Gibson wrote a number of high tech fiction books including Neuromancer, Jonny Gnumonic(sic), Idoru, All Tommorows Parties. He is credited with coining the phrase cyberspace among others long before the web ever existed. He is considered somewhat of a visonary among tech fiction writers. I recommend him.
With preformatted cheap floppies all over the place people have forgotten how we used to do it in the old days. Take the floppy out of the box, format it yourself, run chkdsk on the floppy to lock out bad sectors. Mass formatting is done by a quick format method which does not check or clean the disk. All disks have bad sectors when they come from the factory and if you load data onto them without locking out the bad sectors you will wind up with (you guessed it) corrupt data. I always used three formatted and checked disks to save my data. All you have to do is insert each disk and hit the save button. I have never lost any data this way.
I know what you mean. The probes are out there and they are always active. I'm running a cable connection with a four tier security layer including black ice and surfingard. I pull the logs and check them every evening. After deducting all the legitimate pings and probes (my ISP, IM software, etc) I still wind up with between 40 and 50 probes I can't resolve. If my security software is catching these I can't help but wonder what they might not be catching. I've gotten to the point that I keep all my important files on zip disks and only work on that data with my internet service disconnected. I don't believe that absolute security is possible on any computer that is connected to the web. I only keep those things on my internet machine that I don't care if the world sees.
Don't let yourself get too excited by this guy. He would be the one screaming the loudest if he thought his rights were being abused. He needs to turn off his $5000 PC and take his $0.25 head out into the world and observe. I worked around guys like him my entire career. All talk, no substance. Surf in peace:}
1. I made a copy of that response and I'm going to frame it and hang over my employees "suggestion box".
2. Since you seem to be intimately familier with the EZ form you are obviously not solvent enough for anyone to bother using the IRS as a weapon against you.
3. First off, it's doesn't not doesnt.
4. You are one hundred percent correct. So why do we want to give them a tool to allow them to do what they do more efficiently.
5. It's not the legal use that's the problem. It's the potential for illegal abuse that far outweighs potential benefits.
Nuff Said
If you reread my post you will notice that I did not say that government would become obsolete, only politicians and nothing is more dangerous than a career politician facing redundancy. I was also not referring to hard working career civil servents who go to work every day, do their jobs and go home to their families at night. This discussion isn't even germain to them except for the fact that they are too often unjustly punished when they try to bring the illegal activities of politicians to the public's attention. In fact this discusion doesn't even pertain to the people we elect to office. By and large most of them are reasonably good at their jobs. It's about a whole subculture of non elected individuals who form a layer between the person we elect and the career civil servent. They have their own agenda's which may or may not be the same as the citizens they are supposed to be serving.
Government will never be obsolete for it is necessary in order for civilized societies to exist at all. With a more informed citizenry and high speed communications ability government can become more efficient and responsive. This is a very threatening prospect to many individuals in that middle layer subculture. They are the ones willing and able to do just about anything to preserve their positions of power.
If what I said in my post scares you thats good. I hope you get scared enough to lift your head out of the sand and grab a glimpse of reality. No one questions the FBI's mission or right to spy on criminals and other social misfits, it's their job. You must remember that the FBI is only one of a whole phalanx of federal law enforcement agencies, many of which you have never even heard of. All these agencies share information and resourses. All of them including the FBI are political organizations first and foremost. I am not talking about field agents who work their butts off and risk their lives every day trying to protect the american people. I am talking about upper level management which is comprised entirely of political appointees who owe their livlyhoods and careers to whichever political party is currently in power. I believe that the current administration has gotten themselves in a spot of trouble for using the FBI to illegally gather information about employees of previous administrations. They got caught that time but how many other illegal searches were conducted without getting caught. If you examine the history of the FBI you will see that their record on protecting the civil rights of this countries citizens is not something to write home about. A system like carnivore allows them to gather more detailed information with little possibility of direct oversight. Once the info is downloaded to their computers it can be channeled to any other agency or individual with the click of a mouse.
I am sure that you personally are not involved in criminal activity but you don't seem to understand that all kinds of information can be of value to other people and can be used for many different purposes, some of which could cause you an annoying problem, but some could negatively impact your lifestyle in a bad way.
I have lectured you enough for one day so youmay now replace your head in the sandpit and sleep peacefully.
BTW If my post scared you, you don't even want to know what my profession has been for my entire adult life. That would scare you to death.
You make it sound humorous but think about it in a different light. Lets say you are emailing a friend and you are critical of your boss. Your boss just happens to be a major contributor to the party currently in power. A few weeks later you suddenly start getting hasseled on they job or just plain get fired. You can't figure out why. Politicans often use govt. resourses to look out for the interests of their friends. Lets say you are frequent slashdot contributor who is critical of many govt activities. Your criticism starts to hit them a little to close to home. Suddenly you find the IRS paying a little more attention to your tax return. Your son gets turned down for that R.O.T.C. scholorship he seemingly had in the bag. Your parents social security checks keep getting lost or shortchanged. Your brothers company on the other side of the country looses that big government contract they thought they had locked up. Beep Beep, you've just been eaten by the Carnivore
You don't get it. The whole concept of hundreds of millions of people instantly communicating across all national and political boundries without any form of government control, has government goons the world over scared to death. The more the people of the world communicate and work out solutions to their problems, the less relevent politicans are. Pretty soon the only thing they will be needed for, is to make sure the roads are paved and the trash gets picked up. Our beloved government as well as many others will use all manner of excuses (protecting children from the evils of an unregulated web, consumer protection, national security, war on crime, drugs etc.) to get their collective claws into the web. Even the U.N. is starting to get into the act. If you allow them to develope technology like carnivore and actually deploy it we are in deep trouble. Unless there will be a watchdog looking over the shoulder of every government employee with access to a computer there is no way to control how this software is used. The only time they have to prove they used this software legally, is if they wish to use the information they gather as evidence in court. If they are going to use the information for some other purpose they can slap a Top Secret clearance on it, use it, then drop it in the old burn bag and it's gone forever without a trace.
As good netizens we have to do everything in our power to activley resist any attempt by any government to control the web. Coders need to be writing a carnivore killer right now. A nice little bug that locates carnivore, tracks it back to it's home machine and simply destroys that machine. You must remember that the best brains in the high tech world don't work for governments. Most of them work on the web so it's not a question of whether or not governments can be stopped from grabbing control of the web. The only question is, how bad you have to hurt them before they see the error of their ways.
Slashdot Mirror
Gibson wrote a number of high tech fiction books including Neuromancer, Jonny Gnumonic(sic), Idoru, All Tommorows Parties. He is credited with coining the phrase cyberspace among others long before the web ever existed. He is considered somewhat of a visonary among tech fiction writers. I recommend him.
With preformatted cheap floppies all over the place people have forgotten how we used to do it in the old days. Take the floppy out of the box, format it yourself, run chkdsk on the floppy to lock out bad sectors. Mass formatting is done by a quick format method which does not check or clean the disk. All disks have bad sectors when they come from the factory and if you load data onto them without locking out the bad sectors you will wind up with (you guessed it) corrupt data. I always used three formatted and checked disks to save my data. All you have to do is insert each disk and hit the save button. I have never lost any data this way.
I know what you mean. The probes are out there and they are always active. I'm running a cable connection with a four tier security layer including black ice and surfingard. I pull the logs and check them every evening. After deducting all the legitimate pings and probes (my ISP, IM software, etc) I still wind up with between 40 and 50 probes I can't resolve. If my security software is catching these I can't help but wonder what they might not be catching. I've gotten to the point that I keep all my important files on zip disks and only work on that data with my internet service disconnected. I don't believe that absolute security is possible on any computer that is connected to the web. I only keep those things on my internet machine that I don't care if the world sees.
Don't let yourself get too excited by this guy. He would be the one screaming the loudest if he thought his rights were being abused. He needs to turn off his $5000 PC and take his $0.25 head out into the world and observe. I worked around guys like him my entire career. All talk, no substance. Surf in peace:}
1. I made a copy of that response and I'm going to frame it and hang over my employees "suggestion box". 2. Since you seem to be intimately familier with the EZ form you are obviously not solvent enough for anyone to bother using the IRS as a weapon against you. 3. First off, it's doesn't not doesnt. 4. You are one hundred percent correct. So why do we want to give them a tool to allow them to do what they do more efficiently. 5. It's not the legal use that's the problem. It's the potential for illegal abuse that far outweighs potential benefits. Nuff Said
If you reread my post you will notice that I did not say that government would become obsolete, only politicians and nothing is more dangerous than a career politician facing redundancy. I was also not referring to hard working career civil servents who go to work every day, do their jobs and go home to their families at night. This discussion isn't even germain to them except for the fact that they are too often unjustly punished when they try to bring the illegal activities of politicians to the public's attention. In fact this discusion doesn't even pertain to the people we elect to office. By and large most of them are reasonably good at their jobs. It's about a whole subculture of non elected individuals who form a layer between the person we elect and the career civil servent. They have their own agenda's which may or may not be the same as the citizens they are supposed to be serving. Government will never be obsolete for it is necessary in order for civilized societies to exist at all. With a more informed citizenry and high speed communications ability government can become more efficient and responsive. This is a very threatening prospect to many individuals in that middle layer subculture. They are the ones willing and able to do just about anything to preserve their positions of power.
If what I said in my post scares you thats good. I hope you get scared enough to lift your head out of the sand and grab a glimpse of reality. No one questions the FBI's mission or right to spy on criminals and other social misfits, it's their job. You must remember that the FBI is only one of a whole phalanx of federal law enforcement agencies, many of which you have never even heard of. All these agencies share information and resourses. All of them including the FBI are political organizations first and foremost. I am not talking about field agents who work their butts off and risk their lives every day trying to protect the american people. I am talking about upper level management which is comprised entirely of political appointees who owe their livlyhoods and careers to whichever political party is currently in power. I believe that the current administration has gotten themselves in a spot of trouble for using the FBI to illegally gather information about employees of previous administrations. They got caught that time but how many other illegal searches were conducted without getting caught. If you examine the history of the FBI you will see that their record on protecting the civil rights of this countries citizens is not something to write home about. A system like carnivore allows them to gather more detailed information with little possibility of direct oversight. Once the info is downloaded to their computers it can be channeled to any other agency or individual with the click of a mouse. I am sure that you personally are not involved in criminal activity but you don't seem to understand that all kinds of information can be of value to other people and can be used for many different purposes, some of which could cause you an annoying problem, but some could negatively impact your lifestyle in a bad way. I have lectured you enough for one day so youmay now replace your head in the sandpit and sleep peacefully. BTW If my post scared you, you don't even want to know what my profession has been for my entire adult life. That would scare you to death.
You make it sound humorous but think about it in a different light. Lets say you are emailing a friend and you are critical of your boss. Your boss just happens to be a major contributor to the party currently in power. A few weeks later you suddenly start getting hasseled on they job or just plain get fired. You can't figure out why. Politicans often use govt. resourses to look out for the interests of their friends. Lets say you are frequent slashdot contributor who is critical of many govt activities. Your criticism starts to hit them a little to close to home. Suddenly you find the IRS paying a little more attention to your tax return. Your son gets turned down for that R.O.T.C. scholorship he seemingly had in the bag. Your parents social security checks keep getting lost or shortchanged. Your brothers company on the other side of the country looses that big government contract they thought they had locked up. Beep Beep, you've just been eaten by the Carnivore
You don't get it. The whole concept of hundreds of millions of people instantly communicating across all national and political boundries without any form of government control, has government goons the world over scared to death. The more the people of the world communicate and work out solutions to their problems, the less relevent politicans are. Pretty soon the only thing they will be needed for, is to make sure the roads are paved and the trash gets picked up. Our beloved government as well as many others will use all manner of excuses (protecting children from the evils of an unregulated web, consumer protection, national security, war on crime, drugs etc.) to get their collective claws into the web. Even the U.N. is starting to get into the act. If you allow them to develope technology like carnivore and actually deploy it we are in deep trouble. Unless there will be a watchdog looking over the shoulder of every government employee with access to a computer there is no way to control how this software is used. The only time they have to prove they used this software legally, is if they wish to use the information they gather as evidence in court. If they are going to use the information for some other purpose they can slap a Top Secret clearance on it, use it, then drop it in the old burn bag and it's gone forever without a trace. As good netizens we have to do everything in our power to activley resist any attempt by any government to control the web. Coders need to be writing a carnivore killer right now. A nice little bug that locates carnivore, tracks it back to it's home machine and simply destroys that machine. You must remember that the best brains in the high tech world don't work for governments. Most of them work on the web so it's not a question of whether or not governments can be stopped from grabbing control of the web. The only question is, how bad you have to hurt them before they see the error of their ways.