The former requires a burden of proof while the latter is assumed.
They may or may not be entirely genuine — but you did claim, there was misinformation mixed in. This was a claim — made by you — that remains unsubstantiated by any citations...
They are either authentic or they are not.
What? Why? For all we know, there may be a 1000 genuine copies of real documents and 1 slightly altered — to remain believable, but appear more damning somehow. This — adding a little bit of lies into loads of truth is one of the dishonest propaganda methods (there can be honest propaganda). But to assert, as you did, that such mixing really did happen, you need to cite an example. At least one...
Why do you keep bring up Hillary Clinton?
Because her life offers so many good examples of how lies and truth are "fluid" and a "social construct".
Accountability need no single overlord. It should be part of our culture.
It should be. It may even already be. But humans aren't perfect — and certainly not omniscient Recall, if you will, the standards like "based on preponderance of evidence" vs. "beyond reasonable doubt" vs. "beyond any doubt". A statement may hold up to the first one, but not to the third — perhaps not even the second. Is the statement true?
You may be sick of Ms. Clinton as an example, so consider O.J. Simpson — the statement: "he killed his wife and her lover" is false according to the "reasonable doubt" standard (used by criminal courts), but true on the preponderance of evidence (used in the civil suits)... So much for the "truth is absolute"...
For what? Why should selling something to a willing buyer be a crime? Ah, it is "harmful" — well, it is harmful only to him and/or other willing consumers...
The burden of proof comes on the original claim that they are genuine.
I made no claim the dump is genuine. You, on the other hand, did claim, there are fakes in there:
misinformation has been mixed in with the information
It is now on you to cite an example of such misinformation...
Either information is true or it is false.
Well, let's see... Is the sky blue? If Hillary Clinton said so last year, "Fact Checkers" would've agreed, that it is a "Mostly True" statement. If Donald Trump made such a claim, the same "Fact Checkers" would've pointed out, that the sky is black at night and red at dusk and dawn — and rated the claim "Mostly False".
Everyone should be held to this standard.
Which omni-scient and benevolent deity would be doing the holding?
Accuracy is always good, but a lot of it is subjective. And, besides, when Hillary's e-mails were posted, no one protested the content. People were outraged over "Putin" meddling in the US elections, but I don't recall anyone calling any particular e-mail a fake...
Besides, politicians — and their fans — lie and exaggerate all the time, it is par of the course. Why should the requirements and the expectations be higher for leaked info?
The problem here is that misinformation has been mixed in with the information
allegations of heroin possession and of unlawful possession of a handgun
Neither possession should be a crime anyway... Free citizens of a free country ought to be able to poison themselves with whatever substances they please. And the gun? Hello? The Bill of Rights?
If these things are illegal in the first place — without anybody protesting loudly — protesting minute details (like the original search vs. reenactment) seems kinda silly... If the government is allowed to violate the Second Amendment — with about 50% of the populace enthusiastically cheering it on — why is there such outrage, when the Fourth is violated?
Of course, it is — the costs of the infrastructure are largely fixed. It (almost) does not matter, whether the network is used by 100 or 100000 people. So, as the number of users dwindles, the costs born by the remaining users go up.
Watching some old cartoons the other day, I had to explain to my older kid, what "payphone" used to be... The younger one may need the same explanation for a "landline".
Seriously, if you told someone, you "left your phone at home" in the 1980ies (or even early 90ies), they would've thought, you are crazy... Is not technology wonderful?
Though this has nothing to do with my original point — that Slashdot readers do not need it explained to them, what F[oO][rR][tT][rR][aA][nN] is — unless there has been an official renaming ("the programming language known as FORTRAN shall henceforth be called Fortran"), the casual renaming is still a colloquial whim...
TCL (Tools Command Language) has suffered similarly as it gradually became "Tcl" or, even worse, "tickle"...
If we go by the colloquial whims of the day, we'd start spelling "you are" as "your" and "ur" and believe that humans — uniquely among mammals — have not two, but 71 sexes...
The software was developed in the 1980s and is written in an older computer programming language called Fortran.
I understand, why BBC may want to explain, what FORTRAN is, but for Slashdot to spell it out reveals clumsy copy-pasting — and lousy editing.
$55,000 between the top two people who can make its FUN3D software run up to 10,000 times faster
What's with the "up to"? If I make it only twice faster, will I get anything? What if I make it 20,000 times faster — will my entry be disqualified for exceeding the specified maximum improvement?
The stupid humans crossed (what is now) Bering's Straits, started too many fires and melted too much ice. The ocean-levels rose and there was no way for them to walk back... The Shamanry was settled — it was all their fault.
When you keep your data in the cloud, and don't keep backups on hand, you're at the mercy of the powers to be
Indeed. And the even bigger picture here is that the Government — the single biggest "power that is" — is the primary source of problems. Every interaction with it — be it the TSA agents, the police (even if they aren't after you), the DMV, a hospital, or even the Post Office — carry a high risk of being unpleasant if not outright horrifying. Having an uneventful encounter with these officials is the surprise, not the other way around.
Folks demanding, government takes over this or that are either idiots or hope to profit personally without being subject of the takeover themselves.
could dangle deep discounts to drug suppliers -- with the condition that they turn their backs on Sanofi's Auvi-Q
We've had antitrust laws for over a century now, since Standard Oil was using similar tactics against competition. New "regulations" since then are mostly junk...
Law-suits brought by the unfairly injured competitor seems like the best means of resolving these problems.
Do you have actual complaints about how The Clinton Foundation spends donations
Clinton Foundation was an influence-peddling scam. It was receiving money, when Clinton was a Secretary of State and seemed a shoe-in to become President. It closed down its international wing after she lost the elections.
Had it been really a charitable organization, it would have instead flourished, when the proprietors finally left the distractions of politics and could concentrate on the sincere charity work. But no, the most charitable thing you can say about this charity is that it is "at crossroads" now that they have no influence left to peddle.
Well, Obama is set to get about $80 total in his first year out of office. And one wonders, why — considering his past statements like this:
“We’re not trying to push financial reform because we begrudge success that’s fairly earned. I mean, I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money.”
I can't believe, this is happening without the FCC or a similar government organization mandating it — driven simply by the KKKorporate greed and the fear of competition...
England was paying for information, paying informants, paying propagandists, jailing and killing people who spoke out publicly against the Crown's control
Citations would've been most helpful here, but let's stipulate, it is all true.
So, in the 18th century Britain was already doing all of that. And in the 20th it did too — and we still regard Alan Turing's efforts as nothing but heroic and decisive in turning the war in the Allies' favor and saving thousands of lives.
Why, then, are so many folks — yourself included — denouncing Turing's descendants at CIA, NSA and their British equivalents in the 21st century? Yes, they could spy on their own citizens illegally and it, likely, does happen — including political opposition. But they do, unfortunately, have a vast number of legitimate targets and their secretive efforts continue to save lives... To sabotage all of their efforts because they could sometimes be abusive is like banning cars because some times people die in them.
It is most refreshing to have a mainstream media outlet call the "leaker" a "traitor", but, when he is found, we are likely to discover, that he was lead to these actions by the Western public's suicidal attitudes towards earlier traitors — Snowden and Manning.
Yep, me too... I was in fifth grade, our new Astronomy teacher — I'm about twice older now, than she was then (darn!) — offered the class to write a program for her for extra credit (I am pretty sure now, she needed it for her own class in college).
I took my dad's Fortran book and coded the thing up — something really simple, a loop doing something with an array... I never got to test it on anything, but I did get the extra credit...
As if the the fact that intelligence agency could possibly use a preinstalled microphone of an electronic device, is in any way non-obvious or as if it's problematic that the 'intended' knows about this.
If it really were as trivial as you imply:
the spooks would not have used it,
the leaker would not have leaked the details of it,
Wikileaks would not have found it publication-worthy,
Slashdot-editors would not have put it on the front page,
Slashdot-users would not have gone to discuss it as much.
Since all of the above did happen, it is not as trivial as you imply. More than likely, some of our enemies have been eavesdropped upon with this tool. And, just as likely, most of them will now make it impossible — endangering lives on our side. Our efforts to thwart them have been impeded and the millions spent on this efforts — wasted. Thanks to the traitor.
Truth is that all terrorists so far used unencrypted normal SMS services and burner phones, or the unencrypted chat services of various Playstation games.
Those are means of communications. When communicating a person may wonder, who else is listening. TVs are used primarily for entertainment — it does not occur to most people, an adversary can spy on them in their living room.
This leaker can only be defended by people, who view NSA (and Britain's equivalent) as the adversary. Presumably, you aren't one of them, are you?
What, you want to make it a secret that intelligence agencies can see the chatlogs of Playstation games, too?
If a dumber among the enemy is still unaware of it, yes, I'd like to keep them ignorant. Even if only 5% of the enemies have a Samsung TV today, I would've liked them to keep on using it — so that my employees at the NSA can be privy to their conversations.
Whoever leaked this is a traitor. It is no different from informing Kriegsmarine, their Enigma codes have been broken.
Yes, the "Weeping Angel" could be used against civilians. But the same was true about Alan Turing's crypto-breaking machinery and their listening for any and all radio-traffic as well.
Like any other weapon or tool It could be abused, but publicizing it defeats its effectiveness against the intended — and perfectly legitimate — targets and is thus bona fide treasonous.
Slashdot Mirror
They may or may not be entirely genuine — but you did claim, there was misinformation mixed in. This was a claim — made by you — that remains unsubstantiated by any citations...
What? Why? For all we know, there may be a 1000 genuine copies of real documents and 1 slightly altered — to remain believable, but appear more damning somehow. This — adding a little bit of lies into loads of truth is one of the dishonest propaganda methods (there can be honest propaganda). But to assert, as you did, that such mixing really did happen, you need to cite an example. At least one...
Because her life offers so many good examples of how lies and truth are "fluid" and a "social construct".
It should be. It may even already be. But humans aren't perfect — and certainly not omniscient Recall, if you will, the standards like "based on preponderance of evidence" vs. "beyond reasonable doubt" vs. "beyond any doubt". A statement may hold up to the first one, but not to the third — perhaps not even the second. Is the statement true?
You may be sick of Ms. Clinton as an example, so consider O.J. Simpson — the statement: "he killed his wife and her lover" is false according to the "reasonable doubt" standard (used by criminal courts), but true on the preponderance of evidence (used in the civil suits)... So much for the "truth is absolute"...
For what? Why should selling something to a willing buyer be a crime? Ah, it is "harmful" — well, it is harmful only to him and/or other willing consumers...
I made no claim the dump is genuine. You, on the other hand, did claim, there are fakes in there:
It is now on you to cite an example of such misinformation...
Well, let's see... Is the sky blue? If Hillary Clinton said so last year, "Fact Checkers" would've agreed, that it is a "Mostly True" statement. If Donald Trump made such a claim, the same "Fact Checkers" would've pointed out, that the sky is black at night and red at dusk and dawn — and rated the claim "Mostly False".
Which omni-scient and benevolent deity would be doing the holding?
Accuracy is always good, but a lot of it is subjective. And, besides, when Hillary's e-mails were posted, no one protested the content. People were outraged over "Putin" meddling in the US elections, but I don't recall anyone calling any particular e-mail a fake...
Besides, politicians — and their fans — lie and exaggerate all the time, it is par of the course. Why should the requirements and the expectations be higher for leaked info?
Has it been? Citations?
Neither possession should be a crime anyway... Free citizens of a free country ought to be able to poison themselves with whatever substances they please. And the gun? Hello? The Bill of Rights?
If these things are illegal in the first place — without anybody protesting loudly — protesting minute details (like the original search vs. reenactment) seems kinda silly... If the government is allowed to violate the Second Amendment — with about 50% of the populace enthusiastically cheering it on — why is there such outrage, when the Fourth is violated?
Of course, they do — financed by Russia Le Pen wants to lift sanctions against Kremlin and endorsed Crimea "occupendum" as a legitimate transfer of Ukraine's land to Russia.
How is Democracy at risk over this? Does not "information want to be free"? Is not it good that voters know more about the candidate, than less?
Suppose, somebody hacked Trump's tax-returns — would that also be denounced as a threat to Democracy, or cheered?
Of course, it is — the costs of the infrastructure are largely fixed. It (almost) does not matter, whether the network is used by 100 or 100000 people. So, as the number of users dwindles, the costs born by the remaining users go up.
Watching some old cartoons the other day, I had to explain to my older kid, what "payphone" used to be... The younger one may need the same explanation for a "landline".
Seriously, if you told someone, you "left your phone at home" in the 1980ies (or even early 90ies), they would've thought, you are crazy... Is not technology wonderful?
Though this has nothing to do with my original point — that Slashdot readers do not need it explained to them, what F[oO][rR][tT][rR][aA][nN] is — unless there has been an official renaming ("the programming language known as FORTRAN shall henceforth be called Fortran"), the casual renaming is still a colloquial whim...
TCL (Tools Command Language) has suffered similarly as it gradually became "Tcl" or, even worse, "tickle"...
If we go by the colloquial whims of the day, we'd start spelling "you are" as "your" and "ur" and believe that humans — uniquely among mammals — have not two, but 71 sexes...
No, it is FORTRAN... As in FORmula TRANslator.
I understand, why BBC may want to explain, what FORTRAN is, but for Slashdot to spell it out reveals clumsy copy-pasting — and lousy editing.
What's with the "up to"? If I make it only twice faster, will I get anything? What if I make it 20,000 times faster — will my entry be disqualified for exceeding the specified maximum improvement?
The stupid humans crossed (what is now) Bering's Straits, started too many fires and melted too much ice. The ocean-levels rose and there was no way for them to walk back... The Shamanry was settled — it was all their fault.
Indeed. And the even bigger picture here is that the Government — the single biggest "power that is" — is the primary source of problems. Every interaction with it — be it the TSA agents, the police (even if they aren't after you), the DMV, a hospital, or even the Post Office — carry a high risk of being unpleasant if not outright horrifying. Having an uneventful encounter with these officials is the surprise, not the other way around.
Folks demanding, government takes over this or that are either idiots or hope to profit personally without being subject of the takeover themselves.
Well, whatever they actually did, they were accused of jacking their prices back up after driving the competition away.
This is one of those cases, when the facts do not really matter, ha-ha, only the public perception does...
We've had antitrust laws for over a century now, since Standard Oil was using similar tactics against competition. New "regulations" since then are mostly junk...
Law-suits brought by the unfairly injured competitor seems like the best means of resolving these problems.
Clinton Foundation was an influence-peddling scam. It was receiving money, when Clinton was a Secretary of State and seemed a shoe-in to become President. It closed down its international wing after she lost the elections.
Had it been really a charitable organization, it would have instead flourished, when the proprietors finally left the distractions of politics and could concentrate on the sincere charity work. But no, the most charitable thing you can say about this charity is that it is "at crossroads" now that they have no influence left to peddle.
Barack Obama, 2010 [emphasis mine]
In other news Barack Obama will be paid $400K for one speech. Which is what his annual salary used to be, while in office.
I wonder, who was more ruinous to the enterprise they were charged with running...
I can't believe, this is happening without the FCC or a similar government organization mandating it — driven simply by the KKKorporate greed and the fear of competition...
Is there a lesson here? Maybe, use of Social Media impedes the economic growth?
Citations would've been most helpful here, but let's stipulate, it is all true.
So, in the 18th century Britain was already doing all of that. And in the 20th it did too — and we still regard Alan Turing's efforts as nothing but heroic and decisive in turning the war in the Allies' favor and saving thousands of lives.
Why, then, are so many folks — yourself included — denouncing Turing's descendants at CIA, NSA and their British equivalents in the 21st century? Yes, they could spy on their own citizens illegally and it, likely, does happen — including political opposition. But they do, unfortunately, have a vast number of legitimate targets and their secretive efforts continue to save lives... To sabotage all of their efforts because they could sometimes be abusive is like banning cars because some times people die in them.
It is most refreshing to have a mainstream media outlet call the "leaker" a "traitor", but, when he is found, we are likely to discover, that he was lead to these actions by the Western public's suicidal attitudes towards earlier traitors — Snowden and Manning.
Yep, me too... I was in fifth grade, our new Astronomy teacher — I'm about twice older now, than she was then (darn!) — offered the class to write a program for her for extra credit (I am pretty sure now, she needed it for her own class in college).
I took my dad's Fortran book and coded the thing up — something really simple, a loop doing something with an array... I never got to test it on anything, but I did get the extra credit...
Yes, that's entirely possible. And yet, the technology has plenty of legitimate uses and should not have been sabotaged.
If it really were as trivial as you imply:
Since all of the above did happen, it is not as trivial as you imply. More than likely, some of our enemies have been eavesdropped upon with this tool. And, just as likely, most of them will now make it impossible — endangering lives on our side. Our efforts to thwart them have been impeded and the millions spent on this efforts — wasted. Thanks to the traitor.
Those are means of communications. When communicating a person may wonder, who else is listening. TVs are used primarily for entertainment — it does not occur to most people, an adversary can spy on them in their living room.
This leaker can only be defended by people, who view NSA (and Britain's equivalent) as the adversary. Presumably, you aren't one of them, are you?
If a dumber among the enemy is still unaware of it, yes, I'd like to keep them ignorant. Even if only 5% of the enemies have a Samsung TV today, I would've liked them to keep on using it — so that my employees at the NSA can be privy to their conversations.
Whoever leaked this is a traitor. It is no different from informing Kriegsmarine, their Enigma codes have been broken.
Yes, the "Weeping Angel" could be used against civilians. But the same was true about Alan Turing's crypto-breaking machinery and their listening for any and all radio-traffic as well.
Like any other weapon or tool It could be abused, but publicizing it defeats its effectiveness against the intended — and perfectly legitimate — targets and is thus bona fide treasonous.