Is limewire and frostwire illegal?
26,000 people are facing civil lawsuits for using P2P file-stealing programs such as Limewire. People DO get caught stealing and "sharing" copyrighted "stuff" using P2P filesharing programs such as Limewire, Bearshare, Kazza etc, and face huge fines. People as young as 12 years old get busted. "The music industry has turned its big legal guns on Internet music-swappers — including a 12-year-old New York City girl who thought downloading songs was fun." "Brianna LaHara said she was frightened to learn she was among the hundreds of people sued yesterday by giant music companies in federal courts around the country." "I got really scared. My stomach is all turning," Brianna said last night at the city Housing Authority apartment where she lives with her mom and her 9-year-old brother." More at: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,96797,00.html _____________________________ Or this one from just a few weeks ago: " Jammie Thomas makes $36,000 a year but says she's not looking for a handout to pay a $222,000 judgment after a jury decided she illegally shared music online and did it on purpose...Record labels have sued more than 26,000 people they accuse of sharing music online in violation of copyright laws." From: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20071006/music_nm/musicindustry_lawsuit_dc More info: http://timworstall.typepad.com/timworstall/2007/10/jammie-thomas.html
Is possession of thermite legal in CA if not used/intended for illegal, dangerous, bad, or malicious purposes?
Marijuana is illegal primarily because of propaganda and racism. It has remained illegal because of money, and the government's inability to tax it thus far. The government refuses to admit that marijuana is not anywhere near as dangerous as they say, or even that's its less dangerous than cigarettes. Tobacco has remained legal because of money, the government makes huge profits off of the taxes from tobacco, and if it were to push to make it illegal the tobacco industry would make a huge fuss, which would cost the government even more money. Interestingly, tobacco isn't as bad for you as you think. What's really bad for you is all the chemicals they put in the cigarettes, but the government can't even get tobacco companies to admit what they put in their cigarettes. Natural tobacco is not only safer, but without the ammonia in the reconstituted tobacco its also LESS ADDICTIVE. On top of that, studies done on second hand smoke has proven that it's harmless, yet the government has insisted that its a public safety hazard. Almost as if the government wants you to think that smoking anything is going to lead to the deaths of thousands of people, yet they won't admit that they have mishandled the tobacco industry and that its this poor management of a company that they can no longer control that leads to thousands of preventable deaths a year.
Originally named "Economic Security Act", the name changed in committee. It was originally far more encompassing. Here is the Preamble to the original Social Security Act existing when it passed in 1935. "An act to provide for the general welfare by establishing a system of Federal old-age benefits, and by enabling the several States to make more adequate provision for aged persons, blind persons, dependent and crippled children, maternal and child welfare, public health, and the administration of their unemployment compensation laws; to establish a Social Security Board; to raise revenue; and for other purposes."The Social Security part was originally designed as contributory program retirement plan trust fund- with the government role only as administrator. It is a self-supporting program which has had only 2 inserts of general revenue early on to cover disabled WWII vets and those who turned 72 before 1971. Also, since Reagan made SSI income taxable in 1983, a miniscule revenue stream results as well. Since inception, the fund has generated 13.8T in revenues through 2009 and expended 11.3T in the same period. You can find all the FACTS about the origin and history of the Social Security Act here:Social Security HistoryWelfare has nothing to do with this contributory retirement plan. Be wary of those who try to portray otherwise because situations involving deceptions or founded on mistaken impressions will follow shortly.
Is it legal to download music from Limewire?
Unlike the other answers. Limewire is 100% legal. Just downloading pirated music from the place is illegal. Additional: If they DO catch you sharing (sending) music on limewire, They'll send you a Letter/E-mail saying that they've detected you sharing music withoutthe artist's consent, do not do this again, ect. With that maybe they'll put a warning on the bottom. If the letter is being sent to you for a certain amount of times, chances are that they'll have to sue you for sharing pirated music without the artist's permission.
This is a popular misconception that using torrent to download stuff is illegal. Nothing can be farther from the truth. A torrents downloading program is merely a P2P sharing program, which can put to good use as well as to bad use.Let me take an example of a good use of Torrent - Say there is a freeware software. It’s free to download, free to use, and free to distribute. Now, using torrent to distribute such a software is beneficial. Why? How? Because the provider (the software author) need no spend on hosting a website and host his software there. It is a saving of cost for the author. Besides, the availability (and in turn reach) of his software increases if it is available via torrent download. The author doesn’t have to provide a download site, with 100% availability, and practically unlimited upload quota for his site.For the users looking to download the software the benefit is multi-fold. The user can still download the software, even if it is not available from the author site. The user may be download from a peer hosting that software on his PC which is merely a block away. In that case download speeds will be much higher. Besides, the user may even find old versions of the software, which is not supported by the author and has been taken offline.In short: A torrent platform is a distributed system that works on P2P. All the benefits associated with a distributed P2P system applies here.This reply was extracted from my detailed reply on Torrents here: Ranjeet Rain's answer to Is it illegal to download (especially movies, tv series, etc) via torrent in India now?
First things first: I am not a lawyer and these comments are solely based on my experience working at Scrapinghub, please seek legal assistance accordingly.Here are a few things to consider when scraping public data from websites (note that the following addresses only US law):As long as they don't crawl at a disruptive rate, scrapers do not breach any contract (in the form of terms of use) or commit a crime (as defined in the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act).Website's user agreement is not enforceable as a browsewrap agreement because companies do not provide sufficient notice of the terms to site visitors.Scrapers accesses website data as a visitor, and by following paths similar to a search engine. This can be done without registering as a user (and explicitly accepting any terms).In Nguyen v. Barnes & Noble, Inc. the courts ruled that simply placing a link to a terms of use at the bottom of webpage is not sufficient to "give rise to constructive notice." In other words, there is nothing on a public page that would imply that merely accessing the information is subject to any contractual terms. Scrapers gives neither explicit nor implicit assent to any agreement, therefore breaches no contract.Social networks, for example, assign the value of becoming a user (based on call-to-action on public page), as the ability to: i) Gain access to full profiles, ii) Identify common friends/connections, iii) Get introduced to others, and iv) Contact members directly. As long as scrapers makes no attempt to perform any of these actions they do not gain "unauthorized access" to their services and thus does not violate CFAA.A thorough evaluation of the legal issues involved can be seen here: http://www.bna.com/legal-issues-...
How are viruses and malware created ?
Kids as young as 11 can and have out there some pretty nasty computer viruses they create for sick kicks. It just takes one's passion for computer programming mixed with a sick twisted mind to create one. Fortunately, the FBI is fast catching virus creators; many finding fast jail time--and kids creating PC viruses find it's not so eary to wriggle out from trouble being a "minor". Some PC users even whisper rumors of the major popular anti-virus pay services hire hackers to create viruses to hype up their business.....all rumor, of course. PC viruses can be written in any of the available and currently used computer languages and formats: from Basic to Borlean encryption. The time malicious viruses take to affect a system vary from a few seconds to days, weeks even months. Time bomb viruses used to lie well embedded within a PCs BIOS clock software, set to go off a certain day and time. Today, PC users often grow uneasy having their computers on and online during major observed holidays like Valentine's Day, Halloween or Christmas. But with advancements in virus detection and clean-up, most can surf worry free--given the anti-virus scanner is updated and running. The common vehicle for carrying PC viruses are spam and/or the "pass this on" e-chain letter--both advised to be deleted on sight--regardless of who sends them. If you don't know who sent it, delete it. Also avoid opening e-letter attachments that end in .rar or .zip; both known to be red flags for viruses. PC viruses are illegal to create and send out. Malware and/or spyware, however IS legal. Widely used by major corporate online business, information services and yes---porn peddlers, spyware is just that--a simple program that "tracks" where you go on the net and reports that information back to its target. Carefully read the Privacy Policy of a website. There are free anti-virus scanners, like AVG and a great many free anti-spyware programs like Crap Cleaner, Spybot Search N' Destroy that with use prior to and after online surfing can give you the advantage against PC attacks from viruses and spyware.