+1 for this. Although that's not to say we shouldn't implement what can be done, but the real solution for this problem is at the social and political level rather than technological. No matter how neat a technological solution it can always be broken down through laws, bribes, threats and violence, and when the state itself does this, there's not much you can do through technology alone.
> I mean really, are you planning on sticking glue in the CDROM drive and USB ports to prevent them > from booting a ubuntu live distro with TOR? Because that's all it takes.
Do you really think 10-12 year olds and younger have the know-how to find and download a live distro, flash/burn it, then configure TOR, and access porn!? Even if it were so, a properly locked down system would ask for a password before allowing boot from DVD or USB, and even writing DVD/USB can be turned off for child accounts. As for mobile, a solid netnanny type software on mobile should be even more difficult to circumvent as booting of alternate media and bypassing the OS wouldn't be possible with it.
As for your argument that an average parent doesn't themselves have the capability to install such measures, I tend to agree. But is it the proper strategy to deal with someone ignorant of X by forbidding Y or rather educating them on X?
Anyway by all means let the UK have its netnanny filter if it wants. I think time will show that it failed in its stated purpose. I just hope other countries don't follow this lead. Freedom on the Internet has been enough eroded as it is, without people who themselves search for porn in legislatures telling me I can't do this or that! At the very least such a filter should be opt-in, not opt-out.
Well I'm not saying children should be exposed to everything with no regard to age. My point is, this is more the domain of parents and teachers rather than a law codified by government and forced upon the whole of society. If I were a parent I'd start by installing software that blocks access to specified URLs. If properly done, then it ought to be impossible to circumvent without considerable technical knowledge or reinstalling the whole system, which a pre-teen or a young teen should be too inexperienced to do. Something like a community workshop for expectant parents could give them guidance in case they already do not know how to do this. And follow this up with education that frankly discusses our biological nature (and not hide it as dirty or taboo) and also a set of values and ethics which say such-and-such is healthy while such-and-such is not. Beyond that we can't control someone determined to do something... they'll do it even in spite of all the enforcements in place.
In my experience obsession with online porn happens only when real life relationships fail, and real life in general fails to enthuse. That's something that society will have to look into, as to how it can help youngsters to live meaningful lives. No one in a truly meaningful life will give porn more than brief passing interest, and they won't let it control and twist their psyche. On the contrary, when society is structured in such a manner that more and more youngsters are finding lesser and lesser lasting purpose in their lives, simply having a net filter is unlikely to keep in check their negative outpourings.
Try tor with bridge relays. If that doesn't work too then you're stymied I'm afraid. Only way would be ask someone you know living outside the country to download what you want and have them emailed to you, but remember govts these days can read your mail, so ask your friend to encrypt it with PGP before sending it.
That's what parenting is for, and nothing can replace good parenting. Blocking all porn from teens won't really matter in the long run. They'll access it through proxies, and once you block proxies and have an impenetrable wall... well simply they'll start 'doing' it with their peers in the real world, and how're you gonna stop that? The biological drive cannot be stopped, only directed in the right direction and tools given to the children (in the form of value based education) to deal healthily with it, and also deal with whatever they encounter out there in the world. Blinkering their eyes to the reality of the world and protecting them behind the govt's apron isn't gonna really work. We can't really protect someone from seeing, hearing or thinking about something... somehow they'll find a way to do so. We can only teach them how to react sensibly to what they see, hear, and think.
Reprisals would begin only when conditions get really bad. A nebulous invasion of privacy on digital networks is not something the average guy can either understand nor care. No, it'll take an economic, military or humanitarian disaster (not necessarily US based. Even a global disaster affecting the US) for the populace to really begin to rethink, and even then, as other parts of the world have demonstrated, most people will simply react in a knee-jerk manner and run towards the other extreme, and start the cycle again. In the long term, true education and building of values could do it, but once again the paradox of who will take the initiative, and how it is going to achieve critical mass are the questions. In short words, we are probably in for a very very horrible century of attrition, with positive values making only slow headway, against negative values built-up over millenia of our evolution. It's not just the US, it's the same everywhere.
> OpenGL and glx run many windows DirectX games under Wine FASTER than Windows running DirectX. > > Many games ported to use Linux and OpenGL natively show up FASTER than their Windows relation, either OpenGL > (being faster on Windows than DirectX) or DirectX on Windows.
I can testify to this as well, having run Need for Speed Hot Pursuit as well as Roadrash under WINE.
No because enough people with the necessary level of mathematical expertise are not available here. Any such are busy now working for the US govt and companies in return for fat paycheck, and that happened because the government is made up of people who never even completed high school and are rouges, and don't know or care about the wider implications of science and technology for humanity, and are in general content with milking money of lucrative deals, securing their office and living their decadent lives. Not saying things couldn't improve, but I can't see who are what can kickstart this ground-up sea change that needs to happen.
The mobile hardware can't be trusted, especially not in conjunction with the mobile carriers, and even one single piece of closed source software or firmware on such a phone could render it worthless. So, I suppose practically speaking Android can be assumed to be as compromised as everything else, although the scope to make it more resistant in future is better than with the closed source counterparts.
Not surprising given that the smartphone hardware and software are very much propreitary in nature, and allow for easier exploitation since third party auditing is practically impossible for the entire ecosystem.
At this point nothing except a ground-up freshly designed and built system and either written from scratch software or highly trusted ones like OpenBSD (without installing anything except base system) can be regarded as tentatively safe, and even this security is gone once such system connects to the Internet since once data is beyond the system, NSA can still intercept and crack it.
We need clean engineered hardware, and software, and that's not going to happen anytime soon, so we have to make do with open source software and best security practices and air-gapping sensitive stuff, or not storing it in digital systems in the first place
Indeed. Urbanisation is destroying the social fabric of India here, leading to chaotic urban nightmares while villages like languishing. These days there's really no excuse for tech to not reach every area, except for the most inhospitable 5%. It's just that our leaders and planners are too lazy, indifferent, or maliciously plan to divide-and-rule, or perhaps they smell money in cities.
Why should you give yourself a need to tap into the codes of others when militarily you are and economically you were, untouchable? Why not simply devote yourselves to building your country to greater and greater heights while acting only in defense against any aggressors (which you'd have had precious little off if you hadn't started so many wars in the first place)? The end of the Cold War and collapse of USSR could really have been used by the US to advance leaps and bounds in terms of science, tech and human standards, but instead, year after year it's shoving itself onto every piece of hell on earth, getting caught up in costly and messy quagmires, embarrassing itself...
The NSA could have acted far more ethically had the policy of the USA been one of just defense when needed, but no, the policy happens to be one of offense at every turn, preemptive offense in fact, and hence the necessity to turn yourself slowly into one big military camp
While China is doing a lot of research lately, until now the US has been the main place for research and development and commercialisation of computing systems, so any standards of such would have a preponderance of US influence through individuals and processes.
Good perspectives, and I agree with the need for security and privacy for everyone, but I disagree that an interview at Google would dehumanise you. Just know that you won't allow anyone else to define your humanity, and that all of us are essentially in the same boat. It's just that while he (your Google interviewer) might have some dirt on you, you don't have any on him, but you can rest assured he too has visited porn sites and done much the same blunders as all of us. If you're doing wrong stuff you've to be ashamed of it yourself, even if not even one person in the world knows you do it. On the other hand, if you truly believe you've not done any serious wrong, or have made up for any, and have basic self respect, you wouldn't let the fact that someone knows about it stop you from holding your head high. I know, not as easy as in words yet...
Concentration camps are whole different league to online privacy, at least several orders of magnitude difference between the two.
Having said all this, yes, I do agree the Internet in it's early days afforded us the ability to be at least psuedo-anonymous from everyone except government and law enforcement, and now it's too bad that any old company can store data on you, while both companies and governments are increasingly eroding the little shreds of privacy still left by things like mandating real name, blocking proxies, and so on.
The "backdoors" leak from Snowden shows how money and threats corrupt even large corporations to speak nothing of small VPN companies. I wouldn't be surprised to learn one day that popular VPN providers were incentivised/coerced by CIA/NSA and such into deploying backdoors. After all, very few people can remain honest when a promise of tens of millions of dollars is dangled with one hand while threats are dangled with the other. To be sure, this might not be possible with all VPN providers in all countries, but the reach of CIA is very long, and combined with the local govt's own secret service...
Can you be sure that any of those companies haven't been founded by, or are collaborating with the NSA and CIA? It's logical for the latter two to get unscrupulous non-Americans to start-up VPN services touting to be very secure and trackerless, all the while secretly in partnership with the Devil.
I would say not unless it blocks Javascript. Just using Firefox with NoScript reduces my fingerprint to 14 bits apparently. Enable JS and it becomes uniquely ID'able in the panopticlick DB.
Yes exactly. The super rich, the militarily powerful and the elite the world over are building systems to spy on each other and try to out-compete each other in a race without any clear destination in sight. But meanwhile the systems and resources they're building to achieve their nebulous goals have now become lethally effective in quelling any call from ordinary people for accountability, transparency and democracy. In others words when X (substitute this with NSA or PLA or whatever you want) is effective against it's foreign counterparts, it'll be practically invulnerable to it's own citizens, the ordinary people. In the end, it's an overall rat-race where the fanatics, the fundamentalists, the megalomaniacs, the super-greedy and the super-rich people around the world are effectively ruining the whole planet for the "rest of us," who want genuine progress in science, environment, human standards of living, peace and so on.
Couldn't agree more. Also the majority of comments from Americans who are outraged at the NSA activities seem to indicate they're so pissed off only because it has now been shown that NSA is *also* spying on Americans! This is exactly the same "Who cares about the other guys" mentality that has led the NSA and the higher echelons of America's politicians and military to act like this: to them, the majority of America's people have also now become "others," and hence the casual treatment of American laws and citizens as well. Non-Americans are "others with no rights, not even human rights" while American citizens are "others with least possible rights."
I'm more interested in security rather than privacy. What's the worst that can happen? Targeted ads? I block ads anyway. Future employer might look at my Facebook posts? He's welcome to... it might educate him. Bank may refuse loan? I care two hoots. My govt or NSA can track me down? Lol that'd be a really stupid thing on their part. What I wouldn't want though are insecure systems which could enable my accounts to get hacked or my transactions to be compromised.
Slashdot Mirror
Depends on what type of guys you're talking about. Usenet was (and is?) overwhelmingly male dominated.
+1 for this. Although that's not to say we shouldn't implement what can be done, but the real solution for this problem is at the social and political level rather than technological. No matter how neat a technological solution it can always be broken down through laws, bribes, threats and violence, and when the state itself does this, there's not much you can do through technology alone.
> I mean really, are you planning on sticking glue in the CDROM drive and USB ports to prevent them
> from booting a ubuntu live distro with TOR? Because that's all it takes.
Do you really think 10-12 year olds and younger have the know-how to find and download a live distro, flash/burn it, then configure TOR, and access porn!? Even if it were so, a properly locked down system would ask for a password before allowing boot from DVD or USB, and even writing DVD/USB can be turned off for child accounts. As for mobile, a solid netnanny type software on mobile should be even more difficult to circumvent as booting of alternate media and bypassing the OS wouldn't be possible with it.
As for your argument that an average parent doesn't themselves have the capability to install such measures, I tend to agree. But is it the proper strategy to deal with someone ignorant of X by forbidding Y or rather educating them on X?
Anyway by all means let the UK have its netnanny filter if it wants. I think time will show that it failed in its stated purpose. I just hope other countries don't follow this lead. Freedom on the Internet has been enough eroded as it is, without people who themselves search for porn in legislatures telling me I can't do this or that! At the very least such a filter should be opt-in, not opt-out.
Well I'm not saying children should be exposed to everything with no regard to age. My point is, this is more the domain of parents and teachers rather than a law codified by government and forced upon the whole of society. If I were a parent I'd start by installing software that blocks access to specified URLs. If properly done, then it ought to be impossible to circumvent without considerable technical knowledge or reinstalling the whole system, which a pre-teen or a young teen should be too inexperienced to do. Something like a community workshop for expectant parents could give them guidance in case they already do not know how to do this. And follow this up with education that frankly discusses our biological nature (and not hide it as dirty or taboo) and also a set of values and ethics which say such-and-such is healthy while such-and-such is not. Beyond that we can't control someone determined to do something... they'll do it even in spite of all the enforcements in place.
In my experience obsession with online porn happens only when real life relationships fail, and real life in general fails to enthuse. That's something that society will have to look into, as to how it can help youngsters to live meaningful lives. No one in a truly meaningful life will give porn more than brief passing interest, and they won't let it control and twist their psyche. On the contrary, when society is structured in such a manner that more and more youngsters are finding lesser and lesser lasting purpose in their lives, simply having a net filter is unlikely to keep in check their negative outpourings.
Try tor with bridge relays. If that doesn't work too then you're stymied I'm afraid. Only way would be ask someone you know living outside the country to download what you want and have them emailed to you, but remember govts these days can read your mail, so ask your friend to encrypt it with PGP before sending it.
> All to opt out of censorship by a poxy mobile provider. Forget that - I'll just take my money elsewhere.
Until all of them start doing this. Only a matter of time. The relevant laws need to be reappealed.
That's what parenting is for, and nothing can replace good parenting. Blocking all porn from teens won't really matter in the long run. They'll access it through proxies, and once you block proxies and have an impenetrable wall... well simply they'll start 'doing' it with their peers in the real world, and how're you gonna stop that? The biological drive cannot be stopped, only directed in the right direction and tools given to the children (in the form of value based education) to deal healthily with it, and also deal with whatever they encounter out there in the world. Blinkering their eyes to the reality of the world and protecting them behind the govt's apron isn't gonna really work. We can't really protect someone from seeing, hearing or thinking about something... somehow they'll find a way to do so. We can only teach them how to react sensibly to what they see, hear, and think.
> No need to create tensions with dinosaurs like Linus. I'm happy with using C++ for applications only for now and leave system to C.
AFAIK you wouldn't be able to use C++ in Linux kernel coding, even if you wanted to, since Linus has disallowed it.
See: http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/c++/linus
Reprisals would begin only when conditions get really bad. A nebulous invasion of privacy on digital networks is not something the average guy can either understand nor care. No, it'll take an economic, military or humanitarian disaster (not necessarily US based. Even a global disaster affecting the US) for the populace to really begin to rethink, and even then, as other parts of the world have demonstrated, most people will simply react in a knee-jerk manner and run towards the other extreme, and start the cycle again. In the long term, true education and building of values could do it, but once again the paradox of who will take the initiative, and how it is going to achieve critical mass are the questions. In short words, we are probably in for a very very horrible century of attrition, with positive values making only slow headway, against negative values built-up over millenia of our evolution. It's not just the US, it's the same everywhere.
It'll certainly flag the packets to NSA as deserving of extra long retention!
> OpenGL and glx run many windows DirectX games under Wine FASTER than Windows running DirectX.
>
> Many games ported to use Linux and OpenGL natively show up FASTER than their Windows relation, either OpenGL
> (being faster on Windows than DirectX) or DirectX on Windows.
I can testify to this as well, having run Need for Speed Hot Pursuit as well as Roadrash under WINE.
No because enough people with the necessary level of mathematical expertise are not available here. Any such are busy now working for the US govt and companies in return for fat paycheck, and that happened because the government is made up of people who never even completed high school and are rouges, and don't know or care about the wider implications of science and technology for humanity, and are in general content with milking money of lucrative deals, securing their office and living their decadent lives. Not saying things couldn't improve, but I can't see who are what can kickstart this ground-up sea change that needs to happen.
The mobile hardware can't be trusted, especially not in conjunction with the mobile carriers, and even one single piece of closed source software or firmware on such a phone could render it worthless. So, I suppose practically speaking Android can be assumed to be as compromised as everything else, although the scope to make it more resistant in future is better than with the closed source counterparts.
Not surprising given that the smartphone hardware and software are very much propreitary in nature, and allow for easier exploitation since third party auditing is practically impossible for the entire ecosystem.
At this point nothing except a ground-up freshly designed and built system and either written from scratch software or highly trusted ones like OpenBSD (without installing anything except base system) can be regarded as tentatively safe, and even this security is gone once such system connects to the Internet since once data is beyond the system, NSA can still intercept and crack it.
We need clean engineered hardware, and software, and that's not going to happen anytime soon, so we have to make do with open source software and best security practices and air-gapping sensitive stuff, or not storing it in digital systems in the first place
Indeed. Urbanisation is destroying the social fabric of India here, leading to chaotic urban nightmares while villages like languishing. These days there's really no excuse for tech to not reach every area, except for the most inhospitable 5%. It's just that our leaders and planners are too lazy, indifferent, or maliciously plan to divide-and-rule, or perhaps they smell money in cities.
Why should you give yourself a need to tap into the codes of others when militarily you are and economically you were, untouchable? Why not simply devote yourselves to building your country to greater and greater heights while acting only in defense against any aggressors (which you'd have had precious little off if you hadn't started so many wars in the first place)? The end of the Cold War and collapse of USSR could really have been used by the US to advance leaps and bounds in terms of science, tech and human standards, but instead, year after year it's shoving itself onto every piece of hell on earth, getting caught up in costly and messy quagmires, embarrassing itself...
The NSA could have acted far more ethically had the policy of the USA been one of just defense when needed, but no, the policy happens to be one of offense at every turn, preemptive offense in fact, and hence the necessity to turn yourself slowly into one big military camp
While China is doing a lot of research lately, until now the US has been the main place for research and development and commercialisation of computing systems, so any standards of such would have a preponderance of US influence through individuals and processes.
Good perspectives, and I agree with the need for security and privacy for everyone, but I disagree that an interview at Google would dehumanise you. Just know that you won't allow anyone else to define your humanity, and that all of us are essentially in the same boat. It's just that while he (your Google interviewer) might have some dirt on you, you don't have any on him, but you can rest assured he too has visited porn sites and done much the same blunders as all of us. If you're doing wrong stuff you've to be ashamed of it yourself, even if not even one person in the world knows you do it. On the other hand, if you truly believe you've not done any serious wrong, or have made up for any, and have basic self respect, you wouldn't let the fact that someone knows about it stop you from holding your head high. I know, not as easy as in words yet...
Concentration camps are whole different league to online privacy, at least several orders of magnitude difference between the two.
Having said all this, yes, I do agree the Internet in it's early days afforded us the ability to be at least psuedo-anonymous from everyone except government and law enforcement, and now it's too bad that any old company can store data on you, while both companies and governments are increasingly eroding the little shreds of privacy still left by things like mandating real name, blocking proxies, and so on.
The "backdoors" leak from Snowden shows how money and threats corrupt even large corporations to speak nothing of small VPN companies. I wouldn't be surprised to learn one day that popular VPN providers were incentivised/coerced by CIA/NSA and such into deploying backdoors. After all, very few people can remain honest when a promise of tens of millions of dollars is dangled with one hand while threats are dangled with the other. To be sure, this might not be possible with all VPN providers in all countries, but the reach of CIA is very long, and combined with the local govt's own secret service...
Can you be sure that any of those companies haven't been founded by, or are collaborating with the NSA and CIA? It's logical for the latter two to get unscrupulous non-Americans to start-up VPN services touting to be very secure and trackerless, all the while secretly in partnership with the Devil.
I would say not unless it blocks Javascript. Just using Firefox with NoScript reduces my fingerprint to 14 bits apparently. Enable JS and it becomes uniquely ID'able in the panopticlick DB.
Yes exactly. The super rich, the militarily powerful and the elite the world over are building systems to spy on each other and try to out-compete each other in a race without any clear destination in sight. But meanwhile the systems and resources they're building to achieve their nebulous goals have now become lethally effective in quelling any call from ordinary people for accountability, transparency and democracy. In others words when X (substitute this with NSA or PLA or whatever you want) is effective against it's foreign counterparts, it'll be practically invulnerable to it's own citizens, the ordinary people. In the end, it's an overall rat-race where the fanatics, the fundamentalists, the megalomaniacs, the super-greedy and the super-rich people around the world are effectively ruining the whole planet for the "rest of us," who want genuine progress in science, environment, human standards of living, peace and so on.
Couldn't agree more. Also the majority of comments from Americans who are outraged at the NSA activities seem to indicate they're so pissed off only because it has now been shown that NSA is *also* spying on Americans! This is exactly the same "Who cares about the other guys" mentality that has led the NSA and the higher echelons of America's politicians and military to act like this: to them, the majority of America's people have also now become "others," and hence the casual treatment of American laws and citizens as well. Non-Americans are "others with no rights, not even human rights" while American citizens are "others with least possible rights."
The enemies these days are good at blending in.
I'm more interested in security rather than privacy. What's the worst that can happen? Targeted ads? I block ads anyway. Future employer might look at my Facebook posts? He's welcome to... it might educate him. Bank may refuse loan? I care two hoots. My govt or NSA can track me down? Lol that'd be a really stupid thing on their part. What I wouldn't want though are insecure systems which could enable my accounts to get hacked or my transactions to be compromised.