Minor correction (by me, not the original author):
it's just a damned network sniffer set to filter TCP packets on the SMTP port.
should really read "The FBI claims it's just a damned network sniffer set to filter TCP packets on the SMTP port." Am I being paranoid in ascribing hidden motives to the FBI? Well, as the poster says,
The technology that allows this to happen has been around practically since the dawn if[sic] TCP/IP
But if the technology exists and is proven, why does the FBI have to black-box it? What else are they doing with that device? It still seems to me that they're hiding something.
the wiretap model pressumes that their is a specific communications channel you can regularly listen to
Unless you're Carnivore, in which case you listen to a whole Wide-Area Network so as to catch the baddie if he's (a) smart enough to change access points but (b) stupid enough to stay on the same ISP.
Carnivore seems to be a system that seriously degrades the privacy of all users so that the FBI can catch those criminals as computationally inept as itself.
Blockquoth the poster, referring to "What if everyone had everyone's slashdot info?":
Sure, it would certainly give people an extra pause before hitting that submit button.
Is that really necessarily a good thing? Sure, some idiot posts are avoided. So are some valid, thought-provoking, but karmically-disfavored ones. There's the potential for some huge chill factor.
Plus, if you ever ARE charged, any lawyer with a half brain would question how the evidence was collected against you (you know, that little right you have that protects you from unreasonable search and seizure).
Which is all well and good -- until the FBI refuses to discuss the methodology of Carnivore for fear of "endangering enforcement resources". They have black-boxed this thing and insisted that no one be allowed to see it or poke at its workings. So how can you challenge their methods, if they won't tell you what they did?
Odd query: The Sixth Amendment includes the right of the accused "to be confronted with the witnesses against him". How advanced do these things have to get, before they qualify as "witnesses" (instead of simple tools)? And can a defendant subpenoa an FBI geek and demand that he/she explain the workings of Carnivore to the jury?
I respect the FBI. I even trust them... a little. But my respect rests upon the fact they are constrained by the laws, traditions, and people of the United States. It doesn't take long to slide from law enforcement to police state. And because I respect the FBI, I don't want them to ever be faced with that temptation.
Oh, grow up. This is a type of argument -- reasoning from extremes -- that is prima facie invalid. Saying "the FBI shouldn't indiscriminately read all emails passing through an ISP router on the off chance one might be for or from a suspect" is very far from saying "the FBI should be stripped of all law enforcement tools".
I suppose you believe the 4th, 5th, and 6th Amendments are also criminal-coddling. I mean, if we want to catch criminals, why require search warrants? They just slow down the process and allow the "guilty" to go free...
A free and dignified people must always evaluate any expansion of governmental power, to judge it as to its merits and appropriatness. What are we gaining here? And what are we being asked to yield? From everything -- I mean everything -- that has come out about Carnivore, my opinion is that we are being asked to yield important and vital rights, and that in return we are being offered nothing that is not already available.
For a people to remain free and strong, the government must never be treated like a black box. We own the government, and it's our right and our duty to look under the hood and see how the engine's running.
We have to hand over some kind of power to law enforcement agencies, or anyone can do anything that want.
Yes, but we must hand over the absolute least that we can. No one here has called for the disarmament of the FBI. But by your logic, they should institute phone surveillance of everyone, just in case. And we should welcome this, apparently?
If the FBI's motives are so pure, why is the operation -- and for some time, the mere existence -- of Carnivore such a closely-held secret. Why can't the FBI obtain email logs from the ISPs, who collect them for legitmate reason? What else does Carnivore do -- and if the answer is "nothing", why is the FBI afraid to let anyone see the box?
I wonder if the American people are worth saving, if we're so ready to abandon fundamental Consitutional rights ("The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated") in return for hypothetical payoff.
While it sounds great, in principle, to have complete control over UI and controls, it can make moving between pieces of software much harder. I have that beef with programs like WinAmp, which go out of their way to "stand out" -- even at the price of usability.
... is that the FTC is conceding that customer contact databases are indeed monetary assets of a company. Sure, they put restrictions on how they can be sold, but those restrictions aren't written up in regulations, much less enshrined in law. I can't see how this action fails to violate the contract between customers and Toysmart. As one of the commissioners said, "'Never' means never".
I think the only recourse left is, as someone suggested, a class action suit. Toysmart collected that information under a privacy agreement that formed part of the contract between the company and its customers. It is now seeking to violate that contract. Because privacy is a major right, its loss should carry a heavy monetary penalty. In fact, if I were czar, I'd make the customers have first claim as creditors.
It is another nickle-and-dime dimunition of our rights. And in this bizarre, psuedo-libertarian corporate culture, contract law is the last remaining bulwark. If companies can violate their agreements at whim, we're really living in some capitalist version of oligarchy, no matter what papers we pretend to govern with.
Anyone else find it amusing that one of the commissioners involved in this is named "Commissioner Swindle?":) Although this commish does seem to be on the side of goodness and nice.
Check your sources and your facts before being egregiously sarcastic: Although perhaps the construction isn't the best choice, the original article makes clear that the last outer (>11 Gm, or ) moon was discovered in 1974 while Voyager discovered three inner ( 2 Gm) moons in 1979.
Fine, don't call it stealing; call it counterfeiting or sharing or whatever you want. It's irrelevant; a semantic wild-goose chase
Actually, we have a word for it, distinct from "stealing": "infringement". So, if a well-established word covers this sense exactly, why would the Copyright Cartel repeatedly insist on using a fuzzier, metaphorically-extended word like "stealing"?
Because the poster is right in the particulars and clueless in the import: It is "just semantics", but that doesn't imply it is unimportant. This whole struggle is not about right v. wrong, or even permissible v. illegal. It's about perception. If the Copyright Cartel can convince the average citizen that copyright infringement is stealing -- or better, somehow it's "piracy" -- then they get to take advantage of a built-in connotation, immediately making people thinkg "Oooh, stealing is wrong. So this must be wrong."
"Infringement" does not have that same embedded meaning, so it doesn't rouse the emotions. Of course -- make no mistake here -- the RIAA and the MPAA most certainly do not want to have this settled by reason. The chances are far too good that, considered reasonably, their arguments are untenable. No, the Copyright Cartel want to triumph via the emotions. After all, manipulating emotions is the core of their business anyway. So they attempt to frame the debate in a way to push the buttons of the uninformed.
Sadly, too many seem willing to cede choice of the emotional/intellectual terrain to the enemy... and as any good general will tell you, that spells defeat. Pay attention to Cosmo (from Sneakers), if you really want to understand this conflict:
There's a war out there, old friend. A world war. And it's not about who's got the most bullets. It's about who controls the information. What we see and hear, how we work, what we think... it's all about the information!
I dislike the MPAA, but I think they have a duty to protect everyone in the movie business from potential damage.
Ah, I see. Then it must also be moral and right for the Tobacco Institute to falsify data and for the cigarette companies to distort culture and Congress. Sure, tobacco kills its users, but hey, think of all those cigar shops that might go out of business...
I feel for your friend, but no one suggested stepping in and "saving" the horse-and-buggy makers. Technology can move on, and business models sometimes -- despite all the FUD of the RIAA and MPAA -- sometimes do become obsolete.
Well, I'm not a high energy physicist (although I trained as an astrophysicist), and I always get queasy trying to "predict" spin-offs, but...
Back in the 1960s?, similar questions were raised over the building of SLAC. What possible real use would a two-mile-long linear accelerator be? Of course, once the things were built, it became clear that you could use highly-polarized synchroton radiation for fundamental crystal studies, for materials engineering (about as practical as one can get, in terms of research areas), and biomedical studies. These were not foreseen, but they've become really important.
Not everything is going to be electrons and protons under "normal" conditions forever and ever amen. A lot of the 21st century will be breaking the dumb-monkey mold and designing things because we understand them for once. Current understandings of superconductivity, for example, are intimately tied to the Standard Model and the field theory it enshrines. If the SM is replaced, one can imagine -- and I, for one, would be willing to bet -- that it will impact that and other materials field.
A focus on the "practical" is a guarantee that further progress will end -- in basic knowledge, in human scientific endeavour, and in applied technology. Sagan illustrates this nicely in The Demon-Haunted World. In the 1860s, Queen Victoria (he says) could never, despite her power and the wealth of the British Empire, have commanded the invention of a wireless broadcast technology. Yet a social outcast, pursuing his own interests (Maxwell) laid the foundations for the entire telecommunications revolution that we like to preach about. Directed research would never have produced the same results as serendipity, becuase we would never have asked the right questions.
So this probably will be useful for applications someday, in some way. And I'll just leave out the higher, ennobling ends of science. If I have to discuss them, you probably wouldn't understand them anyway.
Blockquoth the poster (italic-quoting the original article):
Larry promises that Perl 6 will be "better, stronger, faster" This is very much like NASA's promise of "faster, better, cheaper" , although they usually get only one or two right.
Actually, it sounds like they should be calling this "bionic Perl".:)
They are clearly marking the link with a deja triange and are not attributing the link to you in any way, shape, or form.
Um, I use deja and I've never seen anything to indicate that those little triangle are inserted by deja and not the poster. The fact of the matter is, by default, it looks like an endorsement by the poster. Yes, deja can mediate the service in exchange for providing it... but they should be explicit.
as somewhat of an audiophile, i can argue that i do hear the difference between vinyl and say, a CD, or an mp3. OK, I'm something of a heretic, but... have you actually done a double-blind test of this? Has anyone ever done a large-scale double-blind study asking whether people can distinguish these things? I'd love to see the results, just to see.
Also, I've always wondered why Coca-Cola has had such high brand name recognition? I mean, think of all the ads you can remember that Coke has made. Now count anything done by Pepsi. I don't know about you, but Pepsi has that annoying little girl, the "Pepsi Challenge", and if you count Mountain Dew, a whole line of memorable commercials.
"I'd like to buy the world a Coke..." That was classic for years. And I think most people can recall the polar bear series they've done. But that begs a bigger issue:
Perhaps the poster has the causal sequence reversed. Perhaps Pepsi has had such a diverse range of commericials precisely because they haven't figured out how to achieve Coke's recognition...
Anyway, the best salvo in the cola wars, IMHO, was the RC Cola commericial toward the end of the Cold War, when they show a "unification" between the two big brands (from the colors, obviously Coke and Pepsi) and say, "But somewhere, freedom of choice still lives" (paraphrased). They cut to some sort of vibrant village festival where everyone is drinking RC... and then the Cola Nazi break down the doors. I can't remember the tagline but it was hilarious.
Darn, no moderator points to spend. But I have never seen such a concise and relevant explanation of the status of deCSS. Just like it's time to stop acception "pirate" as a synonym for "copyright infringer", it's time to stop accepting the presumption of deCSS' violation of DCMA.
Blockquoth the poster: Is domainname.type.country really that difficult? No, but I oppose them on principle. Country codes simply facilitate the re-geographicalization (ooo, new word!) of the Net. One of the shining beautiful fictions of the Internet back in the dim dark days of, say, the early 1990s, was that it was transnational -- truly global in scope.
These, every tinplate legislator is trying to apply regulations or taxes to "their" slice of the Internet. We see systems like Carnivore and the firewall in China trying to re-partition the Internet. We see juries and judges trying to apply local standards to a global medium. Anything that calls attention to the geographic location of a server works against the global nature of the system.
It's time for people to understand: cyberspace != real space! There is no good reason -- and about a zillion bad ones -- to replicate the geographical structure of the planet in the Net. Let it go, already.
For from establishing a US dominance, forcing everyone into.com, etc., would lower barriers. Of course, the whole system is mucked up anyway...
OK, I know everyone's been riding ICANN because they are being slow to organize. People want something done! and apparently don't care if it's half-baked. But isn't anyone else worried that a relatively large policy decision, fundamentally affecting the very structure of the DNS system, was made before the at-large representatives were elected... heck, before they've even been nominated?
I thought the at-larges were supposed to be the counterbalance, the last bastions of hope for the average user to offset the awesome and frightening clout of the corporate droids. At the time people complained that at-large representation seemed to be merely a bone thrown by the powers-that-be, to defuse charges of corporate dominance.
While it greatly reduces spam sent to sites that subscribe to it, it can also be infuriating to be a customer of a company that is on the RBL and is unwilling to fix its open relays.
Um, that's the point, isn't it? If your provider is "unwilling" to fix the relays and would rather be blackholed, then you logically should move to another provider -- one who actually gives a darn about customer service. Eventually, if market theory or Darwin is right, the bad providers go out of business...
This mutex property applies to most other property too. You can't eat the sandwich I've eaten, and you can't transport treacle in a tanker lorry I've filled with bleach.
There is a difference, in that your usurping my usage of a lorry requires you to actually physically possess that lorry. Eating my sandwich (and thereby depriving me of eating it) requires you to physically possess the sandwich: you can't eat it abstractly.
But spectrum is not a tangible thing like lorries or sandwiches. Any old bloke with a generator and a crystal can pollute "your" slice of spectrum and deprive you of its usage. Sure, he can't use it any more than you can, but sometimes that isn't important.
However, I agree mostly with the poster's follow-on comment,
The correct solution is: for the government to police EM usage but not control it. IOW people would own parts of it in given areas, could sell or buy, could split or merge, and could sue if someone "sets up shop on their property".
To my eye, this model is a better one than the current licensing schemes. Of course, it puts EM spectrum on a footing perilously close to "intellectual property" -- "ownership" of an abstract concept and control of its concrete instantiation. I think it leaves spectrum open to many of the same concerns as IP. Of course, I think the whole edifice of "ownership" of intangibles is an unwarranted (and unsafe) extension of the laws of physical property into socioeconomic spaces wherein they might not be valid.
The Chinese empire lasted for three thousand years....
Fair enough. On the other hand, from my admittedly spotty understanding of Chinese history, it's not really fair to say the empire was continuous throughout that time. I believe (but am willing to be corrected) that long periods of stability were punctuated by sharp bursts of chaos wherein much of the structure retreated if not collapsed.
As an aside, according to http://www-chaos.umd.edu/history/imp erial.html, the unification of China into the currently-recognizable entity occured around 221 BC, so that empire lasted for "only" 2100 years.:)
The same source goes on to say "The collapse of the Han dynasty was followed by nearly four centuries of rule by warlords." The Han collapsed around 200 AD, so this dark period runs until around 600 AD. The Chinese Empire is down to, at best, 1300 years of continuous rule. But lo, "Misrule, court intrigues, economic exploitation, and popular rebellions weakened the empire, making it possible for northern invaders to terminate the dynasty in 907. The next half-century saw the fragmentation of China into five northern dynasties and ten southern kingdoms... But in 960 a new power, Song (960-1279), reunified most of China Proper." So the Chinese Empire has only about 1000 years.
In fact, if you look into the history of the Chinese Empire, you find many turnovers and wholesale replacements of the ruling peoples and structures, including foreign dominantion at least twice. I believe the myth of a super-stable Chinese Empire placidly ruling for thousands of years is just that --- a myth.
Slashdot Mirror
Carnivore seems to be a system that seriously degrades the privacy of all users so that the FBI can catch those criminals as computationally inept as itself.
Odd query: The Sixth Amendment includes the right of the accused "to be confronted with the witnesses against him". How advanced do these things have to get, before they qualify as "witnesses" (instead of simple tools)? And can a defendant subpenoa an FBI geek and demand that he/she explain the workings of Carnivore to the jury?
I respect the FBI. I even trust them ... a little. But my respect rests upon the fact they are constrained by the laws, traditions, and people of the United States. It doesn't take long to slide from law enforcement to police state. And because I respect the FBI, I don't want them to ever be faced with that temptation.
I suppose you believe the 4th, 5th, and 6th Amendments are also criminal-coddling. I mean, if we want to catch criminals, why require search warrants? They just slow down the process and allow the "guilty" to go free...
A free and dignified people must always evaluate any expansion of governmental power, to judge it as to its merits and appropriatness. What are we gaining here? And what are we being asked to yield? From everything -- I mean everything -- that has come out about Carnivore, my opinion is that we are being asked to yield important and vital rights, and that in return we are being offered nothing that is not already available.
For a people to remain free and strong, the government must never be treated like a black box. We own the government, and it's our right and our duty to look under the hood and see how the engine's running.
Yes, but we must hand over the absolute least that we can. No one here has called for the disarmament of the FBI. But by your logic, they should institute phone surveillance of everyone, just in case. And we should welcome this, apparently?If the FBI's motives are so pure, why is the operation -- and for some time, the mere existence -- of Carnivore such a closely-held secret. Why can't the FBI obtain email logs from the ISPs, who collect them for legitmate reason? What else does Carnivore do -- and if the answer is "nothing", why is the FBI afraid to let anyone see the box?
I wonder if the American people are worth saving, if we're so ready to abandon fundamental Consitutional rights ("The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated") in return for hypothetical payoff.
While it sounds great, in principle, to have complete control over UI and controls, it can make moving between pieces of software much harder. I have that beef with programs like WinAmp, which go out of their way to "stand out" -- even at the price of usability.
I think the only recourse left is, as someone suggested, a class action suit. Toysmart collected that information under a privacy agreement that formed part of the contract between the company and its customers. It is now seeking to violate that contract. Because privacy is a major right, its loss should carry a heavy monetary penalty. In fact, if I were czar, I'd make the customers have first claim as creditors.
It is another nickle-and-dime dimunition of our rights. And in this bizarre, psuedo-libertarian corporate culture, contract law is the last remaining bulwark. If companies can violate their agreements at whim, we're really living in some capitalist version of oligarchy, no matter what papers we pretend to govern with.
Anyone else find it amusing that one of the commissioners involved in this is named "Commissioner Swindle?" :) Although this commish does seem to be on the side of goodness and nice.
Check your sources and your facts before being egregiously sarcastic: Although perhaps the construction isn't the best choice, the original article makes clear that the last outer (>11 Gm, or ) moon was discovered in 1974 while Voyager discovered three inner ( 2 Gm) moons in 1979.
Shouldn't you being putting your pinky to your mouth as you intone, "two ... million ... kilometers", Dr. Evil?
Because the poster is right in the particulars and clueless in the import: It is "just semantics", but that doesn't imply it is unimportant. This whole struggle is not about right v. wrong, or even permissible v. illegal. It's about perception. If the Copyright Cartel can convince the average citizen that copyright infringement is stealing -- or better, somehow it's "piracy" -- then they get to take advantage of a built-in connotation, immediately making people thinkg "Oooh, stealing is wrong. So this must be wrong."
"Infringement" does not have that same embedded meaning, so it doesn't rouse the emotions. Of course -- make no mistake here -- the RIAA and the MPAA most certainly do not want to have this settled by reason. The chances are far too good that, considered reasonably, their arguments are untenable. No, the Copyright Cartel want to triumph via the emotions. After all, manipulating emotions is the core of their business anyway. So they attempt to frame the debate in a way to push the buttons of the uninformed.
Sadly, too many seem willing to cede choice of the emotional/intellectual terrain to the enemy... and as any good general will tell you, that spells defeat. Pay attention to Cosmo (from Sneakers ), if you really want to understand this conflict:
I feel for your friend, but no one suggested stepping in and "saving" the horse-and-buggy makers. Technology can move on, and business models sometimes -- despite all the FUD of the RIAA and MPAA -- sometimes do become obsolete.
Back in the 1960s?, similar questions were raised over the building of SLAC. What possible real use would a two-mile-long linear accelerator be? Of course, once the things were built, it became clear that you could use highly-polarized synchroton radiation for fundamental crystal studies, for materials engineering (about as practical as one can get, in terms of research areas), and biomedical studies. These were not foreseen, but they've become really important.
Not everything is going to be electrons and protons under "normal" conditions forever and ever amen. A lot of the 21st century will be breaking the dumb-monkey mold and designing things because we understand them for once. Current understandings of superconductivity, for example, are intimately tied to the Standard Model and the field theory it enshrines. If the SM is replaced, one can imagine -- and I, for one, would be willing to bet -- that it will impact that and other materials field.
A focus on the "practical" is a guarantee that further progress will end -- in basic knowledge, in human scientific endeavour, and in applied technology. Sagan illustrates this nicely in The Demon-Haunted World. In the 1860s, Queen Victoria (he says) could never, despite her power and the wealth of the British Empire, have commanded the invention of a wireless broadcast technology. Yet a social outcast, pursuing his own interests (Maxwell) laid the foundations for the entire telecommunications revolution that we like to preach about. Directed research would never have produced the same results as serendipity, becuase we would never have asked the right questions.
So this probably will be useful for applications someday, in some way. And I'll just leave out the higher, ennobling ends of science. If I have to discuss them, you probably wouldn't understand them anyway.
as somewhat of an audiophile, i can argue that i do hear the difference between vinyl and say, a CD, or an mp3. OK, I'm something of a heretic, but... have you actually done a double-blind test of this? Has anyone ever done a large-scale double-blind study asking whether people can distinguish these things? I'd love to see the results, just to see.
Perhaps the poster has the causal sequence reversed. Perhaps Pepsi has had such a diverse range of commericials precisely because they haven't figured out how to achieve Coke's recognition...
Anyway, the best salvo in the cola wars, IMHO, was the RC Cola commericial toward the end of the Cold War, when they show a "unification" between the two big brands (from the colors, obviously Coke and Pepsi) and say, "But somewhere, freedom of choice still lives" (paraphrased). They cut to some sort of vibrant village festival where everyone is drinking RC ... and then the Cola Nazi break down the doors. I can't remember the tagline but it was hilarious.
Darn, no moderator points to spend. But I have never seen such a concise and relevant explanation of the status of deCSS. Just like it's time to stop acception "pirate" as a synonym for "copyright infringer", it's time to stop accepting the presumption of deCSS' violation of DCMA.
These, every tinplate legislator is trying to apply regulations or taxes to "their" slice of the Internet. We see systems like Carnivore and the firewall in China trying to re-partition the Internet. We see juries and judges trying to apply local standards to a global medium. Anything that calls attention to the geographic location of a server works against the global nature of the system.
It's time for people to understand: cyberspace != real space! There is no good reason -- and about a zillion bad ones -- to replicate the geographical structure of the planet in the Net. Let it go, already.
For from establishing a US dominance, forcing everyone into .com, etc., would lower barriers. Of course, the whole system is mucked up anyway...
I thought the at-larges were supposed to be the counterbalance, the last bastions of hope for the average user to offset the awesome and frightening clout of the corporate droids. At the time people complained that at-large representation seemed to be merely a bone thrown by the powers-that-be, to defuse charges of corporate dominance.
Sadly, it seems such accusations were correct.
But spectrum is not a tangible thing like lorries or sandwiches. Any old bloke with a generator and a crystal can pollute "your" slice of spectrum and deprive you of its usage. Sure, he can't use it any more than you can, but sometimes that isn't important.
However, I agree mostly with the poster's follow-on comment,
To my eye, this model is a better one than the current licensing schemes. Of course, it puts EM spectrum on a footing perilously close to "intellectual property" -- "ownership" of an abstract concept and control of its concrete instantiation. I think it leaves spectrum open to many of the same concerns as IP. Of course, I think the whole edifice of "ownership" of intangibles is an unwarranted (and unsafe) extension of the laws of physical property into socioeconomic spaces wherein they might not be valid.As an aside, according to http://www-chaos.umd.edu/history/imp erial.html, the unification of China into the currently-recognizable entity occured around 221 BC, so that empire lasted for "only" 2100 years. :)
The same source goes on to say "The collapse of the Han dynasty was followed by nearly four centuries of rule by warlords." The Han collapsed around 200 AD, so this dark period runs until around 600 AD. The Chinese Empire is down to, at best, 1300 years of continuous rule. But lo, "Misrule, court intrigues, economic exploitation, and popular rebellions weakened the empire, making it possible for northern invaders to terminate the dynasty in 907. The next half-century saw the fragmentation of China into five northern dynasties and ten southern kingdoms... But in 960 a new power, Song (960-1279), reunified most of China Proper." So the Chinese Empire has only about 1000 years.
In fact, if you look into the history of the Chinese Empire, you find many turnovers and wholesale replacements of the ruling peoples and structures, including foreign dominantion at least twice. I believe the myth of a super-stable Chinese Empire placidly ruling for thousands of years is just that --- a myth.