Attempting to monitor the world's communications is bound to fail at this scale. It is probably already extremely costly from a capture-process-filter-store perspective. The fact is that the world is not just becoming more connected, it is also producing and processing a lot more information/data. As the data production increases and the network effect makes the transfers exponentially larger/faster/denser there is no way that any government can keep up. Every attempt at collecting information and correlating it would necessarily involve some level of centralization. Information centralization will fail as surely as economic centralization (communism) did. Throw in a healthy dose of encryption, obfuscation, peer-to-peer, wireless and spread spectrum and the guys at the NSA are already playing a losing hand.
I don't care what their budget is to capture information; the rest of the world's budget to produce information is larger. This kind of rational is inefficient and obsolete.
Anyway, if you really believe that the NSA and the FBI are going to use all their new powers and increased public tolerance for abuse to catch "terrorists" (I challenge you to define that word without making ideological choices), perhaps you should look up "COINTELPRO" on google. History has a lot to say about what happens when you use fear to make a society give up its rights in order to gain security.
This is in violation of the Biological and Chemical Weapons Treaty which bans the reasearch of such weapons.
The same thing that Bush is accusing Cuba, Iraq, N.Korea, Iran etc. of,
The same treaty the US refuses to ratify because it might slow down their own research into weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The US which has always been the worlds No.1 researcher in WMD (USSR was No. 2).
Curious how the same rules they want to apply to others they don't want applied to themselves.
I guess the rules don't apply because the US is not amongst Bush's "most dangerous nations wielding the most dangerous weapons". That is as long as you're not one of the US's targets. Because then, the US has publicly reported it is considering abolishing the "no first strike" doctrine, instead saying it might use WMD preemptively. I guess that might change your perspective of who is wielding the dangerous weapons.
We are riding on a small ball, cruising through space... about to collectively blow ourselves up.
I would bet that companies like Doubleclick are paying M$ and Netscape not to develop protection from popups within their browsers. But I'm a conspiracy theorist.
What you don't realise is that MS and Netscape are protecting the RIGHTS of advertisers. After all when you browse on the Web, you have a CONTRACT to view add supported content. If you close the poppups, that would make you a THIEF. Unfortuanately for Web advertisers, they don't have a great man like Turner CEO Keller to point out the moral hazard the masses face from such criminal technologies as the famous "X" icon on the top right corner of a window. A lawsuit is pending to have the "X" removed from windows that contain advertising, as this is a "circumvention" device under the DMCA. It's all connected...
It's not over yet!
on
Disconnecting
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Hey Katz!
You think it's over?
Just wait till next month and check your credit card bills... I think you'll be in for a nice surprise. Just because they SAID they cancelled it, doesn't mean they did.... Your still only at level 1 of 17 as far as the cancellation escallation is concerned. You're going to have to complain to VISA, the SEC and the UN before this is over.
If the net police monitor your communications in order to fine you if you do something wrong, they would be violating the 4th Amendment. By monitoring you without "probable cause", they are violating "due process" by having a presumption of guilt.
so... NO!
If piracy is a problem, make it illegal. Oh wait, it already is. Well in that case, stop whining and go enforce existing laws.
Identity cards may prove identity. What we need to know about is behaviour. Identity tells you nothing about behaviour.
If you take the idiotically simplistic notion that people are either "good" or "evil-doers", then you make behaviour some timeless abstract "inate" feature of identity. Based on that premise then, identity is useful because it allows you to separate evil-doers from do-gooders.
In the real world however, behaviour (good or evil) depends on environment, past history and future circumstances and opportunity. It also changes. A do-gooder today can become an evil-doer tomorrow (say, if an innocent relative of theirs is killed by a "smart bomb"). It is even possible (gasp) for an evil-doer to become a do-gooder (blatantly optimistic tree-hugging belief in "rehabilitation"?).
Case in point: Richard "Explosive Sneakers" Reid, had a past history (the only element an identity can point to) that was totally clean. His identity was never doubted, his past history contained no violence or terrorism. They knew who he was, they just didn't know what he was about to do. Unless you assume that behaviour such as belonging to a mosque or being a muslim, makes you a potential "evil-doer" (we generally refer to that kind of association as "prejudice", or sometimes "racism"), then identity is useless.
In the larger context therefore, establishing identity, at a time when mind-reading and behaviour-guessing is impossible, is simply a different way of enabling "prejudice". Prejudice, meaning literally, pre-judging someone on past behaviour.
Obviously, in some very limited cases, identity provides knowledge about highly relevant past criminal activity. For those cases, identity would be useful, although it can be "fooled" as described by the ACLU. Unfortunatelly though, this whole argument is trying to push identity using the narrow case, in order to pursue or enable the broader prejudicial, racist, discriminatory policy which is characteristic of the anti-Arab backlash after the attacks. Hating "them" is just as narrow minded as "them" hating "us".
In the commercial software world there is software for Windows that acts as an app. level firewall. It is OKENA'sStormWatch software solution. I have received training in this software and it is able to control the following application access attempts:
- Access to the Network - Access to the Registry - Access to the File System - Access to the Windows OS (OLE, DCOM, ActiveX etc.)
For each of these, you can set very fine grained controls. For example, you can restrict "Notepad" to only be able to access.txt files, no registry, no network. Or you can allow some registry keys, but not others.
Generally a very good piece of software, I watched it catch Nimda purely through its behavior, not a signature.
The point that the studios (and many others) are missing is that the Internet does not facilitate copying, it facilitates distribution. With Morpheus, Napster or whatever the latest p2p craze, it only takes 1 Tivo or pirate to make a copy and put it on, and the rest is Metcalf's law on steroids.
Pirate once, distribute exponentially. So, the SSSSCA is a complete scam. All it takes is 1 person to find a way to bypass it (hm, Camcoder->Frame Grabber) and the copy will then be distributed with EXTREME efficiency.
The point is that the studios are not afraid of you pirating their work. What they really fear is the diversity that comes from unsanctioned distribution. The problem is not that people will copy Britney Spears, but that they might actually find something BETTER to listen to.
Once that happens, the old distribution method of stacking CDs in a store, fails to represent the diversity the consumer wants and the studios are fsckd.
The SSSSCA is all about controling the outlet, not to stop copying, but to be able to interject the studios in every transaction. Think doubleclick enforced by law. Everything else is just a smoke screen. It's not about piracy. It's about the studios ability to limit choice, pigeon hole consumers and spoon feed everyone with their latest teen craze.
Congress just voted to overwhelmingly pass the Copyright Terrorism Protection Act. After the latest string of copyright thefts, the government has now aproved the following measures:
A copyright task force headed by the RIAA and the MPAA will be manned by paramilitary forces in order to stop the tide of terroristic copyright theft. The task force is authorised to use deadly force upon "vague suspicion" of potential copyright theft. The law includes special provisions for an exception to the 1st, 4th and 14th ammendments for reasons of national security.
Already, 16 people have been killed with flamethrowers for humming tunes without a license. 6 bystanders were killed during the skirmish. An RIAA spokesperson said that the collateral damage was "Regrettable" but that "Copyright terrorism threatens our freedom and must be stopped".
If only Tim B.-Lee (and later W3C) had made it against the standard to have a user-agent string identifying the browser, having instead a "capabilities" array, (eg. HTTP5.2;HTML6.1)
Then the only "qualification" would be support of the HTTP/HTML version.
That way Microsoft would have to explicitely break the standard to make exceptions for its own browser.
I don't agree with the statement that "we now have the source code for humans". What we seem to have, is a core dump of the "binary", without a dissassembler or any concrete idea of what the higher-level building blocks are. Furthermore, this "binary" has not been produced by a heavenly programmer. Instead, it is the result of a "Genetic Algorithm". If you have ever looked at the results of a genetic algorithm, you would see that they lack any "logical" structure. It is very difficult to see what the code is actually doing, since it hasn't been produced by a logical process, but rather an almost random process over millions of years.
London is currently economically booming. There is a lot of work for IT consultants, IT contractors, Web everything. We have connectivity difficulties (no xDSL yet, and leased lines are expensive). Amsterdam is also (from what I hear) very developed in the field. Amsterdam is also very welcoming for English speakers. Everyone there speaks English very well and many of the businesses operate in English.
I have had problems with Belkin KVMs but I currently use CYBEX. Extremely reliable and effective. A very nice feature of the CYBEX is that it doesn't have any power source. It feeds off the PS/2 for power. This is especially convenient for quick setups or when you don't have a power socket available.
Leonardo Di Caprio has made many movies before Titanic.
"Basketball Diaries" "What's eating Gilbert Grape" and a few others.
He is an EXCELENT actor. I have never seen Titanic, nor do I intend to. I have seen Leonardo Di Caprio in older movies and he has always created a stunning performance. Furthermore, he is not "typecast" as many posts sugested. Most of his roles are extremely varied.
I think he would be very good for the part. It would also lift the curse of the Titanic which make most people think of him as a bad actor.
Apart from the US ITAR regulations you may have a serious problems with the Wassenar (sp?) agreement that has been signed by all of the EU (inc. Austria) and the U.S. The Wassenar agreement regulates "dual use" technology i.e. technology that can be used for military purposes as well as commercial. It is therefore illegal to export certain technologies without a license even from Austria directly. Furthermore, contrary to advice voiced here, giving directions to an ftp site where the software can be downloaded, may in itself be a violation of the Wassenar agreement. This iis because it also covers the export of "information" and "expertise" leading to development or aquisition of technology. I would recommend you speak to the Austrian Dept. of Trade to get a license to export Linux directly. This would solve all your problems (if they give you one)
Living in the UK, I find it difficult to understand the american culture at times. On CNN yesterday there was a program (Crossfire) that talked about the effectes of "Computer Games, Rock Music and the Internet" on these killers.
When a similar incident occured in the UK a few years ago (Dunblane massacre), all private ownership of guns was prohibited. This even included.22 guns used by the British Olympic team. Within 2 months all guns were turned in to the government. In the UK even the police do not carry guns unless they are part of special "armed response" forces.
The issue that was consistently ignored by the American media (from what I saw) was the availability of guns. Things like the Internet and Rock music which at best have an incredibly small effect were paraded as the obvious reasons. The gun culture which was probably (IMHO) the major effect was ignored.
Burying the head in the sand?
Now, I understand the gun culture even less. I am of course an outsider so my opinions are pure speculation.
Slashdot Mirror
Attempting to monitor the world's communications is bound to fail at this scale. It is probably already extremely costly from a capture-process-filter-store perspective. The fact is that the world is not just becoming more connected, it is also producing and processing a lot more information/data. As the data production increases and the network effect makes the transfers exponentially larger/faster/denser there is no way that any government can keep up. Every attempt at collecting information and correlating it would necessarily involve some level of centralization. Information centralization will fail as surely as economic centralization (communism) did. Throw in a healthy dose of encryption, obfuscation, peer-to-peer, wireless and spread spectrum and the guys at the NSA are already playing a losing hand.
I don't care what their budget is to capture information; the rest of the world's budget to produce information is larger. This kind of rational is inefficient and obsolete.
Anyway, if you really believe that the NSA and the FBI are going to use all their new powers and increased public tolerance for abuse to catch "terrorists" (I challenge you to define that word without making ideological choices), perhaps you should look up "COINTELPRO" on google. History has a lot to say about what happens when you use fear to make a society give up its rights in order to gain security.
This is in violation of the Biological and Chemical Weapons Treaty which bans the reasearch of such weapons.
The same thing that Bush is accusing Cuba, Iraq, N.Korea, Iran etc. of,
The same treaty the US refuses to ratify because it might slow down their own research into weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The US which has always been the worlds No.1 researcher in WMD (USSR was No. 2).
Curious how the same rules they want to apply to others they don't want applied to themselves.
I guess the rules don't apply because the US is not amongst Bush's "most dangerous nations wielding the most dangerous weapons". That is as long as you're not one of the US's targets. Because then, the US has publicly reported it is considering abolishing the "no first strike" doctrine, instead saying it might use WMD preemptively. I guess that might change your perspective of who is wielding the dangerous weapons.
We are riding on a small ball, cruising through space... about to collectively blow ourselves up.
sarcasm: Raw and scornful use of apparent approval to express disapproval.
Check out the link under the word "THIEF", thief!
I would bet that companies like Doubleclick are paying M$ and Netscape not to develop protection from popups within their browsers. But I'm a conspiracy theorist.
What you don't realise is that MS and Netscape are protecting the RIGHTS of advertisers. After all when you browse on the Web, you have a CONTRACT to view add supported content. If you close the poppups, that would make you a THIEF. Unfortuanately for Web advertisers, they don't have a great man like Turner CEO Keller to point out the moral hazard the masses face from such criminal technologies as the famous "X" icon on the top right corner of a window. A lawsuit is pending to have the "X" removed from windows that contain advertising, as this is a "circumvention" device under the DMCA. It's all connected...
Hey Katz!
You think it's over?
Just wait till next month and check your credit card bills... I think you'll be in for a nice surprise. Just because they SAID they cancelled it, doesn't mean they did.... Your still only at level 1 of 17 as far as the cancellation escallation is concerned. You're going to have to complain to VISA, the SEC and the UN before this is over.
If the net police monitor your communications in order to fine you if you do something wrong, they would be violating the 4th Amendment. By monitoring you without "probable cause", they are violating "due process" by having a presumption of guilt.
so... NO!
If piracy is a problem, make it illegal. Oh wait, it already is. Well in that case, stop whining and go enforce existing laws.
Add to that:
Identity cards may prove identity. What we need to know about is behaviour. Identity tells you nothing about behaviour.
If you take the idiotically simplistic notion that people are either "good" or "evil-doers", then you make behaviour some timeless abstract "inate" feature of identity. Based on that premise then, identity is useful because it allows you to separate evil-doers from do-gooders.
In the real world however, behaviour (good or evil) depends on environment, past history and future circumstances and opportunity. It also changes. A do-gooder today can become an evil-doer tomorrow (say, if an innocent relative of theirs is killed by a "smart bomb"). It is even possible (gasp) for an evil-doer to become a do-gooder (blatantly optimistic tree-hugging belief in "rehabilitation"?).
Case in point: Richard "Explosive Sneakers" Reid, had a past history (the only element an identity can point to) that was totally clean. His identity was never doubted, his past history contained no violence or terrorism. They knew who he was, they just didn't know what he was about to do. Unless you assume that behaviour such as belonging to a mosque or being a muslim, makes you a potential "evil-doer" (we generally refer to that kind of association as "prejudice", or sometimes "racism"), then identity is useless.
In the larger context therefore, establishing identity, at a time when mind-reading and behaviour-guessing is impossible, is simply a different way of enabling "prejudice". Prejudice, meaning literally, pre-judging someone on past behaviour.
Obviously, in some very limited cases, identity provides knowledge about highly relevant past criminal activity. For those cases, identity would be useful, although it can be "fooled" as described by the ACLU. Unfortunatelly though, this whole argument is trying to push identity using the narrow case, in order to pursue or enable the broader prejudicial, racist, discriminatory policy which is characteristic of the anti-Arab backlash after the attacks. Hating "them" is just as narrow minded as "them" hating "us".
In the commercial software world there is software for Windows that acts as an app. level firewall. It is OKENA's StormWatch software solution. I have received training in this software and it is able to control the following application access attempts:
.txt files, no registry, no network. Or you can allow some registry keys, but not others.
- Access to the Network
- Access to the Registry
- Access to the File System
- Access to the Windows OS (OLE, DCOM, ActiveX etc.)
For each of these, you can set very fine grained controls. For example, you can restrict "Notepad" to only be able to access
Generally a very good piece of software, I watched it catch Nimda purely through its behavior, not a signature.
...and Google uses Pigeon Clusters (PCs) to rank using it's proprietary PigeonRank (TM)system. I kid you not. Check this page out.
The point that the studios (and many others) are missing is that the Internet does not facilitate copying, it facilitates distribution. With Morpheus, Napster or whatever the latest p2p craze, it only takes 1 Tivo or pirate to make a copy and put it on, and the rest is Metcalf's law on steroids.
Pirate once, distribute exponentially. So, the SSSSCA is a complete scam. All it takes is 1 person to find a way to bypass it (hm, Camcoder->Frame Grabber) and the copy will then be distributed with EXTREME efficiency.
The point is that the studios are not afraid of you pirating their work. What they really fear is the diversity that comes from unsanctioned distribution. The problem is not that people will copy Britney Spears, but that they might actually find something BETTER to listen to.
Once that happens, the old distribution method of stacking CDs in a store, fails to represent the diversity the consumer wants and the studios are fsckd.
The SSSSCA is all about controling the outlet, not to stop copying, but to be able to interject the studios in every transaction. Think doubleclick enforced by law. Everything else is just a smoke screen. It's not about piracy. It's about the studios ability to limit choice, pigeon hole consumers and spoon feed everyone with their latest teen craze.
Are you getting it yet?
Congress just voted to overwhelmingly pass the Copyright Terrorism Protection Act. After the latest string of copyright thefts, the government has now aproved the following measures:
A copyright task force headed by the RIAA and the MPAA will be manned by paramilitary forces in order to stop the tide of terroristic copyright theft. The task force is authorised to use deadly force upon "vague suspicion" of potential copyright theft. The law includes special provisions for an exception to the 1st, 4th and 14th ammendments for reasons of national security.
Already, 16 people have been killed with flamethrowers for humming tunes without a license. 6 bystanders were killed during the skirmish. An RIAA spokesperson said that the collateral damage was "Regrettable" but that "Copyright terrorism threatens our freedom and must be stopped".
If only Tim B.-Lee (and later W3C) had made it against the standard to have a user-agent string identifying the browser, having instead a "capabilities" array, (eg. HTTP5.2;HTML6.1)
Then the only "qualification" would be support of the HTTP/HTML version.
That way Microsoft would have to explicitely break the standard to make exceptions for its own browser.
Given Moore's Law, if you wait ten years, I will then lend you my palm top. It will probably be a bit overkill, but hey!
I don't agree with the statement that "we now have the source code for humans". What we seem to have, is a core dump of the "binary", without a dissassembler or any concrete idea of what the higher-level building blocks are. Furthermore, this "binary" has not been produced by a heavenly programmer. Instead, it is the result of a "Genetic Algorithm". If you have ever looked at the results of a genetic algorithm, you would see that they lack any "logical" structure. It is very difficult to see what the code is actually doing, since it hasn't been produced by a logical process, but rather an almost random process over millions of years.
London is currently economically booming. There is a lot of work for IT consultants, IT contractors, Web everything. We have connectivity difficulties (no xDSL yet, and leased lines are expensive). Amsterdam is also (from what I hear) very developed in the field. Amsterdam is also very welcoming for English speakers. Everyone there speaks English very well and many of the businesses operate in English.
I have had problems with Belkin KVMs but I currently use CYBEX. Extremely reliable and effective. A very nice feature of the CYBEX is that it doesn't have any power source. It feeds off the PS/2 for power. This is especially convenient for quick setups or when you don't have a power socket available.
Congrats!
/.
One small comment. You said: "hopefully soon servers will pop up on each coast."
How about looking at us poor Europeans. I bet there's lots of us reading
Leonardo Di Caprio has made many movies before Titanic.
"Basketball Diaries"
"What's eating Gilbert Grape"
and a few others.
He is an EXCELENT actor. I have never seen Titanic, nor do I intend to. I have seen Leonardo Di Caprio in older movies and he has always created a stunning performance. Furthermore, he is not "typecast" as many posts sugested. Most of his roles are extremely varied.
I think he would be very good for the part. It would also lift the curse of the Titanic which make most people think of him as a bad actor.
Apart from the US ITAR regulations you may have a serious problems with the Wassenar (sp?) agreement that has been signed by all of the EU (inc. Austria) and the U.S. The Wassenar agreement regulates "dual use" technology i.e. technology that can be used for military purposes as well as commercial. It is therefore illegal to export certain technologies without a license even from Austria directly. Furthermore, contrary to advice voiced here, giving directions to an ftp site where the software can be downloaded, may in itself be a violation of the Wassenar agreement. This iis because it also covers the export of "information" and "expertise" leading to development or aquisition of technology. I would recommend you speak to the Austrian Dept. of Trade to get a license to export Linux directly. This would solve all your problems (if they give you one)
Good Luck!
Living in the UK, I find it difficult to understand the american culture at times. On CNN yesterday there was a program (Crossfire) that talked about the effectes of "Computer Games, Rock Music and the Internet" on these killers.
.22 guns used by the British Olympic team. Within 2 months all guns were turned in to the government. In the UK even the police do not carry guns unless they are part of special "armed response" forces.
When a similar incident occured in the UK a few years ago (Dunblane massacre), all private ownership of guns was prohibited. This even included
The issue that was consistently ignored by the American media (from what I saw) was the availability of guns. Things like the Internet and Rock music which at best have an incredibly small effect were paraded as the obvious reasons. The gun culture which was probably (IMHO) the major effect was ignored.
Burying the head in the sand?
Now, I understand the gun culture even less. I am of course an outsider so my opinions are pure speculation.