So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure, How amazingly unlikely is your birth, And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space, 'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.
-- The last lines from The Galaxy Song - Monty Python's The Meaning of Life
"We put two and two together," Houston FBI spokesman Bob Doguim said Monday. "We had missing rocks in Houston, and some people trying to sell them online."
Good man. Someone who gives credit to the Poles as well as the UK for breaking Enigma. So often the Brits get all the credit - Much credit is of course due, but to Brits and Poles.
I both detest the Saudi govenment and would love all Saudi's to have unfiltered Internet access.
So, following JK's logic (well, there's none really. Notice no real suggestions, it's just a well-intentioned rant), "we" (the West) should maybe stop the sale of any filtering software to the Saudis. And what have we achieved then? We've ensured that Saudi's then get NO Internet, filtered or not.
Filtering is undesirable, but in practice is, in the best possible sense, the thin end of the wedge: i.e. give them some access and it will improve their society just a little. Then maybe the filtering will ease just a little. And so on... Iterate until sanity achieved.
Sure, it's not certain to work, but what else should we do?
Terrorists exist because they come from uncivilized, barbaric nations.
I can think of British terrorists, Irish, German, French, Spanish, American, in fact I think you'll find ALL countries have produced one sort of terrorist or another.
Terrorists do not come from uncivilised barbaric nations. Rather they are uncivilised barbaric people. An important difference, and one which we should all remember if the civilised majority, from all countries, is to oversome the terrorists from whatever place.
Anyone with an international telephone line (i.e. an awful lot of "ordinary" people") can bypass the system and dial an external ISP. That's all it takes.
FYI, I was not implemting this filtering system - I led the effort to build and operate a licensed ISP which offered ordinary Saudis and expatriates living there some level of Internet access (albeit degraded by filtering). The filtering is provided by the government at a central location: all ISPs have to connect to the Internet via the centrally controlled system. (Indeed all ISPs also had to use dial-up POPs provided by Saudi Telecom, although that was less do do with moral control and more to do with protecting a monopoly operator!)
Your point about Saudi princes (and don't forget the princesses!) leading a double life is true for many. They have a LOT of money, but the Saudi trick, to date, is to allow just enough of this huge wealth to trickle down to ordinary Saudis. Give'em some but not too much is the tactic.
Of course this too is a precarious balancing act...
Anyway, to answer your speciific question: I'm no troll, but for real (although that's not to say that I'm right!).
Of course what the Saudi's understand as porn is not the same as me... Did you know that a women's bare leg is, to the power-that-be in SA, pornographic?
"Do your spouses know any personal details of your workmates' spouses, beyond what may have slipped out during a long forgotten company Chistmas ball?"
Am I the only one who sniggered when I read this?
PS Also, think the word is Christmas, not Chistmas?
I was the Engineering Manager of the third (two others beat us by a few days!) ISP to operate in the Kingdom.
Yes, the filtering is more or less as described. They used to have, maybe still do, an option on the "blocking" page where you could ask that a blocked URL be unblocked, since it was actually something innocuous (of course whether your view that Cindy's Sin Palace etc was innocuous might be disputed by those in charge...:-))
The article also points out that Saudi's can (and do) simply dial up ISPs in neighboring countries to get the access they desire. Equally, rich individuals (they've got a few...) and companies can also make use of satellite access (illegal, but very common).
So, if a Saudi really wants to access porn or political stuff he/she can do so very easily. And therein lies the key to much about Saudi laws: it's not the reality that matters, but appearances.
The Saudi government plays a precarious balancing act, and needs to keep the religious extremists content ("Look we've blocked all the porn") while trying to drag their society into the modern world (where, so I'm told, the Internet is mandatory). Of course balancing acts never work for ever, and one day you fall off, but that's going offtopic.
A little touchy? Heaven forfend that the US should "copy" France, or France imitate the US, or any country slavishly copy any other country. Vive la difference and all that jazz.
However that's not to say that one can't look at other countries and see what's good and what's bad about them, and maybe, just maybe, learn how to improve one's own country. Unless of course you think you're beyond improvement? (and you can read that last sentence as you wish;-))
Not sure how valid a comparison it is with those saying "Not in the US as we've so many federal differences" but just last week I paid my local (n.b. similar to state, up to a point) taxes (Taxe d'habitation) here in France via the central gov portal site.
Really does seem to work OK. One can only hope that one benefit will be to improve efficiency and result in lower taxes. However I somehow doubt it!!
Slashdot Mirror
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.
-- The last lines from The Galaxy Song - Monty Python's The Meaning of Life
"We put two and two together," Houston FBI spokesman Bob Doguim said Monday. "We had missing rocks in Houston, and some people trying to sell them online."
Heck, they're clever these FBI chaps, eh?
I'm intrigued to see if her reply gets modded "Interesting", "Troll" or maybe "Flamebait". ;-))
I didn't see any generalisations about GLib, and certainly no details on it.
Good man. Someone who gives credit to the Poles as well as the UK for breaking Enigma. So often the Brits get all the credit - Much credit is of course due, but to Brits and Poles.
The article assures us that even though DES can now be (relatively easily) broken, AES would take umpteen quadrillion years to break (plus or minus).
I can't help thinking that back when DES was new, they probably told us the same thing.
Moore's law and all that stuff, but betcha in a decade or so AES is suddenly breakable...!!!!
I both detest the Saudi govenment and would love all Saudi's to have unfiltered Internet access.
So, following JK's logic (well, there's none really. Notice no real suggestions, it's just a well-intentioned rant), "we" (the West) should maybe stop the sale of any filtering software to the Saudis. And what have we achieved then? We've ensured that Saudi's then get NO Internet, filtered or not.
Filtering is undesirable, but in practice is, in the best possible sense, the thin end of the wedge: i.e. give them some access and it will improve their society just a little. Then maybe the filtering will ease just a little. And so on... Iterate until sanity achieved.
Sure, it's not certain to work, but what else should we do?
Maybe they backed out the Greased Turkey patch for 2.5.0?? Dunno, haven't looked. (Or maybe 2.5.0 should be Cold Turkey?)
Build 2.4.15 with some modules. Look where it installs them... (Clue: Think when it was released)
;-))
Linus is a little joker, isn't he?
Terrorists exist because they come from uncivilized, barbaric nations.
I can think of British terrorists, Irish, German, French, Spanish, American, in fact I think you'll find ALL countries have produced one sort of terrorist or another.
Terrorists do not come from uncivilised barbaric nations. Rather they are uncivilised barbaric people. An important difference, and one which we should all remember if the civilised majority, from all countries, is to oversome the terrorists from whatever place.
I agree. It's that old Catch-22 type of thing along the lines of "How much should we compromise our freedom in order to preserve our freedom?"
Anyone with an international telephone line (i.e. an awful lot of "ordinary" people") can bypass the system and dial an external ISP. That's all it takes.
FYI, I was not implemting this filtering system - I led the effort to build and operate a licensed ISP which offered ordinary Saudis and expatriates living there some level of Internet access (albeit degraded by filtering). The filtering is provided by the government at a central location: all ISPs have to connect to the Internet via the centrally controlled system. (Indeed all ISPs also had to use dial-up POPs provided by Saudi Telecom, although that was less do do with moral control and more to do with protecting a monopoly operator!)
Your point about Saudi princes (and don't forget the princesses!) leading a double life is true for many. They have a LOT of money, but the Saudi trick, to date, is to allow just enough of this huge wealth to trickle down to ordinary Saudis. Give'em some but not too much is the tactic.
Of course this too is a precarious balancing act...
Anyway, to answer your speciific question: I'm no troll, but for real (although that's not to say that I'm right!).
Of course what the Saudi's understand as porn is not the same as me... Did you know that a women's bare leg is, to the power-that-be in SA, pornographic?
"Do your spouses know any personal details of your workmates' spouses, beyond what may have slipped out during a long forgotten company Chistmas ball?"
Am I the only one who sniggered when I read this?
PS Also, think the word is Christmas, not Chistmas?
I was the Engineering Manager of the third (two others beat us by a few days!) ISP to operate in the Kingdom.
:-))
Yes, the filtering is more or less as described. They used to have, maybe still do, an option on the "blocking" page where you could ask that a blocked URL be unblocked, since it was actually something innocuous (of course whether your view that Cindy's Sin Palace etc was innocuous might be disputed by those in charge...
The article also points out that Saudi's can (and do) simply dial up ISPs in neighboring countries to get the access they desire. Equally, rich individuals (they've got a few...) and companies can also make use of satellite access (illegal, but very common).
So, if a Saudi really wants to access porn or political stuff he/she can do so very easily. And therein lies the key to much about Saudi laws: it's not the reality that matters, but appearances.
The Saudi government plays a precarious balancing act, and needs to keep the religious extremists content ("Look we've blocked all the porn") while trying to drag their society into the modern world (where, so I'm told, the Internet is mandatory). Of course balancing acts never work for ever, and one day you fall off, but that's going offtopic.
A little touchy? Heaven forfend that the US should "copy" France, or France imitate the US, or any country slavishly copy any other country. Vive la difference and all that jazz.
;-))
However that's not to say that one can't look at other countries and see what's good and what's bad about them, and maybe, just maybe, learn how to improve one's own country. Unless of course you think you're beyond improvement? (and you can read that last sentence as you wish
Not sure how valid a comparison it is with those saying "Not in the US as we've so many federal differences" but just last week I paid my local (n.b. similar to state, up to a point) taxes (Taxe d'habitation) here in France via the central gov portal site.
Really does seem to work OK. One can only hope that one benefit will be to improve efficiency and result in lower taxes. However I somehow doubt it!!