My problem with such censorship is mainly that it doesn't work.
1. It legitimizes the opposition. To them, their government now appears as a legitimate oppressor. In turn, that conveys legitimacy toward their message. If you really want to destroy them, treat their actions as a more mundane crime, like unlicensed use of unscientific ideas. Or tear a page from the Soviet book and categorize them as insane.
2. In a pluralistic society, clashes are inevitable. We now have thousands of different groups in just about every country, and most of them oppose almost all the others. Whose god is true? Whose idea of society is true? Socialism is incompatible with capitalism, some religion is incompatible with some science, many ethnic groups hate each other, most life-philosophies and political viewpoints clash, and any ideology is going to first oppose all others because to be an ideology it must claim to be the one right way. That includes pluralism, for Inception fans.
3. It is a slippery slope, for two reasons. First, the censored group is going to be evasive and start disguising their message. This means you're going to have to censor more and more stuff, and may eventually destroy your government's efficiency with lots and lots of possibly contradictory rules. Second, the more you censor, the greater likelihood that the opposition will be able to use this against you. We're already seeing this with people saying nasty things about Israel regarding Palestinians, in fact, calling them Nazis. I don't think this leads anywhere but to bad.
4. It teaches your citizens to become sheep. The message from government should not be, "We're going to get rid of bad ideas." It should be that citizens and institutions need to constantly be aware of why certain ideas are opposed. The censorship becomes a rule like traffic laws, which we evade when we can because we don't see a clear connection (mainly because it often does not exist) between going 5 mph faster and carnage on the roads. Imagine this applied to political ideas.
People usually tell you that censorship leads to 1984 and that may be true, but I find the above list even more likely and more dangerous. They are less exciting though and I'll never get on Letterman this way.
The problem with F/OSS office suites is that their audience tends to be uncritical, so much as in the fairy tale "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" (but in inverse), professionals have stopped listening.
I remember at least three incidents where I was instructed to evaluate Open Office, Libre Office or other F/OSS word processing or layout packages. In each instance, the F/OSS products fell short in fundamental ways, and were a total disaster for larger documents. Their main strength was that it was often easier to export data from them than it was in certain commercial products.
The point of this is that in order for one of these FOSS office suites to survive, people who are critical and have use requirements beyond short documents get involved. For these packages to be competitive, they need to rise to a higher standard than Grandma's recipes, Son's book report, a weekend memo to the boss, etc.
From 1223-1240, Mongols (partial ancestors of today's Han Chinese and cultural contributors to all of Asia) invaded Europe, eventually being stopped at the borders of Western Europe.
From 1839 to 1860, the English and Chinese fought a series of wars. If it had not occurred before, resentment of the West was now part of the Chinese psyche.
In 1949, China became communist. It no longer had the pro-Western orientation of its nationalist party.
From 1950 to 1953, the US fought a proxy war with China in Korea.
From 1965 to 1975, the US fought a proxy war with China in Vietnam.
Many of our enemies are using weapons made by China or her allies in Russia and Eastern Europe. This is unchanged since the 1950s-1990s when those nations were united into a military bloc as allies.
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Verizon's the first, but watch Google and others to follow now that it's mainstreamed. We're all going to get put into consumer categories based on our online activities:
These will match up to categories of products which we will then see repeatedly everywhere we go until we get so paranoid we buy them just to feel normal.
It's like minority report, but as a for-profit business instead of a pre-crime intervention.
In industries where arrogance and demanding people are common, the only people who work the jobs are those with a tolerance for such behavior.
This means you're picking your IT guys by whether they put up with your drama or not.
If you wonder why many law firms and hospitals have such bad IT staff, this is the reason. High turnover, low investment beyond what is demanded. Mainly because the demands are constant and irate.
These people are probably dropping 4000 Windows XP machines into a hospital, and then complaining about the reboots for patches and/or that weird orange browser they have to do now.
As a result, they get a ton of malware. The solution is obvious: turn on Windows update, and train staff to rein in their egos and drama for just a few minutes every day.
Most designations like "zero-day" assume that hacking is like academia and usually only one person discovers a vulnerability at a time. More likely, many people stumble across it in the course of doing other things, and trade it as a favor to other IT professionals or hackers. Those in turn trade it down the line until it gets to someone who uses it for evil.
I bet if you surveyed IT professionals, you will find that 90% of us have circumvented security in order to make necessary repairs or alterations at some time or another. It's a nobody's fault type situation; often you're waiting for a system to be upgraded, or integrated, or working your way around older hardware or software. The shortest distance between two points is through the security wall.
If the dumbshits only put them at entrances/exits then your solution would work rather well. At least until the student was forced to account for his whereabouts when the manual attendance discrepancy started showing up on reports.
This sounds like the kind of committee-logic we can expect from our schools, government, corporations and media. I was amused at first by your example, then realized how likely lowest common denominator thinking ("dumbshit" mode) would be.
If the purpose is to make sure kids are on campus, they might just decide to put them at the front door. Then they could turn around to the parents, shareholders, government, whoever, etc. and claim "mission accomplished."
At which point, I'd find the kid with the best attendance record and bribe him/her to carry around a cloned RFID for me.
The relevant data: did they learn valuable skills?
The irrelevant data: did they attend every class, and take three (3) or fewer dumps a day, numbering fewer than 15 minutes each and not more than 42.3 minutes total?
Our society is in love with metrics, but in its mad dash, produces lots and lots of data that is actually not relevant to the task at hand.
If they said they were using these RFIDs to figure out exactly when and where pedophiles are snatching their kids, I might consider that relevant data, but emphasizing attendance is a surrogate for emphasizing learning.
It just was the easiest way to share larger files with people who normally don't use any kind of file-sharing technology. If someone was challenged by a USB drive, or multiple email attachments, I'd sent them the megaupload link and say "download it here."
This was generally for non-sensitive information shared with a large decentralized group working on both for-profit and non-profit products. When does the internet get a new anarchy file host, where no one cares what you upload and they keep it around if it's popular?
Btw, it's not just microkernels. Any time you have "one overriding idea", and push your idea as a superior ideology, you're going to be wrong. Microkernels had one such ideology, there have been others. It's all BS. The fact is, reality is complicated, and not amenable to the "one large idea" model of problem solving. The only way that problems get solved in real life is with a lot of hard work on getting the details right. Not by some over-arching ideology that somehow magically makes things work.
If you have "one overriding idea," you've made that idea the part of your thinking that serves as your reality-check, not reality itself as your reality-check. Great point, Linus, and one that I constantly encounter in completely non-tech-related fields.
The fact is that life costs money, and we all want to do what we love as day jobs, because there isn't enough time to fully do anything else. Thus writers, musicians, artists, software writers, etc. need to get paid.
I think the idea of "information wants to be free" applies to information, not information products. The knowledge about how to play a guitar, or write code for a specific operating system, should not be kept away from those who can use it. That doesn't mean they should be entitled to free downloads of all software, music, books, etc.
It seems to me that a majority of the cases overturned for bad evidence, especially death penalty cases, involve jailhouse informants, infiltrators, citizen reports, eye-witnesses and other HUMINT that may or may not be of value.
When you set the bar to entry very low, such that just about anyone can fire up a computer and report someone else, you're going to see lots of spurious reports which are methods of personal revenge. Just like in the Salem Witch trials, or the Soviet Union, if you create an easy way to identify "bad" people and take their stuff, it will be abused.
It's not surprising that giving police departments the power of seizure (and sale) had a similar effect. Busting rapists takes a second-tier to busting rich drug lords, because it's intelligent to ensure funding for your department first and later take on the non-paying cases.
This isn't to say that crowdsourcing is "wrong" but that we should step carefully when we implement any open-to-the-public reporting program.
Microsoft seemed to be heading in this direction, with Microsoft keyboards and mice on the shelves and rumors of a "Microsoft PC," when they were rudely interrupted by the anti-trust suit (which lore attributes to federal judges really detesting IE4).
Now they have resumed this path.
It might work for Apple; will it work for Microsoft? Possibly, especially if their model is licensing their OS and software as a precursor to hooking us up with smart homes and persistent, cloud-based data (or buzzwords of the day).
The signal here is that Microsoft may no longer see the OS as a huge moneymaker, as people shift away from PCs to tablets and the like, and they may also have doubts that people outside business will keep buying Office and other software. I'm skeptical on this; I don't think tablets will replace PCs or that people will stop buying software (usually for the support contracts).
One thing that history seems to make clear: the bigger a company is, the more likely it is that it will become unresponsive to market forces, and drop like Goliath with a head wound.
That was an interesting vision of the future. A couple thoughts:
(1) It's a vision of hell. I prefer solitude and real experience to the social networking world. What about someone who wants off the grid because the grid is a plastic substitute for real experience?
(2) Bonus points to the writer for not claiming that social problems were non-existent. The freeways get hacked, there's been a nuclear war, the middle east is still trouble, and China still wants to control Europe.
It shies away from Utopian thinking enough that I can believe it, but it also shows an automated world that I don't think I want. In that, it's an excellent brain-stimulating piece of writing.
While it's most convenient to have superpower governments concentrate wealth and use their military research to make space exploration possible, humanity's need for space exploration interprets a lack of funding as an obstacle and routes around it.
The real challenge now is finding a profit model. For the time being, space flight will be used to ferry celebrities into outer orbit, but in the future, our species will need to discover either outright profit or some way to subsidize the exploration of space itself.
I mean, it's great to think we could soon have flights to the moon, but what about more missions to Mars, and beyond?
Buy cheap abroad (labour, manufacturing, components etc) and sell at home for profit.
It's sad that what has long been considered business as usual for companies is legally questionable for individuals.
That is the underlying question about business itself, isn't it? How far do we let it take over our lives?
These business practices should be valid for:
a. Individuals b. Businesses c. Both d. Neither
Which would you choose?
My inner libertarian says whatever is good business should stand. But I fear that might make North America into one giant McDonald's.
My inner liberal says that we should take a moral stance first, but this usually results in government legislation that is even more abusive than good business.
If I have an inner conservative, he's suggesting that our society needs a sense of its direction outside of "make profit," and that with that in place, business as usual will be guided to a saner place...
I got subpoenaed last week by a lawyer from Google, because Google is getting sued by a patent troll (I don't know the name of the company), and Google wants to use the web site in my sig, which dates back to 2001, to prove prior art and invalidate the patent.
Ugh. What a pain in the posterior. However, look at the bright side -- you might meet some interesting people from Google, and/or convince them to add new Gmail skins.
The guy who's being brought to trial seems to have imported enough textbooks to earn $1.2 million. That means this isn't really a case about reselling your car, but about whether private citizens can buy a bunch of stuff abroad and re-sell it here for profit because it's cheaper abroad.
Slashdot Mirror
My problem with such censorship is mainly that it doesn't work.
1. It legitimizes the opposition. To them, their government now appears as a legitimate oppressor. In turn, that conveys legitimacy toward their message. If you really want to destroy them, treat their actions as a more mundane crime, like unlicensed use of unscientific ideas. Or tear a page from the Soviet book and categorize them as insane.
2. In a pluralistic society, clashes are inevitable. We now have thousands of different groups in just about every country, and most of them oppose almost all the others. Whose god is true? Whose idea of society is true? Socialism is incompatible with capitalism, some religion is incompatible with some science, many ethnic groups hate each other, most life-philosophies and political viewpoints clash, and any ideology is going to first oppose all others because to be an ideology it must claim to be the one right way. That includes pluralism, for Inception fans.
3. It is a slippery slope, for two reasons. First, the censored group is going to be evasive and start disguising their message. This means you're going to have to censor more and more stuff, and may eventually destroy your government's efficiency with lots and lots of possibly contradictory rules. Second, the more you censor, the greater likelihood that the opposition will be able to use this against you. We're already seeing this with people saying nasty things about Israel regarding Palestinians, in fact, calling them Nazis. I don't think this leads anywhere but to bad.
4. It teaches your citizens to become sheep. The message from government should not be, "We're going to get rid of bad ideas." It should be that citizens and institutions need to constantly be aware of why certain ideas are opposed. The censorship becomes a rule like traffic laws, which we evade when we can because we don't see a clear connection (mainly because it often does not exist) between going 5 mph faster and carnage on the roads. Imagine this applied to political ideas.
People usually tell you that censorship leads to 1984 and that may be true, but I find the above list even more likely and more dangerous. They are less exciting though and I'll never get on Letterman this way.
The problem with F/OSS office suites is that their audience tends to be uncritical, so much as in the fairy tale "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" (but in inverse), professionals have stopped listening.
I remember at least three incidents where I was instructed to evaluate Open Office, Libre Office or other F/OSS word processing or layout packages. In each instance, the F/OSS products fell short in fundamental ways, and were a total disaster for larger documents. Their main strength was that it was often easier to export data from them than it was in certain commercial products.
The point of this is that in order for one of these FOSS office suites to survive, people who are critical and have use requirements beyond short documents get involved. For these packages to be competitive, they need to rise to a higher standard than Grandma's recipes, Son's book report, a weekend memo to the boss, etc.
From 1223-1240, Mongols (partial ancestors of today's Han Chinese and cultural contributors to all of Asia) invaded Europe, eventually being stopped at the borders of Western Europe.
From 1839 to 1860, the English and Chinese fought a series of wars. If it had not occurred before, resentment of the West was now part of the Chinese psyche.
In 1949, China became communist. It no longer had the pro-Western orientation of its nationalist party.
From 1950 to 1953, the US fought a proxy war with China in Korea.
From 1965 to 1975, the US fought a proxy war with China in Vietnam.
Many of our enemies are using weapons made by China or her allies in Russia and Eastern Europe. This is unchanged since the 1950s-1990s when those nations were united into a military bloc as allies.
History repeats itself.
Hard times, coming our way.
We notice that you've been modifying your behavior in response to our tagging. To better serve you, we have tagged you paranoid in our consumer tracking database. This tag reflects your interests and desires as a consumer.
Coincidentally, we are offering you discounts this week:
* 25% off "Ron Paul: The Retaliation" tshirts
* $10 off paramilitary gear if you spend $25
* Free shipping on gas masks from Amazon.com
* Buy 1984 and Brave New World together and save $5 at Abe Books
* Click here to consult with an offshore banking expert
We think you may also qualify for these related tags: prepper, gun owner, cave or basement habitation expert.
If you have any questions, please call our automated line for a recorded answer.
Verizon's the first, but watch Google and others to follow now that it's mainstreamed. We're all going to get put into consumer categories based on our online activities:
sports fan, shoe fetish, gear head, porn enthusiast
These will match up to categories of products which we will then see repeatedly everywhere we go until we get so paranoid we buy them just to feel normal.
It's like minority report, but as a for-profit business instead of a pre-crime intervention.
In industries where arrogance and demanding people are common, the only people who work the jobs are those with a tolerance for such behavior.
This means you're picking your IT guys by whether they put up with your drama or not.
If you wonder why many law firms and hospitals have such bad IT staff, this is the reason. High turnover, low investment beyond what is demanded. Mainly because the demands are constant and irate.
These people are probably dropping 4000 Windows XP machines into a hospital, and then complaining about the reboots for patches and/or that weird orange browser they have to do now.
As a result, they get a ton of malware. The solution is obvious: turn on Windows update, and train staff to rein in their egos and drama for just a few minutes every day.
Journalist Stephen Levy goes into the data center itself:
"Google Throws Open Doors to Its Top-Secret Data Center"
Pretty fascinating stuff. I didn't expect the whole thing to be run on C-64s.
Most designations like "zero-day" assume that hacking is like academia and usually only one person discovers a vulnerability at a time. More likely, many people stumble across it in the course of doing other things, and trade it as a favor to other IT professionals or hackers. Those in turn trade it down the line until it gets to someone who uses it for evil.
I bet if you surveyed IT professionals, you will find that 90% of us have circumvented security in order to make necessary repairs or alterations at some time or another. It's a nobody's fault type situation; often you're waiting for a system to be upgraded, or integrated, or working your way around older hardware or software. The shortest distance between two points is through the security wall.
This sounds like the kind of committee-logic we can expect from our schools, government, corporations and media. I was amused at first by your example, then realized how likely lowest common denominator thinking ("dumbshit" mode) would be.
If the purpose is to make sure kids are on campus, they might just decide to put them at the front door. Then they could turn around to the parents, shareholders, government, whoever, etc. and claim "mission accomplished."
At which point, I'd find the kid with the best attendance record and bribe him/her to carry around a cloned RFID for me.
Tie the RFID chip to a rat, and leave out rat treats on the floor in your favorite classes. You'll get a perfect attendance award.
(Adults are dumb.)
The relevant data: did they learn valuable skills?
The irrelevant data: did they attend every class, and take three (3) or fewer dumps a day, numbering fewer than 15 minutes each and not more than 42.3 minutes total?
Our society is in love with metrics, but in its mad dash, produces lots and lots of data that is actually not relevant to the task at hand.
If they said they were using these RFIDs to figure out exactly when and where pedophiles are snatching their kids, I might consider that relevant data, but emphasizing attendance is a surrogate for emphasizing learning.
If you can find any name that's not related to murdering your wife, go for it. Bonus points if it's catchy.
Our modern societies are composed of thousands of cultures, ethnic groups, religions, sub-cultures and cults.
Anything you do will offend someone.
It's unlikely people are going to learn to live without being offended either. In this uncertain world, values and beliefs are sometimes all we have.
And so the conflict will continue, renewing itself constantly.
It's a neat thought-experiment, but like many things that get touted in the media, more hype than reality.
This won't be easily manufactured on a large scale. It will not be as fast as fiber optics or electricity. It will degrade during use.
Fix those, then let us know...
I miss Megaupload for its entirely legal uses.
It just was the easiest way to share larger files with people who normally don't use any kind of file-sharing technology. If someone was challenged by a USB drive, or multiple email attachments, I'd sent them the megaupload link and say "download it here."
This was generally for non-sensitive information shared with a large decentralized group working on both for-profit and non-profit products. When does the internet get a new anarchy file host, where no one cares what you upload and they keep it around if it's popular?
I found this part insightful beyond technology:
If you have "one overriding idea," you've made that idea the part of your thinking that serves as your reality-check, not reality itself as your reality-check. Great point, Linus, and one that I constantly encounter in completely non-tech-related fields.
There seems to be a lot of this going around.
Pirate Party Leader Fights Illegal Downloads of Her Book
The fact is that life costs money, and we all want to do what we love as day jobs, because there isn't enough time to fully do anything else. Thus writers, musicians, artists, software writers, etc. need to get paid.
I think the idea of "information wants to be free" applies to information, not information products. The knowledge about how to play a guitar, or write code for a specific operating system, should not be kept away from those who can use it. That doesn't mean they should be entitled to free downloads of all software, music, books, etc.
It seems to me that a majority of the cases overturned for bad evidence, especially death penalty cases, involve jailhouse informants, infiltrators, citizen reports, eye-witnesses and other HUMINT that may or may not be of value.
When you set the bar to entry very low, such that just about anyone can fire up a computer and report someone else, you're going to see lots of spurious reports which are methods of personal revenge. Just like in the Salem Witch trials, or the Soviet Union, if you create an easy way to identify "bad" people and take their stuff, it will be abused.
It's not surprising that giving police departments the power of seizure (and sale) had a similar effect. Busting rapists takes a second-tier to busting rich drug lords, because it's intelligent to ensure funding for your department first and later take on the non-paying cases.
This isn't to say that crowdsourcing is "wrong" but that we should step carefully when we implement any open-to-the-public reporting program.
Microsoft seemed to be heading in this direction, with Microsoft keyboards and mice on the shelves and rumors of a "Microsoft PC," when they were rudely interrupted by the anti-trust suit (which lore attributes to federal judges really detesting IE4).
Now they have resumed this path.
It might work for Apple; will it work for Microsoft? Possibly, especially if their model is licensing their OS and software as a precursor to hooking us up with smart homes and persistent, cloud-based data (or buzzwords of the day).
The signal here is that Microsoft may no longer see the OS as a huge moneymaker, as people shift away from PCs to tablets and the like, and they may also have doubts that people outside business will keep buying Office and other software. I'm skeptical on this; I don't think tablets will replace PCs or that people will stop buying software (usually for the support contracts).
One thing that history seems to make clear: the bigger a company is, the more likely it is that it will become unresponsive to market forces, and drop like Goliath with a head wound.
That was an interesting vision of the future. A couple thoughts:
(1) It's a vision of hell. I prefer solitude and real experience to the social networking world. What about someone who wants off the grid because the grid is a plastic substitute for real experience?
(2) Bonus points to the writer for not claiming that social problems were non-existent. The freeways get hacked, there's been a nuclear war, the middle east is still trouble, and China still wants to control Europe.
It shies away from Utopian thinking enough that I can believe it, but it also shows an automated world that I don't think I want. In that, it's an excellent brain-stimulating piece of writing.
While it's most convenient to have superpower governments concentrate wealth and use their military research to make space exploration possible, humanity's need for space exploration interprets a lack of funding as an obstacle and routes around it.
The real challenge now is finding a profit model. For the time being, space flight will be used to ferry celebrities into outer orbit, but in the future, our species will need to discover either outright profit or some way to subsidize the exploration of space itself.
I mean, it's great to think we could soon have flights to the moon, but what about more missions to Mars, and beyond?
That is the underlying question about business itself, isn't it? How far do we let it take over our lives?
These business practices should be valid for:
a. Individuals
b. Businesses
c. Both
d. Neither
Which would you choose?
My inner libertarian says whatever is good business should stand. But I fear that might make North America into one giant McDonald's.
My inner liberal says that we should take a moral stance first, but this usually results in government legislation that is even more abusive than good business.
If I have an inner conservative, he's suggesting that our society needs a sense of its direction outside of "make profit," and that with that in place, business as usual will be guided to a saner place...
I wonder which is closest to the truth.
Apple: it must look good, work out of the box, and be very simple so that even a hipster in skinny jeans and Ray-Bans can do it.
Nokia: it must be solid as a rock, work for 10,000 years, and the interface must exist. If it is convenient, that is a bonus, but not important.
These companies are opposites. Merging them together will just get us stylized Nokias that lack the legendary bulletproof Nokia quality.
Ugh. What a pain in the posterior. However, look at the bright side -- you might meet some interesting people from Google, and/or convince them to add new Gmail skins.
The guy who's being brought to trial seems to have imported enough textbooks to earn $1.2 million. That means this isn't really a case about reselling your car, but about whether private citizens can buy a bunch of stuff abroad and re-sell it here for profit because it's cheaper abroad.
You can track the legislation here: