there is nothing in the article that indicates this is about privacy. the article talks about privacy, but the only thing the article mentions about this program is that if a merchant were to leak your credit card number, it would not be usable.
do you have other information that you can
share with us?
Did you mean that in a snide way? I could ask you the same question. I don't think there is any other information. I think it's pretty clear that this is not a privacy enhancing program. I'm not an expert on this, but IIRC the contractual relationships between the credit card companies and the merchants and the credit rating agencies require that all of them get access to your identity.
Boo-hoo... You know what sickens me? The hypocrisy of so-called parents when it comes to who
is responsible for their children's behavior.
there's a lot of hostility and emotion in your message, though you try to make it look like it's the other side that's crying.
I don't have children. When I favor laws that I think are good for children, yes, it is to help make up for some amount of bad parenting or bad judgement by some parents, but it's not mine. What's wrong with being worried about the way other people's children are being raised? Do you think anything goes when it comes to kids, or do you just want to enforce your own set of standards? Thanks for bolding the word hypocrisy, it helped draw my attention to it:)
anyway, we don't need proof to pass laws. People think it's a good idea not to drive too fast, so we pass a law against it. we think that heroin and marijuana are bad, and alcohol is ok (now, anyway). So what? Is there a law that says we have to have proof? I like the idea of my kids going to public school, but not being surrounded by a bunch of boorish kids who I think learned their behavior from TV and violent video games Right now, most people don't agree with me. But if most people did, we could pass laws against it. I don't see why that gets your panties in a bunch. Mine aren't now... but, there's no law that says your panties can't be in a bunch:)
Notice how you subtley changed the wording in the two halves of what you wrote. You should have written
Notice
how choice of legal venue doesn't affect the rights granted in the GPL, since the GPL doesn't
grant the licensor the right to choose the legal venue!
I stuck in that bolded text where you left it out because it's the only way your statement works. IANAL, but if actual venue chosen does in fact change the users' rights, rights granted I presume where the user lives, then RMS would have a point.
get rid of the quotes
if you want to get picky, despite the fact that they are called quotation marks, their function is to turn that text into meta-text in the context I used it. There was no "quotation" necessarily implied. You, BTW, used double quotes... were you quoting someone twice?;)
Okay, the hypothesis is that anonymizing an individual transaction removes no
accountability
but the part I think you're not getting is, that individual transaction is not anonymous either. You would go to Amex, get the new (temporary/one time) number, then go to the merchant and present it, along with your name and address, just like you would a normal card. The only privacy enhancing feature is if Echelon were to search a transaction log for credit card numbers they wouldn't be able to tell all the transactions were you. But if the IRS were to get the records from the merchant and look buy CustID or the records from Amex and look at your account number, all the transactions would be there just like they always were... you seem to be making the assumption that your credit card number is how these databases are keyed, but except for Amex, I don't think that's true.
BTW, I think that the credit-rating agencies that the card issuers rely on for validation require *every* transaction to be logged to them in an individually (as in SSN) identifiable way, and they resell that info. That's where the zero privacy problem issues.
"your side" of this discussion thinks that these
new one-time credit card numbers are little encrypted numbers that let you purchase without giving out your name and address.
"my side" thinks they are not. they are just like regular credit card numbers. you go to a site, you enter your name, billing address of this credit card, and a credit card number. the only difference is, you don't enter the same number twice. the only "privacy" implication is that if someone breaks into Amazon and steals their database, the theif learns everything about you except your permanent credit card number.
are we communicating yet? I'll grant you, the article and the person who posted it here kept mentioning privacy like this had something to do with it, but it doesn't.
But remember back to when you were 12 years old? You wouldn't want to be denied something because you were too young. Now, quite apart from whether violence is good/bad/NOP for kids, you have to remember that Slashdot is overrun with fairly young geeks. no, not Flamebait: I'm proposing this as a statement of fact, not a value judgement They may be old enough now to buy V-games (they may not), but they still remember how much it smarted to be denied, and there's a natural tendency for adolescents to want to undermine anything The Man tries to do.no, I'm not Trolling. I proposing this as a statement of fact. I'm bringing the whole subject up because when you are my age with my sociopolitical beliefs, you see stories like this and scratch your head trying to figure out why this is alarming to anybody. It's an interesting question to me, that's why I feel compelled to click and comment about it.
It's not going to be anonymous to the business, either. it's your same credit card. It's like getting a new copy with a different number... "no different" means "not anonymous" because your credit card is not anonymous. Not to mention, they aren't giving you an anonymous mail-drop anyway...
the only way that it provides anything like anonymity would be for a merchant who keeps the customer file keyed by credit card number and would thus fail to match up your different orders.
But, (1) merchants don't do this, and (2) if they did, they would change. It's not anonymous.
Assuming that using a disposible cc number is anonymous, (why wouldnt it be, it would
be like a phone card)
The number is not like a phone card. You don't "buy" it in advance, it's just a different credit card number tied to your same account. After you use it, they will send you a bill.
it's not splitting hairs. The GPL says (and I'm guessing that this is the reason) "no extra restrictions" and this is an extra restriction.
If you really think it's splitting hairs, why don't you accuse CNRI of the hair-splitting... they could easily take it out if it's so insignificant as to be hair-splitting...
you need to go back to school because it is you who doesn't understand what you are talking about (nice to see you learned that charming way union members communicate, though:)
Yes, unions do get higher wages and better working conditions for their members, that is absolutely true, and that's why you loved the union. But unions accomplish this feat by
creating unemployment for other workers who are not in the union. If the highway budget is spent on union workers, it doesn't stretch as far in terms of employing more people. Furthermore, since prices are higher, it doesn't make sense to take on as many projects. Therefore, not only are fewer people employed, but less money is spent, i.e. less money gets distributed to workers. Unions are bad for workers.
By increasing the prices of labor, unions increase the prices of the products. This also harms workers, other workers whose paychecks don't stretch as far with the higher prices. Unions are bad for consumers.
Anticipating your response: no, the higher prices charged by union workers do not get made up in higher productivity. If that were true, we wouldn't need strikes and laws to protect unions because every employer would want to employ them, or the employers that did would win in a competitive market.
In an economy with unions, yes, try to get in one: it's legalized robbery, and you get to keep the loot. But in the voting booth, vote against them.
as you said, but did not say strongly enough, all ip address shortages are artificial. It is precisely because they are regulated and hoarded that folks with connections grab all they can and hang on. if they were auctioned there'd be a huge glut.
You can't compare
auctioning domains and auctioning IP blocks, that's just crazy!
I didn't compare it to domains: you did. I was comparing to real estate, sorghum futures, petroleum, pollution rights, etc. They all get bought and sold routinely. With real estate (and domain names) location, location, location matters, but ip addresses and other commodities are fungible.
IP addresses deal with the essential functionment of the internet, this
CANNOT be taken lightly and certainly not put in the dirty hands of
capitalism.
... why, it would be as bad as putting our food supply in private capitalist hands. Why, giant companies would come along and own it all and charge exorbitantly... oh wait, private companies do control our food and it's dirt cheap. Your "theory" is gasping for breath.
all IP's WILL be owned by one or two telco
giants
I love it the way you ignore all the parts where I addressed your sole legitimate concern. I said, NO MONOPOLIES. if you want reviews, fine, we can add in NO IDIOTS.
man, everybody's jawing away in here: a lot of good info, reasonable suggestions, and stuff I didn't know.
But this problem has already been solved: private property and free markets. Just auction IP addresses through a central exchange, all IP addresses, including the sacrosanct class As. You want an IP, or a block of IPs, you pay for them. How much? Who knows, who cares, we'll find out when they go up for sale.
Some regulations are required: don't allow monopolies or cartels; declare IPs fungible to allow central administrators to reallocate or consolidate blocks for routing purposes.
if you go to d.net's website you'll see a lot of boosterism and cheerleading and attempting to get people interested in their stats and the competition. how is that my fault? sounds like you yourself have gone through the stats checking phase.
while their first achievement was cool, ultimately, the work that was being done was repetitive and of no use to anyone. cracking CSS keys, now that would be interesting...:)
you're mostly right, and I'm clearly out of date -- thanks for the correction.
distributed.net did get very boring for a long while and I stopped paying attention. OGRs are hard to find and there's no substitute, so it's good to see all the effort being put to something useful. It is a little bit boring still, but that shouldn't be a measure of the hard work of science.
Many posters here are talking about having entered songs into the CDDB and they wanted the info shared.
Just to clarify, CDDB doesn't claim to own the song titles (the record companies do?), they claim to own the encoding that turns the length of all the tracks on a disc (the "uniqueness") into a code number to be looked up in the database. You are free to take the song titles from their database. What they'll try to stop is any use of that algorithm.
I just thought I'd clarify because it makes a difference to how to circumvent their theft of everyone's hard work. The distributed.net idea would not suffer from this problem, BTW, not to mention it would be fun. SETI@CDDB!:) I'm sure d.net would never go for it, though, they'd rather bore us all to tears with a yet longer attempt to crack some obscure n-bit variant of a public key system. (d.net: we know that things can be cracked by brute [yawn] force. do something more interesting!]
On the client machines, Novell Netware worked by intercepting the DOS reserved INT 21, essentially modifying the way that the DOS operating system worked so that Netware shares would appear to be part of DOS. Those interrupt functions subfunctions show up in Undocumented DOS and I think deserve to be part of the family.
By the same measure, I now wish to add Borland Sidekick and some of the other TSRs to the list.
but linux is a completely independent reinvention of unix and it's on the unix chart... so by the same reasoning (it's the same guy!) the family of DOS and windows should include compatibles.
I'm pretty sure that if the DoD distributes binaries, they need to give clear instructions about from where source can be downloaded: so, on the outside of every cruise missile there'll be an URL... lotta good it will do the recipients:)
Seriously, I'd think that national defense might trump copyright?
well, QDOS was written from scratch, though a goal was to mimic CP/M. DOS 2 added significant Unix functionality so Unix would have to be mentioned also. CP/M was modelled after the DEC OSes like RSX-11 and RT-11: anybody remember PIP?:)
BTW, I thought of more of the DOS lineage that should have been included: Phar Lap DOS extenders, QEMM and 386Max... was TopView in there?
Slashdot Mirror
do you have other information that you can share with us?
Did you mean that in a snide way? I could ask you the same question. I don't think there is any other information. I think it's pretty clear that this is not a privacy enhancing program. I'm not an expert on this, but IIRC the contractual relationships between the credit card companies and the merchants and the credit rating agencies require that all of them get access to your identity.
there's a lot of hostility and emotion in your message, though you try to make it look like it's the other side that's crying.
I don't have children. When I favor laws that I think are good for children, yes, it is to help make up for some amount of bad parenting or bad judgement by some parents, but it's not mine. What's wrong with being worried about the way other people's children are being raised? Do you think anything goes when it comes to kids, or do you just want to enforce your own set of standards? Thanks for bolding the word hypocrisy, it helped draw my attention to it :)
anyway, we don't need proof to pass laws. People think it's a good idea not to drive too fast, so we pass a law against it. we think that heroin and marijuana are bad, and alcohol is ok (now, anyway). So what? Is there a law that says we have to have proof? I like the idea of my kids going to public school, but not being surrounded by a bunch of boorish kids who I think learned their behavior from TV and violent video games Right now, most people don't agree with me. But if most people did, we could pass laws against it. I don't see why that gets your panties in a bunch. Mine aren't now... but, there's no law that says your panties can't be in a bunch :)
Notice how choice of legal venue doesn't affect the rights granted in the GPL, since the GPL doesn't grant the licensor the right to choose the legal venue!
I stuck in that bolded text where you left it out because it's the only way your statement works. IANAL, but if actual venue chosen does in fact change the users' rights, rights granted I presume where the user lives, then RMS would have a point.
get rid of the quotes
if you want to get picky, despite the fact that they are called quotation marks, their function is to turn that text into meta-text in the context I used it. There was no "quotation" necessarily implied. You, BTW, used double quotes... were you quoting someone twice? ;)
but the part I think you're not getting is, that individual transaction is not anonymous either. You would go to Amex, get the new (temporary/one time) number, then go to the merchant and present it, along with your name and address, just like you would a normal card. The only privacy enhancing feature is if Echelon were to search a transaction log for credit card numbers they wouldn't be able to tell all the transactions were you. But if the IRS were to get the records from the merchant and look buy CustID or the records from Amex and look at your account number, all the transactions would be there just like they always were... you seem to be making the assumption that your credit card number is how these databases are keyed, but except for Amex, I don't think that's true.
BTW, I think that the credit-rating agencies that the card issuers rely on for validation require *every* transaction to be logged to them in an individually (as in SSN) identifiable way, and they resell that info. That's where the zero privacy problem issues.
"your side" of this discussion thinks that these new one-time credit card numbers are little encrypted numbers that let you purchase without giving out your name and address.
"my side" thinks they are not. they are just like regular credit card numbers. you go to a site, you enter your name, billing address of this credit card, and a credit card number. the only difference is, you don't enter the same number twice. the only "privacy" implication is that if someone breaks into Amazon and steals their database, the theif learns everything about you except your permanent credit card number.
are we communicating yet? I'll grant you, the article and the person who posted it here kept mentioning privacy like this had something to do with it, but it doesn't.
But remember back to when you were 12 years old? You wouldn't want to be denied something because you were too young. Now, quite apart from whether violence is good/bad/NOP for kids, you have to remember that Slashdot is overrun with fairly young geeks. no, not Flamebait: I'm proposing this as a statement of fact, not a value judgement They may be old enough now to buy V-games (they may not), but they still remember how much it smarted to be denied, and there's a natural tendency for adolescents to want to undermine anything The Man tries to do.no, I'm not Trolling. I proposing this as a statement of fact. I'm bringing the whole subject up because when you are my age with my sociopolitical beliefs, you see stories like this and scratch your head trying to figure out why this is alarming to anybody. It's an interesting question to me, that's why I feel compelled to click and comment about it.
the only way that it provides anything like anonymity would be for a merchant who keeps the customer file keyed by credit card number and would thus fail to match up your different orders. But, (1) merchants don't do this, and (2) if they did, they would change. It's not anonymous.
The number is not like a phone card. You don't "buy" it in advance, it's just a different credit card number tied to your same account. After you use it, they will send you a bill.
If you really think it's splitting hairs, why don't you accuse CNRI of the hair-splitting... they could easily take it out if it's so insignificant as to be hair-splitting...
Yes, unions do get higher wages and better working conditions for their members, that is absolutely true, and that's why you loved the union. But unions accomplish this feat by
Anticipating your response: no, the higher prices charged by union workers do not get made up in higher productivity. If that were true, we wouldn't need strikes and laws to protect unions because every employer would want to employ them, or the employers that did would win in a competitive market.
In an economy with unions, yes, try to get in one: it's legalized robbery, and you get to keep the loot. But in the voting booth, vote against them.
as you said, but did not say strongly enough, all ip address shortages are artificial. It is precisely because they are regulated and hoarded that folks with connections grab all they can and hang on. if they were auctioned there'd be a huge glut.
I didn't compare it to domains: you did. I was comparing to real estate, sorghum futures, petroleum, pollution rights, etc. They all get bought and sold routinely. With real estate (and domain names) location, location, location matters, but ip addresses and other commodities are fungible.
IP addresses deal with the essential functionment of the internet, this CANNOT be taken lightly and certainly not put in the dirty hands of capitalism.
... why, it would be as bad as putting our food supply in private capitalist hands. Why, giant companies would come along and own it all and charge exorbitantly... oh wait, private companies do control our food and it's dirt cheap. Your "theory" is gasping for breath.
all IP's WILL be owned by one or two telco giants
I love it the way you ignore all the parts where I addressed your sole legitimate concern. I said, NO MONOPOLIES. if you want reviews, fine, we can add in NO IDIOTS.
Actually, it reminds the employees' friends. The employees never see it.
But this problem has already been solved: private property and free markets. Just auction IP addresses through a central exchange, all IP addresses, including the sacrosanct class As. You want an IP, or a block of IPs, you pay for them. How much? Who knows, who cares, we'll find out when they go up for sale.
Some regulations are required: don't allow monopolies or cartels; declare IPs fungible to allow central administrators to reallocate or consolidate blocks for routing purposes.
Problem solved.
oh, you who is so erudite: explain the difference between "pedantic" and "too pedantic" ;)
while their first achievement was cool, ultimately, the work that was being done was repetitive and of no use to anyone. cracking CSS keys, now that would be interesting... :)
distributed.net did get very boring for a long while and I stopped paying attention. OGRs are hard to find and there's no substitute, so it's good to see all the effort being put to something useful. It is a little bit boring still, but that shouldn't be a measure of the hard work of science.
Just to clarify, CDDB doesn't claim to own the song titles (the record companies do?), they claim to own the encoding that turns the length of all the tracks on a disc (the "uniqueness") into a code number to be looked up in the database. You are free to take the song titles from their database. What they'll try to stop is any use of that algorithm.
I just thought I'd clarify because it makes a difference to how to circumvent their theft of everyone's hard work. The distributed.net idea would not suffer from this problem, BTW, not to mention it would be fun. SETI@CDDB! :) I'm sure d.net would never go for it, though, they'd rather bore us all to tears with a yet longer attempt to crack some obscure n-bit variant of a public key system. (d.net: we know that things can be cracked by brute [yawn] force. do something more interesting!]
By the same measure, I now wish to add Borland Sidekick and some of the other TSRs to the list.
but linux is a completely independent reinvention of unix and it's on the unix chart... so by the same reasoning (it's the same guy!) the family of DOS and windows should include compatibles.
Seriously, I'd think that national defense might trump copyright?
well, QDOS was written from scratch, though a goal was to mimic CP/M. DOS 2 added significant Unix functionality so Unix would have to be mentioned also. CP/M was modelled after the DEC OSes like RSX-11 and RT-11: anybody remember PIP? :)
BTW, I thought of more of the DOS lineage that should have been included: Phar Lap DOS extenders, QEMM and 386Max... was TopView in there?
Yep :) but Steve Jobs picture and not Linus Torvalds or Richard Stallman?
... and especially, it doesn't show all the rebooting :)