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Stupid Censorship, Stupid Security
The
2003 Jefferson Muzzle
"winners" are out. This year's crop starts with John Ashcroft and the U.S. Congress, and works its way down through the school board that voted to put Harry Potter on the restricted shelf. Innovation in censorship deserves recognition, read and enjoy. And in other stupid news,
the winners of the
Stupid Security Competition
have been announced. I like that I'm being protected from tea. It makes me feel safe.
Slashdot should get an award for "innovation in censorship" for its moderation system that (usually) succeeds in blocking posts like the parent from being seen by most people.
was a porn filter in the library of the university of Essex. But they did it bad and the university homepage become filtered
Most Annoyingly Stupid Award
Wrong... It should be awarded to this guy, when explaining the security in Iraq.
</joke>
--
Error 500: Internal sig error
the problem with censoring data is that - if you aim to remove access to offending data - there is no end to it. there will always be people who get offended at anything.
for example the harry potter book burning event was just plain stupid. it is just a kids story (good though) and if your belief system is so fragile that you have to protect it by removing access to all data that you find not suitable, you have a problem.
in my experience if people prevent other people asking questions, than that means that that you are not too sure about your answers to those questions.
int.
Ned: And Harry Potter... and all his wizard friends... went STRAIGHT to hell for practicing witchcraft!
Todd: Yay!
One of my favorite saying is "Information is not bad, it is the is the holding of information that is bad". The idea that you are protecting a child from harm it unfounded. The only reason Censorship is around is cuz of Right Wing, conservatives are afraid of change. God forbid a child read a book about a kid who can make things float. Censorship is really about control, someone had decided that an idea should not be shared with other people and thus they take it upon them selves to control that idea. An idea could be anything, a book, a word, a movie, etc,. I am a firm believer that Censorship in any form is bad and hinders creativity. The DMCA is one of the biggest acts of Censorship I've ever seen. "NOPE! This here DMCA cays you can't publish that report about anti-copy protection!" common guys, step out of the box for a sec and look at with relevance Censorship has. and i'll tell you, it has none
Google doesn't index user sigs, so stop trying to "Google Bomb" with them.
if I am not mistaken, our government is our fellow man, atleast here in the USA.
Great Linux Site
It is interesting how many educational institutions get the award. Maybe they will finally learn something.
...is actually very good, espesially with a teaspoon of honey.
Having read thru a lot of the article, I must say that there is one thing that strikes me; the 'security measures' seems to have been dreamt up by someone in an office, written down by someone who's mind is on other things, and implied by people without the faintest idea of what the first person really meant.
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
Geez, then where do they put books like American Psycho (Bret Easton Ellis) ? On the secret underground cellar police-protected shelf ? In the porn section ?
theefer
from the Ashcroft article:
"Allowing $8,000 in tax dollars to be spent on drapes to conceal two semi-nude statues that often appeared behind the attorney general during press conferences in the Great Hall of the Department of Justice. Ironically, the two statues represent "The Spirit of Justice" and "The Majesty of Law."
Ironic indeed, in fact most telling.
Ashcroft in his post 9/11 reign of the DOJ has done more to hide the doings of the DOJ and execution of it's commandments from the public than any other Attorney General in our nations history.
Being that he is the mind behind "secret search warrants", "secret evidence" and "secret imprisonment", it is quite fitting that he display this by making the representitive figures of his office "secret" as well.
The Censor sits
Somewhere between
The scenes to be seen
And the television sets
With his scissor purpose poised
Watching the human stuff
That will sizzle through
The magic wires
And light up
Like welding shops
The ho-hum rooms of America
And with a kindergarten
Arts and crafts concept
Of moral responsibility
Snips out
The rough talk
The unpopular opinion
Or anything with teeth
And renders
A pattern of ideas
Full of holes
A doily
For your mind
Mason Williams
The Mason Williams Reading Matter, Doubleday & Company, New York, 1964
FreeSpeech.org
Do the rest of us a favor who do not see an FBI agent around every corner, stop calling every administrative attempt to restrict a display of objectional art to children censorship.
Whether this organization agrees with it or not parents and citizens have a right to restict objectional art from being displayed using publicly funded means, every bit as much as the artists have in producing then getting publishers to distribute and/or display their garbage.
Dawn of the Dead
How about linking to awards from opinionjournal.com or nationalreview.com?? Oh, its because it doesn't fit with your political biases and would actually serve to get both sides of the story.
You could of linked to their awards just now. Browsing the front pages of those two sites, I see no awards. Could you find the links?
Is there some kind of a Moore's law for Censorship? Something like "For every disgusting act of censorship, in 12 to 18 months there will be one twice as disgusting?"
some other thoughts:
People who are easily offended deserve to be... a lot!
The real war against liberty for all.
Can someone explain how this example constitutes censorship? From what I read, this incident was completely blown out of proportion. It wasn't because he wanted to cover up the statues, it was to provide a better backdrop for the cameras.
Using this as an example of "censorship" or to say that free expression has been muzzled is a little dubious. It puts the whole list into question of the motives and partisanship behind making it.
But of course it makes slashdot because it fits with their worldview.
SIG:Slashdot: indymedia for nerds.
...a certain online service implemented filters in its user registration process. People with last names like Petit or Snodgrass, and people who lived in cities with names like Scunthorpe or Middlesex, were prohibited from signing up for the service! The filters are implemented elsewhere too, one of AOL's remote employees couldn't enter his last name, Kuntz, into his online profile. Way to lose revenue.
Rev. Lovejoy: I've got to go and burn some Harry Potter books before children discover the joy of reading.
Or are you thinking at all? What the heck do you think censorship is except filtering? Jazus keerist, when the public institution makes the decision on what can be seen and what can't, that is censorship.
What looney bin do you pull your definitions from?
Infuriate left and right
Is ironic that most of the measures assumed that the terrorist are dumb and use always the same method or container for what they will do, not changing a bit their habits (puting bombs in backpacks instead of big, uncontrolled bags?) showing that the real dumbs are in the controlling points, and that the more effective measure of terrorism is letting the same dumb people to do his job, with that is enough.
My school's filter has blocked the Muzzle Awards under the category of "Pornographic and Recreational Nudity"! -Joe
did anyone else notice that there were a disproportionate number of awards going to institutions of learning? namely, school districts including middle schools and high schools?
i don't know about anyone else, but this is a scary proposition for me. schools trying to prohibit the dissemination of information about different cultures and schools of thought speaks volumes about the types of people that are educating our young people. if i let my kids in the future go through a given school system, i want availble to them a variety of vantage points, not just the "right one" as prescribed by the administration.
Help! Help! I'm bein' repressed!
All censorships exist to prevent any one from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions...
:) The rest of the quote reads: ...All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently, the first condition of progress is the removal of censorships. -George Bernard Shaw
Didn't say it was it was a very good purpose...
Amen.
On a similar note, I'd like to cite the Bill of No Rights, Article II:
You do not have the right to never be offended. This country is based on freedom, and that means freedom for everyone - not just you! You may leave the room, turn the channel, express a different opinion, etc., but the world is full of idiots, and probably always will be.
=Smidge=
The Johns Hopkins University here in Baltimore, MD views itself as a potential "soft target" for terrorists, due to its being a high-profile educational institution.
Since February, Hopkins has had a van parked in front of 34th street to keep terrorists from blowing up the freshman dorms with a car bomb.
Presumably this was done to pre-emptively quell the fears of parents who might think JHU wasn't doing enough to keep their kids safe. Nevermind that the side streets allow terrorists equal access to the dorms, that the freshman dorms probably aren't high on Osama's list of Baltimore targets, and that the number of people in the world who knew Hopkins was anything but a hospital can be counted on one hand.
Otherwise a harmless gesture of stupidity, aside from the fact that 34th Street is a free parking zone with about 20 spaces. Its closing has created a major parking shortage in the entire University area. For those of us that actually have to deal with it on a daily basis, this is more than just whining- this is a true inconvenience.
Stupid.
Intercarve Networks, LLC
While the baby milk incident at an airport is well known I feel other airport incidents deserve honorable mention as well.
Like... The decorated World War Two veteran who was told he would not be able to take his Medal of Honor on the plane due to the pin on it. There was also a small pen knife with the set. When he asked if they could mail it to him he was told no. When he asked what would be done with it he was it would "probably be thrown away."
And here's one you see on the news now and then but never, ever makes the news in the way it should... Someone gets through security at an airport terminal in a way they should not. No one ever thinks of using the video cameras all over the airport to track them down, to see if they did anything suspicious. Oh no. Much easier to empty the entire terminal out so that everyone who was spread out all over the terminal is now crowded into the street and sidewalk in front of the terminal.
None of the people doing security ever seem to think of the great risk this exposes those people to when they are forced to congregate in an open area much more tightly packed than they had been in the terminal. None of the security personnel have ever considered that this might be an excellent way to initiate a terrorist attack.
(DISCLAIMER - Any terrorist with half a brain has probably thought of these or variations thereof so my discussing them here is not giving them any ideas. Maybe this will cause some security person who stumbles on this to start thinking seriously about how stupid this "empty the terminal to secure it" policy is.)
Recipie for Mass casualties:
Precipitate an incident at an airport terminal that you know will cause the security personnel to herd all of the people in the terminal outside where they are easy to get at and densely packed to boot. (If you pay any attention to the world at all you must have seen scenes like this on your TV when such an overreaction occurs locally.)
Possibilities to cause mass casualties include:
Set off a car bomb. Set off several if you can manage it. Can't park one? Well drive one into the crowd and detonate it. Couple of guys in security uniforms telling you that "You can't drive your car in there?" Shoot them and drive where you like.
Fire on the crowd with automatic weapons. Two or three people with assault rifles could cause hundreds of casualties in under a minute given the rate of fire of the weapons and the density of the targets. Full metal jacketed rounds can even penetrate one target and enter and possibly penetrate another multiplying the effectiveness of the attack. If a belt-fed weapon can be used that's even better. No need to stop and reload and probably a higher cyclic rate that will yield even better results.
Rocket-propelled grenade launcher into.. you guessed it... the crowd. Can even be mixed in along with the automatic weapons fire.
Chemicals. Whether these are chemical weapons specifically or simply highly poisonous or corrosive laboratory supplies, great effectiveness is possible. Combine with explosives or automatic weapons fire for improved results.
I'm sure there are other possibilities but the above and combinations of the above would be quite effective in achieving mass casualties. Why would any terrorist need to look further when so many simple but effective and quite realistically doable ways spring to mind.
Hopefully some airport security personnel will see this and bring it to the attention of someone with enough insight to see that the old "Herd them out" routine is not really sensible these days.
I like that I'm being protected from tea. It makes me feel safe.
Read the article. They stopped an airplane passenger because he was carrying a box of gunpowder tea. After some investigating and discussing, they decided he could, in fact, carry the tea, but they had to impound the box with the evil word "gunpowder". So, they transferred the tea to a plastic bag, after which the passenger proceded to the plane.
So, no, they're not protecting you. They let the gunpowder tea onboard, those incompetent fools! What next? Bazooka Joe gum?
I'm telling you, what we need is more restrictions. I'm glad these gentlemen got the recognition they so richly deserve.
Others because they just don't care.
I looked through the Jefferson Muzzles an the one thing that struck me was that the damn things keep repeating. Its the same things that have been going on for ever before the awards for started.
The scenario is always the same some small or petty elected/appointed official decides what the hell I am going to do this anyway. Its not that they don't know whats gone before. Its not that they don't understand. Theyre just assholes and theres no good way to make certain that the pain they cause others gets back to them in a timely fashion.
It's not just government, its any organization that thinks its managed to achieve a level of insulation. You can put in your favorite (Phone Co., Power Co., Cable Co. (often the best purchase a political contribution can buy), Microsoft, legacy app vendor ).
well, in our government's defense (this time), those curtains were bought to hide the breasts simply to stop the press from acting like 5th graders trying to get politicians into a shot with the breast. if you see the actual setting, the statue would hardly be seen from a normal point of view, but photographers would go out of their way to include them in a shot.
mechanicos ergo cogito
A rant about it
The RAVE act basically means, if there are any drugs on your property, no matter whether they belong to someone else or whether you knew about it, are your responsibility, and your property may be forfeit and you can be subject to a ludicrous fine.
The full text of the law.
A.C. for obvious reasons.
In 2001 I was interning as a system/network administrator for a publishing house (hint: textbooks). It was (alas) a mostly NT shop for the typists, editors, etc. "grunt workers." The graphics and design teams were mostly using Macs. We had an NT box with 5 30 gig drives serving as a file server.
One of the C-level pointy hairs must have logged into the file server one day and realized that most of the space was used up. He sent a memo to our department (Technical Operations) saying how he found a large number of TIF, EPS, and PSD files on the drives taking up "inordinate amounts" of space and that they need to be deleted immediately. I kid you not. Dunno whether he thought they were horrific pirate music files or what, but they were taking up space so by god they needed to go.
My manager printed out a copy of the memo, handed it to me, smiling, and said "write a batch file to do what he wants." I did. Ten minutes later, the fileserver had about 80 gigs more storage space.
All of us on the floor laughed our asses off most of the day.
The night shift spent most of their time restoring backups (fortunately most of the artsy folks had their own backups as well) cursing us for carring out the order.
The C-level never contacted TechOps again.
Just one example: San Fransisco's subway system BART is criticized for closing their public restrooms. In Washington DC the subway systems was designed 20 years or so ago without public restrooms in the first place. It is in fact hard to find a spot in the DC subway system where you are not under the watchfull eye of a video camera, all being monitored by at least one attendant visible to the public (I think the feeds go to a central location as well). Since they don't put subway stops in deserted parts of the city, this is hardly a major inconvenience. You simply visit a public restroom before you enter the station.
I can't think of any security measures anywhere that don't have at least one of the following problems:
The awards seem to include examples of all three. When I have talked to people who complain about various security measures I try to come up with scenarios that would justify the specific measure that they are complaining about. I can almost always get them to say "Oh, I never thought of that."
In a perfect world we would do this experiment: Every city would have TWO airports. One with the current mix of inconvenient, invasive, and imperfect security checks, the other with only the most cursory check in place (like US Airports in the 50's). Pilots, passengers and employees would use/work at the airport of their own choosing. There would probably be significant cost savings associated with having little or no security measures in place, so that airport could use lower costs as an incentive too.
I'd love to see the long-term results.
Huh? At least 60% of the "awards" are to liberal groups or individuals making asses of themselves. Such as throwing out right-wing newspapers on school campuses, or attacking a student's right of free speech because they said something religious. Yes the big awards go to the government, which happens to be Republican right now, but Democrats in power would get the big awards too.
I think they refused the passenger to take the foil with 'gunpowder' written on it on board because he might fake a bottle of actual gunpowder and threaten to blow it up in the plane. This is why no toy-weapons are alowed on board, too.
Just my idea.
Another possible option is Gentoo Linux. Gentoo makes it easy to circumvent censorship by compiling directly from the source, so that the programs you run are optimized for the platform they run upon. It's very difficult to censor, say, a movie, if the DVD player that's playing it has support for MMX and was compiled using -funroll-loops.
photographers would go out of their way to include them in a shot.
Only because the polititians were tits to begin with.
The fact of any security measure being not 100% effective is the critical one, and completely vitiates most procedures. You may be able to rationalize a scenario that explains a procedure. But the low occurance of the feared scenario, coupled with the imperfections often make the system with the new procedure work worse than the old.
Since terrorism happens so infrequently, we can't tell if terrorist acts have decreased, increased, or stayed the same since any new tightened procedures have been implemented, or even since 9/11/01. Looking at it the other from the other side, more arduous security measures are a definite good for those who are paid to implement them, and we should be suspicious that their $100000/unit, less than perfect security system isn't truly any more effective than rolling dice.
As an example, suppose 1 person in 1000000 tries to smuggle a bomb detectable by those ion scanners in airports, and those scanners have a 95% detection rate and a 1% false alarm rate. With 200 million passengers/month (http://www.atwonline.com/stats_top25.cfm), 10 bombs will be completely undetected, the device will trigger 2000190 times, causing the screenings to be useless 99.9905% of the time, and hoping that the further screening will pick up the 0.01%. Maybe the time and effort doing the useless screenings would be better as guard service on the flights, or on combat training for the crew.
You can juke around with the numbers some, but there's always a tradeoff between the sensitivity and the false alarm rate of any test.
Terrorist acts are so low frequency, that using an imperfect system to counteract them is a waste of money and effort. Gains that you would expect from a system are mostly lost in the wasted effort in false alarms, and the effort might be better directed elsewhere.
Me? I want to carry my Visor Edge stylus on the plane so I can poke the eye of a box-toting hijacker, like brave Swiss Army penknife, fingernail clipper, and knitting needle toting passengers on flight 93. Rationalizing useless security procedures is counterproductive.
There's nothing more fundamental to the concepts of Liberty and Freedom than conformism.... not.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
I think the thing with disposeable lighters being allowed and refillable ones not is that you could fill the lighter with something other than lighter fuel, but it's still stupid because they let you on with bottled drinks even if they're opened already.
graspee
> those curtains were bought to hide the breasts
> simply to stop the press from acting like 5th
> graders trying to get politicians into a shot
> with the breast. if you see the actual setting,
> the statue would hardly be seen from a normal
> point of view, but photographers would go out of
> their way to include them in a shot.
I've seen this written a couple of times on Slashdot. Do you have any proof of this?
It doesn't make sense to me, because I can't imagine an editor of a major newsagency allowing hundreds of photos to be shown with the same pair of statue's breasts in them. So why would professional photographers go out of their way to immaturely compose their pictures that won't get printed anyway. I mean, it's not like the breasts improve the photo's newsworthyness.
I guess you could use the same justification to censor the war photos: "We got rid of this whole free speech thing because people started acting like a bunch of fifth graders, you know showing pictures of injured civilians and stuff."
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
The devil is usually in the details, though. Let me provide some examples of stupid airport security (and contrast to good security examples).
1: Flew to Ecuador-- in Newark, out JFK. The terminal in JFK had the ticket counters in the same physical space as the gates *with no possibility&* of a wall or checkpoint between. Thus,the security checkpoint had to be before you get to the ticket counter, and every piece of luggage must be assumed to be a carry-on (you cannot have a knife in your checked luggage).
Compare with Singapore where every gate has a security checkpoint, and the gate waiting area is opened just before the plane is ready to board.
2: In Sea-Tac airport, even international travelers are *not* allowed to lock thier luggage (which could be tampered with, or stolen once outside the US) because the TSA must have the ability to search any bag.
Compare to Jakarta where every bag is x-rayed and if necessary searched *before* it is checked. Ususally they are also sealed by the airline or by security personnel to prevent further tampering.
I guess it is true that we in the US have never faced a threat like we do now, unlike many other parts of the world, so we are having to learn many things the hard way. I just wish the government would take a look at how other countries solve the problem and use that as a starting point rather than assume that nobody else has had to deal with these issues.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I have noticed lately that there are very concerted attempts from both the radical left and extreme right wings to limit speech that they find offensive. It is very troubling. The lefties want to limit "offensive" speech- like Mark Twain- , and the right wing-nuts want to ban BAD things like NUDITY.
I think both of these extreme groups need to take a breather. How about READING Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. The "nigger" Jim was the most noble and compassionate character. Even as an opressed slave man, he showed that his humanity remained with him. He was the earliest black character to portray true nobility. Sure, he was uneducated and ignorant of many things, but his character was unselfish and kind. Can no-one spot the irony of someone like Jim being called "the nigger" by even his closest friends?
And realistically, I have two young sons, and I object more to the gratuitous and unrealistic violence on television than nudity. Nudity is part of human existence and is almost never offensive. (okay, the nudity in "1984" offended me). I would trade 50% of the violence for 300% more nudity if humans must be titillated in order to watch TV.
Just remember, folks, the PC crowd and the Religious Right may disagree on what should be banned and why, but they're basically identical personalities, believing themselves to know best for OUR kids.
I am Canadian, and live in Toronto. I used to sail over to the US to visit their friendly towns, but I stopped a few years ago because of their weird customs rules. If they decide your I68 form is not in order, your boat will be impounded. Due to their zero-tolerance drug laws, if an immigration officer decides that there is even one speck of marijuana on your boat, your boat will be impounded. I am NOT a pot user, btw.
This is a disturbing trend I heard more and more often during the Drug War (which continues to rage unabated), but especially since 9/11- people from countries like Canada and Great Britain are cancelling trips to the U.S. because they are scared to come here. With all the loud and apologetic rhetoric about how "rights are only for citizens" (which any lawyer can tell you is bullshit), can you blame them? If I weren't a U.S. citizen I'd be nervous to come here too given the scary shit I've been seeing enter the conventional wisdom. I've never seen a level of nationalism and xenophobia like I'm seeing now.
This country likes to shoot its collective mouth off about its "freedoms", and it slathers the words "freedom" and "liberty" through its propaganda. Just look at the obnoxious names we give to things like Operation Iraqi Freedom. Even a few years ago it would have gotten a sensible name like Operation Desert Storm or Operation Desert Fox. Our naming of military operations has become perfused with propaganda- Operation Restore Hope, and now Operation Iraqi Freedom which just sounds creepily dishonest. We have made no secret of the fact that these are freedoms for us, not for you in the rest of the world. And while we like the idea of democracy taking root in foreign lands, it better not get in the way of cheap gas here or something has to be done about it. We have no problems with our government undermining or overthrowing democratically elected governments, or propping up repressive regimes. That stuff happens in countries we know or care nothing about and 90% of us couldn't place them on a map to save our lives anyway.
Except that the freedom that Americans lecture the world about is really like the royalty in Britain- sort of there for show, functioning as a crowd-pleaser, but with no solid or meaningful foundation underneath it. The Queen has meaningless rights that have mere ceremonial value, and as an American citizen, so do you! The reaction to one day of hijackings has revealed that much. When it comes time to put up or shut up, and actually honor these inalienable rights that we brag about, we're really clever at coming up with various excuses for denying them. Ironically, we often do this by dreaming up new contervailing powers for the state, phrased as if they're rights enjoyed by individuals- like the "right not to be killed in a terrorist attack" or the "right to protect our flag from desecration". The British may be a little pretentious with their own cultural fiction, but at least they're not as hypocritical.
This "freedom fries" talk can't be helping, either. Here it's just funny, but I just can't believe that nobody overseas is hearing the words "freedom fries" and questioning the wisdom of their investments here.
Americans are stupidly digging their own grave. If it means they might never have to start an uncomfortable conversation with their children about pot, the idiots will watch contentedly as thousands of people's lives are ruined in prison and Canadians (i.e. foreigners) have their boats confiscated with no due process. Then when the country has succeeded in scaring all foreign investment away and sinks into a depression, we'll just pin the blame on France (or whatever other representative of the civilized world has gotten in our way most recently). We're so wonderful, that if the world thinks we've lost our minds, it must be someone else's fault.