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License to Surf
Bogatyr writes "Robert Cailliau, who designed the Web with Briton Tim Berners-Lee in late 1990, says all Internet users should be licensed so surfers on the information highway are as accountable as drivers on the road. " W3C has been working on such systems for years - unforgeable certificates which users must present to gain access to content, and which incidentally identify them uniquely and provide assorted marketing information. The end of anonymity, coming soon to a Web near you.
Why do i have wierd colors now?
huh?
Accountable for what, I'd like to know. Should we get insurance in case our packets collide with somebody elses?
Anyone who visits www.NoProxy.com can get access to our free anonymous surfing service that a friend and I put together. Runs on Linux. You do not have to give up your privacy to surf the web -- at least not yet.
Me too !
The anonymous nature of many web transactions has been one of the driving forces behind the web. We all know they aren't completely anonymous, but it's often not worth the effort to track down visitors, so there is a practical anonymity which works a lot of the time.
Losing that anonymity is likely to slow the spread of ideas, as people avoid visiting "subversive" web sites. That will be a pity.
Well that would remove about 90% of the users right there... mode bandwidth for us!
Seriously... how would these licenses be issued? What 'test' would you have to take to get one? Who exactly would be giving out the licenses? And how would you write into every single piece of Internet software the checks for a license?
Doesn't sound very plausible to me...
-- $SIGNATURE
whenever something new comes along someone thinks we need to get a liscense to use it. Why the hell should i need a liscense to surf? is there something about reading slashdot that i shoulnd't be allowed to read unless i'm over 18?
.sig
I can understand the possiblity of someone needing to restrict access to porn, but otherwise where do they get off saying i need a liscence to read stuff? most of the internet (i said most) is like a book. You can crash a car, but not a book. A liscence strongly reduces your likely hood of crashing your car(think driver's ed), but a computer liscece can't do much good in that department.
Anonimity is a great thing on the net, there is no need for you to know weather I'm and 85 year old American woman on an iMac, or a 4 year old child in India on a Compaq Presario.
matisse:~$ cat
One of the best and most appealing aspects of the web is it's anonymity and ease of access. These "licenses" hinder both of those aspects. First, you will never be able to visit your favorite pr0n site again without *somebody* knowing about it, and secondly, you will have to have the darn thing with you when ever you use the web... if they implement it in a way that's effective for it's purpose. Talk about a pain!
Personally, I don't think it will happen in the near or mid-range future... people don't like to fix things that aren't broken, and a system like this would require _allot_ of expensive work, some of which could create incompatibilities. People are only willing to do this if the gains outweigh the means, something I personally don't see from such a system.
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Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
This news is a bad thing for all Anonymous Cowards everywhere. We should get a petition together to thwart this kind of action ... shame the signatures will all be the same.
Anonymous Coward.
Maybe it's not such a bad idea (please, don't flame yet). Wouldn't it be the (relative) end of spam? If you can't send an email without someone knowing EXACTLY who you are, it makes it easier for people to relieve that aggravation. Really, can you go to the library and get all the books you want without them knowing who you are? No...
The difference, is that you can go to a bookstore, purchase the books with cash, and retain (for the most part) anonymity.
The only reason that this notion is being entertained, is because of cracking attempts, and website defacements, in which they can't track down the perpetrators.
Does somebody really need to be able to identify me individually, with my certificate, in order for me to view the latest sports scores? Or check and see what's funny on Segfault? I don't think so.
And exactly how is this going to be prevented from being used in some marketing scheme. Surely it has to be, otherwise, what's the point? It can't be that easy.
Regardless of what system they come up with, short of quantum crypto it's going to be forgeable. Just depends on how much time is invested.
Is this a good idea? probably. Is it a bad idea, yes... It's not often I take two sides of an issue, but each side has its merits. Just wish I didn't have to give up my anonymity to receive them.
The problem here is that the W3C don't see what the internet is being used for: it might not be the dream of every slashdotter, or internet purist, but the web is a popular medium now...
and so these proposals won't work because everyone supplying content on the web wants the greatest possible audience. Who is going to enforce licensing, when everyone wants as big a market share as possible?
Amazon stopping people going onto their site because some bureaucrat has been slow in granting a digital id?
I think not - and until a licensing system mandatorily covers 100% of all internet users, you can forget it.
Just my two centimes.
I wonder, could we force novices to take courses, get a learner's permit, and pass a final examination of proficiency before they're allowed to access the web without supervision? It'd make my job easier! Not that I agree completely with the idea, mind you, but wouldn't it be better if people actually had to get a clue before diving right in? You don't see people doing 540s on a half pipe the first time they put on a pair of rollerblades, or driving cross country the first time they put the keys in the ignition of a car. So here's the lowdown on what I think: while you may trade anonymity for required proficiency, it might be worth it.
I toggled a toggle and buttoned a button, but when I got done, I was done doin' nothin'.
"One of the best and most appealing aspects of the web is it's anonymity and ease of access."
hmm. let me rephrase that...
"Two of the best and most appealing aspects of the web are it's anonymity and ease of access."
There, that's better. Imagine, my english sucks and here I am in germany trying to learn a second language.
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Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
For obtaining information?
This is so insane I can't even imagine the flamefest that'll follow...
It's like needing a license to buy books or newspapers. Utter nonsense.
This entire thing just smacks of a half-hearted attempt for W3C to get their hands on some of the money thats pouring through the web right now. Also, Cailliau really contradicts himself: he wants to track down racist websites and perverts, but at the same time, he wants things to be free of content governing rules? Make up your mind, buddy.
It's arguable that licensing people to use the internet would probably increase the level of clue out there among all the Joe Sixpacks on AOL. But I really doubt that any sort of licensing or registration will help in combatting stuff like warez, kiddie porn, or whatever the media is whipping the public into a frenzy about. And I'm certain that advertising companies are not going to go out of their way to make sure that these 'licensed' users see less ads while surfing, or get less spam in their mailbox.
Besides, with all the ways to be anonymous nowadays (remailers, Freedom, etc.) I seriously doubt that this would be easy to implement, so that it covers every person, anywhere. If this was thought about a few years ago, maybe it wouldn't sound so farfetched. But right now, its a case of closing the barn door after the horse has ran off.
"Micropayments"? Is this a way to charge users of the Internet? Who does the money go to? And why is a charge necessary? And he also talks about "regulating" the Internet by some international committee that would decide what could be presented on the web and where you could go. The reasons stated were to protect people from "child pornography" and "racism". But where does it stop? And how would you get an international group to agree on what was appropriate to display or visit on the Internet? Maybe I'll build myself a new Internet just in case the old one goes to shit...
well yeah, but you might... talk to someone! how will echelon track you???? it may not be able to!!!! *gasp*
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Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
Now, you know why...
-- ----------------------------------------------
Vive le logiciel... Libre!!!
for people like my friend.... i met this person online almost 5 years ago, we talk everyday,but i still dont know his first name. He is totally paranoid, i can offer him free books and stuff and he would never give me his address, if you had to have a license and everyone knew who you were then he would stop using computers.Im sure there are other paranoid people on the net like him..... as for me, if this happens and like you have to be certain age to get the license like a driver license, and it restricts access to sites.... since the net is my life, i'd prolly commit suicide, but that's just me
But please. Who the hell would administer something like this? More importantly, who would 'police' it?
Sounds like a bunch of hot air to me.
Licensing surfers would change the internet from a sort of cafe, where ideas are exchanged freely into a kind of mega-mall, where faceless corporations separate you from your money in exchange for junk that you don't really need.
Maybe BBSes will make a comeback after all.
-Peter
THESE ARE THE SAME PEOPLE WHO THOUGHT THE INTERNET WOULD ALSO BE USED AS A PLACE FOR THE ADVANCE OF SCIENCE AND EDUCATION, I THINK THEIR OPINIONS ARE COMPLETELY OFFTOPIC FOR THE MODERN INTERNET
I'm interested in who actually owns it, the millions who have personally used it for years now and are the driving force behind it, or the origonal creators of it? Also Ive been thinking, do the creators and owners of certain services have the right to say "I dont want people to have to use those licences on my service"? Also, is there a patent on the internet?
~~~ They call me Little John, but don't let the name fool you...in real life I'm very big.
The governments of Australia and the UK, for starters. What better way to enforce their draconian anti-privacy/anti-Internet laws than to have everyone given a number? Heck, there's quite a few politicians here in the US (Sen. Feinstein) who'd just love to see this come about.
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Earth first? Oooh, and I was thinking of paying the rent.
Why? The reason is the simple theories of of forces and counter-forces. If the W3 ever would have a system that worked as a universial moderator and access granter to the 'net, the workaround (and there's alway workarounds!) would be known to all people with a fair knowledge of the basic functions of the 'net within days, of even hours. The W3 would jest be spending their time smashing their heads in a wall, and they know that.
I can see both sides of this issue. On the one hand, as society starts having more and more of its business online, it will be more and more important for people who commit online crimes to be held accountable- in real life, "I just shot him to demonstrate what poor security against bullets he had!" doesn't hold up in many courts. Which is not to say that I think pranks like defacing a web site are as serious as murder, of course, but what about the guy who discovers an exploit for those new digital iToasters that will let him burn people's houses down, and uses it? Or who subtly hacks into an e-commerce site so that when you submit your credit card number, it records it in a plaintext file on the server before passing it along so he can come back and read it at his convenience?
From that standpoint, we want to make it as hard to be truly anonymous as possible, so that we can catch people who are doing things that we ought to punish. On the other hand, anonymity on a more casual level is very important. I am doing a sociology study on homosexuality and the internet, for example, and am finding that it's pretty common for people who are just discovering that they are gay to turn to the anonymity of the Internet to get information because they don't want people to know that they're gay. Destroying their anonymity would be very bad for them, perhaps even physically dangerous. And of course there are the more common reasons: I certainly don't want people knowing about my surfing habit just because it's none of their business, dammit, and I *certainly* don't want to start getting e-mails about sites that I'll just *love* considering the sites that I visit now...
I'm not sure how to reconcile those two competing interests. Does anyone else have any ideas?
-jacob
Quite how this man can equate driving a car with surfing is beyond me. When I am driving a have in my control about a ton of steel that could be travelling at up to 50 metres per second, we all know that plenty of people die in car accidents. When I am surfing I access some documents and view them, I am unaware of any fatalities being due to this kind of behaviour. Aside from the obvious ridiculousness of this analougy (being dumb hasn't stopped people before)I'd like to ask how this would be executed anywhay 1. One of the great things about the net is the possibility of annoynimity, ok it can be abused by racists and so on, but this facility is also available to abused children, assaulted women, oppressed minorities as well. Would they be any way of avoiding identification for some people? no? thought not. 2. Say I get myself an internet license, although god knows what would constitute the test for safe surfing- its not as if I can damage any property or person, and I go to work at a connected company. Do I use my own license, or do they have their own which I use whilst at work? If I don't have a license for what ever reason would that mean I could be precluded from working in such an establishment? Just my £0.02
J-aims
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Yo, whatever happened to peas? Join T( H)GS
-- $SIGNATURE
I'd be willing to put up with spam if that meant retaining my rights. Heck! I am putting up with spam right now... This is NOT the way to solve the problem.
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
The phrase 'information super-highway' is a means of descriping a quick way of accessing a plethora of information available to the public. It was not meant to be taken in the literal sence, "..all Internet users should be licensed so surfers on the information highway are as accountable as drivers on the road." How is 'surfing the web' remotely similar to driving? I don't think my life would suddenly become in danger if I were to 'recklessly surf'. Or what if I had my liscence revoked because I had too many points? Maybe I'd just have to obey surfing speeds.
Sounds like a wet dream for Marketing departments. And people got all upset over the P-III ID#... Sheesh, that was nothin' compared to what could happen if we were all "licensed" (how the hell would that work anyway?).
"We've had micropayments in the French Minitel system for 15 years and it is shown to work extremely well," he added.
Arrrgh, it may have worked well but when you see you phone bill you are horrified.
You Americans are lucky not to have a metered phone bill for the Internet. In Europe we generally have a metered one (you pay per minute, the rate per minute depending if it is a peak time or not).
For the Minitel you had special numbers that were more expensive, a part of the price going to the owner of the Minitel server, so when you see an advertisement saying that you can have game X gratuitously by going to 36 17 jeux (games) you go there, they make you wait between the screens so the phone bill goes up and you end up paying more than in a normal store (and you must wait for the game to be delivered). The most useful use for the minitel was teleshopping and the annuaire, the inscriptions in school was cool too.
If they really want to do a micropayment then it should be possible to choose between advertisement or micropayment (I personally don't care about ads, just ignore them most of the time) and it should be per page, not per minute (which is VERY different from the minitel).
Otherwise if they want to suppress the anonymity on the Web then maybe it is time to recreate something else and incorporate the last 10 years of experience.
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." Bill Gates,
Sure, I can post snail mail anonymously (well, almost, they'll always be able to track me to the place where it was really posted - and then try to extract fingerprints) and I can buy stuff in stores with cash etc to retain my anonomity, however, most of the time that won't work. It's possible to track someone 99% of the time living our daily lifes, and I don't really see an uproar against that. Come on - I am a responsible adult and I accept responsibility for my actions.
I do that on the web too. I don't hack a website more than I deface a store's facade - and if the store has a camera that can find out who does, why shouldn't the same ability exist on the net?
My car has a license plate - everyone knows who's car goes down the road. When I surf, my packets have an IP that belongs to me. It should be just as illegal to spoof that IP as it should be to use false plates ...
I think you get the picture. While I don't like to have _everything_ I do stored somewhere, I don't expect to have a right to anonymousity on the Internet that I don't have anywhere else.
(I've never made a single post as AC on /. either ...)
it's in my head
Umm... is this supposed to be a joke ... ?
Please say yes.
-jacob
You don't need a license to walk down the street, so why should you need a license to surf the web? I could see that a company might need to obtain a license to get a domain name, but not surfing the web.
Government property is my property. I pay taxes, don't I? Sure do. Confiscatory taxes enforced by armed coercion. The least they can do is let me do as I please on the roads I pay for.
There's one big fault with this whole license idea, which severly differs it from a drivers license. When I'm driving around the roads, the road owner (possibly the state) and the people in the cars around me, certainly don't know who I am, where I'm from and where I'm going. On the internet with this kind of scheme they would, which is a pretty big privacy concern! My actions should only be known by me, noone else!
You do realize that you are nothing more than a spammer, right? You post incoherent, off-topic posts every chance you get. And you don't even have the decency to tell us who you are! Do you think you are actually convincing anyone?
At least come up with some better arguements. Your tired act is getting old.
--GnrcMan--
But the system is open, neutral and non-proprietary, and must remain so, according to Cailliau. ``One has to be extremely careful what it is that one regulates. We should not regulate the content but the behavior of people.
:-> ). The US has had laws against the importation of drugs like cannibis for years, but all that those laws resulted in was 1) higher quality and 2) better availability of ganja!
Let see... Humans have tried to change the behavior of others for years -- they're called laws. Even though humans have had laws against prostitution for thousands of years, you can still find prostitutes (if you know where to look
What I don't understand is how they intend to separate content from behavior. If I smoked weed regularly (my behavior) I would probably want to put up some pro-legalization webpages (my content). If my webpages advocated mass consumpution of marijuana, could the powers that be still ban my website by saying that they are targeting my behavior, not my content?
--
A man who wants nothing is invincible
This sort of "feature" of the web would require some pretty fundamental changes to TCP/IP. What makes them think that these changes will be widely accepted? Certainly, the new non-private protocol (let's call it PT/PCT) would have to be backwards compatible with TCP/IP for it to even get a foot in the door, but by being backwards compatible, there would be no good reason for major servers to switch. Sounds like these guys ought to start their own network, independant of today's Internet, if they plan on getting this done.
There's no reason for a sig here.
Lessee... The business opportunity here is in generating forged certificates, anonymous proxy with forged certificates, places that don't require certificates, ... Anyway, leave it to the dimwitted leftists of the low-countries to come up with government regulation for everything.
It's really sad to see pioneers think they've got all the answers. Should we have stopped OS development because MULTICS was so good, or did UNIX turn out to have any redeeming qualities?
Just because you come up with one idea that rocks doesn't mean you shouldn't be ignored when you start babbling. I think it's high time to start ignoring these fools at CERN.
Besides, are you willing to give up your privacy for child porn and terrorists? That child porn exists is not a reason to license every camera purchase. That terrorists might use a pager to kill you is not a reason to ban pagers.
The analogy between the Internet and our roads is so sad that I am perfectly ready to question the intelligence of this man: regardless of his merits in the past. I'm completely dumbfounded by how anybody can advocate this, and in the name of openness and freedom to boot.
There are reasons why our society imposes regulations on our freedoms, namely when excersising them physically endangers our fellow citizens. Roads and drivers licenses are a great example of this: we are regulated not for our own safety, but for the safety of other people on the road. If you speeding causes you to crash into a brick wall and die your more than welcome to to it as far as I care, but not so if its my car you are crashing into...
The situation on the Web, however, is the exact opposite. On the web, I can have the freedom to be just about as lame as I want, and it is not going to hurt anyone. I can be annoying, for sure, but since when are we ready to step all over our freedoms to keep people from being annoying (don't answer: I know the sad truth). If anything, the drivers license analogy is the exact reason to keep the web free of all articifial regulation: we do not need to keep the web safe.
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Guess Secure Computing has you on their block list along with anonymizer. ;-)
There's better ways to eliminate spam. For example, you could require a hashcash or digital cash micropayment before you will accept a message from someone you've never corresponded with before.
Hashcash is free, but computationally intensive to make. If spammers had to compute a 26 bit hashcash micropayment for every single message they send, it would limit them to about 100-200 messages a day per computer. Their business would quickly become unprofitable.
See http://www.cypherspace.org/~adam/hashcas h/
From the article:
In an interview with Reuters Television, the Belgian software scientist was adamant that the system must remain open and neutral -- free of heavy-handed rules governing content.
This is pathetic. Who is going to handle Internet regulation, if not a governmental agency? Are we to create a new international group with these powers, or should we just grant this power to the W3C? The only reason they are saying this is because the public is rightfully distrustful of government regulation.
Also, the comparison to drivers' licenses is way off the mark. Drivers are licenced to prevent accidents. Improper behavior on the Internet is almost exclusively intentional. Refusing to give me a driver's license doesn't stop me from commiting vehicular homicide. The idea that this would somehow make it easier to stop child pornongraphy is wrong too. It is not difficult to find where a page is being hosted and demand the ISP take it down. How would licensing change this?
Licensing Internet users would artificially limit who could contribute, destroying the open forum which currently exists. Small players would be removed, allowing the media giants to dominate yet another medium. He who controls the present controls the past. He who controls the past controls the future.
I'm going to live forever or die trying.
Unlike most responders, I agree with the concept of an "internet license." I've thought about such a thing for seven or eight years now, going back to the wild n' wooly glory days of Usenet.
The issue isn't so much accountability. There's a certain set of mistakes that all newbies make when they realize that the web allows two-way communication:
1. They send mail to webmasters about "corrupted" files.
2. They jump into hot-headed discussions with the impression that topics such as abortion, the death penalty, the existence of God, and the health effects of smoking have never been debated before.
3. They spam friends and coworkers with annoying humor pieces that they've run across for the first time.
4. They fall for one or more of the old standbys: Craig Shergold wants greeting cards, there's an impending modem tax that needs to be fought, the Good Times virus, etc.
5. They drive everybody crazy with Blue Mountain Greeting cards.
Most of these have more to do with Usenet, email, and web-based discussion groups, and not just surfing for information. But it's hard to draw a line for someone not familiar with the entire concept of being online. Newbies usually come onto the web in a big way, then settle down greatly after three or four months. It would be nice to cut down on the nonsense caused by tens of millions of people in the process of working through those four months at any given moment.
Time for an Underground Internet to take hold based on a strong secure VPN? :-) Actually that'd be a good idea for a nice porn or warez trading network.. hmm.. never though about that. ;-)
Either this is a bad joke or I'm right in being amazed at the pure stupidity of some people.
You don't have any rights except what whomever is willing to pay for your 'rights' is willing to give you. There are no inherent rights as you seem to belive. People aren't born with rights, just as little as people are born with responsibilities. It is trough struggle, their own and others, that people get 'rights'. If someone would not have fought for freedom, what right would you have to it? None. You'd be a slave like everyone else, except for those people who were lucky to be born into a class that were in control. Just check the history of the middle ages and backwards.
And if you're still willing to claim that you get rights just because of some piece of paper stating that you have them, well, I hereby officialy grant you the right to eat lots of beans and fart yourself into orbit. Go ahead, three, two, one, liftoff!
And even the precious constitution, that you think is giving you all your unaliable rights; if it were not for the people who fought for it against the British, and if it wasn't for the people who have fought for it ever since, from Lincoln to Martin Luther King, the constitution would be nothing but a mildewing piece of paper.
And if you still want to babble on about your 'rights' I'm going to paraphrase Dead Kenedys:
Take a holliday in Cambodia.
Phase 1: Where do you want to go today? Phase 2: This is where you want to go today. Phase 3: You're not going any
Most people will *never* understand that kind of
thing, and so the certification would be worthless.
Which industry are you talking about anyhow?
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
I'd like to see one of these "forgeproof" certificates. I'll bet they are as forgeproof as DVD encryption was uncrackable. Anyone wanna be Bill G for a day? What a great underground industry THAT would be - creating false identities on the internet.
If I understand the "micropayments" concept, it's a way to whack you with a small charge for every page view. A nickel here for a sports page, a dime there for a web search. A really braindead idea, in my opinion, a relic from the old days.
Some of these corporations just haven't figured out that the Internet is The Great Commoditizer--information has become like network sitcoms, no one's going to pay for the privilege of watching Everybody Loves Raymond ('cept me) but they'll tolerate a few bad TV commercials as long as they have a mute button on their flipper.
slashdot broke my sig
I read the article and I can see the point he's trying to make. In having a license to drive a car, you agree to abide by the traffic laws and you realize that there are legal and life consequences if you do not. By failing to obey traffic laws, you could lose your license or if you're involved in an accident, you could lose your life. Driving is more dangerous than web surfing because it involves real objects that can do real damage. It is therefore neccessary to have a set of rules that we all agree to obey so that all drivers can be safe on the road.
The web, on the other hand, deals with thoughts and words. The regulation for what you think and the words you speak comes from YOU, from that internal moral center that has come to you from your life experiences. A license cannot regulate your soul.
As I said, I can see his point but I disagree with his idea. My heart and my conscience are my license. They may not be perfect but no one is.
If there is a licence for internet users what's the minimum age? How hard is it to get the licence? If it isn't possible to easily get such a license you would crush the net.
This scheme will never fly, I hope.
So this is it. The w3c has finally given up being impartial and objective. They have finally fallen to the pressure of 'money-for-the-big-corps'. As far as I know, all their previous activity has been good, writing good standards and growling at people who write browsers that don't comply (do any?).
This is the first time I've seen quotes from the W3C that are so saturated with greed. 'Micropayments'? Are they crazy? As far as I'm concerned, one of the great strenghts of the web is that it doesn't cost anything to look twice, and you run no risk of being charged when you follow a link you have less that 100% trust in.
The other issue with the 'license' is of course privacy. Another great strength of the web is that you can go look at information you would never dream of looking at if others could see you. As for the argument 'protecting viewers' - I don't see how any (adult) needs protection from access to any information, as long as you are free to turn it off! Neither child porn nor nuklear bomb plans are going to do damage to my brain, especially if I have a chance to leave real quick. The analogy to driving is of course ridiculous, as many posters have already said.
The remaining question in my mind is: How do we stop this? Would ISP's, content providers (== you and me), and browser vendors implement this? (If it is even technically possible... crypto schemes at this grand scale tend to be cronically br0ken... DVD anyone?)
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__
Comment submitted. There will be a delay before you understand what you posted.
It sounds like he's trying to assure some level of accountability with the net to combat certain evils like spam, but he's using the wrong analogy. Surfing the Internet is not like driving a car.
A better analogy would be visiting a library. You make a request for some information (either by looking it up in a card catalog, or asking the reference librarian), and you receive it. We would never suggest that a librarian demand ID before allowing access to the book racks. However, we might expect them to politely stop the six-year-old from wandering into the art section where are kept the books of human figure photography. It's easy, after all, for a human to spot a six-year-old.
I think what worries Cailliau is the fact that the medium of information exchange is now entirely mechanized; that there's no longer a human gatekeeper to make sure that neither the six-year-old nor the neighborhood Fundamentalist doesn't accidentally wander off with Mapplethorpe.
Unfortunately, such wisdom requires adult human intelligence and life experience, which we aren't about to get in machines for some time. And the alternative suggested by Cailliau of checking IDs is unworkable and ethically repugnant.
For the time being, it seems we must rely on the honesty and honor of humans to not foul the well water. Even given Talin's Third Law ("Politeness doesn't scale."), this approach has worked remarkably well on the Internet so far. As long as we keep developing honesty and honor in our children, I believe we should be, for the most part, just fine.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
and provide assorted marketing information...
Sorry, but if I am NOT going to volunteer to violate my own privacy and allow targetted SPAM into my mailbox.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Using the Internet is like walking around town. You can just go around looking at stuff, you can buy things from stores, you can have conversations, you can meet new people, etc. Why do we need a license to do these things? Is it because we can also do harmful things? We can do that when we're not online without a license.
Another thing... did you notice that they plan to discriminate against racists(can you say 'hypocracy'?)? I'm not saying I like racists, I just support everyone's right to free speech. That's basically all you can do on the Internet, speak(you can buy stuff too, but how is that harmful?).
Anyway, that's just how I feel about it.
--
Seeing is believing; You wouldn't have seen it if you didn't believe it.
Do you think you are actually convincing anyone?
I doubt very much that he thinks he's convincing anyone.
Your tired act is getting old.
I hope he realizes that, but I can sympathize. It's tough to create on demand. He should probably take a vacation and recharge the old batteries. The problem is that there's not a whole hell of a lot of variety in right-wing belief systems. "You can't make me", "I gotta right", "You don't gotta right", "They're out to get me", and "God is Great". That's about the extent of it. The grace notes are varied, but the song is always the same. It's like the blues, or bullfights: If you're not an afficionado, it all seems kinda redundant.
--
Bob James, not logged in: Don't wanna, you can't make me
The problem with making such a change is that if people think that their privacy is going to be severely compromised by using the net, they won't use it. Many people are afraid enough of computers and the internet without having the added fear that someone is tracking their every move ready to sell it to the government, their employer, or their next door neighbor. Surfing the net comes with no more responsibilities than reading a book or watching the TV, and has to certain degree the same content. There is no reason to have to have a license to surf the net other than to strip away our privacy.
Well, I assume your having a laugh, but I would point out that the roads are not YOUR private property. I don't know about in the US but in the UK anyone can drive a car on private property given the permission of the car and land owners- if these are you it's very easy. No license or insurance is required. However since the roads are public property- or the private property of the government which ever way you want to see it, you also have to abide by their rules and conditions in order to use them
J-aims
--
Yo, whatever happened to peas? Join T( H)GS
What we really need is our own network. If we do our legal homework properly, we can have it recognized as private property and do with it whatever we wish.
The first step is to set up a VPN that uses IP tunneling over the internet. Then we need to replace the physical network used to transport the packets to private assets, like packet radio stations, private telephone lines, and even privately laid-down cable where possible.
The future is in our hands -- will we drop the ball?
-- Guges --
A while ago, I remember that Emmanuel Goldstein of 2600 Magazine (Host of the popular hacker/phreak/tech radio show, off the hook) declared himself President of the Internet. He is the unquestionable master of the 'net.
look in the Off the Hook archives at http://www.2600.com/offthehook and look for that episode.
Require me to have a licence? I'll forge mine. Or better yet, I'll use yours. The underground will create a new scene, one devoted to net-identity creation/trading/distribution... the point here is that anonymity is what makes the internet such a beautiful thing, arguably the most important creation of this last thousand years. And it will never die. So while I choose to use my /. acct, I can still post as an Anonymous Coward if i so choose.
/. story for a bridging story)
(Branching over into the other
When i was active in the BBS community many a night ago, my favorite board decided that everyone needed to fill out a information form and turn it in to the sysop so that he could confirm our identities on posts in the message forums... a few phone calls later, a few of us decided to create an individual with the nickname of "Anonymous" and turn in a stat sheet for him. The password was known to almost all of the regulars, and we used it to post when we wanted anonymity.
For 90% of the internet, the illusion of privacy and anonymity is enough. They don't need more than a safety blanket, even if it is an illusion. But for the other 10% of us in the know, and concerned about our internet rights, this idea of "name tags" is utterly absurd.
~spot
{[- I'm the guy who lost his voice screaming his demo over Caldera at Comdex. -]}
"and no, im not the spot working for Transmeta, although i wish i was..." -- ~spot "i'm the epitome of public enemy..."
What I want to know is: how long will it take some l33t haX0r to break the encryption or however they make these licenses and get a million of them, getting other people blamed, etc. I like the Web the way it is (although a little less spam would be nice, hotmail) and the way it is going... or was going until the government began making rules to control it. It is the perfect place to speak your mind, if you feel like being anonymous, go ahead. If this license comes around I guarentee someone WILL crack it, and the pedophiles or whatnot can find out who you are on IRC without you even telling them. These licenses sound very insecure and I would most likely be one of the first people to try and break the system to get to my daily news and comics and whatnot. What about age, do I need to be 18 to surf the Web? Did Corel forsee something? Do I need to take a surfing test (what is your "click on hyperlink signal," ransom?)
I think this idea is absurd and I hope it never gets past the speculation point.
If you think you know what the hell is going on you're probably full of shit.
If you think you know what the hell is going on you're probably full of shit.
jdube is who I am
As long as the government doesn't step in with its coercive power to force us to get licenses, we have nothing to fear from the advocates of such a scheme. Even if the scheme gains wide acceptance, we've got the brains and the freedom of choice to keep the anonymous web alive.
This is sad. When I first started using screwing around on the internet when I was 10 in 93-94, I remember how cool it was that nobody knew I was a little kid. I could talk with adults on IRC and nobody knew the difference. Anonymity is what makes the internet so great. It is the one "place" where it is possible to trash any past you have and start a new identity and now the W3C wants to take it away. It's sad.
And one other thing: Is this supposed to cover all protocols (telnet, FTP, et cetera) or just HTTP/HTTPS? And if it's all protocols, does anyone have any idea what it would take to implement a liscensing system like this that would be universally compatible with all operating systems, hardware platforms, protocols et cetera?
Ta,
Alec C.
... and I doubt that "they" can put it back in. If "they" attempt to regulate or otherwise hinder the free exchange of information and ideas, we will make our own networks. As the price of the physical connections drop, we will see other networks pop up that are seperate from the Internet.
--fatboy
So, either I can pay to go places that I don't know whether even I want to be there until I get there (so basically I get billed for a lot of wrong numbers and useless pages, and you can bet the number of deliberately useless pages and interim pages you have to pass thru to get where you're going would skyrocket) or I can pay to avoid being visually spammed by advertizing, which may start off small but will eventually expand to fill my entire screen, and gods help the people who still pay by the minute.
No thanks. I'd go back to fetching web pages by FTP (if it still exists under this system) so they come emailed in to the BBS where, yes, I still get most of my daily email.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
How many people are killed every day in car accidents? Killed over bad drug deals? Where are they killed? Who kills them? The real world, people, they kill others, they harm others, they abuse others. The Internet has *very* little to do with it. In fact, if anything, the Internet has forced those with idealistic views of the world to wake up and realize what the world is really like.
In addition, on a personal note, I feel that everyone controls their own destiny on the Internet (much more so than in any other medium). If I don't want to see porn, I don't visit porn sites. If I don't want to read racist remarks, I don't visit their sites. It's that simple. I've never been "bombarded" with porn, I've never been propositioned for sex, because I choose not to put myself in those situations. As with anything else, it takes a certain amount of responsibility on the *user* to make the Internet useful to *them*.
Art imiates life, and so does the Internet. If we can help clean up the real world, the Internet will go with it. The real problem is outside our doors, folks. Not inside our computers.
I really don't think eliminating anonymity is the answer. In Real Life(tm) for example, in order to prevent crime, shops have cameras, security guards, and so on - basically the equivalents of various security tools available for servers on the Internet, such as firewalls, proxy servers, and so on.
...right?
Licensing surfers seems, IMHO, tantamount to forcing everyone to have little credit card-like things with their social security number (or whatever). Card readers would be posted on the door of every house, shop, mall, etc. and in order to enter a building, you'd need to insert your card. That way, there would be records of where everyone was and when, so if something got stolen, they (the government, police, storeowner, or whomever) would theoretically know who it was; and, incidentally, there would be reams of information on every single person in the country who ever left their home, detailing where they went and when. So law enforcement would have a very powerful new tool to combat crime, and marketers would be able to target the right people for their bulk mailings - everybody wins!
As I think most people can tell, a system like that would never, ever, ever be brought into existence, at least in a "free" country - it would be held as a massive violation of rights. So why on Earth should such a system exist on the Internet? It's hardly the only way to combat crime.
In the article, the Internet is compared to a highway, where all drivers are licensed, and so on. I have to disagree with this; I think an analogy of people in a massive city might be a little more appropriate, although even that is flawed. But perhaps one of the most glaring flaws in the drivers-on-the-road analogy is the potential for damage: someone in a car can easily kill themselves or others through a lack of skill in handling a car - either by hitting another car, or running into a tree, or whatever. That is why drivers and cars are licensed - if someone tries to drive a car without adequate training, then nine times out of ten they'll get into some sort of accident, and quite possibly seriously hurt. Now, if you put someone in front of a computer with no prior training, they'll just get confused, nothing more. No one gets hurt or killed. On the Internet, the people with potential to cause damage are the ones who know what they're doing (or, in some cases, script kiddies who just think they know what they're doing - but I don't think most of them are capable of serious damage). And I think that the truly dangerous people will figure out how to get around the licensing anyway.
And of course, there's the problem of who you get to oversee the licensing. A government wouldn't really work, since the Internet has no geographical boundaries; W3C wouldn't be able to do it, since IIRC no one is actually *forced* to listen to them. In fact, I wouldn't be amazingly surprised if an attempt at licensing surfers like this just resulted in fracturing the Internet into parts that require licenses, and parts that don't. I personally think that part of the beauty (for lack of a better word) of the Internet is the fact that it's pseudo-anonymous, and unregulated. There isn't really anyone with the power to say what you can or can't do. Naturally, this does get abused, but that hasn't ruined the Internet. It's a place where anyone can say what they want, and have an equal opportunity to be heard, without having to be afraid of anyone coming after them for it; that's something that should always be protected. A licensing and identification scheme would be a large step towards destroying that.
It is impossible to design the system so that licenses are required. What will happen is that those with malicious intent will find ways around the system, use fake or stolen licenses, etc.
Just like real life.
This kind of thing is stupid. Noone can -govern- a network!
Imagine an Internet with all the regulations that people want to put onto it. Wouldn't that be terrible?
/. articles that have been posted recently about "private" and "small" BBS's of days gone by.
This overbearing internet would surely be less useful than its worth.
So, what happens when the internet becomes this way?
I'd a say a new Internet would be created, different protocols, goverened by different people, taking into account all the best possible technologies and regulations.
"Well isn't this the Internet 2?" No, the internet 2 already has corporate sponsors and will eventually (despite the fact that it isn't supposed to) become just as regulated and slow as the current one.
Thats when an "underground" internet gets started: running on a different protocol, where small groups of people start to provide access to others.
This "underground" internet harkens to the
Unfortunately, who is to say that this new internet will not fall to the same fate as the current? Nothing, and unfortunatly, I must concede that human nature strives to be greedy and regulate. But under the right hands, with good legislation from the start (perhaps some sort of viral type rule, like the GPL that forbids certain types of legislation) it could become a better, bolder, more free internet.
It boils down to censorship...
*they* don't want the people to know anything and are breeding mindless, tv can't lie, the gov't is your friend, etc people on mind numbing sitcoms and Microsoft products.
At least we have CmdrTaco, George Orwell ( he's alive, dammit!) Gillian Anderson, and David Duchovny on our side! Yeah, fight the power, down with Clinton and his illigetimate son, Bill Gates!
Anyway, gotta go, those annoying black helicopters are circling my house again.
--
David
We can't be so fixated on our desire to preserve
the rights of ordinary Americans.
--President Bill Clinton
If people had to be licensed to use the Internet, it would make them more accountable for their actions and encourage them to think twice before they do anything stupid.
I've been e-mail bombed a few times before. It's not a fun ordeal, especially if you're trying to sift through the debris to find important messages. Only a few times was I able to trace the person who did it (mainly through an IP address or whatever). Other times, I have been out of luck. Requiring Internet users to be licensed would help to make people responsible for their actions and be held culpable for them. Just like the driver of a car can be held responsible for ramming into someone else, so an Internet user should be held responsible for e-mail bombing someone.
Also, if there were an Internet licensing test, it would end up eliminating about 95% of AOL's user base ;o)
awkwardone
www.tealeaves.org "All you need is love." -
This kind of regulation will not achieve its intended purpose.
The fact of this type of regulation is going to make more people interested in concealing themselves, or 'stealing' identities.
I can't see anything good coming out of this, except one thing: a few actual criminals will be (discouraged|arrested). But this may be a small good compared to the evils of the wave of over-regulation and oppressive government crackdowns on 'enemies of the state' for speaking their minds which is sure to occur afterwards.
Steve
Don't they think it's a little too late for that? Now they must negotiate with all ISP-s and countries.......................and even with 'privacy rights' organisations
If they will make book buyers to require a LICENSE to buy a book i will go for it. Otherwise this is utter nonsense from people who do not understand what the web is all about.
A license to surf? I've read about that idea for many years now, and I say "Yes, a license would be good". I don't say "Yes, every step you take should be traced and reported to the FBI and mr. Gates". I'm saying "Yes, before you are allowed on to the net, you have to identify with your license which you got through a certificate, and once you're online there is no tracing and shit done".
+ You have to take a certificate
+ AOL may NOT give certificates
+ You can do training do get this certificate
+ You should not need to be able to use any Microsoft-crap to get this license
+ You should have to be able to speak at least one language at least OK (preferably enough to get through primary school)
+ No tracing should be done at all
+ You should be able to shop securely through this
My $0.03. Oops, I spent too much!
First let me note. Child Pornography, Racism and others things like terrorism and such stuff can be traced up to a certain measure. Sometimes you can trace out even the creator up to his home address, with whom he/she sleeps, where he works and what his phone. However it is always harder to trace him on his financial doings. Moreover it is much harder to trace out clear evidences of criminal behaviour even if it seems that you know "everything" about him.
Licensing users does not help in anything to solve this situation. It will be a few bucks more in the hands of beaurocrats. Just think. If there are guys working so openly why they should bother by paying a few more bucks for a very "foggy" license?
Foggy? Exactly. Internet deals with information. From A to Z, Alpha to Omega, A to Ya. If we count all the types and forms of information we get some sort of informational Babylon. Now how will you license this? "You have the right to express your ideas?" Or worse "You have the right to receive information" ? A license is supposed to regulate a type of activity to avoid excesses. I may agree that there are certain types of activities that should be licensed. However I never heard that we could receive licenses to obtain a type of service.
Frankly. Does anyone pays a license to take a ride? Does anyone has to pay a license to read a newspaper? Does your friend have to check if you have a license beofre he borrows you his book? Do you have to get a license to hear your presidential candidate? Do you need to have a license to buy a Coke?
Let us suppose that we get a chance to "classify" the licensing system. And let us suppose that they avoid this dangerous "right to read" and leave the "right to publish". Now if we force everyone to have a "right to publish" then we are attempting against something that the constitutions of all democratic countries set as a fundamental right: the right of free expression.
This is not just bla-bla-bla. Imagine the situation when a country, considering that there is dangerous information roaming on the Internet, immediately invalidates the licenses of his citizens. A thing very much like "The Matrix has you...".
We may think on other things. How Hackers play with a bad secured license. How we get hostages of a tax game much like the hideous "Microsoft tax". How people can be easily traced by the Super-Echelon license tracing system...
However there is one thing that can be the most flagrant. You walk on Internet. As in any street, the Internet has its dangers. You can harm or get harmed. But has anyone asked you a license to walk?
According to that argument, there are never rights. Why?
Because who's assigning the privileges and rights? The only logical conclusion is rule by complete force; since, say, somebody could stab you with a knife and take your wallet, it's perfectly fine to do so: he's asserting power, and that's the source of "rights".
Go read about natural law.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Actually, the Bill of Rights has the purpose of defining the inalienable rights of people. Meaning that those rights are owned by all (well, the way they applied it, not slaves... but the meaning is still there). These rights are not always able to be expressed, but they are there. What you're referring to as rights are actually privleges.
Do I need to get a license for window shopping? for walking down the street? rollerblading? There are surely more dangerous things than 'surfing the net'.
I hope you're not suggesting that left wing belief systems are any more varied...
We use money because resources are scarce. Money is a method of providing an abstraction for the value of a resource based on supply and demand. If demand is held constant while supply goes up, the price of a resource falls. If a resource has an infinite supply, then the price should drop to 0. On the web, we are dealing with an essentially unlimited supply of a resource (information). The generation of that information must be paid for in some cases (to pay for news.com's reporters, for example.) If advertising is used, the scarcity of the information generators (reporters, etc) is compensated for. (And yes, you pay for the advertising in higher prices and reduction in the percentage of your bandwidth that you can actually use for something useful.) The costs of generating the information are covered, and everyone can access a nearly unlimited supply of it for free. But if we had to pay for information using a micropayment system, we would either be charged by the quantity of information downloaded (paying for bandwidth), or by the demand for (quality of) the information. In either case, the more information you want, or the more in demand that the information is, the more that you would pay. Research on the net would suddenly become rather expensive. Shopping on line might as well. People with lots of money would have plenty of access to information. People without it would not. Information would become the domain of those that have. The empowering and equalizing power of the web would be lost. Micromarkets in small pieces of information would be created. You could opt out by putting up with advertising - but of course, you would also pay with your privacy, since each site would need to authenticate you so that it would know whether or not to charge you. By the way...what happens if someone uses my computer to web browse? Do they then run up my information bill?
The Internet crosses national boundaries, so just who, exactly, shall reign soveriegn over IP? The United Nations? Is Koffi Annan going to have to learn the in's and out's of IPSec, SSL, and SMTP?
That's silly. Why don't we find someone - I know! - Robert Cailliau, to tell us what to do.
"...which is very interesting because if we can get it to work, that will change the quality of the Web completely." No shit. And not a moment too soon. People don't even want to use the Internet anymore, because it's such a dangerous place. I can't even sleep at night.
There are two proposals here: (1) uniquely identify people, and (2) bill them.
We need (1), we are told, to help the world confront the hordes of evil racist child molesters who want to steal your money. Notice, however, that (1) is also what makes (2) possible.
Who REALLY wants to steal your money?
--Lawrence Lessig for Congress!
bedtime for democracy :)
I guess I've just about heard it all now. Somewhere, somehow, somebody is going to figure out how to completely destroy the things that have made the internet great. We will be telling our grandkids about the good old days when the net was like the wild west. Yep... if it's not the politicians or the save-the-whales crowd, it'll be someone. It's just a matter of time.
I say we just fork the whole thing off right now. How hard could it be to do that. All we need are phone lines... maybe some new protocols.. it could be done. We could call it "The Undernet" The slashdot community has the knowledge and resources to get it started too.
At least if you are in the US, the internet is owned by Worldcom. All hail The Company.
Seriously, after this sprin buy-out passes, they will be one purchase away from owning 99.9999% of the Internet bandwidth in the US.
Leaving a trace in real life will eventually pose a much greater risk to personal freedom. What I mean is the introduction of so called "smart cards", memory chips that contain personal data and that can be remotely read (and possibly altered) via a small built-in radio transmitter. Initially this kind of gadget will of course only be used under not so controversial circumstances. An example is public transport, where every passenger carries such a card in his wallet and the fare is automatically deducted from it as soon as he enters the subway station or the bus. Sooner or later however, governments, insurances and banks will want to introduce the same technique for ID cards, social security cards, tax forms, health records - every conceivable personal information on one plastic card which can be read from a distance. People who are not carrying it are suspicious, people having the wrong kind of information stored on it will be denied access to certain areas. And computers everywhere will track it. Compared to this the net will probably remain a place of relative freedom.
Why is it so hard to understand that just because we have a new medium for communication does not mean we need to whip out an ID (or an ID card), to be used ultimately by some marketing jack-ass. I hate marketing anyway... so much existential inauthenticity...
It's hard to believe one of the inventors of the web could be so stupid. Anonymity is simply one of our "check and balance" systems that we have in this country. Once systems are in place for web licensing, we lose more of our freedoms.
Greed is the driving force in all of this. Tracking illegal child pornography and avoiding offensive sites is simply an excuse. And pay money for no-ad sites? Sheesh! Get junkbuster (http://www.waldherr.org/junkbuster/) instead.
The Net is more than just the WWW. It includes telnet, mail, IRC, etc... The W3C can only 'control' the Web aspect of it. If the W3C decides to enforce such a license, the answer to rectify this is easy (though to put it in action wouldn't be). All that would need to be done is create a new way of displaying graphics and text on the web. Instead of HTML, create a new format & language to do so and call it something else. I said the answer was easy. Whether it's feasible or not is another matter. But I get the impression that if such a ruling is passed and enforced that it wouldn't take long for this new way of doing things to be embraced by net users in general. Sandman71, who's a bit surprised Microsoft hasdn't tried doing something like this already ;P
It's better to burn out than to fade away!
The Net is more than just the WWW. It includes telnet, mail, IRC, etc... The W3C can only 'control' the Web aspect of it.
If the W3C decides to enforce such a license, the answer to rectify this is easy (though to put it in action wouldn't be). All that would need to be done is create a new way of displaying graphics and text on the web. Instead of HTML, create a new format & language to do so and call it something else.
I said the answer was easy. Whether it's feasible or not is another matter. But I get the impression that if such a ruling is passed and enforced that it wouldn't take long for this new way of doing things to be embraced by net users in general.
Sandman71, who's a bit surprised Microsoft hasdn't tried doing something like this already
It's better to burn out than to fade away!
Give everyone an unforgable "license" to identify them on every Web site they hit, and you'll immediately drive a lot of people to proxies that hide the licenses.
Stupid job ads, weird spam, occasional insight at
- at the browser
... but I'm gonna compile up my own browser and 'drive without a license' - at the ISP
.... hell I'll start my own ISP, or we'll start using other protocols for access to web pages - at the server (probably more likely) servers will only serve pages to people with 'drivers licenses' - not my server buddy - when an e-commerce site starts only accepting people with 'licenses' people will go elsewhere
.... it will be bad for business
In our international cross-national web no one country's going to be able to censor the whole webThere is no comparing air with content - you have to breathe the air that drifts your way, but nobody is forced to look at "polluted" content (it's sure easier to filter out ads than ciggy smoke). If money is to be put into one or the other, I know I'd rather it went to clean air.
And how is a license going to make it any easier to find a naughty server?
I might've expected this as a joke from Tim; as a Brit he'd be used to having a license to watch TV... but surely he'd also know the silliness to which it leads.
In fact, I think people should need to have to pass a proficency exam before they are allowed to buy a computer. Can't buy a car without a liscense. It would fix the world. Companies could invest in R&D instead of wasting money on support. No more need to hand hold users who are unwilling to edjucate themselves. Heck, try calling Honda and asking them how to drive.
Score 3, Insightful????
If you voted for Nader, THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT!!
Who wants these licenses? Internet users? No. Web site operators? No. ISPs? No.
So are they going to happen? Not in a free society.
Let's keep our free society and try to make it more free.
BTW: The first step to a free society would be to eliminate driver's licenses. They don't guarantee your safety, and it hasn't been proven that they're even helpful. In a free society, an adult should be free to drive his car, not prohibited from driving without special permission from the government. If driver's licenses were not necessary, no one would even consider web-surfing licenses or ISP licenses or parenting licenses or half of the other kooky schemes designed to exercise control over the ordinary citizen.
these ideas suck and undermine the idea of the Internet. The Web was not half as revolutionary as people tend to say. It was just the single peace (distributed hypertext) that was introduced at the right time.
micropayment is stupid. we had this before. anyone remembers CompuServe and CIM, often attributed as CI$. The internet's growth is linked to the fact that there IS NO MICROPAYMENT. This guy is just stupid, no matter how close he is with Tim Barners-Lee.
Licence would make us all easy targets for ECHELON, CIA, KGB, Mossad etc. It's so DAMN STUPID.
We should create "THE UNDERGROUND" a set of protocols and software to use the Internet secretly, providing self-changing proxy arrays for citizens of Australia and other countries.
Don't let the FASCISTS of NSA and governments kill the free, democratic spirit of the Net...
YRO articles are dominated by YRO-typical posters and YRO-typical moderators. This pretty much guarantees any anti-government/corporation post will earn kudos and points while any pro-government/corporation post will rot or be demoted.
</sarcasm>
On the opposite side of the coin, some people are working on making web stuff MORE anonymous. See Adam's Page for an assortment of cryptographic projects. Another idea for true anonymous web hosting is at http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue3_4/goldberg /index.html. I've also thought that it'd be fairly easy to make Mozilla read a .tar.gz or a .zip file as a web tree, allowing people to post web pages anonymously on netnews, but that would not allow for long term storage of pages, wheras these other projects would.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Let me ask everyone this, do you need a license to use a library? Do you need a license to go to a park and talk to your friends? Do you need license to listen to music? Do you need a license to go shopping? Do you need a license to play games? Think about it... don't you now think that having a license to use the interent is just plain silly.
Um, excuse me, but when did the expression "surf" leave the domain of AOLers and assorted clueless newbies and become acceptable for use by the geek community as a metaphor for using the Internet?
No way. We're too cool to say "surf".
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
What is with people saying that the net is somehow different from "real life?" The net is part of real life! What you do online is held against you in a court of law if it violated "real laws"! As for that internet inventor guy I think it is rather ironic that he is a censorship nazi since he created the largest platform for free speech ever made! Just remember pro-censorship kiddywinks that you may be in power today but those you piss off might get into power and censor what *YOU* say and persecute you. Persecution is a like the relationship between the dog and the fire hydrant. 1 day you are the dog, the next you are the hydrant!
Ewww... POWER is the only source of rights? I think MAO said that... whereas in this country -- with its consitution and all -- citizens have rights and the GOVERNMENT, which has a monopoly on the legal initiation of force, has LIMITATIONS. Or that was the theory anyway...
I'm sure the NSA is absolutley devastated by this prospect.
-Anonymous (but not for long) Coward
This guy isn't related to the W3C at all, and he most certainly isn't speaking for them.
The W3C makes standards, they don't create organizations or rules mandating licensing. The "author" of this article mentioned W3C only in that the W3C has created in the past a mechanism for digital certificates and authenticating users over the web. The most obvious use for this would be for securely authenticating yourself with a private Intranet or bank. I guess he was working under the assumption that this could be expanded to include just about any Internet web site, which I suppose is possible.
In the article the guy mentions the W3C is looking at a micropayment system. Remember, they're just doing *standards* here. If there exists a mechanism to pay $0.10/month to eliminate banner ads, that would be desirable to some people, and the W3C's ability to standardize this process isn't just desirable, it's NECESSARY if we ever hope to keep things like this interoperable.
The World Wide Web Consortium is a very OPEN and HONEST standards body. They are not one of these stupid YRO evil corporations that are bashed on a daily basis. They solicit public opinions, responses, and generally make every effort to keep their standards in the best interests of the *Internet*, not evil, money-hungry, privacy invading corporations as you people seem to suspect.
When a government starts requiring you to carry identification, the intelligent people move elswhere.
Actually, you can drive your car all you like without a license, on your own property. But when you go driving on the street, well, that's public property, and the government has the right to regulate that to maximize the safety of all involved.
If you get in the way of my car and you get hurt or killed, you deserve it. Don't get in the way of cars.
So, let me get this straight - if you lose control of your car (you have a blow-out, serve to avoid someone (doesn't sound too likely...), or you're stoned out of your brain) and plough into another car/a group of pedesrians/whatever, it's their fault because they should've got out of the way?
Driving is a privilege that is earnt by demonstrating that you have the ability and temperment required for being allowed to be in charge of such a potentially deadly piece of machinary. Trying to call driving a right just belittles those things that really are rights.
Tim
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Programmers responsibility for their own sloppy coding has gone on unchecked far too long. Programmers (or software engineers as they like to call themselves) need to be held accountable just like any other engineering discipline. States should test and license programmers. Bad programmers should have their licenses pulled or suspended. Only in software could companies get away with EULAs chock full of "no warranty, not responsible for messing up your computer, not responsible for damages, yada yada yada." Bullshit, you *are* responsible. If you don't want to be responsible for your own actions then you should be barred from employment as a programmer.
Mao's quote (translated, of course. By whom? Dunno.) was "Power comes from the barrel of a gun". In his case, it did.
My main claim is that unless there's rights that are *natural* and assumed to belong to everybody, then there really aren't *any* rights at all, except what one can tear from the claws of others -- and that's not really a "right" in that sense.
But I digress.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Anyone wishing to enter the community that is the internet and use community resources has no right to hide from the community. Anonymity must end. Without it the pr0n, w4r3z, trading would all but dry up.
The privacy violations implicit in micropayment systems are certainly bad. However, I am forced to admit that it would be nice if everyone on the Net adhered to some basic etiquette, which could be enforced.
A "Net licensing" scheme wouldn't have to necessarily involve privacy violations, however. Granted, stripping identifying festures from a license (reducing it, in essence, to a certificate stating that someone has completed an etiquette course) would reduce the effectiveness of the license and eliminate the accountability issue.
It all comes down to trade-offs, I suppose. If you want security, you have to sacrifice some privacy (simply because all known methods of security are traceable to at least some degree; the contents may be hidden but the participants are not). It comes down to where you're willing to draw the line. Personally, I don't like the idea of an identifying Net license. I can't ignore the potential benefits of such a system, though. I'm just not willing to pay the price for those benefits.
Likewise, a right to drive on the public roads - there is a (legislated) responsibility to drive in a manner that protects and respects others. That is why there are road rules, and fines and penalties for those who choose to disobey them (no cynical comments about government revenue raising activities, please).
The trouble with the web, and the Internet in general, is that with the reasonably high degree of anonominity that is available, some people ignore any sense of responsiblity. And so we have the spammers, crackers, scam merchants, kiddie porn, and the like, mainly because these people believe thay can get away with it with no fear of retribution.
What is required is a process where people's rights (and I am not sure just where it is stated or implied that everyone has the "right" to free (as in speech, not beer) and unfettered use of what is becoming a privately owned infrastructure) are balanced by the responsibility to use the Internet in a way that respects everyone else's rights.
Whether or not "user licensing" is the way to go, but there needs to be some way to hold people accountable for what they do.
Just my 2 bits worth, flames to /dev/null please.
At least here in the US, if you own a car, you can do anything you want with it... you don't have to have a insurance, drivers license or license plate. You can drive it around all you want, perfectly legally.
Of course, if you want to drive it on roads that were paid for by the public, you have to follow the rules that go along with those public roads. That means a valid drivers license and up to date proof of ownership (tag) in all states, and insurance in most states (here in Florida, we're a "no-fault" state, meaning that the insurace companies pay for everything regardless of fault since having insurance is manditory).
Incidently, speed-limit is an interesting legal construct. It's the rated safe speed, meaning safe for normal road conditions - above which, you are driving recklessly. Often you can get out of a speeding ticket by saying that the road was empty, the weather was fine, and conditions were safe for that speed. YMMV IANAL... but I've seen it work three times here in Florida.
Of course, that means that you can get a speeding ticket if you are doing the speed limit and the weather is really bad. Here in the subtropics, we get rain so bad that you can't see the end of your hood, and I see no problem in ticketing people doing 50 on the interstate in such conditions. Also, the maximum speed in *any* residential area will never be above 35 mph.
--
Evan "55 mph = 88 kph iirc" E.
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
If information has become like network sitcoms, isn't there room for providers akin to cable pay-per-view?
[turns up volume on bullhorn *squeeeeaaalll* turns down volume a touch] HEY LEGISOATORS! HEY COMMITTEES! HET GOV'T GOONS! THE INTERNET IS FUCKING GLOBAL. [normal volume] If FOO is outlawed in 99% of all nations, a FOO server will be setup in the remaining 1% of nations and as readily accessible to all as any other site on the web. Get it? Is it illegal for a warez server in Singapore to post cracked copies of win98, office, tomb raider III, etc.? So unless you plan to block all traffic to .sg (there's too much legit traffic for this to happen) you must accept that illegal material (in your nation) will be available now and forever somewhere on the net (where it's not illegal). Get it, now?
Most leftists I've met think Marxism is THE hammer and EVERYTHING ELSE is a nail.
Population explosion? Communism is the answer
Population decrease? Communism is the answer
Food shortages? Communism is the answer
Food surplus? Communism is the answer
Nuclear Winter? Communism is the answer
GreenHouse warming? Communism is the answer
Social injustice? Communism is the answer
Private ownership? Communism is the answer
Too much freedom? Communism is the answer
A perfect example of one dimensional thinking.
Their only problem is we've recently seen the completion of a seventy year experiment in "Communism is the answer" and it left EVEYTHING to be desired. The previous examples "weren't really communism"? Ya, right. Just because you live in denial doesn't mean the rest of us have to bury our heads in the sand next to yours.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
Seriously, considering that "the internet" is actually a hodge-podge of independent companies, individuals, and various governments, all of them across many nations, I fail to see how any one body can claim to possess the power to decide who can have access. Some people still don't truly understand the anarchist nature of the 'net.
Suppose they'd used another metaphor? They'd be laughed at!
a) Net surfers should be licensed just like real surfers should be ... uh no, attempts to require licensure of 'dangerous sports fall short in most nations, including the US. 'Risk to others' does not necessarily enter into it. A skydiver or ultra light pilot could cause a lot of injury if they happened to land on a schoolbus. Indeed the risk of injuring innocent bystanders exists in *most* sports (I've seen people hit by wayward golfballs)
b) Those who browse the web should be licensed just as those who browse books in a library or bookstore... another non-starter in most 'free' nations.
c) Those who talk/write over the internet should be licensed like those who call or write letters. (ulp!)
d) Hey the internet is effectively broadcasting! We license TV/radio stations! -- Alas, talk radio is rather popular. Note that we license the station (site??), but not the users (callers/listeners) -- and in the US, at least, freedom of the press has roots almost as deep as freedom of speech
e) There are countless metaphors that could be used, and only the 'driving a car' metaphor gets the proponents anywhere near where they want to go (partly because of the aura of fear that surrounded the automobile when it was introduced accompanying the excitement and enthusiasm -- hence the old laws (now jokes) requiring that flagwavers precede automobiles to warn pedestrians/sensible horse-riders/etc.)
By now, we all know that the telegraph and telephone were, realio-trulio, slandered with the same 'society destroying' label that the internet faces today.
But we cannot ignore the power and misuse of metaphors -- they are likely to be all that many of our legislators and law enforcement authorities understand... or choose to understand. It is important to remember (and almost impossible to overestimate) the degree to which most people will seek out, and accepts as fully real ('intuitively obvious') those metaphors that justify their preconceptions, fears, etc.
And even we /.ers know that there are things to fear in the Internet. We can evaluate these risks and accept them as the price of freedom. Others might not see any need for any freedom they don't personally exercise. ("Hey, I got nothin' to hide")
Finally, (and this is truly shocking to Americans like me) there have been legal cases (recent ones) in US state courts that quietly question whether drivers licenses can be required for private individuals driving their own cars on the public ways. At least one state supreme court has ruled that it isn't. Any search engine can point you to many 'nutcase' anti-tax anti-gov't pages that have the unfortunate property of citing quite valid case findings (text available online; verifiable in any law library) I find the idea unsettling, but it is nice to know that the gov't can't just 'make it so' by fiat. (not that I'd risk being a test case in *my* state) I've read some interesting social analyses of the factors that allowed the institution of the driver's license -- which is in many ways an unprecedented abrogation of our social rights.
(Don't argue the necessity with me -- just note that proponents of a dozen other social programs have tried throughout the century to acquire this type of licensing/identification/authorization privileges, and the courts struck every one of them down. The driver's license is the one that sneaked by -- and not because it was the most worthy.]
If you can go to bed, knowing you did a valuable thing today, you're very lucky. If you can't... it's not bedtime
Complicated question. There are some protocols for very specific purposes that reveal identity upon some protocol violations (various anonymous cash protocols, for instance, are provably anonymous until someone double spends).
I don't believe these could be generalizable to "reveal identity when they try a buffer overflow". A strong system of contractual agreements could work, but I'd be afraid they'd be immediately back doored by law enforcement and whatnot (which one could argue is "OK"... I don't think so, that's a different discussion). In essense, this would be an anonymizing proxy which logs your behaviour and provides a token to remote sites tying your actions to the ISP's logs, with the ISP agreeing to never disclose the logs to the remote site so long as you didn't do certain things.
This would never work without something akin to attourney style relationships with your ISP.
I forget what 8 was for.
Excerpt:
Full version at http://www.mit.edu/activities/safe/humor/drunk-on- infohighway
The security model of the current system not only accounts for the fact that a computer system can always be broken into, but it relies on it. If a "licensing" system is put into place now, how long will it take before someone figures out how to completely take control of someone's identity.
I think the internet was not designed on the scale of "a way of life", it's simply a tool. When the time comes that the internet (or something like it) is woven into the fabric and or dictates more crucial aspects of our life, there should be some kind of licensing system so that people can be help accountable for damage. (Say cracking into someones GPS and crashing thier car) Now it's not practical, reliable or nessecary to do so.
This perhaps illustrates an axiom that the most technically gifted are not always the best policy makers. I only hope that those in charge of internet policy understand this and don't give too much weight to Cailliau's opinions.
Why not have a private authority test drivers? And why not have anonymous car tags? In fact, privledged state employees in Massachusetts get tags that cannot be traced easily. This might be needed for the governor's daughter, but mostly this is used to avoid speeding tickets. A private licensing authority would be less susceptible to such abuse. (One could expect similar preferences for members of the apparat in Web licensing, but that is beside the point). So why not have an encrypted identity on one's license plate? You can prove you are you. Others cannot, unless they convince a judge there is "probable cause" (leaving aside for a moment the debasement of the concept of probably cause) to know. Just because an infringement of privacy has become customary does not mean it is permanent.
So it is sad to see an inventor of the Web pushing for less privacy when a mind like his could be turned to, for example, creating a system of medical records-keeping where an individual would have complete control over release of his medical information, enforced by a cryptosystem. Instead we get the result of some rather narrow thinking.
I wrote parts of this stuff
As a support tech, I'm all about the education process. Another post was a joke about insuring against colliding packets, but seriously... that's not a bad idea. With all the new users coming into the net these days who have never heard of things like Winzip (for their huge pictures and sound files that they just have to send to their aunt and their grandma and everyone else they can think of that has an email address) or Spam... there *is* a sort of bandwidth crisis, And it's only going to get worse...
If folks were required to take a training class in basic Internet (covering "netiquette", spam, file compression, and a dozen other useful tidbits that most of us take for granted) The net would be a far better "place."
I am, however, against the invasion of privacy that licensing represents. Then again, privacy is a bit of an illusion these days... (just watched Enemy of the State again last night) ...so what are we really losing by license? Just how free do you think you are, people?
You DON'T need a driver's license to freely travel on the public road(s), so WHY would I need permission to view public information on the web?
l _1.html
7 /vehiclecertorig.html
http://www.ptialaska.net/~swampy/interest/trave
One legal way to travel without a license is to get an International Driver's Permit that is valid in over 200 countries. (I have met sovereigns who don't even bother with a license as they have the Manufacturer's Statement of Origin for their car)
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Senate/441
http://teaminfinity.com/~ralph/dl.html
http://www.ironsoft.com/lp/driving.html
http://aero.net/silver/Driving.htm
I have yet to be given a ticket for "Driving without a License" since I am out the officer's jurisdiction.
Cheers
http://www.zeroknowledge.com/
is working on a set of proxy client/server... some of youe packet gets encrypted and sent to a Freedom that decypher them, do whatever request/transaction you want... end return you the result encrypted. The freedom server supposedly doesn't keep any user info, so it's transparent. And work at the top of any ISP.
> Government property is my property.
No, look up "Allodial Title" in Black's Law Dictionary.
If you TRUELY owned your land, the government wouldn't legally be able to seize it if you didn't pay taxes.
> If I own a car, it's my right to operate it. This is called "private property".
7 /vehiclecertorig.html
That is correct.
Unfortunately, you DON'T own your car UNLESS you have the Manufacturer's Statement of Origin.
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Senate/441
http://teaminfinity.com/~ralph/dl.html
http://www.ironsoft.com/lp/driving.html
http://aero.net/silver/Driving.htm
Cheers
> Of course, if you want to drive it on roads you have to follow the rules, that means a valid drivers license and up to date proof of ownership (tag) in all states
l _1.html
Not true.
You DON'T need a driver's license to freely travel on the public road(s).
http://www.ptialaska.net/~swampy/interest/trave
I have an International Driver's Permit. It is valid in over 200 countries.
Cheers
...oh if only the founding fathers went with that first draft of the Constitution.
It was not really communisim... I'm very sorry you belive everything the media machine throws out for the public to chew on. The fact is that with the way human society works there can be no communisim because people would rather have more then enough then just enough even if it means watching others die of starvation.
It's the "I'm better then those people" syndrome. People think they somehow have an inherant right to screw everyone else over.
"We want to take over the world, but we don't want to do it tomorrow, it's OK if it's next week"-- Linus Torvalds
Non sequitur--I have no faith in you until you explain your reasoning. Actually, it should be the other way around, no? The way it is now, everybody just wants your money, and to shove advertising in your face because they don't know who you are and you don't know who they are, etc.. Only when it is possible to identify the people with whom you interact (as is the case in small communities like Slashdot... except with AC's like me) do significant interactions normally take place. Welcome the day when the whole of the Internet will be so familiar!
... and which incidentally identify them uniquely and provide assorted marketing information. The end of anonymity, coming soon to a Web near you.
Anyone who values their right to privacy should find this extremely disturbing. If you use common browsers such as IE or Netscape, every time you visit a site the browser gives the site a lot of information that you would probably prefer kept private, such as how many pages you've viewed, what link you clicked to get there, and so forth. Some web sites push cookies at you, don't provide information as to what the cookies are for, and use information obtained from the cookies to target marketing crap at you. And even though the cookie standard specifies that only the issuing site can retrieve the cookies they push, several organisations that use cookies for marketing are forging agreements to trade this cookie information freely with each other, thus indirectly violating the cookie standard, and ensuring that if you visit any of their sites, then your details will be traded to all of them without your knowledge or consent.
My personal information is my private property. Some of the personal information I have, I have to pay for. I pay to have a telephone number. I pay to rent a flat. I pay to have a driver's licence. Why should corporations take my personal details from me for free, then sell it for a profit without my knowledge, without my consent and without giving me a hefty percentage of the take? I have given serious consideration to asking any company that requires my personal details to sign an EULA that severely restricts how they use this information, including a ban on selling or trading the information (except where they are required by law to do so, of course). I want to take back control of my personal details. I don't want my residential address to be a tradable commodity. I don't want my Net access habits to be sold to anyone. I value my privacy, and I will defend it.
If anything needs to be licensed on the Net, it is not the users. It is those organisations that require your personal information for any reason, those organisations that use cookies as a means to target marketing information, those organisations whose sites are unusable unless you have Javascript AND cookies enabled, those organisations that require you to register or provide your e-mail address to access their site, and so forth. The terms of such license should require such sites to display prominently a privacy statement on their home page that informs users EXACTLY how their details will be used by the site, so users can opt out anonymously before accessing the site if they so wish.
For more information, visit www.junkbusters.com/.
--
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
...in the form of "auto-pay" systems. The toll-paying ones on cars are just the start.
Have you seen the new IBM ad set in a grocery store with this suspicious-looking character stuffing everything in his pockets, walking out the door, and the security guard stopping him because he almost left his receipt (having automatically paid by walking through an arch)?
Funny though, they didn't show the mark of the beast on his hand...
Given that law-enforcement agencies seem to always demand access to all databases which might contain useful information for hunting down criminals, and the way companies love to sell personal information to marketing agencies, I somehow suspect the information won't be kept private.
This will go the way it always does: first it's a novelty, then it's a convenience, then it's the standard and the alternatives are actively discouraged, then everybody thinks you're a paranoid nutcase if you don't go along, finally no alternative is available.
I think the Otherland series covered the future of the internet fairly nicely (though the VR interface was a little overemphasized): a split system of "normal" commercial activity where everything costs, nobody is anonymous, and the authorities can monitor everything fairly easily; and then the Treehouse: good ol' fashion wild west internet, semi-parasitical on the commercial web, basically illegal and you need connections (no pun intended) to get online.
>uniquely and provide assorted marketing >information. The
:)) about user profiling and intelligent agents. Most of the stuff is pretty scary.
>end of anonymity, coming soon to a Web near you
Here in Finland, the country's biggest newspaper just today (oops, yesterday by now) had this article on a book about privacy in the modern Finnish society. Nothing about the Net, at least in the article, but quite scary scenarios about the use of different ID cards, bonus cards, registers, and even surveillance cameras. We have the second most surveillance cameras in Europe, and the crappiest privacy laws, btw. The book was written by two legal and privacy experts, both very pessimistic about our privacy in the future.
What does the Net matter anymore? Here, at least, the banks know how and where you use your different cards, the shops know what kind of stuff you buy, the police can (ironically) keep registers on anything you've done *except* the criminal register, which for most crimes is purged after some time. In the cities, there are enough cameras to track anybody down through half the city, and that's not exaggerating. Every Finn is listed in 100-300 registers, that can easily be combined to form profiles. And the legislation is only doing this easier.
The idea is, that people are willing to give authorities rights to get the criminals caught. In (Finnish) real life, they want to give the social authorities access to individuals' bank accounts to determine whether monetary help is needed. In the Net, everybody agrees that almost any amount of measures is fine to get pedophiles and perverts arrested. But always, after some time, the exceptions on the criminals are expanded to caver normal people also. In the name of equality or something. The society is turning into a prison.
I'm writing a paper for my university (no, I'm writing it in Finnish, I can express myself much better in Finnish
---
NOSPAM@NOSPAM.REMOVETHIS.NO.SPAM - you'll find the real address somewhere
NOSPAM@REMOVETHIS.NO.SPAM - you'll find the real address somewhere
It's unfortunate that Cailliau is apparently unable to distinguish between actual crimes (possession/distribution of child pornography) and activity which is stupid or rude or insensitive but legal (racist speech). The government's got no business tracking the second activity - and imposing a scheme by which the government approves (or disapproves) of people's access to the internet just to slow down the spread of child porn makes about as much sense as requiring a "photographer's license" or an "artists's license" before one is allowed to purchase film or pencils - those, too, might be used to create child porn. (In the US, "child porn" includes manufactured/artistic depictions of child sexuality, not just images of actual children.)
Some contributors to this thread appear to assume that a micropayment scheme implies trackable transactions, which isn't true - micropayments may use one of the "digital cash" schemes, which allow counterparties to exchange economic value irrevocably (as with cash), which means that they don't need to know each others' identities - knowing the other's identity is only important if you later plan to track that person down (or ask the state to do it) and punish them for engaging in a bad transaction. If you're certain their money is good, you can skip all of the verification and recordkeeping overhead.
My *god*, I think this one's *real*!
That's my point exactly, rights come from power. But your conclusion is slightly incompleate; the robber is exposed to a greater power, that of the state which says that it's against it's laws to kill people. Thus the citizen is granted the right to live without (or with very little) threat to himself. In response the citizen is faced with responsibilities that the state demands; to pay taxes, to obey the laws, perhaps even to get drafted and die. Thus the greater power (state) protects the lesser power (citizen).
As for the rest of the argument, the power doesn't have to grant it's citizens any rights. Just look at dictatorships in general. But in a democracy the control of the power goes not to whomever can threaten others but to whomever can win their confidence. By voting many citizens assert one citizens right to control the power they all create. In turn the one in charge is supposed to fullfill whatever promises he gave to gain the confidence of others whether it's to lower taxes or raise wellfare or whatever.
Of course this doesn't always work. There parts of a state that rejects it's laws, whether from conviction or for personal gain. But in general the laws of the state are followed (why they're followed is another matter, check Bordieu for some strange ideas).
So much for my ranting. Happy days and happy living.
Phase 1: Where do you want to go today? Phase 2: This is where you want to go today. Phase 3: You're not going any
there and swat you, young man!
This is a troll thread -- if you want to discuss rational things in a rational way, just move along and do it somewhere else.
. . . you obviously haven't met very many real leftists. In my life I've met quite a few, and I have met one (1), precisely one, who took Communism seriously. He was an idiot.
The "leftists" that you are describing exist primarily in your imagination.
I hope you're not suggesting that left wing belief systems are any more varied...
You're right, they're not more varied -- just less amusing. The right wing in the USA at the moment is enormously entertaining because of their bigotry, raging paranoia and religious fanaticism. Their flights of fantasy travel much farther from planet Earth -- dig, for example, the ZOG thing, or the imaginative legal theories of R. J. Rushdoony. The left hasn't come up with anything as fantastically weird as that since Abbie Hoffman's salad days. The right-wingers also contradict themselves a lot more than the left, and they have a fascinating habit of treating words and laws as "magic spells", for lack of any better description. Like the "state citizenship" thing, for example. When the left gets off its ass and turns funny again, I'll breathe a sigh of relief. The right wing makes them look too good these days, and they're not earning it. It's unfair.
The hard-core left is just as wrong as the hard-core right, and I wouldn't care to live under a government dominated by either one. I'm not judging the troll as political theory, I'm judging it as entertainment.
This is the way I see it... Information, no matter what is can do very little harm. However, a semi travelling 60 MPH can do quite a bit of harm. The internet is information. There was child porn before the internet as well as breaking and entering, vandalism and other various crimes that we have seen replicated on the Internet. However, there was no car related fatalies until the auto was invented. What I see the Internet as, is an enormous library that anyone can publish to or read from. People might publish false material, but a little extra research would show the claims to be false. Library's have the same problem (If it is a problem) now. If I wanted to read about the beginning of the world, I could read the Bible and other Christian views on the subject, but if I only read scientific points of view I would get a completely different picture. In a library there is a card to check out books, but everyone can come in and read. It should be the same with the Internet.
If this sort of crazy scheme actually takes off (hopefully it will get buried where the sun doesn't shine), then it will be time to fork the net. A slightly less drastic measure is to build a network of anonymizing remailers and proxies interconnected by VPNs, so we can build a net on top of the net.
At any rate, this proposal goes way beyond the licensing of cars, since it is something that will be checked every time a person surfs. Car license plates are only checked if and when a police officer happens to think he has reason to do so. Hell, I have neglected to put the little registration stickers on the plates of one of my cars for several years and have never been questioned (the stickers are in the glove box I think, I just never got around to cleaning off the plates so they would stick). And as for the driver, he doesn't even need to show his drivers license unless he is stopped, and even then, the police will often give you 24 hours to prove you have a license if you claim to have forgotten it (of course if you look suspicious, they will probably search you, and your car and run you in to the police station).
On another level, if we require unforgeable certificates (which of course, there is no such thing, especially given the incredible lack of security on the Windows machines and Macs most people surf the net with), it will be going way beyond what we have for the postal system and the telephone system. Anyone who has pocket change can anonymously call anyone they want by using a pay telephone, and you can buy a prepaid long-distance phone card with cash at any Wal-Mart, which will even allow you to call internationally. If you use such a card at a payphone, you are about as anonymous as you can get. As for the postal system, anyone can buy stamps with cash and drop a letter into a post box anonymously. It isn't too difficult to mail even a large package without ever having to show any kind of ID (grocery store mail counters are good for that), despite laws enacted because of the Unibomber which are supposed to make that more difficult.
Any way I look at it, I don't see a 'real world' that is much more 'safe' than the net is, nor do I see what good any kind of restrictions are going to do. People will always find a way to circumvent them, and the stupid will still get caught if they don't circumvent them correctly.
No. programmers are the evolutionary descendants of sorcerers, wizards, and witches. Think about this. We cast spells (write code) to make inanimate objects perform things for us. We have stacks of magick books (programming books, o'reaily animal books, etc.) on our shelves. Programs performing dedicated tasks non-interactively are appropriately called daemons (note how the archaic spelling [the ae character, properly a single character, asc, pronounced 'ash', from Old English] was kept). Dead child processes not yet cleared from the process table are aptly called zombies. And all that jargonistic terminology and icons, in it's ha-ha-only-serious usage, waving dead chickens, kill, killall, the FreeBSD devil logo, satanic easter eggs (put "about:mozilla" in your location bar in netscape), The parallels between witchcraft and programming are too numerous to be mere coincidence. Magick is also notorious for its occacional utter-backfiring and failure to do the Right Thing. Programming is not science. That's why state engineering boards can't come up with a test to license and certify programmers. And programming ability can differ by many many orders of magniture from person to person, unlike in other engineering and science fields. And why is magick not science? A little story to answer that:
Microwave ovens vs. Conventional ovens.
Conventional ovens work on science. Gas flows through a pipe, mixes with air and vents at a porous structure near a pilot flame where it ignites and burns. The hot gas below heats the metal oven chamber to the desired temp. A bimetallic strip bends as the heat reaches the desired temperature and eventually trips a mechanical switch or relay to shut off the gas flow. Then as the oven cools, the metal stip unbends and eventually reopens the gas flow. A norrow hysterisis temperature range is thus reliably maintained. All gooood solid science. Explainable, reliable, always does the job as expected.
Enter the Microwave oven. Microwaves work on magick. When you press the start button, an invisible door (perhaps to another dimension) opens and releases a number of invisible demons into the interrior of the oven. The demons wield pitchforks charged with magic. They repeatedly poke your food with the forks to heat it up. Demons are picky, though, they don't like to touch some materials like glass, paper, and some plastics. The demons, sentient entities, are also playful too. They will cognizantly and feindlishly leave a portion of your food uncooked. They then laugh as you bite into that big chunk of ice. Sometimes a demon will get overexcited and literally explode. The exploded demon can no longer maintain its own invisibility and so shows up as a visible residue on the interrior walls of your oven. This also explains how the splatters got there when you *always* made a point of covering your food. When time is up, the demons are pulled instantaneously back into their realm. You then open the door and retrieve your food. Thus microwaves are inherently unreliable. They may overcook, undercook, or do both at the same time. No one can tell you how long to microwave something or accurately label the oven with it's cooking output power because the demons are sentient and do as they please. As Spock said, "No one can predict the actions of another." Pure magick and totally unreliable. Perplexing, contridictory, and never doing the job as expected, microwave ovens do not operate on science.
What was the question again? Oh yeah, whisk any programmer back to the middle ages and see what career he decides upon. I'll wager he'll become a sorcerer or alchemist, and may well end up burned at the stake as a result. Today we have EULAs to protect against that.
Make access to bandwidth similar to the licensing scheme in Ham Radio. Passing an easy technical examination will get you access via a 2400 Baud modem to a very limited selection of websites. Passing more difficult exams, say with knowledge of TCP/IP protocol, being able to read the text from binary packets (the equivalent of reading Morse Code) will be required to be able to access more of the internet and at higher baud rates :=)
Anonymity must end. Without it the pr0n, w4r3z, trading would all but dry up.
I don't know what "pr0n" is, but a lot of "pornography" is in the eye of the beholder (especially in "commercial" porn - the risque ads used to sell undergarments, perfume, etc.). Even the hard-core "no doubt it's 'porn'" pornography is legal in many jurisdictions.
As for the quaint idea that pornography can only exist in anonymity, exactly how do you think the multi-billion dollar adult video rental industry works? Do you think the stores merely trust all patrons to return the tapes, or are they secured by credit cards? Likewise, how do you think the for-profit web sites operate? Did you honestly believe that the patrons dutifully send in anonymous cash and cashiers checks?
Of course, all of this changes when you're talking about something like child pornography, but I'm not gonna give you the benefit of the doubt since you couldn't be bothered to distinguish between legal and illegal content.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Never going to happen, and if it does I will still use the internet. However under a false account. They are foolish to think that something could be made unforgeable. This is client/server. A spoof here, a crack there and script kiddies around the world become one John Doe. Can you imagine the backlash this would cause. They would be back on the network, anonymous and very upset.
Yes, a la MSN, AOL and Prodigy.
But the rest of us want the WWW, the Internet, etc. without being nickled and dimed every time we want to check the sport scores.
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There is a world of difference between a driver's license and this Internet or Web license. The ability to use/post to a Web site or use the Internet is entangled with fundamental rights--free speech being an obvious one. The ability to drive a car is not. If you do not have a driver's license, you still can speak your mind, travel freely (via bus, train, or plane). However, if you cannot use the Internet because you are not licensed to use it, fundamental rights have been infringed. It will become more and more difficult to survive without Internet access. A good current example is the necessity of downloading patches or software, in general. There are alrady ways to handle accountability on the net when it's needed. Porn sites must do this and they obtain age verification via credit cards. I can see no reason why current methods of accounability should not be used when necessary. There are too many Bad Things possible if licensing was done.
It seems like this measure would be one step ahead of implimenting a tracking system which would make everyone accoutnable to some central authority for all their actions on the web. Now we have some privacy, that is our names cannot easily be tied to us online. If this were implimented, our names would be tied to our actions. Just imagine this. A certain banner ad company gets your government || W3C manadated certificate. They figure out your name and do a quick credit check. Banner ad: "[your name]: Did you know that you're $65,535 in debt? Consolidate your debts. Click here." It only goes downhill from there. Suppose your employer wants to know dirt on you. They get a large content provider to tell them what websites you visit, what you search for, etc. Don't think that's possbile? Look at the number of sites Microsft Passport encompasses. Imagine if your Operating System Vendor tied your registration number for their product (and your name) into this sort of certificate when registering (or even installing) your OS and then integrated it into their Web browser. Ouch.
Of course, since this is comment 11-million or so, who will read it...
Shut up, be happy. The conveniences you demanded are now mandatory. -- Jello Biafra
A related idea, at least in the U.S., is that such licenses could be viewed as an infringement on the constitutional right to freedom of assembly.
Many people forget that this right has two faces. Not only does it prevent the government from preventing a group from peacefully assembling, it also prevents the government from requiring that its agent be present at all meetings. It even prevents the government from getting a list of all members in a group, or attendees at a meeting. (Two recent cases involved an attempt to get an NAACP membership list in the 1950's, or a KKK membership list in the 1990's (both dates iirc). Both attempts failed.)
If citizens are required to obtain a "surfing license" for *all* internet access, it would be trivial to identify everyone who visits every site. (Even if the group's servers don't keep such logs, it would be possible to monitor the network traffic upstream.) This would be akin to posting a cop outside of the meeting hall, one who demands everyone present their ID prior to entry. No US court would tolerate this.
I'm sure the latter-day Fascists would argue that this point is irrelevant since it is enforced by businesses, not the government. But since it's a government-issued (and -mandated) ID, I think even the current courts would recognize that this is a difference that doesn't matter.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Of course there is. People pay for porn and other premium content like certain investment research.
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
Let me say first off that I don't like the idea of being monitored in any sense, but my new business venture (partially detailed here is based on the premise that sooner or later, EVERYONE will feel the need, or at least desire, to be online 50-100% of the time.
I don't particularly look forward to a borg-like existance, but as we evolve from PDA users to Beowulf-clustering computer wearers, towards computer-neural interfaces, where do we stop being individuals in a society and become nodes in a cluster? Where does individuality end?
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Mr. Cailliau is just trying to sugar-coat his real aim with this "licnse" BS. What he's really talking about is what was called an internal passport in the old Soviet Union. Idenity Papers, that the police stop you for, To make sure that you aren't some place you aren't allowed to be. He drags out the usual buzz-words (Child-porn & Racist sites) to back this up, Then declares himself against "Heavy handed rules governing content". Excuse me, His whole reason for the license is because he dosen't like the content of the sites he mentioned earlier. It's easy to go after the repugnent sites he mentioned, But what sites will be next? Pro-gun? Anti-abortion? Violent games? The rest of the porn sites? A lot of people would like to ban those too. Then theres that pesky World in the WWW. Different cultures find different things offensive. Do we ban McDonalds from having a web site because many Hindus consider it to be more offensive than the racist sites? IMO the censorship that this will lead to is is more repugnent than anything I've seen online.
Quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est
Do system administrators get to revoke the internet licenses of clueless (l)users?
I think that this is a great idea, but only if I am in charge of it.
Will it be a crime after this to attempt to remain anonymous?
Can this be a voluntary thing that you only have to login to it when you want to go to a site that has a legal requirement for identity? Such as a government services site? In other words, just use a local wallet style to fill in billing information for buying products, but actually id yourself when you pay taxes or renew your drivers license online.
How would I identify myself as myself if I am on a friends computer and don't have access to a certificate on a hard drive? What happens if my hard drive crashes and I lose my certificates?
Am I going to be required to use Windows? or any other limited set of operating systems?
If my identity is lost or stollen how difficult will it be to cancel my old identity and get the certificates reissued?
If this uses encryption will the US goverment try to cripple it so the NSA/CIA can spy on everyone?
What happens when the system security is eventually compromissed?
"The end of anonymity, coming soon to a Web near you."
;-)
;-)
Digital ID already exists. PGP, and the certificates used for SSL (from Verisign). A good digital ID should let you send email "signed" (PGP fingerprint, anybody?). How is this bad? As Rob said in the last version of "Geeks in Space" I listened: "alright -- no more stupid faxing!" (regarding a law relating to digital ids). A digital signature should (in practice) be even harder to forge than a signature, unless you choose something like single DES
Conversly, it'll only be a problem like the PIII serial number issues if you use things like closed source software that can't be verified to not send along important digital ID relating things to sites. I know Opera and Netscape aren't in the habit of sending my name, email address, and street address along to every site I visit. But if I said something bad enough, and someone went and got a court order, it sure wouldn't be hard for the system admins of a public board to dig through their logs, find my IP, and get my info from my ISP.
So really, how is this a change from the status quo, except for a change towards popular support for digital ids?
Either way, I wouldn't mind if we had less "31337" first posting *censored*s
---
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
CERN originally stood for "Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire", which was established in 1952 to start planning the lab-soon-to-be. When the institution was officially founded two years later, they chose to call it "l'Organisation Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire" (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), but kept the old acronym. Guess they liked "CERN" more than "OERN".
As you mention, today it's commonly referred to as "the European Laboratory for Particle Physics" (Laboratoire Européen pour la Physique des Particules). I have understood that this is because a) these days they are more interested in the smaller particles, and b) the word "nuclear" has bad connotations for the general public, and CERN too needs (lots of) funding. In fact you'll be hard pressed to find the name spelled with "nuclear" anywhere on the CERN web site or brochures.
In official contexts the name would be, I believe, either the full "Organisation Européenne..." or simply "CERN". (That's "le CERN" in French :-) ) Dunno if the English translation of the full name enjoys an equally official status.
As an additional trivia item, the French site seems to write their name in the postal address as "Organisation Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire" but the Swiss site uses "CERN". (The actual lab spans a rather large land area near the border of the two countries.)
This must be as off-topic for the original thread as can be, but since you brought it up...
P.S. Sorry for AC'ing, but I have too many passwords to remember as it is. The actual topic of anonymity on the web I'll not discuss further, as others have already more or less said what I would want to. (I wish more people would do the same - would make /. much more enjoyable for everyone...)
Would you please provide some evidence to back your claim that...
?
It's completely untrue and unfounded, and shows extremely poor editorial judgement.
--Dan Connolly, W3C
[I tried to register as something other than Anonymous Coward, but I have not received the password mail message.]
I think people should have to pass a simple test before they can own a computer of their own. Sure would solve a lot of problems with tech. support and netiquette. Think about it. A computer is a tool. People are forgetting this. You must know how to properly use a tool. You wouldn't let your 8 year old child operate, say, a chainsaw, or shoot a gun, or drive a forklift...without being trained or supervised, right? You shouldn't use a tool without knowing something about it. This is a big problem with the flood of newcomers to pc's. I just bought a machine for my mom...she's never touched a computer in her life. I intend to take the time to show her the concept of file systems and what it is she is doing when she is on the web and whatnot....this little time investment is well worth the saved headaches later. Without someone to show new people what they are doing, having to take a test will force them to finally read and study a bit and know wtf they are doing for once!
IPv6. Tracking is already built in.
What about something similar to the HAM (amature radio) licensing?
Mostly when my mom asks a stupid question, I quip something like "Didn't your computing instructor show you how to save files before the license test?" and the occasional "I'm gonna revoke the computing license of the next moron who forwards a virus-infected attachment."
Anecdotally I love the idea, I'd get such a kick out of being an internet cop. "No more spam for you! Hand it over, Stanford."
Realistically? It'll never fly.
The time is 20:00PM, December 1st
1983.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Okay, so drivers' licenses are a good thing from the standpoint of making sure people know how to drive. They are still immoral for a couple of different reasons. Licenses and license plates are too often used as a way to collect additional taxes without calling them taxes. They should not cost any more than what it actually costs to give them out. They are also used all too much as identification, especially in states like MO, where your social security number is your license number. Internet licenses are ludicrous, completely unnecessary, and a violation of the First Amendment. They are also simply a way to track you when there is no need of ANY sort to do so.
because everyone knows that Internet Is Like a Vagina. no?
--
You're a cartoon of rebel! You're all like exaggerated version of yourself! - Gerard Jones
You can pretend that rights are "natural" in order to try to develop a consistent belief system, but you'll pretty quickly run into the fact that rights are a human construct, not a property of the universe. Then you have to start to accept that rights are what those in power define them to be. You are still free to argue about what rights people "should" have, but then you're engaging in political discussion rather than physics.
Ok,
1) How would the dosh get distributed? my little web site is for free help for newbies using Debian. I wouldnt stop anybody browsing it if they didnt have a licence. Considering when newbies get on line with linux for the first time adding the complication of a licence might defeat them....NO WAY.
2) I would not charge for access to my site its a way to put something back into the linux community as I cant program. I dont think the guy could understand this if it was rammed down his throat!!!
3) Reduce advertising? yeah right, i could buy a banner filter for $20US or get something working on my firewall (which im trying to do now btw).
4) How would this be policed? monitored? the cost of doing so would not result in a 'micro charge' but a bloody big one.
5) Why are millions(?) of good users being punished for porn sites? surely it would make more sense to licence server software, there are far less of those and as they have static IPs far easier to trace and say block if they have no 'signiture'
6) As we now have the alternic, why would sites want to join this system? maybe the alternative would take off as it would continue to be unrestricted.
7) If i had a porn site why would i stop someone if they didnt have a licence? no i dont think so.
8) Define porn? in salt lake city its probably showing your ankles, yet you can have more than one wife?
9) He is too late
Thing
The only change this scheme would make, is to widen the already spreading gap between technical and non-technical users. A little. Marketing trackers can already keep pretty close tabs on computer illiterate M$ users, what with the combination of 3 kinds of cookies, referring site data, and the strangely unremarked M$ system identification "feature".
But, even if this ID certificate scheme is tried, with full backing of the mass media (it is a measure to curb "Cyberterrotrism"!), will already paranoid surfers tolerate it? No way.
Just get a big tank/truck and you will be safe, or turn that little Geo you must drive into a A-team car (armer, steal plates, etc...). Its all good :)
Speed limits? I dont think we have such a thing here in CT-USA. heh, i normaly have have my CC set to something like 80MPH or 85MPH and dont give a second thought about the cops. You only see them pull over the 16 year old kids in their new BMW's who must have been doing about 110MPH.
I have to return some videotapes...
Obviously Robert Cailliau is a moron.
There is no way the government or a consortium of governments will agree on skills and responsibilities for internet use, which is an extremely diverse set of activities. If they try, they will fail. If they start to try, they will see that they will fail, and they will backtrack, kinda like this silly frenchman should be doing right now.
Also, if he doesn't see that subscriptions to sites that would free you from a given site's advertising are not arrangements that have anything to do with the WC3, he DOESN'T GET IT.
I don't think any of us who make the networks work are going to listen to this silly french faggot. Maybe old farts like Monsieur Cailliau think that they have great ideas, but people who understand how things work know better than the further tie down networking protocols with silly babysitting bullshit. We're a little more interested in things that matter, like performance, and that's kinda what STOCKHOLDERS of all the networking companies and ISPs want too. He's talking like a politician.
Now let this be a lesson: just because someone can do one thing does not mean they know how everything even remotely like it should work, nor does it mean you should kiss their ass. especially if they're french, and therefore gay.
And Slashdot, I know, I know, the price of freedom is eternal vigilance, right? but really, your 'Panic' journalism is starting to look like the Weekly World News.
And to those moderators (about half of them these days) who will probably label this a 'troll' and moderate it down, get bent. Your political correctness is ruining the freshness of this forum. Soon you will turn it into the Kathie Lee show.
The ISP just resells bandwidth on cables maintained (owned?) by such companies as MCI, Sprint, AT&T - basically, a governmentally regulated oligopoly.
Owners of the backbone can do whatever the government permits them to do - they probably wouldn't be permitted to shut the whole thing down, for instance - and will have to do whatever the government wants them to do. It doesn't need congress - an executive order would probably do just as well to institute licensing, should the technology exist.
And the protocols could, at this point, be altered by fiat. The ISP's would have to support them to be allowed to connect to the backbone, the users would have to obtain browsers that supported these new licensing protocols. Servers would have to be modified as well.
Next time you check out a website in the Czech Republic, think how the packets are getting back and forth. Somebody OWNS the satellite link.
Packets don't just fly through the air! Unless the hams are willing to give up some of their spectrum, that is.
As always innovation can't come from a standards body any more than from a huge corporation. Instead they just mess with things until everything is fucked up. It's the same as the government. Let them screw the web I guess. If they do then maybe a better alternative will be invented. Remember all this is the transition period. Eventually we'll throw it all away and make a new and better Internet from what we learn here. May the best Net win. :P
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
It's not the IDs themselves that are distasteful, but the power structure and assorted stupidity that surrounds them. The mentality of many IDs is barely above that of a high school club. What's more, a perfectly trustworthy person can be denied simple stuff simply because they don't have the right peice of paper.
Case in point; Me. (Note: I live in Australia, so local stuff may not match your locale) I don't drive, I don't like cars (I won't bore you with details), thus I don't have a driver's license. I don't travel internationally - I have, but not in the last 5-10 years, thus I don't have a current passport. I don't own a gun, so I don't have a shooter's licence. I went to buy a mobile phone. Not a cheap one with a $0 up front thing, I went to buy a Nokia 8810 - AU$1299 up front, A$60/month. I was not able to meet the minimum ID requirements. (They didn't accept a birth certificate). In the end, I applied for a Citibank credit card with a photo just to be able to buy a mobile phone.
Simply because I'm not in the Car Club, or Travel Club, or Gun Club, I was initally denied a mobile phone. Scale this up to important things and am I going to be denied access to, say, my local government member because I'm not in the Politics Club, with invasive ID to match??? Am I going to have to carry around a birth certificate if I want to walk into the local library?
It all starts sounding like Starship Troopers and having to do a tour with the Army for the right to vote, or go to college. You have to be "One Of Us" just to gain the right to exist.
If some sites want to have a logon for access to information, that's their affair - I simply won't be as quick to visit them. If someone wants a credit card number for proof of age, then I wan't go there at all. How can anyone suggest a UID for the 'Net after all the problems with M$ & Real??
Chris (Kris) Johnson.
License me so I can make compost so I can EVENTUALLY make gun powder..
I'd like to make your first point more explicit.
Everyone should notice that there are TWO proposals being floated. Licensing and *micropayments*. Micropayments don't work with anonymous visitors very well, and I think that's a clue about what's really driving the licensing issue. (When I hear "kiddieporn", I reach for my wallet. To protect it, I mean.)
Corporations want to get PAID. You think the New York Times enjoys giving out content for free? Micropayments would allow companies to finely calibrate entrance fees--just enough to make a profit but not so high as to drive everyone away.
The day we lose our anonymity (in this billing sense), is the day websites will be stop being free as in beer. Taxing transactions will probably get lots easier, too.
I'm cool like a fool in a swimming p-p-pfft-pool
I dont believe that one analogy is going to adiquitly explain this situation. There are far too many reasons for wanting to track the identities of web surfers for one analogy to apply.
Law enforcement wants to track users on the net so that users breaking laws can be prosecuted offline. An analogy for this would simply be the requirement of ID to buy guns. Police want to know who has a gun and who owns which gun.
Advertisers want to know who goes where so that they can market more accuratly. An anlogy is not exactly needed for this because its such a simple idea.
Other net users want to know who the other people are so that the people can have some level of trust in the other person. Its a simple issue of accountability.
There are many different reasons why people would want licenses for web surfing.... I think that licenses for the purpose of filtering content is dumb however. It is an old and dumb idea that kids shouldnt be exposed to sex - especially sex that is with love. Other material is simply a reality of life - racism, etc... but a parent should be able to explain this material - it is the parents job to raise and to guide a child, it is not the job of the government - especially if the parent wants that control.
It's HBO or Showtime that's missing on the web, not The Playboy Channel.
This wasn't off topic you silly moderators.
let's hope the CRTC doesn't get wind of this. :) Paul
I can see it now ... before being allowed out on the Information Superhighway (TM) proper, it will be compulsory for all newbies to learn on Slashdot first (right now it just seems that way.) They'll have to be good citizens, make their contributions, avoid being a potty mouth, etc. Once they've developed a Karma of, say, 25 they'll be allowed out on their own. Another fine product of CmdrTaco's Academy!
Regards, Ralph.
So this is the future of e-commerce: everyone requires a licence number to trade online? I'm sure Revelations in the Christian Bible said something along the lines of everyone requiring a mark to trade. If the licence numbers are 18-digit numbers in three groups of 6, start worrying....
And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.
Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is six hundred three score and six.
-- Revelations 13:16-18--
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
This is a nearly verbatim copy of an article I read several years ago on the subject of communism in America. It illustrates the point that America is about as communist as countries go, except maybe China, fairly well. Probably won't be taken well by someone who has hardcoded beliefs in the goodness of "American governmeent."
Such thinking is integral to the human way of life...humans should only care for the others in their tribe...who cares about those wierd people down the river who don't even flavor their food with the same spices we do? Biological self-interest takes a lot of schooling and conditioning by the state to stamp out. The more schooling you've had, the more likely you are to believe that "We" is a larger and larger group. (city, nation, all humans on Earth).
-- Thomas Jefferson
Here's another one that I heard recently that's pretty good too:
"You exterminated their people. You had superior weapons, and you massacred them. That's how war is. Caesar never said,"I came, I conquered, I felt really bad about it."
-- Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Thanksgiving episode
What crap. Are us humans evolving, or has communist Russia planted mind control devices in our pollies? Or has cyber space sucked their brains out; or GM food affected their IQ's Freedom to read, write and communicate.....
Japan has tons of crime, just not violent crime. And the crime rate in the USA has been going down for the past 30 years.
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no
When the hell was a driver ever prevented from driving because they did not posess a license?
How is licensing of web users going to prevent unlicensed users from using the net the same way unlicensed drivers drive every day, even in cars that the owner's don't know they are driving?
Utter nonsense! This is pure rubbish!
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
I think also that Cailliau might just be doing one of these "I invented xyz, so you'll listent to me", unfortunately. He is right to say that regulation of the Internet would help trace illegal child pornography and racist sites, but it would stop other things. For example helping victims of some kind of abuse, or people being victimised into a corner of society due to some sort of minority grouping (e.g., colour, creed, sexuality, religion...).
I really don't understand how he can say it has to be regulated, and then go on Reuters and say it " must remain open and neutral". That's any oxmoron...
And as for micropayment... maybe we should let established electronic payment systems continue, e.g. SWIFT, MONDEX, etc., etc. Plus, I'd rather see advertisements, and maybe buy something interesting, than spend my money paying NOT to see adverts! It's dumb! The whole notion of "uncluttered cyberspace" wouldn't work, anyway. People are always looking for a righteous hack. Unfortunately he is living in a dream, alebit a utopian one, that would only have worked at the beginning of the computer revolution... Now, it's just too late.
Though I agree with Cailliau saying we have "duties as well as their rights", the Net has flourished on "unwritten" rules, and attempts at regulation have either been thwarted, or have had disastrous results.
Though I found what he said about regulating pronography, etc., quite interesting. His system of registration and enforcement might work. IF it's given any teeth: "We don't tell the servers what they are allowed or not allowed to show. We just register them [...] If they put child pornography on there, we can at least get at them".
One last thing: he says "We've had micropayments in the French Minitel system for 15 years and it is shown to work extremely well"... Well, I hate minitel... and it sucks, and it IS NOT the Web! Bad analogy!
So they want a closed internet eh? The solution is simple : the open source community will code another communication protocol that is going to be used over the existing hardware, practically re-implementing the internet for the free world. And their closed internet would die, as these ideas should do.
At least give the pedestrians on the Web the freedom to walk around without the need for a license. Otherwise, what should we do about underage surfers? Constant supervision?
F*CK OFF. Thats my repsonse to this stupid idea of licencing.
I don't think the licsensing is a bad idea...by itself. But the idea of micropayments frightens me. One of the coolest things about the internet and the WWW in specific, is it's completely free (well...the cost of an ISP connection). That is the beauty of it! It's a global public library. As with librarys, give cards, but don't CHARGE for them, even micropayments! I am a minor, with almost no income of my own. I spend a great majority of my time online (IRC, WWW, telneting), because it's fun, free, and VERY educational. everyone's always talking about kiddie pr0n and whatnot, well, call me eNaive, but, I have /never/ run across pr0n that wasn't searched for specifically. I've never even seen kiddie pr0n to begin with. I'd sift through pages of adverts any day if it meant that I got to see/read/listen to whatever I wanted to for free. Hell, /. uses a banner add. I really don't mind it at all, in fact, I occasionally click on it it it's an interesting one. Isn't the W3 in place as a standards-forming commision? What are they even /thinking/ of a micropayment plan for? Who would get the money? What form of currency would it be in ($, euros?)?, who would be responsible for monitoring the income, etc. etc.? The minute I begin to get charged for normal web surfing...is the minute I remove this PC from the WWW and the 'net. I canna afford even micropayments, and I know my parents wouldn't pay more than the 19.95 month they pay now, so the W3 is essentially cutting off everybody in my position. It's like a public library here in the 'States charging for library cards, and for rental of individual books. It's just not right, and we need to do something to stop it before it really starts!
Hwh... what?! By the state? The more schooling? I take exception to that. Granted, I'm just familiar with the US educational system, but how could ANY institution "stamp out" opinion, attitude, or biological imperitave? It may be a school's responsibility to provide contact with various cultures (which most do poorly enough as it is), but even the most industrious, non-dictatory (as far as social judgement) school environment can do only so much before it becomes the responsibility of the student to use his or her intelligence and judgement to over-rule (or not) their "biological imperitaves". I have seen far too many cases where people with more schooling (specifically institutional education) are much smaller-minded than their contemporaries that are self-taught.
I think the term I'm grasping for is "social conscience". In any case, I think it all ends up being as much (if not more) a function of the individual as of the state or institution.
"All these years believing you're the signified monkey, only to find out you're just a big hunk of nobody cares."
This idea of 'Web Licenses' is rediculous(sp?) the one thing we have all learnt, from the Pentium 3 chip ID, is that ID's can be forged, and therefore many innocent people could be held responible for the actions of others.
This, sad to say, I cannot think of any words that CAN be used to describe this preposterous(sp?) plan.
Of course Internet anonymity(sp?) is rare in any case, I have always had a greater comfort on the Internet with the belief that my actions are not tracked...has anyone ever heard of a concept called PRIVACY? I wonder how long it will be, until I can no longer take a crap without someone tracing the route of the turd through the sewer (and possibly my bowel, too) It looks as if the untamed days of the Net are going to come to an end soon, which is quite sad.
There is a lot which I can say, yet I do not yet know the words to describe the loss that the world will feel, at yet another layer of beuracratic bull added to our everyday lives.
One day, I hope before this plan comes into place, those responible learn the error of their ways. The Internet is it's own country, it's own world, with it's own laws of physics and life. The laws of man do not belong on the Internet, it is not their domain. The Internet is kept safe by it's users, PLEASE I am begging these people, to understand that they cannot govern this domain like their own houses. This is our realm, the realm of the Internet users, we are it's guardians, it's peace keepers, it's Jedi Knights. Don't let these people take our universe away from us.
As far as I know, nobody at CERN really takes him seriously, except for the people that sit in the same self-important committees as he does. But then again, most of those people are very much like him. Seen the CERN web pages lately? Designed after "standards" implemented by the Web committee that R.C. heads. What a joke.
So, having said that, don't expect the people who matter to take R.C. seriously...
BTW, Tim B.L. is the man really behind the web. The fact the R.C. is quoted as being the co-inventor is more than just a little rediculous, and an insult to Tim!
And yes, I worked at CERN for many years, including those during the webs conception.
Hmmm, a big company like AT&T hears a little company (or Org) like W3C say , "you gotta pay monay for access" they will be ignored. AT&T, MCI and the others OWN the net, and they will do with it what they desire period! can you imagine the hell that would insue if the big companies pulled their networks offline?
This is just some old "professor" wiggling his face in front of media to try and drum up some more funding... for shame for shame... I always hoped that the "net's" founders were more grounded than that.
Register the users instead of fixing the IP protocol. Pretty dang stupid idea I'd say.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Cool, another good link to add to my Travel vs Driving links.
Guess I'll have to get working on my Sovereinty FAQ.
Cheers
sounds great!
don't have a penis?
back in the kitchen!
(before anyone marks this flamebait, i'm trying to be sarcastic)
If I wish to complete some sort of on-line transaction, then I can choose to present credentials at that time. But to be forced into displaying identification all the time is just the sort of control that is required in the flesh in totalitarian countries.
--
An esoteric scratched itch:
Homeworld Map Maker Tool
Let's see,
let's make it so every packet is logged on your computer and stored so that anyone can inspect them for any reason too!
There is one endgame that theis stuff will produce..
Net fragmentation - Internet, samnet, davenet, freddynet, etc......
and (God forbid... AOLnet)
Oh yeah that'll be a good thing!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
If I want to write a piece of code, and someone wants to pay me to do it, what business is that of yours? You are free not to buy my software, and if the existing offerings are all third-rate, you are free to help write a new one. The fact that you don't like the way I code doesn't give you a right to force me to jump through hoops.
It is true that some applications (say medical equipment) needs to be held to a higher standard than most software. But that fact does not justify forcing the entire software industry to spend millions of dollars so that some beaurocrat can give you a liscence that says you're a good programmer. Engineering is about tradeoffs. While you may like your software to have fewer features and fewer bugs, others might be willing to accept more bugs in exchange for faster turnaround and more features.
By the way, the same is true of all other professions. Government liscenses are a bad idea, and their requirement should be repealed.
Private property rights are being eroded deliberately in the name of protecting the environment.
"Deliberately"? What's that meant to imply? That environmentalism is a communist plot? I'll assume that the author is not that paranoid.
I know some very sincere free-market republicans who don't care to see the environment destroyed. Many of them like to go out and hunt animals in it, while others are just wary of destroying anything we can't replace.
There's also the notion that what I do to the environment on my private property generally affects the value of your private property next door. When rights conflict, the law tries to balance them and find a reasonable compromise.
Abolition of child factory labor in its present form.
Hardly a disaster.
Combination of education with industrial production." Done.
"Done"! Okay! But what is it? This sentence doesn't describe anything to me, except possibly co-op programs at engineering colleges like MIT, RIT and Drexel. That's communism?
"Centralization of the means of communications and transport in the hands of the state." Seen a private road or bridge lately? Who licenses all radio and television?
Licensing is not equivalent to ownership.
Ownership of roads is not equivalent to ownership of cars, trucks, busses, and ships along with ownership of the roads.
Private ownership of what we now call "public" roads has been tried, in Europe. It was a mess. It turns out to be impractical in real life. Take for example private ownership of the streets in a city. Imagine collecting the tolls. Worse yet, imgagine the bureaucracy you'd need to keep non-payers off the streets. You'd have to keep them off, because no one would pay if they could use the streets anyway. This alone would be almost as much hassle as municipal government is now, and you still haven't mentioned the fire department or the police. If my house catches fire, and I haven't paid my subscription to the fire department, what happens to your house next door? The laws of economics won't protect it from the laws of thermodynamics.
If public ownership of roads is advocated by communists, then I guess they must have been right about something. They've spewed out so much gibberish over the years that by sheer weight of numbers they must have hit the truth once or twice
Anyway, to reject an idea because of who advocates it is the ad hominem fallacy.
I suspect that hate-speech laws will soon follow hate-crime laws, and that will erode that freedom.
This guy can "suspect" anything he likes, but that doesn't mean it will happen. His thesis is that "we already are" communists, but he's supporting it with "I suspect that we will soon . .
the government runs many businesses and some folks would like to see it run more.
How many is "many"? Can we have a percentage? And how many is "some folks"? Not all that many, actually. Marx demanded total ownership by the state of all businesses. That is hardly equivalent to "many", accompanied by the belief of "some folks" that more would be better. This is a lot like saying that because I smoked pot in college I'm equivalent to a heroin addict.
"Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of distinction between town and country." Pretty much done, because big corporations dominate what's left of agriculture and mass communications have more or less erased cultural differences.
This is not reasonably accurate (though he overstates cultural homogenization between urban and rural areas), but these changes were brought about by the free market. It's an interesting coincidence, but it hardly indicates communist intentions or beliefs. In fact, it tends to indicate that our culture and economy are driven to a remarkable degree by the market.
Free education of all children in public schools.
This one is accurate. I may not agree with his assumptions about the intent, but the phenomenon is right there.
"Abolition of all rights of inheritance." We haven't gone all the way on that one, but heavy estate taxes are a step in that direction. Estate taxes are purely punitive because they are taxes levied on assets on which multiple taxes have already been paid many times.
Don't get me started on this one
The reasons you give for drivers licenses being immoral are problems with the implementation, not the concept.
Internet licenses are ludicrous, completely unnecessary,
Absolutely. The analogy with driving is simply invalid.
and a violation of the First Amendment.
I'm not sure about that, though. How would they prevent you from saying things? The First Amendment protects speect, but it does not explicitly protect anonymous speech. You could claim that it does by implication, or that protecting anonymous speech is consistent with the intent of the framers of the Constitution, but then you're drifting into judicial activism.
It looks to me more like the, uh, fourth? Amendment, about "unreasonable search and seizure", is the one we should be looking at. "Person, property, or papers". It's real hard not to conclude that "papers" can and should be taken as equivalent to "information in general". The framers had no way of anticipating digital storage media. They mentioned the only information storage medium known at the time.
There should be some sort of license for people to purchase a computer. I work tech support and over half of the calls i get start off "i know nothing about computers". Having people licensed to use the internet stinks of government control. Having them licensed to have a computer seems like common sense
... and none shall trade (or surf) save those who bear the mark.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
There are two conflicting messages in this article: Robert Cailliau is calling for licensing and regulation to restrict Things We Don't Approve Of. And the W3C are working on a secure certificates system (and, incidentally, a privacy _protection_ system: http://www.w3.org/P3P/ ).
Just because Robert happens to be co-inventor of the Web (this is the first I'd heard of this), doesn't mean his views are particularly relevant, so I'm going to ignore this part.
A secure certificates system is, in my view, a very admirable cause. The point is that it would be an opt-in system: a server can ask for a certificate stating that you are over 18, and, depending on your Platform Privacy Preference, your browser will either decline, accept, or prompt you.
This doesn't mean that if you accept, your browser instantly transmits all your personal details. The privacy settings would enable you to specify your preferences for various categories of information - your gender, age, home town, etc. To a large extent, this would remove the need for Cookies, sign-on pages, and similar annoyances.
So users will know exactly what information is being transmitted to any given website - and what that information is used for, how it will be distributed, and whether any data gathered will be used anonymously. At the moment, there seems to be a strong feeling that Cookies and other tracking-devices are used to steal our souls while we browse the web. I think these W3C proposals will make the commercial side of the web a much safer place to surf.
-- Andrem
There has been a major scientific break-in
Not to put too fine a point on it, but removing anonymity from the Internet is at best destructive and at worst dangerous. Other people have already touched on the ways that coercive governments would use accountability to track thought crimes, but you don't even have to look that far to see how much damage the Internet would suffer in an "accountable" world. Anonymity is a vital cornerstone of Internet discourse because it allows people to express unpopular or dissident opinions without any fear of retribution. For example, I'm sure there are many people that "come out" online before any of their friends or family know they are homosexual. Without anonymity, these people would be afraid of the prejudicial reactions of others and therefore wouldn't get the support they need. If the Internet is allowed to become like a courtroom, where everything you say is a matter of public record and usable against you, it's usefulness as a place of free and open discussion will be destroyed. As far as I'm concerned, this free exchange of information is the most important thing about the Internet, more important than e-commerce or distributed computing or even networked Quake. Whatever we have to sacrifice in order to keep that, we should sacrifice. If we have a harder time tracking software pirates, so be it.
MWA HA HA HA HA!! Little you know!
A week ago I wandered into the Boston Public Library to scope it out (I had not used it for the better part of a decade). I learned that the circulating collection is about 1 million books. However, the "research collection" is about 5 million books. Just about anything non-fiction and interesting is in this "research collection". We're not just talking expensive or rare academic tomes. I was looking for some popular press self-help books, and they were in the "research collection."
The public does not have access to the stacks of the research collection. You have to fill out a form - a carbonless-copy duplicate form - requesting the book and a clerk will fetch it for you.
The form requires your name and address and library card number.
We're not talking about checking the books out of a library. I can easily see how if the library is going to let you walk off with their property, they'd like to know who you are. No, I'm talking about reading the books while in the library. I'm talking about merely handling the book.
I thought stared at the request forms for a good long while, then I got up, tore my BPL card in half, and walked out.
I'll buy my books. With cash.
Uh, guys.... The licensing of motor vehicles and the operation of motor vehicles has as much, if not more, to do with a cash cow for the State as some sort of public good.
If the licensing of drivers was meant to keep the unsafe drivers off the roads, there would be fewer people with driver's licenses.
Licensing didn't work for automobiles, and it's not going to work for the Net. At least not to promote safety/security.
Meanwhile, you'd better expect politicians to get wind of this and start salivating over the prospect of yet another way to line their coffers.
----------------------------------------------
-*- Any technology indistinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced -*-
Meaning that those rights are owned by all (well, the way they applied it, not slaves... but the meaning is still there).
I think this illustrates the point perfectly. The rights are whatever the powerful decide they are. They are not inalienable. They can be changed or taken away if the power that grants them wishes to do so. In the case of the U.S., something as simple as a court ruling can change your rights. In more dramatic cases, it might take an amendment to do it. Either way, your "inalienable rights" are subject to change.
This doesn't mean that I don't think we should have certain rights. The U.S. belongs to its citizens. They are the ones who fight and die to protect a place where they have the rights they've come to value greatly. They should (and do to some extent) have a say in what rights they should have. It seems to be the unfortunate case that some citizens are more equal than others and can exert a much greater influence on the rights of others than they should be able to. That is something that we will hopefully find a way to deal with.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
The proposer of this idiocy is a Belgian.
In Belgium, as in many other countries,
all adult (over 12) citizens are required,
by law, to carry a goverment issued ID
card anytime they are outside of their
homes.
Of course, there are groups within the
US who would like US citizens to carry
a state-issued license to breathe, as
well.
This is what it used to be like. If someone annoyed you or acted stupidly, you told their SysAdmin and they had their account pulled. People were a little more considerate since the results of trolls would end up in your mailbox.
As nice an idea as this is (I can see a strong case against anonymity), I doubt that it will work. There is just too much scope to circumvent these sorts of measures. For example, how are you going to police who buys pre-paid net access CDs? How about the enterprising people who bought you deCSS and unfuck.exe?
X
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"