I noticed a few people reacting to the 3,727, as if it was some sort of brute-force attack to get a URL.
If that was 3,727 requests to the http server, I think that wouldn't be very much. That is, reading a web page with graphical elements would, I would think, involve a dozen or so http requests -- more if there were lots of little icons and what not. Two journalists looking at a dozen such web pages a few times each would run up that number pretty quickly. (Can someone with more networking experience than I have check my thinking?)
And, of course, a decent firewall logs all requests, including legitimate requests.
So, I would guess that this is just the politician grabbing a number that sounds large to him, and ascribing significance it doesn't have.
The affected government minister said that the website was accessed 3,727 times, and that this is 'akin to 3,727 attempts to turn the doorknobof an insecure office and make copies of highly confidential documents.'
There, fixed that for you, Mr. Minister.
I'd say it's equivalent to walking up to the headquarters of a government agency, entering by the side door adjacent to the parking lot -- a sliding glass door that opens automatically when you approach -- and walking to the main lobby, going to the kiosk under the sign that reads INFORMATION, and picking up and reading a few brochures with a total of 200 photographs and 3,527 words.
The difference is, by publishing a document on the Internet, you have made it publicly available. The Internet is a public medium. Publishing documents on the Internet is equivalent to passing out leaflets on a busy street corner -- people are likely to ignore you, but the assumption is, they can take the leaflets and read them if they please.
If they didn't want the documents to be publicly available, they could have: * Required a password to view them; * Or, hosted them on a webserver not accessible via the Internet; * Or, not hosted them on a webserver.
The last would have taken no effort at all. You don't actually need a webserver running to view local HTML documents -- your filesystem is perfectly adequate for serving a website to a browser on your own computer.
The short answer is yes, the privacy war has been lost. The Slashdotters who respond with more technical suggestions, or chide the original poster for trading security for convenience, are missing the real point. Human beings are social beings to the core; cutting oneself off from society is not an option, and participation in society means divulging personal information, intentionally and unintentionally. We have a problem that organizations have made an enormous leap in their ability to accumulate and mine that information, and no one is so technically adept that they can out-think every such organization. As one of my instructors put it, unplugging a computer is not a guarantee of security, because an unplugged computer is a "denial of service."
Most people have just given up trying.
We need new social rules. I think the most pressing problem is that individuals are nearly totally exposed, but large institutions are not. The first thing we should do is demand more visibility on the part of large corporate institutions, whether "private" corporations or government entities. The second, which will take time, is to think through and create new social norms, about what should and should not be public knowledge about an individual.
This is an example of a political protest done very badly. A distributed denial of service attack is unethical, to begin with, and thus would alienate many potential allies. Adopting an egregiously sexist title for it makes it worse, alienating more. All in all, this reads like a protest calculated to win support for the government's position.
I only rarely look back at notes I've taken, and then, usually only for specific details: due dates, a URL or book title the instructor mentioned, and so forth. Nevertheless, I take notes in most of my classes -- because the effort to maintain focus on what the instructor is saying, think about how to express it, and write it out, is a significant aid to memory. I find that lectures in which I thought I was paying close attention, but did not take notes, I do not remember as well as the ones for which I took notes -- despite my not reviewing the notes.
I use pen and paper, but mostly because I don't own a laptop anyway. As far as that goes, I'd think, whatever works for you.
I'm sick of the dumbasses still playing Chess 2009. When will they upgrade their crappy hardware? HDTV has been available for years now. There's no excuse for playing old games on SDTV.
As I understood, it was a widely-circulated argument in the major social democratic parties in Europe on the eve of World War I. I haven't read those arguments directly, only their critiques by radical leftists such as Rosa Luxemburg and V. I. Lenin.
I wonder about this sort of thing. Once in a while, documentation comes out, and it's hard to believe. As a moderate example, there's the Skull and Bones secret society at Yale, which has an astonishing number of major US politicians as members. That's public knowledge now, though it still sounds like a bizarre conspiracy theory.
Less dramatic still, but I still found it instructive: I was peripherally involved in a campaign for city council. The candidate I volunteered for was very smart, and had outspoken views on a lot of issues and some really good ideas for improving the city's financial crisis -- the sort of views and ideas that almost never get a hearing in conventional politics. By the end of the campaign, the candidate had repressed or recanted everything in an effort to appease the local newspaper and the major-party candidate for mayor, lost the election, and concluded that it hadn't been worth the effort. Part of what was sick about the situation was that the candidate for mayor needed the support of one more member of city council in order to accomplish anything, but decided that he'd rather be completely powerless as mayor rather than support a third-party candidate.
I never understand this advice. In my experience, bullies gather in packs, and single out individual targets. They *love* it when their victims try to resist them, because then they feel justified in further escalating the violence.
I remember several occasions when I tried to push a bully away, and ending up lying on the ground, covering my face, while half a dozen kids were kicking me. I gave up fighting back and learned to hide. I think that's how I survived -- literally.
When I was a child, I suffered a great deal from bullying, particularly when I went to an elementary school in a wealthy suburb. On the few occasions when school staff intervened, they would ask what it was I was doing that provoked attacks. As I recall, it was the poorer kids, and the kids who were "ethnic" or non-white, who were the principal targets of bullying.
One day, one of our teachers explained about Mutually Assured Destruction, and I realized that bullies ruled the world.
2) Some children really are sissies, and believe it or not, they can get inherently non-bullies to bully them. Sadly, these children often have sissy parents, sissy friends (if any), and are surrounded by sissy teachers. The original article definitely tries to shed light on this sissy factor.
Wouldn't it be more efficient to invest directly in useful research, instead of on useless space exploration, in the hopes that there will be some accidental benefits?
I'm still astonished that this even has to be pointed out. The Moon is uninhabitable. It has no air, no water, and no ecosystem to support agriculture. We can't afford to export resources to the Moon, and even if there are exploitable mineral resources, we can't afford to move them back to Earth.
We have an energy crisis, remember? And a looming water crisis. Colonizing the Moon would make these problems worse. It would solve no problems.
The Apollo project was about developing launch systems for nuclear weapons. The Space Shuttle is about placing military reconnaissance satellites in orbit. The rest is advertising. Colonies on other planets are simply fantasy.
I agree, generally. I'm writing this while taking a break from going over my stepson's high school applications. The applications for high schools are more complex and difficult than the applications for colleges I remember in the late 80s.
Another thing that's concerned me for some time is the near-complete absence of a positive vision of the future. Such a vision can help one overcome any tribulation; the absence of one can make any tribulation seem crushing. In the late 1930s, there were many such visions in play: the democratic republic were still a new idea in much of the world; that science could lead rapidly and directly to practical improvements in daily life was a new phenomenon; the labor movement was broadening its base and establishing its legitimacy; the several varieties of socialism were attracting mass followings; and, hideous as most now recognize it to be, fascism and totalitarianism were seen as visions for a future.
Now, most visions of the future seem to be nothing more than the belief that if we overcome various threats, to the global environment in particular, we may continue to live as we do now, except maybe with better web browsers. Even radicals seem to have very circumscribed visions of what may be accomplished. So, the kids I meet seem to look forward to individual prosperity, or to helping forestall various potential crises, and that's it. It's not much to lean on in times of trouble.
I appreciate your post. While responses on Slashdot are often toxic, I was astonished that the responses here were so uniformly hostile to the very concept of mental illness. Mental illness may be over-diagnosed; however, I've known a lot of people who undoubtedly suffered from mood disorders, and had to find ways to cope with those disorders. I was clinically depressed for years -- it was a real problem.
I do find the original article's claims dubious; in particular, I don't think it makes much sense to compare rates of mental illness in the present with the rates of mental illness in an era in which only a minority of intellectuals and medical professionals had a meaningful understanding of mental illness.
Except that the entire saga was about Anakin/Darth Vader. His fall to evil and ultimate redemption is the backbone of the overall plot.
Episode IV: the first character we're introduced to is the fantastically evil Darth Vader. Obi-Wan tells Luke about his father, the noble Jedi Knight who was his friend. The climax of Episode V: the revelation that Darth Vader and Anakin are the same person. Episode VI: Luke trusts his own feelings and reaches out to the "good" side of Darth Vader, and succeeds.
What more obvious subject to explore in the prequel trilogy but how Anakin Skywalker went from good to evil?
One of the staples of much of the authorized spin-off fiction that I'd seen was that the Clone Wars were a war *against* clones, which makes much more sense, given the name, and the general ominous sound of clones. Wars are named for the subject of contention or the enemy fought against, not for the method of fighting.
What I found maddening about Episodes I-III is that they could *easily* have been a coherent story, with just a little effort to make the connections. It's like they got so wrapped up in the whooshing noises that they literally forgot what the plot was. Lucas was buddy-buddy with Joseph Campbell, author of "The Hero with a Thousand Faces," and set up a classic "black magic" story, but didn't make the obvious connections.
That is, Anakin's haunted by dreams of Amidala's death. He turns to Palpatine, who says the Sith know how to save someone from death. Later, Amidala dies -- for no apparent reason -- Anakin is brought back from the brink of death, in Palpatine's presence, and is thereafter utterly Palpatine's creature, until his redemption and death (which happens, also without explanation, shortly after Anakin/Vader kills Palpatine.)
The obvious way to tie these together is that Palpatine use Sith powers to bring Anakin back to life, through stealing his beloved Amidala's life, and binding Anakin, body and soul, to Palpatine. It's a classic "black magic" motif, it pulls the entire saga together, reinforcing the tragedy of Amidala's death and Anakin's fall, and the nobility of Anakin's ultimate redemption, which in this version would be at the cost of his own life. It's also obvious, and would have taken just a line or two of dialogue to establish.
That they failed to do this, is breathtakingly sloppy.
I also resented the way that Lucas deliberately tossed out years of fan fiction, including authorized fan fiction, some of which was much better stuff than the movies we actually got.
An irony in the struggle between FOSS and proprietary software is that for many people, pirating commercial software is a practical necessity, in part because of the efforts of monopolists to enforce their dominance of the market. How often do you see "Familiarity with OpenOffice.org" in a job description? How many student graphic designers, working their way through school with minimum wage jobs, can use GIMP instead of Photoshop for their class work?
Entertainment media is more complicated, ethically. But given the consolidation of mass media, it's increasingly difficult to find any variety in broadcast music -- a few years ago, there was a much wider range of choices, available legally and freely.
In effect, DRM is a Sword of Damocles hanging over the heads of nearly everyone.
Now that you mention it, the thought that there's some sort of understanding between the GNU and the OpenSource people -- that they're playing out a sort of "good cop bad cop routine" -- has crossed my mind. It seems like too much of a conspiracy theory, but perhaps that's how it's working out in practice.
Slashdot Mirror
I noticed a few people reacting to the 3,727, as if it was some sort of brute-force attack to get a URL.
If that was 3,727 requests to the http server, I think that wouldn't be very much. That is, reading a web page with graphical elements would, I would think, involve a dozen or so http requests -- more if there were lots of little icons and what not. Two journalists looking at a dozen such web pages a few times each would run up that number pretty quickly. (Can someone with more networking experience than I have check my thinking?)
And, of course, a decent firewall logs all requests, including legitimate requests.
So, I would guess that this is just the politician grabbing a number that sounds large to him, and ascribing significance it doesn't have.
There, fixed that for you, Mr. Minister.
I'd say it's equivalent to walking up to the headquarters of a government agency, entering by the side door adjacent to the parking lot -- a sliding glass door that opens automatically when you approach -- and walking to the main lobby, going to the kiosk under the sign that reads INFORMATION, and picking up and reading a few brochures with a total of 200 photographs and 3,527 words.
The difference is, by publishing a document on the Internet, you have made it publicly available. The Internet is a public medium. Publishing documents on the Internet is equivalent to passing out leaflets on a busy street corner -- people are likely to ignore you, but the assumption is, they can take the leaflets and read them if they please.
If they didn't want the documents to be publicly available, they could have:
* Required a password to view them;
* Or, hosted them on a webserver not accessible via the Internet;
* Or, not hosted them on a webserver.
The last would have taken no effort at all. You don't actually need a webserver running to view local HTML documents -- your filesystem is perfectly adequate for serving a website to a browser on your own computer.
The short answer is yes, the privacy war has been lost. The Slashdotters who respond with more technical suggestions, or chide the original poster for trading security for convenience, are missing the real point. Human beings are social beings to the core; cutting oneself off from society is not an option, and participation in society means divulging personal information, intentionally and unintentionally. We have a problem that organizations have made an enormous leap in their ability to accumulate and mine that information, and no one is so technically adept that they can out-think every such organization. As one of my instructors put it, unplugging a computer is not a guarantee of security, because an unplugged computer is a "denial of service."
Most people have just given up trying.
We need new social rules. I think the most pressing problem is that individuals are nearly totally exposed, but large institutions are not. The first thing we should do is demand more visibility on the part of large corporate institutions, whether "private" corporations or government entities. The second, which will take time, is to think through and create new social norms, about what should and should not be public knowledge about an individual.
The sexism of the latter doesn't justify the sexism of the former. It just adds up to more sexism.
This is an example of a political protest done very badly. A distributed denial of service attack is unethical, to begin with, and thus would alienate many potential allies. Adopting an egregiously sexist title for it makes it worse, alienating more. All in all, this reads like a protest calculated to win support for the government's position.
I only rarely look back at notes I've taken, and then, usually only for specific details: due dates, a URL or book title the instructor mentioned, and so forth. Nevertheless, I take notes in most of my classes -- because the effort to maintain focus on what the instructor is saying, think about how to express it, and write it out, is a significant aid to memory. I find that lectures in which I thought I was paying close attention, but did not take notes, I do not remember as well as the ones for which I took notes -- despite my not reviewing the notes.
I use pen and paper, but mostly because I don't own a laptop anyway. As far as that goes, I'd think, whatever works for you.
I'm sick of the dumbasses still playing Chess 2009. When will they upgrade their crappy hardware? HDTV has been available for years now. There's no excuse for playing old games on SDTV.
As I understood, it was a widely-circulated argument in the major social democratic parties in Europe on the eve of World War I. I haven't read those arguments directly, only their critiques by radical leftists such as Rosa Luxemburg and V. I. Lenin.
I wonder about this sort of thing. Once in a while, documentation comes out, and it's hard to believe. As a moderate example, there's the Skull and Bones secret society at Yale, which has an astonishing number of major US politicians as members. That's public knowledge now, though it still sounds like a bizarre conspiracy theory.
Less dramatic still, but I still found it instructive: I was peripherally involved in a campaign for city council. The candidate I volunteered for was very smart, and had outspoken views on a lot of issues and some really good ideas for improving the city's financial crisis -- the sort of views and ideas that almost never get a hearing in conventional politics. By the end of the campaign, the candidate had repressed or recanted everything in an effort to appease the local newspaper and the major-party candidate for mayor, lost the election, and concluded that it hadn't been worth the effort. Part of what was sick about the situation was that the candidate for mayor needed the support of one more member of city council in order to accomplish anything, but decided that he'd rather be completely powerless as mayor rather than support a third-party candidate.
I never understand this advice. In my experience, bullies gather in packs, and single out individual targets. They *love* it when their victims try to resist them, because then they feel justified in further escalating the violence.
I remember several occasions when I tried to push a bully away, and ending up lying on the ground, covering my face, while half a dozen kids were kicking me. I gave up fighting back and learned to hide. I think that's how I survived -- literally.
When I was a child, I suffered a great deal from bullying, particularly when I went to an elementary school in a wealthy suburb. On the few occasions when school staff intervened, they would ask what it was I was doing that provoked attacks. As I recall, it was the poorer kids, and the kids who were "ethnic" or non-white, who were the principal targets of bullying.
One day, one of our teachers explained about Mutually Assured Destruction, and I realized that bullies ruled the world.
2) Some children really are sissies, and believe it or not, they can get inherently non-bullies to bully them. Sadly, these children often have sissy parents, sissy friends (if any), and are surrounded by sissy teachers. The original article definitely tries to shed light on this sissy factor.
This is a statement of pure evil.
Wouldn't it be more efficient to invest directly in useful research, instead of on useless space exploration, in the hopes that there will be some accidental benefits?
Kennedy had foresight.
Kennedy threatened to destroy all life on Earth. He was the worst head of state in world history.
I'm still astonished that this even has to be pointed out. The Moon is uninhabitable. It has no air, no water, and no ecosystem to support agriculture. We can't afford to export resources to the Moon, and even if there are exploitable mineral resources, we can't afford to move them back to Earth.
We have an energy crisis, remember? And a looming water crisis. Colonizing the Moon would make these problems worse. It would solve no problems.
The Apollo project was about developing launch systems for nuclear weapons. The Space Shuttle is about placing military reconnaissance satellites in orbit. The rest is advertising. Colonies on other planets are simply fantasy.
The agenda in question is preventing the destruction of the world. A lot of us support that agenda.
I agree, generally. I'm writing this while taking a break from going over my stepson's high school applications. The applications for high schools are more complex and difficult than the applications for colleges I remember in the late 80s.
Another thing that's concerned me for some time is the near-complete absence of a positive vision of the future. Such a vision can help one overcome any tribulation; the absence of one can make any tribulation seem crushing. In the late 1930s, there were many such visions in play: the democratic republic were still a new idea in much of the world; that science could lead rapidly and directly to practical improvements in daily life was a new phenomenon; the labor movement was broadening its base and establishing its legitimacy; the several varieties of socialism were attracting mass followings; and, hideous as most now recognize it to be, fascism and totalitarianism were seen as visions for a future.
Now, most visions of the future seem to be nothing more than the belief that if we overcome various threats, to the global environment in particular, we may continue to live as we do now, except maybe with better web browsers. Even radicals seem to have very circumscribed visions of what may be accomplished. So, the kids I meet seem to look forward to individual prosperity, or to helping forestall various potential crises, and that's it. It's not much to lean on in times of trouble.
There's "The Secret,", for example.
I appreciate your post. While responses on Slashdot are often toxic, I was astonished that the responses here were so uniformly hostile to the very concept of mental illness. Mental illness may be over-diagnosed; however, I've known a lot of people who undoubtedly suffered from mood disorders, and had to find ways to cope with those disorders. I was clinically depressed for years -- it was a real problem.
I do find the original article's claims dubious; in particular, I don't think it makes much sense to compare rates of mental illness in the present with the rates of mental illness in an era in which only a minority of intellectuals and medical professionals had a meaningful understanding of mental illness.
Except that the entire saga was about Anakin/Darth Vader. His fall to evil and ultimate redemption is the backbone of the overall plot.
Episode IV: the first character we're introduced to is the fantastically evil Darth Vader. Obi-Wan tells Luke about his father, the noble Jedi Knight who was his friend. The climax of Episode V: the revelation that Darth Vader and Anakin are the same person. Episode VI: Luke trusts his own feelings and reaches out to the "good" side of Darth Vader, and succeeds.
What more obvious subject to explore in the prequel trilogy but how Anakin Skywalker went from good to evil?
One of the staples of much of the authorized spin-off fiction that I'd seen was that the Clone Wars were a war *against* clones, which makes much more sense, given the name, and the general ominous sound of clones. Wars are named for the subject of contention or the enemy fought against, not for the method of fighting.
What I found maddening about Episodes I-III is that they could *easily* have been a coherent story, with just a little effort to make the connections. It's like they got so wrapped up in the whooshing noises that they literally forgot what the plot was. Lucas was buddy-buddy with Joseph Campbell, author of "The Hero with a Thousand Faces," and set up a classic "black magic" story, but didn't make the obvious connections.
That is, Anakin's haunted by dreams of Amidala's death. He turns to Palpatine, who says the Sith know how to save someone from death. Later, Amidala dies -- for no apparent reason -- Anakin is brought back from the brink of death, in Palpatine's presence, and is thereafter utterly Palpatine's creature, until his redemption and death (which happens, also without explanation, shortly after Anakin/Vader kills Palpatine.)
The obvious way to tie these together is that Palpatine use Sith powers to bring Anakin back to life, through stealing his beloved Amidala's life, and binding Anakin, body and soul, to Palpatine. It's a classic "black magic" motif, it pulls the entire saga together, reinforcing the tragedy of Amidala's death and Anakin's fall, and the nobility of Anakin's ultimate redemption, which in this version would be at the cost of his own life. It's also obvious, and would have taken just a line or two of dialogue to establish.
That they failed to do this, is breathtakingly sloppy.
I also resented the way that Lucas deliberately tossed out years of fan fiction, including authorized fan fiction, some of which was much better stuff than the movies we actually got.
An irony in the struggle between FOSS and proprietary software is that for many people, pirating commercial software is a practical necessity, in part because of the efforts of monopolists to enforce their dominance of the market. How often do you see "Familiarity with OpenOffice.org" in a job description? How many student graphic designers, working their way through school with minimum wage jobs, can use GIMP instead of Photoshop for their class work?
Entertainment media is more complicated, ethically. But given the consolidation of mass media, it's increasingly difficult to find any variety in broadcast music -- a few years ago, there was a much wider range of choices, available legally and freely.
In effect, DRM is a Sword of Damocles hanging over the heads of nearly everyone.
Now that you mention it, the thought that there's some sort of understanding between the GNU and the OpenSource people -- that they're playing out a sort of "good cop bad cop routine" -- has crossed my mind. It seems like too much of a conspiracy theory, but perhaps that's how it's working out in practice.