When policemen are allowed to "break" the law, it's only in strictly regulated situations. Cops can't even turn on the siren, unless it's in a situation that's allowed by regulation. Entrapment operations are not something that are take lightly. IANAL, but I would imagine it would involve an insane amount of paperwork, and not just by the policemen involved, but their superiors, their superiors superiors, their superiors superiors superiors, a district judge, etcetera...
The main reason for a society to have a police force, is to restrict who are allowed to enforce law and order. This means cops are the only people who are allowed to use force against other citizens (except in certain other exceptional circumstances). So by definition, it's not equality between policemen and other citizens. The police are allowed to do more, and in turn, must live with strict regulation, and an absolutely clean record. Allowing cops to fake a drug-buying operation (under strict regulation), is no different then allowing cops to drive faster than the speed limit (under strict regulation).
If you need data to back up the obvious fact that, generally speaking, it's not greed that mainly motivates cops, I give up. Your lack of common sense is astonishing. If you are mainly motivated by money, you become a salesman, stockbroker, etc... In particular, you will not choose a low-paying, risky job that requires you to work shifts around the clock. My guess would be that cops are far more likely to be motivated by things such as a strong sense of justice and a will to do something right, a wish to gain more authority and a nice uniform, having a job that involves many different tasks and gives you unique experiences, etc...
And despite what you may have heard from bitter gangsters, RICO seizures go to the treasury, not to the policemen. And like anything else cops do, it's strictly regulated. It's not like the cops can take what they want from anyone suspicious, and bring it back home for their wife to spend on a shopping spree. But yes, it is about greed, because greed is what drives organized crime, and taking away the money from mobsters hurts crime.
No, drug-dealers are violent sociopaths, because the only way to profit from selling drugs, is to be one. Like any other business, the drug-business is a competitive one, and if you want to stay in business you need to be able to deal both with competitors (who may not be as nice as you are), and people not paying. In legalized trades, there are legal ways to fight off such people. In the drug-world, it's done through violence or threats of violence.
Sure, if drugs were legal, you would have sane, normal people selling drugs. And the people who are selling drugs now, would probably find something else to do, legal or not. But assuming that legalization of drugs would mean all the drug-dealers would suddenly be law-abiding, upstanding citizens who would still continue to sell drugs in the legal way (filing paperwork and all), is a child-like fairy-tale with no base in reality. Most of them chose the criminal route for a reason. And I'm perfectly happy having the police after them, even if I support legalization.
As for your comment about suburban peaceful low-level drug-dealers, well I live in the city, so I can't comment. I've never seen one, and if they exist, I assume that selling drugs is not their primary income. You can't get rich by selling drugs the same way auntie is selling tupperware. You might get a few extra bucks, but that's about it. On the other hand, I see a lot of very violent 14-year olds.
Please don't come crying with the story of the poor, innocent drug-dealers, these saint-like people who only want to help drug-users get their daily fix. It's not like they even want to get paid, but like anyone else, the drug-dealers need the money to feed their wife and kids, and thus are forced to take a small commission.
While I agree that legalizing most drugs would probably be beneficial for society, it's not like todays drug-dealers aren't criminals in every sense of the word. So don't come telling me about confusing the issues, because it's obviously you who are confused here.
Besides, cops are supposed to solve crimes and arrest criminals, not commit crimes while becoming criminals to 'trick' other criminals.
I disagree. In my opinion, cops are supposed to reduce crime. This includes talking to school children about it, being visible in the neighbourhood, cooperating with idealistic organizations and private security companies, "solving crimes", and lots of other things, such as taking out organized crime by undercover operations. Cops also have to balance the stuff they do between the different tasks; if they focus only on the most serious crime, everyone will start speeding and running red lights. And they have to do it within budget. Sometimes undercover operations are a far more cost efficient way of taking out organized crime, than doing it the old-fashioned way. In the end, it's my taxpayer money they are using, and as a taxpayer, I prefer cops to be cost-efficient.
Oh, and by the way, it's not the cops fault that drugs are illegal. There are plenty of cops who disagree with prohibition of drugs. That doesn't mean that they can simply let criminals go away. Cops still have to do their jobs, even if they don't like it. If you want to blame someone, blame the politicians, or the voters.
You know what they say about trying to catch monsters.
Uhm, that some monsters are really difficult to catch, and that it can be dangerous?
Isn't the whole point of being a whistleblower or informant that you can either help put bad guys behind bars or expose a corporate scandal or safety breach without fear of reprisal, because your identity is kept secret?
Nope. The "point of being a whistleblower or informant", is to inform the right authorities about wrongdoings so that they can be fixed.
If you feel more comfortable hiding your identity, they might be able to help you with that, to various degrees. But being without fear, or having your identity kept secret, is not "the point of being a a whistleblower or informant".
Actually, I would claim, that in the majority of cases, hiding the identity of the "whistleblower or informant" is bad. A society where anyone is free to snitch on anyone else, without fear of appraisal, is not a society I would like to live in. It smells too much of Stasi or KGB. In most cases, if you are afraid to make accusations in your own name, it's usually because your case is not particulary strong, it might even be an outright lie. Accountability is perhaps even more important than anonymity.
It just seems to be that the whole point of this website is to give bad guys the ability to track down and "punish" those who actually help the authorities curtail their wrongdoings.
Not necessarily so. It can also be used by criminals to see which people they should avoid talking too much with, or conduct "business" with.
Given that the information contained on the site is already publicly available, I believe that the criminals who would be likely to "punish" certain informants, already know which informants to "punish" from reading their own court documents.
That such sites show up, is actually a good thing. It forces policy-makers to review their preferences for what information should be publicly available, and which information should not. Just because it worked before the digital revolution, doesn't mean it should remain that way forever.
Meaningful and valuable to who? If I had to make the choice between using the bandwidth and storage space to store your post, or to store half a kilobyte of CERN sensor data, I would actually choose to store your post. And it's not because I find your post particularly valuable. It's because the CERN data is as meaningless to me as line-noise would be. For me even donkey bukkake with midgets is more meaningful, than random sensor data from CERN. Only when the scientists make discoveries from it that either carries important philosophical, economical, and/or practical benefits or changes, do I become interested.
Correction: Unoptimized java apps are usually within the same order of magnitude regarding speed as unoptimized native apps; if your benchmarks happen to overlook the effects of slow startup due to just-in-time compilation, and huge virtual memory overhead (global system slowdown) due to garbage collection. In the real world, people still optimize their native apps.
I'm not against people using java where it makes sense. But imagine a system where every little command required launching a java interpreter (e.g. "ls"), and you see why it's not such a great idea. Java works great for writing moderate to large programs on budget and within time. But there's a reason suns "java os" never saw the light of day (and that reason was not related to failure in marketing it)
What a marvellous idea. They should write all their crap in some slow-as-molasses bytecode. Surely the way to go if loosing further marketshare is your thing!
On the other hand, x86 is a non-native instruction set. They stopped making x86 processors somewhere back in the early 90s. Every x86 processor since, has emulated the x86 instruction set with their own microcode. Which, from a performance standpoint, is far better than doing the same thing in software.
Well, I don't necessarily find cutting color bits evil. Although, not telling your customer is of course rather evil. If I needed a cheap lcd display, I might still choose one that was bit-challenged, if the decrease in prize was noticeable.
They almost certainly were using security software. The problem is that it is awfully difficult to judge effective security software from the much more common snake oil that is out there.
Obviously not. Assuming they used security software, this ISP certainly learned the difference.
There is a decent chance that the breach was not the fault of the security software but some kind of human error. They probably made the common mistake of assuming all they had to do was install firewall, intrusion detection and anti-malware tools and they were magically fully protected.
That's certainly excusable for a naïve end-user. But if you are that naïve, you should at the very least hire a tech, before you start your own ISP-business.
The "magic" would make the brain feel and think, sense the environment, and control the body. Just as the "magic" inside a combustion engine make the car move. The only difference is that we know how a combustion engine works, and are therefore usually not referring to it as "magic", even if people a thousand years ago would. However, both them as us are currently unable to explain the brain.
Also, free will is not incompatible with determinism. One can argue that as long as you have a choice, you have free will, even if the choice you make is predetermined. Only when you are forced to make a certain choice, do you loose free will (among others, Hobbes and Hume held this view). Free will is not the same as randomism, even if many people seem to interpret it that way.
Non-identical people in non-identical but similar situations, often choose the same thing. This is not an argument against either determinism or free will. In fact, it is not an argument against anything else than your dogmatism.
For all we know, the things that are going on inside our heads, might just as well be described as "magic". We do not know how the brain works, we may suspect it works similarly to a computer, but then again, it wouldn't be the first time people are wrong about how the brain works. Earlier theories have involved everything from souls, to telephone switchboards, and as far as I know, the only thing that has definitely been proven, is that the brain does not work the same way as a telephone switchboard.
Similarly, your argument that an identical person in an identical environment would do exactly the same thing, is nonsense. We do not have the ability to set up an experiment to test whether this is true, which puts the experiment in the realm of thought experiments, not science. As such, I could just as well claim that an identical person in an identical environment may choose to do something else, and you would be just as unable to disprove my statement, as I would be to disprove yours. This last statement could be interpreted to state that brain functions are random, that free will exists, or a combination of both.
Your claim that philosophy can't change how things are, is of course true. But how do you know "how things are"? Science isn't perfect. The only thing we know with absolute certainty in science, is that our models are incomplete and most often wrong. And just because you think the brain works in a certain way, doesn't mean it actually does. Like most eminent scientists, you are also capable of being wrong.
Since we do not know what kind of universe we live in, it's impossible to define what a "physical universe" means, except perhaps, that it must mean our own. And since we are unable to come up with a final proof (or even a convincing argument) either way, I think the only sane position to take, is that the existence of free will is still UNDECIDED.
Now, please go read some science and philosophy, because you obviously have a bad understanding of both.
It's funny that it's only on windows that these problems come up, and only on windows that users are so naïve that they happily install anything to their computer that questionable people send them in email. Sure, windows is the market leader, but even then, one would assume that at least a few people would target Mac OS X, or linux as well. In particular, Mac OS X seems like a good target. Many people who own macs choose them exactly because they consider themselves non-technical, and just want something that works. So why aren't mac users as easily fooled?
The problem with windows, is that (a) The operating system is completely useless out of the box. Even clueless users know that in order to get things done, you need to install a ton of third-party software, from lots of different sources, and thus windows users become easy targets for social engineering. (b) Every windows user sends every other windows user binaries instead of something useful, such as e.g. a PDF file. (Even funny joke animations in flash, is something users send each other as binaries instead of SWF, which is completely pointless, as the binary wouldn't work if the recipient didn't already have flash installed).
In linux, we already have a system that only allows you run "permitted" software. Either the software is available as a package in the distribution, and you can be reasonably confident that it's not malware, or it isn't available through the distribution, in which case, it's less convenient to install, and it's your problem to figure out if it's secure. If you are using a major distribution, such as ubuntu, this system works great, as most useful stuff are available within the distribution. You do not need to install third-party software, ever! I haven't actually used a Mac lately, but I imagine the problem is less there too, as from what I understand, a "naked" Mac is actually useful.
So ok, the problem is (of course) partly technical, and partly social. It's technical because windows itself, and various other software often used with windows, both from Microsoft and third-parties, are not designed from a security perspective. Some (most) versions of Windows are even crackable remotely by default, as installed from a fresh disk, and most likely will be cracked even before you have managed to download something from windows update. It's party social and partly technical because windows and most windows software foster a culture where binaries are freely interchanged, and users get accustomed to make bad security decisions, because it's the only way to actually get anything done at all. And it's social because even if you tell them there's a dangerous new virus that involves users typing "format c:" at their command prompt, some users are going to do just that, just to see what happens.
Counterintuitive? How intuitive is it to stop your progress just 'cause some red light shines on you? It's something that you learned, not something that is part of our genetic makeup.
There is a difference between being intuitive and part of the genetic makeup. Eating sugary food is not intuitive, it's part of our genetic makeup. Clicking on links in hypertext-like media is intuitive, because it's what we have learned to do in similar contexts. Just as turning the page in a book or magazine is intuitive, because it's what we've learned to do for those kinds of media. If you somehow tell me that I should not turn the page in a book or magazine I got from an unknown source, that would be counterintuitive.
Oh, and: Please take your medication!
This is also not a technical problem. You have today trojans that (to circumvent proxy-based malware detection) mail themselves to you in an encrypted zip file, tell you to decypher the attached text to find out the password (a password in the text would be used by modern proxy AV tools), type that password and execute the file in the zip. And people actually DO THAT!
It is a technical problem. Just because such "trojans" as you describe exist, doesn't mean that they are successful, or that anyone would even consider them a problem. The majority of bots are caused by software that depends on technical glitches. (And in particular, the ability to easily execute a file inside a zip-file, like winzip does, is a technical glitch. It's similar to the glitch of easily being able to execute attachments in email. Although in this particular case, it probably wouldn't have helped much to fix it).
Sure, social engineering works, but please show me an example of a real, live botnet with more than one compromised host that depends purely on social engineering.
People switch their common sense off when they access the internet. I have no other explanation for this phenomenon. You can get most people to double click your attachment with the most hare brained excuse, "important news from your lawyer" is often enough.
So why shouldn't people doubleclick their attachments? I mean, to read the attachment, you have to doubleclick it, right? So why are you suggesting that they shouldn't?
This is completely counterintuitive. The people who need to be held responsible are the idiot programmers who allow arbitrary code to be executed by clicking on attachments in a program deliberately designed for end-users. Such a feature in an email-program sounds like it might be more useful to movable-computation researchers working on lab-machines in a closed network.
Don't get me wrong. I don't want to keep anyone from using the net. But as with everything that can be harmful to other people using the same tools you do, you have to act responsibly. This applies to cars, this applies to guns, and it also applies to machines with internet connection.
And by clicking on attachments, you are harming someone? By simply leaving your computer connected to the Internet, you are harming someone?
This is completely counterintuitive. It would be like prosecuting car-owners for having their cars parked in the garage instead of constantly driving it to and from the factory for "updates". Or prosecuting gun-owners because the manufacturer of the gun decided that whenever you put the safety on, the gun would fire a shot, if someone sent a certain radio-signal.
Nonsense! Technical problems deserve a technical solution!
Sounds reasonable to me. The problem with spam is that it's essentially "free". So instead of making it illegal, we should tax it, to make it less profitable. Botnets is just the modern way of getting spam out of the door, so it should be taxed as well.
It may sound strange, but I take a certain pride in the first email address I ever got still working and (valid) email sent to that still reaching my current inbox.
So, essentially, you are saying that slashdot posts are like schematic drawings in braindead software that won't let you enlarge text boxes so words longer than four letters fit?
In that case, I can assure you, that you are wrong. Slashdot postings allow words longer than four letters. And they are not very useful for drawing schematics.
Interesting points, but since the prediction came true, it's sort of misleading to say he was wrong.
So if I tell you that "the sky is blue because the firmament of heaven that covers the (flat) surface of the earth (and that the sun, moon, and stars are placed on), is again covered by water, and water is blue", you would say that I'm correct, since the sky is blue?
Slashdot Mirror
When policemen are allowed to "break" the law, it's only in strictly regulated situations. Cops can't even turn on the siren, unless it's in a situation that's allowed by regulation. Entrapment operations are not something that are take lightly. IANAL, but I would imagine it would involve an insane amount of paperwork, and not just by the policemen involved, but their superiors, their superiors superiors, their superiors superiors superiors, a district judge, etcetera...
The main reason for a society to have a police force, is to restrict who are allowed to enforce law and order. This means cops are the only people who are allowed to use force against other citizens (except in certain other exceptional circumstances). So by definition, it's not equality between policemen and other citizens. The police are allowed to do more, and in turn, must live with strict regulation, and an absolutely clean record. Allowing cops to fake a drug-buying operation (under strict regulation), is no different then allowing cops to drive faster than the speed limit (under strict regulation).
If you need data to back up the obvious fact that, generally speaking, it's not greed that mainly motivates cops, I give up. Your lack of common sense is astonishing. If you are mainly motivated by money, you become a salesman, stockbroker, etc... In particular, you will not choose a low-paying, risky job that requires you to work shifts around the clock. My guess would be that cops are far more likely to be motivated by things such as a strong sense of justice and a will to do something right, a wish to gain more authority and a nice uniform, having a job that involves many different tasks and gives you unique experiences, etc...
And despite what you may have heard from bitter gangsters, RICO seizures go to the treasury, not to the policemen. And like anything else cops do, it's strictly regulated. It's not like the cops can take what they want from anyone suspicious, and bring it back home for their wife to spend on a shopping spree. But yes, it is about greed, because greed is what drives organized crime, and taking away the money from mobsters hurts crime.
If it's legally allowed, by definition, it's not a crime.
If you believe cops are mostly motivated by greed, I think you need to examine their salaries a bit closer.
No, drug-dealers are violent sociopaths, because the only way to profit from selling drugs, is to be one. Like any other business, the drug-business is a competitive one, and if you want to stay in business you need to be able to deal both with competitors (who may not be as nice as you are), and people not paying. In legalized trades, there are legal ways to fight off such people. In the drug-world, it's done through violence or threats of violence.
Sure, if drugs were legal, you would have sane, normal people selling drugs. And the people who are selling drugs now, would probably find something else to do, legal or not. But assuming that legalization of drugs would mean all the drug-dealers would suddenly be law-abiding, upstanding citizens who would still continue to sell drugs in the legal way (filing paperwork and all), is a child-like fairy-tale with no base in reality. Most of them chose the criminal route for a reason. And I'm perfectly happy having the police after them, even if I support legalization.
As for your comment about suburban peaceful low-level drug-dealers, well I live in the city, so I can't comment. I've never seen one, and if they exist, I assume that selling drugs is not their primary income. You can't get rich by selling drugs the same way auntie is selling tupperware. You might get a few extra bucks, but that's about it. On the other hand, I see a lot of very violent 14-year olds.
Please don't come crying with the story of the poor, innocent drug-dealers, these saint-like people who only want to help drug-users get their daily fix. It's not like they even want to get paid, but like anyone else, the drug-dealers need the money to feed their wife and kids, and thus are forced to take a small commission.
While I agree that legalizing most drugs would probably be beneficial for society, it's not like todays drug-dealers aren't criminals in every sense of the word. So don't come telling me about confusing the issues, because it's obviously you who are confused here.
I disagree. In my opinion, cops are supposed to reduce crime. This includes talking to school children about it, being visible in the neighbourhood, cooperating with idealistic organizations and private security companies, "solving crimes", and lots of other things, such as taking out organized crime by undercover operations. Cops also have to balance the stuff they do between the different tasks; if they focus only on the most serious crime, everyone will start speeding and running red lights. And they have to do it within budget. Sometimes undercover operations are a far more cost efficient way of taking out organized crime, than doing it the old-fashioned way. In the end, it's my taxpayer money they are using, and as a taxpayer, I prefer cops to be cost-efficient.
Oh, and by the way, it's not the cops fault that drugs are illegal. There are plenty of cops who disagree with prohibition of drugs. That doesn't mean that they can simply let criminals go away. Cops still have to do their jobs, even if they don't like it. If you want to blame someone, blame the politicians, or the voters.
Uhm, that some monsters are really difficult to catch, and that it can be dangerous?
Nope. The "point of being a whistleblower or informant", is to inform the right authorities about wrongdoings so that they can be fixed.
If you feel more comfortable hiding your identity, they might be able to help you with that, to various degrees. But being without fear, or having your identity kept secret, is not "the point of being a a whistleblower or informant".
Actually, I would claim, that in the majority of cases, hiding the identity of the "whistleblower or informant" is bad. A society where anyone is free to snitch on anyone else, without fear of appraisal, is not a society I would like to live in. It smells too much of Stasi or KGB. In most cases, if you are afraid to make accusations in your own name, it's usually because your case is not particulary strong, it might even be an outright lie. Accountability is perhaps even more important than anonymity.
Not necessarily so. It can also be used by criminals to see which people they should avoid talking too much with, or conduct "business" with.
Given that the information contained on the site is already publicly available, I believe that the criminals who would be likely to "punish" certain informants, already know which informants to "punish" from reading their own court documents.
That such sites show up, is actually a good thing. It forces policy-makers to review their preferences for what information should be publicly available, and which information should not. Just because it worked before the digital revolution, doesn't mean it should remain that way forever.
Meaningful and valuable to who? If I had to make the choice between using the bandwidth and storage space to store your post, or to store half a kilobyte of CERN sensor data, I would actually choose to store your post. And it's not because I find your post particularly valuable. It's because the CERN data is as meaningless to me as line-noise would be. For me even donkey bukkake with midgets is more meaningful, than random sensor data from CERN. Only when the scientists make discoveries from it that either carries important philosophical, economical, and/or practical benefits or changes, do I become interested.
Correction: Unoptimized java apps are usually within the same order of magnitude regarding speed as unoptimized native apps; if your benchmarks happen to overlook the effects of slow startup due to just-in-time compilation, and huge virtual memory overhead (global system slowdown) due to garbage collection. In the real world, people still optimize their native apps.
I'm not against people using java where it makes sense. But imagine a system where every little command required launching a java interpreter (e.g. "ls"), and you see why it's not such a great idea. Java works great for writing moderate to large programs on budget and within time. But there's a reason suns "java os" never saw the light of day (and that reason was not related to failure in marketing it)
What a marvellous idea. They should write all their crap in some slow-as-molasses bytecode. Surely the way to go if loosing further marketshare is your thing!
On the other hand, x86 is a non-native instruction set. They stopped making x86 processors somewhere back in the early 90s. Every x86 processor since, has emulated the x86 instruction set with their own microcode. Which, from a performance standpoint, is far better than doing the same thing in software.
Well, I don't necessarily find cutting color bits evil. Although, not telling your customer is of course rather evil. If I needed a cheap lcd display, I might still choose one that was bit-challenged, if the decrease in prize was noticeable.
Obviously not. Assuming they used security software, this ISP certainly learned the difference.
That's certainly excusable for a naïve end-user. But if you are that naïve, you should at the very least hire a tech, before you start your own ISP-business.
There's never been a Slack linux either.
The "magic" would make the brain feel and think, sense the environment, and control the body. Just as the "magic" inside a combustion engine make the car move. The only difference is that we know how a combustion engine works, and are therefore usually not referring to it as "magic", even if people a thousand years ago would. However, both them as us are currently unable to explain the brain.
Also, free will is not incompatible with determinism. One can argue that as long as you have a choice, you have free will, even if the choice you make is predetermined. Only when you are forced to make a certain choice, do you loose free will (among others, Hobbes and Hume held this view). Free will is not the same as randomism, even if many people seem to interpret it that way.
Non-identical people in non-identical but similar situations, often choose the same thing. This is not an argument against either determinism or free will. In fact, it is not an argument against anything else than your dogmatism.
For all we know, the things that are going on inside our heads, might just as well be described as "magic". We do not know how the brain works, we may suspect it works similarly to a computer, but then again, it wouldn't be the first time people are wrong about how the brain works. Earlier theories have involved everything from souls, to telephone switchboards, and as far as I know, the only thing that has definitely been proven, is that the brain does not work the same way as a telephone switchboard.
Similarly, your argument that an identical person in an identical environment would do exactly the same thing, is nonsense. We do not have the ability to set up an experiment to test whether this is true, which puts the experiment in the realm of thought experiments, not science. As such, I could just as well claim that an identical person in an identical environment may choose to do something else, and you would be just as unable to disprove my statement, as I would be to disprove yours. This last statement could be interpreted to state that brain functions are random, that free will exists, or a combination of both.
Your claim that philosophy can't change how things are, is of course true. But how do you know "how things are"? Science isn't perfect. The only thing we know with absolute certainty in science, is that our models are incomplete and most often wrong. And just because you think the brain works in a certain way, doesn't mean it actually does. Like most eminent scientists, you are also capable of being wrong.
Since we do not know what kind of universe we live in, it's impossible to define what a "physical universe" means, except perhaps, that it must mean our own. And since we are unable to come up with a final proof (or even a convincing argument) either way, I think the only sane position to take, is that the existence of free will is still UNDECIDED.
Now, please go read some science and philosophy, because you obviously have a bad understanding of both.
It's funny that it's only on windows that these problems come up, and only on windows that users are so naïve that they happily install anything to their computer that questionable people send them in email. Sure, windows is the market leader, but even then, one would assume that at least a few people would target Mac OS X, or linux as well. In particular, Mac OS X seems like a good target. Many people who own macs choose them exactly because they consider themselves non-technical, and just want something that works. So why aren't mac users as easily fooled?
The problem with windows, is that (a) The operating system is completely useless out of the box. Even clueless users know that in order to get things done, you need to install a ton of third-party software, from lots of different sources, and thus windows users become easy targets for social engineering. (b) Every windows user sends every other windows user binaries instead of something useful, such as e.g. a PDF file. (Even funny joke animations in flash, is something users send each other as binaries instead of SWF, which is completely pointless, as the binary wouldn't work if the recipient didn't already have flash installed).
In linux, we already have a system that only allows you run "permitted" software. Either the software is available as a package in the distribution, and you can be reasonably confident that it's not malware, or it isn't available through the distribution, in which case, it's less convenient to install, and it's your problem to figure out if it's secure. If you are using a major distribution, such as ubuntu, this system works great, as most useful stuff are available within the distribution. You do not need to install third-party software, ever! I haven't actually used a Mac lately, but I imagine the problem is less there too, as from what I understand, a "naked" Mac is actually useful.
So ok, the problem is (of course) partly technical, and partly social. It's technical because windows itself, and various other software often used with windows, both from Microsoft and third-parties, are not designed from a security perspective. Some (most) versions of Windows are even crackable remotely by default, as installed from a fresh disk, and most likely will be cracked even before you have managed to download something from windows update. It's party social and partly technical because windows and most windows software foster a culture where binaries are freely interchanged, and users get accustomed to make bad security decisions, because it's the only way to actually get anything done at all. And it's social because even if you tell them there's a dangerous new virus that involves users typing "format c:" at their command prompt, some users are going to do just that, just to see what happens.
Wouldn't that be execution for attempt to circumvent patent? You know, such as thinking about two-click shopping, but not actually implementing it?
I would love to start throwing metaphorical wrenches at tornados. Give me a metaphorical wrench, and I'll throw it at any tornado you point out to me!
It's approximately fifty-two football-fields turned lengthwise upwards worth of energy.
There is a difference between being intuitive and part of the genetic makeup. Eating sugary food is not intuitive, it's part of our genetic makeup. Clicking on links in hypertext-like media is intuitive, because it's what we have learned to do in similar contexts. Just as turning the page in a book or magazine is intuitive, because it's what we've learned to do for those kinds of media. If you somehow tell me that I should not turn the page in a book or magazine I got from an unknown source, that would be counterintuitive.
Oh, and: Please take your medication!
It is a technical problem. Just because such "trojans" as you describe exist, doesn't mean that they are successful, or that anyone would even consider them a problem. The majority of bots are caused by software that depends on technical glitches. (And in particular, the ability to easily execute a file inside a zip-file, like winzip does, is a technical glitch. It's similar to the glitch of easily being able to execute attachments in email. Although in this particular case, it probably wouldn't have helped much to fix it).
Sure, social engineering works, but please show me an example of a real, live botnet with more than one compromised host that depends purely on social engineering.
Wow, a new word: e-organized crime!
Why not e-organized e-crime. I'm sure that when e-crime merges with crime, many e-dead e-bodies will start to appear.
So why shouldn't people doubleclick their attachments? I mean, to read the attachment, you have to doubleclick it, right? So why are you suggesting that they shouldn't?
This is completely counterintuitive. The people who need to be held responsible are the idiot programmers who allow arbitrary code to be executed by clicking on attachments in a program deliberately designed for end-users. Such a feature in an email-program sounds like it might be more useful to movable-computation researchers working on lab-machines in a closed network.
And by clicking on attachments, you are harming someone? By simply leaving your computer connected to the Internet, you are harming someone?
This is completely counterintuitive. It would be like prosecuting car-owners for having their cars parked in the garage instead of constantly driving it to and from the factory for "updates". Or prosecuting gun-owners because the manufacturer of the gun decided that whenever you put the safety on, the gun would fire a shot, if someone sent a certain radio-signal.
Nonsense! Technical problems deserve a technical solution!
Sounds reasonable to me. The problem with spam is that it's essentially "free". So instead of making it illegal, we should tax it, to make it less profitable. Botnets is just the modern way of getting spam out of the door, so it should be taxed as well.
Correct, that does sound strange!
In that case, I can assure you, that you are wrong. Slashdot postings allow words longer than four letters. And they are not very useful for drawing schematics.
So if I tell you that "the sky is blue because the firmament of heaven that covers the (flat) surface of the earth (and that the sun, moon, and stars are placed on), is again covered by water, and water is blue", you would say that I'm correct, since the sky is blue?