China and Russia have a long history of doing stupid shit that causes problems for other people. I think it comes with having bad, undemocratic governments, and they think they can steamroll over the interests of everyone on Earth, and not just their own people.
To wit the Russian RORSAT crash in Canada that spread radioactive debris over the Canadian Arctic, and China's incredibly irresponsible ASAT test, which left behind loads of long lived orbital debris.
And hey, if they want to waste the money, let 'em. Given China's unwillingness to behave responsibly internationally (e.g. with Sudan and Darfur), and their unproductive attitude towards international cooperation, I frankly hope that blowing through all that cash will cramp their style. Because it means less hassle for everyone outside China in the long run.
The "JP Morgan" model is used by most people to generate credit yield curves, and then prince single-name credit default swaps.
I've worked on credit pricing code in my day job. So I was very curious to take a look at the source code, if only to see how the big boys code. I haven't gotten around to looking at the numbers it generates yet, but it's nice to know I can check my code against the standard implementation if I need to.
A peek at the source code is quite interesting. I've just had a chat with one of the finance wonks at work, and he reckons that much of the source comes from a library called ALib (which is a cheap, if somewhat proprietary financial analytics library), and they've just gone and renamed identifiers all over the source code -- you can tell where, because they haven't reindented the right hand side of the source code comments where they've made the changes....
I've been told that some banks are famous for writing rubbish code, but this looks like a pretty respectable effort. I could follow the example and library code fairly easily, which makes a refreshing change from my day job. Although they've got this really weird idiom with GOTOs all over the place, which in my years of C, have not managed to come across. I've been assured, however, that the original coders knew what they were doing.
It looks like a really nifty piece of kit. Rugged, good-looking and portable. And easy to steal (let's ignore the fact that you'd look like a complete tit if you tried to fence of of these things down the pub).
I'd hope to God that sensitive patient clinical data is either very well secured on the machine (e.g. encrypted hard drives), or accessed remotely.
Well, I'm not saying that it would be any harder to steal than a paper patient medical record file (which aren't all that hard to steal or interfere with because lots of people are careless), but being an expensive piece of kit, much more attractive to opportunistic thieves. Not to mention the fact that an inch-thick ruggedized PC can store a HELL of a lot more sensitive data than an inch-thick bundle of paper patient records.
Incandescent lights are on their way out in Australia. The only trouble with a complete ban, is that a lot of people hate CFLs, they can't be dimmed, they contain mercury, and they can't be used in extreme environments, like inside kitchen ovens.
Can LED lights be made to work inside (very hot) kitchen ovens? I know that some semiconductors can be engineered to work while white-hot, and wonder if it's so hard to design an LED light light that'll work inside an oven or kiln.
Recessions are wonderful things
on
Less Is Moore
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
This could simply be down to the tanking economy: people look at what they're spending, and quickly realise that:
1) the upgrade treadmill over the last twenty years has produced insanely powerful and dirt-cheap hardware. When was the last time you had trouble running Linux on your hardware? I'm old enough to remember!
2) and that you don't need teraflops of CPU/GPU power just to draw greasepaper-style borders around your Microsoft Word windows. Perhaps the entire industry has woken up and seen how unbelievably wasteful modern computing is, and have decided to take the dividend of Moore's Law in cash instead.
3) recessions are good for purging wasteful and suboptimal behaviour generally.
Maybe people will realize what an obscene waste of money and computing power and operating system like Windows Vista, which requires a gig of RAM to run, really is.
Your freedom to swing your fist stops an inch away from my face.
I'm generally supportive of freedom of speech in general and IndyMedia in particular (it certainly serves as a counterweight to Little Green Footballs, the Drudge Report and Free Republic). However they have shown a shocking lack of discretion on who they implicitly support in what they allow to be published (stories AND comments).
I'm going to look askance at anybody who supports terrorists, whether they kill in the name of Allah, or in the name of cute furry little animals.
We all know that malware criminals and fraudsters are sociopaths.
A risk of a peer-to-peer zero day malware shield (besides being cracked and exploited by criminals), is that it could turn out to be a success. As we saw with BlueFrog, a lot of criminals are completely morally bankrupt, and will do absolutely anything to preserve their illegal business models.
BlueFrog was doomed because it was too effective and destroyed spammers' business models. So the criminals waged a massive campaign of harrassment and intimidation on BlueFrog's entirely-innocent users until BlueFrog were forced to accede to the crims' demands.
Malware criminals cannot be defeated by technical means alone. It would be nice if the police started doing their jobs -- because the one thing these sort of scum fear is getting caught and subsequently made somebody's bitch in prison.
The UK one isn't too bad -- about two minutes to fill out, tops. The Australian one is more annoying, since they have one of the most stringent customs regimes in the world. But I feel that the US Form I94-W is worse.
My big issue with Form I94-W is that it can be a little tricky to fill out correctly, it takes a while, and it has to be double-checked and checked again before you get off the plane, because there are serious repercussions for filling it out incorrectly. A trick I was shown by an air steward, is to fill it out backwards(!) to ensure the correct values go in the correct fields. A poor substitute for simply getting the damned thing right in the first place!
At least with Australian immigration, the worst thing that can happen to you, is that you'll be (politely!) asked to stand aside and answer a few questions.
One of my big annoyances with travelling to the US, especially under the visa waiver programme, is that evil landing card that they make foreigners fill out. It's worse because that form is 1) badly designed and a pain in the arse to fill out and 2) everyone warns of dire consequences for not filling it out correctly.
It does have to be said that getting into the US, even for Australians and Brits (like me), is still a bigger pain in the arse than for many other countries. This is before you count in things like privacy issue, having to go through two security checkpoints to *ENTER* the country, the nuisance factor of having your fingerprints and photo taken, having to 'scan out' at those dinky little Homeland Security terminals upon leaving the country, that sort of thing.
A curious situation for a country which prides itself on being the 'Land of the Free'!.
So visa preapproval over the net, to do away with the horrible landing card (and having it valid for several years), in my book, is actually a slight improvement on the way things were.
Russia has a long record of acting irresponsibly in scientific endeavours.
Besides some of the insane stuff they've done on their own territory, there's the small case of their deliberate and senseless vandalism of Lake Vostok in the Antarctic. Despite a massive world outcry, they insisted of drilling into the deep, pressurised lake, contaminating it in the process.
Presently, people effectively donate their time to write and maintain articles. They do it out of altruism, to basically get the warm and fuzzies.
Paying people money would replace a strong incentive with a weak one, and quality would go through the floor. How long would it be before cybercriminals find a way to game such a system and destroy Wikipedia overnight?
A good analogy is why blood donors don't get paid money to donate: at the moment, people donate blood to help others. As soon as you start paying people for blood donations, only junkies and down-and-outers, who are more likely to carry blood borne disease, would bother donating blood.
Anybody suggesting that Wikipedia would be improved by paying contributers is stupid, stupid, stupid.
Using common sense, it's obvious why pay-as-you drive hasn't been rolled out already. It's hard to come up with a way to do it in a secure and practical way. I'll guarantee that if somebody rolls this out with current technology, people will be cheating the shit out of it with a week of deployment.
Still don't underestimate the ability of governments to piss vast amounts of money up against the wall on technically infeasible projects. Take ID cards, road pricing and electronic health records in the UK as notable (and hugely expensive) examples.
The Russian authorities have an attitude problem, and don't give a tinker's damn about the crime being committed from their soil, as long as it isn't Russian citizens being targeted. Which goes part-way to explain why cybercriminals NEVER target people in their own countries.
After my IT degree, I considered enrolling in a space engineering degree at the University of Queensland. It's got a good reputation, as it hosts the famous, but criminally underfunded Centre for Hypersonics. Sadly, after doing my sums, I worked out that it wasn't going to be worth my while if after five years, I ended up on the mines rather than designing spacecraft.
Agreed with other posters, Australia _DOES_ need to pull its head out of its arse and start making science and technology a priority. Sadly, I think that Australia's bias against anything clever is cultural and ingrained. This means that anybody with any ambition, and who wants to work with technology does what I did three years ago, and emigrate.
Am I the only person who thinks that the movie studios waiting until Real designed, built, and tested this software at enormous expense before suing in order to suppress this product, is incredibly low?
Clearly, they're not content with destroying the lives of grandmothers and orphans and want to make an example out of honest software engineers, making a best-effort attempt at obeying the law.
I seem to remember some after-market ECUs you could buy in Australia, with a very special feature of particular interest to performance car modders.
A feature they added was "valet mode", where the ECU could be instantly reprogrammed to severely restrict the engine's power and torque output. The idea being, that if you find yourself needing to hand over your hotted-up pride and joy to a parking attendant, they wouldn't get enough out of the engine to do any burnouts.
TBH, I think it's an excellent idea, and I'm surprised noone's thought of this any earlier. As it stands, some modern car keys are "paired" with the car's ECU cryptographically. If the key doesn't respond correctly to the challenge sent from the ECU, the car doesn't start at all.
A major issue here is the prevailing attitude problem of the Russian authorities.
As they see it, their turning a blind eye to Russian cybercrime targeting Westerners is a passive-aggressive form of payback for the fall of the Soviet Union. Why should they give a damn that Russian citizens are making massive amounts of money ruining the lives of innocent Westerners, so long as they're not targeting their own kind (e.g. Slavs)?
We've seen in the past that the Russian authorities CAN take care of their festering cybercrime problem when they want to; to wit, the Pinch Trojan authors. It's very simple if you're some Russian shithead with no morals looking for some easy money: as long as you obey the unwritten law that it's okay to victimize Westerners and not Slavs, then you can do what you damned well please. If you cross the line, only then will you find yourself in a camp in Siberia chopping down trees.
If you look at this situation for more than five seconds, then it makes perfect sense. The Russian state is corrupt from top to bottom, and everyone in a position of power is either a gangster, or an FSB agent gangster wannabe. We shouldn't be surprised then, when they behave like gangsters.
You've hit on a really good question there. Is it right to demand 5000x the sticker price of a game in a civil copyright infringement case?
Did the plaintiff's lawyers just pull the figure "5000" out of their butts, or is there a very specific formula, designed, with the odds of getting busted taken into account, to maximise deterrance (assuming they're aiming to deter casual piracy)...
Amen to this. The pros operate on an industrial scale and must surely account for a significant amount of revenue foregone, when people realize they can just buy a disc for a fiver off some fat Chinese kid.
In London, DVD piracy is a huge, and very sophisticated business. They're big enough that they have proper presses and proper glossy three colour printed jackets, all manufactured here in town. They have runner who move the good to the sellers, who are trafficked into Britain and paid a pittance to sell the disks.
It's a sad thing to watch, when sitting in a pub, some desperate looking kid in a shopping bag sneak in and offer 'DVD' 'DVD' to everyone in the pub until the manager comes and moves him on.
The guys behind this are the real parasites, and given its prevalence around here, not nearly enough effort is done to bust down on it.
... playing the world's saddest song, on the world's smallest violin.
I have little sympathy for people who get busted doing the wrong thing and pirating games. It's not like games are a human right or anything. As a developer myself who depends on our software being SOLD FOR MONEY to make a living (as opposed to peace and love and lentil burgers, as the freetard hippie commie FSF crowd would have us do).
Frankly, if somebody is dumb enough to get caught not paying for something that cost somebody a lot of time and effort to make, then they probably have it coming.
Whether or not it actually achieves its stated aims, you know that law abiding people will suffer the negative consequences, while criminals and sleazebags will have a field day.
Here in the UK, with widespread introduction of numberplate recognition, people just steal or clone numberplates, and when crimes are committed using your plates, the police knock on _your_ door first.
Abolishing anonymity (read: total impunity) for criminals and troublemakers on the Internet can only be a good thing.
I know that this POV would be highly unfashionable amongst the long-haired anarchist libertoons that infest Slashdot and the FOSS community in general, but I completely fail to see why 'privacy' should always trump the rule of law.
If you don't like the way things work in your country, then you can either exercise your right to vote for somebody who agrees with you, or in countries where you can't you can employ more direct methods. If you're hell bent on fighting the Man, anonymity on the Internet won't buy you much. If you want to be a martyr or revolutionary, the mere existence of the Internet is not going to obviate the need to spill your own blood to maintain your freedom.
All anonymity and privacy on the Internet buys us, is the situation we have now: total anarchy and impunity for every shade of grifter, fraudster, racketeer and con artist out there. There's a very good reason why every criminal piece of shit on the planet is flocking to cybercrime in droves: the chances of being held to account for one's actions (especially if you're determined) are infinitesimally small.
The problem is so bad, that cybercrime now makes more money than the drugs trade. And the idiot libertoon bedroom freedom fighters amongst you are partly to blame.
Slashdot Mirror
China and Russia have a long history of doing stupid shit that causes problems for other people. I think it comes with having bad, undemocratic governments, and they think they can steamroll over the interests of everyone on Earth, and not just their own people.
To wit the Russian RORSAT crash in Canada that spread radioactive debris over the Canadian Arctic, and China's incredibly irresponsible ASAT test, which left behind loads of long lived orbital debris.
And hey, if they want to waste the money, let 'em. Given China's unwillingness to behave responsibly internationally (e.g. with Sudan and Darfur), and their unproductive attitude towards international cooperation, I frankly hope that blowing through all that cash will cramp their style. Because it means less hassle for everyone outside China in the long run.
The "JP Morgan" model is used by most people to generate credit yield curves, and then prince single-name credit default swaps.
I've worked on credit pricing code in my day job. So I was very curious to take a look at the source code, if only to see how the big boys code. I haven't gotten around to looking at the numbers it generates yet, but it's nice to know I can check my code against the standard implementation if I need to.
A peek at the source code is quite interesting. I've just had a chat with one of the finance wonks at work, and he reckons that much of the source comes from a library called ALib (which is a cheap, if somewhat proprietary financial analytics library), and they've just gone and renamed identifiers all over the source code -- you can tell where, because they haven't reindented the right hand side of the source code comments where they've made the changes....
I've been told that some banks are famous for writing rubbish code, but this looks like a pretty respectable effort. I could follow the example and library code fairly easily, which makes a refreshing change from my day job. Although they've got this really weird idiom with GOTOs all over the place, which in my years of C, have not managed to come across. I've been assured, however, that the original coders knew what they were doing.
From cds.c:
if (fl == NULL)
goto done;
if (JpmcdsFeeLegPV (fl, today, stepinDate, valueDate, discCurve, spreadCurve, cleanPrice, pv) != SUCCESS)
goto done;
status = SUCCESS;
done:
if (status != SUCCESS)
JpmcdsErrMsgFailure (routine);
I feel a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced...
It looks like a really nifty piece of kit. Rugged, good-looking and portable. And easy to steal (let's ignore the fact that you'd look like a complete tit if you tried to fence of of these things down the pub).
I'd hope to God that sensitive patient clinical data is either very well secured on the machine (e.g. encrypted hard drives), or accessed remotely.
Well, I'm not saying that it would be any harder to steal than a paper patient medical record file (which aren't all that hard to steal or interfere with because lots of people are careless), but being an expensive piece of kit, much more attractive to opportunistic thieves. Not to mention the fact that an inch-thick ruggedized PC can store a HELL of a lot more sensitive data than an inch-thick bundle of paper patient records.
Incandescent lights are on their way out in Australia. The only trouble with a complete ban, is that a lot of people hate CFLs, they can't be dimmed, they contain mercury, and they can't be used in extreme environments, like inside kitchen ovens.
Can LED lights be made to work inside (very hot) kitchen ovens? I know that some semiconductors can be engineered to work while white-hot, and wonder if it's so hard to design an LED light light that'll work inside an oven or kiln.
This could simply be down to the tanking economy: people look at what they're spending, and quickly realise that:
1) the upgrade treadmill over the last twenty years has produced insanely powerful and dirt-cheap hardware. When was the last time you had trouble running Linux on your hardware? I'm old enough to remember!
2) and that you don't need teraflops of CPU/GPU power just to draw greasepaper-style borders around your Microsoft Word windows. Perhaps the entire industry has woken up and seen how unbelievably wasteful modern computing is, and have decided to take the dividend of Moore's Law in cash instead.
3) recessions are good for purging wasteful and suboptimal behaviour generally.
Maybe people will realize what an obscene waste of money and computing power and operating system like Windows Vista, which requires a gig of RAM to run, really is.
Your freedom to swing your fist stops an inch away from my face.
I'm generally supportive of freedom of speech in general and IndyMedia in particular (it certainly serves as a counterweight to Little Green Footballs, the Drudge Report and Free Republic). However they have shown a shocking lack of discretion on who they implicitly support in what they allow to be published (stories AND comments).
I'm going to look askance at anybody who supports terrorists, whether they kill in the name of Allah, or in the name of cute furry little animals.
We all know that malware criminals and fraudsters are sociopaths.
A risk of a peer-to-peer zero day malware shield (besides being cracked and exploited by criminals), is that it could turn out to be a success. As we saw with BlueFrog, a lot of criminals are completely morally bankrupt, and will do absolutely anything to preserve their illegal business models.
BlueFrog was doomed because it was too effective and destroyed spammers' business models. So the criminals waged a massive campaign of harrassment and intimidation on BlueFrog's entirely-innocent users until BlueFrog were forced to accede to the crims' demands.
Malware criminals cannot be defeated by technical means alone. It would be nice if the police started doing their jobs -- because the one thing these sort of scum fear is getting caught and subsequently made somebody's bitch in prison.
Is that just Terminal 5?
(Go the Heathrow Hassle!)
Some landing cards are more evil than others.
The UK one isn't too bad -- about two minutes to fill out, tops. The Australian one is more annoying, since they have one of the most stringent customs regimes in the world. But I feel that the US Form I94-W is worse.
My big issue with Form I94-W is that it can be a little tricky to fill out correctly, it takes a while, and it has to be double-checked and checked again before you get off the plane, because there are serious repercussions for filling it out incorrectly. A trick I was shown by an air steward, is to fill it out backwards(!) to ensure the correct values go in the correct fields. A poor substitute for simply getting the damned thing right in the first place!
At least with Australian immigration, the worst thing that can happen to you, is that you'll be (politely!) asked to stand aside and answer a few questions.
One of my big annoyances with travelling to the US, especially under the visa waiver programme, is that evil landing card that they make foreigners fill out. It's worse because that form is 1) badly designed and a pain in the arse to fill out and 2) everyone warns of dire consequences for not filling it out correctly.
It does have to be said that getting into the US, even for Australians and Brits (like me), is still a bigger pain in the arse than for many other countries. This is before you count in things like privacy issue, having to go through two security checkpoints to *ENTER* the country, the nuisance factor of having your fingerprints and photo taken, having to 'scan out' at those dinky little Homeland Security terminals upon leaving the country, that sort of thing.
A curious situation for a country which prides itself on being the 'Land of the Free'!.
So visa preapproval over the net, to do away with the horrible landing card (and having it valid for several years), in my book, is actually a slight improvement on the way things were.
Russia has a long record of acting irresponsibly in scientific endeavours.
Besides some of the insane stuff they've done on their own territory, there's the small case of their deliberate and senseless vandalism of Lake Vostok in the Antarctic. Despite a massive world outcry, they insisted of drilling into the deep, pressurised lake, contaminating it in the process.
Arrogance and stupidity is a bad combination.
Presently, people effectively donate their time to write and maintain articles. They do it out of altruism, to basically get the warm and fuzzies.
Paying people money would replace a strong incentive with a weak one, and quality would go through the floor. How long would it be before cybercriminals find a way to game such a system and destroy Wikipedia overnight?
A good analogy is why blood donors don't get paid money to donate: at the moment, people donate blood to help others. As soon as you start paying people for blood donations, only junkies and down-and-outers, who are more likely to carry blood borne disease, would bother donating blood.
Anybody suggesting that Wikipedia would be improved by paying contributers is stupid, stupid, stupid.
Using common sense, it's obvious why pay-as-you drive hasn't been rolled out already. It's hard to come up with a way to do it in a secure and practical way. I'll guarantee that if somebody rolls this out with current technology, people will be cheating the shit out of it with a week of deployment.
Still don't underestimate the ability of governments to piss vast amounts of money up against the wall on technically infeasible projects. Take ID cards, road pricing and electronic health records in the UK as notable (and hugely expensive) examples.
The Russian authorities have an attitude problem, and don't give a tinker's damn about the crime being committed from their soil, as long as it isn't Russian citizens being targeted. Which goes part-way to explain why cybercriminals NEVER target people in their own countries.
I'm sure I'm not the only one...
After my IT degree, I considered enrolling in a space engineering degree at the University of Queensland. It's got a good reputation, as it hosts the famous, but criminally underfunded Centre for Hypersonics. Sadly, after doing my sums, I worked out that it wasn't going to be worth my while if after five years, I ended up on the mines rather than designing spacecraft.
Agreed with other posters, Australia _DOES_ need to pull its head out of its arse and start making science and technology a priority. Sadly, I think that Australia's bias against anything clever is cultural and ingrained. This means that anybody with any ambition, and who wants to work with technology does what I did three years ago, and emigrate.
Am I the only person who thinks that the movie studios waiting until Real designed, built, and tested this software at enormous expense before suing in order to suppress this product, is incredibly low?
Clearly, they're not content with destroying the lives of grandmothers and orphans and want to make an example out of honest software engineers, making a best-effort attempt at obeying the law.
What a bunch of scumbags.
I seem to remember some after-market ECUs you could buy in Australia, with a very special feature of particular interest to performance car modders.
A feature they added was "valet mode", where the ECU could be instantly reprogrammed to severely restrict the engine's power and torque output. The idea being, that if you find yourself needing to hand over your hotted-up pride and joy to a parking attendant, they wouldn't get enough out of the engine to do any burnouts.
TBH, I think it's an excellent idea, and I'm surprised noone's thought of this any earlier. As it stands, some modern car keys are "paired" with the car's ECU cryptographically. If the key doesn't respond correctly to the challenge sent from the ECU, the car doesn't start at all.
A major issue here is the prevailing attitude problem of the Russian authorities.
As they see it, their turning a blind eye to Russian cybercrime targeting Westerners is a passive-aggressive form of payback for the fall of the Soviet Union. Why should they give a damn that Russian citizens are making massive amounts of money ruining the lives of innocent Westerners, so long as they're not targeting their own kind (e.g. Slavs)?
We've seen in the past that the Russian authorities CAN take care of their festering cybercrime problem when they want to; to wit, the Pinch Trojan authors. It's very simple if you're some Russian shithead with no morals looking for some easy money: as long as you obey the unwritten law that it's okay to victimize Westerners and not Slavs, then you can do what you damned well please. If you cross the line, only then will you find yourself in a camp in Siberia chopping down trees.
If you look at this situation for more than five seconds, then it makes perfect sense. The Russian state is corrupt from top to bottom, and everyone in a position of power is either a gangster, or an FSB agent gangster wannabe. We shouldn't be surprised then, when they behave like gangsters.
You've hit on a really good question there. Is it right to demand 5000x the sticker price of a game in a civil copyright infringement case?
Did the plaintiff's lawyers just pull the figure "5000" out of their butts, or is there a very specific formula, designed, with the odds of getting busted taken into account, to maximise deterrance (assuming they're aiming to deter casual piracy)...
Amen to this. The pros operate on an industrial scale and must surely account for a significant amount of revenue foregone, when people realize they can just buy a disc for a fiver off some fat Chinese kid.
In London, DVD piracy is a huge, and very sophisticated business. They're big enough that they have proper presses and proper glossy three colour printed jackets, all manufactured here in town. They have runner who move the good to the sellers, who are trafficked into Britain and paid a pittance to sell the disks.
It's a sad thing to watch, when sitting in a pub, some desperate looking kid in a shopping bag sneak in and offer 'DVD' 'DVD' to everyone in the pub until the manager comes and moves him on.
The guys behind this are the real parasites, and given its prevalence around here, not nearly enough effort is done to bust down on it.
... playing the world's saddest song, on the world's smallest violin.
I have little sympathy for people who get busted doing the wrong thing and pirating games. It's not like games are a human right or anything. As a developer myself who depends on our software being SOLD FOR MONEY to make a living (as opposed to peace and love and lentil burgers, as the freetard hippie commie FSF crowd would have us do).
Frankly, if somebody is dumb enough to get caught not paying for something that cost somebody a lot of time and effort to make, then they probably have it coming.
Whether or not it actually achieves its stated aims, you know that law abiding people will suffer the negative consequences, while criminals and sleazebags will have a field day.
Here in the UK, with widespread introduction of numberplate recognition, people just steal or clone numberplates, and when crimes are committed using your plates, the police knock on _your_ door first.
A total waste of time and money.
Abolishing anonymity (read: total impunity) for criminals and troublemakers on the Internet can only be a good thing.
I know that this POV would be highly unfashionable amongst the long-haired anarchist libertoons that infest Slashdot and the FOSS community in general, but I completely fail to see why 'privacy' should always trump the rule of law.
If you don't like the way things work in your country, then you can either exercise your right to vote for somebody who agrees with you, or in countries where you can't you can employ more direct methods. If you're hell bent on fighting the Man, anonymity on the Internet won't buy you much. If you want to be a martyr or revolutionary, the mere existence of the Internet is not going to obviate the need to spill your own blood to maintain your freedom.
All anonymity and privacy on the Internet buys us, is the situation we have now: total anarchy and impunity for every shade of grifter, fraudster, racketeer and con artist out there. There's a very good reason why every criminal piece of shit on the planet is flocking to cybercrime in droves: the chances of being held to account for one's actions (especially if you're determined) are infinitesimally small.
The problem is so bad, that cybercrime now makes more money than the drugs trade. And the idiot libertoon bedroom freedom fighters amongst you are partly to blame.