I don't understand. When they want to take away my guns "for the children" people stand up and cheer. But God forbid they want to take away the be all end all of freedom, MySpace.
I haven't read the bill yet, and if anyone has specific objections I am very interested in them. But all I have read so far is objections to the general idea of limiting children's access to information. That's as extreme a position as saying that any American, regardless of psychiatric or criminal history, should be able to own any firearm he can get his hands on.
I don't see why people "need to grow up" for contributing what they can to this process.
I think you are missing the big picture. The point of this article is that the merry band of volunteers just isn't getting it done anymore. So it isn't surprising, or a particularly useful datapoint that many of them are against this change.
There's no clear language that limits the rules he can enact, either, though.
I'm confused. Are we supposed to be pissed off about what is in the bill, or what isn't in it?
The AG should have no right to enact rules and regulations himself. Since when has the AG been able to create laws?!
Most of what you think of as "federal laws" are actually regulations developed by federal agencies. The enabling regulations passed by the FCC, EPA, DOJ, ATF, IRS, DOT, et al, probably account for much more of the corpus of federal law than direct legislative action.
There are constitutional limits as to how much authority Congress can delegate to agencies, and how specific/vague that authority can be before it becomes an unconstitutional delegation of legislative authority. If the statute were interpreted as broadly as the article implies it should be, it would very possibly be unconstitutional. It's a cardinal rule of statutory interpretation that if a law can be read in a way that would make it constitutional, and a way that could make it unconstitutional, that the presumption is Congress meant the constitutional interpretation.
Yes, it is less secure if "secure"=="verifiably secure". But that's not really a practical way of talking about security. On the day that you decide that the system is verifibly secure, it isn't really any more secure than it was when you started. However, you insurance costs should be lower.
to let McCullagh pimp his articles here? Three links to his own articles in one summary. Holy crap. I sure hope that/. is getting a share of cnet's ad revenue.
A record of something isn't a notation of a piece of information in this sense. It's the actual information itself. So record retention could include the genesis of new databases with whatever information the AG requires.
Ok, if a record is, as you say, the information itself, how can the phrase "record retention" be parsed to mean "genesis of new databases". Either the ISP already has the information on your browsing habits, in which case they may have to "retain" it; or they don't.
The only burden this could create on ISPs is keeping records for longer than they would otherwise be inclined to.
Just for shit and giggles, why should the IP address provided by your ISP be anymore anonymous to law enforcement than your phone number?
I read TFA, but I'm not sure what particular expertise cnet_declan, the author of TFA has with respect to statutory interpretation. Any records that an ISP keeps that are reachable by court order will be reachable in civil litigation in many cases, and nothing in the law changes that. You and he are correct that matching IPs to individuals is the minimum that the regulations must cover, but there's nothing in the clear language of the bill that would give the AG the power to force ISPs to track browsing, etc., if they don't already.
SEC. 6. RECORD RETENTION REQUIREMENTS FOR INTERNET SERVICE PROVIDERS. (a) REGULATIONS.Not later than 90 days after the date of the enactment of this section, the Attorney General shall issue regulations governing the retention of records by Internet Service Providers. Such regulations shall, at a minimum, require retention of records, such as the name and address of the subscriber or registered user to whom an Internet Protocol address, user identification or telephone number was assigned, in order to permit compliance with court orders that may require production of such information.
First note that the information they are primarily interested in is being able to tie a user to an IP address. It is trivial for an ISP to keep this information, and any responsible ISP already does so that they can investigate fraud and abuse complaints.
Second, the regulations are to deal with record retention, not tracking. So, if an ISP currently tracks user activity, the AG could require the ISP to keep that information for x days. But this bill does not seem to give anyone the power to order ISPs to start tracking users in ways they aren't already.
He's been doing what you say since before 9/11. He wrote in the introduction to "Secrets and Lies" that he had an "epiphany" one day that security isn't about cryptography (like it was when he was just a cryptographer), but that it was about managing risk. Oh, and by the way he had just founded the company that you should hire to manage your risk for you. So, Bruce Schinier was transformed from a cryptography to a "security expert" (read, risk manager). He's not a bad writer, and he seems to be able to convey a message to many people, but I've never found his observations to be particularly insightful. He tries too hard to break new ground, and he winds up coming up with this amygdyla stuff.
Yes, just like the dinosaurs and every other living species that has lived or will live on the earth, humans will one day be extinct. I find it ironic that the same camp that refuses to see anything unique or sacred in human life is now whinnying about our eventual extinction. Come on, we're just masses of cells, masses of cells die!
Some have even suggested that run-away global warming caused Venus to become the hell-hole it is today.
How did humans get to Venus to cause all that global warming?
IMO, Schneier has two problems. The first is that he thinks he is an expert in everything, and he thinks he is always right. Now he is an expect in human psychology. The second is that for some reason people are unwilling to stand up and say when he is full of it. Some days his blog is nothing other than Bush bashing under the guise of writing about security. That being secure and feeling secure are different is not news. That even in business people make decisions based on emotions instead of understanding is not news either.
The real problem is assignment of benefits. There's a lot more to the legal realm of "marriage" than taxes and child rearing. There's being able to claim inheritance. There's being able to speak for another in a medical crisis, and having that person able to speak for you. Health insurance. Car insurance. Life insurance. On and on. And if you think any of this is trivial, look at what James Brown's widow, and mother of his son, is going through at the hands of lawyers because they were never "properly married".
And these things have a cost to society as well. It doesn't matter what you think the benefits of state sanctioned marriage are. I assume that we agree that there are benfits, otherwise people wouldn't be fighting for the prvilege. All you have to do is explaing what reciprocal advantage your expanded definition of marriage replies, and I'll support. And don't ask me to justify the current definition, since I'm not sure it can be.
I thought the state was an organizational tool to protect people from each other and to aim for the common good.
I don't think that any definition of "state" changes the meaning of what I wrote. If you interpreted what I wrote as somehow condoning socialism, then I think you either misunderstand my post, or socialism, or both.
It depends on how you believe married couples benefit the rest of us. If you believe that benefit is limited to reproduction, then the obvious answer is no. But then you have to ask why we don't give the benefits of marriage to unmarried parents. I think there is more to it than just reproduction.
But the court isn't deciding to look at these more interesting case that the 9th circuit is blessed with and upholding them. They are looking at these more interesting cases and overturning them. Whether the subjects or novel or not doesn't change the fact that the 9th seems to get it wrong more often than other circuits. But it might be another possible explanation besides being so liberal as to why they get it wrong so often. However, if the Supreme Court denied cert to 9th circuit cases in greater percentages than other circuits, that would be an interesting datapoint.
Those cases, in turn, are much more likely to be reviewed by the SCOTUS, regardless of whether or not the SCOTUS would ultimately agree with the lower court's decision.
But now you're playing games as well. Appeals to the Supreme Court are usually by cert, not by right, so for the most part the Supreme Court hears only the cases they choose to hear. That they choose to hear more cases from the 9th than from any other circuit is not an inconsequential fact, or merely the result of the volume of cases the 9th decides.
Quite simply, the conjoining of incomes for tax purposes and the assignment of benefits should be an automatic, simple, and painless event. It is not the state's place to say "Ewww"
"Single me out for a benefit, but don't ask what I did to deserve it!"
Either the state derives a benefit from marriage, and in return should allow certain benefits to married couples, or it doesn't. We seem to have made a decision a long time ago that marriage does benefit the state. Does the type of marriage that you want recognized (and you must admit that gay marriage is fundamentally different than traditional marriage) bestow the same benefits on the state?
Personally, I don't give a shit who you want to marry, and if you can get a Priest, a Rabbi, or a homeless guy to marry you, more power to you. The tax code, rules of testate, etc., should be simple and the state should just get out of the marriage business altogether. It' absolutely hipocritical to say that you want the state to butt out of your personal choices, but at the same time to want the state to honor those choices with official recognition.
Which is why they also had another group that was logging on to their own bank accounts. Presumably, this group would behave in the same way they would normally behave, since it was really their $$ on the line, and they weren't playing a role. They also interviewed the subjects after, to see if they noticed the security issues, but proceeded anyway. In any case, to anyone who deals with users on a daily basis, that phishing works is not news, or even remotely interesting. People are dumb. Any security measure that relies on people not being dumb will fail. Any security system that relies on people doing the right thing will fail.
What is most interesting about this study is the validation that it gives to other studies' methodologies. The three groups behaved very similarly, lending credence to earlier studies whose critics made the same types of claims that you are making here.
Have you read the Declaration of Independance? The Federalist Papers? The Constitution? The whole point of the structure of our government is that the people shouldn't trust the government.
If people are not seeing their site-key and continuing with the 'experiment', perhaps the experiment was flawed. (The people may have felt they should continue even though the sitekey was not present, as they wanted the experiment to succeed.)
Did you read the paper? The study attempted to control for this by telling one of the three groups that the purpose of the study was to test security awareness. This group did just as badly as the others.
As the other poster pointed out, many times the newer drugs treat a wider range of people, and are generally more refined. However, the pattern you point to is also related to how the the drug companies deal with patents and generics. The name brands keep ahead of the generics by introducing new (usually slightly better) versions of the drugs right about the time generics start coming out. This is much more profitable than developing entirely new drugs for different diseases, since much existing R&D can be leveraged.
Then of course there's the fact that drug companies are trying to cure Cystic Fybrosis and Macular Degeneration (because there's money there, too) but that may be harder. We still have male pattern baldness, and we all know how much money there would be in curing that. Along with AIDS, cancer, etc. Somethings are easier than others.
The 'L'ibertarian philosophy is not very much like the 'l'ibertarian philosophy. That and the fact that Libertarians always want to take about being Libertarian, the gold standard, silver coins, pot, Ayn Rand, etc. That's why they are annoying.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't understand. When they want to take away my guns "for the children" people stand up and cheer. But God forbid they want to take away the be all end all of freedom, MySpace.
I haven't read the bill yet, and if anyone has specific objections I am very interested in them. But all I have read so far is objections to the general idea of limiting children's access to information. That's as extreme a position as saying that any American, regardless of psychiatric or criminal history, should be able to own any firearm he can get his hands on.
I don't see why people "need to grow up" for contributing what they can to this process.
I think you are missing the big picture. The point of this article is that the merry band of volunteers just isn't getting it done anymore. So it isn't surprising, or a particularly useful datapoint that many of them are against this change.
There's no clear language that limits the rules he can enact, either, though.
I'm confused. Are we supposed to be pissed off about what is in the bill, or what isn't in it?
The AG should have no right to enact rules and regulations himself. Since when has the AG been able to create laws?!
Most of what you think of as "federal laws" are actually regulations developed by federal agencies. The enabling regulations passed by the FCC, EPA, DOJ, ATF, IRS, DOT, et al, probably account for much more of the corpus of federal law than direct legislative action.
There are constitutional limits as to how much authority Congress can delegate to agencies, and how specific/vague that authority can be before it becomes an unconstitutional delegation of legislative authority. If the statute were interpreted as broadly as the article implies it should be, it would very possibly be unconstitutional. It's a cardinal rule of statutory interpretation that if a law can be read in a way that would make it constitutional, and a way that could make it unconstitutional, that the presumption is Congress meant the constitutional interpretation.
Yes, it is less secure if "secure"=="verifiably secure". But that's not really a practical way of talking about security. On the day that you decide that the system is verifibly secure, it isn't really any more secure than it was when you started. However, you insurance costs should be lower.
to let McCullagh pimp his articles here? Three links to his own articles in one summary. Holy crap. I sure hope that /. is getting a share of cnet's ad revenue.
A record of something isn't a notation of a piece of information in this sense. It's the actual information itself. So record retention could include the genesis of new databases with whatever information the AG requires.
Ok, if a record is, as you say, the information itself, how can the phrase "record retention" be parsed to mean "genesis of new databases". Either the ISP already has the information on your browsing habits, in which case they may have to "retain" it; or they don't.
The only burden this could create on ISPs is keeping records for longer than they would otherwise be inclined to.
Just for shit and giggles, why should the IP address provided by your ISP be anymore anonymous to law enforcement than your phone number?
I read TFA, but I'm not sure what particular expertise cnet_declan, the author of TFA has with respect to statutory interpretation. Any records that an ISP keeps that are reachable by court order will be reachable in civil litigation in many cases, and nothing in the law changes that. You and he are correct that matching IPs to individuals is the minimum that the regulations must cover, but there's nothing in the clear language of the bill that would give the AG the power to force ISPs to track browsing, etc., if they don't already.
And forever is a long time.
The sky is not falling.
Here's what the bill says:
SEC. 6. RECORD RETENTION REQUIREMENTS FOR INTERNET SERVICE PROVIDERS.
(a) REGULATIONS.Not later than 90 days after the
date of the enactment of this section, the Attorney General
shall issue regulations governing the retention of records
by Internet Service Providers. Such regulations shall, at
a minimum, require retention of records, such as the name
and address of the subscriber or registered user to whom
an Internet Protocol address, user identification or telephone
number was assigned, in order to permit compliance
with court orders that may require production of such information.
First note that the information they are primarily interested in is being able to tie a user to an IP address. It is trivial for an ISP to keep this information, and any responsible ISP already does so that they can investigate fraud and abuse complaints.
Second, the regulations are to deal with record retention, not tracking. So, if an ISP currently tracks user activity, the AG could require the ISP to keep that information for x days. But this bill does not seem to give anyone the power to order ISPs to start tracking users in ways they aren't already.
He's been doing what you say since before 9/11. He wrote in the introduction to "Secrets and Lies" that he had an "epiphany" one day that security isn't about cryptography (like it was when he was just a cryptographer), but that it was about managing risk. Oh, and by the way he had just founded the company that you should hire to manage your risk for you. So, Bruce Schinier was transformed from a cryptography to a "security expert" (read, risk manager). He's not a bad writer, and he seems to be able to convey a message to many people, but I've never found his observations to be particularly insightful. He tries too hard to break new ground, and he winds up coming up with this amygdyla stuff.
Yes, just like the dinosaurs and every other living species that has lived or will live on the earth, humans will one day be extinct. I find it ironic that the same camp that refuses to see anything unique or sacred in human life is now whinnying about our eventual extinction. Come on, we're just masses of cells, masses of cells die!
Some have even suggested that run-away global warming caused Venus to become the hell-hole it is today.
How did humans get to Venus to cause all that global warming?
IMO, Schneier has two problems. The first is that he thinks he is an expert in everything, and he thinks he is always right. Now he is an expect in human psychology. The second is that for some reason people are unwilling to stand up and say when he is full of it. Some days his blog is nothing other than Bush bashing under the guise of writing about security. That being secure and feeling secure are different is not news. That even in business people make decisions based on emotions instead of understanding is not news either.
Yes, they can take your picture, but they can't necessarily sell it without your permission.
Right of publicity
The real problem is assignment of benefits. There's a lot more to the legal realm of "marriage" than taxes and child rearing. There's being able to claim inheritance. There's being able to speak for another in a medical crisis, and having that person able to speak for you. Health insurance. Car insurance. Life insurance. On and on. And if you think any of this is trivial, look at what James Brown's widow, and mother of his son, is going through at the hands of lawyers because they were never "properly married".
And these things have a cost to society as well. It doesn't matter what you think the benefits of state sanctioned marriage are. I assume that we agree that there are benfits, otherwise people wouldn't be fighting for the prvilege. All you have to do is explaing what reciprocal advantage your expanded definition of marriage replies, and I'll support. And don't ask me to justify the current definition, since I'm not sure it can be.
I thought the state was an organizational tool to protect people from each other and to aim for the common good.
I don't think that any definition of "state" changes the meaning of what I wrote. If you interpreted what I wrote as somehow condoning socialism, then I think you either misunderstand my post, or socialism, or both.
It depends on how you believe married couples benefit the rest of us. If you believe that benefit is limited to reproduction, then the obvious answer is no. But then you have to ask why we don't give the benefits of marriage to unmarried parents. I think there is more to it than just reproduction.
But the court isn't deciding to look at these more interesting case that the 9th circuit is blessed with and upholding them. They are looking at these more interesting cases and overturning them. Whether the subjects or novel or not doesn't change the fact that the 9th seems to get it wrong more often than other circuits. But it might be another possible explanation besides being so liberal as to why they get it wrong so often. However, if the Supreme Court denied cert to 9th circuit cases in greater percentages than other circuits, that would be an interesting datapoint.
Those cases, in turn, are much more likely to be reviewed by the SCOTUS, regardless of whether or not the SCOTUS would ultimately agree with the lower court's decision.
But now you're playing games as well. Appeals to the Supreme Court are usually by cert, not by right, so for the most part the Supreme Court hears only the cases they choose to hear. That they choose to hear more cases from the 9th than from any other circuit is not an inconsequential fact, or merely the result of the volume of cases the 9th decides.
Quite simply, the conjoining of incomes for tax purposes and the assignment of benefits should be an automatic, simple, and painless event. It is not the state's place to say "Ewww"
"Single me out for a benefit, but don't ask what I did to deserve it!"
Either the state derives a benefit from marriage, and in return should allow certain benefits to married couples, or it doesn't. We seem to have made a decision a long time ago that marriage does benefit the state. Does the type of marriage that you want recognized (and you must admit that gay marriage is fundamentally different than traditional marriage) bestow the same benefits on the state?
Personally, I don't give a shit who you want to marry, and if you can get a Priest, a Rabbi, or a homeless guy to marry you, more power to you. The tax code, rules of testate, etc., should be simple and the state should just get out of the marriage business altogether. It' absolutely hipocritical to say that you want the state to butt out of your personal choices, but at the same time to want the state to honor those choices with official recognition.
Which is why they also had another group that was logging on to their own bank accounts. Presumably, this group would behave in the same way they would normally behave, since it was really their $$ on the line, and they weren't playing a role. They also interviewed the subjects after, to see if they noticed the security issues, but proceeded anyway. In any case, to anyone who deals with users on a daily basis, that phishing works is not news, or even remotely interesting. People are dumb. Any security measure that relies on people not being dumb will fail. Any security system that relies on people doing the right thing will fail.
What is most interesting about this study is the validation that it gives to other studies' methodologies. The three groups behaved very similarly, lending credence to earlier studies whose critics made the same types of claims that you are making here.
Have you read the Declaration of Independance? The Federalist Papers? The Constitution? The whole point of the structure of our government is that the people shouldn't trust the government.
If people are not seeing their site-key and continuing with the 'experiment', perhaps the experiment was flawed. (The people may have felt they should continue even though the sitekey was not present, as they wanted the experiment to succeed.)
Did you read the paper? The study attempted to control for this by telling one of the three groups that the purpose of the study was to test security awareness. This group did just as badly as the others.
As the other poster pointed out, many times the newer drugs treat a wider range of people, and are generally more refined. However, the pattern you point to is also related to how the the drug companies deal with patents and generics. The name brands keep ahead of the generics by introducing new (usually slightly better) versions of the drugs right about the time generics start coming out. This is much more profitable than developing entirely new drugs for different diseases, since much existing R&D can be leveraged.
Then of course there's the fact that drug companies are trying to cure Cystic Fybrosis and Macular Degeneration (because there's money there, too) but that may be harder. We still have male pattern baldness, and we all know how much money there would be in curing that. Along with AIDS, cancer, etc. Somethings are easier than others.
You can still download it.
The 'L'ibertarian philosophy is not very much like the 'l'ibertarian philosophy. That and the fact that Libertarians always want to take about being Libertarian, the gold standard, silver coins, pot, Ayn Rand, etc. That's why they are annoying.