Yes, and no! For a criminal court, an insult is just free speech. You won't get convicted over it. However, persons can still decide to sue the person who insulted them and demand damages. This is a bit similar to the O.J. Simpson trial. O.J. was cleared in a criminal court, yet found guilty and forced to pay in a Civil court.
Look at http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/analysis.aspx?id=18508 for example. It's more about profanity but it does say that insults can be considered criminal, if they were meant to be hurtful. (It's called "Fighting words".) The case "Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire" confirms that insults can be punishable by law, though.
So technically, the person insulting Liskula Cohen could be tried by the Criminal system for breaking the peace with her insults, which were used as fighting words. And she could be tried in Civil Court for defamation and damages to the reputation of Liskula Cohen.
Another case at http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org//commentary.aspx?id=2213 shows that insulting someone doesn't automatically make it criminal. "Criminal Libel" barely exists anymore because the law that supports it is a bit outdated. It's still there, though. But insults can still result in civil cases and the case the article links to mentions that the case failed in Criminal court but it was settled before it got in Civil court, resulting in the insulting party being forced to pay damages and costs.
Don't overestimate the things Free Speech will allow you to say.
The RIAA actually can't sue either. They first have to find the identity of the persons whom they want to sue, but no one gets convicted anonimously, because people have the right to defend themselves in court.
The case wasn't about if "Skank" is too offensive or not. The case was that someone made a remark that this model took as a serious offense. And I do think people have a right to know who is insulting them. You can't sue an anonymous person so to take further steps, you need to know who did the insulting.
I can imagine the judge to force Google to provide the identity of the person who did the insults so another judge can decide if the remarks are defamatory or not.
Free speech doesn't allow people to freely insult others without further consequences. Free speech is mostly so people can tell their opinions freely to others without any fear. But insults aren't opinions and that makes a big difference.
True, that would be a more common way for thieves to pick their target. It's just that most thieves just aren't used to use social networks for picking their targets. Besides, most criminals became criminals simply because they had an opportunity to break the law. Still, not a good reason to be careless with your info...
I'd almost bought it, just to support them. Probably would have paid €10 or more, if it seemed a good game to me. But as it turns out, it's a Soccer game. I hate soccer! I really, really hate soccer! Why did they use this great concept for such a boring sport? (Sorry guys.) Did I mention that I hate soccer? Oh, well. If they'd ever use the same concept for a game that I don't hate, then I'll pay. But paying for soccer? Never! I hate it!
The odds of a criminal to find someone tweeting in his area is slightly bigger than you think. They're not going after one specific person but will just see if some tweeters are reporting about things in their neighbourhood. Say, for example, the Gay Parade that was held a few weeks back in Amsterdam. Just check with your search engine within tweeter.com about anyone making remarks about this parade and you'll have a collection of possible visitors who might live near Amsterdam. Some further research would provide some very interesting targets.
And about stalkers, there's always a risk for that although it does depend on your online behavior. I just wonder how many teens are tweeting and how many adults are listening to their tweets, hoping for a chance to meet one of those.
Criminals won't just go for one person. They just collect information and then filter this data until they find some interesting victim. This can happen with any site, not just Tweeter. It's just that people seem to have far less problems providing personal information over the Internet than by person. And there are far more people who can overhear them!
Example: I used this URL to query twitter: http://twitter.com/#search?q=visit%20parade%20amsterdam
It only provided three members, but I do find a Dutch guy there, tweeting. He has his own website, thus his own domain so I could check the domain registration to find his address and I know he's visiting the parade (well, a week ago) so he's not home by then. A nice moment to visit his place, right?
Still, most criminals aren't so technical inclined to just search on the Internet for possible targets, which explains why it's still very rare. The Internet is about 20 years old and Twitter is even younger. Crime hasn't adjusted to this new technique yet. Just keep in mind that a century ago, most people wouldn't even need to lock their door, car, bike, horse or whatever. There were still many dishonest people but the possessions of the average civilian just weren't interesting enough to steal.
There's one other risk with twitter, though. It was recently proven that there's a botnet active that misused Twitter to send commands to all the bots. It worked because Twitter access goes over port 80, while an email-based command system would require access to port 25/110. The latter is blocked more often.
Never heard about problems with holiday tweet notifications? Then read this: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10260183-83.html
Well, it could just have been a random act but could Twitter have had a part in this? Let's just assume it could be possible, thus take no risks...
The babble on twitter is quite useful! For criminals...
The babble on twitter is quite useful! For criminals... Say, for example, that I twit that I'm away from home to watch a movie or just to get a tan at a sunny beach in France. If this tweet is picked up by a criminal who knows where I live, it could become very valuable information for them, because now they know my house is unattended. And if I tweeted before about the valuable computer that I've just bought, my holiday tweet becomes even more valuable.
Or when I tweet about the club that I'm visiting. My online stalker will then know where to look for me and with my picture in Twitter he can easily recognize me, put something in my drink and take a drugged me to his place where I could end up raped and/or murdered.
Do people realize that tweets could be very valuable for criminals???
To be honest, many SL gamers are there hoping for some profit. One of the biggest trades in SL is the trade of land, mostly selling pieces to newbies. There's some trade in virtual goods which provides some profits for some. But most are there just for the dirty chats with others. Basically, it's like those expensive phone-sex lines, but then with bad virtual images...
There's some room for advertisements but basically, you'd have to pay SL gamers to get them to view those commercials. (By making them camp on your land.) Because you pay them, players become interested but otherwise they just go somewhere else to have dirty talks...
There are many porn sites that contain links to the W3C sites. This is a nice trick to tell webspiders and webcrawlers to get lost and stop spending bandwidth of the porn site itself. As a result, you can find plenty of references to the W3C on porn sites.
Then again, many other sites including the TechDirt sites contain links to the W3C site. Techdirt uses this reference:
So when an ISP blocks a porn site and everything it references to, W3C gets blocked too. :-)
Techdirt has an URL field in the reply part but that URL is never shown. :-)
The link I posted was http://www.nu.nl/news/1745563/52/Providers_blokkeren_samen_kinderporno.html which is an initiative by Dutch ISP's to block child porn sites. Basically, the Dutch justice system started the whole thing just to discover that it would be illegal for the Dutch state to keep a list of banned sites. (Something related to freedom of speech or whatever.)
But local ISP's have already started to block several sites and they just want to continue this so they're going to create a separate organisation that will be responsible for maintaining a blacklist of sites. So in a way, our justice system did get this whole bad idea started.
And why is it a bad idea? First of all, censorship doesn't work that well. The Great Firewall of China isn't that effective either since those who want to bypass it, know how to do so. Furthermore, how do we know that this blacklist only contains child porn sites? They could also misuse the same blacklist to block certain political sites or informational sites.
Then again, it's bad when justice tries to enforce censorship on ISP's. It's worse when those same ISP's just decide to work together and come up with their own censorship.
I've linked to a Dutch newssite (Sorry, no english translation) about some actions that Dutch ISP's are taking in an attempt to clean up the Internet.
First of all, the Dutch justice system has examined the possibility to have certain sites blocked by the ISPs. (Sites containing childporn, btw.) They started pushing those ISPs here into taking appropiate actions already while Justice would find any legal means to force these ISPs to block those sites.
Unfortunately, research showed that Dutch Law doesn't allow Justice to dictate those ISPs which sites need to be blocked. Thus, agreements between justice and several ISPs about this censorship had no legal grounds and would be unconstitutional.
So, now the ISPs have decided to take matters in their own hands. They will still continue to block certain sites but an independant organisation will be maintaining the blacklist of sites that need to be blocked.
But who will be keeping an eye on this "independant" organisation? What if they block more than just childporn sites? What if they block certain political sites? Or some other, innocent sites? It's a step in the direction of the Chinese Firewall and to be honest, it doesn't solve any problems. It just covers them up...
And that's the power that ISPs have. They sooner or later will dictate which sites we can visit... And they're watching every step we take online...
Actually, I think it's a very good thing NXP did. Because now everyone knows how insecure their products are. Products that have been used world-wide for all kinds of purposes. These chips will always have security flaws but now with all this publicity, no one can deny anymore that this problem doesn't exist.
Sure, their lawyers wasted a lot of time on this. But the legal team is a completely different one than their development team. And it's just good to know that although these companies will add some security, they can never guarantee 100% security.
Just don't use them for something that's more valuable than the time it would cost to investigate the leaks... :-)
This could be related to the problems the Dutch justice system has with several Dutch bloggers. Their biggest pain in the is a site called geenstijl.nl (geen stijl = no style) which tends to report on many different issues that are mostly ignored by the regular media. For a few years, the Dutch justice system and Dutch politicians tend to be favorite targets on this site, yet the site just kicks everyone on an equal level. Recently there were some articles about Gregorius Nekschot, a cartoonist who was accused om publishing racist cartoons on the Internet. GeenStijl just suggested that there was a more political motive behind this arrest. Nekschot had made some cartoons that the current political powers didn't like, especially the CDA.
Also, recently one of the bloggers at GeenStijl also had to report to the police since they concluded that the site contained racist remarks. Normally, someone would report such remarks to the moderator and the moderator would then remove them. However, in this case some organisation that investigates racist remarks on the Internet (MDI) had filed several complaints to the local police instead of warning the moderators. That was in 2006. For two years nothing happened until recently. And again, this was reported as a form of intimidation on GeenStijl. As an attempt by the current political powers to shut down all negative comments about their work. A kind of censorshop.
Yesterday, a new article appeared on GeenStijl which accuses the CDA (One of the major political powers here) of taking Geert Wilders (politician and creator of the movie Fitna) hostage in his own country. How? Well, Jordan (the country) has instructed their judges to prosecute Wilders for publishing this Fitna movie. As a result, Wilders cannot leave the Netherlands anymore or risk being arrested. Our government is supposed to question Jordan and make it clear that this is unacceptable but no... Maxime Verhagen who is responsible for foreign affairs just isn't going to take any actions about this, thus by doing nothing he supports a possible arrest of Wilders.
If you can understand the Dutch language, reading GeenStijl almost gives you the idea that the Dutch government is trying to become a dictatorship... Almost. :-)
I could be wrong but Louis Vuittin bags have a monogram on their bags with the letters "LV". Nadia Plesner created something similar with a monogram of the letters "LS". Also, the texture of Nadia's bag does look a bit like the louis bag but such a thing is common for designer bags, isn't it?
Of course, the "LS" actually stands for "Simple Living" and I don't think it's even possible to copyright a monogram. (Lots of prior art anyways...) But the original letter mentions this monogram as a trademark violation.
Then again, maybe LV is actually trying to help this girl by using the Streisand Effect! Maybe they're so stupid on purpose because I can't imagine any qualified Lawyet to be this dumb, even if they're french...
Fact is, this publicity makes their name better-known again, even though it's bad publicity. People tend to remember the name only, anyways. But people will now also start supporting this woman a lot more, with a lot of extra publicity for her case. So, they might have blemished their own reputation a bit, this is helping thos good cause quite a lot. :-)
I do wonder if Lori Drew didn't break another law in this case. It seems that the fake Josh and Megan had some very intimate chats. Would these chats include some sexual suggestions? Chats about lovemaking and similar stuff? Because if that is the case, Lori might be arrested for the sexual grooming of an underage person. She would then become a registered sex offender and end up in jail for a time, I assume.
Am just suggesting this in case no one else thought of this. Don't want to encourage people to keep harassing Lori either. It's just that for those who do demand some kind of additional justice, this could be one possible -legal- solution. But bullying a bully? Bad idea...
On the post: Tech Columnist Calls Model 'A Hero' For Exposing Anonymous Blogger
Re: Re: Re: Just wondering...
On the post: Tech Columnist Calls Model 'A Hero' For Exposing Anonymous Blogger
Re: Re: Just wondering...
Look at http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/analysis.aspx?id=18508 for example. It's more about profanity but it does say that insults can be considered criminal, if they were meant to be hurtful. (It's called "Fighting words".) The case "Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire" confirms that insults can be punishable by law, though.
So technically, the person insulting Liskula Cohen could be tried by the Criminal system for breaking the peace with her insults, which were used as fighting words. And she could be tried in Civil Court for defamation and damages to the reputation of Liskula Cohen.
Another case at http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org//commentary.aspx?id=2213 shows that insulting someone doesn't automatically make it criminal. "Criminal Libel" barely exists anymore because the law that supports it is a bit outdated. It's still there, though. But insults can still result in civil cases and the case the article links to mentions that the case failed in Criminal court but it was settled before it got in Civil court, resulting in the insulting party being forced to pay damages and costs.
Don't overestimate the things Free Speech will allow you to say.
Finally, http://www.article19.org/advocacy/defamationmap/map/?dataSet=defamation_legislation provides a good map of countries where certain kinds of defamation are a criminal offense and how insulted parties can deal with these.
On the post: Tech Columnist Calls Model 'A Hero' For Exposing Anonymous Blogger
Re: Re: Just wondering...
On the post: Tech Columnist Calls Model 'A Hero' For Exposing Anonymous Blogger
Just wondering...
I can imagine the judge to force Google to provide the identity of the person who did the insults so another judge can decide if the remarks are defamatory or not.
Free speech doesn't allow people to freely insult others without further consequences. Free speech is mostly so people can tell their opinions freely to others without any fear. But insults aren't opinions and that makes a big difference.
But Liskula Cohen is no hero.
On the post: Popular Video Game Series Tries Pay What You Want
Re: Re: I would almost even pay for it!!
On the post: Pointless Babble Is In The Eye Of The Beholder
Re: Re: Re: Re: Felix
On the post: Popular Video Game Series Tries Pay What You Want
I would almost even pay for it!!
On the post: Pointless Babble Is In The Eye Of The Beholder
Re: Felix
And about stalkers, there's always a risk for that although it does depend on your online behavior. I just wonder how many teens are tweeting and how many adults are listening to their tweets, hoping for a chance to meet one of those.
Criminals won't just go for one person. They just collect information and then filter this data until they find some interesting victim. This can happen with any site, not just Tweeter. It's just that people seem to have far less problems providing personal information over the Internet than by person. And there are far more people who can overhear them!
Example: I used this URL to query twitter: http://twitter.com/#search?q=visit%20parade%20amsterdam
It only provided three members, but I do find a Dutch guy there, tweeting. He has his own website, thus his own domain so I could check the domain registration to find his address and I know he's visiting the parade (well, a week ago) so he's not home by then. A nice moment to visit his place, right?
Still, most criminals aren't so technical inclined to just search on the Internet for possible targets, which explains why it's still very rare. The Internet is about 20 years old and Twitter is even younger. Crime hasn't adjusted to this new technique yet. Just keep in mind that a century ago, most people wouldn't even need to lock their door, car, bike, horse or whatever. There were still many dishonest people but the possessions of the average civilian just weren't interesting enough to steal.
There's one other risk with twitter, though. It was recently proven that there's a botnet active that misused Twitter to send commands to all the bots. It worked because Twitter access goes over port 80, while an email-based command system would require access to port 25/110. The latter is blocked more often.
Never heard about problems with holiday tweet notifications? Then read this: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10260183-83.html
Well, it could just have been a random act but could Twitter have had a part in this? Let's just assume it could be possible, thus take no risks...
On the post: Pointless Babble Is In The Eye Of The Beholder
The babble on twitter is quite useful! For criminals...
Or when I tweet about the club that I'm visiting. My online stalker will then know where to look for me and with my picture in Twitter he can easily recognize me, put something in my drink and take a drugged me to his place where I could end up raped and/or murdered.
Do people realize that tweets could be very valuable for criminals???
On the post: Linden Labs Thinks It's The Sex That's Keeping Businesses Out Of Second Life
There's some room for advertisements but basically, you'd have to pay SL gamers to get them to view those commercials. (By making them camp on your land.) Because you pay them, players become interested but otherwise they just go somewhere else to have dirty talks...
On the post: What Kind Of Filtering System Thinks W3C Is A Porn Site?
Actually...
Then again, many other sites including the TechDirt sites contain links to the W3C site. Techdirt uses this reference:
So when an ISP blocks a porn site and everything it references to, W3C gets blocked too. :-)
On the post: We Should Be More Worried About Our ISPs Than Google When It Comes To Abuse
Funny...
The link I posted was http://www.nu.nl/news/1745563/52/Providers_blokkeren_samen_kinderporno.html which is an initiative by Dutch ISP's to block child porn sites. Basically, the Dutch justice system started the whole thing just to discover that it would be illegal for the Dutch state to keep a list of banned sites. (Something related to freedom of speech or whatever.)
But local ISP's have already started to block several sites and they just want to continue this so they're going to create a separate organisation that will be responsible for maintaining a blacklist of sites. So in a way, our justice system did get this whole bad idea started.
And why is it a bad idea? First of all, censorship doesn't work that well. The Great Firewall of China isn't that effective either since those who want to bypass it, know how to do so. Furthermore, how do we know that this blacklist only contains child porn sites? They could also misuse the same blacklist to block certain political sites or informational sites.
Google translated link: http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http://www.nu.nl/news/1745563/52/Providers_blokkeren_samen_k inderporno.html&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&sl=nl&tl=en
Then again, it's bad when justice tries to enforce censorship on ISP's. It's worse when those same ISP's just decide to work together and come up with their own censorship.
On the post: We Should Be More Worried About Our ISPs Than Google When It Comes To Abuse
An interesting note to add...
First of all, the Dutch justice system has examined the possibility to have certain sites blocked by the ISPs. (Sites containing childporn, btw.) They started pushing those ISPs here into taking appropiate actions already while Justice would find any legal means to force these ISPs to block those sites.
Unfortunately, research showed that Dutch Law doesn't allow Justice to dictate those ISPs which sites need to be blocked. Thus, agreements between justice and several ISPs about this censorship had no legal grounds and would be unconstitutional.
So, now the ISPs have decided to take matters in their own hands. They will still continue to block certain sites but an independant organisation will be maintaining the blacklist of sites that need to be blocked.
But who will be keeping an eye on this "independant" organisation? What if they block more than just childporn sites? What if they block certain political sites? Or some other, innocent sites? It's a step in the direction of the Chinese Firewall and to be honest, it doesn't solve any problems. It just covers them up...
And that's the power that ISPs have. They sooner or later will dictate which sites we can visit... And they're watching every step we take online...
On the post: Dutch Court Allows Research On Smart Card Vulnerabilities To Be Published
Sure, their lawyers wasted a lot of time on this. But the legal team is a completely different one than their development team. And it's just good to know that although these companies will add some security, they can never guarantee 100% security.
Just don't use them for something that's more valuable than the time it would cost to investigate the leaks... :-)
On the post: Technopanic In The UK! Think Of The Children! They're Talking About SEX Online!
You dumb macho-testosterone brickhead!
Are you ASSuming that only boys look at porn online? Boy, you have a lot to learn about us women. :-)
On the post: US Gov't: Do Not Carry Your Social Security Number; US Gov't: You Must Carry Your Social Security Number
On the post: European Politicians Discuss 'The Blogger Problem'
Also, recently one of the bloggers at GeenStijl also had to report to the police since they concluded that the site contained racist remarks. Normally, someone would report such remarks to the moderator and the moderator would then remove them. However, in this case some organisation that investigates racist remarks on the Internet (MDI) had filed several complaints to the local police instead of warning the moderators. That was in 2006. For two years nothing happened until recently. And again, this was reported as a form of intimidation on GeenStijl. As an attempt by the current political powers to shut down all negative comments about their work. A kind of censorshop.
Yesterday, a new article appeared on GeenStijl which accuses the CDA (One of the major political powers here) of taking Geert Wilders (politician and creator of the movie Fitna) hostage in his own country. How? Well, Jordan (the country) has instructed their judges to prosecute Wilders for publishing this Fitna movie. As a result, Wilders cannot leave the Netherlands anymore or risk being arrested. Our government is supposed to question Jordan and make it clear that this is unacceptable but no... Maxime Verhagen who is responsible for foreign affairs just isn't going to take any actions about this, thus by doing nothing he supports a possible arrest of Wilders.
If you can understand the Dutch language, reading GeenStijl almost gives you the idea that the Dutch government is trying to become a dictatorship... Almost. :-)
On the post: Louis Vuitton Sues Darfur Fundraiser; Seems Unclear On The Concept Of Trademark
I could be wrong...
Of course, the "LS" actually stands for "Simple Living" and I don't think it's even possible to copyright a monogram. (Lots of prior art anyways...) But the original letter mentions this monogram as a trademark violation.
Then again, maybe LV is actually trying to help this girl by using the Streisand Effect! Maybe they're so stupid on purpose because I can't imagine any qualified Lawyet to be this dumb, even if they're french...
Fact is, this publicity makes their name better-known again, even though it's bad publicity. People tend to remember the name only, anyways. But people will now also start supporting this woman a lot more, with a lot of extra publicity for her case. So, they might have blemished their own reputation a bit, this is helping thos good cause quite a lot. :-)
On the post: Jill Sobule The Latest Musician To Embrace New Music Business Models
Ehm...
On the post: Will Online Harassment Law Be Used Against Those Harassing Lori Drew?
About that harassment case...
Am just suggesting this in case no one else thought of this. Don't want to encourage people to keep harassing Lori either. It's just that for those who do demand some kind of additional justice, this could be one possible -legal- solution. But bullying a bully? Bad idea...
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