The constitution does not grant rights. Rights are inalienable. If the constitution contained a clause that said you didn't have a right of privacy, then it would be wrong and we would fix it.
But amendment IV of the constitution is actually pretty clear on this point:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
I'd say email counts as ones "papers" in this context. The police need a warent to track it, and that shall not be violated.
Now the common carrier I use to send my papers might have some right to do traffic analysis,
but the police have no right to do so without a court order. They certainly can not force my ISP to turn over such records, or impose on my ISP in any way, without a court order.
Warents aren't that hard to get. All that is necessary is to convince a judge that you have
probable cause to believe the person is involved in something illegal. The fact the law enforcement is trying to remove this requirement make me wonder why. Are investigations so poor that they don't even withstand that tiny amount of scrutiny?
National ID cards (in the US, replacing the mishmash of Social Security, Driver's License, Military ID, blah blah) are actually a privacy enhancing thing, if backed up by the proper regulations.
No they aren't.
Privacy means keeping information private.
The easier it is to obtain information about you,
the less privacy you have.
ID cards make it much easier to obtain information about the holder,
therefore they reduce that individuals privacy.
That ID cards reduce privacy shouldn't even be in question,
and I'm saddened that so many/.ers missed this fundamental point.
Now it may be that some decent legislation to protect the distribution
of personal information is in order, and that legislation might even be
powerful enough to more than offset the loss of privacy an ID card entails,
but we'd be even better off if the laws were passed and the ID cards weren't issued.
If you're interested in maintaining your freedom, then say the following
out loud: "ID cards are a bad idea." Get your friends to say
"ID cards are a bad idea" too. And write to your congressman and
tell him "ID cards are a bad idea" as well.
From reading the article, it seems the questions asked weren't "Do you support anti-crypto?" but instead "Do you think anti-crypto would help catch terrorists?"
Of COURSE anti-crypto has a chance of helping catch terrorists...
It's not that obvious to me. What sort of encryption are they supposed to have used anyway?
It's not an unacceptable tradeoff between the forth amendment and security, it's just a power grab by the intelligence community with no benefits to the citizens of the U.S. at all.
Does spam work? Probably.
If spammers can buy bandwidth for less than $10 a Gigabyte, and the average spam size is 10K,
Then they can send 10,000 spams for a dollar.
If a sale is worth $10, then they only need better than a 1 in 100,000 positive response rate to be profitable.
Those figures are high. A well written piece of spaming code could do 10 - 20 times that, which lowers the needed response rate to 1 in 1,000,000.
It's tempting to try and change this. Suppose for example, ISPs charged 1 penny for each SMTP connection initiated by an account. Then a spammer would need a 1 in 1,000 positive response rate to make money. This would probably eliminate most of the true scams and pathetic offers, but doing so would make spam more "legitimate." As the stigmata of spam wore off, the same companies that are sending you junk mail now would start sending you spam (junk mail already costs more than 10 cents)
There's really only one sure way to stop spam - higher someone else to read your email, and delete all the stuff you don't want.
To further define At-Large membership, the ALSC recommends the following:
Each individual who holds a domain name be given the option of becoming an At-Large member and paying a membership fee;
Individuals who hold multiple domain names are eligible for one At-Large membership (and one vote in an At-Large election);
Entities, such as ISPs, that may conduct batch registrations should be asked to alert the domain name holder of the opportunity to become and At-Large member; and
To further focus At-Large membership on individual domain name holders, sub-registrations should be ineligible.
ICANN already gets several million dollars a year in funding, and now it wants more. This particular tax would be attached to domain registration, raising the price of that even higher. And what do I get for this extra money? Less representation.
Personally, I'd like to see ICANN actually do something before I give them even more money. The Open Root Server Confederation looks better every day.
Funny, I didn't see the word "repeater" mentioned anywhere in the article, or any actual dollar amounts. A less trusting person than myself might assume that you didn't read the article.
Maybe I'm trolling a bit, but somehow I find it a bit hard to swallow that science is so all fired important. Sure, some professions need to know a lot about it, but most people can get along fine without. Hell, most people would survive thinking that heavy things fall faster than light things in a vacuum, vacuums being somewhat uncommon here on earth. I suggest that the "problem" here is the perception that a major change in education system is needed.
The reason trademark holders win the vast majority of these domain name disputes couldn't possibly be because they deserve the name and the current holder has no reason other than cybersquatting to have it...could it?
Of course not, because if it were, then a group of three wouldn't decide differently than a group of one, as was clearly explained in the article.
Rendering a movie at 320 x 240 or 640 x 480 is much easier than rendering it at the resolution and size of a movie theater's screen. If the Quadro was rendering the movie at 100 x 75 pixels, all this doesn't mean much.
Yeah, they're probably only really rendering a 1000 times faster, instead of the 13,500 implied by the math (when done correctly) or the 100,000 times faster claimed by the Yahoo article. I mean, who can get excited by a mere 3 orders of magnitude improvement?
Hmmm....
It should be fairly simple to make a program which randomly picks one of two formats at N second intervals (with a minor pause between "switches") and let's you vote better/worse/same. I think we could trust the computer to be unbiased even though it "knows" which stream is playing, and accept this single blind test.
There have been many suggested responses, in approximate order of grayness;
Do nothing.
Send email to any system that probes yours.
Provide a patch, and make it as easy to download and install.
Have a bot send email to any system that probes yours.
Provide a web page that activates a bot that exploits and patches a system.
Have a bot exploit and patch any system that probes yours.
Have a bot exploit any system that probes yours, and patch it with the bot.
Actively search out infected systems and patch them.
Actively search out infected systems and patch them with something that
actively searches for systems.
Write an even more virulent worm that patches systems.
I feel that arguing the current legality of the above options is meaningless.
The question is, which of the above is the right thing to do. Once it's
decided what the right thing is, then we can change the law to make
that legal.
Personally, I would be opposed to anything past 6, as they all involve
unlimited expansion, and thus are potentially more harmful than the worm
they are stopping. Below 5, I think is ok, although 4 does have some
potential for harm. As long as the bot is properly limited to, say,
one email per infected system
per week, then I think the response is justified.
5 is curious - it does involve cracking the infected system,
but theoretically only at the behest of those who are infected.
There is, however, a potential for abuse - you could spoof a request,
and trick it into patching a different server. However, someone would
have to actively choose to spoof it, so it effectively is no different
than the spoofers running the exploit themselves. I.e. you've made it a tiny
bit easier for them to do it, but didn't actually initiate the action.
6 is onerous. It does involve cracking a system - but it's a system
that is "attacking" you, and potentially others as well. I would rate
it about the same as cold cocking someone who's been drugged,
and is now running around swinging at everyone they see.
I'm nervous about the idea of vigilante cracking, though - too much potential
for abuse.
Perhaps a compromise between this and 4 above - have someone "trusted"
set up a cracker/patcher that only patches servers that are reported to it,
and which it also agrees are infected and dangerous.
Sort of like calling the net-cops on the server.
mp3 isn't going to die overnight, and I'm sure a lot of people will be sticking with it long term. - I certainly wouldn't re-rip my entire library of CDs to.ogg, even if my Neo jukebox played them. But new products will probably include Ogg, because if you're going to include.wav,.aiff,.raw,.mp3, and.wma support, why not include.ogg as well?
So the key question as I see it, is "how quickly will Ogg improve?" MP3 and to a lessor extent, WMA, are supported by a single organization - any improvements to them will come from those organizations only. Ogg is faif (free as in freedom.) That means Ogg has the potential for
improvement from many different places at once.
You don't have to be much better to win - but you do have to be noticably better. So far, Ogg isn't, but I expect that to change this year.
While I'm not sure that releasing him is the correct strategy, I think they should give him a bail hearing, let him speak to his consulate, and generally, obey the law they are claiming to represent. If they aren't willing to play by the rules, I don't see how they can expect anyone else to do so.
Microsoft makes a product, Microsoft charges some amount of money for said product. If you don't like the product, or the way it is produced, then don't buy it.
Nope, sorry but that just doesn't work. (let the stoning begin)
Operating systems are more like fax machines than bread. I.e. it's hard to imagine what incompatible bread would be, much less how it would effect anyone besides the purchaser, but an incompatible fax would be a problem for everyone who owns a fax machine - even people without incompatible brands. In the case of Microsoft, they aren't just selling something incompatible, they are actually making it incompatible after the fact.
What's more, Microsoft actually does have some power to force us to buy their browser, simply by being the biggest OS. If all they did was suceed by suceeding, then it wouldn't be so bad. But they are trying to destroy the competition in ways that are illegal. This isn't the first time they've been found guilty of violating law, and unless the courts apply a structuaral remedy of some sort,it probably won't be the last. Not buying the product isn't enough, because Microsoft is messing with the alternatives.
The usual reply is that I'm paying for it instead of the spammer.
This is of course, bullshit.
Email is so cheap, that for most people the costs of throwing away the junk mail they receive is greater than the cost of downloading the spam. If you figure bandwidth at $10 / gigabyte, which is very high, then a 10K email costs a hundreth of a penny.
The true cost of spam is the time wasted reading the crap. And if people weren't up in arms about it, there would be a lot more of it in your email box. It's sort of like flaming people for bad posts on usenet - it's not that the posts/spam is so bad, it's that if we don't do it, they'll just get worse and worse.
Checksums don't work very well, but with a few refinements, you can produce a system that's just like the already existing brightmail
which does.
The problem with public versions of spam filters, is that spammers have access to the data too, and can tailor spam to pass much more quickly than you can tailor the filters to stop them.
Open relays mainly exist because of legacy. Once upon a time we needed them, because most systems weren't connected 24/7, and just routing traffic was a major issue. That changed once TCP/IP became the norm, but relays were still necessary for the transition phase. Even today, there are still people who's mailboxes aren't connected 24/7 that require a relay service, though they are definitely a minority.
Sadly, relays are still needed today because of spam blockers. A depressing number of sites require that email come from the "correct" IP address (your From: address must have the same MX record as your IP address) which means your ISP must maintain a relay for your use, though it doesn't have to be an "open" relay.
With most ISPs, it's easy to bipass relays and send email directly to port 25 on the target machine, so blocking open relays wouldn't help much, it would just push the problem back one step.
I still remember the first time I discovered my employer was opening mail addressed to me, and in most cases, not bothering to forward it to me, but of course most of it was junk anyway so it really was quite the time saver not to be bothered with that personal stuff at work. And monitoring the phone calls was a good way to insure I wasn't exposed to dangerous head-hunters, or time-sucking medical appointments. The camera in the locker room helps prevent theft of course, and only a fool would consider the contents of his work locker his property - after all, the company pays for the locker, not you.
And all the patentable ideas thought up while working at the company naturally belong to the company too, after all, why pay people if you're not entiled to every good idea they have? So this whole email privacy thing is clearly a no brainer - I should no more expect to keep it private, than phone calls from my doctor, letters from my wife, the contents of my locker, or the thoughts in my head.
...But it doesn't hurt to obscure things sometimes just to make it tougher for your attacker
Obscurity can hurt you.
Obscurity makes it harder for the black hats, but it also makes it harder for white hats as well.
Obscurity means you miss out on a lot of important feedback. If you've ever received a "I notice you're running an old version of a service with a known security hole" message,
then you know what I mean.
Obscurity is bad. There may be some good parts to it, but on the whole the bad parts far outweigh the good. (Yes, I read the original article, I'm claiming that it's wrong)
So let's get this straight: Verisign charges 5 times more than other registrars do....
Um... no
NetworkSolutions charges $35 a year, which is between 1.5 and 3.5 times what most others charge
(if you want to comparison shop, check out
http://www.internic.com/regist.html)
$7 per year is not very likely, since
all registrars still have to pay Network Solutions $6
per name. (as per http://www.icann.org/nsi/nsi-rla-04nov99.htm sec. 5.2 b)
Personally, I think $1 per year per domain name would be far more appropriate.
I think these allegations of slamming are just a red herring - notice they do not mention which registrars are supposedly slamming. You'd think that some of them would at least have a different percentage of slams, even if they were all corrupt.
If memory serves me correctly, programs like CDParanoia already interpolate across unreadable samples when ripping a CD. It s
eems simple enough to check for "obviously" bogus samples and weed them out. Viola - end of copy protection.
OK, now someone who knows what the real deal is can explain to me why this argument is complete hogwash:-).
You can only interpolate across sectors that you can identify as bad.
If the sector reads correctly, but the error correction says it's bad,
then most players will "correct" it anyway, while most computers will
read the sector as OK. In other words, CDParanoia won't realize it's
an obviously bogus sample. And it doesn't have to be white noise,
it could be a click, pop, or even a sour note.
IF you had access to the raw data as it came off the head,
then silliness like this would be a minor software upgrade -
but the average consumer doesn't have access to the raw data,
and has to make do with the "corrected" data. Personally,
I want the raw bits, or rather, I want the option to
get them raw. I can do my own processing, thanks.
Overall, I'd say this is even more doomed than Macrovision
was - it makes the music sound worse, (even if only a little)
it doesn't stop anyone from distributing copies once they
make that first one, and it prevents users from making personal copies
for download into their RIO, unless they pirate them.
i.e.
I only download music I already own - I wouldn't do it if I could make
a copy for myself...
Slashdot Mirror
The constitution does not grant rights. Rights are inalienable. If the constitution contained a clause that said you didn't have a right of privacy, then it would be wrong and we would fix it.
But amendment IV of the constitution is actually pretty clear on this point:
I'd say email counts as ones "papers" in this context. The police need a warent to track it, and that shall not be violated.
Now the common carrier I use to send my papers might have some right to do traffic analysis,
but the police have no right to do so without a court order. They certainly can not force my ISP to turn over such records, or impose on my ISP in any way, without a court order.
Warents aren't that hard to get. All that is necessary is to convince a judge that you have
probable cause to believe the person is involved in something illegal. The fact the law enforcement is trying to remove this requirement make me wonder why. Are investigations so poor that they don't even withstand that tiny amount of scrutiny?
It won't work then, since I am not a moral person.
Privacy means keeping information private. /.ers missed this fundamental point.
The easier it is to obtain information about you,
the less privacy you have.
ID cards make it much easier to obtain information about the holder,
therefore they reduce that individuals privacy.
That ID cards reduce privacy shouldn't even be in question,
and I'm saddened that so many
Now it may be that some decent legislation to protect the distribution of personal information is in order, and that legislation might even be powerful enough to more than offset the loss of privacy an ID card entails, but we'd be even better off if the laws were passed and the ID cards weren't issued.
If you're interested in maintaining your freedom, then say the following out loud: "ID cards are a bad idea." Get your friends to say "ID cards are a bad idea" too. And write to your congressman and tell him "ID cards are a bad idea" as well.
Crypto backdoors sound good,
No they don't.
Of COURSE anti-crypto has a chance of helping catch terrorists...
It's not that obvious to me. What sort of encryption are they supposed to have used anyway?
It's not an unacceptable tradeoff between the forth amendment and security, it's just a power grab by the intelligence community with no benefits to the citizens of the U.S. at all.
If spammers can buy bandwidth for less than $10 a Gigabyte, and the average spam size is 10K, Then they can send 10,000 spams for a dollar. If a sale is worth $10, then they only need better than a 1 in 100,000 positive response rate to be profitable. Those figures are high. A well written piece of spaming code could do 10 - 20 times that, which lowers the needed response rate to 1 in 1,000,000.
It's tempting to try and change this. Suppose for example, ISPs charged 1 penny for each SMTP connection initiated by an account. Then a spammer would need a 1 in 1,000 positive response rate to make money. This would probably eliminate most of the true scams and pathetic offers, but doing so would make spam more "legitimate." As the stigmata of spam wore off, the same companies that are sending you junk mail now would start sending you spam (junk mail already costs more than 10 cents)
There's really only one sure way to stop spam - higher someone else to read your email, and delete all the stuff you don't want.
ICANN already gets several million dollars a year in funding, and now it wants more. This particular tax would be attached to domain registration, raising the price of that even higher. And what do I get for this extra money? Less representation.
Personally, I'd like to see ICANN actually do something before I give them even more money. The Open Root Server Confederation looks better every day.
Funny, I didn't see the word "repeater" mentioned anywhere in the article, or any actual dollar amounts. A less trusting person than myself might assume that you didn't read the article.
Maybe I'm trolling a bit, but somehow I find it a bit hard to swallow that science is so all fired important. Sure, some professions need to know a lot about it, but most people can get along fine without. Hell, most people would survive thinking that heavy things fall faster than light things in a vacuum, vacuums being somewhat uncommon here on earth. I suggest that the "problem" here is the perception that a major change in education system is needed.
Of course not, because if it were, then a group of three wouldn't decide differently than a group of one,
as was clearly explained in the article.
Yeah, they're probably only really rendering a 1000 times faster, instead of the 13,500 implied by the math (when done correctly) or the 100,000 times faster claimed by the Yahoo article. I mean, who can get excited by a mere 3 orders of magnitude improvement?
It should be fairly simple to make a program which randomly picks one of two formats at N second intervals (with a minor pause between "switches") and let's you vote better/worse/same. I think we could trust the computer to be unbiased even though it "knows" which stream is playing, and accept this single blind test.
There have been many suggested responses, in approximate order of grayness;
- Do nothing.
- Send email to any system that probes yours.
- Provide a patch, and make it as easy to download and install.
- Have a bot send email to any system that probes yours.
- Provide a web page that activates a bot that exploits and patches a system.
- Have a bot exploit and patch any system that probes yours.
- Have a bot exploit any system that probes yours, and patch it with the bot.
- Actively search out infected systems and patch them.
- Actively search out infected systems and patch them with something that
actively searches for systems.
- Write an even more virulent worm that patches systems.
I feel that arguing the current legality of the above options is meaningless. The question is, which of the above is the right thing to do. Once it's decided what the right thing is, then we can change the law to make that legal.Personally, I would be opposed to anything past 6, as they all involve unlimited expansion, and thus are potentially more harmful than the worm they are stopping. Below 5, I think is ok, although 4 does have some potential for harm. As long as the bot is properly limited to, say, one email per infected system per week, then I think the response is justified.
5 is curious - it does involve cracking the infected system, but theoretically only at the behest of those who are infected. There is, however, a potential for abuse - you could spoof a request, and trick it into patching a different server. However, someone would have to actively choose to spoof it, so it effectively is no different than the spoofers running the exploit themselves. I.e. you've made it a tiny bit easier for them to do it, but didn't actually initiate the action.
6 is onerous. It does involve cracking a system - but it's a system that is "attacking" you, and potentially others as well. I would rate it about the same as cold cocking someone who's been drugged, and is now running around swinging at everyone they see. I'm nervous about the idea of vigilante cracking, though - too much potential for abuse. Perhaps a compromise between this and 4 above - have someone "trusted" set up a cracker/patcher that only patches servers that are reported to it, and which it also agrees are infected and dangerous. Sort of like calling the net-cops on the server.
Nope, sorry but that just doesn't work. (let the stoning begin)
Operating systems are more like fax machines than bread. I.e. it's hard to imagine what incompatible bread would be, much less how it would effect anyone besides the purchaser, but an incompatible fax would be a problem for everyone who owns a fax machine - even people without incompatible brands. In the case of Microsoft, they aren't just selling something incompatible, they are actually making it incompatible after the fact.
What's more, Microsoft actually does have some power to force us to buy their browser, simply by being the biggest OS. If all they did was suceed by suceeding, then it wouldn't be so bad. But they are trying to destroy the competition in ways that are illegal. This isn't the first time they've been found guilty of violating law, and unless the courts apply a structuaral remedy of some sort,it probably won't be the last. Not buying the product isn't enough, because Microsoft is messing with the alternatives.
This is of course, bullshit.
Email is so cheap, that for most people the costs of throwing away the junk mail they receive is greater than the cost of downloading the spam. If you figure bandwidth at $10 / gigabyte, which is very high, then a 10K email costs a hundreth of a penny.
The true cost of spam is the time wasted reading the crap. And if people weren't up in arms about it, there would be a lot more of it in your email box. It's sort of like flaming people for bad posts on usenet - it's not that the posts/spam is so bad, it's that if we don't do it, they'll just get worse and worse.
The problem with public versions of spam filters, is that spammers have access to the data too, and can tailor spam to pass much more quickly than you can tailor the filters to stop them.
Sadly, relays are still needed today because of spam blockers. A depressing number of sites require that email come from the "correct" IP address (your From: address must have the same MX record as your IP address) which means your ISP must maintain a relay for your use, though it doesn't have to be an "open" relay.
With most ISPs, it's easy to bipass relays and send email directly to port 25 on the target machine, so blocking open relays wouldn't help much, it would just push the problem back one step.
Obscurity can hurt you.
Obscurity makes it harder for the black hats, but it also makes it harder for white hats as well. Obscurity means you miss out on a lot of important feedback. If you've ever received a "I notice you're running an old version of a service with a known security hole" message, then you know what I mean.
Obscurity is bad. There may be some good parts to it, but on the whole the bad parts far outweigh the good.
(Yes, I read the original article, I'm claiming that it's wrong)
Um... no
NetworkSolutions charges $35 a year, which is between 1.5 and 3.5 times what most others charge
(if you want to comparison shop, check out http://www.internic.com/regist.html)
$7 per year is not very likely, since all registrars still have to pay Network Solutions $6 per name.
(as per http://www.icann.org/nsi/nsi-rla-04nov99.htm sec. 5.2 b)
Personally, I think $1 per year per domain name would be far more appropriate.
I think these allegations of slamming are just a red herring - notice they do not mention which registrars are supposedly slamming. You'd think that some of them would at least have a different percentage of slams, even if they were all corrupt.
It's ok not to read the article, but if you don't, then don't post!
You can only interpolate across sectors that you can identify as bad. If the sector reads correctly, but the error correction says it's bad, then most players will "correct" it anyway, while most computers will read the sector as OK. In other words, CDParanoia won't realize it's an obviously bogus sample. And it doesn't have to be white noise, it could be a click, pop, or even a sour note.
IF you had access to the raw data as it came off the head, then silliness like this would be a minor software upgrade - but the average consumer doesn't have access to the raw data, and has to make do with the "corrected" data. Personally, I want the raw bits, or rather, I want the option to get them raw. I can do my own processing, thanks.
Overall, I'd say this is even more doomed than Macrovision was - it makes the music sound worse, (even if only a little) it doesn't stop anyone from distributing copies once they make that first one, and it prevents users from making personal copies for download into their RIO, unless they pirate them.
i.e.