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Community Choice Award "Most Likely to be Shut Down By Govt"

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the make-your-sarcastic-vote-heard dept.

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.

14 of 246 comments (clear)

  1. Most likely to be shut down by the government? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Slashdot of course!

  2. So I'm guessing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    TrueCrypt has already changed it's name to TueCrypt to avoid pursuit.

  3. The Most Likely Choice... by Fragholio · · Score: 5, Interesting
    ...has got to be WikiLeaks.

    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
    1. Re:The Most Likely Choice... by UnderCoverPenguin · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Depends on your definition of shutdown. More likely, I see the service being manipulated by social engineering.

      --
      Don't try to out wierd me, three-eyes. I get stranger things than you, free with my breakfast cereal. --Zaphod Beeblebr
    2. Re:The Most Likely Choice... by moderatorrater · · Score: 5, Informative

      Copyright infringement, people posting things they're legally/contractually obligated not to post, etc.

    3. Re:The Most Likely Choice... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Copyright infringement is a maybe (depends heavily on how good your lawyer is...), but under US law Wikileaks can't be held responsible for displaying things that other people weren't supposed to be sharing. Wikileaks can't very well violate an NDA that they never signed onto and all that. Of course, this is also almost entirely irrelevant, since Wikileaks is based in Sweden, which is also noted for a rather laid back stance on the whole copyright infringement bit (of course, that doesn't mean that individual contributors can't get in trouble in their home countries, especially since many of them are Chinese, but Wikileaks itself isn't terribly vulnerable). So, um, yeah... What exactly is illegal here?

  4. Any Serious Chance It'll Happen???!!! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Think about it, what exactly has been shut down by the government lately? Freenet or Truecrypt anyone???!!

    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.

    1. Re:Any Serious Chance It'll Happen???!!! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      And Truecrypt is legal in the U.K., but you must turn over your keys when asked to. It's not illegal, but pretty much useless.
      That's not true. You just have to know how to use TrueCrypt. The trick that most people don't seem to understand is to use both keys regularly.

      The indication they look for that you're trying to spoof them is that the last modified file dates are all months old in your "cover" partition. So don't leave that kind of a signature. Think of one as the "low security" partition and the other as the "high security" partition. I put work stuff on the low security partition and my own stuff on the high security partition and I use them both all the time. In fact, the stuff in the work partition probably has newer timestamps than the stuff in my personal partition right now.

      There really is no way to tell that I've got another partition, and a dozen files (or more) in the partition I'll reveal have last modified timestamps as of today or yesterday. Also, I'll put up a serious squawk about needing to protect confidential information for my clients, then give them the key. Then when they actually see the confidential information of my clients...

      The best lie is not to lie at all.
  5. **AA by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    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?

  6. Re:Links please? by x_MeRLiN_x · · Score: 5, Informative

    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/

  7. Not a suggestion by petes_PoV · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
  8. Re:Vote None! by bsDaemon · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Until they figure on some exigent circumstances. "pedophile terrorist communists use freenet!" use of freenet is then banned.

    Someone posts to wikileaks about how the govt made up the charges about freenet, and then freenet gets taken down over "state secrets" or something.

    Notions of law and justice are really somewhat quaint these days.

  9. Re:what? by MonsterTrimble · · Score: 5, Funny

    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'
  10. Truecrypt can live underground. Wikileaks can't. by scaryjohn · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.