* Posts by LucreLout

3039 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Jun 2014

Yorkshire bloke's Jolly Roger flag given the heave-ho after council receives one complaint

LucreLout

All the local chav areas round here have George Cross hanging from upstairs windows.

When an Englishman can't fly the flag of England in England, without some numpty slagging him off, something has gone very wrong.

For the record I do not have anywhere to fly a flag from, let alone a flag to fly, but can see no wrong in this given the plethora of other flags flown throughout the year - EU, GB, Pride, etc etc

No DeepNudes please, we're GitHub: Code repo deep-sixed as Discord bans netizens who sought out vile AI app

LucreLout

Re: Finally a killer app for Google Glass

Sadly, what you propose would indeed be a killer app.

Silver lining though - the tech might then get enough R&D time to evolve into something useful to the rest of us (Augmented reality that is, rather than pervy nonsense).

LucreLout

Re: misogynistic monstrosity

Women don't need a special app for that; they just look at your hands and feet. Tells 'em -- with a good degree of correlation -- what they want to know.

I wish! I have big hands and clown size feet...... the rest I'll round up to "average".

Prenda Law boss John Steele to miss 2020 Olympics... unless they show it in prison

LucreLout

Re: Copyright trolls....

On a slightly more serious tack, what's the difference between a drug dealer and a bartender, besides the legality?

Obtain a product from each but don't pay, then report back.

p.s. for the fun police, don't actually do this, it might not end well.

Oh good. This'll go well. Amazon's Alexa will offer NHS advice

LucreLout

Anyone actually got an Alexa?

If so, can you answer a few questions for me?

- Can anyone ask about my order history?

- Can anyone ask about my kindle library?

- Can anyone ask about my Prime movie history?

Just assume the reason I'm asking is that I'm a dibbling sex pest who is hiding his secret life from his wife. I'm not, but it's what you'll all assume :)

Firm fat-fingered G Suite and deleted its data, so it escalated its support ticket to a lawsuit

LucreLout

Re: Place files in cloud - surprise - can't reach'em anymore

you'd expect an enterprise cloud solution to be equivalent to an in-house system... So backed up and recoverable within a day of catastrophic failure / mistakes.

It is, if you do it right. We have several availability zones all synchronised, acting as hot backups, we use the cloud providers backup for data (CI/CD for code with github and local hardware acting as code backups), and we still retain our own daily data backup in our own equipment.

Of course, if you have inexperienced dreamers or fools setting up your backup and retention policies, it simply doesn't matter if you're in the cloud or using local hardware, it won't end well. Experience cannot be replaced with keenness and ego, or talent as the kids describe it because there's no short cut to experience.

DoH! Secure DNS doesn't make us a villain, Mozilla tells UK broadband providers

LucreLout

Re: Mozilla are only partly right

Sure, people commit suicide in other ways too, but there's nothing so permanent and easy as grabbing a gun... Most other methods take considerably more effort.

Gun's are easy to get in the UK. Certainly easy enough to kill yourself with - shotguns rarely miss at that range, and may be preferable to a small cal. rifle. And yet, people still jump in front of trains. I've been a commuter in the SE for 20ish years, and so far have been on 3 trains that someone has jumped in front of; That's not delays, that's being on the train that hit them. Presumably you now seek to ban trains?

Method of suicide is a fairly meaningless statistic and certainly not enough to warrant banning guns - more people OD and yet you can still buy OTC pain killers; still more are killed by transport and still we travel; more by falling off tall things and still we build.

There's only so much we can and should do to protect people from themselves; thereafter we should respect their wishes.

In terms of protection from others, homicide rate is the stat that matters. The rest is noise.

LucreLout

Re: Mozilla are only partly right

Attitudes like that are why I don't want other people to have guns.

Other people have guns. You're going to have to accept it, because it is now and always be a fact. You have to go back a ways to find the last person killed with a legally held gun, while you don't even have to go back to last week for the most recent killing with an illegally held gun.

Attitudes like yours are what always leads to fascism. Sorry, but it just does. Outside of very restricted cases, "your" rights cannot trump "my" rights or neither of us can have rights.

LucreLout

Re: Mozilla are only partly right

We think that curtailing people's freedom to buy guns in the UK is an acceptable trade-off between your right to do what you want and my right for you not to have a dangerous weapon.

Unfortunately you have no such right. People can still routinely access shotguns, bladed weapons, clubs, etc etc With MMA or steroids they can make themselves the weapon. I'm genuinely puzzled why you think you might have such a right and why you might think you would want same.

LucreLout

Re: @MacroRodent you really need to open your eyes

The child abuse angle is a straw man. Surely people don’t just browse such abhorrent content as you’d browse YouTube? They’ve got to be aware that it’s illegal, and don’t fancy getting caught, so they’ll already be bypassing their ISP’s filtering etc. DoH won’t have any impact on that aspect at all.

You've misunderstood how far below average intelligence the average criminal is. I mean, it's not like they all wear gloves when committing crime to render fingerprint checks worthless, is it? The stoopid is strong with criminals, its a huge part of why they get caught.

Front-end dev cops to billing NSA $220,000 for hours he didn't work

LucreLout
Joke

It'll be a ring of fire by the end of October.

LucreLout

Re: Huh?

But what kind of idiot attempts time fraud in a secure environment.

I feel you could have stopped with "But what kind of idiot attempts time fraud", because stealing from your employer is just dumb. Don't do it folks.

If they've pissed you off - leave and get a better job.

If they've payed you below market rate - leave and get a better job.

If they've walked back on your agreed promotion - leave and get a better job.

There's no kind of criminal record that is going to help you get a job. Screwing yourself over forever in order to screw them over today is not a smart play. Just leave, and get a better job.

Get rekt: Two years in clink for game-busting DDoS brat DerpTrolling

LucreLout

Re: 1 minute of fame

Yeah but he only really got in trouble once Amber Heard.

NPM Inc settles union-busting complaints on third try – after CEO trolled for ordering internal mole hunt

LucreLout

Re: @Spanners ....union busting is very 20th century

@Alan Brown

Wow, someones triggered today. Are you by any chance off your meds?

No union in British history has worked with management for the betterment of the enterprise. Most are quite happy to wreck a business to show a stronger "negotiating" (read blackmailing) hand with other employers.

The average Rover worker lost 50% of their comp when the factories closed, meaning they were economically earning twice their replacement cost - double pay. The average miner lost more still, if they ever worked again. Dockers didn't just used to be a type of shoe. The list is endless and it is the reason unions by and large simply don't exist in the private sector.

LucreLout

Re: JavaScript. just say no.

When do you imagine that Web Assembly will take over from _server side_ JS ??

What's server side js and why would anyone want such a thing?

LucreLout

Re: @Spanners ....union busting is very 20th century

It is unfortunately very 21st century as well in the US

The simple reality, however unpopular with the Commentards it is, is that no competent management group will ever allow a union to take root in their company if there is any way at all to prevent it. The sole MO of most unions is to stir up discontent, and as we all know a house divided cannot stand.

There's a fundamental misalignment of expectations too - unions expect inflation busting pay rises every year, while management view salaries as being a replacement cost (how much does it cost to get the job done, as opposed to how much does it cost to get the job done by you).

They're mutually exclusive competing concerns - the primary job of any company is to make money for its owners. At their core, that is why they all exist. Companies can survive and thrive without unions, but the converse is not true.

DeepNude's makers tried to deep-six their pervy AI app. Web creeps have other ideas: Cracked copies shared online as code decompiled

LucreLout

Re: I'm impressed and worried

It would be rather nice though if a new strain of a virus could be nailed in weeks and the logistics of dealing with a natural disaster could be solved in hours.

Unfortunately, solving those problems takes more brain power and more time, than simply drawing tits on stuff. And the average or slow manifestly outnumber the smart or intelligent, so the available time balance is the wrong way around.

This weekend you better read those ebooks you bought from Microsoft – because they'll be dead come early July

LucreLout

Re: Do pay, and they'll take it away

As for 'works created by a corporation'; corporations don't make works of art, books or movies. People do.

I pay a builder to build me a house. I have every reasonable expectation at the end of it, that I am the owner of the house. How is it different if a company pays someone to create something for them?

Put another way, the company I work for owns my entire output during their day. Some of it they copyright, some of it they don't. I made it, with their resources, and I was paid to do so. If at the end of the day I own the work, then there's no job anyone would pay someone to do that involved IP. Outside of work though, I own my output, or rather I own some of it, and my side hustle company that I own owns some of it.

LucreLout

Re: Do pay, and they'll take it away

Copyrights should only be allowed to be owned by natural.persons not corporations.

How do you think that would work? I ask because I'm actually interested in your answer.

I can see some concerns with the idea - two tier property law (one class of things owned by people another by corporations, or both?), what happens when a copyright holder dies (copyright expires, transfers with estate? if so, what of the estate is left to a company?), and lastly what do you do about works created by a corporation and not a person?

Scumbags can program vulnerable MedTronic insulin pumps over the air to murder diabetics – insecure kit recalled

LucreLout

Until we start making security the personal responsibility of the the person who gets paid the most in a company with massive personal penalties that mean that can't just leave and get a well paid job somewhere else, then this kind of stuff will keep happening. CEO, President, CIO and all the others with a C(hief) in there name should personally be fined £1m for professional ineptitude and falling asleep at the wheel.

I can see where you're going with this, and I don't disagree with the sentiment, but it is factually incorrect. Quite often the highest paid person isn't in the C-suite: many banks pay their rockstar traders more than the CEO, for instance - they just do it "off the books", so to speak.

Biz tells ransomware victims it can decrypt their files... by secretly paying off the crooks and banking a fat margin

LucreLout

Re: Doesn't matter

If your wife was kidnapped and they wanted $100K in unmarked bills, would you consider it fine if you paid $300K for someone to "use their elite special forces skills" to get her back and then it turned out all they did was put $100K in unmarked bills in the drop off and picked her up when they divulged her location?

You got the outcome you wanted for a price you were willing to pay. So, yes, pretty much. This isn't spectacularly different to wholesalers selling to retailers who sell to the customer.

There ought to be a law against paying such ransoms, if everyone was forced to stop paying the attacks would stop.

I agree the attacks would reduce - some corporates aren't above illegal behavior when the alternative is closure. Its a rehash of the "if people were forced to patch their machines there wouldn't be botnets" thing, and yet, even though patching is damn near automatic these days for many OSes, we still have botnets.

That's a sticky Siemens situation: Former coder blows his logic bomb guilty plea deal in court

LucreLout

Re: $42,000 to read a code listing?

Could no-one at Siemans crack a spreadsheet password?

Quite possibly, and I'm just guessing here, their corporate security guys don't allow them to download, install, and run hacking software on the corporate network. Just possibly, they don't allow the client order spreadsheet to leave the network. Bit of an obvious issue trying to reconcile those things, no?

I would have stored the bomb in XORed uuencoded data stored as a BMP object.

You're my hero. Now, what if they didn't have any BMP objects in the rest of the workbook - kinda stands out again doesn't it?

Any sufficiently bad code can take days or weeks to untangle. It's not just finding the first bomb, its verifying that you found all the bombs.

Before we lose our minds over sentient AI, what about self-driving cars that can't detect kids crossing the road?

LucreLout

Re: Looking for 'discrimination' where none exists

The folk with money (generally speaking, not people who's grandparents were slaves) didn't wanna because, generally speaking, their grandparents owned slaves. So you put all the white people and the money *here* and the black people and the no money *there* and then say "schools are funded locally", so white kids get better schools.

This utter fallacy that all, most, more than a small percentage of white people owned slaves is so far beyond reality, it's skewed your entire world view.

Firstly, it wasn't only the whites that owned black slaves. Secondly, most white families didn't own slaves. Thirdly, in most states slavery was always illegal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_United_States#Distribution_of_slaveholders

Any chance you could rethink your views using facts rather than just using emotions and prejudice please?

LucreLout
Joke

They also need, what's the current polite term for little people?

Taxpayers.

HP CFO Cathie Lesjak didn't even read KPMG's Autonomy due diligence before $11bn biz gobble

LucreLout

Re: OK, that does it!

Seriously, does anyone in the C-suite do their job AT ALL in these large megacorps?

Doubtful. I'm not even sure some of them could if they tried. This particular case though, looks to be the worst example I've ever seen - the CFO not reading the numbers on an $11 Billion takeover? If negligence was criminal, this should deserve the highest penalty.

JavaScript tells all, which turns out not to be so great for privacy: Side-channel leaks can be exploited to follow you around the interweb

LucreLout

Re: "losing a lot of web functionality"

Has anyone tried referring the project to your appropriate agency for legal compliance with disabled customers

Actually, yes, I have. Our websites are AA compliant, but still rendered by js (react usually). Unfortunately under-powered machines isn't in breach of any act.

I may well build sites using js, but I do push back where I can and as much as possible. I realize this has an air of "I was only obeying orders", but unfortunately, keeping a roof over my daughters head trumps privacy (yours and mine). It just does. Sorry.

I'm always open to new suggestions for how anyone else is building sites while resisting the tidal wave of js frameworks, and always willing to push back where I can, but unfortunately, it's simply not my decision most of the time - where it is, there's always a minimal js version as a "downgrade" option.

LucreLout

Re: "losing a lot of web functionality"

Unfortunately I'm coming across more and more pages that show four fifths of fuck all if JS is disabled. I usually can't be arsed with them, but not to show anything at all is either wilfully antisocial or smacks of a dependence on the latest trendy framework.

I'm arguing at work that anything client facing should degrade gracefully, but I'm losing the fight. Everyone wants to work with the latest vue or react type frameworks, meaning its JavaScript or nothing. Literally nothing.

I'm arguing for presentation of basic html & css as a downgrade (for UX designers) option, but the bank simply no longer want to pay for "two sites". I kid you not.

What's everyone else doing? How are you winning or holding back against the seemingly relentless march of js at your workplace?

LucreLout

Re: JavaScript is only a threat when it runs

Use NoScript, or any other extension that controls what JavaScript runs and when.

Genuine question here - how much of the web degrades gracefully if you turn off JavaScript? My expectation based on places I've worked, and admittedly no actual research, is probably very little?

TIA

UK taxman spent six times more with AWS last year than cloud firm paid in corporation tax

LucreLout

Re: Corporation tax should be abolished

Why do shareholders and other investors allow it to pour money into the UK, when it's barely profitable?

Why? Capital gains. The annual earnings that could have been profit are instead ploghed back into growth, allowing the firm to make even more money later down the line.

Thanks to the foolery with the UK tax system, it's actually way better from a tax perspective to make capital gains over dividends.

large multi-nationals are strangely reluctant to show territorial P&L in their consolidated accounts because that would show places like the UK are likely very profitable

No, they aren't. See my earlier post on Lout UK vs Lout Cook Islands etc for why. They do raise a lot of revenue here, but revenue is not profit. You seem to grasp this further down your own post:

"So hardly suprising the UK makes very little profit under that kind of arrangement, and then there are all the other tricks, like intercompany loans, trading, IP licencing etc etc."

Those are the kinds of tricks that allow coffee shops to survive, despite buying the world's most expensive coffee beans.. Unless you're a smaller coffee shop that can't afford to buy those ultra-premium Swiss roasts.

My local independent coffee shop does exactly this. They pull the same basic tricks as Starbucks et al do. The bigger multinational chains make damn sure that nobody using the same loopholes as they do loses a case in court - That's how the RIAA managed to kill Napster etc, by allegedly stooging a case which the defendant then lost, thus setting a precedent.

Nothing will change quickly because it's not something national goverments can really fix, ie international tax treaties and accounting standards that permit this kind of global piss-taking.

Absent a global flat tax for both people and corporates, which ain't ever going to happen, it's impossible to "fix". Should the company in Holland really not be paid for it's creative IP? Should the importer in Denmark not be paid for their work? And the bean roaster in Italy, should they not be paid? Why should the UK coffee shop be made to fund the operational costs of the entire supply chain? Obviously, if the same multinational "owns" all of the entities, it encourages price elasticity in the supply line, but that can be very hard to prove.

LucreLout

Re: hmmmmmm

it has a small population and the income it brings in is worth much more than is lost from the taxation it would have got from local businesses if it had tax rates comparable with the UK's

Yup - a small slice of a large pie is worth a lot more than a larger slice of nothing, or at best a very small pie. It's not really related to population size though - it's why the EU fears Brexit, because we could drop our trousers on Corp Tax and gain a huge hit on the revenue bong and their multinationals flock from their jurisdictions here.

Ideologues from various bankrupt ideologies such as socialism or communism hate the idea of being a tax haven, but economically at least, it's the correct thing to do if you want to finance your public spending. Note, low CT does not require the abolition of CT, merely set it at a low rate in a legally stable nation.

LucreLout

And clearly having the means to do it cost effectively...

I've just done about 15 mins research with google and from what I can tell, I could set up a favorable tax arrangement via a couple of legal entities for about £1000, with an annual run cost of around the same (filing fees etc).

Most people don't look at structured tax planning because they make faulty assumptions - it's too hard, it's too expensive, I can't do it etc etc And yet it's way more widespread than most would believe - your union does it, your favorite left leaning newspaper group does an awful lot of it, the BBC does stacks of it etc etc

The reason collection rates dropped when the tax rate went up is neatly explained by the Laffer curve - you can have high taxes or high public spending, but you cannot have both. The higher the tax the greater the benefit in avoiding it, the lower the tax, the greater the benefit of paying it (simple, no grey areas, money switches to being tax paid rather than tax due internationally etc etc).

LucreLout

Re: Corporation tax should be abolished

A tax on turnover would be more efficient and harder to avoid though rather painful for companies that were genuinely loss making.

It would effectively lock almost all start-ups out of any market entry. You'd literally be handing the keys to the economy to pre-existing corporations. As far as ideas go, this one is terrible I'm afraid.

The UK would become global prey for companies started elsewhere that could finance a market takeover in the UK. It'd kill the economy almost as quickly as socialism.

LucreLout

Re: hmmmmmm

All companies exist to make a profit and that means being where your customers are.

More correctly it means having a presence where your customers are that while being the legal entity through which your derive most of your income from your customers, it may or may not be the legal entity through which most of your profit is made.

Lout UK sells dog turds to you for £50 per box. Lout UK buys those turds from Lout Cook Islands Ltd, for £40 per box. Lout UK also buys branding services from Lout Holland Ltd at a cost of about £5 per box of turds.

The gross profit for Lout UK is then actually £5 minus any onshore costs of operation. The fact that Lout Cook Islands is paying only £10 per box of turds means it makes most of the profit and pays none of the tax. Lout Holland Ltd also makes £5 profit because ip isn't taxed there the way you think it should be (it's why Bonio and his band have their ip rights owned via their hedge fund in that locale).

All of this is legal, all of it complies with EU and UK law. Your moral perspective on it is your own, not the person closest to you or anyone else in the world, so regrettably, the rest of the planet won't be using it as a basis for law.

This won't be a popular intrusion of facts into this debate, but they are the facts nonetheless.

LucreLout

Lawyers shouldn't have any way of avoiding country based taxes

Why on earth would you think that? My local coffee shop is headquartered in the Caribbean for tax purposes. It's literally an owner ran one premises coffee shop in the high street, it's just that the owner knows someone who knows how to structure legal entities to reduce their onshore tax bill.

You might not like that, you might even be positively miffed about it, but that doesn't confer any sort of obstacle to him doing it, and nor would it for a UK lawyer.

LucreLout

"Government departments using AWS are seeing a 40 per cent to 60 per cent cost saving."

So the GMB want us, the tax payer, to spend twice as much money in order to comply with the GMB's own morally bankrupt ideology? Ok, why?

Service provision != tax collection. They're different things.

Interesting to note that the union actively support, encourage, and provide services to members in order to avoid tax: -https://www.gmblondon.org.uk/benefits/guardian-taxation

Not only that, but they seem to be avoiding millions in taxes each year themselves:- https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/10353397/Revealed-11-unions-make-millions-in-stocks-and-shares-but-pay-no-tax-on-the-profits.html

So your position, given your views on tax avoidance, is that the GMB union are immoral and by extension then, so are all of their members? BTW, you'll find this applies to ALL of the trade unions, so I do hope you're not an "immoral" union member.

IBM raising axe for 'significant workforce balancing in Europe', says staffer rep council

LucreLout

Re: Given the recent rounds of redundancy,....

The issue is that if you take a package... you need senior execs to sign off on bringing you back.

As one of my former colleagues used to say:

Ex-employers are like ex-girlfriends: there's a reason you broke up, and there's millions of other opportunities out there, so why go back?

Amazon Alexa: 'Pre-wakeword' patent application suggests plans to process more of your speech

LucreLout

Wow! If you don't have a pressing need, such as a physical disability, for such a device why would you have one?

Convenience. I don't have one, but would like to get one with the proviso that someone can adequately demonstrate to me that anything I say preceding the magic word "Alexa" does not leave my house. Nobody has yet shown that as far as I am aware.

I'd quite like to be able to ask Alexa if my train is on time, if I need a rain jacket etc I don't have time to browse for these things even though it'd only take a couple of minutes, but I could talk to Alexa while getting the kids ready or tying my shoes.

Alexa would be convenient, possibly fun, vaguely useful, but wholly unnecessary, so without some privacy safeguards (including protecting my kindle bookshelf or movie library from casual enquirers) it's not going anywhere for me I'm afraid.

Swedish court declines to detain Belmarsh prison resident Julian Assange

LucreLout

there’s less risk of the Swedes handing him to the Merkins than the Tories

Your ignorance astounds. Which labour prime minister was it signed the legislation that allows speedy extraditions to the USA? Oh yes, his tonyness.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK%E2%80%93US_extradition_treaty_of_2003

Try using facts to form a proposition rather than your rabid and morally bankrupt politics, yes?

DXC: We axed 10k staff, shut nine data centres, closed 4.6m sq ft of office space... and sales tumbled, funnily enough

LucreLout

Re: Hiring for SUCCESS

Experience and wisdom are EXPENSIVE

Not according to the millennial's I work with - talent is expensive, experience is just age. They genuinely don't seem to understand why anyone needs more than 5 years experience or why someone with 30 years experience is likely to be significantly better and faster at their job than they are, and so paid more.

WikiLeaks boss Assange acted as a foreign spy, Uncle Sam exclaims in fresh rap sheet

LucreLout

Re: I was fine with the first indictment

"What happened to the immediate recession?" - have we left yet?

"The crash in house prices? " - Have we left yet?

"The crash in the stock market?" - Have we left yet?

"The rise in unemployment?" - Have we left yet?

The remainer lies were not predicated on having left - these were just the day one after the referendum effects that were being bandied about.

But the biggest lie of all, the absolute whopper of the whole campaign, that the EU has kept peace in Europe since the second world war is both factually and readily demostrably a lie. Yet remainers seem to believe it.

Why only this afternoon I had one tell me in all seriousness that to vote to leave means every rEU citizen in the UK would be kicked out. Where do they get this nonsense?

LucreLout

Re: Democracy absolutely requires that the losers acknowledge their defeat

So why doesn't the White House cooperate with the democratically elected lower house then?

The democratically elected senate block the bills?

LucreLout

Re: I was fine with the first indictment

There was a referendum on joining the EU years ago

WRONG! The UK never joined the EU. The people were never asked.

The UK voted to join the common market, not the rest of the batshit crazy empire. Do try to keep up at the back.

LucreLout

Re: I was fine with the first indictment

It was an advisory referendum

There's no such thing.

The leave campaigns lied and cheated

Ok, so what happened to the punishment budget? What happened to the immediate recession? The crash in house prices? The crash in the stock market? The rise in unemployment? And you think Leave lied??! I have a bridge you may like to buy. F.F.S.

LucreLout

Re: I was fine with the first indictment

No it does not. Democracy allows the argument to be advanced again and again.

It allows the argument to be advanced again yes, but it doesn't allow implementation to be aborted. Trump gets to be President. That doesn't stop Pelosi disliking his views or arguing against them, but it absolutely does require Obama hand over the keys to 1600 Penn Ave.

You have to accept you lost the election. You can keep arguing, but you can't deny the result or pretend it didn't happen.

Just about every advance to what we now accept as right and proper has been defeated democratically, possibly many times, and then, democratically, accepted.

Yes, but power transitioned and the world moved forward because people accepted they had lost the vote and needed to rethink and reframe their argument.

This pretense that Trump isn't president, the UK doesn't have to leave the EU etc etc it's all just destroying democracy and polarising and entrenching positions. It helps nobody.

It'd be far more constructive to accept Trump as president, because he is, and argue that he's a bad president or that his policies suck. Nothing good will be achieved by the refusal to accept his democratically given right to the Presidency.

LucreLout

Re: These new indictments could help Assange ...

If he evades going to the USA - what can he do, where does he live ?

Ecuador, I presume. As far as I know he hasn't been stripped of their citizenship.

LucreLout

Re: This will be fun to watch...

In the US, the maximum penalty for treason is death, which would be to Assange's advantage: it would guarantee that the UK will never extradite him to the US.

Not so. They'd require a written guarantee that the death penalty would not be applied, but that isn't a blocker on sending him.

LucreLout

Re: This will be fun to watch...

Therein is the argument, do they or don't they. This one will probably end up in the Supreme Court due to notoriety.

It'll certainly set up some interesting legal debates:

Do American Constitutional rights apply to non-citizens?

If so, do they apply only on American soil?

What has primacy, American law, or the law of your country of citizenship?

Let's say the free speech thing applies to non-citizens, and lets say it applies only within the USA. What happens if I got to America and exercise my free speech to say, label a leader of a political party a spy due to leaks from former handlers? Why do my own countries laws regarding libel not apply just because I'm on holiday?

Lets say constitutional rights do not apply to non-citizens of the USA. What rights then do apply or are they without rights during a visit? That one really might call into question my willingness to travel there at my employers request.

This one is going to run for decades while all the test cases and appeals filter through. The dogs of law must be wagging their furry little tails this fine morning.

LucreLout

Re: I was fine with the first indictment

But a lot of these new charges amount to "being someone we have decided we won't call a journalist", which would be quite dangerous

I agree, it would, and it should rightly cause concern, however, simply saying "No, it's OK, I'm a journo" should rightly not be viewed as a permit to do whatever you please. If being a journalist is to convey any leniency or privilege at all, then there has to both be some definition of what constitutes an actual journalist, and some oversight on their activities to ensure they don't overstep the mark (again).

especially with a president who thinks he has the right to decide who is "fake news" and who isn't, based on how their reporting treats him

That seems to me to be mostly borne of the fact that the left have decided, for reasons only knowable to them, to refuse to accept when they lose a vote. Democracy absolutely requires that the losers acknowledge their defeat and that they accept it. It simply cannot survive when the losing side pretend they might have won or simply want to obstruct whoever won the vote from implementing their mandate.

If I had to venture an opinion on why, I'd have to guess it's because their group-think has led them to mistakenly believe their views occupy some moral high ground and that other perspectives are invalid or somehow nasty or evil. Emotive fascism, of a sort.

From the article:

But at the same time many of the methods he employs to get hold of information and made it publicly available are effectively the same, making it hard to draw a distinction.

I've always considered Assange something of an egotistical tosser, but I'd given him enough credit to assume even he wouldn't stoop to journalist levels.

British Army cyber 'n' psyops unit 77 Brigade can't even brainwash civvies into helping it meet recruitment targets

LucreLout

Re: Join the army?

I think it's important that an army is held to account

And yet it is widely and repeatedly reported that the person that may have fired the first shot on Bloody Sunday went on to have a long and lucrative career in politics. Where was your outrage then?

We've pardoned, commuted, paroled, and otherwise released almost every convicted terrorist in Northern Ireland's history, and now.... now you want to come for some septuagenarians whose only crime was to serve their country? Really? FFS.

Its simply not good enough to come after our armed forces decades after the event, and purely as a function of politics. Those lobbying for this need to be told to fuck off pronto.

Why telcos 'handed over' people's GPS coords to a bounty hunter: He just had to ask nicely

LucreLout

Re: Freedom!

leaving the market side unchecked is how slavery came about

Slavery came about because people were either party members (white) or they weren't. Slavery came about because a system overlooked human nature (communism and socialism both overlook this as their core philosophy) which then placed no value at all on non-party members (non-whites).

The system you're railing against isn't capitalism, it's just that you can't see it for your entrenched beliefs.

Capitalism has saved more lives throughout history than any other economic system ever devised. It remains fundamentally the best and only realistic choice for the progress of humanity. Pretending otherwise, in favour of a system that has failed everywhere and ever time it's been tried, is delusion.