You. Your "gentle correction" was completely over the top. It was a pointless, stupid rant - and how you can think someone is "pompous" for simply using normal British English defies belief.
I know your type too. You're a nobody in real life, you're frustrated with your boring life, but unable to change it. You deal with your frustration by trying to bring others down to your level, arguing viciously over minutiae as some kind of pathetic imitation of the challenge that eludes you in reality.
All you really achieve is wasting everyone's time. You've wasted a few minutes of mine today, but probably far more of your own. No great loss, you have nothing better to do, right?
You're not evil. I don't hate you - I'm not even angry. I understand only too well why you do what you do. But I am telling you - you are on the wrong path. You are going in the wrong direction.
I repeat - go do something better with your life. Annoying random people on websites is pretty fucking lame. Don't you think that deep down you have the potential to be better than this?
Go do something. Make some money. Do something cool. Girls dig that shit. "I spend my days being a jerk on Slashdot" isn't good enough. Why not make today the day that you go and make a change?
And this disturbing specimen, ladies and gentlemen, is a chilling reminder of the consequences of allowing an otherwise normal male to go without sex for upwards of five years..
you pompous douchebag
It's the language I learnt at school and have spoken and written every day of my life, you crazy asshole. You have a minor point, but it's commonplace and completely undeserving of your ridiculous rant. The harbour of the city I live has the proper name "Sydney Harbour" but I often see Americans writing it without the "u". They should know better and so should have I, but your reaction is just insane.
Why don't you go home and think about what went so wrong in your life that you're reduced to writing crazy anonymous rants in response to minor spelling errors to people you've never met on Slashdot.
Good points. I'm a bit of a history buff myself and also lament the decline in knowledge of the Great War - and the popular conception of WWII is also desperately inadequate.
That said, I can think of a couple more reasons why WWI is particularly susceptible to forgetting, and why its "villains" are not more prominent in the public mind.
Firstly, the war was so long ago that it seems irrelevant to the modern mind. Unlike WWII, where the technology and even the name of the countries are roughly comparable to today, WWI was very primitive. For example, people today know what a modern tank looks like - when they see those weird trapezoid things crawling around over trenches they disconnect. It seems too long ago to be relevant. Ditto aircraft of the time, horses, the tactics in general.. it's all just too removed from the modern age.
Secondly, the lack of moving picture records. WWII movies may be B&W but at least they're watchable. What WWI even looked like is something you pretty much have to imagine.
Thirdly, despite the label "World War I", it really was pretty localised. It's difficult for people outside Europe to feel very personally connected to a war a long time ago on the other side of the world. This lack of global "appeal" leads to a reduction of popular media coverage, eg. films, compounding the effect.
Fourth, it lacks the accessible "drama" of WWII. Everyone can tell you how WWII began and ended. Even the layman knows which country Germany invaded first, or how America was dragged in - Pearl Harbour was a brilliant opening act, from a dramatic perspective! And no-one will forget how the war ended for Japan in a hurry.
WWI, on the other hand - even for afficionados its beginnings were a bit, for want of a better word, lame. Some guy gets shot in Austria. Right.
Lastly, WWI was awful, but it lacks the pure "evil" of WWII. Oh sure the fighting was inhumane; I would much rather have been a solider in WWII - but compared to the concentration camps, the atrocities against the Jews and by the Japanese, the Bomb - it just doesn't compare. You rightfully lament the lack of recognition of Ol' Willie the Deuce but he was no Hitler. The Kaiser was hardly a Prince of Peace, to be sure, but he wasn't exactly an Architect of Evil either.
Well, this is turning into a bit of an essay so I'll stop there. Anyway, it is regrettable that WWI is so forgotten in the modern age. The ignorance is unjustified, but it's easy to find reasons why it came about.
Buying insurance generates funds to research criminal activity and make communities safer.
Going slightly off topic, but I've always thought it would be a very interesting experiment to force police forces to offer insurance against crime.
Or, in a socialist country (like, I presume, we ALL are from, including you Americans) you could formalise the insurance as default compensation coverage for all citizens. If you had a violent crime perpetrated against you, you receive a sizable cash payment from the Polices' own budget. Anything to directly link police "profit" to a reduction in crime as experienced by the citizens with whose protection they are charged.
That would seem likely to "focus their minds", especially away from nonviolent consensual "crimes" like one stoner selling weed to another. There may be unintended consequences not immediately obvious in this gedankenexperiment, but I think it would be an interesting experiment at the least.
During the baggage search Customs officers allegedly found a memory card containing video files depicting females under the age of 18-years engaged in sexual acts and poses.
During a frisk search Customs officers allegedly located a memory card that contained videos depicting persons who appeared to be under 18 years of age engaged in sexual activity.
They know all about memory cards. Encrypt *everything*.
And note I am not trying to encourage people to smuggle encrypted child porn around, they're just the results that came up when I searched for "memory card"..;)
Not trying to convince you of anything, buddy. Indeed, I doubt that is possible.
Just annoyed at your use of the word "argument". You see, argument is about logic and reason. You, having embraced irrationality and "faith" in unprovable "truths", are capable of neither. So stop using that word, please.
And another word for you to stop using is "intolerant". Persecution of groups they don't like for some arbitary reason is what religion does best. I probably wouldn't have anywhere near as much animosity towards religion if I hadn't heard repeated tirades by the believers I know against gays, for example.
Maybe using the word "sneer" to describe valid and reasonable criticism of your belief system makes you feel better, but it doesn't change the facts. You believe, unconditionally, in supernatural beings with great powers to create and restore life, influence world and personal events, who tell you how to live your life, and who reside in an unknown location either in space or another dimension or something. You have zero evidence beyond personal anecdotes for any of this.
If my pointing out the ridiculousness of your beliefs is "sneering" then yeah, I guess I'm sneering. However, to me, I'm just stating the obvious.
I'd sneer at someone who professed an earnest belief in the truthfulness of the Harry Potter series. Your beliefs are just as ludicrous, and quite a bit less entertaining.
Argument? There's nothing to argue about. You believe some crazy-ass story taken from a 2000 year old book. You have no evidence whatsoever for any of it. In the absence of compelling evidence to the contrary, you are completely delusional.
The worst thing is, that site is probably accurate in most of the things it claims. Take this example from their "Questions for students":
6) Who called King a "hypocrite preacher."
Answer: President Lyndon B. Johnson
And he probably did. *They* are not claiming he's a hypocrite, they're just quoting someone else! And yet the implication remains.
They selectively quote and emphasize choice factoids of information to make their sicko point, but the factoids in themselves are probably accurate. How can you defeat that? Worse - someone put a lot of work into that site, just because they're fucking maelevolent racist asshole traitors to everything good about the human race.
Anyone who doesn't want to be caught already uses some form of obfuscation, and I don't see how adding "tracing" to the IP protocol (presumably some kind of unique signature in the packet which doesn't get stripped out in routing) could possibly stop even current techniques.
For example, how could they possibly defeat proxy servers? A proxy server rewrites the request totally, keeping no part of the original packet. Proxy servers are not perfect, they can be snooped locally or via timing attacks at say the national gateway level, but I can't see how this would work.
Also, just think about the glacial implementation pace of IPv6 - and I don't think there's any special "tracing" function in that. Now another protocol? Good luck with that.
So, an impossible-to-get-implemented new protocol which is easily defeated anyway. It's a bad idea, evil even IMO, but I'm not too worried about freedom of speech on the internet for the time being.
Envy? The thing costs $250. Almost anyone with a job, and plenty of people who don't, can afford that. At least anyone in the somewhat educated/technically literate class which is likely to be reading slashdot.
The reason I don't own an iPhone has nothing to do with money. I'm typing this on a Macbook Pro which costs over 10 times as much as the iPhone. I don't own an iPhone for the same reason I don't buy songs on the iTunes store - I'm not signing up to someone's walled garden, not matter how convenient it appears.
The iPhone is most useful to me as a portable touch screen computer. It's the best hardware and OS of its kind out there, for now anyway. But Apple's control-freak approach of making it only usable through iTunes totally kills that for me. I want the web, not AOL - and I want a general purpose open computer, not a tightly controlled 'iTunes store experience'. I use iTunes for my music but if I could only use it with songs I'd bought from Apple, I wouldn't. I have an iPod but if it was only usable with songs boguht from them, I wouldn't. The iPhone only works with apps from Apple, I don't have one.
It's a pity, because Apple has created a really great bit of hardware/software and then totally ruined it for me by locking it down completely. I don't think I'm the only person who thinks this. Judging from history, the closed system never wins no matter its temporary advantages, and I expect the iPhone to be crushed when comparable-tech but open-platform competitors arrive, maybe within a year or two. Apple hasn't learnt its lesson from the Mac, obviously...
How you expect anyone to take your "slashdot is biased!" criticism seriously when you have a username like Slash.Poop is beyond me.
You know, we can glean a surprising amount of information from your inane choice of nicknames:
1. It's very recent. You presumably signed up to say just that. 2. You are so obsessed with your hatred of slashdot that you chose the name "slash.poop" 3. You are such a pussy that you can't even bring yourself to swear when you're basically anonymous on the internet. I mean seriously.. "poop"? I'd think an 8 year old was lame if they said that.
The real funny thing is that you're here. Signing up and making comments. How you expect your actions to do anything other than encourage the editors escapes me.
Don't get me wrong, I have my criticisms of Slashdot (not slashDot.. are you a java programmer?). What I don't have, however, is your peculiar conviction that anyone gives a flying fuck what you think. I mean what are you expecting?
CmdrTaco: "Oh no! We've lost Slash.Poop's respect. I cannot go on. Hand me my gun" kdawson: "Shoot me first! Fuck the world!"
And there are a lot of intelligences that don't construct valid HTML. At first glance, the site you linked is missing.. uh, well let's start with the DOCTYPE?!
If you're gonna spam on slashdot, it better validate. Although I have to admit I do like the minimalist look; it's kind of a pity that in 2008 you really need that doctype.
Could be, but now you're talking about a much more complex and "black" system. I'm just talking about the publically known capability, trying not to get into "inside knowledge" or speculative claims.
I, personally, do not think that voice recognition for ID purposes (as opposed to keyword purposes) is currently being run on a national all-inclusive scale. Maybe for international calls and on persons of interest but I can't see them doing it on all calls all the time. Firstly, it is illegal in most countries - that still might not stop them but it's at least a big nuisance, and they would probably have to do it offshore (hello UKUSA, again). Secondly, the scale of that project would be fucking insane. Even the transmission requirements boggle the mind, before you even consider storage and analysis! Thirdly, I don't think voice recognition for ID is quite there yet technically.
As for the keyword-triggered automated taping & transcription, I have no idea how far that goes, but my guess is "pretty far".
But even so, I think there's elements you're not considering. For example, you hand-wave away that you somehow know their number. From who? Probably a known contact of that person. Probably someone a contact of that person called, or was called, in the last week. How many people is that? A hundred or two? That's already a massive narrowing of scope. Or did you talk to some guy in a bar? That is actually a good option and one reason that many criminals/people who don't want to be traceable own bars.
You also mention disguising your voice. Well, unless there is actual wiretapping going on, I don't think that is necessary - if the person is actually being tapped, you would have to be extremely careful. For example, if they've already started getting warrants for that kind of action (or acting like they don't need them..) then you better have made sure your purchase at the phone shop wasn't caught on any CCTV or the clerk can't give a good description. However, I am not really talking about avoiding criminial investigations : )
And as far as I know ECHELON et al do not do voice recognition of that type. Could be wrong, of course.
But I do accept your point, which is that someone making these extreme efforts at not being traceable is, on balance, fairly "safe". However, I don't think the scenario you've described is common, because it's incredible inconvenient and doesn't scale very well. One phone per call? That's an awful lot of phones, an awful lot of phone purchases, and an awful lot of opportunities to get recorded on CCTV buying them. Shops will, of course, record the time of sale along with the number of the phone being sold.
Anyway, someone making these extreme efforts will be OK for a while, if they don't make any other mistakes. I wasn't really trying to say that there is absolutely no way to even temporarily avoid leaving an identifiable pattern in the phone system, only that it's hard not to, and that most people seem to be completely unaware that the capabilities to mine this data even exist.
Most people are unaware, for example, that while a warrant is required for the *contents* of your phone calls (or email) to be tapped (and these restrictions, while recently weakened, still present at least a hurdle), *header* information does not. Which number called which number, when and for how long - the logs, basically. The agencies do not need a warrant for that info and of course, they get it, probably in realtime.
People do not seem to understand the implications of that kind of data being available to the agencies and tend to concentrate on the content of the calls being the most important thing to protect. They don't realise that the header information is a fucking gold mine and with intelligent analysis you can get pretty much everything just from that. Ditto for email - and if you think S/MIME or PGP will protect you, think again. Headers, remember!
The intel agencies had this all figured out 20 years ago.
I don't really understand what you're saying. How could there only be *one* point of contact? I mean for starters - how would the caller know the person he was calling? He must know them from somewhere, he must have got the number from someone.
I suppose if you buy a prepaid cellphone and just dial a random number then that is indeed pretty anonymous and resistant to pattern matching, but I don't think that's what you're saying. Maybe be more specific and I'll try and pick holes in it / admit you've got a good point.
In the USA, it's also legal to use a pay phone or a prepaid phone call without revealing your identity. You will reveal your location, so make sure you call from a relatively populated place that is devoid of cameras.
For some, anonymity is a valuable commodity: Some people are willing to pay $10-$20 for a single phone conversation in exchange for anonymity - that's the approximate cost of a cheap prepaid cell phone with 10-20 minutes of talk time.
No, you're buying an illusion of anonymity. With modern call log pattern analysis systems, intelligence services can determine your identity from your calling patterns, not the number from which you happen to make the call. The rough geographical location they get from the cell phone companies is just the icing on the cake. This kind of pattern matching is well suited to automation and it wouldn't surprise me one bit if every cell phone in every country with a decent intelligence service was subject to such analysis.
One would also expect pre-paid "anonymous" cellphones to be subject to additional "identity guessing" analysis since they are an obvious option for "anonymity" that the naive crook might take. With a bit of data sharing and international cooperation, I bet they can track people as they move around the world from cellphone to cellphone.
Basically, if there is any kind of pattern at all to your cell phone use - and there almost certainly is - cell phones are not "safe", no matter what. The same, of course, goes for people thinking that going to an internet cafe and thinking that their web browsing is somehow hidden. Fact is, if you log on at an internet cafe and then do the same 10 things you always do, that narrows the scope of your likely identity down like 6 orders of magnitude. Wow, thinks the computer, this session at this net cafe looks very similar to the guy at this home address. And boy, it's geographically pretty close. Likelihood: 85%. Save.
If someone is watching at the telecoms/ISP level, and you can be sure they are if you're in a UKUSA country, then your identity is likely derivable from patterns of usage, not the registered owner of that IP/number/whatever.
Sucks doesn't it. Anyway, it is possible to communicate anonymously, but it's a lot more work than just buying a prepaid. In fact you basically cannot use the phone system at all. You have to think a lot more like them, though, if you really want to escape the pattern matching dragnet.
On the bright side, SIGINT is pretty high level stuff. The intel agencies are not going to be giving away this kind of info to the police, who will just overuse it and kill the golden goose - at most they'd send a tip or two in politically important cases, I guess. One would hope that the top-level intel agencies are fairly responsible with the awesome data they have and you'd have to be a pretty bad guy for them to actually act on info from pattern matching surveillance.
In a past life I was IT Manager at a couple of places. I have first-hand experience of an outsourcing event or two, so here's my observations.
1. Low quality is an absolute myth
I don't know where people get the idea that as a rule, all outsourced code is poor quality. That is absolute rubbish in my view.
A company I worked for was building a new system for in-house document handling (it was a legal firm, docs are the lifeblood). At the time I had no idea who to hire, we couldn't do it in-house, so we devised a test - we'd hire 3 or 4 outsource/consulting agencies to do a small task, then hire the one we liked the most. I'm not really a programming god but I do know good code when I see it so I took part in the process.
Two results were of such low quality we threw them out immediately. One of them was *local* and charged a lot of money for the privilege.
Of the other two, the results were pretty good - the best results were more expensive but still less than half the price of the incompetent local consulting company. We took a vote and unanimously agreed to hire them.
2. Set yourself up properly
Their setup was that they had a local guy who knew his stuff. He'd communicate with us, the clients, and act as local liason. He'd deal with the remote staff - I can't even remember where they were - and make sure everything was cool, all the time.
His service was *invaluable* and you can bet he made a lot of money. I would seriously recommend a lot of people who are afraid of losing their jobs to foreign outsourcing companies start thinking about setting themselves up as intermediataries for SMB like that guy did. You will make a fortune.
As someone hiring an outsourcing team, I do not want to be on the phone to india/estonia/whereever. I don't want to organise everything. I want to talk to someone local, who knows the team, knows what they need to do a good job, will be my point of contact, and will see that I'm happy - and he should pass on most of the savings from the outsourcing but is welcome to keep a fair cut for himself. *Be that guy*. Hell, if I was going to change careers tomorrow, I'd be doing that.
Outsourcing consultant, guys. Say it. Embrace the enemy. You sure as hell cannot beat them, so join them.
You think you know good code from bad? Put that in the brochure. Sell yourself. You want to improve the world with good code? You can improve it a lot more if you leverage against an entire team! Pissed off at not being a manager yet? *Make yourself a manager* !
3. This is completely unstoppable
30 years ago, my country had a thriving textiles industry. Now, you'd be lucky to find a single textiles factory per state. No-one cried for the t-shirt machine operators, and no-one made an effort to "buy local" and save the local manufacturing jobs. It was inevitable. But the t-shirts are still designed here.
20 years ago when I was in High School my bus ride took me past a factory that made actual computers. Obviously it is now closed, everything is made in East Asia. No-one paid triple the cost to buy local... but it's still designed in the west.
10 years ago you could make serious money just knowing HTML. That didn't last long did it?
My point is things change. The jobs float up, nothing is set in stone. To be honest I am surprised programming is still so manual and low-level - maybe in another 10 years the whole programming field worldwide will be decimated by a decent system of code that writes code.
Who will people complain to then?
Half the programming jobs today exist only because there's no truly good open source modular code-sharing system. Come on you know it's true. Thousands of people are re-inventing the wheel even as we speak. There's nothing inherently wrong with cut and pasting code if it's *good* and it *fits* and it *works*. It's all just a matter of time.
Things change. They will not stop changing because you fail to adapt. Tough love, some other commentors mentioned? No
Ouch. Well, you're right, and I agree - I'm usually fairly clear/specific but got sloppy this time. Thanks for the heads up, will be more precise in future : )
Ah well. Best practise remains to travel light (both physically and data-wise) and just get what you need when you arrive.
It's all BS anyway. I'd be using a VPN even if I wasn't concerned about security, simply because my laptop drive is only 200GB or something and my home RAID is twenty times the size. The security issues just make it an absolute no-brainer.
Slashdot Mirror
Now - let's review - how do you spell Pearl Harbor?
However the fuck I want to, loser.
Who is the real asshole here?
You. Your "gentle correction" was completely over the top. It was a pointless, stupid rant - and how you can think someone is "pompous" for simply using normal British English defies belief.
I know your type too. You're a nobody in real life, you're frustrated with your boring life, but unable to change it. You deal with your frustration by trying to bring others down to your level, arguing viciously over minutiae as some kind of pathetic imitation of the challenge that eludes you in reality.
All you really achieve is wasting everyone's time. You've wasted a few minutes of mine today, but probably far more of your own. No great loss, you have nothing better to do, right?
You're not evil. I don't hate you - I'm not even angry. I understand only too well why you do what you do. But I am telling you - you are on the wrong path. You are going in the wrong direction.
I repeat - go do something better with your life. Annoying random people on websites is pretty fucking lame. Don't you think that deep down you have the potential to be better than this?
Go do something. Make some money. Do something cool. Girls dig that shit. "I spend my days being a jerk on Slashdot" isn't good enough. Why not make today the day that you go and make a change?
And this disturbing specimen, ladies and gentlemen, is a chilling reminder of the consequences of allowing an otherwise normal male to go without sex for upwards of five years ..
you pompous douchebag
It's the language I learnt at school and have spoken and written every day of my life, you crazy asshole. You have a minor point, but it's commonplace and completely undeserving of your ridiculous rant. The harbour of the city I live has the proper name "Sydney Harbour" but I often see Americans writing it without the "u". They should know better and so should have I, but your reaction is just insane.
Why don't you go home and think about what went so wrong in your life that you're reduced to writing crazy anonymous rants in response to minor spelling errors to people you've never met on Slashdot.
Good points. I'm a bit of a history buff myself and also lament the decline in knowledge of the Great War - and the popular conception of WWII is also desperately inadequate.
That said, I can think of a couple more reasons why WWI is particularly susceptible to forgetting, and why its "villains" are not more prominent in the public mind.
Firstly, the war was so long ago that it seems irrelevant to the modern mind. Unlike WWII, where the technology and even the name of the countries are roughly comparable to today, WWI was very primitive. For example, people today know what a modern tank looks like - when they see those weird trapezoid things crawling around over trenches they disconnect. It seems too long ago to be relevant. Ditto aircraft of the time, horses, the tactics in general .. it's all just too removed from the modern age.
Secondly, the lack of moving picture records. WWII movies may be B&W but at least they're watchable. What WWI even looked like is something you pretty much have to imagine.
Thirdly, despite the label "World War I", it really was pretty localised. It's difficult for people outside Europe to feel very personally connected to a war a long time ago on the other side of the world. This lack of global "appeal" leads to a reduction of popular media coverage, eg. films, compounding the effect.
Fourth, it lacks the accessible "drama" of WWII. Everyone can tell you how WWII began and ended. Even the layman knows which country Germany invaded first, or how America was dragged in - Pearl Harbour was a brilliant opening act, from a dramatic perspective! And no-one will forget how the war ended for Japan in a hurry.
WWI, on the other hand - even for afficionados its beginnings were a bit, for want of a better word, lame. Some guy gets shot in Austria. Right.
Lastly, WWI was awful, but it lacks the pure "evil" of WWII. Oh sure the fighting was inhumane; I would much rather have been a solider in WWII - but compared to the concentration camps, the atrocities against the Jews and by the Japanese, the Bomb - it just doesn't compare. You rightfully lament the lack of recognition of Ol' Willie the Deuce but he was no Hitler. The Kaiser was hardly a Prince of Peace, to be sure, but he wasn't exactly an Architect of Evil either.
Well, this is turning into a bit of an essay so I'll stop there. Anyway, it is regrettable that WWI is so forgotten in the modern age. The ignorance is unjustified, but it's easy to find reasons why it came about.
Buying insurance generates funds to research criminal activity and make communities safer.
Going slightly off topic, but I've always thought it would be a very interesting experiment to force police forces to offer insurance against crime.
Or, in a socialist country (like, I presume, we ALL are from, including you Americans) you could formalise the insurance as default compensation coverage for all citizens. If you had a violent crime perpetrated against you, you receive a sizable cash payment from the Polices' own budget. Anything to directly link police "profit" to a reduction in crime as experienced by the citizens with whose protection they are charged.
That would seem likely to "focus their minds", especially away from nonviolent consensual "crimes" like one stoner selling weed to another. There may be unintended consequences not immediately obvious in this gedankenexperiment, but I think it would be an interesting experiment at the least.
Don't be so sure. I don't know about the USA but I sure know about Australia:
http://www.customs.gov.au/site/page.cfm?c=10673
During the baggage search Customs officers allegedly found a memory card containing video files depicting females under the age of 18-years engaged in sexual acts and poses.
http://www.customs.gov.au/site/page.cfm?c=10428
During a frisk search Customs officers allegedly located a memory card that contained videos depicting persons who appeared to be under 18 years of age engaged in sexual activity.
They know all about memory cards. Encrypt *everything*.
And note I am not trying to encourage people to smuggle encrypted child porn around, they're just the results that came up when I searched for "memory card" .. ;)
Not trying to convince you of anything, buddy. Indeed, I doubt that is possible.
Just annoyed at your use of the word "argument". You see, argument is about logic and reason. You, having embraced irrationality and "faith" in unprovable "truths", are capable of neither. So stop using that word, please.
And another word for you to stop using is "intolerant". Persecution of groups they don't like for some arbitary reason is what religion does best. I probably wouldn't have anywhere near as much animosity towards religion if I hadn't heard repeated tirades by the believers I know against gays, for example.
Maybe using the word "sneer" to describe valid and reasonable criticism of your belief system makes you feel better, but it doesn't change the facts. You believe, unconditionally, in supernatural beings with great powers to create and restore life, influence world and personal events, who tell you how to live your life, and who reside in an unknown location either in space or another dimension or something. You have zero evidence beyond personal anecdotes for any of this.
If my pointing out the ridiculousness of your beliefs is "sneering" then yeah, I guess I'm sneering. However, to me, I'm just stating the obvious.
Anyway, no point arguing, like I said. Carry on.
A sneer is not an argument.
I'd sneer at someone who professed an earnest belief in the truthfulness of the Harry Potter series. Your beliefs are just as ludicrous, and quite a bit less entertaining.
Argument? There's nothing to argue about. You believe some crazy-ass story taken from a 2000 year old book. You have no evidence whatsoever for any of it. In the absence of compelling evidence to the contrary, you are completely delusional.
Next!
The worst thing is, that site is probably accurate in most of the things it claims. Take this example from their "Questions for students":
6) Who called King a "hypocrite preacher."
Answer: President Lyndon B. Johnson
And he probably did. *They* are not claiming he's a hypocrite, they're just quoting someone else! And yet the implication remains.
They selectively quote and emphasize choice factoids of information to make their sicko point, but the factoids in themselves are probably accurate. How can you defeat that? Worse - someone put a lot of work into that site, just because they're fucking maelevolent racist asshole traitors to everything good about the human race.
How can you "truth rate" that?
A hundred years? BlueGene/L has 213k cores - a mere factor of three increase shouldn't take long.
http://www.top500.org/list/2008/06/100
Maybe you should have posted AC.
Anyone who doesn't want to be caught already uses some form of obfuscation, and I don't see how adding "tracing" to the IP protocol (presumably some kind of unique signature in the packet which doesn't get stripped out in routing) could possibly stop even current techniques.
For example, how could they possibly defeat proxy servers? A proxy server rewrites the request totally, keeping no part of the original packet. Proxy servers are not perfect, they can be snooped locally or via timing attacks at say the national gateway level, but I can't see how this would work.
Also, just think about the glacial implementation pace of IPv6 - and I don't think there's any special "tracing" function in that. Now another protocol? Good luck with that.
So, an impossible-to-get-implemented new protocol which is easily defeated anyway. It's a bad idea, evil even IMO, but I'm not too worried about freedom of speech on the internet for the time being.
Envy? The thing costs $250. Almost anyone with a job, and plenty of people who don't, can afford that. At least anyone in the somewhat educated/technically literate class which is likely to be reading slashdot.
The reason I don't own an iPhone has nothing to do with money. I'm typing this on a Macbook Pro which costs over 10 times as much as the iPhone. I don't own an iPhone for the same reason I don't buy songs on the iTunes store - I'm not signing up to someone's walled garden, not matter how convenient it appears.
The iPhone is most useful to me as a portable touch screen computer. It's the best hardware and OS of its kind out there, for now anyway. But Apple's control-freak approach of making it only usable through iTunes totally kills that for me. I want the web, not AOL - and I want a general purpose open computer, not a tightly controlled 'iTunes store experience'. I use iTunes for my music but if I could only use it with songs I'd bought from Apple, I wouldn't. I have an iPod but if it was only usable with songs boguht from them, I wouldn't. The iPhone only works with apps from Apple, I don't have one.
It's a pity, because Apple has created a really great bit of hardware/software and then totally ruined it for me by locking it down completely. I don't think I'm the only person who thinks this. Judging from history, the closed system never wins no matter its temporary advantages, and I expect the iPhone to be crushed when comparable-tech but open-platform competitors arrive, maybe within a year or two. Apple hasn't learnt its lesson from the Mac, obviously...
How you expect anyone to take your "slashdot is biased!" criticism seriously when you have a username like Slash.Poop is beyond me.
You know, we can glean a surprising amount of information from your inane choice of nicknames:
1. It's very recent. You presumably signed up to say just that. .. "poop"? I'd think an 8 year old was lame if they said that.
2. You are so obsessed with your hatred of slashdot that you chose the name "slash.poop"
3. You are such a pussy that you can't even bring yourself to swear when you're basically anonymous on the internet. I mean seriously
The real funny thing is that you're here. Signing up and making comments. How you expect your actions to do anything other than encourage the editors escapes me.
Don't get me wrong, I have my criticisms of Slashdot (not slashDot .. are you a java programmer?). What I don't have, however, is your peculiar conviction that anyone gives a flying fuck what you think. I mean what are you expecting?
CmdrTaco: "Oh no! We've lost Slash.Poop's respect. I cannot go on. Hand me my gun"
kdawson: "Shoot me first! Fuck the world!"
etc, etc.
And there are a lot of intelligences that don't construct valid HTML. At first glance, the site you linked is missing .. uh, well let's start with the DOCTYPE?!
If you're gonna spam on slashdot, it better validate. Although I have to admit I do like the minimalist look; it's kind of a pity that in 2008 you really need that doctype.
If you aren't willing to defend the freedom to speak about stuff you find offensive, then you didn't ever really believe in free speech to begin with.
Well said.
Could be, but now you're talking about a much more complex and "black" system. I'm just talking about the publically known capability, trying not to get into "inside knowledge" or speculative claims.
I, personally, do not think that voice recognition for ID purposes (as opposed to keyword purposes) is currently being run on a national all-inclusive scale. Maybe for international calls and on persons of interest but I can't see them doing it on all calls all the time. Firstly, it is illegal in most countries - that still might not stop them but it's at least a big nuisance, and they would probably have to do it offshore (hello UKUSA, again). Secondly, the scale of that project would be fucking insane. Even the transmission requirements boggle the mind, before you even consider storage and analysis! Thirdly, I don't think voice recognition for ID is quite there yet technically.
As for the keyword-triggered automated taping & transcription, I have no idea how far that goes, but my guess is "pretty far".
Well, yeah, I guess that would be untraceable.
But even so, I think there's elements you're not considering. For example, you hand-wave away that you somehow know their number. From who? Probably a known contact of that person. Probably someone a contact of that person called, or was called, in the last week. How many people is that? A hundred or two? That's already a massive narrowing of scope. Or did you talk to some guy in a bar? That is actually a good option and one reason that many criminals/people who don't want to be traceable own bars.
You also mention disguising your voice. Well, unless there is actual wiretapping going on, I don't think that is necessary - if the person is actually being tapped, you would have to be extremely careful. For example, if they've already started getting warrants for that kind of action (or acting like they don't need them ..) then you better have made sure your purchase at the phone shop wasn't caught on any CCTV or the clerk can't give a good description. However, I am not really talking about avoiding criminial investigations : )
And as far as I know ECHELON et al do not do voice recognition of that type. Could be wrong, of course.
But I do accept your point, which is that someone making these extreme efforts at not being traceable is, on balance, fairly "safe". However, I don't think the scenario you've described is common, because it's incredible inconvenient and doesn't scale very well. One phone per call? That's an awful lot of phones, an awful lot of phone purchases, and an awful lot of opportunities to get recorded on CCTV buying them. Shops will, of course, record the time of sale along with the number of the phone being sold.
Anyway, someone making these extreme efforts will be OK for a while, if they don't make any other mistakes. I wasn't really trying to say that there is absolutely no way to even temporarily avoid leaving an identifiable pattern in the phone system, only that it's hard not to, and that most people seem to be completely unaware that the capabilities to mine this data even exist.
Most people are unaware, for example, that while a warrant is required for the *contents* of your phone calls (or email) to be tapped (and these restrictions, while recently weakened, still present at least a hurdle), *header* information does not. Which number called which number, when and for how long - the logs, basically. The agencies do not need a warrant for that info and of course, they get it, probably in realtime.
People do not seem to understand the implications of that kind of data being available to the agencies and tend to concentrate on the content of the calls being the most important thing to protect. They don't realise that the header information is a fucking gold mine and with intelligent analysis you can get pretty much everything just from that. Ditto for email - and if you think S/MIME or PGP will protect you, think again. Headers, remember!
The intel agencies had this all figured out 20 years ago.
I don't really understand what you're saying. How could there only be *one* point of contact? I mean for starters - how would the caller know the person he was calling? He must know them from somewhere, he must have got the number from someone.
I suppose if you buy a prepaid cellphone and just dial a random number then that is indeed pretty anonymous and resistant to pattern matching, but I don't think that's what you're saying. Maybe be more specific and I'll try and pick holes in it / admit you've got a good point.
What the hell are you smoking?
Ice?
In the USA, it's also legal to use a pay phone or a prepaid phone call without revealing your identity. You will reveal your location, so make sure you call from a relatively populated place that is devoid of cameras.
For some, anonymity is a valuable commodity: Some people are willing to pay $10-$20 for a single phone conversation in exchange for anonymity - that's the approximate cost of a cheap prepaid cell phone with 10-20 minutes of talk time.
No, you're buying an illusion of anonymity. With modern call log pattern analysis systems, intelligence services can determine your identity from your calling patterns, not the number from which you happen to make the call. The rough geographical location they get from the cell phone companies is just the icing on the cake. This kind of pattern matching is well suited to automation and it wouldn't surprise me one bit if every cell phone in every country with a decent intelligence service was subject to such analysis.
One would also expect pre-paid "anonymous" cellphones to be subject to additional "identity guessing" analysis since they are an obvious option for "anonymity" that the naive crook might take. With a bit of data sharing and international cooperation, I bet they can track people as they move around the world from cellphone to cellphone.
Basically, if there is any kind of pattern at all to your cell phone use - and there almost certainly is - cell phones are not "safe", no matter what. The same, of course, goes for people thinking that going to an internet cafe and thinking that their web browsing is somehow hidden. Fact is, if you log on at an internet cafe and then do the same 10 things you always do, that narrows the scope of your likely identity down like 6 orders of magnitude. Wow, thinks the computer, this session at this net cafe looks very similar to the guy at this home address. And boy, it's geographically pretty close. Likelihood: 85%. Save.
If someone is watching at the telecoms/ISP level, and you can be sure they are if you're in a UKUSA country, then your identity is likely derivable from patterns of usage, not the registered owner of that IP/number/whatever.
Sucks doesn't it. Anyway, it is possible to communicate anonymously, but it's a lot more work than just buying a prepaid. In fact you basically cannot use the phone system at all. You have to think a lot more like them, though, if you really want to escape the pattern matching dragnet.
On the bright side, SIGINT is pretty high level stuff. The intel agencies are not going to be giving away this kind of info to the police, who will just overuse it and kill the golden goose - at most they'd send a tip or two in politically important cases, I guess. One would hope that the top-level intel agencies are fairly responsible with the awesome data they have and you'd have to be a pretty bad guy for them to actually act on info from pattern matching surveillance.
500 million people, an entire subcontinent, all terrorists, huh?
Your ignorance is sickening.
In a past life I was IT Manager at a couple of places. I have first-hand experience of an outsourcing event or two, so here's my observations.
1. Low quality is an absolute myth
I don't know where people get the idea that as a rule, all outsourced code is poor quality. That is absolute rubbish in my view.
A company I worked for was building a new system for in-house document handling (it was a legal firm, docs are the lifeblood). At the time I had no idea who to hire, we couldn't do it in-house, so we devised a test - we'd hire 3 or 4 outsource/consulting agencies to do a small task, then hire the one we liked the most. I'm not really a programming god but I do know good code when I see it so I took part in the process.
Two results were of such low quality we threw them out immediately. One of them was *local* and charged a lot of money for the privilege.
Of the other two, the results were pretty good - the best results were more expensive but still less than half the price of the incompetent local consulting company. We took a vote and unanimously agreed to hire them.
2. Set yourself up properly
Their setup was that they had a local guy who knew his stuff. He'd communicate with us, the clients, and act as local liason. He'd deal with the remote staff - I can't even remember where they were - and make sure everything was cool, all the time.
His service was *invaluable* and you can bet he made a lot of money. I would seriously recommend a lot of people who are afraid of losing their jobs to foreign outsourcing companies start thinking about setting themselves up as intermediataries for SMB like that guy did. You will make a fortune.
As someone hiring an outsourcing team, I do not want to be on the phone to india/estonia/whereever. I don't want to organise everything. I want to talk to someone local, who knows the team, knows what they need to do a good job, will be my point of contact, and will see that I'm happy - and he should pass on most of the savings from the outsourcing but is welcome to keep a fair cut for himself. *Be that guy*. Hell, if I was going to change careers tomorrow, I'd be doing that.
Outsourcing consultant, guys. Say it. Embrace the enemy. You sure as hell cannot beat them, so join them.
You think you know good code from bad? Put that in the brochure. Sell yourself. You want to improve the world with good code? You can improve it a lot more if you leverage against an entire team! Pissed off at not being a manager yet? *Make yourself a manager* !
3. This is completely unstoppable
30 years ago, my country had a thriving textiles industry. Now, you'd be lucky to find a single textiles factory per state. No-one cried for the t-shirt machine operators, and no-one made an effort to "buy local" and save the local manufacturing jobs. It was inevitable. But the t-shirts are still designed here.
20 years ago when I was in High School my bus ride took me past a factory that made actual computers. Obviously it is now closed, everything is made in East Asia. No-one paid triple the cost to buy local ... but it's still designed in the west.
10 years ago you could make serious money just knowing HTML. That didn't last long did it?
My point is things change. The jobs float up, nothing is set in stone. To be honest I am surprised programming is still so manual and low-level - maybe in another 10 years the whole programming field worldwide will be decimated by a decent system of code that writes code.
Who will people complain to then?
Half the programming jobs today exist only because there's no truly good open source modular code-sharing system. Come on you know it's true. Thousands of people are re-inventing the wheel even as we speak. There's nothing inherently wrong with cut and pasting code if it's *good* and it *fits* and it *works*. It's all just a matter of time.
Things change. They will not stop changing because you fail to adapt. Tough love, some other commentors mentioned? No
Ouch. Well, you're right, and I agree - I'm usually fairly clear/specific but got sloppy this time. Thanks for the heads up, will be more precise in future : )
*takes his lumps*
Well, shit. : /
Ah well. Best practise remains to travel light (both physically and data-wise) and just get what you need when you arrive.
It's all BS anyway. I'd be using a VPN even if I wasn't concerned about security, simply because my laptop drive is only 200GB or something and my home RAID is twenty times the size. The security issues just make it an absolute no-brainer.