I am not a robot, and I don't blindly (obediently) follow laws, especially the ones I don't agree with. For example, I speed, and I jaywalk, and so on. Nor do I turn in others who commit similar crimes. In particular, the way the law is structured regarding child pornography is, in my opinion, highly unConstitutional and uncivilized. For example, the government can run an ad in Hustler for some kiddie porn, and then when you respond, they sell you kiddie porn, then they bust you for possesion of kiddie porn. That's *wrong* regardless of whether or not it's *legal*. In my opinion, of course. Apparently that's a very clear moral line that only I can see.
So perhaps kiddie porn is a touchy issue with me, but I would probably only make mention of anything I found on a user's hard drive if it were, say, explicit plans to blow up the WTC. Porn, even kiddie porn, is never going to put me into "The Sky Is Falling!" mode.
Re:EM rather than heat
on
Ant Farm PC
·
· Score: 1
Hmmm. I must be getting Heat and Temperature confused. Or, maybe I was thinking that the original poster was doing that.
You can hardly tell anymore that I actually took thermodynamics in college. Kinda sad, really.
No, it's just offensive on purpose... just to be offensive. I never had the ulterior motive of getting people to turn off sigs, but I like it!
It's a personal vendetta of sorts, I think. My last sig was: By Pentagon standards, the WTC was a "dual-use" target.
Not surprisingly, that led to some debate, which culminated in a great exchange with someone who actually put me on and took me off his "friends" list over the course of our exchange. So, I figured I'd try it again. But as it turns out my new sig is just stupid. Somehow the mention of nuking all arabs doesn't pack nearly the same payload as my last one. I guess nuking arabs isn't nearly as controversial as pointing out that, had the WTC been in Iraq or Yugoslavia, it would have gotten blown up. This was actually the part that angered people, who agreed that it would have been blown up, but not during the day with thousands of people inside. I didn't bother pointing out that the crude weapons being used by the attackers might not have worked at night, since they're optically guided etc., because we got sidetracked when I started saying "War is Terrorism."
And now you know the rest of the story!
Re:EM rather than heat
on
Ant Farm PC
·
· Score: 1
(yes, i know heat is a form of EM radiation, just bear with me:P)
I think you meant to say that EM radiation is a form of heat, but I see where you're coming from.
Don't you just love the bitchy little comments you get on slashdot? I know I do!
One of the best theories I've heard to describe modern times is that we are living in a Dark Age. Of course we don't call it that overtly, but in a few hundred years the history books will describe it that way. For example, we've reduced the cost of manufacturing things so greatly that the major cost of many items is simply shipping. And, we've become so dependent on manufacturing these cheap things that we're deliberately designing them with a short lifespan to perpetuate the further manufacturing and shipping of things, which will then need to be replaced so more of them can be built. It's kind of like a virus. Or rather, has tricked our central nervous system. Now we just want to keep making things, and we've lost sight of the reason we ever started in the first place.
Anyway, I would add hunting to your list. Being able to go out to the woods and bring home free dinner for a month is a pretty awesome skill to have. And it's going to be much healthier meat than the beef or (even worse) chicken you get at the grocery store.
Just recently I learned how to cut up a whole chicken, and I will never pay $5.99 a pound for boneless skinless chicken breasts again. Plus, you can make an awesome soup from the parts of the chicken you don't use anywhere else.
Oh, and hunting comes with guns, which are pretty cool. Or, if you want to go ninja style, there's crossbows and stuff you can use. Who doesn't like crossbows?
Re:Illegitimately Underground
on
I, Spammer
·
· Score: 1
The simple truth to the matter is that these guys are underground because their business is not legitimate... They are not running a business. They're running a scam.
They should get smart and do like Enron, just tie things up in such a convoluted knot that it will take ten years to untangle it, then when Barney Fife does come sniffing around, you have already set up shop somewhere else, say in the Bush administration.
Fact is, much of "busniess" is just a "scam" to get you to buy cheap plastic crap made in China that you didn't really need in the first place. You thought you could buy "happiness," but all you did was transfer your wealth to someone who convinced you with a sexy woman, a woman who thinks that men who buy cheap plastic crap are really, reallly sexy. Mmmmm, sex!
Dude, don't use stopping spam as a good reason to keep the DMCA. Remember how pissed off we are about the DMCA? Plus, if you think back to what we learned earlier, just making it illegal won't stop it from happening. Finally, if you want this guy to languish in prison *for DMCA violations*, then I hope you feel the same way about people who watch DVDs on Linux.
Re:The solution to spam: Follow the money
on
I, Spammer
·
· Score: 1
The only real solution is to follow the money to the source.
Just out of curiosity, do you feel the same way about eradicating the drug problem? Should we focus completely on the source, and ignore the "victims" if you will?
Or maybe there's some sort of "Hi, my name is Qrlx, and I clicked on spam" program we can get up and running? To educate/rehabilitate the gullible ones and mitigate the harm to society?
The really hard thing about getting to the source, too, is what if the source is overseas, and they're not breaking any laws by sending you spam? And even if they are breaking laws, how much is the Korean law enforcement apparatus going to care about shutting down someone who's only crime is to send spam to America? Hell, those spams might even be helping the Korean economy, so then there's negative incentive for Korea to stop them.
Lies are perfectly legal; they're even protected!
on
I, Spammer
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Sadly, fraudulently representing yourself is protected speech under the First Amendment to the Constituion. The Nike case in California is the biggest test to this in a really long time.
I don't think things would be so different if corporations didn't have that right -- the actors, script writers, spammers, etc. working for corporations would still have the right to tell you lies, as individuals.
(OT TIME) What pisses me off is when the *cops* are allowed to misrepresent the truth. Like alleged sniper guy John Malvo not getting a lawyer because he asked "Do I get to see a lawyer?" and the cops said "No." Then he started singing like a bird. The judge ruled the testimony should be allowed, since Malvo didn't explicitly ASK for a lawyer -- he didn't say "Can I see a lawyer?" But it's clear from his question that his intent was to see a lawyer, and it's also quite clear that the cops knew they could play word games with him, because everyone wants this kid to fry so jurisprudence goes out the window. Hmmm I guess it does piss me off that the cops lie, but it pisses me off even more that it now has a big fat stamp of approval, at least in Virginia. What a crock -- what if someone who doesn't speak English well (Malvo perhaps) is detained and can't formulate the specific grammatically correct sentence to request a lawyer? Oh, wait, that person is probably a terrorist or illegal immigrant, nevermind.
So, I guess the overall arc of this post would be: don't come bitching about how horrible all these spammers are, they lie, hide behind secrecy etc. when that sort of behavior is exactly the same thing our legal system is doing with Malvo, and don't get me started on Ashcroft's tactics.
And, what's the fucking problem with spam in the first place. C'mon people, I have had the same HOTMAIL account for like five years, and for a LONG time my email was listed with each post on SlashDot. I still don't get that much spam, maybe five a day, and I'm not so freaking busy that I don't have the FIVE SECONDS it takes to delete them. What's that, you say? You run a mail server and the spam has got you down? Well, that's why your job is to run that mail server. If it were easy, they wouldn't have to go out and hire a specialist.
The posession of child pornography is a felony. This isn't about some guy doing something against company policy.... whether the company thinks it's OK or not is irrelevant.... it's NOT ok.
And the possesion of a single MP3 can net the company a $150,000 fine. Now, which is more relevant to the corporation: One employee carted off for kiddie porn, or a hundred MP3s that will bankrupt the entire organization when the RIAA sues for $15 million in damages?
And technically, if you have knowledge of a felony and don't report it, YOU have committed a crime, as well.
Hey, maybe those kiddie porn pictures were the legally acceptable kind, you know the ones where they've been digitally edited and no actual children were harmed in the making of said kiddie porn?
Don't bite off more than you can chew, techie. Get to the desktop, fix the problem, and be done with it. Don't go and decide who's breaking what laws, and especially don't take a sensitivie issue like that to the cops without getting some backup from management first. Simple common sense.
If you're heading out into the cube farm to fix an end user's desktop, you ought to ignore everything that's not part of the problem.
Now, if the hard drive was literally full, and the reason is that there's gigabytes of kiddie porn and no room for a temp file, then you'd be justified mentioning something. I'd probably say something like "You should delete the Candyman directory, it's taking up too much room. Is it okay if I go ahead and delete that for you?"
Unless your organization has an acceptable use policy for the computers, and unless the employees are aware that personal files on their computers are going to be audited/double-clicked on by bored techies, and unless your job description specifically states that you are to monitor for unacceptable use, then you have no business snooping around. In my experience, 1/3 of the people never install stuff without approval, 1/3 of them install RealPlayer even if you tell them not to, and the other 1/3 install RealPlayer and everything else they can click on without even realizing it because they are clueless but thankfully the tech support guys are there to clean up the mess afterwards.
Look, employees have to sit in front of these screens eight hours a day. Is it really anyone's business WHAT or HOW they decide to use their computers, so long as they are getting the job done?
And what next, after you tell on the guy with kiddie porn? Bob has too many MP3s, Larry didn't wash his hands after using the bathroom, and Alice took an extra ten minutes on her lunch break. Nobody wants to work with a person like that. Just do your job, ignore the kiddie porn, and get on with your life. I would hate to be the director of IT, and have some techie ruin my week by coming up to me and telling me that some employee has kiddie porn on his computer. This was not a problem until some n00b techie started looking at stuff he shouldn't have and had to go blabbing his big mouth about it.
Firing might seem harsh, but if someone with access to all the data in the company can't exhibit some discretion, I think it's justifiable.
Of course, kiddie porn is sooo highly illegal in this country (rules of entrapment don't apply, etc.) that the firee probably can make a strong case that the only reason he was fired is because he alerted manegement to an endemic problem within the organization. That wouldn't get him his job back, but it would be a nice payback to get the U.S. Marshalls in their seizing hard drives and restoring from tape to look for any other kiddie porn on the company LAN.
Most of the uses of this technology are benign - for example, finding multiple instances of the same individual in a given hospital's records, so that the hospital's medical records about that individual are not fragmented.
And I think this is where the problem came from in the first place. In the early days of computing, people still believed in Scientific Management, the belief that any process could be ratiocinated down to its most efficient algothirmic components.
You give the example of health care, and surely it's great that the hospital has these records -- for surely the doctors know far better than the patient the value of this information. But somewhere along the line, it became dehumanized, and you ended up with data on a Q. R. LX. and a Q R Lx and you had to write the Felligi-Sunter algorithm to piece it back together.
Think of how much simpler it might have been if you simply gave all the medical records to the patients. Let them keep a folder at home, and bring it in each time they visit the doctor. That's what I do nowadays, after X number of different jobs and Y different healthcare plans have got my personal data scattered across at least 20 different companies, more if you count eye doctors and dentists.
Why is it anyone hospital's role to steward a person's medical records? Why not just let the patients maintain their own records and kiss your HIPAA worries goodbye?
Re:Forget it -This horse is long out of the barn
on
Databases and Privacy
·
· Score: 1
can I get a job doing that? sounds like fun. And pretty easy...all those patters reminds me of "A Beautiful Mind."
Well, I really don't think that's accureate.; The riaa is woried about your gramma>??
No, as it turns out, the teeny-bopperes of america still go to the mall on wekkends, and tney gotta spend that dough somewhere.
Once upon a time, the teeny booppers will all buy macs,. and learn how easy it is, and ***GAME OVER MAN, GAME OVER*** but until then, they can still get tholse little sixteen year old9s (www.ageofconsent.com) to flirt with the cashiers at the Sam Goody and it's a done deal.
The collateral damage of this battle is the youth of today. Which side they're on depends on how many karma bombs you can drop on them.
A few years back, I worked on (replaced a failing HDD) on a fax-back system. You know, you call in, enter the number of the document you're requesting, put in your fax machine's phone number, and it faxes the document to you. You see this sort of system in the insurance/legal/medical field, anything that's very paper-intensive.
Anyway, the system was from about 1978 and it was running CP/M. That's as old-school as it gets for me. Come to think of it, I was probably writing my D&D Character Generation program on the VIC-20 around the time that fax system was installed.
Well, it seems that we should be able to get the answer with a little bit of work. So, there were 18 cases one year and 16 cases the next where the feds encountered encrypted traffic.
I would have to think that at least one of those would be coming to a federal courtroom sometime soom. Unless these are all secret wiretaps for secret hearings, which seems to be more and more common these days.
Another method would be a survey of which encryption methods are likely to be used by individuals seeking to secure their telelphonic communications. Such a survey probably already exists. We can make an educated guess that the most widely forms of encryption are represented in this (admittely tiny) sample size of 34, and assume they are broken.
Look for reports like this one from the Administrative Office of the United States Courts to be classified soon, since knowing what encryption methods the feds can crack might be used to aid terrorism!
Slashdot Mirror
I am not a robot, and I don't blindly (obediently) follow laws, especially the ones I don't agree with. For example, I speed, and I jaywalk, and so on. Nor do I turn in others who commit similar crimes. In particular, the way the law is structured regarding child pornography is, in my opinion, highly unConstitutional and uncivilized. For example, the government can run an ad in Hustler for some kiddie porn, and then when you respond, they sell you kiddie porn, then they bust you for possesion of kiddie porn. That's *wrong* regardless of whether or not it's *legal*. In my opinion, of course. Apparently that's a very clear moral line that only I can see.
So perhaps kiddie porn is a touchy issue with me, but I would probably only make mention of anything I found on a user's hard drive if it were, say, explicit plans to blow up the WTC. Porn, even kiddie porn, is never going to put me into "The Sky Is Falling!" mode.
Hmmm. I must be getting Heat and Temperature confused. Or, maybe I was thinking that the original poster was doing that.
You can hardly tell anymore that I actually took thermodynamics in college. Kinda sad, really.
No, it's just offensive on purpose... just to be offensive. I never had the ulterior motive of getting people to turn off sigs, but I like it!
It's a personal vendetta of sorts, I think. My last sig was:
By Pentagon standards, the WTC was a "dual-use" target.
Not surprisingly, that led to some debate, which culminated in a great exchange with someone who actually put me on and took me off his "friends" list over the course of our exchange. So, I figured I'd try it again. But as it turns out my new sig is just stupid. Somehow the mention of nuking all arabs doesn't pack nearly the same payload as my last one. I guess nuking arabs isn't nearly as controversial as pointing out that, had the WTC been in Iraq or Yugoslavia, it would have gotten blown up. This was actually the part that angered people, who agreed that it would have been blown up, but not during the day with thousands of people inside. I didn't bother pointing out that the crude weapons being used by the attackers might not have worked at night, since they're optically guided etc., because we got sidetracked when I started saying "War is Terrorism."
And now you know the rest of the story!
(yes, i know heat is a form of EM radiation, just bear with me :P)
I think you meant to say that EM radiation is a form of heat, but I see where you're coming from.
Don't you just love the bitchy little comments you get on slashdot? I know I do!
Plus, you can make an awesome soup from the parts of the chicken you don't use anywhere else.
No, I didn't.
Perhaps you should click the "ignore offensive sigs" button and you'll get your base back.
but there's just something more authentic about banging on a piece of machinery that's older than my grandmother.
For some reason, I can't stop laughing.
One of the best theories I've heard to describe modern times is that we are living in a Dark Age. Of course we don't call it that overtly, but in a few hundred years the history books will describe it that way. For example, we've reduced the cost of manufacturing things so greatly that the major cost of many items is simply shipping. And, we've become so dependent on manufacturing these cheap things that we're deliberately designing them with a short lifespan to perpetuate the further manufacturing and shipping of things, which will then need to be replaced so more of them can be built. It's kind of like a virus. Or rather, has tricked our central nervous system. Now we just want to keep making things, and we've lost sight of the reason we ever started in the first place.
Anyway, I would add hunting to your list. Being able to go out to the woods and bring home free dinner for a month is a pretty awesome skill to have. And it's going to be much healthier meat than the beef or (even worse) chicken you get at the grocery store.
Just recently I learned how to cut up a whole chicken, and I will never pay $5.99 a pound for boneless skinless chicken breasts again. Plus, you can make an awesome soup from the parts of the chicken you don't use anywhere else.
Oh, and hunting comes with guns, which are pretty cool. Or, if you want to go ninja style, there's crossbows and stuff you can use. Who doesn't like crossbows?
The simple truth to the matter is that these guys are underground because their business is not legitimate... They are not running a business. They're running a scam.
They should get smart and do like Enron, just tie things up in such a convoluted knot that it will take ten years to untangle it, then when Barney Fife does come sniffing around, you have already set up shop somewhere else, say in the Bush administration.
Fact is, much of "busniess" is just a "scam" to get you to buy cheap plastic crap made in China that you didn't really need in the first place. You thought you could buy "happiness," but all you did was transfer your wealth to someone who convinced you with a sexy woman, a woman who thinks that men who buy cheap plastic crap are really, reallly sexy. Mmmmm, sex!
Dude, don't use stopping spam as a good reason to keep the DMCA. Remember how pissed off we are about the DMCA? Plus, if you think back to what we learned earlier, just making it illegal won't stop it from happening. Finally, if you want this guy to languish in prison *for DMCA violations*, then I hope you feel the same way about people who watch DVDs on Linux.
The only real solution is to follow the money to the source.
Just out of curiosity, do you feel the same way about eradicating the drug problem? Should we focus completely on the source, and ignore the "victims" if you will?
Or maybe there's some sort of "Hi, my name is Qrlx, and I clicked on spam" program we can get up and running? To educate/rehabilitate the gullible ones and mitigate the harm to society?
The really hard thing about getting to the source, too, is what if the source is overseas, and they're not breaking any laws by sending you spam? And even if they are breaking laws, how much is the Korean law enforcement apparatus going to care about shutting down someone who's only crime is to send spam to America? Hell, those spams might even be helping the Korean economy, so then there's negative incentive for Korea to stop them.
Sadly, fraudulently representing yourself is protected speech under the First Amendment to the Constituion. The Nike case in California is the biggest test to this in a really long time.
I don't think things would be so different if corporations didn't have that right -- the actors, script writers, spammers, etc. working for corporations would still have the right to tell you lies, as individuals.
(OT TIME) What pisses me off is when the *cops* are allowed to misrepresent the truth. Like alleged sniper guy John Malvo not getting a lawyer because he asked "Do I get to see a lawyer?" and the cops said "No." Then he started singing like a bird. The judge ruled the testimony should be allowed, since Malvo didn't explicitly ASK for a lawyer -- he didn't say "Can I see a lawyer?" But it's clear from his question that his intent was to see a lawyer, and it's also quite clear that the cops knew they could play word games with him, because everyone wants this kid to fry so jurisprudence goes out the window. Hmmm I guess it does piss me off that the cops lie, but it pisses me off even more that it now has a big fat stamp of approval, at least in Virginia. What a crock -- what if someone who doesn't speak English well (Malvo perhaps) is detained and can't formulate the specific grammatically correct sentence to request a lawyer? Oh, wait, that person is probably a terrorist or illegal immigrant, nevermind.
So, I guess the overall arc of this post would be: don't come bitching about how horrible all these spammers are, they lie, hide behind secrecy etc. when that sort of behavior is exactly the same thing our legal system is doing with Malvo, and don't get me started on Ashcroft's tactics.
And, what's the fucking problem with spam in the first place. C'mon people, I have had the same HOTMAIL account for like five years, and for a LONG time my email was listed with each post on SlashDot. I still don't get that much spam, maybe five a day, and I'm not so freaking busy that I don't have the FIVE SECONDS it takes to delete them. What's that, you say? You run a mail server and the spam has got you down? Well, that's why your job is to run that mail server. If it were easy, they wouldn't have to go out and hire a specialist.
And don't forget to close your italics tag, either.
D'OH!
I also find it interesting that you're labelling the accused as "basically innocent"
Yeah, that's terrible how the accused have a basic presumption of innocence in our society.
Where are you from, anyway? Saudi Arabia? Edwardian England? The presumption of innocence is a freaking pillar of our society, you know?
The posession of child pornography is a felony. This isn't about some guy doing something against company policy.... whether the company thinks it's OK or not is irrelevant.... it's NOT ok.
And the possesion of a single MP3 can net the company a $150,000 fine. Now, which is more relevant to the corporation: One employee carted off for kiddie porn, or a hundred MP3s that will bankrupt the entire organization when the RIAA sues for $15 million in damages?
And technically, if you have knowledge of a felony and don't report it, YOU have committed a crime, as well.
Hey, maybe those kiddie porn pictures were the legally acceptable kind, you know the ones where they've been digitally edited and no actual children were harmed in the making of said kiddie porn?
Don't bite off more than you can chew, techie. Get to the desktop, fix the problem, and be done with it. Don't go and decide who's breaking what laws, and especially don't take a sensitivie issue like that to the cops without getting some backup from management first. Simple common sense.
he is also suggesting that when you see a crime you should not report it!
The cops must love you down at the local station house, the way you come in there dutifully to sear out a complaint each time you see someone jaywalk.
A free society, practically by definition, in no way imposes the obligation of ratting out other citizens to the authorities.
Or, to put it another way, read "The Diary of Anne Frank" and then tell me who's the coward.
If you're heading out into the cube farm to fix an end user's desktop, you ought to ignore everything that's not part of the problem.
Now, if the hard drive was literally full, and the reason is that there's gigabytes of kiddie porn and no room for a temp file, then you'd be justified mentioning something. I'd probably say something like "You should delete the Candyman directory, it's taking up too much room. Is it okay if I go ahead and delete that for you?"
Unless your organization has an acceptable use policy for the computers, and unless the employees are aware that personal files on their computers are going to be audited/double-clicked on by bored techies, and unless your job description specifically states that you are to monitor for unacceptable use, then you have no business snooping around. In my experience, 1/3 of the people never install stuff without approval, 1/3 of them install RealPlayer even if you tell them not to, and the other 1/3 install RealPlayer and everything else they can click on without even realizing it because they are clueless but thankfully the tech support guys are there to clean up the mess afterwards.
Look, employees have to sit in front of these screens eight hours a day. Is it really anyone's business WHAT or HOW they decide to use their computers, so long as they are getting the job done?
And what next, after you tell on the guy with kiddie porn? Bob has too many MP3s, Larry didn't wash his hands after using the bathroom, and Alice took an extra ten minutes on her lunch break. Nobody wants to work with a person like that. Just do your job, ignore the kiddie porn, and get on with your life. I would hate to be the director of IT, and have some techie ruin my week by coming up to me and telling me that some employee has kiddie porn on his computer. This was not a problem until some n00b techie started looking at stuff he shouldn't have and had to go blabbing his big mouth about it.
Firing might seem harsh, but if someone with access to all the data in the company can't exhibit some discretion, I think it's justifiable.
Of course, kiddie porn is sooo highly illegal in this country (rules of entrapment don't apply, etc.) that the firee probably can make a strong case that the only reason he was fired is because he alerted manegement to an endemic problem within the organization. That wouldn't get him his job back, but it would be a nice payback to get the U.S. Marshalls in their seizing hard drives and restoring from tape to look for any other kiddie porn on the company LAN.
Most of the uses of this technology are benign - for example, finding multiple instances of the same individual in a given hospital's records, so that the hospital's medical records about that individual are not fragmented.
And I think this is where the problem came from in the first place. In the early days of computing, people still believed in Scientific Management, the belief that any process could be ratiocinated down to its most efficient algothirmic components.
You give the example of health care, and surely it's great that the hospital has these records -- for surely the doctors know far better than the patient the value of this information. But somewhere along the line, it became dehumanized, and you ended up with data on a Q. R. LX. and a Q R Lx and you had to write the Felligi-Sunter algorithm to piece it back together.
Think of how much simpler it might have been if you simply gave all the medical records to the patients. Let them keep a folder at home, and bring it in each time they visit the doctor. That's what I do nowadays, after X number of different jobs and Y different healthcare plans have got my personal data scattered across at least 20 different companies, more if you count eye doctors and dentists.
Why is it anyone hospital's role to steward a person's medical records? Why not just let the patients maintain their own records and kiss your HIPAA worries goodbye?
can I get a job doing that? sounds like fun. And pretty easy...all those patters reminds me of "A Beautiful Mind."
Well, I really don't think that's accureate.; The riaa is woried about your gramma>??
No, as it turns out, the teeny-bopperes of america still go to the mall on wekkends, and tney gotta spend that dough somewhere.
Once upon a time, the teeny booppers will all buy macs,. and learn how easy it is, and ***GAME OVER MAN, GAME OVER*** but until then, they can still get tholse little sixteen year old9s (www.ageofconsent.com) to flirt with the cashiers at the Sam Goody and it's a done deal.
The collateral damage of this battle is the youth of today. Which side they're on depends on how many karma bombs you can drop on them.
Nothing in this post is original, esp. my sig.
What shoudl I call it?
And was the frisco kid a friend of yours?
Instering lots of blank linoie byecuause me yseigis too opppenfinseige
A few years back, I worked on (replaced a failing HDD) on a fax-back system. You know, you call in, enter the number of the document you're requesting, put in your fax machine's phone number, and it faxes the document to you. You see this sort of system in the insurance/legal/medical field, anything that's very paper-intensive.
Anyway, the system was from about 1978 and it was running CP/M. That's as old-school as it gets for me. Come to think of it, I was probably writing my D&D Character Generation program on the VIC-20 around the time that fax system was installed.
Well, it seems that we should be able to get the answer with a little bit of work. So, there were 18 cases one year and 16 cases the next where the feds encountered encrypted traffic.
I would have to think that at least one of those would be coming to a federal courtroom sometime soom. Unless these are all secret wiretaps for secret hearings, which seems to be more and more common these days.
Another method would be a survey of which encryption methods are likely to be used by individuals seeking to secure their telelphonic communications. Such a survey probably already exists. We can make an educated guess that the most widely forms of encryption are represented in this (admittely tiny) sample size of 34, and assume they are broken.
Look for reports like this one from the Administrative Office of the United States Courts to be classified soon, since knowing what encryption methods the feds can crack might be used to aid terrorism!
well, i thought it was +1 funny.
That's funny, because I was hacking the mac lab at CU back in 1990.