First of all, a major problem with email (just as with snail-mail) is that it is unreliable. You send an email out and in the general case you have no clue whether it reached its destination or some host on the way folded, spindled and mutilated it, and then discarded it. Some MUAs offer delivery receipts, but generally they require that you run the same mail client on both ends. We really need an RFC (maybe there is one?) for mail delivery receipts and have it implemented in all MUAs.
As regards to authentication and encryption, this is a bigger issue. The general answer, I would say, would be: the general population will use authentication and encryption when it will be build into all mail tools, switched on by default, and work transparently. I am rather pessimistic about more than 1% of computer users doing something proactive to use encrypted email. And from personal experience I know that trying to communicate by encrypted email with people who don't understand either encryption or the need for it is a pain in the ass.
Authentication (i.e. digital signatures) is a complicated topic with the key problem of correlating a digital signature with a real-world or an online identity. There are two major approaches -- one uses centralized certificate authorities that vouch for the key-identity correspondence, and another (PGP) uses what it calls a web of trust. Both have significant problems and are not in widespread use.
I guess my answer is 'don't hold your breath'. Security is complicated by nature and people are generally unwilling to spend the time and effort to work it out and set it up. Another answer, which the/. community will like even less is that authentication and encryption will become widespread when they will become default settings in Microsoft Outlook [ducks, quickly pulling on his asbestos long johns...]
The Suck article should be required reading for Linux zealots. Not because it is completely right, correct, and reflects the absolute truth, but because it is focused, edgy, nasty, and says the dirty words without flinching. The guys at Suck have a point and they make it very well indeed. You may disagree with the article or parts of it (at least I do), but the issue is not going to go away. That's the same issue that has been repeatedly surfacing at Slashdot and subject of much discussion by a lot of very smart people -- Linux and the big bad commercial world out there.
I'm not going to try to recap these discussions, but I think it's worth pointing out some quite trivial facts:
RHAT is a public corporation. Its management has legal duty to maximize shareholder value by whatever legal means necessary. Historically, courts have given a lot of leeway to company management in deciding how to go about it, but on the other hand, management has been sued, sometimes successfully, for doing (or not doing) something useful for shareholders. Think about it: if they believe, e.g. that writing and selling proprietary extensions to Linux, will make the company more profitable, then the RedHat management has a duty to do this. I really would not be surprised to see an effective fork of Linux (on the same kernel base) into a "corporate" Linux, sold, say, by RedHat and Corel, and a "pure" Linux, distributed by e.g. Debian. It's not a good thing to happen, but welcome to the real world.
So, yes, the transition from the academic/hobbyist/sysadmin world into the rat-eats-dog-eats-rat corporate world is dangerous and will probably affect Linux in some way and the Suck article pointed it out with a very-well-sharpened finger.
Well, first of all you seem to be mightily confused about what is a society and what is a government. You are arguing that societies are a good thing and without a society around us life would suck. Sure, no problem. But then you make a interesting jump and tell me that the government is the society. Er... Consider for a moment an interesting place like North Korea. Are you willing to tell me that the government there is doing nothing but serving the North Korean society, looking out for every member of it, etc. etc? Are you going to tell me that every law passed is a good law and should be obeyed because THEY know better and are really doing this in your best interest?
Go back and read some basic history/sociology/political science/anthropology/philosophy -- hell, almost anything that deals with humans. There are such things as clues lying around there. Try to find at least one.
You're implying that protections against police abuse rely upon the irretrievable hiding of information from the police.
Yes, they do. That's not the only protection, and probably, not even a highly important one, but my capability to hide information from police puts a limit to police's power and so indirectly protects from the abuse of this power.
I don't trust the police to do all the right things all the time. I do want some capability to personally control which information can be found without necessarily depending upon the wisdom of some judge. You are telling me to trust the system -- I don't want to trust the system.
The illogic of this scenario is that a warranted search that turned up papers with the above information would in no way violate your rights
I don't see anything illogical here. If a cop searches your house without a warrant and finds some cocaine, he violated your rights. If you go to a cop and hand him the same cocaine, your rights weren't violated. So what?
Again, the 4th Amendment relies upon the court system, not individuals, to control police abuses.
Yes, but to repeat myself,
(1) Some assumptions on which the 4th was based have changed or are changing
(2) Regardless of what the 4th relies on, I do want some personal protection against police abuses.
Furthermore, you can argue 5th Amendment protections, regardless.
What do you mean? If the cops have my data and my encryption key, they don't have to ask me anything, the 5th just never comes up.
As I've said before, the potential for abuse of power (i.e. ignoring the need for a warrant) is another issue, entirely.
No, not at all. If there were no potential for abuse, there would be no need for all the checks and balances, and for the 4th in general. It is exactly the balance of power between the individuals and the government, and the distrust of the government, that brought to life the Bill of Rights.
Besides, I disagree with your examples. If I have encrypted data on my hard drive, it's currently very hard to get it. A single person is not likely to have the needed resources (TEMPEST surveillance, hardware keyboard sniffers, etc.) even if he resorts to illegal methods, and a small-scale corrupt system isn't likely to do much better, either.
The 4th Amendment's protection against illegal search and seizure does rely upon the "difficulty of conducting a search" or the efficiency of police operations. Rather, the entire rationale of the Amendment is the use of a warrant system for such protection.
The framers assumed certain things about how the world operated and build a system of checks and balances based on these assumptions. If some of these assumptions become invalid, the checks and balances are likely to become unbalanced. Stepping for a second into the realm of science fiction, imagine that the police officers can effortlessly see what's happening at any time in any location. Wouldn't the 4th Amendment be different then?
However, we're not talking about placing cameras in every home,
Not yet. But the "slippery slope" argument is pretty convincing here. Witness all the govenrment efforts to mandate backdoors to all encryption -- this is very similar in spirit.
We're talking about the police, with a warrant, entering a home
Unless I am mistaken, we are also talking about a remote intrusion over the net, and that's a very significant part.
Ah, that's a free upgrade program courtesy of the Federal government. Why, they'll come in and upgrade your keyboard cable all for free, you needn't worry your pretty little head about it. They may forget to mention it to you, too, but you know how paperworks gets lost...
It sounds like you want to have a chance to hide stuff that looks bad. I can understand that. But with a non-sealed warrant, you can't see it coming, either. The only difference is that you can see them rummaging around your house.
No, you don't understand the difference. Let's say I have collected a large body of information on home-growing of pot and stored it on my hard drive. Suspecting that other people might not think that my motives are pure, I encrypt all this stuff, and, maybe use steganography, as well. Now if the cops come with a warrant, they have to deal with the encryption. They need a court order for me to surrender the key, I can claim Fifth Amendment, etc., etc. It becomes a prolonged legal battle, expensive for the cops to wage.
However, in the case we are discussing now, the cops have installed a keyboard sniffer on my machine and so don't need a court order for my encryption key: they already have it. Major time- and effort-saving for cops happened, and I am screwed in worse way than with a 'normal' warrant.
Again, as I posted elsewhere, I don't believe (as a lot of posters around here) that the main issue is with the warrant being sealed. That was done before, and while unpleasant it is understandable and perfectly legal. I think that the main problem is making the search-and-seizure so easy, fast and cheap, that the balance of power shifts and the protections we have look much more inadequate.
You're not addressing this particular action; rather, you seem to have a problem with how search warrants are granted in general.
Not exactly. I have another post which describes the main problem with this idea, but basically the physical enter-and-search is quite manpower-intensive. Your local cops physically cannot do 1000 searches every day. Electronically they can, and they will be tempted very much to do so. This is not a problem with the granting of warrants (that problem exists, but it is different), but rather a problem with the fact that one of the existing limitations on search-and-seizures starts to disappear and that upsets the balance of need-to-know vs. privacy.
Why would you even care that the feds can crack into your machine?... And even if they did go to every machine, if you haven't done anything illegal, who cares?
Ah, another of those happy people...
I guess, then, that you wouldn't mind a device in your car that recorded every time you went over the speed limit, would you? You probably also wouldn't mind wearing another device that calls the cops when you cross the street on a red light, or throw a piece of paper on the sidewalk, would you? And, of course, the cops are never ever going to use any of this information for other purposes (like reading erotic email for fun).
The problem is that conventional enter-and-search is very manpower-intensive. The budgets and staff limitations of law-enforcement agencies ensures that they don't do too many searches. Now, if they'll be able to pull off a remote intrusion attack and install a keyboard sniffer / trojaned encryption on your system -- possible, given sufficient cluelessness of the target computer's owner -- then the process becomes very quick, painless and cheap.
Your local police department cannot do 1000 searches a day. But it can install 1000 sniffers in a day (given the warrants, etc.) and will be tempted very much to do so. Somebody's selling marijuana in a neighborhood? Find a tame judge, install sniffers on everybody's machines and catch your guy! This ain't gonna work this way, but that's the way the police departments will think. And if they bad a couple of tax evaders along the way, so much the better.
Why is this any different than the Feds coming in and pulling apart your house with a warrant?
This is not taking your house apart to search for something. This is like installing hidden microphones and videocameras all around your house to see if you are doing anything illegal. Sure, you still need a warrant, but
(a) there are a lot of tame judges that go along with pretty much everything a DA asks for;
(b) fishing expeditions become much more alluring;
(c) the DOJ might decide to install a keyboard sniffer on your machine over the net, a remote intrusion attack. If it'll work (whether this will work depends, as usual, on the cluefulness of the target computer's owner), the temptation to install sniffers all over the place will be irresistible. And think of the justification: there is no invasion of privacy because just installing a sniffer by itself does not provide any of your info to the cops. Only later, if it turns out that the cops do need info from your hard drive (say, they are bored and want to check out your pr0n), then they can use the handy captured passwords to read all your safely encrypted stuff.
Second, it's not a matrix, it's a net. Free advice: overdosing on Gibson can lead to reality problems.
Third, yes, the original arpanet was designed to go on functioning after a limited nuclear attack on the US. This does not mean that if you now take out several backbone(s) pieces simultaneously, things will not get very ugly. No, the 'net as a whole will not die. Yes, it might take you two hours to put in your trade order on E-trade.
Fourth, I would like to remind you that a single moderately clueful piece of (the Morris worm) code brought down a large portion of the net in less than a day. There are doomsday scenarios (e.g. check www.hackernews.com) which involve stealthy quickly-proliferating worms/viruses with highly unpleasant consequences (for the net, not for some individual machines).
Obviously, the net will not crash on Jan 1, 2000. However you seem to be claiming that the net will survive anything that could possibly be thrown at it. That is a much more doubtful assertion.
> Not to mention the fact that someone keeps killing/bin/cat.
Actually, I'm not sure whether mine's dead or alive. I'd better go check...
Don't go and check! Until you look your/bin/cat is in superimposition of states and so works OK. As soon as you check, the wave function collapses and you have a chance of getting a dead/bin/cat!
Disclaimer: this assumes a Copenhagen interpretation. If you like multiple universes better, you can check your/bin/cat without any problems -- nothing more serious than forking of the whole universe is likely to occur.
Big, well-written and funny: called The Hitchhiker's Guide to Evolutionary Computation (FAQ in comp.ai.genetic). Here is the relevant extact:
Obtaining copies of this guide This FAQ is available between postings on rtfm.mit.edu:/pub/usenet/news.answers/ai-faq/genet ic/ as the files: part1 to part6. The FAQ may also be retrieved by e-mail from . Send a message to the mail-server with "help" and "index" in the body on separate lines for more information.
A PostScript version is also available. This looks really crisp (using boldface, italics, etc.), and is available for those who prefer offline reading. Get it from ENCORE (See Q15.3) in file FAQ/hhgtec.ps.gz (the ASCII text versions are in the same directory too). In Germany, its also available from the SyS ftp-server: lumpi.informatik.uni-dortmund.de:/pub/EA/docs/hhgt ec.ps.gz
ENCORE is a set of FTP sites, including ftp://ftp.krl.caltech.edu:/pub/EC/Welcome.html ftp://ftp.cs.wayne.edu:/pub/EC/Welcome.htm ftp://coast.cs.purdue.edu:/pub/EC/Welcome.html and others
First of all, the Processors available today are not even getting any use. Build a better BUS, find an alternative to IRQ's thats modern. Give me a backplane system that handles gigabits of data so my processor actually has something to do. Give me a drive system that pumps our in gigs a second rather then 10-15 megs at a time. Give me something i can run visual interpretations on, exploration systems.
Well, the correct answer is the usual one: it depends. The location of the bottleneck is highly dependent of what exactly you are running. Some of the processes I run are I/O-limited and having faster hard drives would speed them up. Others are bandwidth-limited (yes, on a LAN) and a gigabit Ethernet would help. But most of my stuff (guaranteed to be untypical) is actually CPU-limited - and I am running on a dual Sun Ultra 60.
So, yes, I understand the importance of the bus, and DMA, and AGP and all the other TLAs. But for me, at least, processor speed is more important right now.
P.S. For example, in the FPS (Quake, etc.) gaming community there is a very well understood distinction between being CPU-limited and fillrate-limited. Depending upon your specific hardware, any of these can be your problem.
I believe we are watching the beginning of a Linux-induced revolution in corporate finance
Err.. excuse me? Either I am going blind, or you are seeing something that I am not seeing. What revolution in corporate finance? This was a standard plain-vanilla IPO. By Wall Street standards nothing interesting happened. Other stocks, notably so-called "dot-com" stocks had huge run-ups in their stock prices on the IPO day and after that. Netscape already brandished a sky-high market cap while giving away its principal product for free.
So a sexy software company goes public, the float is very small, nobody can short because there is nobody to borrow share certificates from, and the stock price goes through the roof. So what else is new? Again, what revolution we are talking about??
Any what do you do if your traps go off? Take the server off line?
There is an old but delightful movie called "How to steal a million" that is based on exactly that scenario. Basically, if your traps go off every fifteen minutes, you will not be paying any attention to them very soon.
I suggest you READ the Communist Manifesto - it's available on the web
I have. I've read it before there was a Web.
Prohibiting private property has nothing to do with communism... Prohibiting private ownerships of the means of production has.
And that's exactly why I said "other than personal". Private property other than personal is, to a great degree, property of means of production.
...Some Marxist ideology skipped...
That's all fine, but we are not talking about Marxism, we are talking about communism. See the my post above about the two meanings of the word "communism". You may argue that the system that existed in the Soviet Union, etc. was not really Marxist, and technically was not communist at all, but the common usage in the Western countries clearly points to the USSR as the quintessential "communist" country. Marxism in its pure form was never implemented anywhere, so there is not much point in discussing what society might have looked like it it has happened somewhere. Communism (again, in the common meaning) has happened -- and the consequences were very brutal and unpleasant.
So, same conclusion: We should prevent (through inspection, peer-review, whatever) individuals and interest-homogenous groups of individuals (government, corporations, special interests, ethnicities, religions, earning brackets... umm.. thin ice?) from achieving too much power over other individuals or groups thereof.
We are almost in complete agreement, except that I would add a big stick to the means to prevent groups from getting too much power. Big sticks on occasions can be very useful...
You are also right that the issue boils down to the philosophy of individual vs. a group. There is a basic, axiomatic choice to be made: in case of conflict of an individual and a group, whose values/interests/goals/points of view are more important? It's almost impossible to argue this issue, as it is too basic -- it's like arguing the existence of God. The issue under discussion -- what are acceptable limits to what a group can impose upon an individual "for the common good" -- follows directly from the stance taken in the base issue. Obviously, libertarians tend to favor the individual, and utilitarians tend to favor the group.
Neither Lenin, nor Stalin, nor any other Russian, Chines, or Eastern European leader claimed to run communist states, because a communist state is an oxymoron
That is entirely correct. However, the common usage in the West was to call countries like the Soviet Union "communist" and countries like Sweden "socialist". The Marxist terminology, as you said, would be to call the first one "socialist", and the second one "capitalist".
Furthermore, Marxism has been tested with warying degrees of success several places
I claim that the "varying degrees of success" was not varying at all -- everywhere the "test" turned out to be a complete failure.
However, in none of these cases where the conditions that Marx himself set forth (for instance in The German Ideology, and also of course in the Manifesto of the Communist Party) for a foundation for a successful transition to socialism and later communism present.
That is also entirely correct, although the conditions that Marx set forth did not occur anywhere. I would argue that this point to (one of many) weaknesses of Marx's ideology, rather than serve as an explanation why the USSR could not be called a marxist state.
... a lot of early Soviet history skipped...
You are applying the classical western-marxist analysis to the Russian revolution. I myself tend to think that among the Russian revolutionaries some were idealistic "good guys", some were bloodthirsty sadists on a power high, and some were pragmatic "whatever it takes for me to keep my job/position/comforable existence". The ranks of the idealists thinned in the late teens and early twenties when they had to deal with a chaotic country that almost fell apart into many pieces, and the rest of them were shot during the purges on the late 20s and 30s. In the 30s the bloodthirsty sadists came to power (with very unfortunate consequences to the country) and since the 50s the pragmatists ran the slowly dying colossus. I am quite sure that the preponderance of peasants in the Russian population didn't make that much of a difference and even if the majority of the population *were* proletariat, things would have turned out to be much the same.
It could turn out that we are of the same mind, if we work out the causal chains.
But as people are distrustful of the gov, their distrust is unfocusable. It becomes a heat-seeker, and targets the strange, the unknown and the different. A black family in a white neighborhood, or the smiling stranger in a faceless crowd.
I think that the distrust of the government is the *consequence*, not the cause. There is a biological bias to be distrustful of the strange and the different. If you perceive the environment around you as safe (huge media role!), then you become more tolerant of the different ones, and vice versa.
It seems the causal chain would go like this:
There is a certain level of actual crime ->
Media tends to focus on crimes, so the *perceived* threat level becomes very high ->
People become afraid and distrustful, especially of strangers (note that depending on the circumstances that might be the correct and rational thing to do) ->
People tell politicians that they want 'safety' ->
Politicians, quite happy, increase the powers of the government "to protect the people" and, usually not explicitly, to prohibit 'strangeness' and 'freakiness'.
Yes, this is one way the governments get to be more powerful. My point was however, that govenments innately hunger for power without any prodding from the populace. So we should distrust governments and limit their power just because they are governments, and not because the population is afraid and actually encourages the governments to take away freedoms.
Communism, as it was originally intended, is the united force of the population taking care of itself through cooperation. ("Workers of all nations unite" (At least, I think that's how it goes))
You are somewhat confused. Let's try to clear up some of terminology.
"Utopian socialism": forerunner to Karl Marx from which he (Marx) borrowed a lot of ideas about the desirable form of society. Under utopian socialism everybody lives in the same conditions, labors for the general good, owns nothing, and generally behaves himself. This is basically a secular form of a monastic order. People nowadays tend not to know anything about utopian socialism and tend to be horrified when they learn the details, which are very unpleasant (as in death penalties for insubordination, prohibition on any unsanctioned sex, breeding of people for genetic traits, etc.). Campanella is a good example of an utopian socialist writer.
"Marxism": an economic, social, and political philosophy, formulated by Karl Marx. Never implemented in reality. Economically it is based on common ownership of means of production (Marx was very vague as to who would actually run factories), socially -- on utopian socialism, and politically -- on violent revolution overthrowing existing governments worldwide, with the semi-anarchic global community without any governments to follow.
"Communism": two meanings. Meaning one, the original one: a phase in the socio-economic history of manking that follows capitalism. Very rarely used nowadays. Meaning two, the common one: the political, economic, and social structures implemented in Russia in the beginning of the century, and later in Eastern Europe, China and some other countries. It mostly has been developed by Lenin, so sometimes the word "leninism" is used. I use "communism" in it's second meaning.
By the way, the meaning of the expression "Workers of the world, unite!" is "unite, so that we together can overthrow all the governments in the world". It has nothing to do with population taking care of itself through cooperation.
What most misinformed Americans (including myself up until about two or three months ago) believe the only form of communism is the supposed Russian atrocities, but this is false.
First, I am not a misinformed American. Second, the Russian atrocities are not supposed but quite real. By the best estimates Stalin killed about 20 million people by artificially induced famines in the 20s, plus about 10 million perished in labor camps during Stalin's lifetime.
Many countries are using some form of communism.
Right now I can think of North Korea, maybe Cuba, but that's about it.
In true communism, people give up their possessions voluntarily, to provide for a better life for others.
I don't know what do you mean by "true communism". Karl Marx certainly didn't envision it this way. Some utopian socialist did, but see above re their views.
It is only when these rules are enforced at penalty of death that communism becomes what most consider it to be.
It so happened that these rules always were enforced at the penalty of death. Doesn't it tell you something?
Slashdot Mirror
First of all, a major problem with email (just as with snail-mail) is that it is unreliable. You send an email out and in the general case you have no clue whether it reached its destination or some host on the way folded, spindled and mutilated it, and then discarded it. Some MUAs offer delivery receipts, but generally they require that you run the same mail client on both ends. We really need an RFC (maybe there is one?) for mail delivery receipts and have it implemented in all MUAs.
/. community will like even less is that authentication and encryption will become widespread when they will become default settings in Microsoft Outlook [ducks, quickly pulling on his asbestos long johns...]
As regards to authentication and encryption, this is a bigger issue. The general answer, I would say, would be: the general population will use authentication and encryption when it will be build into all mail tools, switched on by default, and work transparently. I am rather pessimistic about more than 1% of computer users doing something proactive to use encrypted email. And from personal experience I know that trying to communicate by encrypted email with people who don't understand either encryption or the need for it is a pain in the ass.
Authentication (i.e. digital signatures) is a complicated topic with the key problem of correlating a digital signature with a real-world or an online identity. There are two major approaches -- one uses centralized certificate authorities that vouch for the key-identity correspondence, and another (PGP) uses what it calls a web of trust. Both have significant problems and are not in widespread use.
I guess my answer is 'don't hold your breath'. Security is complicated by nature and people are generally unwilling to spend the time and effort to work it out and set it up. Another answer, which the
Kaa
The Suck article should be required reading for Linux zealots. Not because it is completely right, correct, and reflects the absolute truth, but because it is focused, edgy, nasty, and says the dirty words without flinching. The guys at Suck have a point and they make it very well indeed. You may disagree with the article or parts of it (at least I do), but the issue is not going to go away. That's the same issue that has been repeatedly surfacing at Slashdot and subject of much discussion by a lot of very smart people -- Linux and the big bad commercial world out there.
I'm not going to try to recap these discussions, but I think it's worth pointing out some quite trivial facts:
RHAT is a public corporation. Its management has legal duty to maximize shareholder value by whatever legal means necessary. Historically, courts have given a lot of leeway to company management in deciding how to go about it, but on the other hand, management has been sued, sometimes successfully, for doing (or not doing) something useful for shareholders. Think about it: if they believe, e.g. that writing and selling proprietary extensions to Linux, will make the company more profitable, then the RedHat management has a duty to do this. I really would not be surprised to see an effective fork of Linux (on the same kernel base) into a "corporate" Linux, sold, say, by RedHat and Corel, and a "pure" Linux, distributed by e.g. Debian. It's not a good thing to happen, but welcome to the real world.
So, yes, the transition from the academic/hobbyist/sysadmin world into the rat-eats-dog-eats-rat corporate world is dangerous and will probably affect Linux in some way and the Suck article pointed it out with a very-well-sharpened finger.
Kaa
Well, first of all you seem to be mightily confused about what is a society and what is a government. You are arguing that societies are a good thing and without a society around us life would suck. Sure, no problem. But then you make a interesting jump and tell me that the government is the society. Er... Consider for a moment an interesting place like North Korea. Are you willing to tell me that the government there is doing nothing but serving the North Korean society, looking out for every member of it, etc. etc? Are you going to tell me that every law passed is a good law and should be obeyed because THEY know better and are really doing this in your best interest?
Go back and read some basic history/sociology/political science/anthropology/philosophy -- hell, almost anything that deals with humans. There are such things as clues lying around there. Try to find at least one.
Kaa
You're implying that protections against police abuse rely upon the irretrievable hiding of information from the police.
Yes, they do. That's not the only protection, and probably, not even a highly important one, but my capability to hide information from police puts a limit to police's power and so indirectly protects from the abuse of this power.
I don't trust the police to do all the right things all the time. I do want some capability to personally control which information can be found without necessarily depending upon the wisdom of some judge. You are telling me to trust the system -- I don't want to trust the system.
The illogic of this scenario is that a warranted search that turned up papers with the above information would in no way violate your rights
I don't see anything illogical here. If a cop searches your house without a warrant and finds some cocaine, he violated your rights. If you go to a cop and hand him the same cocaine, your rights weren't violated. So what?
Again, the 4th Amendment relies upon the court system, not individuals, to control police abuses.
Yes, but to repeat myself,
(1) Some assumptions on which the 4th was based have changed or are changing
(2) Regardless of what the 4th relies on, I do want some personal protection against police abuses.
Furthermore, you can argue 5th Amendment protections, regardless.
What do you mean? If the cops have my data and my encryption key, they don't have to ask me anything, the 5th just never comes up.
As I've said before, the potential for abuse of power (i.e. ignoring the need for a warrant) is another issue, entirely.
No, not at all. If there were no potential for abuse, there would be no need for all the checks and balances, and for the 4th in general. It is exactly the balance of power between the individuals and the government, and the distrust of the government, that brought to life the Bill of Rights.
Besides, I disagree with your examples. If I have encrypted data on my hard drive, it's currently very hard to get it. A single person is not likely to have the needed resources (TEMPEST surveillance, hardware keyboard sniffers, etc.) even if he resorts to illegal methods, and a small-scale corrupt system isn't likely to do much better, either.
Kaa
The 4th Amendment's protection against illegal search and seizure does rely upon the "difficulty of conducting a search" or the efficiency of police operations. Rather, the entire rationale of the Amendment is the use of a warrant system for such protection.
The framers assumed certain things about how the world operated and build a system of checks and balances based on these assumptions. If some of these assumptions become invalid, the checks and balances are likely to become unbalanced. Stepping for a second into the realm of science fiction, imagine that the police officers can effortlessly see what's happening at any time in any location. Wouldn't the 4th Amendment be different then?
However, we're not talking about placing cameras in every home,
Not yet. But the "slippery slope" argument is pretty convincing here. Witness all the govenrment efforts to mandate backdoors to all encryption -- this is very similar in spirit.
We're talking about the police, with a warrant, entering a home
Unless I am mistaken, we are also talking about a remote intrusion over the net, and that's a very significant part.
Kaa
How about keeping your old keyboard? ;)
Ah, that's a free upgrade program courtesy of the Federal government. Why, they'll come in and upgrade your keyboard cable all for free, you needn't worry your pretty little head about it. They may forget to mention it to you, too, but you know how paperworks gets lost...
Kaa
It sounds like you want to have a chance to hide stuff that looks bad. I can understand that. But with a non-sealed warrant, you can't see it coming, either. The only difference is that you can see them rummaging around your house.
No, you don't understand the difference. Let's say I have collected a large body of information on home-growing of pot and stored it on my hard drive. Suspecting that other people might not think that my motives are pure, I encrypt all this stuff, and, maybe use steganography, as well. Now if the cops come with a warrant, they have to deal with the encryption. They need a court order for me to surrender the key, I can claim Fifth Amendment, etc., etc. It becomes a prolonged legal battle, expensive for the cops to wage.
However, in the case we are discussing now, the cops have installed a keyboard sniffer on my machine and so don't need a court order for my encryption key: they already have it. Major time- and effort-saving for cops happened, and I am screwed in worse way than with a 'normal' warrant.
Again, as I posted elsewhere, I don't believe (as a lot of posters around here) that the main issue is with the warrant being sealed. That was done before, and while unpleasant it is understandable and perfectly legal. I think that the main problem is making the search-and-seizure so easy, fast and cheap, that the balance of power shifts and the protections we have look much more inadequate.
Kaa
You're not addressing this particular action; rather, you seem to have a problem with how search warrants are granted in general.
Not exactly. I have another post which describes the main problem with this idea, but basically the physical enter-and-search is quite manpower-intensive. Your local cops physically cannot do 1000 searches every day. Electronically they can, and they will be tempted very much to do so. This is not a problem with the granting of warrants (that problem exists, but it is different), but rather a problem with the fact that one of the existing limitations on search-and-seizures starts to disappear and that upsets the balance of need-to-know vs. privacy.
Kaa
The spooks like hardware...
How about a keyboard cable that looks exactly like the one you have now, but just happens to have certain additional capabilities?
Kaa
Why would you even care that the feds can crack into your machine? ... And even if they did go to every machine, if you haven't done anything illegal, who cares?
Ah, another of those happy people...
I guess, then, that you wouldn't mind a device in your car that recorded every time you went over the speed limit, would you? You probably also wouldn't mind wearing another device that calls the cops when you cross the street on a red light, or throw a piece of paper on the sidewalk, would you? And, of course, the cops are never ever going to use any of this information for other purposes (like reading erotic email for fun).
[sigh]
Kaa
a warrant is grounds to enter and search
How about break in and watch?
The problem is that conventional enter-and-search is very manpower-intensive. The budgets and staff limitations of law-enforcement agencies ensures that they don't do too many searches. Now, if they'll be able to pull off a remote intrusion attack and install a keyboard sniffer / trojaned encryption on your system -- possible, given sufficient cluelessness of the target computer's owner -- then the process becomes very quick, painless and cheap.
Your local police department cannot do 1000 searches a day. But it can install 1000 sniffers in a day (given the warrants, etc.) and will be tempted very much to do so. Somebody's selling marijuana in a neighborhood? Find a tame judge, install sniffers on everybody's machines and catch your guy! This ain't gonna work this way, but that's the way the police departments will think. And if they bad a couple of tax evaders along the way, so much the better.
Kaa
Why is this any different than the Feds coming in and pulling apart your house with a warrant?
This is not taking your house apart to search for something. This is like installing hidden microphones and videocameras all around your house to see if you are doing anything illegal. Sure, you still need a warrant, but
(a) there are a lot of tame judges that go along with pretty much everything a DA asks for;
(b) fishing expeditions become much more alluring;
(c) the DOJ might decide to install a keyboard sniffer on your machine over the net, a remote intrusion attack. If it'll work (whether this will work depends, as usual, on the cluefulness of the target computer's owner), the temptation to install sniffers all over the place will be irresistible. And think of the justification: there is no invasion of privacy because just installing a sniffer by itself does not provide any of your info to the cops. Only later, if it turns out that the cops do need info from your hard drive (say, they are bored and want to check out your pr0n), then they can use the handy captured passwords to read all your safely encrypted stuff.
Kaa
That's what the Feds basically want to install. I don't like this at all.
It seems that instead of 'spot the Fed' we'll all soon be playing 'spot the Fed sniffer on your machine'.
Kaa
First, I agree about the idiots.
Second, it's not a matrix, it's a net. Free advice: overdosing on Gibson can lead to reality problems.
Third, yes, the original arpanet was designed to go on functioning after a limited nuclear attack on the US. This does not mean that if you now take out several backbone(s) pieces simultaneously, things will not get very ugly. No, the 'net as a whole will not die. Yes, it might take you two hours to put in your trade order on E-trade.
Fourth, I would like to remind you that a single moderately clueful piece of (the Morris worm) code brought down a large portion of the net in less than a day. There are doomsday scenarios (e.g. check www.hackernews.com) which involve stealthy quickly-proliferating worms/viruses with highly unpleasant consequences (for the net, not for some individual machines).
Obviously, the net will not crash on Jan 1, 2000. However you seem to be claiming that the net will survive anything that could possibly be thrown at it. That is a much more doubtful assertion.
Kaa
> Not to mention the fact that someone keeps killing /bin/cat.
/bin/cat is in superimposition of states and so works OK. As soon as you check, the wave function collapses and you have a chance of getting a dead /bin/cat!
/bin/cat without any problems -- nothing more serious than forking of the whole universe is likely to occur.
Actually, I'm not sure whether mine's dead or alive. I'd better go check...
Don't go and check! Until you look your
Disclaimer: this assumes a Copenhagen interpretation. If you like multiple universes better, you can check your
Kaa
Big, well-written and funny: called The Hitchhiker's Guide to Evolutionary Computation (FAQ in comp.ai.genetic). Here is the relevant extact:
t ic/ as the files: part1 to part6. The FAQ may also be retrieved by e-mail from . Send a message to the mail-server with "help" and "index" in the body on separate lines for more information.
t ec.ps.gz
Obtaining copies of this guide
This FAQ is available between postings on rtfm.mit.edu:/pub/usenet/news.answers/ai-faq/gene
A PostScript version is also available. This looks really crisp (using boldface, italics, etc.), and is available for those who prefer offline reading. Get it from ENCORE (See Q15.3) in file FAQ/hhgtec.ps.gz (the ASCII text versions are in the same directory too). In Germany, its also available from the SyS ftp-server: lumpi.informatik.uni-dortmund.de:/pub/EA/docs/hhg
ENCORE is a set of FTP sites, including
ftp://ftp.krl.caltech.edu:/pub/EC/Welcome.html
ftp://ftp.cs.wayne.edu:/pub/EC/Welcome.htm
ftp://coast.cs.purdue.edu:/pub/EC/Welcome.html
and others
Kaa
First of all, the Processors available today are not even getting any use. Build a better BUS, find an alternative to IRQ's thats modern. Give me a backplane system that handles gigabits of data so my processor actually has something to do. Give me a drive system that pumps our in gigs a second rather then 10-15 megs at a time. Give me something i can run visual interpretations on, exploration systems.
Well, the correct answer is the usual one: it depends. The location of the bottleneck is highly dependent of what exactly you are running. Some of the processes I run are I/O-limited and having faster hard drives would speed them up. Others are bandwidth-limited (yes, on a LAN) and a gigabit Ethernet would help. But most of my stuff (guaranteed to be untypical) is actually CPU-limited - and I am running on a dual Sun Ultra 60.
So, yes, I understand the importance of the bus, and DMA, and AGP and all the other TLAs. But for me, at least, processor speed is more important right now.
P.S. For example, in the FPS (Quake, etc.) gaming community there is a very well understood distinction between being CPU-limited and fillrate-limited. Depending upon your specific hardware, any of these can be your problem.
Kaa
I believe we are watching the beginning of a Linux-induced revolution in corporate finance
Err.. excuse me? Either I am going blind, or you are seeing something that I am not seeing. What revolution in corporate finance? This was a standard plain-vanilla IPO. By Wall Street standards nothing interesting happened. Other stocks, notably so-called "dot-com" stocks had huge run-ups in their stock prices on the IPO day and after that. Netscape already brandished a sky-high market cap while giving away its principal product for free.
So a sexy software company goes public, the float is very small, nobody can short because there is nobody to borrow share certificates from, and the stock price goes through the roof. So what else is new? Again, what revolution we are talking about??
Kaa
Any what do you do if your traps go off? Take the server off line?
There is an old but delightful movie called "How to steal a million" that is based on exactly that scenario. Basically, if your traps go off every fifteen minutes, you will not be paying any attention to them very soon.
Kaa
You're all fucking idiots
As the article in today's Slashdot demonstrates, we may be idiots, but we sure as hell ain't fucking.
Kaa
You're making several factual errors.
... Prohibiting private ownerships of the means of production has.
...Some Marxist ideology skipped...
I don't think so.
I suggest you READ the Communist Manifesto - it's available on the web
I have. I've read it before there was a Web.
Prohibiting private property has nothing to do with communism
And that's exactly why I said "other than personal". Private property other than personal is, to a great degree, property of means of production.
That's all fine, but we are not talking about Marxism, we are talking about communism. See the my post above about the two meanings of the word "communism". You may argue that the system that existed in the Soviet Union, etc. was not really Marxist, and technically was not communist at all, but the common usage in the Western countries clearly points to the USSR as the quintessential "communist" country. Marxism in its pure form was never implemented anywhere, so there is not much point in discussing what society might have looked like it it has happened somewhere. Communism (again, in the common meaning) has happened -- and the consequences were very brutal and unpleasant.
Kaa
So, same conclusion: We should prevent (through inspection, peer-review, whatever) individuals and interest-homogenous groups of individuals (government, corporations, special interests, ethnicities, religions, earning brackets... umm.. thin ice?) from achieving too much power over other individuals or groups thereof.
We are almost in complete agreement, except that I would add a big stick to the means to prevent groups from getting too much power. Big sticks on occasions can be very useful...
You are also right that the issue boils down to the philosophy of individual vs. a group. There is a basic, axiomatic choice to be made: in case of conflict of an individual and a group, whose values/interests/goals/points of view are more important? It's almost impossible to argue this issue, as it is too basic -- it's like arguing the existence of God. The issue under discussion -- what are acceptable limits to what a group can impose upon an individual "for the common good" -- follows directly from the stance taken in the base issue. Obviously, libertarians tend to favor the individual, and utilitarians tend to favor the group.
Kaa
Neither Lenin, nor Stalin, nor any other Russian, Chines, or Eastern European leader claimed to run communist states, because a communist state is an oxymoron
... a lot of early Soviet history skipped ...
That is entirely correct. However, the common usage in the West was to call countries like the Soviet Union "communist" and countries like Sweden "socialist". The Marxist terminology, as you said, would be to call the first one "socialist", and the second one "capitalist".
Furthermore, Marxism has been tested with warying degrees of success several places
I claim that the "varying degrees of success" was not varying at all -- everywhere the "test" turned out to be a complete failure.
However, in none of these cases where the conditions that Marx himself set forth (for instance in The German Ideology, and also of course in the Manifesto of the Communist Party) for a foundation for a successful transition to socialism and later communism present.
That is also entirely correct, although the conditions that Marx set forth did not occur anywhere. I would argue that this point to (one of many) weaknesses of Marx's ideology, rather than serve as an explanation why the USSR could not be called a marxist state.
You are applying the classical western-marxist analysis to the Russian revolution. I myself tend to think that among the Russian revolutionaries some were idealistic "good guys", some were bloodthirsty sadists on a power high, and some were pragmatic "whatever it takes for me to keep my job/position/comforable existence". The ranks of the idealists thinned in the late teens and early twenties when they had to deal with a chaotic country that almost fell apart into many pieces, and the rest of them were shot during the purges on the late 20s and 30s. In the 30s the bloodthirsty sadists came to power (with very unfortunate consequences to the country) and since the 50s the pragmatists ran the slowly dying colossus. I am quite sure that the preponderance of peasants in the Russian population didn't make that much of a difference and even if the majority of the population *were* proletariat, things would have turned out to be much the same.
Face it, Marx was wrong.
Kaa
It could turn out that we are of the same mind, if we work out the causal chains.
But as people are distrustful of the gov, their distrust is unfocusable. It becomes a heat-seeker, and targets the strange, the unknown and the different. A black family in a white neighborhood, or the smiling stranger in a faceless crowd.
I think that the distrust of the government is the *consequence*, not the cause. There is a biological bias to be distrustful of the strange and the different. If you perceive the environment around you as safe (huge media role!), then you become more tolerant of the different ones, and vice versa.
It seems the causal chain would go like this:
There is a certain level of actual crime ->
Media tends to focus on crimes, so the *perceived* threat level becomes very high ->
People become afraid and distrustful, especially of strangers (note that depending on the circumstances that might be the correct and rational thing to do) ->
People tell politicians that they want 'safety' ->
Politicians, quite happy, increase the powers of the government "to protect the people" and, usually not explicitly, to prohibit 'strangeness' and 'freakiness'.
Yes, this is one way the governments get to be more powerful. My point was however, that govenments innately hunger for power without any prodding from the populace. So we should distrust governments and limit their power just because they are governments, and not because the population is afraid and actually encourages the governments to take away freedoms.
Kaa
Communism, as it was originally intended, is the united force of the population taking care of itself through cooperation. ("Workers of all nations unite" (At least, I think that's how it goes))
You are somewhat confused. Let's try to clear up some of terminology.
"Utopian socialism": forerunner to Karl Marx from which he (Marx) borrowed a lot of ideas about the desirable form of society. Under utopian socialism everybody lives in the same conditions, labors for the general good, owns nothing, and generally behaves himself. This is basically a secular form of a monastic order. People nowadays tend not to know anything about utopian socialism and tend to be horrified when they learn the details, which are very unpleasant (as in death penalties for insubordination, prohibition on any unsanctioned sex, breeding of people for genetic traits, etc.). Campanella is a good example of an utopian socialist writer.
"Marxism": an economic, social, and political philosophy, formulated by Karl Marx. Never implemented in reality. Economically it is based on common ownership of means of production (Marx was very vague as to who would actually run factories), socially -- on utopian socialism, and politically -- on violent revolution overthrowing existing governments worldwide, with the semi-anarchic global community without any governments to follow.
"Communism": two meanings. Meaning one, the original one: a phase in the socio-economic history of manking that follows capitalism. Very rarely used nowadays. Meaning two, the common one: the political, economic, and social structures implemented in Russia in the beginning of the century, and later in Eastern Europe, China and some other countries. It mostly has been developed by Lenin, so sometimes the word "leninism" is used. I use "communism" in it's second meaning.
By the way, the meaning of the expression "Workers of the world, unite!" is "unite, so that we together can overthrow all the governments in the world". It has nothing to do with population taking care of itself through cooperation.
What most misinformed Americans (including myself up until about two or three months ago) believe the only form of communism is the supposed Russian atrocities, but this is false.
First, I am not a misinformed American. Second, the Russian atrocities are not supposed but quite real. By the best estimates Stalin killed about 20 million people by artificially induced famines in the 20s, plus about 10 million perished in labor camps during Stalin's lifetime.
Many countries are using some form of communism.
Right now I can think of North Korea, maybe Cuba, but that's about it.
In true communism, people give up their possessions voluntarily, to provide for a better life for others.
I don't know what do you mean by "true communism". Karl Marx certainly didn't envision it this way. Some utopian socialist did, but see above re their views.
It is only when these rules are enforced at penalty of death that communism becomes what most consider it to be.
It so happened that these rules always were enforced at the penalty of death. Doesn't it tell you something?
Kaa