An excellent idea. I love the idea that you can read the mail I sent to you, but only if you are in the US! Or only if your email reader was made by Sony! Quite a brave new world that you are working towards.
Note that your argument work equally well against anti-spam systems. Mr. Spammer certainly didn't knowingly consent to allow his message to you go through spamassassin. Quick, send in the lawyers!
And a good thing. My wife wants her ads to show up in her email, I want them gone, and spam filters can figure that out and (mostly) do the right thing.
Wow, you truly have no idea how anti-spam algorithms work. Please read up on bayesian networks. They are used by anti-spam software, and they (or something similar) are used by Google's ad systems.
You're right. If you send me a letter, and I show it to my wife, well, you didn't consent to that. Hell, I can show it to the New York Times, and you didn't consent to that, and tough shit to you. Once you send it to me you cannot control who I show it to.
Please stop trying to tell me what I can do with MY email. You sent it to me, so you no longer control it. Stop trying to control me.
Or are you trying to say that gmail users didn't consent to Google having access to their email? Despite the text they saw when they signed up, the contents of the first letter in their inbox, and Google's greatly simplified privacy policy that was all over the news a year ago for months on end? Hell, I applied for this credit card but didn't realize I had to pay it back, pretty please mister judge fix that for me!
In other words, if you want private contact between you and another party you shouldn't be using a service like gmail.
If you want private contact between you and another party, well, good luck enforcing that from your end. You can send them an actual letter, which they can keep secret or they can show to their spouse, their lawyer, or the New York Times.
This whole thing seems to be "I want the courts to let me determine what you are allowed to do with the email I sent to you". I am amazed that anyone thinks that this is a good idea. I have a gmail.com and a.org account, both through Google, and I let Google look at my mail for spam detection, categorization, etc, because I'm tired of dealing with spamassassin and procmail. And now these guys want to tell me that I cannot do that????
The law says you can't steal or open my mail in route, or sitting in the post office, sitting in my mailbox, or sitting in my house.
You are missing a very critical bit: "without permission".
There are companies who will receive all of your mail (or send people to your house to read it) so that they can pre-sort it, toss the junk, handle the mundane and pass through the important stuff. You or I don't care much about this, but a celebrity who gets thousands of letters a week does. This is legal, because the celebrity has given permission and the celebrity "owns" the mail they receive. The people sending the letters don't get any say in this, no matter their "expectation of privacy".
If you send mail to my personal.org account, well, I've "contracted" with Google (for $5/month) to handle my email. I've permitted Google to look at my email to categorize it, throw away the spam, and show me ads based on the contents. (Well, no ads for the $5/month one, but ads on my gmail.com throwaway one.). And you don't get any say in this. It's my mailbox, please don't tell me what I can do with it.
You mean that you expected tech companies to lobby congresscritters about something which they were not allowed to talk about and which neither the public nor the congresscritters knew about (or particularly cared about)? Gee whiz, that does seem likely to help. Were you writing letters to your representative during Jan-April about the warrantless wiretapping that Bush started and Obama continues, known publicly for years now? But you're happy to whine "Oh why won't Google protect my rights when I can't be bothered, boo hoo".
Those who like facts over rhetoric and "being right" might consider the various transparency reports, including the fact that Google started reporting NSLs (as much as they legally could) long before all this came to light. But for most people, thinking is too hard, so they'll keep on complaining and not thinking.
Fixing our problems is hard, but if you demonize the few folks trying to help, you're doing the NSAs work for them. Blame those who deserve blame, not the easy targets.
Now, do you want to split hairs and argue that "maybe Google isn't a 'telecommunications company'" or "maybe the orders they got weren't for 'bulk phone records'," or do you want to maybe acknowledge that the industry in the US doesn't give a flying fuck if nobody is looking (or is even allowed to look)?
So you don't even know what a telecommunications company is, but that's okay, you'll spew your "facts" anyways. The best defense against the government is an informed populace. Sadly, we've mostly got people like you who refuse to educate yourself. Be proud, you're part of the reason the NSA got this far and hasn't had to back down.
As far as I can tell, the internet companies have done more that any others is trying to hold back the NSA. They're not perfect, but they've tried, and deserve recognition for that. The telecommunications companies, on the other hand, seem to have been happy to help their government. Well, except for Qwest, and we know how that turned out.
(The funny thing is that, with Google Voice and Google Fiber, Google is a better telecommunications company than the actual telecommunications companies.)
I'm assuming that TFS reads differently in your world? But I agree, it's best to make up your mind before deciding which facts to ignore.
I'm assuming, from your quote of Eric Schmidt, that you disagree with him. In what way? If you don't want people knowing that you go it a DUI, for example, what do you suggest:
1) Passing laws forcing people to not talk about things you don't want them to talk about. Should work well with the Bill of Rights. 2) Use telepathy to remove the knowledge from peoples' brains. 3) Call a cab.
Really, now. Think, and take some responsibility for your actions.
Google, at least, has been fighting this for a while. Probably Microsoft too.
You know, I often wonder why companies like Google even bother fighting for our privacy, when people like you are happy to whine and complain about them without looking into the facts. Why do they bother fighting the good fight when they know that no matter what they do, they'll be blamed and hated. Just think, your ignorance is helping the NSA and hurting Google and Microsoft. Bet you feel mighty proud.
The solution, as always, is knowledge. Know who to support. Know who to vote for. Know what to write your congresscritters. Learn, and always assume that there is something you don't know so you have to learn more, and look behind the curtains.
If I send a letter through the Postal Service to my friend Alex, then Alex can show the letter to other people, or even have a service open the letter to sort it and to throw away circulars and junk mail. OH NOES ALEX IS INFRINGING MY RIGHTS. And according to you, so are anti-spam systems.
Also, do you have any proof that Google sells information about anyone, or are you just confused and ranting?
If you send me a letter, I am allowed to show it to anyone I want. I can even hire a service to open my mail, sort it, and toss the junk. Is that illegal? Should you be able to prevent me from doing that?
If you send an email to my gmail address, guess what happens? Guess who I authorized to read and sort MY mail, for the cost of some targeted ads?
Please stop trying to control what I can do with MY email that people sent to me. I always hear that the government is the one trying to take our rights, but that's nothing compared to well-meaning idiots. Once your message enters the mailbox in front of my house or the mailbox in my mail provider, you keep your grubby hands outta my letters.
My insurance company is a non-profit, so in years when they collect more in rates than they pay out in claims, all of their customers get rebate checks.
This is just ridiculous FUD / trolling at this point. No one would buy a car that would do this. There's no market for it.
But in my bizarro-universe, the EVIL GOVERNMENT will force you do buy this, thus conclusively proving that (1) the government is evil and that (2) self-driving cars will destroy your freedoms and take away your guns.
Yup. One week it's President Obama, next week it's the muslim in the white house, the next week it's the Kenyan in the white house, then it's the socialist president who hates America.
Or, in this case, one week it's the liberal scientists, then the greedy scientists protecting their million-dollar profits, then the corrupt scientists who alter data, then the enviro-nazis who want to kill humanity, then the conspiracy of scientists who don't allow studies which push an alternate view!
Wow, Putin is a shoe-in for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination! I wonder if the Tea Party realizes that Russia stole their platform? Or maybe they stole Russia's?
Not a contradiction. "Murder" doesn't mean "kill", it means "kill without the approval of most of society". War isn't murder. Capital punishment is only murder in some societies. Same with killing teenagers wearing hoodies and armed with candy, or killing women who show their faces in public, or killing those of the wrong skin color or religion or sexual preference.
Sucky and misleading, perhaps, but not a contradiction.
I seem to recall something about taxes being at or very near all-time-lows (well, modern-time-lows, like since WW2). So once again, your point is confusing. I assume that rather than making up facts, you have been listening to "facts" from sources who make them up and you have never thought to fact-check those sources.
Inflation is a fact of pretty much any monetary system and (in small doses) is fine. In fact, long-term lack of inflation ("stagflation") and deflation are demonstrably harmful. Plus, once again, inflation has been low lately, so you seem to be afraid of imaginary monsters.
That being said, yes, if your wages stay the same and inflation runs its slow course, you have less effective money. The confusing part is where you blame the government for inflation, but make no mention of companies and the market which keep wages the same, even when the per-capita GDP (a rough measure of worker efficiency) has gone up and inflation (a rough measure of income the companies make for a given output) has gone up. I'm confused because you blame the wrong people and wrong causes. And blaming the wrong causes means that you have no chance of fixing the problem, and are likely to make it worse when you try.
Please, check your facts. There are lots of fact-checking sites out there; all of the good ones list their sources so you can fact-check the fact-checkers if you believe they are in error. And when you find a media source which gives a high ratio of bad facts, well, stop paying attention to them. No source is perfect, but some are far less perfect than others.
The current system of taxation and the Federal Reserve's continual inflation of the monetary system practically require it.
You mispronounced "the current level of wages". Individual wages are set by the market, and the market has found that since most families have two wage-earners, companies can pay each wage-earner less. It sucks, but blaming the government or federal reserve for this is... confusing.
$48k is middle class in most areas, though not in terribly expensive areas. $24k is certainly not middle class.
Huh; I had heard about the "incompatibility" but I didn't know exactly what it was. Thanks for the link.
It's ironic that a group of people who often hate copyrights and patents will simultaneously cling to a particularly strict interpretation of a App Store/GPL license interaction. I'm not saying the interpretation is wrong, but it;s unclear enough that neither side would want the court battle needed to settle it.
This definitely sounds like a "cut off the nose to spite the face" situation to me.
I know some people like to believe that if Google, the NSA, the Chinese or some other group really really wanted to, they could decrypt any encrypted information, even without the password.
This is false. It is still infeasible for anyone to crack Triple DES info encrypted with a reasonable choice of keys.
Absolutely true.
Oddly enough, there are also people who think that a wifi network with a password would be hard to subvert. Really! It amazes me, but it's true. Aside from the fact that most people use easily-breakable passwords, most access points run old buggy code And if you're worried about the NSA or the Chinese, well, you know the right XKCD comic.
Wow, good point. If it weren't for this bug, your wifi would have been secure against the NSA!
Look, if you think your wifi is secure against *any* well-funded group, then you've rather confused about security. If you use a shared wifi password rather than certificates, then you have already decided that convenience is more important than security. I make the same trade-off myself; I just don't publicly complain that somehow this could be secure against anyone with the power to hack or subpoena Google. Cause that would be crazy.
Um, the First Amendment actually "enshrines the religious bigotry of these Christians into law" and forbids government from getting involved in religious concepts. If the federal government is not allowed to recognize the Ten Commandments, how can mandate licenses and set rules for marriage?
Hmm. I don't know of a single law in the US that forces a religious official to perform a same-sex marriage ceremony or any other marriage ceremony if they do not want to perform it.
But I've seen many, in many different states, which will PREVENT a religious official from performing a same-sex marriage ceremony. Yes, there are many non-bigoted religious officials (some christian, some not) who will happily perform marriage ceremonies on any consenting adults who are legally allowed to be married.
By your definition, it seems that anti-same-sex marriage laws are the ones which are breaking the First Amendment.
And yet, as the number of Concealed Carry license holders increased in recent decades, the murder rate has declined.
The murder rate has gone down both in places with high concealed-carry increases and in places where concealed-carry has not increased greatly. One possible conclusion is that guns have such magical anti-crime abilities that they reduce crime rates *hundreds of miles away*. Another possible conclusion is that the correlation between crime rates and concealed-carry rates is just that, a correlation whose causation breaks down when you look closely. Which do you think is true?
Australia put in heavy gun regulation some years ago. The murder rate went slightly higher for about two years after the regulations (about 5% growth), then dropped over 50% over the next decade. How that that fit in with the magical concealed-carry theory?
Slashdot Mirror
An excellent idea. I love the idea that you can read the mail I sent to you, but only if you are in the US! Or only if your email reader was made by Sony! Quite a brave new world that you are working towards.
Note that your argument work equally well against anti-spam systems. Mr. Spammer certainly didn't knowingly consent to allow his message to you go through spamassassin. Quick, send in the lawyers!
And a good thing. My wife wants her ads to show up in her email, I want them gone, and spam filters can figure that out and (mostly) do the right thing.
Wow, you truly have no idea how anti-spam algorithms work. Please read up on bayesian networks. They are used by anti-spam software, and they (or something similar) are used by Google's ad systems.
They are exactly the same system. Exactly.
You're right. If you send me a letter, and I show it to my wife, well, you didn't consent to that. Hell, I can show it to the New York Times, and you didn't consent to that, and tough shit to you. Once you send it to me you cannot control who I show it to.
Please stop trying to tell me what I can do with MY email. You sent it to me, so you no longer control it. Stop trying to control me.
Or are you trying to say that gmail users didn't consent to Google having access to their email? Despite the text they saw when they signed up, the contents of the first letter in their inbox, and Google's greatly simplified privacy policy that was all over the news a year ago for months on end? Hell, I applied for this credit card but didn't realize I had to pay it back, pretty please mister judge fix that for me!
In other words, if you want private contact between you and another party you shouldn't be using a service like gmail.
If you want private contact between you and another party, well, good luck enforcing that from your end. You can send them an actual letter, which they can keep secret or they can show to their spouse, their lawyer, or the New York Times.
This whole thing seems to be "I want the courts to let me determine what you are allowed to do with the email I sent to you". I am amazed that anyone thinks that this is a good idea. I have a gmail.com and a .org account, both through Google, and I let Google look at my mail for spam detection, categorization, etc, because I'm tired of dealing with spamassassin and procmail. And now these guys want to tell me that I cannot do that????
The law says you can't steal or open my mail in route, or sitting in the post office, sitting in my mailbox, or sitting in my house.
You are missing a very critical bit: "without permission".
There are companies who will receive all of your mail (or send people to your house to read it) so that they can pre-sort it, toss the junk, handle the mundane and pass through the important stuff. You or I don't care much about this, but a celebrity who gets thousands of letters a week does. This is legal, because the celebrity has given permission and the celebrity "owns" the mail they receive. The people sending the letters don't get any say in this, no matter their "expectation of privacy".
If you send mail to my personal .org account, well, I've "contracted" with Google (for $5/month) to handle my email. I've permitted Google to look at my email to categorize it, throw away the spam, and show me ads based on the contents. (Well, no ads for the $5/month one, but ads on my gmail.com throwaway one.). And you don't get any say in this. It's my mailbox, please don't tell me what I can do with it.
You mean that you expected tech companies to lobby congresscritters about something which they were not allowed to talk about and which neither the public nor the congresscritters knew about (or particularly cared about)? Gee whiz, that does seem likely to help. Were you writing letters to your representative during Jan-April about the warrantless wiretapping that Bush started and Obama continues, known publicly for years now? But you're happy to whine "Oh why won't Google protect my rights when I can't be bothered, boo hoo".
Those who like facts over rhetoric and "being right" might consider the various transparency reports, including the fact that Google started reporting NSLs (as much as they legally could) long before all this came to light. But for most people, thinking is too hard, so they'll keep on complaining and not thinking.
Fixing our problems is hard, but if you demonize the few folks trying to help, you're doing the NSAs work for them. Blame those who deserve blame, not the easy targets.
Now, do you want to split hairs and argue that "maybe Google isn't a 'telecommunications company'" or "maybe the orders they got weren't for 'bulk phone records'," or do you want to maybe acknowledge that the industry in the US doesn't give a flying fuck if nobody is looking (or is even allowed to look)?
So you don't even know what a telecommunications company is, but that's okay, you'll spew your "facts" anyways. The best defense against the government is an informed populace. Sadly, we've mostly got people like you who refuse to educate yourself. Be proud, you're part of the reason the NSA got this far and hasn't had to back down.
As far as I can tell, the internet companies have done more that any others is trying to hold back the NSA. They're not perfect, but they've tried, and deserve recognition for that. The telecommunications companies, on the other hand, seem to have been happy to help their government. Well, except for Qwest, and we know how that turned out.
(The funny thing is that, with Google Voice and Google Fiber, Google is a better telecommunications company than the actual telecommunications companies.)
I'm assuming that TFS reads differently in your world? But I agree, it's best to make up your mind before deciding which facts to ignore.
I'm assuming, from your quote of Eric Schmidt, that you disagree with him. In what way? If you don't want people knowing that you go it a DUI, for example, what do you suggest:
1) Passing laws forcing people to not talk about things you don't want them to talk about. Should work well with the Bill of Rights.
2) Use telepathy to remove the knowledge from peoples' brains.
3) Call a cab.
Really, now. Think, and take some responsibility for your actions.
Google, at least, has been fighting this for a while. Probably Microsoft too.
You know, I often wonder why companies like Google even bother fighting for our privacy, when people like you are happy to whine and complain about them without looking into the facts. Why do they bother fighting the good fight when they know that no matter what they do, they'll be blamed and hated. Just think, your ignorance is helping the NSA and hurting Google and Microsoft. Bet you feel mighty proud.
The solution, as always, is knowledge. Know who to support. Know who to vote for. Know what to write your congresscritters. Learn, and always assume that there is something you don't know so you have to learn more, and look behind the curtains.
If I send a letter through the Postal Service to my friend Alex, then Alex can show the letter to other people, or even have a service open the letter to sort it and to throw away circulars and junk mail. OH NOES ALEX IS INFRINGING MY RIGHTS. And according to you, so are anti-spam systems.
Also, do you have any proof that Google sells information about anyone, or are you just confused and ranting?
If you send me a letter, I am allowed to show it to anyone I want. I can even hire a service to open my mail, sort it, and toss the junk. Is that illegal? Should you be able to prevent me from doing that?
If you send an email to my gmail address, guess what happens? Guess who I authorized to read and sort MY mail, for the cost of some targeted ads?
Please stop trying to control what I can do with MY email that people sent to me. I always hear that the government is the one trying to take our rights, but that's nothing compared to well-meaning idiots. Once your message enters the mailbox in front of my house or the mailbox in my mail provider, you keep your grubby hands outta my letters.
Yup, USAA. I'm not military myself, but my father was. Great rates, great service. Interesting that no other insurance company manages that.
My insurance company is a non-profit, so in years when they collect more in rates than they pay out in claims, all of their customers get rebate checks.
This is just ridiculous FUD / trolling at this point. No one would buy a car that would do this. There's no market for it.
But in my bizarro-universe, the EVIL GOVERNMENT will force you do buy this, thus conclusively proving that (1) the government is evil and that (2) self-driving cars will destroy your freedoms and take away your guns.
Yup. One week it's President Obama, next week it's the muslim in the white house, the next week it's the Kenyan in the white house, then it's the socialist president who hates America.
Or, in this case, one week it's the liberal scientists, then the greedy scientists protecting their million-dollar profits, then the corrupt scientists who alter data, then the enviro-nazis who want to kill humanity, then the conspiracy of scientists who don't allow studies which push an alternate view!
Wow, Putin is a shoe-in for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination! I wonder if the Tea Party realizes that Russia stole their platform? Or maybe they stole Russia's?
Not a contradiction. "Murder" doesn't mean "kill", it means "kill without the approval of most of society". War isn't murder. Capital punishment is only murder in some societies. Same with killing teenagers wearing hoodies and armed with candy, or killing women who show their faces in public, or killing those of the wrong skin color or religion or sexual preference.
Sucky and misleading, perhaps, but not a contradiction.
I seem to recall something about taxes being at or very near all-time-lows (well, modern-time-lows, like since WW2). So once again, your point is confusing. I assume that rather than making up facts, you have been listening to "facts" from sources who make them up and you have never thought to fact-check those sources.
Inflation is a fact of pretty much any monetary system and (in small doses) is fine. In fact, long-term lack of inflation ("stagflation") and deflation are demonstrably harmful. Plus, once again, inflation has been low lately, so you seem to be afraid of imaginary monsters.
That being said, yes, if your wages stay the same and inflation runs its slow course, you have less effective money. The confusing part is where you blame the government for inflation, but make no mention of companies and the market which keep wages the same, even when the per-capita GDP (a rough measure of worker efficiency) has gone up and inflation (a rough measure of income the companies make for a given output) has gone up. I'm confused because you blame the wrong people and wrong causes. And blaming the wrong causes means that you have no chance of fixing the problem, and are likely to make it worse when you try.
Please, check your facts. There are lots of fact-checking sites out there; all of the good ones list their sources so you can fact-check the fact-checkers if you believe they are in error. And when you find a media source which gives a high ratio of bad facts, well, stop paying attention to them. No source is perfect, but some are far less perfect than others.
The current system of taxation and the Federal Reserve's continual inflation of the monetary system practically require it.
You mispronounced "the current level of wages". Individual wages are set by the market, and the market has found that since most families have two wage-earners, companies can pay each wage-earner less. It sucks, but blaming the government or federal reserve for this is... confusing.
$48k is middle class in most areas, though not in terribly expensive areas. $24k is certainly not middle class.
Huh; I had heard about the "incompatibility" but I didn't know exactly what it was. Thanks for the link.
It's ironic that a group of people who often hate copyrights and patents will simultaneously cling to a particularly strict interpretation of a App Store/GPL license interaction. I'm not saying the interpretation is wrong, but it;s unclear enough that neither side would want the court battle needed to settle it.
This definitely sounds like a "cut off the nose to spite the face" situation to me.
I know some people like to believe that if Google, the NSA, the Chinese or some other group really really wanted to, they could decrypt any encrypted information, even without the password.
This is false. It is still infeasible for anyone to crack Triple DES info encrypted with a reasonable choice of keys.
Absolutely true.
Oddly enough, there are also people who think that a wifi network with a password would be hard to subvert. Really! It amazes me, but it's true. Aside from the fact that most people use easily-breakable passwords, most access points run old buggy code And if you're worried about the NSA or the Chinese, well, you know the right XKCD comic.
Wow, good point. If it weren't for this bug, your wifi would have been secure against the NSA!
Look, if you think your wifi is secure against *any* well-funded group, then you've rather confused about security. If you use a shared wifi password rather than certificates, then you have already decided that convenience is more important than security. I make the same trade-off myself; I just don't publicly complain that somehow this could be secure against anyone with the power to hack or subpoena Google. Cause that would be crazy.
Um, the First Amendment actually "enshrines the religious bigotry of these Christians into law" and forbids government from getting involved in religious concepts. If the federal government is not allowed to recognize the Ten Commandments, how can mandate licenses and set rules for marriage?
Hmm. I don't know of a single law in the US that forces a religious official to perform a same-sex marriage ceremony or any other marriage ceremony if they do not want to perform it.
But I've seen many, in many different states, which will PREVENT a religious official from performing a same-sex marriage ceremony. Yes, there are many non-bigoted religious officials (some christian, some not) who will happily perform marriage ceremonies on any consenting adults who are legally allowed to be married.
By your definition, it seems that anti-same-sex marriage laws are the ones which are breaking the First Amendment.
And yet, as the number of Concealed Carry license holders increased in recent decades, the murder rate has declined.
The murder rate has gone down both in places with high concealed-carry increases and in places where concealed-carry has not increased greatly. One possible conclusion is that guns have such magical anti-crime abilities that they reduce crime rates *hundreds of miles away*. Another possible conclusion is that the correlation between crime rates and concealed-carry rates is just that, a correlation whose causation breaks down when you look closely. Which do you think is true?
Australia put in heavy gun regulation some years ago. The murder rate went slightly higher for about two years after the regulations (about 5% growth), then dropped over 50% over the next decade. How that that fit in with the magical concealed-carry theory?