The other side of the coin to Regulatory Capture
on
The Short Arm of the Law
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
...which is a sign of a failed state. Regulatory Capture is when government agencies become run primarily for the special interests they are supposed to regulate.
This CNN article shows how corporations can become too big to punish (which is similar to the oft cited "too big to fail"). The same conditions which put monopolistic corps and cartels beyond market accountability (lack of competition for those at the top of an industry) probably add to the effect of being "too big to nail" at the same time.
Corporatism has emerged in our society and become monopolistic and wildly out of control. The best remedy we may have is stringent application of antitrust law (break 'em up), although other measures (such as limiting their spending and ties with the media) will probably be necessary as well.
...and I don't see the tie-down anywhere other than the normal situation of not being able to run native apps on other platforms.
When you see a non-Apple program unable to browse an internal work website because it doesn't have the right Apple voodo, then drop us a datagram. Until then, you'd better keep your eye on how MS is trying to expand this common office situation to the wider Internet by making their Son-of-Active Directory the defacto protocol for single sign-on to websites.
Apple's biggest threat to date is actually the iPad, because if they get the tablet form factor to take off and supplant personal computers, it will be with a closed iPhone-like architecture which is much worse in terms of freedom than having a tablet Mac.
MS painted their elephant Pantone Pink to give their beast a certain aura of standardization. People were fooled into thinking that real standardization would follow but it all turns out to be a cheap tactic in a nasty campaign of steamrolling the ISO and bamboozling the rest of us who weren't terribly aware of Microsoft's history.
The ugly fact is that no American corp in a monopoly position can do anything other than cheat and lie and steal in the end. It is ingrained in the business culture and all that is required for any traded corp to be made to work this way is a bit of investor and executive turnover with a sprinkling of lawsuits. Even Google will succumb to this as their regular M.O. eventually.
Working in different fields is par for the course unless you are some kind of wack job elitist with an axe to grind.
Tell that to the Meteorologists who inveigh against Climatology because they have trouble predicting the *weather* 10 days into the future. Your insight about elitist wack jobs is probably unknown to most of the general public.
Then these people you cite (non-climatologists by the way) need to engage in normal scientific discourse with climatologists and through peer reviewed journals, instead of throwing out opinions. Only I suspect they won't do this because they really don't know the field and know they'll get pwned.
Meteorologists who assume that Climatology is predicting the weather years into the future are dangerous idiots.
"Kids" typically get married after college. But biology says these people will have a substantial appetite for sex by the time they're 16.
The abstinence model of education is based on ignorance and unrealistic expectations. It only partially works in societies where women are relegated away from higher education and career-seeking, and bars educators from teaching a large chunk of biology education.
I think the "Just Say No" conservatives need to ask themselves why so many of these diseases are worst in the regions lacking sex education. And the USA's Bible Belt is often implied in different discussions and speeches as some kind of would-be role model for issues like teenage pregnancy (Godly abstinence) and worker productivity (Protestant work ethic). But I'm sorry, the numbers often tell an opposite story.
Personally, I think the controversies have a lot to do with people determined to hold on to childlike myths and attitudes about humanity and the cosmos into adulthood. Its to the point where they end up at "spiritual war" with information in general and with most of the sciences.
Uh, "rational freethinkers" fulminating over f-this and f-that "positive environment for future children"?
You should do stand-up.:-)
Seriously, AC has a point that the pie just won't stretch any bigger. And it seems to hold true for everything not the least of which are space and resources.
Corporate types and their political lackeys don't want to deal with these now very scary hard limits, so they try to create fake / soft scarcity models that allow them to even more zealously find ways to rip-off and punish 'unimportant' people (those of us who cannot push back through their corrupt underbelly). Its called creating economic growth through punishment, both domestic and abroad, which is the economic system this country turned to when the cold war was over. It allows the powers that be to turn the suppression of what scares them into a money-making business, so long as they can scare the rest of us at least enough so we don't speak out against their life-mangling scams.
And though they were mainly introduced to it through AOL and the reserved world of academia, the realization of what the Internet really is eventually sank in... And it scares them! Pretexts for attacking the Internet are very much in demand these days.
How long until we have BitTorrent with TOR and encryption built in?
TOR wasn't designed to handle large P2P transfers. The only anonymous network I've seen that is robustly handling torrent traffic is I2P. One you install it and set the proxy on your browser, just go to tracker2.postman.i2p to see what is on the most popular tracker.
The I2P software is open source and comes with anonymized email, bittorrent and http software built in. Other programs either written for or adapted to I2P are available, such as Tahoe-LAFS file system and iMule. I2P just recently got a new plugin architecture to make it easy to distribute new apps to interested users, and they could use some coding talent on the many ideas bouncing around on the main forum site.
It seems that I2P aims to be very TOR-like in terms of internal routing and anonymizing capability (they call it "garlic routing"), but in a mostly darknet fashion. This means that the trackers, torrents and web sites you visit through I2P will be 'inside' the anon network. However, there are 'gift' gateways to regular www as well as to freenet and TOR. Another difference with TOR is that all running I2P 'clients' are also routers and route at least a minimal amount of traffic for the network (this increases anonymity because there is no built-in "exit node" capability). Yet another difference is that the I2P network is supposed to be less centralized, though I'm not intimate with the code and can't say for sure.
A single false, signed certificate from anywhere provides undeniable cause to revoke a CA from all browsers.
A very good point. However, there is no reason why a privileged attacker (e.g. a government or an insider) couldn't use the fake certs sparingly in a targeted manner.
Further, the CA in question could be any of the relatively minor ones who may have more interest in cashing out with a large government entity and getting revoked than in continuing to run a small CA with little revenue.
Displaying the fingerprint behind the glass would be excellent, but I've long thought that simply putting it on checkbooks, credit cards and correspondence would work nicely. Trying to substitute a fingerprint for a fake cert wouldn't get very far because too many people would see mismatches with the real cert from the website, fingerprints on older correspondence, etc. Even an option to hear the fingerprint somewhere on the organization's phone menu would be great (and so very easy).
In fashion on the other hand people do it because they are such losers that they think they would be left out and not accepted otherwise.
Newsflash: For the past 20 years it has been extremely unfashionable (unaccepted) to be poor or even just lower-middle class in our society. Finance may be more closely related to fashion than you say it is, except with fashion the barrier to starting ones own trends (using textiles, thread and dyes) is often much lower.
It ends... at the boundary where wealthy patrons can still use the information to easily maintain their comparative wealth. When it ceases to be a timely and valuable vehicle for Wall St. bankers and Fortune 500 CEOs to pull the wool over our eyes, then 'advice' becomes 'news' because the players have already made their move.
The judiciary can't have it both ways when the Supreme Court is promoting an extreme interpretation of the First Amendment (i.e. unlimited corporate donations to political campaigns are OK).
Either the court system recognizes justifiable mitigation of an enumerated Right in order to prevent other Rights from being undermined by it, or they don't. What we heard from SCOTUS in 'Citizens United' was that free speech is absolute, so no more controls on obscenity, defamation, incitement, threats, etc....and no controls on the Internet, either.
Do they want us to go from a situation where SSO in Windows is the standard on LANs, to SSO in Windows to Facebook or Windowslive servers becomes the standard in the Internet?
Because that is the direction that Microsoft is going in with what was Active Directory.
And the TFA goes on to point out that a phisher would be pretty damn stupid to go to all the trouble to setup a fake domain and then put a broken certificate on it to throw up a warning and cause a potential victim to take a second look at the site and make sure it isn't something suspicious.
That's why the user has to look at the site's domain at the same moment they check for the little lock icon. I think it was Firefox 3.0 that placed both the domain name and the lock side-by-side in the status bar--This was a great move. Later, they removed both from the status bar because they wanted people to focus on the new EV color scheme in the address bar.
Honestly, browser makers need to decide on properly representing security context in the GUI and then stop jerking people around with semantically vague stuff that keeps changing. I feel like an idiot for training users on how to verify a secure browser connection; needless to say, they don't know how to do it anymore.
Deleting your account deprives them of further advertising revenue and sends a signal to the market that selling our data can worsen a company's lagging business into a death spiral.
The more account closings there are after this selloff, the more Myspace will smell like a dirty dog.
Other companies that build portable players are trying to offer an alternative to the iPod, not to clone it. Even so, Linux's apparent versatility fails here...
If I want to download a video from a website, I will probably be given choices that include "Apple/iPod". I know that video will play on any Apple device with video capability. But the user of the Linux device has to memorize a long list of formats that may or may not work either on the player or their PC. And if that video site even wanted to target owners of "Linux" players, what format would they choose?? What phrasing would they choose??
Its an absurd situation.
OTOH, look at email and groupware support. A Linux-based device may have any combination of supported types, but on the poor side. Many will not even support syncing with Gnome and KDE calendars. But I know that an iPhone will sync with a Mac's calendar, and the same goes for PocketPC/Windows.
Why should someone with a "Linux desktop" have to research whether their "Linux phone" will sync their emails, address book and calendar?? Answer: Because the "Linux" moniker is a total red herring as a consumer-facing identifier. It can have no real meaning to typical users. "Linux" qualifies as a platform only to engineers, designers, hackers and dedicated hobbyists.
Think about how many devices have Linux installed on them, and how many ways Linux touches our daily lives.
It makes my devices cheaper and that's about it.
"Linux" does not confer any synergies among the different devices that use it because it is too low-level. Everything that runs on top is not standardized, so people end up with multiple Linux-based gadgets that can't even share information between them. This version of the FOSS/bazaar idea doesn't bestow any real freedoms on end users; rather it maximizes the freedom of designers and engineers at the expense of user convenience.
The above is why Google does not commonly refer to their mobile platform as "Android Linux", as its the "Android" upper-level parts that are crucially important to how the Android devices look, feel and inter-operate for users.
They could 'accidentally' send routing commands to ISPs for sites that are not actually banned. The traffic for those sites would then be routed through the DIA ready for snooping.
How does the filtering work?
1. A list of banned sites and their internet addresses is maintained by the Department of Internal Affairs.
2. The DIA then use a routing protocol to tell the participating ISPs (Internet Service Providers) that the ‘best’ way to the internet address of the banned site’s web server is through the DIA’s filtering server.
3. When a person tries to access a site (banned or not) on one of the filtered addresses, their ISP knows to divert the request to the DIA’s server.
4. The DIA’s filtering server then looks at the request. If it is to a banned site, the request is refused and a message is sent back to the person. If it is to a non-banned site, the DIA’s filtering server passes the request on to the real server through the DIA’s internet connection.
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...which is a sign of a failed state. Regulatory Capture is when government agencies become run primarily for the special interests they are supposed to regulate.
This CNN article shows how corporations can become too big to punish (which is similar to the oft cited "too big to fail"). The same conditions which put monopolistic corps and cartels beyond market accountability (lack of competition for those at the top of an industry) probably add to the effect of being "too big to nail" at the same time.
Corporatism has emerged in our society and become monopolistic and wildly out of control. The best remedy we may have is stringent application of antitrust law (break 'em up), although other measures (such as limiting their spending and ties with the media) will probably be necessary as well.
...and I don't see the tie-down anywhere other than the normal situation of not being able to run native apps on other platforms.
When you see a non-Apple program unable to browse an internal work website because it doesn't have the right Apple voodo, then drop us a datagram. Until then, you'd better keep your eye on how MS is trying to expand this common office situation to the wider Internet by making their Son-of-Active Directory the defacto protocol for single sign-on to websites.
Apple's biggest threat to date is actually the iPad, because if they get the tablet form factor to take off and supplant personal computers, it will be with a closed iPhone-like architecture which is much worse in terms of freedom than having a tablet Mac.
No one else with software that writes "100% compliant" ODF has been able to manage such a feat.
But we know that MS is expert in creative reinterpretation of standards (or even what standard means).
MS painted their elephant Pantone Pink to give their beast a certain aura of standardization. People were fooled into thinking that real standardization would follow but it all turns out to be a cheap tactic in a nasty campaign of steamrolling the ISO and bamboozling the rest of us who weren't terribly aware of Microsoft's history.
The ugly fact is that no American corp in a monopoly position can do anything other than cheat and lie and steal in the end. It is ingrained in the business culture and all that is required for any traded corp to be made to work this way is a bit of investor and executive turnover with a sprinkling of lawsuits. Even Google will succumb to this as their regular M.O. eventually.
The last real Netscape Navigator release was 4.x, which was the contemporary of IE4 not IE6.
And IE4, as reviewed by most, was a steaming pile of crap. But it still steamrolled over Netscape because of Microsoft's tying it to Windows.
Working in different fields is par for the course unless you are some kind of wack job elitist with an axe to grind.
Tell that to the Meteorologists who inveigh against Climatology because they have trouble predicting the *weather* 10 days into the future. Your insight about elitist wack jobs is probably unknown to most of the general public.
Then these people you cite (non-climatologists by the way) need to engage in normal scientific discourse with climatologists and through peer reviewed journals, instead of throwing out opinions. Only I suspect they won't do this because they really don't know the field and know they'll get pwned.
Meteorologists who assume that Climatology is predicting the weather years into the future are dangerous idiots.
How old is the 'kid' we are talking about?
"Kids" typically get married after college. But biology says these people will have a substantial appetite for sex by the time they're 16.
The abstinence model of education is based on ignorance and unrealistic expectations. It only partially works in societies where women are relegated away from higher education and career-seeking, and bars educators from teaching a large chunk of biology education.
I think the "Just Say No" conservatives need to ask themselves why so many of these diseases are worst in the regions lacking sex education. And the USA's Bible Belt is often implied in different discussions and speeches as some kind of would-be role model for issues like teenage pregnancy (Godly abstinence) and worker productivity (Protestant work ethic). But I'm sorry, the numbers often tell an opposite story.
Personally, I think the controversies have a lot to do with people determined to hold on to childlike myths and attitudes about humanity and the cosmos into adulthood. Its to the point where they end up at "spiritual war" with information in general and with most of the sciences.
Uh, "rational freethinkers" fulminating over f-this and f-that "positive environment for future children"?
You should do stand-up. :-)
Seriously, AC has a point that the pie just won't stretch any bigger. And it seems to hold true for everything not the least of which are space and resources.
Corporate types and their political lackeys don't want to deal with these now very scary hard limits, so they try to create fake / soft scarcity models that allow them to even more zealously find ways to rip-off and punish 'unimportant' people (those of us who cannot push back through their corrupt underbelly). Its called creating economic growth through punishment, both domestic and abroad, which is the economic system this country turned to when the cold war was over. It allows the powers that be to turn the suppression of what scares them into a money-making business, so long as they can scare the rest of us at least enough so we don't speak out against their life-mangling scams.
And though they were mainly introduced to it through AOL and the reserved world of academia, the realization of what the Internet really is eventually sank in... And it scares them! Pretexts for attacking the Internet are very much in demand these days.
How long until we have BitTorrent with TOR and encryption built in?
TOR wasn't designed to handle large P2P transfers. The only anonymous network I've seen that is robustly handling torrent traffic is I2P. One you install it and set the proxy on your browser, just go to tracker2.postman.i2p to see what is on the most popular tracker.
The I2P software is open source and comes with anonymized email, bittorrent and http software built in. Other programs either written for or adapted to I2P are available, such as Tahoe-LAFS file system and iMule. I2P just recently got a new plugin architecture to make it easy to distribute new apps to interested users, and they could use some coding talent on the many ideas bouncing around on the main forum site.
It seems that I2P aims to be very TOR-like in terms of internal routing and anonymizing capability (they call it "garlic routing"), but in a mostly darknet fashion. This means that the trackers, torrents and web sites you visit through I2P will be 'inside' the anon network. However, there are 'gift' gateways to regular www as well as to freenet and TOR. Another difference with TOR is that all running I2P 'clients' are also routers and route at least a minimal amount of traffic for the network (this increases anonymity because there is no built-in "exit node" capability). Yet another difference is that the I2P network is supposed to be less centralized, though I'm not intimate with the code and can't say for sure.
A single false, signed certificate from anywhere provides undeniable cause to revoke a CA from all browsers.
A very good point. However, there is no reason why a privileged attacker (e.g. a government or an insider) couldn't use the fake certs sparingly in a targeted manner.
Further, the CA in question could be any of the relatively minor ones who may have more interest in cashing out with a large government entity and getting revoked than in continuing to run a small CA with little revenue.
a self-signed cert becomes more trustworthy than a CA-verified one.
Displaying the fingerprint behind the glass would be excellent, but I've long thought that simply putting it on checkbooks, credit cards and correspondence would work nicely. Trying to substitute a fingerprint for a fake cert wouldn't get very far because too many people would see mismatches with the real cert from the website, fingerprints on older correspondence, etc. Even an option to hear the fingerprint somewhere on the organization's phone menu would be great (and so very easy).
Scads of cyber criminals and spies here in the good ole USA? Say it ain't so!
In fashion on the other hand people do it because they are such losers that they think they would be left out and not accepted otherwise.
Newsflash: For the past 20 years it has been extremely unfashionable (unaccepted) to be poor or even just lower-middle class in our society. Finance may be more closely related to fashion than you say it is, except with fashion the barrier to starting ones own trends (using textiles, thread and dyes) is often much lower.
It ends... at the boundary where wealthy patrons can still use the information to easily maintain their comparative wealth. When it ceases to be a timely and valuable vehicle for Wall St. bankers and Fortune 500 CEOs to pull the wool over our eyes, then 'advice' becomes 'news' because the players have already made their move.
The judiciary can't have it both ways when the Supreme Court is promoting an extreme interpretation of the First Amendment (i.e. unlimited corporate donations to political campaigns are OK).
Either the court system recognizes justifiable mitigation of an enumerated Right in order to prevent other Rights from being undermined by it, or they don't. What we heard from SCOTUS in 'Citizens United' was that free speech is absolute, so no more controls on obscenity, defamation, incitement, threats, etc. ...and no controls on the Internet, either.
Do they want us to go from a situation where SSO in Windows is the standard on LANs, to SSO in Windows to Facebook or Windowslive servers becomes the standard in the Internet?
Because that is the direction that Microsoft is going in with what was Active Directory.
...have their cake and eat it too.
And the TFA goes on to point out that a phisher would be pretty damn stupid to go to all the trouble to setup a fake domain and then put a broken certificate on it to throw up a warning and cause a potential victim to take a second look at the site and make sure it isn't something suspicious.
That's why the user has to look at the site's domain at the same moment they check for the little lock icon. I think it was Firefox 3.0 that placed both the domain name and the lock side-by-side in the status bar--This was a great move. Later, they removed both from the status bar because they wanted people to focus on the new EV color scheme in the address bar.
Honestly, browser makers need to decide on properly representing security context in the GUI and then stop jerking people around with semantically vague stuff that keeps changing. I feel like an idiot for training users on how to verify a secure browser connection; needless to say, they don't know how to do it anymore.
Deleting your account deprives them of further advertising revenue and sends a signal to the market that selling our data can worsen a company's lagging business into a death spiral.
The more account closings there are after this selloff, the more Myspace will smell like a dirty dog.
Other companies that build portable players are trying to offer an alternative to the iPod, not to clone it. Even so, Linux's apparent versatility fails here...
If I want to download a video from a website, I will probably be given choices that include "Apple/iPod". I know that video will play on any Apple device with video capability. But the user of the Linux device has to memorize a long list of formats that may or may not work either on the player or their PC. And if that video site even wanted to target owners of "Linux" players, what format would they choose?? What phrasing would they choose??
Its an absurd situation.
OTOH, look at email and groupware support. A Linux-based device may have any combination of supported types, but on the poor side. Many will not even support syncing with Gnome and KDE calendars. But I know that an iPhone will sync with a Mac's calendar, and the same goes for PocketPC/Windows.
Why should someone with a "Linux desktop" have to research whether their "Linux phone" will sync their emails, address book and calendar?? Answer: Because the "Linux" moniker is a total red herring as a consumer-facing identifier. It can have no real meaning to typical users. "Linux" qualifies as a platform only to engineers, designers, hackers and dedicated hobbyists.
Think about how many devices have Linux installed on them, and how many ways Linux touches our daily lives.
It makes my devices cheaper and that's about it.
"Linux" does not confer any synergies among the different devices that use it because it is too low-level. Everything that runs on top is not standardized, so people end up with multiple Linux-based gadgets that can't even share information between them. This version of the FOSS/bazaar idea doesn't bestow any real freedoms on end users; rather it maximizes the freedom of designers and engineers at the expense of user convenience.
The above is why Google does not commonly refer to their mobile platform as "Android Linux", as its the "Android" upper-level parts that are crucially important to how the Android devices look, feel and inter-operate for users.
They could 'accidentally' send routing commands to ISPs for sites that are not actually banned. The traffic for those sites would then be routed through the DIA ready for snooping.
How does the filtering work?
1. A list of banned sites and their internet addresses is maintained by the Department of Internal Affairs.
2. The DIA then use a routing protocol to tell the participating ISPs (Internet Service Providers) that the ‘best’ way to the internet address of the banned site’s web server is through the DIA’s filtering server.
3. When a person tries to access a site (banned or not) on one of the filtered addresses, their ISP knows to divert the request to the DIA’s server.
4. The DIA’s filtering server then looks at the request. If it is to a banned site, the request is refused and a message is sent back to the person. If it is to a non-banned site, the DIA’s filtering server passes the request on to the real server through the DIA’s internet connection.
...I predicted just days after Novell signed their patent deal with MS that Novell would eventually follow a similar path as Caldera/SCO.
But I don't want to be proven right.