Re: 'Honestly, it was his own fault for lying in front of a gun.
The "don't let us catch you again" part is totally optional. If he ever gets caught again, he still has tons of options: erasing his record, have the prosecutor pretend that past records are irrelevant, move to a different place where he had no past record...
Justice in the US is nearly never served properly when the criminal has a badge.
I can hope that these cases are statistically a minority, but when they are so obviously mishandled, there is no incentive for avoiding bad and dangerous behavior. They end up being large in numbers even if overall much lower than properly handled cases.
The problem is not that mistakes are made. It's that there is no incentive to at least try and avoid making them.
But these voices have pretty routinely been drowned out by those driven more by patriotism or profits than any genuine, measured interest in a consistently fact-based approach to better security.
Worse yet, the so-called "patriots" don't care about security at all. They only care about taking down an "enemy", be it real, imagined or self-crafted.
They use the word "security", interchangeably with others such as "piracy", "terrorism", "communism"... without any regard to their definition, only interested in the impact the word has on the public at large.
Some of these words now have completely twisted meanings, if any at all, left in their radical supporters' minds.
The example in this case, "security".
For us, it's about you protecting your devices and data from being accessed by someone you didn't allow. (Short version, obviously)
For them, it's a lot more about then accessing any system or data they want, whatever the cost... particularly if it's at our expenses... but - funny enough - not at their individual expenses. They have this concept of "sacrifice" that I hate the most as being the peak of hypocrisy: no price is too high to pay, unless they have to pay it themselves.
And in the Huawei case, it's not even that much. It's just an empty word used to justify taking down competition.
This is not a first, though.
As an example, I remember a court in Canada declared a content was to be removed globally in pretty much the same way.
As for content recognition (being "content similar to something previously judged illegal" or "obviously illegal content"), as long as things seem easy to the eyes of people ignorant of technology, they will make such poor decisions. They ignore the amount of resources, time and effort required to build a recognition engine, as well as the amount of both false positive and false negative percentages. Worse yet, something flawed will be hand-waved as "good enough" despite the impact on freedom of expression (false positives) and legal responsibility (false negatives), with requests - or more like demands - to "nerd harder" in the face of critics.
And that's not going to improve as long as the ruling class is in majority composed of the "rich old white men" (or more generally people who know nothing about the life of people whose yearly income isn't at least a 7-digit figure) who will willfully ignore any attempt to educate them. And only vote along partisan lines.
Funny how, when talking about "copyright infringement", all you hear from publishers, media and politicians is about those bad, very bad "pirates who just want everything for free and steal from creators".
Never a word about copyright infringement actually done to make profit and do divert money away from creators.
It's almost like there are several standards used to define infringement, and actually stealing or extorting money is the lesser evil.
My question there is...
What did the governor get in exchange for his silence?
You just don't "sign an NDA". You sign it as a contact where you shut up about something in exchange for something else (typically money or job).
So why did he sign it?
As far as I remember that's not quite right.
You have to register to file for statutory damages.
You can still request damages without a registration, but you then have to prove the actual harm that you want compensated.
However, this second option is much more difficult than just claiming "$125,000 per infringement" without proof of harm when you have registered your work.
This is not victim-blaming.
This is pointing out that victims can and do file frivolous lawsuits too.
Their lawyers should tell them how much of a waste of time and resource this is for both the client and the system in general. They might feel like they have the right to sue "someone" for what happened to them, but they completely misunderstand who they should sue or whether suing was a good idea at all. The lawyer's role should be help them get past the emotional viewpoint and understand that you can't just blame anyone.
Or that would be the case if there was no incentive for the lawyer to let the lawsuit get filed. They get paid whatever the outcome after all.
And that's exactly what's wrong with so many judgments in US.
Not willingly bowing to any demand from law enforcement is a crime in many ways. "Resisting arrest", even if the police didn't have an actual cause to arrest you in the first place. "Contempt of court", with unlimited detention, for refusing to provide a password. And more examples can be found.
It seems like not being subservient to the police is a crime in itself.
See also, how the police regularly gets excuses for any abuse of power. "Good faith exceptions", "Forfeiture", "Fear for their life" and more allow them to both avoid consequence from stealing from, raping or killing innocents and even helps them salvage evidence that were illegally collected. (Yes, even when a judge admits the evidence is illegal, it sometimes still gets salvaged because the cop didn't know better... or pretended not to.) The ones who are there to enforce the law are, curiously, the only one who are actually allowed to ignore it.
This all seems like the signs of a police state, not a democracy governed by the rule of law.
This looks like it could all lead to an accidental robot-apocalypse. ("Oops, I killed my owner because I mistook it for the chicken I was supposed to cook.")
Guys, if we are to be killed by robots, please at least make it intentional. Please don't have historians (aliens or robots) make fun of us for wiping ourselves from the face of Earth with shoddy programming.
Re: Video Games are a great example of this phenomina
Definitely my first thought.
This is particularly obvious when core features break down (e.g. main quest in an RPG, collision detection in... just about any game). These should be evident in a simple play-through. Run through your game once, that's the bare minimum of testing.
It's a little more acceptable when it's about edge cases (e.g. optional side quest with complicated requirements, jumping into a wall while strafing and using a consumable in an action game). It's less obvious, so I can forgive them overlooking this at launch.
Now, the article talks about software with real-world life-and-death consequences, but it is indeed a similar symptom of bug-tolerance in software development that should not have been left to grow.
I love how that quote can be used to justify anything.
This nation was founded on one principle above all else: The requirement that we stand up for what we believe, no matter the odds or the consequences.
I see what the walking US metaphor means it, that you shouldn't care about people getting violent to shut you up and all, but you see...
Copyright holders believe they should own works of art forever, with unlimited control over what can be done with them.
Extreme conservative politicians believe they should be allowed to regulate anything they want, down to your sexuality and reproduction.
Second amendment fanatics believe anyone can own and carry a gun, any gun, anywhere.
Often overlapping with the ones above, advocates of "stand your ground" or similar policies believe they're allowed to shoot anyone when they are afraid or uneasy in their presence.
And the list goes on.
My conclusion is: beware of anyone telling you not to care about consequences.
Re: How are foreigners supposed to know that the sting was a sti
A sting is to let people commit a crime they were going to commit anyway, while setting the conditions to catch them red-handed easily. (eg setting a bait or infiltrating the group.)
Entrapment is to make people commit a crime when they had no intention to. (eg harassing or threatening them or, as in this case, luring them to commit a legal action while placing them in an illegal context that they didn't know about.)
There are various ways to trick people into committing a crime unknowingly, and it's supposed to be illegal for law enforcement to do so. If you let that through, you basically let LEO jail anyone they want.
This was 100% entrapment as everything was setup to look legitimate. A sting would have had something like a recruiter for the university tell the students that they have ways to provide fake immigration papers or something similar. You must confirm that the would-be student wanted to enroll with the purpose of breaking the law.
So, to answer your question, they weren't supposed to know because it was a trap.
Re: Re: Re: The constitution either applies everywhere or nowher
The way I see it, it can be summed up in this way.
Does the US government has jurisdiction in the matter and place of a given case?
If so, its constitution applies, no ifs and buts.
If not, it just has no right to demand anything. It can ask politely, without threat. That's all.
Carving exceptions is just a way to reduce the limitations that were put in place to avoid it turning into a dictatorship.
If the citizens let it get away with it, it will carve new exceptions until the Constitution doesn't apply anywhere anymore.
Remember the quote about democracy and everlasting vigilance? This is what it is about.
It's not RICO. That's the first thing I'm convinced of. Ken White has documented his post pretty well.
I agree with most of the arguments in the article except when they say that Getty can licence public domain images. I agree that they can sell the images, individually or in bundles, but they cannot claim copyright on them and sell licences on the non-existant copyright.
There is a major problem with public domain. It's nearly impossible to have standing to sue when someone claims copyright on it. When you falsely claim copyright on copyrighted works, the actual right holder can sue. But public domain has, but definition, no official copyright holder so nobody has standing. The law should clarify that public domain means everybody is copyright holder si that anybody can sue. This would enable a ton of possibilities for artists to defend themselves when relying on public domain, as well as argue positively against copyright term extensions.
As things are now, even though this specific lawsuit is dumb and should not move forward, other more legitimate cases are also stuck. Public domain is vulnerable because it cannot be legally defended.
Re: Don't want to be treated like a mafia thug, stop acting like
And it's exactly the kind of things they say all the time.
My "favorite" (ie. most horrifying) one is when a cop did an op'ed after a cop shooting an innocent, where he said that you have to listen to anything police tells you to do because... they are armed and dangerous.
Not that they are public servants, enforcers of law and order. Not that they have legal authority for each and every demand they make. Not that they are here to help the public.
They have guns and they can use them without consequence. That was his point.
That was another case where the arguments were more appropriate in a mafia movie than a cop's speech.
There ARE still some good cops out there. But they tend not to get promoted, so they have no effect on policy.
We even have stories where cops get fired for trying to deescalate a situation.
I remember one where a cop was fired for endangering his colleagues because he tried to talk somebody into dropping his gun (which was unloaded, but that wasn't known at the time) whereas his two colleagues shot the guy dead as soon as they arrived on the scene.
Good cops don't get promoted, they get filtered out of the system.
You don't need to have committed a crime that's common to both countries. You just need to be formally accused of it.
The charges against Kim were likely inflated to fit extradition conditions. (Which is why NZ sent a full SWAT-level force to get him as if he was an international drug lord.)
Not to say that he didn't do something illegal by US law. Only that what he might have actually done didn't qualify to the level of "seriousness" required for extradition.
Re: NOPE! Due to Backpage taken down - BEFORE FOSTA!
Trolling or just misunderstanding?
The article doesn't attribute the raise in ads to FOSTA (ie "they raised because of FOSTA"), but notes that they still raised after FOSTA (ie "they raise despite FOSTA"). Hence, the law didn't accomplish this objective and introduced a lot of other negative side effects (censorship, more difficult investigations, ...) that were indeed attributed to this failure of a law.
It also points out that the supporters lie about the result both in effect ("raise" instead of "drop") and cause ("it dropped because of FOSTA", when the small-term drop that did occur happened before FOSTA).
I'll pass on commenting the rest of the ridiculous rant.
On the post: Doomed: Bethesda's Classic Doom Re-Releases Are Fixed, But Demonstrate Again That We Don't Own What We Buy
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Just because it involves laughter, doesn't m
Actually, Europe had a judgement passed stating that reselling digital goods is legal.
Link
This even included service attached to the software, but excluded "fragmenting" multi-user licenses.
That was quite a while ago, and I don't know about any follow-up, but at least it's not quite as clear-cut as you said depending on where you live.
On the post: Appeals Court Says No Rights Were Violated When A Cop Shot At A 'Non-Threatening' Dog But Hit A Kid Instead
Re: 'Honestly, it was his own fault for lying in front of a gun.
The "don't let us catch you again" part is totally optional. If he ever gets caught again, he still has tons of options: erasing his record, have the prosecutor pretend that past records are irrelevant, move to a different place where he had no past record...
Justice in the US is nearly never served properly when the criminal has a badge.
I can hope that these cases are statistically a minority, but when they are so obviously mishandled, there is no incentive for avoiding bad and dangerous behavior. They end up being large in numbers even if overall much lower than properly handled cases.
The problem is not that mistakes are made. It's that there is no incentive to at least try and avoid making them.
On the post: Latest Huawei 'Smoking Gun' Still Doesn't Prove Global Blackball Effort's Primary Justification
Worse yet, the so-called "patriots" don't care about security at all. They only care about taking down an "enemy", be it real, imagined or self-crafted.
They use the word "security", interchangeably with others such as "piracy", "terrorism", "communism"... without any regard to their definition, only interested in the impact the word has on the public at large.
Some of these words now have completely twisted meanings, if any at all, left in their radical supporters' minds.
The example in this case, "security".
For us, it's about you protecting your devices and data from being accessed by someone you didn't allow. (Short version, obviously)
For them, it's a lot more about then accessing any system or data they want, whatever the cost... particularly if it's at our expenses... but - funny enough - not at their individual expenses. They have this concept of "sacrifice" that I hate the most as being the peak of hypocrisy: no price is too high to pay, unless they have to pay it themselves.
And in the Huawei case, it's not even that much. It's just an empty word used to justify taking down competition.
On the post: European Court Of Justice Suggests Maybe The Entire Internet Should Be Censored And Filtered
Global censorship
This is not a first, though.
As an example, I remember a court in Canada declared a content was to be removed globally in pretty much the same way.
As for content recognition (being "content similar to something previously judged illegal" or "obviously illegal content"), as long as things seem easy to the eyes of people ignorant of technology, they will make such poor decisions. They ignore the amount of resources, time and effort required to build a recognition engine, as well as the amount of both false positive and false negative percentages. Worse yet, something flawed will be hand-waved as "good enough" despite the impact on freedom of expression (false positives) and legal responsibility (false negatives), with requests - or more like demands - to "nerd harder" in the face of critics.
And that's not going to improve as long as the ruling class is in majority composed of the "rich old white men" (or more generally people who know nothing about the life of people whose yearly income isn't at least a 7-digit figure) who will willfully ignore any attempt to educate them. And only vote along partisan lines.
On the post: A True Story Of 'Copyright Piracy': Why The Verve Will Only Start Getting Royalties Now For Bittersweet Symphony
Funny how, when talking about "copyright infringement", all you hear from publishers, media and politicians is about those bad, very bad "pirates who just want everything for free and steal from creators".
Never a word about copyright infringement actually done to make profit and do divert money away from creators.
It's almost like there are several standards used to define infringement, and actually stealing or extorting money is the lesser evil.
On the post: FBI Tells The Governor Of Florida About Election Hacking, But Says He Can't Tell Anyone Else
My question there is...
What did the governor get in exchange for his silence?
You just don't "sign an NDA". You sign it as a contact where you shut up about something in exchange for something else (typically money or job).
So why did he sign it?
On the post: Conan O'Brien Explains The Insanity Of Fighting Bogus Joke Stealing Lawsuit For Years
Re: Re: Re:
As far as I remember that's not quite right.
You have to register to file for statutory damages.
You can still request damages without a registration, but you then have to prove the actual harm that you want compensated.
However, this second option is much more difficult than just claiming "$125,000 per infringement" without proof of harm when you have registered your work.
On the post: Student Files $1 Billion Lawsuit Against Apple Over Supposedly Faulty Facial Recognition Tech That Falsely Accused Him Of Theft
This is not victim-blaming.
This is pointing out that victims can and do file frivolous lawsuits too.
Their lawyers should tell them how much of a waste of time and resource this is for both the client and the system in general. They might feel like they have the right to sue "someone" for what happened to them, but they completely misunderstand who they should sue or whether suing was a good idea at all. The lawyer's role should be help them get past the emotional viewpoint and understand that you can't just blame anyone.
Or that would be the case if there was no incentive for the lawyer to let the lawsuit get filed. They get paid whatever the outcome after all.
On the post: Washington State Supreme Court Tries, Fails To Protect The Rights Of The State's Residents
Re: Wow
And that's exactly what's wrong with so many judgments in US.
Not willingly bowing to any demand from law enforcement is a crime in many ways. "Resisting arrest", even if the police didn't have an actual cause to arrest you in the first place. "Contempt of court", with unlimited detention, for refusing to provide a password. And more examples can be found.
It seems like not being subservient to the police is a crime in itself.
See also, how the police regularly gets excuses for any abuse of power. "Good faith exceptions", "Forfeiture", "Fear for their life" and more allow them to both avoid consequence from stealing from, raping or killing innocents and even helps them salvage evidence that were illegally collected. (Yes, even when a judge admits the evidence is illegal, it sometimes still gets salvaged because the cop didn't know better... or pretended not to.) The ones who are there to enforce the law are, curiously, the only one who are actually allowed to ignore it.
This all seems like the signs of a police state, not a democracy governed by the rule of law.
On the post: Shoddy Software Is Eating The World, And People Are Dying As A Result
This looks like it could all lead to an accidental robot-apocalypse. ("Oops, I killed my owner because I mistook it for the chicken I was supposed to cook.")
Guys, if we are to be killed by robots, please at least make it intentional. Please don't have historians (aliens or robots) make fun of us for wiping ourselves from the face of Earth with shoddy programming.
On the post: Shoddy Software Is Eating The World, And People Are Dying As A Result
Re: Video Games are a great example of this phenomina
Definitely my first thought.
This is particularly obvious when core features break down (e.g. main quest in an RPG, collision detection in... just about any game). These should be evident in a simple play-through. Run through your game once, that's the bare minimum of testing.
It's a little more acceptable when it's about edge cases (e.g. optional side quest with complicated requirements, jumping into a wall while strafing and using a consumable in an action game). It's less obvious, so I can forgive them overlooking this at launch.
Now, the article talks about software with real-world life-and-death consequences, but it is indeed a similar symptom of bug-tolerance in software development that should not have been left to grow.
On the post: Could Article 13's Upload Filters Be Thrown Out Because Of The EU-Canada Trade Deal CETA?
Re:
I love how that quote can be used to justify anything.
I see what the walking US metaphor means it, that you shouldn't care about people getting violent to shut you up and all, but you see...
And the list goes on.
My conclusion is: beware of anyone telling you not to care about consequences.
On the post: ICE's Fake University Sting Operation Also Used A Bunch Of Fake Facebook Profiles
Re: How are foreigners supposed to know that the sting was a sti
A sting is to let people commit a crime they were going to commit anyway, while setting the conditions to catch them red-handed easily. (eg setting a bait or infiltrating the group.)
Entrapment is to make people commit a crime when they had no intention to. (eg harassing or threatening them or, as in this case, luring them to commit a legal action while placing them in an illegal context that they didn't know about.)
There are various ways to trick people into committing a crime unknowingly, and it's supposed to be illegal for law enforcement to do so. If you let that through, you basically let LEO jail anyone they want.
This was 100% entrapment as everything was setup to look legitimate. A sting would have had something like a recruiter for the university tell the students that they have ways to provide fake immigration papers or something similar. You must confirm that the would-be student wanted to enroll with the purpose of breaking the law.
So, to answer your question, they weren't supposed to know because it was a trap.
On the post: ACLU Asks CBP Why It's Threatening US Citizens With Arrest For Refusing Invasive Device Searches
Re: Re: Re: Re: The constitution either applies everywhere or no
Nb: also, I missed the exceptions apply footnote in this founding document.
On the post: ACLU Asks CBP Why It's Threatening US Citizens With Arrest For Refusing Invasive Device Searches
Re: Re: Re: The constitution either applies everywhere or nowher
The way I see it, it can be summed up in this way.
Does the US government has jurisdiction in the matter and place of a given case?
If so, its constitution applies, no ifs and buts.
If not, it just has no right to demand anything. It can ask politely, without threat. That's all.
Carving exceptions is just a way to reduce the limitations that were put in place to avoid it turning into a dictatorship.
If the citizens let it get away with it, it will carve new exceptions until the Constitution doesn't apply anywhere anymore.
Remember the quote about democracy and everlasting vigilance? This is what it is about.
On the post: Getty Images Sued Yet Again For Trying To License Public Domain Images
As things are now, even though this specific lawsuit is dumb and should not move forward, other more legitimate cases are also stuck. Public domain is vulnerable because it cannot be legally defended.
On the post: After No-Knock Raid Goes Horribly Wrong, Police Union Boss Steps Up To Threaten PD's Critics
Re: Don't want to be treated like a mafia thug, stop acting like
And it's exactly the kind of things they say all the time.
My "favorite" (ie. most horrifying) one is when a cop did an op'ed after a cop shooting an innocent, where he said that you have to listen to anything police tells you to do because... they are armed and dangerous.
Not that they are public servants, enforcers of law and order. Not that they have legal authority for each and every demand they make. Not that they are here to help the public.
They have guns and they can use them without consequence. That was his point.
That was another case where the arguments were more appropriate in a mafia movie than a cop's speech.
On the post: After No-Knock Raid Goes Horribly Wrong, Police Union Boss Steps Up To Threaten PD's Critics
Re: Re: Desperate people do desperate things
We even have stories where cops get fired for trying to deescalate a situation.
I remember one where a cop was fired for endangering his colleagues because he tried to talk somebody into dropping his gun (which was unloaded, but that wasn't known at the time) whereas his two colleagues shot the guy dead as soon as they arrived on the scene.
Good cops don't get promoted, they get filtered out of the system.
On the post: EU Copyright Directive Has Been Made Even More Stupid, And Some Are Still Trying To Make It Even Worse
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: ...extradition requests...
With two more points to consider:
Not to say that he didn't do something illegal by US law. Only that what he might have actually done didn't qualify to the level of "seriousness" required for extradition.
On the post: The Utter Failure Of FOSTA: More Lives At Risk... And Sex Ads Have Increased, Not Decreased
Re: NOPE! Due to Backpage taken down - BEFORE FOSTA!
Trolling or just misunderstanding?
The article doesn't attribute the raise in ads to FOSTA (ie "they raised because of FOSTA"), but notes that they still raised after FOSTA (ie "they raise despite FOSTA"). Hence, the law didn't accomplish this objective and introduced a lot of other negative side effects (censorship, more difficult investigations, ...) that were indeed attributed to this failure of a law.
It also points out that the supporters lie about the result both in effect ("raise" instead of "drop") and cause ("it dropped because of FOSTA", when the small-term drop that did occur happened before FOSTA).
I'll pass on commenting the rest of the ridiculous rant.
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