What legislative candidates are running on a platform of enacting something that will explicitly outlaw what ICE did here? (Don't tell me it's already illegal; whether it's true or not, the courts have apparently decided otherwise.)
What executive candidates are running on a platform of, by order, prohibiting ICE from doing this?
America needs to know these two things, and we need to know right now.
I don't know that any of the sites in question are selling counterfeit goods. I'm not talking proof-beyond-reasonable-doubt or anything like that, just vague informal subjective stuff. What was autocd.com doing? I never heard of them. I can't even begin to guess.
Under normal circumstances, this is an easy problem to solve. You just go look at what the accused person was saying. If they're actually guilty and their crime happens to involve soliciting transactions, then all you have to do is go look at the things they've been saying, and you'll very likely see stark black-and-white evidence of them incriminating themselves.
Oops, we can't see them shooting their mouths off in public about their own crime, because they've been censored.
That's bad. Really bad. As a very distant-second choice, though, at least some information will eventually come out at their trial. Oops, except we've decided to unanimously vote for parties who say "Fuck due process." There will be no trial.
I'm being asked to accept on 100% faith that someone did a bad thing. I'll never see any evidence myself that it's true, and I'll never even receive an assurance that "the system" that we all count on serving justice -- the same thing we rely on protecting you and me -- reviewed this apparently-too-sensitive-for-the-public evidence and came to that conclusion. Maybe you're enough of a religious nut for that amount of faith, but I'm not.
All the formal and informal checks have been bypassed; we're talking about true anarchy and a breakdown of law here. Given that, why would anyone care about something as relatively trivial as counterfeit goods? ICE's actions themselves totally overshadow that.
Um.. um.. that was an old commie-block design! Modern first-world hydro-electric doesn't have that problem!
Heh, I can't wait for the first solar-power screwup that results in mass casualties. Not that I want people to die, but we do need to get past the whole anecdotes-set-the-perception-of-safety that seems to plague energy planning. The best part is trying to imagine a solar power disaster. You've gotta get pretty sick in the head to come up with anything even marginally believable. The holy grail, of course, is thinking up a scenario where a solar power accident kills tens of thousands. I think it would have to involve an orbital reflector.
It seemed to me that what Perspectives notaries do, as expressed in OpenPGP-speak, is act as sophisticated Robot CA. (Is this wrong?) Is a Convergence notary "merely" a more sophisticated Robot CA, or does it provide information which couldn't be represented in a Web of Trust?
Some things are secret for good reason. Very little in what Manning released had any reason to be secret. On the whole, the country is better off having this information public than not.
One of the disappointing things (not) happening, is that there has been virtually no followup on that issue. There was plenty of stuff that was leaked, which should have been part of government press releases on the day it happened, but instead was treated as secrets. The existing politicians in power aren't saying they intend to change that, and rivals running against them aren't running on the platform of fixing the problem. This should have been a 2010 campaign issue, and wasn't. 2012? Well, no one is talking about it yet.
The public shouldn't have to count on people in Manning's position to.. er.. effectively de-classify information (yes, I realize this publicly-available information is still classified, and that's just another example of the law being comically out-of-touch with reality). I don't trust corporals to do that job well, and you shouldn't either. (And many Manning/Wikileaks critics will happily point out some things which indicate that he didn't do it well.) And yet, illegal leaks are the public's only recourse right now, and that means someone has to risk
nobly sacrificing themselves to America's government for America's people
getting caught doing shitty things, identified as the commie spy scumbag
(pick whichever you think applies -- it really doesn't matter!) just for the information to get out. Right now, American voters need people like Manning, and that is fucked up and dangerous.
As you say, America was better off for what happened. But that was dumb luck. Had the ratio of stuff-which-should-remain-secret to stuff-which-should-have-been-release been different, Manning's actions would have been overall harmful. Similarly, if Manning hadn't felt like risking his life/liberty and had done nothing, that would have been harmful too. America was lucky this time, and luck is a stupid thing for people to rely on in order to have government accountability.
This isn't how things should be working. Saying so, and putting a plan for rapid or preemptive declassification of (let's put this as nicely as possible) mistakenly-classified information, would be a way for political candidates to distinguish themselves from the status-quo assholes who can't be trusted with power.
That is ultimately a doomed approach to the problem. The running computer is the owner's agent; it's on his side. I'm not really all that worried about the government (or any other attacker) right now, but if I were, I would sincerely hope my adversaries would keep my ally powered up and serving my interests instead of theirs.
Powering off and treating the media as "dead" data in a computer system that is on their side, is the only reasonable long-term strategy for them to adopt.
Extortion is when someone tells you "do this for me, or else I will do this bad thing to you." In this situation, there's no bad thing done. If someone elects to not pay the $200, the consequences are...
... absolutely nothing.
xxx can be used to be actively exploit and damage the names of respected businesses and organizations.
Anything can be used to actively exploit and damage the names of respected businesses and organizations. I can register hot-chicks-of-disney.com right now and show you photos of who is really in the Goofy suit. I don't even need to register a domain name to do it; I can use Slashdot.org for it by writing a little story.
As I entered the gates of Disneyland, I became immediately aroused. Finally my fetish for standing in lines with strangers, many of them childen, could be satisfied. But on my way to the first line, someone in a Goofy suit accosted me. "Hey there," they said, in a muffled androgenous voice which piqued my curiosity. Not being one to waste time, I winked. "Goofy69, is that you?" Was this goofy69 from last night's chat? How did he? she? spot me so quickly? The large oversized head nodded. "This way," Goofy69 said, and motioned me to an area outside of the surveillance network. As Goofy69 began to unzip my pants, I realized it was now time to decide: did I want to know? Should I ravish Goofy69 with my greedy hands right then and there, or should I just receive? "I have been doing this 15 years," said Goofy69, "and so far, everyone has resisted taking off my Goofy head. You will have to be a good boy and resist too, if you want to be one of my regulars." As the skilled hands worked my needy flesh, I ached with two great desires. Which would be stronger?
Nobody needs.xxx. It's an offer and a poor one. The consequences of declining the offer change nothing.
It doesn't have to unseat anything. Google is in the interesting position of having some websites with a significant amount of traffic and a web browser with a significant number of users. All they have to do is have Chrome send it in the Accept header and have their sites pay attention to that header. Instant n% reduction of bandwidth used by images.
Right there, technological progress can stop and Google still comes out ahead. (Ignoring what they've paid to people to come up with WebP.) No rival has to be unseated.
OTOH, once your site starts receiving a significant number of image/webp (or whatever they're using) in the Accept headers from Chrome (and Opera!) users, you have incentive to reconsider taking advantage, and the network effect has started, bouncing back'n'forth between site developers and browser developers.
JPEG2000 didn't go this way because of the patent issue; from the very get-go, everyone knew they weren't allowed to use it. With WebP, it's either a mystery (if you're cautious) or allowed (because you trust that Google did a good patent search). Unlike JPEG2000, nobody has stepped forth and shown for sure that the tech needs to be sequestered for a couple decades. The default assumption about its legality is different.
Really, you can't imagine it, even if Microsoft wrote the licensing agreement?
If I were going around extorting people over bogus patents, the sign-this-or-else papers that I handed out would not have anything in them, saying things would get better for my victims if it turned out that some of my patents were declared invalid. If anything, if the agreement did have a clause covering what happens if any patents were invalidated, the agreement would say it makes no difference.
And then if they stopped paying me, maybe I wouldn't have good grounds to sue them for patent infringement anymore, but I'd have a piece of paper saying they agreed to pay, which they'd then by in violation of.
The agreement would also have an NDA, so that my victims wouldn't be allowed to tell the rest of the world what the agreement was.
This is Extortion 101 and if Microsoft fucked this up then some lawyer is getting fir-- a generous severance packa-- no wait, the premise is that the lawyer is comically incompetent -- he's getting fired.
I suppose this is "a lot better" from the perspective of the fascists who want the protestors to disappear
It also might be a lot better from the perspect of people who don't want them to "disappear," as in get killed by local LE going off-the-handle "Kent State" style. The situation is a mixed bag; it suggests a pretty shitty attitude by city governments (though with a very close reading of the articles, I don't really see a smoking gun), but if you look at what the feds' advice here was, it steered things toward less violent confrontation.
Of course, less violence is bad news for martyr wanna-be romantics.
Take a look at what's left, though, and tell me The People are any less able to protest than they could before. If you think the fascists are responsible for this, then you ought to be delighted at the fascists' ineffectiveness, because this won't even be a minor speed bump to any serious attempt at reforming government. If this is your opponent's best move, then you have won.
That's why I think people are blowing this out of proportion with too much cynicism. The park-camp breakups really are for the "cover reasons" of public safety and sanitation, and I say this as a government-hating paranoid loon. I'm disappointed that the feds were involved in this at all, and pleasantly surprised by what they did.
Because the right of the people to assemble peaceably doesn't have a time-limit? "You may assemble, but not at night. Limit your protests in public spaces to ten hours a day" isn't in the Constitution.
You're right, but nevertheless curfew laws have been tolerated for a long time. Maybe it's time to change that.
Even so, cellphones, signs, PA systems, pamphlets, etc are tools for petitioning government; tents and sleeping bags are tools for petitioning Freddy Kruger. A sleeping person cannot be engaging in speech, unless you're talking about a Dream Circle happening in defiance of the insulting "Free Snore Zone," where people are handing out Pillowphlets which explain why Wall Street Bedmakers shouldn't be gambling on Droolfaults.
Your average consumer doesn't need the 80386. There's hardly any software compiled to take advantage of its features anyway. I can see maybe someone using them for servers, but that's a pretty small niche.
[reasons you don't like any of the existing parties] there is no real third party option for me.
That's because you haven't formed it yet.
Wouldn't it be funny if instead of politically alone and unique and incompatible with all other Americas, you found out you're mainstream and that a party that matches your opinions could get a third or half of the vote?
The only real barrier to finding out, is that (unlike TP or OWS) some sucker would have to take one for the team, by stepping forth and risking spending a couple years in Washington. It's a shame everyone has such stable employment committments right now. Part of the cost of our booming abundant economy is that everyone is too busy getting rich, so no one has time to think about government.
doesn't it worry you about what can be hidden in the baseband?
As long as the baseband really just includes the radio (i.e. microphone, keys/touch, screen, etc drivers aren't included in that) then it can be treated as being part of the network. And the network is already untrusted, i.e. your own radio being compromised is no worse than your ISP (or a backbone, or the person-you're-talking-to's ISP) being compromised.
People have known for decades that it's sometime useful to give users feedback about something that takes a long time, by displaying a progress meter or at least "Please wait" or "loading" or "initializing the galaxy." When GUIs got popular, displaying it as an icon was natural. When small screens started to get more popular, it became somewhat common to eschew fixed-position widgets in favor of using the entire screen as a "content area" because there was so little to spare for scrollbars, status displays, or whatever.
Yet despite this situation, no one could figure out how to display a loading status icon in a content area. Or at least no one easily could. But then Microsoft Research applied themselves to the problem, and with a lot of insight, experiments, trial and error, hard work, and just plain luck, they figured out how to do it. I've never seen a Microsoft handheld computer, but presumably they used the novel solution in a product. But nobody wanted it, so it died. And Microsoft, too, may some day die.
The secret for how to display a status icon in a content area, could become lost when Microsoft dies. But no. Not willing to let their efforts be buried by the sands of time as a lost trade secret, they took advantage of patent law, which gave them a brief monopoly (a mere 20 years within the millennia that people have been doing mathematics) for which We The Public received public disclosure for how their invention works.
And what did Google and Barnes & Noble do? They renegged on the disclosure-for-monopoly deal!! Instead of having to figure out on their own, how to display a status icon in a content area, they dishonorably read through all of Microsoft patents, learned all the secrets ("aha! That's how to display a status icon, where the icon is in the content area! Ingenious!") and defied the monopoly.
And here you all are, blaming the victim, Microsoft. Yet without Microsoft, would you know how to display an icon inside a content area instead of outside it? Or would you be pounding your keyboards in frustration? "It doesn't compile!" or "It doesn't run right! There's my icon, but it's outside of the content area! How did they do it!" or "There's my icon inside the content area, but WTF, it doesn't say 'Loading'! How is the user supposed to know it's loading something, if I can't figure out how to make the icon say 'Loading'?!" Please, people, think of the inventors and their technical solutions. Without the monopoly, they might not have had any incentive at all, to solve the long-standing mystery.
I have a test machine with the 12-core version and the single-core performance is truly dreadful.
Usually when I talk about a pampered princess I'm referring to my chorkie, but today it's you. You just called Bulldozer "truly dreadful." Not "not as good as Sandy Bridge" but "truly dreadful."
I'm typing this on an Atom 330 HTPC and its performance is far, far above "truly dreadful" so I must conclude you are from the year 2030 if you think any 2011 processor, even the bottom-of-the-line, is dreadful even in hyperbole, much less "truly." Get back in your time machine, pampered princess.
The worst shit you can get today, is a monstrous beast. Fucking kids. Get off my lawn.
Slashdot Mirror
What legislative candidates are running on a platform of enacting something that will explicitly outlaw what ICE did here? (Don't tell me it's already illegal; whether it's true or not, the courts have apparently decided otherwise.)
What executive candidates are running on a platform of, by order, prohibiting ICE from doing this?
America needs to know these two things, and we need to know right now.
Ok, seriously, here's the answer:
I don't know that any of the sites in question are selling counterfeit goods. I'm not talking proof-beyond-reasonable-doubt or anything like that, just vague informal subjective stuff. What was autocd.com doing? I never heard of them. I can't even begin to guess.
Under normal circumstances, this is an easy problem to solve. You just go look at what the accused person was saying. If they're actually guilty and their crime happens to involve soliciting transactions, then all you have to do is go look at the things they've been saying, and you'll very likely see stark black-and-white evidence of them incriminating themselves.
Oops, we can't see them shooting their mouths off in public about their own crime, because they've been censored.
That's bad. Really bad. As a very distant-second choice, though, at least some information will eventually come out at their trial. Oops, except we've decided to unanimously vote for parties who say "Fuck due process." There will be no trial.
I'm being asked to accept on 100% faith that someone did a bad thing. I'll never see any evidence myself that it's true, and I'll never even receive an assurance that "the system" that we all count on serving justice -- the same thing we rely on protecting you and me -- reviewed this apparently-too-sensitive-for-the-public evidence and came to that conclusion. Maybe you're enough of a religious nut for that amount of faith, but I'm not.
All the formal and informal checks have been bypassed; we're talking about true anarchy and a breakdown of law here. Given that, why would anyone care about something as relatively trivial as counterfeit goods? ICE's actions themselves totally overshadow that.
Um.. um .. that was an old commie-block design! Modern first-world hydro-electric doesn't have that problem!
Heh, I can't wait for the first solar-power screwup that results in mass casualties. Not that I want people to die, but we do need to get past the whole anecdotes-set-the-perception-of-safety that seems to plague energy planning. The best part is trying to imagine a solar power disaster. You've gotta get pretty sick in the head to come up with anything even marginally believable. The holy grail, of course, is thinking up a scenario where a solar power accident kills tens of thousands. I think it would have to involve an orbital reflector.
You don't buy Intel; you buy Sandy Bridge.
Someone has finally invented the website.
It seemed to me that what Perspectives notaries do, as expressed in OpenPGP-speak, is act as sophisticated Robot CA. (Is this wrong?) Is a Convergence notary "merely" a more sophisticated Robot CA, or does it provide information which couldn't be represented in a Web of Trust?
One of the disappointing things (not) happening, is that there has been virtually no followup on that issue. There was plenty of stuff that was leaked, which should have been part of government press releases on the day it happened, but instead was treated as secrets. The existing politicians in power aren't saying they intend to change that, and rivals running against them aren't running on the platform of fixing the problem. This should have been a 2010 campaign issue, and wasn't. 2012? Well, no one is talking about it yet.
The public shouldn't have to count on people in Manning's position to .. er .. effectively de-classify information (yes, I realize this publicly-available information is still classified, and that's just another example of the law being comically out-of-touch with reality). I don't trust corporals to do that job well, and you shouldn't either. (And many Manning/Wikileaks critics will happily point out some things which indicate that he didn't do it well.) And yet, illegal leaks are the public's only recourse right now, and that means someone has to risk
(pick whichever you think applies -- it really doesn't matter!) just for the information to get out. Right now, American voters need people like Manning, and that is fucked up and dangerous.
As you say, America was better off for what happened. But that was dumb luck. Had the ratio of stuff-which-should-remain-secret to stuff-which-should-have-been-release been different, Manning's actions would have been overall harmful. Similarly, if Manning hadn't felt like risking his life/liberty and had done nothing, that would have been harmful too. America was lucky this time, and luck is a stupid thing for people to rely on in order to have government accountability.
This isn't how things should be working. Saying so, and putting a plan for rapid or preemptive declassification of (let's put this as nicely as possible) mistakenly-classified information, would be a way for political candidates to distinguish themselves from the status-quo assholes who can't be trusted with power.
I don't care how that sentence ends -- it's guaranteed to be utterly stupid.
That is ultimately a doomed approach to the problem. The running computer is the owner's agent; it's on his side. I'm not really all that worried about the government (or any other attacker) right now, but if I were, I would sincerely hope my adversaries would keep my ally powered up and serving my interests instead of theirs.
Powering off and treating the media as "dead" data in a computer system that is on their side, is the only reasonable long-term strategy for them to adopt.
Extortion is when someone tells you "do this for me, or else I will do this bad thing to you." In this situation, there's no bad thing done. If someone elects to not pay the $200, the consequences are ...
Anything can be used to actively exploit and damage the names of respected businesses and organizations. I can register hot-chicks-of-disney.com right now and show you photos of who is really in the Goofy suit. I don't even need to register a domain name to do it; I can use Slashdot.org for it by writing a little story.
Nobody needs .xxx. It's an offer and a poor one. The consequences of declining the offer change nothing.
It doesn't have to unseat anything. Google is in the interesting position of having some websites with a significant amount of traffic and a web browser with a significant number of users. All they have to do is have Chrome send it in the Accept header and have their sites pay attention to that header. Instant n% reduction of bandwidth used by images.
Right there, technological progress can stop and Google still comes out ahead. (Ignoring what they've paid to people to come up with WebP.) No rival has to be unseated.
OTOH, once your site starts receiving a significant number of image/webp (or whatever they're using) in the Accept headers from Chrome (and Opera!) users, you have incentive to reconsider taking advantage, and the network effect has started, bouncing back'n'forth between site developers and browser developers.
JPEG2000 didn't go this way because of the patent issue; from the very get-go, everyone knew they weren't allowed to use it. With WebP, it's either a mystery (if you're cautious) or allowed (because you trust that Google did a good patent search). Unlike JPEG2000, nobody has stepped forth and shown for sure that the tech needs to be sequestered for a couple decades. The default assumption about its legality is different.
What is the world coming to, when the only use for image files that people can think of, is "be displayed on a web page?"
Really, you can't imagine it, even if Microsoft wrote the licensing agreement?
If I were going around extorting people over bogus patents, the sign-this-or-else papers that I handed out would not have anything in them, saying things would get better for my victims if it turned out that some of my patents were declared invalid. If anything, if the agreement did have a clause covering what happens if any patents were invalidated, the agreement would say it makes no difference.
And then if they stopped paying me, maybe I wouldn't have good grounds to sue them for patent infringement anymore, but I'd have a piece of paper saying they agreed to pay, which they'd then by in violation of.
The agreement would also have an NDA, so that my victims wouldn't be allowed to tell the rest of the world what the agreement was.
This is Extortion 101 and if Microsoft fucked this up then some lawyer is getting fir-- a generous severance packa-- no wait, the premise is that the lawyer is comically incompetent -- he's getting fired.
It also might be a lot better from the perspect of people who don't want them to "disappear," as in get killed by local LE going off-the-handle "Kent State" style. The situation is a mixed bag; it suggests a pretty shitty attitude by city governments (though with a very close reading of the articles, I don't really see a smoking gun), but if you look at what the feds' advice here was, it steered things toward less violent confrontation.
Of course, less violence is bad news for martyr wanna-be romantics.
Take a look at what's left, though, and tell me The People are any less able to protest than they could before. If you think the fascists are responsible for this, then you ought to be delighted at the fascists' ineffectiveness, because this won't even be a minor speed bump to any serious attempt at reforming government. If this is your opponent's best move, then you have won.
That's why I think people are blowing this out of proportion with too much cynicism. The park-camp breakups really are for the "cover reasons" of public safety and sanitation, and I say this as a government-hating paranoid loon. I'm disappointed that the feds were involved in this at all, and pleasantly surprised by what they did.
You're right, but nevertheless curfew laws have been tolerated for a long time. Maybe it's time to change that.
Even so, cellphones, signs, PA systems, pamphlets, etc are tools for petitioning government; tents and sleeping bags are tools for petitioning Freddy Kruger. A sleeping person cannot be engaging in speech, unless you're talking about a Dream Circle happening in defiance of the insulting "Free Snore Zone," where people are handing out Pillowphlets which explain why Wall Street Bedmakers shouldn't be gambling on Droolfaults.
Still bitter?
Your average consumer doesn't need the 80386. There's hardly any software compiled to take advantage of its features anyway. I can see maybe someone using them for servers, but that's a pretty small niche.
That's because you haven't formed it yet.
Wouldn't it be funny if instead of politically alone and unique and incompatible with all other Americas, you found out you're mainstream and that a party that matches your opinions could get a third or half of the vote?
The only real barrier to finding out, is that (unlike TP or OWS) some sucker would have to take one for the team, by stepping forth and risking spending a couple years in Washington. It's a shame everyone has such stable employment committments right now. Part of the cost of our booming abundant economy is that everyone is too busy getting rich, so no one has time to think about government.
As long as the baseband really just includes the radio (i.e. microphone, keys/touch, screen, etc drivers aren't included in that) then it can be treated as being part of the network. And the network is already untrusted, i.e. your own radio being compromised is no worse than your ISP (or a backbone, or the person-you're-talking-to's ISP) being compromised.
People have known for decades that it's sometime useful to give users feedback about something that takes a long time, by displaying a progress meter or at least "Please wait" or "loading" or "initializing the galaxy." When GUIs got popular, displaying it as an icon was natural. When small screens started to get more popular, it became somewhat common to eschew fixed-position widgets in favor of using the entire screen as a "content area" because there was so little to spare for scrollbars, status displays, or whatever.
Yet despite this situation, no one could figure out how to display a loading status icon in a content area. Or at least no one easily could. But then Microsoft Research applied themselves to the problem, and with a lot of insight, experiments, trial and error, hard work, and just plain luck, they figured out how to do it. I've never seen a Microsoft handheld computer, but presumably they used the novel solution in a product. But nobody wanted it, so it died. And Microsoft, too, may some day die.
The secret for how to display a status icon in a content area, could become lost when Microsoft dies. But no. Not willing to let their efforts be buried by the sands of time as a lost trade secret, they took advantage of patent law, which gave them a brief monopoly (a mere 20 years within the millennia that people have been doing mathematics) for which We The Public received public disclosure for how their invention works.
And what did Google and Barnes & Noble do? They renegged on the disclosure-for-monopoly deal!! Instead of having to figure out on their own, how to display a status icon in a content area, they dishonorably read through all of Microsoft patents, learned all the secrets ("aha! That's how to display a status icon, where the icon is in the content area! Ingenious!") and defied the monopoly.
And here you all are, blaming the victim, Microsoft. Yet without Microsoft, would you know how to display an icon inside a content area instead of outside it? Or would you be pounding your keyboards in frustration? "It doesn't compile!" or "It doesn't run right! There's my icon, but it's outside of the content area! How did they do it!" or "There's my icon inside the content area, but WTF, it doesn't say 'Loading'! How is the user supposed to know it's loading something, if I can't figure out how to make the icon say 'Loading'?!" Please, people, think of the inventors and their technical solutions. Without the monopoly, they might not have had any incentive at all, to solve the long-standing mystery.
I didn't know they let you have a phone, Hans.
Oh, I wouldn't worry about that, unless you're thinking of upgrading that little Via CPU to a 16-core Opteron.
Sorry, couldn't resist. I wasn't trying to stalk you; it just sorta happened. ;-)
You never should have admitted that. Everyone was so boggled by your post, that they couldn't even flame it. That was awesome.
Usually when I talk about a pampered princess I'm referring to my chorkie, but today it's you. You just called Bulldozer "truly dreadful." Not "not as good as Sandy Bridge" but "truly dreadful."
I'm typing this on an Atom 330 HTPC and its performance is far, far above "truly dreadful" so I must conclude you are from the year 2030 if you think any 2011 processor, even the bottom-of-the-line, is dreadful even in hyperbole, much less "truly." Get back in your time machine, pampered princess.
The worst shit you can get today, is a monstrous beast. Fucking kids. Get off my lawn.
Not if you can build two computers out of $300 processors. ;-)