Slashdot Mirror

I am not sure what Anonymous is trying to achieve. They certainly might want to be more specific about their guy... On the other hand, I don't know what they are going to achieve by publishing a list of people's names and addresses. Those are sold in Tepito (black market in Mx City) for 12 000 dollars .
  And who will be in the list? The previous governor of Veracruz? Everyone knows where he lives. The ones with power will just deny everything and "swear for the bible" (by which i mean, pay their way out of it IF they get in trouble), since being on a list is no proof of anything.
As for the drug lords being smart, they don't have to be smart, they just have to be smarter than the authorities (or at least the non-corrupted, "good" authorities, which are fewer), which is totally unlikely. Just look for the use of GT 200 in the Mexican war. And the have to have enough money to buy or kill those who are smarter than them... They are like what becomes of a big evil corporation: not smart people, just a good system (one that has evolved to become better and better). And just like in the US there is lobbying, in Mx there is probably lobbying (from them) to not legalize drugs.
That said, maybe it will be harder to recruit new adepts to the cartels, maybe anonymous will actually eventually cause some economical damage to them (together with a few more deaths). But the drug dealing is a far too complex problem :( to be taken down just from the digital front...

Well, using that convoluted logic the mexican state of Guanajuato declared that effectively, women that had an spontaneous abortion are guilty of murder, even if those women had that spontaneous abortion because they were poor and couldn't afford effective health care. Some of those poor women spent more than 5 years in jail. So, if conservatives are really against all abortions, they surely must be in favor of a quality universal health care and 100% behind preconceptives, no?

Thats' a ratter original view, but without a good general public education system you end without a modern state since education is the basis for a responsible citizenship, a working public health system and the existence of a middle class. The main tension between the public school system and religion comes from its almost inherent secularism and the divergence from religious/custom based knowledge and scientific knowledge. About kids disagreeing with parents and disrespecting gods, thats what kids have been doing at least since ancient summerian times if we trust the oldest written records by humankind.

I'm from Mexico and in my case, thanks to the public education system is that I afforded an education than let me work in IT instead of cleaning up windshields at crossroads. That system was painfully built by heroic teachers that faced execution at the hands of ignorant mobs. Close to the town where I was born is Tabasco, Zacatecas where in 1935 was violently raped, murdered and carved up the teacher Maria Murillo by an extremist catholic gang of Cristeros. Around 200 teachers were murdered in those years, and many more had their noses and ears cut out in the name of God. Despite that they succeeded and thanks to them Mexico made the "mexican economic miracle" of the 1950's-1960's years; if not were by the incredibly corrupt, inept politicians and mexican elite of the last 35 years Mexico could have been like South Korea is today instead of the bloodly mess that currently it is.

According to this. Starbucks has agreed to pay royalties to the mexican government.

This is not true, IFE declared itself incompetent to do give any resolution on this. http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/nacion/168150.html

Please post your news sources for your statement.

Regards.

The outbreak coincided with the President Barack Obama's trip to Mexico City on April 16.

Not really. The trend was noticed on March 18 according to The Globe and Mail and El Universal (in Spanish). "Mid-March" according to the BBC

If I recall correctly you do not need any type of identification to get a prepaid telephone in Mexico. It is just a matter of going to your Telcel shop at the corner of the street (there are more of those than there are cantinas) and buy a chip with "100 pesos tiempo aire".

Funny that they provide a link to the Milenio paper... I believe that "El Universal" ( which has the article here) is better.

Now, for those very paranoid slashdotters, note that one of the reasons they are doing this is because given the lack of such identification records, mobile phones are heavily used in blackmailing.

That happened to my brother once, he was studying in Mexico City and he got a call which went like this:
After the phone rang and he answered a shouting voice said:

"Hey we got your brother, and we will kill him unless you comply with our desires"

After that, a voice in the background of the telephone shouted as if he was the "captured" brother "please please, help me, please don't leave me"

In the "heat" of the moment, my brother shout my name "Pedro, are you ok?" [not my real name of course].

Of course with that information the criminals continued with their tale, telling him that yes they had "Pedro" and they were going to hurt him blah blah...

My brother just hung up the telephone and called my mother (who lives in another state)... Fortunately for us, I have been living *outside* Mexico for the last 5 years... therefore I could not have been trapped in Mexico City...

My brother wrote me an email telling me to ask me to mail back just to be shure I was OK, I called him that afternoon from the UK where I was living then.

There are countless of similar stories with such kind of social engineering. Of course not all the people are as "wise" as us, or they get blackmailed in the middle of some kind of crisis (money, family, etc) where the scenario of a kidnapped relative is very possible.

The issue until now (that the database is started) is that even if you had a caller-id and a number, you could not do anything with it because it would not be registered, or it will be faked. The current registry will require both an valid id (Mexican voting credential which is the national id) and a fingerprint.

Good ol American here. Any good online news sites you can recommend then?
I've been checking out the BBC, but even they are pretty filtered these days...

Try newspaper and news channel websites around the world - of course, there's the issue of translating them :-/

For Mexico, there's Proyecto 40, El Universal and La Cronica (right-wing tendency). La Jornada has a left-wing tendency. (No subscription needed for any of them). Of course, you can translate most of them via Google Language tools.

Google news is also a nice source for news - the key is finding a proxy for the country of your choice to fool Google (just in case of great firewalls) and/or including it in the url. Example:
http://news.google.com/news?ned=es_mx&topic=w gives you world news tailored for Mexico, in spanish.

Hope that helps.