To read these comments, one would think that it looks like in a year or two the Net would be a passe, forgotten fad. One would think that it was expected that so many things would change, but that they never did, and that no lasting impact resulted.
Excuse me? Isn't that a bit strange, particularly to see it "posted" (how long ago was that word used by so many in such a way) on a website, particularly one like Slashdot? I'm typing this, and looking at words that once upon a very recent time were not in existence or used the way they currently are. "Preview," "URL," "HTML," these terms have become a part of our lives. Granted, the general population does not use them as commonly as the more tech-savvy of us do, but what about other things? How many people use IM clients? Does anyone remember how arduous it was to have a pen pal as a kid, in another country, and struggle with the mail systems as we passed letters back and forth? Now, we can chat on IRC, AOL, ICQ, or just "plain old ordinary email." Imagine that...email, high-speed "written" communication without hindrance by distance or border, now viewed as commonplace.
Okay, so the get-rich-quick people who went gaga over IPOs and whatnot perhaps got a bit misled, or did the misleading themselves, depending on who you ask. Is it not profound that such a phenomenon could take place at all? That an entire class of people could come into being, rise and then fall in plain view of the world?
The bottom line is this. Throughout time, breakthroughs in communications produce massive change, like a nitrous oxide shot into the evolutionary engine of society. Still, however, it takes time for that engine to accelerate, and the speed still carries for a time after the nitrous is no longer pumping into the engine. And, most importantly of all, even after speed returns to normal, you've still come all that way farther down the road, and your view through the windshield is no longer what it was just a short time ago. And unlike a car, there is no reverse here.
And now, as I preview this, I see the irony of ironies in what I am saying...the signature I've had all along:
I have to disagree in general with the concept behind the above post, which appears to condemn the very nature of this project. Indeed, it would be irresponsible and dishonest for the Marines (or any of the organizations pursuing "less-than-lethal" weapons technology) to represent this as a functional, proven weapon. That is not what they are doing, however. They are researching something in the hopes of coming up with a way to fight with less harm and loss of life. Yes, so far they haven't succeeded...what else is new with research? It takes patience and perseverance to make it work, that's nothing new. And what's wrong with the cause?
It may be jumping ahead a bit, but imagine this...what if NYC's "finest" were carrying something less lethal than 9mm pistols loaded with hollowpoint bullets when they confronted Amadou Diallo? Instead of a lethal horizontal rainstorm of lead, there would be sounds of "ouch! ouch!" and the matter would have been resolved without any permanent harm.
I do know that 130 degrees fahrenheit is not enough to cause significant damage, particularly in this fashion, where the heat is localized to the outer layer of skin without the surrounding air being heated. Ask any experienced firefighter...they will be quick to tell you that they have been subjected to far, far worse without becoming sterile. And yes, this does call into question the effectiveness of this weapon against the really determined...I think if someone is prone to engage in a hostage situation, they are probably determined enough to bear the pain.
Yes, and I especially love the logic where the scammers (who have the opportunity to make WAAAAY more money than just $99, based on their list of top 3 offenders) wouldn't pay to get in. Um, yeah.
I agree with the notion that Carnivore is not inherently evil, yes. Obviously, law enforcement must have the ability to perform surveillance on criminals, or people suspected of being criminal for good cause. The problem with Carnivore stems from the method in which this capacity has been implemented.
If the FBI were an entire agency made up of "RoboCop" clones, law-abiding super-ethical droids with a fanatical love of the notion that justice is blind and a good streak that makes a girl scout look like Dr. Mengele, then ok. I'd be fine with Carnivore, as it exists. But they are not. The FBI has a challenging and frustrating job, and they are human. So, from time to time, they cheat. COINTELPRO is an excellent example, one that probably predates most of the readers of Slashdot, where the FBI tagged every organization that was even remotely at odds with the current government as "subversive," and tapped/bugged/surveilled its members. The short version is that all sorts of bad naughty things happened.
Law enforcement have been known to listen in on a tap before the warrant came in authorizing them to start doing so. This, from a good person who had nonetheless admitted to doing it himself, and also admitted that such a practice is common. And yes, the taps are often put in place as soon as the REQUEST for the warrant is put in...the warrant doesn't really authorize the tap, it authorizes listening to it. Why do that? Because you can still get information that can help you, even if you must hide the fact that you had inside information in the first place. Still, the FBI does not have taps already wired into every phone line, set to easily record and collate our lives.
Carnivore, on the other hand, is a system with taps in place for everyone who sends data across the links in the USA. Carnivore does not have user-level access logging...well, it does, except that there are only a few user accounts for the entire system, so it's not logging actual users. This, of course, means there is no accountability. Furthermore, the fashion in which the FBI has handled this entire affair is frightening. Fighting, kicking and screaming into an independent review process, only to choose "independents" who are beholden to them. Refusal to disclose details of the systems...and don't try to tell me that disclosure would weaken Carnivore in some manner unless you can figure out how to easily evade tcpdump running on an unknown box somewhere (also unknown) between you and another end point. Evasion of Carnivore would be made even harder by the QoS platform (Packeteer) that is integrated into the DragonWare (aka Carnivore) suite.
One of the greatest complaints of our founding fathers was the abuses committed by governmental authorities. Our system of government has, integrated into it, safety checks against such things, out of recognition that law enforcement officers are as human, corruptible, and fallible as any of us. Here we have a situation where those checks do not carry far enough down into the day-to-day activities of the largest and most powerful law enforcement apparatus in our country.
At my last job, I worked with a person who was previously extremely high up at the DEA. (Great guy, btw...although the job didn't work out, I wished I could have taken him with me to work here too.) Remembering the fact that among the various goblins and badguys mentioned as users of crypto was "Drug Cartels," I saw the opportunity to ask someone who really knew.
You know what he said? The drug cartels are not using things like PGP or any of the other commercially available OR open-source encryption tools. It's far worse than that...they have developed their own tools, and by his account (and knowing him, it's not his opinion but that of someone who would actually be knowledgeable on the topic) they have crypto that is "ahead of anything you can buy now." They bought some talent and created their own proprietary tools.
This goes beyond the concept of "ban crypto and only criminals will have it." The criminals roll their own now.
Ah, tethal91 hits a critical point. The notion of "winners" and "losers" comes from the competition...after all, if you don't have a winner, how can you have competition? The sim games are not competitive in the normal sense; there is no other entity or "enemy" in any sense, figurative or otherwise. There cannot possibly be competition because there is only one person playing. The problem is that as soon as you have multiple people involved in a game, even if they are on the same team, you still end up with the sort of social behavior that creates competition.
Expand the notion out to a business for a moment, and imagine that the business is a legal monopoly to remove the concept of competing enterprises. Everyone is on the same team with the same larger goal, right? Obviously, yes. But does that mean that nobody competes? There are no office politics, no posturing for position, no desire to advance (and therefore compete against others who advance towards the limited number of higher positions)? Of course not. At some point, human nature enters the picture, and while a zero-sum game may be an exaggeration of the competitive nature that has been so critical to our evolution, there will always have to be a winner and a loser when multiple people are involved.
I think a non-zero-sum game is possible, but I doubt highly that it would be widely accepted. I genuinely believe that competition is human nature and that if the rules work sufficiently well that people are interacting without being able to compete, they will neither enjoy it nor feel at ease with it.
If they go through with this insane notion, I will just be watching and waiting for the first lawsuit. At some point a machine with the current version (or recent version with an undisclosed security flaw) will be hacked, and ISC will immediately be held liable for this. I really do not see how being an operator of a TLD makes someone more worthy with respect to vulnerabilities in BIND. It sure as hell isn't like they're the only ones who use it.
I can think of moral arguments, legal arguments (and I'm not even a lawyer, heh) and even cite Jewish rabbinical law (and I'm not even a Rabbi, heh..but check out "hashevat aveda" and "meshiv shelo b'daat baalim" if you're so inclined) as to why this is bad. If they manage to do this, ISC will be roasted for restricting public access to information that, predictably, will be discovered and exploited by some guy in a garage or bedroom with a cable modem.
At one point in history, two armies faced each other. One had a new ranged weapon, the bow, while the other did not. In time, however, everyone implemented the bow in war, and there were even different levels of prowess both in designing them and in using them. The fact that you could attack an enemy without actually walking up to them changed tactics forever. And this evolutionary jump in warfare has been seen repeatedly, with the advent of such things as heavy cavalry, siege weapons, mechanized infantry and armor, and the incorporation of airborne vehicles in combat.
Now, the new technologies of satellite imagery and real-time communications throughout the entire depth of the battlefield are changing war. We may be the first to the battlefield with the new 21st century "bow," but just as with any other weapon, the trend will be that any nation with sufficient resources will implement this technology to the best of their ability. It won't matter that this country or that country doesn't have their own powerful tech industry to fuel the drive for this; just look at how Iraq is working to circumvent the ban on high-end computer imports by (probably) using Playstation 2 consoles to achieve their goals. And just as it has been in the past, when both armies have archers, at certain points in time it will only make clear sense to "kill their archers." This country has been working on the technology to do this since the early 80s at the very least, even designing a sat-killer missile that can be launched from under the wing of an F-15 at high altitude. There can be no doubt that this form of war will be developed and very real in the next few decades.
Your point is valid in the context you envision, but the implementation of filtering software has been a different matter. Nobody states that children should be permitted to view porn or other things that are so obviously inappropriate for minors.
The problem is that filtering software also incorporates sites and even entire themes that extend past blocking "www.bigcelebrityknockers.com" towards sites that are arguably not inappropriate. For instance, how about a website about breast cancer? Might be a great way to circumvent the restrictions, after all...one man's medical journal is another kid's porn, right?
I don't mean to demonize the companies that make this software. After all, the pressure is on them to cast their net extremely wide so that they don't miss anything, and so they do, for many reasons. One, there's the numbers game relating to how many sites are in everyone's database. On top of that, parents are understandably emotional about the whole issue, so woe to the company whose software refuses to block what some super-tightassed parent thinks is "offensive". The problem is that there is no option to determine just what is in the blocking lists; I seem to remember a company suing an individual for developing software that enabled and end user to read the blocked list. I just can't feel good about a program that takes my willingness to block certain kinds of information in extreme circumstances and expand upon it without telling me exactly what it is doing.
This is ridiculous. Even overriding all other aspects of this concept, how is an artillery shell going to be able to release that much wattage at once? Billions of watts? And let's not forget that artillery shells are not like cell phones; you can't just keep one warm in a desktop charger to be all nice and ready to go until you have to grab it on your way out the door to go blow someone into the "sticks and stones" era. Not only would the shell neet to store far more electrical power than current technology can even imagine, it would also have to have a long shelf life. If this shell has been built, I'd love to be able to power my laptop with the battery from it...imagine what a breakthrough THAT would be!
Slashdot Mirror
To read these comments, one would think that it looks like in a year or two the Net would be a passe, forgotten fad. One would think that it was expected that so many things would change, but that they never did, and that no lasting impact resulted.
Excuse me? Isn't that a bit strange, particularly to see it "posted" (how long ago was that word used by so many in such a way) on a website, particularly one like Slashdot? I'm typing this, and looking at words that once upon a very recent time were not in existence or used the way they currently are. "Preview," "URL," "HTML," these terms have become a part of our lives. Granted, the general population does not use them as commonly as the more tech-savvy of us do, but what about other things? How many people use IM clients? Does anyone remember how arduous it was to have a pen pal as a kid, in another country, and struggle with the mail systems as we passed letters back and forth? Now, we can chat on IRC, AOL, ICQ, or just "plain old ordinary email." Imagine that...email, high-speed "written" communication without hindrance by distance or border, now viewed as commonplace.
Okay, so the get-rich-quick people who went gaga over IPOs and whatnot perhaps got a bit misled, or did the misleading themselves, depending on who you ask. Is it not profound that such a phenomenon could take place at all? That an entire class of people could come into being, rise and then fall in plain view of the world?
The bottom line is this. Throughout time, breakthroughs in communications produce massive change, like a nitrous oxide shot into the evolutionary engine of society. Still, however, it takes time for that engine to accelerate, and the speed still carries for a time after the nitrous is no longer pumping into the engine. And, most importantly of all, even after speed returns to normal, you've still come all that way farther down the road, and your view through the windshield is no longer what it was just a short time ago. And unlike a car, there is no reverse here.
And now, as I preview this, I see the irony of ironies in what I am saying...the signature I've had all along:
I have to disagree in general with the concept behind the above post, which appears to condemn the very nature of this project. Indeed, it would be irresponsible and dishonest for the Marines (or any of the organizations pursuing "less-than-lethal" weapons technology) to represent this as a functional, proven weapon. That is not what they are doing, however. They are researching something in the hopes of coming up with a way to fight with less harm and loss of life. Yes, so far they haven't succeeded...what else is new with research? It takes patience and perseverance to make it work, that's nothing new. And what's wrong with the cause?
It may be jumping ahead a bit, but imagine this...what if NYC's "finest" were carrying something less lethal than 9mm pistols loaded with hollowpoint bullets when they confronted Amadou Diallo? Instead of a lethal horizontal rainstorm of lead, there would be sounds of "ouch! ouch!" and the matter would have been resolved without any permanent harm.
I do know that 130 degrees fahrenheit is not enough to cause significant damage, particularly in this fashion, where the heat is localized to the outer layer of skin without the surrounding air being heated. Ask any experienced firefighter...they will be quick to tell you that they have been subjected to far, far worse without becoming sterile. And yes, this does call into question the effectiveness of this weapon against the really determined...I think if someone is prone to engage in a hostage situation, they are probably determined enough to bear the pain.
Yes, and I especially love the logic where the scammers (who have the opportunity to make WAAAAY more money than just $99, based on their list of top 3 offenders) wouldn't pay to get in. Um, yeah.
I agree with the notion that Carnivore is not inherently evil, yes. Obviously, law enforcement must have the ability to perform surveillance on criminals, or people suspected of being criminal for good cause. The problem with Carnivore stems from the method in which this capacity has been implemented.
If the FBI were an entire agency made up of "RoboCop" clones, law-abiding super-ethical droids with a fanatical love of the notion that justice is blind and a good streak that makes a girl scout look like Dr. Mengele, then ok. I'd be fine with Carnivore, as it exists. But they are not. The FBI has a challenging and frustrating job, and they are human. So, from time to time, they cheat. COINTELPRO is an excellent example, one that probably predates most of the readers of Slashdot, where the FBI tagged every organization that was even remotely at odds with the current government as "subversive," and tapped/bugged/surveilled its members. The short version is that all sorts of bad naughty things happened.
Law enforcement have been known to listen in on a tap before the warrant came in authorizing them to start doing so. This, from a good person who had nonetheless admitted to doing it himself, and also admitted that such a practice is common. And yes, the taps are often put in place as soon as the REQUEST for the warrant is put in...the warrant doesn't really authorize the tap, it authorizes listening to it. Why do that? Because you can still get information that can help you, even if you must hide the fact that you had inside information in the first place. Still, the FBI does not have taps already wired into every phone line, set to easily record and collate our lives.
Carnivore, on the other hand, is a system with taps in place for everyone who sends data across the links in the USA. Carnivore does not have user-level access logging...well, it does, except that there are only a few user accounts for the entire system, so it's not logging actual users. This, of course, means there is no accountability. Furthermore, the fashion in which the FBI has handled this entire affair is frightening. Fighting, kicking and screaming into an independent review process, only to choose "independents" who are beholden to them. Refusal to disclose details of the systems...and don't try to tell me that disclosure would weaken Carnivore in some manner unless you can figure out how to easily evade tcpdump running on an unknown box somewhere (also unknown) between you and another end point. Evasion of Carnivore would be made even harder by the QoS platform (Packeteer) that is integrated into the DragonWare (aka Carnivore) suite.
One of the greatest complaints of our founding fathers was the abuses committed by governmental authorities. Our system of government has, integrated into it, safety checks against such things, out of recognition that law enforcement officers are as human, corruptible, and fallible as any of us. Here we have a situation where those checks do not carry far enough down into the day-to-day activities of the largest and most powerful law enforcement apparatus in our country.
At my last job, I worked with a person who was previously extremely high up at the DEA. (Great guy, btw...although the job didn't work out, I wished I could have taken him with me to work here too.) Remembering the fact that among the various goblins and badguys mentioned as users of crypto was "Drug Cartels," I saw the opportunity to ask someone who really knew.
You know what he said? The drug cartels are not using things like PGP or any of the other commercially available OR open-source encryption tools. It's far worse than that...they have developed their own tools, and by his account (and knowing him, it's not his opinion but that of someone who would actually be knowledgeable on the topic) they have crypto that is "ahead of anything you can buy now." They bought some talent and created their own proprietary tools.
This goes beyond the concept of "ban crypto and only criminals will have it." The criminals roll their own now.
Ah, tethal91 hits a critical point. The notion of "winners" and "losers" comes from the competition...after all, if you don't have a winner, how can you have competition? The sim games are not competitive in the normal sense; there is no other entity or "enemy" in any sense, figurative or otherwise. There cannot possibly be competition because there is only one person playing. The problem is that as soon as you have multiple people involved in a game, even if they are on the same team, you still end up with the sort of social behavior that creates competition.
Expand the notion out to a business for a moment, and imagine that the business is a legal monopoly to remove the concept of competing enterprises. Everyone is on the same team with the same larger goal, right? Obviously, yes. But does that mean that nobody competes? There are no office politics, no posturing for position, no desire to advance (and therefore compete against others who advance towards the limited number of higher positions)? Of course not. At some point, human nature enters the picture, and while a zero-sum game may be an exaggeration of the competitive nature that has been so critical to our evolution, there will always have to be a winner and a loser when multiple people are involved.
I think a non-zero-sum game is possible, but I doubt highly that it would be widely accepted. I genuinely believe that competition is human nature and that if the rules work sufficiently well that people are interacting without being able to compete, they will neither enjoy it nor feel at ease with it.
If they go through with this insane notion, I will just be watching and waiting for the first lawsuit. At some point a machine with the current version (or recent version with an undisclosed security flaw) will be hacked, and ISC will immediately be held liable for this. I really do not see how being an operator of a TLD makes someone more worthy with respect to vulnerabilities in BIND. It sure as hell isn't like they're the only ones who use it.
I can think of moral arguments, legal arguments (and I'm not even a lawyer, heh) and even cite Jewish rabbinical law (and I'm not even a Rabbi, heh..but check out "hashevat aveda" and "meshiv shelo b'daat baalim" if you're so inclined) as to why this is bad. If they manage to do this, ISC will be roasted for restricting public access to information that, predictably, will be discovered and exploited by some guy in a garage or bedroom with a cable modem.At one point in history, two armies faced each other. One had a new ranged weapon, the bow, while the other did not. In time, however, everyone implemented the bow in war, and there were even different levels of prowess both in designing them and in using them. The fact that you could attack an enemy without actually walking up to them changed tactics forever. And this evolutionary jump in warfare has been seen repeatedly, with the advent of such things as heavy cavalry, siege weapons, mechanized infantry and armor, and the incorporation of airborne vehicles in combat.
Now, the new technologies of satellite imagery and real-time communications throughout the entire depth of the battlefield are changing war. We may be the first to the battlefield with the new 21st century "bow," but just as with any other weapon, the trend will be that any nation with sufficient resources will implement this technology to the best of their ability. It won't matter that this country or that country doesn't have their own powerful tech industry to fuel the drive for this; just look at how Iraq is working to circumvent the ban on high-end computer imports by (probably) using Playstation 2 consoles to achieve their goals. And just as it has been in the past, when both armies have archers, at certain points in time it will only make clear sense to "kill their archers." This country has been working on the technology to do this since the early 80s at the very least, even designing a sat-killer missile that can be launched from under the wing of an F-15 at high altitude. There can be no doubt that this form of war will be developed and very real in the next few decades.
No, no, no...if you're thinking about the people who'd have to put a gun down to have a free hand to turn the pages, THAT's the high school student...
Your point is valid in the context you envision, but the implementation of filtering software has been a different matter. Nobody states that children should be permitted to view porn or other things that are so obviously inappropriate for minors.
The problem is that filtering software also incorporates sites and even entire themes that extend past blocking "www.bigcelebrityknockers.com" towards sites that are arguably not inappropriate. For instance, how about a website about breast cancer? Might be a great way to circumvent the restrictions, after all...one man's medical journal is another kid's porn, right?
I don't mean to demonize the companies that make this software. After all, the pressure is on them to cast their net extremely wide so that they don't miss anything, and so they do, for many reasons. One, there's the numbers game relating to how many sites are in everyone's database. On top of that, parents are understandably emotional about the whole issue, so woe to the company whose software refuses to block what some super-tightassed parent thinks is "offensive". The problem is that there is no option to determine just what is in the blocking lists; I seem to remember a company suing an individual for developing software that enabled and end user to read the blocked list. I just can't feel good about a program that takes my willingness to block certain kinds of information in extreme circumstances and expand upon it without telling me exactly what it is doing.
This is ridiculous. Even overriding all other aspects of this concept, how is an artillery shell going to be able to release that much wattage at once? Billions of watts? And let's not forget that artillery shells are not like cell phones; you can't just keep one warm in a desktop charger to be all nice and ready to go until you have to grab it on your way out the door to go blow someone into the "sticks and stones" era. Not only would the shell neet to store far more electrical power than current technology can even imagine, it would also have to have a long shelf life. If this shell has been built, I'd love to be able to power my laptop with the battery from it...imagine what a breakthrough THAT would be!