Posts by Tom 13

Re: legal precedent as set by the courts over about a thousand years.

I wasn't aware we were in the 23rd Century.

As too where we got our ideas from, it was the result of abuses of justice and fairness even within the boundaries that existed at the time. Hence they are more protected under our unitary constitution. Part of the problem with the assembled bits and pieces in the UK is that it leaves more than sufficient room for word manglers to rework clear intentions.

Not that it has helped us all that much on this side of the pond. Here judges just ignore the plain meaning and substitute their prejudices when they see fit, then claim stare decisis when someone challenges their interpretation in subsequent cases.

The underlying problem on both sides of the pond is that neither of our governments are fit for purpose under any except a religious people. Absent essentially immovable rights granted from an all powerful, just and sovereign God its all just words on paper that are easily re-arranged by other clever men. And if that fails, they can always just shoot you.

Re: The Golden Thread

None of which apply AFTER you have been convicted.

Re: how it can be legal to try and force someone to talk.

Legal is easy, you pass a law saying so, provided you don't have some higher framework law that prohibits said law. Fairness is a whole other issue.

That being said, even in places where you have those protections prior to conviction, once you've been convicted you tend to lose most of those rights. In the US which does have a higher thresholds against a number of these invasions, a paroled prisoner is subject to search by any law enforcement officer without the requirement that a warrant by issued. Similarly free movement is also restricted as is free association (hangout with other previously convicted felons will earn you a quick trip back to the pen).

Given the terror conviction, it seems reasonable that he lost the right to protect the data on the drive.

Re: What I don't understand is what has happened

It lost the PR value. By setting it back to mere minutes before they once again get breathless "news" article spreading their Democrat/Leftist/Progressive/Fascist/Communist propaganda.

Re: Why strikes down't work.

My maternal grandfather belonged to a union because he didn't have a choice. Every time the contract was up the union went on strike. It didn't matter what the offer was, a strike was called. The picket line went up for at least three weeks. During that time the union members drew strike pay which barely paid for groceries let alone the rest of the bills. Being from a impoverished family he went to work after he left the seventh grade. But he was able to calculate that the wages he lost in those three weeks were never made up in the extra raises they got over the life of the new contract. Mind you, this was during what is usually called the golden age of unions. They only people getting richer off those strikes were the union bosses who were lining their own pockets. Unions are and were every bit as corrupt as you accuse businesses of being.

Re: Why?

It's really simple. These days in the US, the only mode of operations Big Unions know is:

"Nice business ya got there. It'd be a shame if anything happened to it..."

Re: 1000's of years to measurable.

Nope. In fact, that was the reason for the article. After confirming the fact, they had to go back and restate the amount of ice loss attributable to warming vs the amount lost to simply being dumped into the ocean faster. And after they'd adjusted for the increased flow rate for lower friction, the component to heat dropped back to historical norms.

@ Symon: You're both right.

The Malthusian hypothesis is utter bollocks but it is still a bigger threat to us than AGW. In both cases, it's the cure we need to fear.

Re: cover the last couple of meters at best.

Meters? Really? Try maybe an inch, and that's being generous. The US National weather service was founded in 1870. There were still 10 states to be admitted before you've got the continental part covered. Which gives you the outer limit for records on our continent. While services in other areas could have existed before then you have real problems with getting reliable equipment. The barometer dates to circa 1640, the thermometer maybe 40 years earlier. That's the outermost limit on reliable data. Everything else is a proxy which is subject to unknowable variations.

Re: the collapse ... of human civilization in a few hundred years is tentatively on the table

Yes,yes it is. but 1) it isn't tentative, 2), it is more like mere decades away, 3) but it doesn't have anything to do with AGW.

Re: Y2K

I won't deny it. My employer and I made good money in the year before that running scans and shifting boxes in the year before the great catastrophe was supposed to happen. It was 70% crock. Fixing the actual critical systems could have been done for far less money than was spent. And the worst offender on that front was MS not issuing patches to fix DOS because they wanted everyone on Windows 98. But hey, at least everybody got spiffy new processors and roomy hard drives right?

Re: when anyone pulls out the First as their defence,

Maybe in the UK (although I doubt that), but in the US you'd better be prepared to receive a massive body check.

Regrettably, the patent troll is correct on this one. The First amendment along with the 5th protect you from having the government preemptively stopping your speech. The government has to file the charges and then the case has to be proven. Where it gets worse is that they will also be asserting they have the right to petition the courts for redress, which they do. And that part of the process the courts have outlined for bringing petition is that you have to have first made a good faith effort to resolve the dispute without involving the courts. Until it can be proven (in court) that the letters were not sent in good faith the court is obliged to assume they were.

You and I can look at the totality of what MPHJ have done and rationally deduce they are patent trolls. The presumption of innocence does not permit the same latitude to the courts.

Now where things do get dicey for them, is that after the government proves in court that the letters were not sent in good faith, a whole raft of entirely justified penalties can be invoked. They include piercing the corporate veil so that individuals of the corporation as well as stockholders in the corporation can be held personally liable for the damages. Furthermore the courts can (although they usually don't) assign ALL the costs of the litigation (including plaintiffs attorneys fees and all salaries and benefits incurred by the state for all of the employees of the court) to a vexatious litigant. And then you finish it off with a disbarment.

Re: If the FCC reclassified ISPs as 'Common Carriers', would it work?

That was my first thought until I did some checking: No. Congress specified the categories and didn't authorize the FCC to change them. That requires an act of Congress. Which interestingly enough, Congress opted not to do when they held the House and a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate even though The Big 0 asked them to. So this really WAS an attempted end-run around the US Constitution and therefore properly struck down by the court. In fact, the margin of the DC circuit court decision should give some indication of just how far wrong the FCC was. Yes, the 9th circuit is probably more leftist, but not by a whole bunch.

Re: did, does and always will have, jurisdiction over, well, communications, see?

Actually, no they don't.

The original 1934 act only applied to telephone, telegraph, cable and all wireless communications. The word explicitly noted that it did not grant new power to the FCC, only re-organized existing powers under existing legislation. They were broadly grouped into separately regulated entities. The 1996 act moved to remove regulatory barriers to entry which were impeding competition. It also created a new category for information service providers. Since this originated with Congress, the FCC must comply with the Congressionally mandated provisions.

And yes, it was the continuation of dismantling that dirty commie FDR's monopoly producing regulations which treated the average person as just another mark to be shaken down by the well heeled and well connected.

Re: Anti-monopoly laws should have prevented one industry from owning the telephone

It was the government that granted Ma Bell the monopoly in exchange for a promise of universal service. Think of it as the "net neutrality" issue of those days, which is why that will work out badly as well. Trevor's probably too young to remember the bad old days of nearly free local service, exorbitantly priced long distance, and government mandated corporate wealth redistribution (i.e. "fascism") of those days.

Re: Does that mean we can sue them for allowing attacks through?

While common carrier may provide that protection, in the case of the internet it is an explicit protection for unedited material.

Expecting the ISPs to filter traffic is a double-edged sword. Filtering means they have to be able to read it. If they can read it, is it still private? Probably not. Given that I have one foot firmly in both camps and am willing to live with the status quo.

Re: monopoly is when one firm has control of an entire market.

So you really are economically illiterate.

A monopoly or monopolistic competition (oligopolies, cartels, and differentiated markets [Apple]) occur when firms in a market can set the price to earn an economic instead of normal profit. It's the price setting power that is the problem, not the number of firms in the market.

But that very act creates the normalizing forces that will destroy them unless they have government protection. Since they have an economic profit, it behooves another firm to move into their market and undercut their price. The only problem(s) is/are potential barriers to entry in the market. Usual barriers are the amount of capital or labor needed or government regulation; of the three only government regulation is nearly impossible to overcome unless you are the incumbent.

Re: operates is an open poker tournament.

And in one short line you make the fundamental flaw of all redistributionist theories: The pie isn't fixed. Real economic activity produces new stakes. The guy who lost all his chips can go get more and rejoin the game. New players can enter the game at any time.

Re: Monopolies are not the norm with unfettered capitalism.

It was a quaint theory, but one which when we dropped the stones instead of accepting Aristotle's brilliance in logic, turned out to be wrong. Only governments can grant monopolies, and even then only within limits in within their boundaries. Yes, some businesses may try to form a Cartel. But without the threat of murder, they tend not to hold together or withstand new businesses arising that will undercut them. We saw this back in the 1980s with OPEC. Everybody thought they had us literally over a barrel. The Reagan deregulated the oil industry, Great Britain developed the North Sea and the ability of the cartel to control the price of oil collapsed. The regulatory idiots like you came back in and re-enabled the cartel's price fixing ability. Until just now fracking, in spite of the best effort of regulatory madmen, is once again collapsing the cartel's price fixing ability; even to the point that the normally-placid-because-they're-sitting-on-a-100-year-supply-of-oil Saudis are concerned that we will destroy their cartel.

In fact, the very oligopoly you are current decrying is a result of the the US government grant Ma Bell a telephone monopoly on phone service all in the name of getting it deployed to every house the the US.

Globalization is inevitable. We have fast travel and fast communication. The people living in mud huts who have a wireless connection and computer connected to their diesel powered generator are going to be able to compete with programmers in their brick houses in Toronto or Cardiff. Deal with it.

Not zero regulation, minimal. Only the amount necessary to prevent fraud or coercion. Not the amount that is indistinguishable from coercion.

Massive wealth gaps happen when we let governments over-regulate the economy while granting monopolies to their crony friends or other forms of outright corruption all being protected in the name of helping "the little people." Which is exactly what happened with TARP and the Fed's QE programs.

Re: the internet's direction has been good in any way.

Who died and made you God? Because only God can impartially make that determination.

Where I come from, since we generally don't agree about who is talking to God, we generally let the market decide. Given the growth in the market and the willingness of people to continue to buy it's service it seems to be going in a direction that most consumers consider good, regardless of your petty prejudices.

Re: The civilized world, on the other hand, prefers fewer monopolists,

No it doesn't. Sad but true. If it did we wouldn't be where we are. And no, American law does not allow the needs of some to outweigh constitutionally protected rights. Maybe they allow that in Canada, but I think even Old Blighty has similar levels of protection for people.

The court ruling in this instance is actually fairly narrow: the FCC was granted the power to regulate telecommunications, not internet or cable traffic. Congress could grant them that authority but hasn't. The FCC simply asserted they had the power. Which is the act of a tyrant/bully/charlatan.

And whatever good intentions you think you have will completely backfire by allowing the government to set Net neutrality rules. The real fix is in constitutionally granted powers: the Congress needs to step in and stop local governments from granting trade monopolies that interfere with interstate commerce.

Re: Who said the POS system has internet access?

No, clearly the POS system was the primary target otherwise they wouldn't have all the Debit PINs. The online system was just collateral damage.

Re: back-end systems should not have Internet access.

At least one back end system of necessity has internet access: the one that contacts the credit/debit card vendors to authorize the credit/debit transaction. The days when that was all done by modem are long gone. Yes you can double home that system so the POS registers aren't directly exposed to the internet, but I'm not sure how much that really buys you in the long run. Yes you only have one system to keep properly patched and secure instead of 15 or 30, but if you compromise that system chance are you still have access to all the POS systems through it.

Now the scarier part here is that Target and Nieman Marcus are chains with relatively large IT budgets. So they may (not necessarily are) have more recent OS systems for the servers in a POS location. Think about all the fast food stores with POS systems on a shoestring budget.

I have a friend who does that kind of support work for a small chain. They had been putting a single w2k server in a store and hooking up their POS terminals to it. Not sure what the underlying POS system was, hopefully proprietary but that's not a smart money bet these days. I think they may have finished upgrading to 2003/8 in December. Each one of them is a cookie cutter image of the first. Once you own one you own them all, it's just a matter of re-iterating your exploit on each subsystem. Oh, and odds are decent the registers start at 1 and count up, at each store.

So even if you aren't Target or Nieman Marcus, if you have anything to do with retail POS systems, you should probably be crapping concrete block sized bricks right about now.

Re: MS shouldn't make anything other than OS and Office

Given that I haven't had a decent word processor since they leveraged their OS to kill WordPerfect, no. They should only be allowed to produce an OS. In fact, I was just thinking about the fact that back in the day there were a number of charts I could rip out lickety split with Harvard Graphics, and these days there's not a program on the market that will do the same thing.

The relevant point is that they shouldn't be able to leverage their government granted monopoly in one area beyond the reach of that area. I like the free market. The more free the market is the better. But we don't have much of one anymore. Damn government has its hands in everything. And once they're in it things get hideously distorted if you aren't careful. Which they haven't been. The government has been greedy and that spreads to the corporations. Or maybe the other way around. Either way evil is always attracted to locations of power and extends its fingers from whichever ones it already controls.

I get what you're saying. Google needs to be able to compete with other businesses. But you're overdoing it on the ideology. They need to be able to compete, but that also implies there has to be competition, not simply Google rolling over everybody else on the planet because they have a license to print money via Ad Words.

Re: winters were less cold, and stairs were less steep?

Absolutely NOT!

Why when I was a lad, during the winter you had to wear your long johns even when you were IN the building. Stairs? You have stairs? All I had was 20 feet of rope and a grappling hook with two bent tines!

But yes, money was proper, we knew our places.

And the sheep were scared.

Re: A lawsuit might shed some light.

No, no it won't. That would just cost the taxpayers even more.

I wish it would. I really do. But it won't.

Re: What's the problem?

Lots of them. But here's one that caught my attention:

You have to provide all your data before they let you start browsing for plans.

Think about that. Think about how just about any retail site you have ever been to works.

...

Yeah, that's bad.

Oh, and I think they changed the plan for this particular aspect of the site design about half way through the already too short development time. With no* plans for integration testing. It was all just going to magically work.

*OK, technically they allowed 2 weeks. I'm not a professional programmer, hell, I'm not even an assistant project manager. But I KNOW that in multi-system, multi-Department programs like this one, two weeks is equal to zero for all practical purposes.

Re: I don't get it

Well for one thing, you get points awarded for having previously worked on similar projects. There isn't any mention of you success at pulling them off.

Next up you have to spread around the cash for the project to buy enough votes in the House and Senate. No, no, I don't mean the lobbyist payola, I mean the projects in their district/state that prove to their voters that they are good at bringing home the bacon. Why Kansas should have a critical roll in submarine building is a bit beyond me, but it does. The North Dakota angle I get (big deep cold lake, not so much with the waves, natural test bed), but it is pushing it a bit.

And of course the stuff the guys above me already mentioned.

Re: Encryption?

Wish I could remember where I read the details, but the point of attack was the interface between two sets of exchanges. Both individual links were secure end to end, and they thought the transfer between the two was good as well. It sounded like the breach was both novel and clever. Although this is the first article I've seen confirming it was the POS system and not the back end db that was cracked. I was suspicious about that because of the too careful wording they were using to describe the breach and the ranged time period.