Yea, I do work in classified and higher environments. We are not allowed to bring cell phones into closed containers. In on of the DOD demonstrations they get a cell phone from the audience and remotely activate it as a wiretap in real time.
This is not a "myth", its that other thing, what is that called again, oh yea, a "fact".
No special application required either. See your cell phone _is_ the application. It is running all the time the phone is on, it listens to commands and responds to them.
For a day-to-day proof. Go buy a new cell phone. Put the battery in. Then don't turn it on for a day. When you do turn it on it will have been "provisioned" even though it was "off". Go buy another cell phone and take the battery out immediately for 24 hours. I will not work when you finally put the battery in and turn it on. This is because the provisioning messages couldn't find and program your phone because the receiver had no power. In the latter case you will probably have to call the cell phone provider and ask them to re-send your provisioning. This request will _not_ confuse even the first-tier support people.
If your phone has power, it can be turned on and off and reprogrammed all from the other end using just your IMEI and maybe your GSM key. Both of these things are known to your provider as a requirement of providing service to you.
Don't go take your under-graduate degree from a college that is famous for its graduate program, you will never see your professors, just their graduate student teaching assistants.
You should pick a school that is "known for" the program you are going to take at the level you are going to take it. That can be well worth it.
And the definition of famous needs to be curtailed. As some professionals in the field you intend to pursue whether what schools they "know are good". The answers to this are almost always rather surprising and often include some very good near-by or state schools.
Schools "earn their branding" for a reason, but you have to _really_ _check_ the brand details and you also have to make sure that it isn't expired. Only the professionals in the field will know if the school that is famous for X to the general populace is really sitll famous for X amongst the topical peerage.
I've bought several computers in the last few years and all but one have been absent any TPM. One board from several years back had one, and several I have considered lately had a TPM header, but no actual TPM. My amd64 dual-core has a suspicious connector next to the memory connectors that I think _could_ accept a TPM, but said adapter is blank.
So far "Trusted Computing Modules" are common on HP/Compaq gear, and some Dell stuff, but not so much on any of the pieces-parts you can get hither and yon.
I know, I've looked. TPMs usually have (must have?) a hardware random number source so I actually like boards that have them for that.
But I would never buy a board that had a certified boot chain to windows enforcement environment. Blarg. Like I said, the idea is great if _I_ have the master key to my gear so that _I_ can trust my computing environment. When it's a mater of the MAFIAA and Microsoft that want to trust my computer, well I could give a rat's ass...
If you RTFA you discover that the whole second half is boosterism for putting "Trusted Computing" modules inside cell phones. In that light the agnostic condensation of both "jailbroken iThingies" and "that unreliable open source Android thing" makes perfect sense.
This article has nothing to do with exchange boosterism etc, it is back-door partisanship for trying to revive the Trusted Computing Hardware Module that the technical industry managed to ignore into oblivion.
The article _is_ an attack on reason, but the goal isn't about Exchange etc, its about re-initializing the idea of corporate capture of your personal property and turning your device from a personal resource to a limited media consumption node. The media used this time isn't movies, its "corporate email" etc.
Disclaimer: I would _love_ TPM hardware if there were a law that required that _I_ get the _master_ _keys_ for my hardware when I buy it. This would, of course, allow me to lie to an exchange server if I so chose, and would do _nothing_ to prevent jailbreaks. Of course I would also have to demand that there was no "government key" etc. With those elements in place, a TPM would let my paranoia be soothed when I boot my gear.
So anyway, bitching about how bad exchange software is etc, falls into the hands of the author who is trying to false-flag some emergency to spur on "trusted computing" on the "new platform battlefield".
(Before you get all anti-eugenicist, read the post...)
Right now if you get seriously ill there is a strong possibility that your treatment would be limited or your policy "retroactively canceled" by an anonymous functionary acting unilaterally and impersonally with zero accountability from the depths of a hidden cube farm whole states away from you. Such ruling performed in secret, possibly, in the case of limited treatment, without you ever knowing about it.
Notice that the private insurance carriers defended retroactive cancellation of health care policies (I cannot remember their sanitized term for this just now) by saying that only about one-in-two-hundred people suffer that occurrence industry wide. Nobody seemed to notice that about one-in-two-hundred people with health care suffer serious conditions that result in very high cost long-term payouts by health care providers. (Both numbers are unproved as far as I could find, but they were both cited in the same general context by similarly informed and reasonably-likely-to-be-correct individuals so I will use them for their apparent value here.)
Requiring that such decisions to revoke or limit treatment would involve "a panel" instead of a random accountant, and that they happen in some sort of public and reviewable context, and according to some rigorous process sounds like a large-scale net win to me.
During all the shouting I firmly wished I had some screen time to respond to the Tea Baggers etc with "that is an outstanding idea! I will see about adding cancellation review panels to the bill immediately rather than let you be left to die solely on the decision of your _financial_ case worker."
You state that the survey was "designed, year after year, to bash Fox News"... Do you have proof?
In particular you demonstrate a primary failure of reasoning. You presume that because "the survey" repeatedly reveals the same result, it must a-priori be designed to falsify that result based on the fact that you assume or believe the result to be false.
One of the problems with this kind of reasoning is that it is too self-serving to be valid. All honest testing of a proposition must always be designed to _disprove_ a base proposition.
That said, the statement "is less informed" has no relationship to the statement "is wrong" despite various inferiority complexes common to the, frankly, less informed. For instance, imagine a guy who knows exactly one thing: "If I release this object from shoulder height, while standing in my living room, it will fall to the floor." He is completely correct. He lacks untold vistas of information, but he is absolutely, 100%, correct.
So the observed set "Fox News Viewers" and the observed set "less informed viewers" show very strong, but directional, overlap. (That is, a disproportionate number of Fox Viewers are under-informed, but no conclusion has been made as to whether a disproportionate number of under-informed people watch Fox news. That is, we can conclude that well-informed people avoid Fox News disproportionately, not that Fox News is factually incorrect.)
As to being "well informed"; information is neither opinion nor "correctness". For instance, I am reasonably informed about several religions which I do not practice. I am well informed about nuclear power generation technologies, but I have no task involving generation of power via nuclear means. I know a lot about women's issues but I am male.
The reason that it "stings you" to be called under-informed as a Fox News viewer (two conditions I imply directly from your defensive-sounding response) is that you have been taught that "more informed" opinions and world views are generally "more _likely_ to be correct." Sadly, for Fox News viewers, this is generally a truth.
The fact of the matter is that the more informed a person is, the more they understand about the positions of their rivals _AND_ their cohorts, the less likely they are to be _misled_.
Were I to draw social conclusions from the information provided, I would tend to believe that Fox News viewers are engaged in the practice of allowing personal bias to influence their willingness to entertain positions that have not been pre-vetted for conformance to their world views. That is, Fox News viewers don't seem to _want_ the correct information and are willing to presume things like "the survey is designed to bash Fox News" rather than to analyze the survey for its actual content.
Of course this fits my "confirmation bias" nicely, so who is to say that I am correct...?
When Web 1.0 (or indeed web. 0.1) came out I didn't jump on the bandwagon. Hey, yea, it cost me my share of the easy cash from the first bubble. But I didn't jump because "The Web" wasn't, and isn't, "an interesting technology".
The Web(TM) is a display surface. It is no different than X or curses or any number of other display surface technologies, except for the part where it is slow, annoying, lame, and awkward to use. Granted, it fills that whole "putting a relatively static display up in front of someone very far away" niche pretty darn well. "Well" but not so much for the "easy", "subtee", nor "magical".
For each incremental piece of magic involved in "The Web(TM)" someone has to make a piece of incremental magic for "a local machine" and then port that magic to all the "local machines", by type, that they want to support, then get people to install that local magic, and then "magically" the web works. Think about it. Flash, Silverlight, MP3 players, HTML5, Netflix Player, PDF reader, eBook reader, PNG support, GIF support, JPG support, etc, etc, etc.
Even this slashdot web site thing does all the work anterior to the actual web part.
The Web is really "http" and maybe "html" and a whole bunch of very concrete and specific wholly-local technologies at each/either/every end of one verbose pipeline.
So it is no surprise that "Cloud Computing" is bunk. Its just Web 3.0. It is a term in search of a concrete meaning. They(TM) want your data Out There Somewhere(TM), but the business and marketing people pushing the concept don't get that there is no magical somewhere called The Cloud(TM). So since Chrome OS would have to be backed by a bunch of Chrome OS servers running normal databases and whatnot the technology starts to fall apart just as thoroughly as LanManager Networking for Windows. If _everyone_ has a my-documents folder, then that part of the name is meaningless. If everyone is in the same pile of databases, then the location of that data isn't terribly cloudy at all and the "adjacency graph" looks exactly like "hey everybody get a gmail account."
Then let the marketroids and the "one-environment visionaries" who imagine the entire Internet is about a complicated as the 40-person hot-house they used to do their proof of concept coding and you end up with "the cloud" where, if no device was ever turned off, and every device was within the same communication cell, then it wouldn't matter where your document was last stored.
The problem with "you'll be somewhere and your documents will be 'where-ever'" is that to someone else you are 'where-ever'"
So the dream of _everybody_ having cheap devices that leverage all the unused device time out there, a priori means that everyone is going to be wearing down _your_ battery/storage/whatever faster than you could wear it down yourself.
Now the _opposite_ of cloud computing, where you carry around your mesh-available storage device and any computer you walk up to would see it and let you use your stuff by magic is pretty interesting. But then again you have to trust every computer you walk up to whether you intend to use it or not in that scenario. Or you would need an encryption key technology, but then you don't get "any computer you walk up to" you get "any computer you plug into" and again, you need to trust it not to have been compromised by the last guy to use it. etc.
So "the cloud" has no meaning, and the technologies like it are like Communism. Communism would be the _perfect_ form of government if there were _no_ _humans_ involved in the process. But humans are not universally fair, trustworthy, and interested solely in the common good, so no communism for you comrade.
There just isn't anyplace in a "cloud" to store anything if nobody buys any local storage etc.
That only leaves deluded idealists, and people who want to throw themselves on your data "for your own good".
(1) Faxes are "as good as" photocopies, and as such have a legal standing. Particularly in that if the fax went straight to paper, that paper is a fixed media. Yes, someone can forge anything at any time. That isn't the point.
(2) Anonymous doesn't expect to be "listened to" any more than prison officials expect their prisoners to "become reformed." We live in a "crime and punishment" society, not a "reflect and reform" one. The best "The Internet(tm)" can hope for is a "don't mess with those crazy mo-fos, they will jack your shite up" reputation. If you don't think that didn't work for the Islamists go try to put an image of Muhammad on your masthead.
We have created a "fear the terrorist" climate, and so it should not surprise us that when someone wants to engender a reaction they want to wave the banner of "dangerous to your peace".
Just like there are just as many non-poisonous but colorful creatures that take advantage of the fact that nature has learned that "bright colors means deadly", there will be a number of effective techniques of disruption that are in no way actual terrorism but will receive the "terrorist-like" moniker in the press, and so become effective means for inciting change.
Before 9/11, no terrorist organization or action had _ever_ lead to victory. But the "toh mai gawd" reaction of the U.S., and our utter willingness to hide behind our full-body pat-down security theater have lead even smart countries to bow to Islamist demands like "don't show that picture or we will get testy".
The U.S.A. under Bush did what no terrorist organization had ever done before, give individuals with 'splodie things credibility.
Now we reap what the right-wing fraidy-cats have sown so deeply.
And we reap it in all sorts of unexpected ways.
You cannot fault Anonymous. They didn't set the rules. And their grievance is even pretty valid.
Someone somewhere wanted an internet kill switch, they have discovered that if they piss off more than a minuscule fraction of the internet, the internet will react badly and kill them. "No net neutrality from you, then no internet for you" is a pretty good lesson for companies and maybe even governments to learn.
TCP packets can be used like bullets and we _are_ now in a territorial dispute over the internet landscape. It doesn't matter what side of any one issue you support, you are in the fight, or at least the crossfire.
When the feds bust down their doors and discover that the VoIP account that spawned all those calls isn't _really_ owned by the GOP, PETA, or Westboro Baptist Church.
Yea, a lot of the the small-timers will be linked back to some guys house. But most of the bad actors are probably going through hacked SIP nodes or, if they are smart, email-to-fax converters or plain old mis-attributed VoIP accounts paid for with pre-paid visa cards, recharged with cash, and with names and addresses associated with the victims themselves.
You know... "Why is Amazon.com fax spamming PayPal.com?" will be a pretty good question for _someone_ to ask.
As a society we have lost our ability for calm measured response. Any trivial issue can now be instantly promoted to international awareness by even trivial acts of pseudo-terrorism. That then means than the current best way to get your issue heard is to get all 'splodie on someone or something. It doesn't even have to be really a real explosion in the real world.
Now I cannot particularly gainsay Anonymous. Someone else set the stage and established the rules. Then the government and a bunch of reactionaries did _utterly_ _fail_ to simply ignore wikileaks like they should have. Then still others tried to "rally with the government(s)" in their utter failure to properly ignore wikileaks.
Now it wouldn't be a bad thing at all if The Internet got the "do not fark with those guys" street-cred that the Islamists got. I mean we cannot post _old_ pictures of Muhammad right? Well maybe if companies got the "net neutrality or no net for you" message then things might be better.
Meanwhile the Internet as a whole can out-wacko and out-crazy _any_ organization you can imagine. It can also out-think such organizations.
Mark my words: Soon we will see a DNS system based on PGP keys and distributed by DHT etc. The URLs will look like "pgpk://key_here/path/resource", "pgpkfp://pgp_key_fingerprint/path/resource" or just plain "pgp://your_domain_word/path/resource". The client will look in the distributed database and get a list of IPv6 (or v4, sadly) addresses (and actual public keys for pgpkfp: or pgp:) and all the requests to those addresses will be encrypted with that same pgp key, and include the public key to use in response. Someone wants to take over "wikileaks.org" they, at best, could add new keys. But the old keys worked, and the new keys, when they got to internet-busy-signal warning pages would just me marked "crap" by the user with a click. People will have real "home pages" for themselves instead of others, and those pages will be full of known-good key-based links that take them to the start of "The Internet they want to see".
And if someone, say ICANN, were to start poisoning the key cache, then people would blacklist their key and they would find themselves stranded with everybody just ignoring their node(s) in the distributed database.
Yea, banks and business would have a terrible time at first because of the pishing possibilities as hundreds of evil-people added "chase.com" to the key cache. They'd adapt eventually. The alternative DNS system will rise up informally at first as a bind replacement amongst techies, free-thinkers, and yes, media "pirates", but nobody will be able to prove any one participant is a bad actor so who cares. Everything will be encrypted anyway, and when the Distributed Name Database (dnd 8-) grows up it will carry bit-torrent up with it in a giant reverse Streisand Effect.
So yes, all these articles are fuel for the fire.
But the overgrown plain of dead grass that is the currently broken media infrastructure and semi-stable self-appointed gate keepers kinda needs to burn.
Not all fires are bad, and in information systems, like ecosystems, many of the seeds only germinate after a good conflagration.
Funny thing is, these creationism attractions always die. Sure it "could" take in N million dollars... but I "could" actually be a freak mutation with an immortality gene.
In both cases the smart bet is "against".
They keep trying to "evolve creationism" into something sale-able and sure, a wicked roller coaster with cars shaped like velociraptors, which I can ride while wearing Jesus Robes (to prove that dinosaurs were contemporary with early man) might be a hoot.
But aside from that one possible example, what is so amusing about creationism, or for that matter evolution, that it could inspire "amusement"?
At least with an "evolution" theme park we could have things like "the haunted Level 3 Containment Lab" and "the Survival of the Fittest" king of the mountain "kiddy play pit".
The "God Did It Accusitorium" is only good for like one walk-through at god-did-it-land...
The "tar-pit fossil search" on the game midway would be pretty fun.
Compressing code into a near-unreadable terse format to reduce transmission bandwidth is not "obfuscation" it's "compression".
Obfuscation has, as a trademark, the addition of operations intended to obscure the function of the code. Compressed code doesn't particularly obscure the function, though it usually obscures the purpose of the coded operations.
Example: "++a;" is compressed and obscure to purpose as we don't know what _a_ represents nor why incrementing it by one is significant. This is compressed code.
Example: "aeradewd=1;/* long body of code */ aeradewd = ~aeradewd;/*long body of code */ wierakex --= aeradewd;" is obfuscated code, while it is no more clear that _a_ and _wierakex_ are analogous, deliberate gymnastics have been undertaken to "hide" the fact that _wierakex_ is being incremented by one. This is obfuscated code.
Obfuscated code is usually less efficient, but it doesn't have to be. in the obfuscated case, if the incrementor factor had been constant, and the ~ operator had been used to initialize second constant instead of altering a variable, then the compiler would have seen the final "--= -1" and converted that into an increment operation.
So "poor programming practices" and frankly old-school variable and function names (possibly as the result of a global search-and-replace of good names for terse ones) is unfriendly to your eyes, but falls far short of the verb "to (deliberately) obfuscate". When done to reduce network consumption and improve page load times, you are in the realm of completely legitimate action. At that point you might as well complain that compilation is an act of obfuscation undertaken just to inconvenience you.
That I can then get _my_ books off of my nook onto my laptop in a readable format?
Seriously, at $10 for the book or $9 for the ebook (real sample prices for Harry Dresden novels, rounded up by one cent from nook store) there needs to be some way for me to recover "my property" off the device other than buying another one.
No, actually, I don't own a nook because of the "not really my book" and so the super-shallow discounts for the rental of a title made getting one "kinda dumb" IMHO.
B&N will _have_ to engage in the war of the lockouts. They likely must contractually. If I can get into the nook in general then those titles they are trying to rent and escrow for me become effective purchases and the various publishers surely don't allow for that. If they did I could get a nook account for my Gentoo laptop and be done with this.
(HEY Barnes and Nobel! If I could extend a nook account to include my Gentoo laptop as one of my five allowed clone devices, I would have bought the thing. Just Sayin...)
Your logic that copyright should last long enough to inherit is ridiculous to me, 'cause Mister Anderson is not likely to rise from the grave an write more, so the value of his copyright "to encourage" him is somewhat limited.
Why should any single act of creativity or performance be rewarded with more than a reasonable wage for the effort exerted.
The fact is that normal people can leave behind what they have saved or produced, provided they _save_ some of it. But that's just for us proles apparently. Somehow we have decided that you do a month or even a year's worth of studio time to make a song, or spend a month to write a short story, or a couple of years to write a novel, and you deserve that time's effort to pay your children and grandchildren 50 years after your death?
Why then aren't the heirs of the stone masons who built the Empire State Building entitled to a share of each months rent for three generations? Their work is just as valid and lasting. Perhaps more-so since people are paying more and more each year to use it.
Now, as an author, I understand two things: (1) I want to be able to control how my words are used commercially and socially because nobody wants to see their "children" exploited or raped; and (2) if anybody is going to be making a profit off of my words I want that someone to be me.
In previous ages that meant cost to copy and copyright because copying was costly. Now I think there should be a deal where some short time after release (e.g. even 20 years, as it can take a long time to make that two years salary for that two years writing) literal and exact copies distributed for ZERO cost on a non-profit basis should be legal. All the transformative rights, such as the right to anthology, the right to rewrite, the right to "make a movie of it", the right to "remake" it, etc should be preserved.
As a caveat of course, DRM is impermissible (because DRM is impossible anyway and) because that would obstruct the legal exact copying mandated.
The goal here is two-fold. (1) REASONABLY reward creators for the value of their creative EFFORT and (2) PRESERVE the creative control, and so the creator's "good name" to allow for a creator to deny the "N.A.M.B.L.A. Theater's All-Furry production of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Bone".
Get 30 guys. Go to DC, or New York, or LA. Give each a single smoke bomb. At a predesignated time (high-noon local time being optimal) have each individual go into a separate McDonalds or whatever, and set off that smoke bomb. Leave behind laminated cards: "Meet our demands or next time it will be Sarin." (Or Anthrax, or whatever).
Never take responsibility. Never make a demand. Disband your organization immediately and utterly, then walk away.
That is how you sow terror.
Not one life lost. Huge media value. No clear enemy. No certainty of the nature of a threat. And you could do it by organizing the opposite of a flash-mob. (e.g. a flash dispersal...?) And what more American target than a fast food chain. And how better to threaten than by distributed action? Blowing up a big target is flashy, but it isn't as good as making people afraid to go to their neighborhood Circle-K.
I can actually think of dozens of ways to do this stuff.
The single biggest reason that Terrorists will never win is that Religious Wackos are not allowed to play D & D, and if they were, they would not remain religious wackos of the dangerous sort. Every D&D, GURPS, or whatever system "gamer" (e.g. table-top free-form tactical gamers, not console computer mindless gamers) I have ever known could utterly _thwart_ any common security practice they see. The entire mind set of gamers is to invent scenarios and then challenge their peers to defeat them. "How would I beat this checkpoint" or even "how could I use this checkpoint to my advantage" is a reflex thought to anybody who has played more than 200 hours of table-top RPG.
On the morning of September 11 I was awoken by a call from my mom. My housemate and I went to the basement and watched the coverage live. We were both gamers. We had the over-under on it being islamic, and how the cross-country flights were chosen for their fuel payload in _minutes_. (I thought there was a 10% chance it was the McVeigh people because of the military-industrial complex nature of the targets, but "survivalists" are set-and scurry bombers, not suicide bombers). By the end of the first hour we had predicted the USA PATRIOT act though we were idealistic and didn't see the torture and craven anti-american actions of the Bush Administration comming for days.
The reason gamers would never be terrorists is because the "how to make fearful people fearful" task is nowhere near as entertaining as the variations of the Zombie Hoard problem or "who and what would I need to rebuild civilization" exercise.
I get nervous in the TSA line because that is the optimal weak point in any airport. The right action there could close an airport for days or weeks, and by definition nobody has been checked for active payload yet.
Had we any brains, we would get the Israelis to design our airport security etc. By the time you are in their airport you have already been vetted like three times and they divide up the people into small segregated groups of no more than like 20.
Again the goal of that bwraep is to shut off the site, and it is probably very satisfying to see the site shut off...
But many hosting arrangements don't quota-out, they graduate to a higher cost. The hoards don't get to _see_ that, so it isn't as sexy to the protester, but it does _cost_ the targeted entity money.
So TAXing an entity hits them where _they_ feel it, as opposed to hitting them in a way that satisfies you.
Plus how funny to watch a site buy whole new servers to meet the new load of their new importance just to see that load disappear the next day.
You don't win by costing Sony Music and Friends 101% of their bandwidth and server capacity, as that lets them paint you as the bad guy. You _can_ win by constantly costing them 99% of that capacity.
You never "bring them down" but you make them pay out the nose.
A corporation only has one nerve-center to attack, and that's its money. Making a corporation pay a noticeable amount of money for no benefit to the corp is the only way to make it react. Government fines don't work because those are small fees levied after effective action.
Huge random spikes in phone costs (9-cents per 800 call if they arn't voip etc) and bandwidth bills. Making their services look unresponsive to their paying customers. These are the ways you make a company notice you.
Thing is, there is "unflattering" as in "he is such a douche and his breath stinks", and there is unflattering such as "while he will agree to the terms, I am sure that this will not cause him to halt the executions performed by the secret death-squads we know he backs."
Remember that in political terms, as opposed to normal human interactions, "unflattering" is a weasel-word.
"I just got out of negotiations with Junta Bob and he does not seem trustworthy."
"I am sure that we are being stalled by the crown prince, he cannot possibly be unaware of the recent police action since the police chief reports to him directly."
"Abdulla is a figurehead propped up by the sole will of the Tribunal for Religious Purity, and has no actual ability to act in this situation."
All of these and countless other kinds of vital truths are quite "unflattering" to the persons these truths name, and yet the _are_ vital truths that must be communicated for related issues to be addressed.
Political situations are almost universally outside the "if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all" rule, because politics, human rights, and brokering are completely unnecessary when people on all sides are already being "nice". Nice People(TM) don't _have_ death squads, so saying someone has death-squads is not nice, but if they in fact _do_ have death squads it would be unutterably wrong for that information to be held private by some single political officer in the field in the name of being nice to Junta Bob.
My first thought was that the ban was real, but _NOW_ it was never real. Once the ban got out and people noticed the dumb, then mouthpiece-of-the-government newspaper of record "discovers" that they didn't do their research and no such ban was ever planned.
"I must find out where my people are going, so I can run out that way and lead them".
I would put $10 on the ban having been originally real, but once everything we discussed about it here was discussed about it _everywhere_ someone noticed that it would be a dumb move and counter to the overall interests of the state, at which point documents were shredded and retractions were printed to cover the original error (bad idea) up with the pretense of error (we got our story wrong at the paper).
You don't even need a tinfoil hat to see that one as obvious.
Rather than trying to crash the server, Anonymous should be building a targeted spider of all the sites related to the offender. These sites should be carefully and constantly farmed of their content with due care to make sure the site isn't ever actually brought down.
So instead of a DOS, you levy a TAX. Yes, tax the site, as in "that was a very taxing experience".
There are several important results of TAXing a site.
(1) bandwidth charges go up, so there is TAXing and taxing both. (2) You are never really stepping over the line legally because you didn't "interfere" with their business. (3) You have an affront-in-depth because you can TAX the core site, and all the accomplice sites. So not just IPFI but Sony Music, and all thier ilk. (4) The each TAX collector gets the best use of their action. (5) you are likely wearing out the gear a little too.
So, to use the physical analogy, take all your sit-in participants and, instead of "blocking the door" you make a velvet rope maze of sitters that complicit actors would have to navigate.
Think of it this way... If you block the door to a bank you will get rousted by the man. If you get 1000 people to go to the bank, stand quietly in line, and when they reach the teller have them perform a cash-only or information-only transaction (e.g. "can I get change for a ten?" "I need to check my balance.") Go get a brochure, read it, then go ask a question in person or on the toll-free number like "This says the interest rate is good for six months. Does that start on the day I open an account, the end of the month I open the account, or the start of the month I open the account?", get the answer, thank the support guy and hang up.
So sure, fill out forms; File polite inquiries, visit their sponsors and members; fill out forms and file polite inquiries.
If brochures are available, ask for one. Recommend they contact a friend. Recommend they contact an enemy. Ask for more information by every possible venue to every reasonable destination.
Get their site to _vomit_ _up_ as much bandwidth and postage. Buy one share. Get the actual share certificate printed up and mailed to you. Then sell the share to your friend for a loss. Make sure he gets his share certificate as well. Buy his share for a loss on the same day and get your new certificate. (best done in a bg circle not just two guys. 8-)
A reject connect attempt is cheap compared to actually fetching a web page or sending out an email that was composed by a support-desk guy, or even a support desk automation.
Find business reply coupons and _use_ them.
At first it isn't as splashy, but you know what, when they run to their government buddies and whine "but they are using our free services exactly as offered" their buddies will probably laugh.
I just tried to reply to someone in this thread about how Kitty Pron (only spelled the other ways) was one of the root passwords to the US constitution and the submission just evaporated.
So yes, kitty pron, and drug stuff, is "contraban" so subject to border search no matter how unreasonable that is. (we cannot keep cell phones and drugs out of prisons but we expect to keep _information_ from penetrating our border... go figure.)
While it was a tad sarcastic it was in no way "filter worthy" and it _was_ previewed and submitted.
So apparently our draconian guardians exist here as elsewhere. All hail the nany state. Zig! File!
Really I guess once they cut down all the forest in Redmond WA they couldn't call it that any more. Now is just a technoslum...
In the late eighties and early ninties the Silicon Forest was where Microsoft lived here in Redmond.
So I guess you guys _are_ entrenched.
Of course that entrenchment is not official till someone at a tech company forces a major political sea-change in local government politics by threatening to leave.
If that has happened there large scale like it has (twice) here, then I bow to your superior bought-up technical status...
(Example implementation abstracted from game theory) The way one would create search magnets in the keyword result set would be to take individual keywords, such as "sore" and "throat" and "natural" and "remedy" (for this example of a site that was paying up for, in this case "natural remedies for sore throats") and put magnet ranking on those words. (Or one could also "demagnetize" other sites.)
In each case each magnetized word would be assigned a factor slightly greater than one (e.g. 1.0005). All non-magnetic words at all sites would have an identity value of 1.0.
When composing the indexes the total magnetic factor of each keyword would be calculated by simple multiplication. This would set cause all the known words to have their own "domain strength". A word that was very bought up would have a very high domain strength. Think words like "natural" that everybody wants, and that some would buy. (And think negative words like "goatse" which the system would want to have very weak domains just in principle; or "Toyota" which Ford and Mitsubishi might each want to bury. Not to mention A, AN and THE which are noise words in English.)
Now the search term comes in. All the words are separated and the words with the strongest domain are made most dominant in the query. Then you do rank and weight calculations and filter this preferred list. Because of the magnets the bought sites bubble up to the front.
In such a magnitized system adding noise words and punctuation would have no noticable effect.
BUT this is not what was observed... Instead...
In a fair language analysis the words are considered as phrasings. A phrase like "natural remedy for a sore throat" would ideally be represented as a conceptual atom. (In practical terms most google users have not spent significant amounts of time in various keyword boolean search contexts, so they don't get that this is a good "atom" so) the system will look for word pairs and triplets "sore throat" "natural remedy" and because that would lead to a cartesian product of equal indexes, such a filter would rank the words by their original position such that "natural remedy sore throat" would favor natural remedies while "sore throat natural remedy" would be more focused on the sore throat that the naturalness of the remedy. This makes "sore throat remedy" a super set of "sore throat natural remedy" but would make "natural remedy sore throat" tend to select against the matches for "sore throat" alone.
Now the various weighted phrases and lexemes get dispatched in parallel to sub-engines that go fishing through the indexes by word and by phrase. (We know this because really cruddy random phrases will return results such that a search for "cat elephant guitar fountain" will return stable results as surely as "natural sore throat remedy".
When the sub-searches find "enough results" the combiner filters them into a stable list by score strenght and that's what you get.
And that is what we see.
For instance, you type "sore throat" and your first listing is a definition (from google.com/health), and then there are a bunch of remedy sites. You make it "a sore throat" and the medical definition disappears but the rest of the rankings stay the same.
Now if google were to _stupidly_ make "sore throat" return every definition for sore throat on the web before it got to any of the remedies, well, we wouldn't use google. So it makes sense that the very first "definition of" result would stop the "Definition of" search, but that singe result would be at the top because the two words "sore throat" may well represent a need for a definition on the part of the querier. But query "what is a sore throat" and you get something from princton.edu at the moment; but again just one "definition of" result from that query engine.
Still on, you put "a sore throat" and the likely hood of needing a definition of the thing you know is already singular and the "definition of" result just disappears.
Perturb good search strings with noise and sites made to communicate clearly and be reasonably searchable will fall victim to that noise and fall off of the rankings.
In todays news a man discovered that a lack of noise on google run and google coached pages will cause things like turning "sore throat" (a _general_ topic) into "a sore throat" (a specific event descriptive) or adding unnecessary punctuation to a valid search term may lead to less stable results.
Insiders claim that this is a failure of the search engine to properly spam itself and that the lack of self spam is evidence that spammed pages are clearly finding themselves separately categorized from concise sites.
In other news, language based filters filter different language based constructs differently... On expert was quoted as saying "no duh..."
For the Sarcasm Impaired: If the fix were in, then the addition of "a" to "sore throat" would _never_ drop the site from the ranking because the hacked unconditional keyword match for "sore" and "throat" would never be confused by "a". Such hacked algorithms would be noise tolerant not noise susceptible. Researcher has thus proved the _absence_ of wired-up responses.
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Yea, I do work in classified and higher environments. We are not allowed to bring cell phones into closed containers. In on of the DOD demonstrations they get a cell phone from the audience and remotely activate it as a wiretap in real time.
This is not a "myth", its that other thing, what is that called again, oh yea, a "fact".
No special application required either. See your cell phone _is_ the application. It is running all the time the phone is on, it listens to commands and responds to them.
For a day-to-day proof. Go buy a new cell phone. Put the battery in. Then don't turn it on for a day. When you do turn it on it will have been "provisioned" even though it was "off". Go buy another cell phone and take the battery out immediately for 24 hours. I will not work when you finally put the battery in and turn it on. This is because the provisioning messages couldn't find and program your phone because the receiver had no power. In the latter case you will probably have to call the cell phone provider and ask them to re-send your provisioning. This request will _not_ confuse even the first-tier support people.
If your phone has power, it can be turned on and off and reprogrammed all from the other end using just your IMEI and maybe your GSM key. Both of these things are known to your provider as a requirement of providing service to you.
Don't go take your under-graduate degree from a college that is famous for its graduate program, you will never see your professors, just their graduate student teaching assistants.
You should pick a school that is "known for" the program you are going to take at the level you are going to take it. That can be well worth it.
And the definition of famous needs to be curtailed. As some professionals in the field you intend to pursue whether what schools they "know are good". The answers to this are almost always rather surprising and often include some very good near-by or state schools.
Schools "earn their branding" for a reason, but you have to _really_ _check_ the brand details and you also have to make sure that it isn't expired. Only the professionals in the field will know if the school that is famous for X to the general populace is really sitll famous for X amongst the topical peerage.
I've bought several computers in the last few years and all but one have been absent any TPM. One board from several years back had one, and several I have considered lately had a TPM header, but no actual TPM. My amd64 dual-core has a suspicious connector next to the memory connectors that I think _could_ accept a TPM, but said adapter is blank.
So far "Trusted Computing Modules" are common on HP/Compaq gear, and some Dell stuff, but not so much on any of the pieces-parts you can get hither and yon.
I know, I've looked. TPMs usually have (must have?) a hardware random number source so I actually like boards that have them for that.
But I would never buy a board that had a certified boot chain to windows enforcement environment. Blarg. Like I said, the idea is great if _I_ have the master key to my gear so that _I_ can trust my computing environment. When it's a mater of the MAFIAA and Microsoft that want to trust my computer, well I could give a rat's ass...
If you RTFA you discover that the whole second half is boosterism for putting "Trusted Computing" modules inside cell phones. In that light the agnostic condensation of both "jailbroken iThingies" and "that unreliable open source Android thing" makes perfect sense.
This article has nothing to do with exchange boosterism etc, it is back-door partisanship for trying to revive the Trusted Computing Hardware Module that the technical industry managed to ignore into oblivion.
The article _is_ an attack on reason, but the goal isn't about Exchange etc, its about re-initializing the idea of corporate capture of your personal property and turning your device from a personal resource to a limited media consumption node. The media used this time isn't movies, its "corporate email" etc.
Disclaimer: I would _love_ TPM hardware if there were a law that required that _I_ get the _master_ _keys_ for my hardware when I buy it. This would, of course, allow me to lie to an exchange server if I so chose, and would do _nothing_ to prevent jailbreaks. Of course I would also have to demand that there was no "government key" etc. With those elements in place, a TPM would let my paranoia be soothed when I boot my gear.
So anyway, bitching about how bad exchange software is etc, falls into the hands of the author who is trying to false-flag some emergency to spur on "trusted computing" on the "new platform battlefield".
(Before you get all anti-eugenicist, read the post...)
Right now if you get seriously ill there is a strong possibility that your treatment would be limited or your policy "retroactively canceled" by an anonymous functionary acting unilaterally and impersonally with zero accountability from the depths of a hidden cube farm whole states away from you. Such ruling performed in secret, possibly, in the case of limited treatment, without you ever knowing about it.
Notice that the private insurance carriers defended retroactive cancellation of health care policies (I cannot remember their sanitized term for this just now) by saying that only about one-in-two-hundred people suffer that occurrence industry wide. Nobody seemed to notice that about one-in-two-hundred people with health care suffer serious conditions that result in very high cost long-term payouts by health care providers. (Both numbers are unproved as far as I could find, but they were both cited in the same general context by similarly informed and reasonably-likely-to-be-correct individuals so I will use them for their apparent value here.)
Requiring that such decisions to revoke or limit treatment would involve "a panel" instead of a random accountant, and that they happen in some sort of public and reviewable context, and according to some rigorous process sounds like a large-scale net win to me.
During all the shouting I firmly wished I had some screen time to respond to the Tea Baggers etc with "that is an outstanding idea! I will see about adding cancellation review panels to the bill immediately rather than let you be left to die solely on the decision of your _financial_ case worker."
You state that the survey was "designed, year after year, to bash Fox News"... Do you have proof?
In particular you demonstrate a primary failure of reasoning. You presume that because "the survey" repeatedly reveals the same result, it must a-priori be designed to falsify that result based on the fact that you assume or believe the result to be false.
One of the problems with this kind of reasoning is that it is too self-serving to be valid. All honest testing of a proposition must always be designed to _disprove_ a base proposition.
That said, the statement "is less informed" has no relationship to the statement "is wrong" despite various inferiority complexes common to the, frankly, less informed. For instance, imagine a guy who knows exactly one thing: "If I release this object from shoulder height, while standing in my living room, it will fall to the floor." He is completely correct. He lacks untold vistas of information, but he is absolutely, 100%, correct.
So the observed set "Fox News Viewers" and the observed set "less informed viewers" show very strong, but directional, overlap. (That is, a disproportionate number of Fox Viewers are under-informed, but no conclusion has been made as to whether a disproportionate number of under-informed people watch Fox news. That is, we can conclude that well-informed people avoid Fox News disproportionately, not that Fox News is factually incorrect.)
As to being "well informed"; information is neither opinion nor "correctness". For instance, I am reasonably informed about several religions which I do not practice. I am well informed about nuclear power generation technologies, but I have no task involving generation of power via nuclear means. I know a lot about women's issues but I am male.
The reason that it "stings you" to be called under-informed as a Fox News viewer (two conditions I imply directly from your defensive-sounding response) is that you have been taught that "more informed" opinions and world views are generally "more _likely_ to be correct." Sadly, for Fox News viewers, this is generally a truth.
The fact of the matter is that the more informed a person is, the more they understand about the positions of their rivals _AND_ their cohorts, the less likely they are to be _misled_.
Were I to draw social conclusions from the information provided, I would tend to believe that Fox News viewers are engaged in the practice of allowing personal bias to influence their willingness to entertain positions that have not been pre-vetted for conformance to their world views. That is, Fox News viewers don't seem to _want_ the correct information and are willing to presume things like "the survey is designed to bash Fox News" rather than to analyze the survey for its actual content.
Of course this fits my "confirmation bias" nicely, so who is to say that I am correct...?
When Web 1.0 (or indeed web. 0.1) came out I didn't jump on the bandwagon. Hey, yea, it cost me my share of the easy cash from the first bubble. But I didn't jump because "The Web" wasn't, and isn't, "an interesting technology".
The Web(TM) is a display surface. It is no different than X or curses or any number of other display surface technologies, except for the part where it is slow, annoying, lame, and awkward to use. Granted, it fills that whole "putting a relatively static display up in front of someone very far away" niche pretty darn well. "Well" but not so much for the "easy", "subtee", nor "magical".
For each incremental piece of magic involved in "The Web(TM)" someone has to make a piece of incremental magic for "a local machine" and then port that magic to all the "local machines", by type, that they want to support, then get people to install that local magic, and then "magically" the web works. Think about it. Flash, Silverlight, MP3 players, HTML5, Netflix Player, PDF reader, eBook reader, PNG support, GIF support, JPG support, etc, etc, etc.
Even this slashdot web site thing does all the work anterior to the actual web part.
The Web is really "http" and maybe "html" and a whole bunch of very concrete and specific wholly-local technologies at each/either/every end of one verbose pipeline.
So it is no surprise that "Cloud Computing" is bunk. Its just Web 3.0. It is a term in search of a concrete meaning. They(TM) want your data Out There Somewhere(TM), but the business and marketing people pushing the concept don't get that there is no magical somewhere called The Cloud(TM). So since Chrome OS would have to be backed by a bunch of Chrome OS servers running normal databases and whatnot the technology starts to fall apart just as thoroughly as LanManager Networking for Windows. If _everyone_ has a my-documents folder, then that part of the name is meaningless. If everyone is in the same pile of databases, then the location of that data isn't terribly cloudy at all and the "adjacency graph" looks exactly like "hey everybody get a gmail account."
Then let the marketroids and the "one-environment visionaries" who imagine the entire Internet is about a complicated as the 40-person hot-house they used to do their proof of concept coding and you end up with "the cloud" where, if no device was ever turned off, and every device was within the same communication cell, then it wouldn't matter where your document was last stored.
The problem with "you'll be somewhere and your documents will be 'where-ever'" is that to someone else you are 'where-ever'"
So the dream of _everybody_ having cheap devices that leverage all the unused device time out there, a priori means that everyone is going to be wearing down _your_ battery/storage/whatever faster than you could wear it down yourself.
Now the _opposite_ of cloud computing, where you carry around your mesh-available storage device and any computer you walk up to would see it and let you use your stuff by magic is pretty interesting. But then again you have to trust every computer you walk up to whether you intend to use it or not in that scenario. Or you would need an encryption key technology, but then you don't get "any computer you walk up to" you get "any computer you plug into" and again, you need to trust it not to have been compromised by the last guy to use it. etc.
So "the cloud" has no meaning, and the technologies like it are like Communism. Communism would be the _perfect_ form of government if there were _no_ _humans_ involved in the process. But humans are not universally fair, trustworthy, and interested solely in the common good, so no communism for you comrade.
There just isn't anyplace in a "cloud" to store anything if nobody buys any local storage etc.
That only leaves deluded idealists, and people who want to throw themselves on your data "for your own good".
(1) Faxes are "as good as" photocopies, and as such have a legal standing. Particularly in that if the fax went straight to paper, that paper is a fixed media. Yes, someone can forge anything at any time. That isn't the point.
(2) Anonymous doesn't expect to be "listened to" any more than prison officials expect their prisoners to "become reformed." We live in a "crime and punishment" society, not a "reflect and reform" one. The best "The Internet(tm)" can hope for is a "don't mess with those crazy mo-fos, they will jack your shite up" reputation. If you don't think that didn't work for the Islamists go try to put an image of Muhammad on your masthead.
We have created a "fear the terrorist" climate, and so it should not surprise us that when someone wants to engender a reaction they want to wave the banner of "dangerous to your peace".
Just like there are just as many non-poisonous but colorful creatures that take advantage of the fact that nature has learned that "bright colors means deadly", there will be a number of effective techniques of disruption that are in no way actual terrorism but will receive the "terrorist-like" moniker in the press, and so become effective means for inciting change.
Before 9/11, no terrorist organization or action had _ever_ lead to victory. But the "toh mai gawd" reaction of the U.S., and our utter willingness to hide behind our full-body pat-down security theater have lead even smart countries to bow to Islamist demands like "don't show that picture or we will get testy".
The U.S.A. under Bush did what no terrorist organization had ever done before, give individuals with 'splodie things credibility.
Now we reap what the right-wing fraidy-cats have sown so deeply.
And we reap it in all sorts of unexpected ways.
You cannot fault Anonymous. They didn't set the rules. And their grievance is even pretty valid.
Someone somewhere wanted an internet kill switch, they have discovered that if they piss off more than a minuscule fraction of the internet, the internet will react badly and kill them. "No net neutrality from you, then no internet for you" is a pretty good lesson for companies and maybe even governments to learn.
TCP packets can be used like bullets and we _are_ now in a territorial dispute over the internet landscape. It doesn't matter what side of any one issue you support, you are in the fight, or at least the crossfire.
When the feds bust down their doors and discover that the VoIP account that spawned all those calls isn't _really_ owned by the GOP, PETA, or Westboro Baptist Church.
Yea, a lot of the the small-timers will be linked back to some guys house. But most of the bad actors are probably going through hacked SIP nodes or, if they are smart, email-to-fax converters or plain old mis-attributed VoIP accounts paid for with pre-paid visa cards, recharged with cash, and with names and addresses associated with the victims themselves.
You know... "Why is Amazon.com fax spamming PayPal.com?" will be a pretty good question for _someone_ to ask.
As a society we have lost our ability for calm measured response. Any trivial issue can now be instantly promoted to international awareness by even trivial acts of pseudo-terrorism. That then means than the current best way to get your issue heard is to get all 'splodie on someone or something. It doesn't even have to be really a real explosion in the real world.
Now I cannot particularly gainsay Anonymous. Someone else set the stage and established the rules. Then the government and a bunch of reactionaries did _utterly_ _fail_ to simply ignore wikileaks like they should have. Then still others tried to "rally with the government(s)" in their utter failure to properly ignore wikileaks.
Now it wouldn't be a bad thing at all if The Internet got the "do not fark with those guys" street-cred that the Islamists got. I mean we cannot post _old_ pictures of Muhammad right? Well maybe if companies got the "net neutrality or no net for you" message then things might be better.
Meanwhile the Internet as a whole can out-wacko and out-crazy _any_ organization you can imagine. It can also out-think such organizations.
Mark my words: Soon we will see a DNS system based on PGP keys and distributed by DHT etc. The URLs will look like "pgpk://key_here/path/resource", "pgpkfp://pgp_key_fingerprint/path/resource" or just plain "pgp://your_domain_word/path/resource". The client will look in the distributed database and get a list of IPv6 (or v4, sadly) addresses (and actual public keys for pgpkfp: or pgp:) and all the requests to those addresses will be encrypted with that same pgp key, and include the public key to use in response. Someone wants to take over "wikileaks.org" they, at best, could add new keys. But the old keys worked, and the new keys, when they got to internet-busy-signal warning pages would just me marked "crap" by the user with a click. People will have real "home pages" for themselves instead of others, and those pages will be full of known-good key-based links that take them to the start of "The Internet they want to see".
And if someone, say ICANN, were to start poisoning the key cache, then people would blacklist their key and they would find themselves stranded with everybody just ignoring their node(s) in the distributed database.
Yea, banks and business would have a terrible time at first because of the pishing possibilities as hundreds of evil-people added "chase.com" to the key cache. They'd adapt eventually. The alternative DNS system will rise up informally at first as a bind replacement amongst techies, free-thinkers, and yes, media "pirates", but nobody will be able to prove any one participant is a bad actor so who cares. Everything will be encrypted anyway, and when the Distributed Name Database (dnd 8-) grows up it will carry bit-torrent up with it in a giant reverse Streisand Effect.
So yes, all these articles are fuel for the fire.
But the overgrown plain of dead grass that is the currently broken media infrastructure and semi-stable self-appointed gate keepers kinda needs to burn.
Not all fires are bad, and in information systems, like ecosystems, many of the seeds only germinate after a good conflagration.
...added the words "on a computer" and patented it. Then it would have been novel, in-obvious, and valuable.
Funny thing is, these creationism attractions always die. Sure it "could" take in N million dollars... but I "could" actually be a freak mutation with an immortality gene.
In both cases the smart bet is "against".
They keep trying to "evolve creationism" into something sale-able and sure, a wicked roller coaster with cars shaped like velociraptors, which I can ride while wearing Jesus Robes (to prove that dinosaurs were contemporary with early man) might be a hoot.
But aside from that one possible example, what is so amusing about creationism, or for that matter evolution, that it could inspire "amusement"?
At least with an "evolution" theme park we could have things like "the haunted Level 3 Containment Lab" and "the Survival of the Fittest" king of the mountain "kiddy play pit".
The "God Did It Accusitorium" is only good for like one walk-through at god-did-it-land...
The "tar-pit fossil search" on the game midway would be pretty fun.
On the whole evolution makes for better rides...
Compressing code into a near-unreadable terse format to reduce transmission bandwidth is not "obfuscation" it's "compression".
Obfuscation has, as a trademark, the addition of operations intended to obscure the function of the code. Compressed code doesn't particularly obscure the function, though it usually obscures the purpose of the coded operations.
Example: "++a;" is compressed and obscure to purpose as we don't know what _a_ represents nor why incrementing it by one is significant. This is compressed code.
Example: "aeradewd=1; /* long body of code */ aeradewd = ~aeradewd; /*long body of code */ wierakex --= aeradewd;" is obfuscated code, while it is no more clear that _a_ and _wierakex_ are analogous, deliberate gymnastics have been undertaken to "hide" the fact that _wierakex_ is being incremented by one. This is obfuscated code.
Obfuscated code is usually less efficient, but it doesn't have to be. in the obfuscated case, if the incrementor factor had been constant, and the ~ operator had been used to initialize second constant instead of altering a variable, then the compiler would have seen the final "--= -1" and converted that into an increment operation.
So "poor programming practices" and frankly old-school variable and function names (possibly as the result of a global search-and-replace of good names for terse ones) is unfriendly to your eyes, but falls far short of the verb "to (deliberately) obfuscate". When done to reduce network consumption and improve page load times, you are in the realm of completely legitimate action. At that point you might as well complain that compilation is an act of obfuscation undertaken just to inconvenience you.
That I can then get _my_ books off of my nook onto my laptop in a readable format?
Seriously, at $10 for the book or $9 for the ebook (real sample prices for Harry Dresden novels, rounded up by one cent from nook store) there needs to be some way for me to recover "my property" off the device other than buying another one.
No, actually, I don't own a nook because of the "not really my book" and so the super-shallow discounts for the rental of a title made getting one "kinda dumb" IMHO.
B&N will _have_ to engage in the war of the lockouts. They likely must contractually. If I can get into the nook in general then those titles they are trying to rent and escrow for me become effective purchases and the various publishers surely don't allow for that. If they did I could get a nook account for my Gentoo laptop and be done with this.
(HEY Barnes and Nobel! If I could extend a nook account to include my Gentoo laptop as one of my five allowed clone devices, I would have bought the thing. Just Sayin...)
Your logic that copyright should last long enough to inherit is ridiculous to me, 'cause Mister Anderson is not likely to rise from the grave an write more, so the value of his copyright "to encourage" him is somewhat limited.
Why should any single act of creativity or performance be rewarded with more than a reasonable wage for the effort exerted.
The fact is that normal people can leave behind what they have saved or produced, provided they _save_ some of it. But that's just for us proles apparently. Somehow we have decided that you do a month or even a year's worth of studio time to make a song, or spend a month to write a short story, or a couple of years to write a novel, and you deserve that time's effort to pay your children and grandchildren 50 years after your death?
Why then aren't the heirs of the stone masons who built the Empire State Building entitled to a share of each months rent for three generations? Their work is just as valid and lasting. Perhaps more-so since people are paying more and more each year to use it.
Now, as an author, I understand two things: (1) I want to be able to control how my words are used commercially and socially because nobody wants to see their "children" exploited or raped; and (2) if anybody is going to be making a profit off of my words I want that someone to be me.
In previous ages that meant cost to copy and copyright because copying was costly. Now I think there should be a deal where some short time after release (e.g. even 20 years, as it can take a long time to make that two years salary for that two years writing) literal and exact copies distributed for ZERO cost on a non-profit basis should be legal. All the transformative rights, such as the right to anthology, the right to rewrite, the right to "make a movie of it", the right to "remake" it, etc should be preserved.
As a caveat of course, DRM is impermissible (because DRM is impossible anyway and) because that would obstruct the legal exact copying mandated.
The goal here is two-fold. (1) REASONABLY reward creators for the value of their creative EFFORT and (2) PRESERVE the creative control, and so the creator's "good name" to allow for a creator to deny the "N.A.M.B.L.A. Theater's All-Furry production of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Bone".
Get 30 guys. Go to DC, or New York, or LA. Give each a single smoke bomb. At a predesignated time (high-noon local time being optimal) have each individual go into a separate McDonalds or whatever, and set off that smoke bomb. Leave behind laminated cards: "Meet our demands or next time it will be Sarin." (Or Anthrax, or whatever).
Never take responsibility. Never make a demand. Disband your organization immediately and utterly, then walk away.
That is how you sow terror.
Not one life lost. Huge media value. No clear enemy. No certainty of the nature of a threat. And you could do it by organizing the opposite of a flash-mob. (e.g. a flash dispersal...?) And what more American target than a fast food chain. And how better to threaten than by distributed action? Blowing up a big target is flashy, but it isn't as good as making people afraid to go to their neighborhood Circle-K.
I can actually think of dozens of ways to do this stuff.
The single biggest reason that Terrorists will never win is that Religious Wackos are not allowed to play D & D, and if they were, they would not remain religious wackos of the dangerous sort. Every D&D, GURPS, or whatever system "gamer" (e.g. table-top free-form tactical gamers, not console computer mindless gamers) I have ever known could utterly _thwart_ any common security practice they see. The entire mind set of gamers is to invent scenarios and then challenge their peers to defeat them. "How would I beat this checkpoint" or even "how could I use this checkpoint to my advantage" is a reflex thought to anybody who has played more than 200 hours of table-top RPG.
On the morning of September 11 I was awoken by a call from my mom. My housemate and I went to the basement and watched the coverage live. We were both gamers. We had the over-under on it being islamic, and how the cross-country flights were chosen for their fuel payload in _minutes_. (I thought there was a 10% chance it was the McVeigh people because of the military-industrial complex nature of the targets, but "survivalists" are set-and scurry bombers, not suicide bombers). By the end of the first hour we had predicted the USA PATRIOT act though we were idealistic and didn't see the torture and craven anti-american actions of the Bush Administration comming for days.
The reason gamers would never be terrorists is because the "how to make fearful people fearful" task is nowhere near as entertaining as the variations of the Zombie Hoard problem or "who and what would I need to rebuild civilization" exercise.
I get nervous in the TSA line because that is the optimal weak point in any airport. The right action there could close an airport for days or weeks, and by definition nobody has been checked for active payload yet.
Had we any brains, we would get the Israelis to design our airport security etc. By the time you are in their airport you have already been vetted like three times and they divide up the people into small segregated groups of no more than like 20.
Again the goal of that bwraep is to shut off the site, and it is probably very satisfying to see the site shut off...
But many hosting arrangements don't quota-out, they graduate to a higher cost. The hoards don't get to _see_ that, so it isn't as sexy to the protester, but it does _cost_ the targeted entity money.
So TAXing an entity hits them where _they_ feel it, as opposed to hitting them in a way that satisfies you.
Plus how funny to watch a site buy whole new servers to meet the new load of their new importance just to see that load disappear the next day.
You don't win by costing Sony Music and Friends 101% of their bandwidth and server capacity, as that lets them paint you as the bad guy. You _can_ win by constantly costing them 99% of that capacity.
You never "bring them down" but you make them pay out the nose.
A corporation only has one nerve-center to attack, and that's its money. Making a corporation pay a noticeable amount of money for no benefit to the corp is the only way to make it react. Government fines don't work because those are small fees levied after effective action.
Huge random spikes in phone costs (9-cents per 800 call if they arn't voip etc) and bandwidth bills. Making their services look unresponsive to their paying customers. These are the ways you make a company notice you.
Thing is, there is "unflattering" as in "he is such a douche and his breath stinks", and there is unflattering such as "while he will agree to the terms, I am sure that this will not cause him to halt the executions performed by the secret death-squads we know he backs."
Remember that in political terms, as opposed to normal human interactions, "unflattering" is a weasel-word.
"I just got out of negotiations with Junta Bob and he does not seem trustworthy."
"I am sure that we are being stalled by the crown prince, he cannot possibly be unaware of the recent police action since the police chief reports to him directly."
"Abdulla is a figurehead propped up by the sole will of the Tribunal for Religious Purity, and has no actual ability to act in this situation."
All of these and countless other kinds of vital truths are quite "unflattering" to the persons these truths name, and yet the _are_ vital truths that must be communicated for related issues to be addressed.
Political situations are almost universally outside the "if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all" rule, because politics, human rights, and brokering are completely unnecessary when people on all sides are already being "nice". Nice People(TM) don't _have_ death squads, so saying someone has death-squads is not nice, but if they in fact _do_ have death squads it would be unutterably wrong for that information to be held private by some single political officer in the field in the name of being nice to Junta Bob.
My first thought was that the ban was real, but _NOW_ it was never real. Once the ban got out and people noticed the dumb, then mouthpiece-of-the-government newspaper of record "discovers" that they didn't do their research and no such ban was ever planned.
"I must find out where my people are going, so I can run out that way and lead them".
I would put $10 on the ban having been originally real, but once everything we discussed about it here was discussed about it _everywhere_ someone noticed that it would be a dumb move and counter to the overall interests of the state, at which point documents were shredded and retractions were printed to cover the original error (bad idea) up with the pretense of error (we got our story wrong at the paper).
You don't even need a tinfoil hat to see that one as obvious.
Rather than trying to crash the server, Anonymous should be building a targeted spider of all the sites related to the offender. These sites should be carefully and constantly farmed of their content with due care to make sure the site isn't ever actually brought down.
So instead of a DOS, you levy a TAX. Yes, tax the site, as in "that was a very taxing experience".
There are several important results of TAXing a site.
(1) bandwidth charges go up, so there is TAXing and taxing both.
(2) You are never really stepping over the line legally because you didn't "interfere" with their business.
(3) You have an affront-in-depth because you can TAX the core site, and all the accomplice sites. So not just IPFI but Sony Music, and all thier ilk.
(4) The each TAX collector gets the best use of their action.
(5) you are likely wearing out the gear a little too.
So, to use the physical analogy, take all your sit-in participants and, instead of "blocking the door" you make a velvet rope maze of sitters that complicit actors would have to navigate.
Think of it this way... If you block the door to a bank you will get rousted by the man. If you get 1000 people to go to the bank, stand quietly in line, and when they reach the teller have them perform a cash-only or information-only transaction (e.g. "can I get change for a ten?" "I need to check my balance.") Go get a brochure, read it, then go ask a question in person or on the toll-free number like "This says the interest rate is good for six months. Does that start on the day I open an account, the end of the month I open the account, or the start of the month I open the account?", get the answer, thank the support guy and hang up.
So sure, fill out forms; File polite inquiries, visit their sponsors and members; fill out forms and file polite inquiries.
If brochures are available, ask for one. Recommend they contact a friend. Recommend they contact an enemy. Ask for more information by every possible venue to every reasonable destination.
Get their site to _vomit_ _up_ as much bandwidth and postage. Buy one share. Get the actual share certificate printed up and mailed to you. Then sell the share to your friend for a loss. Make sure he gets his share certificate as well. Buy his share for a loss on the same day and get your new certificate. (best done in a bg circle not just two guys. 8-)
A reject connect attempt is cheap compared to actually fetching a web page or sending out an email that was composed by a support-desk guy, or even a support desk automation.
Find business reply coupons and _use_ them.
At first it isn't as splashy, but you know what, when they run to their government buddies and whine "but they are using our free services exactly as offered" their buddies will probably laugh.
I just tried to reply to someone in this thread about how Kitty Pron (only spelled the other ways) was one of the root passwords to the US constitution and the submission just evaporated.
So yes, kitty pron, and drug stuff, is "contraban" so subject to border search no matter how unreasonable that is. (we cannot keep cell phones and drugs out of prisons but we expect to keep _information_ from penetrating our border... go figure.)
While it was a tad sarcastic it was in no way "filter worthy" and it _was_ previewed and submitted.
So apparently our draconian guardians exist here as elsewhere. All hail the nany state. Zig! File!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Seattle_since_1940#Silicon_Forest:_1985-.3F
Really I guess once they cut down all the forest in Redmond WA they couldn't call it that any more. Now is just a technoslum...
In the late eighties and early ninties the Silicon Forest was where Microsoft lived here in Redmond.
So I guess you guys _are_ entrenched.
Of course that entrenchment is not official till someone at a tech company forces a major political sea-change in local government politics by threatening to leave.
If that has happened there large scale like it has (twice) here, then I bow to your superior bought-up technical status...
(Example implementation abstracted from game theory) The way one would create search magnets in the keyword result set would be to take individual keywords, such as "sore" and "throat" and "natural" and "remedy" (for this example of a site that was paying up for, in this case "natural remedies for sore throats") and put magnet ranking on those words. (Or one could also "demagnetize" other sites.)
In each case each magnetized word would be assigned a factor slightly greater than one (e.g. 1.0005). All non-magnetic words at all sites would have an identity value of 1.0.
When composing the indexes the total magnetic factor of each keyword would be calculated by simple multiplication. This would set cause all the known words to have their own "domain strength". A word that was very bought up would have a very high domain strength. Think words like "natural" that everybody wants, and that some would buy. (And think negative words like "goatse" which the system would want to have very weak domains just in principle; or "Toyota" which Ford and Mitsubishi might each want to bury. Not to mention A, AN and THE which are noise words in English.)
Now the search term comes in. All the words are separated and the words with the strongest domain are made most dominant in the query. Then you do rank and weight calculations and filter this preferred list. Because of the magnets the bought sites bubble up to the front.
In such a magnitized system adding noise words and punctuation would have no noticable effect.
BUT this is not what was observed... Instead...
In a fair language analysis the words are considered as phrasings. A phrase like "natural remedy for a sore throat" would ideally be represented as a conceptual atom. (In practical terms most google users have not spent significant amounts of time in various keyword boolean search contexts, so they don't get that this is a good "atom" so) the system will look for word pairs and triplets "sore throat" "natural remedy" and because that would lead to a cartesian product of equal indexes, such a filter would rank the words by their original position such that "natural remedy sore throat" would favor natural remedies while "sore throat natural remedy" would be more focused on the sore throat that the naturalness of the remedy. This makes "sore throat remedy" a super set of "sore throat natural remedy" but would make "natural remedy sore throat" tend to select against the matches for "sore throat" alone.
Now the various weighted phrases and lexemes get dispatched in parallel to sub-engines that go fishing through the indexes by word and by phrase. (We know this because really cruddy random phrases will return results such that a search for "cat elephant guitar fountain" will return stable results as surely as "natural sore throat remedy".
When the sub-searches find "enough results" the combiner filters them into a stable list by score strenght and that's what you get.
And that is what we see.
For instance, you type "sore throat" and your first listing is a definition (from google.com/health), and then there are a bunch of remedy sites. You make it "a sore throat" and the medical definition disappears but the rest of the rankings stay the same.
Now if google were to _stupidly_ make "sore throat" return every definition for sore throat on the web before it got to any of the remedies, well, we wouldn't use google. So it makes sense that the very first "definition of" result would stop the "Definition of" search, but that singe result would be at the top because the two words "sore throat" may well represent a need for a definition on the part of the querier. But query "what is a sore throat" and you get something from princton.edu at the moment; but again just one "definition of" result from that query engine.
Still on, you put "a sore throat" and the likely hood of needing a definition of the thing you know is already singular and the "definition of" result just disappears.
These things continue on with "treatm
Perturb good search strings with noise and sites made to communicate clearly and be reasonably searchable will fall victim to that noise and fall off of the rankings.
In todays news a man discovered that a lack of noise on google run and google coached pages will cause things like turning "sore throat" (a _general_ topic) into "a sore throat" (a specific event descriptive) or adding unnecessary punctuation to a valid search term may lead to less stable results.
Insiders claim that this is a failure of the search engine to properly spam itself and that the lack of self spam is evidence that spammed pages are clearly finding themselves separately categorized from concise sites.
In other news, language based filters filter different language based constructs differently... On expert was quoted as saying "no duh..."
For the Sarcasm Impaired: If the fix were in, then the addition of "a" to "sore throat" would _never_ drop the site from the ranking because the hacked unconditional keyword match for "sore" and "throat" would never be confused by "a". Such hacked algorithms would be noise tolerant not noise susceptible. Researcher has thus proved the _absence_ of wired-up responses.