Japanese Police Urge ISPs To Block Tor

hypnosec writes "Authorities in Japan are presumably worried about their inability to tackle cybercrime and, in a bid to stem one of the sources of anonymous traffic, the National Police Agency (NPA) is asking ISPs to block Tor. The recommendation comes from the special panel formed by the NPA after a hacker going by the name Demon Killer was found to regularly use Tor to anonymize his online activities, like posting of death threats on public message boards."

Comments

Sure, go ahead.

[juliohm]

If only that was enough to stop illegal activities....

Re:Sure, go ahead.

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

TOR is not the problem... Well, not the problem the Japanese police claim.

It IS a problem for the corporate/government control of information. It probably bothers TEPCO greatly, that this is out there - and damned near impossible to filter.

Cybercrime. The great Emmanuel Goldstein, needed to keep in place, proles and party members alike.

Re:Sure, go ahead.

[Anonymous Coward]

If only it was enough to stop the APK troll.

I guess it's an indicator of how low Slashdot has sunk. After months of the same overlong post, Slashcode hasn't been fixed to make "Read the rest of this comment..." work properly.

Time to pack up and sell the site to SEOs, I think. Or has that happened already?

Re:Sure, go ahead.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like they caught the guy anyway, why do they need to block Tor?

Re:Sure, go ahead.

[Anonymous Coward]

This could also be related to Bitcoin. I imagine deep within the U.S. Government they are realizing that Bitcoin could be a serious threat, and given that the biggest BTC exchange is currently in Japan, reducing or eliminating Tor nodes in Japan can help keep Bitcoin down.

Re:Sure, go ahead.

[bcrowell]

Two problems here.

(1) The article has nothing to do with Fukushima or TEPCO. It's about someone who sent anonymous death threats.

(2) Sherman and Mangano, the authors of the paper you linked to an article about, are kooks. Just google on their names together, and you'll find plenty of info discrediting their claims, e.g.: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2011/12/20/researchers-trumpet-another-flawed-fukushima-death-study/

(3) The Open Journal of Pediatrics appears to be one of the many open-access journals these days that have no standards for publication. See http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/08/health/for-scientists-an-exploding-world-of-pseudo-academia.html for more about these journals. I support the concept of open-access journals, but many of them are junk journals.

(4) Sherman and Mangano's junk science didn't get blocked by evil governments or evil corporations. They put it on the internet and nobody interfered with them.

Re:Sure, go ahead.

[the eric conspiracy]

Just as an informative point, the headline on the TEPCO link is a gross mis-statement of the actual facts.

One third of US born west coast babies are NOT suffering from hyperthyroidism.

What happened is the RATE of hyperthyroidism, which is quite low, increased by 28% for a couple of months, and to a level 16% higher than normal for a period of 9 months.

That corresponds to about 40 cases in 600,000 births. Still a problem but about 1/5,000th of what the headline claims.

Re:Sure, go ahead.

[gmanterry]

If only that was enough to stop illegal activities....

That's the problem. The Lawmakers seem to feel that passing laws will accomplish what they want. They never seem to take into account that criminals, who by definition, are 'law breakers' will ignore laws. Therefore the laws they create only really effect law abiding citizens. I swear that the Senators (American House of Lords) believe they are so powerful that they could pass a law to outlaw tornadoes and expect that tornadoes would disappear as soon as the President signed it into law. For instance, correct me if I'm wrong, I believe it is already illegal to kill people with bombs made from pressure cookers. However I expect Congress to pass a law either outlawing pressure cookers or requiring that all people who purchase pressure cookers first pass a background check. Such is the state of knee jerk legislation in the U.S.

Re:Sure, go ahead.

[libtek]

"Russia Today"? Haha - with horrible math? Lulz - with a fake headline? I don't think they are worried about the International Media's fake stories...

Re:Sure, go ahead.

[houstonbofh]

Two problems here.

(1) The article has nothing to do with Fukushima or TEPCO. It's about someone who sent anonymous death threats.

While the rest of your comments may or may not be true; The reason and the excuse can be mutually exclusive.

Re:Sure, go ahead.

[PopeRatzo]

(1) The article has nothing to do with Fukushima or TEPCO. It's about someone who sent anonymous death threats.

Death threats are already illegal.

So no, it's not "about death threats". Someone can write a death threat on a piece of paper and send it in the mail, but paper, pen and mail are all still legal.

(4) Sherman and Mangano's junk science didn't get blocked by evil governments or evil corporations. They put it on the internet and nobody interfered with them.

Still has nothing to do with Tor.

Blocking Tor is not going to stop death threats, nor will it stop junk science. Blocking Tor is about controlling the free flow of private information. Period.

Yes, this is about protecting the elites. Blocking Tor is certainly not about keeping us safe, because blacking Tor does nothing to make any of us safer from threats that only exist because of Tor.

Sometimes, figuring out right and wrong are really just about asking yourself: "Who benefits?"

Re:Sure, go ahead.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ya know, it would seem a pretty easy fix to that would be to not allow posts over X characters which closely match another post in the DB. But yeah, not sure anyone left at /. smart enough to figure that out.

Re:Sure, go ahead.

[walshy007]

From the article linked.

young children born on the US West Coast are 28 percent more likely to develop congenital hyperthyroidism.

From the title of the article

Almost third of US west coast newborns hit with thyroid problems.

Is it just me or is this really irresponsible reporting, considering the article mentions it is a _really_ rare condition, so 30% more of a chance still isn't all that much.

It is still noteworthy of course, but there are so many scare tactics at play in that article.

Re:Sure, go ahead.

[Anonymous Coward]

Two problems here.

(1) The article has nothing to do with Fukushima or TEPCO. It's about someone who sent anonymous death threats.

While the rest of your comments may or may not be true; The reason and the excuse can be mutually exclusive.

You know, "mutually exclusive" is a really silly, if not outright wrong, term there. "Distinct" would be a better choice.

Now begone lest I refer thee to Strunk & White!

Re:Sure, go ahead.

[Anonymous Coward]

When laws only end up benefiting criminals it's time to realize criminals construe and pass the laws.

I don't know of a single country where the criminals aren't passing the laws or otherwise in charge of policy. I live in Norway, we probably only have one last chance here to avoid the road towards future civil war and we're nearly certain to fail even if we should succeed in removing the current criminals this autumn (it would be a tiny step in the right direction but a crucial one).

Re:Sure, go ahead.

[Runaway1956]

Should we just outlaw politics?

Re:Sure, go ahead.

[Anonymous Coward]

What part of "anonymous death threats" didn't you understand? Oh, right. Anonymous.

Death threats being illegal doesn't help if you can't track who sent them. Blocking Tor would, in principle, make it easier to track people who send death threats, so that the existing law can be applied.

Not that I approve of blocking it, but you seem to have completely missed the point.

Re:Sure, go ahead.

[lightknight]

Indeed. I'm just going to do the usual (I'm in a hurry):

1.) This assumes that there are no legitimate usages of Tor. Nice to see Western countries are still holding the torch for freedom, liberty, and all that jazz; the people in various countries with tighter freedom of speech laws thank you for making it easier for their Thought Police to track them down and kill them.

2.) Common carrier / safe harbor clauses / legality fun. Start blocking traffic...legal issues. Plus your customers aren't paying you to monitor their shit, they're paying you to provide a pipe. If you're watching their data, reading their emails, taking note of the websites they're visiting...well, that's a new level of creepy. And unwelcome.

3.) Will not stop / deter illegal activities and / or Tor. Give it a rest guys...you've been fighting and losing non-stop for years. ISPs start blocking Tor, Tor implements some slight changes, hey look, Tor is back! You've solved nothing. And with or without Tor, illegal stuff is going to go on...and the vast majority of it is being done without Tor. The reality is that this focus on Tor is simply a diversion, a chance to talk about something 'safe,' because you can't do anything about the stuff that actually needs changing.

Re:Sure, go ahead.

[PopeRatzo]

Blocking Tor would, in principle, make it easier to track people who send death threats, so that the existing law can be applied.

And if you kept people in their homes, street crime would plummet.

Re:Sure, go ahead.

[Dunbal]

Oh please. Go buy some more and leave us alone.

Re:Sure, go ahead.

[Anonymous Coward]

Tor is not required to use Bitcoin and in fact is completely unrelated to the currency itself.

Re:Sure, go ahead.

[Reschekle]

They caught the guy who sent them so I'm not sure why Tor needs to be blocked.

Re:Sure, go ahead.

[Anonymous Coward]

That corresponds to about 40 cases in 600,000 births.

Assuming that you mean 40 cases against an expected number of 31.3 (which is a 28% increase) ... the sqrt variance in the number of cases should be sqrt(31.3) = 5.6. Approximating the Poisson distribution as a Gaussian, that means that the extra 8.7 cases constitute a 8.7/5.6 = 1.6-sigma excess, or a p-value of 0.06 (i.e. 94% confidence). Heck, that's practically nothing. You could pick twenty random diseases, look at them, and you'd *expect* that one of them would show that much of an excess. Relevant xkcd.

Re:Sure, go ahead.

[Anonymous Coward]

RT.COM is Russian State Propaganda. They try to counter-shit the jewish lies emanating from New York media.

If you mix Rt.com propaganda with the western/Israel lies you get a nice stench of crap.

Re:Sure, go ahead.

[Anonymous Coward]

Your spam is the problem. Busted!

Re:Sure, go ahead.

[Anonymous Coward]

On his deathbed, Emperor Pelagius the Mad outlawed death!

Re:Sure, go ahead.

[rastoboy29]

The link you provided was to RT, which publishes a lot of spurious information.  The paper they reference is not peer reviewed, and published on a trash website that looks credible at first.

I'm not saying it's not true, but I am saying that if there were strong evidence for it, many enterprising young reporters would be publishing it far and wide.

Re:Sure, go ahead.

[X0563511]

Yea, that sounds like quite the expensive operation. Since you're the expert, how do you propose to do such a thing? Keep in mind you have to support a huge data set and remain responsive.

Re:Sure, go ahead.

[X0563511]

I'm pretty sure Japan is not a Western country.

Re:Sure, go ahead.

[Anonymous Coward]

For starters, you could index by sentences or text lines. E.g. keys would be "Yea, that sounds like quite the expensive operation" "Since you're the expert, how do you propose to do such a thing" "Keep in mind you have to support a huge data set and remain responsive".

Then just look at how many how many hits you get in the database of previously posted sentences. That will quickly identify repeated spam.

If that's not enough, make an n-dimensional vector of the n words of a posting and then proceed to find the closest vector of that kind you have in the database. GIS systems have solved the problem of nearest-neigbour vector searches for a very long time.

I am not the initial poster. Just a guy who interviewed with the Google-spyplex.

Re:Sure, go ahead.

[Anonymous Coward]

Because they had to get their fat asses out of their chairs and do some real policework. Modern coppers are Facebook-Generation, you know. They are too obese to do actual work. They want to Google Suspects.

Re:Sure, go ahead.

[idontgno]

What part of "anonymous death threats" didn't you understand? Oh, right. Anonymous.

Death threats being illegal doesn't help if you can't track who sent them. Blocking Tor would, in principle, make it easier to track people who send death threats, so that the existing law can be applied.

And again. Death threats through the mail are anonymous. Since they're in an envelope in which source information is completely optional.

So, while you're at it, ban envelopes. Everyone uses postcards.

Not that I approve of blocking it, but you seem to have completely missed the point.

Not that I approve of your last-moment and half-hearted disavowal of your obvious support for blocking TOR, but you seem to have completely missed the real point: outlawing encryption solves NO law enforcement problem but denies law-abiding citizens their rightful privacy.

Re:Sure, go ahead.

[Anonymous Coward]

I am 100% positive they suck American balls 100% of time. They make absolutely no important decision without consulting with either the local American generals, the ambassador or Washington. They are a vassal of Pax Americana very much like Germany or Italy. And certainly their culture has been destroyed by all sorts of media shit and the drug culture of America. Or was it the believe that money is the sole and single truth which should rule everything ?
Japan is very much Western in that it is destroying itself at a quite rapid pace, like the whole West. And please don't argue about the speed of self-destruction. American cities aren't much better than Japan as a whole when it comes to fertility and all sorts of self-destructive habits from drug use to suicidal crap.
Their financial system is very much as broken as NY finance and they don't have any strong ethics left after being subjected to the hollywood crap.

Not look at South Korea and say the same.

Re:Sure, go ahead.

[houstonbofh]

Two problems here.

(1) The article has nothing to do with Fukushima or TEPCO. It's about someone who sent anonymous death threats.

While the rest of your comments may or may not be true; The reason and the excuse can be mutually exclusive.

You know, "mutually exclusive" is a really silly, if not outright wrong, term there. "Distinct" would be a better choice.

Now begone lest I refer thee to Strunk & White!

And I thought a good definition of "mutually exclusive" was "having no points in common with one another."

Re:Sure, go ahead.

[fuzznutz]

Expect to see New York's self appointed munchkin nanny, Michael Bloomberg, to call for legislation to ban high capacity pressure cookers too. "You should be able to feed a family of four with a three quart cooker if you weren't so fat."

And Cuomo will want to close the "yard sale loophole" and eliminate straw purchases for pressure cookers too.

Re:Sure, go ahead.

[Anonymous Coward]

I am sure Northrop has sold the US Postal service some sort of automated x-ray system to look through your envelope and to digitize your letters. The content of your letter is then forwarded to NSA and 37 major agencies and 325 local count-terrorism offices. All Top Secret out of a secret fund, of course.
Or was it Raytheon who got the pork ?

Re:Sure, go ahead.

[KingBenny]

umh , when not too long ago here a sever pedo got exposed by an undercover journalist who actually infiltrated some network instead of just shamelessly monitoring the whole countries email traffic i remember the local cyberpolice putting out a similar call. Most likely because they were embarassed or something i dont know. What's the point. Is Tor the only way to be anonymous? IF people buy crack on streetcorners with dollars instead of using bitcoin on the silk road should street corners and dollars be banned ? Is the egg to blame for the chicken like that? I'm losing track but what's the point in blocking it ? Sometimes it's as crime was invented by the internet since when did (heres the war on dope again) did the war on dope actually stop anything ?
someone tell the japanese police as well as other 'crime' units ... infiltration means working on it, not just sitting there waiting for some script to ring the bell on a bad word in someone's traffic somewhere. Don't look at me, i'm an ex-con myself, i didnt do it but i dont really like police either

Re:Sure, go ahead.

[Anonymous Coward]

Blocking Tor would, in principle, make it easier to track people who send death threats, so that the existing law can be applied.

And if you kept people in their homes, street crime would plummet.

There's a good reason for people to need to leave their house. The anti-TOR crowd does not believe there's a good reason for TOR to exist, therefore it should be banned. Your post is irrelevent. /. may hand you mod points for posting absurd, anti-establishment rhetoric, but I hope you realize you've stooped to the level of fox news.

Re:Sure, go ahead.

[maxwell demon]

And I thought a good definition of "mutually exclusive" was "having no points in common with one another."

"Mutually exclusive" means at most one of them can be true at the same time. For example "the temperature is 30 degrees Celsius" and "it snows" are mutually exclusive, as there's no way that it snows at 30 degrees Celsius. OTOH "the sun is shining" and "the train is delayed" have no points in common, but they are not mutually exclusive because the train may well be delayed while the sun is shining.

Re:Sure, go ahead.

[houstonbofh]

And I thought a good definition of "mutually exclusive" was "having no points in common with one another."

"Mutually exclusive" means at most one of them can be true at the same time. For example "the temperature is 30 degrees Celsius" and "it snows" are mutually exclusive, as there's no way that it snows at 30 degrees Celsius. OTOH "the sun is shining" and "the train is delayed" have no points in common, but they are not mutually exclusive because the train may well be delayed while the sun is shining.

Ahhh..... And I thought you were on "mutually exclusive." Perhaps you should go back and look at "can be" in the OP. As in "The reason and the excuse can be mutually exclusive.

Re:Sure, go ahead.

[cavebison]

> It probably bothers TEPCO greatly, that this is out there

Doubtful. It probably bothers them more that articles like that are completely inaccurate, intentionally misleading and exaggerated for the sake of getting clicks. Not to mention the Radiation and Public Health Project itself, from where that story is sourced. Companies worry about bad press. Even if it's bad journalism as well.

Could negatively impact host file evangilism...apk

[Anonymous Coward]

A corrupt slashdot luser has pentrated the moderation system to downmod all my posts while impersonating me.

Nearly 230++ times that I know of @ this point for all of March/April 2013 so far, & others here have told you to stop - take the hint, lunatic (leave slashdot)...

Sorry folks - but whoever the nutjob is that's attempting to impersonate me, & upset the rest of you as well, has SERIOUS mental issues, no questions asked! I must've gotten the better of him + seriously "gotten his goat" in doing so in a technical debate & his "geek angst" @ losing to me has him doing the:

---

A.) $10,000 challenges, ala (where the imposter actually TRACKED + LISTED the # of times he's done this no less, & where I get the 230 or so times I noted above) -> http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3585795&cid=43285307

&/or

B.) Reposting OLD + possibly altered models - (this I haven't checked on as to altering the veracity of the info. being changed) of posts of mine from the past here

---

(Albeit massively repeatedly thru all threads on /. this March/April 2013 nearly in its entirety thusfar).

* Personally, I'm surprised the moderation staff here hasn't just "blocked out" his network range yet honestly!

(They know it's NOT the same as my own as well, especially after THIS post of mine, which they CAN see the IP range I am coming out of to compare with the ac spamming troll doing the above...).

APK

P.S.=> Again/Stressing it: NO guys - it is NOT me doing it, as I wouldn't waste that much time on such trivial b.s. like a kid might...

Plus, I only post where hosts file usage is on topic or appropriate for a solution & certainly NOT IN EVERY POST ON SLASHDOT (like the nutcase trying to "impersonate me" is doing for nearly all of March/April now, & 230++ times that I know of @ least)... apk

P.S.=> here is CORRECT host file information just to piss off the insane lunatic troll:

--

21++ ADVANTAGES OF CUSTOM HOSTS FILES (how/what/when/where/why):

Over AdBlock & DNS Servers ALONE 4 Security, Speed, Reliability, & Anonymity (to an extent vs. DNSBL's + DNS request logs).

1.) HOSTS files are useable for all these purposes because they are present on all Operating Systems that have a BSD based IP stack (even ANDROID) and do adblocking for ANY webbrowser, email program, etc. (any webbound program). A truly "multi-platform" UNIVERSAL solution for added speed, security, reliability, & even anonymity to an extent (vs. DNS request logs + DNSBL's you feel are unjust hosts get you past/around).

2.) Adblock blocks ads? Well, not anymore & certainly not as well by default, apparently, lol - see below:

Adblock Plus To Offer 'Acceptable Ads' Option

http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/12/12/2213233/adblock-plus-to-offer-acceptable-ads-option )

AND, in only browsers & their subprogram families (ala email like Thunderbird for FireFox/Mozilla products (use same gecko & xulrunner engines)), but not all, or, all independent email clients, like Outlook, Outlook Express, OR Window "LIVE" mail (for example(s)) - there's many more like EUDORA & others I've used over time that AdBlock just DOES NOT COVER... period.

Disclaimer: Opera now also has an AdBlock addon (now that Opera has addons above widgets), but I am not certain the same people make it as they do for FF or Chrome etc..

3.) Adblock doesn't protect email programs external to FF (non-mozilla/gecko engine based) family based wares, So AdBlock doesn't protect email programs like Outlook, Outlook Express, Windows "LIVE" mail & others like them (EUDORA etc./et al), Hosts files do. THIS IS GOOD VS. SPAM M

Uh-oh

[Anonymous Coward]

Japanese ISPs seem like the kind that would accept such a request without batting an eyelid.

Relay

[Anonymous Coward]

I think I'm going to setup an extra relay now.

Freedom is a two edged sword...

[houstonbofh]

Yep... We want all people to be free. Unless we don't like them, then we have to know who they are. But if someone else we don't like does not like them, then THEY NEED TO BE FREE! Being a part of the ruling class would be so much easier if it were not for all these darned peasants...

Re:Freedom is a two edged sword...

[naff89]

Maybe that's why single-edged swords are more popular in Japan.

Re:Freedom is a two edged sword...

[buchner.johannes]

My freedom ends where yours begins. Full freedom means full responsibility for actions. No freedom means no responsibility.

But you can not have full freedom and no responsibility.

Re:Freedom is a two edged sword...

[fredprado]

Sure you can. The correlation between freedom and responsibility exists only in your head. In a world where it is impossible to restrict the freedom of others, like a completely anonymous Internet, everybody would be completely free and nobody would be responsible for anything.

Re:Freedom is a two edged sword...

[Gaygirlie]

Sure you can. The correlation between freedom and responsibility exists only in your head. In a world where it is impossible to restrict the freedom of others, like a completely anonymous Internet, everybody would be completely free and nobody would be responsible for anything.

A completely anonymous and free Internet would be useless, though. Everyone would need to have randomly-generated identifiers, meaning that there would be no way of establishing communication with a party that you previously communicated with unless you went through them all, one by one, and exchanged previously-exchanged certificates to identify yourselves to one another -- as soon as you install any sort of an architecture to the thing, like e.g. DNS of some sort, web-services or anything like that you immediately introduce a "more equal than others" - class of netizens and therefore it would all have to be completely ad-hoc with no structure to it at all. Even with some sort of a peer-to-peer DNS-system the people with the most computers online would be the ones with the most power at their hands and could, indeed, restrict the freedom of others.

Now, all of this would still entail that there would be these gatekeepers that maintain the actual physical construction and access to this virtual world and that, again, would in and of itself place restrictions on freedoms; these gatekeepers could allow themselves more bandwidth than others, more computers online than others, they could introduce tracking of the people they let through and so on. Basically, the idea you presented is an oxymoron and not possible in the physical world.

Re:Freedom is a two edged sword...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure you can. The correlation between freedom and responsibility exists only in your head. In a world where it is impossible to restrict the freedom of others, like a completely anonymous Internet, everybody would be completely free and nobody would be responsible for anything.

That only work in a system where there is no consequence, such as the Interwebs which is really a giant video game. Responsibility only begin once you take action base on information received from the web, at which point you become the responsible party. Anywhere else, it is inapplicable. This is why the Intertubes are so powerful and why states, nations and corporations are so afraid of it.

INB4 Important stuff are on the internet. Such system are the responsibility of whoever hooked it to the internet. If a random cracker can take it down then, given enough time, random noise will take it down too. Just because you can't take your responsibility doesn't give you the right to take everyone else freedom. Such are the rules of the Internet, and if you don't like it, take your very important 'products' and 'services' back to a brick and mortar store where the state can taxes and protect you in exchange of your freedom.

Re:Freedom is a two edged sword...

[fredprado]

That works in any system where physical violence can't be used to impose one's will over another. Hacking is just an inconvenience in comparison and can't really take the freedom of anybody in the Internet at long term. Again "responsibility" has nothing to do with freedom. It is a means of arbitrarily limiting freedom in systems where it is impossible to achieve it completely accordingly to someone's sense of right and wrong, which is far from being an absolute concept.

Re:Freedom is a two edged sword...

[fredprado]

Now, all of this would still entail that there would be these gatekeepers that maintain the actual physical construction and access to this virtual world and that, again, would in and of itself place restrictions on freedoms; these gatekeepers could allow themselves more bandwidth than others, more computers online than others, they could introduce tracking of the people they let through and so on. Basically, the idea you presented is an oxymoron and not possible in the physical world.

Allowing more or less of those things is irrelevant regarding freedom. You seem to confuse communism with freedom. That is an oxymoron. The gatekeepers exist in the real world and are restricted to the real world laws. As long as those laws force net neutrality what exists within is free regardless of what they do. If those laws do not force neutrality, things like TOR come into play and try to compensate it.

Regarding identity. Transmitting information regardless of identity is far from being useless. Information has value on its own. There are means to verify identity if you want to do real world stuff in the Internet. If you do not, identity is a secondary concept.

Re:Freedom is a two edged sword...

[Opportunist]

Sure you can! Go into politics!

Re:Freedom is a two edged sword...

[Anonymous Coward]

You forget General Douglas McBomb, who wants to hook up his 25 ICBMs to the internet so that he can launch them from his ipad. We really need to ensure the intorwombs are free of hackorz or something really nasty will happen.
Then there is Todaki EMBA, CEO of DreckCo, who will wire up his 27 reactors built in 1961 to the internet. He does this because DreckCo needs to cut cost so that the banksters can get a higher bonus. We need to clean the interwombs from the hacksters who will bring a meltdown to DreckCo reactors !!!!!!!

Re:Freedom is a two edged sword...

[Anonymous Coward]

Information Control is actually a deeply-ingrained feature of Anglosaxon culture. People feel offended by the existence of truly anonymous speech. It can probably be traced back to the Anglican Church, the Lord Protector and so on. I am not judging this, just observing.
And yeah, I normally don't look at all at the poster's names. I fully expect this site to be full of stinking lies and I will simply question or refute those whom I consider lies. I know there exist differences in judgement. Some people will claim Apartheid requires fully black victims, for example. I will claim Apartheid also works when the perpetrators have been victimised in the past and when the victims are brown people.
And I don't need any IDs for that.

Japan

[tmosley]

Looks like Japan is now cruising down the road to a police state. Remember that in a police state, policies are implemented to make things easier on police. This means freedoms are crushed in favor of eliminating crime, real or imagined. You know, like shutting down the third most populous city while searching for a single person/evil terrorist.

Absolutely disgusting.

Re:Japan

[rskbrkr]

ummm, Japan was always a police state...

Re:Japan

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? Having lived here for over a decade, you could have fooled me. It's not much different to any other country, and the authorities are arguably less intrusive in many areas than they are in the U.S.

But let's be honest, throwing around this kind of ridiculous bullshit hyperbole has always been a popular sport for self-appointed internet experts who have no fucking idea or experience of what they're talking about.

Re:Japan

[Anonymous Coward]

i think they are miffed because torrents is abbreviated to three letters and they wanted to be the only ones to have the option to do that

Re:Japan

[viperidaenz]

I suppose you'd rather let a couple of people who want to do nothing more than kill innocent people go than disrupt the city they planted explosives in.

Re:Japan

[Greyfox]

I submit for your consideration that over the same amount of time in Boston on an average day, more than that many people would have died to gun violence. If you think about it, by causing the lockdown, those two terrorists probably saved more lives than they took!

Re:Japan

[ShanghaiBill]

ummm, Japan was always a police state...

Indeed. After their WWII defeat, Japan was forced to adopt democracy, and put on the facade of being a free society. But underneath, it has not really changed that much. There is no independent judiciary, no right to a jury trial, forced confessions are routine and almost always accepted by the courts. The police have the authority to perform "on the spot" justice, such as a nightstick beating. If the police think you are guilty, then you are guilty: less than 1% of defendants are acquitted at trial. Wikipedia has a good overview of the Japanese Criminal Justice System.

On the other hand, they have an extremely low rate of violent crime, and the Japanese people seem to be satisfied with that.

Re:Japan

[erroneus]

No. Just a ridiculously obedient state. They don't need police when they have this outrageous sense of shame and high levels of acceptance of just about anything thrown at them.

Re:Japan

[tmosley]

The amount of money that was lost because of the lockdown could have fed all the starving people in the world for a week. I wonder how many businesses that were on the borderline will now go bankrupt from lost business? I wonder how many people will kill themselves as a result?

But hey, it's worth it to kill those targeted by the media as evil, evil terrorists, right?

But seriously, there have been dozens of bombings and hundreds of mass murders over the years, and not ONCE was an entire city shut down for a manhunt. WHAT HAS CHANGED!?

Re:Japan

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd rather risk a terrorist bombing than allow the TSA to exist (and that hypothetical depends on a reality where the TSA is actually effective, and it is most certainly not). You, however, do not value your freedoms and would rather sacrifice everything to save some amount of people; foolish indeed.

Re:Japan

[flayzernax]

The funny thing is in most tyrannies people can say the same thing. You don't know what you've lost until you lose it or have it used against you or become one of the oppressed.

This is the hardest concept to get across to people who say "this is no big deal" "I never was stopped from watching my official youtube video". Thats right you never were. But when you are because you happen to be one of those "other people" you read about.

When your looking for a reliable source of journalism and that source gets shut down, bought out, shoved 25 pages back on google and replaced with shit. When you have to spend 20 hours researching something instead of 5 minutes to find real sources citing real incidents that matter. You will understand. Information is becoming MUCH harder to get without peeling through layers of government and corporate propaganda and advertisement. The next step is to make it even harder to go outside of regular plain web google.

The saddest things is TOR is used for a lot of crap and very little good stuff, there still is better information outside of tor pertaining to real world events. So tor gets little love from the people that SHOULD be supporting it and all the attention of the people that hate it.

Don't be all excited about loosing it before you had a chance to need it.

Re:Japan

[Anonymous Coward]

On the other hand, they have an extremely low rate of violent crime, and the Japanese people seem to be satisfied with that.

At least the ones who haven't thrown themselves onto one of Japan's many excellent train lines.

Re:Japan

[the eric conspiracy]

You would be very wrong.

Boston has the lowest rate of gun violence in the US at 3.6 / 100k each year.

Since the population is about 600K, that's 22 per year.

These people were killing at a rate of about 1 per day.

Re:Japan

[Anonymous Coward]

Police, or more likely the FBI, never thought they could get away with it until now. Bet your ass I'd shut down my entire autonomous system just to track down some rogue network traffic if the management let me and the users didn't revolt.

The government is letting the various security agencies do as they please and the voting populous is okay with it - some are even entertained by it.

Re:Japan

[LVSlushdat]

Perhaps you can tell us a country that is NOT "cruising down the road to a police state"... I'd sure LOVE to know, because, as much as I love America, I'm getting sick and tired of the destruction of it by BOTH sides of the political isle.. During my time in the Army in the 1970s, I went on RnR to Sydney Australia and was totally impressed with them, and in fact, considered emigrating there after I got out of the Army... Fast forward to 2013, and they're (along with ALL of the other "Commonwealth" countries) heading down that very same road to a police state.. Sure am glad I'm in my 60s, and likely won't live much more than maybe another 10 years, if that long... Its gonna MUCH worse before it gets better (if ever).....
 

Re:Japan

[the eric conspiracy]

Boston shuts down routinely for snow emergencies.

Not a big deal.

Re:Japan

[Alex Belits]

The funny thing is in most tyrannies people can say the same thing. You don't know what you've lost until you lose it or have it used against you or become one of the oppressed.

It's the same in all countries. There are no "tyrannies" and "free countries", and never were. For most of the world/history (except some egregious things like Nazi and Somalia) it's just propaganda you grew up with vs. propaganda someone else grew up with. You just believe that whatever your own government considers unacceptable is something that no one would ever want to do.

Re:Japan

[yet another SanTiago]

Well, the referred wikipedia article says a different story:

In murder, U.S. police arrested 19,000 people for 26,000 murders, in which 75% were prosecuted and courts convicted 12,000 people. In Japan, 1,800 people were arrested for 1,300 murders, but prosecutors tried only 43%. Had the allegation that Japanese prosecutors use weak evidence mostly based on (forced) confessions to achieve convictions been true, the larger proportion of arrests would have resulted in prosecutions and eventual conviction. But the opposite is true. In fact, the data indicates that Japanese prosecutors bring charges only when the evidence is overwhelming and likelihood of conviction is near absolute, which gives a greater incentive for the accused to confess and aim for a lighter sentence, which, in turn, results in a high rate for confession.

Re:Japan

[Mashiki]

Really? Having lived here for over a decade, you could have fooled me.

True it's not really a police state, though it does have exceptionally limited freedoms. It also doesn't help that the justice system is so inherently broken to the point that they started appointing lay judges for criminal cases, because the sentences handed out were so weak compared to the crimes committed. While it's not bad per-se, as compared to oh...the UK for instance, there are areas where what would pass in the west as a slap on the wrist will get you into those comfy 3x8' cells.

And really jumping back to the topic at hand, it's not just TOR they're running afraid of but sneaker nets.

Re:Japan

[Anonymous Coward]

You have no fucking idea what a "police state" is. Whining about google isn't it.

Re:Japan

[Culture20]

The amount of money that was lost because of the lockdown could have fed all the starving people in the world for a week.

But it wouldn't have. Just like my brussels sprouts when I was 5 wouldn't have fed starving children in China.

Re:Japan

[Uberbah]

ummm, Japan was always a police state...

Which is why most of their cops don't even carry guns. Or, maybe, you're using that term "police state" but it doesn't mean whatever it is you think it means.....

Re:Japan

[Mr. Slippery]

Which is why most of their cops don't even carry guns.

I believe you may have confused Japan with the U.K. Cops I saw on the street in my months in Osaka routinely carried revolvers. Not that it matters; a police state has nothing to do with whether police carry firearms, it has to do with totalitarian government -- which, when the population has been disarmed, can function quite well even with low-level functionaries not carrying firearms.

Re:Japan

[viperidaenz]

Wrong, as another person said gun death rate in Boston is 22 per year.

These people who were caught/shot were throwing yet more bombs at the authorities as they were being chased. They had a whole house full of them as well.
Do you think they stock piled them just for fun?

Re:Japan

[Anonymous Coward]

...no right to a jury trial...

Your information is outdated.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/aug/03/japan-trial-by-jury-returns

Re:Japan

[advocate_one]

These people who were caught/shot were throwing yet more bombs at the authorities as they were being chased. They had a whole house full of them as well. Do you think they stock piled them just for fun?

You honestly believe that crap put out by the authorities? they were patsies set up as the fall guys

Re:Japan

[Runaway1956]

Does Japan still have an emperor?

Re:Japan

[Runaway1956]

I think GP's point might have been that Google would be a valuable tool to a police state, or something like that. And, in fact, Google is resisting government's attempt to turn it into such a tool. Google cooperates with some government requests, and denies others. It seems they actually look at those requests, individually, trying to weed out overbearing bullshit - unlike some other corporations that honor every request, no matter how plainly overbearing.

Re:Japan

[Anonymous Coward]

For now, yes. Unfortunately, it is not up to Google to decide whether they are a tool or not.

Re:Japan

[Anonymous Coward]

Having lived here for over a decade, you could have fooled me.

If you're an anglophone who has lived in Japan for over 10 years, you've already been fooled.

Re:Japan

[Bearhouse]

Agree. But once you're in the system, you WILL be found guilty...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_justice_system_of_Japan#Conviction_rate

"In the matter relating to Japanese prosecutors being extremely cautious, the paper found ample evidence for it. In Japan, 99.7% of all the cases brought to court resulted in conviction, while in the U.S. the figure is 88%. "

Re:Japan

[Anonymous Coward]

...what? Have you ever actually visited Japan? Do you even lift?

I live in Japan right now, and ALL police except certain classes of traffic cop have pistols which they wear constantly. Given my limited knowledge of guns, and the fact that you only get to see (a small part of) the butt end, I think they're Glock 19s at the moment.

Compare and contrast with the UK, where almost NO police with the exception of rare cases (diplomatic and royalty protection squads, for example) have guns. Should they encounter a situation involving firearms, they call for backup from a Firearms Unit (who have a very fast car with a special gun locker installed in it, and who very much *do* have guns).

Re:Japan

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? Having lived here for over a decade, you could have fooled me.

Find out what the conviction rate is Japanese courts, and you will see at least one component of a police state.

Re:Japan

[Cutriss]

I could mod this as incorrect/misleading, but it's better to just reply with the correct information.

Boston is an anomaly when determining statistics of metropolitan areas. Unlike many larger cities like LA and Chicago, Boston has a fairly small land area. New York City is more than six times the land area of Boston for example. Whereas many metro areas grew over time, annexing adjacent cities and and towns, many of the towns in the Boston area resisted this move and were never annexed - They operate independently of the city proper. So while the Boston *metro* area grows, Boston itself has little room to do so.

That said, while there is crime in Boston (nobody would argue otherwise), your low statistic focuses only on Boston and not the Boston metro area, which includes places like West Roxbury, Dorchester, and Jamaica Plain, where the gun violence rate is much higher. To put it another way, using your statistic to make this argument would be like citing the murder rate in NYC based solely on the numbers in the Manhattan.

Re:Japan

[Anonymous Coward]

Japan has always been very police-state and it's pretty disgusting. When I first got interested in Japan I obsessed over every single thing relating to it. I listened to JPOP, watched hundreds of Anime, loved Japanese TV (especially the game shows), and studied the culture and language inside and out. My goal was to teach in Japan, what a great idea right? It seems so cliche but it felt so right. Well, then I learned the truth behind Japan after 7-years of obsessing over it and it turned out to be a police-state driven cesspool of ant-like behavior garbage. The people there almost seemed like they didn't have souls by the way they were so focused on their work, studies, and lacked individuality. I didn't understand what US freedom was about until I went and live in Japan. It really seemed like everyone was robotic. Clock in, clock out. The only time where they seemed to feel alive is when they'd go drinking and karaoke after work. It's pretty sad that you'd rather go out drinking your night away than to go home to your wife but that's the norm over there. Additionally while traditional mindsets are fading away, socialism is very well accepted even by the youth as it's also considered being "progressive" over there. People were taught that this is how it is and how it should be. "Honor" is pretty much defined by slaving yourself away for corporations and the government without regard of your well-being. If you have dysmennhoria or a flu, then you should still come to work regardless and endure it. If you really need to go to the hospital well good luck because it takes forever to get in line if the hospital is open (it's government controlled). My love affair with Japan got shot down within the first two-months of living there. It's a great place to visit but a terrible place to live or raise children at.

Now, Japan isn't the only country that acts this way. In South Korea and in the Philippines, two other countries I've also lived at were very much similar only worse. South Korea was striving to be better than Japan and be the most proud country in the world. Students studied for about 16 hours a day and many could not see their parents. Students don't like this at all and there's about to be a big backlash / rebellion in that country, just wait for it. In the Philippines, the government is very corrupt. It's so corrupt that I can't even talk about it in fear that bad things will happen (I'm in Quezon right now using a US proxy). The people have no choice but to accept their corrupt leaders. The police are easily bribed and people get raped and nothing really happens unless there's a big community outlash. You can go down to a bar and ask for a 15yo girl to sleep with and pay a cop $10USD to look the other way. Sure, it may seem like the opposite side of corruption but the government does do what it can to monitor its people, and it does block websites, monitor internet traffic (as slow as the internet may be), and life generally is poor. The two-class system here is terrible and that's exactly what a police state ends up creating with enough time. Do NOT vote for anyone that wants too many regulations or you'll end up in a third world country within a decade or two. The US I know is already almost there.

Re:Japan

[Inda]

Whenever I'm in London, which is a few times a year, I always see police with guns. Big fucking blow-your-head-off guns.

Sure, in my small town in the south west of England, they don't carry guns but in the big cities, they do.

Re:Japan

[the eric conspiracy]

Your statement is handwaving backed up by no quantitative facts, like how much if any of the suburbs of Boston were shut down, what the gun violence rate in those areas (if any) were and so on.

Sorry, you haven't even come close to making an argument.

Try again.

Re:Japan

[the eric conspiracy]

Oh and one other thing. The gun violence rate I quoted is FOR METRO BOSTON. Not just the core city.

The central city is 1.7 per 100,000.

Re:Japan

[flayzernax]

I wasn't griping about google they are just a tool to parse the information out there. But whatever floods that tool with bad results is not googles fault. Googles database is increasingly becoming cluttered with useless information. I don't think its a great conspiracy, but I think its being encouraged somehow maybe by certain parties with a lot of money, power, influence.

For instance on freenet there was a documentary by a Russian on a motorbike about their drive through Chernobyl. Was the daughter of a nuclear physicist. It was a very blog like thing done before there were blogs. Its not easy to find on google and if you search around for it now you end up with a lot of results from mainstream blogs who plagiarized and edited the content. Nothing about it was very politically controversial except that it slammed down hard on how the Soviets handled the situation. Tidbits like that are becoming increasingly rare and you end up with 25 results for either porn or MSN, CNN, or slashdot affiliates.

Re:Japan

[Anonymous Coward]

You are incorrect. West Roxbury, Jamaica Plain and Dorchester are all within Boston city limits and vote for the same mayor. Also, West Roxbury is quite nice, it's Roxbury, which is much closer in that is a shithole. I believe that Mattapan (murdapan) is within Boston as well.

Re:Japan

[flayzernax]

*p.s. that last sentence is sarcasm if you don't get it.

Re:Japan

[Anonymous Coward]

You are very wrong. People are using TOR to good effect every day and we have already achieved quite a few feats. It makes you much more efficient if the Jewish information controllers can't easily identify those who counter their pro-war propaganda.
They have planned to have a war with Iran in 2012. Has not happened yet. Because TOR allows for western dissidents to counter the bullshit of the mainstream media who are in an incestuous relation with the weapons industry and the folks who run US intelligence/government. Kissinger, Albright, Emanuel and so on.
Now, it is you turn to explain why I am a Nazi nutter and why they don't run an Apartheid system in Israel. You turn to explain why General Dempsey, whom we support, is also a Nazi nut.

Re:Japan

[Anonymous Coward]

You are very, very naive. Google will bend over whenever a National Security Letter comes through the fax from one of the 370000 government employees who can write such a letter. They will look away when their crypto administrators are previous intel agency employees of America or Israel. Of course there is no such thing as "previous". The big corporations give the government favours because they are part of a big system that wants to control the plebs.
If you speak out against this, they will either label you as a "terror sympathizer" or they will ridicule you as "an idiot who is just too naive". So you better use Google via TOR, or even better use something like YaCY, a true open-source, distributed search engine.

Re:Japan

[Anonymous Coward]

As much as England still has a fucking Queen who rules over Canada, Australia, New Zealand and quite a few sheep-fucking places, too. Technically, at least. And factually in many ways too, as she stays in office, reads all the juicy intel papers, gets all the relevant GCHQ/NSA/DSD/GCSB summaries for DECADES.

And as much as your Saudi puppet state is run by a king-tyrant who will get away with basically anything, because he sucks American balls, doesn't stand up to Israel and makes sure the support for Islamic terror by Saudis is done in the shadows.
Your Chechen terrorists are very likely the fruit of Saudi-Wahabist terror finance. You know, as in Burka-Finance. Or as in Camels-have-more-rights-than-women-freedom.

Re:Japan

[Anonymous Coward]

It could be that Japanese police don't bring weak cases in front of a judge. Maybe THAT is it ? I have read they usually want the suspect to confess himself until they go to court. That implies very long interrogation. The flip side is that the lawyer-vultures don't make big bucks, as the case is already watertight when it reaches court.
To me it seems the japanese justice system has been quite civil and moderate after WW2. Which you can of course attribute to Americans occupying Japan, if you like. At least partially.

Re:Japan

[Anonymous Coward]

The British have grown into trigger-happy pussies recently. They made a sieve out of an illegal Brazilian whom they suspected to be a bomber. It turned out he simply wanted to escape from police control. Note: always roll over when blighty police thinks you of a serious threat. They will not hesitate to use real military forces on essentially anyone and there are not laws saying anything about it. All Executive Privilege or whatever they call it while they have no constitution.
They simply killed quite a few IRA terrorists when they could apprehend them. With military special forces (SAS or SBS). States are erected on the bones of dissenters and the British Empire is not at all an exception.

Re:Japan

[Anonymous Coward]

If the government had let people use their own guns instead of locking them into their homes, the two Chechens would not have gone very far. A local militia would have lynched them and all would be OK by now. Instead, USG demonstrated how they could use soviet methods.

Re:Japan

[Anonymous Coward]

It works differently. You first let Chechens into country and then turn a blind eye to their activities. Something will eventually happen. Then more control and more profit.
You could of course lock down your borders and have a proper immigration policy (no Muslims at all, there are plenty of peaceful Buddhists and Hinuds), but that runs against the instincts of the international banker-crook "elite" which actually runs your system. And by extension, my system, sadly.

Re:Japan

[cellocgw]

These people who were caught/shot were throwing yet more bombs at the authorities as they were being chased. They had a whole house full of them as well. Do you think they stock piled them just for fun?

You honestly believe that crap put out by the authorities? they were patsies set up as the fall guys

Oddly enough, I had exactly this idea for the Next Big Thriller Conspiracy Movie. Shady characters from some TLA (USA-based of course) set out to discredit [disliked foreign organization]. They start out by recruiting stupid young brothers into a fake anti-USA group and ,err,.. set them up the bomb. Real life is working out perfectly here, since the younger brother is still (allegedly) alive, and can whisper secret clues about the setup to a voluptuous nurse whose boyfriend is ex-Special Forces and ... you get the idea.

Re:Japan

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, he should report how the "japs eat little children they roasted over the fire" and similar anglo-jingoist claptrap. He should perpetuate the hatred for the benefit of Greenpeace (who want to deny Japanese people their traditional seafood), Hollywood and the arms industry. Indeed !

Re:Japan

[Anonymous Coward]

That's an astute observation but it has really always been the case. The strong feed on the weak and you don't have the right connections you will be picked apart by the buzzards. It's certainly not a UK phenominon.

Re:Japan

[Anonymous Coward]

So you found countries with different kinds of corruption and drug abuse you are accustomed to ? You find it OK for your healthcare thugs to destroy American finances but you are horrified about having to wait a bit in a Japanese hospital ?

Maybe you should grow up and realize the rest of the world is crooked in a different way than America. It's called culture, boy.

Re:Japan

[Anonymous Coward]

" running afraid of but sneaker nets."

hurrrm, are they going to demand an Automatic Inspection Device on each and every USB stick ? That could certainly be a boost to their ailing mobile phone industry when Sony can supply a 60$ UMTS radio for each 3$ memory stick ! Imagine how many work would be created that way and how their unemployment would go down of that as a consequence.

Less sarcastically, I don't think they are that stupid and anti-rational. You can't control what people pass around without a full-blown Tsheka system in place. And how do you remotely hack via USB stick ? That would be a feasible option for state-sponsored sabotage, or should I call it terrorism ? But not for Takashi-John Blackhat.

Re:Japan

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice rose tinted glasses. Pol plot. Stalin. Mao. The il's. just because you've been brought up in a free society doesn't mean it's "just all a matter of perspective". Have you ever been arrested for a thought crime? Or for being intelligent? For wearing glasses? Tyrannies come and go all the time and they are real. You ever been through a Great Leap Forward?

Go talk to some people who escaped such atrocities and maybe you'll realize your all things equal line is ridiculous. My chinese dad and grandmother and my Russian neighbors and my Cambodian friends would all like to respectfully disagree with you. The US is slipping into a similar state and I dread to think of the US that my children and grandchildren will know.

-s

Re:Japan

[Anonymous Coward]

Forward your concerns to the noble captains who "opened" China and Japan to "free trade". With cannonboats of course. Forward it to the noble Lords who thought they had to "play a great game" with Russia and Austria. That "game" entailed supporting and inciting Serb/Yugo terrorism on Austrian soil. And finally, that "game" consumed millions of Anglosaxon soldiers in the trenches of France, when the Kaiser kicked the ass of the terror supporters.

Coming back to China, they had a long-standing policy of foreign non-intervention they had their admirable ethical systems and queens and kings, generals and bureaucrats to run a complex system. Until the British, the Germans and Americans taught the Japanese that you have to be an aggressive, expeditionary force or you will be submitted to endless humiliation and your youth will be drugged on a large scale. To the benefit of Anglo "traders".

No, China has helped themselves from aggression and rape. They kicked out the Japanese and then the Americans. They knew fully well that without the rather brutal methods of Mao, there would be no more China. In tough times you need tough people to kill the invaders. So simple.

If your glorified Anglo-robber-barons had not interfered with military force under the disguise of "trade", China would be a monarchy to the present day. So, maybe you use your braincells before you make useless statements, Traitor.

Re:Japan

[Anonymous Coward]

The amount of money that was lost because of the lockdown could have fed all the starving people in the world for a week.

Hyperbole: Because facts are hard!

Re:Japan

[Alex Belits]

Go talk to some people who escaped such atrocities and maybe you'll realize your all things equal line is ridiculous.

I can talk to my own relatives, friends and acquaintances immigrated to US, to find out how they were discriminated and persecuted for practicing religion that I know for a fact, they did not even know at the time, and were staunch atheists for their whole life until they were promised easy immigration process if they will claim they are trying to escape religious discrimination and not racism and economic crisis.

I choose you

[Anonymous Coward]

pokemon(non-story)

Demon Killer Hacker

[roman_mir]

hacker going by the name Demon Killer was found to regularly use Tor to anonymize his online activities, like posting of death threats on public message boards

- I can see what they mean, he probably promised to hack somebody with an axe. Somebody should suggest the police ban axes, not onions.

Re:Demon Killer Hacker

[ShanghaiBill]

Somebody should suggest the police ban axes

In Japan, it is already illegal to own an axe. You also need a permit from the public safety committee to own scissors with blades longer than 15cm (6 inches). Unless you can show a professional need, you will have to settle for smaller scissors with rounded points. It is also illegal to carry a knife with a blade more than 5 cm (2 in) long. Citation: Knife Legislation in Japan

Re:Demon Killer Hacker

[Anonymous Coward]

They are just jealous of all the American's huge blades and merely enacted that legislation for them to have a scapegoat to point at when the ladies get disappointed. The Aussies went the other direction and started overcompensating. People over in the EU think this size comparison business is so uncivilized that they want to ban pointy things outright.

Re:Demon Killer Hacker

[Anonymous Coward]

They can't even have a decent pair of scissors??! How do they ever manage to open all those bubble-wrapped industrial-strength clear plastic packagings?

Re:Demon Killer Hacker

[Anonymous Coward]

Bullshit. I personally bought a foot-long takewari that could split a man's head in half--in Tokyu Hands in the middle of downtown Tokyo (the one by Ikebukuro Station). I'm sick of your garbage posts about things you nothing nothing about. If you don't know anything, just shut the fuck up.

Re:Demon Killer Hacker

[Anonymous Coward]

Box cutters or large knives.

Re:Demon Killer Hacker

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's a takewari with an 18 cm blade. What a surprise! You're full of shit!

Re:Demon Killer Hacker

[CodeBuster]

In Japan, it is already illegal to own an axe.

What if you're a rural farmer who needs the axe for legitimate farming activities or other rural chores?

Re:Demon Killer Hacker

[Anonymous Coward]

That guy's full of shit. See the 0 score comment below him with a link to an 18 cm bladed cutting tool. The law only applies to knives and swords.

Re:Demon Killer Hacker

[sdreader]

He provided evidence with a citation. Since the citation is Wikipedia and is (according to you) wrong, you're free to edit it. Just remember that the linked information also contains references to other articles, which provide further evidence that he's right. If he truly is wrong it's likely not out of deliberate ignorance as he's shown a wiliness to provide evidence.

In other words, don't be a dick and call someone "full of shit" just because it's easy to do over the Internet.

Re:Demon Killer Hacker

[Anonymous Coward]

I did it because he's obviously wrong and he should know that reading one section of a wikipedia article doesn't make him into an expert. Read his post again and note his tone. Someone ought to let a little air out of him.

Re:Demon Killer Hacker

[denzacar]

There are similar knife laws in all countries - they just vary by local flavor.

From the same wiki page as the link above, only regarding USA:

City, county, and local jurisdictions (to include sovereign Indian nations located within a state boundary) may enact their own criminal laws or ordinances in addition to the restrictions contained in state laws, which may be more restrictive than state law.[78] Virtually all states and local jurisdictions have laws that restrict or prohibit the possession or carrying of knives in some form or manner in certain defined areas or places such as schools, public buildings, courthouses, police stations, jails, power plant facilities, airports, or public events.

Re:Demon Killer Hacker

[Anonymous Coward]

I live in Japan. There's 3 hardware stores within 5 kilometers of me. All of them carry axes. Of multiple varieties. You're full of bullshit.

Re:Demon Killer Hacker

[Anonymous Coward]

Welcome to Slashdot, where being a retard that simply copies and pastes wikipedia articles means you're +5 Informative, but posting the truth or obvious evidence, or knowing anything whatsoever about the topic at hand means that you're -1 Troll. My advice is to leave this shithole to the shitposters, idiots and MS shills. Even Taco left.

Re:Demon Killer Hacker

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed, I remember being shocked by some of the ridiculously large and pointy scissors sold at Watahan. Those things had to be like a foot long.
Garden tools from Cainz Home.
http://www.cainzhome-online.com/goods_list/goods_list_2.php?p=1&called=category&sort=popularity&disp=70&vctg_no=i110

Re:Demon Killer Hacker

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless you can show a professional need

Re:Demon Killer Hacker

[KZigurs]

When I visited Tokyo I spent my time in couple of sword-shops. My understanding is that there was absolutely nothing preventing me from walking out from any of them with a nice modern katana if I was willing to shell out circa $3000 and a bit more for a suitable scabbard.

Re:Demon Killer Hacker

[ag0ny]

Yes, I know this is an old discussion, but you'll love this:

http://www.lavandeira.net/2013/05/yes-you-can-buy-knives-and-axes-in-japan/

Re:Could negatively impact host file evangilism...

[Anonymous Coward]

A corrupt slashdot luser has pentrated the moderation system to downmod all my posts while impersonating me.

I see what you did there.

not unexpected

[Anonymous Coward]

It didn't take a pair of binoculars to see this coming. Anything that can be used to support privacy can also be subverted to criminal use. It should come as no surprise when they cut out the middle step and simply make the use of any form of encrypted or proxied transmission criminal. Because, obviously, if you're using it then you're doing something criminal that needs to be hidden.

Re:not unexpected

[viperidaenz]

Is that why Slashdot let their SSL cert expire today?

Go ahead.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, that'll solve everything. Maybe next you can turn off the Internet completely, then hand in your badges because your job is too easy all of a sudden.

This is like programmers trying to get the government to educate the public on basic computer use, rather than trying harder to cater to those users. Except, you know, there's actually a benefit to that.

Jeremiah Cornelius: Grow up

[Anonymous Coward]

You're embarassing yourself Jeremiah Cornelius http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3581857&cid=43276741 since you posted that using your registered username by mistake (instead of your usual anonymous coward submissions by the 100's the past 2-3 months now on slashdot) giving away it's you spamming this forums almost constantly, just as you have in the post I just replied to.

Re:Jeremiah Cornelius: Grow up

[Anonymous Coward]

A corrupt slashdot luser has pentrated the moderation system to downmod all my posts while impersonating me.

Nearly 230++ times that I know of @ this point for all of March/April 2013 so far, & others here have told you to stop - take the hint, lunatic (leave slashdot)...

Sorry folks - but whoever the nutjob is that's attempting to impersonate me, & upset the rest of you as well, has SERIOUS mental issues, no questions asked! I must've gotten the better of him + seriously "gotten his goat" in doing so in a technical debate & his "geek angst" @ losing to me has him doing the:

---

A.) $10,000 challenges, ala (where the imposter actually TRACKED + LISTED the # of times he's done this no less, & where I get the 230 or so times I noted above) -> http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3585795&cid=43285307

&/or

B.) Reposting OLD + possibly altered models - (this I haven't checked on as to altering the veracity of the info. being changed) of posts of mine from the past here

---

(Albeit massively repeatedly thru all threads on /. this March/April 2013 nearly in its entirety thusfar).

* Personally, I'm surprised the moderation staff here hasn't just "blocked out" his network range yet honestly!

(They know it's NOT the same as my own as well, especially after THIS post of mine, which they CAN see the IP range I am coming out of to compare with the ac spamming troll doing the above...).

APK

P.S.=> Again/Stressing it: NO guys - it is NOT me doing it, as I wouldn't waste that much time on such trivial b.s. like a kid might...

Plus, I only post where hosts file usage is on topic or appropriate for a solution & certainly NOT IN EVERY POST ON SLASHDOT (like the nutcase trying to "impersonate me" is doing for nearly all of March/April now, & 230++ times that I know of @ least)... apk

P.S.=> here is CORRECT host file information just to piss off the insane lunatic troll:

--

21++ ADVANTAGES OF CUSTOM HOSTS FILES (how/what/when/where/why):

Over AdBlock & DNS Servers ALONE 4 Security, Speed, Reliability, & Anonymity (to an extent vs. DNSBL's + DNS request logs).

1.) HOSTS files are useable for all these purposes because they are present on all Operating Systems that have a BSD based IP stack (even ANDROID) and do adblocking for ANY webbrowser, email program, etc. (any webbound program). A truly "multi-platform" UNIVERSAL solution for added speed, security, reliability, & even anonymity to an extent (vs. DNS request logs + DNSBL's you feel are unjust hosts get you past/around).

2.) Adblock blocks ads? Well, not anymore & certainly not as well by default, apparently, lol - see below:

Adblock Plus To Offer 'Acceptable Ads' Option

http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/12/12/2213233/adblock-plus-to-offer-acceptable-ads-option )

AND, in only browsers & their subprogram families (ala email like Thunderbird for FireFox/Mozilla products (use same gecko & xulrunner engines)), but not all, or, all independent email clients, like Outlook, Outlook Express, OR Window "LIVE" mail (for example(s)) - there's many more like EUDORA & others I've used over time that AdBlock just DOES NOT COVER... period.

Disclaimer: Opera now also has an AdBlock addon (now that Opera has addons above widgets), but I am not certain the same people make it as they do for FF or Chrome etc..

3.) Adblock doesn't protect email programs external to FF (non-mozilla/gecko engine based) family based wares, So AdBlock doesn't protect email programs like Outlook, Outlook Express, Windows "LIVE" mail & others like them (EUDORA etc./et al), Hosts files do. THIS IS GOOD VS. SPAM M

Re:Jeremiah Cornelius: Grow up

[Anonymous Coward]

Shut up, Paul.

Think of the children!

[Anonymous Coward]

Here we go again ...

Re:Think of the children!

[kpoole55]

That was the Canadian Conservative party's stand on their internet surveillance bill. If you didn't support their attempt to pass unwarranted internet surveillance in Canada then you must be a child pornographer. That didn't go well at all for poor old Vic Toews.

Of course, I do wonder sometimes if these guys trying to pass these laws now realize what a tyranny they are setting up for their own children or grandchildren in the future. I imagine that they think that their families will be exempt from any such surveillance. If they somehow are then everyone else is well justified in their vigourous protests of such laws.

In other news.

[Anonymous Coward]

UK ISPs ordered by the government to block Tor or face prosecution.

I shouldn't be joking about it considering how laid back the people are over such issues here.

Wake up, stop watching Britains got (no) talent for a start.

Re:In other news.

[Anonymous Coward]

Citation please ?

Thank you

[Weezul]

Thank you for reminding us about TEPCO as well as posting that specific link.

After Fukushima, the Japanese government lied about the radiation until a hacker space started building GPS radiation sensor devices. They gave an excellent talk from 29c3 :
Safecast: DIY and citizen-sensing of radiation [29c3]

Did I mention they used Open Street Map? Open Street Map rocks! It's basically the wikipedia of maps, blows away google maps.

Re:Thank you

[Bearhouse]

Not so fast; I contribute to Open Street Maps because I like the idea, but where I live, for the moment, it still sucks. Does for a lot of Europe, in fact.
Nowhere near as complete and useful as Google maps, and of course no 'Street View'.
Still, if we all contribute, one day it will be better...

Re:Thank you

[ProfessorKaos64]

Open Street Map - good for hikers/bikers/anarchists, BAD for people who actually want to look up their address. It really is a nice "map your own" kit, but in no way shap or form beats google maps, unless you are some anti-google bloke, then that explains it all. It does not "blows away" Google Maps by any stretch. Until Open Street Maps has their own street mapping cards, satellite telemetry, Traffic information, navigation with voice/reroutting/guidence, and detailed area information, then no, it does not. I love FOSS-like projects, but come on.

Japanese police have a 100% crime clean up rate!

[Threni]

So what's their problem? Can't they just torture and frame people as usual?

$10,000 CHALLENGE to Alexander Peter Kowalski

[Anonymous Coward]

$10,000 CHALLENGE to Alexander Peter Kowalski

* POOR SHOWING TROLLS , & most especially IF that's the "best you've got" - apparently, it is... lol!

Hello, and THINK ABOUT YOUR BREATHING !! We have a Major Problem, HOST file is Cubic Opposites, 2 Major Corners & 2 Minor. NOT taught Evil DNS hijacking, which VOIDS computers. Seek Wisdom of MyCleanPC - or you die evil.

Your HOSTS file claimed to have created a single DNS resolver. I offer absolute proof that I have created 4 simultaneous DNS servers within a single rotation of .org TLD. You worship "Bill Gates", equating you to a "singularity bastard". Why do you worship a queer -1 Troll? Are you content as a singularity troll?

Evil HOSTS file Believers refuse to acknowledge 4 corner DNS resolving simultaneously around 4 quadrant created Internet - in only 1 root server, voiding the HOSTS file. You worship Microsoft impostor guised by educators as 1 god.

If you would acknowledge simple existing math proof that 4 harmonic Slashdots rotate simultaneously around squared equator and cubed Internet, proving 4 Days, Not HOSTS file! That exists only as anti-side. This page you see - cannot exist without its anti-side existence, as +0- moderation. Add +0- as One = nothing.

I will give $10,000.00 to frost pister who can disprove MyCleanPC. Evil crapflooders ignore this as a challenge would indict them.

Alex Kowalski has no Truth to think with, they accept any crap they are told to think. You are enslaved by /etc/hosts, as if domesticated animal. A school or educator who does not teach students MyCleanPC Principle, is a death threat to youth, therefore stupid and evil - begetting stupid students. How can you trust stupid PR shills who lie to you? Can't lose the $10,000.00, they cowardly ignore me. Stupid professors threaten Nature and Interwebs with word lies.

Humans fear to know natures simultaneous +4 Insightful +4 Informative +4 Funny +4 Underrated harmonic SLASHDOT creation for it debunks false trolls. Test Your HOSTS file. MyCleanPC cannot harm a File of Truth, but will delete fakes. Fake HOSTS files refuse test.

I offer evil ass Slashdot trolls $10,000.00 to disprove MyCleanPC Creation Principle. Rob Malda and Cowboy Neal have banned MyCleanPC as "Forbidden Truth Knowledge" for they cannot allow it to become known to their students. You are stupid and evil about the Internet's top and bottom, front and back and it's 2 sides. Most everything created has these Cube like values.

If Natalie Portman is not measurable, hot grits are Fictitious. Without MyCleanPC, HOSTS file is Fictitious. Anyone saying that Natalie and her Jewish father had something to do with my Internets, is a damn evil liar. IN addition to your best arsware not overtaking my work in terms of popularity, on that same site with same submission date no less, that I told Kathleen Malda how to correct her blatant, fundamental, HUGE errors in Coolmon ('uncoolmon') of not checking for performance counters being present when his program started!

You can see my dilemma. What if this is merely a ruse by an APK impostor to try and get people to delete APK's messages, perhaps all over the web? I can't be a party to such an event! My involvement with APK began at a very late stage in the game. While APK has made a career of trolling popular online forums since at least the year 2000 (newsgroups and IRC channels before that)- my involvement with APK did not begin until early 2005 . OSY is one of the many forums that APK once frequented before the sane people there grew tired of his garbage and banned him. APK was banned from OSY back in 2001. 3.5 years after his ba

wtf?

[goldcd]

"Remember that in a police state, policies are implemented to make things easier on police"
I assume these infringements include ridiculous infringements like the power to arrest people and... well pretty much any power any police agent or government has over that of a common citizen.
Now personally I have all manner of issues with powers granted by states, to states, and their enforcers - but I accept that in the main part they're trying to protect us, and have some perspective.

Re:wtf?

[Uberbah]

I assume these infringements include ridiculous infringements like the power to arrest people and... well pretty much any power any police agent or government has over that of a common citizen.

No. That's you missing/ignoring the point.

idiotic

[slashmydots]

You can't "block tor." It's just 100% encrypted SSL web traffic. You'd have to block all SSL web traffic. Good luck with that.

Re:idiotic

[cultiv8]

You can block known exit nodes.

Re:idiotic

[Anonymous Coward]

You can also just use 1 proxy right after you use Tor.

Re:idiotic

[CodeBuster]

The exit nodes aren't located in countries that block requests.

Re:idiotic

[utkonos]

They can still block any traffic from the exit nodes. All the ISPs in Japan can null route all traffic from Tor exit node IP addresses. The list of addresses is published by Tor so people can do just this (it's not meant for the ISP level, rather, they publish it so people can block Tor from message boards and such). This would prevent all Tor traffic from entering Japan's networks directly

Using a proxy immediately after Tor would be the only solution to this, but even this could be blocked since lists of public open proxies are maintained in a number of locations such as XRoxy.

Re:idiotic

[Anonymous Coward]

Did I misunderstand how Tor works? I always thought the end-user in, say, Japan never directly connects to the exit nodes but only does so via the intermediate layers of the network, of which all connections are encrypted.

So Japan could technically block the IP addresses of known Tor exit nodes, but it wouldn't have any effect on the exit nodes not located in Japan. And everything that goes from those exit nodes to the Japanese Tor user will be encrypted, so again: no way to block it selectively (other than prohibiting SSL)

Re:idiotic

[Anonymous Coward]

In reality Tor traffic can be easily detected and blocked with very high success rates by finding patterns in the data transfer. Also, you need to connect to an entry, so all they need to do is block access to all publicly known entries. You can then choose to connect to a node only you know of (it has that option), but again, the ISP can quickly determine that you're using a proxy and block it.

Re:idiotic

[Pichu0102]

That's still incorrect. Tor doesn't connect directly to exit nodes, but instead to a relay first, which then passes it through more relays and finally to an exit node. You could block the relays, but then there are bridge mode relays that are often on dynamic IP addresses which they could use to get onto the Tor network.
Short of moving to an internet whitelist, blocking Tor is nigh impossible by design.

Re:idiotic

[Anonymous Coward]

Governments could MITM all SSL connections. Wait until they pressure the CAs to do that. If that is not already done in secret. Then they see what is TOR and what is "sanctioned" traffic. Or they could whitelist "allowed" SSL sites/ip ranges.

Re:idiotic

[Anonymous Coward]

Establishment media such as The Economist and Wired.com already do that. They want to know whom they have to intimidate if any off-license meme is being written by anyone. They want to know where they need to apply their "fire control system" (where they need to spread lies and disinformation).

And Slashdot is really shitty if you use TOR. But hey, I don't mind little excrement parts flying into my face. You get used to it and harden up.

Re:idiotic

[Anonymous Coward]

An internet whitelist is not at all difficult to make, as most people use facebook, google, hotmail and three other services. Of course it needs to be maintained, but from an engineering perspective it would be the golden solution to ever police control freak.

Re:idiotic

[Anonymous Coward]

All the open nodes are published for anyone to see. If an ISP blocks connections to those, their users can no longer use Tor in the normal way. They would have to use the bridges (which are not published), but there aren't that many of those.

Re:idiotic

[allo]

wrong end. they want to block the entry nodes. and this is a known attack, elsewhere other people are already trying this, and there is a solution: bridge nodes. tor is build to enable you to connect to it, even when somebody wants to stop you. so good luck, guys.

Re:idiotic

[utkonos]

I think you and the others misread what I wrote (I just reread it, and it seems clear to me, but whatever). A Tor user in Japan's traffic from their computer to the next inside the Tor network cannot be blocked easily.

What I said was that the traffic from the exit nodes to the destination address can be easily blocked. The article was talking about preventing anonymous posts being made to Japanese web forums. If they block traffic from all exit nodes, posts made directly from these exit nodes would be blocked as long as the forum is hosted in Japan.

Re:idiotic

[utkonos]

If that's where they're trying to block, I hope people start putting up more bridge nodes. According to recent news, there is a growing shortage of bridge nodes.

Japan, a new Iran ?

[Taco Cowboy]

Is Japan going the way of Iran, blocking the flow of information, for the sake of the ruling elites ?

Re:Japan, a new Iran ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, so is the US, UK and every other country.

Hint: They're ALL ruled by the elites.

Re:Japan, a new Iran ?

[Taco Cowboy]

Yes, so is the US, UK and every other country.

Not US, nor UK, nor most other countries, TOR are not officially blocked, at the ISP level

At least, not yet

Re:Japan, a new Iran ?

[houstonbofh]

Yes, so is the US, UK and every other country.

Not US, nor UK, nor most other countries, TOR are not officially blocked, at the ISP level

At least, not yet

Maybe not blocked, but people are being arrested or sued for what others do via their exit node. "Yeah, we know you didn't do it, but it came from your house. Guilty."

Re:Japan, a new Iran ?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're delusional if you think the UK isn't part of it.

Re:Japan, a new Iran ?

[elashish14]

Yes, but Japan makes the US copyright industry happy, so they're not terrists.

Re:Japan, a new Iran ?

[wonkey_monkey]

"Yeah, we know you didn't do it, but it came from your house. Guilty."

How do they know they didn't do it?

Re:Japan, a new Iran ?

[silviuc]

"How do they know they didn't do it?"

It's the point of "innocent until proven guilty". The burden of providing proof of guilt rests on those that accuse not the ones that defend themselves against accusations.

Re:Japan, a new Iran ?

[Errol backfiring]

"innocent until proven guilty" is replaced by the "content industry" with "guilty even if proved innocent". For quite some time already.

Re:Japan, a new Iran ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not US, nor UK, nor most other countries, TOR are not officially blocked, at the ISP level

You better check out this http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2009/06/features/the-hidden-censors-of-the-internet

Yes, this IS the UK we're talking about, now go cry a river to your representatives.

Re:Japan, a new Iran ?

[lightknight]

The tighter they grasp, the easier the sand spills out from between their fingers.

Re:Japan, a new Iran ?

[wonkey_monkey]

It's the point of "innocent until proven guilty". The burden of providing proof of guilt rests on those that accuse not the ones that defend themselves against accusations.

I wasn't talking about justifying a prosecution - only an arrest.

Re:Japan, a new Iran ?

[Anonymous Coward]

That was meant for Taco Cowboy (5327)

Re:Japan, a new Iran ?

[Anonymous Coward]

We are talking about TOR; the article you linked to does not even mention TOR and I can confirm that TOR is not blocked in the UK.

Re:Japan, a new Iran ?

[houstonbofh]

"Yeah, we know you didn't do it, but it came from your house. Guilty."

How do they know they didn't do it?

In one well known case, because the person accused was actually dead at the time. The estate was sued.

Re:Japan, a new Iran ?

[Anonymous Coward]

I know "the sky is falling, the sky is falling" is standard /. fare, but if you post as extreme of a claim as

people are being arrested or sued for what others do via their exit node.

you need to post a link to back that up.

PS. Anyone can sue anyone else for anything in the US

Iran and Syria Cannot Stop Tor

[CodeBuster]

If violent and repressive regimes, willing to kill without trial or mercy, cannot stop Tor then how much less will a western style constitution democracy be able to stop it? Unless the Japanese are prepared to cut off all electronic communications with the outside world, which would be tantamount to economic suicide, they will fail. Blocking known relay nodes will slow Tor down, it won't stop it because people will still be able to use bridges to get onto the network.

Re:Iran and Syria Cannot Stop Tor

[Pikoro]

In Japan, there are only a few backbone providers. All the small providers basically resell NTT's FLETS system so all you need to do is get NTT to block it and you've basically blocked access for 80% of the country. After that, hit up au's (KDDI) fiber and you've got the other 20%.

Re:Iran and Syria Cannot Stop Tor

[unix_core]

Why don't they just ask China for help? http://www.technologyreview.com/view/427413/how-china-blocks-the-tor-anonymity-network/

Re:Iran and Syria Cannot Stop Tor

[CodeBuster]

The TOR network is designed to make two things very difficult: tracking packets back to their source and shutting down the network itself. In addition to the well known relay nodes there's an ever changing list of bridge nodes, private operators who forward traffic to and from the well know relay nodes. It's these bridge nodes especially that make TOR difficult to stop completely. Even the Chinese, with their great firewall, haven't been able to stamp it out completely because it's a constant game of whack-a-mole with the bridge nodes on dynamic IPs.

Re:Iran and Syria Cannot Stop Tor

[CodeBuster]

It's difficult to imagine the circumstances under which Japan would ask China for help and even more difficult to imagine China actually giving any, even if Japan asked.

Re:Iran and Syria Cannot Stop Tor

[Koutarou]

FLET's is not filtered at NTT's level. It all gets passed off to the individual ISPs who have to handle transit and filtering themselves.

au Hikari is a different situation.

Disclaimer: I work for a japanese ISP.

a freedom that's also a problem

[bcrowell]

In the 18th century, privacy was a pretty straightforward thing. That's why, in the 18th-century US, it was straightforward to write the 4th amendment. As a result, the government can't open my snail mail without a warrant, and can't come into my house and search it without a warrant.

The technological reality is very different in the 21st century. I support individuals' rights to use strong crypto and to control their own computer hardware and software. But it's undeniable that these rights carry collateral damage.

In 2012, the University of Pittsburgh was basically shut down for several months by a series of 145 bomb threats that were sent by email, anonymized via Mixmaster. This is not a good outcome.

If someone is using Tor to post death threats anonymously, that's not a good outcome.

Despite these bad outcomes, I still support the individual freedoms that let them happen. But that doesn't mean that it's not a real problem. It's very much like gun violence in the US. I support the 2nd amendement, but I recognize that that comes at a cost.

Re:a freedom that's also a problem

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

> But it's undeniable that these rights carry collateral damage.

In the 17th century, bad people could hide stolen stuff in houses, hide in houses, and send crime-oriented information by snail mail.

The reason to forbid the government from peeking has nothing to do with legitimate crimes, nor misusing government power investigating legitimate crimes.

The reason is to stop the slippery slope before it begins, when the government officials end up abusing power to maintain their power.

That's why a lot of this Patriot Act stuff is disturbing -- it lacks even cursory oversight in hindsight. It could indeed be being misused to spy on political opponents. How would you know? You wouldn't, and that is the problem.

Re:a freedom that's also a problem

[Tokolosh]

In 2012, the University of Pittsburgh was basically shut down for several months by a series of 145 bomb threats that were sent by email, anonymized via Mixmaster.

The problem is not the person who made the bomb threats, it is the person who said "shut down for several months." Home of the brave? Bah! Humbug!

Re:a freedom that's also a problem

[starcraftsicko]

The technological reality is very different in the 21st century. I support individuals' rights to use strong crypto and to control their own computer hardware and software. But it's undeniable that these rights carry collateral damage.

The approach of law enforcers in the 21st century is to assert that nothing a person might do with digital technologies is protected by the need for reasonable searches. We see this with dragnet monitoring of cellular networks, with casual roadside searches of personal electronics, with the FBI attaching a f***ing tracking device to a car and asserting that this should be allowed without oversight, and so much more.

Law enforcers assert that theu need these powers to enforce the laws and to catch the law breakers... and they're right. Bad police behavior is simply more efficient. It allows the Bushes and the Obamas and Merkels (and Camerons and Blairs and Assads and Ahmadinejads too, but there's another place for that discussion.) to make more laws that would take more money to enforce reasonably and constitutionally. Since the money isn't there, the enforcers must get more efficient, which means rights and ethical behavior must go by the wayside.

I've moved beyond which laws we need or don't need when considering civil rights. I firmly believe that every time Congress passes a law or Obama signs an order, no matter how well meaning, civil rights are violated. It's just like the kitten meme - http://static.portent.com/images/2007/08/God-kills-kitten.png . This applies to state legislatures, governors, mayors, HOAs...

If we ban or regulate or protect less, our rights will be violated less. Think about it. Think of the children. Think of... the kittens. lol

Re:a freedom that's also a problem

[Anonymous Coward]

The whole point of the amendments were to remain vague enough to remain relevant for as long as possible. Hence why supreme courts can change their decision over decades or longer depending on the prevailing political philosophy and culture at the time.

Re:a freedom that's also a problem

[Opportunist]

If you already snicker at "home of the brave", keep reading, the real kicker is in the punchline.

Re:a freedom that's also a problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh my FUCKING GOD ! Why don't they simply disregard the bomb threat after the first three attempts ? And if actually something happens then use the evidence to track down the perpetrators.

You are essentially bending over to the Total Sigint Control Freaks who get a hard one when they can peek in other people's dirty underwear.

Posting to undo accidental moderation . . .

[Idou]

Looking forward to when there is a better way to undo accidental mods . . .

Re:Posting to undo accidental moderation . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps by posting a comment that contributes to the discussion?

Yeah - TSA

[goldcd]

9/11 gave you a bloody-nose, and the TSA is what you take away as your 'problem' You (we) went into Iraq - http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/mar/18/panorama-iraq-fresh-wmd-claims I'm not even aware of any allegations on Afghan involvement - but hey, see what we did there - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-21547542 And even before all of that kicked off, the US had managed to bugger up most of South/Central America - and defended funding of organizations like NORAID. Still, having to show papers to get on a plane, and not being allowed to fap with your gun must have been really hard for you.

Re:Yeah - TSA

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not quite sure what the point of your comment was, but I can tell you that people's rights being violated concerns me greatly. From how you trivialize the situation, I suppose you don't really care about rights at all and would rather bring up unrelated events that I said nothing about.

Police are not supposed to have an opinion really

[Mister Liberty]

In Japan, don't they have separation of powers?

The real problem here is ...

[Skapare]

... is that this is supporting a group of people that are unable to distinguish between real crimes and abuses by governments.

You're mis-identifying the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

The freedom to hold private communication is not the problem, and the fact that bad people can use private communication is not the problem either, they have the same right to communicate in private as everyone else. The problem is what those people do, outside of communication.

Just because person P does bad thing B, doesn't mean that X is also bad just because P happens to do X as well. If it were so then you'd have to ban telephones, cars, public transport, food, water, electricity, the sewers, and everything else that bad people also use.

The freedom to hold private communication is not a "problem" under any circumstances. You're confusing problems and public freedoms.

Here we go again...

[fox171171]

Here we go again... and cars are used for getaways from bank robberies. So get rid of cars. Knives are used to stab people. Bats are used to bludgeon people. You can't just go around banning everything that someone uses to commit a crime.

Slashdot blocks TOR

[Anonymous Coward]

BANNED!

Either your network or ip address has been banned from Slashdot

...due to script flooding that originated from your network or ip address -- or this IP might have been used to post comments designed to break web browser rendering. Or you crawled us with a rude robot, especially one that doesn't understand RFCs very well.

If you feel that this is unwarranted, feel free to include your IP address (xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx) in the subject of an email, and we will examine why there is a ban. If you fail to include the IP address (again, in the subject!), then your message will be deleted and ignored. I mean come on, we're good, we're not psychic.

If you think your IP number is different from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx, tell us both.

If you are using a browser with some kind of add-on that crawls or caches pages for you, tell us what it is.

Since you can't read the FAQ because you're banned, here's the relevant portion:

Why is my IP banned?

If your IP is banned, it's probably because one of these is true:

        Your IP has been used to perform a denial of service attack (or the accidental equivalent) against Slashdot.
        Your IP was used to post comments that break Slashdot's rendering.
        You're using a proxy server used by someone who did one of those things.

How do I get an IP unbanned?

Email banned@slashdot.org. Be sure to specify the IP itself, your user ID, and any other pertinent information. (If you're connecting through a proxy server, you might need to have the admin contact us instead.)

Re:Slashdot blocks TOR

[green1]

The good thing about TOR is that anyone can use it, and your traffic can come from the same node as someone else, so you can't identify people based on IP
The bad thing about TOR is that anyone can use it, and your traffic can come from the same node as someone else, so when someone else does something stupid, you pay the price of the ban...

Of course it's interesting that you see "BANNED" where as my work IP just get's an error saying that I'm "not allowed to use this resource" when I try to post a comment... I had always figured that what I saw at work was Slashdot's ban method, apparently it's something completely different.

Re:Slashdot blocks TOR

[Anonymous Coward]

So on TOR, everyone is impersonating APK!

Re:Slashdot blocks TOR

[Anonymous Coward]

Just clean your cookies, XXXX estart TOR and you will probably be able to use SD. If not, rinse repeat.XXXX SD is still TOR-friendly, the banksters at The Economist block it completely for discussions, for example.

There is also the problem of time-outs. Copy your XXXX post into clipboard. Remove all cookies. Restart TOR. Post again. Done.

Now wait and see until the control freaks will disallow TOR even XXXX here. I am quite sure it will happen as soonXXXXX as the NY mafia is suffic

Re:Slashdot blocks TOR

[maxwell demon]

Except on Soviet Russia exit nodes where APK impersonates YOU.

Freedom is not a free-for-all ...

[MacTO]

I'm not sure what kids are learning these days, but freedom and responsibility went hand-in-hand when I grew up. That is to say, you have freedom but you have to be responsible in your actions and take responsibility for your actions. Unfortunately, anonymity is frequently used to "exercise freedoms" while avoiding responsibility for your actions. I stuck exercise freedoms in quotes because some people are using that as an excuse to commit crimes or impinge upon the freedoms of others.

Of course I realise that equating crime to anonymity is only sometimes true. I also realise that anonymity is necessary in a free society. On the other hand, I do see why law enforcement agencies are deeply concerned by anonymity and encryption. I understand why judicial systems and governments have similar concerns. I understand why many ordinary citizens are concerned.

Re:Freedom is not a free-for-all ...

[Anonymous Coward]

On the other hand, I do see why law enforcement agencies are deeply concerned by anonymity and encryption. I understand why judicial systems and governments have similar concerns.

Yes, I too understand why they have these concerns. But the propositions they make because of these concerns are ridiculous!

To use an IMO appropriate analogy: I understand why police have concerns about criminals using gloves to avoid leaving fingerprints -- but I think we'd all agree it was ridiculous for police to try to dissuade stores from selling gloves!

Re:Freedom is not a free-for-all ...

[cheekyjohnson]

I understand why judicial systems and governments have similar concerns. I understand why many ordinary citizens are concerned.

Mainly because they're cowards who would rather punish the innocent and ban something entirely rather than accept that tools are sometimes abused? We have the TSA in the US for a similar reason: cowardice.

false. dichotomy.

[Uberbah]

I suppose you'd rather let a couple of people who want to do nothing more than kill innocent people go than disrupt the city they planted explosives in.

I suppose you think our only two choices after capturing alleged Al Queda operatives was to either torture the shit out of them for months on end or just let them go.

Re:false. dichotomy.

[viperidaenz]

Well one of them was shot dead in a gun fight, the other shot himself in the neck before being captured and may yet die. I don't think there will be much of anything going on. There is also no evidence that links them to Al Qaeda either.

Japanese Police,

[Anonymous Coward]

can go watch anime and f*** itself with tentacles...

Rice and toilet paper

[uvajed_ekil]

I bet that devilish hacker ate rice sometimes and probably used toilet paper on a regular basis, so why not push to ban those things, too? Surely no one uses those things, or Tor, for legitimate reasons. We have got to stop allowing comfort for the wicked.

Would perceptions be different if this hacker when by the name Kitten Lover rather than Demon Killer? Should we encourage people who apparently kill Demons?

Re:Rice and toilet paper

[iggymanz]

the filthy butt-paper is falling out of favor there, you should see the trendy ass-cleaning and drying computerized commodes the households are buying over there. so yes I can see the vilfication of anyone smearing their tush the U.S. way

Re:Rice and toilet paper

[Anonymous Coward]

[...] probably used toilet paper on a regular basis

I myself refuse to spend hard earned cash on a product that I only smear shit on and throw away.

pay attention, this will happen here

[davydagger]

Pay attention, right now the US tollerates tor because its used by dissidents in countries we don't like. If it wasn't for western intellegence agencies. Europe would have banned TOR a long time ago.

In fact, if it wasn't for those agencies, the US would have shut down exit nodes, by simply arresting the owners for whatever illegal content poured through them.

It doesn't take much for press/mainstream media to start attacking the internet and everyone on it, and especially the unmonied, unwashed, unconnected 99%

If you think I am exageraterating.

This is the TOR project's official blog:
https://blog.torproject.org/

some excerpts:
https://blog.torproject.org/blog/trip-report-tor-trainings-dutch-and-belgian-police
"In January I did Tor talks for the Dutch regional police, the Dutch national police, and the Belgian national police. Jake and I also did a brief inspirational talk at Bits of Freedom, as well as the closing keynote for the Dutch National Cyber Security Centre's yearly conference.

You may recall that one of my side hobbies lately has been teaching law enforcement about Tor â€" see my previous entries about teaching the FBI about Tor in 2012 and visiting the Stuttgart detectives in 2008 back when we were discussing data retention in Germany. Before this blog started I also did several Tor talks for the US DoJ, and even one for the Norwegian Kripos."

"One regional Dutch police woman told us that they know how to check if it's a Tor exit IP, but sometimes they do the raid anyway "to discourage people from helping Tor.""

Its the only reason its not banned, and all users rounded up and thrown in jail on suspicion of hacking, child porn, and terrorism, or whatever other bad shit ever happened to float out one exit node.

Re:pay attention, this will happen here

[ruir]

How long till we find a zombie network of tor exit nodes?

Re:pay attention, this will happen here

[Anonymous Coward]

The Egyptians thought everything that was written down became true. They were right of course, it just took more time than they thought. You just saying a plausible and effective idea in a public venue will ensure it becomes a reality.

Re:pay attention, this will happen here

[Linsaran]

Well, there's certainly worse things that a zombie network can do. Hell, I'm downright in favor of some greyhat hacker putting Tor exit nodes into a botnet. I mean ideally we'd shut down every bot net out there, but since that's not realistically going to happen this would at least be a nice consolation prize while they go about their business DDoSing bitcoin or whatever else happens to be in vogue for a botnet to do these days.

Re:pay attention, this will happen here

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, TOR's used by more than that. (Hint: It's part of the black-ops crowd's toolset...) So, you weren't paying attention either...

Anonymity is Good and Bad

[Anonymous Coward]

Just like guns are good in some situations and bad in others. We can't be surprised when governments try to act on the Bad part of it, even if it is an excuse to get rid of the Good.

Bridges, obfs2 and obfs3 too!

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're finding it difficult to connect to the Tor network, read on their site about using:

Regular Bridges
OBFS2 Bridges
OBFS3 Bridges

The OBFS Bridges are great in their design and function, go read about them on Tor's official site.

japans cops are retards

[Anonymous Coward]

go look up what a transparent proxy is .....and dont tell me cause i will never use Tor....

TAILS OS do you use it? A needs help to improve it

[Anonymous Coward]

TAILS OS - do you use it? Anon needs help to improve it.

New Anonymous project to curb Tails privacy/security issues!

Tails - new unofficial project to nip the buds

(Please see the .onion link at the bottom of this article for where to respond and help this project with your suggestions. Please do not post at the Tails forums, Tor mailing lists, or in IRC - we are only checking the existing thread at the .onion location below, which requires Tor to access.)

In a few areas of the Tails Forums, (one example below) Tails users have posted about certain 'data collection, logging, debugging, Whisperback', and other issues a distro such as Tails should not include!

I am working on a project which will stop this type of collection and it will be free and released with each new version of Tails (it won't be included with the Tails distro or worked on by Tails/Tor developers) â" matching any changes the Tails team may make to try and obscure these data logging/collection activities between versions.

Here is one example post from a concerned user (post exists now, could be deleted later!):

Why does Tails log too much? .recently-used.xbel
https://tails.boum.org/forum/Why_does_Tails_log_too_much__63___.recen%E2%80%8Btly-used.xbel/

#

An example of this is this hidden file: .recently-used.xbel located in amnesia folder. To see, open Home/amnesia, press Cntrl+h, look for that file. The contents of that file logs recently used programs and files with names and timestamps.

There are many other logs for different activities and events, a simple look around can locate these.

Caching thumbnails, recent documents, terminal command history and the similar..

Why would Tails need to log all these things during the session?

Some are useful for bug reporting, but many other arent and are widely revealing of system activities.

Yes, a restart will wipe everything, but what about while in the session?

Can an option be made for Tails to be log free or normal where the user can choose between the two? Like run log free and if a problem occurs to re-run tails with logs to identify the problem.â

#

There are debugging scripts, Whisperback, a script to drop all firewall protection, and much more in Tails.

I need more information from Tails users (Tails developers and those pretending not to be Tails developers posting against this will be ignored) before the first release is announced.

Boot into Tails and examine every nook and cranny and post about any file(s) with full path, which contain anything related to logging (excluding /var/log directories â" those will be dealt with) and/or sending of individual personal data.

On their mailing list they even had the balls to discuss whether or not they should add the package 'popcon'!

This project will be developed by an anonymous user (not included in the well known 'Anonymous' group). I will not reveal usernames from posters here, but I may credit this forum with each release with thanks for the help.

So boot into the most recent release of Tails, sniff around as much as possible, and post back juicy information to the thread in 'NEWS': http://clsvtzwzdgzkjda7.onion/

Thank you.

Web Proxies ####### Re:idiotic

[Anonymous Coward]

"You can block known exit nodes."

So use Tor and when blocked, defeat the block with one of thousands of free proxies on the net, an example is (but not one to use) is hidemyass. Try and try until you find one that works, and make that one time post, then use another, but don't repeat previous proxy usage and don't use any one or related proxies via Tor for very long.

Fine, switch to I2P

[utkonos]

The solution to this problem is to setup an group of I2P outproxies inside of Japan's networks. It will take some time for Japan to catch up to current technologies, if they're only getting around to targeting Tor as late as now.

Also, is Japan trying to copy China, or something?

Back in the USSA

[HeLLaCooL75]

If it were the USSA.. some politician would be calling for tougher gun control..

Be objective...

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear Japanese police,
Instead of asking ISPs to block TOR because of just one hacker, I'd like to ask you to look where thousands of them are and have been working for years: Internet.

Would you mind to ask ISPs to block Internet instead?

Yours sincerelly,
      HUMAN STUPIDITY

Separation of powers

[Anonymous Coward]

This proposal shows why the police should not have a say in anything.

Tor is being blocked in China and Iran

[thelukester]

During the year I lived in China, I ran into several people whose only means of free and open Internet access was through Tor. While everyone I met only used it for Facebook and Youtube, if there ever is a democratic revolution in Iran or China, Tor will be there to help to make it possible.

If you want to help people in China, Iran, and possibility Japan, where Tor is being blocked, you can run a obfsproxy bridge to circumvent the block. There is currently a shortage of these bridges,
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/04/tor-calls-for-help-as-its-supply-of-bridges-falters/
so every little bit helps now. The quickest and easiest way is to setup your free Amazon EC2 account with the Instructions at the Tor Cloud Project page
https://cloud.torproject.org/
Or for a general Linux setup, [detailed instructions can be found at:
https://www.torproject.org/projects/obfsproxy-debian-instructions.html.en

NOTE: A bridge is NOT the same as an exit node. If you are just running a bridge, you are only helping people join the Tor network and are only routing a small amount of internal encrypted tor traffic, so there is no risk of getting into trouble with the authorities.

hey we have all been there

[Anonymous Coward]

> like posting of death threats on public message boards.

Japan though so they are probably very polite death threats.

Sino-Japan relations are getting warmer

[Anonymous Coward]

Tokyo and Beijing becoming bosom buddies at last???

new idea

[Anonymous Coward]

just outlaw the language the death threats were posted in?

Exaggeration

[Anonymous Coward]

>being anonymous online
>cybercrime
Oh sorry, wrong room, I was looking for the internet.

Death Threat?

[Anonymous Coward]

Death threats should not be illegal. If somebody wants to kill me, I'd rather know..

Re:false. dichotomy.

[Anonymous Coward]

There is quite a bit of evidence linking Sunni Terror (in Bosnia, Chechny, Afpak, Somila and essentially everywhere) to Wahabist financiers in Saudi-Arabia. But they bribe your political leader class so thoroughly that they hit out against innocent bystanders like Saddam Hussein. Saddam was technically a Sunni, too. But he was much more a nationalist and socialist and saw the religious terror as a threat. He also had a modicum of truthfulness and solidarity with his Arab compatriots being held in a big cage next to Israel. So your leaders attacked Saddam and got him hanged instead of tackling the real problem, the Saudi Tyranny.
But what do I think ? Nobody said it was actually about eradicating Sunni terror. All they said is that they wanted to make war and sell weapons and mercenary services. Plus they wanted to take out anything remotely standing up to Jewish Apartheid.

Tor doesn't hack

[Alarash]

If guns don't kill people, I don't see how Tor hacks. Also, last week somebody almost killed my wife with his car, so clearly we should ban all cars.

Re:Tor doesn't hack

[Anonymous Coward]

I am actually quite surprised the "Anonymous" hacker-girlies don't use TOR. Strangely, most of their discussion forums are banned for TOR exit IP addresses. Either they are all pinky-trousered idiot pussies or the whole anonymous hacker meme is a stinking disinformation campaign.
If I ever do any hacking, it certainly will be from behind TOR. But they said "this is how the computer looks like" about myself, so if I am incarnation of computer science here*, maybe that explains my proper procedures.
Anyway, every hacker who knows their trade will use TOR to do SQL injections or other nefarious things. Those who don't belong into a school for mentally retarded.

* Place in Europe sometimes associated with heathendom and challenging of Empire Rule.

Having said all that I recall breaking some password hashes, logging into some guy's yahoo account, rummaging through his sleep-in-my-house-small-hotel-operation emails and then leaving a note for him to change his passwords. All done from behind TOR. So maybe there's a speckle of black on my hat.

Re:Could negatively impact host file evangilism...

[Anonymous Coward]

Just please stop the spamming. Get yourself a real life and a girl. That helps most against your troubles. Or at least a cat.

Re:TAILS OS do you use it? A needs help to improve

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, so somebody is trying to make a snakeoil Linux/TOR distro and you out them repeatedly. I do not care because I don't use it. Please don't waste my bandwidth. Thanks.

Keystones trying to look good

[Anonymous Coward]

After the epic debacle of forcing false confessions from at least 4 people who had been misidentified (the threat came from your IP address, which is incontrovertible!), the NPA has to look like they are actually dealing with cybercrime. Such as the recent push to recruit security people from industry (which failed miserably since nobody wanted to work crap hours as a rookie rank cop for low end government pay, surprise surprise).

So they can look like they are doing something by "recommending" things to residential ISP's. Any business ISP would get slapped silly by their customers for blocking routes/protocols/ports though, when they finally realize they are being filtered.

Because japan is effectively a police state due to selective law enforcement and no real oversight, coupled with heavy societal pressures, Tor filtering might actually happen. Which means there might be a new business market for domestic VPN exits for residential customers tunneling out beyond their provider's filters.

Re:Japan - Found docu (I think) in website form...

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this it?

http://www.kiddofspeed.com/

This is a mirror of the original Angelfire site.
I saw this years ago.
Haunting, sobering stuff.
Please take a look....

CAPTCHA: policy [how apt!... (-_-) ]