Yes - the CFAA as a criminal issue requires "mens rea", the intention to commit a crime. Very few laws (such as involuntary manslaughter) have exceptions to this.
If you break someone's shit by accident, they can still sue you, and people should probably sue HP, but you can't try to have a prosecutor bring them to a criminal trial under the CFAA.
No, but it usually makes it civil liability and not criminal liability. For the most part (there are exceptions), you can't accidentally commit a crime.
Why shouldn't that work? Dropbox and SMB both just need to read/write/watch files like any normal process. I do the same thing at home with Syncthing/SMB and it works fine.
From a theoretical perspective, sure, but the product Dropbox sells is either a website or an app each end user gets that adds local sync and some other useful sharing features. They certainly don’t intend it as a centralized system that people expose over the network in a bespoke way, and I can fully sympathize with why they’d tell this user that’s not something they want to support.
> For example, illegal transactions, scams and gambling together make up less than 3% of volume.
Sure there's the odd dumb criminal who doesn't understand the prosecutorial implications of an immutable public ledger. But it pales in comparison, according to the actual data.
Yes, because most of the transfers happening are speculative investment trades, arbitrage, etc. People moving money around, without paying for anything.
That source says, when it comes to the demand in terms of spending crypto for goods or services:
> 46% of transactions are due to illegal transactions
If Bob transfers $10 back and forth between both of his bank accounts 99 times and then buys $10 worth of crack, would you say that 1% of Bobs money was used for illegal purposes or 100% of it was used for illegal purposes? Depends on what specifically you're trying to measure.
There are two things here that are simultaneously true:
1. A small percent of BTC transactions are for illicit purposes.
2. A large percentage of the goods and services purchased with BTC are illicit.
Moving the goalposts. GP was only talking about illegal activity. But since you brought it up -
Global GDP is $101T. Global yearly forex volume is $2738T. So by this logic you should conclude that 96% of transaction volume in the traditional financial system is also not tied to economically meaningful activities. You're going to be disappointed if you want to believe society as a whole is any less financialized than bitcoin.
What do you think would be an acceptable percentage of speculation?
I think it's absurd to say that only say 3% of crypto transactions are criminal, if the majority of other transactions are meaningless.
Surely what we actually care about is how many useful, legal, meaningful transactions there are.
For example if for every 1 legal transaction there is 3 illegal transactions and 96 speculative or maintenance transactions... it starts looking like this is predominantly for criminal uses even though only 3% of transactions are criminal.
That tells me literally nothing. This is all machine generated boilerplate code. This isn't executive emails or documents. Since when are comments written by nameless workers an authoritative newsworthy leak on corporate policy? It probably tells us something about what sort of things workers at Google have researched, e.g. csam, scams, racism. If I grep for SEO then I see some database fields for their pagespeed service that mentions accessibility audits and progressive web apps. Looks pretty consistent with what Google has always said publicly. Where's the specific code that's generating all the shock and outrage?
There are plenty of breakdowns of what exactly the technical documents contain, including the stuff I just said. In great detail! Google ironically here is your friend. It confirms what SEO practitioners have been saying for years that Google has actively been discrediting with flat out falsehoods, such as they don’t use domain authority anywhere in their ranking (documentation describes fields named domainAuthority), they track clicks in great detail (which they have vigorously denied), and they use chrome usage data as a factor in their rankings. Hope that helps
Regarding trade secrets, inadvertent or accidental disclosure means it is no longer a trade secret - no protection. And regarding copyright, there is Oracle vs. Google that copying APIs is fair use (Google's argument). So even if the copyright license grant in the leak is held to be invalid (the license states it is perpetual, if it is valid it does forever carry that license), it would be fair use anyway. I think the only IP protection is patents, Google has patents on various parts of the system so if you did actually want to build a Google clone by reverse-engineering their documentation you would run into trouble.
I think serving the docs themselves is likely illegal, though. You don't actually have a right to distribute copies just because someone pushed a wrong button and they were made visible in a repo that has a top-level Apache 2 license.
Sure, they can't stop people who received a copy from studying it and using or discussing the information in there. But I think they can almost certainly stop them from (legally) distributing that information to others.
Apache 2 is irrevocable, and you can redistribute it however you wish. I think it's safe to assume as soon as it was pushed public to the original google repo it's was covered under apache 2. that entire repo was distributed by google as Apache 2. So if you pull that commit, as far as I would be concerned everything in it is apache 2 since that's the license it's distributed with. We have no idea why that code was pushed, and it doesn't matter from a public perspective.
None of that matters if the company never intended to publish it as Apache 2, and can show they took immediate steps to correct their mistake. The law is not code, and intent matters.
source or relevant case? Because if someone pulls before it's another commit that removes it... you would have absolutely zero idea why they removed it, or you wouldn't even know it was removed. Or even if you still pull that commit that as of yesterday after over 1 month was still in the google repo, there's no info that it shouldn't be there... And I think pushing code to a public opensource repo, shows intent to publish it...
> people that can get by on 0-net electricity use pay nothing for the real, significant benefit of being connected to the grid
What's stopping them from changing their pricing structure to something that makes sense in a world with solar? Example: My gas bill is $30-40/mo in summer months when I'm only using maybe $1 worth of actual gas for cooking. They need to pay salaries and maintain the pipelines, etc, fine by me.
Why can't PG&E do the same and charge $x/mo + $y/kWh? (where $x is a flat rate and only $y could go to 0)
This would be the best solution, but other low-usage customers (retirees, low income workers) have come to rely on the implicit subsidy granted by not charging explicit infrastructure fees. The solution to that second order problem is to grant some sort of government financial aid to low income customers with low monthly electricity consumption. That way most households pay for infrastructure proportional to infrastructure costs, but the most vulnerable are protected against financial hardship.
It's already moving in that direction. You will have a $100/mo hookup fee and a $1 charge for usage.
It will be fair with respect to actual costs, but the state hates it because it is less favorable to the poor. This is why they are implementing income based service pricing.
Edit: it seems like there is some skepticism, so the law requiring it was AB 205, which was passed, and CPUC has approved the plan.
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