241–250 of 311 posts
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I'd say you're already there.
In terms of law enforcement: I disagree. It's like 97% national still. In terms of civil disputes between citizens from different member countries - well, we don't have any phone/internet/post police.
The underlying crime was wire fraud, and it happened to be about acquiring IP addresses. He wasn’t prosecuted because he got too many, but for how he got them.
Wire fraud, wire fraud, it's nearly always wire fraud. Elizabeth Holmes, George Santos, Charlie Javice, all the people who got fake Covid funds - wire fraud, wire fraud, wire fraud. In this day and age if you're committing fraud it's pretty hard for it not to be wire fraud given how everything is transmitted digitally. And penalties for wire fraud are extremely steep (up 20 years for each charge), and it automaticall…
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Did he actually die, or conveniently “die”? I guess it’s hard to know.
He'd be 82 so it's not implausible that he actually died last year - though he claimed he couldn't participate in his defense against the IRS charges since he had dementia and the government called 'bullshit' on that. Amusingly, the government has some funny details like he learned that his Bermuda-based co-conspirator had been raided by tax officials while on a fishing trip in Alaska, and then 1 day later emailed a…
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Oh, it is absolutely wild, which I don't think is a very good characteristic for a legal system, especially one where the rule is that 'ignorance of the law is not a defense'.
I think we need a new take on that phrase, something like "ignorance of the law must not be a reasonable defence" — when the law is too complex for most people to understand, it is vulnerable to capricious enforcement, malicious compliance, and unwitting everyday violations being held against the politically undesirable. Not only do I have absolutely no idea how to get from here to there, I also assume the degree of…
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I think 1 IP address per human was short sighted. We ran out before the human population doubled. But I think a billion per human was someone liking powers of two, and nothing more. “Ipv5” with 48 bit addressing would have done pretty well. As 6 octets or 4 base 12. For humans you could reserve all ambiguous addresses and have about 50k times as many addresses while people sort themselves out. You could still be able…
v4 was 32-bit, v6 was 128-bit. I think that 64 bits is a more obvious happy medium. Conveniently, 2^13 = 8192 allows you to use most of the information available in four decimal digits. And 64 = 13•5 - 1 means that you get a roughly even division into five address tiers (with either the first or last one half the size). 4095.8191.8191.8191.8191 is a bit worse than 255.255.255.255 but not nearly as bad as ffff:ffff:ff…
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Story time? What makes Postal Inspectors so feared.
Some agencies, ones you might not even expect like the USPS and FDA, also have law enforcement powers, but have very narrow jurisdiction (relative to general law enforcement agencies like the FBI). So when a case actually does fall under their jurisdiction, they execute their duties "with extreme prejudice", so to speak. Assuming the story from the OP you replied to is true, the fact that they arrested the police off…
But in all fairness, the distinctions are all pretty arbitrary, I'm sure people were laughing as much when the navy spun off their weather stuff and when the army spun off their flying stuff as they do now with the air force spinning off the space stuff.
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Was this at MIT?
Yes. Did you happen to work with the AllAdvantage anti-fraud team, or know someone in Course 2 at MIT who dropped out of school writing poker bots and AllAdvantage bots?
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Quite a bit more boring, but a co-worker once paid a contractor to install some blinds in his house, for a few thousand dollars. Dude took a down payment and then never delivered/installed the product, wouldn’t return their calls, etc. My coworker went to the local police, who wouldn’t do anything, but then his lawyer advised him to go to the postal inspector (he had mailed the check to the contractor.) The contracto…
The US justice system seems very odd to this European. Then I realize that if the EU project ever were to reach its presumed goals (by some), we'd probably end up with something pretty similar in terms of "oddness complexity".
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Back around the turn of the millennium, there was a company called AllAdvantage. They paid you to install spyware/ad injection software and watch you browse, and sold the add space and analytics to corporations. They'd pay you for... I think it was 48 hours of ad-injected spied browsing per month, and then stop paying you (but keep injecting ads and spying on you). There was also a pyramid aspect where you'd get some…
It's too late to edit, but I swear I know the difference between ad and add. On a side note, I thought a naive shuffle with a well-seeded cryptographic-quality pseudorandom number generator was the most likely finding from his poker bot history archive. I thought the linear congruential generator and seeding with the current time were long shots. I was just hoping that the skewed distribution gave a measurable edge o…