Slashdot Mirror
Community Choice Award "Most Likely to be Shut Down By Govt"
Last week we took nominations for a Slashdot category at the SourceForge Community Choice awards. Our category was 'Most Likely to be Shut Down By Government Agency'. Your nominations were tallied, and we arbitrarily selected a few that we think are the best. Today is the day where you can at long last determine the winner, using the incredibly scientifically accurate Slashdot Poll. Our nominees are
Truecrypt,
EFF Patent Busting,
GNU Software Radio,
WikiLeaks,
Cryptome.org,
Tor,
Freenet,
and CowboyNeal.
Slashdot of course!
TrueCrypt has already changed it's name to TueCrypt to avoid pursuit.
Hmmmm... any government agency? Based on the earlier story, it seems the U5 governments should be on the list, being shutdown by some Chinese Government agency ...
10b||~10b -- aah, what a question!
Among the nominees, it's the biggest threat to the governments themselves. And make no mistake, the governments will deal with threats to itself before others.
412077696e6e657220697320796f7521da
Missing Option: All of the above...
I challenge anyone to even find one credible attempt by anyone in government to shut down one of the nominees.
This story is just hysterical scaremongering.
I see a typo.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
I've lost track. Is the **AA is counted as a government agency, or is the government counted as an **AA agency? Can anyone clarify?
The current Slashdot Poll is about utensils. The Article Poll seems more relevant.
I read the earlier story, but it only now just occurred to me that another prime candidate for this is YouTube. The freedom to "Broadcast Yourself" is scary in a lot of general contexts that have already led to a number of government agency censorships around the world.
Also, giving Google the ability to self-censor the content posted (currently, I believe objectionable violence and pornography is banned by the TOS) provides for a bias on the site.
Support the 30 Hour Work Week!!!
What difference does it make if something is "likely" to get shut down by a government agency?
It matters if something is actually shut down. The answers on this "likely" poll are just a measure of the prejudice (in the dictionary sense of the word prejudice) of the people answering the question.
Where's the answer for "none of them should be shut down, but I prefer to keep an open mind and deal with reality rather than wallow in my own preconceptions about things that haven't happened yet"?
I don't get it, why would the government want to shut down a sci-fi/fantasy publisher?
Unless... I knew it! That whole wheel of time thing really WAS a government conspiracy designed to cause me to fail out of junior high/high school/college! I thought it was a little fishy when RJ supposedly passed away just before finishing the final installment.
http://www.truecrypt.org/
http://w2.eff.org/patent/
http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuradio/
http://www.wikileaks.org/
http://www.cryptome.org/
http://www.torproject.org/
http://freenetproject.org/
confuse and throw the gov. off the Wikileaks trail.
Please link me to this Google website you speak of, thanks.
For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.
It's got to be WikiLeaks. It's one of the only sites to post that completely crazy garbage that Scientology calls the "OT" levels. And who can forget that draft version of ACTA that got mention here?
Wikileaks has a legal team and the balls to use them to keep running, but that likely won't stop the insensitive clods in the government.
Oh the irony of this post in light of how wrong I am.
I apologize and retract my statement
The government doesn't shut down websites. They can't, legally, unless there's something criminal going on.
No, Thats the North American Marlon Brando Look-Alikes.
Stupidity only gets you so far, then you've gotta try
Given that most governments now consider George Orwell's classic: 1984 more as an instruction manual than a warning, someone should make it clear to the govt. that we are not asking them to close these sites down.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Lets see, you can encode or decode any signal... hdtv, gps. Create ad hoc networks. Communicate directly to others using unknown protocols over an essentially analog medium that cannot be recorded exactly. And you aren't plugged into the grid... there's no account numbers and monthly fees so the man doesn't even know you are doing any of this.
Some people say 'wikileaks' because the man doesn't want you knowing, but imo worse than that is the man not knowing. The man being any of the govt, riaa, mpaa, cable, bells, etc.
Was I the only one who punched in http://www.cowboyneal.com/ and got blocked because it's a porn site?
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
As much as I think TPTB would like to kill off truecrypt (assuming it's on their radar), it can live on with underground distribution since it's a software project. Development might grind to a halt, since no one could easily validate the source for various underground successor projects. But checksums for the last known, good version would be as easy to find elsewhere as a bootleged disc of code.
The whole point of Wikileaks is to make things public, so driving leaked documents repositories underground would make them indistinguishable from conspiracy theorists and the lunatic fringe.
One might ask the same about birds. What ARE birds? We just don't know.
Well.. if the government "shuts EFF Patent Busting down" by fixing the patent system, then that would be a Good Thing.
Seriously, even the patent office is complaining about the backlog of patents. I think they want a solution as much as the rest of us.
What a relief.
I guess we're all safe, just as long as there aren't any laws or regulations that these websites might be violating. I'm sure the authors of Freenet double-check their regulatory compliance every week. After all, the index volume for the Code of Federal Regulations is only 1100 pages, and the other 50 volumes can't be too much bigger. And why even bother reading the US Code? You barely have to skim the thing to determine that there could never be anything illegal about providing assistance to third parties who want to covertly transmit large amounts of unspecified data.
You're the only one who reported back and got modded Interesting.
Thank you Slashdot readers. Your research has been a great help. We will get right on this.
Sincerely,
U.S. Govt.
I went with Mr. Neal because all the other options are products of our society. You can try to suppress society, but it will only rise up against you. You can however take someone out of society and effectively martyr them. Their voice may remain, but their influence diminished. Everything else will reappear in a different form possibly greater than its predecessor. Even taking someone out of society may have little effect on their cause if their cause is strong enough.
I must have been busy with something really really important or I would have nominated
. . . . . the Sirius and XM satellite radio merger
. . . . . the United States Patent Office
. . . . . the border between the United States and Mexico
. . . . . Amtrak
either Truecrypt or Tor since they can easily be labeled to the public as terrorist tools. Thinkofthegovt! Panic!!
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
Even though it would be delicious irony for them to shutdown TOR - after all, the US Navy created it - I would say TrueCrypt.
TOR (and Freenet) is too easy to co-opt. Anyone can locally modify their copy of the software and deploy "spyware enhanced" entry and exit nodes. Traffic between the exit node and final destination is not (TOR) encrypted. Also, even if otherwise encrypted, traffic analysis is useful due to the fact that entry and exit traffic can be correlated.
TrueCrypt, however, represents a real problem. While it would be easy enough to foist a back-doored version on to most potential TrueCrypt users, the people who are really serious about keeping their private information private, would build from source and be extremely careful about where they got the source from.
On the other hand, truly shutting down an open source project is likely impossible. Also, it is virtually certain that the software has been extensively analyzed for implementation weaknesses, so it might be decided to allow users to think they are secure.
Don't try to out wierd me, three-eyes. I get stranger things than you, free with my breakfast cereal. --Zaphod Beeblebr
2600
For those of you to whom the number "2600" has no meaning, the courts stopped 2600.org from posting and even linking to DeCSS or the source code (which the last I saw was seven lines of code and still shrinking). It is the website of 2600: The Hacker Quarterly. Amazing that anyone at slashdot hasn't heard of it.
The courts held that source code isn't speech, pissing off a LOT of programmers who only know a few languages, all of which are computer languages.
</script>
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
What else would it be?
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
TrueCrypt is a mainstream encryption utility used by federal and state agencies, as well as Fortune 100 corporations, to protect data when it must be transported. How does this make it vulnerable to shut down by those same entities?
Yes, Slashdot. Tell us. What projects *are* most likely to be shut down by government?
Listening attentively,
-US Gov't
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
Leaks and are something a politician understands. The rest they rely on their lackeys to explain to them. I'm sure if someone were to take aside some of the more religious conservative elected officials in Washington and show them what a few choice words and mouse clicks can dredge up in the way of pr0n - no age 13 nonsense blocking the way - I'm sure the internet would be shut down in less than a week.
But leaks they definitely understand and posting leaked info online is simply poking the Happy Fun Ball repeatedly with a sharp stick.
While Wikileaks may be subject to many DMCA take downs, it will be difficult for the Government to shut it down completely because the site falls very straightforwardly under a First Amendment umbrella. So the Government will have to take more subtle actions against it than plain censorship. On the other hand, GNU Radio is a potential threat to many big industries: cell phone providers, HDTV content producers, digital radio and, of course, the military. Furthermore, it is very easy for the Government to ban it (via FCC) due to technical issues rather than the more controversial political issues. If GNU Radio ever works on hardware easy to build by anyone out of cheap components, it will be banned the next day. Imagine being able to build your own cell phone with all the features you actually want... This cannot be allowed to happen.
And interestingly one of the categories they thought to offer links for was "Slashdot Subculture"; which is apparently pretty shallow. Clicking it brings a page of... nothing.
So there you have it. Slashdot Subculture, already targeted and dealt with by the Government!
Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal
Do a search for it on google.
Really? Fuck! I'm there!