Postulator 's Techdirt Comments

Latest Comments (93)

• On the post: Dutch Telcos Used Customer Metadata, Retained To Fight Terrorism, For Everyday Marketing Purposes

  

  Postulator ( profile ), 18 Oct, 2013 @ 06:03pm

  Only Dutch telcos? I'd be surprised.

• On the post: Oops: Brett Gibbs Releases Spreadsheet Showing 70% Of Prenda Proceeds Went To Steele & Hansmeier

  

  Postulator ( profile ), 17 Oct, 2013 @ 07:43pm

  They forgot the golden rule: when you're involved in a criminal enterprise, you all hang together - otherwise you'll all hang separately.
  
  By hanging Gibbs out to dry Steele and Hansmeier have created a huge problem for themselves.

• On the post: Two Florida Students Charged In Connection With A Bullied 12-Year-Old's Suicide

  

  Postulator ( profile ), 16 Oct, 2013 @ 06:28pm

  If I were a child today who had access to Facebook (noting its age limits), I would have two accounts as would all of my friends.
  
  The "parents" account would contain all the "Hi Jodie, are you okay to stay over at my place Friday night?" and "Justin Bieber is such a wonderful singer" posts.
  
  The "other" account would contain the "Jodie, don't forget to bring your dad's stash of weed when you come over Friday" and "I would let Justin Bieber me".
  
  So of course my parents will say "my child wouldn't post something like that, the account must have been hacked".
  
  Oh, and as someone in his forties who still has nightmares about his school years - bullying is NOT okay. You don't just "get over it", and anyone who thinks it is okay has clearly never faced bullying from the victim's perspective.

• On the post: When Will Hollywood Stop Blaming Everyone Else And Help Itself?

  

  Postulator ( profile ), 16 Oct, 2013 @ 06:00pm

  Since playing the game, I have been wanting to watch an episode of The Walking Dead (which as far as I am aware has not been released in Australia. I wandered across to www.amctv.com, to be presented by "The video you are trying to watch cannot be viewed from your current country or location".
  
  Thanks MPAA and AMC.

• On the post: Internal Investigation Into Pursuit And Shooting Results In The Suspension Of 63 Cleveland Police Officers

  

  Postulator ( profile ), 16 Oct, 2013 @ 05:56pm

  Oh boy - bobbies behaving badly. The more of these I read, the less likely I feel compelled to step in and help a police officer "in trouble".
  
  Our law enforcement agencies need to reconnect to their communities - which doesn't mean firing one hundred and thirty seven bullets! And receiving a slap on the wrist. I wonder if they arrested all civilians in sight to try and hush the whole thing up? Certainly if it had been a civilian doing the shooting they would at the least be facing serious jail time.
  
  Of course, if an officer had been slightly injured the police actions would clearly have been fully justified. (/s)

• On the post: Newspaper Editor: If The Gov't Tells Me Publishing NSA Secrets Is Not In The Public Interest, Who Am I To Disbelieve Them?

  

  Postulator ( profile ), 15 Oct, 2013 @ 07:37pm

  So much for the fourth estate.

• On the post: Dianne Feinstein Plays The 9/11 Card For Why The NSA Should Keep Spying On Every American

  

  Postulator ( profile ), 15 Oct, 2013 @ 07:07pm

  One wonders what Ms Feinstein is going to be doing after she leaves government. She clearly has some friends at the NSA, and almost certainly other friends in the "security" industry who will happily pay a bazillion for her lobbying efforts to date.

• On the post: GoDaddy Revokes Lavabit's Security Certificate After Reading About How The Feds Got It

  

  Postulator ( profile ), 10 Oct, 2013 @ 08:49pm

  The negative answer solution

  There is a very easy solution to government-compromised certificates. The certificate authority sends an email once a month (more or less time depending on the importance of the certificate holder - so Google (which I understand complicates things by issuing its own certificates) may be once a week). That email asks the certificate holder's chief executive to:
  
  "Confirm that your certificate remains secure, and to your knowledge your private key has not been provided to or accessed by any third party".
  
  A separate annual email would ask the chief executive to:
  
  "Confirm that all certificates issued to you, including those that have now expired, remain secure, and confirm that to your knowledge no private key issued to you has been provided to or accessed by any third party".
  
  These questions would exclude any certificates that are known to have been leaked, but there would need to be an extra question about what arrangements have been made to protect any data that is insecure because of lost certificates.
  
  The way these questions are phrased, chief executives could indicate by refusing to answer them that they have been forced to hand over private keys. They don't need to disclose anything that is prevented by super-secret "we cut off your balls" court orders.

• On the post: GOG Working Their Publicity Magic Via The Government Shutdown

  

  Postulator ( profile ), 10 Oct, 2013 @ 08:21pm

  Good on Good Old Games.

• On the post: Ohio Zombie-Man Confirmed Dead By The Court He Personally Attended

  

  Postulator ( profile ), 10 Oct, 2013 @ 07:24pm

  This is a silly article, arguing a silly point. When someone disappears, then there are certain things that have to happen legally.
  
  It generally takes seven years for a person to be declared dead, after which their will comes into force. Their spouse becomes a widow/widower, and may be entitled to certain government payments as well as being able to marry again. All sorts of other legal niceties have to be sorted out.
  
  If/when that person reappears, one immediate question is "where have you been, and why?" Regardless of that, though, the stuff that has been done cannot be undone. The spouse who remarries is not suddenly a bigamist, the person can't just take back all their old possessions...
  
  This is all sensible, because you cannot leave a person's life (or death) in limbo, affecting all around them. And you cannot, when they suddenly reappear, undo all that has been done on the assumption that they were dead. In this case, they guy turns up and says "I'm back". The court cannot just say "oh yeah - okay, here's your life back. We kept it in a cupboard while you were gone".
  
  The guy actually made a conscious decision to abandon his life (including his debts) - he cannot expect to just pick things up when he returns.

• On the post: Red Cross Pushing For War Crimes In Video Games To Be Punished In Video Games

  

  Postulator ( profile ), 04 Oct, 2013 @ 08:53pm

  Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:

  Watchit, I think you mean "likening".

• On the post: How The NSA Pulls Off Man-In-The-Middle Attacks: With Help From The Telcos

  

  Postulator ( profile ), 04 Oct, 2013 @ 09:17pm

  Protect businesses

  One thing is very clear from all of this, and I am saying this as a fan of big government. Business must not be in a position of relying upon government largesse. The NSA is clearly blackmailing companies. In the case of telecoms, "if you do this for us, you'll get that spectrum you want to buy". In the case of other companies, presumably applying a range of various arm-twisting using all the resources a government can apply.
  
  This is not right. Government decisions are supposed to be open and transparent - this is anything but. Government decisions are supposed to be based upon the facts at hand and upon what is best for the citizens - the NSA has seemingly inserted itself into decision-making processes and corrupted them. Large-scale corruption like this warrants a large-scale judicial review, and heads should be rolling. Instead, it appears that judges and politicians are too frightened to act, while the third arm of government is just totally involved in the problem and so cannot.
  
  Too many secrets.

• On the post: NSA Trying Hard To Compromise Tor, But It's Still Mostly Safe

  

  Postulator ( profile ), 04 Oct, 2013 @ 09:10pm

  Because if I don't want someone looking over my shoulder at everything I do on the Internet I'm a "bad person"?
  
  Thanks NSA for protecting the world, one rewritten dictionary at a time.

• On the post: London School Of Economics Study Shows, Yet Again, That The Music Industry Is Thriving, Not Dying

  

  Postulator ( profile ), 04 Oct, 2013 @ 09:05pm

  The London School of Economics is "prestigious"? It certainly wasn't that back in the 80s, when James Hacker was Prime Minister and a graduate of the LSE. Certainly Sir Humphrey and Bernard Woolley were happy to ridicule his qualifications.

• On the post: Red Cross Pushing For War Crimes In Video Games To Be Punished In Video Games

  

  Postulator ( profile ), 04 Oct, 2013 @ 08:49pm

  Are war crimes in books punished in the book? Certainly not in Tom Clancy's world, where the US ran rampant after someone offended against it.
  
  And religious texts such as the Bible detail some atrocious crimes against humanity. I don't recall anyone being penalised for them though - in fact God is generally the cheerleader.

• On the post: Former NSA Director Jokes About Putting Snowden On A 'Kill List,' Says He 'Hopes' NSA Is Involved In Targeted Killings

  

  Postulator ( profile ), 04 Oct, 2013 @ 02:27am

  They assassinate. We do targeted killings.

• On the post: Peruvian Congress Finalizes And Approves New Computer Crime Law In Secret Session, With No Public Discussion

  

  Postulator ( profile ), 04 Oct, 2013 @ 01:47am

  Where's the problem? It sounds like they've modelled this on US law, which is clearly the finest in the world.
  
  (For government/corporations).

• On the post: EA Hates You: SimCity Kneecaps The Modding Community

  

  Postulator ( profile ), 04 Oct, 2013 @ 01:42am

  Seriously, EA - spelling?

  When I read this story I figured Kotaku must have stuffed up in quoting "UGC that effects the simulation for multiplay games and features". Fortunately they had a link to the original, which confirms that EA doesn't know the difference between affect and effect.

• On the post: The Government Can't Even Figure Out How To Shut Down Its Websites In A Reasonable Way

  

  Postulator ( profile ), 02 Oct, 2013 @ 11:24pm

  So why does this article read like it's blaming the victim? Surely the confusion over government websites is the fault of the Republicans, who have failed to pass a budget bill because they want to grandstand a bit.

• On the post: Dianne Feinstein Accidentally Confirms That NSA Tapped The Internet Backbone

  

  Postulator ( profile ), 27 Sep, 2013 @ 10:18pm

  So is she a whistleblower? Or a leaker? Or - has she been to Russia lately - maybe a spy for a foreign power?

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