Driving over the speed limit is a criminal act. Period. Crossing the street off the walkpath is a criminal act.

OK, but honestly, nobody is giving you a damned website to act as a marketplace for someone to speed or jaywalk for you.

Which means the site pretty much has one function: to facilitate people doing illegal things on your behalf in exchange for money. As soon as you start facilitating connections between people to break the law, it becomes something else.

If the owner didn't police this, then I'm going to say "ethical ambiguity" is a crock of shit.

How many of these transactions are provably legal? Because reading the examples in TFA, they're pretty much blatantly illegal.

Well, and then extend the metaphor to real world things and it gets even harder to understand.

Need access to your neighbor's house? Someone else's car? A safe?

Yes, you would totally go find a pseudo-anonymous entity to help you get into those things, because that's how those things are normally done. No, wait, it completely isn't.

But suddenly hacking into Facebook, or GMail, or a database (so you can use it for doxxing) .. and someone can claim to have a legal business facilitating these transactions? I think not.

Sounds quite sketchy to me, especially when the site owner is adamant that people won't be using his site for anything illegal. I'm with you, I can't think of any situation in which this makes sense.

What next, the pseudo-anonymous physical intimidation service? Mooks List?

Unauthorized computer access is a criminal act. Period.

Well, the fairly obvious answer is that if it's a federal crime, then federal resources will be the ones going after you and won't need to care about state jurisdiction.

For a felony you would not necessarily get the feds turning their resources to you.

So, in terms of which agencies will be coming after you, and with what resources ... pointing out that you'd be violating federal law says you get a whole different class of people coming after you.

Federal crimes may not be worse, but the magnitude of who is investigating it and how much resources they have is an entirely different animal.

I'd say it's very relevant. Because it's the big boys who will be investigating and prosecuting, not local/state agencies.

Shady stuff on the intertubes? I'm shocked I tell 'ya.

There's really only one question: is the owner aware that his site is being used for illegal stuff, or has be willfully made sure he isn't aware.

Because TFA sure as hell makes it sound like it's pretty blatantly being used for illegal stuff ... and then it's just a matter to which the owner is consciously facilitating this.

So, which is it ... clueless that your site is being used to break the law? Or intentionally not noticing that your site is being used to break the law?

Hacker's List "is intended for legal and ethical use." And, according to the owner, "[n]o one is going to complete an illegal project through my website."

How about "i need hack account facebook of my girlfriend," completed for $90 in January? Or "need access to a g mail account," finished for $350 in February? Or "I need [a database hacked] because I need it for doxing," done for $350 last month?

That does not sound like a site which is in any way policing itself to be a legal operation.

Not even a little.

Oh, and why is it always a 'sophisticated Cyberattack'?

Because if they didn't call it that, they might have to say "because we're screamingly incompetent".

You can bet your ass that PR firms and image consultants play a huge part in how this is announced and described.

And "yarg, teh highly sophisticated hax0rs pwned us" puts them in the best possible light.

Now, how difficult and sophisticated the actual attack was, I have no idea.

And this is why we can't have nice things.

When smart phones and tablets were having their best growth, we were getting stripped down OSs and applications ... things were back to being measured in 'megs' instead of 'gigs'. They got smaller, and chucked the legacy bloat.

But now we're back to having full x86 architecture and Windows ... because for some reason people want to cling to the decades of bloat we have and run Office, instead of actually deciding to take all that legacy crap and just destroy it.

If all we're doing is turning the mobile devices back into full-fledged PCs with the same OS ... we're throwing away the progress when we got away from that in the first place.

The bloated carcass which is Windows on x86 has no place in mobile phones and tablets. All it does is reward dinosaurs who are incapable of actually innovating and coming up with something new.

The last thing I want is a phone spec'd enough to run a full version of x86 Windows while hosting a fucking Linux VM. It screams "hey, the hell with progress, let's make the same shit we've made the last 15 years".

The only way to fix this is criminal liability, with very stiff fines.

If they're going to continue to be incompetent at security, hit them where it hurts ... right in the profits.

As long as corporations can say "oops" and just pretend that two years of credit tracking like this, nothing at all will change.

Until then, corporations will be as incompetent and lazy as the law allows ... which is pretty much as incompetent and lazy as they want to be.

If you don't make the company pay actual fines, escalating to much bigger things for repeat offenses, corporations will simply do whatever their PR consultants tell them they can get away with ... basically nothing.

Once again lawmakers don't understand the issue.

Making the tools illegal doesn't mean people who plan on doing illegal things won't have them.

It also assumes that the best such tools come from America.

This is idiot lawmakers who don't understand technology passing laws trying to fix it. So, saying it's extra special illegal to break the law achieves absolutely NOTHING, and it prevents people from studying actual security holes because the tools are limited.

Can we make it illegal to be stupid? That would be awesome!

Yeah, I read TFS as a big giant "holy cow are police forces actually this damned stupid?"

How can these idiots take themselves seriously when they have such monumentally idiotic ideas? And why should they expect us to take them seriously?

exactly, thank you for the demonstration

no

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

words drift in meaning all the time. nobody owns a language. what a word means is pretty much what people use it for. that's the only rule

as RC aircraft, especially quadcopters, have exploded in popularity, the term drone has come into common use to refer to this burgeoning sector

therefore, drone is a perfectly acceptable term now for this new generation of RC aircraft definition. no other authority needed, because there is no authority at all

neither you nor anyone else can say otherwise

people "misuse" the term hacker too. and certain mentally fragile and rigid, socially maladaptive folk get really upset about the semantic change for some reason. it's alternatively confusing and funny, that people get so upset at the simple and common notion that words change in meaning

don't be bad at adapting to change in your world. the word's new meaning continues on without you, your protestations mean nothing and simply marginalize you

languages are living things, get used to it

But the reality is from the description of this, the manufacturer has done a crap job of building the "networking" part of this, and if you start trying to be clever and hook it up to an actual network you might really fsck it up.

So, imagine some field tech decided he'd rather find a clever new way to fix things, and then hoses (pun intended) the pumps because he's doing something which the pumps can't actually be made to work with.

Who the hell do you think is going to fix it?

You can call it a networking problem, but I would suggest if the manufacturer has given them all the same IP address ... these things aren't designed to be "networked" in any meaningful sense of the word.

Do you really want to run the risk of fucking up the pumps because you think you have a solution which works?

Because setting up a bunch of VMs so you can hook them up in a clever way and try to do this in parallel sounds like you have a better chance of it going wrong than going right.

It may use some networking technology in a limited way, but it isn't a networked device ... from the sounds of it they use that networking port as little more than a serial connection. And if you start trying to connect them all at once with some fancy setup of your own, you have no frickin' idea how it's going to work or what will happen.

You don't want to explain to the gas station owner why he has no working pumps and why the company who makes them wants no part of what you broke by doing it in an unapproved way.

Raising minimum wage *past a certain point* won't help anyone. If you've ever done basic calculus you will have come across the concept of oprimization - in the abstract for instance, finding where the derivative of a function that's some sort of concave-down curve crosses zero.

The minimum wage will be like that. If you graphed the spending power of the minimum wage people (their income minus their expenses) it will probably be some kind of curve. Starting from zero, the graph will slope upwards, until you hit a peak, and then it will slope downwards as the increased labour cost exceeds the benefit of higher wages.

We are probably somewhere to the left of this optimal point. The increase LA is making probably will move people closer to the optimal point. Increasing the minimum wage to $100/hr will move you to a point far to the right of the point at which the first derivative of the graph crosses zero.

Most farms are highly mechanised and the cost of labour makes up only a tiny part of the cost. (My dad's ex's family are farmers, and farms employ a tiny fraction of the number of people than they did even just 40 years ago).