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Comment Re:Daily Mail fail (Score 4, Insightful) 547

IANAL, but: intent may be irrelevant in this case. The current fashion is to make so-called "strict liability" laws, especially in the area of "child protection". For example, in the UK, if there are child-porn pictures on your computer, then you are guily of an offence, regardless of how they got there. I don't know, but the same may apply in this case.

The beauty of this is that it allows the police to arrest people like this unfortunate person and put them in jail without all the tedious arguments about whether they intended do harm or whether it was an accident. A jury will be told "if he sent the message then he is guilty, even if it was a mistake".

Indeed, it is even possible for a policeman to force someone to do something against their will, and then arrest them for it. Google the case of "Winzar (1983)" if you don't believe me.

Comment Re:Who cares (Score 1) 399

To apply the fix, everyone involved must cooperate and spend a lot of money upgrading.

The alternative is to carry without ipv6: this will create an artificial scarcity of ipv4 addresses. They will become more and more valuable, so existing businesses will be able to make more and more money renting them out: as no more are available, nobody else will be able to join the cartel to get a slice of the pie.

So: the choice is: spend a lot of money on ipv6 now to help the customer, or screw the customer over and head towards a cartel-dominated future. Surely ipv6 is doomed.

Comment Re:Empower the poor! (Score 1) 104

It's important for politicians to ensure that voters in poor countries to have mobile phones. Their use has revolutionized democratic elections in many countries.

Before, when a politician bought your vote, you had no way to prove how you actually voted. So the politicians had to trust the people to vote the way they were told.

Now, when the politician visits your village, you just show him the picture you took of your voting paper on your mobile phone in order to collect your bribe.

Comment Re:No cashier needed (Score 2) 145

Why bother with customers at all? Just track the people walking past the store, charge each of them $5, and leave the country with a big bag of cash before the police can catch up with you.

Credit card transactions with no audit trail: what could possibly go wrong?

Comment Re:Microchannel Anyone? (Score 2) 437

I remember a salesman from IBM coming to show us one of the early Microchannel machines.

He proudly told us about its wonderful security feature: if you changed any hardware, you could not boot it unless you had a magic floppy disk containing some magic security files.

Then he switched it on to demonstrate it. It was as dead as a dodo. He then remembered that he had removed a network card just before bringing it to us. And he had forgotten to bring the magic floppy with him.

Exit one very red-faced salesman. And we vowed never to buy any of that crap.

Comment Re:So where's the security? (Score 3, Interesting) 437

So I'm a philanthropically-minded linux user with $99 to spare. I give that money to Microsoft, and they give me some magic key that lets me write linux kernels that will run on anyone's machine. I immediately publish that key on my website, for anyone to use. Now any criminal can use this key to run their malware on any machine.

Obviously it doesn't work like this, or the whole scheme would be useless. So how is it going to work?

I read TFA, and as far as I can tell, it *does* work like that: for $99, I get my key sent to the hardware vendors to be put into their UEFI boot chips. So will everyone get a free "bios upgrade" when I deliberately leak my key?

Comment Re:Facebook too (Score 5, Insightful) 198

Microsoft and Facebook can do what they want - people can't complain too much, they are the company's networks after all, they can do what they want.

Would people have the same attitude as you if the phone company started beeping out words that they objected to? Or if the postal service started throwing away mail because they objected to the recipient? After all, the phone and the postal network belong to those companies, so they should be able to do whatever thay want?

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