Wow, someone badly needs a refresher course in Con Law. Amendment 9 doesn't mean that anything you can dream up is your "right" automatically. It's typically only applied to certain areas of "privacy" (e.g. the original Roe v Wade decision was based largely on the 9th Amendment). Anything that falls within the "police power" of the states or the federal government, i.e. anything that touches on areas of public concern, such as safety, health, monetary policy, etc., is not covered by the 9th Amendment.

Now you're just being even sillier. Where oh where in the U.S. Constitution do you find a "right" to attend a particular meeting at a particular time? This would only plausibly have a constitutional relevance if the "meeting" had some sort of public significance, like going to the ballot box to vote, attending a court hearing, presidential inauguration, etc. But even then, it's up to you to plan your trip accordingly so that you get there on time: you don't have the constitutional right to bypass a bunch of safety regulations just so you can make a timely arrival. "I'm late for my meeting, so everyone else has to suffer the probability that I might try to fly this plane into a building, or drop some sarin gas on a densely-populated urban area".

Are you sure about that? According to Wikipedia (was too lazy to research any farther than that), Minnesota state law allows local jurisdictions to "enact laws which are more strict than state liquor law, including completely prohibiting the sale, possession, and consumption of alcoholic beverages" (emphasis added). Whether any such Minnesotan jurisdictions have enacted such laws, or whether any such laws have been challenged on constitutional grounds, remains to be seen. Counties in many states, however, can and do go "dry", meaning no liquor can be sold. And the 21st Amendment clearly gives states the power to control "transportation or importation" of liquor. The constitutional "right to booze" isn't nearly as clear-cut as you imply.

This was only recently recognized as being a right of "privacy", protected under the 9th Amendment and similar "privacy" Supreme Court precedents. But it has little or nothing to do with the safety regulations that apply to certain modes of travel. Other than, of course, your wishful thinking that 9th Amendment makes every individual's preference or desire automatically a "right" under the U.S. Constitution.

To be sure, the fine line between what is "public" and what is "private" is constantly under review and re-definition. But flying on airplanes is pretty far over the public/private line to the "public" side. If we had any doubts about that pre-9/11, I don't think those doubts exist any more, in the mind of anyone reasonable.

Glyph.

You do understand the new glyph system, yes?

Noob

I guess RTFA isn't your strong suit?

The FBI investigated whether the district broke any criminal wiretap laws, but prosecutors declined to bring any charges.

Actually, I took a slightly different tack in my "never" response. The question was: " How Long Until We Commonly Use Flying Cars?" (emphasis added). But there was no explicit choice for "We will never commonly use flying cars" (again, emphasis added). I looked at the "We'll never have flying cars" option and asked myself "who is this mysterious, ambiguous 'we' in the question? human society as a whole? Some subset of human society?". I convinced myself that "we" (= human society as a whole) will some day produce flying cars, that will be used for special purposes (emergencies? search and rescue?), but that "we" (= the common folk, such as myself) won't be in flying cars as a matter of course, because of the energy inefficiency of flying objects through the air versus driverless cars on the ground, or (as one poster speculated) underground in some sort of artificial vaccuum. Never mind all the fanciful stuff about teleporters and such; I was only comparing "in the air" versus "in/under the ground".

In short, I "repurposed" the "never" option. Sure, we (human society, considered abstractly) will have flying-car technology, and some people will use it some of the time, but "we", you and me, the common folks, won't use it, due to more energy-efficient alternatives being available and preferable.

This is not about being narrow-minded, it's about understanding, finally, at this point in human history, that almost every technological advance has tradeoffs. Don't just implement technology for the sake of implementing it. Do so with a full understanding of both the benefits and the costs.

The combining forms "-phobia"/"-phobe" have undergone a transition over the years. Originally they meant "fear", but then came to be used in contexts where fear is not possible, e.g. hydrophobic, meaning to repel or be repelled by water, acquired the general sense of "repelled by" or "having an aversion to", and eventually became used for psychological states or belief systems characterized by a dislike or hatred of a particular grouping, attribute, or belief system. Hence, "homophobic" (fear or hatred of homosexuals or of being homosexual), {country}-phobic, e.g. "anglophobic", a fear or hatred of people of a particular country, or {religion}-phobic, e.g. Islamophobic, a fear or hatred of people belong to a particular religion.

Also, even if we take "-phobic" in its original "fearing" meaning, I think there's a valid distinction between fearing individual Islamic people, versus fearing Islamic ideas or concepts. This Bible Belt moron may not fear physical attacks from Muslims -- after all, there isn't a Muslim-dominated country within thousands of miles of Gainesville, Florida -- but he probably fears, with good reason, that the Islam religion, it's theology and practice, may overtake Christianity. After all, Islam has been gaining on Christianity for many generations now, even in modern, "western" countries.

Wait, let me see if I've got this right: IPv6 is going to be resisted by the legions of users

1. who can't get their network admins to set up a reliable DNS infrastructure,
2. on whose network no device ever needs to be re-addressed,
3. who never use DNS-based load-balancing, round robins, MX records, SRV records, or any of the other features that only DNS provides, and therefore
4. for whom it actually makes sense to access resources on the network by IP address rather than by name, and
5. who can't deal with the extra digits of an IPv6 address, because such addresses are long and scary, and the users' fingers are -- if their complaints are to be believed -- so fragile that they will literally fall off their hands if subjected to even a modicum of extra typing.

Let's call this set "those who should be mocked and giggled at", or TWSBMGA for short.

Is the IPv6 transition truly imperiled by TWSBMGA? Stay tuned folks.

Who is this Steve Cassidy guy anyway, and how did he get a gig writing about network technologies for a magazine?

Distilled, what this nimrod's article amounts to is:

• The fears of IPv4 runout have been somewhat exaggerated since at least 1998.
• Home users generally don't need to worry about runout because their little SOHO router NATs their addresses
• The default IPv6 address for a device includes its MAC address, which Mr. Cassidy finds quaint and old-fashioned
• The IPv6 transition/co-existence mechanism are scary and confusing to Mr. Cassidy
• Some IPv6 documentation seems (to Mr. Cassidy, possibly no-one else) to favor using literal IP addresses over DNS names

While I agree with Mr. Cassidy about the runout exaggerations, I'm willing to give the exaggerators some benefit of the doubt with respect to intent, since they're just trying to motivate people to move to IPv6, which is clearly superior from a technical perspective. NAT is evil, breaks many applications, and is not the long-term solution to our runout problem. Perhaps if Mr. Cassidy would actually educate himself on the horrors of NAT -- what he refers to as "hiding" -- he would understand why IPv6 is not just an academic pipedream being foisted on the rest of us. I would invite him to try to integrate two large enterprise networks (not over his arbitrary theshold of 100,000 "seats", but still large nonetheless) which are both extensively using 10.*.*.* addresses, with tons of overlapping address space. This is something I personally struggle with every day, so I don't exactly appreciate some ignoramus telling folks to ignore IPv6. Many enterprises need it yesterday. What's ironic is that one of the co-authors of RFC 1918 actually worked here at the time of its publication -- classic case of "be careful what you wish for".

As for Mr. Cassidy's whining about the format of default addresses and about documentation slant/quality, I really don't see those as particularly relevant to the core argument that NAT is evil and must die

Well, in criminal terms, that's "vandalism", as a Tort, might be considered "trespass to chattels" (warning: IANAL). Withholding a password is not "vandalism", and I think that would be even more of a stretch than the "anti-hacking" statute under which he was convicted.

But they are the providers of the "service", not the intended beneficiaries of it. I think that's an important legal distinction to make -- there's no evidence that Terry ever targeted the users of the network with any kind of malicious intent. It was merely a scuffle amongst the providers of the service, something that happens all the time in workplaces. Even if he had remained in the employ of the City of San Francisco, he could have -- and reportedly did -- keep information about the particulars of the network, its architecture and its configuration, from other administrators and his management. This happens every day in workplaces all across the U.S. and in fact the world. No-one is compelled to disclose everything they know about their work, at the request of anyone and everyone who works in the same place. While a secretive, distrusting and/or insular employee may be grounds for disciplinary action, up to potentially -- actually, as it turns out in Terry's case -- termination, having "special" knowledge about the network, and not sharing it, is not "hacking" and not criminal.

I think the main disconnect here is that people view passwords as disconnected facilitators of "access" (however that is defined), more analogous to a physical key than to a piece of information. But I see those passwords as being at the end of a continuum of "special knowledge" that one may have about a network, or some other IT system, whether it be Operating System, application, or network infrastructure. What use would it be to give someone a password to a network infrastructure device, but they have no clue how to configure it, how to troubleshoot problems, how to even understand the role that the device plays in the overall infrastructure? Having the password to a router, a switch, a fiber concentrator, or whatever, doesn't mean you can do anything useful with it. So the threshold isn't just "password", in practical terms it's "password + other special knowledge necessary to do something useful with that access". Certainly Terry had "special knowledge" about FiberWAN that he wasn't willing to share with his co-workers or management. Passwords were only the tip of the iceberg. But to criminalize this behavior threatens to drill deep into the iceberg to other forms of "special knowledge" that workers withhold from each other and from their management on a regular basis. That's why it's such a dangerous ruling, and why it has vastly overextended the concept of "hacking", which is about protecting the society at large from the malicious actions of individuals against electronic systems.

It didn't block them; it merely failed to facilitate the handoff process. That's another important legal distinction -- between acting and failing to act. I think it's stretching the concept of "hacking" way too far when someone who declines to act can be held criminally liable. There are some examples of so-called "duty to assist" laws (look it up) on the books, where someone can be held liable for not lending their (minimal) assistance in an emergency or while a crime is being committed, but as far as I know, no such law exists in California, and, in any case, to return to the point, Terry wasn't convicted of a failure to assist the City of San Francisco to maintain and secure their network; he was convicted of "hacking" it, framed in terms of "denying service to authorized users". That -- like DDoS'ing the management ports -- implies an affirmative malicious act, not merely a "failure to assist".

I don't think it was reasonably applied. The obvious intent of the statute was to criminalize actions by person A, interfering with a network or system of organization B, which ultimately delivers (or doesn't deliver, if it's interfered with) services and/or content to user community C. But in this case, person A was part of organization B. He was on the inside, not the outside, had no malice towards user community C, and simply had a disagreement with other members of the organization about how best to deliver services. AFAIK, no evidence was ever presented that the end-users were affected by any of this (except later, as a side-effect of the City's incompetent attempts to "fix" the "damage").

What I think sticks in the craws of most of us IT professionals, especially those in the network area, is the absence of evidence that Terry himself denied "service" to anyone for whom the FiberWAN was ultimately supposed to benefit. The only "service" that was denied was to those who disagreed with Terry's methods and ended up being his accusers. This smacks more of a petty reprisal against Terry than the legitimate complaint of someone who has been hacked. These are not innocent victims here -- they clearly had an axe to grind with Terry, and had the power of the whole city bureaucracy behind them to mete out punishment.

Normal workplace disagreements are not prosecutable as "hacking". Fire someone if you consider them to be secretive, distrustful, or that they don't work well with others. Sue them for monetary damages if you think they increased your operating costs by putting up unnecessary and/or unjustified obstacles to an orderly handoff of responsibility. But don't throw them into jail over it. Crimes are reserved for harm that people commit against the whole society, not just wrongs committed between individuals or by an individual against a particular department of a particular organization. Those don't warrant the stigma and loss of liberties than a criminal sentence entails.

We don't know for sure that the password was non-incriminating. Certain combinations of letters, numbers and/or symbols are criminal ipso facto (how soon we forget the "munition" crypto algorithm, expressible on a t-shirt or other relatively compact media?).

If some piece of information could be incriminating, generally speaking we give broad latitude for the holder of the information to invoke the Right Against Self-Incrimination, since to determine whether it's incriminating or not, one would have to divulge it, which is a Catch-22, since it might result in criminal penalties for the divulger. Of course, the way to cut through that Gordian Knot is for an agent with the power to do so to offer Limited Immunity, with respect to that particular piece of information. Free of any possibility of incrimination, the holder of the information can then be compelled to divulge it, in accordance with usual rules of testimony, production of evidence, etc.. As far as I know, no-one offered Terry any kind of Limited Immunity in this case.