Slashdot Mirror
Ian Clarke and Freenet in the Crosshairs
EMIce writes "John Markoff of the New York Times writes of Ian, "Though he says his aim is political - helping dissidents in countries where computer traffic is monitored by the government, for example - Mr. Clarke is open about his disdain for copyright laws, asserting that his technology would produce a world in which all information is freely shared. ... Now, however, Mr. Clarke is taking a fresh approach, stating that his goal is to protect political opponents of repressive regimes." Wasn't freenet originally about dissent? Mr. Markoff appears to be re-writing a history that he probably only knows through a handful of lexis-nexis searches." Update: 08/01 18:32 GMT by T : Ian Clarke wrote to point out his comment posted to the story which lays out the actual subject of his Defcon talk.
"The classic use for Freenet would be for a group of political dissidents in China, or even in the United States."
Yeah.
Because the United States and China are so similar when it comes to oppressing free speech and jailing political dissidents. It's clearly impossible in the US to criticize the government, or even have imagery of the president with a bullet hole in his head on the tob banner of your web site.
If anyone can give actual provable examples of the US government abridging Constitutionally protected free speech, I'd love to hear it.
(Note: traveling to Afghanistan, training in Taliban camps, and planning to blow up buildings in downtown Chicago with radiological dirty bombs is not "free speech".)
If you're looking for trampling of free speech, you needn't look to the government; you need only look no further than our own academic institutions.
Don't we already know John Markoff's tactics all too well?
Mr. Clarke is taking a fresh approach, stating that his goal is to protect political opponents of repressive regimes." Wasn't freenet originally about dissent?
Isn't that exactly what protecting dissent is? A very common definition of the word is someone who disagrees with the reigning government in their country. So I don't see this sudden change of motive that is being implied here.
i am a soviet space shuttle
Hm. Back to the old "Political Dissent" angle.
Yeah.
John Markoff writes an innuendo-laden attack piece on someone who created a piece of security-related software and thinly disguises it as "news". ...and you're surprised?
It's too late for that, the internet is designed to not being able to be shut down...
John Markoff is a hack who will write anything that will get him published. Now that Mitnick's out he's trying to find a new source of revenue - that means attacking anyone operating "in the grey."
Remember in Takedown when Mitnick beat up Shimomura? I'll bet that we'll be seeing a best-selling novel by Markoff in which Clarke is a heroin-dealing child pornographer. Just give it time.
The US Army: promoting democracy through unquestioned obedience
..actually get this thing to work?
Last few times I tried it I could never get it to REALLY connect, just spurts, an image here, an image there.
They talked about Usenet in the article. The fact is that Usenet news is still very much alive and there are tons of copyrighted material floating around on it. There's also lots of legitimately published stuff too. Does anyone know of any efforts by RIAA and others to shut it down? ISP's have been carrying the alt.binaries.* groups for as long as I can remember. Have there been any legal challenges to that?
You got any karma man? I really neeed it. Just a little hit! Come on!
That may indeed be up for review. For before we decide whether Child Porn is free speech, we have to decide what CP is. Anyone under 18 engaging in sexual activity? Does that activity include kissing? Hugging? Fondling? Dancing?
Is a picture of a naked child CP? How about a topless 17 year old? How about a girl in a wet t-shirt?
There is some material that is obviously easy to classify as CP. However, there is a great deal of matter that is questionable. Considering the penalties and hysteria involved, the question of CP as free speech may not be as easy to answer as you think.
In order to accurately discuss Scientology you need access to documents they claim are copyrighted and sell only at extornist prices. Open informed discussion brings lawsuits.
Yet free speech via Freenet brings charges that it is just a method used to violate copyrights.
How do you reconcile these two, divergent views?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Truth is, the U.S. is probably locked down a bit tighter than China these days. Does China have one of these? Through Echelon and the Patriot act, you can say the wrong thing and have nice black suits show up within 24 hours to take you away without a warrant, hold you indefinitely without a trial and completely ignore any constitutionaly protected rights you think you might have.
That is America today and some people are not so happy about it. People like Ian are sticking their necks out and being good Americans. You aren't trying to tell us he's not a PATRIOT are you?
It is your personal duty to fight for what is right on a daily basis. Ignoring injustice is identical to approving
Whenever freenet pops up in any discussion, there are two points discussed.
* Child porn
* Political propoganda
These are two of the untouchable evils that are used to condemn Freenet. The rest of the world really doesn't see the point of an organized data store distributed accross machines based on constancy of use.
After all, political dissidents are an essential measure of the health of a country. One with too little or too much of those indicate either fascism or anarchy. Democracy essentially says that the minorities shall not get what they want (ie the minority is defined as people who voted for something other than the majority) - it should technically have some disgruntled citizens. If you believe otherwise, please stop buying more shiny things.
Anyway, like I like to say "Technology is a sword, both sides use and misuse it". And the essential sarcastic comment about "Freenet can be used for terrorist communications".
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
Mr. Markoff appears to be re-writing a history that he probably only knows through a handful of lexis-nexis searches.
Slashdotters, in turn, appear to comment on the story they probably only know through reading the headline or the submitted blurb.
- shadowmatter
Wow, how did I know that I'd be treated to a post like the parents after reading the article...
First off, he did in no way compare the US and China. All he did was state the obvious (from his point of view anyway), that a technology like freenet can protect free speech wherever necessary.
Now I think we would all agree that it is necessary in China, but how saying that it would also protect free speech in the US, when and if necessary can be constructed to mean US==China is beyond me.
You'll probably have to be a neocon ideologue getting your worldview from far right wing websites like the one the parent link to, to "misunderstand" the quoted sentence in this way.
And btw., maybe you should read up on some US history. A google search for McCarthy or J. Edgar Hoover might provide you with some clues.
"So anyone have any anecdotal examples of were Freenet has actually helped any Dissidents?"
That's a tough one, since the absence of evidence is the entire point of the system.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
This article doesn't seem to be about Clark. What Markoff appears to be saying is that the struggle corporations have with "protecting" copyrighted material is similar to the challenges repressive governments face with censorship. Tools such as Freenet challenge both. Advocates like Clark typically find themselves disagreeing with corporations and governments. Communication technology and individual liberty makes no distinction between information. /.'s should already know this well.
If you're going to let anyone onto the network, you may be letting undercover government agents onto the network.
If you're going to transmit data from point A to point B, points A and B have to know something that makes the other unique among all possible points.
If you're going to make the network 100% anonymous and available, it'll get blocked by administrators afraid it will be abused, like Tor.
When freenet becomes common enough, government and industry will have to resort to Old Fashioned Police work, trying to trick file sharers into trusting them, then exploiting that trust in an investigation. I have no doubt that we will see that for highly objectionable content, such as child porn and terrorist communications. It won't be worth it for infringement cases, though.
The real question is whether the courts will be bold enough to make the technology unlawful based on the widespread criminal uses that are sure to develop. Stay tuned.
Didn't you learn anything here?
/. mods to understand sarcasm, you'll have to clearly mark your comments as being sarcastic.
In order for
That way, at least some of them will understand what you are trying to say.
So please, the next time around, put [sarcasm] tags around your post, followed by a short disclaimer that your post is indeed intended to be sarcastic and maybe add a link to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarcasm for good measure.
Hope this helps.
Article Text follows to avoid registering:
New File-Sharing Techniques Are Likely to Test Court Decision
By JOHN MARKOFF
Published: August 1, 2005
SAN FRANCISCO, July 31 - Briefly buoyed by their Supreme Court victory on file sharing, Hollywood and the recording industry are on the verge of confronting more technically sophisticated opponents.
At a computer security conference in Las Vegas on Thursday, an Irish software designer described a new version of a peer-to-peer file-sharing system that he says will make it easier to share digital information anonymously and make detection by corporations and governments far more difficult.
Others have described similar efforts to build a so-called darknet that aims to shield the identities of those sharing information. The issue is complicated by the fact that the small group of technologists designing the new systems say their goal is to create tools to circumvent censorship and political repression - not to abet copyright violation.
Such a stand is certain to test the impact of the Supreme Court ruling in June against Grokster and StreamCast Networks, publishers of peer-to-peer file-sharing software, a number of legal specialists and industry executives said. The court ruled unanimously that the publishers could be held liable for the copyright infringement that their software enabled in the sharing of pirated movies and music.
The Irish programmer, Ian Clarke, is a 28-year-old free-speech advocate who five years ago introduced a software system called Freenet that was intended to make it impossible for governments and corporations to restrict the flow of any kind of digital information. The system initially used a secure approach to routing between users and employed encryption to protect the information from eavesdroppers who were not part of the network.
Unlike today's open peer-to-peer networks, the new systems like Mr. Clarke's use software code to connect individuals who trust one another. He said he would begin distributing the new version of his program within a few months, making it possible for groups of users to establish secured networks - available only to them and those they choose to include - through which any kind of digital information can be exchanged.
Though he says his aim is political - helping dissidents in countries where computer traffic is monitored by the government, for example - Mr. Clarke is open about his disdain for copyright laws, asserting that his technology would produce a world in which all information is freely shared.
Mr. Clarke lives in Edinburgh and is employed by a music recommendation site, www.indy.tv. While Freenet attracted wide attention as a potentially disruptive force when he introduced it in 2000, it proved more difficult to use than file-sharing programs like Grokster and Napster, and did not achieve the impact that he envisioned.
Now, however, Mr. Clarke is taking a fresh approach, stating that his goal is to protect political opponents of repressive regimes.
"The classic use for Freenet would be for a group of political dissidents in China, or even in the United States," he said in a telephone interview on Thursday. But he acknowledged that the software would also surely be used to circumvent copyright restrictions, adding, "It's an inevitable consequence of our design."
Industry executives acknowledge that even with their Supreme Court victory, peer-to-peer technology will continue to be a factor in illicit online trading.
"Everyone understands that P-to-P technology is, and will remain, an important part of the online landscape," said Jonathan Lamy, a spokesman for the Recording Industry Association of America. "But the Supreme Court's unanimous decision in the Grokster case will help ensure that business models won't be based on the active encouragement of infringement on P-to-P or other networks."
Initiatives like Freenet are certain to complicate industry and government efforts to restrict the digital sharing of
oh, wait thats your source. I beg your pardon.
Hmm, another disingenous, intellectually dishonest NYT columnist with the intials JM (Judith Miller). What a surprise.
No. That's a thin dry biscuit. A hacker is somemone who breaks into computers.
Definition is typically defined by use. Most people mean person who breaks into computer systems when they say "hacker"
The most visible movement is the weird "Freenet-china", which is actually a code fork made some years ago. I have no idea if it tracks the current code or what.
The devs have said that they are a bit insane though, since current Freenet has known weaknesses in that if it is illegal to run a node in the first place it isn't too hard to find them (e.g. the current protocol can be detected by layer 7 filters) given a well funded adversary. Hence the darknet stuff coming in 0.7, and later probably some steganography. It is not really ready for use yet in a truly hostile regime like China. Perhaps they think it's the best thing they have for the time being.
(voluntary disclosure: I am a practicing Catholic in full communion with the see of Peter, and a Canadian citizen)
I've actually thought about this a bit myself - partly about the Scientology problem, partly about the fact that copyright law makes it essentially impossible to post complete, up-to-date copies of Catholic liturgical texts and such online. I would be inclined to suggest the following:
Any "official" sacred writing or liturgical text of any religious group, or any translation thereof, is automatically in the public domain.
(From a Catholic context, this would include Scripture itself, the contexts of the "official" liturgical books - the Missal, the Breviary, the Ritual, etc. - and other similar materials published by the Church herself, possibly including the Catechism of the Catholic Church. For other religious entities, I don't know enough about the details to comment in an informed manner.)
Now, this would in many ways solve the whole Scientology problem. If they are a religious group, then all these texts they're trying to protect would be public-domain, and so they couldn't suppress public dissemination and discussion of them using copyright law. If they insist on protecting these texts under copyright, then they're no longer a religious entity, but a business, and that opens them up to government legislation.
Unless you can point to a specific clause in the Patriot Act that abridges free speech and violates the first ammendment, I must reiterate my assertion that you are using a fallacious argument and confusing two distinct constitutional principles.
You got any karma man? I really neeed it. Just a little hit! Come on!
...piracy is bad. Middle men (RIAA/MPAA) are good. If you believe in file sharing then you are completely opposed to copyright and probably a communist. It's all crap if you ask me.
The way I see it, (and the people who originally drew up the concept of copyright), a copyright should protect the rights of the person who CREATED the work. Not the assumed rights of the distributors. Not the guy making millions while doing nothing. If it's a song, then the people involved in the actual act of composing, performing, producing and recording the piece should be covered by copyright. Not the corporation.
(Note: the following statements do not apply 100% across the board, but they do apply in the majority of cases) The problem with our society is that we have a surplus population of useless morons who have no ability to actually do anything productive. They are the "middle men". All they do is insert themselves into the middle of a transaction and do everything they can to make it seem like they have value. But they don't. For example, take the long distance business. We used to have a system that "just worked". It was called the Bell Telephone Company. Yes, it was a monopoly. But, the level of service provided was world class. Then the great American terrorist Ronald Reagan, broke up the monopoly and created the hellball we have today. All in the name of "competition". So what do we wind up with twenty some years later? We have a handful of really big, greedy corporations who provide shitty service.
Where's the competition? Oh yeah... that's right. I almost forgot about all the "mom-n-pop" long distance RESELLING outifts. They offer you long distance at various rates differing by only a few cents here or there. And they provide even shittier service because a lot of times their tehnical people are complete bumpkin morons. (Where I work, we have a nickname for AllTel in Southern-Ohio: Fred's Phone and Feed Service [in case you can't tell, I hate country folk]) We actually had one of their "technicians" attempt to test a T1 line with a butt set. So all of these small long distance services RESELLING you long distance that they bought in bulk from the big greedy corporations offer what exactly? Their long distance service sucks. Their technical expertise sucks. And for the quality of service, their prices suck. The situation is even worse with cell phones. Just think about how many shitty places there are to buy your cell phone service from with how many millions of plans. That's NOT helpful.
So... back to the whole file sharing concept and copyright. The RIAA and the MPAA are the useless middlemen in this whole fiasco. They have realized just how irrelevant they could become if the artists took the power of distribution into their own hands. The only way to preserve their stranglehold on the business it to outlaw the technology that could get the artists wider exposure without help from the RIAA or MPAA. So they focus on the piracy instead of working to make a system that actually works for them and accepting that they may have a smaller role in the future. They want it all. But in all of this, copyright has been twisted in order to protect the "rights" of a corporation. The artists get shit upon. In most cases musicians don't get to keep a lot of the money they make because they wind up paying it back into their record label for supporting them. It's an ugly and scammy system that's basically run by thugs. They are corporate rats that are pretty much a mafia that needs to be rubbed out. All this bullshit about P2P folks not believeing in copyright is total smoke and mirrors. Copyright in it's original form was fine. As it stands right now, it's terribly broken since it protects the people who need the least protection and ensures that the original artists don't get much unless they tow the party line. It's fucked.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
In other notes we have violations of due process in the case of Jose Padilla and other U.S. Citizens. For example Article III Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution states: "The trial of all crimes, except in cases of impeachment, shall be by jury; and such trial shall be held in the state where the said crimes shall have been committed; but when not committed within any state, the trial shall be at such place or places as the Congress may by law have directed." Which requires jury trials for those accused not secret military tribunals. Amendments V and VI also speak to this subject:
And before you jump on the point I would point out that the Military Tiribunals are not being convened against members of the U.S. Military ('
In service in war or in time of public danger') so that clause of Amendment V doesn't give carte Blanche for them.
On another note both the USAPATRIOT act and various federal laws dealing with drugs routinely allow for the unwarranted search and seizure of private property in some cases such property is not returned even when no conviction takes place. This would be (IMHO) a violation of Amendment IV of the constitution which states:
While we're on the topic of drugs. Excessive punishments and jail times have routinely been employed in this area noteably including California's 3-strikes policy which leads to life in prison even for 3 minor crimes (any 3 frauds including possession). Agasin in my opinion this would be a severe issue with Amendment VIII:
As a key point I would also mention this amendment:
So basically we have to take it on faith that Freenet is being used by Dissidents then?
From the Wayback Machine archive of May 2000:
Another page from the Wayback Machine:
Freenet's political goal isn't revisionist history. Implying that it's intended for copyright infringement is.
This reminds me of a news broadcast in Sweden a year ago or so about - you guessed it - child pornography. They interviewed a guy at a children's rights organization and he particularly mentioned Freenet, he called it "an open door for pedophiles" and continued with some inane ramblings about how ISP's must monitor all traffic for greater good (tm). This also reminds me of http://news.com.com/Congress+threatens+P2P+network s+on+porn/2100-1028_3-5809223.html?tag=nefd.top
When will these people realize guns don't kill people, you can actually use a road for speeding, a scissor is a pontetial murder weapon and (gasp) in real life, in cities, people kill, murder and rape. Lets ban outdoors - think of the children!
How about the part where the RIAA spokesperson honestly refers to the Grokster decision as prohibiting only "active encouragement to abuse", while Markoff pretends that the Court decided that "enabling copyright infringement" is prohibited? Markoff's boundary is much more restrictive, which prohibits all kinds of legitimate transactions, than the actual law. He's always shilling for the corporate interest, from his New York Times soapbox.
He's planting a corporate flag in the conventional media wisdom of what people can do online. How many people will fear to exercise our actual rights, because they bought into Markoff's lies?
--
make install -not war
Because if America is superior to China, a still-stalinist-in-many-ways entity that probably qualifies as the most successful fascist nation in the world, then Americans don't need extralegal protections on their freedom of speech?
Wait, no. That's silly. There's a massive gray area between "Stalinist China" and "free", and anyway, America being superior to China now says nothing about the future. One would think that strengthening our guarantee to freedom of speech through technical as well as legal means could only be a good thing.
In the meantime, the government is far from the only entity which "political dissidents", as your quote puts it, might have to fear; any number of private or corporate entities, or persons, might be fully capable of in some way retaliating against some individual for exercising their speech, and in such circumstances the individual would generally have no legal recourse to first amendment rights.
Except, oh wait, it appears you feel that way already:
If you're looking for trampling of free speech, you needn't look to the government; you need only look no further than our own academic institutions. [thefire.org]
Oh, wait, never mind. And here I thought you were actually trying to discuss freenet, or the article. Nope, it looks like you're just trying to create a straw man by implying that the article means to speak of "dissidents" as only needing to fear the government, all so that you can tear it down by plugging a right-wing organization which exists to demonize academic institutions just for getting all huffy when people speak out against minorities. Which all may well be a suitible or potentially interesting topic for discussion, but seems almost entirely offtopic for this article.
But in answer to your question, it seems examples abound where exercising free speech in public results in negative and undesirable attention from the government, thus making it fair to say that yes, freenet might be in some circumstances a useful tool for avoiding such things. I provide that link simply because it was the most recent example in a story on, well, slashdot.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Spell three times: "amendment", "amendment", "amendment".
Can anybody actually FIND an example of Freenet being used for political reasons (i.e. dissidence)? I've heard child porn is rampant (just what I've heard, that's the ticket) but I've NEVER heard of a single instance of it being used as (supposedly) intended.
While False information is generally covered as Slander or Libel "Scandalous" and "Malicious" wiritng is simply anything oppositional to the current govenrment. That includes almost all politicial speech except that desired by the current officeholders. This would include all of the Clinton-Bashing that was published during his office (some of which included unfounded accusations). The same would be true of any and all things critical of the bush administration including news reports of their manipulating WMD evidence.
Unsubstantiated accusations and innuendo do not constitute valid logical argument.
It worked for going to war with Iraq, didn't it?
I don't know if you keep up with the news or anything like reality, but Novak wrote an email 3 days before publishing the article, in which he stated that Rove told him Plame was a CIA operative.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
That would make it harder to fund new translation efforts.
(Of course, emphasis is my own)
Though we all act like there is one solid definition for the term "free speech", this isn't necessarily so. Though the Constitution guarantees many freedoms as far as personal expression, there are many more possible freedoms it doesn't guarantee. It could be that someone else's version of Free Speech includes freedom of anonymity, or freedom to speak freely without any fear of reprisal, neither of which is present in the Constitutionally protected Free Speech. In that case, there are an almost unlimited number of examples for you.
Note: I'm not saying that I agree with the alternative version of Free Speech, or that we should practice that in the U.S., just pointing out that an assumption you've made may not be universal.
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There's not much meat in the abstract of Clarke's Defcon presentation, and no clues on the Freenet site. Can anyone explain the new routing algorithm or point me to some documentation?
This new design for Freenet is different, it is a globally scalable invite-only Darknet. Oskar Sandberg and Ian Clarke have developed a method to route messages through a "fixed links" P2P network in a scalable way. This is non-trivial as most scalable P2P search algorithms (such as that previously employed in Freenet, and other Distributed HashTable algorithms) rely on being able to choose which peers are connected to each-other. Its like trying to create signposts for a gigantic maze in an entirely decentralised way.
We hope to make a paper describing this available through the Freenet website in the next few days.
-Ian
Think about it this way... I can accept that Freenet would have uses to protect speech of dissidents in places with restrictive free speech laws and repressive authorities. The problem is that I think *this* solution is the answer to a question that is never going to be asked.
"I am in a repressive state and I have a computer infrastructure that can't be monitored easily, what tool can I use to allow it to transmit documents and other dissident material?"
The problem with the question is that it is all too clear that repressive states are fully capable of finding out you are using Freenet because they assume that any non-standard traffic is forbidden and firewall you or conduct random sniffing. About the only place this is useful is a place like the US or Western Europe where the government doesn't have this broad power. And in those places, you hardly need Freenet to express ethical dissent.
So, what Freenet becomes is a place where people in places where strange traffic patterns won't often be catalogued pass documents that they would not otherwise be passing. And if political documents are protected by free speech legislation, what is left? The answer is all too often things that are not really free speech like child porn and your other less-than-ethical fringe activities.
Look, I'm not saying that people envisioned Freenet as a place for kiddie porn and terrorists, and I'm sure that there are people dutifully engaged in posting valid dissident material on Freenet. I totally believe what they are trying to accomplish is what they say they are trying to accomplish. However, it's never going to gain widespread acceptance if you find yourself faced with anonymously hosting repugnant material on your machine, or heck (irony) material that is even disinformation against your own cause. Sure, you don't *know* you have those images or movies on your machine, but you know they are a) out there and b) you know you have almost no way of keeping that data off your machine. Therefore, you have to assume that you are hosting that material, by default.
So, in the end, Freenet ends up as a completely neutral transmission means, much like the rest of the Internet, except it's slower and it's harder to tell where things originated from. Of course, that last part helps you very little in a state where it's perfectly legal for them to arrest you for simply using Freenet or any encryption.
You want secure transmission? I suggest putting encrypted messages into the bits of a big fat JPEG image of Chairman Mao and slapping it in the Mao Fans Yahoo groups site. I'm sure the Communist Party will be more than happy to give you millions of the images to work with for free.
I too get tired of people toeing the party line, or using the official party stance as a substitute for thinking, but it comes from both sides of the aisle. It's sad that lately the rants coming from the Republicans and Democrats are starting to make the most extreme Libertarians and Green Party politicians seem more sane every day. Here, I thought I was supposed to drift more towards the mainstream in my old age. To quote John Stewart, "Please, stop hurting America".
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because we can use the media to discredit them.
By offering and relaxing decades-old restrictions on media monopolies, the media will do virtually whatever they are told. And we can squash any suspicions of govt + media collusion by having very public fights about Howard Stern's perverted jokes and fining the media a few hundred thousand bucks.
Besides, we can divide the country into "conservatives" and "liberals", then brand the controlling power into one group and then brand the media as the opposite group. In fact, if the media keeps telling the population that "the media is biased liberal" while the sitting president is "conservative", the population will never suspect behind-the-scenes cooperation taking place.
For example, even incidents involving a conservative strategist using so-called liberal media to punish an American that simply spoke out won't raise any questions about the media being controlled or manipulated by the govt. By focusing on some other aspect, this question will never get raised on the air during primetime.
And if things get out of hand, we can always drag out abortion, gay marriage, and religion to divide the dissidents in half. Heck, we can even bribe organized religious leaders into driving their followers to the voting booths by changing laws to allow federal funding of religious organizations that discriminate based on religious belief.
If this is too complicated for you to understand, then go watch your summer movie. It'll rake in many millions more than the total annual campaign contributions made by middle class Americans--who incidentally, wonder why politicians benefit the few wealthy groups that contributed far more money.
Remember boys and girls, the words "conservative" and "liberal" have become virtually meaningless these days and their definitions and perceptions will change again if necessary to divide and conquer the general population. Now go focus on abortion or gay rights or some complete stranger that disappeared a thousand miles away from you.
In the meantime we'll we take a big chunk of your income to generously repay those that helped us get elected--heck if they don't get ROI, then they'll stop contributing. And since you really haven't done anything personally to help during elections, don't expect much from your social security plan 30 years from now.
John Markoff was the NewYork Times journalist who framed Kevin Mitnick for solitary confinement for over 5 years!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Markoff
So stay clear from John Markoff, he's even worse than a government chill.
Robert
Well, if we took the time to actually read the article, we have no chance of getting our opinions modded t3h gl0r10us +5 Insightful.
..to freely sharing his SSN (or equivalent), vital stats, and bank account number? Or does the hypocrisy start there?
That was SUPPOSED to be "short stories". I can just feel like there will soon be a new "Stephen King's Shorts" troll arising from this in the near future. 8-O
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
(For what it's worth, my main bible is a 10 year old NRSV wide-margin minister's edition, with many many notes, all of them incisive and correct because I wrote them. It cost me less than $20 - cheap as bibles go. No $100 Leather-Bound NIV study bible with notes that are either stupid, wrong, or both here!)
The problem is that the funding-through-copyright-and-exclusive-deal-with- big-publisher model doesn't allow for uses that might cut into the publisher's profits. Thus, there is only one place online where you can get the NIV text, and you can't get it for any bible software that Zondervan doesn't "bless". Last time I looked, Zondervan wants you to fork over $10,000 before they will even talk to you.
Might be worth taking a look at the NET Bible project, at bible.org. I've actually come to like the translation a bit (and LOVE the notes. Omigosh, those notes. Did I mention the notes?)
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
Click me!
Of course much of Freenet's publicity has centered around the issue of copyright, and thus I will speak to it briefly. The core problem with copyright is that enforcement of it requires monitoring of communications, and you cannot be guaranteed free speech if someone is monitoring everything you say. This is important, most people fail to see or address this point when debating the issue of copyright, so let me make it clear:
You cannot guarantee freedom of speech and enforce copyright law
It is for this reason that Freenet, a system designed to protect Freedom of Speech, must prevent enforcement of copyright.
Since this topic creeps up again, let me share what I wrote some time ago; I kept it hidden in the hope that it would mature, but it did not by itself ;-) Its fancy name is:
Tractatus Arcanae
I'm going to suggest a combination of measures to improve the stealth and integrity of peer-to-peer communication.
Preface:
The exchange of personal information and forbidden secrets is facing the nosyness of governments and intellectual property 0wners. Allow me to add a sidenote here:
I believe there is such a thing as intellectual property, but that it only exists as long as you actually keep the information secret.
Steps in securing a P2P network are already implemented by Freenet (http://freenet.sourceforge.net/).
The steps are encryption of traffic and obfuscating the origin of a file to the extent that the author of the file looses control over the file and stays anonymous, while the file is duplicated across the network in the cache of the nodes.
This leaves a bad feeling, because one might end up storing content that one does not condone, like bad pornography. Fortunately, a network such as Freenet has a property which puts the extra traffic and routing to good use:
Computation of network flow.
As Advogato explains (http://www.advogato.org/trust-metric.html), network flow has the property that in a network containing "good" information, say good music, and "bad information"(everything else..), the flow between the good part of the network and the bad part is restricted by the throughput rate of the "confused" notes, who don't know the difference between good and bad information.
This means that if the nodes, instead of keeping the information anonymous, instead specialize on knowing about and storing such information as is liked and considered good by the user, then nodes that "like each other" will automatically cluster. However, many P2P systems are very generous in giving away information, something that is very dangerous in a police state or when the traffic is otherwise under scrutinity. It does not help that traffic is encrypted since the source of the file, or at least the identity of the last one to pass the file is known. Therefore, restricting the flow of information only to between nodes that trust each other therefore is essential to the operation of a network that can hide the identity of at least some users of the network.
How is the trust relationship between nodes with good information established? This closes the circle with the aliens I mentioned in the beginning: if you trade information with them, you will initially have to consider them untrustworthy, and you will only want to give information if you get information back.
Therefore the mechanism to establish trust is not unlike a conversation: You talk with someone and when have something in common to talk about, like soccer or baseball, you will talk more with the person. In a peer-to-peer network, this can work by requesting a information(a file) from the unknown, and if you get back good information, which you can verify either because you have the file already, or because you got the hash from 3rd parties, then you add this node to the list of nodes that can be trusted and increase the trust rating. Initially, you will have to trade public information to determine common interests, information like a copy of a GPL licensed software, or a list of prime numbers(that is, if you talk to aliens). When exchanging new information, the quality of the information would have to be manually evaluated, just like two hackers who don't know each other will evaluate their knowledge for e-quality. Gradually, the trust level of the conversation between the nodes will rise and the the nodes will concentrate on handling traffic between trusted nodes.
I am aware that these methods require a lot of traffic for transferring some new information, but these are necessary
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
Freenet has never been about dissent, at least not in any realistic way. The system is designed to preserve data on the basis of its popularity. It might be marginally useful to a popular resistance group, but it won't do shit for a minority group promoting an unpopular point of view -- including advocacy for their own survival. The numerically superior group need only participate actively in Freenet for the minority view to be drowned out.
The other problem with Freenet is that it appears to be predicated on the oppressive government's willingness to play by the rules of due process. So you can't say which Freenet machine(s) contains the offending information? Clarke seems to think that an oppressive regime like mainland China will just throw up its hands and give up. Much more likely is that everyone using the software will be considered a subversive, and they'll all be sought out and shut down by state security. Oppressive regimes wouldn't be oppressive if they were fastidious about applying due process and avoiding collective punishment, now would they?
Software can and does change the world, sometimes in dramatically beneficial ways. But it does so in large part because the industrialized world consists primarily of relatively free countries. Repressive countries will be no more affected by software like Freenet than China is affected by FREE TIBET bumper stickers on American cars.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
None of the rights enumerated in this Constitution shall be held to apply to non-citizens.
He's a blowhard that made his name demonizing Kevin Mitnick. Not that I'm saying Kevin Mitnick didn't do some foolish things, but the picture Markogg painted of Mitnick made him sound like some insane lunatic out to destroy mankind as we know it.
Yo, moderators! Parent post is DA MAN in question.
Protest Zones curtail your ability to freely speak toward your intended target: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22protest+zo nes%22
"Mailing obscene material to a customer who paid money for it doesn't harm anybody"
It sounds good in an excuse.
It isn't actually true, though.
Whether it is something that should be legislated is another matter, but it is harmful.
Mitnick went to jail for a couple years for computer crimes. He sold a book about it. He now makes at least six figures a year on the interview, lecture, and consulting circuits.
Would you mind explaining to me hwo Markoff's "tactics" weren't the best thing to happen to an otherwise unemployable "computer guy with criminal record"?
Please help metamoderate.
as limited by US copyright law, does not allow the ultimate definition of "free" speech.
After all, before there was a first A, people yearned for free speech. It may be that some of these yearners see the limits on free speech in the US as 'repression', just as others see China's, and saw the USSR's, the British Empire's,etc., limits.
For the sake of any critical thinkers who may have read the parent post: The quote from the Washington Post was INCORRECT. Specifically, s/Iraq/Iran/.
Here's the sidebar on the same damn page this genius quoted from:
_____Correction_____
In some editions of the Post, a July 10 story on a new Senate report on intelligence failures said that former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV told his contacts at the CIA that Iraq had tried to buy 400 tons of uranium from the African nation of Niger in 1998. In fact, it was Iran that was interested in making that purchase, but no contract was signed, according to the report.
----
These damn right wing zealots are really starting to bug me. It's politics before country with these types.
I would modify this to make such public domain disclosure a condition of being allowed as an officially government recognized religion. Any group that didn't want to adhere to this rule could opt out, losing whatever benefits and tax exemptions would otherwise be granted
For the record, Scientology was officially recognized as a valid religion under the Bill Clinton administration at his urging.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
But if 90% of the world still uses windozer, than a pretty good portion of it can come down!!!!!!!!!!!!
Manz, I'm funny.
I'd like to send shoutz out to RMZ, EZR, Linuz, Jobz, the little devil, platypus and blowfish guyz (hey, anytime you guyz want to play some XBox, call me!!!) and most of all, the Linuz fanboyz on SlashDot.
AC out.
that are perfectly legal under Chinese law, that many would consider oppressive.
Saying that the US Govt. doesn't oppress free speech because it doesn't break it's own laws on speech is one of them tautology thingies...
censorship. When a corporation wants to shut you up, they go to your ISp and get your site pulled. That won't work for a freesite. The biggest problem I see with Freenet is it's disconnected from potential users by being its own spearate network without enough gateways to the World Wide Web. The problem with making a gateway is you have to try to exercise some editorial control over what goes through it to avoid legal trouble, and you have to be willing to get shut down by corporate pressure. I willingly accept the latter risk, but I'm still experimenting on how to keep what goes through my gateway legal and worthwhile at the same time. My current approach is to alow all HTML and text but block most other data types except from freesites I trust.
We don't need yet another new programming language. Let's just pick an existing language and fix its flaws.
I fail to see how anyone needs to be a "critical thinker" to understand the Washington Post may have made an error. I searched for the Senate report on pre-war intelligence, and came up with that article, among others. I missed the sidebar. Since I linked it in my own post, I obviously wasn't trying to hide anything.
Please accept this revised post:
That depends. Is your wife a CIA agent?
If she were, apparently she'd either directly or indirectly approve trips to Africa for me, her husband, to disprove what she would call "crazy reports" of Iraq trying to buy uranium from Africa.
Also, how am I a "right wing zealot"? Incorrectly quoting an article that still has the incorrect quote in it, and missing a sidebar?
It doesn't change the appearance of impropriety of recommending, and then having your own workgroup send, your husband to investigate what you prejudicially call a "crazy report". Here, let's see if you're a "left wing zealot": if you see no impropriety there, I imagine you also defended DeLay's wife working for his campaign in what by all accounts was a perfectly professional capacity?
Well, I don't defend either: they BOTH have unacceptable appearances of impropriety, regardless of whether there is any ACTUAL impropriety. This is why we work to avoid such things.
And I didn't vote for Bush, and actually voted for more Democratic/Liberal candidates (including Feingold, the only Senator not to vote for PATRIOT) in the last major elections, but thanks for your concern of my well being as a "right wing zealot".
Can anybody actually FIND an example of Freenet being used for political reasons (i.e. dissidence)?
No.
Reason being, it's Freenet's purpose to keep the dissidents anonymous. If you could find an example, it wouldn't be working.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
If there was, the US would have been guilty of yet another war crime. So score -1 for being a dumbass.
By the way, you dont have to Forbid speech to still have deterrents for free speech. I know it takes a little thinking to grasp the concept but then again anyone who can summarize Patriot crap 1 and 2 in those 3 sentences probably needs a little more time.
As for your second paragraph, you start off on one topic and then switch right after to 24hour warning stories.
Can you be arrested without a warrant? Yes.
Can it be because of what you said? That's where you live in the grey area. No, you cannot be arrested for saying something but police will come talk to you, maybe even take you down for a ride to their offices. All freely of course.
Intimidation plays a big part in the whole free speech debate, to ignore it, shows a total lack of understanding how things really are.
75 year old nuns arent likely terrorists yet I met some recently who got a visit from quite a few federal agents...'just to talk'. You dont bring 7-8 federal agents to visit old women unless you are trying to scare them (they are peace activists).
Talk to the ACLU about intimidation, they have folders full of them.
The question is when does free speech go to far?
Someone complained that about the preventing protests too close to the president. How do they feel on limiting how close protesters can be to abortion clinics? Another talks about how valuable hiding you identity is when you speak but how do they feel about Microsoft funding studies about Linux? I have seen people post that allowing kiddie porn is a price they are willing to pay for free speech. If I had the home address and phone number of someone that was unpopular on Slashdot should I have the right to post it? Should I have the right to lie about them?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
of the Constitution, the demonstration has to be organized as a peaceful one. There is obvioulsy no right to assemble if the assemblers must give an impossible to enforce guarantee that there will be no violence.
Following the Constitution, that would allow peaceful assemblies on any public land that is usually open to the public, if it's ok to have 1000 people in a public square on monday just hanging out, it should be ok to have 1000 people there on Teusday protesting a government policy.
Ian's motivations aren't much more than a curiosity of some historical significance, but not much else. Ian won't decide how people use the technology he creates, the people using it will. The tone of this submission reminds me of bad architects thinking they can play god with a magic marker on a floor plan: "This will be the community center. This will be the stage." etc. Bullocks. Aside from obviously tethered uses like bathrooms and so on, space will be used however the occupants choose to use it. Ditto for encrypted untraceable anonymous communication.
Where in his plan does he explain how he gets rid of rabid ideologies, murderous theologies, tribal animosities and the endless hunger for greed, blood, devastation, death, war and horror? I'm curious to see how he solved that bit.
Because we live in a world where certain secrets must be kept lest those with the lesser intellects (which is nearly the same set as those most willing to kill and/or die for their favored set of fairy tales or ideological flim flam or just good old personal selfishness) will bring it all crashing down.
What amazes me is how highly educated and intelligent men can be so naive. I guess they project themselves onto all of humanity, and forget that the greater mass of hyumanity is really just a pack of troglodytes.
Abstract:
It has become apparent that the greatest threat toward the survival of peer to peer, and especially file sharing, networks is the openness of the peers themselves towards strangers. So called "darknets" - encrypted networks where peers connect directly only to trusted friends - have been suggested as a solution to this. Some, small-scale darknet implementations such a Nullsofts WASTE have already been deployed, but these share the problem that peers can only communicate within a small neighborhood.
Utilizing the small world theory of Watts and Strogatz, Jon Kleinbergs algorithmic observations, and our own experience from working with the anonymous distributed data network Freenet, we explore methods of using the dynamics of social networks to find scalable ways of searching and routing in a darknet. We discuss how the results indicating the human relationships really form a "small world", allow for ways of restoring to the darknet the characteristics necessary for efficient routing. We illustrate our methods with simulation results.
This is, to our knowledge, the first time a model for building peer to peer networks that allow for both peer privacy and global communication has been suggested. The deployment of such networks would offer great opportunities for truly viable peer to peer networks, and a very difficult challenge to their enemies.
Blog Entry:
I started the Freenet Project in 1998 with the goal of building a network for truly free communication, and of all the things we have learned since then, perhaps the most salient is that the biggest threats to P2P networks come not from without, but from within the network itself. This is something that the current file sharing networks are now learning the hard way, with those organizations who wish to stop them now infiltrating the networks to sue individual users for providing certain files. And while Freenet has always been designed to protect the identity and security of people who access and publish information from attackers and prying eyes, it's design has never been able to protect the identity of people who operate nodes in the network from one another.
Recently Oskar, who was one of the original contributors to the project and who is now working on his PhD in Mathematics, and I have been discussing the mathematical mechanics behind large scale networks. As a part of this discussion it dawned on us, that because science now believes that human relationships really do form a "small world" (between any two of us, there are only six degrees of separation), with the right algorithms it should be possible to find data fast even in a network where peers only ever talk to peers that they already know and trust. We believe our methods for doing this provide to key to making peer-to-peer networks that are both dark and searchable: secure and efficient. For those who wish to constrain the free flow of information, such networks could be the biggest nightmare of all...
the first amendment is there to protect racists, not dirty open source hippies
I searched for the Senate report on pre-war intelligence, and came up with that article, among others.
Funny, then, that the article you chose to use is the one with incorrect information. The proof you submit of Iraq "trying to buy uranium from Africa" is actually nothing more than a typo.
The fact is, there is no proof of Iraq trying to buy uranium from Africa. If you are so concerned about appearances of impropriety, as you say you are, I suggest you take a look at what the President of the United States of America told the citizens of this country before going to war with Iraq. We've lost almost 1800 men and women and $200 billion, with nothing to show for it except a terrorist breeding ground and no end in sight.
How is this guy still a "reporter"? He writes things he knows to be untrue and he has not a shred of journalistic integrity. It says a lot about the NYT editorial dept whenever his fiction makes it into the paper as 'fact'. Either they don't care or are incompetent boobs.
But neither your thread-starting post nor your followup actually substantiate your claim that Markoff exploited Mitnick. It's fair to expect that a post moderated "informative" would actually contain a summary and links to information which backs up one's claim.
Digital Citizen
Correction (same article you cite, right column):
In some editions of the Post, a July 10 story on a new Senate report on intelligence failures said that former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV told his contacts at the CIA that Iraq had tried to buy 400 tons of uranium from the African nation of Niger in 1998. In fact, it was Iran that was interested in making that purchase, but no contract was signed, according to the report.
The defense of the outing of Joe Wilson's wife falls apart when it is shown that his Niger reconnaissance was, in fact, correct.
Ok, understood. And we can all agree that sexual acts performed on minors by adults which are recorded are child porn. Child porn is when you a photo you see could be evidence of statutory rape.
BenCurry.net
From your history of right wing posts I question whether you would be so quick to excuse the actions of a Democrat. You like to come across as reasonable, but you aren't. I believe you would support "your team" no matter what they did, and try your best to cast their irrational and dangerous actions in a rational light.
Free speach doesn't trump anyone's safety, but that is not the issue. If people want to do more than just talk, stop those people from doing wrong or punish them after.
Do you know that some people who drive cars intend on breaking traffic laws? I say we stop YOU from driving a car because of that. Not me of course, because I don't intend on breaking the law, but you are known to drive on the same roads as law breakers, so YOU we have to stop. Selective enforcement can be so fun.
With your statements, you seem to be the kind of fascist control freak that would lock up a hundred innocents to prevent one guilty party from going free. I despise you as I despise all enemies of freedom. People like you make it easier for all the Stalins and Hitlers of the world. You may not be the type to herd people into the ovens yourself, but you are the type to make up rationalizations about why it would be okay if "your side" does it. You, sir, are a waste of good air, and in a just world you would be carted away by the fascist thugs you support.
(posting anonymously as I have already moderated in this discussion)
I'm all for prosecution of making and selling child porn. Prosecution for having it, though, is prosecuting thoughtcrime. And this is just the camel's nose underneath the tent--once it's okay to prosecute people for thinking about illegal things, we can expect less heinous thoughts to be prosecuted as well.
http://www.rense.com/general37/char.htm
Now, how far away do you think it is?
Do you feel love for the dirt under your feet, the morons around you or even the goverment?
yes, I do love the land (i.e., dirt under my feet) around me. It is beautiful, it is majestic, it sustains me in many, many ways.
yes, I do love the morons around me. I think they are morons, I dislike some of their beliefs, and some of their actions, but the vast majority of them are decent, honest, caring folks. At least, they are as decent, as honest, and as caring as I am, if not more so. I love myself quite a bit (as in quantity, not frequency), so it would be a bit unfair for me to hold those around me to a higher standard than I hold myself.
government, well, that ones tricky. I love, admire, and respect the ideals of government for which my country stands. The actual implementation often leaves something to be desired, but then again, so does most everything else in life.
...sometimes, in order to hurt someone very badly, you have to tell that person terrible lies. - PA
I see what you mean, but we already prosecute possession of drugs, prostitution, etc. There are good samaritan laws in several states. All this points to is that there are laws on the books that are far more limiting on our rights than child porn laws.
Also, the illegality of child porn lies not only in the making and selling of it, but also in its possession as an illegal material. Are you suggesting that it should be legal to distribute child porn as long as it's not for profit? I disagree; any biproduct of a violent crime against another human being should dealt with accordingly.
BenCurry.net
...find this to be perhaps the most disturbing quote of the article?
There is just this culture of freedom that people feel they're entitled to, and they don't want anyone looking over their shoulders.
Tierce
Who sponsors your feelings?
and some of them are way out there. They dissent from just about everything.
We don't need yet another new programming language. Let's just pick an existing language and fix its flaws.
There's also the problem that it is not exactly difficult to break into the average residential computer and plant child abuse images. I'm sure one day some sick individual will use it as a worm payload, then the exact meaning of the "possession" laws will really be tested.
Also the law is messed up in other ways - in the UK if you are found to have a collection of child abuse pics then you get busted for possession, fair enough if it can be shown you acquired them deliberately, but I hear you can also be done for PRODUCTION of child porn. The logic is that by transferring the files onto your computer you have made a copy, hence production! The result is that "casual" paedophilles who are unlikely to ever actively abuse, (and morbidly curious / stupid non-paedophilles like that Massive Attack guy,) get crucified on the news as "evil producers of child porn" which everyone takes to mean they are actively kiddy fiddling and taking photos of it. Of course they then get firebombed etc and in some cases murdered by vigilantes. This is not proportionate punishment.
Couldn't have said it better myself.
Speech should always be free. Period. Those who can't deal with the ramifications, good and bad, will all eventually be bred out by genetically superior individuals. It's simply the best path for our species continued evolution. Get used to it or shut up and die already.
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
So, you are telling me that people use Freenet to voice dissent. You are also telling me that nobody can find this dissent. So, are you saying that Freenet doesn't work because it doesn't effectively share information? Please clarify what you mean.
I was not asking for specific examples attributed to specific people. I was merely asking for ANY examples AT ALL of ANY type of dissidence.
In the case of drugs and prostitution, those are victimless crimes and shouldn't be being prosecuted at all to the extent they involve consenting adults. The argument that the images are a byproduct of a violent crime against another human being might have some merit, though. First, the newspaper publishers and television news anchors will need to be locked up for profiting from reporting using photographs of the victims of violent crime, though.
If anyone can give actual provable examples of the US government abridging Constitutionally protected free speech, I'd love to hear it.
Four dead at Kent State.
Three dead at Jackson State.
It doesn't get more "abridged" than that.
I guess some of us have longer memories than others.
No. Now please shut up so you don't ruin it for the rest of us.
Nothing to see here. Please move along. Thank you.
? Holy crap, best not to let Faux News know, they'll aim to get Air America nailed for Sedition.
No, he's not . You're missing something fundamental (or just choosing not to care). There is no way, at all, to differentiate CP from anything else that might pass through freenet nodes. Or, put another way, anything that can be used to classify CP as un-free speech can be used to classify anything else as un-free speech. Until AI image-recognition algorithms become extremely sophisticated, we have to choose between: a) our benevolent government (as well as our employers, depending on what we say) deciding what sort of speech is acceptable or b) agreeing that everything is "free" and hope for the best. So, in answer to your question (which you probably weren't really asking), no, as much as they don't like it (and beleive me, they torture themselves over this issue on the freenet mailing lists - especially Matthew Toseland), this is not up for review because it's an undecidable problem.
Because you can't spell "slaughter" without "laughter"
But it turns out that they were wrong...
see: http://www.loompanics.com/Articles/FirstAmend.htm
usurper_ii
Ron Paul
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hustler_Magazine_v._F alwell
Though it was overturned at the Supreme Court, Larry Flynt was told that his parody was not libel by the court, yet he had to pay 200,000 dollars in damagement.
Imagine a court in the United States of America telling someone that they produced a legal parody ad...and then making them pay 200,000.00 in "damages." Yeah, as noted above he took it all the way to the top and got it overturned, but how much money did he have to spend to do so?
Usurper_ii
Ron Paul
You know, *every time* Markoff's name has drifted across my senses, it's in connection with him blowing something out of proportion and generally smearing someone in the process. Why the heck is he still on the NYT staff? Are there literally no tech writers that are more than half-assed, or does the NYT just like alarmism?
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
You do have to admit that China's firewall does cast a bit of a pall over the Internet.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
The other side of the six-degrees of separation thing is that people will probably still be able to infiltrate the network. Your nephew will be friends with some kid at school whose dad works for the movie industry; that guy your friend's friend met at that bar got hired to do this as their dayjob. And if you use onion routing, figuring out whose fault it is will just be that much harder.
Well, thank goodness that the US Supreme Court "elected" George W. Bush as President in 2000, since he "...is a uniter, not a divider".
And thank goodness that the illegal actions (Iran/Contra) and dirty political tricks (Watergate Breakin) of the Executive branch under previous Republican administrations has not been outdone 1000x over by the current regime in power.
And if no one talks about these issues in the press (letters to the editor), cannot publically protest without being arrested or shunted off away from the press, or all the publicized political "town meetings" guests have all been vetted as party loyalists, or that the foreign press pays more attention to the wrongdoings of the regime in power than the USA's consolidated corporate press -- hey, everybody will just calm down, sit in a circle holding hands, and singing "Kumba Ya", right?
The current regime in power is hurting America, and I would have little problem enumerating a rather long list from the top of my head. Discussing these issues does not make them worse IMHO, because democracy and love of liberty is aided by an open and public discussion. Supressing freedom of speech and the free exchange of ideas is the handmaiden of tyranny. Get a grip, and deal with it.
Are you suggesting that it should be legal to distribute child porn as long as it's not for profit? I disagree; any biproduct of a violent crime against another human being should dealt with accordingly.
"Statutory rape" is not usually a violent crime. Forcible rape is already covered by laws against rape that can be applied regardless of age.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
The reason why protesters are not allowed near where someone else is giving a speech is the same reason why that one ass hole wearing an American flag and has "GOD HATES FAGS" is given his own little corner to shout at the gay pride festivals.
He is being a fucking dick.
I went to see Ralph Nader speak. I live in Boston... so we have more colors of liberal then your average southerner can even begin to imagine. During the middle of the speech, a guy supporting some local Democrat (LaRouche I think it was) stood and started shouting. This isn't a fucking matter of free speech. This is just some jerk trying to disrupt someone else's speech. He is more then welcome to complain that Ralph is going to make Kerry lose (which he didn't), but he can't do it at the top of his lungs while someone else is giving a speech to a large audience.
The secret service pushing protestors away from where the president is giving a speech is the exact same thing. They are not allowed in because people want to hear Bush speak, not a bunch of college students chanting. Setting up a place where both parties can speak seems like a pretty good compromise. Bush gets to have his little speech at his event, and the protesters get to march and chant just out of ear shot.
I personally never understood why people got upset over this issue and act surprised when they are not allowed to protest in shouting distance of an event. Dude, they don't like you in because you are acting like and ass and shouting. If in this nation two groups could coexist in the same area but respect each other it wouldn't be a problem. The gay rights folks wouldn't mind letting the whack-job Jesus nuts into the gay pride parade to watch the festivities, and whack-job pseudo communist with a Chavez t-shirt could go quietly sit and listen to the president's speech. The real problem is that the Jesus nut can't help but screaming and frothing at the mouth at the homosexuals, and the those hip college students with their trendy Urban Outfitters Anarchy shirt can shut the fuck up while Bush speaks.
Personally, I think more events should be held with the singular purpose of getting two completely opposed groups to sit down and talk. Shit, they don't even need to try and agree, just see if you can get equal numbers of people opposed to each other in the same room/park and get some practice letting each other speak without being a jack ass. I won't hold my breath though.
Except that the recording of child porn is not a documenting of an event that would have ocurred otherwise. News simply plays witness, while a child pornographers' purpose is to create the violent crime so that it can be recorded.
BenCurry.net
google "irwin schiff and book banned" for starters. There's a lot more if you have been following political news for a long time. Try this one "cia phony journalists". Google "USS Liberty attack coverup". Try "Sibel Edmonds". How about "FDA whistleblowers". or "DOE nuclear whistleblowers".
/. bad car analogy) as when your oil light on the dash comes on, do you A keep driving, or B stop and remedy the situation right then and there before the engine goes?
Just because you can't think of any off the top of your head doesn't mean they don't exist or haven't existed in the past. Free speech issues go several directions, "sunshine laws" have been tried to get government to come clean on shenanigans. The FOIA was passed to try and help there. Under current laws, something like the "pentagon papers" would result not in revelations about government misconduct, but in people going to jail. I mean, really, the thread going on about the black box voting, that's a free speech issue deluxe. We as a perople have been "censored" away from our rights to have open honest transparent elections. That's as fundamentally wrong as it can get.
You have to watch the trends, this is not an absolute one day it's "all bad" deal. It's the direction things are going. Think of it (que obligatory
No it's not as bad as it could get yet. That still doesn't mean it's "good" either.
Statutory rape CAN be considered a violent crime when perpetrated against someone who can actually be physically harmed in the acts performed. There is an idea (which I even agree with...hehe...) that statutory rape in some cases is not really wrong...it's just the arbitrary edge between crime and "love" and we all accept it. In the context child pornography, however, I would argue that statutory rape is both mentally and physically violent to the child involved.
16-year-olds are a gray area. I'm, like, sooo sarcastic.
BenCurry.net
Statutory rape CAN be considered a violent crime when perpetrated against someone who can actually be physically harmed in the acts performed. [...] In the context child pornography, however, I would argue that statutory rape is both mentally and physically violent to the child involved.
Depends on how you define child pornography. Porn involving any minor (under 18) is illegal in the US, but teenagers are physically capable of having sex without harm from a significantly earlier age. If there's nothing violent in the act, then it doesn't become violent the moment you start taping it.
Some statutory rape can be violent, sure.. but in many if not most cases involving adolescents, it isn't. (FTR, in most jurisdictions, it's not classified as rape at all, but rather something like "unlawful sexual contact with a minor".)
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
Also tell everyone you know to put their store size to 10+GigaBytes. If you make your store big enough you're surfing most / lot of the content locally.
As well, there should be an 'intergration' box showing the % of your datastore that's filled and it's size, how many open connections you currently have, how many nodes in your routing table. Is there any others?
I certainly agree to drawing a distinction between adolescents and children.
BenCurry.net
One of Freenet's primary goals may be resistance to a powerful, organized opposition, but what keeps such an opposition to simply label anyone running a freenet node as a criminal? And it would be at least partially true, because the intent of freenet as you stated it is to provide a white noise background to forbidden activity. Basically all of freenet becomes a cluster which can be prosecuted as a whole.
If a network such as freenet at least strives to maintain some kind of group accountability and identity by restricting which nodes talk to others, then some cliques will be able to claim a legitimate use of freenet. In addition, prosecuting someone over a network with less contacts eventually means to have to chase him over more hops, which requires more effort even if only a legal effort.
I also think that it will still be possible to get a message from one clique of freenet to another clique by following links established by commonplace activity like the exchange of free music and software; in fact, if you really wanted to stay clandestine, you'd have to engage in this activity to stay connected at all.
My suggestion that the quality of files transferred needs to be checked also is aimed at network leeches, who only download but never emit. One would randomly check that the host one is connected to actually is willing to cede that information.
I am aware that such a network would trade bandwidth for safety, but it seems to be the right choice considering the stated goals.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
PETA runs a Humane Society shelter. The Humane Society euthanizes animals that are sick or un-adoptable (i.e., infirm, dangerous, failed temperament testing, etc.). Of course, it's not as catchy if a website is named The Humane Society Kills Animals dot com. The Humane Society believes its mission is ethical. Full disclosure: my wife works for the Humane Society.
0 22005/111781
For more on the douche --er, lobbyist-- that runs petakillsanimals.com, see http://fredericksburg.com/News/FLS/2005/072005/07
Read Heinlein's 1953 Revolt in 2100, now more than ever.
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=157679&cid =13227147
Any "official" sacred writing or liturgical text of any religious group, or any translation thereof, is automatically in the public domain.
This is the single worst idea I've heard regarding copyright in a long time.
Haven't you heard of the separation of Church and State? There should be no official state recognition of the religious status of any group; it is not the place of the state to recognize or not recognize any faith, belief, or custom, nor to benefit nor punish it.
We've got too much religous interferance in Canadian law as it is; from the criminal code sections forbidding "Blasphemous Libel", to the enforced prayers in school I remember as a boy, to the public funding of Catholic education (and only Catholic education) in Ontario schools. We need to be free of all dogma, of any stripe, and leave people with free and equal choice of religious values.
Religion should have no more special status under the law than reading does, and religious groups should have no more benefits or penalties than the local dogwalkers club. The Church and State should be separate things; the people should be free to choose.
It's simple, really. It's basic fairness. And it's what our Constitution says we're supposed to do.
--
AC
There is a picture of me as a baby being bathed by my father. We are both naked in a bathtub.
Going by recent arrests and court cases, if I were to take my parents photo album negatives to get them digitized, both of us could be arrested for child porn.
Well I've wrestled with reality for thirty five years doctor, and I'm happy to say I finally won out over it.
Well, that's essentially the situation now with freenet, and anonymous remailers, and whatnot. People are afraid to use them because they don't want to stick out, even if they're innocent of any crime. One of the goals of the cypherpunk types was to get enough people using anonymizing software that the mere use of such software would not be enough to look unusual. PGP, ssh, and SSL have more or less been accepted, but more esoteric things like mixmaster, freenet, and onion routing have a harder time.