Thats just fine and dandy. However I feel sorry for the poor student who went and wrote a paper on the subject, quoted that "fact" from Wikipedia, and then got in trouble for it. Then to prove himself right, points back to Wikipedia 2 weeks later and its gone from the reference.
I doubt this happened, because it looks like the wiki community was taking steps against this guy.
But the point is that it could conceivably happen. What's the solution? Well, as you say, you only get trust when you restrict editing power to a select group of trusted people.
The way to create a 'trusted' wikipedia, then, is just to have a select few people have the power to migrate page revisions from wikipedia.org to, say, trusted.wikipedia.org. These editors need not actually edit the pages, just migrate them if they're acceptable. Just make sure none of them are cranks, make sure that highschool students understand the varying levels of trust between the sites, and then you won't see any "Einstein was a plagiarist" stuff
You might object by saying this is too monumental a task for a select group to do, or that the trusted site will go out of date really fast. Well, maybe. But propagating these revisions is at least as hard as maintaining a dictionary in the old style.
owever if you put in "porn porn" you don't get the warning, and the first sight returned is "blowjob pictures!!!" followed by "pornstar pictures!!!" and etc.
Amusingly, the first hit for "porn king" is a Slashdot article.
Notice that a search for "X Free 86" returns xfree.org, the XFree86 website, as its first hit.
If you think about it, it's unlikely their adult filter is catches pornographic searches by the query text alone. I can think of any number of queries which would give porn but which it would be difficult to computationally distinguish from non-pornographic queries.
My guess is that MSN performs the search in any case, probes the first hits in their cache with some porn-detection algorithm, and redirects you if the algorithm thinks it might be porn.
This would suggest that, for whatever reason, the first few hits for XFree86 (as opposed to "X Free 86" or XFree85") pass the porno test.
On the other hand, the notice says "You have entered a search term that is likely to return adult content" which suggests strongly that only the query is being studied. So I don't know.
Anyway, I'd be more inclined to think it's a crappy test than to think they've explicitly coded this as some incredibly obscure means of spiting XFree86.
Even in this article, which is reasonably technically sophisticated, Verisign's SiteFinder is almost invariably described in terms which suggest it was just a helpful service for lost souls (people who'd typed a wrong URL) instead of being recognized for what it is, an aggressive land grab and a ridiculous abuse of monopoly power.
A perfect example of this is this crap article from Forbes which lists a whole bunch of problems, many genuine, with ICANN, then lumps in VeriSign with the rest as a party wounded by ICANN's policies. This is the emptiest description of Sitefinder I've seen yet:
"VeriSign's Galvin says the company is just trying to understand ICANN's process and is seeking clarity on ICANN's charter. Specifically, he says ICANN overstepped its bounds when in October it forced the company to discontinue a service called SiteFinder, which helps redirect Web surfers to sites, saying it had technical problems."
Visual impressions of places like the Shire, Bree, Mordor, etc. were useful as pegs to 'hang' the various plot elements on.
I agree. In particular, I had really not paid attention to Minas Tirith in the books, and though I'm told the movie version wasn't a completely faithful depiction, I have a hell of lot of a clearer image than I ever did. But I still blame myself for being too lazy and skipping over the description the first time in the books.
While Jackon's changes to Faramir were against the Sacred and Holy Canon of LOTR, it actually made Faramir MORE interesting and MORE developed. In the books, if you turn off your automatic mental redaction engine, [...]
Maybe I would be more interesting in arguing my position if you didn't appear to be so utterly convinced that I'm being prejudiced and closeminded.:)
I'm sure he'd be quite pleased that his work touched millions of new people, and encouraged many of them to read the books.
I think, ultimately, you're right. I think that, had he been around to oversee the making of the movie, we would have a better movie. But Peter Jackson is a genuine fan, and I think that love really shows in the movies, which I'm myself happy with (except for a few changes which got under my skin).
That said, I'm not sure whether Tolkien would have considered the movies to be Fantasy.
That isn't this day and age. Now, I think he might object, because now there is an single image everyone has of a "Balrog" that they can latch on to. That anyone who ever reads the stories after seeing the movies will miss getting to imagine the scenes.
Yes, the idea that Tolkien could probably not have anticipated the realism of modern computer graphics is the most common argument I see raised in defence of the film's existence. However, I think Tolkien answered this point early on in the excerpt I quoted:
"In painting, for instance, the visible presentation of the fantastic image is technically too easy; the hand tends to outrun the mind, even to overthrow it."
He means this for those who see the painting, not just those who paint it. I think the same applies to a graphically-rendered film production.
Much the same as the hand of the painter 'outruns' both his mind and, presumably, the minds of those viewing the painting, I think Tolkien would argue that the graphics of a film adaption 'outrun' the minds of its viewers. That is, the film imposes a calculated and predetermined vision of the narrative on the eyes, which is expressly intended to be faster than the thought and imagination of the viewer. The Balrog you make in your mind, the first time you read the book, is scarier than anything Jackson can throw at you, because you made it.
And yet Tolkien was the one who signed away the movie rights, and even suggested editing changes, such as removing Helm's Deep because it was "unnecessary" to the story. Read his letters sometime.
Yeah, I knew about those. I don't pretend to know his motivations there, and I have no objection to him selling movie rights, or to there being a movie. I just don't think the movies are fantasy, and based on what I know of him through his writings I don't think he would have either.
Amusingly, Tolkien was much more liberal about Lord of the Rings than his own fans--he was editing and changing his mythologies up until the very end of his life. He stated several times he would have done things differently had he the chance to write the book over again.
Yes, if you read the Book of Lost Tales, or any of the many (too many!) books Christopher Tolkien has published, you'll see the development of these stories in detail.
Did I appear to do this? I see no reason against getting uptight if there's reason for it. Sure, Helm's Deep could go, and I'm happy they got rid of Bombadil. I didn't mind the Scouring of the Shire being gone either.
However, the crap they did to Denethor and Faramir really did bug me. Not because I think Tolkien is God or his word is golden or some such crap, but simply because Jackson took interesting, nuanced characters and turned them into something less interesting and less developed. And it was not for lack of screen time he did this.
keep in mind that he wrote this before effects and costuming could do what they can today. The orcs in these movies didn't come across as men dressed up as animals, or as buffoons or mimics.
Yes, the idea that Tolkien could probably not have anticipated the realism of modern computer graphics is the most common argument I see raised in defence of the film's existence. However, I think Tolkien answered this point early on in the excerpt I quoted:
"In painting, for instance, the visible presentation of the fantastic image is technically too easy; the hand tends to outrun the mind, even to overthrow it."
He means this for those who see the painting, not just those who paint it. I think the same applies to a graphically-rendered film production.
Much the same as the hand of the painter 'outruns' both his mind and, presumably, the minds of those viewing the painting, I think Tolkien would argue that the graphics of a film adaption 'outrun' the minds of its viewers. That is, the film imposes a calculated and predetermined vision of the narrative on the eyes, which is expressly intended to be faster than the thought and imagination of the viewer.
I'm a pretty diehard Tolkien fan, and I seriously considered not seeing any of the movies for fear I wouldn't be able to read any of the books properly again. I went anyway, and I'm glad I did, but I do hope that most of the kids encountering Tolkien now through the movies will be able to read Lord of the Rings without having visual scenes from the movies constantly in mind.
As happy as I am that this year's Oscar sweep didn't go to a movie that sucked, I still don't think Tolkien would be happy with the state of things, were he around to see it. In his famous essay On Fairy Stories, he explains why he believes Fantasy is best left to words, and that Fantasy and Drama are inherently different and incompatible:
"In human art Fantasy is a thing best left to words, to true literature. In painting, for instance, the visible presentation of the fantastic image is technically too easy; the hand tends to outrun the mind, even to overthrow it. Silliness or morbidity are frequent results. It is a misfortune that Drama, an art fundamentally distinct from Literature, should so commonly be considered together with it, or as a branch of it. Among these misfortunes we may reckon the depreciation of Fantasy. For in part at least this depreciation is due to the natural desire of critics to cry up the forms of literature or "imagination" that they themselves, innately or by training, prefer. And criticism in a country that has produced so great a Drama, and possesses the works of William Shakespeare, tends to be far too dramatic. But Drama is naturally hostile to Fantasy. Fantasy, even of the simplest kind, hardly ever succeeds in Drama, when that is presented as it should be, visibly and audibly acted. Fantastic forms are not to be counterfeited. Men dressed up as talking animals may achieve buffoonery or mimicry, but they do not achieve Fantasy."
The GPL states that if you violate the terms of the GPL license you (as in a legal entity, human or corporation) lose your license to distribute said GPLed software.
No, no, you don't "lose" your licence, you never had it to begin with, since you didn't satisfy the criteria for distribution.
If I try to give away or sell GPL'ed software, there is a list of criteria I must satisfy to do this: making the source available, providing proper attribution, etc., etc.
If I fail to do these things, and continue to distribute this software, I am doing so illegally. I'm a very bad man and the authors can sue me.
If, however, the day after that I decide to change my ways and meet the criteria for distribution, I am acting fully within the bounds of the licence. There's nothing the original author can do to stop me now: they can still sue me for my earlier infractions, since damage was done, but there's no way that can impose their own judgement on the matter and stop me from distributing it once I've met these conditions.
The reason this is true is that anyone can redistribute GPL'ed code provided the aforementioned criteria are met, so I could always get some third party to download the code, then have them immediately redistribute it to me.
So I go to the website, and download another copy. I have a new license to distribute - Fyodor is giving these licenses away freely, and nothing in the GPL states that GPL violators are barred from aquiring new licenses.
And if the author doesn't want to provide a licence to Nmap, the GPL expressly allows some other individual to download it, then relicense it to SCO, should they choose to do so.
So, right now, the cat is out of the bag, and the original author has no legal way of preventing SCO from distributing new versions of NMAP unless SCO is violates the terms of the GPL in their future distribution of Nmap.
One exception, though: Couple cam thru buying wine, condoms, KY, straight razors, rubbing alcohol (!!!), and nothing else. Had a funny look in their eyes... I don't know what they were up to, but the alcohol and razors STILL makes me shudder.
A friend of mine was participating in a scavenger hunt once. He went to the local Canadian Tire (basically a hardware store, for non-Canadians) with another friend, who happened to be female, and bought, among several things I can't recall, a box of condoms, a lot of Coke, a duck decoy, a for-emergency-use-only CO2 bicycle pump, and a hockey goalie mask.
The cashier gave them a very strange look as they left.
The bottom line of intellectual property is this: The creator of that IP has an absolute moral right to determine how his property may be used.
One problem I have always had with Objectivism is that the natural property to which an individual is entitled seems always to be quite an arbitrary accident of history.
You accept that individuals have an 'absolute right' to own and control the use of intellectual property, and presumably personal property as well. Yet Objectivists are appear to be the first to act as apologists for multinational corporations engaged in exceedingly questionable practices in developing countries, and the first to cite the profit motive as justification for, say, bribery of government officials in these developing nations, clear cutting, and various other acts which are profitable for individuals but not society as a whole.
It isn't enough to say that, eventually, the invisible hand will step in to correct these sorts of abuses.
I think this whole Verisign/ICANN thing, perhaps better than most recent examples of high-profile disputes in the tech industry, illustrates what a fundamental disconnection there is between the computer sophisticates and average, well-educated newspaper readers.
Even in this article, which is reasonably technically sophisticated, Verisign's SiteFinder is almost invariably described in terms which suggest it was just a helpful service for lost souls (people who'd typed a wrong URL) instead of being recognized for what it is, an aggressive land grab and a ridiculous abuse of monopoly power.
It's not like newspapers are in VeriSign's pockets or anything. Why is that so few of them seem to understand how bad what VeriSign did is?
I'm sure you extend the same liberal sensibilities to people wanting to swap information about weaknesses in airport security, the travel arrangements of heads of state etc?
Creating a law banning the public discussion of these things on the Internet would be entirely pointless.
We already have ways of ensuring this sort of information is not released to people wishing to do harm: we don't release it publicly.
For those people who are privy to this information (e.g. airport employees, people coordinating state visits, etc.), there are already mechanisms to keep them from further publicising it. If they do so with obvious collaboration with the would-be evildoers, they will be considered accessories to attempted murder (or whatever crime was planned). If not, they will be fired for breach of protocol.
One someone has decided to breach either of these rules, some vague prohibition on discussion of this matter will achieve nothing.
I could be wrong, but i'm pretty sure the Hijackers from 9/11 had been emailing each other using some form of encryption.
Care to provide evidence for this?
If I had to guess, I would say it started with unproven speculation by a representative of the government or some media person, and then got passed around as fact.
I don't definitely believe they weren't using encryption, I just don't think that the actual truth is the source of this publicity. publicity of this. I'd be interested to know what they were using, if they were, though.
They're supposed to be unbreakable, yet those in office are convinced that terrorists are using encryption. So the government has broken it, or are lying.
Well, they could know these groups are using encryption without actually having broken any particular message. For instance, they might have seized a computer and found a PGP installation on it.
My guess, though, is that the government angle is all spin. This makes it into the headlines for two reasons.
First, the government and government contractors are genuinely worried about encryption, because its use really does reduce their ability to eavesdrop. The issue of U.S. encryption policy was a major political issue throughout the 1990s, which reached ridiculous extremes with T-shirts with the RSA algorithm on them which were legally classified as munitions. Legislation is so unenforceable now that it would be hard to make it stronger, but the "threat" of terrorist use provides enough political weight to check any forward movement.
Secondly, the notion that terrorists are fully versed in all our Western skills, and thus may be able to exploit them to advantage against us, scares people and therefore resonates with them. Scaremonger broadcasters on local news stations live and breathe on this kind of stuff.
Maybe terrorists are using steg and crypto; maybe they're not. In either case, it's politically desirable for the government to claim they are, and for the media to report it.
I can't say for definite if anon.penet.fi would have received the support it needed without the Observer's article, but I can say for definite that The Observer made that support much, much, harder.
Fair enough. Thanks for posting that, by the way; I had no idea about the Observer's role in that whole business.
Attackers of the CoS had used the service to publish, anonymously, various CoS tracts. The service shut down one week after the Observer article was published.
Well, anon.penet.fi (which is what I assume you're talking about) was shut down willingly by its maintainer shortly after a raid by the Finnish police seized personal information on an anon.penet.fi user who'd posted Scientology data.
Slashdot Mirror
Thats just fine and dandy. However I feel sorry for the poor student who went and wrote a paper on the subject, quoted that "fact" from Wikipedia, and then got in trouble for it. Then to prove himself right, points back to Wikipedia 2 weeks later and its gone from the reference.
I doubt this happened, because it looks like the wiki community was taking steps against this guy.
But the point is that it could conceivably happen. What's the solution? Well, as you say, you only get trust when you restrict editing power to a select group of trusted people.
The way to create a 'trusted' wikipedia, then, is just to have a select few people have the power to migrate page revisions from wikipedia.org to, say, trusted.wikipedia.org. These editors need not actually edit the pages, just migrate them if they're acceptable. Just make sure none of them are cranks, make sure that highschool students understand the varying levels of trust between the sites, and then you won't see any "Einstein was a plagiarist" stuff
You might object by saying this is too monumental a task for a select group to do, or that the trusted site will go out of date really fast. Well, maybe. But propagating these revisions is at least as hard as maintaining a dictionary in the old style.
owever if you put in "porn porn" you don't get the warning, and the first sight returned is "blowjob pictures!!!" followed by "pornstar pictures!!!" and etc.
Amusingly, the first hit for "porn king" is a Slashdot article.
Turns out we were off by an order of magnitude -- it was much, much more than that.
86000000/11000000 = 7.818...
Sorry to be picky, but how is this 'an order of magnitude'? In base seven, maybe.
Notice that a search for "X Free 86" returns xfree.org, the XFree86 website, as its first hit.
If you think about it, it's unlikely their adult filter is catches pornographic searches by the query text alone. I can think of any number of queries which would give porn but which it would be difficult to computationally distinguish from non-pornographic queries.
My guess is that MSN performs the search in any case, probes the first hits in their cache with some porn-detection algorithm, and redirects you if the algorithm thinks it might be porn.
This would suggest that, for whatever reason, the first few hits for XFree86 (as opposed to "X Free 86" or XFree85") pass the porno test.
On the other hand, the notice says "You have entered a search term that is likely to return adult content" which suggests strongly that only the query is being studied. So I don't know.
Anyway, I'd be more inclined to think it's a crappy test than to think they've explicitly coded this as some incredibly obscure means of spiting XFree86.
But I'm gonna go ahead and guess that Darl drives some expensive luxury sedan, which he gets serviced every 3,000 miles at the local dealership?
:)
Like, maybe, a Mercedes?
If J.R.R. Tolkien were here today he'd be saying "help, help, let me out of this box.. help!". ROFL.this gravestone looks pretty damned heavy.
Even in this article, which is reasonably technically sophisticated, Verisign's SiteFinder is almost invariably described in terms which suggest it was just a helpful service for lost souls (people who'd typed a wrong URL) instead of being recognized for what it is, an aggressive land grab and a ridiculous abuse of monopoly power.
A perfect example of this is this crap article from Forbes which lists a whole bunch of problems, many genuine, with ICANN, then lumps in VeriSign with the rest as a party wounded by ICANN's policies. This is the emptiest description of Sitefinder I've seen yet:
"VeriSign's Galvin says the company is just trying to understand ICANN's process and is seeking clarity on ICANN's charter. Specifically, he says ICANN overstepped its bounds when in October it forced the company to discontinue a service called SiteFinder, which helps redirect Web surfers to sites, saying it had technical problems."
Visual impressions of places like the Shire, Bree, Mordor, etc. were useful as pegs to 'hang' the various plot elements on.
I agree. In particular, I had really not paid attention to Minas Tirith in the books, and though I'm told the movie version wasn't a completely faithful depiction, I have a hell of lot of a clearer image than I ever did. But I still blame myself for being too lazy and skipping over the description the first time in the books.
While Jackon's changes to Faramir were against the Sacred and Holy Canon of LOTR, it actually made Faramir MORE interesting and MORE developed. In the books, if you turn off your automatic mental redaction engine, [...]
:)
Maybe I would be more interesting in arguing my position if you didn't appear to be so utterly convinced that I'm being prejudiced and closeminded.
I'm sure he'd be quite pleased that his work touched millions of new people, and encouraged many of them to read the books.
I think, ultimately, you're right. I think that, had he been around to oversee the making of the movie, we would have a better movie. But Peter Jackson is a genuine fan, and I think that love really shows in the movies, which I'm myself happy with (except for a few changes which got under my skin).
That said, I'm not sure whether Tolkien would have considered the movies to be Fantasy.
That isn't this day and age. Now, I think he might object, because now there is an single image everyone has of a "Balrog" that they can latch on to. That anyone who ever reads the stories after seeing the movies will miss getting to imagine the scenes.
Yes, the idea that Tolkien could probably not have anticipated the realism of modern computer graphics is the most common argument I see raised in defence of the film's existence. However, I think Tolkien answered this point early on in the excerpt I quoted:
"In painting, for instance, the visible presentation of the fantastic image is technically too easy; the hand tends to outrun the mind, even to overthrow it."
He means this for those who see the painting, not just those who paint it. I think the same applies to a graphically-rendered film production.
Much the same as the hand of the painter 'outruns' both his mind and, presumably, the minds of those viewing the painting, I think Tolkien would argue that the graphics of a film adaption 'outrun' the minds of its viewers. That is, the film imposes a calculated and predetermined vision of the narrative on the eyes, which is expressly intended to be faster than the thought and imagination of the viewer. The Balrog you make in your mind, the first time you read the book, is scarier than anything Jackson can throw at you, because you made it.
And yet Tolkien was the one who signed away the movie rights, and even suggested editing changes, such as removing Helm's Deep because it was "unnecessary" to the story. Read his letters sometime.
Yeah, I knew about those. I don't pretend to know his motivations there, and I have no objection to him selling movie rights, or to there being a movie. I just don't think the movies are fantasy, and based on what I know of him through his writings I don't think he would have either.
Amusingly, Tolkien was much more liberal about Lord of the Rings than his own fans--he was editing and changing his mythologies up until the very end of his life. He stated several times he would have done things differently had he the chance to write the book over again.
Yes, if you read the Book of Lost Tales, or any of the many (too many!) books Christopher Tolkien has published, you'll see the development of these stories in detail.
Did I appear to do this? I see no reason against getting uptight if there's reason for it. Sure, Helm's Deep could go, and I'm happy they got rid of Bombadil. I didn't mind the Scouring of the Shire being gone either.
However, the crap they did to Denethor and Faramir really did bug me. Not because I think Tolkien is God or his word is golden or some such crap, but simply because Jackson took interesting, nuanced characters and turned them into something less interesting and less developed. And it was not for lack of screen time he did this.
keep in mind that he wrote this before effects and costuming could do what they can today. The orcs in these movies didn't come across as men dressed up as animals, or as buffoons or mimics.
Yes, the idea that Tolkien could probably not have anticipated the realism of modern computer graphics is the most common argument I see raised in defence of the film's existence. However, I think Tolkien answered this point early on in the excerpt I quoted:
"In painting, for instance, the visible presentation of the fantastic image is technically too easy; the hand tends to outrun the mind, even to overthrow it."
He means this for those who see the painting, not just those who paint it. I think the same applies to a graphically-rendered film production.
Much the same as the hand of the painter 'outruns' both his mind and, presumably, the minds of those viewing the painting, I think Tolkien would argue that the graphics of a film adaption 'outrun' the minds of its viewers. That is, the film imposes a calculated and predetermined vision of the narrative on the eyes, which is expressly intended to be faster than the thought and imagination of the viewer.
I'm a pretty diehard Tolkien fan, and I seriously considered not seeing any of the movies for fear I wouldn't be able to read any of the books properly again. I went anyway, and I'm glad I did, but I do hope that most of the kids encountering Tolkien now through the movies will be able to read Lord of the Rings without having visual scenes from the movies constantly in mind.
As happy as I am that this year's Oscar sweep didn't go to a movie that sucked, I still don't think Tolkien would be happy with the state of things, were he around to see it. In his famous essay On Fairy Stories, he explains why he believes Fantasy is best left to words, and that Fantasy and Drama are inherently different and incompatible:
"In human art Fantasy is a thing best left to words, to true literature. In painting, for instance, the visible presentation of the fantastic image is technically too easy; the hand tends to outrun the mind, even to overthrow it. Silliness or morbidity are frequent results. It is a misfortune that Drama, an art fundamentally distinct from Literature, should so commonly be considered together with it, or as a branch of it. Among these misfortunes we may reckon the depreciation of Fantasy. For in part at least this depreciation is due to the natural desire of critics to cry up the forms of literature or "imagination" that they themselves, innately or by training, prefer. And criticism in a country that has produced so great a Drama, and possesses the works of William Shakespeare, tends to be far too dramatic. But Drama is naturally hostile to Fantasy. Fantasy, even of the simplest kind, hardly ever succeeds in Drama, when that is presented as it should be, visibly and audibly acted. Fantastic forms are not to be counterfeited. Men dressed up as talking animals may achieve buffoonery or mimicry, but they do not achieve Fantasy."
The GPL states that if you violate the terms of the GPL license you (as in a legal entity, human or corporation) lose your license to distribute said GPLed software.
No, no, you don't "lose" your licence, you never had it to begin with, since you didn't satisfy the criteria for distribution.
If I try to give away or sell GPL'ed software, there is a list of criteria I must satisfy to do this: making the source available, providing proper attribution, etc., etc.
If I fail to do these things, and continue to distribute this software, I am doing so illegally. I'm a very bad man and the authors can sue me.
If, however, the day after that I decide to change my ways and meet the criteria for distribution, I am acting fully within the bounds of the licence. There's nothing the original author can do to stop me now: they can still sue me for my earlier infractions, since damage was done, but there's no way that can impose their own judgement on the matter and stop me from distributing it once I've met these conditions.
The reason this is true is that anyone can redistribute GPL'ed code provided the aforementioned criteria are met, so I could always get some third party to download the code, then have them immediately redistribute it to me.
So I go to the website, and download another copy. I have a new license to distribute - Fyodor is giving these licenses away freely, and nothing in the GPL states that GPL violators are barred from aquiring new licenses.
And if the author doesn't want to provide a licence to Nmap, the GPL expressly allows some other individual to download it, then relicense it to SCO, should they choose to do so.
So, right now, the cat is out of the bag, and the original author has no legal way of preventing SCO from distributing new versions of NMAP unless SCO is violates the terms of the GPL in their future distribution of Nmap.
One exception, though: Couple cam thru buying wine, condoms, KY, straight razors, rubbing alcohol (!!!), and nothing else. Had a funny look in their eyes... I don't know what they were up to, but the alcohol and razors STILL makes me shudder.
A friend of mine was participating in a scavenger hunt once. He went to the local Canadian Tire (basically a hardware store, for non-Canadians) with another friend, who happened to be female, and bought, among several things I can't recall, a box of condoms, a lot of Coke, a duck decoy, a for-emergency-use-only CO2 bicycle pump, and a hockey goalie mask.
The cashier gave them a very strange look as they left.
The bottom line of intellectual property is this: The creator of that IP has an absolute moral right to determine how his property may be used.
One problem I have always had with Objectivism is that the natural property to which an individual is entitled seems always to be quite an arbitrary accident of history.
You accept that individuals have an 'absolute right' to own and control the use of intellectual property, and presumably personal property as well. Yet Objectivists are appear to be the first to act as apologists for multinational corporations engaged in exceedingly questionable practices in developing countries, and the first to cite the profit motive as justification for, say, bribery of government officials in these developing nations, clear cutting, and various other acts which are profitable for individuals but not society as a whole.
It isn't enough to say that, eventually, the invisible hand will step in to correct these sorts of abuses.
I think this whole Verisign/ICANN thing, perhaps better than most recent examples of high-profile disputes in the tech industry, illustrates what a fundamental disconnection there is between the computer sophisticates and average, well-educated newspaper readers.
Even in this article, which is reasonably technically sophisticated, Verisign's SiteFinder is almost invariably described in terms which suggest it was just a helpful service for lost souls (people who'd typed a wrong URL) instead of being recognized for what it is, an aggressive land grab and a ridiculous abuse of monopoly power.
It's not like newspapers are in VeriSign's pockets or anything. Why is that so few of them seem to understand how bad what VeriSign did is?
I'm sure you extend the same liberal sensibilities to people wanting to swap information about weaknesses in airport security, the travel arrangements of heads of state etc?
Creating a law banning the public discussion of these things on the Internet would be entirely pointless.
We already have ways of ensuring this sort of information is not released to people wishing to do harm: we don't release it publicly.
For those people who are privy to this information (e.g. airport employees, people coordinating state visits, etc.), there are already mechanisms to keep them from further publicising it. If they do so with obvious collaboration with the would-be evildoers, they will be considered accessories to attempted murder (or whatever crime was planned). If not, they will be fired for breach of protocol.
One someone has decided to breach either of these rules, some vague prohibition on discussion of this matter will achieve nothing.
God Bless Will Farrell
Well, it was Christopher Walken who had the fever.
I could be wrong, but i'm pretty sure the Hijackers from 9/11 had been emailing each other using some form of encryption.
Care to provide evidence for this?
If I had to guess, I would say it started with unproven speculation by a representative of the government or some media person, and then got passed around as fact.
I don't definitely believe they weren't using encryption, I just don't think that the actual truth is the source of this publicity. publicity of this. I'd be interested to know what they were using, if they were, though.
They're supposed to be unbreakable, yet those in office are convinced that terrorists are using encryption. So the government has broken it, or are lying.
Well, they could know these groups are using encryption without actually having broken any particular message. For instance, they might have seized a computer and found a PGP installation on it.
My guess, though, is that the government angle is all spin. This makes it into the headlines for two reasons.
First, the government and government contractors are genuinely worried about encryption, because its use really does reduce their ability to eavesdrop. The issue of U.S. encryption policy was a major political issue throughout the 1990s, which reached ridiculous extremes with T-shirts with the RSA algorithm on them which were legally classified as munitions. Legislation is so unenforceable now that it would be hard to make it stronger, but the "threat" of terrorist use provides enough political weight to check any forward movement.
Secondly, the notion that terrorists are fully versed in all our Western skills, and thus may be able to exploit them to advantage against us, scares people and therefore resonates with them. Scaremonger broadcasters on local news stations live and breathe on this kind of stuff.
Maybe terrorists are using steg and crypto; maybe they're not. In either case, it's politically desirable for the government to claim they are, and for the media to report it.
I can't say for definite if anon.penet.fi would have received the support it needed without the Observer's article, but I can say for definite that The Observer made that support much, much, harder.
Fair enough. Thanks for posting that, by the way; I had no idea about the Observer's role in that whole business.
Attackers of the CoS had used the service to publish, anonymously, various CoS tracts. The service shut down one week after the Observer article was published.
Well, anon.penet.fi (which is what I assume you're talking about) was shut down willingly by its maintainer shortly after a raid by the Finnish police seized personal information on an anon.penet.fi user who'd posted Scientology data.