Earlier I posted a message basically saying Katz doesn't have a clue about big number-crunching. A number of people, mostly AC, asked me to provide evidence. Unfortunately I do not have the time to write either an introductory tutorial on scientific computing, or a sentence-by-sentence refutation of the Katz's article. Instead I'll just use a couple of quotes from the article to, hopefully, demonstrate the mind-boggling cluelessness of the author.
one of the biggest technology stories of the year - perhaps in several years - the institutionalization of deep domputing (sic!) by one of the most powerful corporations on earth
Er.. Jon, who do you think used what you call "deep computing" before? Some kids in a garage? Massive number-crunching was *always* the domain of the government, the academia, and large corporations -- only they had and have the resources to do it. I don't know how you can get more institutional than that. Besides, are you telling us that IBM is just now getting into supercomputers??
It?s logical that Deep Computers will be asked to consider some of the world?s most intractable social as well as business problems
Perhaps supercomputing could do to ethnic and regional warfare what it does to weather: warn us about where it?s likely to occur. Is political unrest - Rawanda (sic!), Kosovo - cyclical or predicable in some cases, like crime has been found to be?
Jon, I don't think you understand what supercomputers do. They have not magically acquired any problem-solving technology. All they do is crunch numbers, usually vectors and matrices, really really fast. The class of problems suitable for these machines is not big at all. Does it mean that, say, weather forecasting will become more precise? Yes, sure. But it's a function of the growth of the processing power in general and has nothing to do with supercomputers. Believing that increased specialized processing power will solve the world's political and social problems is naive at best. You are confusing ability to solve a problem (e.g. build a good predictive model) and raw computing power.
its time to use scientific modeling for decision making
Welcome to the real world, pal. In front of me is a Sun Ultra 1, a middle-powered workstation. It runs a whole bunch of scientific models which are used in decision making all the time. What do supercomputers have with decision support? I don't know and I don't think you do either.
If some of the most specialized existing data on the planet were focused on specific medical problems, treatment and research be greatly accelerated.
The meaning of this sentence is beyond me. Does it mean that if medical researchers read each others publications we would be able to... aahh, no, this is hopeless.
I could go on and on about AI, forecasting models, hope that increasing computation speed will solve social problems, etc. etc., but really, the article is beyond salvation.
Please, please stick to the subjects that you have at least have some approximation to a clue about. It is painfully obvious that you have no idea at all about heavy-number-crunching big-iron computing, how it works, where it is needed, and what uses it has. Really. Stick to human-interest stories, OK?
Oh, sure, the neural nets are very useful. It's just that they were overhyped some time ago.
Whether the artificial neural nets modify connections during training depends on the how the net is trained. First, there are learning methods that specifically work by adding/deleting new neurons (cascade correlation); and second, most learning methods win when they are combined with a pruning strategy (shutting off unimportant connections). The problem is determining which connections are not important.
In math/statistics/computer science there is a subfield called neural networks. Basically, this is a class of modeling algorithms which (usually) construct statistical models of data. They were really hot 4-5 years ago because of claims that they could learn -- that is, if you throw enough raw data at them they'll figure what it means.The reality, as usual, turned out to be quite uglier: yes, you can ask a neural net to construct you a model without specifying what the model should look like; no, if you don't know what you are doing, you'll end up with a lot of numerical garbage. Generally neural nets are successfully used in dealing with huge amounts of noisy data, such as voice and image recognition, stock market modeling, etc.
"Normal" neural nets, implementation-wise, are just programs that take some inputs and produce some outputs. Custom-made chips exist which put common neural net operations into hardware thus speeding the whole process immensely. It seems that what these guys are doing is a wetware neural net, that is instead of software constructs or logic gates they are using living neurons. There may be advantages to that, but I don't see them yet. Most of the stuff that they mentioned (such as making connections on the as-needed basis) are characteristics of all neural nets, including the software and the hardware ones.
I've also met Milken. He *is* a nice guy, but I don't know about remorse. I assume it would be a touchy subject with him.
misrepresentation of the risk involved in buying junk bonds
Well, caveat emptor, as the Romans used to say. He didn't sell junk bonds to widows and orphans, but rather to financial institutions that were perfectly capable of evaluating the risk themselves. I tend to have very little sympathy for, say, a hedge fund which bought risky assets (because they offered high return, why else!) and when the risk turned against them started crying misrepresentation. BTW, the Milken junk bond career started with an academic book which proved that historically a well-diversified (key word!) portfolio of junk bonds provided better risk/return ratio than a portfolio of blue-chip bonds.
a lot of due dilligence was corrupted
Er.. I don't really understand what you mean and I doubt it had anything to do with Milken.
and the American taxpayer had to help clean up the mess
There was no need. A lot of financial institutions (like pensions funds) became too greedy and gobbled up junk bonds. When the junk bond market collapsed they ran to the government for help. I don't see any *need* for helping them out of the mess they got themselves into. The situation is similar to the smoking debates: are the tobacco companies guilty that the people smoke, or they just provide a choice and some, or maybe a lot, people *choose* to smoke. I personally tend to take the latter position.
This is slightly off-topic of the government fixation with hackers/crackers, but I feel somewhat uncomfortable about the demonization of Michael Milken, the truly evil convicted robber baron, etc. etc. AFAIK, the real crime of Mike Milken was his success in selling junk bonds (which is basically all he did). His ability to sell junk bonds gave aggressive upstarts an opportunity to take over large established companies and resulted in a takeover mania at that time (nothing illegal here, just market forces at work). The powers-that-be became very uncomfortable with this situation (think job security for CEOs) and successfully found a way to get rid of Mike Milken. He *was* demonized by the press, but I really question his image as the evil robber baron. He gave tools to people to take over and, frequently, destroy companies but that is not good or evil in itself. One can make a very good argument that most of these companies were too fat and lazy and needed to be destroyed.
Yes, the government went out of its way to make Kevin Mitnick's life miserable and demonize him, but in an ironic twist lost on Jon Katz, this is the fate of Mike Milken as well.
Cool down. There is no new information here. All developed countries have highly developed and capable agencies that intercept electronic communications. That's the way the world works and neither you nor I (nor all/. readers) are going to change this. Get used to this.
If you find the situation personally objectionable, use strong crypto. That's what it is for.
Processing power of this magnitude was previously very, very difficult to come by
On the one hand, this is quite true. On the other hand, if you need massive processing power and (a very important 'and') your problem can be parallelized in some fashion, than distributed computing (think Beowulf) looks rather attractive compared to the traditional big iron. Granted, some problems do need a massive single machine, but these are, thank gods, tend to be rare (YMMV, of course).
Only in fairly rare cases can a scientist not find code written by collegues that will preform the necessary computations with little modification.
Ahem. Doesn't that entirely depend on the questions you are asking? The code to do standard things is widespread, but as soon as you get somewhat close to the bleeding edge (and that's where you *want* to be, right?) the tools that you can find lying around tend to develop severe problems. And in many cases it's easier to write code from scratch than to modify, debug, and finally rewrite anyway some grad student's project.
"You can tell you've been pushing a new frontier when all available tools are inappropriate" -- Steven K. Roberts, http://microship.com
In fact the whole idea seems a little bit misguided. In the article they talk about using supercomputers to model precise weather patterns. Lorentz showed a while back that precise weather patterns are chaotic, thus rendering most modeling quite useless!
"A little bit misguided" seems to apply to your statement more. It seems that you mean that weather systems are highly sensitive to initial conditions (the butterfly effect), thus you cannot ever model them. Sigh. First, chaotic systems can be modelled and are modelled. Second, you may not care about *precise* weather patterns as long as you get a usable forcast. Third, the time scale is crucial here. Forecasting a month ahead is hard, but forecasting a couple of hours ahead is not that hard. How about a day? two days? three? Fourth, just because right now we see weather as chaotic doesn't mean that at some point we will not develop a better theory which *will* be able to explain and predict weather better than we do now.
I may be missing something, but it is my impression that we are talking here about what's called "reserved" bandwidth. For example, let's say you want to videoconference between New York, London and Hong Kong over IP networks. If the route of your packets takes them through a heavily-used segment (think Starr report downloading), your videoconference is hosed. The idea is that you would be able to reserve bandwidth, which will be guaranteed to you, as in "you are guaranteed to have sustained 1Mb/sec speed between machines foo.com and bar.org from 15:00 to 16:00 on May 24, 1999". AFAIK this is currently technically infeasible for randomly located machines, but is heavily worked on.
First of all, I don't believe the infrastructure to buy and sell bandwidth is in place yet, at least for arbitrarily located machines. This is being worked on, for sure, but in general case I don't think you cannot buy or sell anything but what is essentially a leased line.
Second, for this to work well, we need some kind of micropayments structure in place, plus reasonably intelligent software agents that would be able to go out onto the net and buy bandwidth for us when we need it. I don't see this happening in the near future. In five years we'll see.
Besides, there is a book (IIRC called "Virtual City", but I am not sure) that very well describes a similar system where you buy remote processing power in micro-chunks on the as-needed basis. The book is recommended, by the way, it explores the consequences of being able to transfer human consciousness into a piece of software.
The point is not measuring pi, the point is precision. Whatever is the length of your stick, it is expressed as a finite number (physics takes care of this, think scale of atoms). Pi is not a finite number, ergo...
Isn't an interview supposed to show you the person being interviewed? I got a distinct impression that this "interview" was about Andrew Leonard's ruminations about talking with Neal Stephenson, and I'm not that interested in them.
New/interesting info about Stephenson/Cryptonomicon: zero. New info about Andrew Leonard: self-obsessed. Avoid.
I do have a problem with governments engaging in commercial espionage, though probably not as big as you do:). However all I've seen (this report included) is a lot of allegations, heavy hints, and FOAF (friend of the friend) stories. I have NOT seen any verifiable, hard-data-supported, smoking-gun accusations of commercial espionage against NSA/CIA/etc.
In any case, the role of national intelligence agencies is in flux following the end of the Cold War and it has been repeatedly suggested that they be used for gaining economic advantage. It has also been suggested that the Japanese, as well as Taiwan, Israel, etc. etc. have been doing this for a long time. I don't see any high moral problems here, anyway. All we are talking about are trade secrets of some corporation. The objections to economic espionage tend to be on the lines of "Gentlemen do not read other gentlemen's mail" and, unfortunately, that line of argument exhausted itself in the XIX century.
I don't like key escrow at all and have strong feelings about my own right to privacy. However the article in question is just fluff. Think about it: it is a report generated from the bowels of European bureacracy which has repeatedly proved itself to be totally clueless, and has numerous axes to grind. Basically, the report says two things:
One, the US/UK/etc. intelligence agencies collect data from the world communications network. So? Does this surprise anybody? Didn't we hear about it a zillion times before? Would anybody expect any intelligence agency with proper capabilities to do otherwise? So the UK spooks have a terabyte of Usenet data. Big deal. If I had a terabyte of storage handy I could have it, too. DejaNews likely has much more. Usenet is public forum anyway so I don't see any problems here.
Two, US intelligence agencies use intercepted data for commercial advantage of US companies. Again, this is old news. The report doesn't add any new hard data except some vague allegations that I (at least) have heard before. Airbus has been bitching about being spied upon for years by now.
In any case I don't see what this has to do with key escrow. It was a bad idea, it is a bad idea and it will stay a bad idea. *Of course* the spooks love it, but that's only to be expected and has been demonstrated numerous times before.
So I guess I don't understand what the whole noise is about.
I believe that very small very high-rez displays are already available (to be used behind a magnifying glass in e.g. PDAs and cell phones). Make appropriate software to drive it and you probably (IMHO, I'm not even close to an expert) fool at least some of the iris scanning systems.
Anonymity doesn't have much to do with encryption. Just because they provide the encryption service does not mean that they don't keep logs of connections. If they do, a message, even encrypted, can be traced back to you quite easily. Until recently the simple way to be anonymous was to set up a hotmail account through www.anonymizer.com and access it only through the anonymizer. Unfortunately, this is broken now, although I'm sure it's easy to find a free e-mail service that works through the anonymizer.
If you are interested in practical anonymity, check out www.zeroknowledge.com. Of course, there is a bunch of other resources on the net.
The standard problem with the biometric systems: what happens if your body changes? What if I got conjuctivitis (eye inflammation)? or something happened to my brow and I have to have my eye bandaged? or I developed a temporary light sensitivity and have to wear a patch today? What about colored contact lenses?
The idea is good, but I'd like to have an alternative system available as well.
Well, yes, the UN Charter *is* mostly a set of nice ideas. The only part of UN that can actually do something is the Security Council (that is by design). However, to get more to the point, there is different legal language attached to different issues in the Charter. Some issues are "declarations" and "principles" -- such as those listed in Article 2. These define what the world should look like, but, I repeat, they are not legal obligations of member states. Basically, if the drafters of the Charter wanted to say "A member state cannot go to war against another member state", they knew how to say this:).
As to Kuwait, it was not the "violation of section II" that led to the Gulf War. Essentially, US and Europe decided that Saddam is not going to get away with this and so they went to war. Article 2 was probably quoted for justification/propaganda reasons, but it was not *the reason* for the Gulf War. To remind you, China swallowed Tibet with nary a peep from the UN.
Ask any Israeli if he/she believes that the state of Israel exists only because of UN authority.
And if I'm the first person you met who thinks that the UN Charter has no power, you really should go out more often...:)
Kaa
My can of Diet Pepsi had Queen Amidala (sp?) on it
on
More Star Wars Hype
·
· Score: 1
It also said "Collector's can #17". Boggle.
I wonder if more money was spend marketing the film than creating it.
Well, the original point put forward by Squeeze Truck was that NATO breaks all of international law by waging war against Serbia. I asked him to show what specific law was being broken and he came up with "section II" -- I assume he meant Article 2 -- of UN Chapter. I looked it up and replied, saying that Article 2 imposes no legal obligations on the UN members (leaving aside all issues of moral authority and the way world *should* work). I don't see anywhere here using UN as it suits me (and did I say anything about Iraq?). You seem to be confusing me with the American government. Thankfully, I'm not it.
Slashdot Mirror
If you don't think that 'fucked' can be a correct description of a situation, you haven't seen really fucked up code yet... :)
Besides, you are complaining that kernel hackers have small vocabulary -- so you want to restrict it further?
Kaa
Oops...
Kaa
Earlier I posted a message basically saying Katz doesn't have a clue about big number-crunching. A number of people, mostly AC, asked me to provide evidence. Unfortunately I do not have the time to write either an introductory tutorial on scientific computing, or a sentence-by-sentence refutation of the Katz's article. Instead I'll just use a couple of quotes from the article to, hopefully, demonstrate the mind-boggling cluelessness of the author.
... aahh, no, this is hopeless.
one of the biggest technology stories of the year - perhaps in several years - the institutionalization of deep domputing (sic!) by one of the most powerful corporations on earth
Er.. Jon, who do you think used what you call "deep computing" before? Some kids in a garage? Massive number-crunching was *always* the domain of the government, the academia, and large corporations -- only they had and have the resources to do it. I don't know how you can get more institutional than that. Besides, are you telling us that IBM is just now getting into supercomputers??
It?s logical that Deep Computers will be asked to consider some of the world?s most intractable social as well as business problems
Perhaps supercomputing could do to ethnic and regional warfare what it does to weather: warn us about where it?s likely to occur. Is political unrest - Rawanda (sic!), Kosovo - cyclical or predicable in some cases, like crime has been found to be?
Jon, I don't think you understand what supercomputers do. They have not magically acquired any problem-solving technology. All they do is crunch numbers, usually vectors and matrices, really really fast. The class of problems suitable for these machines is not big at all. Does it mean that, say, weather forecasting will become more precise? Yes, sure. But it's a function of the growth of the processing power in general and has nothing to do with supercomputers. Believing that increased specialized processing power will solve the world's political and social problems is naive at best. You are confusing ability to solve a problem (e.g. build a good predictive model) and raw computing power.
its time to use scientific modeling for decision making
Welcome to the real world, pal. In front of me is a Sun Ultra 1, a middle-powered workstation. It runs a whole bunch of scientific models which are used in decision making all the time. What do supercomputers have with decision support? I don't know and I don't think you do either.
If some of the most specialized existing data on the planet were focused on specific medical problems, treatment and research be greatly accelerated.
The meaning of this sentence is beyond me. Does it mean that if medical researchers read each others publications we would be able to
I could go on and on about AI, forecasting models, hope that increasing computation speed will solve social problems, etc. etc., but really, the article is beyond salvation.
Kaa
Dear Jon,
Please, please stick to the subjects that you have at least have some approximation to a clue about. It is painfully obvious that you have no idea at all about heavy-number-crunching big-iron computing, how it works, where it is needed, and what uses it has. Really. Stick to human-interest stories, OK?
Kaa
Oh, sure, the neural nets are very useful. It's just that they were overhyped some time ago.
Whether the artificial neural nets modify connections during training depends on the how the net is trained. First, there are learning methods that specifically work by adding/deleting new neurons (cascade correlation); and second, most learning methods win when they are combined with a pruning strategy (shutting off unimportant connections). The problem is determining which connections are not important.
Kaa
In math/statistics/computer science there is a subfield called neural networks. Basically, this is a class of modeling algorithms which (usually) construct statistical models of data. They were really hot 4-5 years ago because of claims that they could learn -- that is, if you throw enough raw data at them they'll figure what it means.The reality, as usual, turned out to be quite uglier: yes, you can ask a neural net to construct you a model without specifying what the model should look like; no, if you don't know what you are doing, you'll end up with a lot of numerical garbage. Generally neural nets are successfully used in dealing with huge amounts of noisy data, such as voice and image recognition, stock market modeling, etc.
"Normal" neural nets, implementation-wise, are just programs that take some inputs and produce some outputs. Custom-made chips exist which put common neural net operations into hardware thus speeding the whole process immensely. It seems that what these guys are doing is a wetware neural net, that is instead of software constructs or logic gates they are using living neurons. There may be advantages to that, but I don't see them yet. Most of the stuff that they mentioned (such as making connections on the as-needed basis) are characteristics of all neural nets, including the software and the hardware ones.
Kaa
I've also met Milken. He *is* a nice guy, but I don't know about remorse. I assume it would be a touchy subject with him.
misrepresentation of the risk involved in buying junk bonds
Well, caveat emptor, as the Romans used to say. He didn't sell junk bonds to widows and orphans, but rather to financial institutions that were perfectly capable of evaluating the risk themselves. I tend to have very little sympathy for, say, a hedge fund which bought risky assets (because they offered high return, why else!) and when the risk turned against them started crying misrepresentation. BTW, the Milken junk bond career started with an academic book which proved that historically a well-diversified (key word!) portfolio of junk bonds provided better risk/return ratio than a portfolio of blue-chip bonds.
a lot of due dilligence was corrupted
Er.. I don't really understand what you mean and I doubt it had anything to do with Milken.
and the American taxpayer had to help clean up the mess
There was no need. A lot of financial institutions (like pensions funds) became too greedy and gobbled up junk bonds. When the junk bond market collapsed they ran to the government for help. I don't see any *need* for helping them out of the mess they got themselves into. The situation is similar to the smoking debates: are the tobacco companies guilty that the people smoke, or they just provide a choice and some, or maybe a lot, people *choose* to smoke. I personally tend to take the latter position.
Kaa
This is slightly off-topic of the government fixation with hackers/crackers, but I feel somewhat uncomfortable about the demonization of Michael Milken, the truly evil convicted robber baron, etc. etc. AFAIK, the real crime of Mike Milken was his success in selling junk bonds (which is basically all he did). His ability to sell junk bonds gave aggressive upstarts an opportunity to take over large established companies and resulted in a takeover mania at that time (nothing illegal here, just market forces at work). The powers-that-be became very uncomfortable with this situation (think job security for CEOs) and successfully found a way to get rid of Mike Milken. He *was* demonized by the press, but I really question his image as the evil robber baron. He gave tools to people to take over and, frequently, destroy companies but that is not good or evil in itself. One can make a very good argument that most of these companies were too fat and lazy and needed to be destroyed.
Yes, the government went out of its way to make Kevin Mitnick's life miserable and demonize him, but in an ironic twist lost on Jon Katz, this is the fate of Mike Milken as well.
Kaa
Isn't it wonderful looking at how the youngsters rediscover the classic joys of electronic communications on their own!
Look into the Jargon File for details.
Kaa
Cool down. There is no new information here. All developed countries have highly developed and capable agencies that intercept electronic communications. That's the way the world works and neither you nor I (nor all /. readers) are going to change this. Get used to this.
If you find the situation personally objectionable, use strong crypto. That's what it is for.
Kaa
Processing power of this magnitude was previously very, very difficult to come by
On the one hand, this is quite true. On the other hand, if you need massive processing power and (a very important 'and') your problem can be parallelized in some fashion, than distributed computing (think Beowulf) looks rather attractive compared to the traditional big iron. Granted, some problems do need a massive single machine, but these are, thank gods, tend to be rare (YMMV, of course).
Only in fairly rare cases can a scientist not find code written by collegues that will preform the necessary computations with little modification.
Ahem. Doesn't that entirely depend on the questions you are asking? The code to do standard things is widespread, but as soon as you get somewhat close to the bleeding edge (and that's where you *want* to be, right?) the tools that you can find lying around tend to develop severe problems. And in many cases it's easier to write code from scratch than to modify, debug, and finally rewrite anyway some grad student's project.
"You can tell you've been pushing a new frontier when all available tools are inappropriate" -- Steven K. Roberts, http://microship.com
In fact the whole idea seems a little bit misguided. In the article they talk about using supercomputers to model precise weather patterns. Lorentz showed a while back that precise weather patterns are chaotic, thus rendering most modeling quite useless!
"A little bit misguided" seems to apply to your statement more. It seems that you mean that weather systems are highly sensitive to initial conditions (the butterfly effect), thus you cannot ever model them. Sigh. First, chaotic systems can be modelled and are modelled. Second, you may not care about *precise* weather patterns as long as you get a usable forcast. Third, the time scale is crucial here. Forecasting a month ahead is hard, but forecasting a couple of hours ahead is not that hard. How about a day? two days? three? Fourth, just because right now we see weather as chaotic doesn't mean that at some point we will not develop a better theory which *will* be able to explain and predict weather better than we do now.
Kaa
I may be missing something, but it is my impression that we are talking here about what's called "reserved" bandwidth. For example, let's say you want to videoconference between New York, London and Hong Kong over IP networks. If the route of your packets takes them through a heavily-used segment (think Starr report downloading), your videoconference is hosed. The idea is that you would be able to reserve bandwidth, which will be guaranteed to you, as in "you are guaranteed to have sustained 1Mb/sec speed between machines foo.com and bar.org from 15:00 to 16:00 on May 24, 1999". AFAIK this is currently technically infeasible for randomly located machines, but is heavily worked on.
Kaa
First of all, I don't believe the infrastructure to buy and sell bandwidth is in place yet, at least for arbitrarily located machines. This is being worked on, for sure, but in general case I don't think you cannot buy or sell anything but what is essentially a leased line.
Second, for this to work well, we need some kind of micropayments structure in place, plus reasonably intelligent software agents that would be able to go out onto the net and buy bandwidth for us when we need it. I don't see this happening in the near future. In five years we'll see.
Besides, there is a book (IIRC called "Virtual City", but I am not sure) that very well describes a similar system where you buy remote processing power in micro-chunks on the as-needed basis. The book is recommended, by the way, it explores the consequences of being able to transfer human consciousness into a piece of software.
Kaa
The point is not measuring pi, the point is precision. Whatever is the length of your stick, it is expressed as a finite number (physics takes care of this, think scale of atoms). Pi is not a finite number, ergo...
Kaa
AFAIK both the concept and the word 'cyberspace' were invented before Gibson.
Kaa
Isn't an interview supposed to show you the person being interviewed? I got a distinct impression that this "interview" was about Andrew Leonard's ruminations about talking with Neal Stephenson, and I'm not that interested in them.
New/interesting info about Stephenson/Cryptonomicon: zero. New info about Andrew Leonard: self-obsessed. Avoid.
Kaa
I do have a problem with governments engaging in commercial espionage, though probably not as big as you do :). However all I've seen (this report included) is a lot of allegations, heavy hints, and FOAF (friend of the friend) stories. I have NOT seen any verifiable, hard-data-supported, smoking-gun accusations of commercial espionage against NSA/CIA/etc.
In any case, the role of national intelligence agencies is in flux following the end of the Cold War and it has been repeatedly suggested that they be used for gaining economic advantage. It has also been suggested that the Japanese, as well as Taiwan, Israel, etc. etc. have been doing this for a long time. I don't see any high moral problems here, anyway. All we are talking about are trade secrets of some corporation. The objections to economic espionage tend to be on the lines of "Gentlemen do not read other gentlemen's mail" and, unfortunately, that line of argument exhausted itself in the XIX century.
Kaa
...should be required reading for you, my dear AC.
Kaa
I don't like key escrow at all and have strong feelings about my own right to privacy. However the article in question is just fluff. Think about it: it is a report generated from the bowels of European bureacracy which has repeatedly proved itself to be totally clueless, and has numerous axes to grind. Basically, the report says two things:
One, the US/UK/etc. intelligence agencies collect data from the world communications network. So? Does this surprise anybody? Didn't we hear about it a zillion times before? Would anybody expect any intelligence agency with proper capabilities to do otherwise? So the UK spooks have a terabyte of Usenet data. Big deal. If I had a terabyte of storage handy I could have it, too. DejaNews likely has much more. Usenet is public forum anyway so I don't see any problems here.
Two, US intelligence agencies use intercepted data for commercial advantage of US companies. Again, this is old news. The report doesn't add any new hard data except some vague allegations that I (at least) have heard before. Airbus has been bitching about being spied upon for years by now.
In any case I don't see what this has to do with key escrow. It was a bad idea, it is a bad idea and it will stay a bad idea. *Of course* the spooks love it, but that's only to be expected and has been demonstrated numerous times before.
So I guess I don't understand what the whole noise is about.
Kaa
I believe that very small very high-rez displays are already available (to be used behind a magnifying glass in e.g. PDAs and cell phones). Make appropriate software to drive it and you probably (IMHO, I'm not even close to an expert) fool at least some of the iris scanning systems.
Kaa
Anonymity doesn't have much to do with encryption. Just because they provide the encryption service does not mean that they don't keep logs of connections. If they do, a message, even encrypted, can be traced back to you quite easily.
Until recently the simple way to be anonymous was to set up a hotmail account through www.anonymizer.com and access it only through the anonymizer. Unfortunately, this is broken now, although I'm sure it's easy to find a free e-mail service that works through the anonymizer.
If you are interested in practical anonymity, check out www.zeroknowledge.com. Of course, there is a bunch of other resources on the net.
Kaa
The standard problem with the biometric systems: what happens if your body changes? What if I got conjuctivitis (eye inflammation)? or something happened to my brow and I have to have my eye bandaged? or I developed a temporary light sensitivity and have to wear a patch today? What about colored contact lenses?
The idea is good, but I'd like to have an alternative system available as well.
Kaa
Well, yes, the UN Charter *is* mostly a set of nice ideas. The only part of UN that can actually do something is the Security Council (that is by design). However, to get more to the point, there is different legal language attached to different issues in the Charter. Some issues are "declarations" and "principles" -- such as those listed in Article 2. These define what the world should look like, but, I repeat, they are not legal obligations of member states. Basically, if the drafters of the Charter wanted to say "A member state cannot go to war against another member state", they knew how to say this :).
:)
As to Kuwait, it was not the "violation of section II" that led to the Gulf War. Essentially, US and Europe decided that Saddam is not going to get away with this and so they went to war. Article 2 was probably quoted for justification/propaganda reasons, but it was not *the reason* for the Gulf War. To remind you, China swallowed Tibet with nary a peep from the UN.
Ask any Israeli if he/she believes that the state of Israel exists only because of UN authority.
And if I'm the first person you met who thinks that the UN Charter has no power, you really should go out more often...
Kaa
It also said "Collector's can #17". Boggle.
I wonder if more money was spend marketing the film than creating it.
Kaa
Well, the original point put forward by Squeeze Truck was that NATO breaks all of international law by waging war against Serbia. I asked him to show what specific law was being broken and he came up with "section II" -- I assume he meant Article 2 -- of UN Chapter. I looked it up and replied, saying that Article 2 imposes no legal obligations on the UN members (leaving aside all issues of moral authority and the way world *should* work). I don't see anywhere here using UN as it suits me (and did I say anything about Iraq?). You seem to be confusing me with the American government. Thankfully, I'm not it.
Kaa