I really get a kick from people pointing to these "contracts" put out by corporations and naively believing their worth more than the paper (or monitor) they are printed on.
Someone tell me what law is going to stop a company from "accidently" turning over a database of user preferences to another company? What law is going to stop some data thief from getting into the company's database and turning it over to some other company for a cool $100K?
Let's see, we've the Security & Exchange Commission to regulate and stop invstor trading but it still happens! A toothless agency like the Federal Trade Commission---without even so much as a law to stand on and probably a 1/10th of the budget of the SEC---won't and can't do a thing about the insider trading of private information about consumers.
Within the next 10 years, every consumer will have their profile circulating through the computers of every major consumer-oriented company in America. And if you think it can't happen because you have a "contract," you need a hard lesson in dirty-rotten capitalism.
A friend of mine has invented a way to electronically browse a book on the Internet using the PDF format. He calls it the Riffler.
What's really cool about it is that it works just like browsing a real book at a book store. It will randomly generate a page or block of pages that a viewer can read. So instead of posting just chapter 1, you can post a whole book on the Internet(or only part of it if you are worried about someone stealing it.)
As Ralph Nader says: "If you aren't turned onto politics, politics will turn on you."
In any society, there will always be a ruling class. This has been true since we started walking upright (didn't you see the beginning of 2001?). There will be some group of people who have more power than any other.
Now the whole idea behind our Democracy was to help offset this kind of power by giving everyone a voice in the decision making process. When you disengage from this process, however, you leave the door open for those who ARE engaged in the process to get exactly what they want.
Ask yourself this: if politics is dead, why do corporations and wealthy individuals hand over hundreds of millions of dollars to the political candidates?
The system works, my man, but only for those who choose to take part. There will ALWAYS be someone at the top, be it the Catholic Church, the Kremlin, the King, or a handful of oligarchs. They will ALWAYS want to impose their will on YOU.
So go ahead, disengage from the system. I encourage you to. 'Cuz guess what? I'm VERY wealthy and I'm VERY well-connected with my Congressmen and Senators. And The less I have to worry about mindless peasants getting in the way of what I want to accomplish in life, the better. Keep up the good work. Please spread the word that politics is dead.
We often here companies talk about how they only track "aggregate" numbers. In other words, they don't care really what any one person is doing. They are more interested in looking at the patterns/habits of large numbers of people.
But has anyone stopped to consider that this isn't necessarily going to keep us safe? Think about the power to be able to collectively observe the private habits of 300 million people. I can guarantee you there are mass-psychology specialists poring over all this data, eager to divine the habits and weaknesses the "average" American. And not just the "average" American, either. Don't you think they are tracking this data by zip code? By ethnicity? By age? By sex? By household income? By education? By just about every category that can be plugged into a database?
Now think about how much easier it will become to manipulate the masses with all this data. You, oh genius/. user may not be manipulated. But do you really think Joe Six Pack, and the 80% of Americans who don't give a shit about this issue, will understand how he is being manipulated by this super-sophisticated machine?
And which institutions do you think will have access to this data? The average businessman? The local kid running for city council? The average American looking to petition his/her fellow citizens. Fuck no. The people who will have access to this data, and who will be given a distinct competitive advantage because of it in just about every aspect of Amercian life, will be those who already have the power and the money.
They will create this data and they will consume this data to manipulate the masses into just about anything and we will be just about powerless to do anything about it.
Exactly. I've driven drunk 1,000 times and only hit one kid. Why the fuck did I go to jail? That's statistically insignificant. It's not like I knew something bad was going to happen.
It's the year 2009 and the IRS has finally gotten off its big bureaucratitic butt...and they're pissed.
Now that 80% of the population is using e-mail to send cash, they want to know where their cut is on this deal. Oh, you mean you didn't know that when money exchanges hands needed to pay tax on it? And how much business did you do on E-Bay in Fiscal Year 2006?
House Bill 187 gets introduced and passed into law by a Republican president (who made one too many tax cuts over the past few years and it isn't an election year) which requires all electronic payment services to begin reporting all transactions to the IRS. Conveniently, the taxes will be automatically deducted from all payments as a convenience to consumers everywhere.
Just remember friends, technololgy has an equal and opposite reaction to the dissemination of information: the more it tends to free it, the more it gets imprisoned (once corporations get their hands on it).
Can't happen in the USA, you say? Listen to this scenario:
The RIAA will begin to team up with major ISPs and get them, or have the government get them, to become piracy police. I'm sure companies like Time-Warner/AOL will want the RIAA's interests protected. In fact, MediaOne/AT&T, my ISP currently has it as one of their terms of agreement that "thou shalt not download illegal MP3s with your connection or we mightest terminate your service." The policy already exists, now it's just a matter of MediaOne/AT&T enforcement.
For those ISPs that do not cooperate, the RIAA will have to apply a little more force (such as a federal law requiring ISPs to monitor customers).
In other words, this can happen in America because there are powerful financial forces that will make it happen. Don't be so naive to think the government is the only fucking thing you gotta be worried about.
An ISP has access logs listing the sites you visited, can easily monitor your activity, and have the best ability to police what individuals are doing. Will this kind of monitoring get people really fucking pissed off? Absolutely. Will there still be ways to get free music? Absolutely. Will it be considered a hard core criminal activity (the equivalent of child molestation and drug dealing). Absolutely. Will that get even more people pissed off? Hell yes. It's a vicious circle, ain't it?
To me, it doesn't matter what makes the most money, what is most convenient, or what is practical or effective.
What matters most to me is my dignity and the right not to be required to submit to a "higher" authority so that I may exercise my Constitutional right to freely communicate and share ideas across the Internet.
Why should I be forced to turn my credit card # and my name to a private entity? They do not own the Internet! They do not own my computer! They merely sell me the pen and paper on which I write. They have no right to put strings on how I distribute and share my work.
Let us not forget what happened to radio: Once held out to the world as a two-way communication device, radio is now but a wasteland of gibbering jabberwocky overun with commercials and an asset to no one but the monied classes.
I will not submit. I will let no hindrance come between me and my freedom to communicate. It is one of the most precious rights I have and I will guard it zealously and, if I must, to death.
Extending your argument to its logical conclusion, each time you step foot into a movie theater, the theater operators would be required to obtain your ID and and credit card # for entry. After all, you just might yell "FIRE!" in that crowded theater and wreak all sorts of havoc. No one should be allowed to get away with such behavior anonymously! We must hold everyone accountable for something they *might* do illegally, right? Why don't we just start handing over our DNA samples now? Let's start taking weekly urine samples, too. Doing drugs are wrong. This step will be sure to put a stop to this illegal activity. We just need to be able to hold people more accountable! Right???? Riiiigggggggghhhhhhhhhht...
Aren't most governments just tools of the monied interests working to maintain the status quo in order to safeguard their power? Just think of all the bribery---er, lobbying---it took for American corporations to get the government to do their dirty work for them.
Slashdot Mirror
Someone tell me what law is going to stop a company from "accidently" turning over a database of user preferences to another company? What law is going to stop some data thief from getting into the company's database and turning it over to some other company for a cool $100K?
Let's see, we've the Security & Exchange Commission to regulate and stop invstor trading but it still happens! A toothless agency like the Federal Trade Commission---without even so much as a law to stand on and probably a 1/10th of the budget of the SEC---won't and can't do a thing about the insider trading of private information about consumers.
Within the next 10 years, every consumer will have their profile circulating through the computers of every major consumer-oriented company in America. And if you think it can't happen because you have a "contract," you need a hard lesson in dirty-rotten capitalism.
A friend of mine has invented a way to electronically browse a book on the Internet using the PDF format. He calls it the Riffler.
What's really cool about it is that it works just like browsing a real book at a book store. It will randomly generate a page or block of pages that a viewer can read. So instead of posting just chapter 1, you can post a whole book on the Internet(or only part of it if you are worried about someone stealing it.)
http://washingto npo st.com/wp-dyn/articles/A18824-2000Sep26.html
http://www.votenader.org/
In any society, there will always be a ruling class. This has been true since we started walking upright (didn't you see the beginning of 2001?). There will be some group of people who have more power than any other.
Now the whole idea behind our Democracy was to help offset this kind of power by giving everyone a voice in the decision making process. When you disengage from this process, however, you leave the door open for those who ARE engaged in the process to get exactly what they want.
Ask yourself this: if politics is dead, why do corporations and wealthy individuals hand over hundreds of millions of dollars to the political candidates?
The system works, my man, but only for those who choose to take part. There will ALWAYS be someone at the top, be it the Catholic Church, the Kremlin, the King, or a handful of oligarchs. They will ALWAYS want to impose their will on YOU.
So go ahead, disengage from the system. I encourage you to. 'Cuz guess what? I'm VERY wealthy and I'm VERY well-connected with my Congressmen and Senators. And The less I have to worry about mindless peasants getting in the way of what I want to accomplish in life, the better. Keep up the good work. Please spread the word that politics is dead.
We often here companies talk about how they only track "aggregate" numbers. In other words, they don't care really what any one person is doing. They are more interested in looking at the patterns/habits of large numbers of people. But has anyone stopped to consider that this isn't necessarily going to keep us safe? Think about the power to be able to collectively observe the private habits of 300 million people. I can guarantee you there are mass-psychology specialists poring over all this data, eager to divine the habits and weaknesses the "average" American. And not just the "average" American, either. Don't you think they are tracking this data by zip code? By ethnicity? By age? By sex? By household income? By education? By just about every category that can be plugged into a database? Now think about how much easier it will become to manipulate the masses with all this data. You, oh genius /. user may not be manipulated. But do you really think Joe Six Pack, and the 80% of Americans who don't give a shit about this issue, will understand how he is being manipulated by this super-sophisticated machine?
And which institutions do you think will have access to this data? The average businessman? The local kid running for city council? The average American looking to petition his/her fellow citizens. Fuck no. The people who will have access to this data, and who will be given a distinct competitive advantage because of it in just about every aspect of Amercian life, will be those who already have the power and the money.
They will create this data and they will consume this data to manipulate the masses into just about anything and we will be just about powerless to do anything about it.
Ummm...ever hear of a software program called Photoshop?
Ummm...have you been following the news? Both Firestone and Ford knew about this and did nothing.
Exactly. I've driven drunk 1,000 times and only hit one kid. Why the fuck did I go to jail? That's statistically insignificant. It's not like I knew something bad was going to happen.
It's the year 2009 and the IRS has finally gotten off its big bureaucratitic butt...and they're pissed.
Now that 80% of the population is using e-mail to send cash, they want to know where their cut is on this deal. Oh, you mean you didn't know that when money exchanges hands needed to pay tax on it? And how much business did you do on E-Bay in Fiscal Year 2006?
House Bill 187 gets introduced and passed into law by a Republican president (who made one too many tax cuts over the past few years and it isn't an election year) which requires all electronic payment services to begin reporting all transactions to the IRS. Conveniently, the taxes will be automatically deducted from all payments as a convenience to consumers everywhere.
Just remember friends, technololgy has an equal and opposite reaction to the dissemination of information: the more it tends to free it, the more it gets imprisoned (once corporations get their hands on it).
The RIAA will begin to team up with major ISPs and get them, or have the government get them, to become piracy police. I'm sure companies like Time-Warner/AOL will want the RIAA's interests protected. In fact, MediaOne/AT&T, my ISP currently has it as one of their terms of agreement that "thou shalt not download illegal MP3s with your connection or we mightest terminate your service." The policy already exists, now it's just a matter of MediaOne/AT&T enforcement.
For those ISPs that do not cooperate, the RIAA will have to apply a little more force (such as a federal law requiring ISPs to monitor customers).
In other words, this can happen in America because there are powerful financial forces that will make it happen. Don't be so naive to think the government is the only fucking thing you gotta be worried about.
An ISP has access logs listing the sites you visited, can easily monitor your activity, and have the best ability to police what individuals are doing. Will this kind of monitoring get people really fucking pissed off? Absolutely. Will there still be ways to get free music? Absolutely. Will it be considered a hard core criminal activity (the equivalent of child molestation and drug dealing). Absolutely. Will that get even more people pissed off? Hell yes. It's a vicious circle, ain't it?
To me, it doesn't matter what makes the most money, what is most convenient, or what is practical or effective.
What matters most to me is my dignity and the right not to be required to submit to a "higher" authority so that I may exercise my Constitutional right to freely communicate and share ideas across the Internet.
Why should I be forced to turn my credit card # and my name to a private entity? They do not own the Internet! They do not own my computer! They merely sell me the pen and paper on which I write. They have no right to put strings on how I distribute and share my work.
Let us not forget what happened to radio: Once held out to the world as a two-way communication device, radio is now but a wasteland of gibbering jabberwocky overun with commercials and an asset to no one but the monied classes.
I will not submit. I will let no hindrance come between me and my freedom to communicate. It is one of the most precious rights I have and I will guard it zealously and, if I must, to death.
Hey, thanks for the heads up on this live webcast.
Sorry, my little man.
I did 6 years in the United States Navy and served on three Nuclear Subs. Piss tests? Been there, done that, to coin a "Gen-X" phrase.
Go argue your narrow-minded stereotypes and half-baked assumptions somewhere else.
By the way, my parents are in their seventies.
Extending your argument to its logical conclusion, each time you step foot into a movie theater, the theater operators would be required to obtain your ID and and credit card # for entry. After all, you just might yell "FIRE!" in that crowded theater and wreak all sorts of havoc. No one should be allowed to get away with such behavior anonymously! We must hold everyone accountable for something they *might* do illegally, right? Why don't we just start handing over our DNA samples now? Let's start taking weekly urine samples, too. Doing drugs are wrong. This step will be sure to put a stop to this illegal activity. We just need to be able to hold people more accountable! Right???? Riiiigggggggghhhhhhhhhht...
Aren't most governments just tools of the monied interests working to maintain the status quo in order to safeguard their power? Just think of all the bribery---er, lobbying---it took for American corporations to get the government to do their dirty work for them.