I'm not going to disagree with you that information should be secure. Unfortunately, the Fourth Amendment says nothing about information or ideas; its language is entirely in the physical/material realm.
Lest we get carried away in the assumptions that seem to have even made it into the tags for this article, let us take note that the sole sponsor of this bill is a Democrat, not a Republican.
Huh? It absolutely stopped people from putting images online-- they put up replacement, degraded images instead. Far from "notic[ing] that DRM wasn't even needed," they all have tried to find a way to solve exactly the same problem that DRM tries to solve: controlled access to copyrighted works. Were there a good DRM solution, they probably would have jumped on it, because it would allow people to see the actual image in previewing their purchases, instead of relying on some low-quality substitute. It is hard to sell a visual product when the potential buyer isn't allowed to see the actual product, but only a crappy reproduction of reduced size.
Bogus argument. You could make the same claims for images; but the lack of drm in.jpg,.gif, and.png didn't stop anyone from putting images online.
Sure it did. Have you ever been to a web site that sells clip art or stock photos? Or one that sells posters, paintings, or prints, including those photo sharing web sites where you can download a small picture or buy a full-resolution digital version? The web site of an art museum that has display restrictions from the owners of some of the works on loan from other galleries? Have you ever used Google Earth or another satellite imagery site? The web is full of images that have been shrunk, reduced in quality, or watermarked to prevent people from taking the full versions without paying for them. Almost anyplace where the image itself is what is for sale, you see people refraining from posting original, full-quality images online.
I'm not really sure how to take the news that bug testing in Vista was quadrupled.
Here's one possible way to take it: all the people who were supposed to be fixing the bugs instead got involved in the competition to find them. Results: a buggy release with an internal buglist 20 miles long. I mean, who wouldn't rather sit around pointing out what's wrong than be productive about making it right? If you can win prizes for doing so, all the better! Guess that's why SP1 has been so popular. Maybe a few of them got put back on fixing detail.
Truth in advertising? The Internet is a network, not a collection of applications that run on your computer. Java and Flash are no more part of the Internet than Microsoft Word is. They are simply programs which make use of the Internet.
If Rand McNally advertises one of their products as "the entire US Highway system in one Atlas" are they being deceitful if none of the maps shows gas stations, even though going to get gasoline is one of the most common uses of those highways?
This is probably because they don't want the public to realize that all those superconducting magnets will cause dangerous side effects, such as all the world's cows re-orienting themselves to face Switzerland.
Dude, really? You write a post claiming basically and unreservedly that The Internet Will Set Us Free, and then I counter that it can be used for freedom or oppression, you follow up with an insistence that the latter is impossible, I point out some reasons why it is not, again asserting that both directions are possibilities...and then you assert the same thing I just said and call me a crackpot for having a point of view I never took? Sure, technology is neutral, usable for good or evil. It was your assertion otherwise-- the notion that only more freedom, never less, can come from it-- that prompted my first post on this thread.
I don't have some kind of Orwellian personal mythology. I do, however, have some familiarity with history, and the fact that basically anything people invent is used both for advancement and oppression. The greater the technology, the more good, or the more large-scale evil, it can be used to bring about. So we always need to be aware of both possibilities and take care to be vigilant in preventing the latter.
encryption: they have hooks into every method? ok, they don't but they can hack it...
Encryption? Who the hell is encrypting all, or even most, of their network packets? Nobody, that's who. Most people and companies aren't even encrypting sensitive information, just dumping it as SMTP right across the wires (if they're lucky) and the unsecured public networks (if they're not). Most of those who are using encryption are using proprietary software belonging to companies that aren't provably trustworthy. Many of those who are not, say, by using open source software, are incapable of understanding the source anyway, or might never check the source (or use an auto-update feature which could give them something different than the source posted publicly). And have you read the official position of the FBI (and probably also, then, of more than a few members of Congress in the US and their equivalents elsewhere) regarding encryption? We could someday wind up with legally mandated governmental key escrow. All it will take will be one terrorist attack that "could have been stopped if we could have deciphered their planning communications." Now such a thing would be, of course, impossible to enforce universally...but if it is prosecutable then it becomes a real risk for anyone to use real encryption, and most communications will then once more be watchable.
And you can't encrypt certain things anyway, such as the destination, or it won't get there (forget anonymizers; that's a field that can too easily be infiltrated. It's just a bit of obfuscation, not real anonymity).
Do you have control over the log files of every DHCP server, DNS server, router, and web server you make use of?
do a cost analysis. and you find out that your "raid every basement, read every enveloped" analogy for why complete surveillance in the real world is impossible ALSO APPLIES TO THE INTERNET
they don't have enough soldiers to kick in every door. you got that. good
now guess what: they don't have enough analysts to read every packet
Now guess what else. They don't have to. What, you think I imagine an army of millions of technicians employed all day and night reading Matrix-style screen dumps of every person's download of Grandma's new pictures of her cat? You're not thinking broadly enough about the possibilities, and completely leaving out the vast amount of social and personal information that can be gathered without even actually opening most of the envelopes. Basically what we have here is, as you point out, exactly what we had before, except:
1. The volume of information that can be stored, copied, and scanned is much greater.
2. The speed of analysis is much greater.
3. The proportion of communication that goes through the same few channels is much greater. This is important-- once upon a time you would have had to what, infuse the entire postal service with hundreds of thousands of spies? Now a few hundreds of well-placed computers have access to an even greater percentage of data traffic than all those postal spies ever would have.
Don't forget that the means of obfuscation you say are simple are also subject to the channel problem, as well as the information spreading problem-- any means of evasion that becomes widely known to the evaders will also become widely known to the monitors, and because those evaders are still stuck transmitting over the same few networks to which those monitors have access, they won't be effective for long. This is a problem inherent to the way the Internet is set up. Until it is replaced by a nationwide self-building mesh network (or multiple such networks operating on top of each other) where the majority of data does not travel over just a few people's routers but is actually spread everywhere and completely unpredictably, this will not change.
4. The amount of understanding the average person has about what is going on when they transmit something, and what steps would be
Iran says it has no intention to use the technology for launching nuclear warheads
"No, we are not threatening anybody with weapons; we just want to help out with the worldwide energy crisis. We plan to use the missiles for donating nuclear reactors to Tel Aviv and Washington, DC."
there are no checkpoints where a rogue printing press, pirate cd presser, or renegade vcr duplicator can be located by the authorities and shut down. who are you going to shutdown on the internet? traffic can be obscured in such a way that you can't monitor it, and these methods can be encapsulated in code so the clueless end user need not know any special technical abilities to trrde files discreetly, and find anything they want
Or, alternately: there are no hidden rooms in basements where printing presses can remain hidden unless the authorities search every nook and cranny of everyone's house, no envelopes that can't be opened without evident tampering. There isn't anymore an issue of indiscriminate, whole-nation-scale monitoring of people's activities being hard to pull off logistically and socially due to being 1) physically impossible; 2) obvious to everyone.
Now, what we have, is everything everyone does or says flying around in data packets constructed by software those people don't understand and can't know whether to trust, each packet endlessly capable of being copied, logged, and examined at will, all of them traveling across computers and wires owned by a very small set of large corporations which have already proved themselves willing to give up data about both the data traffic and the subscribers themselves. We have means far beyond what could ever have been dreamed of except in an Orwellian fantasy of tying together a portfolio of evidence linking different activities to the same person. Remember that in the end everything comes down to an actual, physical set of wires that go to your house or business (or a particular contract with an agency to broadcast to a physical satellite or cellular device). The people on the other end of those wires receive everything you send, and can record anything they want about usage, and tell anyone they want about what they see you doing.
The Internet-- or an Internet-- certainly bears the possibility, somewhere in the future and depending on how it develops, of being a completely anonymous world of interaction with data and its destination obscure, but let's not confuse the universe of cyberpunk novels for the reality of today. As long as the protocols in widespread use and the means of end-user service delivery remain something like they are, the Internet is-- or can be-- the ultimate tool for nonprivacy in your day-to-day transactions. It could just as easily ultimately become "game over" in the opposite direction as you mean it; this all remains to be seen.
Duh, where do you think the earth got the idea for doing this?
It probably didn't even notice our measly little one-or-two degree human-caused warming. But obviously it then watched An Inconvenient Truth and realized that it was catastrophic for us-- and that it could get rid of the whole pesky human infestation just by sending some magma up surfaceward to bump up the heat.
If it works, it will probably be considered a medical breakthrough on the order of penicillin, and you can bet the news will travel quickly throughout space to any other planets infected with humanoid life that inducing a slight fever for a few years can take care of the disease. So we're not only responsible for global warming, but for galactic warming. Hello, happy, healthy planets! Goodbye, ET!
One being easier than the other does not make either one hard. Being hit in an engine by a missile is not the same as loss of a single engine to a malfunction. The latter is highly likely to involve damage to your control systems as well as breach of fuel tanks and lines, and shrapnel penetrating areas unrelated to the engine hit
And even though chances of survivability may be slightly higher, that's not the measure here. Unless you are still capable of making it all the way to the target, you've been shot down.
I agree with your overall premise that shooting down a plane before it hits its target is unlikely. Planes move too fast, and military planes are too far away and unprepared. A 747 taking off in Milwaukee and attacking Chicago? The first the President would know would be when it hit. Nevermind a plane taking off at O'Hare itself and attacking Chicago.
However, I have to point out that you have a little bit of inconsistency between the claim that shooting down a passenger airliner with a single missile is impossible and that you could sit at the end of a runway and shoot off the wing of a passenger airliner with...a single missile. (I tend to agree more with the latter, by the way. Bigness does not imply difficulty knocking it down. In fact it makes it more likely that a missile would score a direct hit.)
Have you ever worked in an IT department for pretty much any company? I'll tell you what the two levels of passwords are: an OS (Windows) account password, and a password on the applications or documents. The whole thing is probably some password-protected Excel or Access file(s), which they count as their second level of password protection, or possibly some password-protected custom data view/entry program that reads from a completely unprotected Access (or if they're more advanced than usual an MSDE / SQL Server Express) database.
I understand the appeal of an EVDO device that automagically downloads books, but thats a small niche at this price
A small niche? The price pushes it out of range of many, but the automagical EVDO download is precisely what makes the niche so much larger. WiFi would be nice to have in addition, but instead?
WiFi is a pain in the neck unless you are on your own network, because you have to a) find a hotspot; and b) perform setup operations of some kind to connect to it. Those are things you might expect to do on a laptop, but you really don't want to worry about it with your book. Do you really want to have to somehow figure out how to connect to Boingo's network or whoever the local provider is, on your Kindle, the next time you're in an airport and want to grab a new book to read on the plane? By the time you pay for your one-time Internet access fee, just to access a service on which you can peruse books you haven't yet decided whether to buy, you might as well wander into the airport bookstore instead.
The beauty of this is that it is not reliant on WiFi (nor therefore on the arbitrary choices of network settings, means of acquiring any necessary access codes, and fees of whoever, if anybody, is providing WiFi where you happen to be sitting at the moment).
I think you are missing the point. This isn't about suing for being offended, or using the law to hit back at someone for saying something mean. The anonymous postings in question clearly meet the legal threshold for libel (accusing someone of having an STD is automatically considered libel without proof of damages in most jurisdictions, I believe), and may meet the legal threshold for threats. These are actions which have been illegal, and legally punishable, for centuries. That they take place on the Internet makes no qualitative difference, and shouldn't.
It is standard and reasonable for courts to issue subpoenas in order to ascertain the identity of someone who has broken the law.
The main differences here from printed libel to online libel are 1) that the publisher (owner of the web site) is, in many cases, likely to be off the hook, because hosts of online forums are not usually considered responsible for what those forums contain unless they control their contents (or fail to respond to DMCA requests); and 2) the reasonable expectation of damages is actually higher than it would be in print-- consider that, say, a New York Times op-ed that appeared only in print form and accused you of something vile and damaging to your reputation might be read by a few hundred thousand people and remain forever unread by all 6 billion or so people who never happen to encounter that day's paper. With the expectation that any potential employer will Google your name to see what turns up, however, the audience for online public libel is unlimited.
I don't see anything unreasonable or controversial here; the only thing wrong was originally including the host of the web site in the lawsuit, which probably was an understandable mistake given that we don't have many years of precedent yet for who is responsible in what sorts of online offenses.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not going to disagree with you that information should be secure. Unfortunately, the Fourth Amendment says nothing about information or ideas; its language is entirely in the physical/material realm.
Lest we get carried away in the assumptions that seem to have even made it into the tags for this article, let us take note that the sole sponsor of this bill is a Democrat, not a Republican.
But Google is only half Beta (well, 45%), which means that it has limited telepathic abilities. It might make a good ship's counselor.
Google clearly thinks it is ready for Enterprise-wide deployment, anyway.
Huh? It absolutely stopped people from putting images online-- they put up replacement, degraded images instead. Far from "notic[ing] that DRM wasn't even needed," they all have tried to find a way to solve exactly the same problem that DRM tries to solve: controlled access to copyrighted works. Were there a good DRM solution, they probably would have jumped on it, because it would allow people to see the actual image in previewing their purchases, instead of relying on some low-quality substitute. It is hard to sell a visual product when the potential buyer isn't allowed to see the actual product, but only a crappy reproduction of reduced size.
Bogus argument. You could make the same claims for images; but the lack of drm in .jpg, .gif, and .png didn't stop anyone from putting images online.
Sure it did. Have you ever been to a web site that sells clip art or stock photos? Or one that sells posters, paintings, or prints, including those photo sharing web sites where you can download a small picture or buy a full-resolution digital version? The web site of an art museum that has display restrictions from the owners of some of the works on loan from other galleries? Have you ever used Google Earth or another satellite imagery site? The web is full of images that have been shrunk, reduced in quality, or watermarked to prevent people from taking the full versions without paying for them. Almost anyplace where the image itself is what is for sale, you see people refraining from posting original, full-quality images online.
I'm not really sure how to take the news that bug testing in Vista was quadrupled.
Here's one possible way to take it: all the people who were supposed to be fixing the bugs instead got involved in the competition to find them. Results: a buggy release with an internal buglist 20 miles long. I mean, who wouldn't rather sit around pointing out what's wrong than be productive about making it right? If you can win prizes for doing so, all the better! Guess that's why SP1 has been so popular. Maybe a few of them got put back on fixing detail.
Truth in advertising? The Internet is a network, not a collection of applications that run on your computer. Java and Flash are no more part of the Internet than Microsoft Word is. They are simply programs which make use of the Internet.
If Rand McNally advertises one of their products as "the entire US Highway system in one Atlas" are they being deceitful if none of the maps shows gas stations, even though going to get gasoline is one of the most common uses of those highways?
Ahh, so Locutus has a mini-me and this is his home. How cute!
This is probably because they don't want the public to realize that all those superconducting magnets will cause dangerous side effects, such as all the world's cows re-orienting themselves to face Switzerland.
Dude, really? You write a post claiming basically and unreservedly that The Internet Will Set Us Free, and then I counter that it can be used for freedom or oppression, you follow up with an insistence that the latter is impossible, I point out some reasons why it is not, again asserting that both directions are possibilities...and then you assert the same thing I just said and call me a crackpot for having a point of view I never took? Sure, technology is neutral, usable for good or evil. It was your assertion otherwise-- the notion that only more freedom, never less, can come from it-- that prompted my first post on this thread.
I don't have some kind of Orwellian personal mythology. I do, however, have some familiarity with history, and the fact that basically anything people invent is used both for advancement and oppression. The greater the technology, the more good, or the more large-scale evil, it can be used to bring about. So we always need to be aware of both possibilities and take care to be vigilant in preventing the latter.
encryption: they have hooks into every method? ok, they don't but they can hack it...
Encryption? Who the hell is encrypting all, or even most, of their network packets? Nobody, that's who. Most people and companies aren't even encrypting sensitive information, just dumping it as SMTP right across the wires (if they're lucky) and the unsecured public networks (if they're not). Most of those who are using encryption are using proprietary software belonging to companies that aren't provably trustworthy. Many of those who are not, say, by using open source software, are incapable of understanding the source anyway, or might never check the source (or use an auto-update feature which could give them something different than the source posted publicly). And have you read the official position of the FBI (and probably also, then, of more than a few members of Congress in the US and their equivalents elsewhere) regarding encryption? We could someday wind up with legally mandated governmental key escrow. All it will take will be one terrorist attack that "could have been stopped if we could have deciphered their planning communications." Now such a thing would be, of course, impossible to enforce universally...but if it is prosecutable then it becomes a real risk for anyone to use real encryption, and most communications will then once more be watchable.
And you can't encrypt certain things anyway, such as the destination, or it won't get there (forget anonymizers; that's a field that can too easily be infiltrated. It's just a bit of obfuscation, not real anonymity).
Do you have control over the log files of every DHCP server, DNS server, router, and web server you make use of?
do a cost analysis. and you find out that your "raid every basement, read every enveloped" analogy for why complete surveillance in the real world is impossible ALSO APPLIES TO THE INTERNET they don't have enough soldiers to kick in every door. you got that. good now guess what: they don't have enough analysts to read every packet
Now guess what else. They don't have to. What, you think I imagine an army of millions of technicians employed all day and night reading Matrix-style screen dumps of every person's download of Grandma's new pictures of her cat? You're not thinking broadly enough about the possibilities, and completely leaving out the vast amount of social and personal information that can be gathered without even actually opening most of the envelopes. Basically what we have here is, as you point out, exactly what we had before, except:
1. The volume of information that can be stored, copied, and scanned is much greater.
2. The speed of analysis is much greater.
3. The proportion of communication that goes through the same few channels is much greater. This is important-- once upon a time you would have had to what, infuse the entire postal service with hundreds of thousands of spies? Now a few hundreds of well-placed computers have access to an even greater percentage of data traffic than all those postal spies ever would have.
Don't forget that the means of obfuscation you say are simple are also subject to the channel problem, as well as the information spreading problem-- any means of evasion that becomes widely known to the evaders will also become widely known to the monitors, and because those evaders are still stuck transmitting over the same few networks to which those monitors have access, they won't be effective for long. This is a problem inherent to the way the Internet is set up. Until it is replaced by a nationwide self-building mesh network (or multiple such networks operating on top of each other) where the majority of data does not travel over just a few people's routers but is actually spread everywhere and completely unpredictably, this will not change.
4. The amount of understanding the average person has about what is going on when they transmit something, and what steps would be
Iran says it has no intention to use the technology for launching nuclear warheads
"No, we are not threatening anybody with weapons; we just want to help out with the worldwide energy crisis. We plan to use the missiles for donating nuclear reactors to Tel Aviv and Washington, DC."
there are no checkpoints where a rogue printing press, pirate cd presser, or renegade vcr duplicator can be located by the authorities and shut down. who are you going to shutdown on the internet? traffic can be obscured in such a way that you can't monitor it, and these methods can be encapsulated in code so the clueless end user need not know any special technical abilities to trrde files discreetly, and find anything they want
Or, alternately: there are no hidden rooms in basements where printing presses can remain hidden unless the authorities search every nook and cranny of everyone's house, no envelopes that can't be opened without evident tampering. There isn't anymore an issue of indiscriminate, whole-nation-scale monitoring of people's activities being hard to pull off logistically and socially due to being 1) physically impossible; 2) obvious to everyone.
Now, what we have, is everything everyone does or says flying around in data packets constructed by software those people don't understand and can't know whether to trust, each packet endlessly capable of being copied, logged, and examined at will, all of them traveling across computers and wires owned by a very small set of large corporations which have already proved themselves willing to give up data about both the data traffic and the subscribers themselves. We have means far beyond what could ever have been dreamed of except in an Orwellian fantasy of tying together a portfolio of evidence linking different activities to the same person. Remember that in the end everything comes down to an actual, physical set of wires that go to your house or business (or a particular contract with an agency to broadcast to a physical satellite or cellular device). The people on the other end of those wires receive everything you send, and can record anything they want about usage, and tell anyone they want about what they see you doing.
The Internet-- or an Internet-- certainly bears the possibility, somewhere in the future and depending on how it develops, of being a completely anonymous world of interaction with data and its destination obscure, but let's not confuse the universe of cyberpunk novels for the reality of today. As long as the protocols in widespread use and the means of end-user service delivery remain something like they are, the Internet is-- or can be-- the ultimate tool for nonprivacy in your day-to-day transactions. It could just as easily ultimately become "game over" in the opposite direction as you mean it; this all remains to be seen.
Apparently BBC reporters are like us, and don't necessarily feel the need to RTFA before writing and publishing some reporting or opinion about it.
Glad to see the mainstream media is finally getting with it and learning how to properly make use of the Interweb!
How do we pin this on man-made global warming?
Duh, where do you think the earth got the idea for doing this?
It probably didn't even notice our measly little one-or-two degree human-caused warming. But obviously it then watched An Inconvenient Truth and realized that it was catastrophic for us-- and that it could get rid of the whole pesky human infestation just by sending some magma up surfaceward to bump up the heat.
If it works, it will probably be considered a medical breakthrough on the order of penicillin, and you can bet the news will travel quickly throughout space to any other planets infected with humanoid life that inducing a slight fever for a few years can take care of the disease. So we're not only responsible for global warming, but for galactic warming. Hello, happy, healthy planets! Goodbye, ET!
One being easier than the other does not make either one hard. Being hit in an engine by a missile is not the same as loss of a single engine to a malfunction. The latter is highly likely to involve damage to your control systems as well as breach of fuel tanks and lines, and shrapnel penetrating areas unrelated to the engine hit
And even though chances of survivability may be slightly higher, that's not the measure here. Unless you are still capable of making it all the way to the target, you've been shot down.
I agree with your overall premise that shooting down a plane before it hits its target is unlikely. Planes move too fast, and military planes are too far away and unprepared. A 747 taking off in Milwaukee and attacking Chicago? The first the President would know would be when it hit. Nevermind a plane taking off at O'Hare itself and attacking Chicago. However, I have to point out that you have a little bit of inconsistency between the claim that shooting down a passenger airliner with a single missile is impossible and that you could sit at the end of a runway and shoot off the wing of a passenger airliner with...a single missile. (I tend to agree more with the latter, by the way. Bigness does not imply difficulty knocking it down. In fact it makes it more likely that a missile would score a direct hit.)
Have you ever worked in an IT department for pretty much any company? I'll tell you what the two levels of passwords are: an OS (Windows) account password, and a password on the applications or documents. The whole thing is probably some password-protected Excel or Access file(s), which they count as their second level of password protection, or possibly some password-protected custom data view/entry program that reads from a completely unprotected Access (or if they're more advanced than usual an MSDE / SQL Server Express) database.
I understand the appeal of an EVDO device that automagically downloads books, but thats a small niche at this price
A small niche? The price pushes it out of range of many, but the automagical EVDO download is precisely what makes the niche so much larger. WiFi would be nice to have in addition, but instead?
WiFi is a pain in the neck unless you are on your own network, because you have to a) find a hotspot; and b) perform setup operations of some kind to connect to it. Those are things you might expect to do on a laptop, but you really don't want to worry about it with your book. Do you really want to have to somehow figure out how to connect to Boingo's network or whoever the local provider is, on your Kindle, the next time you're in an airport and want to grab a new book to read on the plane? By the time you pay for your one-time Internet access fee, just to access a service on which you can peruse books you haven't yet decided whether to buy, you might as well wander into the airport bookstore instead.
The beauty of this is that it is not reliant on WiFi (nor therefore on the arbitrary choices of network settings, means of acquiring any necessary access codes, and fees of whoever, if anybody, is providing WiFi where you happen to be sitting at the moment).
I think you are missing the point. This isn't about suing for being offended, or using the law to hit back at someone for saying something mean. The anonymous postings in question clearly meet the legal threshold for libel (accusing someone of having an STD is automatically considered libel without proof of damages in most jurisdictions, I believe), and may meet the legal threshold for threats. These are actions which have been illegal, and legally punishable, for centuries. That they take place on the Internet makes no qualitative difference, and shouldn't.
It is standard and reasonable for courts to issue subpoenas in order to ascertain the identity of someone who has broken the law.
The main differences here from printed libel to online libel are 1) that the publisher (owner of the web site) is, in many cases, likely to be off the hook, because hosts of online forums are not usually considered responsible for what those forums contain unless they control their contents (or fail to respond to DMCA requests); and 2) the reasonable expectation of damages is actually higher than it would be in print-- consider that, say, a New York Times op-ed that appeared only in print form and accused you of something vile and damaging to your reputation might be read by a few hundred thousand people and remain forever unread by all 6 billion or so people who never happen to encounter that day's paper. With the expectation that any potential employer will Google your name to see what turns up, however, the audience for online public libel is unlimited.
I don't see anything unreasonable or controversial here; the only thing wrong was originally including the host of the web site in the lawsuit, which probably was an understandable mistake given that we don't have many years of precedent yet for who is responsible in what sorts of online offenses.