"In terms of mapping rocks and whatnot, there are great incentives for energy and mineral companies to perform this kind of research internally."
There is also great incentive for them to keep that data secret and never publish any of their research, because doing so would allow their competitors to benefit.
Using technology to solve a societal problem is untidy, but in this case it's really the only option globally. It's politically feasable, but difficult, to win a campaign for internet freedom in the US or Europe.. but what about China, or large parts of the middle east, or much of Africa? Even Russia, while certainly better than it used to be, is hardly a beacon of individualism.
It's going to take more than Tor though. Setting up a parallel physical infrastructure isn't really practical, so any effective solution is going to have to be built around modifying existing technology. If I had to pick a few areas to focus on...
1. Anonymous protocols like Tor and Freenet, certainly, but not for all. There is just too much overhead. Keep them for those who need to be paranoid.
2. End-to-end encryption, ideally without a dependance upon central authorities subject to easy government control.
3. Advances in compression. Because the fewer bits you have to move, the easier they are to hide. Be rid of the ageing MP3!
4. Distributed caching. Truely distributed. A node on every device, ideally. This would hugely lower demand on internet infrastructure, thus reducing economic incentives to filter traffic. It would also reduce the viability of choke points for traffic interception. It should ideally be transparent to the user. I'll go into that more later... and practically impossible to take a file down.
5. You want unmonitorable networking? Link that distributed cache with a wireless mesh.
As for how that cache might work... as an example, think of a future time when a webpage may reference images or any other file using magnet links. The magnet link would include both a hash, and a plain old http link. The browser wants to get that file, so it asks the node on that station if it has a copy of the file matching that hash. If no, the node service asks other nearby computers - the ISP's upstream node, the neighbour's computers via wireless, passers-by with mobile phones. If none have the file, then it falls back to the http source... and stores a copy in it's cache, in case anyone else asks for it.
Not quite. There are two changes Microsoft made. One is that Windows 8 supports the feature, which on-one really cares about. The other is that they require OEMs to now support that feature, and to have it enabled by default. That is what people are concerned about. Yes, it's up to the OEM if they want to lock their hardware to make it impossible to run any non-Microsoft OS or if they would like to include a setup option to disable secure boot... there is nothing preventing them including that option, but there is nothing requiring they support it either. It's one more way in which OEMs could screw their users, even if only by simply not careing enough about non-Windows users to get someone to spend ten minutes writing the code.
The problem is that it starts off as opt-in. The slippery slope is a fallacy because A doesn't always lead to B - but A can still greatly increase the probability of B in the future.
"I provided the IP address to the VPD, but they say that laws don't allow warrants solely on the physical address tied to an IP."
Translation: You're a nobody, and we're not going to spend our precious resources tracking down and prosecuting a small-time thief. Come back when you've got a friend in politics or the media.
If an IP address alone is enough evidence to file civil suit against someone for copyright infringement, and under the new proposals enough to have them disconnected without so much as a trial, I find it hard to believe that it can't be enough to be at least reasonable suspicion and thus grounds for a warrant.
The main concern I have is future employability. We've already reached the point where employers routinely google on candidates before offering a job - it's not that much of a stretch to see them contracting with data-mining firms to run more detailed background checks, correlating data to determine pseudonyms and checking if the candidate might have any embarassing hobbies or political views, has been writing posts badmouthing his former boss or has financial problems that could render him a security risk.
The barrier to entry is practically insurmountable due to the network effect. A social network is worthless without people already on it, and people won't join unless there are already people there. You need to either be the first to get to a market segment, or have a massive advertising budget, or some high-profile celebrity endorsements. It's doable - Facebook did manage to displace Myspace - but only barely so.
At a guess, the process initiates at two seperate locations (Perhaps even two seperate embryos), and continues as normal until the two developing spines make contact. At which point the chemical process can't distinguish between them, so they continue growing as a single spine.
Cutting a snake in half would kill it. They have vital organs along almost the full body length, and it'd bleed to death anyway. Perhaps if you just cut the tip of the tail off, though... equivilent to amputating a human's legs.
It's still wrong though. I wouldn't even call it a bad argument, as that would mean admitting it's an argument. It's a good textbook of the ad hominium fallacy: "These people are hypocrites, therefore what they say is wrong."
Why not? There have been some proposals that electric cars need regulations requiring a minimum noise level as a public safety measure, to reduce the risk of accidents. If there is a minimum noise level, then customiseable car sounds are an obvious idea.
Reminds me of the incident with Palin's personal email account. She got the full attention of a federal investigation to find the password-guesser, who was easily caught, convicted and jailed. Do you think that would happen if he had just gotten into the emails of some nobody? It wasn't even a government account - it was purely personal, and she was forbidden by state open-records law from using it for government business. Indeed, the whole point of him breaking in was to investigate previously untested rumors that she was doing just that.
Turned out she was, but only on a very small scale. Just two conversations, for the sake of convenience rather than deliberate cover-up. Still, it goes to show what everyone here knows: The law may protect everyone, but it'll work a lot harder to protect those who are wealthy or influencial enough to demand the VIP treatment.
I suspect part of the NBNs political purpose is to make it easier to justify government-imposed filtering. It's much easier to argue that something needs to be tightly regulated if tax money is being spent on it.
It's become ideological now. A lot of people got into piracy for the free stuff, but then it became a moral issue - they either object to the business practices often associated with the larger copyright industries, or believe that the benefits of copyright are outweighed by the draconian measures required to enforce it in the age of the personal computer.
It doesn't exactly mean enemy. It means something closer to 'adversary' - like an opponent in a game, or the relationship between prosecution and defence lawyers in a trial. They fight, but on good terms. God and Satan even had a friendly wager in the Book of Job regarding how much punishment a man can withstand before losing faith.
True. Though there is an interesting exception: No priest can be required or compelled to break the seal of the confessional in the US. No matter what he may hear there. Doesn't apply here though, as the discovery wasn't via confession.
If it's on the workstation, maybe. If it's on the big fileserver that runs half the company? It's useless even relying on redundant components or backups, as the cops may well sieze the whole server and the backups too to get dates or look for already-deleted images.
I'd pass the decision on to someone higher, and let them take the fall if it all goes wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
"In terms of mapping rocks and whatnot, there are great incentives for energy and mineral companies to perform this kind of research internally."
There is also great incentive for them to keep that data secret and never publish any of their research, because doing so would allow their competitors to benefit.
We'll know in about a month, once someone finally finishes reading the thing.
Using technology to solve a societal problem is untidy, but in this case it's really the only option globally. It's politically feasable, but difficult, to win a campaign for internet freedom in the US or Europe.. but what about China, or large parts of the middle east, or much of Africa? Even Russia, while certainly better than it used to be, is hardly a beacon of individualism.
It's going to take more than Tor though. Setting up a parallel physical infrastructure isn't really practical, so any effective solution is going to have to be built around modifying existing technology. If I had to pick a few areas to focus on...
1. Anonymous protocols like Tor and Freenet, certainly, but not for all. There is just too much overhead. Keep them for those who need to be paranoid.
2. End-to-end encryption, ideally without a dependance upon central authorities subject to easy government control.
3. Advances in compression. Because the fewer bits you have to move, the easier they are to hide. Be rid of the ageing MP3!
4. Distributed caching. Truely distributed. A node on every device, ideally. This would hugely lower demand on internet infrastructure, thus reducing economic incentives to filter traffic. It would also reduce the viability of choke points for traffic interception. It should ideally be transparent to the user. I'll go into that more later... and practically impossible to take a file down.
5. You want unmonitorable networking? Link that distributed cache with a wireless mesh.
As for how that cache might work... as an example, think of a future time when a webpage may reference images or any other file using magnet links. The magnet link would include both a hash, and a plain old http link. The browser wants to get that file, so it asks the node on that station if it has a copy of the file matching that hash. If no, the node service asks other nearby computers - the ISP's upstream node, the neighbour's computers via wireless, passers-by with mobile phones. If none have the file, then it falls back to the http source... and stores a copy in it's cache, in case anyone else asks for it.
An interesting little bit of trivia: Intel used their influence on the PCI management board well. Their vendor ID is 0x8086.
Not quite. There are two changes Microsoft made. One is that Windows 8 supports the feature, which on-one really cares about. The other is that they require OEMs to now support that feature, and to have it enabled by default. That is what people are concerned about. Yes, it's up to the OEM if they want to lock their hardware to make it impossible to run any non-Microsoft OS or if they would like to include a setup option to disable secure boot... there is nothing preventing them including that option, but there is nothing requiring they support it either. It's one more way in which OEMs could screw their users, even if only by simply not careing enough about non-Windows users to get someone to spend ten minutes writing the code.
The problem is that it starts off as opt-in. The slippery slope is a fallacy because A doesn't always lead to B - but A can still greatly increase the probability of B in the future.
I work in IT support at a school, and... yes, they can.
Students rarely try to look at porn in school. No privacy. They are constantly trying to get around the filter to play games.
The monoliths are Sufficiently Advanced technology. Indistinguishable from magic, but only to our limited understanding.
McCaffrey already did that. Genetically engineered teleporting dragons. Somewhat dangerous though.
Star Wars is a space opera: The extreme form of soft sci-fi. Doesn't mean it's bad - not everyone watches scifi for the gadgets.
"I provided the IP address to the VPD, but they say that laws don't allow warrants solely on the physical address tied to an IP."
Translation: You're a nobody, and we're not going to spend our precious resources tracking down and prosecuting a small-time thief. Come back when you've got a friend in politics or the media.
If an IP address alone is enough evidence to file civil suit against someone for copyright infringement, and under the new proposals enough to have them disconnected without so much as a trial, I find it hard to believe that it can't be enough to be at least reasonable suspicion and thus grounds for a warrant.
The main concern I have is future employability. We've already reached the point where employers routinely google on candidates before offering a job - it's not that much of a stretch to see them contracting with data-mining firms to run more detailed background checks, correlating data to determine pseudonyms and checking if the candidate might have any embarassing hobbies or political views, has been writing posts badmouthing his former boss or has financial problems that could render him a security risk.
The barrier to entry is practically insurmountable due to the network effect. A social network is worthless without people already on it, and people won't join unless there are already people there. You need to either be the first to get to a market segment, or have a massive advertising budget, or some high-profile celebrity endorsements. It's doable - Facebook did manage to displace Myspace - but only barely so.
At a guess, the process initiates at two seperate locations (Perhaps even two seperate embryos), and continues as normal until the two developing spines make contact. At which point the chemical process can't distinguish between them, so they continue growing as a single spine.
Cutting a snake in half would kill it. They have vital organs along almost the full body length, and it'd bleed to death anyway. Perhaps if you just cut the tip of the tail off, though... equivilent to amputating a human's legs.
I've seen it in cartoon form too: http://www.onenewsnow.com/uploadedImages/Cartoons/101011.jpg
It's still wrong though. I wouldn't even call it a bad argument, as that would mean admitting it's an argument. It's a good textbook of the ad hominium fallacy: "These people are hypocrites, therefore what they say is wrong."
Why not? There have been some proposals that electric cars need regulations requiring a minimum noise level as a public safety measure, to reduce the risk of accidents. If there is a minimum noise level, then customiseable car sounds are an obvious idea.
That is only true for ni-cad batteries. You don't see many of those today.
Reminds me of the incident with Palin's personal email account. She got the full attention of a federal investigation to find the password-guesser, who was easily caught, convicted and jailed. Do you think that would happen if he had just gotten into the emails of some nobody? It wasn't even a government account - it was purely personal, and she was forbidden by state open-records law from using it for government business. Indeed, the whole point of him breaking in was to investigate previously untested rumors that she was doing just that.
Turned out she was, but only on a very small scale. Just two conversations, for the sake of convenience rather than deliberate cover-up. Still, it goes to show what everyone here knows: The law may protect everyone, but it'll work a lot harder to protect those who are wealthy or influencial enough to demand the VIP treatment.
I suspect part of the NBNs political purpose is to make it easier to justify government-imposed filtering. It's much easier to argue that something needs to be tightly regulated if tax money is being spent on it.
It's become ideological now. A lot of people got into piracy for the free stuff, but then it became a moral issue - they either object to the business practices often associated with the larger copyright industries, or believe that the benefits of copyright are outweighed by the draconian measures required to enforce it in the age of the personal computer.
It doesn't exactly mean enemy. It means something closer to 'adversary' - like an opponent in a game, or the relationship between prosecution and defence lawyers in a trial. They fight, but on good terms. God and Satan even had a friendly wager in the Book of Job regarding how much punishment a man can withstand before losing faith.
Healthy, no... but harmful? Why? They probably have no idea what's going on, and if it's just a few photos will forget all about it.
True. Though there is an interesting exception: No priest can be required or compelled to break the seal of the confessional in the US. No matter what he may hear there. Doesn't apply here though, as the discovery wasn't via confession.
If it's on the workstation, maybe. If it's on the big fileserver that runs half the company? It's useless even relying on redundant components or backups, as the cops may well sieze the whole server and the backups too to get dates or look for already-deleted images.
I'd pass the decision on to someone higher, and let them take the fall if it all goes wrong.