"Whenever I talk about this with other they all give that weird look as if I was making a big drama about it."
From this statement, I gather that, like myself, you watch little to no television at all. The masses are very heavily influenced - one might even say 'drugged' - by the propaganda expertly meted out by way of television broadcasting. That's why you and I notice that 'oblique look'.
Re:Islam - Always Used to Getting its Own Way
on
Pakistan Blocks YouTube
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
No that's completely wrong. Christian fanatics today are incredibly violent and psychopathically extremist. They far excel even the worst of the Muslims in that regard. See this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owCXbDVTLRE
It's funny you should mention that, because the Menwith Hill listening post is widely known to be a listening post, but in the UK the official line is that it's an RAF base (it happens to have an ancillary RAF function). Reciprocally, the UK has a permanent RAF base in the USA (Nevada I think). And naturally, UK servicemen on an RAF base are not answerable to American laws, and are free to listen to whatever they want (including American telephone conversations) without obtaining a warrant from an American court. So it's likely that some kind of exchange of information takes place on the pretext of these reciprocal Air Force bases.
The NSA has been eavesdropping on electronic comms of US citizens including telephone conversations for several decades. It was illegal to do this in the USA so they did it from their base at Menwith Hill in Yorkshire, England (MH is the world's largest listening post).
I live in the UK and have a connection with a medium-sized business that uses Sage accounting software internally.
In addition, the vast majority of the professional accountants and book-keepers in the UK use Sage/Sageline products in preference to any other accounting software.
Have you considered that there's a barrier to your learning in adulthood? Like you, I grew up doing 'things' with computers that my parents couldn't begin to fathom. And yet, times change. The skills I had then are worthless now. I started with an 8-bit Amstrad homecomputer, and progressed onto IBM PCs and using DOS. I moved on to Windows and spent a long time using Windows, letting my brain stagnate all the way up to Win98. Then when I made the switch to Linux I was like my parents: knowing nothing at all.
Do you remember those old kung fu movies? When someone loses a fight, they are told: 'Your skill is useless, and obsolete. GO HOME AND START FROM SCRATCH!' I love those movies... Strangely enough they apply to computer technology. You can't expect to just go to work, do your job, come home and instantly be up to speed on computer technology. You've got to keep the water boiling in the kettle, by learning what you don't know. Just my 2 cents.. Until you put the effort in, you won't get any results. Linux doesn't need more users. It's users who need Linux.
The guys will be mostly interested in making sure that no blame accrues to them in the matter. So the only thought going through their heads is: 'how do I make this thing go away with as little trouble to myself as possible?'
From this point, it depends on several external factors, such as whether there's a general understanding around the office that if the email(s) are found, it could mean trouble for an individual with seniority, or a general sort of trouble for people involved in the matter. Also, it depends on what would happen if someone found the email. I don't think anyone involved will not be under the impression that merely finding it would imply a sort of guilt by association. For example, suppose someone did find the email. Questions will follow, e.g. 'where did you find it?', 'how did you find it?', and then move on to 'why didn't you find it earlier?'. What would then happen is a search on the employee's record for any suggestion of a history of impropriety, with a view to establishing whether it's possible to scapegoat that employee when it's time to go public by saying 'X was untrustworthy - it was his fault - officials are investigating the authenticity of the alleged email in the light of the way it was discovered and the official responsible, etc.'
In summary, if nobody has any personal advantage in finding the email, then the mechanism for 'searching' for it will first involve making it generally understood that this is an 'important' email and its content may have implications for senior people (to make individuals anxious about the limelight falling on them in a negative way), and then a lax method of searching for the email will be deployed (i.e. literally asking people to do a quick 5-minute check and then give an assurance that they don't have it). This way, managers are covered. Everyone will understand that if the email is found, the press office and policy unit will have sole responsibility for producing a cover story, and heads will have to roll. And when on board a ship, some levels are more expendable than others - ultimately the bridge and the captain have to be protected at all costs.
There's a government mechanism for dealing with such matters which people here might find surprising.
In fulfilment of a legal obligation. a request will be made to administrators and office staff to check their email accounts for the 'missing email'. The managers will accept the word of the staff under them, who will typically eyeball their inbox in Outlook before reporting 'no, haven't got it'.
Don't assume they're grepping through their servers because if they're just responding to a freedom of information request, they're not. They will restrict themselves to a search that seems 'reasonable' in the eyes of a technological illiterate, that's all.
"Eventually, this excuse to "lower the bar" on the recruitment standards could become a way to justify drafting *anyone* for combat, not just those with optimal health conditions."
Yes, I believe that is its real purport. Furthermore, when these unfit people are recruited, the USAF can insist that they do basic military training including fitness training and weapons drill to bring them up to the level of other recruits, and then insist that they do non-tech related duties such as combat in the field.
" What better way to conserve your best troops for a major crisis than by simply replacing them all with four or five times as many people with substandard health and arm them all with guns. Anyone whose ever toyed with swarm theory can see the incentive of such an approach. In some sense this could even be considered a form of genocide as those in power send the less desireable of us to fight on their behalf, knowing that our lack of training and good health will probably result massive death counts, while at the same time freeing up resources previously used for these people to be consumed by the higher quality troops and desireables within our population."
This is where I disagree. I don't know much about military strategic operations, but I would assume that it's much less wasteful than what you're suggesting. The US military budget is enormous. Is there really such an incentive to free up resources? And if so, wouldn't it make sense to avoid recruiting 'sub-standard' people in the first place?
It seems clear that the mechanisms used for recruiting real computing talent are very different from national recruitment campaigns for the armed forces such as this one. The real talent is recruited via the top universities, and sometimes by way of the parallel military education system and sponsorship from a very early age through school, college, University by the government. In the latter case, the security concerns are minimalised. But you're right and I agree with you that it's extremely unlikely that they would recruit hackers from civpop.
It seems most likely that this is just a ploy to get more people to sign up for the USAF.
In the UK, the television advertisements for the Army and the Royal Navy both feature people doing stuff with computers - in the case of the Royal Navy there's a guy who encounters a computer fault, and so he turns it off and back on again. A sign for anyone with a bit of intelligence that what they're really after are wannabes. It's much more fashionable and seems more empowering to be a 'geek' than it does to be a slightly anxious youth with minimal education who's about to be shipped off to Iraq or Afghanistan (hats off to them all though).
I'm not sure what the answer is, but looking at the British example, the top secret civilian intelligence organisation GCHQ which is responsible for intercepting all comms has the largest listening post in the world, which comes under the Royal Air Force and is listed on the RAF website as an RAF base.
There are some 'protectors' a protectee should be a bit afraid of. The restrictions on movement and expression of people involved in top secret work are quite daunting. I imagine the daily proofs of innocence you would have to give (being searched on site, overseers, secret interviews, people in your social circle having to be interviewed and vetted etc.) would be quite stressful.
Stay ahead of the game. Beat them with knowledge and understanding of technology - it will always be faster than the rate at which they can make laws. Big organisations are slow and reactive. That's why the new emphasis is about controlling access to technology. Knowledge and cleverness together are an unstoppable combination. Bittorrent itself was invented by a hobbyist.
"So what happens if someone hijacks the wireless that came with her internet access that the goverment recommended and uses it for P2P getting her cut off? Is she supposed to just starve then or something? Another good example is homework, are kids without internet access meant to be at a disadvantage by being unable to perform decent research?"
With respect these questions are no obstacle at all to the proposed measure. They can be defeated with standard lawyer-logic. If someone hijacks the wireless, we have to consider whether (if it's a criminal case) this is a reasonable doubt against your grandmother's guilt. To establish this your grandmother would be asked whether anyone had been around her neck of the woods with a laptop, or even 'any suspicious character'. If yes, why didn't she report it? If she doesn't know, then in the absence of any evidence at all there's no real reason to believe that any hypothetical villain did this file-sharing at your grandmother's expense at any time. What is the likelihood of someone wardriving down the street where you live? Probably extremely unlikely. Also, how often does your grandmother check her router logs? Have these been cleared/deleted? Why is that? Could it mean she was trying to cover her tracks or leave it open to claim that a crook stole her wifi? Your grandmother had a WEP key set. Can your expensive man in a wig explain to the honourable judge how hard/easy it is to crack WEP? Maybe a court-appointed expert would address the probabilities in this case, etc.
Homework: don't the kids have internet access at school? Is there no after-school club they could attend, to do the necessary internet research? Or a local library? A teacher would be asked how long it would take to gather the necessary data for the school project. They won't say it's an all-night homework task, or anything that would require the kid to stay up after 2100.
I don't think the UK government actually wants to permanently deprive anyone of their internet access. The internet is an important way for them to read people's minds (i.e. find out what people are thinking) and to persuade and if necessary coerce. All UK and USA internet activity is already monitored and logged at the GCHQ's Menwith Hill site in Yorkshire, where masses of data is processed and sorted by computers. A computer program will analyse the data and build a database of information about personal habits/political leanings, and if a certain 'score' is reached then this file will go to a human analyst who will decide what to do with it. So, the last thing the British government wants is to take away your internet access.
What will happen instead is that the proposals will be reviewed and amended by the government legal service, so that when the measure comes into force it won't be slapped down by either domestic courts or the ECJ/EHCR. It will be changed to something like this:
Record warnings up to a maximum of 3 times in connection with unauthorised use of a port range (which will have to be logged by the ISP as a matter of obligation) after which the industry association will be informed;
Industry association will prosecute for copyright infringement using a process that has been expedited by this new legislation and during which time the internet access of the defendant shall be suspended and possibly made the subject of a court (or more likely tribunal) order imposing restrictions. The conduct of his ISP and whether this has been in line with the ISP's new statutory obligations shall also be investigated and if applicable prosecuted at this stage;
Defendant if found guilty with the help of evidence from his ISP shall be levied a statutory penalty fine (criminal) on a fixed scale payable to a quasi-public body charged with oversight of copyright infringement. This fine will not serve to reduce the defendant's liability in damages to any other legal body (e.g. the industry association or its members) because it will not be paid (nominally at least) to such persons directly. MI5 (secret Security Service file shall be updated - if this person was not an F-Branch 'subversive' then he is now, and if he already was then his file and status shall be reviewed by some unaccountable spider;
Defendant's internet restrictions shall be lifted subject to any ISP's willingness to accept him as a customer.
The important matters are: 1) legality of any new measure designed to tackle filesharing; and 2) the new measure will be widely broadcast, and the authorities will come down very heavily on perhaps a handful of people at most (wrecking lives and relationships, terminating employment, creating shame, alienation and humiliation with dawn/midnight raids etc.) and this will be widely publicised with the help of the BBC (which has been controlled by F-Branch MI5 since its inception), the Daily Telegraph and other state-controlled media. The rest of the media will further sensationalise and exaggerate the personal aspects of the individual cases. The whole idea will be to create a tense and fearful situation so that even though it will be easy to circumvent any new legal measures to prevent filesharing, people will be too terrorised to do so.
I'm not sure whether he still has a part in the control i.e. the decision making process regarding kernel development, or whether he's now voluntarily taken a back seat. He is definitely the spokesman for Linux though.
They are youngish and tend to be under-par in terms of computing/IT literacy. I have been asked by friends to create a Facebook account, which I have done albeit using an invented name and invented personal details (e.g. date of birth, home town, etc.) It's not a good idea to use Facebook in the manner in which it was intended.
Slashdot Mirror
"Whenever I talk about this with other they all give that weird look as if I was making a big drama about it."
From this statement, I gather that, like myself, you watch little to no television at all. The masses are very heavily influenced - one might even say 'drugged' - by the propaganda expertly meted out by way of television broadcasting. That's why you and I notice that 'oblique look'.
http://www.writetothem.com/
No that's completely wrong. Christian fanatics today are incredibly violent and psychopathically extremist. They far excel even the worst of the Muslims in that regard. See this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owCXbDVTLRE
It's funny you should mention that, because the Menwith Hill listening post is widely known to be a listening post, but in the UK the official line is that it's an RAF base (it happens to have an ancillary RAF function). Reciprocally, the UK has a permanent RAF base in the USA (Nevada I think). And naturally, UK servicemen on an RAF base are not answerable to American laws, and are free to listen to whatever they want (including American telephone conversations) without obtaining a warrant from an American court. So it's likely that some kind of exchange of information takes place on the pretext of these reciprocal Air Force bases.
The NSA has been eavesdropping on electronic comms of US citizens including telephone conversations for several decades. It was illegal to do this in the USA so they did it from their base at Menwith Hill in Yorkshire, England (MH is the world's largest listening post).
#!/bin/sh
apt-get update
/sbin/shutdown -h now
apt-get -f install
I live in the UK and have a connection with a medium-sized business that uses Sage accounting software internally.
In addition, the vast majority of the professional accountants and book-keepers in the UK use Sage/Sageline products in preference to any other accounting software.
True words.. I update my system like this:
#apt-get -f install
and that's all it takes, literally. Done, finished, finito.
Linux has everything you need, and much more.
Have you considered that there's a barrier to your learning in adulthood? Like you, I grew up doing 'things' with computers that my parents couldn't begin to fathom. And yet, times change. The skills I had then are worthless now. I started with an 8-bit Amstrad homecomputer, and progressed onto IBM PCs and using DOS. I moved on to Windows and spent a long time using Windows, letting my brain stagnate all the way up to Win98. Then when I made the switch to Linux I was like my parents: knowing nothing at all.
Do you remember those old kung fu movies? When someone loses a fight, they are told: 'Your skill is useless, and obsolete. GO HOME AND START FROM SCRATCH!' I love those movies... Strangely enough they apply to computer technology. You can't expect to just go to work, do your job, come home and instantly be up to speed on computer technology. You've got to keep the water boiling in the kettle, by learning what you don't know. Just my 2 cents.. Until you put the effort in, you won't get any results. Linux doesn't need more users. It's users who need Linux.
The guys will be mostly interested in making sure that no blame accrues to them in the matter. So the only thought going through their heads is: 'how do I make this thing go away with as little trouble to myself as possible?'
From this point, it depends on several external factors, such as whether there's a general understanding around the office that if the email(s) are found, it could mean trouble for an individual with seniority, or a general sort of trouble for people involved in the matter. Also, it depends on what would happen if someone found the email. I don't think anyone involved will not be under the impression that merely finding it would imply a sort of guilt by association. For example, suppose someone did find the email. Questions will follow, e.g. 'where did you find it?', 'how did you find it?', and then move on to 'why didn't you find it earlier?'. What would then happen is a search on the employee's record for any suggestion of a history of impropriety, with a view to establishing whether it's possible to scapegoat that employee when it's time to go public by saying 'X was untrustworthy - it was his fault - officials are investigating the authenticity of the alleged email in the light of the way it was discovered and the official responsible, etc.'
In summary, if nobody has any personal advantage in finding the email, then the mechanism for 'searching' for it will first involve making it generally understood that this is an 'important' email and its content may have implications for senior people (to make individuals anxious about the limelight falling on them in a negative way), and then a lax method of searching for the email will be deployed (i.e. literally asking people to do a quick 5-minute check and then give an assurance that they don't have it). This way, managers are covered. Everyone will understand that if the email is found, the press office and policy unit will have sole responsibility for producing a cover story, and heads will have to roll. And when on board a ship, some levels are more expendable than others - ultimately the bridge and the captain have to be protected at all costs.
There's a government mechanism for dealing with such matters which people here might find surprising.
In fulfilment of a legal obligation. a request will be made to administrators and office staff to check their email accounts for the 'missing email'. The managers will accept the word of the staff under them, who will typically eyeball their inbox in Outlook before reporting 'no, haven't got it'.
Don't assume they're grepping through their servers because if they're just responding to a freedom of information request, they're not. They will restrict themselves to a search that seems 'reasonable' in the eyes of a technological illiterate, that's all.
"Information wants to be Free"
What does this mean? Not all information should be in the public domain.
"Eventually, this excuse to "lower the bar" on the recruitment standards could become a way to justify drafting *anyone* for combat, not just those with optimal health conditions."
Yes, I believe that is its real purport. Furthermore, when these unfit people are recruited, the USAF can insist that they do basic military training including fitness training and weapons drill to bring them up to the level of other recruits, and then insist that they do non-tech related duties such as combat in the field.
" What better way to conserve your best troops for a major crisis than by simply replacing them all with four or five times as many people with substandard health and arm them all with guns. Anyone whose ever toyed with swarm theory can see the incentive of such an approach. In some sense this could even be considered a form of genocide as those in power send the less desireable of us to fight on their behalf, knowing that our lack of training and good health will probably result massive death counts, while at the same time freeing up resources previously used for these people to be consumed by the higher quality troops and desireables within our population."
This is where I disagree. I don't know much about military strategic operations, but I would assume that it's much less wasteful than what you're suggesting. The US military budget is enormous. Is there really such an incentive to free up resources? And if so, wouldn't it make sense to avoid recruiting 'sub-standard' people in the first place?
It seems clear that the mechanisms used for recruiting real computing talent are very different from national recruitment campaigns for the armed forces such as this one. The real talent is recruited via the top universities, and sometimes by way of the parallel military education system and sponsorship from a very early age through school, college, University by the government. In the latter case, the security concerns are minimalised. But you're right and I agree with you that it's extremely unlikely that they would recruit hackers from civpop.
It seems most likely that this is just a ploy to get more people to sign up for the USAF.
In the UK, the television advertisements for the Army and the Royal Navy both feature people doing stuff with computers - in the case of the Royal Navy there's a guy who encounters a computer fault, and so he turns it off and back on again. A sign for anyone with a bit of intelligence that what they're really after are wannabes. It's much more fashionable and seems more empowering to be a 'geek' than it does to be a slightly anxious youth with minimal education who's about to be shipped off to Iraq or Afghanistan (hats off to them all though).
Excellent question.
I'm not sure what the answer is, but looking at the British example, the top secret civilian intelligence organisation GCHQ which is responsible for intercepting all comms has the largest listening post in the world, which comes under the Royal Air Force and is listed on the RAF website as an RAF base.
There are some 'protectors' a protectee should be a bit afraid of. The restrictions on movement and expression of people involved in top secret work are quite daunting. I imagine the daily proofs of innocence you would have to give (being searched on site, overseers, secret interviews, people in your social circle having to be interviewed and vetted etc.) would be quite stressful.
Stay ahead of the game. Beat them with knowledge and understanding of technology - it will always be faster than the rate at which they can make laws. Big organisations are slow and reactive. That's why the new emphasis is about controlling access to technology. Knowledge and cleverness together are an unstoppable combination. Bittorrent itself was invented by a hobbyist.
No I think it's too broad-ranging. Net neutrality implies a lot more than simply rejecting this proposed legislation.
With respect these questions are no obstacle at all to the proposed measure. They can be defeated with standard lawyer-logic. If someone hijacks the wireless, we have to consider whether (if it's a criminal case) this is a reasonable doubt against your grandmother's guilt. To establish this your grandmother would be asked whether anyone had been around her neck of the woods with a laptop, or even 'any suspicious character'. If yes, why didn't she report it? If she doesn't know, then in the absence of any evidence at all there's no real reason to believe that any hypothetical villain did this file-sharing at your grandmother's expense at any time. What is the likelihood of someone wardriving down the street where you live? Probably extremely unlikely. Also, how often does your grandmother check her router logs? Have these been cleared/deleted? Why is that? Could it mean she was trying to cover her tracks or leave it open to claim that a crook stole her wifi? Your grandmother had a WEP key set. Can your expensive man in a wig explain to the honourable judge how hard/easy it is to crack WEP? Maybe a court-appointed expert would address the probabilities in this case, etc.
Homework: don't the kids have internet access at school? Is there no after-school club they could attend, to do the necessary internet research? Or a local library? A teacher would be asked how long it would take to gather the necessary data for the school project. They won't say it's an all-night homework task, or anything that would require the kid to stay up after 2100.
What will happen instead is that the proposals will be reviewed and amended by the government legal service, so that when the measure comes into force it won't be slapped down by either domestic courts or the ECJ/EHCR. It will be changed to something like this:
The important matters are: 1) legality of any new measure designed to tackle filesharing; and 2) the new measure will be widely broadcast, and the authorities will come down very heavily on perhaps a handful of people at most (wrecking lives and relationships, terminating employment, creating shame, alienation and humiliation with dawn/midnight raids etc.) and this will be widely publicised with the help of the BBC (which has been controlled by F-Branch MI5 since its inception), the Daily Telegraph and other state-controlled media. The rest of the media will further sensationalise and exaggerate the personal aspects of the individual cases. The whole idea will be to create a tense and fearful situation so that even though it will be easy to circumvent any new legal measures to prevent filesharing, people will be too terrorised to do so.
I'm not sure whether he still has a part in the control i.e. the decision making process regarding kernel development, or whether he's now voluntarily taken a back seat. He is definitely the spokesman for Linux though.
I think you'll find there are many candidates for the 'rebel OS' position.
The command line by itself has a classical, austere beauty.
They are youngish and tend to be under-par in terms of computing/IT literacy. I have been asked by friends to create a Facebook account, which I have done albeit using an invented name and invented personal details (e.g. date of birth, home town, etc.) It's not a good idea to use Facebook in the manner in which it was intended.
All internet activity is logged, scanned for keywords and analysed first by a computer and then if necessary a human monitor.