People have theoretically showed themselves to be housetrained members of the slashdot community by the time they get the +2 bonus (well before reaching 50 karma) karma exists then not as a means of demonstrating you are housetrained but of accumulating respect.
A quest for respect is in fact the reason we do most things. It doesn't actually benifit us any to post our ideas to slashdot except we somehow gain pleasure out of the thought we will convince others of the validity of our positions. It is a similar desire for respect which drives altruism and other nice things in local communities (and some people who are just truly good).
The internet however presents a medium where our contact with others is so fleeting (i.e. there are so many people we may interact with an entierly differnt set of people today aw we did yesterday) that traditional methods of accumulating respect (people remember what you said before and gauge your current statements by it) aren't as efficent. To this end karma sort of serves as a cybernetic enhancement of these notions of respect...a limited one dimensional sort of group respect. Therefore by limiting karma at 50 you probably reduce the incentive for many people to post informative useful opinions.
On the other hand just as you might have the con man manufacturing fake respect in the real world you might have karma whore using multiple accounts or other moderation schemes to falsely gain karma.
Ok first of all I never made the claim that this was a victimless crime. I analagized it to "victimless" crimes in the real world to point out the difficulty of enforcing the law when the offended party (the copyright holder) is not a party to the illegal act (copying the program or whatever). The argument was that because everone who might have firsthand knowledge of the actual crime has a motivation to remain quite (unlike a burglary where the man who was burgled is a party to the crime and has interest in seeing hte burglar arrested) it it much more difficult of a law to enforce.
Now I am not an expert (and would appreciate someone to back me up on this one) but wasn't prohibition repealed to a great extent not because a great majority wanted alchool but because enforcement was failing so people got alchool and more violence occured. I imagine a great many laws are probably repealed to some degree or another b/c of enforcement problems but what agency is going to broadcast this fact.
Now unless there is a major upset in the world of mathematics or a worldwide tyrannical police state it appears that it indeed will be possible to retain anaonymous communication on the internet. With the current state of encryption as the power of computers grow the balance shifts more and more to the encryptor and further away from those who would attempt to break my encryption. Already I can create in seconds and decrypt in seconds a message which might take thousands of years to decrypt on the same hardware (maybe in the tens or even several years) for specialized hardware but still certainly to expensive to waste on all but the most wanted criminals. It is very possible, probable even, that this fundamental advantage to the encryptor will be proven correct.
Now given the great difficulty in breaking said encryption a series of remailers like the cypherpunk remailers set up in countries all around the world can be used with the same message differntly encrypted (with random time delays) between each of these machines. Even if several, perhaps most, of the machines were comprimised (meaning actually under the control of a government agency which wanted your information) they would still not be able to decipher what your message was or connect you and the reipiant except under exceptional circumstances. This is not like normal crimes where technology inherintly favors the investigating party but instead appears to be just hte opposite where technology favors the party trying to remain anonymous.
First of all ingesting substances while pregnant is certainly not equivalent to doing drugs while not being pregnant. In essence what you are doing while pregnant is using drugs and forcing another to imbibe the drugs as well.
Yes you have established it is possible to harm another being with drugs...WOW just like all other pieces of matter in the universe it is possible to commit a crime with an actual victim.
Yes indeed street gangs to fight over drugs but this is not a direct result of someone imbibing/possesing the drug (in fact there are good arguments that it is the result of the prohibition). You might argue that by using drugs you contribute to the demand and are hence responsible for the harm caused. However this argument is just as applicable to petroleum or whatever other scare resource in the world which people fight over (if no one wanted gasoline, gold or anything at all there would be nothing to fight over).
Do drugs contribute to crime? Of course (which does not imply that prohibition necesserily is a good idea) but this does not mean that the consumption of drugs is actually victimizing someone.
>a key component of it is willingness to pay for your crimes.
Yes this was a key component of the civil disobediance of the 60's as protests were necesserily not hidden thereby leaving the only choices of violence or accepting arrest. Besides arrest in many instances lent weight to their cause.
This is however not always true. Consider the undergroud railway of an earlier era. This was certainly a well justified violation of the fugitive slave laws, however, those engaged in the undergroud railroad where not willing to pay for their crimes. They believed in the moral rectitude of their actions and saw no need to go to jail for these actions.
The government is no differnt than a gang, tribe or any other large organized group of people. The fact that millions of people believe you should go to jail for your actions gives them no inherent moral authority.
I used the quotation marks around victimless to try to avoid precisely this argument.
Drug use, like anything else, is not consequentless. As drugs are very often undertaken in a poorly thought out manner (those taking the drugs are either engaging in self-destructive behavior or not properly weighing the cost and benifits) with visible consequences some people might call the drug user the victim.
However, the way I use victim, and I think is the prevalent usage is not someone who suffers due to their own poor choices (someone who drops out of college is not a victim they are meerly excersising poor judgement) but instead is someone who unfairly has negative consequences inflicted on them by another. In this sense then drug use is indeed victimless.
Of course you might still claim as victims the friends and relatives of said individual but once again I disagree with this usage. True they are victims in a pure utilitarian sense for if the drug user had not undertaken his actions they would not be in pain but a similar argument makes us all criminals with victims every poor man and women we have not contributed to or given money too.
Moreover, someone coming from an atheist family might hurt his friends and family (because of their belif he is wasting his life) by becoming a priest yet I think we would all hesitate to say his family were victims of his actions.
The differentiating point here is that a victim must have his plight inflicted unfairly. In this sense someone who is mugged is a victim because his loss of money is unfair while a family member saddened at the drug abuse of another has had none of his rights violated hence while they are in a poor position it is not unfairly poor and thus they are not a victim
No, I wasn't clear. It is okay to break a law inconsistant with MY worldview. If you have a differnt worldview I must believe you are in fact incorrect (otherwise I wouldn't believe I was correct).
It is however required of you by consistancy to break laws that disagree with your worldview.
Now things like the french revolution are probably better examples of mistakes. For example it is okay for me to bake an apple pie for my friend, however I am unaware of his allergy to apples and cause him harm. Similar to these revolutions the people who started the revolution had no intention of the disastorous results therefore we may label them as ignorant or without foresight but we would not label them morally lacking
I disagree with your claim about the ability to enforce.
First of all it is the size of the community resisting these changes which makes it more difficult to enforce. In the real world crimes are so often able to be solved because there is an opposing interest. Burn down someones house and it is obvious a crime has been commited and that man his friends and anyone walking in the neighborhood that night are willing to help the police find the guilty party.
This is why there is some much trouble enforcing "victimless" crimes. For instance despite the billions and billions of dollars spent in drug interdiction the government has not been able to stem the flow of drugs. The reason is that their is no offended party so the government has no entry into the situation. A similar argument applies to the possesion and distribution of materials on the internet. The person who suffers harm from the crimes (presumably the MPAA) is not a party to the transaction making enforcement much more difficult.
Secondly the internet is a much more controlled medium. Breaking into a neighbors house, no matter how careful you are, leaves the possibility for incidental evidence. Carefully planning and using multiple mail anonymyzers carries no such risk.
Thirdly the manner and dedication of the people engaged in the crimes. Criminals are often caught so easily because they commit their actions in the heat of the moment without planning or forethought. Moreover, I would hasten to add that your hacker is far more sophisticated than your average burglar.
Furthermore, while lynchings and murders did occur in times past, I do not believe there was ever an organized genocidal type effort. Fortunately such a thing never emerged but if it had (and had enough backers) it might have worked. Conversely the civil rights movement steadfastly refused to obey racially discriminitive laws (in a non-violent manner) and eventually in fact these laws did disappear.
>I cannot help thinking that by giving these DeCSS spammers the oxygen of publicity, we risk setting a very bad example for the weaker members of society (like our children) who may think that its OK to break a law, simply because it doesn't fit with your world view.
In fact, almost by definition, it is okay to break a law which does not agree with your worldview. If you do not believe such an action is wrong then in fact it is not wrong even if 300 million people believe that it is wrong and are willing to throw you in jail for it. Now of course some actions may be wrong for secondary reasons (for example you may believe it to be morally justifiable to shoot someone who is a very negative influence on society but you realize that others may duplicate your actions on otherw who aren't so deserving) but DeCSS doesn't seem like such an issue.
There are many instances of righteous law breaking. For instance the civil rights movement in the south purposefully violated many racist laws in order to get them appealed. Every revolution throughout history, especially against the most tyranical regimes, has been breaking the law and yet many of these revolutions are now venerated and seen as cornerstones of our society (be it the signing of the magna carta or the american revolution).
Yes I do in fact think there would be as much terroism around the world if CNN turned a blind eye. The majority of terrorists do not want the United states attention or any other of these far flung countries attention. They are motivated by a sense of vengence and a desire to right what is an inherintly local wrong. Unless the government placed gag orders on every citizen those close to the affected (the people the terrorists are trying to scare) would here about the activities.
Moreover we only hate terrorists because we feel their causes are wrong. In fact we still celebrate the "terrorist" bomb attempt to kill hitler (which would no doubt have been a good thing if it succeded).
In fact in reference to CNN it seems bringing the world attention to the problem often alleves it. It attracts the notice of non-partisans whose only goal is to end the violence. For instance many of the US recent overseas milatary missions have been motivated by the moral outrage of viewers at home (think somalia). The peace process in northern ireland and in isreal has also no doubt been helped by US involvement which is a direct result of US citizens caring about peace in the region which is a result of being informed via CNN.
Re:I don't want to believe, I want to be left alon
on
Hackers And Mysticism?
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· Score: 2
No in fact I am an atheist. I was giving an explanation for why many atheists seem to preech their atheism as much as religions preech.
The motivations for an argument have no bearing on the truth of that argument. I may want others to belive the earth is 4 billion (or however) many years old because I want to discredit their religious philosophy but this does not change in any way the truth of my claim.
And my observation does not individually impinge upon you. This is something that really bothers me when someone says group X is more likely to have prooperty Y and someone who is in group X gets very mad because they do not have property Y. You don't fall into the category good for you...now it very well be that I have made an incorrect generalization and you are one data point against that but don't take it personally.
While I do generally dislike broad generalizations made about hackers/geeks this is quite an interesting question.
Hackers/geeks like everyone else *want* to believe in religion a higher power to give them comfort. While some may deny this I think the prevalance of religious people on earth (for whatever reason) is more than enough to establish that the human pysche naturally craves something outside itself.
Unfourtunatly people of our persuasion often find "normal" religions inadequate. Whether it is because we are smarter than the average practitioner and hence see the flaws in their belif or because we are used to working in formal none emotive enviornment and hence aren't well equiped to handle the emotional type of religion often practiced hackers often seem to reject conventional religion.
This pushes them in several ways. First some of them turn to alternate spiritualites which let them blaze their own path. Also, as is quite obvious many of them turn to very vocal atheism. This atheism/agnosticism is most likely so vocal because secretly they want someone to come around and convince them they are wrong. If they simply thought others were making a factual mistake they would treat them no differntly than someone who belived (mistakenly) that Mt. McKinley is higher than everest but the desperate need to prove to them they are wrong and broudcast it loudly probably represents a desire to be proven wrong.
Well this is at least true of myself and maybe Im wrong in my generalization but im interested in your comments.
I use gpg and mutt but am a little scared about my passphrase. As far as I can determine from both the mutt source code and documentation mutt stores the pgp key in unprotected memory and then passes the key to gpg via a command line.
Now it was a simple fix to let mutt declare the memmory private or protected or whatever (so it won't get swapped to disk) but I didn't bother as the week link really seemed to be passing the key tpo gpg. Maybe I am mistaken or things have changed but it seems to me anyone with a script and read access to/proc can get my passphrase.
You can't buy from them with a fake everything. If someone wanted to connect you with the stuff you bought all they need to do is look up the various addresses you might have used to ship things too you. And the only time your privacy like this really matters is when those trying to break your privacy care that much. If some junk mailer wants to send you some catalogs this isn't the end of your life...if someone wants to out you because of the controversial books you buy it might be.
I tend to agree with your statement in general but books are something special. Seeing what someone reads tells you a great deal about both their political belifs and personal problems.
Moreover information from book sales is much more damning. This information that I browsed web pages about cancer is virtually meaningless it could have been idle curiosity looking up some piece of info for a friend or just settling an argument. If however I bought a book detalining ways of coping with cancer it is virtually guaranteed I, or a close associate, actually has the disease.
This kind of information could play havoc politically. THe knowledge that Gulianni had cancer significantly effected the new york elections...certainly if this sort of information were leaked about a politician. Even worse would be information leaked that a politician was reading a socially disapproved book...what if they bought a work by karl marx...leaking this could certainly turn an election
I know alternative DNS hierarchies have been proposed for awhile but what about something slightly different. The RBL has beeneffective in combating open mail relays why not something similar to combat inappropriate legal action to steal domain names.
Someone could run a list/dns server listing only those names which have unfairly been taken (such as this one presumably) and pointing them at there rightful owners. Then others could opt in to explicity check this domain hierarchy before the official one.
We are not powerless we can punish the companies who do shit like this.
First of all the "power/control" you have with linux is simply a consequence of the UI. Windows does not technically prevent you from writing code to perform the same tasks all that is differnt is how you go about accessing the underlying utilites (COM vs. calling a shell program). I would argue that not only the command line but also the host of small utilities are all part of the GNU/linux UI. If we are not using linux for this what are we using it for.
>Linux interfaces have been awful, oh so unimaginably awful, until recently.
This really depends on what you mean by interface. As argued before the command line provides a much superior interface to MAC OS or Windows for those of us with greater technical background. As many people often mean good interface==can be used easily by a newbie linux does have a terrible interface but is that the kind of interface we really want. Now I agree that the graphical user interface is lacking but it is still superior to those other interfaces because it is not restrictive.
Does the standardized windows interface restrict the user. Yes I think it does. We have to go the the control panels to change things (or use special document registry features) we cannot like the guy before mentioned easily write a shell script to change our IP. Suppose I have a list of files which I want to change the name in some specific pattern and copy them to another directory. In linux I can often do this on the command line but not in windows.
Why? because power is taken away from the user in the name of usability by the many.
>This is a classic overreaction. If you have access to a terminal window..[snip]..then you can do whatever you want
Not true. This only occurs if all programs have standard terminal level interfaces which is precisely what I am worried about. If all the new software is writtne in gnome what base do we have at the terminal level to hook into?
I am particularly upset by the remark that whoever decided to allow multiple window managers for X was smoking crack. I mean why are we using linux/unix at all if it isn't a way for us to roll our own UI.
If Miguel is such a great fan of MS software development he might stop to think why linux users aren't running windows. While a few of us might be apostles of RMS the vast majority have no such noble reasons for not using windows...we simply like using linux better. Hell in many respects windows 2000 is technically superior to linux (support for more hardware etc.. etc..) and many of us were using linux when its usability was much less than that of windows.
Most of us use linux not because of technical or moral reasons but because we like the interface better. Windows standardized their interface and thus restricts the user. I, and I think many others, would like to be able to choose what window manager I use..I want to be able to adjust desktop setting from the command line a la xset b/c this lets me script and program my computer the way I want. I want to be able to choose the way my applications look...when they all have the same standardized UI like windows I feel stifled.
I am very afraid that this flexability which linux posseses will be deystroyed by gnome/KDE. As these projects progress more and more programs which could have been implemented on the command line are implemented in gtk. Soon I won't be able to access my settings except by dialog boxes and I will once again be trapped in windows hell.
A standardized interface means several things. It means no competition which stagnates development. Moreover I have never seen a UI which scales well from the non-technical user to the wizard. It is just too difficult especially for something as large as an OS or windows manager. If we standardize our interface we will all need to live with the stupid quirks designed for the non-technical.
Actually I have programmed both in functional lnguages (common lisp) and procedural ones. Right now I am working on a reasonable sized project in common lisp and I find it *much* easier.
I find in procedural languages it is far easier to mess up in the architecture. You would get to writing some procedure and find it needed access to variable it couldn't get access to or needed to mostly reimplement code that had been rewritten elsewhere but not in a reusable fashion.
In Lisp the encouragement is to write all the small utilities first (and certainly not on data structures which fuck you up b/c they make you concentrate on large scale layout first) and this makes it much easier to build a large project because by the time you have to write the higher level functions you have a very good idea exactly what is going on (as you already wrote the lower level functions).
Secondly (partially in response to the next post) I find it generally easier to debug. In a procedural language you have to go through line by line always to find an error b/c you have large complicated functions. Usually my function bodies in lisp are much sorter consisting mostly of calls to other functions. As such a simple trace or bactrace will be far more helpful than 20 minutes stepping through code.
So I think the interesting question here is would this bill pass if congress didn't know the supreme court would strike it down? I mean congressmen probably get votes from the anti-drug lobby from passing the bill and the backlash which would occur once people actually started being censored never materializes because the ACLU sues and has the bill declared unconstitutional.
A second point I wish to bring up is the ridiculous propaganda being put out by the government. Here in california radio commercials have started airing explaining the "hazards" of even occasional marijuana use. Aren't there any kind of laws which govern what propaganda purposes the government may spend its money on? For instance if the democrats controlled the house senate and presidency could use federal monies specifically to advocate their own reelection?
Why? This is not a moral primitive as not all theft is wrong. Consider the case where one person has far more food than he needs others are starving and he refuses to let them have any. In this case taking the food from him is perfectly justified.
In fact this is essentially what taxes are. The government takes things you own backed up by force. Merely being backed by the majority of the population does not change the nature of the act.
I claim theft is wrong because it hurts others. If I steal from you now you are deprived of that item and hence less well off. in some cases (taxes and extreme situations) the benifits to others are enough to compensate for the disutility of the confiscation.
Intellectual property is inherintly differnt. If I am a poor college student who would never otherwise buy an expensive software package by pirating it I only increase people's utility. Those who made the product are entierly unaffected by my "theft" while I am strictly better off.
Secondly it is not clear that IP is really property. A very good argument could be made that we have property rights at all to prevent things being taken from us. As IP cannot be taken away from us is it really property? Merely because governments and corporations tell you it is does not make it so.
Look...the report came from beyond2000 while I really like the show they do tend to overdramatize things (so don't take what they say too seriously).
For instance they claim to deal with DDOS byt shutting off access to that port. While this certainly helps with ddos (less half-open connections) so the computer may not crash. It doesn't eliminate the ddos.
I would wait for confirmation before taking all the claims here as gold.
Well several reasons...for the time being suppose you have a group of machines (workstations or whatever) to protect.
If the program is not distributed by running port scans and various other info gather activities against machine A, B and C I can gain information about machine D as they are probably all configured similarly.
If they run only with local data they may not pick up patterns over multiple computers.
A partially succesful attack on machine A (non-root access) or even an attempted attack causes machine A may cause the machine to close the port...it would be nice if the other machines did similarly (as they know there is a security hole here).
Which machine has control over the firewall? It seems one of the advantages of this system is that it can dynamically affect the firewall. If any machine has the ability to unilaterally affect the firewall one hacked machine could enact changes which fuck up the entire network.
Communicating with client software on the machines probably makes it easier to determine which machines are hacked
What I thought was particularly scary was the suggestion that the government needed to "educate" the young people who think piracy is no big deal.
I realize education doesn't seem like a big deal when we are talking about a prosecutable crime but this seems to undermine the entire idea of the US as a republican state. Laws are supposed to flow from the combined will of the people not from lobbyists powerful enough to spend the *peoples* money to convince them of certain positions.
Slashdot Mirror
People have theoretically showed themselves to be housetrained members of the slashdot community by the time they get the +2 bonus (well before reaching 50 karma) karma exists then not as a means of demonstrating you are housetrained but of accumulating respect.
A quest for respect is in fact the reason we do most things. It doesn't actually benifit us any to post our ideas to slashdot except we somehow gain pleasure out of the thought we will convince others of the validity of our positions. It is a similar desire for respect which drives altruism and other nice things in local communities (and some people who are just truly good).
The internet however presents a medium where our contact with others is so fleeting (i.e. there are so many people we may interact with an entierly differnt set of people today aw we did yesterday) that traditional methods of accumulating respect (people remember what you said before and gauge your current statements by it) aren't as efficent. To this end karma sort of serves as a cybernetic enhancement of these notions of respect...a limited one dimensional sort of group respect. Therefore by limiting karma at 50 you probably reduce the incentive for many people to post informative useful opinions.
On the other hand just as you might have the con man manufacturing fake respect in the real world you might have karma whore using multiple accounts or other moderation schemes to falsely gain karma.
Ok first of all I never made the claim that this was a victimless crime. I analagized it to "victimless" crimes in the real world to point out the difficulty of enforcing the law when the offended party (the copyright holder) is not a party to the illegal act (copying the program or whatever). The argument was that because everone who might have firsthand knowledge of the actual crime has a motivation to remain quite (unlike a burglary where the man who was burgled is a party to the crime and has interest in seeing hte burglar arrested) it it much more difficult of a law to enforce.
Now I am not an expert (and would appreciate someone to back me up on this one) but wasn't prohibition repealed to a great extent not because a great majority wanted alchool but because enforcement was failing so people got alchool and more violence occured. I imagine a great many laws are probably repealed to some degree or another b/c of enforcement problems but what agency is going to broadcast this fact.
Now unless there is a major upset in the world of mathematics or a worldwide tyrannical police state it appears that it indeed will be possible to retain anaonymous communication on the internet. With the current state of encryption as the power of computers grow the balance shifts more and more to the encryptor and further away from those who would attempt to break my encryption. Already I can create in seconds and decrypt in seconds a message which might take thousands of years to decrypt on the same hardware (maybe in the tens or even several years) for specialized hardware but still certainly to expensive to waste on all but the most wanted criminals. It is very possible, probable even, that this fundamental advantage to the encryptor will be proven correct.
Now given the great difficulty in breaking said encryption a series of remailers like the cypherpunk remailers set up in countries all around the world can be used with the same message differntly encrypted (with random time delays) between each of these machines. Even if several, perhaps most, of the machines were comprimised (meaning actually under the control of a government agency which wanted your information) they would still not be able to decipher what your message was or connect you and the reipiant except under exceptional circumstances. This is not like normal crimes where technology inherintly favors the investigating party but instead appears to be just hte opposite where technology favors the party trying to remain anonymous.
Ok lets go through this slowly one more time.
First of all ingesting substances while pregnant is certainly not equivalent to doing drugs while not being pregnant. In essence what you are doing while pregnant is using drugs and forcing another to imbibe the drugs as well.
Yes you have established it is possible to harm another being with drugs...WOW just like all other pieces of matter in the universe it is possible to commit a crime with an actual victim.
Yes indeed street gangs to fight over drugs but this is not a direct result of someone imbibing/possesing the drug (in fact there are good arguments that it is the result of the prohibition). You might argue that by using drugs you contribute to the demand and are hence responsible for the harm caused. However this argument is just as applicable to petroleum or whatever other scare resource in the world which people fight over (if no one wanted gasoline, gold or anything at all there would be nothing to fight over).
Do drugs contribute to crime? Of course (which does not imply that prohibition necesserily is a good idea) but this does not mean that the consumption of drugs is actually victimizing someone.
>a key component of it is willingness to pay for your crimes.
Yes this was a key component of the civil disobediance of the 60's as protests were necesserily not hidden thereby leaving the only choices of violence or accepting arrest. Besides arrest in many instances lent weight to their cause.
This is however not always true. Consider the undergroud railway of an earlier era. This was certainly a well justified violation of the fugitive slave laws, however, those engaged in the undergroud railroad where not willing to pay for their crimes. They believed in the moral rectitude of their actions and saw no need to go to jail for these actions.
The government is no differnt than a gang, tribe or any other large organized group of people. The fact that millions of people believe you should go to jail for your actions gives them no inherent moral authority.
I used the quotation marks around victimless to try to avoid precisely this argument.
Drug use, like anything else, is not consequentless. As drugs are very often undertaken in a poorly thought out manner (those taking the drugs are either engaging in self-destructive behavior or not properly weighing the cost and benifits) with visible consequences some people might call the drug user the victim.
However, the way I use victim, and I think is the prevalent usage is not someone who suffers due to their own poor choices (someone who drops out of college is not a victim they are meerly excersising poor judgement) but instead is someone who unfairly has negative consequences inflicted on them by another. In this sense then drug use is indeed victimless.
Of course you might still claim as victims the friends and relatives of said individual but once again I disagree with this usage. True they are victims in a pure utilitarian sense for if the drug user had not undertaken his actions they would not be in pain but a similar argument makes us all criminals with victims every poor man and women we have not contributed to or given money too.
Moreover, someone coming from an atheist family might hurt his friends and family (because of their belif he is wasting his life) by becoming a priest yet I think we would all hesitate to say his family were victims of his actions.
The differentiating point here is that a victim must have his plight inflicted unfairly. In this sense someone who is mugged is a victim because his loss of money is unfair while a family member saddened at the drug abuse of another has had none of his rights violated hence while they are in a poor position it is not unfairly poor and thus they are not a victim
No, I wasn't clear. It is okay to break a law inconsistant with MY worldview. If you have a differnt worldview I must believe you are in fact incorrect (otherwise I wouldn't believe I was correct).
It is however required of you by consistancy to break laws that disagree with your worldview.
Now things like the french revolution are probably better examples of mistakes. For example it is okay for me to bake an apple pie for my friend, however I am unaware of his allergy to apples and cause him harm. Similar to these revolutions the people who started the revolution had no intention of the disastorous results therefore we may label them as ignorant or without foresight but we would not label them morally lacking
I disagree with your claim about the ability to enforce.
First of all it is the size of the community resisting these changes which makes it more difficult to enforce. In the real world crimes are so often able to be solved because there is an opposing interest. Burn down someones house and it is obvious a crime has been commited and that man his friends and anyone walking in the neighborhood that night are willing to help the police find the guilty party.
This is why there is some much trouble enforcing "victimless" crimes. For instance despite the billions and billions of dollars spent in drug interdiction the government has not been able to stem the flow of drugs. The reason is that their is no offended party so the government has no entry into the situation. A similar argument applies to the possesion and distribution of materials on the internet. The person who suffers harm from the crimes (presumably the MPAA) is not a party to the transaction making enforcement much more difficult.
Secondly the internet is a much more controlled medium. Breaking into a neighbors house, no matter how careful you are, leaves the possibility for incidental evidence. Carefully planning and using multiple mail anonymyzers carries no such risk.
Thirdly the manner and dedication of the people engaged in the crimes. Criminals are often caught so easily because they commit their actions in the heat of the moment without planning or forethought. Moreover, I would hasten to add that your hacker is far more sophisticated than your average burglar.
Furthermore, while lynchings and murders did occur in times past, I do not believe there was ever an organized genocidal type effort. Fortunately such a thing never emerged but if it had (and had enough backers) it might have worked. Conversely the civil rights movement steadfastly refused to obey racially discriminitive laws (in a non-violent manner) and eventually in fact these laws did disappear.
>I cannot help thinking that by giving these DeCSS spammers the oxygen of publicity, we risk setting a very bad example for the weaker members of society (like our children) who may think that its OK to break a law, simply because it doesn't fit with your world view.
In fact, almost by definition, it is okay to break a law which does not agree with your worldview. If you do not believe such an action is wrong then in fact it is not wrong even if 300 million people believe that it is wrong and are willing to throw you in jail for it. Now of course some actions may be wrong for secondary reasons (for example you may believe it to be morally justifiable to shoot someone who is a very negative influence on society but you realize that others may duplicate your actions on otherw who aren't so deserving) but DeCSS doesn't seem like such an issue.
There are many instances of righteous law breaking. For instance the civil rights movement in the south purposefully violated many racist laws in order to get them appealed. Every revolution throughout history, especially against the most tyranical regimes, has been breaking the law and yet many of these revolutions are now venerated and seen as cornerstones of our society (be it the signing of the magna carta or the american revolution).
Yes I do in fact think there would be as much terroism around the world if CNN turned a blind eye. The majority of terrorists do not want the United states attention or any other of these far flung countries attention. They are motivated by a sense of vengence and a desire to right what is an inherintly local wrong. Unless the government placed gag orders on every citizen those close to the affected (the people the terrorists are trying to scare) would here about the activities.
Moreover we only hate terrorists because we feel their causes are wrong. In fact we still celebrate the "terrorist" bomb attempt to kill hitler (which would no doubt have been a good thing if it succeded).
In fact in reference to CNN it seems bringing the world attention to the problem often alleves it. It attracts the notice of non-partisans whose only goal is to end the violence. For instance many of the US recent overseas milatary missions have been motivated by the moral outrage of viewers at home (think somalia). The peace process in northern ireland and in isreal has also no doubt been helped by US involvement which is a direct result of US citizens caring about peace in the region which is a result of being informed via CNN.
No in fact I am an atheist. I was giving an explanation for why many atheists seem to preech their atheism as much as religions preech.
The motivations for an argument have no bearing on the truth of that argument. I may want others to belive the earth is 4 billion (or however) many years old because I want to discredit their religious philosophy but this does not change in any way the truth of my claim.
And my observation does not individually impinge upon you. This is something that really bothers me when someone says group X is more likely to have prooperty Y and someone who is in group X gets very mad because they do not have property Y. You don't fall into the category good for you...now it very well be that I have made an incorrect generalization and you are one data point against that but don't take it personally.
While I do generally dislike broad generalizations made about hackers/geeks this is quite an interesting question.
Hackers/geeks like everyone else *want* to believe in religion a higher power to give them comfort. While some may deny this I think the prevalance of religious people on earth (for whatever reason) is more than enough to establish that the human pysche naturally craves something outside itself.
Unfourtunatly people of our persuasion often find "normal" religions inadequate. Whether it is because we are smarter than the average practitioner and hence see the flaws in their belif or because we are used to working in formal none emotive enviornment and hence aren't well equiped to handle the emotional type of religion often practiced hackers often seem to reject conventional religion.
This pushes them in several ways. First some of them turn to alternate spiritualites which let them blaze their own path. Also, as is quite obvious many of them turn to very vocal atheism. This atheism/agnosticism is most likely so vocal because secretly they want someone to come around and convince them they are wrong. If they simply thought others were making a factual mistake they would treat them no differntly than someone who belived (mistakenly) that Mt. McKinley is higher than everest but the desperate need to prove to them they are wrong and broudcast it loudly probably represents a desire to be proven wrong.
Well this is at least true of myself and maybe Im wrong in my generalization but im interested in your comments.
Yes you are correct my original statements where unfounded and I apoligize for spread misinformation.
However with mlock is it not possible to mlock the page and then immediatly give up the root permisions?
I use gpg and mutt but am a little scared about my passphrase. As far as I can determine from both the mutt source code and documentation mutt stores the pgp key in unprotected memory and then passes the key to gpg via a command line.
/proc can get my passphrase.
Now it was a simple fix to let mutt declare the memmory private or protected or whatever (so it won't get swapped to disk) but I didn't bother as the week link really seemed to be passing the key tpo gpg. Maybe I am mistaken or things have changed but it seems to me anyone with a script and read access to
You can't buy from them with a fake everything. If someone wanted to connect you with the stuff you bought all they need to do is look up the various addresses you might have used to ship things too you. And the only time your privacy like this really matters is when those trying to break your privacy care that much. If some junk mailer wants to send you some catalogs this isn't the end of your life...if someone wants to out you because of the controversial books you buy it might be.
Yah...but if I don't give them my address they can't ship me any books.
Maybe I will switch to bn.com..anyone know there privacy policy?
I tend to agree with your statement in general but books are something special. Seeing what someone reads tells you a great deal about both their political belifs and personal problems.
Moreover information from book sales is much more damning. This information that I browsed web pages about cancer is virtually meaningless it could have been idle curiosity looking up some piece of info for a friend or just settling an argument. If however I bought a book detalining ways of coping with cancer it is virtually guaranteed I, or a close associate, actually has the disease.
This kind of information could play havoc politically. THe knowledge that Gulianni had cancer significantly effected the new york elections...certainly if this sort of information were leaked about a politician. Even worse would be information leaked that a politician was reading a socially disapproved book...what if they bought a work by karl marx...leaking this could certainly turn an election
From my understanding these guys don't have access to the server source so how can they possibly be ripping off it's IP?
In effect since no one has reverse enginered said source it is a clean room.
I know alternative DNS hierarchies have been proposed for awhile but what about something slightly different. The RBL has beeneffective in combating open mail relays why not something similar to combat inappropriate legal action to steal domain names.
Someone could run a list/dns server listing only those names which have unfairly been taken (such as this one presumably) and pointing them at there rightful owners. Then others could opt in to explicity check this domain hierarchy before the official one.
We are not powerless we can punish the companies who do shit like this.
Okay I will respond to both posts here.
First of all the "power/control" you have with linux is simply a consequence of the UI. Windows does not technically prevent you from writing code to perform the same tasks all that is differnt is how you go about accessing the underlying utilites (COM vs. calling a shell program). I would argue that not only the command line but also the host of small utilities are all part of the GNU/linux UI. If we are not using linux for this what are we using it for.
>Linux interfaces have been awful, oh so unimaginably awful, until recently.
This really depends on what you mean by interface. As argued before the command line provides a much superior interface to MAC OS or Windows for those of us with greater technical background. As many people often mean good interface==can be used easily by a newbie linux does have a terrible interface but is that the kind of interface we really want. Now I agree that the graphical user interface is lacking but it is still superior to those other interfaces because it is not restrictive.
Does the standardized windows interface restrict the user. Yes I think it does. We have to go the the control panels to change things (or use special document registry features) we cannot like the guy before mentioned easily write a shell script to change our IP. Suppose I have a list of files which I want to change the name in some specific pattern and copy them to another directory. In linux I can often do this on the command line but not in windows.
Why? because power is taken away from the user in the name of usability by the many.
>This is a classic overreaction. If you have access to a terminal window..[snip]..then you can do whatever you want
Not true. This only occurs if all programs have standard terminal level interfaces which is precisely what I am worried about. If all the new software is writtne in gnome what base do we have at the terminal level to hook into?
I am particularly upset by the remark that whoever decided to allow multiple window managers for X was smoking crack. I mean why are we using linux/unix at all if it isn't a way for us to roll our own UI.
If Miguel is such a great fan of MS software development he might stop to think why linux users aren't running windows. While a few of us might be apostles of RMS the vast majority have no such noble reasons for not using windows...we simply like using linux better. Hell in many respects windows 2000 is technically superior to linux (support for more hardware etc.. etc..) and many of us were using linux when its usability was much less than that of windows.
Most of us use linux not because of technical or moral reasons but because we like the interface better. Windows standardized their interface and thus restricts the user. I, and I think many others, would like to be able to choose what window manager I use..I want to be able to adjust desktop setting from the command line a la xset b/c this lets me script and program my computer the way I want. I want to be able to choose the way my applications look...when they all have the same standardized UI like windows I feel stifled.
I am very afraid that this flexability which linux posseses will be deystroyed by gnome/KDE. As these projects progress more and more programs which could have been implemented on the command line are implemented in gtk. Soon I won't be able to access my settings except by dialog boxes and I will once again be trapped in windows hell.
A standardized interface means several things. It means no competition which stagnates development. Moreover I have never seen a UI which scales well from the non-technical user to the wizard. It is just too difficult especially for something as large as an OS or windows manager. If we standardize our interface we will all need to live with the stupid quirks designed for the non-technical.
Actually I have programmed both in functional lnguages (common lisp) and procedural ones. Right now I am working on a reasonable sized project in common lisp and I find it *much* easier.
I find in procedural languages it is far easier to mess up in the architecture. You would get to writing some procedure and find it needed access to variable it couldn't get access to or needed to mostly reimplement code that had been rewritten elsewhere but not in a reusable fashion.
In Lisp the encouragement is to write all the small utilities first (and certainly not on data structures which fuck you up b/c they make you concentrate on large scale layout first) and this makes it much easier to build a large project because by the time you have to write the higher level functions you have a very good idea exactly what is going on (as you already wrote the lower level functions).
Secondly (partially in response to the next post) I find it generally easier to debug. In a procedural language you have to go through line by line always to find an error b/c you have large complicated functions. Usually my function bodies in lisp are much sorter consisting mostly of calls to other functions. As such a simple trace or bactrace will be far more helpful than 20 minutes stepping through code.
So I think the interesting question here is would this bill pass if congress didn't know the supreme court would strike it down? I mean congressmen probably get votes from the anti-drug lobby from passing the bill and the backlash which would occur once people actually started being censored never materializes because the ACLU sues and has the bill declared unconstitutional.
A second point I wish to bring up is the ridiculous propaganda being put out by the government. Here in california radio commercials have started airing explaining the "hazards" of even occasional marijuana use. Aren't there any kind of laws which govern what propaganda purposes the government may spend its money on? For instance if the democrats controlled the house senate and presidency could use federal monies specifically to advocate their own reelection?
>Theft is wrong
Why? This is not a moral primitive as not all theft is wrong. Consider the case where one person has far more food than he needs others are starving and he refuses to let them have any. In this case taking the food from him is perfectly justified.
In fact this is essentially what taxes are. The government takes things you own backed up by force. Merely being backed by the majority of the population does not change the nature of the act.
I claim theft is wrong because it hurts others. If I steal from you now you are deprived of that item and hence less well off. in some cases (taxes and extreme situations) the benifits to others are enough to compensate for the disutility of the confiscation.
Intellectual property is inherintly differnt. If I am a poor college student who would never otherwise buy an expensive software package by pirating it I only increase people's utility. Those who made the product are entierly unaffected by my "theft" while I am strictly better off.
Secondly it is not clear that IP is really property. A very good argument could be made that we have property rights at all to prevent things being taken from us. As IP cannot be taken away from us is it really property? Merely because governments and corporations tell you it is does not make it so.
Look...the report came from beyond2000 while I really like the show they do tend to overdramatize things (so don't take what they say too seriously).
For instance they claim to deal with DDOS byt shutting off access to that port. While this certainly helps with ddos (less half-open connections) so the computer may not crash. It doesn't eliminate the ddos.
I would wait for confirmation before taking all the claims here as gold.
Well several reasons...for the time being suppose you have a group of machines (workstations or whatever) to protect.
If the program is not distributed by running port scans and various other info gather activities against machine A, B and C I can gain information about machine D as they are probably all configured similarly.
If they run only with local data they may not pick up patterns over multiple computers.
A partially succesful attack on machine A (non-root access) or even an attempted attack causes machine A may cause the machine to close the port...it would be nice if the other machines did similarly (as they know there is a security hole here).
Which machine has control over the firewall? It seems one of the advantages of this system is that it can dynamically affect the firewall. If any machine has the ability to unilaterally affect the firewall one hacked machine could enact changes which fuck up the entire network.
Communicating with client software on the machines probably makes it easier to determine which machines are hacked
What I thought was particularly scary was the suggestion that the government needed to "educate" the young people who think piracy is no big deal.
I realize education doesn't seem like a big deal when we are talking about a prosecutable crime but this seems to undermine the entire idea of the US as a republican state. Laws are supposed to flow from the combined will of the people not from lobbyists powerful enough to spend the *peoples* money to convince them of certain positions.