The important revelation here isn't that there are intelligence agents using Wikipedia to spread propaganda -- being open to edit by most anyone means it'll pick up its fair share of people editing in bad faith, ranging from civilian vandals and scumbags to the government's equivalent. The important question here is why the hell did Wikipedia's admins cooperate with her -- protecting her by removing the content -- when she was outed? Everyone likes to argue over the credibility of the information they find on Wikipedia, and this does not help their credibility at all.
They probably can be in some contexts. But when one speaks of using, as a means of authentication, a message-digest included in the message itself, it needs to include a digital signature.
A message-digest includes a digital signature to prevent tampering. Without this, what's to prevent the transmitter from just altering your hash as they alter the content?
They're not a competitor to Northrop Grumman directly; they're a competitor to the government monopoly on space travel, however small. They're showing that an alternative to such is viable. And as I was saying, Northrop Grumman and the other big defense contractors might as well be considered an arm of the government, except perhaps on paper.
As for benefit? Uncle Sam says something like, "Buy out Scaled Composites, and we'll make sure such-and-such tax break goes through, and we'll buy an extra dozen helicopters from you this year," and there's all the benefit you need.
Considering that Northrop Grumman is a government defense contractor, their buyout could be to put a competitor, one that doesn't work for the government, out of business.
So not only is this project a major supporter of digital rights management, but now it's going to be supporting censorware, too? Am I the only one who sees how dangerous this project is on the whole?
If they change the license, the last version of this software not owned by Apple will be forked, probably placed under the GPLv3, and no one will use Apple's version, nor will anyone develop for it except the guy they bought out. Remember what happened to XFree86 when they changed their license? Only a few OSes use it now, and the core development team has been disbanded.
And forkings like this will happen to any piece of GPLv2 software, or any other free or open-source software, if someone tries to do this to it. It's not RMS-proofing the software, because free software is already "proofed" against these types of takeovers.
Perhaps. But putting it together like this, it fits nicely with the back-to-Russia story: A) she's a mail-order bride and these services are known to often be scams, B) she almost immediately engaged in embezzlement the moment she had access to large sums of money, C) she's disappeared and there's no body, and finally, as you said, D) her kids were sent to her mother in Russia, and now are mysteriously "terrified" at coming back to the US.
...Because the police have a coherent theory, it's up to Reiser to prove otherwise? I hope you never get to serve on a jury in the U.S. -- and if you ever do, the defense attorney must've had a room-temperature IQ.
That can be the prosecution's story. The fact that there's a reasonable alternative explanation (and tied together with what I just posted, starts to look like a coherent end-to-end alternative theory of the whole marriage) should be more than enough to establish "reasonable doubt" in the mind of any juror.
Reiser and Nina also apparently met through one of those "mail-order" bride services or something very similar. She was then accused of embezzling money from Namesys while working as their CFO. Resier's lawyer would have to be an idiot not to argue this, and your points, for all their worth.
I wonder if they seized any of his computers. I was thinking it'd be awful ironic if they recover some sort of damning data from his computer -- data that was only recoverable because ReiserFS is resist to things like shred(1).
Oh, I'm not assuming online anonymity is a good thing. I'm looking at all of the data and anecdotes here and making a conscious decision that it is a good thing. Criminals taking advantage of online anonymity is an unfortunately consequence of something that's necessary in a free society; it's the "price of freedom" so to speak.
Successful phishing attacks probably outweigh the number of completely executed government abuses in terms of quantity, that is true. But "completely executed" is the key there -- the government is surveilling millions of people with their NSA wiretapping schemes, and who knows how, when, and against whom all that data is eventually going to be used? By the time they're using this data to execute warrants and arrests against individuals, you're already screwed.
A lot of whatever it is that they're up to is also completely secret (see NSLs and the FISA) so we don't even know how many people are really caught up in one vs. the other.
If we're making comparisons, though, which do you think is going to ruin someone more thoroughly: Getting their credit card number stolen by an identity thief? Liability under US law is limited to $50 as long as the customer is diligent about reporting the theft to their card company. Getting their bank account cleaned out by a phisher? Maybe a few thousand lost; I can't imagine someone with tens or hundreds of thousands in a single bank account would be careless enough to fall for most phishing schemes. Or getting harassed, arrested, and prosecuted by the government? Even if you win your case against the government, I guarantee you that you'll lose more money than any phisher could ever steal from you.
But most importantly, which kind of victimization is more likely is not the issue, since there are alternative -- and better -- solutions to fixing the problems you mention: Phishing attacks can be defended against easily by educating yourself about how your bank and similar businesses actually communicate with you. It's not the result of the anonymity of the criminals, it's the result of the ignorance of the victims. Quite frankly, if someone gets their bank account cleaned out because they clicked on an email titled "ur paypal informations pls !" and then they go and blame the Internet infrastructure for the criminal's ability to hide, I'm not going to have the slightest qualm against laughing in that person's face. These people belong on the same list as people who eat fifteen Big Macs a month then try to sue McDonald's because they mysteriously gained 200kg.
And, identity thefts? Well, if businesses weren't keeping piles of people's personal data around for years, what do you think the likelihood of such things happening are? Minimizing identity theft is actually a prime point in favor of businesses limiting data collection and you being a lot more careful with whom and where you share your info.
It is indeed a problem of our government being out of control. But it can be defended against, right now, a lot more easily by just making sure you're not leaving gobs of data behind, than to try to fix the political system on the national level. If you see what's in my sig right now, there's a project afoot to try and work on some of this insanity on the state level, but even that's going to take a lot of time.
For one thing, nebulous arguments about "government" like this are always weak. "Government" is rarely a single person or institution operating executively (and when it is, that's usually an abuse of the intended system of representation that needs to be fixed for a whole host of other reasons anyway).
Rarely? A single FBI agent can demand records with one of these, with no judicial oversight.
If this is still too nebulous, here are some numbers: "An internal FBI audit found that the bureau violated the rules more than 1000 times in an audit of 10% of its national investigations between 2002 and 2007. Over 20 of these involved requests by agents for information that US law did not permit them to have." Assuming the audit examined a random sampling of reuqests, that means there were ten thousand rule violations and two hundred illegal requests over that five-year period.
As long as we have a culture where both businesses and governments follow this basic principle (because they are required to by law and that law is effectively enforced),...
The government and its laws? Go read about the National Security Letters linked above, learn about the USA PATRIOT Act, read about the 2,176 secret warrants were issued in 2006,...just for starters. The law itself authorizes most of these abuses.
I actually have no problem with my ISP and the hosts at Slashdot keeping sufficient records to identify me in combination as the author of this post, as long as there are sufficient safeguards such as not releasing it without proper legal requirement to do so and only keeping it for a reasonable period of time.
As I hope you can see now, there aren't. One FBI agent can demand data from Slashdot under the authority of an NSL and can get your IP, then he can go over to your ISP and demand your name and address under another NSL. A third request under CALEA to your ISP or their upstream, and your every online move is being monitored for whatever he's looking for. And who knows how long businesses keep IP data around? There are currently no data retention laws in the US -- and if the government ever passes any, I assure you that they won't be to protect you by demanding businesses delete data after n months, they'll be to surveille you by demanding businesses keep data for at least n months. And if a businesses has it, and the government demands it, they have to yield it up.
In other words, the above means of identifying someone only works if all the parties involved are in countries where the law is compatible on these concerns.
Oh, you think being in Canada or the Netherlands or something is going to protect you from all this? That hole has been plugged, too.
If you're not anonymous, you don't have real privacy. If what you're doing online is being monitored and linked to you, then the only thing that stands between you and that loss of privacy is some flimsy company policy, or in some places, legislation -- both of which always have exceptions allowing the information to be handed over to law enforcement for a variety of reasons.
If the data exists, the government can get hold of it. You only have privacy if the data was never collected in the first place.
Exactly. Google's company policy seems to be the (rather prudent for a corporation) "follow the law in the countries in which you operate." In the US, they were able to refuse to refuse to do this because they have legal recourse, for example. This probably doesn't fly in China.
I didn't say there's no distinction -- I said they're both censorship. One is censorship you don't agree with ("wrong") and the other is one that you do ("right"). What I was arguing against is someone calling "censorship I think is right" the same as "not censorship at all."
Besides, on a purely practical note, after the police finish beating the crap out of you and your friend(s), how hard is it for them to confiscate and destroy a recording device?
How about a camera phone so you could upload the photo before anything happens to you? And it'd look pretty bad for them when the cops say, "Camera? What camera?" and then you or the ACLU produce the uploaded pics.
It's not particularly difficult to reconcile the two positions: Police are public officials and ought to have zero privacy when carrying out their official duties. "Privacy" for the government means secrecy and that is fundamentally incompatible with a free society.
Slashdot Mirror
The important revelation here isn't that there are intelligence agents using Wikipedia to spread propaganda -- being open to edit by most anyone means it'll pick up its fair share of people editing in bad faith, ranging from civilian vandals and scumbags to the government's equivalent. The important question here is why the hell did Wikipedia's admins cooperate with her -- protecting her by removing the content -- when she was outed? Everyone likes to argue over the credibility of the information they find on Wikipedia, and this does not help their credibility at all.
They probably can be in some contexts. But when one speaks of using, as a means of authentication, a message-digest included in the message itself, it needs to include a digital signature.
A message-digest includes a digital signature to prevent tampering. Without this, what's to prevent the transmitter from just altering your hash as they alter the content?
Not just a hash, but a message digest.
They're not a competitor to Northrop Grumman directly; they're a competitor to the government monopoly on space travel, however small. They're showing that an alternative to such is viable. And as I was saying, Northrop Grumman and the other big defense contractors might as well be considered an arm of the government, except perhaps on paper.
As for benefit? Uncle Sam says something like, "Buy out Scaled Composites, and we'll make sure such-and-such tax break goes through, and we'll buy an extra dozen helicopters from you this year," and there's all the benefit you need.
Considering that Northrop Grumman is a government defense contractor, their buyout could be to put a competitor, one that doesn't work for the government, out of business.
So not only is this project a major supporter of digital rights management, but now it's going to be supporting censorware, too? Am I the only one who sees how dangerous this project is on the whole?
You mean the license doesn't have the "or at your option any later version" clause?
If they change the license, the last version of this software not owned by Apple will be forked, probably placed under the GPLv3, and no one will use Apple's version, nor will anyone develop for it except the guy they bought out. Remember what happened to XFree86 when they changed their license? Only a few OSes use it now, and the core development team has been disbanded.
And forkings like this will happen to any piece of GPLv2 software, or any other free or open-source software, if someone tries to do this to it. It's not RMS-proofing the software, because free software is already "proofed" against these types of takeovers.
People were predicting over here this would be the excuse they'd use to take TPB down. Nice to see your government's scumbaggery is so predictable.
That's one explanation. There are others. That there are others is perhaps sufficient to establish reasonable doubt, resulting in an acquittal.
Perhaps. But putting it together like this, it fits nicely with the back-to-Russia story: A) she's a mail-order bride and these services are known to often be scams, B) she almost immediately engaged in embezzlement the moment she had access to large sums of money, C) she's disappeared and there's no body, and finally, as you said, D) her kids were sent to her mother in Russia, and now are mysteriously "terrified" at coming back to the US.
...Because the police have a coherent theory, it's up to Reiser to prove otherwise? I hope you never get to serve on a jury in the U.S. -- and if you ever do, the defense attorney must've had a room-temperature IQ.
That can be the prosecution's story. The fact that there's a reasonable alternative explanation (and tied together with what I just posted, starts to look like a coherent end-to-end alternative theory of the whole marriage) should be more than enough to establish "reasonable doubt" in the mind of any juror.
Reiser and Nina also apparently met through one of those "mail-order" bride services or something very similar. She was then accused of embezzling money from Namesys while working as their CFO. Resier's lawyer would have to be an idiot not to argue this, and your points, for all their worth.
I wonder if they seized any of his computers. I was thinking it'd be awful ironic if they recover some sort of damning data from his computer -- data that was only recoverable because ReiserFS is resist to things like shred(1).
Oh, I'm not assuming online anonymity is a good thing. I'm looking at all of the data and anecdotes here and making a conscious decision that it is a good thing. Criminals taking advantage of online anonymity is an unfortunately consequence of something that's necessary in a free society; it's the "price of freedom" so to speak.
Successful phishing attacks probably outweigh the number of completely executed government abuses in terms of quantity, that is true. But "completely executed" is the key there -- the government is surveilling millions of people with their NSA wiretapping schemes, and who knows how, when, and against whom all that data is eventually going to be used? By the time they're using this data to execute warrants and arrests against individuals, you're already screwed.
A lot of whatever it is that they're up to is also completely secret (see NSLs and the FISA) so we don't even know how many people are really caught up in one vs. the other.
If we're making comparisons, though, which do you think is going to ruin someone more thoroughly: Getting their credit card number stolen by an identity thief? Liability under US law is limited to $50 as long as the customer is diligent about reporting the theft to their card company. Getting their bank account cleaned out by a phisher? Maybe a few thousand lost; I can't imagine someone with tens or hundreds of thousands in a single bank account would be careless enough to fall for most phishing schemes. Or getting harassed, arrested, and prosecuted by the government? Even if you win your case against the government, I guarantee you that you'll lose more money than any phisher could ever steal from you.
But most importantly, which kind of victimization is more likely is not the issue, since there are alternative -- and better -- solutions to fixing the problems you mention: Phishing attacks can be defended against easily by educating yourself about how your bank and similar businesses actually communicate with you. It's not the result of the anonymity of the criminals, it's the result of the ignorance of the victims. Quite frankly, if someone gets their bank account cleaned out because they clicked on an email titled "ur paypal informations pls !" and then they go and blame the Internet infrastructure for the criminal's ability to hide, I'm not going to have the slightest qualm against laughing in that person's face. These people belong on the same list as people who eat fifteen Big Macs a month then try to sue McDonald's because they mysteriously gained 200kg.
And, identity thefts? Well, if businesses weren't keeping piles of people's personal data around for years, what do you think the likelihood of such things happening are? Minimizing identity theft is actually a prime point in favor of businesses limiting data collection and you being a lot more careful with whom and where you share your info.
It is indeed a problem of our government being out of control. But it can be defended against, right now, a lot more easily by just making sure you're not leaving gobs of data behind, than to try to fix the political system on the national level. If you see what's in my sig right now, there's a project afoot to try and work on some of this insanity on the state level, but even that's going to take a lot of time.
Rarely? A single FBI agent can demand records with one of these, with no judicial oversight.
If this is still too nebulous, here are some numbers: "An internal FBI audit found that the bureau violated the rules more than 1000 times in an audit of 10% of its national investigations between 2002 and 2007. Over 20 of these involved requests by agents for information that US law did not permit them to have." Assuming the audit examined a random sampling of reuqests, that means there were ten thousand rule violations and two hundred illegal requests over that five-year period.
Business culture? AT&T volunteered to help the NSA spy on their customers. They even have a secret routing center of some sort just for this task. eBay goes out of their way to help law enforcement. Verizon hands over customer data to the NSA and outrageously tries to claim free speech protection to do so.
The government and its laws? Go read about the National Security Letters linked above, learn about the USA PATRIOT Act, read about the 2,176 secret warrants were issued in 2006, ...just for starters. The law itself authorizes most of these abuses.
As I hope you can see now, there aren't. One FBI agent can demand data from Slashdot under the authority of an NSL and can get your IP, then he can go over to your ISP and demand your name and address under another NSL. A third request under CALEA to your ISP or their upstream, and your every online move is being monitored for whatever he's looking for. And who knows how long businesses keep IP data around? There are currently no data retention laws in the US -- and if the government ever passes any, I assure you that they won't be to protect you by demanding businesses delete data after n months, they'll be to surveille you by demanding businesses keep data for at least n months. And if a businesses has it, and the government demands it, they have to yield it up.
Oh, you think being in Canada or the Netherlands or something is going to protect you from all this? That hole has been plugged, too.
I'm not sure. The Google China scandal I heard about is them being forced to censor results in their search.
If you're not anonymous, you don't have real privacy. If what you're doing online is being monitored and linked to you, then the only thing that stands between you and that loss of privacy is some flimsy company policy, or in some places, legislation -- both of which always have exceptions allowing the information to be handed over to law enforcement for a variety of reasons.
If the data exists, the government can get hold of it. You only have privacy if the data was never collected in the first place.
Exactly. Google's company policy seems to be the (rather prudent for a corporation) "follow the law in the countries in which you operate." In the US, they were able to refuse to refuse to do this because they have legal recourse, for example. This probably doesn't fly in China.
I didn't say there's no distinction -- I said they're both censorship. One is censorship you don't agree with ("wrong") and the other is one that you do ("right"). What I was arguing against is someone calling "censorship I think is right" the same as "not censorship at all."
How about a camera phone so you could upload the photo before anything happens to you? And it'd look pretty bad for them when the cops say, "Camera? What camera?" and then you or the ACLU produce the uploaded pics.
It's not particularly difficult to reconcile the two positions: Police are public officials and ought to have zero privacy when carrying out their official duties. "Privacy" for the government means secrecy and that is fundamentally incompatible with a free society.