Slashdot Mirror
Online, You're Being Watched At All Times; Act Accordingly.
An anonymous reader writes "Kaspersky Lab's Internet security expert Costin Raiu discusses internet surveillance claims that you should assume that you're being watched at all times. The article reports that Raiu conducts his online activities under the assumption that his movements are being monitored by government hackers. Raiu: 'I operate under the principle that my computer is owned by at least three governments' ... 'this is not meant as a scare tactic, but a rather as a statement of fact that should now be the default setting for everyone.'"
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4766259&cid=46193879
I can see this being valid when banking or doing a search on 'ambassador reception' posting revenge sex photos about your ex, but what about when you're just being a dick in general? Should those recognized members of society care as well? Does the govt. have an anti-prick squad yet? You know, something besides the wonks looking for donkey punch culprits.
Nothing happened today to me personally, just for your records.
Signed someone not important at all.
They can find the same porn on hundreds of websites.
The Slashdot content/comment quality is dropping fast.
Also, Fuck Beta.
If everyone is evil, they have nobody to zero in on.
Join the Slashcott --- 10 February through 17 February GMT, 2014
Fuck Beta!
Anyone accused of using a computer for illegal purposes now has a perfect defense. After all if credentialed experts believe that computers are controlled by the numerous people of several governments then there has to be hard proof that the doer was the one who took those actions on his PC.
Kaspersky is a horrid software. Hard to uninstall, lots of problems in a domain environment. We thankfull ditched it this year after multiple screwups last year including when client updates caused a significant precentange of machines to slow down or not talk to the network. Took them two months to fix that.
So I am not surprised if he is admitting in a round-a-bout way, that they are hacked by the NSA. You load spyware into products, it causes problems - more bugs. I wouldn't be surprised.
-
and people who own the join offering it are the ones on the hook.
We started off with at least the half hearted assumption that this was the case, then the web and the net went mainstream. Society assumed our paranoia was irrational and silly. It might have been for a bit, but it clearly wasn't in the long run. One of the assumptions we made in the interim and that many folks still make is that, "There aren't enough watchers to watch every one of us" or "They might have access to my e-mail, text and data but they don't have enough people to read each and every one of those things" because we the people society at large, just don't get technology, even those of us who do, Watson super-computing and the Google search algorithm can be applied to you and I our behavior associations and the possibility that we will do something bad in the future... BUT brothers and sisters nevermind that, think for a moment of the possibility that those in charge, or some of them, with access to the spying they might use this access to do something bad, like leak secret e-mails from a popular Governor, that show he closed a bridge, or those who work for him did, as some sort of act of dickery, and so we catch him lying about it, and thus remove the threat of him becoming president... Really... Don't tell me why he is in fact a dick.. he probably is, I could care less, the idea is those with access to the NSA cloud can decide who is in and who is out in terms of eligibility for admission to the public sphere.
fuck beta
Yes well if we were all willful sheep who never question and always follow the herd, I'm sure some people would like that - it would make their job easy for them. Too bad some of those sheep just keep jumping the fence, huh?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I'm sick of seeing posts about the beta.
Well, then, it's your lucky day! Starting in 4 hours and change, a lot of us from the USA will be leaving /. and making no more anti-beta posts for a week! (The Europeans and UTC hardliners everywhere have already left.) Enjoy your week...
--------------------
Please post this to new articles if it hasn't been posted yet. (Copy-paste the html from here so links don't get mangled!)
On February 5, 2014, Slashdot announced through a javascript popup that they are starting to "move in to" the new Slashdot Beta design. Slashdot Beta is a trend-following attempt to give Slashdot a fresh look, an approach that has led to less space for text and an abandonment of the traditional Slashdot look. Much worse than that, Slashdot Beta fundamentally breaks the classic Slashdot discussion and moderation system.
If you haven't seen Slashdot Beta already, open this in a new tab. After seeing that, click here to return to classic Slashdot.
We should boycott stories and only discuss the abomination that is Slashdot Beta until Dice abandons the project.
We should boycott slashdot entirely during the week of Feb 10 to Feb 17 as part of the wider slashcott
Moderators - only spend mod points on comments that discuss Beta
Commentors - only discuss Beta
http://slashdot.org/recent - Vote up the Fuck Beta stories
Keep this up for a few days and we may finally get the PHBs attention.
-----=====##### LINKS #####=====-----
Discussion of Beta: http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&id=56395415
Discussion of where to go if Beta goes live: http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&type=submission&id=3321441
Alternative Slashdot: http://altslashdot.org (thanks Okian Warrior (537106))
Any security expert will tell you to assume that any system you are using, even your own, is compromised, whether it is or not and regardless of whatever steps have been taken to secure it.
Source: I get paid tons of money to provide security consulting.
I've always treated 'online' the same as postcards.
Anything else was/is naive, and this was apparent to anyone that actually understood networks, and 'online'.
Where the problem stems from, is 'security solutions' being added in after the fact. It(the internet) was touted as 'the Information Highway' for a reason...it was.
It was never touted as 'the Secure Information Highway', and when commercialization hit the 'Information Highway', that did not change.
This subject(internet security) is the poster child of unintended consequences.
There are ways of doing business/secure transactions with networks, but it seems no one wants to spend the effort or $$ required to do so.
Until that attitude changes, this kind of 'news' will be a regular, ongoing event. Convenience will trump security anytime money is involved...look at history for supporting evidence.
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
Actually, I like Beta.
In all fairness, there are some things I like about beta, and some things I don't. I think the animosity is stemming from the apparent inflexibility on the idea of maintaining classic as an alternative indefinitely for those who prefer it. And perhaps for not fixing some things (aforementioned via direct linked historical comment) that could use fixing before deploying it on all (or even 25% of) users.
As I suggest here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-d... :-) :-) :-) :-) ... ...
"Our biggest advantage is that no one takes us seriously.
And our second biggest advantage is that our communications are monitored, which provides a channel by which we can turn enemies into friends.
And our third biggest advantage is we have no assets, and so are not a profitable target and have nothing serious to fight over amongst ourselves.
Let's hope those advantages all hold true for a long time.
As I see it, there is a race going on. The race is between two trends. On the one hand, the internet can be used to profile and round up dissenters to the scarcity-based economic status quo (thus legitimate worries about privacy and something like TIA). On the other hand, the internet can be used to change the status quo in various ways (better designs, better science, stronger social networks advocating for things like a basic income, all supported by better structured arguments like with the Genoa II approach) to the point where there is abundance for all and rounding up dissenters to mainstream economics is a non-issue because material abundance is everywhere. So, as Bucky Fuller said, whether is will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end. While I can't guarantee success at the second option of using the internet for abundance for all, I can guarantee that if we do nothing, the first option of using the internet to round up dissenters (or really, anybody who is different, like was done using IBM computers in WWII Germany) will probably prevail. So, I feel the global public really needs access to these sorts of sensemaking tools in an open source way, and the way to use them is not so much to "fight back" as to "transform and/or transcend the system". As Bucky Fuller said, you never change thing by fighting the old paradigm directly; you change things by inventing a new way that makes the old paradigm obsolete.
As with that notion of "mutual security", the US intelligence community needs to look beyond seeing an intelligence tool as just something proprietary that gives a "friendly" analyst some advantage over an "unfriendly" analyst. Instead, the intelligence community could begin to see the potential for a free and open source intelligence tool as a way to promote "friendship" across the planet by dispelling some of the gloom of "want and ignorance" (see the scene in "A Christmas Carol" with Scrooge and a Christmas Spirit) that we still have all too much of around the planet. So, beyond supporting legitimate US intelligence needs (useful with their own closed sources of data), supporting a free and open source intelligence tool (and related open datasets) could become a strategic part of US (or other nation's) "diplomacy" and constructive outreach."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
"They set out to build something even the government wouldn't want to watch! Mission accomplished."
I think this is accomplished already. They could not possibly want to "watch" everybody. You'd have more watchers than watched.
I think OP erred in saying everyone is "watched". That's simply not so. Their data may be collected, and it may be looked at later, but that's not QUITE the same thing as "being watched".
Having said that: I still despise the current situation and it does need to change.
I'm sick of seeing posts about the beta.
I'm sick of seeing posts about the posts about beta.
But don't dismay, after tonight, you will get a break, as most of us(complaining about the beta) will be gone for a week....some for good.
Maybe you AC's can compare recordings of crickets chirping when we are gone. Maybe you will celebrate...who knows?(better yet, who cares?)
I normally do not reply to AC's, but this was too good of an opportunity to bash the beta! :-)
So, AC, thank you for that convenient opening!
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
If this so-called security expert cannot secure his own systems, why should we trust him to begin with to hand out advice regarding security?
That is exactly why I never take any medical advice from any doctor who is not at least 250 years old.
not even reading this article anymore jesus christ
by emmagsachs (1024119) Alter Relationship on Sunday February 09, 2014 @12:58PM(#46205013) I have visited this website on a near-daily basis for over a decade. I have greatly benefited from its community, whether +5 Insightful or -1 Troll. It thus saddens me to watch Slashdot be changed into a bland, cookie-cutter news site, a la the present incarnations of Engadget and Digg. I am perhaps in the minority in this, but I kindly urge you to read this post, and others like it, and to consider joining the week-long Slashcott [slashcott.com] that begins on Feb 10th. I realize that posting off-topic comments such as this is disrupting the Slashdot experience for many of you, and I do apologize for it. But can you honestly say that the new Beta interface does not already disrupt Slashdot for all of us? These anti-Beta posts can quite rightly be viewed as "a series of shock slogans and mindless token tantrums", to borrow a phrase, but since we feel that we are ignored by Dice, this is the best that I, like many other slashdotters, could come up with.
/. at any any cost [slashdot.org], and its users be damned. Dice views its users, the ones who create the site [slashdot.org], as a passive audience. As such, it is interchangeable with its intended B2B crowd. We, the current users of Slashdot, are an obstacle in Dice's way.
What company directs 25% of its users to a partially-working, not-ready-for-production website? Please realize that Beta will not have the features that we want, because they interfere with Dice's plans for Slashdot. Dice presents Slashdot to their advertisers as a "Social Media for B2B Technology" [slashdotmedia.com] platform. B2B - that's the reason Beta looks like a generic wordpress-based news site. To be sure, a large precentage of Slashdotters work in IT, but Slashdot is most certainly not a B2B site.
Nevertheless, Dice is desperate to make money off of Slashdot, even at the cost of losing much of its current userbase. Turning Slashdot into a social platform for IT "decision makers" is a Haily Mary attempt to recoup the failed investment Dice made in buying Slashdot. As they have revealed in a press release [diceholdingsinc.com] detailing their performance in 2013, this acquisition has not lived up to their financial expectations:
Slashdot Media was acquired to provide content and services that are important to technology professionals in their everyday work lives and to leverage that reach into the global technology community benefiting user engagement on the Dice.com site. The expected benefits have started to be realized at Dice.com. However, advertising revenue has declined over the past year and there is no improvement expected in the future financial performance of Slashdot Media's underlying advertising business. Therefore, $7.2 million of intangible assets and $6.3 million of goodwill related to Slashdot Media were reduced to zero.
The new Beta interface is not the result of a superficial makeover. Keeping in mind that Dice felt confident enough to present it as the new face of Slashdot to 25% of its visitors, it is safe to say that the new commenting and moderation system is exactly how they intended it to be. It is a new design that deliberately cripples the one thing that makes Slashdot what it is today, viz. thebest commenting and moderation system online today. From the users' perspective, there is nothing wrong with Slashdot that demands gutting its foundations and dumping the one part of Slashdot we exactly like. As others have commented, this is an attempt to monetize
This is why they ignore the detailed feedback we have given them in the months since Beta was first revealed. This is also why they now disregard our grievances and complaints. Their claims of hearing us are a deliberate snow job. It is only pretense, since at the same time they openly admit that Classic will be cancelled soon [slashdot.org]:
"Most importantly, we want
Three Squirrels
This is a standard trope in every epic novel from middle-earth to outer space: the bad guys want you to hunker down. To hell with that!
Smiert Spionam!
davecb@spamcop.net
A whole week without a bunch of whiny Americans? Bliss! :-)
The article reports that Raiu conducts his online activities under the assumption that his movements are being monitored by government hackers.
I recommend you begin to conduct all your online activities in such an empty, sugary sweet, and flavorless way that who have regularly surveilled you for years completely lose all interest in you and instead begin focusing their attention on other online targets. Let's call this strategy...I dunno..."Security by New Coke".
So is there someone/place out there that runs checks on the VPN providers to be sure they arent just a honeypot ? If so where would one find such a place?
How are they supposed to let the folk who run the site know how upset they are? At least it was under the first post, which is pretty much always a throw-away.
P.S.: I may not be as upset as he is, but I'm not fan of Beta, either. I *am* currently testing it, and it's not really terrible, but that's all I can say in its favor.
P.P.S.: This is just to test how it reacts to unicode:
OK, it looks good before I post it, but it didn't show up in the preview...so now I'll post. (It was largely Greek letters.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
You and your 5 other counterparts are going to get lonely without us though. We worry for you.
And fuck beta.
Support the EFF and Creative Commons. The war is coming, and they're supporting you...
In a court, or a kangaroo court, the two are the same for all intents and purposes. If anything, the archives are worse, because they can be manipulated at will.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
If governmental institutions have the ability to retain the data indefinitely, and you have no way of knowing whether or not you're one of the ones being actively watched, is there a significant difference?
Support the EFF and Creative Commons. The war is coming, and they're supporting you...
Is that a process used by the aliens who carry the anal probes?
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Turn off computer. Call and cancel internet service. Spend internet money on more books to read. /thread
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Firefox color that site isn't working on the beta. Sure would like to dampen the bright white background.
This news is about as recent as 'white lists'...
So... is it still paranoia?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I think OP erred in saying everyone is "watched". That's simply not so. Their data may be collected, and it may be looked at later,
You're being watched, but you haven't attracted their attention yet.
If you or anyone associated with you does anything that they feel the need to respond to, they will have your entire online life and a good proportion of your offline activities available to "encourage" you to work with them to solve their problem.
Even knowing this is happening will change how many people behave. Warnings like this are part of the problem, real security experts will be working to block the watching, not adding to the chilling effects.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
They set out to build something even the government wouldn't want to watch! Mission accomplished.
Just came for a quick last post... I was skeptical about the guy a few stories down who said he was IP banned and account locked after complaining about beta, but the same just happened to me, too. I made a few posts which I thought were constructive criticism of the beta... I will admit that I also made a few "fuck beta" posts, too, but not to an extreme.
It's been a fun 10+ years, folks. Last post... I'm moving on to ars and other tech sites now.
Fuck you, Uncle Sam! :-D
I agree. Kill Beta.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
Fuck Beta with a Big Alpha
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
It's not what happened to you that matters. It matters who you know, how often you talk to them, and who they talk to. Someone else will decide what that leads them to believe about you.
I'll do what I do and say what I say because I am who I am.
And I don't give a rat's shiny fat ass whether the NSA or anyone else likes it or not. The NSA is just another potential hater. No big deal.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
How do you know WHY they have the data, WHAT their intentions are, or WHAT their capabilities are?
Grabbing everything is absolutely useless to going after an enemy. Real bad guys aren't going to be linking to FaceBook when they search for bomb materials, and they aren't going to use their own credit cards.
But it's great if you want to create profiles on people and control movements. If you want to build consensus and monitor people who are not convinced by propaganda -- absolutely awesome.
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
They could not possibly want to "watch" everybody. You'd have more watchers than watched.
You are presuming that the watcher is a human. This does not need to be so today. Even existing, crude algorithms are capable of analyzing your writing, determining what languages you are familiar with, what level of education you likely have, and other things. The software can watch for certain key words and alert humans. The software can compare the manner of writing that you use to post on different web sites and determine that you are the owner of both accounts. The software can take data not only from scraping the public blogs, but also from intercepts of IP when they are available. It is already possible to watch everyone's online activities - the question is only in how much hardware the government is willing to buy with your own tax money to monitor what you do.
What happened to slashdot?? This new site looks awful! Fix this! Click to read more comments??? The comments the ONLY reason I come here!!
For example, I just drove 3 blocks to get some beer. I was seen by 1 traffic camera and several cameras at the store, and who knows how many other private cameras along the way. Think about it, even in your own neighborhood. As soon as you step out you door SMILE! You are on camera!
thanks to the likes of snowden and wikileaks...
actually, it's long been historically understood that secrets have a short shelf life and have a tendency to proliferate sooner or later. moreso in the internetted era.
ellsberg wasn't the first and snowden won't be the last. govs have their asses blowing in the wind too and that provides a nice little incentive to keep their goddamn motherfucking noses clean. it's nice that they've been recently reminded of that.
the fact of gov activity as well as the work product is more or less guaranteed to be wide-banded at some point can serve as a protection where civil rights fail us. as in the cold war, the thing that keeps us safe is MAD... mutually assured destruction... sure you COULD use the breadth and depth to spy on kate upton's auto erotic escapades but that just means that at some point, that fact and the titillating surveillance itself will fall into the public some day. if you have a system composed of human beings, you're gonna have leaks.
eventually, it will be that stalemate that saves us... the fact that gov or private citizen, anyone can spy on anyone else but the fact that all activity and all resulting data will be public information at some point will enforce restraint.
actually, i think that MAD is the only thing that really works in this world. mexican stand-offs for all. because human beings are fucking dicks and the only thing keeping us from ass raping others is a gigantic, barbed wired cock poise at our own back doors.
amen.
I don't usually mould my internet activities around the knowledge that my online activities are being watched by some data collection software somewhere in the world. My position is, so long as I am breaking no laws, I shouldn't have to care. That's why we have the Law, after all.
Big talk from an AC.
tl;dr FUCK BETA
Breakfast served all day!
in the meantime, please don't be the reason people stop posting and turn this into nothing but beta whining.
Speaking of stopping posting, it's time for US Slashdot users to start logging out. The boycott lasts from February 10 through February 17. Let's make it hurt. More specifically, let's make sure DICE hurts -- we're not really hurting /. because /. is US.
Breakfast served all day!
You're being watched, but you haven't attracted their attention yet.
Semantics. It's arguably so but I would say that in the commonly-accepted meaning of the word "watched", it isn't. It's the difference between sending your tax records to the IRS, and actually being audited.
In order to be "watched", you'd have to have already drawn their attention.
It rocks
But how do you buy books, without the internet???
is there a significant difference?
Yes. The difference is in actually having the government's attention.
I did not say that anything about it was good. Just that they're not the same things.
There's a satellite starring at your goat balls.
Electron imaging of your .. body, and its signals, dears.
http://www.oregonstatehospital...
NSA wants you to know you're being watched 24/7, regardless if you're using the telephone or Internet. ;^D
This may be a generational thing (you must be new here). With the assumption that your UID implies that you are not yet a candidate for a nursing home or AARP membership and thus you started your foray into the Internet well after Eternal September, it may be that you LIKE the current crop of web sites with inflexible single columns, large, pointless graphics and very limited functionality.
You must realize that us geezers are still getting over 80 column screens and those fancy modems that don't need to have the phone handset stuffed into the rubber doughnuts.
Now, get off our lawn.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Sorry ColdWetDog, you took your half court 3 pointer and air-balled. deconfliction is not my first account. In fact, if you imagined that anyone else _could have had_ that username with a lower UID, you would then have to presume that I was actually working for the NSA (which I'm not). My original account- jdogalt, has a UID about the same as yours. And if I'd gotten an account when I first read slashdot 5 days out of a week, I'd probably have a 4 digit UID or lower. In fact, I was posting to usenet (check alt.drugs, alt.philosophy.objectivism (i was young once)) since before the eternal september. (I think I first got a college account on KU's VAX when I was in high school at the age of 16 in 1991. I probably knew about usenet from my older brother who worked at SGI's ASD quite awhile before that. Now he is a VP at google)
Nice that you can afford a lawn. I quit my 6 figure salary job at VMWare in 2009 when I had a personal hardwall office in the Xerox-Parc campus (VMWare had just aquired a large chunk of the campus). I quit because when I saw Obama give himself a 1 year deadline to close GITMO, it was obvious to me he had no intention of really doing it. I also didn't like the laughable idea that I was one of four people whose fingerprint was authed for the non-smart-card usbkey containing the private key for the vmware linux guest packages.
p2p wireless mesh based on %100 open source software and hardware
Check this out
http://freedomboxfoundation.or...
Support this project! This is the future of freedom and privacy!
I'd like to quote from Michel Foucault's essay "Panopticon" from his book _Discipline and Punish_. Here's a link to the a pdf of the text:
http://dm.ncl.ac.uk/courseblog...
But first an explanation of the term is in order. In the late 18th century Bentham designed a prison where all the cells pointed to a central guard station. Thus, inmates were always being watched. The guard house design incorporated venetian blinds and obtuse corners so that inmates would know that at any time they could be under the watchful eye of guards, but never know exactly _when_. The intent of this was to impose self-restraint upon the inmate community by fear of potential surveillance. That is, self-censorship imposed by an architectural design. Here's what wikipedia has to say on the matter:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
Foucault took this idea and extended it to surveillance by authorities as a kind of 'social panopticon'.
Foucault extended the idea of the social panopticon throughout all institutions of society, drawing parallels between hierarchical structures in church, state, and corporate spheres where a authority used the possibility of surveillance and the tr
A scared society is easy to control. If you are feeling constantly watched, you are less likely to start democratic processes.
This change of behaviour is what governments want as it secures their place.
Additionally it's not hackers who spy on people. They wouldn't do this as it conflicts with their moral beliefs. It's companies helping governments, and companies like Kaspersky.
The statements of this company's CEO kinda sound like the wishlists of many governments.
End to online anonymity, so political protest can be surveiled much more easily. (as was done with mobile phone users recently in the Ukraine)
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/...
Digital voting which is much easier to fake in a large scale way than democratic ways like pen and paper and impossible to check by the layperson.
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/...
And here he even advocates for "cyberwar", claiming that cyber weapons are somehow cleaner than traditional ones, completely ignoring the fact that such weapons mostly good against civilians as governments can easily have their own secure IT.
http://it.slashdot.org/story/1...
Those of us raised by good parents have always felt that way. It's never been a problem.
Wow. First time in my 5 years here that I've encountered the word "fucktard" on /. (google lists a total of 1310 instances over the entire history of the site https://www.google.com/search?as_q=fucktard&as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=&as_nlo=&as_nhi=&lr=&cr=&as_qdr=all&as_sitesearch=slashdot.org&as_occt=any&safe=images&tbs=&as_filetype=&as_rights=&gbv=1&sei=52n4Up6oI8z_oQStwYL4Bg )
Looks like there is something here to defend.
I think Foucault would have argued that your point conflates surveillance with punishment. But punishment is only a meaningful deterrent when accurately administered. Therefore, surveillance crucial to determining what violations of policy have occurred. Furthermore, you ignores a crucial aspect about punishment - it doesn't scale. That is, one cannot punish every violation for there are not enough guards nor enough whips to strike at every instance. The panopticon resolves this by inculcating self-discipline through constant fear by constant surveillance. Therefore, surveillance crucial to determining what violations of policy have occurred.
Never mind the underlying question of who determines policy.
What a fascinating response. One built upon the notions of "allowed freedoms" combined with the directive to focus on these allowed freedoms rather than the mechanisms inherent in imposing order. It seems self-contradictory at its face.
So....
The white van is both there and not there parked across the street until I open my drapes to check?
Most of those who don't give a rats ass about the changes don't participate in slashdot discussions. They just pretend that they understand nerds and tech and whatnot. Also I guess I should point out that I am not "hiding" behind an anonymous posting even though I have the best posts are usually from those wishing to hide their identity.
Seriously, why does Dice have to be the death of Slashdot? Can't the powers that be find a way to monitize an assest without comprimising that which makes this site worth visiting? I blame all those who don't browse the site at -1.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
This is far far beyond what we should just bear. Take the fucking government apart until they stop this behavior. Enough is enough.
Hope you have something useful to discuss Mr. PHB! What is it that sticks in your craw, Mr. PHP? How to monitize this over how to monitize that? Why is a site free of monitiziation so against your inner being? Why are you so against free speech?c
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Given that the government has accepted the idea that copying information owned by a "person" (a corporation) is equivalent to theft, doesn't their scraping of everything equate to a seizure, and the perusal a search?
vi? Who's that?
Eschelon started some time ago, and people didn't get too worked up about it. It's the billions being spent to create a vast archive of everything, in case they (or their political allies) have a use for such information now or in the future. I think I find most disturbing that few on Capitol Hill currently are resistant to this, though they also vote overwhelmingly to renew the NDAA without amending to restore habeus corpus and Constitutional legal protections so it's not surprising.
vi? Who's that?
Just be careful what books you buy or check out from a library... they are watching.
vi? Who's that?
The animosity is the usual Slashdot hatred for JavaScript. It was just as bad when they moved to what people are now calling "classic" from the previous version.
It's probably also not so much a matter of flexibility as a matter of cost. Maintaining two UI's has a cost associated with it and that cost is probably 90% of why they're moving to the new UI in the first place(to make it more like the mobile version), given that they're building the new UI to avoid having to support two UI's I doubt they'd ever consider keeping the old in one in play.
Either hide everything or overload the systems by acting extremely suspiciously in everything you do?
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
1. Computer has glued-in battery, can decide when it turns on or off with no obvious signs (other than generating heat, but full power isn't needed to spy)
2. WWAN/cellular built into motherboard, doesn't need a paid account to spy on you
It's not so much "WHY" they have the information or even "WHAT" their intentions are. It's tremendously unlikely that the government has raw computer capabilities even as high as an order of magnitude more than what's currently available on the market. They simply don't have the expertise and such huge amounts of private money are going into the same kind of R&D they'd be doing. I suppose it's possible that all the cost overruns in every government IT project and every recent military project have been going into some sort of super secret project to build high capacity storage and really fast processors, but I think it far more likely that that money has gone to making immensely powerful planes that are useless in modern warfare and paying for 50 levels of contracting.
The most recent data I can find indicates that in 2012 just under 28 exabytes of data per month was flowing through the internet and it was increasing at about 7 exabytes year on year, so a relatively safe assumption is that internet traffice for 2013 was probably about 35 exabytes a month. Based on an old whatif" from xkcd, the highest density storage we have microsd cards is about 160 terabytes per kilogram. Let's assume for the sake of insanity that the government can store 10 times that in a manner which is actually practical to process, so we'll give them a data density of 1.6 petabytes per kilogram. This is obviously insane, but let's do it anyway. By that math storing all internet traffic everywhere will mean 35 tons of storage every single month. Note this is ridiculously low and the actual figure is likely substantially higher not counting the mechanisms to actually process and archive all that information.
None of that even comes close to all the data that isn't on the intranet that they're supposedly trying to siphon down, which probably easily doubles or trebles this figure. This is how we know they aren't storing everyone's information indefinitely, or even temporarily, they can't.
Well, gosh... considering my laptop contains stuff from my .gov job, and my .ca job, and another job for which the foreign-CCTLD email has stopped working, that's three countries right there.
(But that said, I'm about to rearrange some stuff on the drive so that if any representative of one government asks to access the machine, I log into the account that contains their stuff, and don't in the process give them trivially easy access to any stuff, passwords, etc. related to the work I do for the others...)
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
Strongly disagree. If they're spying on you, then you're being watched. That's what it means. The NSA might hope to dilute the perception of this being a violation, but you're still being watched. That they haven't singled you out for special treatment is a different matter.
Example: The NSA aren't watching innocent people is false.
If this is true which three Gubermints Owned Edward Snowden's PC?
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
If you live in the US it's already spelled out for you. Using a website or service on the Internet is trusting information to a third party and you have no reasonable expectation of privacy under the 4th Amendment.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
But All the local bookstores are now closed because of Amazon, that means I'll have to go to the public library and buy my books there. Wait, that means I'm using the Internet and I can't do that. I mean the UPS man will know what I've received packages, so he may be tracking me as well. Oh I can't check out books either because the Library is tracking me as well!
The end of knowledge is upon us!
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Example, by a priest (Msgr. Charles Pope): http://blog.adw.org/2010/05/th... ... ... ..."
"The Problem of Privacy: God is Watching... And So Are Many Others!
There is a second sense however in which I use the the phrase the "Problem of Privacy." In a very important way we must remember that there has never been anything private about our life to God. He sees everything. He is the searcher of minds and hearts. The Book of Hebrews says that to him everything lies naked and exposed (Heb 4:13). No thought, deliberation or action of ours is hidden from God. One of the problems of the modern age is that we are too easily forgetful of the fact that God witnesses everything we do.
So, absolute privacy is an illusion. We may well be able to carve out some privacy from one another and well we should. But we should not seek privacy from God nor can we. There is something increasingly medicinal about practicing the presence of God. The more we experience that God is present and watching the more we accept him on his own terms and do not try to reinvent him, them more we do this the more our behavior can be reformed. A little salutary fear can be medicinal while we wait for the more perfect motive of love to drive out sin.
What I am ultimately saying is that too much demand for privacy can also be a problem. In the end the Lord intends for us to live in community where we are accountable to others. Some degree of accountability and transparency is helpful and necessary for us. It is clear that there are significant problems with the erosion of our privacy today. We ought to continue to insist that proper boundaries should be respected. However we should also remember that some demands for privacy are unrealistic. At some level we simply need to accept that the being online is the same as being in public with your name tag on. That's just the way it is, so behave yourself. You might change your name on-line but guess what, it's really those little numbers that identify you. Mine are: 76.1**.3*.6*5 (I have put asterisks as a form of non-disclosure there are acutal numbers in the place of them). Where-ever I go those little numbers say it's me even if I lie about the fact that its me. Now we may lament this but I think it is better simply to say, when I am on-line I am in public with a name tag on. There is nothing private about Internet or e-mail or texting or anything else that uses the public airways, or communication lines. That's just the way it is and knowing this can be salutary.
Finding the proper balance between our public and private lives can be difficult. Surely privacy is to be insisted upon in many cases. But it is also true that overly expansive assumptions of privacy are neither possible nor always healthy. Being in public will always be a necessary part of our life and being aware when we are in public is important. You are in public right now because you are on-line.
If you've been raised in any kind of deeply religious household (whether you still believe the dogma as an adult), the above concept of lack of privacy (from God) was ingrained in you from an early age. You were expected to act uprightly at all times -- and, as in Catholicism, regularly confess otherwise. I wonder how much that affects a person's expectations then about privacy on the internet or acceptance of a lack thereof?
Also, if you grow up in a big family, privacy is in practice hard to find (privacy from other family members, even if family members may sometimes protect your "privacy" from outsiders). Same for those living in small towns (including perhaps college towns).
For those who believe our universe is a simulation, there is also effectively no "privacy" -- any more than a simulated sprite in "Driver: San Franciso" or "Minecraft" has privacy relative to the player (including a player with
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Have you ever heard of dedupe? Try your numbers again.
-Unresolved symbol? Byte me!
You mean the people when a farmer builds a farm, we should end protections on his crops so hoards roaming the hills can loot it again, like pre-civilization days?
Yeah, that worked out well for hundreds of thousands of years.
Nah, I'll take my modern covilization with legally-thwarted hunter-gatherer impulses, thank you, any day over your theft-based system where nothing gets done because it's mathematically indistinguishible from a heavily corrupy nation with kickbacks to get anything done. These nations cannot feed themselves, much less invent computers to type on.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Basically, you have a child's viewpoint where things magically appear, and you cannot understand why, so why-oh-why can't you be the one to hunter-gather that magical stuff?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
There's a CC camera at every street corner, and soon on every person.
If you've resigned to being watched whenever you're online, you've resigned to being watched nearly always.
I'm confused - why did you quit your VMware job because Obama wasn't really going to close Gitmo?
I think OP erred in saying everyone is "watched". That's simply not so. Their data may be collected, and it may be looked at later, but that's not QUITE the same thing as "being watched".
I would have to agree: because it's collected and stored indefinitely, you can be watched at any time. This is even worse than just being watched. Now you can be watched at will, and things can be manipulated (think selectively edited) to make things look other than they are.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
is that it becoming the default means it will become a norm, and then more accepted - instead of people asking "Why should it be this way? Why can't we do more to ensure less surveillance? "
Fuck it becoming a norm.
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
Clearly he knew he would be unable to resist the temptation to use his fingerprint authorization to convert the Linux guest packages into terrorist weapons.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
You don't need to punish every infraction - in fact doing so is counterproductive. Humans (and most other animals) respond far more strongly to semi-random reinforcement (negative or positive) than to consistent responses.
Also, consider this: In the last month you *have* broken numerous laws, with combined fines in the hundreds or thousands of dollars and potentially even jail time. In fact you probably can't even walk around the block without breaking at least one or two again. And now the government knows about many of your infractions. As long as you are acceptable to the established power (including just being disliked by any low-grade officials) they're unlikely to do anything, but step out of line, even a smidgeon, and they can hammer you with the punishments for any and every minor crime you've committed in the last seven years (or whatever your local statute of limitations is). Just look at how badly selective enforcement is abused today, and imagine a future where every infraction has been permanently recorded and is leveraged to keep everyone outside The Party in line.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
It has more do to with the fact that they've decided to roll out a UI that's missing basic functionality, roll out as in intend to replace the production system with a half-assed beta. That's stupid, from every angle.
I was told by some asshole around 2002 that all internet traffic in the world was being routed through a server in Virginia. I laughed it off, knowing how silly the idea of routing that sheer volume of traffic through a spy system was. But you know what happened in the following decade? Broadband speeds in the United States stagnated. In countries all over the world, broadband went from 1Mb, to 3Mb, to 6Mb, to 12Mb, to 20Mb, and beyond. While the average broadband speed in the US stayed around 1-6Mb. It's only been very recently, with looming threats from Verizon's FiOS and Google Fiber, that we saw any noticeable rollout of ADSL2, finally enabling the 20Mb DSL for customers who were stuck in the last decade. Comcast always advertised their top speeds as being for the first ~10 seconds of a download, then throttled.
They never needed to store all the information. They just kept us slow enough to be manageable.
Is to watch porn so disturbing that the government is afraid to monitor your computer
who prays for Satan? Who in 18 centuries has had the humanity to pray for the 1 sinner that needed it most? ~Mark Twain
I think you are assuming that the cost of watching is too high for them to do it at scale.
It's all software based, and CPU time is cheap and getting cheaper.
Watching everyone is possible, if not today, then in the near future.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
Grabbing everything is incredibly useful. It allows you a baseline against which to look for outliers. Without that baseline, you don't have enough statistical power to figure out what is an outlier.
To make up a ridiculous example, it might be the case that one behaviour terrorists very rarely take part in is looking at funny cat pictures. There's no way to develop that correlation without gathering cat watching behaviour in aggregate.
That said, I'm of the mind that terrorist catching isn't worth monitoring everybody on earths cat watching habits. We all should have the freedom to watch funny cat pics without fear of the government violating our constitutionally protected rights against unreasonable search.
I'm going to (attempt to) reply to all four of you at once: http://slashdot.org/~bunkymag ;-)
Bookstore. "It's a magical place.."
http://slashdot.org/~Kasar
Friend, I gotta tell you: I used to be involved in the largest standing militia group in the U.S., so I've already got a file with my name on it at the FBI, couldn't give a rat's ass what they think about my choices in reading material.
http://slashdot.org/~Burz
Go home, you are drunk.
http://slashdot.org/~Virtucon
You're alluding to a membership much higher up in the Tinfoil Hat Club than I posess or aspire to. Also, I know there are still plenty of us out there that prefer printed books, so I have no fear that bookstores that sell them will be going away during at least the remainder of my lifetime.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
That's stupid, from every angle.
And, now that it's a Dice property, exactly what you'd expect.
I'm confused - why did you quit your VMware job because Obama wasn't really going to close Gitmo?
Psychologically the 8 years of the W administration, or rather the 6 that included GITMO, were devastating to me. It was all I could do to make it through each day. I had lived a life, pretty much believing in the propaganda that there was a fundamental difference that made my country better than the Russians and their "Gulag". The idea that we had our own "extralegal black hole", really, really, ate away at my psyche day after day, year after year. It wasn't just GITMO, but the clarity of the "extralegal black hole" issue of GITMO, was a focus. I've also watched HBO's documentary "Ghosts of Abu Ghraib" at least a dozen times. I've chosen to make it my lifes mission to never let my country forget about what it did. And to try my best to educate the younger generations about what a fundamental change those things were.
I always temper those things with reminders about slavery, and Rodney King, and millions of references to socially accepted rape in prisons, and prisons filled with non-violent 'criminals' only guilty of stupid things like growing a plant like cannabis.
I know many of the juvenile 'Fuck Beta' crowd around here will assume I'm a troll, or crazy. But I've just told you the truth. Nothing more. Nothing less.
And when I "read WAY too much" into Obama's choice of giving himself a 1 year deadline instead of closing GITMO within a week of coming into office, I decided I wanted nothing more of being a well-paid part of that system. I'd rather starve. I'd rather die. I'd rather kill. Somehow I've found information warfare as my solace.
You're just repeating the same semantic argument. I disagree.
"Well, if you wanted to make Serak the Preparer cry, mission accomplished." -Kang
There are a few reasons why US internet speeds have stagnated, and neither of them have anything to do with the NSA, if the NSA is doing anything to anyone it's doing it to everyone.
The first reason is geographic, the US is a very large country with a very dispersed population. This makes delivering high speed internet to the majority of the population a very large infrastructure project. Most of the countries with much better internet are much smaller and more densely populated or have a very different population distribution pattern.
The second major reason is unlimited data caps. Under unlimited schemes every economic incentive is to oversubscribe and under invest. You don't make any money by increasing capacity, just by increasing customers. I know this is an unpopular opinion in the US, but it's reality. If you want your ISP to be motivated to get you speeds, pay for use.
In the absence of private investment to build this kind of infrastructure you're only real option is public money, this is happening a little bit at the local level, but debt aside major infrastructure projects with huge costs and timelines are political poison at the state and federal level. Rolling out a network that could deliver what South Korea has for instance would cost several trillion dollars(FTTH was projected to cost about 50 billion to deliver to 93% of Australian and well over half the Australian population lives in 5 capital cities with most of the rest in cities a couple hours drive from those same cities). It's just not going to happen in the current political climate.
Material abundance is not everywhere, and merely asserting that it is (or should be) will not make it so.
In 2014, things are certainly more abundant than they used to be. But the same was true if you compared living conditions 2000 years ago to living conditions 3000 years ago. Progress was made during that 1000-year interval: the number of people living in structures built by carpenters, as opposed to living in mud huts, increased.
We're still quite a long way from the kind of abundance where you can consume whatever you want, and dispatch with having an economy. The purpose of an economy is to allocate finite resources efficiently, where they will do the most good. Even if there were 1000 times more resources than there are now, it would still be a good idea to allocate them efficiently.
Not thinking in terms of scarcity leads to behaviors like this: Joe in Nome, Alaska has a house that he can't be bothered to insulate, and in the middle of winter, on the whim of feeling a chill, he cranks his thermostat up to 100F. (Also, he couldn't be bothered to close his windows at any time during this winter.) If there is no economy providing disincentives to behave that way, why not behave that way? You can see how society would instantly collapse from the inefficient allocation of resources.
Thinking in terms of scarcity directly results in much higher standards of living for everyone.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Absolutely agreed, but Public Funding wouldn't help. www.healthcare.gov - The government is increasingly incapable of building anything without putting the friends of the politicians who approve the funding first, and the desired outcome far, far behind.
It's ludicrous that people think the NSA is listening to every key click from a government who can't build healhcare.gov for the price they paid. That being said, the threat that you may be watched is enough of a deterrent for gullible people.
Murphy was an optimist
It's not possible to punish every infraction. A point I made in the previous comment. But let's be clear on what you mean by 'semi-random reinforcement)'. Because to punish without regard to infraction confirmation does not lead to compliance. It leads to psychosis. But to punish confirmed infractions publicly - to make an example - that's a different matter. Which leads us back to surveillance, the Panopticon, and Foucault's essay on the subject.
They can let them know via the "Feedback" link at the bottom of the homepage.
Ruining the comments section of every story so people cannot find and read the actual relevant comments is what upset me. It was the tenth story in a row I had tried to read the comments and gave up because of all these people "protesting" by ruining the site for everyone else by burying the relevant content.
I should not have gone down to their level by replying, but to be honest- the audacity and glee some of these folks are showing, who are clearly enjoying feeling they have permission to act like complete trolls just hit my "rage" button. They think they are so clever - but as I stated, at least some people are doing it under their own usernames, but some of these truly anonymous coward trolls are really the most infuriating as they hide behind "Anonymous" because that's what cowardly trolls do.
Unfortunately, this will likely just lead to them removing the Anonymous feature, which does have it's uses.
As a reader of this site, this entire thing just looks like one great big juvenile excuse to let people think they have permission to act like complete trolls and it's clear that a number of them don't even actually care about Beta but are just using it as an excuse to get their virtual masturbation jollies. The glee they are taking in it is what is really infuriating - nothing worse than someone using "protesting" as an excuse to ruin everything for everyone else.
Again, I should not have lowered myself to their level - but it's extremely unfortunate that their behavior is likely going to lead to some wholesale changes to commenting and moderation - these folks want this ship to sink entirely if they can't have everything their way, and are so selfish it makes me want to puke. But, I guess it's inevitable - everything good gets ruined at some point by folks who take advantage and manipulate to the detriment of everyone. I guess it's a miracle the site lasted this long.
Not going to happen!
Sorry the useful conversation is dampened right now. Hopefully it'll get better as people communicate what they need to communicate, and as the beta itself improves.
I've pointed this out before and I'll have to again. Healthcare.gov, in it's entirety anyway, is probably the most complex and complicated IT project any government or private enterprise has actually attempted, the fact that it works at all is kind of a miracle.
The other point of course is that while you and me most certainly aren't being watched. It's likely that every single employee of Kaspersky probably is, and yes most likely by multiple governments. A high profile IT security firm in Russia that's revealed things like FLAME and which works closely with any number of questionable governments. The Russians are watching them at the very least, I mean it's not like the FSB is a defender of human rights. The NSA probably is actually watching them as well. If I were the guy writing the article I'd assume that not only have multiple governments hacked my computer, but my apartment and car are probably bugged to. Hell, it's entirely likely that some of Kaspersky's employees actually work for the NSA and FSB.
I wish you fucktards would stop trying to ruin this site for those of us who don't give a rats ass about these changes. You are pathetic wastes of space who cower behind "anonymous" postings. At least be a man and post under your own account so we know who the douche bag cry babies are and can avoid you once this silliness is over.
And I wish you fucktards would stop trying to let them ruin the site for those of us who DO give a rats ass about it.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
With enough data points(gps,card swipes,searches) it would be easy to map wear you go. And what motivates you to go to said places.With huge amounts of data.You could create probability maps of wear you are most likely to be at future date.But there's still a chance you won't go. But since they have a huge database on you. They know you need a hair cut. And just so happens you just got a coupon, For the salon.They PUSH you right to the part of town they want you. From there it can be as simple as marketing products to you. Or as sinister as getting hit buy a "malfunctioning" commercial drone whose pilot was PUSHED there to do a real estate video. I'm not paranoid. I just like to think like one. The chances of a program like this are slim. but it would make a nice enemy of the state--minority report mashup.
Thanks for the reply, and you get major points for being reasonable and not flaming every word I wrote - like some people here.
What every health insurance company does every day is what Healthcare.gov and the associated subsystems are designed to accomplish.
As to your second paragraph I am complete agreement.
Murphy was an optimist