i think what others are saying about this is that poisonous towels/paint/whatever are already regulated (nanotechnology is just potentially much more dangerous), and that this is more a power grab than anything else.
i too don't want poisonous paint (or grey goo!), but it might not need any significant change in how things are run. now, if they could just decrease the amount of corruption... and nanotech isn't only an fda thing either, so they better not be the only agency running tests.
the 8 mile thing is, i think, more specific to this prius. the ev1, for example, had a range more like 50 miles, so the range limit isn't quite that bad.
personally i think it's time the government retired ECHELON and implimented a Privacy Analysis of Network Ofuscation of Protocol Transaction Infrastructure for Classified Observation of the Nation.
weren't the feds using a similar argument in favor of the illegal wiretapping? since the people who wanted to sue couldn't prove they were being wiretapped (since knowledge of who is wiretapped or how is classified/secret/whatever), they couldn't advance, if my memory serves me right.
books get pirated too; it's just awkward to read on a computer screen. i have a huge collection of, uh, 'acquired' books. i also have a huge collection of dead tree books, since they're easier to read and look really cool/impressive on my bookshelves. even once we build smart paper, i'll still buy books, cuz quite frankly, books are awesome.
anyway, copyright is generally thought of in, say, three ways: there's the really old view, where it's a government mandated monopoly on a particular work to keep booksellers and mapsellers out of each others' hair. there's the less old view of it as a social contract between people to monetarily encourage advancement of whatever (still implemented as a government mandated monopoly on the particular work). there's the view which i think you have and many people do that it is a natural right, that a piece of knowledge is akin to the physical property of its creator.
it's been said a million times on/. and elsewhere that information is not like physical property. cars and car copiers are in great abundance in these discussions. i won't go into this here.
so, here's the inability to opt out: i want to be able to communicate whatever i want to my friends, and i want to be able to listen to what my friends want to communicate to me. in our communication we aren't directly bothering anyone. what right does someone else have to stop us? even if it contains something offensive, one would have to eavesdrop to be offended. worried about slander/libel? i think those are antiquated concepts as well; rather than force speakers to always speak the truth, listeners should accept as truth information that they have verified or from trusted sources. i'm not being disruptive either; i'm communicating with people who want to communicate with me, and not requiring others to experience what i say. plagiarism is an issue, but it's an issue that is not solved by copyright or trademark; it requires a trusted 3rd party to verify who did something, which is pretty much doable in the same way as a pki or a notary.
the pirates aren't trying to opt into a system where they can not experience anything that wasn't released into the public domain. they're trying to opt into a system where there isn't a restriction on sharing information; even when the information you share isn't "your property".
we are at a level of technology that every man can be a library, in a sense. but rather than distribute knowledge to all, we must stay silent and censored? if the argument is that the advancement of arts and such would be limited because of lack of monetary gain, well, it's not likely as true, nowadays. since a work can reach a much larger audience, decreasing our pool of artists to those who work for fun or for contract or to sell merch would be fine. for arts like writing or drawing or music, there's the fun factor. for software, there's less of a fun factor but there will still be programs that need to be written; they just won't be sold; they'll be done on contract. i don't know if i'd want the gov to step in, but many suggest that as well to keep starving artists from, well, starving.
i just don't think copyright is a very good idea anymore, and might not ever have been.
definitely so; tor is pretty overloaded as it is, since the users are not routers. if we are to move our bittorrenting to something else, we'd want something distributed. freenet shows the current best possibility; you don't even need to host a tracker--isohunt or whatever would just be a mapping from a human readable title to a machine readable address. furthermore, freenet's model seems to be pretty good at anonymizing, though it is only so-so for finding stuff. the tor model, where there are reliable servers, has a few problems since anyone can start a server; eavesdroppers might open several servers (you need a lucky 3 to determine sender and receiver), and thus could read traffic that tunnels using only theirs. colluding servers is definitely an issue with tor, while freenet (and others) can use a friend-to-friend system; that is, you can adjust such that you always route through someone you have some trust with. and anyway, onion routing isn't really suitable to filesharing, compared to freenet's dht-esque cache system, which is basically a distributed archive.
yes, definitely true. i guess it's partly my beef against things that are so centralized, compared to something decentralized. like, as far as i know, you can't message (poke? i don't know what they call it) someone on myspace via facebook.
also, since everyone uses one thing, it decreases the ability of people to use something else; as an example, a friend of mine who is really quite capable of designing his own stuff has decided to abandon his blog in favor of putting his random musings on facebook, since most of his friends wouldn't check rss but get facebook stuff. if he tags something with me, i see it in my mail and log in to facebook to read it, so i'm not left out, but if i didn't have a facebook account i would be. my personal use of facebook has primarily consisted of accepting other people's friend requests, while i maintain my own little blog-like thing separately. the downside is that few of my non-technical friends read it (not like it had anything of content anyway).
yeah, i guess it's the aspect of having everything that is online and social on one page that people like.
as mentioned elsewhere, there's really not much difference between a text message and an email; or a 'message' or 'poke'. and there's not much difference between a blog post, a blog post's reply, a forum reply, and a post on/. either. i've been wondering if there could be a kind of distributed general social network; as in, one that didn't have each social network be an individual island. i'd be into a system like that, especially since i could run my own server of it (or share one with friends, which is what happens with my little blog now), and run my own blog off it, etc, while still being connected.
ah, for me, my sci-fi experiences have been usually less spacy, with william gibson and neal stephenson being among my favorites. more recently i went into the hyperion universe, which very interesting (though the sequels weren't as fun as the first).
for a while (say, 10th grade or so) i read a lot of simon hawke: a mediocre but fun author (and he had some great titles). no, they were not good books, but that's the neat thing about reading; the more you do it the more you can enjoy it. later i got the hitchhiker's guide, a lot of orson scott card, foundation...
i've always bought a lot of physical books, and more recently i have acquired a large, uh, illegitimate electronic collection as well. during high school it was common for me to keep myself in my room with a book; since college started i've been doing it less (also with discovery of anime).
anyway, the only harry potter book i've read was the goblet of fire (don't know what number that is), which was just lying around the house. i was not especially impressed... i guess the whole magic system just seemed too random. i don't think it's cuz i started with a random book either; the system is such that the author can just pull some spell out of nowhere to satisfy the plot.
offtopic: i noticed your sig; are you building a sci-fi universe of some sort?
yes, in japan text messaging is, as far as i know, equivalent to email (they even use the same english-esque word). in my opinion this is the way it should be... phone companies have been getting away with expensive text messaging when you could be doing cheap email.
Re:muggles still use e-mail, mail, phones, etc.
on
Kids Say Email is Dead
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connecting through ssl doesn't make email more secure; it can be messed with by your mailserver, the mailserver of whoever you're talking to, or anyone in between those. the usefulness of ssl or ssh is that it is more difficult for me to read/modify your mail/password (i have to hack a server as opposed to optionally controlling a router).
gpg really is what makes it secure. still, ssl is a plus. strangely gmail defaults to having it off... weird. and they don't do imap, which makes me sad.
but anyway, the whole social network thing largely exists so that the owners of those servers get to read your messages -- and let future employers, etc, read them too, for a fee. and they don't really do much that people couldn't set up on their own (like, have everyone make an rss feed of their life and aggregate it, is an example).
in america we've got a tradition of defecating on the constitution whenever someone wants something that the constitution doesn't. when they want to censor $FOO, they can just say "$FOO isn't covered by freedom of speech", or, for a separate example "It's freedom of religion, not from religion!". we also have lots of people who try to keep the government in check (aclu is a little crazy but a good thing, for example), which is helpful.
so, america does usually have freer speech than other countries, but it's still not that free. it sounds like whoever wrote that european document was more honest about what he meant than usa politicians who will all support 'free speech' if you ask them -- but only their kind of free speech. ok, kind of an exaggeration, but it's true.
i personally think the whale thing was spot on -- virtually nobody cares about the whales outside of folks who study or are otherwise interested in the environment's animal populations, much like the open-vs-closed argument in software. my parents hardly know anything about computers and wouldn't care about whether they run open or closed software, just like people didn't care whether they got their conveniences from whale blubber or from other sources.
anyway, the thing about alcoholics in seattle is interesting. looking at your sig's book's description, i think you have thought on the subject a lot:). i already wonder why we don't have robots do farming for us. i think i'll try giving your book a read.
personally i'd like to learn lojban and migrate the world to it; unlike other languages (and english is a terrible offender here), it's provably unambiguous in sentence structure. the choice of english as the standard for international communication is, uh, perhaps a poor choice simply coming from the fact that english speaking countries are very powerful. we do need to have a language that everyone speaks so that we can discuss things; in the past, intellectual discussion happened in latin, while now it's mostly english but with a lot of other languages too.
switching to a language hardly anyone knows but has other benefits would make sense, since everyone has to learn something new (including a primarily english speaker like me). english speakers -- i live in america and a few of my friends are like this -- often have no problem with the language situation being like this, since their language is on top. they might think to themselves that everyone simply ought to learn english. but it could easily have been some other language; china or india have large populations, so switching languages to theirs would result in fewer people having to learn, if that was an argument for using english.
But fansubs being a hell of a lot better than proper DVD subs? No way. yes way. it's better recently, but, say, back in the 90's, official translations were often abysmal. not bootlegs, real licensed stuff. they sometimes still are bad. many times, even now, the subtitles will just be whatever they say in the english dub. to make the english dub, they have to translate optimizing for lip movements, rather than accuracy.
this is debated all the time, but i think the overall view is that there are plenty of times fansubs are a hell of a lot better than proper DVD subs, even if it is generally not the case.
i assume you mean don't use credit cards for everyday purchases?
cuz some things, like buying a house pretty much require credit/debit/whatever, since they're so expensive.
anyway, credit score stuff is a lot like/. karma; it could be bad or good and not really have much reason all the time. perhaps a web of trust sort of thing could help... as in, someone you don't respect gives someone bad karma/credit score, since the person who said so was not trustworthy (in your perspective), what he says about someone else should be ignored. 'course, trust is sort of complicated, since there's the 'i trust this person is a good person' and there's the 'i trust this person is able to keep himself from being impersonated', both of which are important.
i think that the biggest problem that could cause identity theft is a combination of that it doesn't require much information to impersonate someone (respectable companies maintain respect even after they make mistakes... which they shouldn't get away with easily) and that the identifying information, once you identify yourself, the person you identified yourself to now has the ability to identify himself as you (kind of like giving out your private key when you should have only given out your public key; that waiter could write down your credit card number, or someone could potentially hack/leak/misappropriate some organization's database of ssid's or whatevers, or any number of things).
i definitely agree with not using the credit card much. but even cash represents something intangible... sigh.
i'd guess that there are more than a few librarians who are uncomfortable about their position regarding piracy. they're expected to support copyright, but are also expected to spread knowledge; the two aren't necessarily very compatible.
anyway, book sellers generally like libraries, since they generate a lot of positive side-effects, at a more noticable level than p2p piracy typically does; people that wouldn't have bought a book read it and tell their friends, for example -- not to mention that libraries buy zillions of books.
well, there was a funny 'unshelved' strip or two on the topic anyway:)
In fact, Google is a model here. They are making it ridiculously easy to get access to data in all kinds of formats. ok, i'm sort of offtopic here, but how come i can't have imap access to my gmail account? having only pop access is kind of annoying (for example, since i don't know of a way to check what got caught by the spam filter without having to go to the website...)
Why should you be able to refuse to obey a properly formed court order? well, personally i think it's different from not giving over a key since, well, even though they're very similar, a physical key is an object and an encryption key or password is a tiny piece of knowledge. my opinion is that since it's data it ought to be treated differently. i know not everyone will agree with me there:) i guess we just differ in opinion. my opinion is that keeping quiet might not be the right thing to do in some situations, but never should be illegal (though the laws in most countries are otherwise).
also, from what i hear, generally searches tend to be quite disruptive, and people don't really complain about them since they don't happen to most people. i don't have any first hand experience on the topic, heh.
i suppose the most appropriate analogy, rather than the key to one's house (something easy to break into and look around), would be if you had a safe that for whatever reason was secure enough that an attacker could not look inside of, and so should the police, with a warrant, be allowed to imprison someone who doesn't give the combination? or another example which is further but still vaguely relevant, suppose some crime occurs, and they can't find some important piece of evidence, and they ask a suspect that they have reason to believe knows it, "where is $FOO?", to which he replies "i don't know". in the us, we have for example the 4th amendment, which says basically that oughtn't be forced to make yourself guilty -- though, like all elements of our constitution, it is up to a judge's opinion what's covered.
in the case of many encryption protocols today, the key is cycled quickly and is never known personally by the communicators, so it wouldn't be unreasonable for a computer to have forgotten what key it used last week. it gets weirder if we consider the case of 'hidden volumes' -- that is, data on a hard drive that looks random (like, leftovers from deleted files, or just how the drive was when you got it, or whatever), but with the password can be revealed as otherwise; it is extremely difficult to figure out if that unused data is, in fact, a hidden volume without using the key. so in this case, the police would have great difficulty proving that there is something hidden at all.
anyway, the financial institutions won't have much to care about if the government can forcibly ask for an encryption key, since they have a lot of maneuverability within the law, while the commoner has less power legally (ie, can't hire lawyers and lobbyists). furthermore, there is a strong opinion amongst my countrymen (fellow usa dwellers) that you have nothing to hide if you've done nothing illegal.
on the subject of making encryption illegal, it's not too far fetched to make it pseudo-illegal. there was the whole clipper chip thing a while ago... luckily, it was shown to be buggy, and so wasn't forced on people:) the idea behind the clipper chip is that any crypto you use it for, the only people who could read it would be you, anyone you are communicating to, and the police. then, it would be possible to make general purpose encryption illegal with only information-privacy nuts like me complaining.
is there a way to tell which claim(s) they actually achieved? it seems awfully strange that we'd have to have a judge sort it out after a patent has been granted...
the list of tor's server nodes is publicly available. there's only like a few hundred of them. blocking all of tor would be easy, though of course i wish it were otherwise:)
there are other systems that people have been thinking about besides onion routing to obfuscate without using specific servers to get to the internet. to make it unblockable at the ip level it would have to be more distributed than tor is.
though the servers they'd have to block are, indeed, all over the planet, they are not nearly as numerous (or random) as the phrase would suggest.
people generally don't send raw binary data these days; they send things encapsulated in ftp or http or whatever. those are easy to recognize, since routers can keep track of the whole tcp stream (aka eavesdrop) and look inside to see what's going on. so, even if you're downloading an image, you first had to do an http get. some encrypted protocols are obvious (ie, start with a handshake that is easy to recognize), and others are not, but hey, isp's control the routers, so can do whatever they want.
some of them might just slow down any protocol they don't recognize; as far as what sorts of specific evilnesses go on in the harsh reality of routing packets, well, i don't know:)
i'm mainly just saying it's possible. of course, i think isp's oughtn't waste their precious clock cycles reading what's in the payload of ip packets, though they certainly can and do. i am of the opinion that a router ought to simply figure out what paths are clear and send incoming packets to the correct place, and any prioritizing of packets should be done using only information at or below the ip layer, which should be more than enough information to stop abusers.
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i think what others are saying about this is that poisonous towels/paint/whatever are already regulated (nanotechnology is just potentially much more dangerous), and that this is more a power grab than anything else.
i too don't want poisonous paint (or grey goo!), but it might not need any significant change in how things are run. now, if they could just decrease the amount of corruption... and nanotech isn't only an fda thing either, so they better not be the only agency running tests.
the 8 mile thing is, i think, more specific to this prius. the ev1, for example, had a range more like 50 miles, so the range limit isn't quite that bad.
personally i think it's time the government retired ECHELON and implimented a Privacy Analysis of Network Ofuscation of Protocol Transaction Infrastructure for Classified Observation of the Nation.
ugh. that was my worst backronym ever.
weren't the feds using a similar argument in favor of the illegal wiretapping? since the people who wanted to sue couldn't prove they were being wiretapped (since knowledge of who is wiretapped or how is classified/secret/whatever), they couldn't advance, if my memory serves me right.
books get pirated too; it's just awkward to read on a computer screen. i have a huge collection of, uh, 'acquired' books. i also have a huge collection of dead tree books, since they're easier to read and look really cool/impressive on my bookshelves. even once we build smart paper, i'll still buy books, cuz quite frankly, books are awesome.
/. and elsewhere that information is not like physical property. cars and car copiers are in great abundance in these discussions. i won't go into this here.
anyway, copyright is generally thought of in, say, three ways: there's the really old view, where it's a government mandated monopoly on a particular work to keep booksellers and mapsellers out of each others' hair. there's the less old view of it as a social contract between people to monetarily encourage advancement of whatever (still implemented as a government mandated monopoly on the particular work). there's the view which i think you have and many people do that it is a natural right, that a piece of knowledge is akin to the physical property of its creator.
it's been said a million times on
so, here's the inability to opt out: i want to be able to communicate whatever i want to my friends, and i want to be able to listen to what my friends want to communicate to me. in our communication we aren't directly bothering anyone. what right does someone else have to stop us? even if it contains something offensive, one would have to eavesdrop to be offended. worried about slander/libel? i think those are antiquated concepts as well; rather than force speakers to always speak the truth, listeners should accept as truth information that they have verified or from trusted sources. i'm not being disruptive either; i'm communicating with people who want to communicate with me, and not requiring others to experience what i say. plagiarism is an issue, but it's an issue that is not solved by copyright or trademark; it requires a trusted 3rd party to verify who did something, which is pretty much doable in the same way as a pki or a notary.
the pirates aren't trying to opt into a system where they can not experience anything that wasn't released into the public domain. they're trying to opt into a system where there isn't a restriction on sharing information; even when the information you share isn't "your property".
we are at a level of technology that every man can be a library, in a sense. but rather than distribute knowledge to all, we must stay silent and censored? if the argument is that the advancement of arts and such would be limited because of lack of monetary gain, well, it's not likely as true, nowadays. since a work can reach a much larger audience, decreasing our pool of artists to those who work for fun or for contract or to sell merch would be fine. for arts like writing or drawing or music, there's the fun factor. for software, there's less of a fun factor but there will still be programs that need to be written; they just won't be sold; they'll be done on contract. i don't know if i'd want the gov to step in, but many suggest that as well to keep starving artists from, well, starving.
i just don't think copyright is a very good idea anymore, and might not ever have been.
definitely so; tor is pretty overloaded as it is, since the users are not routers. if we are to move our bittorrenting to something else, we'd want something distributed. freenet shows the current best possibility; you don't even need to host a tracker--isohunt or whatever would just be a mapping from a human readable title to a machine readable address. furthermore, freenet's model seems to be pretty good at anonymizing, though it is only so-so for finding stuff. the tor model, where there are reliable servers, has a few problems since anyone can start a server; eavesdroppers might open several servers (you need a lucky 3 to determine sender and receiver), and thus could read traffic that tunnels using only theirs. colluding servers is definitely an issue with tor, while freenet (and others) can use a friend-to-friend system; that is, you can adjust such that you always route through someone you have some trust with. and anyway, onion routing isn't really suitable to filesharing, compared to freenet's dht-esque cache system, which is basically a distributed archive.
yes, definitely true. i guess it's partly my beef against things that are so centralized, compared to something decentralized. like, as far as i know, you can't message (poke? i don't know what they call it) someone on myspace via facebook.
/. either. i've been wondering if there could be a kind of distributed general social network; as in, one that didn't have each social network be an individual island. i'd be into a system like that, especially since i could run my own server of it (or share one with friends, which is what happens with my little blog now), and run my own blog off it, etc, while still being connected.
also, since everyone uses one thing, it decreases the ability of people to use something else; as an example, a friend of mine who is really quite capable of designing his own stuff has decided to abandon his blog in favor of putting his random musings on facebook, since most of his friends wouldn't check rss but get facebook stuff. if he tags something with me, i see it in my mail and log in to facebook to read it, so i'm not left out, but if i didn't have a facebook account i would be. my personal use of facebook has primarily consisted of accepting other people's friend requests, while i maintain my own little blog-like thing separately. the downside is that few of my non-technical friends read it (not like it had anything of content anyway).
yeah, i guess it's the aspect of having everything that is online and social on one page that people like.
as mentioned elsewhere, there's really not much difference between a text message and an email; or a 'message' or 'poke'. and there's not much difference between a blog post, a blog post's reply, a forum reply, and a post on
ah, for me, my sci-fi experiences have been usually less spacy, with william gibson and neal stephenson being among my favorites. more recently i went into the hyperion universe, which very interesting (though the sequels weren't as fun as the first).
for a while (say, 10th grade or so) i read a lot of simon hawke: a mediocre but fun author (and he had some great titles). no, they were not good books, but that's the neat thing about reading; the more you do it the more you can enjoy it. later i got the hitchhiker's guide, a lot of orson scott card, foundation...
i've always bought a lot of physical books, and more recently i have acquired a large, uh, illegitimate electronic collection as well. during high school it was common for me to keep myself in my room with a book; since college started i've been doing it less (also with discovery of anime).
anyway, the only harry potter book i've read was the goblet of fire (don't know what number that is), which was just lying around the house. i was not especially impressed... i guess the whole magic system just seemed too random. i don't think it's cuz i started with a random book either; the system is such that the author can just pull some spell out of nowhere to satisfy the plot.
offtopic: i noticed your sig; are you building a sci-fi universe of some sort?
yes, in japan text messaging is, as far as i know, equivalent to email (they even use the same english-esque word). in my opinion this is the way it should be... phone companies have been getting away with expensive text messaging when you could be doing cheap email.
connecting through ssl doesn't make email more secure; it can be messed with by your mailserver, the mailserver of whoever you're talking to, or anyone in between those. the usefulness of ssl or ssh is that it is more difficult for me to read/modify your mail/password (i have to hack a server as opposed to optionally controlling a router).
gpg really is what makes it secure. still, ssl is a plus. strangely gmail defaults to having it off... weird. and they don't do imap, which makes me sad.
but anyway, the whole social network thing largely exists so that the owners of those servers get to read your messages -- and let future employers, etc, read them too, for a fee. and they don't really do much that people couldn't set up on their own (like, have everyone make an rss feed of their life and aggregate it, is an example).
employers use facebook (and others) to keep track employees (future or not)... just thought you should know.
ender's game, for me. considering the site we're on, i don't think i'm very unique in this.
what!? you mean we're bloatware? :)
in america we've got a tradition of defecating on the constitution whenever someone wants something that the constitution doesn't. when they want to censor $FOO, they can just say "$FOO isn't covered by freedom of speech", or, for a separate example "It's freedom of religion, not from religion!". we also have lots of people who try to keep the government in check (aclu is a little crazy but a good thing, for example), which is helpful.
so, america does usually have freer speech than other countries, but it's still not that free. it sounds like whoever wrote that european document was more honest about what he meant than usa politicians who will all support 'free speech' if you ask them -- but only their kind of free speech. ok, kind of an exaggeration, but it's true.
i personally think the whale thing was spot on -- virtually nobody cares about the whales outside of folks who study or are otherwise interested in the environment's animal populations, much like the open-vs-closed argument in software. my parents hardly know anything about computers and wouldn't care about whether they run open or closed software, just like people didn't care whether they got their conveniences from whale blubber or from other sources.
:). i already wonder why we don't have robots do farming for us. i think i'll try giving your book a read.
anyway, the thing about alcoholics in seattle is interesting. looking at your sig's book's description, i think you have thought on the subject a lot
personally i'd like to learn lojban and migrate the world to it; unlike other languages (and english is a terrible offender here), it's provably unambiguous in sentence structure. the choice of english as the standard for international communication is, uh, perhaps a poor choice simply coming from the fact that english speaking countries are very powerful. we do need to have a language that everyone speaks so that we can discuss things; in the past, intellectual discussion happened in latin, while now it's mostly english but with a lot of other languages too.
switching to a language hardly anyone knows but has other benefits would make sense, since everyone has to learn something new (including a primarily english speaker like me). english speakers -- i live in america and a few of my friends are like this -- often have no problem with the language situation being like this, since their language is on top. they might think to themselves that everyone simply ought to learn english. but it could easily have been some other language; china or india have large populations, so switching languages to theirs would result in fewer people having to learn, if that was an argument for using english.
ah, i'm rambling...
this is debated all the time, but i think the overall view is that there are plenty of times fansubs are a hell of a lot better than proper DVD subs, even if it is generally not the case.
i assume you mean don't use credit cards for everyday purchases?
/. karma; it could be bad or good and not really have much reason all the time. perhaps a web of trust sort of thing could help... as in, someone you don't respect gives someone bad karma/credit score, since the person who said so was not trustworthy (in your perspective), what he says about someone else should be ignored. 'course, trust is sort of complicated, since there's the 'i trust this person is a good person' and there's the 'i trust this person is able to keep himself from being impersonated', both of which are important.
cuz some things, like buying a house pretty much require credit/debit/whatever, since they're so expensive.
anyway, credit score stuff is a lot like
i think that the biggest problem that could cause identity theft is a combination of that it doesn't require much information to impersonate someone (respectable companies maintain respect even after they make mistakes... which they shouldn't get away with easily) and that the identifying information, once you identify yourself, the person you identified yourself to now has the ability to identify himself as you (kind of like giving out your private key when you should have only given out your public key; that waiter could write down your credit card number, or someone could potentially hack/leak/misappropriate some organization's database of ssid's or whatevers, or any number of things).
i definitely agree with not using the credit card much. but even cash represents something intangible... sigh.
i'd guess that there are more than a few librarians who are uncomfortable about their position regarding piracy. they're expected to support copyright, but are also expected to spread knowledge; the two aren't necessarily very compatible.
:)
anyway, book sellers generally like libraries, since they generate a lot of positive side-effects, at a more noticable level than p2p piracy typically does; people that wouldn't have bought a book read it and tell their friends, for example -- not to mention that libraries buy zillions of books.
well, there was a funny 'unshelved' strip or two on the topic anyway
also, from what i hear, generally searches tend to be quite disruptive, and people don't really complain about them since they don't happen to most people. i don't have any first hand experience on the topic, heh.
i suppose the most appropriate analogy, rather than the key to one's house (something easy to break into and look around), would be if you had a safe that for whatever reason was secure enough that an attacker could not look inside of, and so should the police, with a warrant, be allowed to imprison someone who doesn't give the combination? or another example which is further but still vaguely relevant, suppose some crime occurs, and they can't find some important piece of evidence, and they ask a suspect that they have reason to believe knows it, "where is $FOO?", to which he replies "i don't know". in the us, we have for example the 4th amendment, which says basically that oughtn't be forced to make yourself guilty -- though, like all elements of our constitution, it is up to a judge's opinion what's covered.
in the case of many encryption protocols today, the key is cycled quickly and is never known personally by the communicators, so it wouldn't be unreasonable for a computer to have forgotten what key it used last week. it gets weirder if we consider the case of 'hidden volumes' -- that is, data on a hard drive that looks random (like, leftovers from deleted files, or just how the drive was when you got it, or whatever), but with the password can be revealed as otherwise; it is extremely difficult to figure out if that unused data is, in fact, a hidden volume without using the key. so in this case, the police would have great difficulty proving that there is something hidden at all.
anyway, the financial institutions won't have much to care about if the government can forcibly ask for an encryption key, since they have a lot of maneuverability within the law, while the commoner has less power legally (ie, can't hire lawyers and lobbyists). furthermore, there is a strong opinion amongst my countrymen (fellow usa dwellers) that you have nothing to hide if you've done nothing illegal.
on the subject of making encryption illegal, it's not too far fetched to make it pseudo-illegal. there was the whole clipper chip thing a while ago... luckily, it was shown to be buggy, and so wasn't forced on people
is there a way to tell which claim(s) they actually achieved? it seems awfully strange that we'd have to have a judge sort it out after a patent has been granted...
the list of tor's server nodes is publicly available. there's only like a few hundred of them. blocking all of tor would be easy, though of course i wish it were otherwise :)
there are other systems that people have been thinking about besides onion routing to obfuscate without using specific servers to get to the internet. to make it unblockable at the ip level it would have to be more distributed than tor is.
though the servers they'd have to block are, indeed, all over the planet, they are not nearly as numerous (or random) as the phrase would suggest.
people generally don't send raw binary data these days; they send things encapsulated in ftp or http or whatever. those are easy to recognize, since routers can keep track of the whole tcp stream (aka eavesdrop) and look inside to see what's going on. so, even if you're downloading an image, you first had to do an http get. some encrypted protocols are obvious (ie, start with a handshake that is easy to recognize), and others are not, but hey, isp's control the routers, so can do whatever they want.
:)
some of them might just slow down any protocol they don't recognize; as far as what sorts of specific evilnesses go on in the harsh reality of routing packets, well, i don't know
i'm mainly just saying it's possible. of course, i think isp's oughtn't waste their precious clock cycles reading what's in the payload of ip packets, though they certainly can and do. i am of the opinion that a router ought to simply figure out what paths are clear and send incoming packets to the correct place, and any prioritizing of packets should be done using only information at or below the ip layer, which should be more than enough information to stop abusers.
and a computer is a swarm of cooperating transistors.