Unfortunately, he’s not in it at the moment.
Paul Ceglia, who once sued Mark Zuckerberg claiming half of Facebook, and who last appeared here back in Assorted Stupidity #39 after his ninth set of lawyers withdrew from that case, has disappeared. His case against Zuckerberg was, surprisingly, dismissed after the judge found it was based on fabricated evidence, and Ceglia was later charged with fraud. Ceglia denounced that move, indignantly pleading not guilty. “I have no interest in a plea deal of any sort,” he told Ars Technica in August, facing a May trial date. “The very idea of it suggests that I have done something wrong. Of course I intend to go to trial,” he said.
He seems to have changed his mind, or else he went on an unapproved vacation and forgot to take his electronic-monitoring bracelet along. Maybe he was just concerned about tan lines?
Ceglia had been released on $250,000 bond and was required to give up his passport, so most likely he has gone to ground somewhere in the United States. A federal marshal was unable to confirm that, though, telling a reporter that he did not know whether Ceglia was still in the country. “Our responsibility is to locate him,” he told the reporter, which at first seemed like stating the obvious but now seems like a polite answer to what was probably a stupid question.
“I can confirm that the suspect has disappeared.”
“Do you know whether he’s still in the country?”
“We don’t know where he is. That’s what ‘disappeared’ means.”
The judge presiding over the case said he was “cautiously optimistic” that Ceglia would return to the jurisdiction in the near future, though he didn’t say why. Since Ceglia most likely is still in the U.S., because he doesn’t have a passport and our borders are hermetically sealed, it probably is just a matter of time before he is recaptured. Although it could take a while if he were to do something especially sneaky like, let’s say, get a job with the Homeland Security Department. That’s the last place they’d look, or at least it used to be.
Category: Human stupidity
THE PRAYER, IT BURNS!!!
Hiram Jimenez’ story isn’t as funny. See Jimenez v. Applebees. He went to Applebees for dinner, which is your first clue about him. He ordered the steak fajita, and the waitress dutifully served it. He then, apparently, believed that God gives shit about what happens in Applebees, or whether you are grateful for a shitty steak fajita, so Jimenez bowed his head in prayer.
Then the almighty taught him a lesson about eating in prole-shit-chain restaurants. God burned his goddamned face! Then, in a scene that sounds like it came from a Jerky Boys crank call:
[Jimenez] panicked, knocked his plate onto his lap and caused his prescription eyeglasses to fall from his face. Plaintiff said he tried to push away from the table with his right arm. He used his left arm to brush the food from his lap. He soon felt that he had “pulled” something in his right arm. He stopped applying pressure to the table, “let [his] [right] hand go because [he] felt pain,” and “banged” his elbow on the table.
Blackburn Bill Attempts To Gut New Net Neutrality Rules. You Know, For Freedom
During the last election cycle, Representative Marsha Blackburn received $15,000 from a Verizon PAC, $25,000 from an AT&T PAC, $20,000 from a Comcast PAC, and $20,000 from the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Surely that funding is only coincidentally related to Blackburn’s recent decision to rush to the defense of awful state protectionist law written by the likes of AT&T and Comcast, preventing towns and cities from doing absolutely anything about their local lack of broadband competition.
That money surely is also only tangentially related to the fact that Blackburn has also just introduced the “Internet Freedom Act” (pdf), aimed at gutting the FCC’s recently unveiled Title II-based net neutrality rules and prohibiting the agency from trying to make new ones. Whereas most of us thought net neutrality is about protecting consumers and smaller competitors from the incumbent ISP stranglehold over the last mile, Blackburn’s website informs readers that net neutrality rules harm innovators, jobs, and err — freedom:
Movie Group To “Kill Piracy” By Not Releasing Movies For Months
This is not how this works… This is not how anything works.
Entertainment companies all around the globe bemoan the fact that their creations cost millions to create and often require years of preparation, but all that can be undone in an instant by pirates.
It’s certainly true that any media – whether movies, music or software – can be instantly cloned and distributed to a potential audience of hundreds of millions. According to the industry the doomsday scenario of this position is that filmmakers, musicians, authors and coders will eventually give up the game and go do something else more profitable instead.
Of course, this hasn’t happened yet, largely due to the fact that the public is still digging deep. Hollywood, for example, is having its best year on record. But what if all content suddenly stopped appearing on physical and digital shelves. What would the pirates do then?
Well, if the threats of India’s Tamil Film Producer’s Council (TFPC) come to fruition, we won’t have long to find out. Plagued by the menace of persistent and large scale piracy of their movies, the Council is close to making the most radical stand against copyright infringement ever seen.
Yesterday the TFPC held their general meeting and of course piracy was high on the agenda. Several solutions were reportedly discussed but one came to the forefront – a complete boycott on releasing films for the foreseeable future.
“Some groups wanted a six-month ban, while others wanted a three-month ban,” said council president Kalaipuli S Thanu.
The producer and distributor, who regained control of TFPC in January following allegations of corruption against his rivals, said that something drastic needs to be done.
“The basic fact is that all producers are suffering losses and we have to look into that. We have asked them for some time to call in all the parties concerned and try to reach a resolution that is beneficial to everybody.”
In addition to promising the establishment of a dedicated anti-piracy unit compromised of ex-police officers, Thanu says that not releasing movies at all will be the best way to hit pirates.
“Piracy will automatically stop when there’s no content. When we stop film releases, say for three months, the movie pirates will go out of business. We are looking into this option because film producers have suffered heavily in the last 24 months,” Thanu said.
Scenic Selfie Station
I feel like Americans were fed a lot of bullshit about American ingenuity and Thomas Edison when they were kids, which produced a generation of adults who view every mundane inconvenience as an opportunity to invent and market a revolutionary problem-solving gadget. In the course of solving some such minor problem, the semblance of reality and practicality fades away as the relentless capitalist logic of the inventor drives him towards the craziest possible solution. He then shits his product onto Kickstarter, where it floats up to the intake of Your Kickstarter Sucks, itself an bizarre invention created to solve the problem of Kickstarters not being made fun of enough.
Ryan wanted to get a picture of himself with his fiancé at Staples Center, but his arms were too short to take a selfie (I am not making this up; watch the video). They were forced to ask a stranger to take a photo, but the stranger’s photo came out bad and Ryan was too shy to ask him to take another. There’s got to be a better way! Well now there is:
The product will be a stationary stand much like the old telescope viewers that still exist at various national monuments. It will stand roughly 4 and 1/2 feet tall. It will have a small camera like those included on an Android or iPhone 6. There will be a touchscreen on the opposite side of the camera for customer’s to log into one of their social media platforms. It will also have a ten second countdown that beeps as those desiring a picture will have that time to pose with their friends for the perfect picture. After the picture is taken, it will be automatically posted onto whatever social media platform the customer has logged into.
Smartphones enable people to take high quality photographs anywhere they want, but what we really need is a $10,000 stationary apparatus mounted in front of Staples Center to save souvenir-craved sports fans the trouble and shame of asking a stranger to take a photograph of them. The best part is it’s totally free to use and funded by nothing more intrusive than corporate logos plastered on your photos:
So… Long story short, we will be offering companies to have their logos included on the customer’s pictures which are taken and then posted on social media and…BOOM! All of the sudden, instead of harassing our social media walls with advertisements that are scrolled through. Companies will now have their logos included on pictures of our friends at beautiful destinations across the nation and eventually globe! Thus using both word of mouth advertising while letting the people be the sole marketers.
The Tsarnaev Trial and the Blind Spots in ‘Countering Violent Extremism’
On April 19, 2013, as Dzhokhar Tsarnaev lay bleeding from gunshot wounds in a suburban Boston backyard, he scrawled a note that contained the following message:
“The US Government is killing our innocent civilians but most of you already know that….I don’t like killing innocent people it is forbidden in Islam but due to said [unintelligible] it is allowed…Stop killing our innocent people and we will stop.”
This message mirrored comments Tsarnaev would later give to investigators, in which he cited grievances over American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as his motivation for the 2013 bombing of the Boston Marathon.
In his trial, which begins today, more details are expected to emerge about how he went from a popular college student to an alleged homegrown terrorist.
Widely described as a “self-radicalized” terrorist, Tsarnaev now serves as a prime example of the type of individual targeted by Countering Violent Extremist (CVE) programs. Yet in fact, Tsarnaev’s life trajectory leading up to the bombing does not resemble the “path to radicalization” identified in CVE frameworks — raising questions about the capacity of these programs to intervene effectively to preempt terrorism.
Killed by terrorists
This is true in quite a lot of countries. You’re also a lot more likely to be killed in a car crash.
There Is No Way That Hillary Clinton Didn’t Know She Was Supposed To Use A Government Email Account
As you may have heard, the latest political “scandal” involving a major Presidential contender comes via the NY Times reporting that when Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, she refused to have a government email address, and conducted all her work via a personal email account.
Hillary Rodham Clinton exclusively used a personal email account to conduct government business as secretary of state, State Department officials said, and may have violated federal requirements that officials’ correspondence be retained as part of the agency’s record.
Mrs. Clinton did not have a government email address during her four-year tenure at the State Department. Her aides took no actions to have her personal emails preserved on department servers at the time, as required by the Federal Records Act.
This is dumb on many, many levels and there appears to be no excuse for it happening. First off, using a personal email as Secretary of State seems like a massive privacy and security risk. While one hopes that there was at least some attempt to better secure her personal account by government security experts, it’s still almost certainly less secure. Given how much sensitive information the Secretary of State has to deal with, it seems inexcusable that she was allowed to conduct official business via her personal account. That to me seems like an even bigger deal than the part that everyone else is focused on: the failure to preserve her emails as required by law.
Of course, the failure to preserve the emails is a big deal as well. But here’s the really stunning thing: there is simply no way that Clinton and others in the administration didn’t know that she was supposed to be using a government email address and preserving those emails. That’s because both the previous administration and others in her own administration got in trouble for using personal email addresses. As Vox notes, towards the end of the Bush administration there was a similar scandal involving a variety of high level administration members using personal email to conduct government business and to avoid transparency requirements.
U.S. Govt Files For Default Judgment on Dotcom’s Cash and Cars
In the wake of the now-famous 2012 raid, the U.S. government has done everything in its power to deny Kim Dotcom access to the assets of his former Megaupload empire. Millions were seized, setting the basis for a legal battle that has dragged on for more than three years.
In a July 2014 complaint submitted at a federal court in Virginia, the Department of Justice asked for forfeiture of the bank accounts, cars and other seized possessions, claiming they were obtained through copyright and money laundering crimes.
“Kim Dotcom and Megaupload will vigorously oppose the US Department of Justice’s civil forfeiture action,” Dotcom lawyer Ira Rothken told TF at the time.
But in the final days of last month Dotcom received a blow when a ruling from the United States barred him from fighting the seizure. A Federal Court in Virginia found that Dotcom was not entitled to contest the forfeiture because he is viewed as a “fugitive” facing extradition.
“We think this is not offensive to just Kim Dotcom’s rights, but the rights of all Kiwis,” Rothken said.
Wasting no time, yesterday the United States went in for the kill. In a filing in the District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, the Department of Justice requested an entry of default against the assets of Kim Dotcom plus co-defendants Mathias Ortmann, Bram van der Kolk, Finn Batato, Julius Bencko, and Sven Echternach.
The targets for forfeiture are six bank accounts held in Hong Kong in the names of Ortmann, der Kolk, Echternach, Bencko and Batato. New Zealand based assets include an ANZ National Bank account in the name of Megastuff Limited, an HSBC account held by der Kolk and a Cleaver Richards Limited Trust Account for Megastuff Limited held at the Bank of New Zealand. Two Mercedes-Benz vehicles (an A170 and an ML500) plus their license plates complete the claim.
The request for default judgment was entered soon after.
AT&T’s $30 ‘Don’t Be Snooped On’ Fee Is Even Worse Than Everybody Thought
Last week we noted that while AT&T has been trying to match Google Fiber pricing in small portions of several markets, it has been busily doing it in a very AT&T fashion. While the company is offering a $70, 1 Gbps service in some locations, the fine print indicates that users can only get that price point if they agree to AT&T’s Internet Preferences snoopvertising program. That program uses deep packet inspection to track your online behavior down to the second — and if you want to opt out, that $70 1 Gbps broadband connection quickly becomes significantly more expensive.
While most people thought this was rather dumb, AT&T actually received kudos on some fronts for trying something new. Apparently, the logic goes, AT&T charging you a major monthly fee to not be snooped on will result in some kind of privacy arms race resulting in better services and lower prices for all. While sometimes that sort of concept works (Google and Apple scurrying to profess who loves encryption more, for example), anybody who believes this is a good precedent doesn’t know the U.S. telecom market or AT&T very well.
As Stacey Higginbotham at GigaOM notes, it’s not as simple as just paying AT&T a $30 to not be snooped on. AT&T actually makes it very difficult to even find the “please don’t spy on me option,” and saddles the process with a number of loopholes to prevent you from choosing it. In fact, you’re not even able to compare prices unless you plug in an address that’s in AT&T’s footprint, but currently doesn’t have AT&T service. Meanwhile, according to Higginbotham’s math, even if you’re successful in signing up, that $30 privacy fee is actually much more depending on your chosen options. If you just want broadband, opting out of AT&T snoopvertising will actually run you $44