Um, no. In fact, the link is the other way around. Permissive sexual attitudes reduce teen pregnancy. (And measuring 'illegitimacy' is idiotic. 'illegitimacy' just means 'children born to unmarried parents. It doesn't day anything about anything. For all you know, they all got married the next day, or just lived together for the next 20 years. And the 'legitimate' parents got divorced.)
Teen pregnancy rates, however, have never risen, not since we've been measuring them in 1976.
And let's check some other countries, ones more liberal about displaying sex on TV:
Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland.
For every 100 women under 19, they had no more than one give birth, and many were lower than that.
The US? It had five out of a hundred.
Which states have the highest teen pregnancy rates? Well, it almost exactly follows the divorce rate. The highest one?
Mississippi, that cesspool of moral filth, at 6.5 per 100. Then Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and Arkansaw, all at or above 6 per 100.
You can take your 'moral values' and shove them.
OTOH, California is at 4.1, which is extremely high for a liberal state. (Vs New York at three and New Hampishire winning the race at two.) We could blame Ahnold, but it is possible it's Hollywood. Or, more likely in my book, it's the large number of poor Hispanic aliens. (Please note I have nothing against them, expecially not hot Hispanic 18 year-old girls having sex with people.)
There is nowhere to purchase CDs except at Walmart and other large chains like Best Buy and Mediaplay, except online, and I'm talking about an hour radius here. (And, yes, there's plenty of stuff within an hour's drive, just not a city over a million people.) There's half a dozen theaters, and none of them show NC-17 movies.
You live in a universe where, if you are displeased with something, you can just go and get it somewhere else.
But the problem isn't that I can't get to CDs, it's that that companies know if they want to be able to put it on the shelves, they have to alter it so it gets the ratings that lets it be in stores. And thus it's altered for everyone, including people who buy it online and at independent stores.
Here it's obvious my choices have been limited. Where you are, it's not.
I disagree. It is incredibly hard to imagine a future like that because no one thinks alike. In order for every single person to shun a human being they would all have to agree that the person was worthy of being shunned. It would take quite an offense to do that. And even if it were possible, to disallow it would be to deny that society the right to make its own decisions. You would be denying individual people's rights to choose who they associate and deal with. That's a cost that far outweighs the prevention of a hypothetical situation that would never happen in the first place.
I think you're failing to grasp the point that this is already happening. Yes, everyone's not in on it, but if 75% of people decide to shun you, you're fairly screwed, even if in theory you can get the other 25% to buy food for you, and that's what is happening with voluntary ratings...a large percentage of people are never are presented with the option of buying certain ratings. This doesn't just affect those people, it affects everyone, because no one makes a product they can't put in stores.
Wal-Mart has every right not to sell something they don't want to sell, including AO-rated games. If the ratings didn't exist, Wal-Mart would still find a way to discriminate based on content. If you don't like it, then don't shop at Wal-Mart. I haven't for years, and it's been great.
Don't get me wrong, I also dislike voluntary rating systems, but that is because they are arbitrary and not terribly useful to me as a parenting tool, not because they result in self-censorship. Censorship only becomes opressive when it comes from the government. Wal-Mart is still within its rights.
Here's a question for you: How does Walmart exist?
Walmart exists because we, as society, say it serves a useful function and thus let it exist. I agree that 'people' should not have to sell what they don't want to sell, but Walmart is not a people. Walmart is a self-organizing system we set up to serve our needs. It should not be making moral judgements.
I mean, I agree with what you're saying. It's hard to see how voluntary ratings are evil, because there doesn't seem to be any obvious bad input, just a bad result.
So let's think of an analogy: Shunning.
Shunning when people in a community refuse to interact with someone. They won't sell them food or buy their stuff or anything. It's all well and good when a single community does it...the person basically has to leave.
Now imagine if, say, the whole state shunned someone, and they were reduced to hitchhiking (because they couldn't buy gas.) via out-of-state people. This is basically where AO games are now, and it really worried me.
And it's not too hard to imagine a future where the whole country shuns someone, and they die of dehydration in a ditch, via perfectly legal voluntary shunning. No one will sell them food or water or let them on their property. See the problem?
Walmart is too powerful to allow it to voluntarily shun games, and it's getting more powerful. And my hatred of voluntary rating systems is fueled more by movie theatres, where it's already happened...you cannot make an NC-17 movie in this country and have it in any theatre except the twenty porn theatres still open in various major cities.
Luckily, video games can't entirely go that route, because you can mail order them. (Although, like I said, it's easiest to just alter the content.) OTOH, I'm waiting for TV stations to refuse to air ads for them...
I think people who have a screen full of icons when they start up are silly, especially if they also do what I do: Store in-transit items on it.
I mean, that's where I download stuff to, that's where I write notes, etc. Every few days I clean it off.
Lots of other people do this, and also have program-launching icons, which is just idiotic, because you can't find anything. If you want programs you can get to at any time, there's the launch bar. If you want more programs than that, there's the start menu.
The desktop would be crappy for icons anyway, even if it wasn't used for temporary storage, because Windows likes to move stuff around on it.
Um...what the fuck is 'per capita GDP'? That's just something you made up, isn't it, because it's a pretty stupid-ass term.
What that term actually says is that 'People in Missouri make almost as much as people in the UK or Belgium'. Oooo, scary. Almost as much!
Its economy is larger than those of Ireland, Luxembourg, Finland, Greece, or Portugal
Luxembourg? WTF? Do they even have an 'economy'? And didn't you then say it has a larger population than Ireland and Finland?
So, to rephrase that paragraph in a saner manner:
That means that people in Missouri make slightly less than people the UK or Belgium, and slight more more than those in France, Germany, Italy, or Spain. It is larger than Luxembourg (Yes, you didn't say that, but everyone is bigger than Luxembourg.), Ireland, and Finland, and thus so is its economy.
The one unqualified comparison is that its economy is bigger than Greece and Portugal, and it's probably smaller. Those are some real EU leaders, there.
This has been a your daily lesson of 'How to lie with statistics'. if you look at what he claims, you can see Missouri fits in perfectly as a member of the EU. (Except that it's not a county, of course, nor is it in Europe.)
I think you have no idea how I feel about this. I absolutely loath 'voluntary' rating systems that result in censorship. And, yes, it is censorship when large chains will not carry your product unless you alter it, even for sale to adults.
The AO rating for games and the NC-17 rating for movies result in censorship to try to get the next better rating, and they need to immediately go away. I don't care if it's some magical combination of voluntary ratings (Which were created under the threat of laws) and voluntary policies at stores and movie theatres. If they are keeping material out of the hands of adults, they are bad.
However, this is almost totally unrelated, as what people are talking about isn't in the game. It requires external software to enable. If kids can go and get this software, they can, um, go get a Nude Raider patch or, you know, normal porn. This is some idiot trying to stir up trouble.
As for your little rant, it's good to learn you think fiction portraying sex is worse than fiction portraying violence, because 'sex' is a bigger problem than 'violence' among kids, even though it's clearly not.
A lot more kids have sex than commit violence. However, 'problems' are not measured by the amount of people doing them. In the real world, however, one kid shooting another is a lot worse than hundred kids fucking.
And the only reason 'teen pregnancy' is a problem is because we refuse to recognize that teenagers have sex. Heaven forbid parents put their foot down and say to their daughters 'If you want to continue to live in this house, you'll go on the pill'.
It's the job of parents to teach their children to be responsible...when they're 16 years old, it's a rather late to be saying 'I absolutely forbid this action'. It's now time to be saying 'Here is how you do this action responsibly'.
But you continue sprouting gibberish about how it takes a more mature child to 'handle' sex responsibly. It doesn't take any more responsibly than driving a car, and a hell of a lot less responsiblity than operating a gun.
Oh, but wait, you were comparing having sex to watching violence, which shows what a hypocrite you are. Watching sex doesn't require any maturity at all. Well, not any over what would be required to play GTA to start with.
The only episode of the HBO show 'Going to California' I ever saw was set in a nudiest colony.
Naked people everywhere, full body shots.
No sex at all, explicit or implied, no violence, a nice, wholesome theme about how the young, cool nudiests wanted to get rid of the old, ugly nudiests, the ones who had built the place up and lived there, and how the cool young people got their comeuppance.
There is no way in hell that will ever air on broadcast, yet it has a lot less 'sexual content' than many prime time TV shows.
This is why many systems indicate at the login prompt that their use is restricted and requires explicit permission.
Yeah, that's a kind of 'cover your ass' message. While ignorance of the law isn't an excuse, ignorance of the facts is, and if you can demonstrate that you did not know access was restricted, you were not unauthorized.
So, in theory, it keeps people from guessing a login and getting in, although that would never work in court anyway, unless the login was 'guest' or 'anonymous'. Asking for a 'password' is a pretty damn clear message.
This is also why anonymous FTP servers print a message saying you can log in with 'anonymous'...in theory, it might be illegal to do so if they don't say that. Although an argument can be made that it's basically the same thing as presenting no credientials when accessing other services...if they actually want 'anonymous' restricted, they shouldn't have had it accept any password.
NAT isn't 'easier' than IPv6. NAT is a lot harder to do right, and thus there are constant struggles WRT it. Every single day there's people complaining that their VoIP phone doesn't work behind their DSL, or whatever. If ISPs would just support IPv6, it would not only be easier than a NAT, it would be easier than IPv4!
Constant technological advances had made NAT almost as usable as a real connection, but I'm fairly certain 'almost as usable as the actually working network we already have' is a very stupid thing to strive for.
Anyway, the firewall effect of NAT is more or less an accident, and has resulted in idiocies where operating system manufacturers (You know who I'm talking about.) have left holes via open ports, with the assumption you will use a firewall, which is the fucking stupidest thing in the world, and results in any computer hooked up to the actual internet being owned in 12 minutes.
Now, of course, to get around that, they've started including firewalls on the computer itself. Which is akin to having a lock on your front door anyone can pick, so you cleverly padlock a steel plate over it, so they don't have to go out and buy a steel-cage entrance way. How about just fixing the lock, thanks in advance.
But having tons of computer automatically firewalled has made the internet less safer, not more, because the lose of usability has resulted in holes being punched everywhere, while everyone assumes they are safe. (Go and check how many 'smart' people put their computer in the DMZ in their DSL router, so all their p2p works. And incidentally putting it outside the firewall.)
And resulted in a universe where you still can't set your windows machine to listen on a real IP and an internal one, and only do file sharing on the internal one. Oh, no, you're supposed to use a NAT firewall instead.
While firewalling is a moderately useful concept as a last line of defense (Filtering specific ports that are just used internally, not all of them.), a NAT firewall is such a usablity nightmare that it's not funny.
What the hell are you talking about? In both cases your 'intent' is to speak to it and request the use of services it provides.
In one case you say 'Give me the web page named X' and in another you say 'Give me an IP address'.
In one case you say 'Give my email to X' and in another you say 'Give this packet to X'.
I'm sounding condescending because you think there's some sort of magical difference between routers and computers, and the way you interact with them, which shows you don't really understand how computer networks work.
They are both pieces of computer hardware running software that listens on a piece of wire or radio frequency, and you just connect to them using a standard protocols and ask them to do stuff.
It's exactly the same thing, as evidenced by the fact that normal computers can be WAPs and routers, while WAPs often are web servers and DHCP servers, and there are some that run Linux that can be any sort of server you want.
And, BTW, if there was some magical difference, you're backwards. It's illegal to access a 'computer system' or a 'computer network' without authorization.
If a router was not a computer , it would presumably legal to access it without authorization, as long as you didn't stray into any 'networks'. It's because WAPs are computers that, say, breaking into them by guessing the admin password is illegal.
And the 'computer networks' has never really worked in court. It's used merely to mean 'unauthorized access to a bunch of related computer systems'. (So that if you broke into, say, a cluster, they couldn't nitpick about 'which' computer you broke into. YOu broke into 'the network'.) No one's ever managed to get anyone for using the wires without accessing a computer.
So if neither WAPs nor normal routers were 'computers', cracking into them would probably be perfectly legal, as long as you touched no computer before you hit the public internet.
So you're really making no sense at all. Asserting that routers differ from computers makes breaking into them more legal. (Using open ones, of course, is already legal.)
So it's okay to access a server without authorization, but not a router?
That's certainly a very interesting position to be taking.
Of course, as everyone except possibly you knows, all WAPs are computers. Every single one of them is a general purpose computer running a custom operating system. (Or sometimes Linux.)
Or, to put it another way, WAPs are Turing-complete. They can do any computations you put into them, thus making them 'computers' in pretty much any sense. It's just hard to get code into most of them.
Some simple wired routers (And lots of hubs.) are custom ICs that can only route, but no WAPs, because they do way too much. (Like encryption.)
In addition, in case you're going to make an argument about 'servers' vs. 'computers', almost all WAPs run a HTTP server, a DHCP server, and sometimes a SNMP server. WAPs are computers providing services to people who connect to them, they are thus 'servers'.
So now we're back to: The difference between a computer and a computer is what, exactly?
And there's the fun idea of driving up with an AP set to his SSID and channel and waiting for him to connect to your network.
All you people who think accessing an unencrypted AP is illegal, or should be, really need to think about the consequences of such a law. What it would do to the internet, for one thing. (I don't have authorization to talk to any of the websites I go to, do you?)
Accessing a computer needs to default to legal. If access is not authorized, the computer contacted needs to indicate so in some way. All protocols delibrately have a way to indicate that access is not authorized. If you do not use that method, you cannot complain when people ask your computer to do things and it does them.
OTOH, we need strict laws against, when presented with rejection of access, you attempt to get around that, either by guessing passwords or by exploiting a flaw, either in the implimentation or in the protocol itself. And by repeatedly asking for authorization when you know you won't get it. (Aka, a DoS attack.)
This is actually how the laws are supposed to work, but that legal concept is being threatened because fucktards sell wifi routers that default to open and haven't been sued out of existence yet.
And it's also incidentally being treatened because idiots 'hide' stuff on the net by not having links to it. Aka what happened with those kids who got rejected for college a few months ago.
No. That cannot work. The legal concept that you have to explicitly have written permission is anarchy and a total breakdown of the internet.
If you wish to restrict access to computers, you need to have those computers indicate it in some way. I'm not saying that it's okay to get around crappy security. I'm saying it's okay to do whatever you want, on anyone's machine, until you run into some security, any security.
If you have older neighbors, maybe you can assume they won't attempt to crack your encryption, so you can use 56 bit WEP or something. (This is why I'm not worried about having an older router with WEP, although it's 128 bit. Yes, people could crack it...but not anyone who lives near me, and it'd be fairly obvious if someone drove down my street...my street doesn't go anywhere, and I'm at the end. I still make sure the DSL isn't flashing when I'm not using it.)
But an open connection doesn't even need an attempt to use it. Maybe some retired guy wants to try this 'internet thing' because he heard there are people on there talking about boat engine repair, which he used to do and has no one to talk to about it anymore.
So he goes and buys a laptop, turns it on, (Luckily, he used to use the accounting system at work ten years ago.) and clicks 'The Internet' after he figures out how to plug the mouse in.
'Oh, look, a page came up. I can type 'boat engine repair' in here...okay, this is interesting. Have to play with this more. Now how does this 'email' thing work...something about hotmail. What happens if I type in 'hotmail' here...'
The old guy might not even know that you get internet connections via ISPs or something. He just hears 'wireless' and assumes it's something like cellphones (Which he's never used either.) and just works, or even doesn't conceptualize how it gets from the world out there into his computer.
People who don't know much about computers are much more likely to inadvertantly use wireless connections that reach into their house, not less.
Actually accessing a network or computer without authorization needs to be a felony. It's fairly serious and causes a lot of cleanup time and money.
However, what happened here shouldn't be, and isn't, illegal at all. He got authorization when he follow the protocols and asked for an IP and was handed one.
I can't believe SSL has been around for a decade and no one noticed that you can decode anyone's session!.
Oh, wait. No you can't, that would be incredibly fucking stupid design.
SSL uses public/private key encryption, and listening to the whole thing won't let you decode it, which is in fact the whole damn point.
If you don't already have the other end's keys, and they aren't using a known certificate authority, you can fall prey to man-in-the-middle attacks, where you talk to them and they talk to the other end, but no one merely listening can decode anything.
Slashdot Mirror
Teen pregnancy rates, however, have never risen, not since we've been measuring them in 1976.
And let's check some other countries, ones more liberal about displaying sex on TV: Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland.
For every 100 women under 19, they had no more than one give birth, and many were lower than that.
The US? It had five out of a hundred.
Which states have the highest teen pregnancy rates? Well, it almost exactly follows the divorce rate. The highest one?
Mississippi, that cesspool of moral filth, at 6.5 per 100. Then Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and Arkansaw, all at or above 6 per 100.
You can take your 'moral values' and shove them.
OTOH, California is at 4.1, which is extremely high for a liberal state. (Vs New York at three and New Hampishire winning the race at two.) We could blame Ahnold, but it is possible it's Hollywood. Or, more likely in my book, it's the large number of poor Hispanic aliens. (Please note I have nothing against them, expecially not hot Hispanic 18 year-old girls having sex with people.)
You live in a city.
I do not.
There is nowhere to purchase CDs except at Walmart and other large chains like Best Buy and Mediaplay, except online, and I'm talking about an hour radius here. (And, yes, there's plenty of stuff within an hour's drive, just not a city over a million people.) There's half a dozen theaters, and none of them show NC-17 movies.
You live in a universe where, if you are displeased with something, you can just go and get it somewhere else.
But the problem isn't that I can't get to CDs, it's that that companies know if they want to be able to put it on the shelves, they have to alter it so it gets the ratings that lets it be in stores. And thus it's altered for everyone, including people who buy it online and at independent stores.
Here it's obvious my choices have been limited. Where you are, it's not.
I disagree. It is incredibly hard to imagine a future like that because no one thinks alike. In order for every single person to shun a human being they would all have to agree that the person was worthy of being shunned. It would take quite an offense to do that. And even if it were possible, to disallow it would be to deny that society the right to make its own decisions. You would be denying individual people's rights to choose who they associate and deal with. That's a cost that far outweighs the prevention of a hypothetical situation that would never happen in the first place.
I think you're failing to grasp the point that this is already happening. Yes, everyone's not in on it, but if 75% of people decide to shun you, you're fairly screwed, even if in theory you can get the other 25% to buy food for you, and that's what is happening with voluntary ratings...a large percentage of people are never are presented with the option of buying certain ratings. This doesn't just affect those people, it affects everyone, because no one makes a product they can't put in stores.
Don't get me wrong, I also dislike voluntary rating systems, but that is because they are arbitrary and not terribly useful to me as a parenting tool, not because they result in self-censorship. Censorship only becomes opressive when it comes from the government. Wal-Mart is still within its rights.
Here's a question for you: How does Walmart exist?
Walmart exists because we, as society, say it serves a useful function and thus let it exist. I agree that 'people' should not have to sell what they don't want to sell, but Walmart is not a people. Walmart is a self-organizing system we set up to serve our needs. It should not be making moral judgements.
I mean, I agree with what you're saying. It's hard to see how voluntary ratings are evil, because there doesn't seem to be any obvious bad input, just a bad result.
So let's think of an analogy: Shunning.
Shunning when people in a community refuse to interact with someone. They won't sell them food or buy their stuff or anything. It's all well and good when a single community does it...the person basically has to leave.
Now imagine if, say, the whole state shunned someone, and they were reduced to hitchhiking (because they couldn't buy gas.) via out-of-state people. This is basically where AO games are now, and it really worried me.
And it's not too hard to imagine a future where the whole country shuns someone, and they die of dehydration in a ditch, via perfectly legal voluntary shunning. No one will sell them food or water or let them on their property. See the problem?
Walmart is too powerful to allow it to voluntarily shun games, and it's getting more powerful. And my hatred of voluntary rating systems is fueled more by movie theatres, where it's already happened...you cannot make an NC-17 movie in this country and have it in any theatre except the twenty porn theatres still open in various major cities.
Luckily, video games can't entirely go that route, because you can mail order them. (Although, like I said, it's easiest to just alter the content.) OTOH, I'm waiting for TV stations to refuse to air ads for them...
I mean, that's where I download stuff to, that's where I write notes, etc. Every few days I clean it off.
Lots of other people do this, and also have program-launching icons, which is just idiotic, because you can't find anything. If you want programs you can get to at any time, there's the launch bar. If you want more programs than that, there's the start menu.
The desktop would be crappy for icons anyway, even if it wasn't used for temporary storage, because Windows likes to move stuff around on it.
But he's fantasy, not sci-fi, anyway. No, I won't argue where the line is, but he's way over it. ;)
The lack of a contract with Fox Studios will keep that Fox Studios from producing more episodes, however.
Nothing is stopping the Sci-Fi channel from going in and working up such a contract, though.
The second part is easy. Just have to get Hillary elected.
What that term actually says is that 'People in Missouri make almost as much as people in the UK or Belgium'. Oooo, scary. Almost as much!
Its economy is larger than those of Ireland, Luxembourg, Finland, Greece, or Portugal
Luxembourg? WTF? Do they even have an 'economy'? And didn't you then say it has a larger population than Ireland and Finland?
So, to rephrase that paragraph in a saner manner:
That means that people in Missouri make slightly less than people the UK or Belgium, and slight more more than those in France, Germany, Italy, or Spain. It is larger than Luxembourg (Yes, you didn't say that, but everyone is bigger than Luxembourg.), Ireland, and Finland, and thus so is its economy.
The one unqualified comparison is that its economy is bigger than Greece and Portugal, and it's probably smaller. Those are some real EU leaders, there.
This has been a your daily lesson of 'How to lie with statistics'. if you look at what he claims, you can see Missouri fits in perfectly as a member of the EU. (Except that it's not a county, of course, nor is it in Europe.)
I think you have no idea how I feel about this. I absolutely loath 'voluntary' rating systems that result in censorship. And, yes, it is censorship when large chains will not carry your product unless you alter it, even for sale to adults.
The AO rating for games and the NC-17 rating for movies result in censorship to try to get the next better rating, and they need to immediately go away. I don't care if it's some magical combination of voluntary ratings (Which were created under the threat of laws) and voluntary policies at stores and movie theatres. If they are keeping material out of the hands of adults, they are bad.
However, this is almost totally unrelated, as what people are talking about isn't in the game. It requires external software to enable. If kids can go and get this software, they can, um, go get a Nude Raider patch or, you know, normal porn. This is some idiot trying to stir up trouble.
As for your little rant, it's good to learn you think fiction portraying sex is worse than fiction portraying violence, because 'sex' is a bigger problem than 'violence' among kids, even though it's clearly not.
A lot more kids have sex than commit violence. However, 'problems' are not measured by the amount of people doing them. In the real world, however, one kid shooting another is a lot worse than hundred kids fucking.
And the only reason 'teen pregnancy' is a problem is because we refuse to recognize that teenagers have sex. Heaven forbid parents put their foot down and say to their daughters 'If you want to continue to live in this house, you'll go on the pill'.
It's the job of parents to teach their children to be responsible...when they're 16 years old, it's a rather late to be saying 'I absolutely forbid this action'. It's now time to be saying 'Here is how you do this action responsibly'.
But you continue sprouting gibberish about how it takes a more mature child to 'handle' sex responsibly. It doesn't take any more responsibly than driving a car, and a hell of a lot less responsiblity than operating a gun.
Oh, but wait, you were comparing having sex to watching violence, which shows what a hypocrite you are. Watching sex doesn't require any maturity at all. Well, not any over what would be required to play GTA to start with.
What kind of 13 year-old guys do you have around you?
Naked people everywhere, full body shots.
No sex at all, explicit or implied, no violence, a nice, wholesome theme about how the young, cool nudiests wanted to get rid of the old, ugly nudiests, the ones who had built the place up and lived there, and how the cool young people got their comeuppance.
There is no way in hell that will ever air on broadcast, yet it has a lot less 'sexual content' than many prime time TV shows.
Watch any TV show with sexual relationships. Hey, things happen. Pregnancies, etc.
Now watch, oh, Alias. Watch people get casually wacked on the head. Watch them get thrown into walls. Watch them walk away from all that.
Watch them get shot. Watch them be back next week with their arm in a sling.
Remember, folks, if you never watch porn you'll never want to have sex.
And remember that wanting to have sex is Wrong(TM).
You missed the point. A researcher would talk.
Yeah, if they say 'Access to this system is restricted to employees of Acme', then it removes all legal doubt.
Yeah, that's a kind of 'cover your ass' message. While ignorance of the law isn't an excuse, ignorance of the facts is, and if you can demonstrate that you did not know access was restricted, you were not unauthorized.
So, in theory, it keeps people from guessing a login and getting in, although that would never work in court anyway, unless the login was 'guest' or 'anonymous'. Asking for a 'password' is a pretty damn clear message.
This is also why anonymous FTP servers print a message saying you can log in with 'anonymous'...in theory, it might be illegal to do so if they don't say that. Although an argument can be made that it's basically the same thing as presenting no credientials when accessing other services...if they actually want 'anonymous' restricted, they shouldn't have had it accept any password.
Constant technological advances had made NAT almost as usable as a real connection, but I'm fairly certain 'almost as usable as the actually working network we already have' is a very stupid thing to strive for.
Anyway, the firewall effect of NAT is more or less an accident, and has resulted in idiocies where operating system manufacturers (You know who I'm talking about.) have left holes via open ports, with the assumption you will use a firewall, which is the fucking stupidest thing in the world, and results in any computer hooked up to the actual internet being owned in 12 minutes.
Now, of course, to get around that, they've started including firewalls on the computer itself. Which is akin to having a lock on your front door anyone can pick, so you cleverly padlock a steel plate over it, so they don't have to go out and buy a steel-cage entrance way. How about just fixing the lock, thanks in advance.
But having tons of computer automatically firewalled has made the internet less safer, not more, because the lose of usability has resulted in holes being punched everywhere, while everyone assumes they are safe. (Go and check how many 'smart' people put their computer in the DMZ in their DSL router, so all their p2p works. And incidentally putting it outside the firewall.)
And resulted in a universe where you still can't set your windows machine to listen on a real IP and an internal one, and only do file sharing on the internal one. Oh, no, you're supposed to use a NAT firewall instead.
While firewalling is a moderately useful concept as a last line of defense (Filtering specific ports that are just used internally, not all of them.), a NAT firewall is such a usablity nightmare that it's not funny.
Yes, that certainly seems safer.
In one case you say 'Give me the web page named X' and in another you say 'Give me an IP address'.
In one case you say 'Give my email to X' and in another you say 'Give this packet to X'.
I'm sounding condescending because you think there's some sort of magical difference between routers and computers, and the way you interact with them, which shows you don't really understand how computer networks work.
They are both pieces of computer hardware running software that listens on a piece of wire or radio frequency, and you just connect to them using a standard protocols and ask them to do stuff.
It's exactly the same thing, as evidenced by the fact that normal computers can be WAPs and routers, while WAPs often are web servers and DHCP servers, and there are some that run Linux that can be any sort of server you want.
And, BTW, if there was some magical difference, you're backwards. It's illegal to access a 'computer system' or a 'computer network' without authorization.
If a router was not a computer , it would presumably legal to access it without authorization, as long as you didn't stray into any 'networks'. It's because WAPs are computers that, say, breaking into them by guessing the admin password is illegal.
And the 'computer networks' has never really worked in court. It's used merely to mean 'unauthorized access to a bunch of related computer systems'. (So that if you broke into, say, a cluster, they couldn't nitpick about 'which' computer you broke into. YOu broke into 'the network'.) No one's ever managed to get anyone for using the wires without accessing a computer.
So if neither WAPs nor normal routers were 'computers', cracking into them would probably be perfectly legal, as long as you touched no computer before you hit the public internet.
So you're really making no sense at all. Asserting that routers differ from computers makes breaking into them more legal. (Using open ones, of course, is already legal.)
That's certainly a very interesting position to be taking.
Of course, as everyone except possibly you knows, all WAPs are computers. Every single one of them is a general purpose computer running a custom operating system. (Or sometimes Linux.)
Or, to put it another way, WAPs are Turing-complete. They can do any computations you put into them, thus making them 'computers' in pretty much any sense. It's just hard to get code into most of them.
Some simple wired routers (And lots of hubs.) are custom ICs that can only route, but no WAPs, because they do way too much. (Like encryption.)
In addition, in case you're going to make an argument about 'servers' vs. 'computers', almost all WAPs run a HTTP server, a DHCP server, and sometimes a SNMP server. WAPs are computers providing services to people who connect to them, they are thus 'servers'.
So now we're back to: The difference between a computer and a computer is what, exactly?
And the obvious difference between accessing a computer and accessing a computer is...
All you people who think accessing an unencrypted AP is illegal, or should be, really need to think about the consequences of such a law. What it would do to the internet, for one thing. (I don't have authorization to talk to any of the websites I go to, do you?)
Accessing a computer needs to default to legal. If access is not authorized, the computer contacted needs to indicate so in some way. All protocols delibrately have a way to indicate that access is not authorized. If you do not use that method, you cannot complain when people ask your computer to do things and it does them.
OTOH, we need strict laws against, when presented with rejection of access, you attempt to get around that, either by guessing passwords or by exploiting a flaw, either in the implimentation or in the protocol itself. And by repeatedly asking for authorization when you know you won't get it. (Aka, a DoS attack.)
This is actually how the laws are supposed to work, but that legal concept is being threatened because fucktards sell wifi routers that default to open and haven't been sued out of existence yet.
And it's also incidentally being treatened because idiots 'hide' stuff on the net by not having links to it. Aka what happened with those kids who got rejected for college a few months ago.
No. That cannot work. The legal concept that you have to explicitly have written permission is anarchy and a total breakdown of the internet.
If you wish to restrict access to computers, you need to have those computers indicate it in some way. I'm not saying that it's okay to get around crappy security. I'm saying it's okay to do whatever you want, on anyone's machine, until you run into some security, any security.
If you have older neighbors, maybe you can assume they won't attempt to crack your encryption, so you can use 56 bit WEP or something. (This is why I'm not worried about having an older router with WEP, although it's 128 bit. Yes, people could crack it...but not anyone who lives near me, and it'd be fairly obvious if someone drove down my street...my street doesn't go anywhere, and I'm at the end. I still make sure the DSL isn't flashing when I'm not using it.)
But an open connection doesn't even need an attempt to use it. Maybe some retired guy wants to try this 'internet thing' because he heard there are people on there talking about boat engine repair, which he used to do and has no one to talk to about it anymore.
So he goes and buys a laptop, turns it on, (Luckily, he used to use the accounting system at work ten years ago.) and clicks 'The Internet' after he figures out how to plug the mouse in.
'Oh, look, a page came up. I can type 'boat engine repair' in here...okay, this is interesting. Have to play with this more. Now how does this 'email' thing work...something about hotmail. What happens if I type in 'hotmail' here...'
The old guy might not even know that you get internet connections via ISPs or something. He just hears 'wireless' and assumes it's something like cellphones (Which he's never used either.) and just works, or even doesn't conceptualize how it gets from the world out there into his computer.
People who don't know much about computers are much more likely to inadvertantly use wireless connections that reach into their house, not less.
However, what happened here shouldn't be, and isn't, illegal at all. He got authorization when he follow the protocols and asked for an IP and was handed one.
I can't believe SSL has been around for a decade and no one noticed that you can decode anyone's session!.
Oh, wait. No you can't, that would be incredibly fucking stupid design.
SSL uses public/private key encryption, and listening to the whole thing won't let you decode it, which is in fact the whole damn point.
If you don't already have the other end's keys, and they aren't using a known certificate authority, you can fall prey to man-in-the-middle attacks, where you talk to them and they talk to the other end, but no one merely listening can decode anything.