What part of "under a wiretap warrent" didn't you understand? If they get a warrent, its ok by the 4th. The 4th is about getting warrents, and issuing them under propable cause.
And one more time, they aren't reading the email of anyone except those who are on the carnivore tapes when they pull them. Saying otherwise is kinda like claiming that if I listen to police traffic on a scanner I am in fact listening to all my neighbors' cell phone calls because the equipment I have hears all of them not just what I'm tuned in on. Or that if I search DejaNews for "the keeper" I'm also performing an inapropriate background check of my potential employees by looking for their email addresses on porn, gay and alternative lifestyle newsgroups. Because, hey, that info is being scanned by the same program that gives me back my search results.
Paranoia is one of the many reasons I don't vote libertarian. I keep one of the others in my wallet.
I refuse to accept that my 4th amendment rights protecting me from unreasonable search and seizure should be violated because there are criminals.
OK, breath deeply. Now lets think about this. Why was the fourth ammendment introduced in the first place? There were no phones, there wasn't even much of a postal service yet. But there were homes and doors and people capable of breaking them down to search your home. And there were police who might hear that you were seen leading a little kid into your home just before he was reported missing, and they might want to search your home. So we have the means to search your home and people who would want to. What do we do? We write an ammendment that says they can't do it unreasonably and a bunch of laws laying out a "reasonable" procedure.
Now the present. We have something besides your home, the internet, which people may want to search. We have ways for them to search it. And we still have an ammendment and a bunch of laws that say when and how they can do it. The existance of wiretap orders for other people who have given law enforcement enough justification to get a warrent, has nothing to do with your 4th ammendment rights, because they aren't searching and seizing you! As we understand carnivore and are discussing it, noone is spying on you.
Jon had it exactly right. As long as the FBI has the right and in fact the duty to obtain search or wiretap warrents, they will expand those rights into new forms of communication. It no more invades your rights than a legal, warrented search of your neighbor does.
-Kahuna Burger
PS, some people have expressed distrust at the number of internet wire tap orders obtained. But I'd be a lot more worried if they weren't getting any. Their going through the warrent process indicates that those warrents are neccassary, indicates that they are working within the system. Not perfectly, but its an indication that internet wiretapping is being taken as seriously as phone tapping. And thats what we want, right?
Hmmm but if the carnivore has spotted the names of various drugs in a disproportionately large number of ur emails, isnt that grounds for a warrant?
But it can't do that. I mean, it won't just "notice" them. Its a computer. If its purpose was to scan for drug references in all emails, they could do that, but it would have to be on purpose. They couldn't use the "plain sight" defense to validate the evidence, because it requires an extra deliberate step to gather. You can't get a warrent based on evidence that you should have needed a warrent to get. It taints the process all the way down the line.
Because I'm not paranoid? Because the system saves them man hours and computer time? Because the entire point of the report is that this new system replaces a system with less filtering? Because the privacy advocate who I was mocking accepted the same premises that I do and yet still managed to be paranoid about it?
Mostly because I'm not paranoid. And because the article stated that courts have already upheld the system. but hey, maybe the machines really aren't wiretapping at all, just trying to get enough information on every single person that they can plant false messages and frame anyone on earth for whatever they want! does that make your paranoid little mind happier?
One problem with the Carnivore system is that we can't trust the FBI to only do selective filtering - they need to intercept all messages and then sort out the ones that apply - except we can't trust them not to take my messages with them!
Are you not trusting the FBI, or not trusting the technology? The entire point of the system is that the FBI isn't just browsing through and deciding to take your messages. "They" aren't doing the sorting, no individual is going to say "hey! I know we just had a warrent for guy X but a line in guy Y's email caught my eye and I think we should look into it!" In fact, that is exactly what this systen is meant to avoid. Get it? The entire point of carnivore is to 1) save man hours, and 2) avoid invading the privacy of people who aren't covered by the warrent.
Why is this bad? Given the existance of wiretapping warrents that can be applied to electronic communications, how can you guys possibly object to a technological solution to decrease the human instinct to notice things other than what they are looking for. Computers don't see anything except what they're looking for. Have you ever done a web search for breed rescues and had your computer say "Hey, this isn't related, but there a kinda neat article over on Slashdot about overclocking."? No? Me neither. But I regularly browse the "new titles" section of the library for one topic and end up with an interesting book on something else. If you are concerned about law enforcement exceeding their warrent, you should be celebrating Carnivore.
If, on the other hand you just salivate like pavlov's dogs at the words "wiretapping" and "messages" Carnivore would be a bad thing by definition.
And no record of it is kept after analysis, does it make an invasion of privacy?
I'd say no. The article was perfectly clear. The idea is to get messages for people/accounts on which there is a warrent. The computer sifts the data for those messages, and only saves those ones. The people whose messages are analysed by the computer but not saved, not read not noted, have suffered no invasion of their privacy.
Look at it this way. What if the police were snooping on conversations over short wave radio by tuning to the frequency of the people they were interested in. Could you seriously say that every person in the area using a short wave radio had had their privacy invaded because the radio equipment used at some level recieved every signal, even though the police only heard and recorded one? Its just as silly to claim that they are "invading" anyone's privacy but the person whose messages they actually read when they download the carnivor files.
People who have a problem with the ability of law enforcement to get warents for wiretaps, should just say so. But when everything turns into some "Big Brother" paranoia rant, it just diminishes your credibility when you try to alert people to a real problem.
Heh, story of SlashDot : The Hacker Who Cried 'Big Brother'
This was 100 times in one year. The first year even. That seems like kind of a lot.
not really. The article said that it was availble to both federal agents and state agencies, right? So of all the investigations of all the state and federal law enforcement agencies over a year, in under a hundred cases did they feel it would be useful to investigate email communications. It would have helped put it in perspective if they said how many phone wiretaps were used in the same amount of time. probably hundreds of times as many.
Once you're scanning someone's molecules, DNA, or whatever, wouldn't this allow for more types of discrimination not less?
In the world of paranoid Gattacca ranting, maybe. In the real world, no.
There is no way at this point to take a person's DNA and sequence it for anything but a few major genetic diseases. No relevance outside of insurance. All the talk of knowing if someone is "prone to X" from their DNA is years in the future. Here and now, all the applications lead to less discrimination. Examples -
Sniffing for drugs. Don't pat down the long haired guy, just run everyone through the same doorway.
Guns, explosives, etc. eliminate "intuition" (often really means built up prejudice) as a reason to demand a frisk or strip search.
IDing someone. What we can do with the DNA today is (maybe) search for a specific individual who left tissue at a crime scene. Scan for the actual person, as opposed to police in a new york town who went with a two word description (black male) and stopped and harrassed avery black man (and some black women) they found in public areas. (true story, read about it in the wall street journal.)
Leave the paranoia behind, and try to think about how the technology can improve or damage security work in the real world. I think it sounds great for increased sercurity in some areas with decreased invasion of real privacy.
I should add: in the old media, there was little way to know if information was complete, or assess the reputation of those providing the information and so on. In the new media, there's a greater ability to do that - in real time, and with real time feedback.
while the realtime feedback may not have been there, I highly disagree that "old media" gives less ways of assessing reputation. Media competed with each other, and were glad to pounce on the "forgotten story" or point out failings.
Sadly, I use the past tense because of the state of media mergers in the US. In Boston, I think three or four of the top radio stations are all owned by the same company. Almost all of the small community newspapers are put out by one large group which also puts out the "competing" TAB. And they're looking at relaxing the rule against one co owning a newspaper and a radio station in the same market. Don't even get me started on TV.
Its this merging of ownership that I think endangers old and new media sources alike, rather than the "closed or open" media idea.
Of course, with very few exceptions, the actual news on/. is simply pointers to an old-school media source that has done all the work for you. I don't think/. is really open media, its a discussion group that rehashes closed media with even more filtering. (good thing too)
You trust information that comes from people and organisations that have built up trust over time, and could just as easily lose trust very quickly.
Er, how is this a product of the "new" media? I trust most information that comes from the Boston Globe, though I don't assume that it is complete. I give less trust to the information from the Boston Herald, because they have built up a reputation with me as sensationalistic. I check out the Mass News once in a while to see what the bile filled liars are ranting about this week.
And since at least the first two have far more to lose from a massivly incorrect or premature story than any web page, I can count on them having more controls in place.
Trust and reputation are what real old school journalism is about. Thats why wading through the data glut of the internet will never compare to reading a respectable paper. The good thing the internet gives us is the ability to delve deeper into issues when we feel that we may not be getting the whole story due to lack of mainstream interest or cultural conflict.
You know, I really think Jon gets too much shit for what he does. People need to lighten up. His articles and comments are attacked, not because of their content or relavence, but because some time long ago, a few people were grossly critical of an article or two and Katz bashing became the cool thing to do.
Funny, I thought people bashed Katz collumns because they were way too long, sometimes incoherent and overuse buzzwords. I have never noticed Katz bashing being "cool" but as red herrings go to make people embarrassed to voice their opinions, its a pretty good one. Good job.
And as a person who hasn't filtered Katz, its because he is occasionally good at coming up with a decent topic, which/.ers can run with as a good conversation. In these cases, the good bits of the thread discussion are usually unrelated to Kazt's ramblings and are just inspired by the teaser paragraph. The actual writing itself is rarely worthwhile.
Oh and the "Katz sucks!" "No, you're just jealous" threads can be fun once in a long while, too.
If the UK would impose an embargo Sealand, they could get their supplies from the European mainland (which contains *a lot* of sovereign countries). It's only a few hours by boat.
ehem. The post said "embargo or blockade". Unless the UK has ever aknowledged Sealands "territorial waters" it would be trivial for them to simply enforce their controll over their own (internationally recognized) waters and prevent any other country's commercial vessels from approaching.
Does any government actually respect the "territorial waters" of Sealand? or are international waters accepted as begining X miles out from the UK?
I mentioned this is the questions thread, but it was too late.:(
All this posturing about repeling assaults ignores the more likely question of an embargo or blockade.
Its an artificial island, right? IE, no source of fresh water. He mentioned the recent aquisition of a water purifiyer which allowed them to take showers, the need for pallets of water, and relience on canned goods. Do we need a picture drawn here? If they piss the US and/or UK off badly enough, they may be invaded, or if there is actually any international respect for their supposed soverngty, they'll just be starved out.
However, if they don't piss off any major powers, they shouldn't have a problem, and in spite of the posturing for this crowd, I doubt they will piss anyone off. I don't think they're really "Republic of Texas" delusional.
After all, it will be very tough for some politician in Washington to come down against an anonymous publishing system that deliberately evokes the Founding Fathers' own belief in the occasional need for anonymity.
yeah, those pols are pretty gutless, aren't they? I can't stand people who will accept anything as right and good if you can make even a tenuous link to a "founding father".
IMHO annonimity is respectable only for expressing your own opinions or artistic work. Your own, because people who annonymously "provide" other people's work are screwing the actual authors/creators and opinions because facts provided annonymously are useful only as tips - an idea point for you to launch your own investigation.
Thought - why exactly was Publis used by the FFs? I can think of a few possible reasons, most of which aren't really related to modern "privacy" concerns.
But what if you did see such complete evidence for the miraculous that you MUST suppose it actually happened? Would Hume or his successors suppose that they had lost their mind before they conceeded a miracle?
I believe Carl Sagen once pointed out that if you believe you have seen something impossible, there are two possibilities : laws of science have been broken, or you are hallucinating. He reminded us that though scientific law has been very durable, there is a great deal of evidence for the fact that people do indeed hallucinate. Objectivly speaking, it would be far more likely that some interactions of my medications would cause a visual or auditory hallucination (losing my mind, at least for a time) than that a mythical omnipotent being would contact me.
Just clarifying here, do you lump all atheists into this "successor of Hume" so called faith?
The other question of course, is whether a "miracle" actually means g/God(s)? Or to ask another way, how can beings as non-powerful as ourselves tell the difference between omnipotence and power that merely dwarfs our imagination. In a STNG episode, Q claimed to be God and Picard angrily rejected him. But what test could he possibly have proposed that could tell the difference? At sufficient power and skill, Q could just "flip" the little chemical switches in his head and make him believe.
So what would it take to say "only a god could do that" as opposed to "only a being much more powerful than myself could do that"? Since it take far less power to warp our petty minds beyond repair than to create a universe, I don't think we can ever know.
Of course, this is all philosophy that I have never and likely will never need. Here in the real world, I hve expereinced nothing that required either a god or an examination of my own sanity, and it is that (amoung other things) and not any "faith" against miracles that has shaped my atheism.
Either: 1. They want to make the US people feel like we are being protected from internet scams by going after an easy big target. (which of course does not solve the problem) OR 2. These companies that are being sued are being singled out and discriminated by the FTC, in which case the FTC will probably (maybe in 50 years) be counter sued. (which does not solve the problem either) Either way its all hand waving with no substance to it, I agree.
Or 3) the FTC goes after lots of people all the time for similar reasons when they step over a line, and this is being reported on because its trendy.
Or 4) The FTC works on a basis of consumer/Better Buniness Bureau complaints and these companies have been having a lot of upset [would be] customers who are complaining.
OR 5) The issues they cited were considered bad by degree, and they determined that these companies were violating them to a degree more action worthy than others.
!OR! 6) They are planning to go after these issues in a more generalized way and are starting with an easy to understand target that a lot of people complain about and has extreme versions of the problems so that they can be sure it will all hold water before spreading out the enforcement.
Or maybe some/.ers just have to bash govenment one way or another. The FTC does its job and the anti-govs who don't call them fascists complain that they didn't try to sweep the entire ad industry this week. And a big brother comment in the main post, no less. Can we try to be a little less paranoid around here?
-Kahuna Burger
doubt it would effect my philosophy....
on
Calculating God
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· Score: 2
If only because I've read so many arguments before. Also, since it is fiction, and the debate would be highly informed by the fictional history of the other races that are introduced, how would any conclusions be relevant to what we laughingly refer to as the real world?
While I like reading sci fi with intelectual charecters, I rarely get any philosophical insights out of them that aren't better enjoyed as raw philosophical discussion.
IMHO of course, and it could be a fun read just for the plot.
I'm only talking about the legal issues here. As for ethics, well, Napster's management team listens to pirated MP3s; the RIAA got ahold of their playlists.
Sorry to jump all over you, discussion on these issues blurs between legal and ethical pretty quickly and I took the "its OK" comments to mean the latter.
maybe the best comparison for Napster is with radar detectors. I don't claim to understand it, but it seems it can be legal to have a product/company whose express intent is to circumvent the law.
No, it's not OK to send Lars' music around the 'Net - but it's OK for Napster to facilitate it. Napster's not the one trading Metallica MP3s, Napster's users are - and without Napster's (official) knowledge or approval. Napster's copyright policy is here.
Not to be picky but hasn't the RIAA or whoever introduced evidence that Napster's entire business plan was based on people using its software to get music illegally? And that they adjusted some protocols (logins etc) to apeal more to that purpose? If we're talking ethics and not just law here, I consider that more significant than a "wink wink, nudge nudge" copyright policy. Napster isn't just a "tool" its a venture funded company with a plan.
Digression: I once had a catalogue of "everyone is out to get you but our books and tools will help you get them first" kinda urban commando stuff. The bit I will always remember from it is the "executive letter opener" and "executive ice scraper." The ad copy for the "letter opener" drooled over the sharp edge you could put on them and the fact that they wouldn't show up at all on metal detectors. Then for the ice scraper, it talked about how "we don't know of any law against carrying an ice scraper - and this one is made of the same high quality material as the Executive letter opener." And just in case no one got the hint, it goes on to say "WARNING! Do not ever hit anyone with the Executive Ice Scraper! It will cause an extremely nasty gash requiring up to 17 stitches to close!"
Far as I'm concerned, Napster is just an Executive Ice Scraper. Legally they may get off scot free, but if we're talking "bad and good" please don't insult my inteligence by pretending its just a neutral tool that some people have unexpectedly chosen to use for piracy.
In the first place, I have to ask if there are any specific individuals who are doing this, or are you simply making the assumption that Slashdot poster ergo pro Napster et pro GPL?
I personally have seen at least one post where it was explicitly said that copyright was immoral because it restricted free speech, but GPL should be upheld as a matter of human rghts.
Personally, I don't buy your claim that they are unrelated. Either you believe that people have the right to some say on what is done with their intellectual work (copyright, GPL, whatever) or you don't and people can do whatever they want, closed source, open source, free, paid, whatever with your work if you release it to even one other person. Personally, I support intellectual property rights, but if you don't, expect to hack and be hacked, don't claim that the limits you want to put on your work are moral, but someone else's aren't.
I'm a crossover Adams/Pratchett fan muself, and I was pretty put off by his (lack of) answer to that question. Even if he really hasn't read any of the other author's work, he could have said something, even if it was only "Americans think we're the same because we're both british humour writers, but there are actually many differences in narrative style." Or, "he sucks because he's selling more new books."
The non-answer almost made me think that maybe he's jealous of Pratchett's current surge in popularity, and I'm getting sick of my favorite authors turning out to be petty dicks as people (JMS, James Randi, the guy who wrote West SIde Story... Stephen King had a short story about the phenomenon.) I would have rather had something more definitly positive or negitive of the Pratchett comparison, if not the books themselves.
The problem with pricing things online is that everything has to be on a credit card. Credit Cos usually charge per-transaction fees. For all the talk of the (very real) cost cutting advantages of direct on-line business, the "cashless" nature of the e-connomy can actually set a minimum cost per transaction to avoid losing money to bring in money. (this is why most small businesses take MC but not AMEX. AMEX can offer no-annual fee cards because they charge higher fees to the businesses that take it. Its also why some places have a minimum charge for a credit card order.)
This, and the hassles of filling out credit card info for a few dollars, will probably be the big roadblocks in distributing low cost or payment optional content on-line. I'd love it if artists could distribute their work on-line for "micro-payments" but actually doing it will likely be complex technologically, economicly, and of course socially (as this thread demonstrates).
I dunno, I make a lot of typo's too, but I still think this would work. Even though I don't touch-type, certain words just "spit" themselves out when I'm writing something. The rhythm of those words is probably tied to my particular brand of hunting and pecking, and there's no good reason that couldn't be analysed.
Saying it wouldn't work because people make typos might be like saying that gait analysis won't be able to identify people who stumble sometimes.
My question would be, does it work better or worse on people who actually learned to touchtype "properly"?
The record companies will share an undisclosed amount of money received in the settlements with its artists.
If you have read the article, this seems to just further harden the relationship that record companies and artists have.. Looks like the artists are stuck just "getting a cut" from their own mp3s.
Er, yeah, of course. See, the record companies were the ones who launched the lawsuit. They paid for lawyers, research, publicity to try to get the public on their side, etc. And when they won, they shared part of the settlement with the artists. Sounds about right to me. Do you realize how much they probably had to share with the lawyers?
And this does cement the relationship with a record company, in a positive way. A newly signed artist is being protected by their label just as well as the guys who are successful enough to have done it themselves. They'll remember that, just like they'll remember the promotion the company did to help them make it. Record companies aren't evil, they're just part of the process.
Slashdot Mirror
And one more time, they aren't reading the email of anyone except those who are on the carnivore tapes when they pull them. Saying otherwise is kinda like claiming that if I listen to police traffic on a scanner I am in fact listening to all my neighbors' cell phone calls because the equipment I have hears all of them not just what I'm tuned in on. Or that if I search DejaNews for "the keeper" I'm also performing an inapropriate background check of my potential employees by looking for their email addresses on porn, gay and alternative lifestyle newsgroups. Because, hey, that info is being scanned by the same program that gives me back my search results.
Paranoia is one of the many reasons I don't vote libertarian. I keep one of the others in my wallet.
-Kahuna Burger
OK, breath deeply. Now lets think about this. Why was the fourth ammendment introduced in the first place? There were no phones, there wasn't even much of a postal service yet. But there were homes and doors and people capable of breaking them down to search your home. And there were police who might hear that you were seen leading a little kid into your home just before he was reported missing, and they might want to search your home. So we have the means to search your home and people who would want to. What do we do? We write an ammendment that says they can't do it unreasonably and a bunch of laws laying out a "reasonable" procedure.
Now the present. We have something besides your home, the internet, which people may want to search. We have ways for them to search it. And we still have an ammendment and a bunch of laws that say when and how they can do it. The existance of wiretap orders for other people who have given law enforcement enough justification to get a warrent, has nothing to do with your 4th ammendment rights, because they aren't searching and seizing you! As we understand carnivore and are discussing it, noone is spying on you.
Jon had it exactly right. As long as the FBI has the right and in fact the duty to obtain search or wiretap warrents, they will expand those rights into new forms of communication. It no more invades your rights than a legal, warrented search of your neighbor does.
-Kahuna Burger
PS, some people have expressed distrust at the number of internet wire tap orders obtained. But I'd be a lot more worried if they weren't getting any. Their going through the warrent process indicates that those warrents are neccassary, indicates that they are working within the system. Not perfectly, but its an indication that internet wiretapping is being taken as seriously as phone tapping. And thats what we want, right?
But it can't do that. I mean, it won't just "notice" them. Its a computer. If its purpose was to scan for drug references in all emails, they could do that, but it would have to be on purpose. They couldn't use the "plain sight" defense to validate the evidence, because it requires an extra deliberate step to gather. You can't get a warrent based on evidence that you should have needed a warrent to get. It taints the process all the way down the line.
-Kahuna Burger
Because I'm not paranoid? Because the system saves them man hours and computer time? Because the entire point of the report is that this new system replaces a system with less filtering? Because the privacy advocate who I was mocking accepted the same premises that I do and yet still managed to be paranoid about it?
Mostly because I'm not paranoid. And because the article stated that courts have already upheld the system. but hey, maybe the machines really aren't wiretapping at all, just trying to get enough information on every single person that they can plant false messages and frame anyone on earth for whatever they want! does that make your paranoid little mind happier?
-Kahuna Burger
Are you not trusting the FBI, or not trusting the technology? The entire point of the system is that the FBI isn't just browsing through and deciding to take your messages. "They" aren't doing the sorting, no individual is going to say "hey! I know we just had a warrent for guy X but a line in guy Y's email caught my eye and I think we should look into it!" In fact, that is exactly what this systen is meant to avoid. Get it? The entire point of carnivore is to 1) save man hours, and 2) avoid invading the privacy of people who aren't covered by the warrent.
Why is this bad? Given the existance of wiretapping warrents that can be applied to electronic communications, how can you guys possibly object to a technological solution to decrease the human instinct to notice things other than what they are looking for. Computers don't see anything except what they're looking for. Have you ever done a web search for breed rescues and had your computer say "Hey, this isn't related, but there a kinda neat article over on Slashdot about overclocking."? No? Me neither. But I regularly browse the "new titles" section of the library for one topic and end up with an interesting book on something else. If you are concerned about law enforcement exceeding their warrent, you should be celebrating Carnivore.
If, on the other hand you just salivate like pavlov's dogs at the words "wiretapping" and "messages" Carnivore would be a bad thing by definition.
-Kahuna Burger
I'd say no. The article was perfectly clear. The idea is to get messages for people/accounts on which there is a warrent. The computer sifts the data for those messages, and only saves those ones. The people whose messages are analysed by the computer but not saved, not read not noted, have suffered no invasion of their privacy.
Look at it this way. What if the police were snooping on conversations over short wave radio by tuning to the frequency of the people they were interested in. Could you seriously say that every person in the area using a short wave radio had had their privacy invaded because the radio equipment used at some level recieved every signal, even though the police only heard and recorded one? Its just as silly to claim that they are "invading" anyone's privacy but the person whose messages they actually read when they download the carnivor files.
People who have a problem with the ability of law enforcement to get warents for wiretaps, should just say so. But when everything turns into some "Big Brother" paranoia rant, it just diminishes your credibility when you try to alert people to a real problem.
Heh, story of SlashDot : The Hacker Who Cried 'Big Brother'
-Kahuna Burger
not really. The article said that it was availble to both federal agents and state agencies, right? So of all the investigations of all the state and federal law enforcement agencies over a year, in under a hundred cases did they feel it would be useful to investigate email communications. It would have helped put it in perspective if they said how many phone wiretaps were used in the same amount of time. probably hundreds of times as many.
-Kahuna Burger
In the world of paranoid Gattacca ranting, maybe. In the real world, no.
There is no way at this point to take a person's DNA and sequence it for anything but a few major genetic diseases. No relevance outside of insurance. All the talk of knowing if someone is "prone to X" from their DNA is years in the future. Here and now, all the applications lead to less discrimination. Examples -
Sniffing for drugs. Don't pat down the long haired guy, just run everyone through the same doorway.
Guns, explosives, etc. eliminate "intuition" (often really means built up prejudice) as a reason to demand a frisk or strip search.
IDing someone. What we can do with the DNA today is (maybe) search for a specific individual who left tissue at a crime scene. Scan for the actual person, as opposed to police in a new york town who went with a two word description (black male) and stopped and harrassed avery black man (and some black women) they found in public areas. (true story, read about it in the wall street journal.)
Leave the paranoia behind, and try to think about how the technology can improve or damage security work in the real world. I think it sounds great for increased sercurity in some areas with decreased invasion of real privacy.
-Kahuna Burger
while the realtime feedback may not have been there, I highly disagree that "old media" gives less ways of assessing reputation. Media competed with each other, and were glad to pounce on the "forgotten story" or point out failings.
Sadly, I use the past tense because of the state of media mergers in the US. In Boston, I think three or four of the top radio stations are all owned by the same company. Almost all of the small community newspapers are put out by one large group which also puts out the "competing" TAB. And they're looking at relaxing the rule against one co owning a newspaper and a radio station in the same market. Don't even get me started on TV.
Its this merging of ownership that I think endangers old and new media sources alike, rather than the "closed or open" media idea.
-Kahuna Burger
-Kahuna Burger
Er, how is this a product of the "new" media? I trust most information that comes from the Boston Globe, though I don't assume that it is complete. I give less trust to the information from the Boston Herald, because they have built up a reputation with me as sensationalistic. I check out the Mass News once in a while to see what the bile filled liars are ranting about this week.
And since at least the first two have far more to lose from a massivly incorrect or premature story than any web page, I can count on them having more controls in place.
Trust and reputation are what real old school journalism is about. Thats why wading through the data glut of the internet will never compare to reading a respectable paper. The good thing the internet gives us is the ability to delve deeper into issues when we feel that we may not be getting the whole story due to lack of mainstream interest or cultural conflict.
-Kahuna Burger
Funny, I thought people bashed Katz collumns because they were way too long, sometimes incoherent and overuse buzzwords. I have never noticed Katz bashing being "cool" but as red herrings go to make people embarrassed to voice their opinions, its a pretty good one. Good job.
And as a person who hasn't filtered Katz, its because he is occasionally good at coming up with a decent topic, which /.ers can run with as a good conversation. In these cases, the good bits of the thread discussion are usually unrelated to Kazt's ramblings and are just inspired by the teaser paragraph. The actual writing itself is rarely worthwhile.
Oh and the "Katz sucks!" "No, you're just jealous" threads can be fun once in a long while, too.
-Kahuna Burger
ehem. The post said "embargo or blockade". Unless the UK has ever aknowledged Sealands "territorial waters" it would be trivial for them to simply enforce their controll over their own (internationally recognized) waters and prevent any other country's commercial vessels from approaching.
Does any government actually respect the "territorial waters" of Sealand? or are international waters accepted as begining X miles out from the UK?
-Kahuna Burger
All this posturing about repeling assaults ignores the more likely question of an embargo or blockade.
Its an artificial island, right? IE, no source of fresh water. He mentioned the recent aquisition of a water purifiyer which allowed them to take showers, the need for pallets of water, and relience on canned goods. Do we need a picture drawn here? If they piss the US and/or UK off badly enough, they may be invaded, or if there is actually any international respect for their supposed soverngty, they'll just be starved out.
However, if they don't piss off any major powers, they shouldn't have a problem, and in spite of the posturing for this crowd, I doubt they will piss anyone off. I don't think they're really "Republic of Texas" delusional.
-Kahuna Burger
yeah, those pols are pretty gutless, aren't they? I can't stand people who will accept anything as right and good if you can make even a tenuous link to a "founding father".
IMHO annonimity is respectable only for expressing your own opinions or artistic work. Your own, because people who annonymously "provide" other people's work are screwing the actual authors/creators and opinions because facts provided annonymously are useful only as tips - an idea point for you to launch your own investigation.
Thought - why exactly was Publis used by the FFs? I can think of a few possible reasons, most of which aren't really related to modern "privacy" concerns.
-kahuna Burger
I believe Carl Sagen once pointed out that if you believe you have seen something impossible, there are two possibilities : laws of science have been broken, or you are hallucinating. He reminded us that though scientific law has been very durable, there is a great deal of evidence for the fact that people do indeed hallucinate. Objectivly speaking, it would be far more likely that some interactions of my medications would cause a visual or auditory hallucination (losing my mind, at least for a time) than that a mythical omnipotent being would contact me.
Just clarifying here, do you lump all atheists into this "successor of Hume" so called faith?
The other question of course, is whether a "miracle" actually means g/God(s)? Or to ask another way, how can beings as non-powerful as ourselves tell the difference between omnipotence and power that merely dwarfs our imagination. In a STNG episode, Q claimed to be God and Picard angrily rejected him. But what test could he possibly have proposed that could tell the difference? At sufficient power and skill, Q could just "flip" the little chemical switches in his head and make him believe.
So what would it take to say "only a god could do that" as opposed to "only a being much more powerful than myself could do that"? Since it take far less power to warp our petty minds beyond repair than to create a universe, I don't think we can ever know.
Of course, this is all philosophy that I have never and likely will never need. Here in the real world, I hve expereinced nothing that required either a god or an examination of my own sanity, and it is that (amoung other things) and not any "faith" against miracles that has shaped my atheism.
-Kahuna Burger
Or 3) the FTC goes after lots of people all the time for similar reasons when they step over a line, and this is being reported on because its trendy.
Or 4) The FTC works on a basis of consumer/Better Buniness Bureau complaints and these companies have been having a lot of upset [would be] customers who are complaining.
OR 5) The issues they cited were considered bad by degree, and they determined that these companies were violating them to a degree more action worthy than others.
!OR! 6) They are planning to go after these issues in a more generalized way and are starting with an easy to understand target that a lot of people complain about and has extreme versions of the problems so that they can be sure it will all hold water before spreading out the enforcement.
Or maybe some /.ers just have to bash govenment one way or another. The FTC does its job and the anti-govs who don't call them fascists complain that they didn't try to sweep the entire ad industry this week. And a big brother comment in the main post, no less. Can we try to be a little less paranoid around here?
-Kahuna Burger
While I like reading sci fi with intelectual charecters, I rarely get any philosophical insights out of them that aren't better enjoyed as raw philosophical discussion.
IMHO of course, and it could be a fun read just for the plot.
-Kahuna Burger
Sorry to jump all over you, discussion on these issues blurs between legal and ethical pretty quickly and I took the "its OK" comments to mean the latter.
maybe the best comparison for Napster is with radar detectors. I don't claim to understand it, but it seems it can be legal to have a product/company whose express intent is to circumvent the law.
-Kahuna Burger
Not to be picky but hasn't the RIAA or whoever introduced evidence that Napster's entire business plan was based on people using its software to get music illegally? And that they adjusted some protocols (logins etc) to apeal more to that purpose? If we're talking ethics and not just law here, I consider that more significant than a "wink wink, nudge nudge" copyright policy. Napster isn't just a "tool" its a venture funded company with a plan.
Digression: I once had a catalogue of "everyone is out to get you but our books and tools will help you get them first" kinda urban commando stuff. The bit I will always remember from it is the "executive letter opener" and "executive ice scraper." The ad copy for the "letter opener" drooled over the sharp edge you could put on them and the fact that they wouldn't show up at all on metal detectors. Then for the ice scraper, it talked about how "we don't know of any law against carrying an ice scraper - and this one is made of the same high quality material as the Executive letter opener." And just in case no one got the hint, it goes on to say "WARNING! Do not ever hit anyone with the Executive Ice Scraper! It will cause an extremely nasty gash requiring up to 17 stitches to close!"
Far as I'm concerned, Napster is just an Executive Ice Scraper. Legally they may get off scot free, but if we're talking "bad and good" please don't insult my inteligence by pretending its just a neutral tool that some people have unexpectedly chosen to use for piracy.
-Kahuna Burger
I personally have seen at least one post where it was explicitly said that copyright was immoral because it restricted free speech, but GPL should be upheld as a matter of human rghts.
Personally, I don't buy your claim that they are unrelated. Either you believe that people have the right to some say on what is done with their intellectual work (copyright, GPL, whatever) or you don't and people can do whatever they want, closed source, open source, free, paid, whatever with your work if you release it to even one other person. Personally, I support intellectual property rights, but if you don't, expect to hack and be hacked, don't claim that the limits you want to put on your work are moral, but someone else's aren't.
-Kahuna Burger
The non-answer almost made me think that maybe he's jealous of Pratchett's current surge in popularity, and I'm getting sick of my favorite authors turning out to be petty dicks as people (JMS, James Randi, the guy who wrote West SIde Story... Stephen King had a short story about the phenomenon.) I would have rather had something more definitly positive or negitive of the Pratchett comparison, if not the books themselves.
-Kahuna Burger
This, and the hassles of filling out credit card info for a few dollars, will probably be the big roadblocks in distributing low cost or payment optional content on-line. I'd love it if artists could distribute their work on-line for "micro-payments" but actually doing it will likely be complex technologically, economicly, and of course socially (as this thread demonstrates).
-Kahuna Burger
Saying it wouldn't work because people make typos might be like saying that gait analysis won't be able to identify people who stumble sometimes.
My question would be, does it work better or worse on people who actually learned to touchtype "properly"?
-Kahuna Burger
If you have read the article, this seems to just further harden the relationship that record companies and artists have.. Looks like the artists are stuck just "getting a cut" from their own mp3s.
Er, yeah, of course. See, the record companies were the ones who launched the lawsuit. They paid for lawyers, research, publicity to try to get the public on their side, etc. And when they won, they shared part of the settlement with the artists. Sounds about right to me. Do you realize how much they probably had to share with the lawyers?
And this does cement the relationship with a record company, in a positive way. A newly signed artist is being protected by their label just as well as the guys who are successful enough to have done it themselves. They'll remember that, just like they'll remember the promotion the company did to help them make it. Record companies aren't evil, they're just part of the process.
-Kahuna Burger