Journalist won't be prosecuted for pressing 'view source' A reporter who faced potential hacking charges for viewing website source code in his browser can rest easier now that Missouri officials have decided not to prosecute him. This month, Cole County Prosecutor Locke Thompson announced no charges would be filed in conjunction with the revelation that Missouri's Department of …
Sorry is this post in Unicode or are these glyphs images? I'm worried a about my browser decoding your data and whether or not I'm breaking the law by reading it...
I wouldn't want to willfully decode ASCII either, so I think the reg should make sure all comments are the exact images we tap on our keyboards.
HR: "I see on your resume you were at Wormwood Scrubs for ten years. I presume that's a legal firm?"
"They were very much involved with the law, yes. Spent many evenings and weekends there."
HR: "Excellent, we need dedicated chaps like you. We're short of staff, so we'll forgo the usual background and reference checks. Welcome aboard. Here's the admin passwords, good luck."
Non-sarcastic/
I would not jump to the conclusion that the man is stupid.
Politicians, especially ones that make it to the higher offices, can be very devious people.
His main goal is to get elected, to continue to rake in the political donations, and votes.
If something he does or says helps him get money and votes, then truth be damned.
If anyone is stupid / ignorant, it is the voting populace.
/non-sarcastic
I have believed that a politician's only concern is to get elected or re-elected. Our needs and wants are a distant third, if there is even a third. This is true no matter what political party the politician is part of. Now, there are a few good apples in the bunch. But these are far outnumbered by the bad ones. And, as the 1939 classic Mr. Smith Goes to Washington showed, the good politicians are quickly destroyed by the bad ones. It was true back then; it is even more true today.
"I have believed that a politician's only concern is to get elected or re-elected. Our needs and wants are a distant third"
Yes, that is certainly true for some. But all? The point is to support the latter and try and get rid of the former.
You say even the good get corrupted and that is certainly true too. Some see it the only option to overcome the former justifying if they give away a lot they might still end up doing a little good. But is the answer just to give up and leave the field to the former? Perhaps in the hope that it will provoke a revolution. But revolutions tend to be bloody and seldom return better results than bad democracy.
Trying to make this country more democratic is a noble cause. We have a hell of a way to go before we can expect politicians to not trade principles for a little progress. And no clear way to achieve it. But giving up on it invites even more certain doom.
What chance to remove the bad when it is the politicians who choose which candidates you are allowed to share your votes among?
While you have the freedom to vote for any of the candidates in your area, those are the only people who have any chance of being elected and even countries which allow a 'write-in' candidate will go with the official candidates 99/100 times (probably orders higher).
I'd argue that this applies to the top of a bureaucracy. For the rank and file it's to protect themselves from the machinations of the above, who'll happily throw them to the wolves at the drop of a memo.
I'll give an example.
Some years ago the top brass of a local council were granting themselves parking exemptions- (intended to allow council front line staff to park in residents' and pay bays while they were on council business) so that they could drive to the town hall and park on meter bays there all day, every day.
So egregious was this that the local businesses complained. Why, they argued, should these officials get free parking when local businesses had to pay to park outside their own premises.
The council top brass got scared and stopped all parking exemptions. Which only sounds sensible if you ignore that they'd granted themselves an "essential driver allowance" of a fixed monthly sum, whether they used their cars or not, more than adequate to pay for their parking costs. But front line staff (for whom driving often was essential ) were given a "casual driver allowance" i.e. claim mileage and vouchers for parking.These front line staff had to buy parking vouchers out of their departmental budgets, from the council that had given them those budgets, to do the job they were being employed for, and waste time organising to make sure they had a whole collection of vouchers to cover any area they (we) had to visit. And then on every visit waste more time driving around to find a residents' bay rather than just using a meter bay as they had done before.
At no time did those senior officials point out that there was no point making council staff pay the council the council's own money. Or that these staff's wasted time was being paid for by the rate payers to be social workers, Psychologists, special ed teachers etc.and that it was the public's money being so wasted.
Because all they were interested in was to save their own privileges (and skins). Stuff the ordinary workers (or indeed the public who needed this support).
Because if you get one who's consistent in their beliefs and doesn't simply tell you what you want to hear the entire country turns on him and brands him a terrorist.
You get what you deserve. Keep voting for rich kids to rip you off and you get rich kids continually ripping you off.
Cost of living crisis. 50 years of neo-liberal austerity. Can't see the connection?
A few years back my wife listened to a statement by Sarah Palin and was mortified that she was so stupid. It was one of those speech where she had some catch phrases written in her palm and she attempted to use all of them in one sentence.
My response to to my wife was consistent with your point. I told here its not that Palin was stupid. Instead it is the case that she thinks her base was stupid enough to believe what she was saying and that she was probable right.
Over the last few years I changed my views to agree with my wife. A large number of our politicians are that stupid. We had a president that could barely put two words together to form a sentence, my Governor passed an anti abortion law and claimed that by doing so they have eliminated rape and incest. Then one of my county republican chair a few weeks back proposed a resolution filled with insanity and and spelling errors.
Yes they are self serving and politics is about election and elect-ability. But no they are not just playing to their base, more than a few of them are just not very bright.
"more than a few of them are just not very bright"
Those who can - do
those who can't - teach
those who can't teach - go into politics
My parents were school principals (very good ones), meaning I got exposed to a lot of what the teaching profession has to offer. Let's just say that the third category is a low bar to hit
That said, I've known some VERY good and highly principled politicians, but the system is stacked against them from the outset. They usually burn out
Those that can't teach, get a college degree in Liberal Arts and take 5 years to do it.
And, I wish Misery's(Missouri) Gov would come after me. When I was finished with him, the only thing he would be running for would be the broom closet.
What an ignorant fuck he is.
I agree, I think far too many of our leaders really are at least as stupid as they appear to be. Possibly they are even worse when they are "off stage".
I believe this is happening because there is a huge control fraud going on: People with interests to protect actively works to insert dumbasses and nincompoops into all areas of society that can possibly regulate or interfere with their interests.
There is also people who are interested in dimishing democracy. Someone like Putin, for example, likely got a very good return on his investment in the ERG. The best part (for someone like Putin) is that most of the continued funding of that operation came from the defrauding of the British Taxpayer!
I'd argue that you give conspirators too much credit. Yes, far too many MPs are idiots. But they are selected to stand for that seat by selection committees who are looking for someone to represent themselves. (Assuming that they even have the material to choose from). So it's not a question of foreign influence so much as that the Activists who make this choice are themselves idiots.
Sarah Palin, Marjorie Greene (who only switched to bei g called Marjorie Taylor Greene due to her forbidden love of AOC), and Lauren Boebart.
And the guys, Matt Geitz, Jim Jordan, Ted Cruz...
And on the British side:
Nadine Dorries, Liz Truss, Suella Braveman, Andrea Leadsom
Boris Johnson. David Frost. Dominic Raab...
But who is truely the worst?
<harry hill> There's only one way to find out......
You're right that the governor has alterior motives. Because the *real* headline is that his administration is actively distributing the personal id details to everyone on the internet.
So now he's looking for cover.
But he is stupid, because it's an incredibly flimsy shield, and he's now trying to use the DA as a human shield. Any DA has some political accumen as well.
Yep. It was an obvious deflection by the governor. The effect of the "criminal investigation" was to gag the journalist whilst the governor dictated the public narrative.
If the governor did not have legal advice, he should be prosecuted for misuse of public funds and violation of first amendment rights.
If he did get legal advice, then that lawyer should be brought before the bar and sanctioned for unethical practices.
The UK prime minister has been doing this a lot recently - including at least one item which if he'd uttered it outside of the chamber would have resulted in legal proceedings
As a lot of his chumps are repeating it (and the target has experienced a few attacks+death threats), I expect there will be some interesting fallout. The target has a year and a day to make his move and I have little doubt that he will do so
Repeating or affirming something said under parliamentary/courtroom privilege outside parliament/courtooms puts the utterer very squarely in the legal crosshairs (There was case in Canada which illustrated that a few years back where a politician gave a courthouse steps press statement affirming the wild accusations made in the courtroom and ended up being legally eviscerated as a result)
The saga of Lord Adonis springs to mind...
If you have a Tory MP - send them an email complaining about the government's lies. Suggest it is time for the PM to resign.
It would be interesting if you receive the same long document as I did - repeating all the statistical lies as "achievements". Presumably a Tory Central Office confection.
"Being stupid is one thing. Being told you've been stupid is another. But going on to continue saying what you've been told is stupid is something else entirely."
This is a case of cholesterol cluttering the brain's (or what remains of it) synapses.
Apparently, this case is so bad that even attempting at doing ones shoelaces is called "hacking".
Really bad stuff ...
"But going on to continue saying what you've been told is stupid is something else entirely."
Complained to my Tory MP about the current Westminster government lies. Received a reply consisting of a long document effectively repeating the lies as "achievements". Presumably a pro forma from Central Office.
The governor is obviously still a moron. But the prosecutor is just being diplomatic: Sure, "an argument can be made" that it's criminal -- the governor is making it, after all! -- but then so can "an argument be made" that the moon is made out of green cheese. Doesn't have to be a good argument, after all, and that's kind of what the prosecutor means.
What he's saying is: "We have determined by non-legal means -- i.e. by asking people who know what the heck they're talking about, and finding out there was absolutely nothing to see here, so 'technical means' -- not to prosecute. But I want to cover my behind and not explicitly call my boss an idiot, so I'm going with the old 'an argument could be made' pablum for his idiocy."
The journalist's newspaper, the St. Louis Post Dispatch, "obtained records through an open records request showing that the state Education Commissioner initially planned to thank the newspaper for finding the problem. But the state instead issued a news release calling the reporter a 'hacker.'"
https://www.newsobserver.com/news/technology/article258330168.html#storylink=cpy
It's both sad and scary what is happening to US politics. The idiot governor on his official website states he "has a passion for sports, agriculture, Christ, and people." But apparently not IT, or Truth. https://governor.mo.gov/about-governor
Needless to say, both the Governor and County Prosecutor involved are Republicans.
Four thumbs down (at 1223 on 16 Feb) and counting, that's depressing.
For a start, what is 'religion' - we need to establish our terms.
Secondly, why the gender bias - 'man' - that doesn't bode well as we try to allow everyone to know that they are part of what it means to be 'human'?
Thirdly, the whole statement is such a crass generalisation that it is either being written simply for a laugh, or because the writer really believes it's true, in which case it would be good of them to demonstrate their evidence.
Get off your high horse.
Name me a religion that is not based on unsound and unproven belief in an entity or action that cannot be observed or even proven to exist by scientific methods. It would be more difficult to find one that doesn't than it would be to name all of the religions that follow that generalization.
While not every religious person may fully believe in the truth of their religious belief system's deity or deistic ability, you cannot deny that the central purpose of not only every religion I can think of, but I assume all known religions is to circulate and support that belief (if it isn't to con people out of money ala Scientology).
The use of "man" here clearly represents all people. For centuries the word has been used in nearly every language to represent the human race. You know that and yet you still nitpick. The use of words is to represent our ideas and thoughts, which means the words themselves may not have the same power that you personally assign them in the eyes of the speaker you lambast. The intent was clearly and obviously not to damage women or in some way make them inferior, so why is it important to complain about? For example, I call women "dudes" because I call everyone "dude", that does not mean I hate women or see them as inferior, because that is not my intent. And because the average, not Twitter brainwashed person (yes that was a personal attack) understands my intent, they understand I mean no harm in the use of my words, and to this day no woman has ever complained that I call then "dude". Hell my girl calls everyone "dude" too including other girls.
In addition, I find it hilarious that you decry the, as you seem to be implying, classical use of the word "man" to define the human race, while trying to attack someone's stance against religions, many of which have deeply-rooted misogyny within them and are responsible for horrible atrocities and inequality against women etc. Remember in Christianity where women were used as tokens of reward to men in the bible and treated as essentially disposable? When, after allowing Satan to murder Job's wife, God simply gave him another and called it good? Or how about the treatment of women in Islam? Getting stoned for not wearing your full-body coverings seems really cool, let's defend those poor religions from being generalized.
I am apalled by and cannot sympathize with people that posit themselves like you.
>Name me a religion that is not based on unsound and unproven belief in an entity or action that cannot be observed or even proven to exist by scientific methods
Why? What gives you the right to claim your belief system (scientific methods) is a judge of the validity of others'?
By its very nature, the scientific method can only be used to measure things which are measurable by the scientific method. It makes no claims about the existence of anything outside that. If you think nothing else exists, that's your belief speaking.
One doubts your decision to live by the scientific method is based on an analysis of scientific data showing this will be better (define 'better'), but rather a gut reaction or emotional reaction. Science DOES show that's a bad way to make optimal decisions.
Everyone should read a little philosophy, and understand what science really is.
Sorry the Scientific Method is not a belief system in the same way as religion.
It's simple language - saying that if you observe something it is true, is pretty much about the definition of words and what they mean. That's not a belief system.
You have made a circular argument "the scientific method can only be used to measure things which are measurable by the scientific method".
By that argument I could make up any old crap and say "sorry, this is not measurable by the scientific method so you can't say I am wrong".
Apparently, some people want to believe random stuff, even with the knowledge that there is absolutely no evidence (ie. no reason to believe it is true). That's the definition of delusion, and I accept that such people think like this although I don't understand such thinking -- wanting to believe something doesn't mean that you should. But don't say that puts it outside of the scientific method or that science is just a belief.
> What gives you the right to claim your belief system (scientific methods) is a judge of the validity of others'?
When we argue about these things, reality always has the last laugh. I suppose you can believe whatever you like, given a sufficient supply of mind-altering chemicals and willing slaves, but I would suggest that this is not the basis for a prosperous and sustainable society.
The primary purpose of a religion is to establish and maintain a set of norms of behaviours essential to preserving the safety and longevity of the people: don't steal, don't murder, don't shag your neighbour's spouse, with secondary ones like don't drink strong spirit in a desert, don't eat disease ridden food, make bread this way (Enkidu in the Epic of Gilgamesh).
Everything else is either setting the authority for the above (Commandments 1-4), jurisprudence, or politics (Paul's letters).
??? You've made your own definition of religion... congratulations on being religious.
FWIW, here's Webster's:
1 : the belief in a god or in a group of gods
2 : an organized system of beliefs, ceremonies, and rules used to worship a god or a group of gods
3 informal : an interest, a belief, or an activity that is very important to a person or group
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/religion
Strictly speaking a 'religion' does not require a belief in a god/gods.
In practice it is any shared belief system that provides a group of people with a framework for understanding the meaning and purpose of existence, and helps them govern their personal and social lives.
A 'religion' does not necessarily require an empirically 'provable' foundation, but most religions of any substance and endurance have a high degree of tolerance/willingness to work with reality as we experience it.
The fact that 'religions' may be used by some to control others or for personal gain often has nothing to do with the tenets of the religion itself, in fact such behaviour is often in direct contradiction of the beliefs/practices of the religion, which simply proves that people are at the heart of the problem, and 'religion' can just as easily be replaced by any other social institution - political, military, educational, etc.
Blaming 'religion', or generalising it as somehow being intrinsically wicked, is simply either evidence of lazy thinking, or evidence of ignorance and prejudice. Either way, it achieves nothing constructive.
For a start, what is 'religion' - we need to establish our terms.
Religion is whatever a Republican officeholder1 says it is.
1Or presumably a Tory office holder. Not as clear on right-ponder politics, but from what I've seen recently, I think this assertion is true.
This has echoes of the Sunncomm Rootkit scandal which you may if you’re old enough remember from SonyBMG CDs. Basically if you put a “copy protected” CD from SonyBMG into your Windows computer it would load a rootkit This was designed to stop you from ripping the contents of the CD and sharing it online, using it in an MP3 player etc. A Princeton graduate pointed out publicly that if you prevented the disc from autoplaying by pressing the shift key whilst you inserted the disc the rootkit wasn’t able to load. The people at Sunncomm were unimpressed by his pointing out a perfectly legitimate feature of Windows and looked at legal action.
https://web.archive.org/web/20031012225424/http://news.com.com/2100-1025_3-5089168.html?tag=nefd_top
This came to naught in the end I believe and SonyBMG faced a huge backlash for the rootkit scandal. As a colleague said at the time, his personal website told people to hold down the shift key when inserting a CD. He joked that he was just waiting for the letter from the lawyers, as his website was hosted in the USA. He said it would be telling him to cease and desist promoting methods that would allow users to circumvent copy protection from running, citing the DCMA etc. The rootkit code was then exploited by others for more malicious purposes later on I seem to recall.
During the dot com boom (the first one) there was a startup e-commerce site we found. The adage we used back then was that if it’s showing as available next day/day after, then the website had stock in the warehouse. Any longer and it was doubtless coming from a supplier on demand and they had no physical stock. All of their items were listed as several days for delivery and they were obviously just listing goods they were able to get from suppliers. In the source code of the page however (we were bored and curious) it listed the SKU (Stock Keeping Unit) and then avseries of numbers that weren’t displayed on the viewable page. Someone worked out that this was the supplier/cost price/delivery lead time/UNKNOWN
We never worked out what the UNKNOWN bit was, nor could we accurately identify the suppliers (we did get one of them though). Interesting to see the markup that they were adding on and very handy when looking at other sites selling the same product.
This has echoes of the Sunncomm Rootkit scandal which you may if you’re old enough remember from SonyBMG CDs.…..
And for completeness here is how this esteemed website covered the story:
https://www.theregister.com/2003/10/08/shift_key_breaks_latest_cd/
https://www.theregister.com/2003/10/09/sunncomm_to_sue_shift_key/
Of course, legal action was a possibility Halderman was well aware of when he published his paper. "I hardly think that telling people to push shift constitutes trafficking in a (copy-protection technology) circumvention device," Halderman yesterday told US newswires. "I'm not very worried." ®
And a follow up story on Sunncomm
https://www.theregister.com/2004/09/27/sunncomm_death_or_glorry/
I used to always rip my CDs to MP3 at the time, for backup and portability.
I can remember one of my friends complaining that he couldn't rip a CD, but had no idea why.
He brought it over to me to look at, and I managed to rip it without issue.
It only dawned on me a while later, that I routinely would hold shift down when popping CDs in, as so many audio CDs came with 'extras' on the disk at that time, that would often auto run some usually poorly written application.
It was only once the news hit a few weeks later, and on double checking, we confirmed the CD was one of the affected ones with the root kit!
I remember a review for a Neil Diamond (remember him?) CD in Amazon. It was, according to the review, Diamond's best work in years. It was great. It got one star and a recommendation for all to stay away because it was 'infected' with the SonyBMG rootkit. I understand that sales of that CD were poor, and that some of the artists who had CDs carrying the infection sued Sony. (Don't know if Diamond was one of them.)
Needless to say, both the Governor and County Prosecutor involved are Republicans.
Hmm ...
Needless to say, both the Governor and County Prosecutor involved are, besides being Republicans, ignorant AHs.
There you go, reads better.
But don't jump to any conclusions, the fact that the journalist accused of hacking has a typically white anglo-saxon name has absolutely nothing to to with all this absurdity.
O.
So he "has a passion for sports, agriculture, Christ, and people"? This is yet another example confirming the observation that:
• in the UK – a country with an Established church – politicians are viewed as a bit nutty if they mention anything religious, and they tend to avoid it at all costs;
• in the US – a country that explicitly separates church and state – politicians are viewed with suspicion if they don't mention anything religious.
Weird, huh? I've been to Italy, France, Spain, Germany, Slovenia, and many other countries including the US: despite (mostly) sharing a language with the latter, I have to say, it's the one I find the most foreign.
The USA is a deeply religious country where religious virtue signalling is absolutely mandatory. Don't forget who the famous "Pilgrims" were: Religious zealots who left the UK because they considered the Church of England to be intolerably godless... And they were followed by other zealots (Puritans come to mind).
Most politicians at any level in the UK still emphasise their religious affiliation. Hence the controversy over local councils who mandate prayers before official meetings.
Judging by his voting record - my own MP always votes with his Tory party line. Except when his Church hierarchy is promoting their bigoted dogma on some misogyny or LGBTQ+ equality issues.
> It's both sad and scary what is happening to US politics. The idiot governor on his official website states he "has a passion for sports, agriculture, Christ, and people." But apparently not IT, or Truth. https://governor.mo.gov/about-governor
I'm not sure how to parse that quote: was the reference to Christ an expletive when he acknowledges that he might have to do something to help ordinary people?
Or is he really going on the record as putting sport and agriculture ahead of Christ?
> going on the record as putting sport and agriculture ahead of Christ?
Priorities. There are clearly more sports fans and agricultural workers than devout voters out there (and then there are those who are both sports fans and devout).
If you parse his sentence it is all quite simple actually: He's a "regular guy" (his thing is sports, not 18th century french poetry), he's into agriculture (I guess profession of most of his voters), then comes the inevitable reminder he's supposed to be deeply religious and a patriot, and to finish a catch-all "people" mention, to show he cares about more than his bank account, and so nobody feels left out. Standard PR stuff. Chances are he never even read it himself.
This is fine, but at the same time re-scale your length unit such that the velocity of light is also 1. This greatly simplifies special relativity, and so much else.
(Not a joke. I was also a physicist once, and Otto Frisch, no less, lectured us on relativity with c=1.)
It's called "natural units", I seem to recall, used a lot in quantum mechanics - you save a ton of ink and paper, but when trying to convert back to meaningful units it quickly becomes a bit messy...
Beer, 'cause a prof once told us we had to know that stuff "drunk and sober". Good times (except for electromagnetism)!
Yeah, I once tried seeing if it was possible to create a system of units where by definition c=1 and also Earth's g=1. All I ended up with was a length-unit that was ridiculously long and a time-unit that was ridiculously short, by the standards of classical mechanics. But probably fine for quantum mechanics .....
What is the deliciousness factor of a spherical pi? Is it more delicious than a normal pi?
Since the crust is the least delicious part of pi, and a sphere has the smallest possible surface area to volume of all three-dimensional shapes, there would be a maximum of filling to crust in spherical pi, so deliciousness would approach a maximum value.
It's in the USA, so there are several different values of π over there!
Every schoolchild outside the USA knows π as the circumference of a circle one metre in diameter. But that's because we use only the metre to measure length.
Americans, with a choice of several different units for measuring any quantity and none of which are sensible multiples of the proper ones, have a whole table of values of π! You have to look up the units that have been used for the diameter and the circumference, and find the appropriate value. For instance, if the diameter is given in inches and the circumference is in feet, then the value of π is approximately 0.261799387799149.
My dad taught there one summer and came home to the UK with some weird stories including having a drink round someones house and getting a bit tiddly and sitting on the lawn only to have to home owners go loopy and start spraying everything with insecticides and stuff. Apparently Missouri lawns will bore holes in you if your not dying of insecticide poisoning!
Apparently Missouri lawns will bore holes in you if your not dying of insecticide poisoning!
They are called "chiggers", and yes, they will. Don't sit on the grass if you don't want your waistband, sock tops, and any tender parts where skin may touch skin to look scalded and itch like crazy. BTDT.
"Chiggers attach to the host, pierce the skin, inject enzymes into the bite wound that digest cellular contents, and then suck up the digested tissue through a tube formed by hardened skin cells called a stylostome."
OK, so the Septics weren't just acting bat shit crazy in this particular case.
Because most countries have a system to prevent idiots achieving legislative power.
Other nations embrace stupidity
Of course in the UK it would be a crime to simply type a URL
Because most countries have a system to prevent idiots achieving legislative power.
Obviously the UK is not one one of these. Otherwise the man in charge wouldn't insist that he was not at a party when all around him were wearing tinsel, while there was booze on his desk and the police are in posession of photographic evidence
That's not evidence of the lying shagger's stupidity. It is evidence Boris is a charlatan who is unfit for public office.
Plod's focus on the "gatherings" in Downing Street is a deflection from the actual problem - Boris's repeated and wilful deceit. Remember his lies that "all guidelines were followed", "it was a work event", "nobody told me", "I didn't know what the rules were"? What's really annoying is he thinks he can lie even more to wriggle away from the consequences of his earlier lies. Which, to be fair, is what Boris has been doing throughout his adult life - and probably earlier than that.
There has to be an element of non-stupidity to be able to maintain a constant stream of lies and deceit for as long as Boris has been doing it.
Just taking a page from the tRump playbook.
Well, actually the only page. Any book (play- or otherwise) from tRump could only have one page in it, and that page would be mostly pictures. In crayon (or black Sharpie).
"Because most countries have a system to prevent idiots achieving legislative power."
(1) The governor of Missouri does not have legislative power. He is the executive. The legislature has legislative power. I am not aware of any US state that has a parliamentary system.
(2) In most democratic countries, the only thing between idiots and power is the electorate. About the most stringest requirements most democracies impose are minimum age, citizenship, and sometimes literacy. Judges are often required to have read law. There may be a country somewhere that requires an intelligence test to stand for election to a legislative body but I'm not aware of one and it certainly isn't common. If one were imposed, you would complain that it's culturally biased and demand that it be eliminated.
Mike Harding (Mancunian Comedian) once proposed that the theory of the "robber-baron" being the one whose face ended up on money could equally well be explained thus:
In days of old, people believed an image of a person could carry their soul, and as a result, nobody sensible wanted their picture painted, photo taken etc. In fact, the only person stupid enough to allow their picture painted was the village idiot, so their face would be the one put on currency to show which area the money came from. As the importance of money grew, so did the importance of the village idiot...
As someone living in the "redneck shitkicker state" of Missouri, kindly fuck off. Your stereotype does not fit me (a black man) and my governor is an idiot on this particular topic.
Go live in one of those shitkicker states and maybe you'll realize that there are far fewer people that give a fuck than you intone, and it's the loud voices that make up the minority.
Continuing to put a hyper focus on race and assuming things are racist by default is just going to send this country further down the tubes. You are not helping.
(5) Accesses a computer, a computer system, or a computer network, and intentionally examines information about another person;
By this definition you don't even need to decode anything. The moment you read the From field at the head of an email you have broken the law.
It sounds like the entire legislature are idiots, not just the govenor.
Maybe, but if you read those words and try to forget your technical skills and instead adopt the mindset of a career politician who's only skills are in getting people onside, who's eyes glaze over at the sound of anything technical and who has admin staff to do the keyboard stuff - you'd have a better idea how this sort of crap gets adopted.
Start with "access a computer". It sounds like something smart and technical- and certainly devious. Add "computer network". This sounds like some kind of espionage, probably involving (gasp) hacking and visions of green screens full of flashing numbers to bypass the access denied message. And all this is done "intentionally". Everyone knows that doing something intentionally has to be sinister because the public are all sheep who are meant to just do as we're told.
The disturbing thing here is that the Prosecutor didn't actually clear him, and said, "There is an argument to be made that there was a violation of law,"
That should bother us all.
There was no argument to be made, and he should have said so, or said "the argument was made, and it's wrong".
Sophisticated hackers use tools to achieve the otherwise impossible.
Your Missouri-genius level abilities mean you can securely walk down the street in Kansas City or St Louis without fear of arrest... as long as you don't catch sight of the reflection of your phone in a shop window.
"There is an argument to be made that there was a violation of law," said Thompson in a statement [PDF]. "However, upon a review of the case file, the issues at the heart of the investigation have been resolved through non-legal means."
Erm, yes, the violation of the law was upon whoever wrote the website code to expose the personal information. So they have decided not to prosecute the company/department responsible for the site...
If the person viewing the source reasonably thought the SSN were secret and shouldn't have been public then he might have broken the law by publishing them - but he didn't, he reported it.
If you find a bunch of papers outside an army base labelled "top-secret" you presumably break the law by reading them - even if the real crime was losing them.
If they are in a folder marked top secret and you read them, yes. If they are in a sealed folder and you hand it unopened directly back to the army base, no. If they are just loose scraps of paper laying around, with the information for all to see, you can't help reading it, as you try to ascertain who they belong to.
But in this case, you can't help not read them, if you are looking at the source code, because they are explicitly openly listed in the source code. If they had been encrypted and he had tried to break the encryption, then he would have been at fault, likewise if he tried to use the data for nefarious purposes or sell the data on, which he didn't.
This reminds me of that backwater Oklahoma city manager that went after the CentOS guys when they thought their website had been hacked.
<damn hard to believe that's been 16 years ago...>
There is an argument to be made that there was a violation of law. However, upon a review of the case file, the issues at the heart of the investigation have been resolved through non-legal means, As such, it is not in the best interest of Cole County citizens to utilize the significant resources and taxpayer dollars that would be necessary to pursue misdemeanor criminal charges in this case.
There speaks a person who has been heavily pressured to prosecute by their boss (and boss's boss) and is desperately trying to find a way to shelve this without saying "What? Of course that's not a crime you stupid halfwit". So they're playing the resource & taxpayer dollar angle because Missouri is an at-will state and they could probably be fired for no reason (unless they have a contract).
N.B. Of course Missouri also has a protection against firing people because they refused to break the law. Sacking someone for refusing to bring charges in a case where prima facie no law has been broken could be construed to be an unconstitutional abuse of power (Fourth Amendment... no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause).
That'd be a fun case - a sacked Prosecutor bringing a wrongful dismissal case against the AG/Governor for refusing to break the US Constitution with a vexatious prosecution.
I heard about this last week whilst catching up on some security podcasts and found the case to be truly astonishing. Seriously, even kids at primary school would have hacked this page, but, not known what they were looking at. I actually think he may know better, but has reached the point of "Oh bollocks, too late to change direction now", much like the Coyote holding an A.C.M.E. sign.
It turns out that our elected leaders have simply won a popularity contest.
Nothing more, nothing less. In many cases, with preferential voting, they have not even done that.
The popular dude expressed his views. The task experts said "Yea.... Nah....."
Simple
It's not, to be frank, even their own popularity in most cases- in fact when it is in the UK they're often pretty good MPs too. - It's often just blind partisan factionalism. Places where a Tory will always/never get in, for example. And even a chimp wearing the right rosette would get elected.
Or where a far left Champagne Socialist will always get elected - possibly even if an ordinary member of the party might not.
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