French bar owners arrested for offering free WiFi but not keeping logs
privateinternetaccess.com
privateinternetaccess.com
I only know of few places that actually use a compliant captive portal that requires some PII (name, email, phone...) to let you use the free WIFI.
My problem with these kind of laws is that they get ignored most of the time and then allow for selective enforcement when the police/local-gov has issues with you.
In this case it is not a law, not in spirit. Rather a tool for "law" enforcement to nail inconvenient people.
You missed a few criteria:
- Cultural, political, racial grievances of police.
- Cultural, political, racial prejudices. That is, maybe no ill will per se toward a citizen who looks a certain way -- but assumed guilt by association.
- Personal ambition, to be pursued by making lots of arrests, on maximal charges.
- Fear. End of month approaching, and beat officer is behind on quota of citations/arrests. Punishment expected from chief or DA, if revenue from fines, or prestige from high-profile arrests are lacking.
So, it's the selection of offenders, rather than of offenses due to resource constraints, that makes selective punishment so ethically offensive.
If officers feel that they need to make their quota or even have an arrests/infraction quote then that's a clear failure of policy, if they feel that they can settled their own grievances by abusing their power it's again a failure of policy.
But, to the point: He drove the interviewer through the streets in Baltimore, and argued that it was close to impossible for any driver in Baltimore to simply drive down a street, without breaking some kind of law - or at the very least giving police probable cause for checking your vehicle.
edit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HyKlFUMBiA
Starting around 4.05
Then if someone is acting up, it's only a matter of figuring out which unrelated laws they are already breaking.
It feels like this is the defining premise of the US tax code.
(These are my words, not the video:) In the bigger scheme of things, you're likely to be guilty of something almost at all times. Whether or not people know, care, or come down on you depends on a variety of factors.
This is pretty much true in any country, it's just that the richest ones have codified it to give the madness more legitimacy.
Leading to us always creating laws and rarely removing them.
It's insane that we can be born into the tyranny of rotting corpses.
You realize the federal government shuts down every so often fro days to months because they cant get there act together on the budget. can you imagine the chaos that would insue in the current political climate if one party or the other thought they could hold a major law hostage to what ever cause they want.
Not exactly. Two things are going on here that makes the US "special". I would argue they're both design mistakes in the US government, its proponents will doubtless chime in that it's supposed to be like this, and presumably they are proud of the results...
1. Appropriations bills. In most countries it is seen as a foregone conclusion that the government should continue to operate. Politicians steer, but in their absence the ship of state continues onwards on auto-pilot. The US has never entirely worked that way, and last century the GOP intentionally destroyed some of the mechanisms to let it keep running in their absence, because of course they did. So, Congress must explicitly pass bills at least once per year that say the government will pay for things, or else important government functions just stop. Nothing like these Appropriations Bills exists in most countries.
2. Separate Executive. In most democratic countries there is ultimately a single elected power, even if it looks on the surface as though there are two or more political power centres, one of them is actually running everything. In this situation there is no conflict between policy and budget, so of course a "government budget" will pass.
One of the few upsides to another US civil war is it's likely that there would be an opportunity to redesign the US government in the aftermath. We've learned a lot about how to design governments since the 18th century.
China? Vietnam? Korea?
How about laws without cute names and that began by describing the problem they intend to solve? I have been told they are written that way in russia though I have no way to verify.
Otherwise, if it's truly pick and choose... how much thought did we give to this? :)
Will everybody pay equally for each law, or rich people pay more?
If rich people pay more, and they decide they don't like the tax avoidance laws, will they be disproportionally funded?
If everybody pays the same, this will be proportionally harsher for poor people.
Most people will not pay for 97% of the laws which may be overall important but don't impact them directly - e.g. I live in Toronto so don't car about fisheries laws, etc.
Some people will not pay for laws they personally don't want to abide buy - from speeding tickets to financial regulations to fitness of goods and services etc.
In addition I don't know enough about traffic safety to figure out what the best speed limit is for certain roads, nor how the road should be constructed (especially given local environmental conditions, estimated use etc). It's cheaper overall to outsource it to people who know. Otherwise how can I decide if I want to subscribe to that safety rail at the edge of a certain roadway?
Says you.
Damn near every government (from local to national) has a charter more along the lines of "do these specific mostly administrative things that we agree are best done at this level".
maybe so, but every so often you get a happy accident. the patriot act missed its most recent deadline for renewal and is still not in effect (though not for a particularly good reason).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Acts_of_the_Parliament...
I'll leave it to someone else to tot up how many laws we're considering here.
>If congress wants to add a new regulation, they have to find two outdated regulations and remove them.
I have no idea how it went.
[0] episode including transcript: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/659049880
...this would be good for other reasons too, like unrelated riders tacked onto appropriations bills
Also, “a regulation” is not a particularly useful unit of size.
It is literally impossible for any single elected official to know enough about every topic they need to legislate in order to make good laws. This isn't because they "can't be bothered", but because there are only so many hours in a day. They have to delegate.
Now, we can argue they do a poor job of delegating, but the problem isn't in the act itself.
The more likely reality is that politicians think they are doing what their constituents want by passing laws to address what they are currently complaining about. And constituents rarely complain about existing laws so the only natural way for the government to go is more laws and more regulations.
When’s the last time you heard a politician run on the platform of getting rid of laws? Even the Republicans who run on less regulation generates far more legislation than repealed.
This is unfounded (do you have any sort of backing for this ridiculously bold claim?), historically inaccurate (in nearly every generation, there's at least one mass-murdering regime born), and isn't actually relevant to the question (evil at every level discounts those who aren't involved, those that are victims, and those that are powerless to stop the evil).
The rest of your comment is spot on. The unfortunate truth is that people who are elected have the skills required to be elected, not the skills required to lead. Our legislative system is designed to encourage childish bickering, which is attractive to people with old faces and childish personalities. The system is built around the idea that the president will be the "adult in the room" and apply a considered direction to the children to mediate their bickering; it seems that doesn't work well.
On HN we are often downvoted for cautioning against unwarranted assumption. Meanwhile elaborate theories that just happen to affirm how great life is for everyone we care about in this best of all possible worlds are quite popular. In 2020. Good grief.
The fact that no politicians campaign in a way that would appeal to most citizens is no surprise. Our congress passed the trillion-dollar covid bailouts (that contained nothing to help normal citizens get health care) nearly unanimously.
For the record - the federal bailout helped many business owners I know personally keep people on the payroll, and many unemployed friends (from food service and travel industry) able to keep paying their rent. With COVID’s 99% survivability rate for most of the working population, I think those benefits took priority over a healthcare stipend. Not trashing the idea of fixing healthcare at all, but given a limited bag of cash and choices to make, keeping people housed and fed en masse is arguably higher on the priority list than a healthcare half measure (if that).
A legal system that no one in a functioning society can live without causing offenses will lead to a non-functioning state, if enforced.
Fair, just, unbiased. And therefore a scary situation for people like me who willfully violate the law but are generally safe from prosecution. This is power and advantage I don't want to give up.
Software is crap, law is so much worse.
“For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law.”
First, I should qualify that I had nothing but respect for these guys. Real professionals, and they were serious about the spirit, as well as the letter, of their vocation. The State Police, in that state, are quite powerful. They have (at least in the early 1980s) complete jurisdiction, throughout the state.
I also think they would have written their own mothers jaywalking tickets, for going across the street to borrow a cup of sugar.
One of them explained to me, how the state code was written, so that everyone is breaking some law, at any given time, and a lot of their training involved learning all these little violations, so they could pretty much justify pulling someone over, at any time.
I suspect these bar owners did something to piss off someone in some authority. It could have been as mild as their main clientele.
Curious how you justify this.
Look, I appreciate the current political situation, but I DID NOT describe them in that fashion. That was a value judgement that you imposed on a couple of gentlemen that I went to school with, in 1981. You did not meet them or interact with them; I did. They were insular, and I cannot call them "friends." That's fairly typical for police, but they were incredibly polite, and everyone in the class liked and respected them (it was an extremely mixed class, in a very tough town).
The people that engineered that scenario (and are probably still engineering it, to this day), were the state legislature. The officers that commanded that barracks were the ones that established the model for their officers.
These were two electronic technicians. They happened to be trained and uniformed officers, but were not particularly interested in the "pithier" aspects of their field. In fact, they had volunteered to spend their careers in a basement, fixing radios.
In that particular state, there is a giant world of difference between the State Police, and the various county and municipality cops. The State Police held themselves, and were held to, a much higher standard than regular cops. I know of at least one county in that state, where the cops were renown for rather gratuitous violence; especially against minorities. The State Police had nothing to do with that.
As for me, and my views...seriously, dude, you have no idea. If you thought that you learned something untoward about me, you are wrong. Dead wrong.
This world is missing something fundamental: basic, human respect. That goes for people in authority, that abuse that authority; whether for personal gain, animus, or to be a "team player." It also goes for people that have appointed themselves "Guardians of 'The Truth'" (Whatever happens to be the flavor of the day).
We might want to consider that not everyone in the world is an evil person.
Just a thought.
> so they could pretty much justify pulling someone over, at any time.
But didn't clarify that your associates did not do that. In human language, people make inferences from what is said to natural extensions, in order to make utterances more compact. Sometimes those inferences are in error.
> One of them explained to me, how the state code was written, so that everyone is breaking some law, at any given time, and a lot of their training involved learning all these little violations, so they could pretty much justify pulling someone over, at any time.
> I suspect these bar owners did something to piss off someone in some authority. It could have been as mild as their main clientele.
In colloquial speech, like that used on this forum, these sentences in combination imply:
* My friends, state policemen, knew how to pull over people at any point
* This was an act that was commonly performed
* My friends also participated
It isn't explicit in the text, but that is the natural inference in colloquial speech.
I only mean this in a descriptive fashion. There are all sorts of reasons you may want to continue communicating the way you do, but it will get you into situations like this where you feel compelled to respond in outrage to someone else who has made that inference. Up to you how you act, but if you weren't already informed, you are now.
In no way is that a natural inference in colloquial speech. Those are your own (incorrect) inferences that you're justifying post-facto, and you are (not so) subtly implying that your interpretation is the correct one and in the majority, even though it:
a) Might not be
b) Involves you making an interpretation and inferential leap that isn't contained in the text of the original poster.
In a similar fashion, you may want to continue making inferences that go beyond what people actual say or write, but it will get you into situations, like this, where you feel compelled to put things into the speaker's mouth that were not written, things that were not said, that will put you in opposition to the original speaker/author unjustifiably and based on your own interpretative error, and which generally make people less inclined to share their opinions in the future.
Additionally, your writing style appears to be one of passive-aggressive condescending superiority. This does not influence the person on the other side round towards adopting your view-point, but actually makes them bristle up and more likely to reject participation in the conversation.
Up to you how you act, but if you weren't already informed, you are now.
And I will continue to communicate the way I do. I'm a real stubborn S.O.B., and don't respond well to being pushed.
BTW: I never called them "friends." I guess half of communication is reading it properly.
The state cops here have that kind of power yet they are way more professional and do a hell of a lot less fishing than the locals.
We already have that when you buy something and a security alarm goes off as you leave the store. You are assumed to be a criminal because a machine said so.
Not really. At least where I live, the false positive rates are high enough that people would walk right past, or the employees would wave them through because they're holding store branded bags. A more egregious example would be the algorithmic bail systems that some states are deploying.
The new horror is machine learning algorithms that make decisions based on hidden inappropriate discriminatory factors.
I have never gotten anything more than a bored looking sales associate casually waving at me to keep walking out.
See also, drug laws
At worst you would owe a penalty.
Due to the complexity of the tax code, there is a very high bar for criminality.
Not if they claim the violation was intentional. Which, whether or not they can prove that, means they can arrest you, and deplete the money you'd have used for your defense as bail. And they do so enjoy that trick where "intentional" generally applies to whether you intentionally did a thing that was against the law, even if you didn't know that it was against the law.
Let's also not so easily dismiss as unproblematic a conclusion that you owe five times more money than you actually have in back taxes plus penalties and interest, which someone wouldn't have who filed the same tax return as you but didn't raise the ire of anyone in power.
> Due to the complexity of the tax code, there is a very high bar for criminality.
If only all of the complex laws actually worked that way.
My suspicion is that felony tax fraud would not have been charged there, or maybe even investigated, if he hadn't been implicated in the death of George Floyd. They had their man so they found his crimes.
Obviously nobody is going to feel sorry for him, but only getting charged with something because you became a political target over something else entirely is exactly the problem in general. Registering your car in a lower tax state may not be legal but it's not exactly uncommon, and plenty of people probably don't even realize it's illegal.
Also, to note: the filing of these charges is unrelated to the Floyd case. Based on the article you linked, there were years of financials that the investigators would have had to go through in order to substantiate the charges they filed. They had to investigate ownership of multiple homes, multiple cars in multiple states, and correspond with tax authorities in several states.
This isn't an investigation that they just trumped up because of the Flloyd case; just the correspondence part alone would have taken months, and these charges were filed less than 8 weeks after the Floyd incident based on a substantial record of tax violations.
Chauvin was already on their radar for tax fraud. Politics had nothing to do with it.
Registering your car in a lower tax state may not be legal but it's not exactly uncommon, and plenty of people probably don't even realize it's illegal.
True, but they're not charged with tax fraud because they failed to pay use taxes. RTFA. They were charged with tax fraud for falsely changing their state of tax residency so that they could avoid Minnesota sales/use taxes despite all evidence showing they were still Minnesota residents.
TLDR: Chauvin was not a political target. He was just a bad apple, and in addition to beating suspects was also a tax fraud.
I do this for a living. I know how tax penalties and tax crimes work better than you do.
Those are the only kind of tax investigations in the US.
None of the politically motivated tax investigations you speak of has resulted in criminal sanctions.
We all rely on the herd defense to protect us from minor math mistakes and code violations. Lord knows you don’t want to end up on the wrong side of the IRS. All my interactions with them have thus far been easy but if you listen to some stories during testimony in the nineties about IRS reform they weren’t always that way.
I like to think a simple flat rate would be better across the board. Many smart people disagree though.
Provide a way to get and delete user data.
Bang, you are now GDPR compliant.
What happens when spambots start using these requests?
Really if you can't established a way to recognise customers how can we (as customers) expect you to competently do 2FA and competently store data without losing it.
It's like complaining that your kitchen shouldn't have to keep track of expiry dates of meat; if that's too onerous for you then you're showing you're not competent to run a kitchen.
Maybe that doesn't matter because posting history is public. One could easily envision another site that had some non-public data associated with email address, pseudonym, and no other PII. That site definitely violates the requirements you describe.
They wouldn't have to. If you're requesting your data from a company, you have to burden of proof that you are in fact the person about whom you're requesting the data. If you cannot prove it, you cannot get the data.
That might be as simple as requiring someone to log into their account (as you can already do on HN) to sending them a confirmation email, or other.
> What if they got a request like this from someone who claimed not to have access to the email they used to sign up? HN couldn't possibly comply.
No, and nor should they.
> One could easily envision another site that had some non-public data associated with email address, pseudonym, and no other PII.
"Dear requester, please log into you account and use the "request my data" link on your account page"
There's a few things written about this around the web:
https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/28998/right-of-acces...
> ISTM the system you describe could lead to more data collection.
It really doesn't. What it does is attempt to gatekeep data (which these days is a huge risk) collection to organisations that are competent. You always have the option of not collecting data if you don't want to take that responsibility.
This is an insanely hard problem to do well. The recognition of customers is literally through which phishing attacks work. This is one of the most common avenues that people get access to systems and data they shouldn't. GDPR mandates that virtually every site needs to deal with this problem now.
Also, I'd say that reprieving all data on someone is not a trivial problem. Imagine you had a forum and somebody requests all of the data on them. However, another user has made a copy elsewhere on the forum with some notes about that user's personal data. Does the requester get access to that copy?
And now keep in mind that you complying is based on your understanding of a regulation that companies have spent millions on lawyers to figure out and still aren't entirely sure. And you have to follow this regardless how big or small your website or business is.
I do see your point though, the intersection with phishing attacks is not something I'd considered in the context of GDPR.
However, as long as you provide a way for users with an account to download their data, you're 90% of the way towards compliance.
Again, unless you are FB or Google, the regulators will cut you some slack (just look at the lack of bankruptcies caused by GDPR).
https://www.reddit.com/r/hearthstone/comments/df0zx5/upset_a...
Most server applications are not designed for invasive laws like this. Think of all the HTTP servers that save IP addresses in log files, or all the mail servers that save user messages, IP addresses, and what not. Think of all the other kinds of software that save "personal data". Now think of the way companies backup this data. Do you think most companies out there have the infrastructure to automatically pull all information about a specific user from all of these sources? No way!!
Sure, a company the size of Activision-Blizzard can maybe pull it of, but the little guy has no practical way to be compliant. Not until GDPR compliance becomes a standard in server applications and backup solutions, and when is that going to happen? This is a serious problem that a few people among the elite have thrown at society without understanding the consequences, or caring about them.
And if you don't comply? Well, then this law is just another set of mines in the minefield.
Given that this is not a new law (2018 it became active), you would hopefully have some list of tables with information on users. From there it's select * from tables where user=blah.
Deletion requests are where you'll normally have more issues, but it's best effort. Again, look at how Facebook handle this. They explicitly state that it will take 90 days for all backups to be rolled out, and this is totally fine.
And if you are a small service, the likelihood of you having large amounts of PII on people across multiple services is pretty low.
It's worth noting that IP addresses which can't be matched back to a user are not covered by GDPR, so unless you've been storing every IP from which a user's logged in, then you'll be fine.
But, the real solution here is to only store data for which you have a need, and get consent for the processing which your service requires. Sure, this is harder than the normal YOLO store all the things, but it's probably better both from a storage and liability point of view.
Also, your argument segues from running a business of noteworthy capacity (who may have a problem complying) to small businesses (who won't have the capacity, but also don't store enough data to have a problem complying).
And to be fair, GDPR was npt imposed by elites, it was demanded by an awful lot of consumers in Europe. Maybe you don't like that, but I personally think that breast-feeding mothers shouldn't be censored. So cultural differences are going to cause both of us problems.
What happens? You say we need a (couple of) SELECT-statement(s)? I say we need more than that. Also, I'll tell you right now that doing a SELECT-query isn't something customer support can handle, this is something you ask from a developer or server administrator (== more wasted $$$$). So think about that while we go through the information retrieval process:
(1)-(3) You'll need select-statements, retrieval from log-files (such as access_log and error_log). Text explaining the data and explaining what it is used for. The data should be categorized and machine-readable in a common format. These requirements require a deeper understanding of the systems than just running a Wordpress site with a few plugins.
(4) "the recipients or categories of recipient to whom the personal data have been or will be disclosed;", that includes the payment, hosting and (possibly) delivery services.
(5) "where possible, the envisaged period for which the personal data will be stored, or, if not possible, the criteria used to determine that period;". Again, this requires extra knowledge.
(6) Since we haven't mentioned analytics services or any other privacy invasive service that knows more about the user than what they explicitly provide, this is not applicable in this example. However, it is still applicable for many real-world websites.
(7) Not relevant.
To be fair, the information retrieval can be automated, and a template can be used to compose a GDPR response. However, this does require the company to hire someone competent to do it, and also keep this process up-to-date so that it doesn't conflict with newer versions of Wordpress/plugins. And there WILL be newer versions because exploits are found on a regular basis. The developer will also have to make sure that the data is retrievable, and isn't stored offline or in an inconvenient format (such as the case with compressed logfiles). All of this costs money, and different solutions must be prepared for different systems. If the owner decides to move away from Wordpress to another CMS, he will have to hire someone to also replace the GDPR automation process.
This is not practical for a start-up, or a small business. Unless the infrastructure adapts (again, when?), people will have to write custom scripts/solutions to automate the process.
> And to be fair, GDPR was npt imposed by elites, it was demanded by an awful lot of consumers in Europe.
People are rightfully worried about their privacy, of course we are! But that doesn't give the elites the right to willy nilly impose (because that's what they have done) any solution without at the very least making sure it doesn't infringe upon other rights, and consult experts before writing the law. If they would've bothered to consult a seasoned and non-partisan server administrator, I think GDPR would've looked very differently.
I personally believe that the current infrastructure must change to respect user privacy, but this is not the way to do it.
And aaallll of this doesn't directly address the main issue, which is that the accumulation of laws has caused everyone to become a criminal in one way or another.
"Every law is an excuse for violence."
The logfiles argument is generally overblown: the process for someone to establish a valid request for that isn't that typically that easy, and in most cases has the simple solution to not keep logfiles with personal data for long if at all (e.g. many webhosts already will by default or as an option anonymize IPs in logs, and it's not all that difficult to implement in other cases).
For business data, yes, you need to be able to look up customers and what data they've given you - but which business application doesn't allow that already?
I don't want to say it's trivial, but small operations tend to also have a small surface for this, easy oversight over everything, and can get this in order with an initial effort to design privacy policies (and identifying and cleaning up places they maybe were negligent before) and prepare checklists that make handling requests easy. I know plenty small shops that have done this just fine.
Thanks, I may actually start building a WP plugin to help with all of this, as if it's the kind of problem you mention here, then I could probably make a whole bunch of money.
Not maybe. Same thing was proposed as a retaliation against other game companies as well. But Activision will just respond to all those emails with "Go to https://support.activision.com/gdpr"
Yes, it may be tricky. It requires some investment in the process. But unless you earn your money by exploiting user data, it's really not that hard to comply. The less data you keep, the easier it is. And the cost of compliance really scales with the company - for the wordpress with accounts from another comment you can do this manually on request. (likely you'll never need to)
> Not until GDPR compliance becomes a standard in server applications and backup solutions, and when is that going to happen?
https://blog.quantum.com/2018/01/26/backup-administrators-th...
> CNIL confirmed that you’ll have one month to answer to a removal request, and that you don’t need to delete a backup set in order to remove an individual from it.
Which risks are “high risk”? They can always come after you for not consulting them and waiting 8-14 weeks for any feature launch.
> Taking into account the state of the art, the costs of implementation and the nature, scope, context and purposes of processing as well as the risk of varying likelihood and severity for the rights and freedoms of natural persons, the controller and the processor shall implement appropriate technical and organisational measures to ensure a level of security appropriate to the risk, including inter alia as appropriate[…]
No organization can objectively measure whether they’ve complied with this, much less prove it to hostile regulators.
> Where a type of processing in particular using new technologies, and taking into account the nature, scope, context and purposes of the processing, is likely to result in a high risk to the rights and freedoms of natural persons...
I find it strange that you didn't quote the important part of the text here (high risk to natural persons).
Like, this doesn't apply to almost anyone. This applies to things like facial recognition or automated systems that track people's health data, not almost anything that one does in most CRUD/tech applications.
If you are subject to this requirement, then you almost certainly have both a legal team, and a data protection officer. Can you give me an example of what you think would be high risk but should not be?
Secondly, you're missing something here. I'm going to assume that you are US-based, based on your theory of regulation.
The US and EU differ wildly on how regulation works. What you would normally do, if your legal team/DPO says that what you're doing is high risk, is write an assessment (which your legal team has already done) and run it by your regulator. They'll say this works, or you'll need to do something different, you'll comply and get on with your life.
In any case, the whole process is really, really slow before any fines are administered. As an example, the ECJ basically said recently that data transfers from the EU to the US are illegal because of the NSA. The Irish regulator has just sent a letter to FB asking them to comply. FB are fighting this in court (with some ludicrous arguments), but as of yet their processing has not been impacted at all.
This legal fight has been going since 2011, and yet FB are still sending data to the US. I'm not sure if that fits the model of crazy regulators.
And let's be clear, as of yet there have been no GDPR cases fining companies for anything less than absurd violations. Ad tech still exists in Europe (and it's arguable that it shouldn't), FB and Google have continued on their merry way.
The second part is pretty much consult your lawyers/DPO and be able to make a case for whatever you're doing. In that sense, it's very similar to HIPAA, which doesn't seem to cause the same level of upset here.
I still stand by my original statement. If you have consent for your data processing, all will be OK (as long as it's not forced consent). If you don't have consent, or a legitimate interest in the data analysis/processing then maybe you shouldn't be doing the analysis or processing?
As an example, Facebook turned off automatic facial recognition in photos in the EU following an outcry. They re-introduced it when GDPR came in, because they asked for consent. You'll note that there have been no court cases on this, because it's totally fine.
tl;dr - get consent for your data processing, make it easy for people to get their data, and GDPR compliance is pretty easy. If you're in an industry where this is difficult/impossible, then lawyer up and be prepared to spend a bunch of money (and probably lose eventually).
I'd like local law and international laws from foreign states to conflict sometimes.
I'd then like my local government to protect me from the foreign government when I (inevitably) break one set of laws.
In turn, that reduces the effectiveness of world-policing
not sure I understand the logic here but Europe, despite having twice the population of the US, has about as many deaths. The region overall has responded well.
If you just make a mistake you'll owe a penalty, but it won't be a crime.
Other laws are much easier to break.
It doesn't have to be intentional for the effect to be real.
“There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.”
Whether this type of government will ever come about in our modern world... Let's not get depressing.
Charitably, I think Rand's point would be that such a case is only possible if that government is not actually ruling the people, but merely providing services. (Not sure how much charity is actually justified, though, given what I've read of hers.)
A totalitarian dictator and democratic judicial system could come to the same decision on any given ruling.
Marketing, plausible deniability and the ability of the higher levels of the system to tell the lower levels of the system to knock it off when they're being jerks under the color of law.
Monarchy worked so well for so long because the king didn't want to see his resources pissed away using the government to prosecute crap that didn't actually matter in the grand scheme of things.
Then its:do whatever you want.
Rand was writing about this in 1957:
"Did you really think we want those laws observed? ... We want them to be broken. ... There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced or objectively interpreted – and you create a nation of law-breakers – and then you cash in on guilt."
Reminds me of Alex Kozinski and Misha Tseytlin's classic essay "You're (Probably) a Federal Criminal" – http://alex.kozinski.com/articles/Youre_Probably_a_Federal_C...
Cost is about 15€/month for a compliant off-the-shelf solution.
I understand that there can be some tolerance in the beginning, but at some point, you can't look elsewhere, especially when the log is actually needed in an investigation.
Quick perusal indicates Cour d'assises is the only court with a jury analog, and it only deals with matters where the penalty would result in a >10 year sentence if I'm reading it correctly.
On the other hand, plea deals are not a thing either, so if the state decides to press charges, you're definitely going to see a judge.
Across the pond, things work a bit differently, and the criminal justice systems are a bit lower friction for the authorities as I understand it. Not that I'm criticizing mind. The American System has not endeared itself to me as of late.
When it comes to MAC addresses, 1) there isn’t a central registry of addresses anyway so having the MAC address alone won’t help much in an investigation, 2) it can be set by the user so malicious users will fake their MAC address and 3) for privacy reasons most devices nowadays will generate unique MAC addresses for each network.
The IMEI and advertising ids are the more pressing ones though. Never underestimate the deanonymyzing power of someone else's UUID you aren't even aware you have.
Chances are that you'll buy this software as the bar owner. You are promised that everything is compliant. Years later it turns out that the software itself collected and sold PII and you're liable for the damage or that the software simply wasn't compliant after all.
Picking out cheap and subplot software that needs to adhere to nebulous requirements is not easy for a layman.
a bar owner isn't a layman but a business owner, and in fact one who already has to navigate regulations around media in particular. For example if you don't get a TV license if you put a TV in your bar and show say, soccer games, you're in hot water too and everyone knows this.
If you act as a service provider in a business I honestly don't know why people would be surprised that there's some caveats.
But my point is that the €15/month solution is not actually €15/month because of the reasons I outlined.
Grenoble is under scrutiny for some time now, it has a bad reputation regarding drug trafficking and the government uses it to show its "strength" with police operations covered by the media. This might be linked.
Last year I was in Paris, but didn't have to fight the system any more, 4G reception was fine. So, no idea what it was like in cities, but in the countryside they followed the law.
There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.
Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced or objectively interpreted – and you create a nation of law-breakers – and then you cash in on guilt. Now that's the system, Mr. Reardon, that's the game, and once you understand it, you'll be much easier to deal with.”
Then when you are in power, you can yield the law and do what you will to your enemies.
Living in America, this is all too often a problem. One segment of society says “there should be a law” often enough that we have more laws on the books in the federal space alone than the GAO can count. Now we add on state and municipal laws and we’re probably all guilty of something each day. Not having enough resources to enforce all of the laws we get the situation you describe exactly - selective enforcement and too often an unjust distribution of enforcement.
Add to that the fact that all laws are ultimately enforced with physical force and we get situations like Eric Garner - a situation instigated by the enforcement of a stupid municipal law - selling untaxed cigarettes. A state interest hardly worth exposing someone to a beatdown or in Eric’s inexcusable case, death.
It definitely feels like a pretext for something else going on, who knows what -- whether it's a police racket or something shady going on in the restaurants they're sending a warning about.
This is what these obscure, rarely-enforced laws seem to exist for in the first place.
If the police were really interested in enforcement over this, they'd send a letter to every restaurant, bar, and cafe owner in the country that they have 3 months to comply and it will become part of regular inspections.
Targeting 5 individual restaurants (through arrests) is definitely not about simply enforcing this regulation.
Note: I'm NOT defending this as a legitimate law enforcement tactic. Just describing what seems to be happening.
- the Charlie Hebdo attack is currently on trial, and during the trial it was revealed that the weapons were sold by a police informant who had sent a report on the sale to his handlers, and that they did nothing. In particular the sale happened in a place chosen to give the police the option to either monitor or interrupt the sale.
- there is a current increase in the monitoring and criminalisation of muslim activities in France, my guess is that the police wanted to spy on someone and found out that the logs had not been kept.
Inconveniencing the police is a surefire way to get prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
Yowza! Hadn’t heard that in my neck of the woods. Very tragic. Recurring problem in defensive systems though. Logging but nobody is reviewing/acting on logs.
All i have to say is that butts@butts.com logs in with the password “butts” at a truly surprising number of cafes across europe!
It's possible to work around when you have a phone connection with limited bandwidth and a low monthly cap, but meh.
It's a good model, and it would work well here, and for any circumstance when your connectivity is intermittent.
If torrenting or some other form of piracy happens on a network, ISPs send letters to that IP's customer, giving them a warning. Perhaps these café owners were repeatedly warned to enact stricter measures against piracy (i.e. logs), and, failing that, they were arrested for failing to comply with other regulations that are actually enforceable. I can't imagine a café owner could ever be charged with piracy for maintaining an open network.
For what it's worth, I looked around Le Monde and some other news sites to find more information, but there isn't much info to expand on the fact that these people were arrested.
What do you mean by this?
This sounds more like market forces, competition.
I'm much obliged.
Free wifi is for the non-EU tourists.
Now I wonder if it's this law that made it not worth the effort for them.
Free, please conquer the rest of Europe too!
There are cheap off-the-shelf solutions marketed specifically for bars to setup public wifis.
> If torrenting or some other form of piracy happens on a network, ISPs send letters to that IP's customer, giving them a warning. Perhaps these café owners were repeatedly warned to enact stricter measures against piracy (i.e. logs)
The thing that happened here is not related to HADOPI, the worst that can happen to you with hadopi is losing your internet service or having to pay a fine.
The likely thing that happened is that some patron did something illegal enough to warrant a court order asking the ISP to provide logs, the logs led to the bar which couldn't provide their own logs. ISP rates for court orders are expensive, so the police is unlikely to enjoy this dead end.
The "garde a vue" was probably unnecessary, but this kind of overreach is common in France.
The law states that businesses must keep some log in case an investigation about patrons' net usage requires it. It's not checked every day, but when an investigation happens and you got nothing to show, you get prosecuted.
Pretty similar to accounting, the minute details of your accounting won't get checked every year, but you must keep them available for the tax service.
Or rather, subscribe to commercial providers who will log contents. Along with the other shopowner’s joys (mandatory yearly electricity inspection €200 even if you didn’t change anything; €140 aircon inspection; fire inspection; etc.)
Given that you're operating a public area, and things like aircon and electrics can be deadly when failing or operated incorrectly it doesn't seem too onerous a requirement.
If you're a landlord in the UK (I'm not) you need a current gas safety certificate if you've got gas appliances (most houses do, eg heating) and plumbers cost a reasonable amount of money. It's just the cost of doing business.
However, it seems like lowering the costs by allowing businesses to skip certain currently required things (at least of the ones mentioned) isn't going to work, as I said before, unmaintained air conditioning is dangerous (I know of at least one case where it tragically killed most of a family in a hotel, and it can make you generally sick https://patch.com/california/saratoga/dangers-badly-maintain...) and it doesn't take much to imagine how badly maintained electrics could be a problem.
Given that we can't rely on some people to maintain these things (even if they are trying to do it right) without checking up on them, and because we don't know who those people are in advance means we need to check up on everyone. It seems to me that this is just the cost of doing business, and let's face it, lots of businesses are still going despite the costs involved.
If you've got some examples of unecessary or silly things costs that governments impose on shops/cafes/businesses then I'm all ears but so far I've not heard any.
Everyone loves to say their pet favorite law is lItErAlLy WrItTtEn In BlOoD but laws are enforced in blood too. If someone isn't dying for lack of a law (at scale) then someone is gonna die when the police go to enforce it (at scale). It's important to remember this when deciding what issues are important enough that we feel like forcing other people to behave how we want under threat of state violence.
For comparison, the internet access itself is usually around 30€/month.
You are allowed to sell coffee without invading your customer's privacy. Shocking I know /s.
When entering fake information into captive portals from bar owners who actually comply with bs laws like these, please take care to use something like a `.invalid` tld so that some unsuspecting third party isn't suddenly subject to your emails. <your_handle>@gmail.invalid works basically everywhere.
why not something like byfmupajzmvdaxef@{gmail.com,outlook.com,yahoo.com}? I doubt that large email providers are going to be inconvenienced by the spam. Your solution is likely to get rejected by overzealous form validation (for good reason!).
Weirdly enough it's the semicolon that isn't allowed, not the single quote.
The whole quoted-string commented multiline business (seriously, why?) is rightfully ignored by anyone who's ever made or used a mailserver, but it's still there.
I was under the impression that the European Court of Justice held data retention laws to be a violation of fundamental rights, and thus illegal:
https://www.theinfostride.com/data-retention-directive-inval...
There is a separate (and very inefficient) enforcement mechanism for copyright fraud.
Lint doesn't have to be perfect, especially when faced with a "code base" that's chaotic and full of dubious legacy. "Code review" in the form of constitutional cases and legislative attempts at reform are a severe bottleneck. Automation that flags egregious smells and incompatibility seems valuable.
A state that claims a "cleaner" code base could use that to attract business looking for lower legal overhead.
(recent iOS devices use random MAC addresses by the way for improved privacy in which case i think this wouldn't help/identify a device anymore.)
Just like iOS they use these randoms when scanning, NOT when connected (static IP's would otherwise not work anymore).
I stand corrected.
> In Android 10, MAC randomization is enabled by default for client mode, SoftAp, and Wi-Fi Direct.
It randomizes per-SSID, so you get a random MAC per SSID you remember on your phone, this ensures privacy while not breaking DHCP / static IP etc.
It's just a tool that can sometimes be useful in a multitude of ways, even if the MAC address is spoofed.
However the more obscure laws and rules are out there by different agencies, the more the legal profession becomes a power. Those wealthy enough to afford multiple lawyers or tax experts also become unscathed. So government starts burdening its regular citizens far more than the most powerful. If the government, or a corrupt official, or a really bad dictatorial newly elected official ever has beef with you, or is short on money because of uncontrolled spending, they can always find a rule to convict you by to extract whatever you have they need (a decision by your company, or a vote, or your money, etc). So leftover regulatory debt needs some kind of mechanism to be cleared, or a system needs to be created that allows you to thoroughly evaluate your standing with all rules. Or you do a civic test every year and if majority of people don't know about a rule in it, the government has to drop that rule (so it puts an onus on the government to not only clean up its laws, but communicate them better, and fix/reduce them if it cant be clear about the rule).
I would not be too surprised if the bars in question have links to the criminal world and the police simply used whatever hard evidence of wrongdoing they could find to bring them down or perhaps as a way to gain further access to documents, etc. I'm pretty sure that a bar owner "unknown to police services" (as they say) would simply receive a warning that logs must be kept, at least at first.
Like it or not, the law mandates something and thus that must be complied with.
Now, despite what some people might like to think, the police do not barge in and arrest people as soon as they notice that they are not keeping logs. If they do arrest someone for this that person is a repeat offender or someone who's in police's sight for serious criminal activity.
That's simply the mundane reality. Of course reality does not lend itself well to outrage....
But as I understand it, taking down Al Capone in that way was only necessary because at the time the laws now used to attack organized crime (RICO for instance) didn't yet exist. If France doesn't presently have laws that allow the government to attack these sort of organizations [doubt], they really should be writing such laws instead of leaning on selective enforcement of chickenshit violations.
My stance was: just rent out a WiFi portal for 5 bucks a month to offload the responsibilities on a third party. Just in case.
The fact that the UMIH hides behind a mention of this problem in a newsletter speak volumes of how well informed they are and what services they bring to adherents.
> I was working for a regional public agency but as a contractor not as a civil servant. My job was budgeted and paid for by a a higher up federal/state agency (country level).
> This job was part of a broader state program to bring some specific skills to some lower agencies and ease the connection between agencies (on a networking level and on a per project basis level).
> This year, that regional public agency was supposed to be absorbed and merged into a sister regional public agency. All those agencies are managed and run by politicians (public sector). So I got my end of employment paper at the beginning of the year, kept on working for three months and then I was supposed to be transfered/rehired - still as a contractor - to the new agency (which is in the same building, do the same work, with the same people, it's just label shuffling).
> Except one week before that I got a call from one of the cronies to let met know that they had budgetary problems and rather prefer to use the budget to pay someone who is already there. That person being - ohohoho - the best friend of our new agency director. It's a public agency, they don't bump into budget problems in march. I cost them 0 bucks because it's financed by another state agency. And yes, that person was severely lacking the necessary skills to do my job and to follow up with the current projects.
> I alerted the higher up agency, they didn't take it well at all because the budget was also used to pay for certifications (which the friend of the director should retake), there were some projects at their level where I had the networking and relationships needed and really they didn't like that the lower agency got rid of one of their element like that and that the lower agency thought they could whatever they wanted with `my ` budget. They don't like ton invest into people for years and see them go, whatever the reasons.
> To be honest, that program was on shaky legs but I was one of the good elements. From the people at the top of the chain (remember I am talking public sector, I went to the highest point) I was told that they had done everything so that our team wouldn't be unemployed in the middle of a pandemic. They had budgeted things so that we didn't lose our job in very difficult times. That's why I use the word `robbed`.
> So now the whole program is scraped, that director's friend is still on half time and the lower agency has a hard time getting their project's budgets approved by the higher up agency.
> And I find a new job, half time though, and I am starting tomorrow so I got that going for me.
> But I am really bitter because I loved that job and the projects were really specific and I was fast tracked at some point to be fully employed as a public servant by the higher up agency which would have meant a much stable life and perspective to buy/build a house, have a baby, etc.
> So, that's how it works.
* Noone is supposed to ignore the law (that's the motto in France judicial system)
* This was a law enacted in 2006: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_on_the_fight_against_terro...
"By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission"
Very much a situation of one regulation putting you in the crosshair of another one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regula...
>>Lawful interception, national security, military, police, justice
So only a government office would be exempt in those matters, not a private organisation, except when seen as performing a government function. That is somewhat up to interpretation, so maybe, maybe not.
Remember that Europeans trust their State more and their companies less than US citizen, on average. The law simply reflects that state of mind.
And unlike data collection by random companies, data collection required by law is subject to public and judicial review. Laws are known - what data companies collect not necessarily.