* Posts by seraphim

16 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2012

I was authorized to trash my employer's network, sysadmin tells court

seraphim

Re: @Ellier ... This will impact others as well

"Mens rea" is not in itself a crime. You can intend to be a total dick, intend to be nasty, intend to be any number of things. You have a guilty mind. But in order to commit a crime, you also must have broken the law as it is written. Not as it maybe SHOULD have been written, but whoever wrote it probably didn't have this scenario in mind. It's one of those weird edge cases.

If there is a loophole in the law as it currently stands, you're off the hook. If it needs fixing, that's up to the legislature to do, but they can't do it retroactively. If your act was, by the wording and letter of the law, legal at the moment you did it, then it was legal period. Regardless of your intentions.

And really, it could be solved by some simple wording in the employment agreement or contract. "Network users and administrators are not permitted to undertake malicious actions with the intent of damaging or disrupting the network or any device or data stored on it without the express permission of (insert here) or higher." There you go, now they're clearly not authorized to do it and you've closed the loophole.

Move over, Google. Here’s Wikipedia's search engine – full of on-demand smut

seraphim

Better stick with Google. There's certainly no porn that will be found using it!

NAKED CELEBRITY PICS LAW BOMB dropped on ad giant Google

seraphim

So long as one person in the entire universe has a local copy saved of these photos, they can pop up anytime, anywhere. Is Google now expected to crack into any machines suspected of having such and kill those photos? Or is it perhaps a bit unreasonable to expect someone to stuff the genie back in the bottle? Once something is widespread on the Internet, it's never going away.

Seattle pops a cap in Uber and Lyft: Rideshare bizs get 150-driver limit

seraphim
WTF?

What's it supposed to accomplish?

I've got a friend who drives for Lyft here in Denver, and have used it myself. The ride is worlds better than taking a grimy taxi, for a comparable or in some cases actually lower price. Every driver I've had a ride with has been polite and pleasant, in comparison to many taxi drivers from whom about the best you can expect is stony silence. You also don't get charged extra for luggage or additional passengers. The legislature has just passed specific laws that work with Lyft and Uber. (I've never used Uber, so can't say much there one way or the other.)

Apparently they do in fact do a vehicle inspection, DMV record check, and ride with the driver before allowing them to begin driving. From what my friend has said, they take that quite seriously. I sure would in their place--they absolutely can't afford a black eye from a major incident.

I'm no one's libertarian by any means. I'm all for reasonable regulation on any of these, like the ones we passed here. I'm generally pro-union, too. But I'm not pro-monopoly, because that ultimately hurts us. If a lot of people would rather take Lyft or Uber than a taxi, it's probably time for the taxi companies to start reevaluating how they do business and figuring out how they can make their customers happier too. It's not time for them to have competition outlawed.

UK.Gov passes Instagram Act: All your pics belong to everyone now

seraphim
WTF?

Re: A Point Being Missed...

If you never knew it had happened, how could you sue them with or without this?

Pirates scoff at games dev sim's in-game piracy lesson

seraphim
Facepalm

Get over it already.

"The fact that the same people who fall all over themselves to get a hold of a Cracked Game, are the very same people who CAN MOST AFFORD TO BUY THE !@#$%^&* THING!"

That's quite a load. I used to do the pirating bit, when I was a student with essentially no extra money. Now that I make good money, I pay. Steam and Spotify are a great deal more convenient than trolling pirate sites, setting up the TOR connection, etc. If you put out a good product that's easy and convenient to use, people will buy it from you, as those two services prove quite well.

"This is is a case of "Who is the coolest computer geek in the neighborhood?" The cool guy doesn't pay, he makes everything "come to him". "Hey, Mates! Guess what I've been playing all day?" And, then he turns on his PC and his chums gaze upon him with awe and respect!""

Uh...I don't know where you went to college, but I sure don't recall that experience.

"The lower income adults, and kids from working class families are stuck with waiting...biding their time until that hot new game comes down in price...and by that time it's old news."

I quite often do that. I could afford the $60 brand-shiny-new price, but why? In a few months it'll be $25. I can find plenty of other things to do until then.

"I'm the sort of person who doesn't believe in stealing. Stealing is wrong, no matter how you look at it."

Sure, stealing is wrong. Murder, assault, and many other things are wrong too. None of those, however, are being discussed here.

"It happened to the Music Industry."

I hear home taping did them in. Terrible thing that we don't have a music industry anymore.

"It's slowly happening to Films and Television, and more people download hot copies of books they want to read rather than pay for them. Games are rapidly following suit."

Yes, it's terrible, isn't it? I turned on my TV the other day, and there were only hundreds of channels running 24 hours a day! Can you believe it? Only HUNDREDS! Those dirty pirates! And when I look through the Steam catalog, no one is developing any new games, either!

"As I read in this article, ANY GAME can be Cracked."

Yep.

"That may be the case at present, but sooner or later, SOMEONE is going to invent a system that makes pirating game impossible."

If you can do that, you'll be rich. Good luck with that. It's cryptographically impossible. You can encrypt a message to Bob in such a way that Charlie can't read it, but it is nonsense to say you want to encrypt a message to Bob in such a way that Bob both can and cannot read it.

"I can easily imagine a kind of security program that activates when someone tries to tamper with the games programming, and totally erases all of the most important files."

And then the cracker restores the backup copy from media that was disconnected, figures out how they did that, and cracks it to not do that anymore. Unless you propose some magical means to do this that would be different from just preventing the game from starting?

"I'd like to also like to see someone come with a security program that uploads an incurable virus while deletes those game files."

And then it gets accidentally triggered against legitimate purchasers (remember, no software is bug free), and someone's facing a class action lawsuit and potential criminal charges. You go right ahead with that. And there's no such thing as an "incurable" virus--at worst, you're going to wind up reinstalling your OS.

"Now THAT would be true justice!"

I copy something of yours, you deliberately break my stuff. Sure, that's a just and proportionate response. If I ever catch you jaywalking, would it be alright for me to burn your house down in retaliation? I mean, jaywalking IS against the law, after all.

British bookworms deem Amazon 'evil'

seraphim
Facepalm

Re: What sort of cretin buys a Amazon Swindle anyway?

"I tend to buy and read fiction. I can count on one hand the number of books I've ever wished to read more than once. I have metres of shelves full of books I've read and will never open again."

Then why on earth aren't you using the library? If you only want to read something once, then check it out, read it, and return it. That's exactly what I do with books I don't suspect I'll want to reread.

I have shelves of books, too. Some have only been read once, but many are reference manuals. They're not the type of book you sit down and read for pleasure, but they're very well used and I refer back to them whenever the need arises. If they were to suddenly disappear, I'd be rather unhappy. Fortunately, with a shelf full of books, that doesn't tend to happen.

seraphim
Pint

Re: What sort of cretin buys a Amazon Swindle anyway?

"He only goes to the libruary once a week, and because he is the wifes family i cant tell him to stop being a moron."

Uh, yes, you can. You can even do it somewhat nicely. Just explain that since your advice wasn't followed in the first place, you're not really sure how to support the device he ultimately settled on, and he'll need to use the normal phone-drone tech support line. Maybe next time he'll listen to start with.

Beer, because you'll need one after trying to be family tech support.

AdBlock Plus BLOCKED from Google Play

seraphim

Re: More adverts, everywhere.

I also have another choice--use technological means to not watch the adverts. If I DVR a show and fast-forward them, or am watching live and go to make myself a cup of coffee when the ads come on, I'm not doing anything wrong. They put the ads out there, I choose not to watch them. It's exactly the same when using an ad blocker in your browser, and it amazes me how people somehow equate it to wrongdoing, or state if you don't watch the ads you ought not view the content either. We've done it for ages in many different mediums.

RIAA: Google failing on anti-piracy push

seraphim
Holmes

NEWS FLASH: Google gives people what they're searching for!

Of COURSE Google gives these in the top results. Google's algorithm is designed to give people what, by commonality, most people want out of a given search.

I'm surprised they even offered to help. They should have told RIAA "your problem, not mine, we just index", and gone about their business. I certainly hope Google won't start any form of content-based censorship.

Anger grows over the death of Aaron Swartz

seraphim
Facepalm

Re: Comparing Turing to Swartz? Complete FAIL!

Turing: A brilliant man, facing unjust punishments from a ludicrous law, took his own life.

Swartz: A brilliant man, facing unjust punishments from a ludicrous law, took his own life.

Yes, utterly ridiculous to compare the two cases, isn't it?

Speaker Bercow's loquacious wife finally silenced - On Twitter

seraphim
WTF?

Libel?

How would it be libel if it's the actual name? Libel is publishing -false- information.

Actually, how could a supposedly free country enforce any such restraints on speech at all?

The Big Debate: OK gloomsters, how can the music biz be FIXED?

seraphim
Stop

Re: Yes but...

Working DRM is impossible. Not "unlikely", not "impossible given current technology", impossible. There is no way to simultaneously give someone the ability to get at the cleartext of an encrypted/protected message, and prohibit them from copying that message (be that message a song, video, document, anything).

Anyone who could make foolproof, or even near foolproof, DRM, would be rich overnight. And a lot of people try for that reason. Yet every last scheme gets cracked, because it -has- to get cracked--in the end, you have to give the end user the means to open the lock, no matter how much you obfuscate it. Otherwise what you've sold them is worthless.

Sysadmins! There's no shame in using a mouse to delete files

seraphim
Meh

Why?

These "holy wars", be they vi/Emacs (and gods forbid you bring up an IDE around that crowd), Windows/Linux, GUI/CLI, all strike me as dead silly. It's like watching two carpenters argue over whether a screwdriver or a hammer is invariably better for all situations, and when you ask "Well...are you trying to put in a nail, or a screw?", getting a blank stare and a sarcastic inquiry as to how that could possibly be relevant.

Trying to design a "one size fits all" tool inevitably results in one size doesn't fit any very well. If I need to automate or script a medium to large process, CLI is almost certainly the way to go. If I need to do significant manipulations to the filesystem, CLI. If I need to write an actual formatted document or read my email, probably GUI. If I'm handling a large and complex codebase with many dependencies, I may prefer to do that in an IDE (involving a GUI, of course) rather than a commandline text editor, but if I need to make a quick change, vi is probably significantly faster and easier than firing up Eclipse and throwing it in there. And while it's not my personal preference, if someone else prefers Emacs to vi, I don't care. It's their work to do, they should use whatever they're most efficient in, not what I'm most efficient in.

Figure out what you're doing, and then pull the best tool out of the toolbox. That's what real professionals do.

Blighty's new anti-bribe law will do more HARM than good

seraphim

Re: the law of unintended consquences

Nicho said:

"No doubt we will now see donations to political parties considered as bribes for favorable laws/regulations."

Isn't that surprising, since that is exactly what they are.

Habeas data: How to build an internet that forgets

seraphim

Not inconsistent with reality, but perfectly consistent.

I haven't seen anything this dumb for quite some time.

What exactly does the author of this piece think software developers are going to do about this? Magic? Believe me, the first developer to come up with a reliable way to prevent computers from copying some piece of information will be wealthy beyond his wildest dreams with one call to the RIAA/MPAA/insert here. So why hasn't that happened yet?

Simple--IT'S NOT POSSIBLE. In order to enter a usable form, information must, at some point, be decrypted and made available to the user. At that point, someone can make a copy, "do not copy" flagging aside. Once there are copies, there can be more copies, and so on.

You can no more erase information from the Internet, than you can erase it from the brain of someone who was actually witness to an event. You can't just command someone to "Forget I ever (said|did) that!" and actually expect them to obey you. What this author presents as something unique to the Internet is very much a feature of reality as well-once someone besides you knows something, they can pass it along, and you can't just reach out and grab it back. Information is not "owned", nor is it ownable. It multiplies.

The author of this piece isn't asking developers and engineers to get in tune with reality. He is asking them to defy reality. It won't happen, and as decades of research in an attempt to take machines designed to copy at breathtaking speed and stop them from copying demonstrate, it can't happen.