Slashdot Mirror

The story has been around for a while and I first read it here. on Dec 29, 03.

I like the way in which the Right can create all the huff, puff, & smoke, but then ridicule it when the same is done to them. And people complaining about this "loss of civil liberties" are going to called by the right as being hysterical and they will get away with it. But why ? Why this inequality ?

• A case in point is the Bush in 30 seconds Videoes at MoveOn.org. Maybe a couple of videos out of 1500 submitted ones had Hitler/Bushe theme. I could see myself doing one like that too. But, then the story got picked up by Fox & Drudge Report and not to mention the RNC And ah, the Wall Street Journal has indignation at the Hitler/Holocaust comparison.
• Fair Enough.
• But on the Other hand "the extremely influential GOP activist and White House insider Grover Norquist" referred to the supposedly specious argument that the estate tax was worth keeping because it really affected only "2 percent of Americans." He went on: "I mean, that's the morality of the Holocaust. 'Well, it's only a small percentage,' you know. I mean, it's not you. It's somebody else." From the transcript, it seems that Gross couldn't believe her ears. "Excuse me," she (the interviewer) interjected. "Excuse me one second. Did you just . . . compare the estate tax with the Holocaust?" ... It's hard to overstate Norquist's importance in contemporary Washington. He is head of Americans for Tax Reform, is an intimate of Karl Rove, the president's chief political aide, and has easy access to the White House. He presides over a weekly meeting of important Republican activists and lobbyists where the agenda -- at least Norquist's -- is to ensure that taxes are reduced to a bare minimum, the government is starved and everyone, the rich and the poor, is taxed the same, which is to say almost not at all.

So, there you go. A President whose actions might have killed thousands (15-20 thousand at least) cannot be compared to Hitler. But the Right can compare impostion of the Estate Tax on the richest 2 % to Hitler and his activities.

Look, at me here while I am talking. Is this fair?

Not true. Federal law prohibits the distribution of obscene material as well. If GTA were to be found "obscene" from the legal standpoint, Rockstar (as well as, perhaps, stores that sell GTA) could be brought up on federal felony charges. Since the threat of terrorism has been solved and the Justice department has nothing better to do, Reichsfurher Ashcroft has already started pursuing his own anti-obscenity agenda. Pretty scary stuff...

12-Year-Old Sued for Music Downloading

Tuesday, September 09, 2003

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.

"I thought it was OK to download music because my mom paid a service fee for it. Out of all people, why did they pick me?"

TheRecording Industry Association of America (search)-- a music-industry lobbying group behind the lawsuits -- couldn't answer that question.

"We are taking each individual on a case-by-case basis," said RIAA spokeswoman Amy Weiss.

Asked if the association knew Brianna was 12 when it decided to sue her, Weiss answered, "We don't have any personal information on any of the individuals."

Brianna's mom, Sylvia Torres, said the lawsuit was "a total shock."

"My daughter was on the verge of tears when she found out about this," Torres said.

The family signed up for theKazaa (search)music-swapping service three months ago, and paid a $29.99 service charge.

Usually, they listen to songs without recording them. "There's a lot of music there, but we just listen to it and let it go," Torres said.

When reporters visited teh apartment last night, Brianna -- who her mom says is an honors student -- was helping her brother with his homework.

Brianna was among 261 people sued for copying thousands of songs via popular Internet file-sharing software -- and thousands more suits could be on the way.

"Nobody likes playing the heavy and having to resort to litigation," said Cary Sherman, the RIAA's president. "But when your product is being regularly stolen, there comes a time when you have to take appropriate action."

At the same time, the RIAA offered amnesty to file-swappers who come forward and agree to stop illegally downloading music over the Internet.

People who already have been sued are not eligible for amnesty.

Brianna and the others sued yesterday under federal copyright law could face penalties of up to $150,000 per song, but the RIAA has already settled some cases for as little as $3,000.

"It's not like we were doing anything illegal," said Torres. "This is a 12-year-old girl, for crying out loud."

12-Year-Old Sued for Music Downloading

Tuesday, September 09, 2003

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.

"I thought it was OK to download music because my mom paid a service fee for it. Out of all people, why did they pick me?"

TheRecording Industry Association of America (search)-- a music-industry lobbying group behind the lawsuits -- couldn't answer that question.

"We are taking each individual on a case-by-case basis," said RIAA spokeswoman Amy Weiss.

Asked if the association knew Brianna was 12 when it decided to sue her, Weiss answered, "We don't have any personal information on any of the individuals."

Brianna's mom, Sylvia Torres, said the lawsuit was "a total shock."

"My daughter was on the verge of tears when she found out about this," Torres said.

The family signed up for theKazaa (search)music-swapping service three months ago, and paid a $29.99 service charge.

Usually, they listen to songs without recording them. "There's a lot of music there, but we just listen to it and let it go," Torres said.

When reporters visited teh apartment last night, Brianna -- who her mom says is an honors student -- was helping her brother with his homework.

Brianna was among 261 people sued for copying thousands of songs via popular Internet file-sharing software -- and thousands more suits could be on the way.

"Nobody likes playing the heavy and having to resort to litigation," said Cary Sherman, the RIAA's president. "But when your product is being regularly stolen, there comes a time when you have to take appropriate action."

At the same time, the RIAA offered amnesty to file-swappers who come forward and agree to stop illegally downloading music over the Internet.

People who already have been sued are not eligible for amnesty.

Brianna and the others sued yesterday under federal copyright law could face penalties of up to $150,000 per song, but the RIAA has already settled some cases for as little as $3,000.

"It's not like we were doing anything illegal," said Torres. "This is a 12-year-old girl, for crying out loud."

> The problem is that they are enabling technologies for what could be very, very evil.

So are many other technologies. But I think it is less the question of what technologies you are employing, but wether you are aware of the risks and what counter-measurements are installed.

The states of the EU have enacted relatively strict privacy-laws. And those requiring a national ID are especially precaucious arbout what data is stored and can be connected with the ID. I think that is the critical part.

> "what if Nazi Germany could have done a SELECT WHERE against a central citizen-unit database?"

Unless they didn't had build up a db storing "religion" and "parents" over two, or three generations back in history, it would not help them much. Not to mention, that your friendly neighbourhood "blockwart" is much more effective.

On a side-note: Stalin let execute several million people based on quota, which had to be fulfilled. The randomness of the murdering was intentional. It fueled the fear among people of each other. A national ID, would not add much to it.

Anyway, I think it boils down who stores, what kind of data, and who else has access to it.
I'd say, an ID, unless it enables one to trace your habits, is not "evil" per se.
In contrast, a database with nation wide profiling information, based on buyed or lend books, diving schools, racial or political is.

An national ID would be a "plus" for Total Information Awareness, but you don't need one to do datamining.

Funny.... I've had reliable keyword recognition since way back in '95 via my P133 and IBM via voice on OS/2 and the Mwave dsp addon board. Keyword isn't that big of a deal (relatively that is) if your selected vocabulary is relatively small. Keyword voice recognition is an almost solved problem and is used often from automated phone systems with amazing accuracy given poor signal quality. The automated collect call system's come to mind as a simple example. I have seen more complicated systems in work which are currently in research and some of the toolkits are open sourced if I'm not mistaken (would have to check to be sure)

As for difficulty.... that's not difficult at all seeing that the goal of the project is to ultimately provide that functionality.

from they're website
"IS-136, IS-95, GSM
A complete cell phone implementation"

All some interested party has to do is take they're freely available cell phone friendly code when it comes up make some modifications so that the signal is piped through a keyword recognizer instead of the speakers and poof... Its not as hard as you claim when sooo many people are willing to give you what you need.

"It would cost a lot more than $14K to do this over 100 channels."

As for cost, first of all I was using fictitious numbers as I stated... but seeing that you've brought up cost as unrealistic... I'll bring more realistic number and now overestimate. First, the paper associated with the article states that a dual 2Ghz machine could handle upto 32 GMS channels.. so.. lets see... lets say it costs $100 (which is probably being conservative) in Radio shack hardware to make the hardware to support 1 channel seeing that they say it only requires fairly inexpensive hardware... that's 3200 for 32 channels. Now add an overpriced Dell dual CPU server @ 3,444. now to get 96 channels it would cost you $19,932. Now, the average person could dig up a dual machine for less than 2000 with similar spec (minus scsi)... so realistically.... It be more like $15,600 which isn't that far off from my original $14k fictitious guess.

"Now targeted scanning could be a problem, but then maybe I can get my freaking cellular provider to turn on basic GSM encryption (phone supports it but none of the cell sites in the US do AFAIK)."

Unfortunately encryption won't end up being much of a stopping stone. It however will probably be the hardest part to deal with. There's a couple of ways that could be thwarted. 1. with so many distributed system for encryption breaking, a brute force could be used, not elegant... but hey... it works... 2. social engineering could be used to gain access to the information... Its certainly not the first time that a provider's phone password has popped up on the net. 3. if the original purpose of the system trickles down to the cellphone/pda... then you could simply walk up to your service provider and ask them to set it up, and voila you know have the encryption key.

I could keep circumventing different ideas all night.... And that's what's scary... cell phone scanners currently exist but are really pricey. Adding the cost of one sc

This looks like it could be the original source.

I'm don't know what you searched under, but Google returns these results.

Some others have picked up on it, there are some loose translations, but no real original articles. No pictures either.

Yeah, this looks a little vaporous. I hope not,the technology is certainly feasible, but I'm a little skeptical of uncorroborated articles in national chinese news sites. The japanese, however, have a robot that looks promising.

Paul did write it long ago. He also wrote (a now very dated) article on cgi security tips which is referenced on page 671 of O'Reilly's "Perl Cookbook". Drink me. A while back I noticed the link was dead and set up a redirect for him at Go2Net, but I was laid off recently and the Go2Net site will go down around March...so, let's hear it for more dead links published in popular books! Hooray!

Somebody mod the parent up. Score:3 Informative would be a fine result, or Funny.

Besides being in rather incredible accordance with the context of this article, such -official- oddities as the two linked Google hacks simply require more attention than being scored at 2.

It harkens back to a day when people actually had fun with their Net-centric job.

The Google bits are a living legend, from an expired era when corporate mentalities were considered prudish and people were just getting used to the idea of wearing jeans to the office, right there to be consumed and enjoyed. Let them be seen.

I remember a lot of web sites that were derided as complete garbage - the ones that first showed live motion video, or message boards, or animations, etc.

I've been following the useless pages for years now. It captures the spirit of the net far better than a dozen Gartner analysts thrown in a bin. Check out the history, and all the old stuff. I wish someone would archive all these things that are REALLY important, before they disappear.

The first popular use of printing was to cater to porn or astrology. It's pathetic the way mainstream media journalists heap scorn on new things appearing on the net, and then desperately try to catch on and "get it".

Save it before it goes.

w/m

See this quote for an old take on the uselessness of knowing pi to the 100th decimal place. Still, my mind occasionally reels at the implications of an irrational relationship between fundamental concepts such as the circumference of a circle and its diameter. But I'm easily reeled.

The Internet Archive has been doing this for several years now. There was a scientific amer. article on this.

This is a very good idea, but frankly, I've found the Useless pages to be the best chronicle of the web. Everything, from the ate my balls pages, to the first spam sites, to the first annoying business pages, are listed in their raw earnest early form.

As for the aussie site, it suffers from the same disease as any govt. funded site - official seriousness. The most interesting and popular stuff on the net is not the crap put on the web by govt. commissions, but the output of real people. But this is all explained right on Pandora's site:

"At the beginning of 1996, before the PANDORA Project was formally set up, the Selection Committee on Online Australian Publications (SCOAP) developed selection guidelines"

The incredibly long and boring selection guidelines reveal that the SCOAP is out of touch with what the net's all about.

"4.1.1 To be selected for national preservation, a significant proportion of a work should

be written by an Australian(11) of recognised authority and constitute a contribution to international knowledge"

Yeah, that takes a realistic snapshot of what the web is like.

That says a lot - 4 yrs of committee work, and not much to show for it. Just goes to prove the govt. should stay out of anything to do with the net, including archiving it for historic reasons.

w/m

According to this article (c. 1995), Hiroyuki Goto, 21, captured the world record, reciting Pi to over 42,000 decimal places.
I found it linked to from http://www.cecm.sfu.ca/PI/.

http://www.go2net.com/int ernet/useless/useless/mahir.html

My opinion on this claim of Mahir's is that he's trying to backpedal after all the attention he got. He's trying to say his page is his, but that someone else pirated his site to write 'I like sex'. Yeah right. Mind you, when a million people are looking at your embarrassing little web space, you're bound to deny it en masse.

First it was the 'Mr. T Ate my Balls' pages spinoffs, then the dancing baby, then the dancing hamsters. Mahir sounds like a misguided, naive man trying to look for love in all the wrong places, but the users themselves who buy into this and start fan clubs are just your run-of-the-mill idiots who not only flog a dead horse but make sure they run over it with a steamroller.

And the media who buy into it and give it more publicity (and I'm sorry to see Slashdot join the fray) are just spoon-feeding the masses with the filling junk news they wish for.

So now we're going to Slashdot Mahir as well?

"The wages of sin is death but so is the salary of virtue, and at least the evil get to go home early on Fridays."

However, when I'm unsure of the exact terms to use for a search, or have to experiment to find the right search terms, I still get better results using a ranked metasearch - the best I've found is MetaCrawler.

When I put up my first pages, I submitted them to the search engines, waited a few days, searched on my name and got pages and pages of junk. I did a new page, on people with the same name as me, figuring that would get me into the running. Nothing.

So where are my hits coming from? Well, go to MetaCrawler and search for scuba, pictures, women. That gets you pictures of me with various celebrities (none underwater) along with a mix of dive sites, scuba porn sites and the charming pages of www.whitesonly.org.

I use MetaCrawler. I don't see how any search engine can compete with a parasitic approach like MetaCrawler. Maybe you loose the ability to construct nuanced expressions, but for basic searches its great. And MetaCrawler's ability to collate and merge duplicates makes it far better (and only marginally slower) than MegaCrawler.