very interesting post.

I think if you look back at the history of the US you will find times when the county was more concerned with preventing putting innocent people in Jail than finding every possbile criminal and sending them to jail.

The philosophy of the function of jails has changed though the year as well. At time the US had thought prison were for reeducation and reforming people. Now we simply want to punish them.

This is an ebb and flow.

Right now we are living in “the put them all away” mode at all costs.

This is why over 1% of the US population is now in prision.

Holding people without charging them, prision torture, taking people to other countries so they do not enjoy the supposed protections of the constitution so the government can do their dirty work, is all part of the current put them jail mentality.

To answer your question, no i don’t trust the government to act fairly and really try to seek the truth, but rather to get convictions as politics demand them

It calls my attention that the FBI didn’t record the “referrer” website along with the IP address. The “referrer” is part of the browser’s request for any page, all browsers implements this and you cannot disable this feature (in fact, it’s a method used to validate the access to a website). The logs shown in the article only stated the IP address, while in order to strengthen the proof value it should include:
- the “referrer” (to claim it was the original link and not a “copy” sent by e-mail or found in another site)
- the browser brand and version (it’d be a good point to prove a match to the one installed in the prosecuted computer, and to disregard crawling robots)
Other information could be usefull as well, for example, the order every URL from images in the web page were requested (this would certainly tell appart a robot from a browser, and even browsers brands and models from their behavior). In fact, the browser sends a LOT of usefull data able to tell appart your computer from the next one, that would be usefull as a proof. But they rely ONLY in the link!

And even proving someone actually activelly clicked the link doesn’t prove the intention. Let say you’re just curious to get to know the way internet reflects our culture, or to what extent internet is actually a crime threat. As a citizen up to endorse these Government actions, you’re entitled to reach the information allowing you to know as much as the Government does about the actual threat and the way crime develops in the web. So you just look around, you get thoursads of images download in your computer cache (even if you didn’t even INTENT to watch), you click on links promoting illegal activities JUST TO GET TO KNOW THEM, but for the Government, this would be the same than becoming a CONSUMER of the illegal stuff.

As for this guy, he was a teacher. I think a teacher MUST get to know the threats childrens faces everiday. But the Government now deprives us all from the right to KNOW.

The implications are bold. The Government (as if it were not a res-pulbican entity) preserves for itself the right to tell wich behavior is criminal or not, while forbiding the taxpayers to even research the subject to agree or disagree with the Government criteria. We have to blindly believe in the Government (even if as part of a jury)!

Moreover, this is a well known method to control the population behavior and way of thinking, one proven usefull for totalitary regimes: people STOP doing things because of the fear, “just in case” they become suspects and (because of what I said before), “automatically” guilty as charged.

The problem relies on the answer to this question: Do you preffer a) to have innocents in jail if this ensures all the criminals were jailed, or b) to have crimminals walking free if this ensures no innocent were jailed?

If you picked (a), then you’d endorse the Government discussed criteria, if you picked (b) you’d be against it. As citizens, the answer to this question shapes two very different societies, and our lack of reaction will let other people shape the society we and our childrens will live in.

UltraRPM who ever they are

Here is a link to the suit:

http://www.loffs.org/neimanmarcus-v-ultrarpm

Talk about the thin blue line. Wow the government is a bunch of scumbags going after scumbags. So I don’t expect to see any of them in heaven. Face it our government is run by
two faced liars…I think this is how Hitler got started. Scary.

The answer to your question is yes there are many people and companies that are fine with this.

Especially those who have done domain tasting.

Last week a lawsuit was filed against a company that has over 4,000,000 domain names and thousand and thousands of typo’s of trademark names

I believe it’s a huge task to enforce TM and regulate domains but hey this will create companies and jobs and on top of it raise google’s stock. The result will distribute money to people who truly deserve it.

With saying this I would hate to see this issue go in a direction of reverse domain hijacking and people thinking they are the rightful owners of a domain just because they registered a TM.

also if you want to check out the original story on cnet, you will see well over 225 comments and 90% of them have the foresight and understanding to appreciate the harm that was done here and what can be done by the government in the future

This will be the subject of tomorrow’s post