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People aren't going to stop "pirating", nor should they. "Pirates" spend more money on music than non-pirates. It's called marketing. The MAFIAA labeled bands have radio, the indies have P2P.

Want to pirate a book? To to Cory Doctorow's site craphound.com. He doesn't mind. In fact, read the forward to Little Brother (free download of the book there) where he explains how your "pirating" his books is a good thing.

Go to my friends in The Station's site. You can "pirate" their stuff, too (first link leads to shn, flac, mp3, ogg). There are dozens of their live shows on archive.org.

You can "pirate" the top 40 by plugging your radio into your PC and sampling. Better quality, less hassle. The only downside is it's only MAFIAA dreck; you have to actually download indie music. A few years ago Micheal Crawford compiled a list of tens of thousands of songs you can pirate legally.

If you live in St Louis you have a lebal-sanctioned pirate radio station that plays seven complete CDs, uncut and uninterrupted, every Sunday night for you to sample and has done so for decades.

Only an idiot wants to keep his art secret.

More like 75000 jobs GAINED. I would like to Quote Cory Doctorow from the forward to Little Brother (emphasis mine):

I recently saw Neil Gaiman give a talk at which someone asked him how he felt about piracy of his books. He said, "Hands up in the audience if you discovered your favorite writer for free -- because someone loaned you a copy, or because someone gave it to you? Now, hands up if you found your favorite writer by walking into a store and plunking down cash." Overwhelmingly, the audience said that they'd discovered their favorite writers for free, on a loan or as a gift. When it comes to my favorite writers, there's no boundaries: I'll buy every book they publish, just to own it (sometimes I buy two or three, to give away to friends who must read those books). I pay to see them live. I buy t-shirts with their book-covers on them. I'm a customer for life.

Neil went on to say that he was part of the tribe of readers, the tiny minority of people in the world who read for pleasure, buying books because they love them. One thing he knows about everyone who downloads his books on the Internet without permission is that they're readers, they're people who love books.

People who study the habits of music-buyers have discovered something curious: the biggest pirates are also the biggest spenders. If you pirate music all night long, chances are you're one of the few people left who also goes to the record store (remember those?) during the day. You probably go to concerts on the weekend, and you probably check music out of the library too. If you're a member of the red-hot music-fan tribe, you do lots of everything that has to do with music, from singing in the shower to paying for black-market vinyl bootlegs of rare Eastern European covers of your favorite death-metal band.

No artist ever starved because of copyright infringement. Many artists have starved because of obscurity.

I googled "spam form letter" and got this

You can't protect software by disabling it. Corporations underestimate the community's ability to understand, and work around, any software problem they come across.

The technical problem and limitation of DRM is more subtle than that - you cant encrypt something and send the encryption key along with it and expect it to remain secure - most ably demonstrated by the BlueRay and HDDVD cracks. What they are attempting to do, manage digital files after they have been released into the wild, is actually impossible. All they can succeed in doing is annoying their genuine customers and driving people, including legitimate customers, away from content with DRM stamped on it. Cory Doctorow's recently released transcript on Life in the Information Economy is a fascinating look at the subject as is Blown to Bits, recently reviewed on /..

I's from Little Brother from Cory Doctorow, great read btw.

I think that the "Don't Trust anyone over 30" is the quote you refering to.

If you ever decide to do something as stupid as build an automatic terrorism detector, here's a math lesson you need to learn first. It's called "the paradox of the false positive," and it's a doozy.

Say you have a new disease, called Super-AIDS. Only one in a million people gets Super-AIDS. You develop a test for Super-AIDS that's 99 percent accurate. I mean, 99 percent of the time, it gives the correct result -- true if the subject is infected, and false if the subject is healthy. You give the test to a million people.

One in a million people have Super-AIDS. One in a hundred people that you test will generate a "false positive" -- the test will say he has Super-AIDS even though he doesn't. That's what "99 percent accurate" means: one percent wrong.

What's one percent of one million?

1,000,000/100 = 10,000

One in a million people has Super-AIDS. If you test a million random people, you'll probably only find one case of real Super-AIDS. But your test won't identify one person as having Super-AIDS. It will identify 10,000 people as having it.

Your 99 percent accurate test will perform with 99.99 percent inaccuracy.

That's the paradox of the false positive. When you try to find something really rare, your test's accuracy has to match the rarity of the thing you're looking for. If you're trying to point at a single pixel on your screen, a sharp pencil is a good pointer: the pencil-tip is a lot smaller (more accurate) than the pixels. But a pencil-tip is no good at pointing at a single atom in your screen. For that, you need a pointer -- a test -- that's one atom wide or less at the tip.

This is the paradox of the false positive, and here's how it applies to terrorism:

Terrorists are really rare. In a city of twenty million like New York, there might be one or two terrorists. Maybe ten of them at the outside. 10/20,000,000 = 0.00005 percent. One twenty-thousandth of a percent.

That's pretty rare all right. Now, say you've got some software that can sift through all the bank-records, or toll-pass records, or public transit records, or phone-call records in the city and catch terrorists 99 percent of the time.

In a pool of twenty million people, a 99 percent accurate test will identify two hundred thousand people as being terrorists. But only ten of them are terrorists. To catch ten bad guys, you have to haul in and investigate two hundred thousand innocent people.

Guess what? Terrorism tests aren't anywhere close to 99 percent accurate. More like 60 percent accurate. Even 40 percent accurate, sometimes.

What this all meant was that the Department of Homeland Security had set itself up to fail badly. They were trying to spot incredibly rare events -- a person is a terrorist -- with inaccurate systems.

If you ever decide to do something as stupid as build an automatic terrorism detector, here's a math lesson you need to learn first. It's called "the paradox of the false positive," and it's a doozy.

Say you have a new disease, called Super-AIDS. Only one in a million people gets Super-AIDS. You develop a test for Super-AIDS that's 99 percent accurate. I mean, 99 percent of the time, it gives the correct result -- true if the subject is infected, and false if the subject is healthy. You give the test to a million people.

One in a million people have Super-AIDS. One in a hundred people that you test will generate a "false positive" -- the test will say he has Super-AIDS even though he doesn't. That's what "99 percent accurate" means: one percent wrong.

What's one percent of one million?

1,000,000/100 = 10,000

One in a million people has Super-AIDS. If you test a million random people, you'll probably only find one case of real Super-AIDS. But your test won't identify *one* person as having Super-AIDS. It will identify *10,000* people as having it.

Your 99 percent accurate test will perform with 99.99 percent *inaccuracy*.

That's the paradox of the false positive. When you try to find something really rare, your test's accuracy has to match the rarity of the thing you're looking for. If you're trying to point at a single pixel on your screen, a sharp pencil is a good pointer: the pencil-tip is a lot smaller (more accurate) than the pixels. But a pencil-tip is no good at pointing at a single *atom* in your screen. For that, you need a pointer -- a test -- that's one atom wide or less at the tip.

This is the paradox of the false positive, and here's how it applies to terrorism:

Terrorists are really rare. In a city of twenty million like New York, there might be one or two terrorists. Maybe ten of them at the outside. 10/20,000,000 = 0.00005 percent. One twenty-thousandth of a percent.

That's pretty rare all right. Now, say you've got some software that can sift through all the bank-records, or toll-pass records, or public transit records, or phone-call records in the city and catch terrorists 99 percent of the time.

In a pool of twenty million people, a 99 percent accurate test will identify two hundred thousand people as being terrorists. But only ten of them are terrorists. To catch ten bad guys, you have to haul in and investigate two hundred thousand innocent people.

Guess what? Terrorism tests aren't anywhere *close* to 99 percent accurate. More like 60 percent accurate. Even 40 percent accurate, sometimes.

What this all meant was that the Department of Homeland Security had set itself up to fail badly. They were trying to spot incredibly rare events -- a person is a terrorist -- with inaccurate systems.

Is it any wonder we were able to make such a mess?

And of course in a similar vein there is the stock response to spam solutions.

So, put some pebbles in your shoes and you'll escape recognition. The world seems to be heading towards the one described in Corey Doctorow's Little Brother novel. - which is available under a creative commons license. Nicely formatted at feedbooks.com.

Read the first chapter or two of Cory Doctorow's Little Brother for some low-tech ideas on defeating gait analysis.

How does it account for any type of foot, ankle, or leg injury that doesn't require crutches?

How about someone throwing a handful of rocks in the shoe to forcibly change their gait?

How about someone that is conscientious enough to change their gait at every new location?

(I cannot lay claim to these ideas myself - I read Cory Doctrow's "Little Brother" - a very good novel that is licensed under the Creative Commons model and is available at http://craphound.com/littlebrother/ )

This just reeks of wasted money and more governmental control.

This is insanity. I can download a copy of that stupid movie without Dumb Restrictions on Media from TPB, or I can just watch the tape I already paid for over ten years ago. Now, I'd buy the key with the movie pre-loaded, but to pay good money for crippleware when I can get a perfectly useable copy for free is just brain-dead stupid.

DRM doesn't affact copyright infringers whatsoever. It only inconvieniences paying customers. The only rational explanation for the MAFIAA's insanity is drugs - cocaine. It must be all the coke they're snorting/smoking/shooting that makes them behave like a bunch of thieving, distrusting, irrational crack whores.

I just started reading Cory Doctorow's Little Brother (HTML version linked; there are other formats here), and its preface has something to say about the insanity that is DRM (I've abbreviated it a bit):

I recently saw Neil Gaiman give a talk at which someone asked him how he felt about piracy of his books. He said, "Hands up in the audience if you discovered your favorite writer for free -- because someone loaned you a copy, or because someone gave it to you? Now, hands up if you found your favorite writer by walking into a store and plunking down cash." Overwhelmingly, the audience said that they'd discovered their favorite writers for free, on a loan or as a gift. When it comes to my favorite writers, there's no boundaries: I'll buy every book they publish, just to own it (sometimes I buy two or three, to give away to friends who must read those books). I pay to see them live. I buy t-shirts with their book-covers on them. I'm a customer for life.

People who study the habits of music-buyers have discovered something curious: the biggest pirates are also the biggest spenders. If you pirate music all night long, chances are you're one of the few people left who also goes to the record store (remember those?) during the day. You probably go to concerts on the weekend, and you probably check music out of the library too. If you're a member of the red-hot music-fan tribe, you do lots of everything that has to do with music, from singing in the shower to paying for black-market vinyl bootlegs of rare Eastern European covers of your favorite death-metal band.

Same with books. I've worked in new bookstores, used bookstores and libraries. I've hung out in pirate ebook ("bookwarez") places online. I'm a stone used bookstore junkie, and I go to book fairs for fun. And you know what? It's the same people at all those places: book fans who do lots of everything that has to do with books.

If I could loan out my physical books without giving up possession of them, I would. The fact that I can do so with digital files is not a bug, it's a feature, and a damned fine one. It's embarrassing to see all these writers and musicians and artists bemoaning the fact that art just got this wicked new feature: the ability to be shared without losing access to it in the first place. It's like watching restaurant owners crying down their shirts about the new free lunch machine that's feeding the world's starving people because it'll force them to reconsider their business-models. Yes, that's gonna be tricky, but let's not lose sight of the main attraction: free lunches!

Universal access to human knowledge is in our grasp, for the first time in the history of the world. This is not a bad thing.

For me -- for pretty much every writer -- the big problem isn't piracy, it's obscurity (thanks to Tim O'Reilly for this great aphorism). Of all the people who failed to buy this book today, the majority did so because they never heard of it, not because someone gave them a free copy. Mega-hit best-sellers in science fiction sell half a million copies -- in a world where 175,000 attend the San Diego Comic Con alone, you've got to figure that most of the people who "like science fiction" (and related geeky stuff li

This is insanity. I can download a copy of that stupid movie without Dumb Restrictions on Media from TPB, or I can just watch the tape I already paid for over ten years ago. Now, I'd buy the key with the movie pre-loaded, but to pay good money for crippleware when I can get a perfectly useable copy for free is just brain-dead stupid.

DRM doesn't affact copyright infringers whatsoever. It only inconvieniences paying customers. The only rational explanation for the MAFIAA's insanity is drugs - cocaine. It must be all the coke they're snorting/smoking/shooting that makes them behave like a bunch of thieving, distrusting, irrational crack whores.

I just started reading Cory Doctorow's Little Brother (HTML version linked; there are other formats here), and its preface has something to say about the insanity that is DRM (I've abbreviated it a bit):

I recently saw Neil Gaiman give a talk at which someone asked him how he felt about piracy of his books. He said, "Hands up in the audience if you discovered your favorite writer for free -- because someone loaned you a copy, or because someone gave it to you? Now, hands up if you found your favorite writer by walking into a store and plunking down cash." Overwhelmingly, the audience said that they'd discovered their favorite writers for free, on a loan or as a gift. When it comes to my favorite writers, there's no boundaries: I'll buy every book they publish, just to own it (sometimes I buy two or three, to give away to friends who must read those books). I pay to see them live. I buy t-shirts with their book-covers on them. I'm a customer for life.

People who study the habits of music-buyers have discovered something curious: the biggest pirates are also the biggest spenders. If you pirate music all night long, chances are you're one of the few people left who also goes to the record store (remember those?) during the day. You probably go to concerts on the weekend, and you probably check music out of the library too. If you're a member of the red-hot music-fan tribe, you do lots of everything that has to do with music, from singing in the shower to paying for black-market vinyl bootlegs of rare Eastern European covers of your favorite death-metal band.

Same with books. I've worked in new bookstores, used bookstores and libraries. I've hung out in pirate ebook ("bookwarez") places online. I'm a stone used bookstore junkie, and I go to book fairs for fun. And you know what? It's the same people at all those places: book fans who do lots of everything that has to do with books.

If I could loan out my physical books without giving up possession of them, I would. The fact that I can do so with digital files is not a bug, it's a feature, and a damned fine one. It's embarrassing to see all these writers and musicians and artists bemoaning the fact that art just got this wicked new feature: the ability to be shared without losing access to it in the first place. It's like watching restaurant owners crying down their shirts about the new free lunch machine that's feeding the world's starving people because it'll force them to reconsider their business-models. Yes, that's gonna be tricky, but let's not lose sight of the main attraction: free lunches!

Universal access to human knowledge is in our grasp, for the first time in the history of the world. This is not a bad thing.

For me -- for pretty much every writer -- the big problem isn't piracy, it's obscurity (thanks to Tim O'Reilly for this great aphorism). Of all the people who failed to buy this book today, the majority did so because they never heard of it, not because someone gave them a free copy. Mega-hit best-sellers in science fiction sell half a million copies -- in a world where 175,000 attend the San Diego Comic Con alone, you've got to figure that most of the people who "like science fiction" (and related geeky stuff li

I wonder if Nate Lawson had read Cory Doctorow's "Little Brother" before his work on the Fastrak transponders?

It just so happens that Doctorow's fictional 'Little Brother' work describes just such an exploit being used on a Bay Area transit card system.

Having said that, Doctorow mentions in his preface that most of the technologies in the work are either current reality or the possibilities of the near future.

Nowadays, it seems it's more about which transit card/xpndr system hasn't been done yet.

The idea of hacking the FasTrak system (or, more specifically, cloning FasTrak units) for false alibis and other social mayhem was explicitly brought up in Cory Doctorow's Little Brother. I think it is way more interesting in the fiction book, because they rapidly re-cloned random other cars, essentially switching IDs around.

I think I read about this in little brother.

Last time this topic arose, I saw Anda's Game . Quite an enjoyable read.

Don't forget Cory Doctorow: http://craphound.com/?p=187

Cory Doctorow wrote a cool short story incorporating gold farming in his collection Overclocked.
Free downloads of the html version and
PDF version.

Cory Doctorow wrote a cool short story incorporating gold farming in his collection Overclocked.
Free downloads of the html version and
PDF version.

Cory Doctorow wrote a cool short story incorporating gold farming in his collection Overclocked.
Free downloads of the html version and
PDF version.

Which is from Cory Doctorow's "Little Bother", and which from the court documents in this case?

"Just flash the firmware on a ten-dollar Radio Shack reader/writer and you're done. What we do is go around and randomly swap the tags on people, overwriting their Fast Passes and FasTraks with other people's codes. That'll make everyone skew all weird and screwy, and make everyone look guilty. Then: total gridlock."

vs.:

"An attacker uses RFID equipment purchased online to sniff communications between a legitimate CharlieCard and a turnstile. He takes the data back home and executes one of several attacks that exploit the weak Crypto-1 cipher to recover a key. Armed with this key, a high-gain antenna, and RFID equipment, he walks down a crowded street in boston remotely copying the CharlieCards in people's pockets."

Please, check out 'Little Brother'. FREE for download at http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/ , or available at fine bookstores everywhere.

may I recommend reading Cory Doctorow's Little Brother - It's fiction but It really get's you thinking about what these, still increasing, limitations to your privacy rights may lead to.

Obligatory reference to Cory Doctorow's Printcrime.

Parent link seems to be gone, here's the picture from somewhere else http://craphound.com/images/translateservererror.jpg

Wouldn't it be nice if this technology was used to make a free citywide wireless internet? We just need a bunch of people with this ambition and it could be done. I once read a book, called When A Strange Comes To Town, in which some people had the same ambition. You can get the book from Project Gutenberg if you look around. It's a newer book that has never been copyrighted.

This is probably a garbled memory of Cory Doctorow's Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town. It is copyrighted, but you can indeed download it from Cory's website; it was released under a Creative Commons license.

(I liked it.)

It is a free download on his website if you want to check it out:
http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/

  I downloaded the PDF and, after reading the first few chapters, I've have been looking for it in bookstores.

Definitely great reading material for teens. Fantastic reading for those with a taste of geek-pop culture. The story feels more "current" then anything I've read for awhile,.. a hard to describe feeling cousin to deja vu maybe.

I'm sure someone else in this thread may have already mentioned this one, but since I haven't read the entire discussion, I will recommend Alexei Panshin's first novel "Rite of Passage." Fantastic story about a pre-teen that doesn't talk down to the reader. Almost a tribute to Heinlein's juveniles, but written in such a way that both adults and young readers can enjoy it. I read it in college and it still holds up today.

Cory Doctorow's new novel "Little Brother" is also written for this audience, and is available online at http://craphound.com/littlebrother. I haven't read the full book yet, but heard him do a reading recently and this one could be just what your children would enjoy. My own son read Doctorow's first novel, "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" when he was sixteen, and became an instant fan.

You are a great parent. Years from now, your smart kids will thank you for encouraging them to read mind-expanding books.

Hi there,

Hope you'll read through all 1000+ comments and find this. :-)

It's too new to be a 'classic' but I just read Cory Docrorow's Little Brother and thought it was fantastic. I'm in my 30s but it's about teenagers and I think teens would love it. The best part is it is available online as a free e-book.

Also, Lois' Lowry's The Giver is absolutely fantastic.

Both are bordering on the light edge of Sci-Fi but they're both great books.

I would consider (and have given to my nephews and nieces) short story collections. Short enough for them to work with but very rewarding. In particular Clarke, Asimov, Niven. For Heinlein I would stick to early Heinlein (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinlein_juveniles ), say : "Rocket Ship Galileo", "Farmer in the Sky" ,"The Rolling Stones".

I would also consider various short story collections. The great advantage is that if some of them don't resonate with one or more of your kids then next one will.

One new book worth looking at is Cory Doctorow's Little Brother http://craphound.com/littlebrother/about/

Also : with respect to some stories being "darker and more political". As long as they are also reading stories with a different messages / vibes then they will not even notice.

Little Brother is hands-down the best young-adult sci-fi I've ever encountered. It's quite recent (within the last year), and is Creative-Commons licensed, so you can check it out before buying if you so desire. The writing is excellent, the story top-notch, and it's chock full of technophilia and anti-authoritarianism. Might be a bit too dark for pre-teens (judge for yourself). Everyone should read this before high school. I say that without reservation. http://craphound.com/littlebrother/ (Also, I second the recommendation for Invitation to the Game. I liked it.)

Doctorow's cc-licensed "Little Brother" is great juvenile-political-scifi reading...

Heck, I really enjoyed it as an adult.

http://craphound.com/littlebrother/

Welcome to the Unwirers.

However, I think that a user-owned wired backbone as well as local caching proxies would be essential to make this work. It's impossible for RF links alone to work for two reasons: Bandwidth and lag. The speed of wired networks is much higher to start with (>= Gbps), and you need that as a backbone. Secondly, long range cable/fiber accumulates microseconds of delay per hop; WiFi in my experience accumulates milliseconds. Would you want to use a network that took seconds to send packets 100Km?

Fast long-range connections will be absolutely essential to prevent the system from failing by reducing load on otherside intermediate nodes and greatly reducing the mean number of hops from A to B. You need is delay-tolerant drivers for your ethernet card and either some nice ECL buffers or fiber transceivers to extend the range if it's a really long way. For example you'd want to run at least 100M ethernet between chains of wifi routers in your neighborhood, and try to run a some 200/600Mbps fiber between distant neighborhoods. The problem is that this shit is expensive which is why mesh networks don't generally work out. But I'm up for giving it a shot. Combine this with a p2p system that uses that OFF distributed filesystem for effective local caching and you've got a winner IMO.

It's not mine. You can get the original from http://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt

What a coincidence! I just read Little Brother linked from a slashdot comment last week, and it had just this sort of issue passed in a fictitious "Patriot act 2." Like the Turk suggested: time to go for cash. I wished governments would stop using these orwellian texts as instruction manuals.

[this is] a rather unique publication in that it seeks to educate teenage youth about an array of issues ranging from privacy, free software, security and the impact of politics on personal freedom as it relates to the use of technology.

You can download a copy of Little Brother at no charge due to its Creative Commons license.

http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/

More and more, I'm feeling like the sci-fi stories we've all been reading for years are becoming less far-fetched as time goes on. I'm not talking about the technology of such stories, but rather the trends of governments and societies towards insane laws that stifle freedom and progress, and which make life worse for all but a few of the citizens.

Cory Doctorow's recent story "I, Robot" comes to mind.

How do these laws keep getting pushed through in the "free world" of democratic governments? Yes, I understand the influence of lobbyists and big business, but still. Is it really too complicated for the average person to understand the significance of these laws? Or do they just not care?

Perhaps it is just a limitation of our systems of government. As a US citizen I hate DMCA-style laws. But I only get one vote for a given office, and I have to find ONE candidate to agree with me not just on DCMA, but on war, health care, economics, and all the other issues. Furthermore, I only get two choices with a realistic shot at victory, and it's likely they've both already been bought by big media.

So what's left to do? I'm asking honestly, how do we work towards change? I'm hoping for something between "angry blog post" and "bloody military coup."

I'm guessing Cory Doctorow might have something to say in regards to Pogue's sentiments.

The link is to the main page for Cory's "Little Brother" which is hitting its 4th week on the bestseller list.

And there is a link to download the eBook right there on the page.

Anyone give this a read? A way to fight back... maybe?

Thought of posting this a few weeks ago re: the tracker tags a Texas school was using, but missed out on a near-top post.

Read it...

http://craphound.com/littlebrother/

I've found several interesting OLDER stories at Wikisource which I found quite enjoyable:

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Sleeper_Awakes
and others by H.G.Wells:
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Author:H._G._Wells

Similarly, you can read classic stuff from Jules Verne. Lots of short stories and such by various authors.

Their index of stuff doesn't seem very complete, but if you search for an author (google "wikisource $AUTHOR"), it seems to work very well.

Other good stories I've read recently:
Little Brother, by Cory Doctorow
http://craphound.com/littlebrother/Cory_Doctorow_-_Little_Brother.htm

The metamorphosis of Prime Intellect (may not be worksafe ;))
http://www.kuro5hin.org/prime-intellect/
(I enjoyed this more than LB, though LB was very engaging as well.)

I agree with *parent*. I just read Corey Doctrow's "little Brother" can we seriously let this kind of thing happen? I have a pair of young daughters. I plan to let them leave school very often. We'll go and do things that are actually educational. If anyone suggests placing my daughters in Prison or placing them under House Arrest for not going to school I will make sure to stock up on Faraday Cage anklets. In fact if you're there in Dallas and you need to circumvent this idiodic "security" try wifi paint on your favorite hangout

http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/

I would recommend this book for how rapidly scary it can get in this day and age. I couldn't put this book down, everything about it screamed "FOR FUCK'S SAKE, IT'S HAPPENING RIGHT NOW!".

If you ever decide to do something as stupid as build an automatic terrorism detector, here's a math lesson you need to learn first. It's called "the paradox of the false positive," and it's a doozy.

Say you have a new disease, called Super-AIDS. Only one in a million people gets Super-AIDS. You develop a test for Super-AIDS that's 99 percent accurate. I mean, 99 percent of the time, it gives the correct result -- true if the subject is infected, and false if the subject is healthy. You give the test to a million people.

One in a million people have Super-AIDS. One in a hundred people that you test will generate a "false positive" -- the test will say he has Super-AIDS even though he doesn't. That's what "99 percent accurate" means: one percent wrong.

What's one percent of one million?

1,000,000/100 = 10,000

One in a million people has Super-AIDS. If you test a million random people, you'll probably only find one case of real Super-AIDS. But your test won't identify one person as having Super-AIDS. It will identify 10,000 people as having it.

Your 99 percent accurate test will perform with 99.99 percent inaccuracy.

That's the paradox of the false positive. When you try to find something really rare, your test's accuracy has to match the rarity of the thing you're looking for. If you're trying to point at a single pixel on your screen, a sharp pencil is a good pointer: the pencil-tip is a lot smaller (more accurate) than the pixels. But a pencil-tip is no good at pointing at a single atom in your screen. For that, you need a pointer -- a test -- that's one atom wide or less at the tip.

This is the paradox of the false positive, and here's how it applies to terrorism:

Terrorists are really rare. In a city of twenty million like New York, there might be one or two terrorists. Maybe ten of them at the outside. 10/20,000,000 = 0.00005 percent. One twenty-thousandth of a percent.

That's pretty rare all right. Now, say you've got some software that can sift through all the bank-records, or toll-pass records, or public transit records, or phone-call records in the city and catch terrorists 99 percent of the time.

In a pool of twenty million people, a 99 percent accurate test will identify two hundred thousand people as being terrorists. But only ten of them are terrorists. To catch ten bad guys, you have to haul in and investigate two hundred thousand innocent people.

Guess what? Terrorism tests aren't anywhere close to 99 percent accurate. More like 60 percent accurate. Even 40 percent accurate, sometimes.

What this all meant was that the Department of Homeland Security had set itself up to fail badly. They were trying to spot incredibly rare events -- a person is a terrorist -- with inaccurate systems.

Is it any wonder we were able to make such a mess?

There's already a few mail reputation systems:

Mail Abuse Prevention System

And there's also a generic checklist for all anti-spam ideas:

Anti-Spam Solutions Checklist

And on that topic, "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" is a novel by Cory Doctorow that has been featured on /. before because it's available as a free download and contains such topics as brain backups and growing new bodies to load them. I found it a fun read.

That's why I named my router "ParasiteNet".

http://craphound.com/someone/download.php

I can connect to four open routers from my home office. I don't stress if my dsl goes down. :-)

Does somebody want to update that Anti-anti-spam form letter doohickey for P2P grievers? I'm not quite savvy enough with internet & P2P protocol to not screw it up (I'm on here for being a MechE, give me a break). This could be done very well and perhaps show some of these otherwise smart people how useless and/or destructive this kind of legislation would be.

Thanks.

Ever seen this list?

http://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt

Please tick the appropriate boxes....