hi, as another reader of the schneier blog (squids are awesome), i'd like to point out that his focus is more that people are stupid. if there's someone intelligent and determined to blow something up, they aren't gonna need the camp, and if someone goes to the camp, they learn how to handle dynamite... not how to make improvised explosive devices (ied's, for people who like tla's). as numerous others have pointed out, learning about the use of dynamite is probably more constructive than destructive.
the issue with the people driving a propane tank into an airport was more like stupidity about choice of explosive, not delivery. their delivery was fine. they knew 'how to use it', the didn't know 'what to use'. if only they had instead used something potent. suicide bombing is easy, getting your hands on explosives is less so, but anyone with the mix of intelligence and determination can do it. luckily terrorists, domestic and abroad, as well as criminals in general, have no shortage of stupidity.
i don't want to come across as harsh, since we can't express tone in text, but you need to read more schneier. i think you might have the sort of theatrical risk perception he preaches against.
[...]no need to panic. Life goes on.
i second the brooks brothers recommendation. fancy shirts i don't completely hate to wear, and the fact they look decent if you just hang them rather than iron them is really nice.
but the even greater technological innovation in clothing is stain-proof pants, which go well with my drinking problem (airplane reference).
i still prefer t-shirts and shorts though, of course.
there certainly is something microsoft can do about it; as mentioned above, they could use the enormous numbers of computers running their software and do p2p-style communications. then you probably can't do a blacklist based on ip addresses -- you'd almost never run out of things to block. considering the number of windows computers around, they might not even need to have an equivalent to bittorrent trackers; just port scan random ip addresses until you find some that have listening ports with whatever protocol they'd cook up. it could require some serious packet sniffing to block.
it could have a catchy name, like 'the microsoft update network' if they want.
they just want to slow it down enough until they can ensure that they will continue to be a relevant part of music distribution. they (and the music industry is certainly not the only one) don't want to slow down the internet, they want to make the internet like television. perhaps inadvertently, stuff like nat has done it for them; many people don't get the ability to receive tcp connections, and to receive udp (from people you didn't first send a packet to) one often has to do weird little dances like stun. if you can't receive connections even though you want to, well, we've broken the original idea behind the internet. there's nothing wrong with having a firewall that blocks incoming connections... there is however a problem with it being forced on people.
so, making programs in which willing computers can talk to each other -- you know, the whole reason we have the internet -- is harder. not impossible, certainly, but it is at least more annoying.
on the web, unlike the raw internet, there are essentially producers and consumers: a model long standing industries are used to. a client requests a server to do stuff. and as we've seen both here and elsewhere, the existing industries would like very much to be the _only_ producers.
with the internet, we have the opportunity to do more than just port 80, and by gosh we should.
well considering that 'vegas' is both speed neutral and matches the name of the 'usual' tcp congestion control algorithm (tcp reno), and there seems to be a tradition of naming new tcp ideas after cities (say, tcp westwood), i think 'fast' is more inappropriate. fast tcp is a backronym that, well, might be obsoleted some day should we switch to something faster... which will be awkward to name if we keep calling things with faster adjectives... should we name things 'swift tcp', 'agile tcp', 'hypersonic tcp'? those all sound kind of silly. as technology advances you can easily get into some sort of arms race with naming things based on their quality. fast tcp might be faster, but it is still a relatively inappropriate name, in my opinion.
well, regardless of the acceleration observations (which might be caused by other junk pulling on us, unknown phenomena, whatever), it is possible that our galaxy and others were given enough oomph to reach escape velocity relative to everyone else; since space could go on forever (that is to say, the stuff in it might only cover a small portion of it), the oil in a pot analogy doesn't work.
i know it might be a little counterintuitive, the concept of escape velocity (getting enough energy that you'll go fast enough to never have to be pulled back) might apply here. having finite energy does not mean that something can only go a finite distance.
i think the confusion arises from the definition of 'universe' -- people often use it to refer to spacetime or also the stuff in it. in terms of the expansion, we're usually referring to how we notice that we're getting further away from most other things we can see.
of course, all this speculation could get thrown out once we discover something tomorrow...
I'm no web dev, but it would appear that the primary failure point is in the parser itself (for processing POST data). A well tested robust parser under attack should simply respond, "fuzz you!". i'm not a web dev either, but i'm guessing that part of the reason for this is to take a less-tested, less-robust parser (or whatever) and eventually make it into one which is better-tested and more-robust. i mean, we do this with most code (or at least ought to). so the devs can learn how to make their program say "fuzz you!" better:)
people will go to lengths to remove the sterile-ness from software, er, genes that they've got. unfortunately this might be harder than breaking drm, since it may require some serious equipment...
Even if I lie to obtain those transcripts; I still haven't broken any laws. Lying is not against the law unless you are under oath. while personally, i think lying should be legal (i don't feel like explaining it right now, would take a while), it isn't. the us, which is the legal system i assume we're talking about, has a number of laws regarding lying when not under oath, including libel/slander and fraud. so no, you're wrong about that particular point.
anyway, while i don't think that there's any particular right to anonymity, i don't think there's a right to unmask. using obfuscation, one can achieve a level of anonymity or pseudonymity (such is with tor or freenet or i2p (whenever they finish that)) without relying on anonymity at the ip level.
if lying were legal, without changing a lot of infrastructure (an example being changing the credit card system to use digital signatures rather than just a number) there would potentially be a lot of chaos.
Take away the anonymity and people start to behave in a civilized manner. That's just how things work. now, you mention the threat of a denial of service attack. i'm not completely up to date on these things, but aren't they usually just attempts to send a ton of expensive requests of some sort? if dhcp would have helped you, there would only be a few people simultaneously doing it (if it was very distributed, then it was probably not the fault of those participating. they were probably running malicious code from a virus.). if there were, say, less than 5 ip addresses doing the dos, the server could detect (hmm. so-and-so ip address made $BIGNUMBER of requests in the last minute.) and ignore packets from those ip addresses. (and since the admin controls the network too, he could probably totally cut that ip address off or do something nasty:) ) this allows us to defend against such an attack without having to know which student or whatever was behind it. essentially, the ip address makes them pseudonymous, not totally anonymous. i'll assume that the school's routers wouldn't allow forged from fields too easily, and if they did then the whole thing about keeping logs of dhcp wouldn't help either.
furthermore, it doesn't seem to be a reasonable argument for long term storage of the data; to find the culprit behind an attack (should we need to), well, we'd only need data from the past day. i can't off the top of my head think up a reasonable attack that would require keeping data on connections that closed a while ago.
probably the even more major problem than a lack of weaponry is a lack of knowledge of history. if they don't know that a brighter future can exist compared to what they've got, they won't revolt. they'll go on thinking things are double-plus-good. often, the mainland chinese don't even know that Tienanmen square, well, happened.
aye, brothers. we must rally our men to combat the numerous evils which threaten our home, the (imperium|usa|middle kingdom). there can be no rest until the (heretics and mutants|dissenters|dissenters) have been purged, and we may stand united to praise the (emperor|president|chairman)!
but we must not merely look within to find the enemy; there is, too, the enemy without: these (xenos|muslims|capitalists)... the more i look at them, the more i come to know them, the more i come to hate them. i hate them not because they are different, but because they are not capable of pure, (human|american|maoist) (hatred|patriotism|nationalism).*
in the grim (future|present) of the (41st millenium|21st century), there can be only war**!
*ironically, all three benefit greatly from their enemies without; the adeptus mechanicus researches c'tan tech, the usa benefits from middle-eastern oil, china benefits from trade and manufacture. **on drugs/terror/whatever in the us. may vary elsewhere.
war yes, but this is because a government is necessary for a war. however, on the individual level, there are plenty of person-to-person murders or thefts. they're not wars because of scale.
i do not think that removing centralized power alone is going to stop war's elements; i'd like for people to be a lot nicer and smarter, but i guess that's a tall order. most governments may have been originated out of coercion, but people are often willing to create mobs, for example, so removal of coercive governments is either infeasible or not ultimate as people are sheep-like enough that they will trade a large amount of liberty for a minuscule or nonexistent increase in security.
a simple and good solution would be to have smaller governments that are capable of rousing a militia; in modern warfare, it appears to be much more expensive to attack than defend, so the amount of spending on defense needn't be too high. attacking is where the expense is.
grandparent poster says that preparation is necessary, and i think everyone agrees. but there is a significant amount more than is necessary, as currently demonstrated by the american military.
anyway, i think we've strewn offtopic from the great-grandparent post, as it was referring to things like the war on drugs or war on poverty, which aren't really wars.
i'd also like to see the mathier side of the nsa open up. they probably have a lot of really advanced crypto (considering rijndael is only approved for i think secret level, i think). from DES, there's the hint that they already knew about differential cryptanalysis way before the academic community did. they recruit a lot of smart folks, so there could be a lot of interesting research going on.
and yeah, i wish they didn't waste so much time spying on the easy-to-spy-on stuff, like telephone conversations. how boring.
anyway, i am of the theory that jesus was a powerful magic user of some sort who eventually managed to become a lich, coming back from the dead. we already know he cursed trees and raised zombies:)
well, one thing about a not-flat-tax is that, well, if only the top 10 or 20 percent of the taxpayers pay the vast majority of taxes (we have a very unequal distribution of income in the us), why should the poor pay at all? whether the people who only make a little pay their share or not wouldn't affect the overall total much. i think this might have been among the original ideas for how income tax would work in the us. now, everyone has to fill out the paperwork for income tax, though it'd probably be payable only by the very-high-income folks.
under a flat tax system, for the accountants and economists: the accountants would have fewer jobs since it'd be easier to do (less loopholes to look for, etc), and the economists could actually put some of their theories into practice, since the system isn't as artifically complicated:)
a flat tax system would also make some things outside of economics nicer. example: marraige. if someone's married, hesheit will pay lower taxes. i guess someone figured that hesheit needs to feed hisherits family and deserves more money. or something. so, there'd be less politics around marraige (ie, less arguing over whether someone can marry $FOO legally) if it mattered less legally. another example: real estate. currently, you get tax breaks if you have a mortgage. this encourages, quite literally, debt. well, i guess whoever decided this would be a good thing figured that it would encourage people to be able to buy a home, start a stable family, etc. the result is that the middle class gets homes just like they would have without the interference, and the upper class have a much easier time buying property for leasing purposes (if the amount you pay for interest is less than what you get from tenants, you're in good shape; with the decreased taxation, this is a more attractive business model). it's basically an example of something tax-wise that might have been intended to help the poor, but overall just ended up helping the people who had resources already. if we introduce simpler tax laws (in whatever way), i think that there would be a lot of positive side benefits.
i'm not an accountant or an economist either, but i don't think that it's too hard to think about or read books on. it seems artificially complicated.
if it is correctly implemented some protocols are easy to implement, some aren't. drm is likely to be by far the most complicated component in the raw video transfer. it's too bad hdmi couldn't just be, you know, a data stream plus little headers describing aspect ratio or whatever. you'd think people wouldn't have too much difficulty making a secure channel though these days... but they do.
personally, i think a national sales tax (say, 10%) combined with a national income tax (which is only applied to the really high income brackets) would make sense. the taxes paid by the poor are not much higher, and income taxes are placed where they are most effective. i think i remember seeing somewhere that 80% of income taxes come from the top 10% of americans by income (my memory is pretty crappy so i could be talking out of my ass).
anyway, moving taxes to the sales side would also make a lot of people shut up on the illegal immigrant issues -- they'd be paying taxes just like every other blue collar worker simply by going about their daily life. so the people who for whatever reason don't like them will have one less thing to complain about.
another option is to have an income tax which is flat minus a constant; for a purely flat income tax, we set some % of income that you have to give to the government. so, you make x, you must pay (p/100)x to the gov or whatever. the 'negative income tax' is if you make x, you must pay (p/100)x-k to the government. if that turns out to be negative, hey, you're being subsidised:) . it has the benefits of being nice to poor people (which is the general motivation for our complicated tax system, though it certainly is has plenty of (possibly intentional) loopholes), as well as being both simple and continuous, in that there aren't [brackets].
i disagree; i believe we are describing very different things.
you describe something like kazaa, where people can search for files by their human-readable name on some search mechanism built into the system. this system would have problems, as you describe, with vandals "Feeding the P2P systems with bogus-files, for example music files with random noise in the middle of a song". so they'll inaccurately give something a name it shouldn't have. this is a problem with all things where we have to translate from human readable names (such as domain names) to machine routable names (such as ip addresses). personally i believe that this doesn't belong in it.
having a rating system is difficult on a global scale since, as you said, "They would also be likely to build scripts/ programs that would rate their bogus-files as being top quality". having centralized control or centralized rating is potentially bad, since the people rating stuff aren't necessarily good at doing so, even if they are not malicious. if you want to look at, say, torrent sites, we realize that we are more likely to get quality from the more focused sites; you want anime? go to boxtorrents. stuff like that. the people at box are determined to maintain quality and will generally not link to stuff that isn't. a global rating system will be automated (it'd have to be distributed), so it can't do the same thing as easily; we will have similar problems as occasionally happen with/.'s rating of posts. they're usually good, but often incorrectly moderated.
you mention a method of having supernodes, where nodes with good uptime and quality become like dns root servers.... alas, this is not reasonable. it's not hard to have good uptime or appear decent, and thus the root servers can collude against the rest. recall that the people who would be attacking the system could have MUCH more money and resources than us. so, they could pour money into building big iron servers, and the network would be so happy to have them there as supernodes, they would be able to manipulate things. here is an example of what might have been an attack on tor a while ago:
so no, i don't think that that is a feasible system.vyou can look at mute as an example of something that addresses by human name and thus has lots of mistreatment. letting people run their own little systems of finding things addressed by hash (machine readable and not tamperable) is enough; let the web (which we'd also be running over this) handle the issues of people finding stuff. it works, and people can use their judgment. there would be karma in quality of files or sites, but it would be simply in human terms. freenet (theoretically) should get rid of useless files that nobody wants because people simply don't request them and thus they are not cached.
as far as reaching the ordinary internet goes, one could simply set up a proxy and people would route connections to it as usual.
incidentally, if you wish to continue the discussion, my contact info is on my little webpage (including pgp public key, i think). email is a bit more easily used for me than/. postings:)
ah, yes, the thing i am planning is similar to what you describe, in that it involves many ideas that anonymizing networks like tor or freenet only implement a few of. it's called banana (there was a project on sourceforge i and a friend started with the same name, but it sat dormant for almost a year, and i've started from scratch in my free time about a month ago, and _lots_ to do, and i'm basically abandoning the piece of crap i left on sf.)
however, i disagree on some points you had; personally, i think it should be entirely pseudonymous -- in other words, there would be no 'logging in', unless one is logging into a server reached over the network (which, incidentally, would be anonymous).
other things that would be cool: clouds, using kademlia (dht) with 512 bits to find nodes adjacent to a server followed by distance-vector routing to actually get to it, lots of hash verification... lots of ideas here.
one thing about it though, is that keeping it decentralized is important; no one place to shut it down. they system, therefore, can't reliably do a karma system on the quality of 'uploads'; this would have to be decentralized. quite frankly, i've got enough on my inchoate coding plate to do before attempting karma. karma can be done by servers on the overlay network. similar issue with a search engine. let things be indexed by hashes, not human-readable names. if it's human readable, then it's not as easy to do and isn't indexable in the same way.
the purpose of my overlay network would be to supply all the usefulness of a (second) internet (tcp-like connections) as well as freenet / bittorrent swarms. freenet is a big dht, which is fine for small files but not so good for larger ones. i think that onion routing isn't useful in banana, but similar ideas there.
so, take 2,3,4,5,6,10 out (and the 'log in' part of 7), and you're close to my idea, except that i add in the useful feature of tor's hidden services; let people run servers that are accessible over the overlay network which are literally just like having a host on the usual internet.
basically, i think your desires are too p2p oriented; you want something like napster, while i want something like the internet in general + arbitrarily hosted data. someone could build a napster on top of banana, but that's too focused. incidentally, if you want to learn more about distributed search engines, you should check out yacy:
yeah... i think mr. barwasp is off his rocker. "tor and freenet unite..." just doesn't really make sense. unless he means he wants to design a new protocol where you onion route to a friend-to-friend network...which makes little sense anyway. i'll throw in my two cents:
issues with tor:
there are only a few hundred servers donating time, many of which are desktops, not real servers, and they have to accomodate a lot of load.
when your tor daemon sets up a route (selects three tor servers to hop through), it selects them (almost) at random--which means that you will have to deal with connections that bounce from continent to continent, which are relatively slow. you might bounce off the uk, to china, then to germany; it's fun to get google in different languages, but it is slow.
other p2p thingies will try to maintain connections with people who are fast with respect to you. tor doesn't, partly to maintain security/anonymity. it's just kind of a problem with onion routing in general.
tor is going to get faster if more people donate server usage and people build faster inter-continental lines. but, considering people right now mostly use tor when they want to do something that requires anonymity i think the wait would be worth it.
i don't know as much about freenet, but in general overlay networks like freenet, which are distributed among peers, improve with scale.
i'm starting to write my own kind of anon network, but i can't imagine either it or freenet getting serious speed until everyone and his dog are using it--in which case it'd be reasonably fast, though by nature still slower than the internet.
Slashdot Mirror
definitely agree with your point. anyway, an unimportant nitpick and|or sidenote, fuzzy logic is something different:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzy_logic
the issue with the people driving a propane tank into an airport was more like stupidity about choice of explosive, not delivery. their delivery was fine. they knew 'how to use it', the didn't know 'what to use'. if only they had instead used something potent. suicide bombing is easy, getting your hands on explosives is less so, but anyone with the mix of intelligence and determination can do it. luckily terrorists, domestic and abroad, as well as criminals in general, have no shortage of stupidity.
i don't want to come across as harsh, since we can't express tone in text, but you need to read more schneier. i think you might have the sort of theatrical risk perception he preaches against. [...]no need to panic. Life goes on.
i second the brooks brothers recommendation. fancy shirts i don't completely hate to wear, and the fact they look decent if you just hang them rather than iron them is really nice.
but the even greater technological innovation in clothing is stain-proof pants, which go well with my drinking problem (airplane reference).
i still prefer t-shirts and shorts though, of course.
there certainly is something microsoft can do about it; as mentioned above, they could use the enormous numbers of computers running their software and do p2p-style communications. then you probably can't do a blacklist based on ip addresses -- you'd almost never run out of things to block. considering the number of windows computers around, they might not even need to have an equivalent to bittorrent trackers; just port scan random ip addresses until you find some that have listening ports with whatever protocol they'd cook up. it could require some serious packet sniffing to block.
it could have a catchy name, like 'the microsoft update network' if they want.
so, making programs in which willing computers can talk to each other -- you know, the whole reason we have the internet -- is harder. not impossible, certainly, but it is at least more annoying.
on the web, unlike the raw internet, there are essentially producers and consumers: a model long standing industries are used to. a client requests a server to do stuff. and as we've seen both here and elsewhere, the existing industries would like very much to be the _only_ producers.
with the internet, we have the opportunity to do more than just port 80, and by gosh we should.
well considering that 'vegas' is both speed neutral and matches the name of the 'usual' tcp congestion control algorithm (tcp reno), and there seems to be a tradition of naming new tcp ideas after cities (say, tcp westwood), i think 'fast' is more inappropriate. fast tcp is a backronym that, well, might be obsoleted some day should we switch to something faster... which will be awkward to name if we keep calling things with faster adjectives... should we name things 'swift tcp', 'agile tcp', 'hypersonic tcp'? those all sound kind of silly. as technology advances you can easily get into some sort of arms race with naming things based on their quality. fast tcp might be faster, but it is still a relatively inappropriate name, in my opinion.
well, regardless of the acceleration observations (which might be caused by other junk pulling on us, unknown phenomena, whatever), it is possible that our galaxy and others were given enough oomph to reach escape velocity relative to everyone else; since space could go on forever (that is to say, the stuff in it might only cover a small portion of it), the oil in a pot analogy doesn't work.
i know it might be a little counterintuitive, the concept of escape velocity (getting enough energy that you'll go fast enough to never have to be pulled back) might apply here. having finite energy does not mean that something can only go a finite distance.
i think the confusion arises from the definition of 'universe' -- people often use it to refer to spacetime or also the stuff in it. in terms of the expansion, we're usually referring to how we notice that we're getting further away from most other things we can see.
of course, all this speculation could get thrown out once we discover something tomorrow...
that'll be the future of drm :)
people will go to lengths to remove the sterile-ness from software, er, genes that they've got. unfortunately this might be harder than breaking drm, since it may require some serious equipment...
anyway, while i don't think that there's any particular right to anonymity, i don't think there's a right to unmask. using obfuscation, one can achieve a level of anonymity or pseudonymity (such is with tor or freenet or i2p (whenever they finish that)) without relying on anonymity at the ip level.
if lying were legal, without changing a lot of infrastructure (an example being changing the credit card system to use digital signatures rather than just a number) there would potentially be a lot of chaos.
furthermore, it doesn't seem to be a reasonable argument for long term storage of the data; to find the culprit behind an attack (should we need to), well, we'd only need data from the past day. i can't off the top of my head think up a reasonable attack that would require keeping data on connections that closed a while ago.
probably the even more major problem than a lack of weaponry is a lack of knowledge of history. if they don't know that a brighter future can exist compared to what they've got, they won't revolt. they'll go on thinking things are double-plus-good. often, the mainland chinese don't even know that Tienanmen square, well, happened.
aye, brothers. we must rally our men to combat the numerous evils which threaten our home, the (imperium|usa|middle kingdom). there can be no rest until the (heretics and mutants|dissenters|dissenters) have been purged, and we may stand united to praise the (emperor|president|chairman)!
but we must not merely look within to find the enemy; there is, too, the enemy without: these (xenos|muslims|capitalists)... the more i look at them, the more i come to know them, the more i come to hate them. i hate them not because they are different, but because they are not capable of pure, (human|american|maoist) (hatred|patriotism|nationalism).*
in the grim (future|present) of the (41st millenium|21st century), there can be only war**!
*ironically, all three benefit greatly from their enemies without; the adeptus mechanicus researches c'tan tech, the usa benefits from middle-eastern oil, china benefits from trade and manufacture.
**on drugs/terror/whatever in the us. may vary elsewhere.
ok, that was totally offtopic, but fun to type.
war yes, but this is because a government is necessary for a war. however, on the individual level, there are plenty of person-to-person murders or thefts. they're not wars because of scale.
i do not think that removing centralized power alone is going to stop war's elements; i'd like for people to be a lot nicer and smarter, but i guess that's a tall order. most governments may have been originated out of coercion, but people are often willing to create mobs, for example, so removal of coercive governments is either infeasible or not ultimate as people are sheep-like enough that they will trade a large amount of liberty for a minuscule or nonexistent increase in security.
a simple and good solution would be to have smaller governments that are capable of rousing a militia; in modern warfare, it appears to be much more expensive to attack than defend, so the amount of spending on defense needn't be too high. attacking is where the expense is.
grandparent poster says that preparation is necessary, and i think everyone agrees. but there is a significant amount more than is necessary, as currently demonstrated by the american military.
anyway, i think we've strewn offtopic from the great-grandparent post, as it was referring to things like the war on drugs or war on poverty, which aren't really wars.
true.
i'd also like to see the mathier side of the nsa open up. they probably have a lot of really advanced crypto (considering rijndael is only approved for i think secret level, i think). from DES, there's the hint that they already knew about differential cryptanalysis way before the academic community did. they recruit a lot of smart folks, so there could be a lot of interesting research going on.
and yeah, i wish they didn't waste so much time spying on the easy-to-spy-on stuff, like telephone conversations. how boring.
nice sig :)
:)
l l/Matthew27_50-52.jpg
anyway, i am of the theory that jesus was a powerful magic user of some sort who eventually managed to become a lich, coming back from the dead. we already know he cursed trees and raised zombies
http://russellsteapot.com/images/knowyourbible/fu
well, one thing about a not-flat-tax is that, well, if only the top 10 or 20 percent of the taxpayers pay the vast majority of taxes (we have a very unequal distribution of income in the us), why should the poor pay at all? whether the people who only make a little pay their share or not wouldn't affect the overall total much. i think this might have been among the original ideas for how income tax would work in the us. now, everyone has to fill out the paperwork for income tax, though it'd probably be payable only by the very-high-income folks.
:)
under a flat tax system, for the accountants and economists: the accountants would have fewer jobs since it'd be easier to do (less loopholes to look for, etc), and the economists could actually put some of their theories into practice, since the system isn't as artifically complicated
a flat tax system would also make some things outside of economics nicer. example: marraige. if someone's married, hesheit will pay lower taxes. i guess someone figured that hesheit needs to feed hisherits family and deserves more money. or something. so, there'd be less politics around marraige (ie, less arguing over whether someone can marry $FOO legally) if it mattered less legally. another example: real estate. currently, you get tax breaks if you have a mortgage. this encourages, quite literally, debt. well, i guess whoever decided this would be a good thing figured that it would encourage people to be able to buy a home, start a stable family, etc. the result is that the middle class gets homes just like they would have without the interference, and the upper class have a much easier time buying property for leasing purposes (if the amount you pay for interest is less than what you get from tenants, you're in good shape; with the decreased taxation, this is a more attractive business model). it's basically an example of something tax-wise that might have been intended to help the poor, but overall just ended up helping the people who had resources already. if we introduce simpler tax laws (in whatever way), i think that there would be a lot of positive side benefits.
i'm not an accountant or an economist either, but i don't think that it's too hard to think about or read books on. it seems artificially complicated.
personally, i think a national sales tax (say, 10%) combined with a national income tax (which is only applied to the really high income brackets) would make sense. the taxes paid by the poor are not much higher, and income taxes are placed where they are most effective. i think i remember seeing somewhere that 80% of income taxes come from the top 10% of americans by income (my memory is pretty crappy so i could be talking out of my ass).
:) . it has the benefits of being nice to poor people (which is the general motivation for our complicated tax system, though it certainly is has plenty of (possibly intentional) loopholes), as well as being both simple and continuous, in that there aren't [brackets].
anyway, moving taxes to the sales side would also make a lot of people shut up on the illegal immigrant issues -- they'd be paying taxes just like every other blue collar worker simply by going about their daily life. so the people who for whatever reason don't like them will have one less thing to complain about.
another option is to have an income tax which is flat minus a constant; for a purely flat income tax, we set some % of income that you have to give to the government. so, you make x, you must pay (p/100)x to the gov or whatever. the 'negative income tax' is if you make x, you must pay (p/100)x-k to the government. if that turns out to be negative, hey, you're being subsidised
i disagree; i believe we are describing very different things.
/.'s rating of posts. they're usually good, but often incorrectly moderated.
/. postings :)
you describe something like kazaa, where people can search for files by their human-readable name on some search mechanism built into the system. this system would have problems, as you describe, with vandals "Feeding the P2P systems with bogus-files, for example music files with random noise in the middle of a song". so they'll inaccurately give something a name it shouldn't have. this is a problem with all things where we have to translate from human readable names (such as domain names) to machine routable names (such as ip addresses). personally i believe that this doesn't belong in it.
having a rating system is difficult on a global scale since, as you said, "They would also be likely to build scripts/ programs that would rate their bogus-files as being top quality". having centralized control or centralized rating is potentially bad, since the people rating stuff aren't necessarily good at doing so, even if they are not malicious. if you want to look at, say, torrent sites, we realize that we are more likely to get quality from the more focused sites; you want anime? go to boxtorrents. stuff like that. the people at box are determined to maintain quality and will generally not link to stuff that isn't. a global rating system will be automated (it'd have to be distributed), so it can't do the same thing as easily; we will have similar problems as occasionally happen with
you mention a method of having supernodes, where nodes with good uptime and quality become like dns root servers.... alas, this is not reasonable. it's not hard to have good uptime or appear decent, and thus the root servers can collude against the rest. recall that the people who would be attacking the system could have MUCH more money and resources than us. so, they could pour money into building big iron servers, and the network would be so happy to have them there as supernodes, they would be able to manipulate things. here is an example of what might have been an attack on tor a while ago:
http://jadeserpent.i2p.tin0.de/tor-dc-nodes-2.txt
so no, i don't think that that is a feasible system.vyou can look at mute as an example of something that addresses by human name and thus has lots of mistreatment. letting people run their own little systems of finding things addressed by hash (machine readable and not tamperable) is enough; let the web (which we'd also be running over this) handle the issues of people finding stuff. it works, and people can use their judgment. there would be karma in quality of files or sites, but it would be simply in human terms. freenet (theoretically) should get rid of useless files that nobody wants because people simply don't request them and thus they are not cached.
as far as reaching the ordinary internet goes, one could simply set up a proxy and people would route connections to it as usual.
incidentally, if you wish to continue the discussion, my contact info is on my little webpage (including pgp public key, i think). email is a bit more easily used for me than
ah, yes, the thing i am planning is similar to what you describe, in that it involves many ideas that anonymizing networks like tor or freenet only implement a few of. it's called banana (there was a project on sourceforge i and a friend started with the same name, but it sat dormant for almost a year, and i've started from scratch in my free time about a month ago, and _lots_ to do, and i'm basically abandoning the piece of crap i left on sf.)
however, i disagree on some points you had; personally, i think it should be entirely pseudonymous -- in other words, there would be no 'logging in', unless one is logging into a server reached over the network (which, incidentally, would be anonymous).
other things that would be cool: clouds, using kademlia (dht) with 512 bits to find nodes adjacent to a server followed by distance-vector routing to actually get to it, lots of hash verification... lots of ideas here.
one thing about it though, is that keeping it decentralized is important; no one place to shut it down. they system, therefore, can't reliably do a karma system on the quality of 'uploads'; this would have to be decentralized. quite frankly, i've got enough on my inchoate coding plate to do before attempting karma. karma can be done by servers on the overlay network. similar issue with a search engine. let things be indexed by hashes, not human-readable names. if it's human readable, then it's not as easy to do and isn't indexable in the same way.
the purpose of my overlay network would be to supply all the usefulness of a (second) internet (tcp-like connections) as well as freenet / bittorrent swarms. freenet is a big dht, which is fine for small files but not so good for larger ones. i think that onion routing isn't useful in banana, but similar ideas there.
so, take 2,3,4,5,6,10 out (and the 'log in' part of 7), and you're close to my idea, except that i add in the useful feature of tor's hidden services; let people run servers that are accessible over the overlay network which are literally just like having a host on the usual internet.
basically, i think your desires are too p2p oriented; you want something like napster, while i want something like the internet in general + arbitrarily hosted data. someone could build a napster on top of banana, but that's too focused. incidentally, if you want to learn more about distributed search engines, you should check out yacy:
http://www.yacy.net/yacy/
yeah... i think mr. barwasp is off his rocker. "tor and freenet unite..." just doesn't really make sense. unless he means he wants to design a new protocol where you onion route to a friend-to-friend network...which makes little sense anyway. i'll throw in my two cents:
issues with tor:
there are only a few hundred servers donating time, many of which are desktops, not real servers, and they have to accomodate a lot of load.
when your tor daemon sets up a route (selects three tor servers to hop through), it selects them (almost) at random--which means that you will have to deal with connections that bounce from continent to continent, which are relatively slow. you might bounce off the uk, to china, then to germany; it's fun to get google in different languages, but it is slow.
other p2p thingies will try to maintain connections with people who are fast with respect to you. tor doesn't, partly to maintain security/anonymity. it's just kind of a problem with onion routing in general.
tor is going to get faster if more people donate server usage and people build faster inter-continental lines. but, considering people right now mostly use tor when they want to do something that requires anonymity i think the wait would be worth it.
i don't know as much about freenet, but in general overlay networks like freenet, which are distributed among peers, improve with scale.
i'm starting to write my own kind of anon network, but i can't imagine either it or freenet getting serious speed until everyone and his dog are using it--in which case it'd be reasonably fast, though by nature still slower than the internet.
roads? :)
ok, i won't pretend to know much about this event, but i'd hardly call it a riot...
http://www.gamejew.com/?q=node/67
http://one.revver.com/watch/254524