Oh, and take this egregious tenuously related dig: I bet EVERY ONE of those savages played violent video games until they could do it in real life. How could violent games possibly lead to any other behavior than savagery?
Once again Blue ignores any evidence contrary to his predetermined beliefs.
Even knowing OOB's history, I took that part of his comment as sarcasm, as in taking a dig at the people (including many cops) who claim that violent video games make people do violent crimes. Basically saying that since the police apparently beat this guy to death they must have been playing violent video games to cause them to do such a horrible thing.
Sadly I wouldn't be surprised to see them try that as an excuse if this ever goes to trial.
Comcast Sports Net should be ashamed of themselves for 1) Not being loyal to an employee and 2) Giving the public a bullshit excuse of their actions and expecting us to believe it. This is disgusting.
Being loyal to your employees went out a looooooong time ago. Nowadays it's all about abusing your employees to make as much money as possible, firing anyone who dares complain (but always done in a way that it can't be proven so the company can't be successfully sued over it) and looking at the short term picture ONLY. Employees are now just so much cattle, there to make the upper management rich. That doesn't excuse the behavior, but it is the norm in the US now.
You're quite correct that it's disgusting. Someday this is all going to come back and bite companies though. Having no loyalty to your employees works both ways, they also have no loyalty to you. At some point in the future it's all going to fall apart when the remaining employees don't care enough to keep the company from failing. But all the current upper management will be long gone with all their money, so they won't care. It's kinda like a Ponzi scheme, only with employment.
I manage a couple of servers, I just checked that site for the IPs of them all, and one server it has listed. But... It's configured to not allow recursion except to a limited set of IP addresses that are other servers specifically allowed to access it for DNS lookup. I just tested it and it is NOT allowing recursion to other addresses, so it's working properly.
Apparently BIND reports that recursion is enabled, even if it's not available for the IP address doing the check. So how many of those servers are like mine, allowing recursive lookups for only specific IPs and not doing recursion to the Internet at large? Those servers aren't part of the problem.
The site seems to recognize this but not explicitly, only saying that of the 27 million servers they list, only roughly 25 million post a threat. If they want the owners of servers to fix things, they need to provide more information than they have available. Hopefully this is just a hurried attempt to get the site up and they'll be adding more info. Otherwise I suspect it's going to be useless in the goal of reducing the number of open resolvers.
The problem is that the "carrot" is exclusively decided by the prosecutor, the same person applying the "stick". As we saw in the Aaron Swartz case, this may not have anything to do with fairness. What if the carrot here is plea-bargaining to a minimum of 20 years in prison and Brown hasn't agreed yet because he thinks that's extreme? (Even if Brown did everything he's accused of I'd consider that extreme myself.)
The problem is that prosecutors, by deciding both the carrot and the stick, and piling on more and more charges, are becoming judge, jury and executioner. They're deciding who gets punished and for how long. And they seem to have no sense of fairness what-so-ever, so the system is falling apart completely.
Brown's probably guilty of quite a bit of stuff, but if the prosecutor feels the need to pile on charges past 90 years worth of prison time, then the "carrot" he's determined Brown should plead to is probably too extreme. And that's wrong, punishment should be commensurate to the crime, no matter what the crime is.
OxyContin's supposed to be an extended time release formula, over 12 hours. What has happened is that addicts crush the drug up and take it all at once to get one major dose of the drug, instead of a dribble of medicine over 12 hours. So done properly (the body still dissolves it gradually) it wouldn't have any effect on people taking it properly, but would make it harder for addicts to get their fix.
So basically he was known to have mental health problems and the prosecutor knew this (or should have known if she'd done her job and research) and still pushed him as hard as possible (threatening jail terms most murderers don't see)? This makes what she did better somehow? To me it makes it worse.
Accountability takes different forms than just being charged with a crime. In this case the prosecutor (and her assistants if they went along all gung-ho) can be held accountable by losing their jobs. If they're doing their jobs poorly, they should be losing them in the first place, and if they're driving people to suicide, they most definitely aren't doing them properly.
Of course for that to work they'd have to lose their jobs and also never be considered for such a high level position in the future. But that's part of the responsibility that comes with such positions: if you fuck up royally and ruin lives, your life/career may be ruined as well. People taking such positions know (or damn well should know) this is the case, so they have no room to complain when it happens.
So basically they need to be "charged" with "doing a totally horrible job" and the remedy is losing that job.
Similarly unfounded is the allegation by Megaupload that the government "planted Megaupload's alleged knowledge of infringing files" and misled the Court. Megaupload Supp. Br. 11-12. Megaupload claims that the government inserted a misleading "snippet" into "each relevant affidavit," id. at 2, and that the "snippet" misinformed the Court by highlighting Megaupload's failure to remove content deemed infringing in the June 24, 2010 warrant. To the contrary, no such "snippet" appears anywhere in the primary search warrant at issue in Mr. Goodwin's motion. That warrant, the search warrant executed at Carpathia Hosting in January 2012 (Case No. 1:12 SW 41), does not even mention the June 24, 2010 search warrant.
Which may be technically true (I can't find a copy of SW 41 online), but if you look at the redacted search warrant to GoDaddy to seize the domains names (SW 34, available here) you'll see this:
17. On or about June 24, 2010, members of the Mega Conspiracy were informed, pusuant to a criminal search warrant from the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, that thirty-nine infringing copies of copyrighted motion pictures were present on their leased servers at Carpathia Hosting, a hosting company headquarted in the Eastern District of Virginia. A member of the Mega Conspiracy informed several of his co-conspirators at that time that he located the named files using internal searches of the Mega Conspiracy's systems. As of November 18 2011, thirty-six of the thirty-nine infringing copies of copyrighted motion pictures were still being stored on servers controlled by the Mega Conspiracy.
So maybe they didn't mention it in that particular warrant but they mentioned it and relied on it in seizing other stuff, so pretending they didn't rely on the June 2010 warrant for their case is highly misleading.
Well you see, one of the major companies behind these complaints is Microsoft, and they tried that with Bing... and they failed, so now they're trying to get the EU (and the FTC before that) to make up for their utter failure to compete in the market by castrating their competition. The other companies are no better, there's lots of companies that produce sites of nothing but search results that are pissed that Google removes them from search results that have complained. (No consumer wants results of more search results as hits, they want the actual answer, so Google rightfully filters that crap out.)
Nah, he's probably hoping (and praying) that people will pay attention to Prenda Law and stop paying attention to him because he obviously can't stop digging.
Is a Copyright Trolling company finally going to dig the hole so deep the bottom falls out from under them?
Arguably that has already happened, since Righthaven completely collapsed and had their assets sold off to pay attorney's fees awarded against them. (And there's still some Bar investigations into the principals last I heard.)
Yes, but this is apparently a "Hail Mary" pass attempt. I believe Gibbs is thinking "If I can get this judge kicked off, maybe the next one will ignore this whole Alan Cooper thing." I believe this is the only change he's got, and it's a mighty slim one.
I don't think it's a particularly smart one, but smart people don't get themselves into situations like this in the first place.
If the allegations about Alan Cooper are correct, insulting the judge to try to avoid answering those questions might actually be the only thing Gibbs can do. I suspect that if they are true (and given Gibbs' reaction, it's looking highly likely they are), he's in deep, deep trouble. As in contempt of court, going to jail trouble. Committing fraud on the courts is much, much worse than simply insulting a judge.
The content industries/copyright maximalists seem to honestly believe that if you just pass enough (and strict enough) laws that everyone will magically start obeying them and stop pirating stuff.
A firm grasp on reality is one thing they most definitely don't have.
labels have always given away free music, and long before there was an internet. but the labels (and artists) had consent about how much, to who, and what they got in return for it.
No, they thought they could control what happened once they gave it away, but the courts smacked them down. It was just last year, and TechDirt did report on it, that the 9th Circuit appeals court declared selling promotional CDs to be 100% legal.
They certainly don't get to control digital Mp3s that they deliberately try to get plastered all over 3rd party websites more than they can control promotional CDs! Freely redistributable means it's freely redistributable.
Seems to me that if I had a brand, and someone *did* try to register a fake domain based around its name like this email insinuates might happen, then I would have a perfect case to take that person to court for (actually legitimate this time) trademark infringement.
You could use the domain name dispute process and probably get the domain name turned over to you on trademark grounds as well, but then... you still have to pay the yearly fee for the domain to keep it. So the registrar for .sx domains wins and you still lose.
Personally, I had a bad feeling about this from the start because of this sentence from Google's announcement:
"Based upon feedback from our community, today we're introducing an appeals process that gives eligible users a new choice when dealing with a rejected dispute."
I suspected at the time that this meant that the new appeal system wouldn't be available to everyone, and now we're seeing that this is indeed the case. It seems the new system has just allowed Google to anoint a chosen few to be eligible for a reasonable review policy, and the rest of the plebes are just out of luck.
Re: Re: As I've said, police aren't even thugs now, just attack dogs.
Even knowing OOB's history, I took that part of his comment as sarcasm, as in taking a dig at the people (including many cops) who claim that violent video games make people do violent crimes. Basically saying that since the police apparently beat this guy to death they must have been playing violent video games to cause them to do such a horrible thing.
Sadly I wouldn't be surprised to see them try that as an excuse if this ever goes to trial.
Re: Re:
Re:
You're quite correct that it's disgusting. Someday this is all going to come back and bite companies though. Having no loyalty to your employees works both ways, they also have no loyalty to you. At some point in the future it's all going to fall apart when the remaining employees don't care enough to keep the company from failing. But all the current upper management will be long gone with all their money, so they won't care. It's kinda like a Ponzi scheme, only with employment.
Re: Re:
See now, that's Prenda's real plan, they're pre-digging their escape tunnel!
Not sure the OpenResolver list is useful
I manage a couple of servers, I just checked that site for the IPs of them all, and one server it has listed. But... It's configured to not allow recursion except to a limited set of IP addresses that are other servers specifically allowed to access it for DNS lookup. I just tested it and it is NOT allowing recursion to other addresses, so it's working properly.
Apparently BIND reports that recursion is enabled, even if it's not available for the IP address doing the check. So how many of those servers are like mine, allowing recursive lookups for only specific IPs and not doing recursion to the Internet at large? Those servers aren't part of the problem.
The site seems to recognize this but not explicitly, only saying that of the 27 million servers they list, only roughly 25 million post a threat. If they want the owners of servers to fix things, they need to provide more information than they have available. Hopefully this is just a hurried attempt to get the site up and they'll be adding more info. Otherwise I suspect it's going to be useless in the goal of reducing the number of open resolvers.
Re:
The problem is that the "carrot" is exclusively decided by the prosecutor, the same person applying the "stick". As we saw in the Aaron Swartz case, this may not have anything to do with fairness. What if the carrot here is plea-bargaining to a minimum of 20 years in prison and Brown hasn't agreed yet because he thinks that's extreme? (Even if Brown did everything he's accused of I'd consider that extreme myself.)
The problem is that prosecutors, by deciding both the carrot and the stick, and piling on more and more charges, are becoming judge, jury and executioner. They're deciding who gets punished and for how long. And they seem to have no sense of fairness what-so-ever, so the system is falling apart completely.
Brown's probably guilty of quite a bit of stuff, but if the prosecutor feels the need to pile on charges past 90 years worth of prison time, then the "carrot" he's determined Brown should plead to is probably too extreme. And that's wrong, punishment should be commensurate to the crime, no matter what the crime is.
Re:
OxyContin's supposed to be an extended time release formula, over 12 hours. What has happened is that addicts crush the drug up and take it all at once to get one major dose of the drug, instead of a dribble of medicine over 12 hours. So done properly (the body still dissolves it gradually) it wouldn't have any effect on people taking it properly, but would make it harder for addicts to get their fix.
Re: Re: Re: Dolan's tweets
So basically he was known to have mental health problems and the prosecutor knew this (or should have known if she'd done her job and research) and still pushed him as hard as possible (threatening jail terms most murderers don't see)? This makes what she did better somehow? To me it makes it worse.
Re: Re:
Accountability takes different forms than just being charged with a crime. In this case the prosecutor (and her assistants if they went along all gung-ho) can be held accountable by losing their jobs. If they're doing their jobs poorly, they should be losing them in the first place, and if they're driving people to suicide, they most definitely aren't doing them properly.
Of course for that to work they'd have to lose their jobs and also never be considered for such a high level position in the future. But that's part of the responsibility that comes with such positions: if you fuck up royally and ruin lives, your life/career may be ruined as well. People taking such positions know (or damn well should know) this is the case, so they have no room to complain when it happens.
So basically they need to be "charged" with "doing a totally horrible job" and the remedy is losing that job.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Sting?
A Mega Farce at that.
They also claim they didn't mention the June 2010 warrant, but they did
Another little bit of misdirection is this:
Which may be technically true (I can't find a copy of SW 41 online), but if you look at the redacted search warrant to GoDaddy to seize the domains names (SW 34, available here) you'll see this:So maybe they didn't mention it in that particular warrant but they mentioned it and relied on it in seizing other stuff, so pretending they didn't rely on the June 2010 warrant for their case is highly misleading.Re:
Well you see, one of the major companies behind these complaints is Microsoft, and they tried that with Bing... and they failed, so now they're trying to get the EU (and the FTC before that) to make up for their utter failure to compete in the market by castrating their competition. The other companies are no better, there's lots of companies that produce sites of nothing but search results that are pissed that Google removes them from search results that have complained. (No consumer wants results of more search results as hits, they want the actual answer, so Google rightfully filters that crap out.)
It's really pretty damn disgusting.
Re:
Nah, he's probably hoping (and praying) that people will pay attention to Prenda Law and stop paying attention to him because he obviously can't stop digging.
Re: Digging so deep the bottom falls out
Re: Re: Re: Insult the judge?
Yes, but this is apparently a "Hail Mary" pass attempt. I believe Gibbs is thinking "If I can get this judge kicked off, maybe the next one will ignore this whole Alan Cooper thing." I believe this is the only change he's got, and it's a mighty slim one.
I don't think it's a particularly smart one, but smart people don't get themselves into situations like this in the first place.
Re: Insult the judge?
If the allegations about Alan Cooper are correct, insulting the judge to try to avoid answering those questions might actually be the only thing Gibbs can do. I suspect that if they are true (and given Gibbs' reaction, it's looking highly likely they are), he's in deep, deep trouble. As in contempt of court, going to jail trouble. Committing fraud on the courts is much, much worse than simply insulting a judge.
Re:
The content industries/copyright maximalists seem to honestly believe that if you just pass enough (and strict enough) laws that everyone will magically start obeying them and stop pirating stuff.
A firm grasp on reality is one thing they most definitely don't have.
Re:
They certainly don't get to control digital Mp3s that they deliberately try to get plastered all over 3rd party websites more than they can control promotional CDs! Freely redistributable means it's freely redistributable.
Re: Don't we already have laws for that?
Re:
Personally, I had a bad feeling about this from the start because of this sentence from Google's announcement:
"Based upon feedback from our community, today we're introducing an appeals process that gives eligible users a new choice when dealing with a rejected dispute."
I suspected at the time that this meant that the new appeal system wouldn't be available to everyone, and now we're seeing that this is indeed the case. It seems the new system has just allowed Google to anoint a chosen few to be eligible for a reasonable review policy, and the rest of the plebes are just out of luck.