Posts by nana

McKinnon loses extradition fight

This is not about where the crime was committed

There is no doubt that this crime was perpetrated against US systems, irrespective of the perpetrators physical location (amazing thing, the interweb - It allows you to affect actions thousands of miles away).

The US legislates that such access is illegal, irrespective of the location of the perpetrator (c.f. Sir Ivor Jennings quote that parliament can legislate to ban smoking on the streets of Paris if it so wishes - such is supreme sovereignty). It is that the UK and the USA to agree bilaterally to extradite individuals to the respective jurisdiction, which lends weight to that legislation.

The issue is not whether he committed a crime, but that he is being extradited with (as far as I know) no presentation of prima facie evidence, on the basis of a unilaterally biased extradition treaty, to a state that has time and again demonstrated a lack of integrity in it's legal process whenever the terrorism card is played.

UK spooks forced to hand Gitmo files to suspect's lawyers

@Philip Posted Tuesday 26th August 2008 19:11 GMT

You have not countered any of the points made, making your claims of a lack of logic entirely vacuous.

Feebly bleating 'liberal' as a pejorative is an emotional appeal of the rankest hypocrisy, as is crying foul of a hurtful word or two.

There is no post hoc logic in the use of the conditional - If A, then B (_If_ your views are because he is a darkie, _then_ you are a racist cunt). Your logic, however, stated that B happened because of A (he was tortured because he was a terrorist), ignoring the conditional aspect, and erroneously validating the outcome.

And I would say the same things to your face, although the keyboard warrior comments are always welcome as light entertainment. You suppurating twat.

Further on, you miss the point, yet again, that you cannot be sure that this person is a vile specimen, as he has not been given the benefit of democracy, due process and decency. Anybody put through secret internment camps and sanctioned torture will come out the other with a self signed note of their guilt.

I don't particularly agree with the fact that he is coming back to the UK, I don't agree with non-discriminatory immigration in general, but I do agree with having standards and morals that do not allow us to turn our backs when there is

I (would like to) imagine that better minds that ours have reasoned why an individual would be returned to the last know country of residence. There must have been a reason to have allowed him to stay in the first place.

I don't wish to clasp terrorists to my bosom, collective or otherwise. Those convicted should be locked up and removed from society. But way to go on the attempted straw man.

But neither do I want to live in a society governed by arbitrary rules, exercised without accountability by those with power, and the ability to convict on the strength of suspicion or circumstantial evidence alone.

Addressing some of your later points:

• He _was_ resident in Britain, albeit out of the country for whatever purpose

• His attempt to enter this country by fraudulent means should surely be dealt with by UK authorities, if nothing else just to confirm that he was making a fraudulent attempt.

• We have only your word that he is a dangerous Jihadist that wishes to kill us. I hope that, if you have supporting evidence, you provide it to the relevant authorities.

• Worthless scrotes like this - You really are in possession of far more information than the rest of us. Because, of course, you would never create a fictive bogeyman character to make a point, would you.

• Surely anyone would jump at the chance to litigate if they had been held without due process. Surely anyone has the right to redress if they had been held without due process. This goes back to the crux of the matter - If he was / is such a bad man, and such a threat to grannies and children, and we are so sure of that, we (as with the US government before us) have a plethora of powers to put him away for a long time.

La-la your not listening lalala

@ Philip Posted Tuesday 26th August 2008 09:41 GMT

You're either being disingenuous to the point of post-ironic excess, or you really are a credulous seeping cock-end.

Standards of democracy, due process and decency are applied unilaterally, and without prejudice or distinction, otherwise they would not be standards now, would they.

You're applying post-hoc logic, pre-assuming that the man is guilty in order to justify subjecting him to even a fraction of the treatment that he has undergone. Maybe you think it's acceptable because he's a darkie? Which elevates you from cock-end to racist cunt.

The assumption of innocence is not some namby-pinko-liberal woolliness - it's a paradigm that extols the value of humanity, and recognises that you can't just fuck someone over because you have some suspicions. If this bloke is so guilty, it should be a shoo in to convict, without the need for this wasteful torture lark and secret trial shenanigans.

Torture, rendition, secret detention - These do nothing to keep us safe. It foments distrust, secrecy, extremism, and hatred. They break down the rule of law itself.

They do, however, provide an illusion of security, that something is being done, to the more facile minded among us (that means you, Philip, just in case you are too soft-headed to infer the correct point, you muppet brained stain).

Game sharer gets £16K fine

The same tired crap again

<troll>

@ Anonymous Coward Posted Tuesday 19th August 2008 10:10 GMT

Gonadal brain leak. A false statement, prepended by "obvious", is still a false statement. The developed business model relies on people paying money to purchase the product - Copyright does not pay anything (except in litigation, it would seem).

From what I can gather, the success of Davenport Lyons relied on the lady admitting liability - there's not much in the way of a definitive win.

@ James Thomas Posted Tuesday 19th August 2008 10:32 GMT

Don't be facile, unless you can substantiate your claim. Furthermore, DRM does nothing to prevent games copyright infringement. Not a sausage. If it did, it would cripple licensed versions.

As a developer you would know that you are paid for what you produce, and the degree to which that product is shared has no bearing on your bottom line.

I have no idea what to make of your free-software-for-the-poor-starving-Africans. Apart from commenting on your inconsistency.

@ Gav Posted Tuesday 19th August 2008 11:21 GMT

The claim is against providing the software to others, not "illegally downloading" it. There is no criminal or civil infringement in downloading software. It's a simple equation.

@ Anonymous Coward Posted Tuesday 19th August 2008 13:25 GMT

ibid. douche.

@ Anonymous Coward Posted Tuesday 19th August 2008 14:30 GMT

Put up or shut up. "it is because it is because i say so" is not a valid argument.

And 0/10 for your car analogy - you would have been better off talking about taking the design of the car and using it to build my own car.

@ By Jon Kale Posted Tuesday 19th August 2008 15:25 GMT

I'm inclined to agree with you. People need to learn to stop being such demanding infants, and do without. However, being bent over and shafted is disproportionate.

That being said, there is a lot to be said for a system that distributes creative works to anyone that wants them, for free, such as a system of patronage - this was effective up until the point of copyright, which created a unilaterally beneficial rent seeking arrangement.

That your wife is being ploughed by another is no reason to project, and makes for a crap line of reasoning.

</troll>

The robot at the border: UK bets big on face scanning

@ Rik Hemsley & @ michael

Face recognition is, perhaps counter-intuitively, one thing that we do not fair well at as humans, in the context of matching a real face to an image

We can recognise _people_, but that capacity for recognition relies on far more factors than the visual image, especially just the static, 2D visual image. Familiarity of the subject, for example, is the single most important factor.

You could, for example, take a selection of passport facial photographs of your significant other, and insert a similar appearing stranger, and you would be hard pressed to pick out the stranger with 100% rate of accuracy.

Further complicate that with picking a stranger from a selection of strangers, losing the advantage of familiarity, and your accuracy drops again.

The traditional passport queue continues to operate, however, because of an innate unwillingness to make false positive / negative matches on the basis of our ability to match a face to a picture.

The proof of concept for computers to perform matching (not recognition) is there - It's now a question of accuracy.

McKinnon UFO hack 'looked like cyberterrorist attack'

@ Andy Worth

Those tarty US servers shouldn't have been wearing short skirts - they were asking for it, and, buy all accounts, they loved it.

The contributory negligence argument only works if you create an allegory to fit - In this case, it is more akin to having your front door closed, bolted and padlocked, with a sign on it saying "trespassers will be extradited", and the burglar took advantage of a window opening trick to gain entrance.

Irrespective of McKinnon's physical location, the crime was committed on and against US sovereign territory.

The issue is not whether he committed a crime, but that he is being extradited with (as far as I know) no presentation of prima facie evidence, on the basis of a unilaterally biased extradition treaty, to a state that has time and again demonstrated a lack of integrity in it's legal process when the terrorism card is played.

BT slams bandwidth brakes on all subscribers

Anonymous Coward @ 7th August 2008 12:14 GMT

You fatuous, credulous douche.

You fail to realise that those people using non-port 80 traffic, whether for peer to peer traffic (irrespective of any notion of copyright, the nuances of which blatantly fly above your facile mental capacity for understanding) have paid for a service, much the same way as you pay for the service

There is no abuse, except for you rabid accusation.

Court slaps UK BitTorrenters with landmark damages award

scruffy

You are wrong to infer that I was suggesting the forced adoption of an historical, albeit workable, business model, and misguided to add a layer of complexity in the form of the attractiveness to investors. Consider advertising - a form of patronage - The investor donates money to be associated with a creation, in the hope that a positive association leads to a benefit.

To the original comment that you challenged: Person A is not depriving anybody of an actual or opportunity income, given that they would have gone without in the absence of "it" being available for free by another source.

They do not contend that they have a right to the "it", nor that the creator be compelled to provide "it" for free on the basis that A does not wish to pay.

The creator suffers in no respect whatsoever.

"would [it] be worse if they were burning those files to optical disc and mailing them to each other" - What is the difference between sharing the media physically or electronically in this context? You might have been better of asking if it were worse if they were _selling_ those files to each other, which would result in a fairly definitive _yes_, although damages would and have generally been awarded in both cases.

The difference that you are so quick to rationalise, in order to forgive your own thieving nature, is moot. The premium accorded to time is everything when it comes to copyright. It (copyright, that is - not time) was, and still is, a legal construct that provides protection, to the creator of a work, of income from that work - and here's the relevant bit - for a specific time period. After which, people may copy / derive / generally muck about with the work.

The BBC / fee thread of your argument doesn't seem to be anything other that a fanciful straw man, and your conclusion that the writing is on the wall for file sharing is entirely unsupported supposition.

Call yourself scruffy

Plenty of people pay for IP (itself a vile neologism - who knew that I would turn out to be a socialist of thought) - Much freeware comes with the ability to donate automatically.

Historically, art thrived under a system of patronage - effectively a donations based business model.

Either way, the argument is that downloading media without paying does not give rise to measurable damages (on the individual level) - The issue of damages arises in this, and pretty much every other case, at the point of distribution. The infringement is in giving the media away for free without license from the creator.

You make an egregious oversight referring to the BBC - which, of course, is funded by the taxpayer in any case. Many television networks are funded by advertising revenue. The upshot is still a free product to the consumer.

And then you admit to rank hypocrisy - There being, of course, a time value attached to IP, which you appear to being not prepared to pay.

Then you go all straw man on us - albeit in a way that condemns your own actions as theft. So well done there.

AC @ post number 2 - your reasoning is specious and wishful at best. You're not Bruce Everiss are you?