Who gets shielded and who doesn't? Is a New York Times reporter automatically better than a blogger? What about a press flack? The 1st Amendment is for *everybody*, not just reporters. The idea of creating supercitizens with special rights doesn't sit well with me. If your problem is with the way the government can invade our privacy, propose new rules for government behavior that don't trample on the ideal of equality before the law.
What would it say about the Feds abilities if they could flawlessly, always, 100%, wiretap exactly the right person? I'd be far more worried if the FBI didn't mess up every once in a while.
It isn't every day that somebody admits he's too clueless to deal with real software that doesn't come with corporate contractors to do all his work for him.
We at Princeton have been getting grief from OIT for quite a while now, and I've always suspected there were persons of dubious intelligence hiding in the hierarchy. It's nice to have confirmation.
Fear not. This particular personage works for OIT (Office of Information Technology), a bunch of folks who mess up the networks they're supposed to manage so badly they've been summarily banned from the CS Department.
Did I mention that I love my regular internet service outages?
Anybody who's been running a website knows that there are more search engine crawlers out there than there are grains of sand on the beach, and the amount of crawling constitutes (even for a low-ranked blog like mine) an amazing level of traffic.
My guess is, the White House is just keeping robots off the pages that get the most hits, in order to make better use of their bandwidth. After all, folks, if they wanted to make that stuff unavailable, they'd take it offline.
Reporters aren't little tin gods. They are the same as the rest of us before the eyes of the law. If you're upset about this (and I find it vaguely scary), blame it on laws that give the lawyers the ability to subpoena just about everybody.
*Sigh*. McCarthy is not the historical analogy you want to reach for. The abuses of the McCarthy era, by and large, were a result of people acting on not enough information. We had very little idea who the Communists among us were (excepting the folks at Project Venona, who weren't talking), so rumor, innuendo, and twisted, half-forgotten anecdotes substituted for proof. If the government had the capabilities Poindexter describes during the McCarthy era, it might not have done much against the hysteria, but that type of data would definitely have refuted some of the more ridiculous allegations floating around (of course, it would have generated grounds for a lot more, so you don't really know what would have happened).
So long as we're talking about publicly accessible databases, there's no real constitutional issue. The only real place where privacy comes up in the Constitution is in the 4th Amendment, which talks about searches and seizures of one's person and effects without a warrant. If the government goes about compiling such a database, chances are that it'll purchase or acquire the rights to the data, not show up and demand it w/o a warrant.
Quite a lot of stuff of questionable quality is published, in my experience, and you don't have to go very far to find it. A lot of the time, it's a rather honest 'mistake' (in the sense that a sloppy or incorrect methodology is a mistake). After all, few have the time to check through every step of a paper, and that generally occurs only when you're working in the same field.
However, the 'hot' or 'important' topics tend to get more review than most, and out-and-out fabrication of results is rare (not too rare, unfortunately; this is the second case in research physics I've heard of in my short life; the other was that mess in the lab at Berkeley).
Far more inane is the requirement on marijuana smoking. Now, I've never touched the stuff, but I *know* people like me are a tiny minority of the talent pool out there. Yet another case of a rather pathetic "zero-tolerance" style "get-tough" policy coming back to bite its originators in the butt.
Re:Didn't Yugoslavia disrupt a NATO e-mail server?
on
Cyber-Attacks?
·
· Score: 1
One of the sadder things, is that NATO, like any organization that has to bridge the technology and standards gaps of some 15 different militaries and languages, doesn't really have better security. Witness a recent article.
Hi:
This has probably already been said somewhere, but let's not forget -- a key point in determining the relative security of a piece of software is sheer volume.
A widely used operating system or protocol implementation is going to have thousands (millions!) of users, and you can expect that almost all bugs will be happened upon, whether they are reported or not (reporting is a big deal). So the security question (i.e. how much damage is done by the security hole) really is, as other have mentioned, how quickly it is patched, and, more importantly, how much scrutiny the code undergoes *BEFORE* it is put into widespread use. In this case, the `experimental' versions of the Linux kernel (2.5.x,etc.) are a great example: they undergo massive scrutiny, but everybody understands that they are buggy code, but we expect the development versions to be better, and errors are fixed before deployment. Win2K cannot claim the same benefit. On the other hand, an infrequently used utility with a small market will have little effort devoted to finding security bugs, so we can safely assume that under any model, many bugs will remain unfound. In this case, it makes quite a bit of sense, security-wise, to be `close-source' since the sheer effort required to reverse-engineer the code to make a bug exploitable will be grossly disproportionate to the gain of cracking the utility. On the other hand, even if you make the code available, people probably won't bother. As long as it's hard to find the bugs, you could keep the source closed, but again, this won't get you quality software, it just decreases the probability of your getting hacked.
Conclusions: for quality software, use open-source -- easier to find bugs, and more people looking. For secure software that everybody uses, use open-source with an extended security-testing phase. For secure software that only you will use, you need not release your own code;-)
Careful: this article is only with respect to *random* breakdowns. A massive amount of internet traffic is connected through a few particular `nodes,' and selective destruction of relatively few of these nodes would be enough to massively degrade connectivity (read: really slow things down) across the entire network.
Now, this isn't a problem when you're considering a network where the topology isn't widely known (i.e. secret military or government networks), or when you're considering random breakdowns, but if there's a hostile group out there that a) knows where those critical nodes are (and on the Internet, these are public), and b) wants to take the network down, it can be done for comparatively little effort. That's where vulnerability to terrorists lies.
There seem to be two ways of establishing legal traditions. One is to plan things out ahead of time, being aware of the mistakes of the past, and the other is to muddle one's way through, sort of making it up as you go along. Our system, based on English common law (but much changed from it), is definitely in category two.
Do you trust our modern-day lawyers and judges to decide something so important as jurisdictional boundaries on the Internet in the anonymity of thousands of courtrooms? And, furthermore, isn't this Congress' job? Last I checked, the Constitution explicitly gives Congress the right to choose which courts hear which items (with the caveat that whenever courts hear something, the Supreme Court has appellate jurisdiction). I'm not that eager to put something like this in the hands of the people who gave us the DMCA, but I prefer a public debate to the mess we're going to get if we let lawyers slug this out behind closed doors using arcane rules that have frequently produced nigh-incomprehensible results.
You know, with all due respect, I think a lot of slashdotters have watched too many reruns of the X-Files. The NSA is an agency charged with defending the United States *against* threats to national security. As recent events (not WTC, but rather the slew of worms and virii) have demonstrated, one of the greatest threats to our electronic infrastructure is having a few gazillion easily hackable machines on the Internet. It's part of their mission to prevent that. After all, it's not like they haven't done it before.
Yes, the NSA has acted to help Americans protect our secrets before. Why? Because it helps our country for banks, companies, and people to be able to do their work without fear of their private data being stolen. For those of us who follow encryption, recall that NSA helped IBM optimize DES against differential cryptanalysis, long before differential cryptanalysis was a public technique (yes, they also limited keylength, but presumably that was to set things up so that they could break in, but only in emergencies with a *lot* of effort -- it still takes 24-odd hours for modern specially designed machines to break DES, do you think the NSA could have done better in the late 70s?).
Even when they were trying to foist Clipper off on us, the people over at NSA always acknowledged that helping Americans (and the global economy) maintain secure systems is a good thing. As lots of people have pointed out, SeLinux is about access controls, not encryption. The NSA has every reason to help develop secure products so that large groups of Internet servers are not easily hacked, and no reason to install a backdoor which anybody could discover (and, if unethical, exploit) simply by perusing the source code.
That said, if you're qualified, feel free to browse the code -- being careful is good, but being paranoid and reflexively hostile to people who devote their lives to public service is bad.
My dear fellow, I *am* a conservative (or so I have been told, although I eschew labeling). I *do* support owning guns for self-defense, and I *do* think that some restrictions on civil liberties will be necessary in the days ahead. That being said, I think crypto is relatively insignificant, and restricting it is obviously somebody pushing their own agenda. I find just as repulsive the gun nuts' attempt to tie owning guns to airplanes, since nobody in their right mind would allow everybody on an airplane to carry a gun.
And, yes, I think these people have no shame, or they have lost their senses on this point -- to bring up an irrelevant political agenda in the moment of tragedy devalues both the tragedy, the political agenda, and the real actions that could address the tragedy. It's backbiting at a time when what we need is goodwill and agreement between our citizens.
This always happens, and it's more than a little sick. Whenever something bad happens, somebody trys to push their own agenda. When there's a school shooting, all the gun control nuts materialize.
And now people are trying to use the dead bodies of those killed last Tuesday to crack down on crypto, and to kill missile defense, both of which have no real connection to what happened. Not to mention Jerry Falwell, the NRA, and all those nuts who're using it to promote Christian fundamentalism and arming everybody on the plane with an Uzi, in that order.
These people are either contemptible for their raw opportunism, or pitiful for their sheer fanaticism and inability to see beyond their agendas.
Right now, I don't think we're planning on it, but if the next attack is *with* a nuke, or at a nuclear plant, or something on that order, all bets are off.
The Constitution allows us to go to war. In war, we don't have to impanel juries and try and convict everybody we shoot. This isn't a matter of justice in the legal sense, although it may be in the moral sense. This is a matter of war and/or public danger, which is another matter entirely.
Now I can agree with you. Others can seek to do harm to you after they see you take up resources. This is as subjective as it can get. Of course, anyone seeing you doing anything can find it offensive and retaliate. This is very different from "I exist and this is a reason for others to hate me".
That's quibbling. By existing, you take up resources (air, food, water, etc.).
I believe jealousy exists only if the person suffering it cannot achieve the envied objective. If you give means (or help) to a person to achieve things he/she envies, it becomes an aspiration, which is always desirable.
Now, I cannot assume the attack to the WTC occurred because of jealousy. This is an awful irrational conclusion.
I believe jealousy exists if the person being jealous doesn't have something, irrespective of whether they *can* achieve it, and equally irrespective of the actions of the object of their jealousy. And I'm not saying that WTC occurred because of jealousy alone. I'm going into the psychological reasons people choose to hate their neighbors. I mean, what do you call arrogance? Many times arrogance is acting contrary to what other people want, because you *can*. It need not even hurt them materially, just ego-wise. People get annoyed when America builds a missile defense system, even though it doesn't hurt them. People get annoyed when they see extravagant waste in America, even when they have no part of the resources being wasted. That's jealousy, and that's a root of hate.
Check your numbers. I live in Brazil. We have imported, thourgh all our history, much more from the US than we exported. Some years ago, some politicians opposing the government showed that Brazil signed trade deals to import pacifiers (the one babies like) as a condition for exporting rice. In simple words, it's "Yes we will buy you food if you buy our toys". This happens all over Latin America. American companies use all the commercial power available to obtain economic advantages here. Things your government wouldn't dream of doing inside the US.
I think we both know governments and companies dare. But Brazil hardly qualifies as one of the world's poorest countries -- stop and think: is your country poorer for the business you do with Americans? Has your life been poorer for our presence in the world? No! Through trade, and scientific and cultural exchanges, our countries have worked together for mutual benefit.
Sure. But please don't use the argument "if we make them fear us, they'll back off". It won't happen. The attacks prove that a dozen (or so) people can cause a lot of destruction.
There are people in whom we can instill fear, to keep them from doing this sort of thing. Into these we will instill fear. There are those who are implacable, who must be implacably destroyed if we are to be safe. These we will destroy. Hatred may breed hatred, but the lesson of the second world war is that it is possible to locate, track down, and annihilate certain evils. To date, we have hoped that certain types of terrorism were transient, or that the price we pay for tolerating it is less than the price we would pay for destroying it. I think that calculation just changed.
I don't think so. You don't stop hate showing more hate. You can create fear , but the hate will remain until it grows bigger than the fear. And then things happen again. You stop hate showing that hate is useless. It achieves nothing good. It only produces more hate.
We will learn to hate, but, more importantly, we will destroy those who seek to hurt us. We will destroy them so that they will not have an opportunity to perform another evil such as this. That's what our political leaders mean when they consider this war.
You have to remember that this sort of attack is not planned for. Normally, when a plane is hijacked, the hijackers are planning to use the people on board as hostages, and they get their demands met that way, so plane crews are specifically taught *not* to resist people who are holding weapons on them (or who may have bombs) in order to prevent a larger tragedy, like the whole plane going down. The standard procedure is that the plan lands w/ the hijackers in control, and they negotiate them out (and/or storm the plane), in a controlled environment. The idea that somebody would hijack a plane to fly it into a building is new. Needless to say, I think we're going to see some changes in the procedure for hijackings after this.
>I'm sorry, but this is too much:
>I refuse to believe that our simple existence is
>bound to create enemies ourselves. We do not live
>in a world with constant clan-like fighting. Do
>you really believe that some stranger seeks to do
>harm you just because you exist?
I believe that because I exist, and take up resources, that others might see me as a means to an end, and, absent an order which prevents them from doing so, some fraction of those others will seek to exploit and use me for my detriment and their benefit. This is commonly called `anarchy' by political theorists, and I don't think anybody denies the impulse is there.
>Now this is interesting: do you really believe
>that the US is a wealthy country without harming
>other countries? Or are all
>trade/economic/political decisions made always
>thinking about what would be the result to other
>countries? Remember, just months ago, president
>Bush said he wouldn't sign a deal for reducing
>pollution because it could harm the US industry.
>Basically, it's "I don't care what will happen to
>the world, if it will give us any trouble".
There are two questions here. The first is do I believe people hate us simply because we are rich, irrespective of how we got here. And the answer is yes, I do. If you have ever visited China, or (I am told) Norway, or even spent some time talking to certain people in certain departments on campus, you will discover that being rich, successful, and motivated carries a stigma. Whether it was the successful farmers in Russia (the kulaks), or the success of Troy, or the `soak-the-rich' income tax, some part of people dislike success for being successful. This is called jealousy, or envy, and I defy you to show that such evil doesn't exist in the human heart, in whatever measure (large or small).
The second has to deal with the idea of exploitation, which I will comment on below.
>This is a basic principle of capitalism: if you
>want to be rich, the first thing you should
>forget is that the poor exist. In the current
>state of world's economy, rich nations like the
>US depend on the poorness of third world
>countries.
Huh? Who among us has forgotten the poor exist? You'll have to be more specific. Secondly, you give voice to the prejudice that our prosperity depends on keeping others low. I disagree vehemently. I accept that it's possible to achieve a measure of prosperity through the exploitation of others, but, by and large, that's not how it works. Do you know how much we trade with the poorest countries in the world? How *little* presence and resources we draw from the poorest countries? Our trade with the 30 or 40 poorest countries in the world comprimses a negligible portion of our economy. Our prosperity does not depend on them. If you look at countries that have become rapidly prosperous in the last 50 years (Taiwan, Korea, Japan, Singapore, possibly China) you will find that their prosperity is mostly home-grown, created by farsighted leaders and hard-working people who toiled through some truly horrible conditions to achieve what they have today. And that prosperity was home-grown, done without need to economically exploit or rob others.
>What's the point in doing that? What did the US
>achieve in the Gulf War? Saddam still exists and
>still is a threat to the world. And war, today,
>isn't necessary in the open field. Look at
>yestedays acts: there was absolutely no military
>weaponry envolved. No troops, tanks, military air
>fighters. Just four comercial airplanes.
Right. And that's because nobody will threaten us on the open field again after 1991 (for a while). Qadafi backed off his program after we bombed him in 1986. And now we must make sure that people back off this program, this war, that they have chosen to make upon us in our workplaces and our homes.
>IMO, the first thing that should be done (of
>course, after attending the horrible aftermath of
>the incidents), rationally speaking, is think
>about why would someone do that to the US. Please
>don't come with the "they're all nuts" answer.
>Unless you can prove that there is a severe case
>of madness spreading on the world, and the first
>symptom is "hate against the US". IMO, there are
>too many "anti-american" movements today to think
>that it's the work of some crazy radicals.
I don't think these people are crazy. I think they have chosen to hate us, for a variety of reasons, ranging from the religious, to resentment of our wealth, to resentment of our unwillingness to help them (and, to be honest, our foreign aid in recent years has been quite stingy). They can weave, to their own mind, quite elaborate mental structures to justify their sentiments, as the Communists did before them.
I agree we should look at where we are unnecessarily offending people. Like any great and influential country, we have a habit of that. But I think we should also vigorously combat those who hate us, and who hate the peace and prosperity of our world.
>Remember, these radicals need funding and
>support, and it always come from non-radical
>groups.
People don't have to be insane to hate. There are many businesses, movements, and governments who fund these groups for other purposes, but these groups are comprised of living, breathing people with beliefs of their own which violently disagree with ours.
And, as enlightened an age as we live in, many who are immune to the logic of our reason and contemptuous of our goodwill are susceptible to the logic of force. Indeed, often the failure to use force shows weakness and invites further contempt and hate, for it shows that hating us is a safe occupation.
Because we exist as human beings, there will be people who seek to do us harm. Because we are a wealthy country, there will be people who seek to do us harm. Because we seek to bring prosperity and trade to others, there will be those who seek to do us harm. And yes, because we are people, often greedy, often ignorant, there will be those who take offense and seek to do us harm.
But sanity is not to be close-minded, and mind our own business. Sanity is not to cravenly surrender when others seek to blackmail with bombs and hijackings, for such appeasement can only encourage more of the same. You're wrong when you say `teaching a lesson' doesn't work. Who has challenged America military on the open field since 1991?
Sanity is not to be found in retreating from the dream of a better, more prosperous world. Sanity is not to be found in allowing others to break every rule of civilized conduct, and get away with it. These are the paths to an insane world, a world where we cower in the corner, helpless against the whims of others, many with goals that we do not like. We make mistakes, we occasionally act out of short-sighted greed. But we can also act for the betterment of the world, and more often than not, this is when we make enemies. Our troubles in the Mideast stem from our effort to help countries and peoples defend themselves from annhilation at the hands of their neighbors (deliberately vague, as more than one country fits the bill), as well as our effort to protect the prosperity of our citizens, and the citizens of other countries.
Canadian connection? What Canadian connection? I've heard of no canadian connection, and nobody is seriously thinking about blaming Canada.
And we're looking outwards for blame, b/c that's where the major terrorists are, and that's where the people celebrating this tragedy are. We'll look inwards too, just to cover the bases, but I'm sad to say that I don't think your statement that `the vast majority are horrified' is accurate.
Slashdot Mirror
It looks like it's only for biologists, from the journals they're taking papers from. Ones you pay to get published in. Huh?
Who gets shielded and who doesn't? Is a New York Times reporter automatically better than a blogger? What about a press flack? The 1st Amendment is for *everybody*, not just reporters. The idea of creating supercitizens with special rights doesn't sit well with me. If your problem is with the way the government can invade our privacy, propose new rules for government behavior that don't trample on the ideal of equality before the law.
What would it say about the Feds abilities if they could flawlessly, always, 100%, wiretap exactly the right person? I'd be far more worried if the FBI didn't mess up every once in a while.
It isn't every day that somebody admits he's too clueless to deal with real software that doesn't come with corporate contractors to do all his work for him.
We at Princeton have been getting grief from OIT for quite a while now, and I've always suspected there were persons of dubious intelligence hiding in the hierarchy. It's nice to have confirmation.
Fear not. This particular personage works for OIT (Office of Information Technology), a bunch of folks who mess up the networks they're supposed to manage so badly they've been summarily banned from the CS Department.
Did I mention that I love my regular internet service outages?
Anybody who's been running a website knows that there are more search engine crawlers out there than there are grains of sand on the beach, and the amount of crawling constitutes (even for a low-ranked blog like mine) an amazing level of traffic.
My guess is, the White House is just keeping robots off the pages that get the most hits, in order to make better use of their bandwidth. After all, folks, if they wanted to make that stuff unavailable, they'd take it offline.
Reporters aren't little tin gods. They are the same as the rest of us before the eyes of the law. If you're upset about this (and I find it vaguely scary), blame it on laws that give the lawyers the ability to subpoena just about everybody.
*Sigh*. McCarthy is not the historical analogy you want to reach for. The abuses of the McCarthy era, by and large, were a result of people acting on not enough information. We had very little idea who the Communists among us were (excepting the folks at Project Venona, who weren't talking), so rumor, innuendo, and twisted, half-forgotten anecdotes substituted for proof. If the government had the capabilities Poindexter describes during the McCarthy era, it might not have done much against the hysteria, but that type of data would definitely have refuted some of the more ridiculous allegations floating around (of course, it would have generated grounds for a lot more, so you don't really know what would have happened).
So long as we're talking about publicly accessible databases, there's no real constitutional issue. The only real place where privacy comes up in the Constitution is in the 4th Amendment, which talks about searches and seizures of one's person and effects without a warrant. If the government goes about compiling such a database, chances are that it'll purchase or acquire the rights to the data, not show up and demand it w/o a warrant.
Quite a lot of stuff of questionable quality is published, in my experience, and you don't have to go very far to find it. A lot of the time, it's a rather honest 'mistake' (in the sense that a sloppy or incorrect methodology is a mistake). After all, few have the time to check through every step of a paper, and that generally occurs only when you're working in the same field.
However, the 'hot' or 'important' topics tend to get more review than most, and out-and-out fabrication of results is rare (not too rare, unfortunately; this is the second case in research physics I've heard of in my short life; the other was that mess in the lab at Berkeley).
Far more inane is the requirement on marijuana smoking. Now, I've never touched the stuff, but I *know* people like me are a tiny minority of the talent pool out there. Yet another case of a rather pathetic "zero-tolerance" style "get-tough" policy coming back to bite its originators in the butt.
One of the sadder things, is that NATO, like any organization that has to bridge the technology and standards gaps of some 15 different militaries and languages, doesn't really have better security. Witness a recent article.
Hi:
;-)
This has probably already been said somewhere, but let's not forget -- a key point in determining the relative security of a piece of software is sheer volume.
A widely used operating system or protocol implementation is going to have thousands (millions!) of users, and you can expect that almost all bugs will be happened upon, whether they are reported or not (reporting is a big deal). So the security question (i.e. how much damage is done by the security hole) really is, as other have mentioned, how quickly it is patched, and, more importantly, how much scrutiny the code undergoes *BEFORE* it is put into widespread use. In this case, the `experimental' versions of the Linux kernel (2.5.x,etc.) are a great example: they undergo massive scrutiny, but everybody understands that they are buggy code, but we expect the development versions to be better, and errors are fixed before deployment. Win2K cannot claim the same benefit.
On the other hand, an infrequently used utility with a small market will have little effort devoted to finding security bugs, so we can safely assume that under any model, many bugs will remain unfound. In this case, it makes quite a bit of sense, security-wise, to be `close-source' since the sheer effort required to reverse-engineer the code to make a bug exploitable will be grossly disproportionate to the gain of cracking the utility. On the other hand, even if you make the code available, people probably won't bother. As long as it's hard to find the bugs, you could keep the source closed, but again, this won't get you quality software, it just decreases the probability of your getting hacked.
Conclusions: for quality software, use open-source -- easier to find bugs, and more people looking. For secure software that everybody uses, use open-source with an extended security-testing phase. For secure software that only you will use, you need not release your own code
Careful: this article is only with respect to *random* breakdowns. A massive amount of internet traffic is connected through a few particular `nodes,' and selective destruction of relatively few of these nodes would be enough to massively degrade connectivity (read: really slow things down) across the entire network.
Now, this isn't a problem when you're considering a network where the topology isn't widely known (i.e. secret military or government networks), or when you're considering random breakdowns, but if there's a hostile group out there that a) knows where those critical nodes are (and on the Internet, these are public), and b) wants to take the network down, it can be done for comparatively little effort. That's where vulnerability to terrorists lies.
There seem to be two ways of establishing legal traditions. One is to plan things out ahead of time, being aware of the mistakes of the past, and the other is to muddle one's way through, sort of making it up as you go along. Our system, based on English common law (but much changed from it), is definitely in category two.
Do you trust our modern-day lawyers and judges to decide something so important as jurisdictional boundaries on the Internet in the anonymity of thousands of courtrooms? And, furthermore, isn't this Congress' job? Last I checked, the Constitution explicitly gives Congress the right to choose which courts hear which items (with the caveat that whenever courts hear something, the Supreme Court has appellate jurisdiction). I'm not that eager to put something like this in the hands of the people who gave us the DMCA, but I prefer a public debate to the mess we're going to get if we let lawyers slug this out behind closed doors using arcane rules that have frequently produced nigh-incomprehensible results.
You know, with all due respect, I think a lot of slashdotters have watched too many reruns of the X-Files. The NSA is an agency charged with defending the United States *against* threats to national security. As recent events (not WTC, but rather the slew of worms and virii) have demonstrated, one of the greatest threats to our electronic infrastructure is having a few gazillion easily hackable machines on the Internet. It's part of their mission to prevent that. After all, it's not like they haven't done it before.
Yes, the NSA has acted to help Americans protect our secrets before. Why? Because it helps our country for banks, companies, and people to be able to do their work without fear of their private data being stolen. For those of us who follow encryption, recall that NSA helped IBM optimize DES against differential cryptanalysis, long before differential cryptanalysis was a public technique (yes, they also limited keylength, but presumably that was to set things up so that they could break in, but only in emergencies with a *lot* of effort -- it still takes 24-odd hours for modern specially designed machines to break DES, do you think the NSA could have done better in the late 70s?).
Even when they were trying to foist Clipper off on us, the people over at NSA always acknowledged that helping Americans (and the global economy) maintain secure systems is a good thing. As lots of people have pointed out, SeLinux is about access controls, not encryption. The NSA has every reason to help develop secure products so that large groups of Internet servers are not easily hacked, and no reason to install a backdoor which anybody could discover (and, if unethical, exploit) simply by perusing the source code.
That said, if you're qualified, feel free to browse the code -- being careful is good, but being paranoid and reflexively hostile to people who devote their lives to public service is bad.
My dear fellow, I *am* a conservative (or so I have been told, although I eschew labeling). I *do* support owning guns for self-defense, and I *do* think that some restrictions on civil liberties will be necessary in the days ahead. That being said, I think crypto is relatively insignificant, and restricting it is obviously somebody pushing their own agenda. I find just as repulsive the gun nuts' attempt to tie owning guns to airplanes, since nobody in their right mind would allow everybody on an airplane to carry a gun.
And, yes, I think these people have no shame, or they have lost their senses on this point -- to bring up an irrelevant political agenda in the moment of tragedy devalues both the tragedy, the political agenda, and the real actions that could address the tragedy. It's backbiting at a time when what we need is goodwill and agreement between our citizens.
This always happens, and it's more than a little sick. Whenever something bad happens, somebody trys to push their own agenda. When there's a school shooting, all the gun control nuts materialize.
And now people are trying to use the dead bodies of those killed last Tuesday to crack down on crypto, and to kill missile defense, both of which have no real connection to what happened. Not to mention Jerry Falwell, the NRA, and all those nuts who're using it to promote Christian fundamentalism and arming everybody on the plane with an Uzi, in that order.
These people are either contemptible for their raw opportunism, or pitiful for their sheer fanaticism and inability to see beyond their agendas.
Right now, I don't think we're planning on it, but if the next attack is *with* a nuke, or at a nuclear plant, or something on that order, all bets are off.
The Constitution allows us to go to war. In war, we don't have to impanel juries and try and convict everybody we shoot. This isn't a matter of justice in the legal sense, although it may be in the moral sense. This is a matter of war and/or public danger, which is another matter entirely.
Now I can agree with you. Others can seek to do harm to you after they see you take up resources. This is as subjective as it can get. Of course, anyone seeing you doing anything can find it offensive and retaliate. This is very different from "I exist and this is a reason for others to hate me".
That's quibbling. By existing, you take up resources (air, food, water, etc.).
I believe jealousy exists only if the person suffering it cannot achieve the envied objective. If you give means (or help) to a person to achieve things he/she envies, it becomes an aspiration, which is always desirable.
Now, I cannot assume the attack to the WTC occurred because of jealousy. This is an awful irrational conclusion.
I believe jealousy exists if the person being jealous doesn't have something, irrespective of whether they *can* achieve it, and equally irrespective of the actions of the object of their jealousy. And I'm not saying that WTC occurred because of jealousy alone. I'm going into the psychological reasons people choose to hate their neighbors. I mean, what do you call arrogance? Many times arrogance is acting contrary to what other people want, because you *can*. It need not even hurt them materially, just ego-wise. People get annoyed when America builds a missile defense system, even though it doesn't hurt them. People get annoyed when they see extravagant waste in America, even when they have no part of the resources being wasted. That's jealousy, and that's a root of hate.
Check your numbers. I live in Brazil. We have imported, thourgh all our history, much more from the US than we exported. Some years ago, some politicians opposing the government showed that Brazil signed trade deals to import pacifiers (the one babies like) as a condition for exporting rice. In simple words, it's "Yes we will buy you food if you buy our toys". This happens all over Latin America. American companies use all the commercial power available to obtain economic advantages here. Things your government wouldn't dream of doing inside the US.
I think we both know governments and companies dare. But Brazil hardly qualifies as one of the world's poorest countries -- stop and think: is your country poorer for the business you do with Americans? Has your life been poorer for our presence in the world? No! Through trade, and scientific and cultural exchanges, our countries have worked together for mutual benefit.
Sure. But please don't use the argument "if we make them fear us, they'll back off". It won't happen. The attacks prove that a dozen (or so) people can cause a lot of destruction.
There are people in whom we can instill fear, to keep them from doing this sort of thing. Into these we will instill fear. There are those who are implacable, who must be implacably destroyed if we are to be safe. These we will destroy. Hatred may breed hatred, but the lesson of the second world war is that it is possible to locate, track down, and annihilate certain evils. To date, we have hoped that certain types of terrorism were transient, or that the price we pay for tolerating it is less than the price we would pay for destroying it. I think that calculation just changed.
I don't think so. You don't stop hate showing more hate. You can create fear , but the hate will remain until it grows bigger than the fear. And then things happen again. You stop hate showing that hate is useless. It achieves nothing good. It only produces more hate.
We will learn to hate, but, more importantly, we will destroy those who seek to hurt us. We will destroy them so that they will not have an opportunity to perform another evil such as this. That's what our political leaders mean when they consider this war.
You have to remember that this sort of attack is not planned for. Normally, when a plane is hijacked, the hijackers are planning to use the people on board as hostages, and they get their demands met that way, so plane crews are specifically taught *not* to resist people who are holding weapons on them (or who may have bombs) in order to prevent a larger tragedy, like the whole plane going down. The standard procedure is that the plan lands w/ the hijackers in control, and they negotiate them out (and/or storm the plane), in a controlled environment. The idea that somebody would hijack a plane to fly it into a building is new. Needless to say, I think we're going to see some changes in the procedure for hijackings after this.
>I'm sorry, but this is too much:
>I refuse to believe that our simple existence is
>bound to create enemies ourselves. We do not live
>in a world with constant clan-like fighting. Do
>you really believe that some stranger seeks to do
>harm you just because you exist?
I believe that because I exist, and take up resources, that others might see me as a means to an end, and, absent an order which prevents them from doing so, some fraction of those others will seek to exploit and use me for my detriment and their benefit. This is commonly called `anarchy' by political theorists, and I don't think anybody denies the impulse is there.
>Now this is interesting: do you really believe
>that the US is a wealthy country without harming
>other countries? Or are all
>trade/economic/political decisions made always
>thinking about what would be the result to other
>countries? Remember, just months ago, president
>Bush said he wouldn't sign a deal for reducing
>pollution because it could harm the US industry.
>Basically, it's "I don't care what will happen to
>the world, if it will give us any trouble".
There are two questions here. The first is do I believe people hate us simply because we are rich, irrespective of how we got here. And the answer is yes, I do. If you have ever visited China, or (I am told) Norway, or even spent some time talking to certain people in certain departments on campus, you will discover that being rich, successful, and motivated carries a stigma. Whether it was the successful farmers in Russia (the kulaks), or the success of Troy, or the `soak-the-rich' income tax, some part of people dislike success for being successful. This is called jealousy, or envy, and I defy you to show that such evil doesn't exist in the human heart, in whatever measure (large or small).
The second has to deal with the idea of exploitation, which I will comment on below.
>This is a basic principle of capitalism: if you
>want to be rich, the first thing you should
>forget is that the poor exist. In the current
>state of world's economy, rich nations like the
>US depend on the poorness of third world
>countries.
Huh? Who among us has forgotten the poor exist? You'll have to be more specific. Secondly, you give voice to the prejudice that our prosperity depends on keeping others low. I disagree vehemently. I accept that it's possible to achieve a measure of prosperity through the exploitation of others, but, by and large, that's not how it works. Do you know how much we trade with the poorest countries in the world? How *little* presence and resources we draw from the poorest countries? Our trade with the 30 or 40 poorest countries in the world comprimses a negligible portion of our economy. Our prosperity does not depend on them. If you look at countries that have become rapidly prosperous in the last 50 years (Taiwan, Korea, Japan, Singapore, possibly China) you will find that their prosperity is mostly home-grown, created by farsighted leaders and hard-working people who toiled through some truly horrible conditions to achieve what they have today. And that prosperity was home-grown, done without need to economically exploit or rob others.
>What's the point in doing that? What did the US
>achieve in the Gulf War? Saddam still exists and
>still is a threat to the world. And war, today,
>isn't necessary in the open field. Look at
>yestedays acts: there was absolutely no military
>weaponry envolved. No troops, tanks, military air
>fighters. Just four comercial airplanes.
Right. And that's because nobody will threaten us on the open field again after 1991 (for a while). Qadafi backed off his program after we bombed him in 1986. And now we must make sure that people back off this program, this war, that they have chosen to make upon us in our workplaces and our homes.
>IMO, the first thing that should be done (of
>course, after attending the horrible aftermath of
>the incidents), rationally speaking, is think
>about why would someone do that to the US. Please
>don't come with the "they're all nuts" answer.
>Unless you can prove that there is a severe case
>of madness spreading on the world, and the first
>symptom is "hate against the US". IMO, there are
>too many "anti-american" movements today to think
>that it's the work of some crazy radicals.
I don't think these people are crazy. I think they have chosen to hate us, for a variety of reasons, ranging from the religious, to resentment of our wealth, to resentment of our unwillingness to help them (and, to be honest, our foreign aid in recent years has been quite stingy). They can weave, to their own mind, quite elaborate mental structures to justify their sentiments, as the Communists did before them.
I agree we should look at where we are unnecessarily offending people. Like any great and influential country, we have a habit of that. But I think we should also vigorously combat those who hate us, and who hate the peace and prosperity of our world.
>Remember, these radicals need funding and
>support, and it always come from non-radical
>groups.
People don't have to be insane to hate. There are many businesses, movements, and governments who fund these groups for other purposes, but these groups are comprised of living, breathing people with beliefs of their own which violently disagree with ours.
And, as enlightened an age as we live in, many who are immune to the logic of our reason and contemptuous of our goodwill are susceptible to the logic of force. Indeed, often the failure to use force shows weakness and invites further contempt and hate, for it shows that hating us is a safe occupation.
Because we exist as human beings, there will be people who seek to do us harm. Because we are a wealthy country, there will be people who seek to do us harm. Because we seek to bring prosperity and trade to others, there will be those who seek to do us harm. And yes, because we are people, often greedy, often ignorant, there will be those who take offense and seek to do us harm.
But sanity is not to be close-minded, and mind our own business. Sanity is not to cravenly surrender when others seek to blackmail with bombs and hijackings, for such appeasement can only encourage more of the same. You're wrong when you say `teaching a lesson' doesn't work. Who has challenged America military on the open field since 1991?
Sanity is not to be found in retreating from the dream of a better, more prosperous world. Sanity is not to be found in allowing others to break every rule of civilized conduct, and get away with it. These are the paths to an insane world, a world where we cower in the corner, helpless against the whims of others, many with goals that we do not like. We make mistakes, we occasionally act out of short-sighted greed. But we can also act for the betterment of the world, and more often than not, this is when we make enemies. Our troubles in the Mideast stem from our effort to help countries and peoples defend themselves from annhilation at the hands of their neighbors (deliberately vague, as more than one country fits the bill), as well as our effort to protect the prosperity of our citizens, and the citizens of other countries.
You're wrong, sir.
Canadian connection? What Canadian connection? I've heard of no canadian connection, and nobody is seriously thinking about blaming Canada.
And we're looking outwards for blame, b/c that's where the major terrorists are, and that's where the people celebrating this tragedy are. We'll look inwards too, just to cover the bases, but I'm sad to say that I don't think your statement that `the vast majority are horrified' is accurate.