You're entirely correct. Just like the old line about gun control: 'If you outlaw guns, then only outlaws will have guns' is 100% true in both cases: You outlaw encryption, they're going to use it anyway, and they'll go out of their way to obfuscate it as much as possible. Think about it, people: Can forum moderators 100% prevent people from using foul language in their posts? No? Why do you think that is (if you don't already know the answer)? Because they morph what they're posting into things that word filters won't catch; pen0r instead of penis, or using leet-speak translators.. Those are just kids trying to use dirty words, how sophisticated do you think terrorists communicating over the Internet covertly are going to get to hide what they're saying? Nope, outlawing things that use encryption will do nothing but aid the enemy.
They're afraid of average joe with a six pack getting tired of their shit and voting / forcing them out of power. If billions of people in a country say 'I'm tired of your shit, you're too corrupt, greedy, and we don't want you in power anymore'. That's the real threat, that's what they actually fear.
You've got part of the answer but not all of it.
The rest of the answer is this: They're afraid of a Western version of the 'Arab Spring' happening here (and in other Western 1st-world countries), because the chaos and power vacuum that results from those is what allowed these Sunni extremists (who laughingly call themselves the 'Islamic State') to gain a foothold in the first place. That's been their play all along: Identify the disaffected, who are otherwise powerless to do anything but complain, and empower them, aid them, assist them in gaining support and popularity, then proceed to topple the government. Granted, it would be very tough to accomplish that in, say, the UK, U.S., or France, but it doesn't mean that the people in power aren't afraid of them trying it, and the chaos that would cause even if unsuccessful.
Maybe if asshole business people weren't importing cheap labor from overseas and hiring our own citizens for a living wage, we wouldn't have this problem. Subsequently we also wouldn't have the problem down the road of 'not having qualified applicants', which is their lame-ass excuse for importing cheap-ass labor from overseas on H1-B's in the first place! MEMO TO CORPORATE AMERICA: Stop shitting on our citizens!
Ummm.. are you really that sheltered, or are you trying to troll/piss off as many people as possible? Here's a clue for you: It's not being faked, it's not a publicity stunt, people got fucking killed, and more and more are getting killed every gods-be-damned day.
1. Read this article. It does a better job of making my point than I ever could. 2. I've read some of your other comments; you're just one more jackass on the Internet that argues for the sake of arguing. As such you can fuck off; I have no time for someone like you. Go get your sense of being relevant from someone else; I am done with you.
What are you talking about? The Chinese have been making knock-offs of microchips for decades, and they are a power-house of child labor-powered, sub living-wage, sub human rights manufacturing. They don't need any technology of their own to do what they already do, they're just looking to scale up production and pirate new markets.
I don't think you're taking my meaning at all: Just because they're not taking credit for pedophiles being caught, doesn't mean it's not happening. How would you know? Do you have a sooper seekrit information source inside local law enforcement and the FBI? I think not. You don't know what they're doing or not doing.
And by the way: just because I lost the password and email to my five-digit account here, doesn't mean I never had one.
Inciting them further by defacing their websites..
So far as their Internet presence goes, things of that sort would actually be effective, especially if they could be denied access to 'fix' the 'damage'; it would make them look stupid and ineffective, discrediting them in the eyes of the public, and more to the point, in the eyes of those that might be swayed and recruited by them. Killing someone potentially creates a martyr; once someone is dead, you can't really effectively hurt them anymore. But discrediting someone, leaving them alive, allows for near infinite possibilities to hurt them more in the future, and as we've seen in the media, some damage, once done, can't be recovered from.
Yeah sure, a group of hackers who regularly commit felonies are going to be all high-profile and visible to everyone and anyone while they're committing their felonious cybercrimes. I think you've seen too many movies and actually believe that's the way things are in the real world. Also you have too many 2's in your user number, do something about that, k?
Sure, I wish them luck, but why does the pentagon have to rely on a loosely organised group of pimply teenagers to disrupt ISIS propaganda?
Who said anyone is 'relying' on them? They're acting on their own motivation. In some ways they can be more disruptive because they're not constrained by the law in any way.
That's the name of the game here. Anonymous no doubt has it's high-level operatives who can stick-and-move on the same level as the hackers working for these Sunni extremists can -- and if they know how they operate, then they know how to smoke them out, too. All it takes is getting a solid lead on one of their Internet operatives, and the right people getting their hands on them. Regardless of whether or not something as fortuitous as that happens, harassing and disrupting their Internet operations, if successful, will have an effect: It'll scare off some Useful Idiots who otherwise might get recruited, and more importantly, it'll make this so-called 'islamic state' look like idiots online. Don't discount the power of discrediting someone.
Are you kidding me? You should go look for reports for people who have lived under their 'government', if you can call it that. Makes living somewhere like Iran or North Korea look positively pleasant comparatively speaking. Animals in a holding pen at a slaughterhouse are treated better than these assholes treat people in their so-called 'caliphate'. They are violent animals, who posess neither the skillset nor the restraint to actually run a productive modern-day country, and any claims they have to be 'running a State' are laughable at best, and completely illegitimate.
That's a rather simplistic viewpoint you have there. These Sunni extremists who call themselves 'Islamic State' are using social media on the Internet as a major component in their propaganda machine, and also using it to recruit useful idiots to their cause, often in a very literal sense. Some group that has little to no regard for the legality of their actions (unlike actual law enforcement and government military) that can hack their way into their Facebook, Twitter, and other Internet assets and expose the operators behind them (and maybe their physical location) would be extremely disruptive to their operations on that front. Meanwhile 'signing up for the military' really won't do shit except give these assholes more targets to shoot at. Personally I send all my best to this particular faction of Anonymous, and wish them good hunting and much success in disrupting these assholes as much as possible.
What motivates them? The same thing that motivates pretty much all of their type: Thirst for power, over as many people as they can, any way they can manage, regardless of how many have to die, or how much has to be destroyed. Remember: Al-Qaeda? The Taliban? Iran? They all want nothing to do with these assholes because they're too extreme for them. What does that tell you about these 'Sunni extremists who call themselves the Islamic State'? So far as their 'caliphate' goes? Examine how things are going in areas they've taken control of: They're unsuited to actually run a government, they don't have the skillset, and they sure as fuck don't have the restraint necessary to do so. What sort of 'civilization' thinks it's OK to kidnap women (many of them underage), after killing their husbands/menfolk, then force them into 'marriage' with someone else (read as: 'turn into sex slaves')? That's not civilization. So far as their so-called 'faith' goes: What they're doing has nothing whatsoever to do with Islamic beliefs, the Quoran, or Allah. If there was indeed an Allah, he/she/it would probably come down personally and wipe these assholes from the face of the Earth, for committing such atrocities in his/her/it's name.
The only reason I can think of is that they hope to goad Paris into dropping a nuke on Raqa... decapitating ISIS... and (I suppose) starting WW-III. Could that be it? Could they really aim at igniting a full-scale war between approx. 1 bln. muslims and 4 bln. non-muslims? Or is thinking not their long suit? Are they too absorbed in their faith for that?
What they want, is to foment as much chaos as possible, in as much of the world as possible. They have one narrow vision of what the world should be, and it involves all of Western civilization destroyed, all forms of thought and religious faith not conforming to their one rigid view of it annihilated, with them in ultimate, total, dictatorial control over who and what is left afterwards. Remember again that Al-Qaeda distanced themselves from these assholes because they were 'too extreme' for even them. Of course the extreme, disproportionate violence aside, they're completely unprepared and unsuited to actually rule any population in any sort of fair and balanced way due to their extremist interpretations of the Quoran (assuming of course their alleged 'faith' isn't just window-dressing to justify their extremely violent actions) and absolute intolerance of anyone or anything that in any way, shape, or form, deviates from their rigidly narrow view of what the world should be. So do they want WW3? Nukes and all? Probably. Seriously, they make Iran look warm and fuzzy by comparison, because they're at least willing to talk to us; these Sunni extremists can't be reasoned with at all. They've bought themselves a one-way ticket to being exterminated, and there's nothing that's going to stop that from happening, now. We (the rest of the world, that is), however, have some sanity and restraint, though: we won't drop nukes on anyone. We'll blast them into oblivion with conventional weapons, though.
While we're talking about it, here's an opinion of mine that is relevant to the discussion, that is sure to be unpopular: Assad shouldn't be removed from power; he does, however, need to see the reality of his situation: He needs to make peace with the rebels, come to some sort of accord with them, and co-exist. Removing Assad will create yet another power vacuum, which is exactly, precisely what those Sunni extremists (who call themselves 'Islamic State') want; then they can swoop in to a severely weakened Syria, and just take over by force of arms. I think that's what Russia is thinking, coming in to help Assad; they see that a power vacuum would be the worst thing to happen. But Assad needs to chill the fuck out and learn to compromise, before someone manages to take him out, and before things reach the point where there isn't a country to govern anymore.
Don't have a smartphone, don't have a tablet, and don't even have a microphone on my desktop machine -- and now, even less interested in ever owning any of those than I was five minutes ago. For the rest of you, I'd suggest hacking into your TV or home theatre receiver, and putting a lowpass filter in all the baseband audio lines so these 'inaudible' signals won't get passed through to the speakers.
Listen, buddy, tell you what: Tell us your real name, show us your PhD in a field related to climatology, and your published white paper on what you just said, and maybe I'll believe you know what you're talking about. Otherwise you're just another asshole on the Internets with an opinion, like the rest of us, and for attempting to push your point as being fact, you can go fuck yourself, OK?
I'm starting to wonder about people. I used to have cable and spent what seems like way too much time watching TV. These days it's all OTA and I have other interests and TiVo gets piled up with things I enjoy watching because I'm busy with other things. What I start to wonder is whether people should be spending less time watching TV and more time doing other things.
Could this be creating a paper trail for the future of the military out in our solar system? The Earth's Moon may be, by mutual agreement (for the time being, anyway) declared to not be the property of any one nation, which makes sense because it's in orbit around the Earth, but asteroids are most certainly not; nations (not just the U.S.) could potentially use them as military bases out in the solar system. Starting a paper trail now, asserting that there are private-sector property rights to asteroids, would make it plausible that a nation's military could also claim property rights to asteroids. Really, though, I hate to have to go there with this, but humans be humans after all, and we're still rather warlike, so it's a factor to consider.
Does the solution have to be a 1985 Television and over-the-air reception?
So cable TV, satellite, and streaming are such gods-be-damned great alternatives? How does 'FREE HDTV' sound to you, pretty good? That's OTA broadcasts. Buy an antenna, once, and get free HDTV, and the quality is as good if not better than anything else (less compression).
*Shrug* don't know what else to tell you, dude. I dumped cable several years ago, got an antenna, and never looked back. Except for in the dead of summertime, I've got more sitting on TiVo to watch than I have time for usually, so it's not like I'm suffering. Meanwhile I hear people with these 'first world problems' of not feeling like they're getting their moneys' worth out of their 500 cable channels complain about the cable companies, and also complain about how they're not able to get a terabyte of bandwidth for a buck fifty a month, but they don't want to make any sort of a change, either. If I didn't know better I'd say that people in this country were spoiled rotten and don't have any sort of appreciation for how much they do have, LOL. Do the cable and wireless companies have many people by the short hairs and are gouging us? Yes, that's one of the reasons I stopped getting cable TV, but it seems like too many people have a sense of entitlement about something that in reality is a luxury. As for your last point:
If you got broadband problems, I feel bad for you son,
I got 99 problems but 'Wife Acceptance Factor' ain't one
Geez, dude, take it down a couple dozen notches, will you? You must get picked on a lot by people on the Internet. Hell, you must have been picked on by people IRL since you were a kid, being so reactive now. Honestly, dude, I'm not your enemy, and nobody wants to take anything away from you. Stop panicking, OK?
Now, then.. I drive a small pickup myself. I wouldn't want anyone taking it away from me, either, it would more or less ruin my life. I've also got a motorcycle, have been riding them since I was a teenager. Wouldn't want anyone taking either one away from me. But they both have internal combustion engines, and the exhaust is really nasty, environmentally speaking. When someone starts marketing full electric versions of them that are practical, I'll jump -- but not before. Not a big advocate of public transportation. I can't live my life taking buses and taxicabs everywhere, that would completely destroy my life, I'd be just existing rather than living. So consider this: If someone came up with a replacement for your pickup that was 100% electric, had all the power and range you have now, but didn't emit so much as a cubic foot of any sort of exhaust gasses, wouldn't you be OK with that? I would, in fact I'd be better than OK with it, because a 100% electric vehicle would require a fraction of the maintenance of a gas or diesel engine, and would be a hell of a lot cleaner to work on, too! That's all I'm saying. Last thing I want is to take away anyones' ability to transport themselves and cargo wherever they want whenever they want.
Slashdot Mirror
You're entirely correct. Just like the old line about gun control: 'If you outlaw guns, then only outlaws will have guns' is 100% true in both cases: You outlaw encryption, they're going to use it anyway, and they'll go out of their way to obfuscate it as much as possible. Think about it, people: Can forum moderators 100% prevent people from using foul language in their posts? No? Why do you think that is (if you don't already know the answer)? Because they morph what they're posting into things that word filters won't catch; pen0r instead of penis, or using leet-speak translators.. Those are just kids trying to use dirty words, how sophisticated do you think terrorists communicating over the Internet covertly are going to get to hide what they're saying? Nope, outlawing things that use encryption will do nothing but aid the enemy.
They're afraid of average joe with a six pack getting tired of their shit and voting / forcing them out of power. If billions of people in a country say 'I'm tired of your shit, you're too corrupt, greedy, and we don't want you in power anymore'. That's the real threat, that's what they actually fear.
You've got part of the answer but not all of it.
The rest of the answer is this: They're afraid of a Western version of the 'Arab Spring' happening here (and in other Western 1st-world countries), because the chaos and power vacuum that results from those is what allowed these Sunni extremists (who laughingly call themselves the 'Islamic State') to gain a foothold in the first place. That's been their play all along: Identify the disaffected, who are otherwise powerless to do anything but complain, and empower them, aid them, assist them in gaining support and popularity, then proceed to topple the government. Granted, it would be very tough to accomplish that in, say, the UK, U.S., or France, but it doesn't mean that the people in power aren't afraid of them trying it, and the chaos that would cause even if unsuccessful.
Maybe if asshole business people weren't importing cheap labor from overseas and hiring our own citizens for a living wage, we wouldn't have this problem. Subsequently we also wouldn't have the problem down the road of 'not having qualified applicants', which is their lame-ass excuse for importing cheap-ass labor from overseas on H1-B's in the first place! MEMO TO CORPORATE AMERICA: Stop shitting on our citizens!
Ummm.. are you really that sheltered, or are you trying to troll/piss off as many people as possible? Here's a clue for you: It's not being faked, it's not a publicity stunt, people got fucking killed, and more and more are getting killed every gods-be-damned day.
1. Read this article. It does a better job of making my point than I ever could.
2. I've read some of your other comments; you're just one more jackass on the Internet that argues for the sake of arguing. As such you can fuck off; I have no time for someone like you. Go get your sense of being relevant from someone else; I am done with you.
What are you talking about? The Chinese have been making knock-offs of microchips for decades, and they are a power-house of child labor-powered, sub living-wage, sub human rights manufacturing. They don't need any technology of their own to do what they already do, they're just looking to scale up production and pirate new markets.
There, fixed that for you.
I don't think you're taking my meaning at all: Just because they're not taking credit for pedophiles being caught, doesn't mean it's not happening. How would you know? Do you have a sooper seekrit information source inside local law enforcement and the FBI? I think not. You don't know what they're doing or not doing.
And by the way: just because I lost the password and email to my five-digit account here, doesn't mean I never had one.
Inciting them further by defacing their websites..
So far as their Internet presence goes, things of that sort would actually be effective, especially if they could be denied access to 'fix' the 'damage'; it would make them look stupid and ineffective, discrediting them in the eyes of the public, and more to the point, in the eyes of those that might be swayed and recruited by them. Killing someone potentially creates a martyr; once someone is dead, you can't really effectively hurt them anymore. But discrediting someone, leaving them alive, allows for near infinite possibilities to hurt them more in the future, and as we've seen in the media, some damage, once done, can't be recovered from.
Yeah sure, a group of hackers who regularly commit felonies are going to be all high-profile and visible to everyone and anyone while they're committing their felonious cybercrimes. I think you've seen too many movies and actually believe that's the way things are in the real world. Also you have too many 2's in your user number, do something about that, k?
Sure, I wish them luck, but why does the pentagon have to rely on a loosely organised group of pimply teenagers to disrupt ISIS propaganda?
Who said anyone is 'relying' on them? They're acting on their own motivation. In some ways they can be more disruptive because they're not constrained by the law in any way.
It takes a thief to catch a thief
That's the name of the game here. Anonymous no doubt has it's high-level operatives who can stick-and-move on the same level as the hackers working for these Sunni extremists can -- and if they know how they operate, then they know how to smoke them out, too. All it takes is getting a solid lead on one of their Internet operatives, and the right people getting their hands on them. Regardless of whether or not something as fortuitous as that happens, harassing and disrupting their Internet operations, if successful, will have an effect: It'll scare off some Useful Idiots who otherwise might get recruited, and more importantly, it'll make this so-called 'islamic state' look like idiots online. Don't discount the power of discrediting someone.
Are you kidding me? You should go look for reports for people who have lived under their 'government', if you can call it that. Makes living somewhere like Iran or North Korea look positively pleasant comparatively speaking. Animals in a holding pen at a slaughterhouse are treated better than these assholes treat people in their so-called 'caliphate'. They are violent animals, who posess neither the skillset nor the restraint to actually run a productive modern-day country, and any claims they have to be 'running a State' are laughable at best, and completely illegitimate.
That's a rather simplistic viewpoint you have there. These Sunni extremists who call themselves 'Islamic State' are using social media on the Internet as a major component in their propaganda machine, and also using it to recruit useful idiots to their cause, often in a very literal sense. Some group that has little to no regard for the legality of their actions (unlike actual law enforcement and government military) that can hack their way into their Facebook, Twitter, and other Internet assets and expose the operators behind them (and maybe their physical location) would be extremely disruptive to their operations on that front. Meanwhile 'signing up for the military' really won't do shit except give these assholes more targets to shoot at. Personally I send all my best to this particular faction of Anonymous, and wish them good hunting and much success in disrupting these assholes as much as possible.
The only reason I can think of is that they hope to goad Paris into dropping a nuke on Raqa ... decapitating ISIS ... and (I suppose) starting WW-III. Could that be it? Could they really aim at igniting a full-scale war between approx. 1 bln. muslims and 4 bln. non-muslims?
Or is thinking not their long suit? Are they too absorbed in their faith for that?
What they want, is to foment as much chaos as possible, in as much of the world as possible. They have one narrow vision of what the world should be, and it involves all of Western civilization destroyed, all forms of thought and religious faith not conforming to their one rigid view of it annihilated, with them in ultimate, total, dictatorial control over who and what is left afterwards. Remember again that Al-Qaeda distanced themselves from these assholes because they were 'too extreme' for even them. Of course the extreme, disproportionate violence aside, they're completely unprepared and unsuited to actually rule any population in any sort of fair and balanced way due to their extremist interpretations of the Quoran (assuming of course their alleged 'faith' isn't just window-dressing to justify their extremely violent actions) and absolute intolerance of anyone or anything that in any way, shape, or form, deviates from their rigidly narrow view of what the world should be. So do they want WW3? Nukes and all? Probably. Seriously, they make Iran look warm and fuzzy by comparison, because they're at least willing to talk to us; these Sunni extremists can't be reasoned with at all. They've bought themselves a one-way ticket to being exterminated, and there's nothing that's going to stop that from happening, now. We (the rest of the world, that is), however, have some sanity and restraint, though: we won't drop nukes on anyone. We'll blast them into oblivion with conventional weapons, though.
While we're talking about it, here's an opinion of mine that is relevant to the discussion, that is sure to be unpopular: Assad shouldn't be removed from power; he does, however, need to see the reality of his situation: He needs to make peace with the rebels, come to some sort of accord with them, and co-exist. Removing Assad will create yet another power vacuum, which is exactly, precisely what those Sunni extremists (who call themselves 'Islamic State') want; then they can swoop in to a severely weakened Syria, and just take over by force of arms. I think that's what Russia is thinking, coming in to help Assad; they see that a power vacuum would be the worst thing to happen. But Assad needs to chill the fuck out and learn to compromise, before someone manages to take him out, and before things reach the point where there isn't a country to govern anymore.
Just because I'm naturally paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get me, and by the way it's Obsessive Compulsive Order, get it right. XD
..than install Windows 10 on anything for any reason. They can shove their so-called 'OS' and their updates up their collective ass.
Don't have a smartphone, don't have a tablet, and don't even have a microphone on my desktop machine -- and now, even less interested in ever owning any of those than I was five minutes ago. For the rest of you, I'd suggest hacking into your TV or home theatre receiver, and putting a lowpass filter in all the baseband audio lines so these 'inaudible' signals won't get passed through to the speakers.
His entire rant more or less screams 'I don't want brown people in my country!', and as such discredits and dishonors him.
Listen, buddy, tell you what: Tell us your real name, show us your PhD in a field related to climatology, and your published white paper on what you just said, and maybe I'll believe you know what you're talking about. Otherwise you're just another asshole on the Internets with an opinion, like the rest of us, and for attempting to push your point as being fact, you can go fuck yourself, OK?
I'm starting to wonder about people. I used to have cable and spent what seems like way too much time watching TV. These days it's all OTA and I have other interests and TiVo gets piled up with things I enjoy watching because I'm busy with other things. What I start to wonder is whether people should be spending less time watching TV and more time doing other things.
How can this be at the national level?
Could this be creating a paper trail for the future of the military out in our solar system? The Earth's Moon may be, by mutual agreement (for the time being, anyway) declared to not be the property of any one nation, which makes sense because it's in orbit around the Earth, but asteroids are most certainly not; nations (not just the U.S.) could potentially use them as military bases out in the solar system. Starting a paper trail now, asserting that there are private-sector property rights to asteroids, would make it plausible that a nation's military could also claim property rights to asteroids. Really, though, I hate to have to go there with this, but humans be humans after all, and we're still rather warlike, so it's a factor to consider.
Does the solution have to be a 1985 Television and over-the-air reception?
So cable TV, satellite, and streaming are such gods-be-damned great alternatives? How does 'FREE HDTV' sound to you, pretty good? That's OTA broadcasts. Buy an antenna, once, and get free HDTV, and the quality is as good if not better than anything else (less compression).
This just in... German Federal Intelligence Service will now access Microsoft data on behalf of the Federal Intelligence Service.
Kids, do yourselves a favor: Keep your own data in your own posession instead, ok? To hell with 'The Cloud', it's for chumps.
As for your last point:
Best of luck to you, friend. :-)
Geez, dude, take it down a couple dozen notches, will you? You must get picked on a lot by people on the Internet. Hell, you must have been picked on by people IRL since you were a kid, being so reactive now. Honestly, dude, I'm not your enemy, and nobody wants to take anything away from you. Stop panicking, OK?
Now, then.. I drive a small pickup myself. I wouldn't want anyone taking it away from me, either, it would more or less ruin my life. I've also got a motorcycle, have been riding them since I was a teenager. Wouldn't want anyone taking either one away from me. But they both have internal combustion engines, and the exhaust is really nasty, environmentally speaking. When someone starts marketing full electric versions of them that are practical, I'll jump -- but not before. Not a big advocate of public transportation. I can't live my life taking buses and taxicabs everywhere, that would completely destroy my life, I'd be just existing rather than living. So consider this: If someone came up with a replacement for your pickup that was 100% electric, had all the power and range you have now, but didn't emit so much as a cubic foot of any sort of exhaust gasses, wouldn't you be OK with that? I would, in fact I'd be better than OK with it, because a 100% electric vehicle would require a fraction of the maintenance of a gas or diesel engine, and would be a hell of a lot cleaner to work on, too! That's all I'm saying. Last thing I want is to take away anyones' ability to transport themselves and cargo wherever they want whenever they want.