I don't live in Australia, but I suspect that the law there, as everywhere, recognizes no "genuine reason" to riot. Incitement to riot, and rioting itself, is against the law in the U.S. and just about every place else.
If you think that your political opinions justify rioting, then at least have the guts to admit that you are engaging in anti-state political violence and accept the consequences pf your actions.
Freedom of speech on the Internet is no different than freedom of speech via any other medium. You don't have any more freedom just because it's the Internet; and you don't have immunity from any goverrnment's sanctions because the Internet is supra-national. If you use your web site to incite to riot, engage in a conspiracy to commit criminal acts, etc., you are just as much subject to government action as if you used the airwaves or handed out pamphlets.
More unthinking, chest-beating, mouthing of NRA propaganda.
I'm not worried about being shot by habitual criminals.
I'm much more likely to be shot by a relative or friend who doesn't become a criminal until they pick up their legally-purchased gun and use it.
Most people shot in the U.S. are shot by non-criminals who are known to the victim. If people weren't allowed to buy guns, most of these people wouldn't be shot. Are you willing to trade your so-called right to own a gun for those murders?
What's that supposed to mean? You believe you can segregate people based on your opinion about their intellectual capacity?
>>...just like the whole 'ban guns' thing, people are the problem, not the guns.
No, they're not. Guns are the problem. If you don't have a gun, you can't shoot me with it. This lame argument has been used for years by the jackals in the NRA, and it is just as false now as when those murderers invented it.
>> Governments shouldn't be allowed to censor free speech.
The Internet is a public place; if you plot criminal acts in public, the government has a responsbility to stop you.
Of course, the Taliban and the mujahedin were cut from the same cloth. My point was, and is, that it is naive to expect governments to continue following a policy if circumstances change. The mujahedin were useful to the U.S. in driving the Soviets from Afghanistan. Twenty years later, they've spawned people who think Westerners should be killed and who want to return the world to the 11th century. Do you expect the U.S. to ignore that and proceed as if nothing has changed?
As for evidence (of which you present none to validate your claims), I've seen and read plenty of evidence from bin Ladin, al-Qaeda and the Taliban to convince me. i don't have a problem with the government not exposing more information if that risks the success of ongoing intelligence operations or the lives of Americans.
>> Terrorism involves the intentional targeting of noncombatants, for the purpose of inciting terror. It doesn't matter what the cause.
One of the few rational statements made here, amid all the parroting.
It is behavior that counts, not motive. If you target the innocent simply to terrorize them, of what relevance is your motivation? Someone who engages in terror may actually believe his actions are just and honorable. Many others may agree. But, so what? Does that mean the victims of terror forfeit their right to fight back simply because their attackers think they were right to attack? Presumably, Hitler thought his actions were honorable and justified. Should his victims, then, have meekly walked away?
Due process has nothing to do with delineating "the other side", whatever your point may be. Due process, to over simplify, means that the protection of the law applies equally to all. The threat to due process in Poindexter's scheme comes not from his notion of building one big computer -- there are already thousands of computer systems and thousands of people doing this work today -- but from the increased exposure of more private data without the need for a search warrant.
You are quibbling. If you attack me, you're my enemy. If I want to call you a terrorist or a common criminal, I may. If you want to call yourself a freedom fighter, you may, but that won't change my response to your attack. What counts is your behavior and my behavior, not the labels attached to the behavior.
As for the Pentagon, presumably the point of the exercise is to develop intelligence data pointing to linkages and behavior patterns, etc., that might help to stop future attacks or identify those responsible for past attacks. This is what intelligence analysts do; that Admiral Poindexter wants to throw computers at it is no surprise
Well, if they've already located it, they've already "walked right in". If someone leaves "sensitive" data out in public, that's they're problem. Besides, Google is busy indexing everything it can find. Why no uproar about that?
While I don't like the notion of amending U.S. law to allow access to private data wihout a search warrant, it is worth remembering just how much information is available publically. In terms of the Internet, information located on a server addressed by a URL is public and fair game, regardless of where the server is located.
If you attack me, I do. The gap between U.S. support of the Afghan mujahedin and al-Qaeda's propping up of the Taliban regime is the same as the time between the end of WWII and the rise of Japan and Germany as democratic economic powers. Times change, so do friends and enemies. Ignoring that and making high school debating points about alleged government inconsistencies is infantile.
BTW, due process applies if you fall under the protection of the U.S. Constitution. People who are at war with the U.S. (including U.S. citizens who go over to the other side) aren't entitled to it.
Whether or not a copy protected CD is "broken" depends on your perspective. Sony, for example, might choose to market CD's that work only with Sony hardware. That doesn't mean the CD is "broken". It just means that Sony chose to make and sell those products.
Now, copy protection seems to me to be self-defeating beecause many potential customers -- like you -- will perceive it as marketing broken products. That's where you have rights -- the right not to buy. What counts, though, is that you won't buy the product, for whatever reason. If enough people share your views, market forces will compel CD companies to change or to get out of the CD business.
You won't find the ability to copy music CD's enshrined as a basic human right anywhere. Most people in the world have a few more basic issues to worry about before they have the luxury of getting irate about copy protection.
This is an economic issue and the market will decide. If enough people buy copy protected CD's, companies will keep making them. If not, they'll stop making them. People will simply have to decide if their "right" to hear Band X is more, or less, important than their "right" to copy CD's.
Hmmm...Suppose this was possible: If you could download tracks, at no cost, that expired after you played them X number of times, would you do that as a way of previewing CD content?
...why people seeem so upset about music companies wanting to copy protect their products. Whether it will work (probably not) or if copying really hurts sales (maybe, maybe not), what's so surprising about it? They obviously think copying costs them money. It's logical that they try to curb that. If you could stick a book in your PC and have honest-to-God paper copies pop out all over the Web, book publishers would be awfully interested in copy protection, too.
Companies selling off-the-rack shrink-wrapped consumer software got burned on copy protection when it cut into sales. Most likely, the same thing will happen here.
All your points are valid and thoughtful, but I'm to be faulted for being unclear. I think our mainstream OS and software design paradigms have reached a dead end. GUI design has arrived there, too. (The fact that all GUI's are so similar, apart from aesthetics, comes down to their all needing to do the same thing: intermediate between the user and the OS.)
I don't have a magic answer, and I don't really think much of the proposals made in the NYT piece that started all this. But, I think the basic point is valid: A paradigm premised on the notion that certain kinds of files will manipulate information held in other files does, by definition, limit the range of possible uses of a computing device.
Even if that asssertion is wrong, we have, in fact, seen very little innovation in delivered user capabilities for a long time, at least since the early 80's when GUI's first appeared on commercial PC's. Increased hardware capabilitiees have allowed the incremental addition of many new features, but the basic game plan hasn't changed in 20 years.
It isn't important to me if file systems survive or disappear. I do think they constrain the capabilities that computing devices can deliver to users because, by definition, the user is forced to think only in terms of files.
Users should not have to remember "where" their information is located. They should not have to remember what applications work with this information, but not that other information. They should not have to remember different commands in different applications to do the same thing to different pieces of their information. (Why is the way i save my email different from the way I save my spreadsheets, which is different from the way I save my to do notes?) They should not be burdened with understanding differerent file formats. In fact, they should not have to deal with different applications at all.
The code/data separation I'm talking about is the OS-enforced segregation of user-created information into certain kinds of files and the segregation of developer-created information into other kinds of files. This leads directly to a paradigm that compels the user to select one file (an executable) to apply against another (the user's data). Frequently, the results of that application of one file against another is a third file. (Remember, too, I'm taking the user's viewpoint, not that of a developer, when I argue that the difference between code and data should be invisible. Users shouldn't even need to think in those terms.)
No matter how well dressed in layers of GUI, operating systems based on this concept are fundmentally limiting. The tasks that can be accompllished by the manipulation of files by other files are limited.
The security issues that you, correctly, point out are, in fact, caused by these operating systems. If you predicate the very structure of a system on the artiificial segregation of information into a single conceptual container -- the file -- and yet need to maintain a partition between information labeled "data" and information labeled "code", then that system's rigidity delivers the security threats you mention.
But that rigidity is, in fact, one legacy of our 30-year-old file-based operating systems.
The issue is innovation, not control. The open source community does, in fact, spend a lot of time going on and on about licensing issues, while contributing little, if anything, new and innovative for the user community. E.g., Linux mimics Unix, Gnome/KDE/whatever mimic Windows/Mac/Xerox; OpenOffice mimics MS Office. Yawn.
You are writing from the point of view of someone, apparently, immersed in our 30-year-old operating system paradigm. That widely held viewpoint is hindering progress in developing new capabilities for users and, in adddition, results in the same wheel being invented over and over again. It is limiting because it offers a frame of reference for what is possible that is bounded by what had already been done.
To see how limiting it really is, consider the frequent and often justified claim of Unix command line addicts that GUI's offer them no extra capabilities.
Some specifics:
1. Separation -- or not -- of data and code is a technical issue. The existence of that issue should be invisible to the user. It isn't, because we force users to live in a world that partitions data from applications from operating systems. We force users to play by the rules of the OS, rather than force the OS to play by the rules of the user.
2. Java and Flash aren't especially innovative. One is a traditional programming languge and the other is an overblown graphics package. Users don't care what language someone used to write their software, anymore than drivers care what kind of forge smelted the metal that is in their car. The fact that Flash allows web designers to put moving graphics on their sites is interesting, but brings no new capabilities to the user.
3. "Hashbang" paths in Unix apply only to scripts. But, you can't really be asserting that UNIX shells represent an efective interface paradigm for users? In any case, they depend on the user understanding the same 30-year-old segregation of "data" into "files" that is the problem in the first place.
4. I never used the word "interpreter", much less proposed an "uber interpreter". I am, in fact, proposing that the entire traditional OS paradigm is outmoded and limiting.
5. Whatever MS is, or is not, doing with Hotmail, javascript, Outlook macros, etc., has nothing to do with my argument. From where I sit, it seems to have a lot to do with sloppy code.
6. "Stupid users" How often have we seen this perjorative tossed out on Slashdot? That egotistical lie is the usual last refuge of developers who can't be bothered to think about how people actually ue computers. If software is hard to use, it isn't the user's problem.
What you say is accurate, if the frame of referrence is confined to current mainstream operating systems. Those systems are premised on assumptions such as data will reside in a linear storage system and that the user will be cognizant of the difference between code and data. This is a limiting frame of reference. Why must data reside on a disk? Why must users be forced to understand concepts such as "data" and "files" and "directories"?
At heart, current operating systems aren't that far removed from punch cards and batch jobs. They assume that the user will furnish data to piece of code that will act on the data. Data goes in, something happens, and, (sometimes) transformed data comes out. As long as this is the paradigm, computing will be stuck in the same old rut.
The problems associated with mixing code and data only arise when the OS assumes that as a paradigm. This constrains the user by forcing him to consider what tool he needs to apply to data to accomplish his task.
Whether those OS concepts are 30 years or 30 months old, the fact remains that they represent a frame of reference that fundamentally limits innovation and progress.
True, but from the point of view of a user, the OS is largely irrelevant. What is relevant is how the OS and other software makes its capabilities available to the user. How a user interacts with a computing device shapes our perception of that device. The code that a particular OS uses to respond to that interaction is not of consequence for a user.
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I don't live in Australia, but I suspect that the law there, as everywhere, recognizes no "genuine reason" to riot. Incitement to riot, and rioting itself, is against the law in the U.S. and just about every place else.
If you think that your political opinions justify rioting, then at least have the guts to admit that you are engaging in anti-state political violence and accept the consequences pf your actions.
Freedom of speech on the Internet is no different than freedom of speech via any other medium. You don't have any more freedom just because it's the Internet; and you don't have immunity from any goverrnment's sanctions because the Internet is supra-national. If you use your web site to incite to riot, engage in a conspiracy to commit criminal acts, etc., you are just as much subject to government action as if you used the airwaves or handed out pamphlets.
More unthinking, chest-beating, mouthing of NRA propaganda.
I'm not worried about being shot by habitual criminals.
I'm much more likely to be shot by a relative or friend who doesn't become a criminal until they pick up their legally-purchased gun and use it.
Most people shot in the U.S. are shot by non-criminals who are known to the victim. If people weren't allowed to buy guns, most of these people wouldn't be shot. Are you willing to trade your so-called right to own a gun for those murders?
>> ...so mentally weak as to be affected by it.
...just like the whole 'ban guns' thing, people are the problem, not the guns.
What's that supposed to mean? You believe you can segregate people based on your opinion about their intellectual capacity?
>>
No, they're not. Guns are the problem. If you don't have a gun, you can't shoot me with it. This lame argument has been used for years by the jackals in the NRA, and it is just as false now as when those murderers invented it.
>> Governments shouldn't be allowed to censor free speech.
The Internet is a public place; if you plot criminal acts in public, the government has a responsbility to stop you.
Of course, the Taliban and the mujahedin were cut from the same cloth. My point was, and is, that it is naive to expect governments to continue following a policy if circumstances change. The mujahedin were useful to the U.S. in driving the Soviets from Afghanistan. Twenty years later, they've spawned people who think Westerners should be killed and who want to return the world to the 11th century. Do you expect the U.S. to ignore that and proceed as if nothing has changed?
As for evidence (of which you present none to validate your claims), I've seen and read plenty of evidence from bin Ladin, al-Qaeda and the Taliban to convince me. i don't have a problem with the government not exposing more information if that risks the success of ongoing intelligence operations or the lives of Americans.
>> Terrorism involves the intentional targeting of noncombatants, for the purpose of inciting terror. It doesn't matter what the cause.
One of the few rational statements made here, amid all the parroting.
It is behavior that counts, not motive. If you target the innocent simply to terrorize them, of what relevance is your motivation? Someone who engages in terror may actually believe his actions are just and honorable. Many others may agree. But, so what? Does that mean the victims of terror forfeit their right to fight back simply because their attackers think they were right to attack? Presumably, Hitler thought his actions were honorable and justified. Should his victims, then, have meekly walked away?
Due process has nothing to do with delineating "the other side", whatever your point may be. Due process, to over simplify, means that the protection of the law applies equally to all. The threat to due process in Poindexter's scheme comes not from his notion of building one big computer -- there are already thousands of computer systems and thousands of people doing this work today -- but from the increased exposure of more private data without the need for a search warrant.
You are quibbling. If you attack me, you're my enemy. If I want to call you a terrorist or a common criminal, I may. If you want to call yourself a freedom fighter, you may, but that won't change my response to your attack. What counts is your behavior and my behavior, not the labels attached to the behavior.
As for the Pentagon, presumably the point of the exercise is to develop intelligence data pointing to linkages and behavior patterns, etc., that might help to stop future attacks or identify those responsible for past attacks. This is what intelligence analysts do; that Admiral Poindexter wants to throw computers at it is no surprise
Well, if they've already located it, they've already "walked right in". If someone leaves "sensitive" data out in public, that's they're problem. Besides, Google is busy indexing everything it can find. Why no uproar about that?
While I don't like the notion of amending U.S. law to allow access to private data wihout a search warrant, it is worth remembering just how much information is available publically. In terms of the Internet, information located on a server addressed by a URL is public and fair game, regardless of where the server is located.
>> ...who gets to define "terrorist"?
If you attack me, I do. The gap between U.S. support of the Afghan mujahedin and al-Qaeda's propping up of the Taliban regime is the same as the time between the end of WWII and the rise of Japan and Germany as democratic economic powers. Times change, so do friends and enemies. Ignoring that and making high school debating points about alleged government inconsistencies is infantile.
BTW, due process applies if you fall under the protection of the U.S. Constitution. People who are at war with the U.S. (including U.S. citizens who go over to the other side) aren't entitled to it.
Thanks for reminding people. Like any publication, the value of a weblog is determined by its content.
Whether or not a copy protected CD is "broken" depends on your perspective. Sony, for example, might choose to market CD's that work only with Sony hardware. That doesn't mean the CD is "broken". It just means that Sony chose to make and sell those products.
Now, copy protection seems to me to be self-defeating beecause many potential customers -- like you -- will perceive it as marketing broken products. That's where you have rights -- the right not to buy. What counts, though, is that you won't buy the product, for whatever reason. If enough people share your views, market forces will compel CD companies to change or to get out of the CD business.
You won't find the ability to copy music CD's enshrined as a basic human right anywhere. Most people in the world have a few more basic issues to worry about before they have the luxury of getting irate about copy protection.
This is an economic issue and the market will decide. If enough people buy copy protected CD's, companies will keep making them. If not, they'll stop making them. People will simply have to decide if their "right" to hear Band X is more, or less, important than their "right" to copy CD's.
Hmmm...Suppose this was possible: If you could download tracks, at no cost, that expired after you played them X number of times, would you do that as a way of previewing CD content?
...why people seeem so upset about music companies wanting to copy protect their products. Whether it will work (probably not) or if copying really hurts sales (maybe, maybe not), what's so surprising about it? They obviously think copying costs them money. It's logical that they try to curb that. If you could stick a book in your PC and have honest-to-God paper copies pop out all over the Web, book publishers would be awfully interested in copy protection, too.
Companies selling off-the-rack shrink-wrapped consumer software got burned on copy protection when it cut into sales. Most likely, the same thing will happen here.
All your points are valid and thoughtful, but I'm to be faulted for being unclear. I think our mainstream OS and software design paradigms have reached a dead end. GUI design has arrived there, too. (The fact that all GUI's are so similar, apart from aesthetics, comes down to their all needing to do the same thing: intermediate between the user and the OS.)
I don't have a magic answer, and I don't really think much of the proposals made in the NYT piece that started all this. But, I think the basic point is valid: A paradigm premised on the notion that certain kinds of files will manipulate information held in other files does, by definition, limit the range of possible uses of a computing device.
Even if that asssertion is wrong, we have, in fact, seen very little innovation in delivered user capabilities for a long time, at least since the early 80's when GUI's first appeared on commercial PC's. Increased hardware capabilitiees have allowed the incremental addition of many new features, but the basic game plan hasn't changed in 20 years.
It isn't important to me if file systems survive or disappear. I do think they constrain the capabilities that computing devices can deliver to users because, by definition, the user is forced to think only in terms of files.
Users should not have to remember "where" their information is located. They should not have to remember what applications work with this information, but not that other information. They should not have to remember different commands in different applications to do the same thing to different pieces of their information. (Why is the way i save my email different from the way I save my spreadsheets, which is different from the way I save my to do notes?) They should not be burdened with understanding differerent file formats. In fact, they should not have to deal with different applications at all.
The code/data separation I'm talking about is the OS-enforced segregation of user-created information into certain kinds of files and the segregation of developer-created information into other kinds of files. This leads directly to a paradigm that compels the user to select one file (an executable) to apply against another (the user's data). Frequently, the results of that application of one file against another is a third file. (Remember, too, I'm taking the user's viewpoint, not that of a developer, when I argue that the difference between code and data should be invisible. Users shouldn't even need to think in those terms.)
No matter how well dressed in layers of GUI, operating systems based on this concept are fundmentally limiting. The tasks that can be accompllished by the manipulation of files by other files are limited.
The security issues that you, correctly, point out are, in fact, caused by these operating systems. If you predicate the very structure of a system on the artiificial segregation of information into a single conceptual container -- the file -- and yet need to maintain a partition between information labeled "data" and information labeled "code", then that system's rigidity delivers the security threats you mention.
But that rigidity is, in fact, one legacy of our 30-year-old file-based operating systems.
The issue is innovation, not control. The open source community does, in fact, spend a lot of time going on and on about licensing issues, while contributing little, if anything, new and innovative for the user community. E.g., Linux mimics Unix, Gnome/KDE/whatever mimic Windows/Mac/Xerox; OpenOffice mimics MS Office. Yawn.
>> So, answer the implied question: If you eliminate the separation between code and data, how do you achieve security?
Beats me. That's a development-side issue. Users don't need to care about that, but current operating systems force them to care.
You are writing from the point of view of someone, apparently, immersed in our 30-year-old operating system paradigm. That widely held viewpoint is hindering progress in developing new capabilities for users and, in adddition, results in the same wheel being invented over and over again. It is limiting because it offers a frame of reference for what is possible that is bounded by what had already been done.
To see how limiting it really is, consider the frequent and often justified claim of Unix command line addicts that GUI's offer them no extra capabilities.
Some specifics:
1. Separation -- or not -- of data and code is a technical issue. The existence of that issue should be invisible to the user. It isn't, because we force users to live in a world that partitions data from applications from operating systems. We force users to play by the rules of the OS, rather than force the OS to play by the rules of the user.
2. Java and Flash aren't especially innovative. One is a traditional programming languge and the other is an overblown graphics package. Users don't care what language someone used to write their software, anymore than drivers care what kind of forge smelted the metal that is in their car. The fact that Flash allows web designers to put moving graphics on their sites is interesting, but brings no new capabilities to the user.
3. "Hashbang" paths in Unix apply only to scripts. But, you can't really be asserting that UNIX shells represent an efective interface paradigm for users? In any case, they depend on the user understanding the same 30-year-old segregation of "data" into "files" that is the problem in the first place.
4. I never used the word "interpreter", much less proposed an "uber interpreter". I am, in fact, proposing that the entire traditional OS paradigm is outmoded and limiting.
5. Whatever MS is, or is not, doing with Hotmail, javascript, Outlook macros, etc., has nothing to do with my argument. From where I sit, it seems to have a lot to do with sloppy code.
6. "Stupid users" How often have we seen this perjorative tossed out on Slashdot? That egotistical lie is the usual last refuge of developers who can't be bothered to think about how people actually ue computers. If software is hard to use, it isn't the user's problem.
What you say is accurate, if the frame of referrence is confined to current mainstream operating systems. Those systems are premised on assumptions such as data will reside in a linear storage system and that the user will be cognizant of the difference between code and data. This is a limiting frame of reference. Why must data reside on a disk? Why must users be forced to understand concepts such as "data" and "files" and "directories"?
At heart, current operating systems aren't that far removed from punch cards and batch jobs. They assume that the user will furnish data to piece of code that will act on the data. Data goes in, something happens, and, (sometimes) transformed data comes out. As long as this is the paradigm, computing will be stuck in the same old rut.
The problems associated with mixing code and data only arise when the OS assumes that as a paradigm. This constrains the user by forcing him to consider what tool he needs to apply to data to accomplish his task.
Whether those OS concepts are 30 years or 30 months old, the fact remains that they represent a frame of reference that fundamentally limits innovation and progress.
>> ...That is what an operating system does.
True, but from the point of view of a user, the OS is largely irrelevant. What is relevant is how the OS and other software makes its capabilities available to the user. How a user interacts with a computing device shapes our perception of that device. The code that a particular OS uses to respond to that interaction is not of consequence for a user.