Even though he was a lousy shot, he knew enough to aim at people if you want to kill them, something he wouldn't have known without Q3.
He knew to aim at people if you want to kill them? What other reason would there be to aim at someone? To ivite them over for Hannukah?
Enough with the semantics though, more to the point, the guy wouldn't have known where to aim if he hadn't played quake? How about walking down to the library and picking up any medical or history book? Would that in turn make people who have a knowledge of basic human physics killers? Why then doesn't more doctors go berzerk instead of postal workers? And why do people who doesn't play computer games actualy kill others, pure dumb luck? Since they can't know where to aim, they haven't played quake.
Yes, there is a connection between watched violent behaviour and expressed violent behaviour. But it's much smaller than say, the connection between endured stress and violent behaviour, or the connection between dysfunctional upbringing and violent behaviour. And if you study you will notice that there is a causual connection between watched violence and expressed, but there has not been a conclusive study to show how much of that is direct and how much is shared (ie the "do people who watch violent movies become more violent or do violent people watch violent movies?" dilema). (Disclamer; I haven't seen one mentionend in any of the sociology and social theory classes I've studied.)
On the other hand, a single man can step on countless roaches without any trouble at all. It would take an unproportionaly large amount of roaches to somp a man into pulp.
I don't think that the RIAA suit tells that much about music as it tells about the status of US law. Apparently, to us stupid Europeans, if you've got a good enough lawyer you can get anything done, legal or not. The US system of suing everyone and everything is causing this storm. It's a hysteric reacton to an insane system and all these lawsuits happend because the legel system in the US favours suing.
What do you think would have happend if the RIAA would simply have called the Napster people and asked them; 'hey, could you implement some kind of copy protection scheme for those who want to use it?'. I bet that they'd have gotten their way, and much faster than by suing. Besides, as has been pointed out, there are a lot of other ways to get MP3's that are just as easy. So maybe the RIAA is only trying to set a precedent by attacking a small part of what they percieve as a problem? If they'd succeed in taking on a weak opponent they could move on to stronger ones with another weapon in their legal arsenal.
But what can you do if you have a system that let's a kid sue her parents for refusing to give her candy? (I still refuse to believe in that one, the thought of a country alowing things like that to happend and armed with nukes is way to scary.) Not to say that our law is perfect, one just has to look at the case where two thieves beat an 70 year old man to death with a frying pan and got out free by blaming eachother to see that, but at least people over here don't sue eachother all the time.
If something like this would happend, with all American representatives leaving the comitee, the US would boycot it's work. And in this day and age any global project that does not have US support will fail.
And if you think that the US wouldn't boycot something just to get more power check the United Nations, where the US refuses to pay it's membership fee so that they can get extra leverage within the UN council.
Re:Drivers Licenses are GROSSLY Immoral
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License to Surf
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That's my point exactly, rights come from power. But your conclusion is slightly incompleate; the robber is exposed to a greater power, that of the state which says that it's against it's laws to kill people. Thus the citizen is granted the right to live without (or with very little) threat to himself. In response the citizen is faced with responsibilities that the state demands; to pay taxes, to obey the laws, perhaps even to get drafted and die. Thus the greater power (state) protects the lesser power (citizen).
As for the rest of the argument, the power doesn't have to grant it's citizens any rights. Just look at dictatorships in general. But in a democracy the control of the power goes not to whomever can threaten others but to whomever can win their confidence. By voting many citizens assert one citizens right to control the power they all create. In turn the one in charge is supposed to fullfill whatever promises he gave to gain the confidence of others whether it's to lower taxes or raise wellfare or whatever.
Of course this doesn't always work. There parts of a state that rejects it's laws, whether from conviction or for personal gain. But in general the laws of the state are followed (why they're followed is another matter, check Bordieu for some strange ideas).
So much for my ranting. Happy days and happy living.
Re:Drivers Licenses are GROSSLY Immoral
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License to Surf
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· Score: 1
Either this is a bad joke or I'm right in being amazed at the pure stupidity of some people.
You don't have any rights except what whomever is willing to pay for your 'rights' is willing to give you. There are no inherent rights as you seem to belive. People aren't born with rights, just as little as people are born with responsibilities. It is trough struggle, their own and others, that people get 'rights'. If someone would not have fought for freedom, what right would you have to it? None. You'd be a slave like everyone else, except for those people who were lucky to be born into a class that were in control. Just check the history of the middle ages and backwards.
And if you're still willing to claim that you get rights just because of some piece of paper stating that you have them, well, I hereby officialy grant you the right to eat lots of beans and fart yourself into orbit. Go ahead, three, two, one, liftoff!
And even the precious constitution, that you think is giving you all your unaliable rights; if it were not for the people who fought for it against the British, and if it wasn't for the people who have fought for it ever since, from Lincoln to Martin Luther King, the constitution would be nothing but a mildewing piece of paper.
And if you still want to babble on about your 'rights' I'm going to paraphrase Dead Kenedys: Take a holliday in Cambodia.
I just read the entire patent (and now I know why col. Kurtz in Apocalypse Now is going 'the horror, the horror') and it seems to me like it's as open ended as might be.
First of, the basis is exactly as for SETI@home but for the one single line (1a):
receiving a start message at the remote computer from the central computer at a time that the central computer has predetermined the remote computer will be available for processing
All of the 'for the good of the world' process distribution systems (like SETI@home) are initiated localy, at the discretion of the user. If I want to run my client overnight that's my decision, not the decision of SETI@home. But here Intel patents a method where the user has nothing to say about if s/he wants to give processor power away.
Moving on (16):
A remote computer having a first set of processing tasks that the remote computer is required to perform only during predetermined times, the remote computer being otherwise available for processing
Now this, at least to my untrained eyes, seems to say that any time the central computer wants it the remote must perform the task. Once again there is no question of 'wanting', it's simply stated that the central comp can order the remote to perform certain tasks. Of course there is the part about 'at a predetermined time'. But that doesn't say anything about what that time is. An ISP using this system might require it's customers computers to be available at any given 'predetermined time', even if this would be in the mid-afternoon when they're in use.
The idea is expanded in 21a:
determining a time at which the remote computer will be available for processing a task selected from the second set of processing tasks
The first set of tasks, stored localy on the remote, might be nothing other than a program that listens for a request from the central server. Thus the servers might, on a predetermined schedule say once every minute, querry the remote. If the remote would then be available it would recieve new data (ie second set) that would contain the 'real' data to be computed. Brilliant, AOL can now enter our comps and request us to compute for them at any time.
Correlation 1(25):
The method of claim 21, wherein the start message comprises a task and the raw data, and the raw data is processed in accordance with the task.
And 2 (27):
The method of claim 21, wherein the [returned] message comprises the processed data.
Ok, so now it's a quetsion of intention. In the patent Intel states its benign intentions, to lessen the server load of an ISP and/or sitehost. But, as with any patent, this could be seen more generaly as the ability to 'slave' a users computer on the whim of an outside agency. Thus it is up to the reader to decide whether they belive in the goodwill of the Intel Corp. or not.
On a side note, wasn't this form of distribution common already in the 70s with linked Microcomputers being assigned tasks from a central computer?
I'll have to dissagree, albeit only on certain parts. Yes, it is almost impossible to predict what will happend in 100 years time. But it is possible to say which direction the world is most likely to take.
About a year ago Swedish television showed a rerun of a documetary series from the 60s, about what the world would be like at the turn of the millenium. Sure, it had it's share of the wildly optimistic futurists who predicted everything from private spacecraft to meeting god. But most of those asked had a relatively sane, and in retrospect true, view of what would happend.
One of the subjects, a nuclear scientist, analyzed how technology was developing trough the 40s, 50s and early 60s. He predicted that it would continue in the same direction, with increased minimization, increased availability and increased usage of technology. He also predicted that communications would explode, allowing people to communicate cheap and fast across the entire globe (internet & iridium anyone?).
There were lots of scientists expressing their opinons, and mostly they have come true. Families have become less solid and divorce rates have climbed. People have become more mobile and we are moving around more than ever, to study, to work and for pure recreation. Airtravel is safe and relatively fast. Computers have shrunk and are available to the common man (although the CS professor that spoke of computers had the modest vision of them taking up the space of a small table).
So it is possible to predict the future in broad strokes, although anyone predicting model ZK-33 neural interfaces should stick to writting SF.
In the universities the teachers are either proffessors, most of whom actively research in the areas they're teaching, or senior students who realy like the subject, know it well, and teach as an extra credit / small source of revenue. Therefore teachers at university are as up to date as they can be.
Not so in Sweden... There was a big case about a year back of 'Radio Islam' a muslim extremist radio station and web site (and publishing house). I never listened to it myself but apparently their principial owner went on the air and online with anti-Semitic progaganda. The station and site got shut down for violation of the 'harrasment of group' act but not the publishing house. (Hets mot folkgrupp, meaning about harrasment or incitement against a particular group of people. It's supposed to protect any group of people from prossecution by any other group but only the nazi crackdowns (and related) have gotten any media coverage, althought it's probable that the law has been used in other cases as well.)
Also, what is the Communications Decency Act? And does it have anything to do with why US TV shows 'beep' out any f**k's?
... but the feet deal under the table, as an old Russian saying goes. The trick here is that no Government wishes to have Internet listed as a freedom of speech issue.
In Sweden there is a constitutional legislation about protecting the freedom to publish and distribute your views. And yet a recent (quite controversial) jugement decided that the internet is not a valid print media, and as such not protected by the free speech act.
This is happening all around the globe. And why? Because it's very easy to publish something on the net. No special resources are needed, you don't even need a computer as you can walk down to your local library and borrow one. All you need is a little bit of knowledge and something to say. And that's dangerous to any government.
I could just as easily be describing how to destroy the US (or any other) government, telling people that one race or religion is superior to another or that abortion is murder and should be punished by death. All of these are statements that are easy to find on the web. All of these are available in print, if you know where to look. So why would anyone care if these (or any other) opinion are also available on the net?
First of, the net is accessible to anyone and there is no (practical) way to check on who accesses what. Therefore there is no way to catalogue 'dangerous elements', however security agencies choose to define the term. It's very easy to check who's going to a meeting or ordering a book, it's much harder to check who's looking at a webpage and even harder to check who's there because of conviction and who just surfed on in.
Secondly, news on the net spread like fire on the steppe. Just think about the case of Mahir, the turkish man who's (stolen) page became the focus of millions of viewers overnight (why? don't ask me, I find it all rather strange). The same could be possible of the White America Movements webpage, or any other extremist groups. And that would lead to media panic. Just think of the headlines 'Nazi party attracts millions of followers', 'Fourth Reich founded in Illonois'. Heck the possibities for bad titles, bad reporting and free exposure for any obscure extremists are humongous.
Third, the Internet is not (yet) protected by any cohesive freedom of media act. Therefore anything published on the net does not benefit from the same rights as a 'normal' publication. For example, in Sweden it's illegal to force vendors to stop selling a certain book, but it's quite legal to force an ISP to stop hosting a certain page. I immagine it's the same in most of the western world.
So there you have four points (yeah, I did number only three, mea culpa) about why censoring the web is so attractive. It's easy to publish on it, it's hard to check the spread of publications, it's easy to spread the widely, which makes undesirable (from an government policy standpoint) websites classed as 'dangerous' and it's easy to do something about it, which makes govenment agencies more likely to intervene. And I'd like to point out that they did not pull Mike Z.s' page until it started to attract attention (security trough obscurity and all that *grin*). Until Mike Z. became famous (however little fame he got) he was just another coock (sic?) ranting away on the net.
For the wrap up then; first to repeat Garins comment: Find yourself a medium that you control, don't depend on renting space from other companies. Very true, just as you can't depend on finding a printing house that is willing to publish your essay on why 'Mein Kampf' is the greatest literary work of all times, you can't expect that ISPs will be throwing themselves at your feet to host your 'International Terrorism for Dummies' website. And if an ISP does host it, don't expect them to fight for it. That's your job. If you feel that your views are worth fighting for, you're the one that has to do all the fighting.
Secondly, assuming that you share my brand of political pessimism, governments will do pretty much anything to force their version of 'goodness' on the world. But anyone with a conviction will do that, even if it's a politico whos conviction is that pushing a certain matter will gain him more votes. If still in doubt, see how the German government managed to ban 'Mein Kampf' in the western world (I'll give you a hint: they claimed that they had the copyright to it and then refused to allow anyone to publish or distribute it, they even managed to get it banned from libraries, except for research reasons) or how the Swedish government managed to claim that the Swedish people wanted to ban nuclear power (by calling a referendum where the choices to vote on were 'ban now', 'ban by year 2000' and 'ban by year 2015'. The 2015 won with a large majority).
So, without further ado, have a nice and very optimistic life.) (And please read everything criticaly, especialy this article.)
Also, if you encrypt your stuff, and you usually have nothing to hide, and others do the same, eventually it gets much harder for anyone to snoop on the internet. They'd generally want to attack people who send unencrypted streams of data... Sucks for them.:)
People who lurk around sniffing out plaintext messages and attacking them are usualy bored script kiddies. They are not something to worry about, unless you annoy your younger brother whos idea of a great retaliation is to post your logfile showing your access to www.spank-me-harder.com.
Against serious attacks, be they privacy or denial of service, the average user has no defence except anonymity. To hide in the masses is a cowardly concept but it works. If noone knows you're there they wont seek you out and attack you. And before you ask, yes I am quite familiar with the 'It's not the voices of the evil but the silence of the good' reasoning and I agree with it. But on the net, if you want to stay somewhat safe, don't stick out. Just take a look at how many attacks are made on the FBI's net resources and how many on John Doe's@Xoom. Anonymity works.
This brings us to the next point. Defending privacy on the net is not only a question of cryptography. The main problem is the usage of information that is gathered. If I wish to post in alt.binaries.terrorists that's my concern, but any ISP can, without threat of legal reprimand, enter my log and punish me by declining me their services. And that's a sanctioned privacy breech.
The same goes for push marketing (see the article further down). It's the companies that log access that choose how they will use their information. And use it they do. Just check AltaVista, the ads they show are tailored based on which country suffix you're connecting from. This is a mild form of push marketing, but it's concievable that someone would store information on what you search for and correlate it against which ads you're most liable to click-trough. And once such databases are in place they become a real threat to the integrity of the average joe.
But I do not believe that the situation is as bad as people are painting it up to be. If one thinks back to the 50s and the Communist paranoia, the 60s and the 'big brother' and later atomic war paranoia and the 70s with its drug wars, none of these problems were as bad as they were made out to be. The privacy issue on the internet will most likely go the same way, it's going to be present, and potentialy dangerous, but it will be forgotten for newer fears.
The idea has it's merits but how do you manage to run? The machine wouldn't be able to work properly at the speeds required (especialy if simulating an uneven surface, the dynamics would be horrible), or if it could move that fast it would probably be very jerky in starting and stoping. Also, you'd get added 'lag' for the time it would take the machine to detect that movement is in progres and overcome it's own inertia.
One major problems with mesh (and any other system that lets the person actualy walk) is that you can't compensate for the lack of moving mass easily. The person doing the walking would still compensate for moving his body, so that he'd lean into the movement. This is basical the same as running at a threadmill, if you don't learn to run without correcting your balance you'll fall off. And if you manage to avoid shifting your weight you'll learn a 'wrong' movement pattern, thus making practical application of any skills you get pretty difficult.
One solution to this is to fake acceleration by letting people wear a vest and connect it to wires placed above and around the person. The wires then pull on the vest in a manner that lets the person lean into the movement. The drawback is that the system doesn't react fast enough to follow small changes, and the wires severely hinder arm movement. It also leaves the problem of inner ear unsolved, as you will never 'feel' the movement.
I agree with you in your conclusions about the absurdity of the 'Laws of War', but look at where they're comming from.
First off the whole issue of FMJs being the only allowed ammunition. This fits nicely into the concept of 'Wounding one man takes three out of the battle'. Dum-dums, JHP and similar cause large, gapping, ugly wounds that kill, more or less, outright. Thus it is much nicer to talk about how it's 'inhuman' to use anything but FMJs, than to talk about how much more effective it is to use FMJs.
The same thing goes for every rule of war there is, even the so-called humane ones. They're all practicalities. No rule of war that is impractical was ever followed. Heck, take treatement of prisoners of war. That was followed with the hope that the other party would follow it to, thus enabling the myth of 'our boys will be home some day', a great morale booster for the home front.
As for illogical rules of war they're a dime a dozen. Take the one about having saw-edged bayonettes in WW1. People (read troops) were so taken in with the concept that a saw-edged (and we're talking about the reverse edge) bayonettes would cause horrible wounds (more horrible than a 'normal' foot-and-a-half of steel in the belly would) that they'd kill any enemy having a saw-edge outright. This was later picked up by commanders and politicians and a new rule of war was instilled; 'No saw edged bayonettes'. This is about as logical as calling the Brady Bill an effective way of keeping guns of the streets.
As for the whole Japanese prisoners vs. US bombings issue, look at the 'Only winners aren't prossecuted' post further down.
It's all pretty simple, IMHO, if the military could do it, they would do it, no question about it.
Compare to WW2 where both sides used false radio broadcasts to eachothers populations. Lord Haw-Haw (part of the German propaganda machine) is widely known, his British, Russian and American counterparts aren't, and they broadcast the same type of information. The point being that German propagandists were treated as War Criminals while nothing happened to their Allied conterparts. Just see any recounting of the Inteligence War of WW2 if you're interested.
The same thing goes for the Gulf War. Saddam was denounced as a war criminal for getting his prisoners to talk about how good it was in Iraq and how bad the USA were for declaring war on Iraq. Bush, on the other hand, was not even condemned for bearing false witness as to the Iraqi treatment of the Kuwaitian (sic?) population. Even the most famous case, where Bush and an employee of the Kuwait Embassy fabricated a tale of how Iraqi troops had entered Kuwaiti hostpitals and killed infants in the incubators so they could bring the incubators back to Iraq, brough brough only cursory examination from the western press. But Bush was on the winning side.
It can be argued that this is not the same thing as sending pictures/sound of enemy commanders to their troops, but the way I figure it is only that the target of the deception is the civilian population (often of both countries). (And sending false orders to the enemy is, and will always be, an integral part of war, it's only a question of if it succeeds, and is kept secret, or not.) What I think happened is that members of the DoD got scared at the thought of what could happend if some foregin power got access to their information distribution and acted accordingly. IMHO it is another example of officials saying 'oh, how bad' and secretly planing on doing it to the other fellow anyhow.
This whole setup with Kevin Mitnick is strangely reminescent of what happend with Eddie Slovik. (This post might be a bit off topic but beer (sic) with me.) Slovik was a private in WW2, just like many others. Like some he felt an incredible dread at the thought of someone shooting at him, and like some he deserted. In WW2 some 40 000 US armed forces personel were charged with deserting their post in one way or another. Most of these recieved disciplinary measures or lesser court-martials but 2864 were tried by general court-martial. Of these 49 were sentenced to death and one actualy executed, Eddie Slovik. And here comes the relevant part, at least to Mitnicks case; Slovik was executed as an example to other troops. The fact that very few even heard of his case is proof enough that the example part failed. Slovik was choosen, out of 49 approved for death, by two factors, he refused to return to duty and signed a piece of paper (a napkin in fact) stating that he would not fight and he was a nobody with a criminal record. Mitnick is also a nobody, he didn't have access to large sums of money and good lawyers, which would make him hard to prosecute. He had a record, stealing computer manuals, breaking into systems and similar. And he was avaliable as a public target, made famous by a cooperation between a reporter and a security specialist. Slovik couldn't defend himself. He was dead before he even went to the court-martial. He was unable to say anything to his own defence, except the truth, that he didn't want to fight. Mitnick couldn't defend himself either. He was convicted before his trial, and not by any legal force but by two men, a reporter and a buisnessman. Two men who earned $750 000 solely by putting Mitnick behind bars. Thus comes the question; if Sloviks death and the following destruction of the lives of his family did nothing to affect the morale of the US troops abroad, will the imprisonment of Mitnick, and the de facto destruction of his life do anything for the morale and/or activities of the Hacker community? I think not...
Yours Truly The Crazy Polak For further information on the Slovik case, and the numbers quoted in this article see William B. Huie - The Execution of Private Slovik. For an article about the Mitnick case see Forbes Magazine.
Really.. I think it's completely reasonable that most people do not want to read every last paragraph in every one of the agreements we see every day.
If you live in the US you have to read the fine print on every piece of paper that you sign otherwise you're just inviting anyone to mess you up royaly. Just check the case with the Danish student who got mugged and the hospital decided to pull the plug on him and take all his organs for donation, just because he didn't read the fine print on the insurance agreement. Apparently his parents tried to sue the hospital but failed because of the insurance agreement said the decision to pull the plug was up to the hospital.
The going rate for a Civil Engineering graduate in Sweden is about 18 000 SEK (slightly more than US$2000) per month. This is slightly higher for computer oriented proffesions, but not always, as Swedish engineers are grossly underpayed compared to their EC and US/Canada counterparts. An expert in a highly specialized field, such as network designing or some forms of situation specific coding (such as controlprograms for the Swedish military unmaned Helo experiment) can get as much as 35 000 (about $4000) with a few (say 5) years of experience. These are the correct numbers but you have to calculate taxes and benefits into this. Income tax in Sweden ranges from 30% to 50%. Benefits are usually nonexistent, instead employees are expected to rely on the state benefits, such as fairly cheap and pretty good medical and dental care (optometrists and contacts are another matter). Companies often sponsor employees with cars, mobile phones and similar essentials, but they count as part of the salary and you have to tax for them.
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Even though he was a lousy shot, he knew enough to aim at people if you want to kill them, something he wouldn't have known without Q3.
He knew to aim at people if you want to kill them? What other reason would there be to aim at someone? To ivite them over for Hannukah?
Enough with the semantics though, more to the point, the guy wouldn't have known where to aim if he hadn't played quake? How about walking down to the library and picking up any medical or history book? Would that in turn make people who have a knowledge of basic human physics killers? Why then doesn't more doctors go berzerk instead of postal workers? And why do people who doesn't play computer games actualy kill others, pure dumb luck? Since they can't know where to aim, they haven't played quake.
Yes, there is a connection between watched violent behaviour and expressed violent behaviour. But it's much smaller than say, the connection between endured stress and violent behaviour, or the connection between dysfunctional upbringing and violent behaviour. And if you study you will notice that there is a causual connection between watched violence and expressed, but there has not been a conclusive study to show how much of that is direct and how much is shared (ie the "do people who watch violent movies become more violent or do violent people watch violent movies?" dilema). (Disclamer; I haven't seen one mentionend in any of the sociology and social theory classes I've studied.)
On the other hand, a single man can step on countless roaches without any trouble at all. It would take an unproportionaly large amount of roaches to somp a man into pulp.
I don't think that the RIAA suit tells that much about music as it tells about the status of US law. Apparently, to us stupid Europeans, if you've got a good enough lawyer you can get anything done, legal or not. The US system of suing everyone and everything is causing this storm. It's a hysteric reacton to an insane system and all these lawsuits happend because the legel system in the US favours suing.
What do you think would have happend if the RIAA would simply have called the Napster people and asked them; 'hey, could you implement some kind of copy protection scheme for those who want to use it?'. I bet that they'd have gotten their way, and much faster than by suing. Besides, as has been pointed out, there are a lot of other ways to get MP3's that are just as easy. So maybe the RIAA is only trying to set a precedent by attacking a small part of what they percieve as a problem? If they'd succeed in taking on a weak opponent they could move on to stronger ones with another weapon in their legal arsenal.
But what can you do if you have a system that let's a kid sue her parents for refusing to give her candy? (I still refuse to believe in that one, the thought of a country alowing things like that to happend and armed with nukes is way to scary.) Not to say that our law is perfect, one just has to look at the case where two thieves beat an 70 year old man to death with a frying pan and got out free by blaming eachother to see that, but at least people over here don't sue eachother all the time.
If something like this would happend, with all American representatives leaving the comitee, the US would boycot it's work. And in this day and age any global project that does not have US support will fail.
And if you think that the US wouldn't boycot something just to get more power check the United Nations, where the US refuses to pay it's membership fee so that they can get extra leverage within the UN council.
That's my point exactly, rights come from power. But your conclusion is slightly incompleate; the robber is exposed to a greater power, that of the state which says that it's against it's laws to kill people. Thus the citizen is granted the right to live without (or with very little) threat to himself. In response the citizen is faced with responsibilities that the state demands; to pay taxes, to obey the laws, perhaps even to get drafted and die. Thus the greater power (state) protects the lesser power (citizen).
As for the rest of the argument, the power doesn't have to grant it's citizens any rights. Just look at dictatorships in general. But in a democracy the control of the power goes not to whomever can threaten others but to whomever can win their confidence. By voting many citizens assert one citizens right to control the power they all create. In turn the one in charge is supposed to fullfill whatever promises he gave to gain the confidence of others whether it's to lower taxes or raise wellfare or whatever.
Of course this doesn't always work. There parts of a state that rejects it's laws, whether from conviction or for personal gain. But in general the laws of the state are followed (why they're followed is another matter, check Bordieu for some strange ideas).
So much for my ranting. Happy days and happy living.
Either this is a bad joke or I'm right in being amazed at the pure stupidity of some people.
You don't have any rights except what whomever is willing to pay for your 'rights' is willing to give you. There are no inherent rights as you seem to belive. People aren't born with rights, just as little as people are born with responsibilities. It is trough struggle, their own and others, that people get 'rights'. If someone would not have fought for freedom, what right would you have to it? None. You'd be a slave like everyone else, except for those people who were lucky to be born into a class that were in control. Just check the history of the middle ages and backwards.
And if you're still willing to claim that you get rights just because of some piece of paper stating that you have them, well, I hereby officialy grant you the right to eat lots of beans and fart yourself into orbit. Go ahead, three, two, one, liftoff!
And even the precious constitution, that you think is giving you all your unaliable rights; if it were not for the people who fought for it against the British, and if it wasn't for the people who have fought for it ever since, from Lincoln to Martin Luther King, the constitution would be nothing but a mildewing piece of paper.
And if you still want to babble on about your 'rights' I'm going to paraphrase Dead Kenedys:
Take a holliday in Cambodia.
First of, the basis is exactly as for SETI@home but for the one single line (1a): All of the 'for the good of the world' process distribution systems (like SETI@home) are initiated localy, at the discretion of the user. If I want to run my client overnight that's my decision, not the decision of SETI@home. But here Intel patents a method where the user has nothing to say about if s/he wants to give processor power away.
Moving on (16): Now this, at least to my untrained eyes, seems to say that any time the central computer wants it the remote must perform the task. Once again there is no question of 'wanting', it's simply stated that the central comp can order the remote to perform certain tasks. Of course there is the part about 'at a predetermined time'. But that doesn't say anything about what that time is. An ISP using this system might require it's customers computers to be available at any given 'predetermined time', even if this would be in the mid-afternoon when they're in use.
The idea is expanded in 21a: The first set of tasks, stored localy on the remote, might be nothing other than a program that listens for a request from the central server. Thus the servers might, on a predetermined schedule say once every minute, querry the remote. If the remote would then be available it would recieve new data (ie second set) that would contain the 'real' data to be computed. Brilliant, AOL can now enter our comps and request us to compute for them at any time.
Correlation 1(25): And 2 (27):
Ok, so now it's a quetsion of intention. In the patent Intel states its benign intentions, to lessen the server load of an ISP and/or sitehost. But, as with any patent, this could be seen more generaly as the ability to 'slave' a users computer on the whim of an outside agency. Thus it is up to the reader to decide whether they belive in the goodwill of the Intel Corp. or not.
On a side note, wasn't this form of distribution common already in the 70s with linked Microcomputers being assigned tasks from a central computer?
I'll have to dissagree, albeit only on certain parts. Yes, it is almost impossible to predict what will happend in 100 years time. But it is possible to say which direction the world is most likely to take.
About a year ago Swedish television showed a rerun of a documetary series from the 60s, about what the world would be like at the turn of the millenium. Sure, it had it's share of the wildly optimistic futurists who predicted everything from private spacecraft to meeting god. But most of those asked had a relatively sane, and in retrospect true, view of what would happend.
One of the subjects, a nuclear scientist, analyzed how technology was developing trough the 40s, 50s and early 60s. He predicted that it would continue in the same direction, with increased minimization, increased availability and increased usage of technology. He also predicted that communications would explode, allowing people to communicate cheap and fast across the entire globe (internet & iridium anyone?).
There were lots of scientists expressing their opinons, and mostly they have come true. Families have become less solid and divorce rates have climbed. People have become more mobile and we are moving around more than ever, to study, to work and for pure recreation. Airtravel is safe and relatively fast. Computers have shrunk and are available to the common man (although the CS professor that spoke of computers had the modest vision of them taking up the space of a small table).
So it is possible to predict the future in broad strokes, although anyone predicting model ZK-33 neural interfaces should stick to writting SF.
In the universities the teachers are either proffessors, most of whom actively research in the areas they're teaching, or senior students who realy like the subject, know it well, and teach as an extra credit / small source of revenue. Therefore teachers at university are as up to date as they can be.
Not so in Sweden... There was a big case about a year back of 'Radio Islam' a muslim extremist radio station and web site (and publishing house). I never listened to it myself but apparently their principial owner went on the air and online with anti-Semitic progaganda. The station and site got shut down for violation of the 'harrasment of group' act but not the publishing house. (Hets mot folkgrupp, meaning about harrasment or incitement against a particular group of people. It's supposed to protect any group of people from prossecution by any other group but only the nazi crackdowns (and related) have gotten any media coverage, althought it's probable that the law has been used in other cases as well.)
Also, what is the Communications Decency Act? And does it have anything to do with why US TV shows 'beep' out any f**k's?
... but the feet deal under the table, as an old Russian saying goes. The trick here is that no Government wishes to have Internet listed as a freedom of speech issue.
.) (And please read everything criticaly, especialy this article.)
In Sweden there is a constitutional legislation about protecting the freedom to publish and distribute your views. And yet a recent (quite controversial) jugement decided that the internet is not a valid print media, and as such not protected by the free speech act.
This is happening all around the globe. And why? Because it's very easy to publish something on the net. No special resources are needed, you don't even need a computer as you can walk down to your local library and borrow one. All you need is a little bit of knowledge and something to say. And that's dangerous to any government.
I could just as easily be describing how to destroy the US (or any other) government, telling people that one race or religion is superior to another or that abortion is murder and should be punished by death. All of these are statements that are easy to find on the web. All of these are available in print, if you know where to look. So why would anyone care if these (or any other) opinion are also available on the net?
First of, the net is accessible to anyone and there is no (practical) way to check on who accesses what. Therefore there is no way to catalogue 'dangerous elements', however security agencies choose to define the term. It's very easy to check who's going to a meeting or ordering a book, it's much harder to check who's looking at a webpage and even harder to check who's there because of conviction and who just surfed on in.
Secondly, news on the net spread like fire on the steppe. Just think about the case of Mahir, the turkish man who's (stolen) page became the focus of millions of viewers overnight (why? don't ask me, I find it all rather strange). The same could be possible of the White America Movements webpage, or any other extremist groups. And that would lead to media panic. Just think of the headlines 'Nazi party attracts millions of followers', 'Fourth Reich founded in Illonois'. Heck the possibities for bad titles, bad reporting and free exposure for any obscure extremists are humongous.
Third, the Internet is not (yet) protected by any cohesive freedom of media act. Therefore anything published on the net does not benefit from the same rights as a 'normal' publication. For example, in Sweden it's illegal to force vendors to stop selling a certain book, but it's quite legal to force an ISP to stop hosting a certain page. I immagine it's the same in most of the western world.
So there you have four points (yeah, I did number only three, mea culpa) about why censoring the web is so attractive. It's easy to publish on it, it's hard to check the spread of publications, it's easy to spread the widely, which makes undesirable (from an government policy standpoint) websites classed as 'dangerous' and it's easy to do something about it, which makes govenment agencies more likely to intervene. And I'd like to point out that they did not pull Mike Z.s' page until it started to attract attention (security trough obscurity and all that *grin*). Until Mike Z. became famous (however little fame he got) he was just another coock (sic?) ranting away on the net.
For the wrap up then; first to repeat Garins comment:
Find yourself a medium that you control, don't depend on renting space from other companies.
Very true, just as you can't depend on finding a printing house that is willing to publish your essay on why 'Mein Kampf' is the greatest literary work of all times, you can't expect that ISPs will be throwing themselves at your feet to host your 'International Terrorism for Dummies' website. And if an ISP does host it, don't expect them to fight for it. That's your job. If you feel that your views are worth fighting for, you're the one that has to do all the fighting.
Secondly, assuming that you share my brand of political pessimism, governments will do pretty much anything to force their version of 'goodness' on the world. But anyone with a conviction will do that, even if it's a politico whos conviction is that pushing a certain matter will gain him more votes.
If still in doubt, see how the German government managed to ban 'Mein Kampf' in the western world (I'll give you a hint: they claimed that they had the copyright to it and then refused to allow anyone to publish or distribute it, they even managed to get it banned from libraries, except for research reasons) or how the Swedish government managed to claim that the Swedish people wanted to ban nuclear power (by calling a referendum where the choices to vote on were 'ban now', 'ban by year 2000' and 'ban by year 2015'. The 2015 won with a large majority).
So, without further ado, have a nice and very optimistic life
Also, if you encrypt your stuff, and you usually have nothing to hide, and others do the same, eventually it gets much harder for anyone to snoop on the internet. They'd generally want to attack people who send unencrypted streams of data... Sucks for them. :)
People who lurk around sniffing out plaintext messages and attacking them are usualy bored script kiddies. They are not something to worry about, unless you annoy your younger brother whos idea of a great retaliation is to post your logfile showing your access to www.spank-me-harder.com.
Against serious attacks, be they privacy or denial of service, the average user has no defence except anonymity. To hide in the masses is a cowardly concept but it works. If noone knows you're there they wont seek you out and attack you. And before you ask, yes I am quite familiar with the 'It's not the voices of the evil but the silence of the good' reasoning and I agree with it. But on the net, if you want to stay somewhat safe, don't stick out. Just take a look at how many attacks are made on the FBI's net resources and how many on John Doe's@Xoom. Anonymity works.
This brings us to the next point. Defending privacy on the net is not only a question of cryptography. The main problem is the usage of information that is gathered. If I wish to post in alt.binaries.terrorists that's my concern, but any ISP can, without threat of legal reprimand, enter my log and punish me by declining me their services. And that's a sanctioned privacy breech.
The same goes for push marketing (see the article further down). It's the companies that log access that choose how they will use their information. And use it they do. Just check AltaVista, the ads they show are tailored based on which country suffix you're connecting from. This is a mild form of push marketing, but it's concievable that someone would store information on what you search for and correlate it against which ads you're most liable to click-trough. And once such databases are in place they become a real threat to the integrity of the average joe.
But I do not believe that the situation is as bad as people are painting it up to be. If one thinks back to the 50s and the Communist paranoia, the 60s and the 'big brother' and later atomic war paranoia and the 70s with its drug wars, none of these problems were as bad as they were made out to be. The privacy issue on the internet will most likely go the same way, it's going to be present, and potentialy dangerous, but it will be forgotten for newer fears.
The idea has it's merits but how do you manage to run? The machine wouldn't be able to work properly at the speeds required (especialy if simulating an uneven surface, the dynamics would be horrible), or if it could move that fast it would probably be very jerky in starting and stoping. Also, you'd get added 'lag' for the time it would take the machine to detect that movement is in progres and overcome it's own inertia.
One major problems with mesh (and any other system that lets the person actualy walk) is that you can't compensate for the lack of moving mass easily. The person doing the walking would still compensate for moving his body, so that he'd lean into the movement. This is basical the same as running at a threadmill, if you don't learn to run without correcting your balance you'll fall off. And if you manage to avoid shifting your weight you'll learn a 'wrong' movement pattern, thus making practical application of any skills you get pretty difficult.
One solution to this is to fake acceleration by letting people wear a vest and connect it to wires placed above and around the person. The wires then pull on the vest in a manner that lets the person lean into the movement. The drawback is that the system doesn't react fast enough to follow small changes, and the wires severely hinder arm movement. It also leaves the problem of inner ear unsolved, as you will never 'feel' the movement.
I agree with you in your conclusions about the absurdity of the 'Laws of War', but look at where they're comming from.
First off the whole issue of FMJs being the only allowed ammunition. This fits nicely into the concept of 'Wounding one man takes three out of the battle'. Dum-dums, JHP and similar cause large, gapping, ugly wounds that kill, more or less, outright. Thus it is much nicer to talk about how it's 'inhuman' to use anything but FMJs, than to talk about how much more effective it is to use FMJs.
The same thing goes for every rule of war there is, even the so-called humane ones. They're all practicalities. No rule of war that is impractical was ever followed. Heck, take treatement of prisoners of war. That was followed with the hope that the other party would follow it to, thus enabling the myth of 'our boys will be home some day', a great morale booster for the home front.
As for illogical rules of war they're a dime a dozen. Take the one about having saw-edged bayonettes in WW1. People (read troops) were so taken in with the concept that a saw-edged (and we're talking about the reverse edge) bayonettes would cause horrible wounds (more horrible than a 'normal' foot-and-a-half of steel in the belly would) that they'd kill any enemy having a saw-edge outright. This was later picked up by commanders and politicians and a new rule of war was instilled; 'No saw edged bayonettes'. This is about as logical as calling the Brady Bill an effective way of keeping guns of the streets.
As for the whole Japanese prisoners vs. US bombings issue, look at the 'Only winners aren't prossecuted' post further down.
It's all pretty simple, IMHO, if the military could do it, they would do it, no question about it.
Compare to WW2 where both sides used false radio broadcasts to eachothers populations. Lord Haw-Haw (part of the German propaganda machine) is widely known, his British, Russian and American counterparts aren't, and they broadcast the same type of information. The point being that German propagandists were treated as War Criminals while nothing happened to their Allied conterparts. Just see any recounting of the Inteligence War of WW2 if you're interested.
The same thing goes for the Gulf War. Saddam was denounced as a war criminal for getting his prisoners to talk about how good it was in Iraq and how bad the USA were for declaring war on Iraq. Bush, on the other hand, was not even condemned for bearing false witness as to the Iraqi treatment of the Kuwaitian (sic?) population. Even the most famous case, where Bush and an employee of the Kuwait Embassy fabricated a tale of how Iraqi troops had entered Kuwaiti hostpitals and killed infants in the incubators so they could bring the incubators back to Iraq, brough brough only cursory examination from the western press. But Bush was on the winning side.
It can be argued that this is not the same thing as sending pictures/sound of enemy commanders to their troops, but the way I figure it is only that the target of the deception is the civilian population (often of both countries). (And sending false orders to the enemy is, and will always be, an integral part of war, it's only a question of if it succeeds, and is kept secret, or not.) What I think happened is that members of the DoD got scared at the thought of what could happend if some foregin power got access to their information distribution and acted accordingly. IMHO it is another example of officials saying 'oh, how bad' and secretly planing on doing it to the other fellow anyhow.
But that's what war is all about.
This whole setup with Kevin Mitnick is strangely reminescent of what happend with Eddie Slovik. (This post might be a bit off topic but beer (sic) with me.)
Slovik was a private in WW2, just like many others. Like some he felt an incredible dread at the thought of someone shooting at him, and like some he deserted. In WW2 some 40 000 US armed forces personel were charged with deserting their post in one way or another. Most of these recieved disciplinary measures or lesser court-martials but 2864 were tried by general court-martial. Of these 49 were sentenced to death and one actualy executed, Eddie Slovik.
And here comes the relevant part, at least to Mitnicks case;
Slovik was executed as an example to other troops. The fact that very few even heard of his case is proof enough that the example part failed. Slovik was choosen, out of 49 approved for death, by two factors, he refused to return to duty and signed a piece of paper (a napkin in fact) stating that he would not fight and he was a nobody with a criminal record. Mitnick is also a nobody, he didn't have access to large sums of money and good lawyers, which would make him hard to prosecute. He had a record, stealing computer manuals, breaking into systems and similar. And he was avaliable as a public target, made famous by a cooperation between a reporter and a security specialist.
Slovik couldn't defend himself. He was dead before he even went to the court-martial. He was unable to say anything to his own defence, except the truth, that he didn't want to fight.
Mitnick couldn't defend himself either. He was convicted before his trial, and not by any legal force but by two men, a reporter and a buisnessman. Two men who earned $750 000 solely by putting Mitnick behind bars.
Thus comes the question; if Sloviks death and the following destruction of the lives of his family did nothing to affect the morale of the US troops abroad, will the imprisonment of Mitnick, and the de facto destruction of his life do anything for the morale and/or activities of the Hacker community?
I think not...
Yours Truly
The Crazy Polak
For further information on the Slovik case, and the numbers quoted in this article see William B. Huie - The Execution of Private Slovik. For an article about the Mitnick case see Forbes Magazine.
Sorry, saw a documentary about it on Swedish television about 2 months ago.
Really.. I think it's completely reasonable that most people do not want to read every last paragraph in every one of the agreements we see every day.
If you live in the US you have to read the fine print on every piece of paper that you sign otherwise you're just inviting anyone to mess you up royaly. Just check the case with the Danish student who got mugged and the hospital decided to pull the plug on him and take all his organs for donation, just because he didn't read the fine print on the insurance agreement. Apparently his parents tried to sue the hospital but failed because of the insurance agreement said the decision to pull the plug was up to the hospital.
The going rate for a Civil Engineering graduate in Sweden is about 18 000 SEK (slightly more than US$2000) per month. This is slightly higher for computer oriented proffesions, but not always, as Swedish engineers are grossly underpayed compared to their EC and US/Canada counterparts. An expert in a highly specialized field, such as network designing or some forms of situation specific coding (such as controlprograms for the Swedish military unmaned Helo experiment) can get as much as 35 000 (about $4000) with a few (say 5) years of experience. These are the correct numbers but you have to calculate taxes and benefits into this. Income tax in Sweden ranges from 30% to 50%. Benefits are usually nonexistent, instead employees are expected to rely on the state benefits, such as fairly cheap and pretty good medical and dental care (optometrists and contacts are another matter). Companies often sponsor employees with cars, mobile phones and similar essentials, but they count as part of the salary and you have to tax for them.