not actually the case. It's saying that if you conspire to commit a crime, you'll be punished for that crime, and you can't use your press card as a shield. Nobody is above the law.
And that is how every journalist who investigates government business will understand it and will feel that their freedom of movement is shrinking fast.
That's quite the assumption. The SPJ's ethics code says journalists should "recognize that legal access to information differs from an ethical justification to publish or broadcast." Again, the only freedom being curtailed is that journalists shouldn't consider themselves to be above the law.
I know what it is to catch someone on a technicality and that is what this is. ... The practice of requesting more information from leakers is entirely standard practice with any journalist who functions.
Requesting is fine. There's even some debate about the ethics of paying for information. Once a journalist crosses the line into offering to help steal documents, that's not just a "technicality"... that's a crime.
Your vision of what a journalist should do is deeply flawed. I'm familiar with it, the impartial/objective neutralist journalist.
I've never said that a journalist should be impartial or objective. The SPJ says journalists should "never deliberately distort facts or context", and that's all I ask as well. Go ahead and be partial. Put a subjective spin on your reporting like any other human... that's perfectly fine.
You want the journalist to be reliable and complete when he tells you what he is looking at. But a true neutral journalist looks where he is told to look and that makes him effectively neutered.
You're making a leap there again, avoiding the point. A journalist can indeed look anywhere that he's lawfully allowed to look, regardless of the desires of his sources or anyone else. He can then report with whatever opinion or direction he wants. However, that looking must be done lawfully. Go ahead and take pictures in public places. That's (usually) legal. Go undercover and lie about who you are to get more access. That's sneaky and underhanded (and gently discouraged by the SPJ), but usually doesn't run afoul of any laws in itself.
Unfortunately, breaking a password without authorization is not lawful. Conspiring to break the laws set by the CFAA is not lawful. It's not a petty crime, either. It's a federal felony, severe enough to warrant 5 years in prison. There's certainly still debate whether the CFAA is too harsh, but for now, it's on par with manslaughter. Again, it's not something you can ignore just because you're a journalist. Journalists can't break this law without consequences any more than they can commit manslaughter with impunity.
Nobody's above the rule of law.
Your depiction of the ... journalist is ... journalism as extension of power. And that is a head-on attack on the press as watchdog over power.
That is neither how the system presently works, nor how it should work.
The singular job of a journalist is to inform the public. It is the public that is the watchdog, and holds power over the laws in a republic, and those laws hold power over the government. To make a journalist exempt from laws is a threat to rule of law itself. Anyone with a press card becomes a tyrant, able to trample others' rights in the name of an unchecked and unaccountable investigation.
A journalist must observe the world, and publish information given to him. Between those events, though, there's far more than the unthinking mechanisms of a Tannoy (and today I've learned a new word - thanks!). The journalist collects information, understands it, and presents it in such a way that the public can more clearly see the truth as the journalist sees it. With apologies to Orwell, it is the journalist's job to say "hey, last week we were at war with Eurasia, but now we're allies fighting Eastasia."
However, it is not the job of a journalist to actually go visit the enemy soldiers and ask where they're from. It's not the journalist who should maintain a record of who was fighting or when. If another citizen showed up at the journalist's desk with all of the required material information, the same story could be published by the journalist. The journalist role is still to simply collect and combine bits of information into the story.
Now, if a regular citizen (or any other role) wants to go visit a war zone, they can. They can also keep whatever lists they want, or hack whatever computers they want, or break into whatever secured facilities they want. If those actions are illegal, they can be prosecuted. That doesn't change if the regular citizen (or investigator, or any other role) also plays a journalist role. The journalist is subject to the rule of law, just like anybody else.
With that in mind, consider that this isn't a charge against Julian Assange, the publishing journalist. It's a charge against Julian Assange, the guy who offered to crack a password hash for Manning, knowing Manning wasn't authorized to have that password.
Under Obama this event was known, and it was not used (despite their already aggressive anti-press stance) because it would endanger journalism
Not quite. Even if the American government had wanted to press this charge earlier, they couldn't really do anything until Assange's asylum was revoked, or until Ecuador chose to permit extradition, which would have almost certainly revoked the asylum in itself. It's hard to overstate just how much Assange's freedom has been relying on his asylum status. This indictment has been waiting for a year, and the UK's bail-related charges have been waiting even longer. Ecuador's willingness to house Assange and tolerate his annoyance has been all that's protected him.
But here, he's an Australian citizen being extradited for so far unspecified crimes committed against a country he apparently wasn't in and isn't a citizen of.
The indictment's unsealed. The crimes are very clearly specified. Despite what Hollywood would have you believe about jurisdiction, it's not so much a question of physical location, but whose rules apply in the pursuit of justice.
Imagine if the US turned over to China everybody who spoke ill of the Chinese government, or shipped off to North Korea the people who released documents that North Korea deemed offensive.
Well, that's certainly possible. China or North Korea could request extradition (even without a treaty, though that helps), and for whatever reason, we could agree. In almost all cases (including this one), the alleged crime must be a crime in both jurisdictions, and the country that would release the accused would need to be convinced that their suitable due process would be adequately followed. That's why several countries will not extradite to the US for anything where the death penalty is an option if their own laws wouldn't allow it, and it's also why the US won't usually extradite to places it sees as having corrupt courts.
Again, the extradition is really just changing whose rules are followed during the trial. Extradition does not change the facts of a case, including what was or wasn't legal at the time the alleged crime was committed.
Yes, this technically means you're subject to the laws of every country at all times. If a German citizen is in Germany speaking ill of the Chinese government, then visits China tomorrow, they could be prosecuted there for their crimes. If they get arrested in Germany before getting to China, China could request extradition.
From what I've read, his only ties to the US are that he offended politicians there, and published documents the government (which was a foreign government for him) didn't want published.
He also (allegedly, with enough evidence for an indictment) committed a crime against the American owners of a computer system.
Apparently, he offered to crack a password to a computer system, knowing that he's be aiding unauthorized access. That's a crime.
As I understand, he can't really be prosecuted for espionage, and the bar for that charge is far higher than what is publicly known about Assange's activities. The short version is that he's a journalist, and not a US citizen, so it's expected that he'd try to publish American secrets.
Where he runs afoul of the CFAA is that he apparently offered to help. Journalists can't do that. As a journalist, Assange must be a passive observer of the world, publishing information given to him. He shouldn't have any active role in obtaining the information. However, it looks like he crossed that line, and he's getting hit for it.
Now, this isn't to say that journalists can't ever have an active role... but they do so as citizens, not journalists. They can use FOIA to force the release of government information, or they can go out and solicit interviews. They can pay sources for information, or participate in illegal activities... but they do all of that as private citizens, and they face all the same consequences as anyone else that does so. Anyone who offers to help crack a password to a system they aren't authorized to access would face the same charges that Assange does, journalist or not.
That's important, because it means this case isn't an attack on free press, or political retribution, or any kind of threat to rule-following journalists. It's a hacker-for-hire getting caught for hacking, and nothing more.
You have to add in the cost of the internet to get your total cost.
If you use your Internet connection just for streaming, then sure, you should include it. If you also use it for your home office, IoT, telephone, and web surfing, then it's just utilization of an existing cost - you'd be paying for it regardless of whether you had cable TV or YouTube TV.
For an accurate comparison, compare the total cost of living with each option. Include every aspect of your life... The obvious ones are connections needed, consumables (like power consumption running your giant liquid-nitrogen-cooled gaming rig to watch a movie), ancillary costs (if you have cable TV with commercial breaks, are you more likely to eat snacks during those breaks?), and preference (how much would you pay to not have those commercials?)... but there are also the unrelated costs, like mortgage/rent, car payments, food, savings, non-TV entertainment, clothing... All of that should be budgeted together, and compared for each option.
It's not just enough to say "this costs less than that, but this needs another thing". You need to say "With this, my total costs will be X, but with that, my total costs will by Y." That keeps things in perspective.
The ISPs shouldn't be competing with Google, Twitter, or Facebook. The ISPs should compete with other ISPs, to provide improving service in the market of connecting customers to the Internet.
Google and Facebook have become the gatekeepers to an awful lot of the Web, like it or not. The ISP, by physical necessity, is already the gatekeeper to the Internet itself. Having the same entity controlling both is where I start to get very worried.
That can backfire easily enough.
If they send enough bills, then the GOP will accuse the Democrats of wasting Congress's time by bullying the Senate and refusing to produce workable legislation, while propping up McConnell as a stalwart defender strong enough to resist the onslaught. Whether the bills are popular or not doesn't really matter... the bigger the number, the more it can be spun to look like political pressure.
I'd prefer to avoid the "drivers" analogy, because people cling to the idea that drivers are at the top of the causality chain. Nevermind the effects of dashboard design, maintenance recommendations,
If you want to go with a human analogue, I'd refer to airplane pilots. They're more likely to have a fatal accident in the car driving to the airport than when they're actually flying the plane. That's primarily because every aspect of the piloting experience has been refined (often at the cost of human lives) to minimize errors. Whenever something is more error-prone, the FAA gets involved, headlines are made, and it's generally a Big Deal until the process or tool changes to reduce those errors again.
That's the only way to actually achieve security. Don't just claim that rules are "commonly accepted" and shift the blame to the users, who often don't have any idea what those rules are. Instead, recognize that humans are reactionary components of the system, and start managing the environment they're reacting to.
Oh very much, yes.
"Users" are the problem causing security breaches, just like "wheels" are the problem in car accident fatalities. Sure, they're an easily-identifiable point in the causality chain, but there's a lot of underlying factors that need to be considered.
People, including users, generally try to do what's right. In almost every case, the source of the problem falls into one of three categories:
There are levels of distinction within each category, but that just changes the difficulty of the attack... how precisely a phishing page needs to be crafted, or how big the bribe needs to be. To raise that difficulty, a company (or individual) must see investing in their environment as an integral part of their security doctrine. Providing users with extra software tools is a security feature. Having an easy change-request process is a security feature. Having a team outing is a security feature, just as much as telling users to pick a complicated password.
Since this is Slashdot, I'll throw in a car analogy, in the time-honored tradition.
You can see my car, a good distance away on level ground. It seems to be moving away from you. With more observations, you can tell it's not just moving, but actually picking up speed.
Since the ground certainly seems level, and you don't see anything else around, it's a safe assumption that my car does indeed have an engine, and someone's driving it away from you.
Now, the problem is that engine doesn't actually create any power. It just transfers the energy from its fuel, so it's also a safe assumption that my car has a fuel tank (or batteries, if electric), and that's providing the energy for the acceleration.
Now back to dark matter...
Galaxies don't have engines or fuel tanks, but we've recently confirmed that they are actually accelerating... and far more than makes sense for the amount of mass and energy we've seen. To use another car analogy, it's like having a horse-drawn cart keeping up with a race car... It's enough to suggest something really fishy is going on.
When something fishy happens in astrophysics, it means either our formulas or our models are wrong. Since our formulas seem to be correct everywhere else, we've started looking for this "dark matter" stuff, under the suspicion that it might hold the energy we're looking for... like finding rockets hidden under the bottom of the horse-drawn cart.
It is still possible that our formulas are wrong... but to match other experiments' results, they'd have to be off by an extremely small amount in some cases, and extremely large amounts in other cases. That means not just a tweak to a scalar value somewhere, but restructuring equations entirely...and we'd still need some kind of reason for the discrepancy. Draft horses don't run at race car speeds, and if they did, they wouldn't look like draft horses.
Looking for dark matter and the dark energy it caries is actually the simpler solution. The theory fits well with our existing observations, and doesn't require completely overhauling our understanding of how the universe works. If we keep running experiments like the one in TFA and finding nothing, we'll start the huge undertaking to figure out what else might be happening, but for now this is the sensible approach.
What the copy-paste summary omits is more informative:
Every time you spend with Apple Card, you get 2 percent cash back — a feature the company calls Daily Cash. Purchases directly from Apple come with 3 percent cash back. That could lift the company’s sales of its own products, providing a greater incentive to pay “full price” at Apple than seek discounted prices elsewhere.
Additionally, the card has no fees: no late fees or international fees, with unspecified lower interest rates than competitors. The absence of late fees is jaw-dropping; whether it will be sustainable for the long term is yet to be seen.
Apple Card will be accepted via MasterCard’s global payment network and backed by Goldman Sachs. While the card will be digital and connected to an iPhone, there will also be a physical card made from titanium that can be used in stores; purchases made with the physical card are only eligible for 1 percent Daily Cash.
Another reason to sign up for Apple Card: greater transaction privacy. Apple has maintained that its customers are “not the product” with its services, which is to say that it doesn’t harvest or sell their personal information to profit off their data.
In short, usually 1% (with the physical card) or 2% (if you're using an iPhone) cash back, no late fees, and it's accepted as MasterCard. the "unspecified lower interest rates" sure sound enticing, but I'll wait until they're specified to actually care. Otherwise, it's a bog-standard credit card, but this time with a shiny Apple logo!
That's not usually true. Video codecs often place a lot of the computation work on the encoding side, since people generally only care about smooth decoding playback. That means encoding often runs far slower. I'm not sure what codecs are standard in the piracy world these days, but I'd be surprised if anything readily available to pirates can encode full-speed 4K with enough effect to make storage feasible.
To my knowledge, there are only some cameras that would have the necessary hardware, but they're rather ridiculously expensive to use for parts. What kind of budget does a pirate have, exactly?
As I said, go ahead and publish, but include the note that the job isn't actually finished. Use the partial result to justify asking for more funding so you can complete the work.
For a while, my job was finding the handful of drug-trial candidates you mentioned. I understand that there are times when you realistically cannot hit a high degree of probability, but that doesn't mean a p-value isn't critically important, and it certainly doesn't mean a p-value should be "banned" from peer-reviewed journals.
If you only ran three trials before funding ran out, that's fine... just make absolutely certain that it's clear that's what happened. In that case, your published result isn't so much a claim that "this is a discovery", but "we did this, and saw this, and more work might show a discovery".
That's how we get the "greater information sharing" that we all love. We don't get it by sweeping poor rigor under the rug.
What they're arguing for, in their words:
The editors [of The American Statistician] introduce the collection with the caution “don’t say ‘statistically significant’”. Another article with dozens of signatories also calls on authors and journal editors to disavow those terms.
We agree, and call for the entire concept of statistical significance to be abandoned.
TFA summarizes this as a "ban on p-values".
I'm all in favor of evaluating work on its merits, but the p-value is still a useful tool for measuring one of the most important merits: the chance that the result was completely coincidental.