...well, maybe not in the top 1% but certainly the top five.
And my objective is not to collect more tax dollars but to hava a tax policy that recognized the value of work for hire by not taxing it at near twice the rate of capital gains. Most people work for hire and they're the people without which investments don't become reality. Ignore them at your peril!
Now, if this could be accomplished by cutting the top income tax rate to the level of capital gains, reducing the lower tax brackets accordingly, then great, that's ideal. Unfortunately, I don't think it's realistic.
And I still think it's immoral that unearned income is taxed at a lower rate than earned income.
...and should be taxed AT LEAST as much as earned income. I'm in the top 5%, and I don't approve of the morality that says I should owe less taxes because it would be an incentive for me to spend more. Fuck that, money I make by moving money around should be taxed the same as money made by the sweat of my brow. The "trickle down" arguments are equivalent to saying "Fat man should eat more food, not less, as when he gets bigger portions, more crumbs fall to the beggars at his feet."
Consumption (sales, excise) taxes, tariffs/duties, property taxes, estate taxes, etc. Except for estate taxes (levied only on estates worth over ~$1.5million anyhow) and tariffs (which are levied against businesses more than individuals), these are state (not federal) taxes. Though property and estate taxes hit the wealthiest for more than the middle class, they don't even the disparity, thanks to lower rates on, my favorite, capital gains taxes.
Why are capital gains taxed at a lower rate than earned income? Why has the number one legislative priority of the Republican party been to eliminate capital gains taxes? Who would benefit from this almost exclusively?
Not the poorest 95% of the country, I assure you. Nothing chaps my hide more than a billionaire complaining about taxes on unearned income, for that's what capital gains are - money made by shuffling other money around.
We do need to streamline the tax code, but for me, step one would be classifying capital gains as income and taxing it to the same degree as we
tax people who work for a living.
(Sorry for the rant, not directed at you particularly, Stonehand. Well, except the top paragraph)
Did you bite that quote about Russian Diplomats and art funding straight off Rush, or did you take the time to doctor it up first?
It must suck to be that bitter, to never find beauty in art. You've never enjoyed a book, or a movie, or a song, or a painting, or a sculpture, or a drawing, or (yes) a computer game?
Anyhow, you want to talk wasteful spending, there are a whole hell of a lot of programs you and I pay for year-in and year-out that I consider more wasteful than pell grants. Guaranteed the war on drugs, to take an example, has cost us a hell of a lot more of your money and freedom than we'll ever pay in taxes to support the arts.
There are better whipping boys than the arts for your anti-tax vitriol. But then, I think you've just never bothered to really consider art - you seem to find it threatening, waving your hands about some "white male"-bashing bogeyman. Yes, 90% of art is crap - 90% of everything is crap, and you know it. It's the 10% (or less) that's valuable, and that lasts.
Personally, I found the "Screenshots" project thought provoking, and think it did require quite a bit of intuition and talent to execute.
Damn, I waste too much time on/.
-Isaac
Re:Some of us worked our way through art school...
on
Life as Video Game Art
·
· Score: 2
If you appreciate art, pay for it. Don't make me pay for it with my money.
Whoa, I worked my way through school - watch where you point that thing, someone might take offense.
But if we want to go determining eligability for financial aid on the basis of what someone's studying, we're well on our way to banishing a lot more than art. Do you want Congress choosing your major?
I know I shouldn't feed trolls, but I saw this at +3 and felt the urge to respond.
Your post reads like addle-pated free-association.
"It makes me uneasy to think that one day, the machines will not only replace us, but also our art. It's the defining quality of humanity -- we, creatures who make analogy and represent our analogies in external form."
Say what? These drawings (for that's what they are) are purely representational (in an external form goes without saying - the only possible "internal form" is thought/memory)
The art linked in this story isn't "Computer Generated" - a real human created it. There's no replacement for the human in this process - can't see how you'd seriously think otherwise.
But then, I think you're just trolling. Congratulations on your positive moderation and plentiful responses, I guess.
But I still wish you'd get your jollies in a way that didn't decrease the Signal/Noise ratio of this forum.
...you're busy playing these classic old games, not buying their new-and-improved shite. Time has long since discarded the videogame chaff and left the classics in bold relief, whereas many, many publishers today are still pushing their new chaff, waiting for you to spend your hard-earned cash on their non-refundable crap.
-I
Dammit, thought I closed that <B> tag. :P
on
Anonymity
·
· Score: 1
Didn't mean to shout.
The key problem with this ruling...
on
Anonymity
·
· Score: 5
...is that it orders the message board operator to reveal the identity of an anonymous poster *before* it has ruled whether the remarks were in legal fact defamatory. This is the dangerous precedent. Even if the statements in this case are defamatory and not protected under the First Amendment, future plaintiffs will be able to point to this court and say "Look! You have to reveal the identity of this Anonymous Coward first, then rule on my claims of libel/defamation", then single out this individual for retaliation once his/her identity is revealed, even if the anonymous posts are protected speech. (This is one of the favored legal tactics of Scientologists seeking to squash critics, in case you've been under a rock.)
Hopefully, this decision won't stand; it only serves to legitimize the nasty practice of identifying anonymous critics and whistleblowers via subpoena, for the sole purpose of seeking retribution.
-Isaac
Those old archives are the best part of deja...
on
Deja For Sale
·
· Score: 3
One can mark the decline of Dejanews by the decline in their USENET archives. First the formerly clean (and quick-loading) search interface became cluttered with other "portal" crap (altavista, anyone?), then the old posts went away ("temporarily"), then USENET searches were relegated to other pages, then the cutoff for old posts was 12 months, and finally they started parsing their usenet posts to add links to their product review databases (does anyone use those? apparently not...) in the bodies of the messages. Now they're on the block... boo hoo hoo.
I hope the archives get bought by someone who wants to make a usefully complete, freely-searchable USENET archive (my wet dream: Google buys the archives), but I fear that they'll just be snapped up by a company like Lexis-Nexis, who'll happily take the publically contributed works of thousands and resell access at kilobucks-a-year.
Then I could plonk all stories about all their keen products I won't be buying, as I don't wish to support them or the MPAA/RIAA (Sony being a key member of both) or their SDMI-enabled/freedom-disabled MemoryStick shite they keep foisting
Maybe you shouldn't do things that you would later be ashamed of, instead of worrying about privacy so much.
On my planet, nobody is so omniscient as to know the future ramifications of any action, or what acceptable activities today may be vilified under tomorrows regimes or mores.
Maybe you should find something more constructive to do than troll/., jerkass.
Funny, they don't have my viewing habits, at least not in a way that's identifiable to me personally. That's what anonymous means.
Really? Did you buy the lifetime subscription under a false name and address? (Is that even possible? Or do you have to pay with a credit card?)
Tivo is neither "good guy" nor "bad guy" - Tivo is a company, an entity that exists solely and amorally to make money.
I'm not cynical, but I always read the fine print and am capable of critical thought. Tivo (and ReplayTV, for that matter) long ago made it clear that their business models had nothing to do with selling boxes. This became even clearer when they started licensing their technology to other manufacturers. Given that the boxes are sold at a loss (or breakeven at best), and that the type and granularity of data the boxes are capable of collecting is far more valuable in real dollars than the monthly fee they're collecting indicates to me that they've got another revenue stream in the works -selling viewing habits.
I do my best to warn people of the risks here. When a Supreme Court appointment's video rental habits were publicized, congress passed a law expxlicitly protecting the privacy of such records. (This is why you have to *opt in* to such programs as "Blockbuster Rewards" to trade your data for "free" gifts.) Back when Ms. Lewinsky's book buying habits were subpoenaed by Mr. Starr, I had been warning people about buying with credit or debit cards (which make such data collection possible). Not everyone is going to be investigated on a national scale, but one never knows when one's data trail may be important. Perhaps to an insurance company (surfed any medical sites that use DoubleClick or Akamai?), perhaps to an ex-spouse in a divorce proceeding or custody battle (surfed any *ahem* other sites? Watching late nite Cinemax on your Tivo? Watching lots of TV, period? Maybe it was your fault/you're not a good parent), perhaps to a future employer, etc. Even people who aren't planning on running for office should be aware at how their personal preferences are collected and mined and can be used against them.
Look, your TV viewing habits are valuable, way more valuable than $10/month. Tivo is only out to protect your privacy inasmuch as early-adopters are sensitive to such things - as soon as they can get away with it, their privacy policy *will change* to allow them to sell these data. This is the first step in this direction.
The best part - even if you cancel the service when their privacy policy changes, they still have your old viewing data, which is still saleable and will still be sold, regardless of your protestations.
Don't believe the hype - it all comes back to pimping your eyeballs. And they have the cojones to charge you for the privilege, how sweet of them!
If the executive branch was under Republican control, Mr. Armey would have kept his mouth shut, and a Democrat would have said it instead.
And Carnivore still would have been created under a Republican DOJ, bet on it. The FBI's internal culture is authoritarian, has been since the beginning, through democrat and republican administrations alike.
Virtual communities are real in an intellectual sense. I certainly know several people online I would consider friends, though I've never met most of them in person. We are a community, in that sense.
But I see where the author is coming from - this virtual community of friends can't affect in any meaningful way my physical environs. They're not part of my meatspace community, and to some extent, they sap my intellectual energies away from the people and institutions of proximate geography I might otherwise be more involved with, but for the internet.
Therein lies the danger - when people abandon their physical community for a virtual one, they leave their meatspace quality of life in the hands of other interested parties. This is how crack houses happen, how fundamentalists get elected to school boards, how zoning laws institutionalize race and class distinctions - smart people who could make a difference just don't pay attention. A virtual community is fundamentally no replacement for a real one.
Don't get me wrong, I don't lay the blame at the foot of the internet exclusively, so much as I do at our society's increasing tendency towards isolation. I do think internet use can be empowering, especially when used for grass-roots media (I love what the folks at indymedia.org are doing, even if I'm not thrilled with their hysterical tone at times - but then "they" are a loose collection of volunteers, mostly, and they still manage better coverage of many issues than professionals). I don't buy the hype of its grand transformative powers, though - the same things were said about television. ("But it's a one-way medium! The internet is different," I hear you say. Tell me about it in 10 years when you can't find an ISP to host your controversial web page about [whatever] because of liability concerns. So you can host pictures of your cat. Real empowering.) The internet, like the real world, is what we make of it - no more, no less. If we try and substitute virtual interactions for knowing your neighbors and local politicians, though, we're going to wake up with a headache one day.
Akamai is dangerous shit. Dangerous, because it's useful, and lulls people into iving up their privacy.
Think: Why does DoubleClick suck? Because they track your browsing habits across multiple websites and associate them with your meatspace info thru their partners.
Now, name another company that's used by many a popular site (including e-commerce companies who have yr name and address on file). They're not serving ads, but they're still tracking you, transparently, across all sites in the Akamai network that you visit.
Akamai's on my junkbuster shitlist permanently. I just don't trust them, sorry.
...forget the MPAA, one need only consider the tactics being brought to bear on anti-globalization protestors, including military assistance to police, police disruption of organization efforts ala COINTELPRO, etc. to understand why secure communication is critical to functional democracy (and why a police monopoly on secure communications is a cornerstone of authoritarian regimes).
-Isaac
Traffic analysis and secure messaging - thoughts..
on
IRC Improvements
·
· Score: 4
We ditch the IRC model, which is fundamentally insecure inasmuch as it requires an extra layer of trust (the server op), who's in a prime position to be leaned-on by [insert powerful party].
Something I haven't seen brought up in these discussions is traffic analysis. Foiling TA is the key to truly secure communications. This is tougher than it sounds, as there are many ways to glean info from an encrypted channel.
The "Buddy List" (or, if you prefer, list of users on a channel) is the most useful piece of intelligence for any security force. Start with an individual under suspicion, watch who that individual communicates with, when, and how frequently, and you know who to investigate next. Encrypted message traffic doesn't affect this channel of info.
Consider encrypted ICQ - messages may be encrypted, and broadcast point-to-point, every user's "buddy list" lives on AOL's servers. Every sign-on or -off is recorded. At this point, say you've got a "buddy" in your list who's sharing MP3s or hosting DeCSS. RIAA/MPAA subpoenas user's buddy list from AOL (whoops, since it's AOL/TW, a court order probably isn't necessary!). Now you are brought under suspicion or targeted for harassment, or otherwise dragged into a case you may have known nothing about.
Now, this has me thinking, what would it take to defeat TA in an instant-messenger type product. I'm not a coder by any means, but I have a few ideas:
No centralized servers, of course. "Buddy lists" stored at each client, exclusively
Clients continuously send/recieve encrypted traffic to neighboring hosts. Within fixed-sized encrypted blocks there might be user messages (w/ routing information encrypted in an "onion skin" fashion, so that a routing host doesn't know the final destination of the message, nor its true origin), client messages (newly connected client advertising its presence on the network, etc), or padding, if necessary to fill space. Continuously sending and recieving fixed-size chunks means others can't trace messages by monitoring traffic volume over time.
The network should only support messaging. The latency and scalability limits to this system should be tolerable for text messages, but would be shot to hell by file transfer.
Any thoughts on this? Anyone working on such a system already?
...is to be allowed to take my privacy into my own hands.
That means, to be allowed, legally, to use junkbuster, deserialize my CueCat, refuse (or falsify) my name and address at RadioShack, buy a Tivo (or similar) and never use the service, etc. without bringing down the goon squad.
What I'm worried about is a future in which I'm prohibited by law from taking these measures. we're already half-way there with the DMCA, causing me to swear off movies, TV, and music (which is saving me beaucoup $$$ and time - I doubt I'll ever consume that crap again). I see a day coming when I'll be requred by law to personally identify myself to every website I visit, thanks to some poorly-written "privacy" legislation, wherin circumventing P3P (by not storing all my correct personal info in my browser) will be a crime, or somesuch.
I fully support this end-run around PR-obsessed and/or corrupt school administrators, but let's not forget that online papers will reach only a limited audience, except in the most affluent of schools. Which is a shame, really, since such schools aren't usually where investigative journalism is most necessary.
That would be in poor urban or rural schools where some very real unsafe conditions exist, conditions only students are likely to encounter, and that aren't likely to be brought to the general public's attention without someone crying foul, and getting noticed. And in such places, that's not going to happen online, if only 3% of the student body (and 2% of the public) has internet access at home.
Big deal - the real information of interest is not in the content of your messages, but who's in your "buddy list".
The name of the game is traffic analysis, building a map of who's talking to whom.
I'm willing to bet that the FBI's foot-draggin on carnivore is directly related to the fact that they may have been saving the message bodies of only current suspects, but saving everyone's headers for future reference. Too bad the truth is unlikely to come out barring a major fsck-up in document handling by the FBI (which is how COINTELPRO got blown wide open).
Slashdot Mirror
...well, maybe not in the top 1% but certainly the top five.
And my objective is not to collect more tax dollars but to hava a tax policy that recognized the value of work for hire by not taxing it at near twice the rate of capital gains. Most people work for hire and they're the people without which investments don't become reality. Ignore them at your peril!
Now, if this could be accomplished by cutting the top income tax rate to the level of capital gains, reducing the lower tax brackets accordingly, then great, that's ideal. Unfortunately, I don't think it's realistic.
And I still think it's immoral that unearned income is taxed at a lower rate than earned income.
-Isaac
...and should be taxed AT LEAST as much as earned income. I'm in the top 5%, and I don't approve of the morality that says I should owe less taxes because it would be an incentive for me to spend more. Fuck that, money I make by moving money around should be taxed the same as money made by the sweat of my brow. The "trickle down" arguments are equivalent to saying "Fat man should eat more food, not less, as when he gets bigger portions, more crumbs fall to the beggars at his feet."
-Isaac
Consumption (sales, excise) taxes, tariffs/duties, property taxes, estate taxes, etc. Except for estate taxes (levied only on estates worth over ~$1.5million anyhow) and tariffs (which are levied against businesses more than individuals), these are state (not federal) taxes. Though property and estate taxes hit the wealthiest for more than the middle class, they don't even the disparity, thanks to lower rates on, my favorite, capital gains taxes.
Why are capital gains taxed at a lower rate than earned income? Why has the number one legislative priority of the Republican party been to eliminate capital gains taxes? Who would benefit from this almost exclusively?
Not the poorest 95% of the country, I assure you. Nothing chaps my hide more than a billionaire complaining about taxes on unearned income, for that's what capital gains are - money made by shuffling other money around.
We do need to streamline the tax code, but for me, step one would be classifying capital gains as income and taxing it to the same degree as we
tax people who work for a living.
(Sorry for the rant, not directed at you particularly, Stonehand. Well, except the top paragraph)
-Isaac
...and so you won't hear me wailing about how unfair it is that they pay 1/3 or even 1/2 of all taxes.
-Isaac
Did you bite that quote about Russian Diplomats and art funding straight off Rush, or did you take the time to doctor it up first?
/.
It must suck to be that bitter, to never find beauty in art. You've never enjoyed a book, or a movie, or a song, or a painting, or a sculpture, or a drawing, or (yes) a computer game?
Anyhow, you want to talk wasteful spending, there are a whole hell of a lot of programs you and I pay for year-in and year-out that I consider more wasteful than pell grants. Guaranteed the war on drugs, to take an example, has cost us a hell of a lot more of your money and freedom than we'll ever pay in taxes to support the arts.
There are better whipping boys than the arts for your anti-tax vitriol. But then, I think you've just never bothered to really consider art - you seem to find it threatening, waving your hands about some "white male"-bashing bogeyman. Yes, 90% of art is crap - 90% of everything is crap, and you know it. It's the 10% (or less) that's valuable, and that lasts.
Personally, I found the "Screenshots" project thought provoking, and think it did require quite a bit of intuition and talent to execute.
Damn, I waste too much time on
-Isaac
Whoa, I worked my way through school - watch where you point that thing, someone might take offense.
But if we want to go determining eligability for financial aid on the basis of what someone's studying, we're well on our way to banishing a lot more than art. Do you want Congress choosing your major?
-Isaac
Your post reads like addle-pated free-association.
Say what? These drawings (for that's what they are) are purely representational (in an external form goes without saying - the only possible "internal form" is thought/memory)
The art linked in this story isn't "Computer Generated" - a real human created it. There's no replacement for the human in this process - can't see how you'd seriously think otherwise.
But then, I think you're just trolling. Congratulations on your positive moderation and plentiful responses, I guess.
But I still wish you'd get your jollies in a way that didn't decrease the Signal/Noise ratio of this forum.
-Isaac
Sparta beat Athens in war, but all Sparta gave us was the word Spartan.
-Isaac
...you're busy playing these classic old games, not buying their new-and-improved shite. Time has long since discarded the videogame chaff and left the classics in bold relief, whereas many, many publishers today are still pushing their new chaff, waiting for you to spend your hard-earned cash on their non-refundable crap.
-I
Didn't mean to shout.
Hopefully, this decision won't stand; it only serves to legitimize the nasty practice of identifying anonymous critics and whistleblowers via subpoena, for the sole purpose of seeking retribution.
-Isaac
One can mark the decline of Dejanews by the decline in their USENET archives. First the formerly clean (and quick-loading) search interface became cluttered with other "portal" crap (altavista, anyone?), then the old posts went away ("temporarily"), then USENET searches were relegated to other pages, then the cutoff for old posts was 12 months, and finally they started parsing their usenet posts to add links to their product review databases (does anyone use those? apparently not...) in the bodies of the messages. Now they're on the block... boo hoo hoo.
I hope the archives get bought by someone who wants to make a usefully complete, freely-searchable USENET archive (my wet dream: Google buys the archives), but I fear that they'll just be snapped up by a company like Lexis-Nexis, who'll happily take the publically contributed works of thousands and resell access at kilobucks-a-year.
-Isaac
Then I could plonk all stories about all their keen products I won't be buying, as I don't wish to support them or the MPAA/RIAA (Sony being a key member of both) or their SDMI-enabled/freedom-disabled MemoryStick shite they keep foisting
-Isaac
On my planet, nobody is so omniscient as to know the future ramifications of any action, or what acceptable activities today may be vilified under tomorrows regimes or mores.
Maybe you should find something more constructive to do than troll /., jerkass.
-Isaac
Really? Did you buy the lifetime subscription under a false name and address? (Is that even possible? Or do you have to pay with a credit card?)
Tivo is neither "good guy" nor "bad guy" - Tivo is a company, an entity that exists solely and amorally to make money.
I'm not cynical, but I always read the fine print and am capable of critical thought. Tivo (and ReplayTV, for that matter) long ago made it clear that their business models had nothing to do with selling boxes. This became even clearer when they started licensing their technology to other manufacturers. Given that the boxes are sold at a loss (or breakeven at best), and that the type and granularity of data the boxes are capable of collecting is far more valuable in real dollars than the monthly fee they're collecting indicates to me that they've got another revenue stream in the works -selling viewing habits.
I do my best to warn people of the risks here. When a Supreme Court appointment's video rental habits were publicized, congress passed a law expxlicitly protecting the privacy of such records. (This is why you have to *opt in* to such programs as "Blockbuster Rewards" to trade your data for "free" gifts.) Back when Ms. Lewinsky's book buying habits were subpoenaed by Mr. Starr, I had been warning people about buying with credit or debit cards (which make such data collection possible). Not everyone is going to be investigated on a national scale, but one never knows when one's data trail may be important. Perhaps to an insurance company (surfed any medical sites that use DoubleClick or Akamai?), perhaps to an ex-spouse in a divorce proceeding or custody battle (surfed any *ahem* other sites? Watching late nite Cinemax on your Tivo? Watching lots of TV, period? Maybe it was your fault/you're not a good parent), perhaps to a future employer, etc. Even people who aren't planning on running for office should be aware at how their personal preferences are collected and mined and can be used against them.
-Isaac
Look, your TV viewing habits are valuable, way more valuable than $10/month. Tivo is only out to protect your privacy inasmuch as early-adopters are sensitive to such things - as soon as they can get away with it, their privacy policy *will change* to allow them to sell these data. This is the first step in this direction.
The best part - even if you cancel the service when their privacy policy changes, they still have your old viewing data, which is still saleable and will still be sold, regardless of your protestations.
Don't believe the hype - it all comes back to pimping your eyeballs. And they have the cojones to charge you for the privilege, how sweet of them!
-Isaac
And Carnivore still would have been created under a Republican DOJ, bet on it. The FBI's internal culture is authoritarian, has been since the beginning, through democrat and republican administrations alike.
-Isaac
But I see where the author is coming from - this virtual community of friends can't affect in any meaningful way my physical environs. They're not part of my meatspace community, and to some extent, they sap my intellectual energies away from the people and institutions of proximate geography I might otherwise be more involved with, but for the internet.
Therein lies the danger - when people abandon their physical community for a virtual one, they leave their meatspace quality of life in the hands of other interested parties. This is how crack houses happen, how fundamentalists get elected to school boards, how zoning laws institutionalize race and class distinctions - smart people who could make a difference just don't pay attention. A virtual community is fundamentally no replacement for a real one.
Don't get me wrong, I don't lay the blame at the foot of the internet exclusively, so much as I do at our society's increasing tendency towards isolation. I do think internet use can be empowering, especially when used for grass-roots media (I love what the folks at indymedia.org are doing, even if I'm not thrilled with their hysterical tone at times - but then "they" are a loose collection of volunteers, mostly, and they still manage better coverage of many issues than professionals). I don't buy the hype of its grand transformative powers, though - the same things were said about television. ("But it's a one-way medium! The internet is different," I hear you say. Tell me about it in 10 years when you can't find an ISP to host your controversial web page about [whatever] because of liability concerns. So you can host pictures of your cat. Real empowering.) The internet, like the real world, is what we make of it - no more, no less. If we try and substitute virtual interactions for knowing your neighbors and local politicians, though, we're going to wake up with a headache one day.
-Isaac
Akamai is dangerous shit. Dangerous, because it's useful, and lulls people into iving up their privacy.
Think: Why does DoubleClick suck? Because they track your browsing habits across multiple websites and associate them with your meatspace info thru their partners.
Now, name another company that's used by many a popular site (including e-commerce companies who have yr name and address on file). They're not serving ads, but they're still tracking you, transparently, across all sites in the Akamai network that you visit.
Akamai's on my junkbuster shitlist permanently. I just don't trust them, sorry.
-Isaac
...forget the MPAA, one need only consider the tactics being brought to bear on anti-globalization protestors, including military assistance to police, police disruption of organization efforts ala COINTELPRO, etc. to understand why secure communication is critical to functional democracy (and why a police monopoly on secure communications is a cornerstone of authoritarian regimes).
-Isaac
Something I haven't seen brought up in these discussions is traffic analysis. Foiling TA is the key to truly secure communications. This is tougher than it sounds, as there are many ways to glean info from an encrypted channel.
The "Buddy List" (or, if you prefer, list of users on a channel) is the most useful piece of intelligence for any security force. Start with an individual under suspicion, watch who that individual communicates with, when, and how frequently, and you know who to investigate next. Encrypted message traffic doesn't affect this channel of info.
Consider encrypted ICQ - messages may be encrypted, and broadcast point-to-point, every user's "buddy list" lives on AOL's servers. Every sign-on or -off is recorded. At this point, say you've got a "buddy" in your list who's sharing MP3s or hosting DeCSS. RIAA/MPAA subpoenas user's buddy list from AOL (whoops, since it's AOL/TW, a court order probably isn't necessary!). Now you are brought under suspicion or targeted for harassment, or otherwise dragged into a case you may have known nothing about.
Now, this has me thinking, what would it take to defeat TA in an instant-messenger type product. I'm not a coder by any means, but I have a few ideas:
Any thoughts on this? Anyone working on such a system already?
-Isaac
That means, to be allowed, legally, to use junkbuster, deserialize my CueCat, refuse (or falsify) my name and address at RadioShack, buy a Tivo (or similar) and never use the service, etc. without bringing down the goon squad.
What I'm worried about is a future in which I'm prohibited by law from taking these measures. we're already half-way there with the DMCA, causing me to swear off movies, TV, and music (which is saving me beaucoup $$$ and time - I doubt I'll ever consume that crap again). I see a day coming when I'll be requred by law to personally identify myself to every website I visit, thanks to some poorly-written "privacy" legislation, wherin circumventing P3P (by not storing all my correct personal info in my browser) will be a crime, or somesuch.
-Isaac
I fully support this end-run around PR-obsessed and/or corrupt school administrators, but let's not forget that online papers will reach only a limited audience, except in the most affluent of schools. Which is a shame, really, since such schools aren't usually where investigative journalism is most necessary.
That would be in poor urban or rural schools where some very real unsafe conditions exist, conditions only students are likely to encounter, and that aren't likely to be brought to the general public's attention without someone crying foul, and getting noticed. And in such places, that's not going to happen online, if only 3% of the student body (and 2% of the public) has internet access at home.
-Isaac
Big deal - the real information of interest is not in the content of your messages, but who's in your "buddy list".
The name of the game is traffic analysis, building a map of who's talking to whom.
I'm willing to bet that the FBI's foot-draggin on carnivore is directly related to the fact that they may have been saving the message bodies of only current suspects, but saving everyone's headers for future reference. Too bad the truth is unlikely to come out barring a major fsck-up in document handling by the FBI (which is how COINTELPRO got blown wide open).
-Isaac
...as if all records of such an era of intellectual wouldn't have been redacted from the historical records of the publishing carted.
-Isaac