All this Slashdot bitching and whining about how nothing is intuitive and everything is learned is completely missing the point.
I'll give you a working definition of intuitive: A feature is intuitive if on the first try it behaves as the user expects it to behave. See? Nothing about genes, nothing about instincts, nothing about learning.
Dragging a sheet-of-paper icon to a waste basket to delete a document is intuitive for me and probably for 90% of the Western world. We know what is a sheet of paper and what is a waste basket. It doesn't matter if we learned this: we have this knowledge by the time we touch the computer. However, say, for our friendly tribesman Mumbo from New Guinea the same action would not be intuitive at all because it's likely he's never seen a wastebasket in his life and doesn't really know what it means.
In other words, intuition is in the eye of the beholder. An interface is intuitive if I can apply my already-acquired, previously-learned knowledge to the new domain.
And, by the way, user interface design is a big and very complicated field. Most Slashdot readers are no more qualified to comment on it than to judge the performance of a surgeon by watching an operation. Of course that never stopped anyone, me included...:-)
Kaa
Re:Unfortunately, Scott McNealy was right...
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Database Nation
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· Score: 1
Cash-equivalent transactions will surely be added to the same reports people like Experian manage, once they see the obvious marketing opportunity available in giving away not just your credit history but your purchase history.
I am sure Experian would just *love* to have all my purchasing history in a database. Unfortunately for them, I don't see this happening any time soon. Cash is anonymous and changing that fact is very hard. It can be (and is) done for large transactions and for certain specific purchases (e.g. airline tickets), but in general changing the anonymity of cash is not feasible.
unforgeable headers IPv6 will certainly implement to render all of your aforementioned defenses obsolete
Another sigh. You don't really know what you are talking about. No good privacy tools rely on IP spoofing. Why don't you start by going off and reading about, say, anonymous remailers. Properly used they provide a huge degree of email privacy and IPv6 is not going to affect them at all.
Kaa
Re:Unfortunately, Scott McNealy was right...
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Database Nation
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· Score: 1
A pill for PMS'ing women.
I see. You must be well acquainted with it, dearie.
Balderdash - debit cards can be tracked as easily as credit cards. Added to which, asking to be lent money is one thing - tracking where I spend it is another. I don't know why you feel inclined to have your creditors be given have this ability to track you.
You are confusing a credit report which companies like Experian will give to anybody for a small amount of money, and a credit card (or a debit card) transaction history, which is possible for the third party to get, but it's much much harder than getting a credit report. A credit report does not contain information on your spending: it records what you were lent money for, when, how much, and how you are paying it back. A credit card statement, on the other hand, does contain all your purchases. But I don't see why the simple idea of using cash has such a hard time of getting into your head.
You're missing the entire notion of why privacy is important
I guess we'll have to disagree about this. You don't seem to understand what I am telling you.
Your MAC address is hardwired. Even if the products you discuss cover this up, they can't cover up the bit trail you leave on email servers and routers in your wake.
Sigh. Why don't you get a clue as to what IP-based networks (such as Internet) are and what are differences between layers in a networking stack?
First, on many NIC cards the MAC address is changeable. Second, I tend to communicate with routers and mail servers using IP protocol. My IP address which the routers, etc. see provides no information about my MAC address and is easily spoofable anyway. I am even ignoring the fact that on a dial-up connection there in no such thing as a MAC address...
Kaa
Re:Unfortunately, Scott McNealy was right...
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Database Nation
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· Score: 1
Take a pamprin honey
What's a pamprin, dearie?
Now go back and read the post again and tell me what "tools" you have for realistically obscuring your credit record... [snip]... Any long-term debt is recorded.
Don't get your panties in a bunch, dearie. Re-read the post again, specifically the part about the trade-off between privacy and convenience. If you don't want information about you appear in the credit report, don't buy things on credit. Yes, I know that this will make your life difficult, but that's exactly the nature of the trade-off.
And remember that the credit report has a reason: you are asking people to lend you money. Don't like the consequences -- don't ask.
The value of privacy is independent of whether you have anything to hide or not
Of course. But the danger to your privacy from the release of a certain piece of info does depend on what's in that piece of info. The value of privacy stands by itself, but *threats* to it can be different. The fact that a driver's licence includes hair color is not very privacy-threatening, the fact that it includes the SSN is.
Your IP address and MAC information can be obtained without you knowing it
Yes, that's exactly why you have to understand what's happening and what your computer may be doing behind your back. But to repeat myself there are tools (e.g. ZeroKnowledge's Freedom.net) which will prevent this if used properly.
Kaa
Re:Social Firewalls and knowing the enemy
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Database Nation
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He then held up a bouncy-ball with LEDs that flashed when it hit something (THE toy to have from the expo) And asked how many of us had one of these (most of the audience raised their hands). He pointed out that our privacy was worth less to us than these flashing balls, because we'd all of course swiped our ID cards to get 'em.
The bouncy-ball with LEDs inside is a VERY cool toy -- I know, I got one. However, the example is not a very good one. What makes you think that the name on my swiped tag was a real one (hint: the last name on the tag was "Foozle")? And yes, of course I am the CEO of a corporation that employs more than 10,000 people, and yes, I personally expect to buy more than a 1000 computers in the near future.
P.S. When the awards were given out at the Slashdot party, I kicked myself hard for not coming up with the "Anonymous Coward" name for my tag...:-(
Kaa
Re:Unfortunately, Scott McNealy was right...
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Database Nation
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when he said "you already have no privacy, deal with it".
What Scott McNealy meant was: "I have no privacy and have to deal with it, so I don't see any reason why any of you should have any privacy either".
Your entire credit history can be inspected by strangers.
Yes, and so? You yourself are observed by strangers every day as you walk/drive on the streets. This is dangerous only if the credit history reveals much about you: see next.
Credit car purchases can be easily tracked, measured, and mined to form a frighteningly fitting profile of you.
Yes. There is a trade-off (as with most things in life): you trade privacy for convenience. You want more privacy? Fine. Don't use your credit card unless absolutely necessary (e.g. car rental). Pay for everything with cash. Yes, it's less convenient, but you leave no paper trail. The choice is for you to make.
Your emails can be read by your employer.
Duh! So, I am to understand, the idea of having non-work email account never crossed your mind? This is like complaining that you had a fight with your girlfriend on the front steps of your house and all the neighbors were watching.
Your phone may already be "observed" by outside agencies.
WTF do you mean? Wiretapping? That's very old news, plus the number of wiretaps in the US is very reasonable.
Most of your network transactions can be traced, given time and effort.
It all depends. If you give your real name/address/email to all who ask, never look into your cookie file, etc. don't be surprised that some companies (DoubleClick comes to mind) know exactly which porn you like to jerk off to. However, again, if you are willing to trade away some convenience to get privacy, there are tools available. Freedom.net, for example, comes to mind.
To summarize: don't whine. If you *care* about your privacy, there are tools out there to help you. If you don't want to spend any effort, thought -- don't be surprised at the results.
The DMCA is not trying to redefine entertainment on the web. It is trying to reclaim what is legally theirs... The purpose of the DMCA is to defend against outright copyright infringement, which is what we are all doing.
This happens to be utter bullshit. Allow me to provide some context for the current mess.
Originally -- mid-century -- copying information (in particular, copyrighted works) was hard and expensive. Unauthorized use wasn't much of an issue. Then technology such as Xerox copy machines, VCRs, etc. made certain kinds of copying easy and cheap. The result was a re-write of the US copyright laws which created a certain balance that right now most people find "natural". Basically, harsher penalties for copyright infringement were offset by "fair use" exemptions. The law essentially said that noncommercial use of copyrighted works is OK, as long as you don't go bananas with it. Fine and dandy. This is the situation that we are all used to. I would like to point out that as time passed, the penalties for breaking the copyright law were becoming harsher and harsher, thus tilting this balance somewhat.
Fast-forward to the end of 90s: enter DMCA. What DMCA does -- forget all the bullshit about entertainment on the web -- is outlaw fair use. Any company that bothers to put any kind of a "technological device" to restrict access can now forbid fair use. Yes, Mr.Smith, you can copy that disc for your own private archival purposes, however to do this you will need to access its contents for the copying operation, and *that* happens to be highly illegal.
So DMCA is not about music, not about entertainment, and not about taking the caviar out of the mouths of recording industry execs. It's about the radical change in the balance of power between information publisher and information user. Guess who loses...
Maybe he's of the mindset that, since he doesn't have any privacy, none of us should either.
No, no, that's not Clinton, that's Scott McNealy. We are supposed to "get over it", remember?
Kaa
Re:PKI and other issues
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SSH v. SRP
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Now, let me make this clear: there is no method for you to ensure data integrity over a public network like the internet. You must exchange keys over a secure medium before you can communicate securely over any network unless you can ensure that the entire network is under the same (trusted) administrative domain and have verified that it has not been tampered with (very, very difficult).
You seem to be confused (umber hulks are a problem in your area?:-) We, and you, are not talking about *data integrity* which is being sure that your chunk of bits got from point A to point B without having been changed en route. We are talking about authentication which is a hard problem, has been a hard problem, and will stay a hard problem for the foreseeable future.
Think about it this way. You, Alice, communicate with some entity at the other end of the wire. This entity tells you that it is Bob. Well, for this statement to be meaningful the label "Bob" has to refer to some entity that Alice knows of.
Now, if Alice and Bob-that-she-knows-of have a shared secret, Alice can test that the entity-on-the-other-end-of-the-wire is really Bob-that-she-knows-of. There are standard crypto protocols for this. However, consider the situation that Alice and Bob have no shared secrets. All that Alice knows about Bob is publicly available info. In this case Alice cannot be sure that the entity-on-the-other-end-of-the-wire is Bob-that-she-knows-of and there is no way for her to be sure.
Again, this problem has nothing to do with "data integrity over a public network". It all revolves around existence of a secret (=key) shared between Alice and Bob.
And, by the way, if Alice has a trusted PKI key server with a trusted path to it, then she can authenticate Bob easily enough over a different, completely non-secure network. That's all standard PKI stuff, really.
I would argue for the historically tested method of storing data: take a chisel and carve it into rock.
The software obsolescence is not a big problem -- humans (we hope) are going to be around for some time and the brain wiring changes awfully slowly. Languages do get forgotten, but smart people are very good at understanding dead languages and will probably get only better. Readers are also not likely to be a problems: just like brain wiring, eyeball construction is quite stable and not going to be superseded by a better design any time soon.
The media -- provided you pick a good hard rock like granite (avoid limestone and its derivatives like marble, they don't like acid raid) -- does not suffer from bit rot, completely ignores magnetic fields, stable with regards to solar radiation, and fairly resistant to pollutants.
You are not limited to ASCII, and even have limited graphical capability. In fact, rock has a huge advantage over current digital media -- it's perfectly possible to create, view, and store 3D objects in rock. Just try that with your 21' monitor!
Just in case you think I am being funny, there is a company which in exchange for a sum of money will take your text, etch it on metal plates (nickel, I believe), and store it in some cave. They are estimating >5,000 years MTBF. I still think a good slab of granite is better, though.
Er, are you talking about those introducing it, or those voting for it?
I am talking about those who push it: those who spend money and/or effort in order to make mandatory library filtering a reality. Most of the voting public are just innocent bystanders:-/
you'll lose PR points saying it so bluntly
I don't think I am running in any popularity contests right now, so...
"This post is for limited release to Slashdot readers only. Under no circumstances it is to be made available to general population. What would they think of us?!?! Keep PR in mind at all times!!"
If you really have something to say/write whatever and didn't want to take the chance of anyone else possibly seeing/hearing it, would you really send it over the net, or over some unsecured copper pair? I wouldn't.
I would. Two reasons.
One: Q: "Where does a wise man hide a fish?" A: "In the ocean".
Two: It seems highly unlikely that NSA or (insert your favorite bogeyman here) can break correctly-used publicly available encryption with reasonable key size (e.g. >=2048 bit for public key, or >=128 bits for symmetric).
Whining and bitching about big brother will achieve nothing.
Truth. It's the path of least resistance, however.
I you are interested in having more of their mission etc. made public, curbed completely or audited, the way to make a little noise and get heard is to write your representative.
I think the key word here is "little". I estimate the chances of governments of the world giving up spying on their own citizens and everybody else to be precisely zero.
The cypherpunks way is more to my liking. Encrypt. Encrypt all messages. Tell your friends to encrypt all messages. Laugh at the very expensive hardware collecting a lot of apparently random noise (but keep yourself up to date on the latest crypto techniques).
Whining on Slashdot only increases your Karma.
But isn't it the goal of existence? Better karma is the ultimate goal of life, isn't it?:-)
Karma... must have karma... more... more... MORE!!!
When you demonify your opponents, you lose the middle ground and you cheat yourself.
Sometimes there is no middle ground. I am not saying this is one of those issue, but there are certainly struggles where there is NO middle (or, rather, the middle is a very slippery and very steep slope towards one side).
Besides, if you are always searching for a compromise, in a negotiated deal you will always end up worse than the hard-core people because you will start from the middle, and they'll start from their end.
Some proponants of filtering software may be in the same league as "book burners." Most aren't going to be. They will be concerned parents, people who have had a misleading porn site draw them in...
I disagree. I think that a small minority of pro-filter people really worry about dropping their kid at the library finding him an hour later totally corrupted. The majority of pro-filter people just want to legislate their morality. What gets their panties in a bunch is a simple fact that somebody somewhere could be sitting in a public library and enjoying porn. Clearly, this is evil and should be prohibited. I would bet that most of these people would gladly prohibit all and any porn anywhere, it's just that there are some problems on this road (Supreme Court being a nuisance, and all that).
As far as I am concerned, the pro-filter people are exactly those who were pushing CDA a couple of years ago and are pushing CDA II now. I don't think they are concerned parents. I think they are unmitigated bigots.
I have adapted to my natural keyboard, so much that to use another keyboard causes me wrist pain within 5 minutes.
That's not good at all. Since you get wrist pain in five minutes from a normal keyboard, your wrists are in pretty bad shape. Your natural keyboard probably saves them from going over the edge, but it doesn't seem to help in healing/b? them. And healing they definitely need.
It seems that the natural keyboard turned out to be a hold-off measure for you, but in your place I would really put an effort into getting your wrists into shape. Shape here means the ability to type on a normal keyboard for months before getting wrist pain (and no, I don't suggest you do that).
Remember all these posts on Slashdot that said that you can never successfully protect content unless human eyes and ears become copyright-protection-device-compliant?
Well, Intel listened, and heard, and we are moving in this direction.
The idea is very clear: if the video stream is decoded only inside the display, then you cannot intercept it and divert it to make a copy. They would claim, of course, that this is prevent piracy but somehow I think this is all steps toward attaching a meter to our eyes so we pay fore each second we look at something.
Marx is not only hated by the US, but anyone associated with his views of power equality...
Err... Marx was not interested in power equality. He was interested in inverting the power balance which existed during his times: he wanted proletariat to be powerful and bourgeoisie powerless.
[Marx's] idea that the underclass are probably just as intelligent as the ruling class
And what does this have to do with Marx??? The idea that common people can be as intelligent as the nobles is actually a capitalist idea and was considered radical when capitalism was replacing feudalism -- fairly long time before Marx. Anyway, Marx was concerned with economic and political power, not intelligence.
Note to self... if ever you see Kaa complaining about the way the government works, reference this comment.
If you ever see me whining about the government, or complaining that the government owes me something, feel free to hit me with a big stick (clue or not).
However I don't see why unwillingness to do something myself strips me of the right to criticise. Do you mean that I cannot say "North Koreans rulers are Stalinist crazies" without going there and trying to start a revolution?
If we libertarians are "just a bunch of guys playing with themselves. They have no political power and not likely to get any soon.", then why are we one of the only three officially recognized political parties in Massachussetts?
So, tell me, how many elected representative do you have? What are the bills that you forced the passage of?
Okay, so you find both of the big political parties repugnant and don't think the libertarians have a chance, so you're going to sit there and let the people you don't like go on running things.
Yes.
There are many things about this world that I don't like. The US political system is not the biggest of them. I happen to have a life and I am not willing to sacrifice it in order to "maybe, just maybe" being able to make a bit of a difference to the current political mess.
If the situation significantly changes (for example the looking-less-ridiculous-by-the-day RMS prediction of debuggers becoming illegal), I might change my mind about this. Right now, however, I have more important things to do.
Y'know, if most of the smart and honest people in the U.S. opted out of politics, our country would end up with an inept, unresponsive government.
That already happend, it is a fact of current life in the US. And it is getting worse, since running for election means a pack of bloodthirsty hounds will rip through your private life trying to find dirt. Given the erosion of privacy we have, there will be a lot to rip through (for "normal", non-paranoid people anyway). I happen to think that this is a huge deterrent to smart and honest people entering politics.
What if a whole bunch of smart, computer-hip, honest people decided they *could* make a difference, and went to those off-season political caucuses and took over the party machinery?
You know, there is a recurring theme in mythology: a hero goes off to fight a bad evil dude who rules the county, defeats him and takes his place. In a very short time the hero turns into exactly the same monster he defeated, and the next hero is arising to battle him...
It seems like a good metaphor to me.
Kaa
Re:Read the article; learn about existing ATA
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Serial ATA and USB 2
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you cannot afford an extra $30 per device in order to get a bus [SCSI] that actually works and performs well?
Reality check.
First, practically all mobos come with IDE built-in. To get a SCSI controller you need to buy one. A good one (say, Adaptec 2940) will set you back around $200.
Second, let's look at hard drives. Maxtor 18Gb IDE drive will cost you ~$140. The cheapest 18Gb SCSI drive will set you back $300 (all prices courtesy of PriceWatch).
And even more important than voting is getting involved in party politics in between elections, which is where and when future candidates and policies are picked
Well, there is a problem here. Democrats make me gag and Republicans make me throw up. Or maybe vice versa, depends which one I meet first:-( I kinda tend to be sympathetic to liberarians, but, to face the truth, politically they are just a bunch of guys playing with themselves. They have no political power and not likely to get any soon.
Now, I am of two minds regarding the "work with the system to change the system" positions. I can see both situations where it is a reasonable thing to do, and where it turns out to be a sellout, pure and simple (and yes, I have friends who found themselves in both situations).
So I am quite doubtful about the wisdom of getting actively involved with politics. Besides, politics do change a person for the worse. One of my friends spend a few years in Washington working inside the political machinery there. It did change him for the worse, noticeably.
Frankly, coding is boring. Designing systems is where the beauty of "programming" lies.
Yeah! Wise words. This needs clarification, though. Coding to somebody else's spec is boring. However, designing systems without any coding is hard (if doable at all) and hardly recommended. My point is that a lot low- and mid-level design is done as-you-are-coding and at that level design and coding intermix.
My personal style tends to (1) Design on paper the framework and the overall structure; (2) Start coding from the bottom, revising the design as the program structure clicks in place; (3) Meet in the middle. Kaa
As soon as you break the rules, you forfeit all rights
I do? I think that this is exactly what the authoritarian law-and-order types want you to believe. Break any rule and you become less than human, not worthy of any rights.
As in: "This guy portscanned a machine on the network! He should go to prison for five years and be forbidden to work with computers for the rest of his life. What do you mean it's too harsh? He's a hacker, vermin that must be eliminated. Be thankful we don't shoot him on the spot!"
Slashdot Mirror
All this Slashdot bitching and whining about how nothing is intuitive and everything is learned is completely missing the point.
:-)
I'll give you a working definition of intuitive: A feature is intuitive if on the first try it behaves as the user expects it to behave. See? Nothing about genes, nothing about instincts, nothing about learning.
Dragging a sheet-of-paper icon to a waste basket to delete a document is intuitive for me and probably for 90% of the Western world. We know what is a sheet of paper and what is a waste basket. It doesn't matter if we learned this: we have this knowledge by the time we touch the computer. However, say, for our friendly tribesman Mumbo from New Guinea the same action would not be intuitive at all because it's likely he's never seen a wastebasket in his life and doesn't really know what it means.
In other words, intuition is in the eye of the beholder. An interface is intuitive if I can apply my already-acquired, previously-learned knowledge to the new domain.
And, by the way, user interface design is a big and very complicated field. Most Slashdot readers are no more qualified to comment on it than to judge the performance of a surgeon by watching an operation. Of course that never stopped anyone, me included...
Kaa
Cash-equivalent transactions will surely be added to the same reports people like Experian manage, once they see the obvious marketing opportunity available in giving away not just your credit history but your purchase history.
I am sure Experian would just *love* to have all my purchasing history in a database. Unfortunately for them, I don't see this happening any time soon. Cash is anonymous and changing that fact is very hard. It can be (and is) done for large transactions and for certain specific purchases (e.g. airline tickets), but in general changing the anonymity of cash is not feasible.
unforgeable headers IPv6 will certainly implement to render all of your aforementioned defenses obsolete
Another sigh. You don't really know what you are talking about. No good privacy tools rely on IP spoofing. Why don't you start by going off and reading about, say, anonymous remailers. Properly used they provide a huge degree of email privacy and IPv6 is not going to affect them at all.
Kaa
A pill for PMS'ing women.
I see. You must be well acquainted with it, dearie.
Balderdash - debit cards can be tracked as easily as credit cards. Added to which, asking to be lent money is one thing - tracking where I spend it is another. I don't know why you feel inclined to have your creditors be given have this ability to track you.
You are confusing a credit report which companies like Experian will give to anybody for a small amount of money, and a credit card (or a debit card) transaction history, which is possible for the third party to get, but it's much much harder than getting a credit report. A credit report does not contain information on your spending: it records what you were lent money for, when, how much, and how you are paying it back. A credit card statement, on the other hand, does contain all your purchases. But I don't see why the simple idea of using cash has such a hard time of getting into your head.
You're missing the entire notion of why privacy is important
I guess we'll have to disagree about this. You don't seem to understand what I am telling you.
Your MAC address is hardwired. Even if the products you discuss cover this up, they can't cover up the bit trail you leave on email servers and routers in your wake.
Sigh. Why don't you get a clue as to what IP-based networks (such as Internet) are and what are differences between layers in a networking stack?
First, on many NIC cards the MAC address is changeable. Second, I tend to communicate with routers and mail servers using IP protocol. My IP address which the routers, etc. see provides no information about my MAC address and is easily spoofable anyway. I am even ignoring the fact that on a dial-up connection there in no such thing as a MAC address...
Kaa
Take a pamprin honey
... [snip] ... Any long-term debt is recorded.
What's a pamprin, dearie?
Now go back and read the post again and tell me what "tools" you have for realistically obscuring your credit record
Don't get your panties in a bunch, dearie. Re-read the post again, specifically the part about the trade-off between privacy and convenience. If you don't want information about you appear in the credit report, don't buy things on credit. Yes, I know that this will make your life difficult, but that's exactly the nature of the trade-off.
And remember that the credit report has a reason: you are asking people to lend you money. Don't like the consequences -- don't ask.
The value of privacy is independent of whether you have anything to hide or not
Of course. But the danger to your privacy from the release of a certain piece of info does depend on what's in that piece of info. The value of privacy stands by itself, but *threats* to it can be different. The fact that a driver's licence includes hair color is not very privacy-threatening, the fact that it includes the SSN is.
Your IP address and MAC information can be obtained without you knowing it
Yes, that's exactly why you have to understand what's happening and what your computer may be doing behind your back. But to repeat myself there are tools (e.g. ZeroKnowledge's Freedom.net) which will prevent this if used properly.
Kaa
He then held up a bouncy-ball with LEDs that flashed when it hit something (THE toy to have from the expo) And asked how many of us had one of these (most of the audience raised their hands). He pointed out that our privacy was worth less to us than these flashing balls, because we'd all of course swiped our ID cards to get 'em.
:-(
The bouncy-ball with LEDs inside is a VERY cool toy -- I know, I got one. However, the example is not a very good one. What makes you think that the name on my swiped tag was a real one (hint: the last name on the tag was "Foozle")? And yes, of course I am the CEO of a corporation that employs more than 10,000 people, and yes, I personally expect to buy more than a 1000 computers in the near future.
P.S. When the awards were given out at the Slashdot party, I kicked myself hard for not coming up with the "Anonymous Coward" name for my tag...
Kaa
when he said "you already have no privacy, deal with it".
What Scott McNealy meant was: "I have no privacy and have to deal with it, so I don't see any reason why any of you should have any privacy either".
Your entire credit history can be inspected by strangers.
Yes, and so? You yourself are observed by strangers every day as you walk/drive on the streets. This is dangerous only if the credit history reveals much about you: see next.
Credit car purchases can be easily tracked, measured, and mined to form a frighteningly fitting profile of you.
Yes. There is a trade-off (as with most things in life): you trade privacy for convenience. You want more privacy? Fine. Don't use your credit card unless absolutely necessary (e.g. car rental). Pay for everything with cash. Yes, it's less convenient, but you leave no paper trail. The choice is for you to make.
Your emails can be read by your employer.
Duh! So, I am to understand, the idea of having non-work email account never crossed your mind? This is like complaining that you had a fight with your girlfriend on the front steps of your house and all the neighbors were watching.
Your phone may already be "observed" by outside agencies.
WTF do you mean? Wiretapping? That's very old news, plus the number of wiretaps in the US is very reasonable.
Most of your network transactions can be traced, given time and effort.
It all depends. If you give your real name/address/email to all who ask, never look into your cookie file, etc. don't be surprised that some companies (DoubleClick comes to mind) know exactly which porn you like to jerk off to. However, again, if you are willing to trade away some convenience to get privacy, there are tools available. Freedom.net, for example, comes to mind.
To summarize: don't whine. If you *care* about your privacy, there are tools out there to help you. If you don't want to spend any effort, thought -- don't be surprised at the results.
Kaa
The DMCA is not trying to redefine entertainment on the web. It is trying to reclaim what is legally theirs ... The purpose of the DMCA is to defend against outright copyright infringement, which is what we are all doing.
This happens to be utter bullshit. Allow me to provide some context for the current mess.
Originally -- mid-century -- copying information (in particular, copyrighted works) was hard and expensive. Unauthorized use wasn't much of an issue. Then technology such as Xerox copy machines, VCRs, etc. made certain kinds of copying easy and cheap. The result was a re-write of the US copyright laws which created a certain balance that right now most people find "natural". Basically, harsher penalties for copyright infringement were offset by "fair use" exemptions. The law essentially said that noncommercial use of copyrighted works is OK, as long as you don't go bananas with it. Fine and dandy. This is the situation that we are all used to. I would like to point out that as time passed, the penalties for breaking the copyright law were becoming harsher and harsher, thus tilting this balance somewhat.
Fast-forward to the end of 90s: enter DMCA. What DMCA does -- forget all the bullshit about entertainment on the web -- is outlaw fair use. Any company that bothers to put any kind of a "technological device" to restrict access can now forbid fair use. Yes, Mr.Smith, you can copy that disc for your own private archival purposes, however to do this you will need to access its contents for the copying operation, and *that* happens to be highly illegal.
So DMCA is not about music, not about entertainment, and not about taking the caviar out of the mouths of recording industry execs. It's about the radical change in the balance of power between information publisher and information user. Guess who loses...
Kaa
Presently, what good is having a lot of karma? It means that you have the freedom to troll a lot before getting harmed by being moderated down.
Two answers.
First, a lot of karma gives you that warm and fuzzy feeling of being loved by the Slashdot community [grins, ducks and runs...]
Second, a starting score of 2 allows you to expose your post to the not-insignificant number of people who set their threshold to 2.
Kaa
Maybe he's of the mindset that, since he doesn't have any privacy, none of us should either.
No, no, that's not Clinton, that's Scott McNealy. We are supposed to "get over it", remember?
Kaa
Now, let me make this clear: there is no method for you to ensure data integrity over a public network like the internet. You must exchange keys over a secure medium before you can communicate securely over any network unless you can ensure that the entire network is under the same (trusted) administrative domain and have verified that it has not been tampered with (very, very difficult).
:-) We, and you, are not talking about *data integrity* which is being sure that your chunk of bits got from point A to point B without having been changed en route. We are talking about authentication which is a hard problem, has been a hard problem, and will stay a hard problem for the foreseeable future.
You seem to be confused (umber hulks are a problem in your area?
Think about it this way. You, Alice, communicate with some entity at the other end of the wire. This entity tells you that it is Bob. Well, for this statement to be meaningful the label "Bob" has to refer to some entity that Alice knows of.
Now, if Alice and Bob-that-she-knows-of have a shared secret, Alice can test that the entity-on-the-other-end-of-the-wire is really Bob-that-she-knows-of. There are standard crypto protocols for this. However, consider the situation that Alice and Bob have no shared secrets. All that Alice knows about Bob is publicly available info. In this case Alice cannot be sure that the entity-on-the-other-end-of-the-wire is Bob-that-she-knows-of and there is no way for her to be sure.
Again, this problem has nothing to do with "data integrity over a public network". It all revolves around existence of a secret (=key) shared between Alice and Bob.
And, by the way, if Alice has a trusted PKI key server with a trusted path to it, then she can authenticate Bob easily enough over a different, completely non-secure network. That's all standard PKI stuff, really.
Kaa
I would argue for the historically tested method of storing data: take a chisel and carve it into rock.
The software obsolescence is not a big problem -- humans (we hope) are going to be around for some time and the brain wiring changes awfully slowly. Languages do get forgotten, but smart people are very good at understanding dead languages and will probably get only better. Readers are also not likely to be a problems: just like brain wiring, eyeball construction is quite stable and not going to be superseded by a better design any time soon.
The media -- provided you pick a good hard rock like granite (avoid limestone and its derivatives like marble, they don't like acid raid) -- does not suffer from bit rot, completely ignores magnetic fields, stable with regards to solar radiation, and fairly resistant to pollutants.
You are not limited to ASCII, and even have limited graphical capability. In fact, rock has a huge advantage over current digital media -- it's perfectly possible to create, view, and store 3D objects in rock. Just try that with your 21' monitor!
Just in case you think I am being funny, there is a company which in exchange for a sum of money will take your text, etch it on metal plates (nickel, I believe), and store it in some cave. They are estimating >5,000 years MTBF. I still think a good slab of granite is better, though.
Kaa
Er, are you talking about those introducing it, or those voting for it?
:-/
I am talking about those who push it: those who spend money and/or effort in order to make mandatory library filtering a reality. Most of the voting public are just innocent bystanders
you'll lose PR points saying it so bluntly
I don't think I am running in any popularity contests right now, so...
"This post is for limited release to Slashdot readers only. Under no circumstances it is to be made available to general population. What would they think of us?!?! Keep PR in mind at all times!!"
Kaa
If you really have something to say/write whatever and didn't want to take the chance of anyone else possibly seeing/hearing it, would you really send it over the net, or over some unsecured copper pair? I wouldn't.
I would. Two reasons.
One: Q: "Where does a wise man hide a fish?" A: "In the ocean".
Two: It seems highly unlikely that NSA or (insert your favorite bogeyman here) can break correctly-used publicly available encryption with reasonable key size (e.g. >=2048 bit for public key, or >=128 bits for symmetric).
Kaa
Whining and bitching about big brother will achieve nothing.
:-)
Truth. It's the path of least resistance, however.
I you are interested in having more of their mission etc. made public, curbed completely or audited, the way to make a little noise and get heard is to write your representative.
I think the key word here is "little". I estimate the chances of governments of the world giving up spying on their own citizens and everybody else to be precisely zero.
The cypherpunks way is more to my liking. Encrypt. Encrypt all messages. Tell your friends to encrypt all messages. Laugh at the very expensive hardware collecting a lot of apparently random noise (but keep yourself up to date on the latest crypto techniques).
Whining on Slashdot only increases your Karma.
But isn't it the goal of existence? Better karma is the ultimate goal of life, isn't it?
Karma... must have karma... more... more... MORE!!!
Kaa
When you demonify your opponents, you lose the middle ground and you cheat yourself.
Sometimes there is no middle ground. I am not saying this is one of those issue, but there are certainly struggles where there is NO middle (or, rather, the middle is a very slippery and very steep slope towards one side).
Besides, if you are always searching for a compromise, in a negotiated deal you will always end up worse than the hard-core people because you will start from the middle, and they'll start from their end.
Some proponants of filtering software may be in the same league as "book burners." Most aren't going to be. They will be concerned parents, people who have had a misleading porn site draw them in...
I disagree. I think that a small minority of pro-filter people really worry about dropping their kid at the library finding him an hour later totally corrupted. The majority of pro-filter people just want to legislate their morality. What gets their panties in a bunch is a simple fact that somebody somewhere could be sitting in a public library and enjoying porn. Clearly, this is evil and should be prohibited. I would bet that most of these people would gladly prohibit all and any porn anywhere, it's just that there are some problems on this road (Supreme Court being a nuisance, and all that).
As far as I am concerned, the pro-filter people are exactly those who were pushing CDA a couple of years ago and are pushing CDA II now. I don't think they are concerned parents. I think they are unmitigated bigots.
Kaa
I have adapted to my natural keyboard, so much that to use another keyboard causes me wrist pain within 5 minutes.
That's not good at all. Since you get wrist pain in five minutes from a normal keyboard, your wrists are in pretty bad shape. Your natural keyboard probably saves them from going over the edge, but it doesn't seem to help in healing/b? them. And healing they definitely need.
It seems that the natural keyboard turned out to be a hold-off measure for you, but in your place I would really put an effort into getting your wrists into shape. Shape here means the ability to type on a normal keyboard for months before getting wrist pain (and no, I don't suggest you do that).
Kaa
Remember all these posts on Slashdot that said that you can never successfully protect content unless human eyes and ears become copyright-protection-device-compliant?
Well, Intel listened, and heard, and we are moving in this direction.
The idea is very clear: if the video stream is decoded only inside the display, then you cannot intercept it and divert it to make a copy. They would claim, of course, that this is prevent piracy but somehow I think this is all steps toward attaching a meter to our eyes so we pay fore each second we look at something.
Kaa
Marx is not only hated by the US, but anyone associated with his views of power equality...
Err... Marx was not interested in power equality. He was interested in inverting the power balance which existed during his times: he wanted proletariat to be powerful and bourgeoisie powerless.
[Marx's] idea that the underclass are probably just as intelligent as the ruling class
And what does this have to do with Marx??? The idea that common people can be as intelligent as the nobles is actually a capitalist idea and was considered radical when capitalism was replacing feudalism -- fairly long time before Marx. Anyway, Marx was concerned with economic and political power, not intelligence.
Kaa
Note to self ... if ever you see Kaa complaining about the way the government works, reference this comment.
If you ever see me whining about the government, or complaining that the government owes me something, feel free to hit me with a big stick (clue or not).
However I don't see why unwillingness to do something myself strips me of the right to criticise. Do you mean that I cannot say "North Koreans rulers are Stalinist crazies" without going there and trying to start a revolution?
Kaa
If we libertarians are "just a bunch of guys playing with themselves. They have no political power and not likely to get any soon.", then why are we one of the only three officially recognized political parties in Massachussetts?
So, tell me, how many elected representative do you have? What are the bills that you forced the passage of?
Kaa
Okay, so you find both of the big political parties repugnant and don't think the libertarians have a chance, so you're going to sit there and let the people you don't like go on running things.
Yes.
There are many things about this world that I don't like. The US political system is not the biggest of them. I happen to have a life and I am not willing to sacrifice it in order to "maybe, just maybe" being able to make a bit of a difference to the current political mess.
If the situation significantly changes (for example the looking-less-ridiculous-by-the-day RMS prediction of debuggers becoming illegal), I might change my mind about this. Right now, however, I have more important things to do.
Y'know, if most of the smart and honest people in the U.S. opted out of politics, our country would end up with an inept, unresponsive government.
That already happend, it is a fact of current life in the US. And it is getting worse, since running for election means a pack of bloodthirsty hounds will rip through your private life trying to find dirt. Given the erosion of privacy we have, there will be a lot to rip through (for "normal", non-paranoid people anyway). I happen to think that this is a huge deterrent to smart and honest people entering politics.
What if a whole bunch of smart, computer-hip, honest people decided they *could* make a difference, and went to those off-season political caucuses and took over the party machinery?
You know, there is a recurring theme in mythology: a hero goes off to fight a bad evil dude who rules the county, defeats him and takes his place. In a very short time the hero turns into exactly the same monster he defeated, and the next hero is arising to battle him...
It seems like a good metaphor to me.
Kaa
you cannot afford an extra $30 per device in order to get a bus [SCSI] that actually works and performs well?
Reality check.
First, practically all mobos come with IDE built-in. To get a SCSI controller you need to buy one. A good one (say, Adaptec 2940) will set you back around $200.
Second, let's look at hard drives. Maxtor 18Gb IDE drive will cost you ~$140. The cheapest 18Gb SCSI drive will set you back $300 (all prices courtesy of PriceWatch).
You were saying something about 30 bucks?
Kaa
And even more important than voting is getting involved in party politics in between elections, which is where and when future candidates and policies are picked
:-( I kinda tend to be sympathetic to liberarians, but, to face the truth, politically they are just a bunch of guys playing with themselves. They have no political power and not likely to get any soon.
Well, there is a problem here. Democrats make me gag and Republicans make me throw up. Or maybe vice versa, depends which one I meet first
Now, I am of two minds regarding the "work with the system to change the system" positions. I can see both situations where it is a reasonable thing to do, and where it turns out to be a sellout, pure and simple (and yes, I have friends who found themselves in both situations).
So I am quite doubtful about the wisdom of getting actively involved with politics. Besides, politics do change a person for the worse. One of my friends spend a few years in Washington working inside the political machinery there. It did change him for the worse, noticeably.
Kaa
Frankly, coding is boring. Designing systems is where the beauty of "programming" lies.
Yeah! Wise words. This needs clarification, though. Coding to somebody else's spec is boring. However, designing systems without any coding is hard (if doable at all) and hardly recommended. My point is that a lot low- and mid-level design is done as-you-are-coding and at that level design and coding intermix.
My personal style tends to (1) Design on paper the framework and the overall structure; (2) Start coding from the bottom, revising the design as the program structure clicks in place; (3) Meet in the middle.
Kaa
As soon as you break the rules, you forfeit all rights
I do? I think that this is exactly what the authoritarian law-and-order types want you to believe. Break any rule and you become less than human, not worthy of any rights.
As in: "This guy portscanned a machine on the network! He should go to prison for five years and be forbidden to work with computers for the rest of his life. What do you mean it's too harsh? He's a hacker, vermin that must be eliminated. Be thankful we don't shoot him on the spot!"
I think you are wrong in a very basic way.
Kaa