Wired News, with help from some readers, attempted to get real answers from the largest United States-based ISPs about what information they gather on their customers' use of the internet, and how long they retain records like IP addresses, e-mail and real-time browsing activity. Most importantly, we asked what they require from law-enforcement agencies before coughing up the data, and whether they sell your data to marketers.
But after negotiations with AT&T, EFF has filed newly unredacted documents describing a secret, secure room in AT&T's facilities that gave the National Security Agency (NSA) direct access to customers' emails and other Internet communications. These include several internal AT&T documents that have long been available on media websites, EFF's legal arguments to the 9th Circuit, and the full declarations of whistleblower Mark Klein and of J. Scott Marcus, the former Senior Advisor for Internet Technology to the Federal Communications Commission, who bolsters and explains EFF's evidence.
"This is critical evidence supporting our claim that AT&T is cooperating with the NSA in the illegal dragnet surveillance of millions of ordinary Americans," said EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn. "This surveillance is under debate in Congress and across the nation, as well as in the courts. The public has a right to see these important documents, the declarations from our witnesses, and our legal arguments, and we are very pleased to release them."
Open Source needs to find some way to infiltrate corporate America, because these bastards are really giving it to us in the ass. Then again, that's just good business, and 99% of the people seem to like it.
I guess I should just admit I think democracy and capitalism are as insane as communism and autocracy.
Second, I've long become disillusioned with "progress," which is what makes you think any ideal is 1300 years too late. This society we're in is not proven to be better.
Honor killings might be necessary. The individual is oppressive. It even oppresses us in the form of an overburdened ego.
I know all of this is new to you. There is a heavy bias toward the progressive, Western opinion in the West, but that is changing.
Apologies to all who thought I was Muslim. Jihadist is just a cool word.
Wait, which is the lesser of two evils here? Google are privacy-destroying voyeurs, and Microsoft are omnivore IP hogs. I'd like to find the lesser of two evils. Except, when I look into it, all they're doing is advancing market share so their shareholders are happy and everyone from the CEO to the janitor goes home richer. So are the people behind Microsoft and Google the evil? Or is it the system?
Why can't we admit that capitalism and good design are oppositional forces, and that we the people through our greed defeat ourselves?
Americans and other "progressive" nations hate anyone who wants to retain tradition instead of becoming a big Wal-mart of crappy ideasl ike America and the UK are.
Not everyone wants your disease, dying West. But you want to spread it so you don't feel so alone as you slump and shuffle into the third world.
America has 50 years left before it becomes the kind of place where you have to pay the cops to not rape your daughters. All of you "pro-freedom" people are helping it get there.
Damage to the public is distributed in cost to all of us, when we can't find some sucker to blame. In the case of spam, we're all going to have to pay a "get it right fee" now that spam has ruined normal email. Good work, society.
...soon we'll pay Amazon for the privilege of choosing between uniformly corrupt leaders with narrowly deviating opinions.
Oh well, Plato warned us about this. We're in the age of oligarchy and timarchy. Next stop: authoritarianism, then third-world insignificance. But my PS/3 is so cool it makes it worth it, I swear!
Power needs only complimentary information available. You do not motivate groups of people by exposing them to contradictory information. Corporations do it with advertising, parents do it with cautionary tales, religions do it with fear of lack of immortality, and governments do it with force. The real question is how to build an international darknet that is impossible to oversee, and can "route around" the damage.
If tech is anything like the music industry, most of the little people can be bought for chump change in free giveaways. I hope I'd have the strength to resist a new Dell laptop that they would "forget to request back" in exchange for a sterling review, although I think I'd kill myself if I forgot to mention their brick heavy laptops are slow as mud.
Google is slowly reinventing the computer... to be a lot like what it was 20 years ago, except through a web browser. Just think, in the 1970s we all used ultra-thin clients called Teletype terminals to connect to mainframes. Then came the PC revolution, and soon we all had slower machines of our own. Then all those machines got as fast as mainframes, and we got the Internet, and started connecting to each other. Now we're going back to ultra-thin-clients connecting not to mainframes but to Google's giant server farm where they store all our personal data and promise not to abuse it. Nothing ever really changes, does it?
I'd treat this problem like the internet would. I'd route around it. Sure, they'd be out cellular signals, but you know, it's nice to have to pay one more tax to some tribal idiot who's just as useless as our tribal government in Washington.
Plato said that all democracies become authoritarian states through the fear of their people. Is that what we're seeing here? He also suggested that wealthy oligarchs would secretly control government, and buy huge blocks of votes when they needed power. This makes it easier for me to accept that 99% of the people out there passively accept this state of increasing surveillance and government power. We're more afraid of each other than of our governments, and so into total authoritarian dominion we go!
The problem with metadata, as Microsoft found out (note: not an MS-bashing post, just an example), is that by making information about information a higher source of "truth" than the information itself, you create an opportunity for any who control the metadata source (mass media, religion, network controllers) to re-define what is true.
From that, they can stage any number of man-in-the-middle attacks -- the least potent but most widespread of which is convincing a clueless electorate^W userbase that they are certain sources of acclaimed truth, and manipulating them for their own narrow or evil ends.
Philosophers write about this in inspiring 5-page screeds like "On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense" by Friedrich Nietzsche. That theory in itself is the foundation of postmodernism and some more dangerous philosophies as well. Could it be that philosophy applies to computer science?
If you want to kill Exchange as a product, you have to make a clone, not a replacement. This is how we got $500 PCs only a few years after a time when three manufacturers sold them for $2500 each. First they made a clone, and then they branched out. If you make an Exchange clone, Microsoft should welcome the competition as it's good for the economy as a whole. I'm not anti-Microsoft by any stretch, but I like the "people power" of Open Source Software and the added security, comfort and conscience-free use it brings.
Slashdot Mirror
Wired News, with help from some readers, attempted to get real answers
0 07/05/isp_privacy
from the largest United States-based ISPs about what information they
gather on their customers' use of the internet, and how long they
retain records like IP addresses, e-mail and real-time browsing
activity. Most importantly, we asked what they require from
law-enforcement agencies before coughing up the data, and whether they
sell your data to marketers.
http://www.wired.com/politics/onlinerights/news/2
But after negotiations with AT&T, EFF has filed newly unredacted documents describing a secret, secure room in AT&T's facilities that gave the National Security Agency (NSA) direct access to customers' emails and other Internet communications. These include several internal AT&T documents that have long been available on media websites, EFF's legal arguments to the 9th Circuit, and the full declarations of whistleblower Mark Klein and of J. Scott Marcus, the former Senior Advisor for Internet Technology to the Federal Communications Commission, who bolsters and explains EFF's evidence.
"This is critical evidence supporting our claim that AT&T is cooperating with the NSA in the illegal dragnet surveillance of millions of ordinary Americans," said EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn. "This surveillance is under debate in Congress and across the nation, as well as in the courts. The public has a right to see these important documents, the declarations from our witnesses, and our legal arguments, and we are very pleased to release them."
http://www.eff.org/news/archives/2007_06.php
Open Source needs to find some way to infiltrate corporate America, because these bastards are really giving it to us in the ass. Then again, that's just good business, and 99% of the people seem to like it.
I guess I should just admit I think democracy and capitalism are as insane as communism and autocracy.
First, I'm in New York and am an American.
Second, I've long become disillusioned with "progress," which is what makes you think any ideal is 1300 years too late. This society we're in is not proven to be better.
Honor killings might be necessary. The individual is oppressive. It even oppresses us in the form of an overburdened ego.
I know all of this is new to you. There is a heavy bias toward the progressive, Western opinion in the West, but that is changing.
Apologies to all who thought I was Muslim. Jihadist is just a cool word.
Wait, which is the lesser of two evils here? Google are privacy-destroying voyeurs, and Microsoft are omnivore IP hogs. I'd like to find the lesser of two evils. Except, when I look into it, all they're doing is advancing market share so their shareholders are happy and everyone from the CEO to the janitor goes home richer. So are the people behind Microsoft and Google the evil? Or is it the system?
Why can't we admit that capitalism and good design are oppositional forces, and that we the people through our greed defeat ourselves?
Americans and other "progressive" nations hate anyone who wants to retain tradition instead of becoming a big Wal-mart of crappy ideasl ike America and the UK are.
Not everyone wants your disease, dying West. But you want to spread it so you don't feel so alone as you slump and shuffle into the third world.
America has 50 years left before it becomes the kind of place where you have to pay the cops to not rape your daughters. All of you "pro-freedom" people are helping it get there.
Damage to the public is distributed in cost to all of us, when we can't find some sucker to blame. In the case of spam, we're all going to have to pay a "get it right fee" now that spam has ruined normal email. Good work, society.
...soon we'll pay Amazon for the privilege of choosing between uniformly corrupt leaders with narrowly deviating opinions.
Oh well, Plato warned us about this. We're in the age of oligarchy and timarchy. Next stop: authoritarianism, then third-world insignificance. But my PS/3 is so cool it makes it worth it, I swear!
Power needs only complimentary information available. You do not motivate groups of people by exposing them to contradictory information. Corporations do it with advertising, parents do it with cautionary tales, religions do it with fear of lack of immortality, and governments do it with force. The real question is how to build an international darknet that is impossible to oversee, and can "route around" the damage.
If tech is anything like the music industry, most of the little people can be bought for chump change in free giveaways. I hope I'd have the strength to resist a new Dell laptop that they would "forget to request back" in exchange for a sterling review, although I think I'd kill myself if I forgot to mention their brick heavy laptops are slow as mud.
Google is slowly reinventing the computer... to be a lot like what it was 20 years ago, except through a web browser. Just think, in the 1970s we all used ultra-thin clients called Teletype terminals to connect to mainframes. Then came the PC revolution, and soon we all had slower machines of our own. Then all those machines got as fast as mainframes, and we got the Internet, and started connecting to each other. Now we're going back to ultra-thin-clients connecting not to mainframes but to Google's giant server farm where they store all our personal data and promise not to abuse it. Nothing ever really changes, does it?
I'd treat this problem like the internet would. I'd route around it. Sure, they'd be out cellular signals, but you know, it's nice to have to pay one more tax to some tribal idiot who's just as useless as our tribal government in Washington.
Plato said that all democracies become authoritarian states through the fear of their people. Is that what we're seeing here? He also suggested that wealthy oligarchs would secretly control government, and buy huge blocks of votes when they needed power. This makes it easier for me to accept that 99% of the people out there passively accept this state of increasing surveillance and government power. We're more afraid of each other than of our governments, and so into total authoritarian dominion we go!
I get too much work from the .NET realm to ever diss Microsoft, because some of their stuff works quite well and saves me quite a bit of time. Some other products... forget it. I think however that when a corporation takes on more than (arbitrary number) say 40 workers, it becomes evil. And now Microsoft has fallen into that evil, and is joining with the empire that emits more greenhouse gasses than the USA, spies on our military, threatens minorities, pollutes recklessly, threatens the US with nuclear weapons, and is building up its military to challenge the US and Europe. Is the new evil empire a Microsoft-China alliance?
From that, they can stage any number of man-in-the-middle attacks -- the least potent but most widespread of which is convincing a clueless electorate^W userbase that they are certain sources of acclaimed truth, and manipulating them for their own narrow or evil ends.
Philosophers write about this in inspiring 5-page screeds like "On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense" by Friedrich Nietzsche. That theory in itself is the foundation of postmodernism and some more dangerous philosophies as well. Could it be that philosophy applies to computer science?
If you want to kill Exchange as a product, you have to make a clone, not a replacement. This is how we got $500 PCs only a few years after a time when three manufacturers sold them for $2500 each. First they made a clone, and then they branched out. If you make an Exchange clone, Microsoft should welcome the competition as it's good for the economy as a whole. I'm not anti-Microsoft by any stretch, but I like the "people power" of Open Source Software and the added security, comfort and conscience-free use it brings.