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sure thing butchie, ole pal:

http://abcnews.go.com/Technolo...

http://www.businessinsider.com...

http://www.discourse.net/2011/...

that set of articles refers to michigan, but a device IS out there and you'd think it would be well known by slashies, at this point.

knowing about calea, its not a big stretch to see how this is yet another 'tool' that was given to cops to allow privacy invasions.

and like networking vendors who MUST give backdoors to products or they will not be allowed to move forward in their business - cell phone vendors MUST allow cops to break into your phone if they have one of these magic keys.

I'm really surprised you have not heard of this before.

SMS got switched off for all providers several hours ago: http://www.discourse.net/2011/01/egypt-cuts-internet-access-sms.html

Posted anonymously for legal analysis. The following is my opinion and my opinion only.

Every lay discussion of the orders in this case have gotten it wrong about what happened. The judge did not have second thoughts about granting the injunction. There are two orders, and they are directed at separate parties, even though they are part of the same case.

The first order is the settlement with the registrar. The registrar Dynadot settled with Bank Julius Bear to dismiss any claims BJB may have against it, in return for the permanent injunction that you see there. Dynadot agreed to do, among other things, lock the domain, disable it, preserve all DNS data, and produce all information it has about who registered the hostname and who had access to it.

This permanent injunction, between BJB and Dynadot, is not binding on Wikileaks, because Wikileaks was not a party to it. I think this is the big story here. Essentially Dynadot rolled over and settled with BJB without letting Wikileaks participate in the process or have any say whatsoever. Depending on the terms of its registration agreement, Wikileaks could very well file a complaint against Dynadot for unjustly terminating its service. Be wary of your registrars and internet service providers, because if this stands, they can agree to terminate your service without your involvement.

The second order is a temporary restraining order against Wikileaks, prohibiting them from publishing the documents at issue. They are listed at the end of the order. Unfortunately for BJB, due to the the way Wikileaks is architected, the operators of Wikileaks do not host the documents themselves, nor can they order their removal. Is Wikileaks concerned about any legal consequences? The answer is no. "We design the software, and promote its human rights agenda, but the servers are run by anonymous volunteers." That's why those who run the company have nothing to do in response to the injunction and why the documents are still online. Wikileak's response is due tomorrow Feburary 20th at noon, and the hearing will be on Friday February 29th at 9:00am at 450 Golden Gate Ave., San Francisco, California 94102 at the US Courthouse, so be sure to show up!

we should charge any child who has seen him/herself naked with possesion of kiddie porn.

That reminds of this case where a 15 year old girl was charged with kiddie porn of HERSELF...
I linked the BLOG because the original news story has gone away...:(

BWP

Selfish selection of peers can lead to cliques of clients on the same network. Tit-for-tat has been proven as a highly effective strategy in games resembling the iterated prisoner's dilemna, but it can be defeated when a large enough group of of agents cooperate. This link has more.

The documentary "The Future of Food" is a great place to start.

Here are the first and second ten minutes of it on YouTube. Others are there as well, but these deal specifically with Monsanto and patents (but the whole one and a half hour documentary deals with it as well).

There is plenty other information on the net about Monsanto and their practices.

After seeing the Future of Food and reading up on Monsanto, I no longer buy any of their products or those of their subsidiaries if I can avoid it. They are cornering the market so much in food, seeds, and pesticides that it's hard to avoid. So now I'm trying to avoid pesticides altogether.

The Financial Times (requires subscription) ran an article on this subject on 2nd of August 2005 here

If ordered to do so, mobile telephone operators can also tap any calls, but more significantly they can also remotely install a piece of software on to any handset, without the owner's knowledge, which will activate the microphone even when its owner is not making a call, giving security services the perfect bugging device. "We have inadvertently started carrying our own trackable ID card in the form of the mobile phone," said Sandra Bell, head of the homeland security department at the Royal United Services Institute.

A reference to this FT article can be found here.

Posted by Michael : October 6, 2003 09:44 AM | Discourse.net | Solitude (0) | TechnoLinks

Why I Just Deleted Something From the Comment Section

During the night, someone posted a comment to Slashdot: 'How Were You Fired?' that recounted an interesting personal story about a law firm that lied to its associates as it did economically motivated layoffs, telling the survivors that the departed were cut for quality rather than financial reasons. Eventually the poster him/herself got the chop.

It was a good read, but the poster had second thoughts after hitting the Post button and e-mailed me, asking me please to remove the item. And I just did.

I don't as yet have carefully worked-out policies for how I will deal with issues that may arise in the comments section. But I do know this:

1. I was satisfied in this case that the request to delete came from the actual original poster.
2. I don't consider myself bound by journalistic ethics here, just basic ethics. I am in any case somewhat suspicious of claims of role morality, which I intuit usually do more harm than good. But that is another, deeper pool.
3. I intend that my actions here be guided by considerations of fundamental decency. In this case the poster was worried (incorrectly I think, but that's easy for me to say) that the post might cause harmful consequences if the workplace was ever identified. No particular interest other than saving a readable and interesting item was served by keeping it. The balance seems clear.
4. I think I should disclose when I cut something, and I did so in what's left of the comment.

Similarly, were someone to post a commercial message, or something really vile, I would have little compunction about chopping it. Other than that, I don't have policies yet.

1) Who said anything about Gay Sex?

2) "It's not like the Pentagon ordered people to be "tortured" in Abu Gharib". My experience differed.

3) I wasn't comparing Bush to bin Laden. I was comparing Bush's moral certainty to bin Laden's. Ever since I saw Bush when he returned to the White House on September 11th and said "this is a Crusade", I've believed that his moral certainty could be his undoing.

I was behind him though, until he invaded Iraq. I knew it was a mistake to 'go it alone' (which is what we, the UK, Australia and Poland did essentially -- don't say "You forgot Poland!") with Rumsfeld's War on the Cheap. Alone we open ourselves up to charges of "War for Oil", which, given the fact that the President and Vice President are both from the Oil Industry, is a reasonable charge. The growing violence in Iraq makes it clear that Muslim extremists think we're occupiers. Another charge that's hard to refute given our Firing of Jay Garner. In other words, if we had elections in late 2003, we'd be home by now.

4) You think I'm Michael Moore? Strange, I don't think you're Anne Coulter. Don't you think they're too busy bar-b-queuing babies to post on slashdot??

You might want to stop demonizing people and see that people who don't agree with you aren't 'hippies' or 'filmmakers'. They're just people who love their country and have different ideas. If we listen to each other, we both might learn something.

Found this though it would be good for a laugh. http://discourse.net/archives/2004/09/hey_florida_ have_you_got_the_hint_yet.html

"There is no consistency as to what is acceptable in one region for the ATF that won't be acceptable somewhere else," said Wickman. "The ATF people seem, as a rule, to feel this whole idea of hobby rocketry being regulated by the (government is) a mistake and a waste of time. There's a disconnect between the ATF in Washington and the regional field offices."

What's worse, even though not much has changed about the regulations, they are subject to arbitrary interpretation in the field, said Bundick, of the National Association of Rocketry. "It's a never-ending treadmill to try to pacify the local inspector."

The Justice Department's Nowacki didn't respond to questions about the ATF's perceived inconsistency.

• (1st) free speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion;
  
• (4th) unreasonable searches and seizures;
  
• (5th) freedom from self-incrimination;
  
• (6th) rights to counsel and to a speedy trial
  
• (8th) freedom from cruel and unusual punishments
  
• (9th) rights retained by the people
  
• (10th ) or rights reserved by the States

Why is that great?

would you want to live in the world with the same freedoms of uncivilized times?

9/10/2001 was uncivilized times? In that case, yes! The only way to ensure democracy is transparency in the government, not in the citizenry. I would consider this age of secret trials, secret military tribunals, and illegal captivity without due process to be uncivilized.

I'm still miffed that I lost my freedom to dump toxic waste in drinking water.

I can't believe you really did that. If you did, and when you say "I lost my freedom", I hope that means you're in jail for violating the rights of others. But, what I don't understand is how that relates to the State monitoring your every move in public, and after that's allowed who knows how much longer before they do it in private?

Why can't I take guns on airlines?

Because, unlike guarding your privacy from intrusive government, carrying a lethal weapon can be contributive to intentionally lethal acts? Couple that with the ease in which a single bullet could quickly wipe-out hundreds of lives, on the plane and on the ground, made the argument for a gun-ban on planes that much easier to swallow. Mass murder, as it happens, was illegal pre-9/11.

Why can't I have the freedom to molest young children?

Because you would be violating their rights?

This cameras sounds like a good one. Do people really have an expectation of privacy when they're on public streets?

Not from each other, but from a government proven to abuse the power granted to it by the people at every opportunity. Your unreasonable fear of everything in life (from sudden heart-attacks to skidding in the rain), and incessant need for safety, encroaches upon my liberty to enjoy life without intrusive government. Just behave sensibly and you'll survive as your forefathers did across millions of years simply to produce the unique individual known as *you*. There's no government-monitored camera on you right now, and look you're still breathing!!

I'd love to see national ID's, I don't even understand the privacy argument against it.

The reluctance you don't understand stems from years of documented abuse by what at first appeared to be reasonable (to the population at the time) requests and benign acts by various governments to keep order. The arguments are always the same, as are the results. I don't have to name recent government abuses to you, you know them. We won't even go into the governmental abuses throughout history. To ignore the lessons from the past and think that they won't be repeated is naive. People haven't changed, and it's people in government who abuse their responsibilities and their authority. Most do so without penalty.

It's simple the government needs a way to identify it's citizens.

How does it do it now? Have