Get a few friends, set up Retroshare. The encryption in it isn't great, so don't count on it to keep the NSA out (1024-bit RSA should hold them back for a few minutes), but cracking it is still well beyond the abilities of any anti-piracy organisation or contractor.
Entrapment doesn't come into this, because there is no need to take the issue to court either civil or criminal. The main interest from ISPs like AT&T is going to be in bandwidth conservation - all they need to do is find the torrent users, apply a quick whitelist for the 'big legitimate' class like WoW updaters, and throttle the rest to dialup level. It does mean a few false alarms as people downloading the more obscure linux distros and independent films are misclassified as pirates, but the loss of a small fraction of customers* could be far outweighed by the savings made in peering costs and deferred network upgrades.
*Assuming they actually have an alternative provider to go to - many areas have a regional monopoly ISP.
You don't need to keep the NSA from tracking you. You need to keep back hired investigators doing bulk-trawling or ISPs using packet inspection en mass. Not so sophisticated, or so focused: If they can't identify you with a purely automatic script, then you're not worth their effort.
$5000 that we know of. It does seem a bit low. I suspect there may be somewhere either an additional undisclosed payment, or some threats made. The $5000 might just be to provide a plausible excuse, and the real reason is that a nice man from the CIA called to point out that his mother hadn't filled out her tax return correctly and a strict enforcement of the law could see her spending ten years in jail for fraud if the government weren't given a suitable favor to overlook the offense.
That's the fun thing about all these leaks. Things that before would have been dismissed as cliche spy novel rubbish with no relation to the real world are now revealed to be a matter of routine. Bribes, threats, ambassadors working on behalf of corporations as forign lobbyists, massive secret government monitoring programs. Life really can be like fiction, and the cold war ways never ended. After reading some of the things the US government was revealed to be doing in those diplomatic cable leaks alone, a bit of extortion seems quite ordinary for them.
I used to troll a blog. It was a political blog, but the faction doesn't matter, and it was run by a person I shall just call 'AHole.' AHole was a recurring opponent of someone running another blog, I think with a focus on native americal issues, who I shall just call 'Victim.' He ran this blog at, to make up a name as I forget the real one, nativemediablog.blogspot.com. It was certainly a blogspot - this was all some years ago.
AHole was very aggressive in politics - he was one of those people who believed he was a True Patriot, and all those who disagreed were treasonous scum, and it was his civic duty to fight these people wherever possible. Not that this is limited to politics - I've seen people get just as rabid about sports teams, or defending a celebrity they admire. But in this case, it was politics. And, this being the internet, his arguments with Victim tended to follow the usual internet lines - a lot of accusations going both ways, and usually ending with someone being compared to Hitler.
One day, AHole took it to a new level. Seeing nativemediablog.blogspot.com, he created nativemediablog.com - purchased the domain. He this proceded to set up a website, under the handle used by Victim, mimicking his style, on which he wrote many posts promoting the abolishion of age of concent laws and promoting sex with children as psychologically beneficial. When Victim objected, AHole argued that he paid money for that domain and that gave him the right to post whatever he wanted there. As far as AHole was concerned, Victim was a piece of sub-human liberal scum, a threat to the survival of the country, and must be destroyed by any means.
At this point I, along with everyone else who had been arguing on AHole's blog, fled - afraid of being the victim of his next smear campaign. Fortunately, Victim had never used his real name. But imagine he had - what would have stopped AHole from setting up fake social networking profiles or posting comments under that name? Victim would have become unemployable: Every time an employer googled him (And they all do, even if they don't admit it) they would have found him to be a proud and active proponent of pedophilia. The only way to stop it would be to hire a lawyer and spend a sizeable chunk of his live savings on legal fees to identify and sue AHole, a process that could take years. AHole could have taken it even further, perhaps by printing notices on false government stationary and sending them to all of Victim's neighbours to warn them he was a convicted sex offender.
The internet is full of some very vicious people. This is why you should never, ever reveal your real name. In the case of AHole it was politics that set him off, but you never know when you are going to upset an AHole somewhere, somehow. These people exist. So be afraid of them.
Let us count some of the things the leaked diplomatic cables revealed: - That the US and UK had both been intercepting communications involving Kofi Annan, in violation of international treaty. Bit of old-fashioned code-war style bugging going on at the UN offices. - An instruction to US diplomats to attempt to obtain encryption keys belonging to Ban Ki-moon. Not even a CIA covert-op thing: Diplomats were engaged in spying on a supposed ally. Further orders instructed everything from keys to frequent-flyer identification numbers be collected from a large number of forign diplomatic personel. It sounds like the plot to a cheap spy novel - but it's real. Even US diplomats cannot be trusted. - A communication from the US embassy in Strasbourg describing EU human rights laws as 'an irritant.' - Proof that US diplomatic offices are instructed to promote sales for US defence contractors overseas. - That DynCorp employees had been accused of running a child prostitution ring, and the US had assisted in a cover-up operation to avoid embarassing one of their significent contractors. - When Pfizer was sued in Nigeria over claims that improper test protocols lead to the deaths of children, they hired a private investigator to find material that could be used to blackmail the country's attorney general. - The US issued instructions to diplomats to lobby against EU regulations requiring the labeling of genetically modified food and to apply pressure for broadening the scope of patents on GMOs in order to allow Montanto to export their products to Europe. - Libya threatened to nationalise the operations of Petro-Canada in their country if they did not recieve a public apology for a diplomatic gaffe made by the Canadian forign minister. - Numerous messages, largely relating to Canada, containing instructions to US embassies that they are to push for stricter copyright law in their host countries.
And that's just a few select examples. I could spend all day looking these up. People have long suspected that the US was playing diplomatic games, using their political influence to benefit major US corporations, covering up embarassments to the country and so on - but these claims were dismissed as the ramblings of foil-hatted conspiracy theorists. The leaked cables reveal that many of those claims are true.
That was easy: Dilithium is required to regulate the reaction, controlling the flow of antimatter to keep the whole thing from going boom. It isn't consumed by the process, but the perfect crystaline pattern is damaged, requiring occasional placement or regeneration of the crystals.
Britain must hold some sort of record. We classified the existence of a gigantic communications tower covered in microwave antennas bang in the middle of London for many years. The thing was and still is a major landmark, even though it was carefully excised from all official maps of the city and it was illegal to publicly admit its existence.
It is a silly rule in this situation, but a rule just the same. We had this before, when the diplomatic cables were leaked and the army put out a notice that anyone caught reading about the contents would be disciplined.
Those collectors are something vestigial. They are referred to by that name in TOS on a couple of occasions, but that's really it - the usual theory is that in early planning, they were part of a scientifically plausible propulsion system the ship was supposed to have in which interstellar hydrogen would be collected, used in a fusion reactor to generate power, and the remaining mass accelerated out the back at ridiculous speed. Such a propulsion system was quickly dropped for story reasons (No-one wants to watch if the ship takes fifty years to get to the next star system), in favor of the technobabble warp drive and a carefully not-defined 'impulse' engine all powered by an antimatter reactor. The old collectors remained on the ship models though, lacking purpose but still in place.
If you include embedded devices, quite a lot of it uses OS from China. Anything from Huawei for a start - that alone has some people in Congress and the military concerned.
Because the corporation may be a fuzzy collective, but it is still made up of people. People who would have to give the ultimatum, people who would design the WMD. People can be arrested. It takes a lot to puncture the shield of corporate liability, but I think terrorist threats should prove sufficient.
Do you imagine that if Al Quida were to incorporate formally, Osama would have been allowed to go free after 9/11?*
*Ok, there is still an element of doubt about just how involved he was personally, but you get the idea.
DRM cannot be open-source, for an obvious reason: If it were, you could just comment out the 'don't copy' line and recompile. The proposed HTML DRM scheme isn't a DRM scheme itsself, but an API by which a propritary DRM binary can be loaded and interface with the browser. So even if Firefox and Chrome supported the API, the DRM vendor (ie, Netflix) would also have to release a linux binary - and given the difficulty of ensuring the DRM is secure on an OS where everything from the kernel to the video driver is subject to user modification, there isn't any chance of that happening.
Apple only managed that because they controled the service, software, OS and hardware - and even then, their DRM was cracked in more ways that I can even bother to count.
'Halal' just means 'permitted under Islamic law.' The implication being that the internet outside is not permitted, because it is contaminated by unislamic content like blasphemy and pornography.
What actually happens: - The cost of living goes down by a third. - People are thus able to support themselves on a third lower wages. - Your employer either cuts your pay by a third, or fires you and hires someone willing to work for less in your place.
"ideally nobody would need to work on needed output"
A good idea, but one that requires a revolution in economics - even if the industrial capacity exists for one-tenth of the population to work and support the rest, right now that tenth would have no reason to work because the non-workers would have no money to buy goods. Your 'ideally' just can't work in any form of market-based economy - it'd require full-blown communism, and that economic structure has a very poor historical record.
I just like the idea of a villain who goes around infecting alternative medicine advocates with terrible but treatable diseases, forcing them to either demonstrate their lack of confidence by seeking conventional medical help or demonstrate how ineffective their quackery is by depending upon it and dying.
If this was in a comic universe, that'd be the obvious outcome: Bio-tinkerer dad is working on a treatment, long-delayed by red tape, protesters and activists attacking his lab for the use of animal testing. When his daughter's heart starts to fail he becomes desperate to cure her before she dies. Short on time tests his prototype serum on the closest biological relative to hand - himself. The treatment grants him the opposite of her symptoms: Great strength and incredible powers of regeneration. As he rushes to hospital he arrives at her room moments after she dies, syringe in hand. Quickly prosecuted for his unauthorised genetic experimentation and unlicensed human testing, he escapes to become BioDad: Doctor on the run, medical consultant for the villain population, stealing supplies as he goes for his last desire: To exact revenge upon those who slowed down the march of science, and cost his daughter her life.
I'm going to have a lot of fun over the next week reading a lot of biased reports, laughing at the ridiculous hyperbole and mocking the ignorance behind it.
Slashdot Mirror
Get a few friends, set up Retroshare. The encryption in it isn't great, so don't count on it to keep the NSA out (1024-bit RSA should hold them back for a few minutes), but cracking it is still well beyond the abilities of any anti-piracy organisation or contractor.
Entrapment doesn't come into this, because there is no need to take the issue to court either civil or criminal. The main interest from ISPs like AT&T is going to be in bandwidth conservation - all they need to do is find the torrent users, apply a quick whitelist for the 'big legitimate' class like WoW updaters, and throttle the rest to dialup level. It does mean a few false alarms as people downloading the more obscure linux distros and independent films are misclassified as pirates, but the loss of a small fraction of customers* could be far outweighed by the savings made in peering costs and deferred network upgrades.
*Assuming they actually have an alternative provider to go to - many areas have a regional monopoly ISP.
You don't need to keep the NSA from tracking you. You need to keep back hired investigators doing bulk-trawling or ISPs using packet inspection en mass. Not so sophisticated, or so focused: If they can't identify you with a purely automatic script, then you're not worth their effort.
$5000 that we know of. It does seem a bit low. I suspect there may be somewhere either an additional undisclosed payment, or some threats made. The $5000 might just be to provide a plausible excuse, and the real reason is that a nice man from the CIA called to point out that his mother hadn't filled out her tax return correctly and a strict enforcement of the law could see her spending ten years in jail for fraud if the government weren't given a suitable favor to overlook the offense.
That's the fun thing about all these leaks. Things that before would have been dismissed as cliche spy novel rubbish with no relation to the real world are now revealed to be a matter of routine. Bribes, threats, ambassadors working on behalf of corporations as forign lobbyists, massive secret government monitoring programs. Life really can be like fiction, and the cold war ways never ended. After reading some of the things the US government was revealed to be doing in those diplomatic cable leaks alone, a bit of extortion seems quite ordinary for them.
I'm going to tell you a story.
I used to troll a blog. It was a political blog, but the faction doesn't matter, and it was run by a person I shall just call 'AHole.' AHole was a recurring opponent of someone running another blog, I think with a focus on native americal issues, who I shall just call 'Victim.' He ran this blog at, to make up a name as I forget the real one, nativemediablog.blogspot.com. It was certainly a blogspot - this was all some years ago.
AHole was very aggressive in politics - he was one of those people who believed he was a True Patriot, and all those who disagreed were treasonous scum, and it was his civic duty to fight these people wherever possible. Not that this is limited to politics - I've seen people get just as rabid about sports teams, or defending a celebrity they admire. But in this case, it was politics. And, this being the internet, his arguments with Victim tended to follow the usual internet lines - a lot of accusations going both ways, and usually ending with someone being compared to Hitler.
One day, AHole took it to a new level. Seeing nativemediablog.blogspot.com, he created nativemediablog.com - purchased the domain. He this proceded to set up a website, under the handle used by Victim, mimicking his style, on which he wrote many posts promoting the abolishion of age of concent laws and promoting sex with children as psychologically beneficial. When Victim objected, AHole argued that he paid money for that domain and that gave him the right to post whatever he wanted there. As far as AHole was concerned, Victim was a piece of sub-human liberal scum, a threat to the survival of the country, and must be destroyed by any means.
At this point I, along with everyone else who had been arguing on AHole's blog, fled - afraid of being the victim of his next smear campaign. Fortunately, Victim had never used his real name. But imagine he had - what would have stopped AHole from setting up fake social networking profiles or posting comments under that name? Victim would have become unemployable: Every time an employer googled him (And they all do, even if they don't admit it) they would have found him to be a proud and active proponent of pedophilia. The only way to stop it would be to hire a lawyer and spend a sizeable chunk of his live savings on legal fees to identify and sue AHole, a process that could take years. AHole could have taken it even further, perhaps by printing notices on false government stationary and sending them to all of Victim's neighbours to warn them he was a convicted sex offender.
The internet is full of some very vicious people. This is why you should never, ever reveal your real name. In the case of AHole it was politics that set him off, but you never know when you are going to upset an AHole somewhere, somehow. These people exist. So be afraid of them.
The left-right divide is rather simplistic. American politics is just forced to follow a very linear scale because it reflects the two-party system.
Let us count some of the things the leaked diplomatic cables revealed:
- That the US and UK had both been intercepting communications involving Kofi Annan, in violation of international treaty. Bit of old-fashioned code-war style bugging going on at the UN offices.
- An instruction to US diplomats to attempt to obtain encryption keys belonging to Ban Ki-moon. Not even a CIA covert-op thing: Diplomats were engaged in spying on a supposed ally. Further orders instructed everything from keys to frequent-flyer identification numbers be collected from a large number of forign diplomatic personel. It sounds like the plot to a cheap spy novel - but it's real. Even US diplomats cannot be trusted.
- A communication from the US embassy in Strasbourg describing EU human rights laws as 'an irritant.'
- Proof that US diplomatic offices are instructed to promote sales for US defence contractors overseas.
- That DynCorp employees had been accused of running a child prostitution ring, and the US had assisted in a cover-up operation to avoid embarassing one of their significent contractors.
- When Pfizer was sued in Nigeria over claims that improper test protocols lead to the deaths of children, they hired a private investigator to find material that could be used to blackmail the country's attorney general.
- The US issued instructions to diplomats to lobby against EU regulations requiring the labeling of genetically modified food and to apply pressure for broadening the scope of patents on GMOs in order to allow Montanto to export their products to Europe.
- Libya threatened to nationalise the operations of Petro-Canada in their country if they did not recieve a public apology for a diplomatic gaffe made by the Canadian forign minister.
- Numerous messages, largely relating to Canada, containing instructions to US embassies that they are to push for stricter copyright law in their host countries.
And that's just a few select examples. I could spend all day looking these up. People have long suspected that the US was playing diplomatic games, using their political influence to benefit major US corporations, covering up embarassments to the country and so on - but these claims were dismissed as the ramblings of foil-hatted conspiracy theorists. The leaked cables reveal that many of those claims are true.
To the wiki!
That was easy: Dilithium is required to regulate the reaction, controlling the flow of antimatter to keep the whole thing from going boom. It isn't consumed by the process, but the perfect crystaline pattern is damaged, requiring occasional placement or regeneration of the crystals.
Britain must hold some sort of record. We classified the existence of a gigantic communications tower covered in microwave antennas bang in the middle of London for many years. The thing was and still is a major landmark, even though it was carefully excised from all official maps of the city and it was illegal to publicly admit its existence.
It's declassified now, though.
It is a silly rule in this situation, but a rule just the same. We had this before, when the diplomatic cables were leaked and the army put out a notice that anyone caught reading about the contents would be disciplined.
Those collectors are something vestigial. They are referred to by that name in TOS on a couple of occasions, but that's really it - the usual theory is that in early planning, they were part of a scientifically plausible propulsion system the ship was supposed to have in which interstellar hydrogen would be collected, used in a fusion reactor to generate power, and the remaining mass accelerated out the back at ridiculous speed. Such a propulsion system was quickly dropped for story reasons (No-one wants to watch if the ship takes fifty years to get to the next star system), in favor of the technobabble warp drive and a carefully not-defined 'impulse' engine all powered by an antimatter reactor. The old collectors remained on the ship models though, lacking purpose but still in place.
If you include embedded devices, quite a lot of it uses OS from China. Anything from Huawei for a start - that alone has some people in Congress and the military concerned.
Because the corporation may be a fuzzy collective, but it is still made up of people. People who would have to give the ultimatum, people who would design the WMD. People can be arrested. It takes a lot to puncture the shield of corporate liability, but I think terrorist threats should prove sufficient.
Do you imagine that if Al Quida were to incorporate formally, Osama would have been allowed to go free after 9/11?*
*Ok, there is still an element of doubt about just how involved he was personally, but you get the idea.
If a corporation threatens to blow up a city, just how limited do you think the liability will be?
DRM cannot be open-source, for an obvious reason: If it were, you could just comment out the 'don't copy' line and recompile. The proposed HTML DRM scheme isn't a DRM scheme itsself, but an API by which a propritary DRM binary can be loaded and interface with the browser. So even if Firefox and Chrome supported the API, the DRM vendor (ie, Netflix) would also have to release a linux binary - and given the difficulty of ensuring the DRM is secure on an OS where everything from the kernel to the video driver is subject to user modification, there isn't any chance of that happening.
Apple only managed that because they controled the service, software, OS and hardware - and even then, their DRM was cracked in more ways that I can even bother to count.
The term they used was 'Halal Internet.'
'Halal' just means 'permitted under Islamic law.' The implication being that the internet outside is not permitted, because it is contaminated by unislamic content like blasphemy and pornography.
What about balloons?
1. Attach bomb to weather balloon.
2. Release upwind of target.
3. Wait until over, send 'drop' signal.
Added bonus: Inflate with hydrox and blow the balloon. It'll be loud enough to shatter windows and terrify an entire city.
But not as many as the robots replace. That's the idea. Fewer workers means lower labor costs.
What actually happens:
- The cost of living goes down by a third.
- People are thus able to support themselves on a third lower wages.
- Your employer either cuts your pay by a third, or fires you and hires someone willing to work for less in your place.
"ideally nobody would need to work on needed output"
A good idea, but one that requires a revolution in economics - even if the industrial capacity exists for one-tenth of the population to work and support the rest, right now that tenth would have no reason to work because the non-workers would have no money to buy goods. Your 'ideally' just can't work in any form of market-based economy - it'd require full-blown communism, and that economic structure has a very poor historical record.
A bit like the biblical use of the number 40, then.
I just like the idea of a villain who goes around infecting alternative medicine advocates with terrible but treatable diseases, forcing them to either demonstrate their lack of confidence by seeking conventional medical help or demonstrate how ineffective their quackery is by depending upon it and dying.
If this was in a comic universe, that'd be the obvious outcome: Bio-tinkerer dad is working on a treatment, long-delayed by red tape, protesters and activists attacking his lab for the use of animal testing. When his daughter's heart starts to fail he becomes desperate to cure her before she dies. Short on time tests his prototype serum on the closest biological relative to hand - himself. The treatment grants him the opposite of her symptoms: Great strength and incredible powers of regeneration. As he rushes to hospital he arrives at her room moments after she dies, syringe in hand. Quickly prosecuted for his unauthorised genetic experimentation and unlicensed human testing, he escapes to become BioDad: Doctor on the run, medical consultant for the villain population, stealing supplies as he goes for his last desire: To exact revenge upon those who slowed down the march of science, and cost his daughter her life.
I do.
I'm going to have a lot of fun over the next week reading a lot of biased reports, laughing at the ridiculous hyperbole and mocking the ignorance behind it.