I'm with David Brin on privacy -- there isn't any, get used to it. That's not what worries me.
There are only two possible reasons for supporting goofy laws like encryption backdoors (or for that matter, outlawing hemp harvesting):
1. The people who support these laws are too stupid to realize that they can't possibly be enforced even-handedly, or
2. They need yet another way to easily repress, intimidate, and imprison any one they want to, anytime they like.
I don't really believe our "leaders" are as stupid as option 1 implies. Do you?
Re:Not really - Client / Server communications...
on
Shirky On P2P
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· Score: 1
"For instance, you don't send email to someone directly - instead you send it to you server,
which then talks to another server, and the end client downloads the email from the server."
Uh, no. That's only since the advent of Dial-ups and NAT. The original plan was that the mail went directly from the host you were logged into to the host the recipient usually logged into.
Likewise, all the hosts ran FTP servers as well as clients.
"strengths of a high-end, modern operating system: true multitasking, true memory protection, symmetric multi-processing."
Those were features of a "high-end" operating system 20 years ago. BSD brought those features to the low end.
It's worth reflecting that the AIDS virus achieved far more in protecting society from careless sex, junkies and Third World people than the FBI could possibly hope to achieve. So a would-be author gets blamed for "billions of dollars" worth of damage, and gets a longer jail sentence than the average rapist. There is no way of directly calculating how much more money would have been lost if AIDS had arrived on the scene before smallpox.
[...]
Yes! And your point is...?
Are you suggesting that if "Typhoid Mary" had been caught and thrown in jail that 25 million Mexican Indians would have lived to become customers of the Spanish entrepreneurs?
We were all so pleased when the University of California agreed to drop the "advertising clause" from their license... Yet another reason to prefer BSD?;-)
I like the way Neal Stephenson said it: "Unix, by contrast, is not so much a product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture. It is our Gilgamesh epic." (from "In the Beginning was the Command Line", available on http://www.cryptonomicon.com/)
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An extra burden on the software/hardware manufacturers so they can justify raising prices, so they can contribute more to political campaigns?
What, cynical? Me?
I'm with David Brin on privacy -- there isn't any, get used to it. That's not what worries me.
There are only two possible reasons for supporting goofy laws like encryption backdoors (or for that matter, outlawing hemp harvesting):
1. The people who support these laws are too stupid to realize that they can't possibly be enforced even-handedly, or
2. They need yet another way to easily repress, intimidate, and imprison any one they want to, anytime they like.
I don't really believe our "leaders" are as stupid as option 1 implies. Do you?
"For instance, you don't send email to someone directly - instead you send it to you server,
which then talks to another server, and the end client downloads the email from the server."
Uh, no. That's only since the advent of Dial-ups and NAT. The original plan was that the mail went directly from the host you were logged into to the host the recipient usually logged into.
Likewise, all the hosts ran FTP servers as well as clients.
"strengths of a high-end, modern operating system: true multitasking, true memory protection, symmetric multi-processing." Those were features of a "high-end" operating system 20 years ago. BSD brought those features to the low end.
[...]
It's worth reflecting that the AIDS virus achieved far more in protecting society from careless sex, junkies and Third World people than the FBI could possibly hope to achieve. So a would-be author gets blamed for "billions of dollars" worth of damage, and gets a longer jail sentence than the average rapist. There is no way of directly calculating how much more money would have been lost if AIDS had arrived on the scene before smallpox.
[...]
Yes! And your point is...?
Are you suggesting that if "Typhoid Mary" had been caught and thrown in jail that 25 million Mexican Indians would have lived to become customers of the Spanish entrepreneurs?
We were all so pleased when the University of California agreed to drop the "advertising clause" from their license... Yet another reason to prefer BSD? ;-)
I like the way Neal Stephenson said it: "Unix, by contrast, is not so much a product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture. It is our Gilgamesh epic." (from "In the Beginning was the Command Line", available on http://www.cryptonomicon.com/)