Often this kind of thing was required for traveling to West or getting a promotion, rigt to publish, etc.
Required? Naa.... You always could pass on that excursion to Rome or don't get promoted. There was a choice. Since the end of fifties no one pressed a gun to anyone's head to force him to inform. And, sorry pal, there were people who did the right thing and plainly said no. Those who didn't are scum, even if I can feel sorry for them. They choose wrong then, they should pay now at least by being exposed.
Wildstein had the right to read the list and use the info in his journalist research, not to carry it from the IPN's library. Those are two different things.
This is total rubbish. So he had the right to carry it out of there in his head but not in his laptop (or traditional, paper and pencil notebook or whatever)? You really don't see how illogical and plainly stupid that statement is? Too much of Gazeta Wyborcza, I guess?
What people should be VERY aware about now is that Marcus Wolf, the architect of the very system you describe, has just been employed by the Department of Homeland Security to set up a similar system in the USA.
I can't believe that, this is a real horror. But there is some hope, since the article you refer to contains an important factual error - Wolf was running the outside intelligence branch of Stasi. That too did some interesting bits, like training of various middle-eastern and south-American terrorists etc. but they were not responsible for the internal informers system. So this can hardly be his specialty, which the source of the article claims. Also, Primakov being ex-KGB (and there is no exactly such thing as an "ex" in that nice club) is not the best source of information. However, this is so scary that you should, if you are an American, probably do something about like write your congressman or something.
BTW, hiring Primakov as an advisor would be an extremely stupid thing to do, because one can be sure that no matter how much you pay he will stay loyal to his pals from the nice building at Dzierzynski Square, Moscow and report there anything he has heard and saw.
She ended up just making up some rubbish which took the heat away from the KGB and wouldn't get anyone into trouble. I guess that when you cooerce people into being informers, many end up fabricating the product.
I guess that if you believe what she said then you really don't get the way it work. You see KGB and their little brothers throughout "satellite countries" were not stupid. Ruthless, devoid of human feelings, totally immoral and sometimes corrupt - yes. Stupid - no. With informer penetration of one third of the society cross-checking the reports sounds like an easy thing to do. And it was frequently done. First, to ensure the system delivered real information. Second, to ensure that the informer would believe his handler (officer who recruited him and was overseeing him, meeting him - or her in the case of your Russian friend) knows everything anyway.
Now, guess what would happen when someone going on that bus would do something strange, out of ordinary by soviet standards back then - like, say, ask this friend of yours what does she think about Chernenko (or whoever was running that place then) or the communism in general - do you think she would hesitate for a moment in reporting that to her KGB handler? Not one. And not because she is (or was) a particularly bad person, no, because she would be afraid, really scared, of what might happen to her if she didn't report that - but someone else did. Her handler has from day one worked hard on ensuring that this fear would be with her, always. They were very effective at putting fear into people's mind, the whole system was - some people in Poland were afraid to, say, sign a petition against government years after 1989.
And while dealing with a secret police there is no such thing as an innocent report that for sure won't get anyone in trouble. Something that looks innocent to an informer might be the missing part of a bigger puzzle for an officer.
The point is - despite all the horrors of the system by seventies and eighties it lost much of its bloodthirsty jaws it had in the Stalin era. And there was a choice, you didn't have to be informant if you didn't want to. You also didn't have to join the communist party. Sure, you had to accept though, that you won't advance in your career, won't get a new car and a flat to live in. And, in some cases, your little sins like cheating on your wife would be exposed. Or you would have to serve that one month prison term for drunk-driving. Or, in the case of your Russian friend, you wouldn't be allowed to do a lucrative and pleasant job of showing foreigners around at the Olympics. But at least you didn't become a part of the system that was destroying your own nation. That wasn't as brave as die on a barricade or something, but nevertheless that was bravery. And many, many people were that brave back then. The fact that those who weren't were not even named... is a shame.
Don't you think that sweating building things in a virtual world is anyway a better job than said prostitution or just a Nike factory or some mechanical sweatshop? At least you don't get this dirty and can't get AIDS through that. And having said that these people have a good reason to do it, while many people do this stuff without getting paid, in the so-called developed countries. Wasting their lives and any talents they might posses in something this stupid. It's pure madness.
Funding that would lead to find a way to actually do something about once we find it is most likely to come from the military budget. As is funding for ensuring that we can spend our time on watching the sky or trying to get there instead of settling in for a good way of finding the direction to Mecca few times a day.
Now that's a surprise that this has made its way to Slashdot. The problem is that unless you are from one of the former soviet bloc countries you won't get it.
Of course there are English native speakers who do get it - people like Norman Davies or Timothy Garton Ash, who studied the subject at length. Actually, if you want to understand just a bit of what it is all about read Timothy's book, The File. In that he describes how it all looked like in former East Germany, the only place where they have dealt with communist secret police and its informers in the proper way. Just one piece of information - one third of the population there was informing on the remaining two thirds. Let me repeat that again - out of three East-Germans one was an informer. Do you, dear Americans or British, can imagine at all what it was to live in a society like this? No? Just what I thought.
And we have no real reason to believe that the proportions were significantly different in other soviet bloc countries. After all secret police in each of those countries was organized along the same good soviet guidelines and under careful, loving supervision by soviet KGB personnel. The only problem is that while in Germany and the Czech Republic they have got rid of the former informers and officers of these secret police organizations from the public life and allowed former victims to learn the (sometimes painful) truth about who informed on them - not in Poland. In Poland former communist officials run the government now and the former secret police officers and informers do very well, many of them forming now the business elite of the now supposedly free and democratic country. For years they have done an excellent job at preventing any attempts to actually reveal who was the scum and snitcher and who wasn't.
But finally some of the data has spilled, the amount of interest shows clearly that people do care who was who and thanks to Internet, p2p networks and stuff no one can prevent this. And that's the point of having it up on Slashdot I guess.
Which, BTW, shows that unless you start shooting people in the head with actual, real lead bullets (like in China) they will share whatever files they like and find worth it. Sorry MPAA, RIAA and any other AA out there. No matter how many lawsuits you will create you can't win. Unless you'll start shooting people. But that works only in China for now, and they don't care about copyrights anyway, sorry.
A 90 year old driving a car, that can't find the way because he is drunk, pulls out his cellphone and calls his grand-grand-grand-son to help him sort things out.
I suspect that there might be some rather important things going on in some other (NIH) agencies (NSF). Just a thought. I suppose it depends how one chooses to define 'important' and 'beneficial'.
Yeah... tell me - how much would new cures for Parkinson disease or whole knowledge about Antarctic ecosystem be worth when one nice rock would appear on a collision course with our humble little planet? If we won't be able to either deflect/destroy it or flee all the achievements of thousands of years of human civilization would be utterly lost. Wasted. Because someone was too shortsighted to see it coming.
The total NASA budget ( $15+ Billion ) is a very small sub 1% fraction of US Gummint spending.
Pathetic, isn't it? Especially considering that space exploration is in the long run the most important and beneficial government program of all (with military being the second).
OK, maybe it is the way I write but this wasn't my point. I understand that courts need to establish whether someone had an intention to say kill or if it was just an accident. But my point was that this is a valid and right way of resolving the cases in which the opinion that the act was criminal is obvious or at least accepted by majority. With this so called intellectual "property" it is quite clear, that this an issue of beliefs, not judgment of whether the action was taken with criminal intent. Documents subpoenaed by the court in this case can be used to support a belief system that stands behind this whole IP concept by being manipulated or used in propaganda by the IP supporters to show that Kazaa's management "was plotting to commit murder... eee... theft of the property". Deciding this matter in court where one of the sides is deprived of their privacy is not the best course of action.
BTW, it's a bit OT, but it just occurred to me why the concept of intellectual property is flawed from the start: you can't own knowledge, because you can't loose your "ownership". If I know how to bake a delicious prune cake I can't say that I own it. After all, someone else can come up with exactly same recipe. Or I can tell someone. In either case number of people knowing the recipe increased but my knowledge didn't shrink at all. I still know how to make the cake. No loss - no property.
This sounds very rational. And this is probably what people should do. However, both the original poster and you assume that other fellow's lawyers' right to read anything that you've written is natural and obvious. But shouldn't there be a limit? If that would be technologically possible to subpoena someone's thoughts would you see it as natural and right? I really don't like the idea that anything I write or draw might be used against me - I thought this rule applied only to testimonies after being arrested.
I understand that from the court's point of view such memos and letters are an important evidence that would allow them to judge not only the actions but also the intentions. Maybe that's what we should worry about? After all, it is really hard to prove intentions in cases like this - and even harder to judge them. An intention to rape & kill are obviously bad, but it is not as obvious with intention to develop a way for people to freely share files over the network. Here it depends on one's beliefs and interests whether he would see it the way I put it or as an intention to develop a way for people to steal precious and highly valued intellectual property of media companies. Are beliefs to be tested in court?
Let's remember about LokiTorrent's law defense fund. They had the guts to stand for their rights and say no to corporate bullying, and they are doing it for the rest of us too. If they win such lawsuits would have to stop.
How is it so that manufacturers of Intel based notebooks can't come up with a design that would be beautiful? Why can't they produce something that would be not only useful but also nice to look at and touch? I read the article (RTFA) and it is full of pictures of ugly designs. They all look either dumb and boring, yet another set of black-greyish boxen or there is some effort to make them look "cool" but in the style of cheap boomboxes for 15 year olds. By my tastes only the new Samsungs X50 & X25 show at least some genuine effort towards design, though I won't call them beautiful.
This is amazing. All these are products of different companies, bigger and smaller, from different countries and yet none of them really stands out from the crowd. Doesn't HP or Acer or anything have a design department? Or maybe it's a mindset of these companies that doesn't value the aesthetic perception?
Nothing really new here, but it explains some phenomena - now I'll now that some politicians are clearly a result of a human-mice brain experiment which went bad...
...which is good news! People (here and everywhere else) have been talking for years about a decent, secure and standards based OS for the masses. Let's face it, OS X is just that.
It isn't free, it isn't open source and it isn't GNU - so it isn't ideologically pure but it is in fact the only real alternative in existence for those of use who don't have a Unix system administration episode somewhere in their past.
The only pity is that the financial might of the Microsoft behemoth prevents Apple from releasing OS X for other hardware than theirs. Even the new entry level Mac is a daring move by Apple. After all, if MS decides to terminate the Office for OS X they will be in trouble.
(I know, it's off-topic but this update limitation problem doesn't bother me that much although I run a "disadvantaged" XP)
Don't worry, if there is any substance in you calling yourself a geek then your mental abilities are by far superior to an average MBA graduate. Just get to actually like people and develop your so called soft skills and you should be ok. And, btw, this is a much better career development path than trying to be a, say, programmer or sysadm for life. Remember, people change slower than computers so what you'll learn about working with and managing people will be yours for good. Good luck.
(And congratulations on having an interesting job. I'm looking for something right now...)
Lets just think... thousands of players immersed in a virtual world and DJs keeping a virtual radio station 24/7 for them, talking about virtual events in that world - this surely is a new frontier of insanity.
Expect the Chinese to field Submarines, Tanks and a Stealth aircraft capable of competing with the F-35 within the next 20 years or so and its surface fleet will become a serious challenge to the USN in the Pacific.
Don't forget their space program. More ambitious than the lazy NASA, not no mention ESA.
(I wonder how many young Chinese are wasting their lives on MMORPG crap?)
But US has something China doesn't - intellectual diversity and society (still) open to immigrants.
I wouldn't be surprised if Homeland Security Operations Morning Briefs [cryptome.org] that we leaked are also part of their inclination to avoid digital record keeping (and comprehensive FOIA searches)
These reports show an interesting view of the domestic intelligence gathering being done at the DHS.
I've read a few pages of these reports. This is mundane information about security incidents (suspicious behavior, bomb threats, security rules violations etc.) which are from what I saw mostly handled by the police. Sometimes there is some information about more grave incidents from abroad (like the guy in Norway who attacked the flight crew with an axe). Nothing suspicious here, just reports about security people of various type doing their job on a daily basis.
And certainly no intelligence - maybe I didn't read enough but I didn't find anything there that could be described as intelligence information or intelligence gathering - reports about suspicious behavior are not intelligence. Reports about aircraft crashes or bomb threats are not intelligence. Reports about security regulations violations (the guy with a knife in this hair gel in his carry-on bag) are not intelligence.
I don't get it, where do you see nonsense? For me someone trying to conceal a knife in a jar of hair gel is suspicious. After all you can put all the knives you want into your luggage and no one would say a bad word about it. If the guy wanted to take his Leatherman on the trip with him then that's what he should have done. But hair gel? Sorry, but your explanation is less plausible that the one that he planned to take it out during the flight and threaten the crew.
Anyway, when I'm flying I prefer that someone ensures that people concealing knives of any kind in any way in their carry-on bags are not with me on the plane. Thanks to all those who do their job and stop nuts like the one described about.
> Google - home" Requires installation of activeX plug-in. Great video feeds.
No, it doesn't - if you use homeJ.html links, there is a Java viewer that works on all platforms. Like in this search. Some of them have even working controls, although most show boring construction sites.
Major magazines can get material before it is released through the same illegitimate channels that the pirates use. And, it's better for the industry for the pundits to have the stuff in hand before release- do you think that those industry "just released" articles on releases just materialize out of thin air?
No, the magazines get it legally. This is the result of hard work by PR departments and agencies who hand down preview/prerelease versions of the software to selected journalists before the final release. Remember, companies are interested in their products getting coverage when they are out, journalists are interested in writing about newest stuff so this is perfect synergy.
Slashdot Mirror
How about getting there first, eh?
Often this kind of thing was required for traveling to West or getting a promotion, rigt to publish, etc.
Required? Naa.... You always could pass on that excursion to Rome or don't get promoted. There was a choice. Since the end of fifties no one pressed a gun to anyone's head to force him to inform. And, sorry pal, there were people who did the right thing and plainly said no. Those who didn't are scum, even if I can feel sorry for them. They choose wrong then, they should pay now at least by being exposed.
Wildstein had the right to read the list and use the info in his journalist research, not to carry it from the IPN's library. Those are two different things.
This is total rubbish. So he had the right to carry it out of there in his head but not in his laptop (or traditional, paper and pencil notebook or whatever)? You really don't see how illogical and plainly stupid that statement is? Too much of Gazeta Wyborcza, I guess?
What people should be VERY aware about now is that Marcus Wolf, the architect of the very system you describe, has just been employed by the Department of Homeland Security to set up a similar system in the USA.
I can't believe that, this is a real horror. But there is some hope, since the article you refer to contains an important factual error - Wolf was running the outside intelligence branch of Stasi. That too did some interesting bits, like training of various middle-eastern and south-American terrorists etc. but they were not responsible for the internal informers system. So this can hardly be his specialty, which the source of the article claims. Also, Primakov being ex-KGB (and there is no exactly such thing as an "ex" in that nice club) is not the best source of information. However, this is so scary that you should, if you are an American, probably do something about like write your congressman or something.
BTW, hiring Primakov as an advisor would be an extremely stupid thing to do, because one can be sure that no matter how much you pay he will stay loyal to his pals from the nice building at Dzierzynski Square, Moscow and report there anything he has heard and saw.
She ended up just making up some rubbish which took the heat away from the KGB and wouldn't get anyone into trouble. I guess that when you cooerce people into being informers, many end up fabricating the product.
I guess that if you believe what she said then you really don't get the way it work. You see KGB and their little brothers throughout "satellite countries" were not stupid. Ruthless, devoid of human feelings, totally immoral and sometimes corrupt - yes. Stupid - no. With informer penetration of one third of the society cross-checking the reports sounds like an easy thing to do. And it was frequently done. First, to ensure the system delivered real information. Second, to ensure that the informer would believe his handler (officer who recruited him and was overseeing him, meeting him - or her in the case of your Russian friend) knows everything anyway.
Now, guess what would happen when someone going on that bus would do something strange, out of ordinary by soviet standards back then - like, say, ask this friend of yours what does she think about Chernenko (or whoever was running that place then) or the communism in general - do you think she would hesitate for a moment in reporting that to her KGB handler? Not one. And not because she is (or was) a particularly bad person, no, because she would be afraid, really scared, of what might happen to her if she didn't report that - but someone else did. Her handler has from day one worked hard on ensuring that this fear would be with her, always. They were very effective at putting fear into people's mind, the whole system was - some people in Poland were afraid to, say, sign a petition against government years after 1989.
And while dealing with a secret police there is no such thing as an innocent report that for sure won't get anyone in trouble. Something that looks innocent to an informer might be the missing part of a bigger puzzle for an officer.
The point is - despite all the horrors of the system by seventies and eighties it lost much of its bloodthirsty jaws it had in the Stalin era. And there was a choice, you didn't have to be informant if you didn't want to. You also didn't have to join the communist party. Sure, you had to accept though, that you won't advance in your career, won't get a new car and a flat to live in. And, in some cases, your little sins like cheating on your wife would be exposed. Or you would have to serve that one month prison term for drunk-driving. Or, in the case of your Russian friend, you wouldn't be allowed to do a lucrative and pleasant job of showing foreigners around at the Olympics. But at least you didn't become a part of the system that was destroying your own nation. That wasn't as brave as die on a barricade or something, but nevertheless that was bravery. And many, many people were that brave back then. The fact that those who weren't were not even named... is a shame.
Don't you think that sweating building things in a virtual world is anyway a better job than said prostitution or just a Nike factory or some mechanical sweatshop? At least you don't get this dirty and can't get AIDS through that. And having said that these people have a good reason to do it, while many people do this stuff without getting paid, in the so-called developed countries. Wasting their lives and any talents they might posses in something this stupid. It's pure madness.
Funding that would lead to find a way to actually do something about once we find it is most likely to come from the military budget. As is funding for ensuring that we can spend our time on watching the sky or trying to get there instead of settling in for a good way of finding the direction to Mecca few times a day.
Of course there are English native speakers who do get it - people like Norman Davies or Timothy Garton Ash, who studied the subject at length. Actually, if you want to understand just a bit of what it is all about read Timothy's book, The File. In that he describes how it all looked like in former East Germany, the only place where they have dealt with communist secret police and its informers in the proper way. Just one piece of information - one third of the population there was informing on the remaining two thirds. Let me repeat that again - out of three East-Germans one was an informer. Do you, dear Americans or British, can imagine at all what it was to live in a society like this? No? Just what I thought.
And we have no real reason to believe that the proportions were significantly different in other soviet bloc countries. After all secret police in each of those countries was organized along the same good soviet guidelines and under careful, loving supervision by soviet KGB personnel. The only problem is that while in Germany and the Czech Republic they have got rid of the former informers and officers of these secret police organizations from the public life and allowed former victims to learn the (sometimes painful) truth about who informed on them - not in Poland. In Poland former communist officials run the government now and the former secret police officers and informers do very well, many of them forming now the business elite of the now supposedly free and democratic country. For years they have done an excellent job at preventing any attempts to actually reveal who was the scum and snitcher and who wasn't.
But finally some of the data has spilled, the amount of interest shows clearly that people do care who was who and thanks to Internet, p2p networks and stuff no one can prevent this. And that's the point of having it up on Slashdot I guess.
Which, BTW, shows that unless you start shooting people in the head with actual, real lead bullets (like in China) they will share whatever files they like and find worth it. Sorry MPAA, RIAA and any other AA out there. No matter how many lawsuits you will create you can't win. Unless you'll start shooting people. But that works only in China for now, and they don't care about copyrights anyway, sorry.
Did you notice it is "individually hand made"? Guess what the first step of the manufacturing process is... ROTFL...
A 90 year old driving a car, that can't find the way because he is drunk, pulls out his cellphone and calls his grand-grand-grand-son to help him sort things out.
Yeah... tell me - how much would new cures for Parkinson disease or whole knowledge about Antarctic ecosystem be worth when one nice rock would appear on a collision course with our humble little planet? If we won't be able to either deflect/destroy it or flee all the achievements of thousands of years of human civilization would be utterly lost. Wasted. Because someone was too shortsighted to see it coming.
Pathetic, isn't it? Especially considering that space exploration is in the long run the most important and beneficial government program of all (with military being the second).
BTW, it's a bit OT, but it just occurred to me why the concept of intellectual property is flawed from the start: you can't own knowledge, because you can't loose your "ownership". If I know how to bake a delicious prune cake I can't say that I own it. After all, someone else can come up with exactly same recipe. Or I can tell someone. In either case number of people knowing the recipe increased but my knowledge didn't shrink at all. I still know how to make the cake. No loss - no property.
I understand that from the court's point of view such memos and letters are an important evidence that would allow them to judge not only the actions but also the intentions. Maybe that's what we should worry about? After all, it is really hard to prove intentions in cases like this - and even harder to judge them. An intention to rape & kill are obviously bad, but it is not as obvious with intention to develop a way for people to freely share files over the network. Here it depends on one's beliefs and interests whether he would see it the way I put it or as an intention to develop a way for people to steal precious and highly valued intellectual property of media companies. Are beliefs to be tested in court?
Let's remember about LokiTorrent's law defense fund. They had the guts to stand for their rights and say no to corporate bullying, and they are doing it for the rest of us too. If they win such lawsuits would have to stop.
This is amazing. All these are products of different companies, bigger and smaller, from different countries and yet none of them really stands out from the crowd. Doesn't HP or Acer or anything have a design department? Or maybe it's a mindset of these companies that doesn't value the aesthetic perception?
Nothing really new here, but it explains some phenomena - now I'll now that some politicians are clearly a result of a human-mice brain experiment which went bad...
...which is good news! People (here and everywhere else) have been talking for years about a decent, secure and standards based OS for the masses. Let's face it, OS X is just that.
It isn't free, it isn't open source and it isn't GNU - so it isn't ideologically pure but it is in fact the only real alternative in existence for those of use who don't have a Unix system administration episode somewhere in their past.
The only pity is that the financial might of the Microsoft behemoth prevents Apple from releasing OS X for other hardware than theirs. Even the new entry level Mac is a daring move by Apple. After all, if MS decides to terminate the Office for OS X they will be in trouble.
(I know, it's off-topic but this update limitation problem doesn't bother me that much although I run a "disadvantaged" XP)
(And congratulations on having an interesting job. I'm looking for something right now...)
Lets just think... thousands of players immersed in a virtual world and DJs keeping a virtual radio station 24/7 for them, talking about virtual events in that world - this surely is a new frontier of insanity.
Don't forget their space program. More ambitious than the lazy NASA, not no mention ESA.
(I wonder how many young Chinese are wasting their lives on MMORPG crap?)
But US has something China doesn't - intellectual diversity and society (still) open to immigrants.
I wouldn't be surprised if Homeland Security Operations Morning Briefs [cryptome.org] that we leaked are also part of their inclination to avoid digital record keeping (and comprehensive FOIA searches)
These reports show an interesting view of the domestic intelligence gathering being done at the DHS.
I've read a few pages of these reports. This is mundane information about security incidents (suspicious behavior, bomb threats, security rules violations etc.) which are from what I saw mostly handled by the police. Sometimes there is some information about more grave incidents from abroad (like the guy in Norway who attacked the flight crew with an axe). Nothing suspicious here, just reports about security people of various type doing their job on a daily basis.
And certainly no intelligence - maybe I didn't read enough but I didn't find anything there that could be described as intelligence information or intelligence gathering - reports about suspicious behavior are not intelligence. Reports about aircraft crashes or bomb threats are not intelligence. Reports about security regulations violations (the guy with a knife in this hair gel in his carry-on bag) are not intelligence.
Anyway, when I'm flying I prefer that someone ensures that people concealing knives of any kind in any way in their carry-on bags are not with me on the plane. Thanks to all those who do their job and stop nuts like the one described about.
No, it doesn't - if you use homeJ.html links, there is a Java viewer that works on all platforms. Like in this search. Some of them have even working controls, although most show boring construction sites.
Major magazines can get material before it is released through the same illegitimate channels that the pirates use. And, it's better for the industry for the pundits to have the stuff in hand before release- do you think that those industry "just released" articles on releases just materialize out of thin air?
No, the magazines get it legally. This is the result of hard work by PR departments and agencies who hand down preview/prerelease versions of the software to selected journalists before the final release. Remember, companies are interested in their products getting coverage when they are out, journalists are interested in writing about newest stuff so this is perfect synergy.