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| Authored by: jbb on Tuesday, January 29 2013 @ 12:19 AM EST |
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link
Here is the 5th question from
the poll:
5. Sally is a college admissions counselor who decides to
let applicants know if they have been admitted by sending them a link to a
unique URL, such as www.college.edu/?shva=1#decision/13c9e80c03a4a673 A person
who visits the URL will see a letter either admitting them or rejecting them.
Joe wants to know who has been admitted to the college, so he he writes a script
that queries the website at each of the possible URLs and collects the letters
indicating the admissions decisions of all 5,000 applicants. In your view,
should accessing the college site to collect all the decisions be considered
permitted authorized access or prohibited unauthorized
access?
Assuming the string "13c9e80c03a4a673" represents 16
hexadecimal digits then Joe would need to to access the web site 16^16 times
(roughly 2 * 10^19, a 2 followed by 19 zeroes). If Joe was able to launch 200
queries per second then it would take him roughly the age of the Universe to get
all the admission/rejection letters. Joe could certainly be charged with
launching a DOS attack if he tried to complete this within his own lifetime.
People are facing many years in jail for similar charges.
IMNSHO, treating this
question seriously shows a breath-taking lack of technical competence. OTOH,
I'm sure many of the things I say show a breath-taking lack of legal competence.
Is a meaningful discussion even possible when people have such radically
different views of reality? I don't mean to pick on Orin Kerr but I think this
highlights the problems we are up against (which BTW are the problems Growlaw is
trying to solve). IMO most of the laws that have to do with computers were
written and passed and are now adjudicated by people who are mostly computer
illiterate. This is why we have the gigantic software-patent problem bogging
down the tech sector in the US.
It is not just that the people passing computer
laws don't know enough about computers to pass laws about them, the real problem
is that they don't know that they don't know. This is the first of the seven
deadly sins: hubris.
It is a difficult problem to solve and left
unsolved it
destroys civilizations.
What can we do to bridge this chasm?
How can we have a meaningful conversation when we are using the same words but
seem to be speaking different languages? How can someone who is extremely
computer literate be judged by a jury of her peers when anyone who is computer
literate will be prohibited from being on the jury? Almost no one in the
courtroom will be even speaking the same language as the
defendant.
---
Our job is to remind ourselves that there are more
contexts
than the one we’re in now — the one that we think is reality.
-- Alan Kay [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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- The collision of law and technology - Authored by: jbb on Tuesday, January 29 2013 @ 12:39 AM EST
- Aaron’s Law, Drafting the Best Limits of the CFAA, And A Reader Poll on A Few Examples - Authored by: PJ on Tuesday, January 29 2013 @ 12:58 AM EST
- Aaron’s Law, Drafting the Best Limits of the CFAA, And A Reader Poll on A Few Examples - Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, January 29 2013 @ 08:09 AM EST
- Aaron’s Law, Drafting the Best Limits of the CFAA, And A Reader Poll on A Few Examples - Authored by: bugstomper on Tuesday, January 29 2013 @ 08:14 AM EST
- The technical impossibility is - in my humble opinion - moot to the question - Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, January 29 2013 @ 12:16 PM EST
- Aaron’s Law, Drafting the Best Limits of the CFAA, And A Reader Poll on A Few Examples - Authored by: OpenSourceFTW on Tuesday, January 29 2013 @ 02:57 PM EST
- What does Joe actually have access to? - Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, January 30 2013 @ 05:52 AM EST
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, January 29 2013 @ 05:04 AM EST |
I guess they believed it was better not to ask, no point getting their father
all upset :p. As their mother explained, it would have been
"disrespectful" ^^;.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, January 29 2013 @ 07:18 AM EST |
Luckily they only affect Windows users, however I'll bet that 9 out of 10
articles won't get that right.
Wayne
http://madhatter.ca
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| Authored by: albert on Tuesday, January 29 2013 @ 12:24 PM EST |
Link
"We’re not done
yet"
What? This is unbelievable, even to a jaded old cynic like me.
What is she thinking? She's doing a Hogan here, footguns ablazin'. It'll be
interesting to see how this plays out...
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, January 29 2013 @ 02:37 PM EST |
I'm sort of surprised I've not seen this in the right hand column here
yet.
How Newegg crushed the “shopping cart”
patent and saved online retail[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, January 29 2013 @ 04:20 PM EST |
From the article, under the section "If You're Allowed to Access
Information, Doing it in an Innovate Way Shouldn't Be a
Crime":
technological barriers increasingly serve purposes far
removed from preventing computer intrusion, such as giving people in one
location a better price than people in another and blocking competitors from
seeing information otherwise available to the general public
Or
even:
attempting to force your customer to use a particular
technology
One of the banks I deal with had implemented (I don't know if
they still do) a web site where I could set up credentials and access my banking
information on line. The problem was:
I wasn't running IE on
Windows
They served up a web page that said "You need to use IE on Windows
in order to access this site" and didn't provide any obvious means of going
anywhere.
So I set the identifier in my chosen web browser on Linux to
identify the most current versions of Windows and IE. The site let me through
just fine with no other issues.
For those of you who missed what just
happened:
Yes, I had to forge my software identity just to use the on-line
facilities the Bank wanted me to use.
And to answer any further
questions:
No, once I figured out what the bank was requiring of me: I never
accessed their on-line services again!
RAS[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Tolerance on Tuesday, January 29 2013 @ 04:50 PM EST |
In the newspick "Splittable laptop-tablets: The U1 Hybrid had it right all
along", PJ remarked:
"A month before the iPad, and look at the
graphic. Rounded corners. Uncluttered design. Black. Hmm."
It's even more interesting when one reflects that the
identical machine featured in the last episode of a three-part BBC documentary
on China's economy, "China: Triumph and Turmoil". This was hosted by
Professor Niall
Fergusson. It showed that machine as a specific example of Chinese
innovation beginning to rival that in the West.
Professor Fergusson was saying
directly that PRC engineers were at least as innovative as those in America and
held up the U1 as a good example.
The upshot is that America and other
Western economies have moved to a rent-seeking model where innovation is taxed
by patent and copyright. The Asian tiger economies are having none of this, but
there's worse to come, because as Fergusson points out they have hugely
increased both the number and quality of patents, and are leveraging their
market clout to make sure that business partners honour them.
It's
hard to avoid the conclusion that Western economies are about to get creamed.
Fergusson explicitly states that the last remaining area where the West is
competitive, innovation, is being taken over at an astonishing rate. I do so
love a train wreck, and over the next five years it will be fun to watch the
reaction on sites like Patently-O when the trolls realize the BRICs are eating
their lunch. Too bad that I'm a passenger on that train.
---
Grumpy
old man [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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