Re:The ends do not justify the means.
on
Freedom or Power?
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· Score: 2
How can giving people the ability to tell others what information they can and cannot communicate, and what programs they can and cannot run, possibly be an individual freedom? Even (sane) proponents of copyright law will admit that it, not the absence of it, is clearly a deviation from individual freedom - one enacted for utilitarian reasons of promoting creativity (read the American constitution for example).
Being given the legal mandate to tell people what they cannot do with information, just because you happen to have written it, can never be construed as a freedom and can thus only be justified in the context of social benefit, as the poster you responded to wrote. It is little different from my and my peers practice of forming a government that taxes you - taxing you is not "our individual freedom" it is a power we grant ourselves and justify in a social context.
Ask yourself who has been more threatening to your individual freedom of late. RMS and others who advocate free communication, or the MPAA & RIAA and their laws like the DMCA and SSSCA? (Which are both justified and _necessary_ laws if we are to put the protection of copyright above it's social cost.)
Free Speech is a fundamental liberty, an axiom, in the US only. The fundamental liberties are not the same in Europe.
As a European, statements like that make me sick. Just because the laws that the framers of the American constitution put down only apply there, does NOT mean that their observations about mankind are incorrect (have you read the American constitution? The other writings of men like Jefferson? The writings of philosophers that inspired them?) Fundamental liberties do not shift between people or continents, they are basis for sanity in society whereever you are.
The examples of horror you state were not caused by freedom of speech, they were caused by people who were unable to think for themselves as individuals, and allowed themselves to be controlled and used in mass as tools by evil men. The way to avoid that happening again is not to decide that we (or some people we elected) are so on much higher ground that we should be given the power to control public opinion but rather to build a world where the right to think as one is inshrined from the root. That is exactly what is not happening in Germany, regardless of how distasteful you or I may find the speech that is being censored.
Also, a government is no longer controlled by the people, elections or not, when it starts controlling the public opinion. There is no such thing as a censoring democracy.
Which explains why you're so supportive of a government effort (any government's effort) to censor "hate-speech".
Have you looked up the meaning of "liberal" lately? I thought both your posts were correct and salient (especially considering what a disgusting quagmire of the pro-censorship that this story turned out to contain) but the above makes no sense.
"Liberalism" is a political philosophy that takes individual freedom as the basic state of society, and says that the burden of proof and justification must always fall on the side of those who advocate deviating from that. It differs from "conservatism", which takes the current (or often years past) society as the natural state and says that the burden of proof must fall on those advocating change. Anybody who supports censorship whenever possible is clearly NOT liberal, whatever they claim to be...
Yes, I did know all that, and it does not change a thing. What part of "censorship is censorship" do you fail to comprehend?
Evil almost never comes into the world because of evil intentions, but rather when fundamental freedoms are trampled upon in the name of utilitarian reward, short term benefit, and an illusion of safety.
Why is this not as bad as China or Saudi-Arabia? Censorship is censorship, and governments trying to restrict their peoples access to information on the Internet is equally despicable regardless of the information or the method with which it is attempted.
The world has suffered too much already to the German people's willingness to allow their governments to manipulate and control them. I say shame on all those who are allowing it to continue...
That is because it is not "copy protection". Nothing stops you from copying the game data, or running it in any manner you want.
The CD-key system is simply account system, where you pay for an account on Id's server network. It would be possible to get around it - simply by cracking the server code to ignore checking the CD-key, but apparently most people who run servers on the Internet feel compelled to enforce Id's accounts for some reason (which is pretty dumb unless Id is giving them some of the money really). It would be interesting to see if Id would go after people running cracked servers (planning to stand with the MPAA, John?)
Once you realize it is an account system, you have to view the security from that perspective (as Divine notes regarding attacks that steal keys from peoples machines). I don't know the exact protocol, but I would worry that it is not secure against game servers sniffing for peoples keys, or any of the more subtle attacks that almost always work against corporate designed protocols. I would be pretty pissed off if a key I payed for was stolen through shabby design by Id, only to be accused of trying to forge my way into the network...
His argument can be expanded to deal with almost all forms of oppresive government. Bolshivism, Nazism, Maoism, to say nothing of the numerous military dictatorships the world over (yes, these count too. If the entire country decides that a ruler is just an asshole and that opposition is the only option, he will fall), all of these rely on their implicit ability to define right and wrong.
Bruce Schneier covered this more than a year ago in the 15.06.2000 cryptogram. Anyone who has read Schneier's newsletter long enough begins to realize that he is the Cassandra of the Internet...
You are contradicting yourself. What is analogous to the Communism is not to pay for transfers by how much is transfered, but not paying heed to the economic realities that it does cost money to transfer information. It is trying to artificially ignore natural costs (if so for utilitarian reasons) that leads to the loss of Freedom - as communism inevitably does, as paying $30 per month for broadband with unlimited transfer does (banning of servers by users which dagnerously centralizes communications), and as users not being able to pay for the bandwidth they use does to community sites.
To claim that the price of products should be based on what the consumers can bear is completely insane. If it were necessary, I could bear paying ten times what I do now on food simply by giving up things that I don't need to keep me alive, and I'm certain that as a whole so could most people around me - but competition keeps the price reasonably close to the cost of production.
I never said that the prices should not be based on market economy, and I think that package routing could allow this to work, with competition, extremely well (imagine the potential of being able to choose between "optimise route by cost" or "optimize route by speed").
Also, I never said that the money should end up with the publisher - I'm saying that CmdrTaco should not have to pay for the bandwidth I use reading your post. One could imagine a situation where websites and carriers would work together to generate more traffic - but users will simply have to keep there eyes open regarding websites that cost more to transfer than they taste.
Probably the easiest way to implement a flat-rate model would be to create a cap. Let's say that the monthly cap were $20 per month. Everyone would know that if they looked at more than 2,000 pages per month, they would pay no more than $20 per month.
This is not implementable - if it were implemented, people would clearly just run proxies to pool everybody's requests through a single machine (not to mention that it is impossible to enforce a single machine per identity to begin with without going for sinister methods).
This is typical of the sort of, not just technically, but logically flawed ideas that always come out of these pointless pipedreams not motivated by reality but what people NEED or DESERVE. If any solutions to the actual problems are to come around, then they need to start with the realities of cyberspace, which the penny-per-page idea clearly does not.
The first reality of cyberspace is that you do not pay for information. Information, once created, can be copied infinitely, so generally available copies have no value - regardless of the emotionally motivated arguments about what creaters NEED or DESERVE. If one is working on a solution for getting people to pay for information online, then one can be sure one's solution is broken.
The second reality is that there is no possible mapping between identity in cyberspace and identity in real life. A single person can be present as a hundred identities, and single identity can represent a hundred people. Any sort of model that includes ideas about any action "per person" is doomed, as is any model that gives an identity negative trust (that is one where an identity can be treated worse then a previously unknown one).
The third reality is that all information is equal. If a model measures information in any other unit then bits it is stupid - because one off units like "pages" mean nothing about the actual contents or the the cost of transfer. It is short sited and ends up relying on user hostile (read evil) software to enforce that "page" means the accepted norm.
However, that is not to say that the problems facing the web are not real. It did not bother me when pages paying millions for content creation folded - paying for content creation hoping to control the information is stupid, so those pages (like the music and film industries) deserved to fall. However, what we are seeing now is the Web reaching the point where pages like this one are folding under their own popularity - because even though they have no costs for creating the content, they are unable to pay for the service of providing the page - that is a real problem.
Everybody who has ever sent an SMS (cell phone short message) or made a local call in Europe knows about overcharging networks. The costs are set not by the actual costs of transfer, but rather by what the companies controlling the networks (usually oligopolies) find they are able to charge people. That is ridiculous and destructive - but it seems that the Internet is the opposite - an undercharging network.
The simple truth is that we should be paying when we visit a website - not for the content - you DO NOT pay for content - but for the cost of transfer. It is unfair and unrealistic that a large part of the cost of transfer should fall on the publisher, rather than the person who benefits from the transfer.
Systems that do not reflect economic realities are dangerous. While the idea of paying a charge on every single IP package routed sounds like a nightmare to many Internet anarchists - the truth is that the fact that we are not paying is gearing up to be a real threat to free speech online since community run services are seizing to be sustainable. The price should be fair, and much lower than then the penny-per-page proposed above, at least for most definitions of "page" (server transfer costs seem between $.001 and $.01 per Megabyte at the moment) - but I fear for the future of the Web, and the net at large, if it does not come about.
A 20 GB drive wouldn't store a busy year's worth of my pictures at decent resolution. Then I would have to decide if I'm gonna try and fit another 20GB drive in my box or cull most of the pictures.
So say we go for a 60 gig drive instead then, which you can get for ~ $200 today. That drive can store 20k of your 3 meg images. And when you fill that up, why not just take it out of your box and archive the whole thing? I mean, 20k pictures is 560 roles of film - you saying you buy film for less than $.36 a piece? And that isn't even counting developing the film (which takes time == money even if you do it yourself). And one 3.5" harddisk is certainly smaller than than 20k pictures, even if they are only negatives - the only issue is how long data lasts on unplugged harddisks, I don't know the numbers, but I have had disks lying for years that survived anyways.
Oops, you're right. So the situation isn't quite as bad as I thought (since routine decryption would be a hard sell for the government).
There is a simple solution to this for the government - simply label the use of unescrowed crypto a terrorist act, that way if they get a warrant and find they cannot decrypt the data, they no longer need to look for further evidence.
Of course, what is really needed from message decryption is the ability to detect and prevent these sort of crimes before they occur, for which this would be useless - but let's not confuse what the world needs and law enforcement wants.
One thing is clear: any practical use of key escrow is deep in police state territory.
It's not the software that is the problem. It is the bussiness model of trying to make a commericial operating system to coexist with windows.
Offtopic: Passenger trains are only dead in America, and I think it has more to do with the car than the airplane (and of course America's large size).
You continue to be shortsighted and naive. These technologies exist, and one way or another they will be used against you, with your knowledge or without it. The only thing your laws against it will do is ensure the latter case.
btw, my city has no council, my district has no congressman, and my country has no president, but that is somewhat beside the point...
So you are proposing the invention of a magic camera detection beam? You should have said so, since though I doubt it is technically possible, it is a much better idea than believing that you can make the cameras go away by asking that they not be used...
Shit does not start at the local level. Give technology a couple of years and your face will be recognizable from satelites whenever you happen to look upwards, while ground based cameras will be sized like flies and fly like them. And face recognition is just one technology like this - your smell, your voice, you skin flakings and hair, you body shape, etc etc, all betray your identity. And many of those don't even require line of sight, and have no real limit as to distance from which they can be applied. Will your model continue to be to decide that these technologies don't exist and to believe that they won't be used without your permission?
I don't know enough about the technology itself to say whether wearing masks is adequate counter-technology. I would guess that at this point it is. Maybe better counter-technology will be developed if we just accept that is how we must maintain the balance, rather than playing pretend.
In the long run, however, I strongly suspect that the cause of trying to keep our identities private in public is a lost cause - from the government or from anybody else. As I said from the beginning, the correct thing to do is to decrease the power that others excert over us to compensate (we grant government power over so that it can fight crime against us - since the decrease in privacy helps the fight against crime it is natural that government thus needs less power).
Yes, you go around waving your bar code, I mean face, in public pretending that this technology does not exist, because you have made your government promise-pretty-please not to use it. But the fact is that this technology WILL still exist, and cameras will not get larger, and software will not get harder to use or less precise (well, unless M$ is involved) - can you really trust the government to stay true to its promise?
By the same argument, why don't we ware bar codes? It would be quite convenient when you want to people to know who you are, and all we need to do is get the bar code readers we don't want pulled out and sent to England!
You are fighting the progress of technology because what you want to do is continue your life the same as it was before these technologies existed by making people promise not to use them. The liberty of the dangerously naive will hurt us more than any government.
You misunderstand me. I propose that you accept the fact that your ass is a shit hole, and accordingly keep your thumb out of it. I dunno if you need technology for that...
... but you can't stop shit from coming out of it.
The author of the article is probably right that it is not pertinent for government accelerate the trend towards automatic recognition at this point, but the just the topic betrays a dangerous fallacy in his reasoning. If it is possible to use your face to identify you (and it is, of course, we evolved that way) then your face is, for all intents and purposes, a human barcode. You can throw a fit and argue all you like about how horrible that is, but by denying the simple inevitable truth you will just be making your situation worse.
Your ass is a shit hole, and your face is a bar code. Get over it, and start from there. The right thing to do when technology starts infringing on our integrity and liberty is not to fight technology, because that is futile and stupid, but to develop technology that evens the scale, or to compensate by other means.
In this case there is no need to develope new technology, masks have been around for some time. If you are not willing to pay the price of inconvience of wearing masks in public, then you do not deserve your freedom. The true infringement on liberty is, of course, when somebody tells you that you cannot use a mask (just like Carnivore is not an issue, while bans against encryption are crimes against humanity).
As for compensating, the best way to compensate against a loss of privacy is to decrease the amount of power over you that you grant to others. As governments are able to track us better, we need to make sure that the amount of power we grant to them decreases accordingly.
It works fine as long as your computer is not allowed to work for you, but instead works for the publisher - which is what the DMCA is all about: making it clear who your computer/DVD player/ebook reader actually belongs to and works for, and that you are merely a servant to it (What? You say you bought it? HAHAHAHAHAHA - you probably paid more for it to install the functionality so it would obey us!).
If the forces of evil thought that these technologies could work, they wouldn't have needed to buy the DMCA and WIPO (legislation costs!) Their agenda is very clear - to wrestle the control of the agents away from the users, so that those agents can act against and control them, returning customers (those things that used to be people when they were capable of cognent thought) into their rightful position as passive money pumps in the global economy.
The difference here is that I can't accidentally eat too much food. But it is easy to accidentally use a bunch of bandwidth (at least given the state of software and networks today).
You can leave food out and have it spoiled. Or forget to eat it before it goes bad. The real difference is that food is prepaid not billed afterwards (unless your living out of the hotel minibar) but there is no reason why bandwidth can't be prepaid if that is what you want (my cellphone usage is prepaid, I "charge" the account with $25 worth of usage when I need it - no rolling costs at all).
Somebody else mentioned natural gas for which you are billed by usage. And electicity. And water. And hot water. And telephony. Do those really keep you up at night?
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How can giving people the ability to tell others what information they can and cannot communicate, and what programs they can and cannot run, possibly be an individual freedom? Even (sane) proponents of copyright law will admit that it, not the absence of it, is clearly a deviation from individual freedom - one enacted for utilitarian reasons of promoting creativity (read the American constitution for example).
Being given the legal mandate to tell people what they cannot do with information, just because you happen to have written it, can never be construed as a freedom and can thus only be justified in the context of social benefit, as the poster you responded to wrote. It is little different from my and my peers practice of forming a government that taxes you - taxing you is not "our individual freedom" it is a power we grant ourselves and justify in a social context.
Ask yourself who has been more threatening to your individual freedom of late. RMS and others who advocate free communication, or the MPAA & RIAA and their laws like the DMCA and SSSCA? (Which are both justified and _necessary_ laws if we are to put the protection of copyright above it's social cost.)
Free Speech is a fundamental liberty, an axiom, in the US only. The fundamental liberties are not the same in Europe.
As a European, statements like that make me sick. Just because the laws that the framers of the American constitution put down only apply there, does NOT mean that their observations about mankind are incorrect (have you read the American constitution? The other writings of men like Jefferson? The writings of philosophers that inspired them?) Fundamental liberties do not shift between people or continents, they are basis for sanity in society whereever you are.
The examples of horror you state were not caused by freedom of speech, they were caused by people who were unable to think for themselves as individuals, and allowed themselves to be controlled and used in mass as tools by evil men. The way to avoid that happening again is not to decide that we (or some people we elected) are so on much higher ground that we should be given the power to control public opinion but rather to build a world where the right to think as one is inshrined from the root. That is exactly what is not happening in Germany, regardless of how distasteful you or I may find the speech that is being censored.
Also, a government is no longer controlled by the people, elections or not, when it starts controlling the public opinion. There is no such thing as a censoring democracy.
Sounds like you're a Gore liberal.
Which explains why you're so supportive of a government effort (any government's effort) to censor "hate-speech".
Have you looked up the meaning of "liberal" lately? I thought both your posts were correct and salient (especially considering what a disgusting quagmire of the pro-censorship that this story turned out to contain) but the above makes no sense.
"Liberalism" is a political philosophy that takes individual freedom as the basic state of society, and says that the burden of proof and justification must always fall on the side of those who advocate deviating from that. It differs from "conservatism", which takes the current (or often years past) society as the natural state and says that the burden of proof must fall on those advocating change. Anybody who supports censorship whenever possible is clearly NOT liberal, whatever they claim to be...
Yes, I did know all that, and it does not change a thing. What part of "censorship is censorship" do you fail to comprehend?
Evil almost never comes into the world because of evil intentions, but rather when fundamental freedoms are trampled upon in the name of utilitarian reward, short term benefit, and an illusion of safety.
Why is this not as bad as China or Saudi-Arabia? Censorship is censorship, and governments trying to restrict their peoples access to information on the Internet is equally despicable regardless of the information or the method with which it is attempted.
The world has suffered too much already to the German people's willingness to allow their governments to manipulate and control them. I say shame on all those who are allowing it to continue...
The copy protection DOES work
That is because it is not "copy protection". Nothing stops you from copying the game data, or running it in any manner you want.
The CD-key system is simply account system, where you pay for an account on Id's server network. It would be possible to get around it - simply by cracking the server code to ignore checking the CD-key, but apparently most people who run servers on the Internet feel compelled to enforce Id's accounts for some reason (which is pretty dumb unless Id is giving them some of the money really). It would be interesting to see if Id would go after people running cracked servers (planning to stand with the MPAA, John?)
Once you realize it is an account system, you have to view the security from that perspective (as Divine notes regarding attacks that steal keys from peoples machines). I don't know the exact protocol, but I would worry that it is not secure against game servers sniffing for peoples keys, or any of the more subtle attacks that almost always work against corporate designed protocols. I would be pretty pissed off if a key I payed for was stolen through shabby design by Id, only to be accused of trying to forge my way into the network...
His argument can be expanded to deal with almost all forms of oppresive government. Bolshivism, Nazism, Maoism, to say nothing of the numerous military dictatorships the world over (yes, these count too. If the entire country decides that a ruler is just an asshole and that opposition is the only option, he will fall), all of these rely on their implicit ability to define right and wrong.
Don't forget organized religion...
Bruce Schneier covered this more than a year ago in the 15.06.2000 cryptogram. Anyone who has read Schneier's newsletter long enough begins to realize that he is the Cassandra of the Internet...
You are contradicting yourself. What is analogous to the Communism is not to pay for transfers by how much is transfered, but not paying heed to the economic realities that it does cost money to transfer information. It is trying to artificially ignore natural costs (if so for utilitarian reasons) that leads to the loss of Freedom - as communism inevitably does, as paying $30 per month for broadband with unlimited transfer does (banning of servers by users which dagnerously centralizes communications), and as users not being able to pay for the bandwidth they use does to community sites.
To claim that the price of products should be based on what the consumers can bear is completely insane. If it were necessary, I could bear paying ten times what I do now on food simply by giving up things that I don't need to keep me alive, and I'm certain that as a whole so could most people around me - but competition keeps the price reasonably close to the cost of production.
I never said that the prices should not be based on market economy, and I think that package routing could allow this to work, with competition, extremely well (imagine the potential of being able to choose between "optimise route by cost" or "optimize route by speed").
Also, I never said that the money should end up with the publisher - I'm saying that CmdrTaco should not have to pay for the bandwidth I use reading your post. One could imagine a situation where websites and carriers would work together to generate more traffic - but users will simply have to keep there eyes open regarding websites that cost more to transfer than they taste.
Probably the easiest way to implement a flat-rate model would be to create a cap. Let's say that the monthly cap were $20 per month. Everyone would know that if they looked at more than 2,000 pages per month, they would pay no more than $20 per month.
This is not implementable - if it were implemented, people would clearly just run proxies to pool everybody's requests through a single machine (not to mention that it is impossible to enforce a single machine per identity to begin with without going for sinister methods).
This is typical of the sort of, not just technically, but logically flawed ideas that always come out of these pointless pipedreams not motivated by reality but what people NEED or DESERVE. If any solutions to the actual problems are to come around, then they need to start with the realities of cyberspace, which the penny-per-page idea clearly does not.
The first reality of cyberspace is that you do not pay for information. Information, once created, can be copied infinitely, so generally available copies have no value - regardless of the emotionally motivated arguments about what creaters NEED or DESERVE. If one is working on a solution for getting people to pay for information online, then one can be sure one's solution is broken.
The second reality is that there is no possible mapping between identity in cyberspace and identity in real life. A single person can be present as a hundred identities, and single identity can represent a hundred people. Any sort of model that includes ideas about any action "per person" is doomed, as is any model that gives an identity negative trust (that is one where an identity can be treated worse then a previously unknown one).
The third reality is that all information is equal. If a model measures information in any other unit then bits it is stupid - because one off units like "pages" mean nothing about the actual contents or the the cost of transfer. It is short sited and ends up relying on user hostile (read evil) software to enforce that "page" means the accepted norm.
However, that is not to say that the problems facing the web are not real. It did not bother me when pages paying millions for content creation folded - paying for content creation hoping to control the information is stupid, so those pages (like the music and film industries) deserved to fall. However, what we are seeing now is the Web reaching the point where pages like this one are folding under their own popularity - because even though they have no costs for creating the content, they are unable to pay for the service of providing the page - that is a real problem.
Everybody who has ever sent an SMS (cell phone short message) or made a local call in Europe knows about overcharging networks. The costs are set not by the actual costs of transfer, but rather by what the companies controlling the networks (usually oligopolies) find they are able to charge people. That is ridiculous and destructive - but it seems that the Internet is the opposite - an undercharging network.
The simple truth is that we should be paying when we visit a website - not for the content - you DO NOT pay for content - but for the cost of transfer. It is unfair and unrealistic that a large part of the cost of transfer should fall on the publisher, rather than the person who benefits from the transfer.
Systems that do not reflect economic realities are dangerous. While the idea of paying a charge on every single IP package routed sounds like a nightmare to many Internet anarchists - the truth is that the fact that we are not paying is gearing up to be a real threat to free speech online since community run services are seizing to be sustainable. The price should be fair, and much lower than then the penny-per-page proposed above, at least for most definitions of "page" (server transfer costs seem between $.001 and $.01 per Megabyte at the moment) - but I fear for the future of the Web, and the net at large, if it does not come about.
Remember TWA flight 800, it's not a new thing.
A 20 GB drive wouldn't store a busy year's worth of my pictures at decent resolution. Then I would have to decide if I'm gonna try and fit another 20GB drive in my box or cull most of the pictures.
So say we go for a 60 gig drive instead then, which you can get for ~ $200 today. That drive can store 20k of your 3 meg images. And when you fill that up, why not just take it out of your box and archive the whole thing? I mean, 20k pictures is 560 roles of film - you saying you buy film for less than $.36 a piece? And that isn't even counting developing the film (which takes time == money even if you do it yourself). And one 3.5" harddisk is certainly smaller than than 20k pictures, even if they are only negatives - the only issue is how long data lasts on unplugged harddisks, I don't know the numbers, but I have had disks lying for years that survived anyways.
All the potential users for such a service are already using MusicNet. Go ask Hillary Rosen and Lars Ulrich yourself if you don't believe me...
Oops, you're right. So the situation isn't quite as bad as I thought (since routine decryption would be a hard sell for the government).
There is a simple solution to this for the government - simply label the use of unescrowed crypto a terrorist act, that way if they get a warrant and find they cannot decrypt the data, they no longer need to look for further evidence.
Of course, what is really needed from message decryption is the ability to detect and prevent these sort of crimes before they occur, for which this would be useless - but let's not confuse what the world needs and law enforcement wants.
One thing is clear: any practical use of key escrow is deep in police state territory.
It could just be the sheer amount of people clicking in in shock - but there have been news stories in the past without the news sites going down.
Is there cyber attack being run together with the terrorist one?
It's not the software that is the problem. It is the bussiness model of trying to make a commericial operating system to coexist with windows.
Offtopic: Passenger trains are only dead in America, and I think it has more to do with the car than the airplane (and of course America's large size).
"We're well aware of the dominance by the key player in this market - we just want to coexist, not supplant." - Peter Tattam
"I once preached peaceful coexistence with Windows. You may laugh at my expense -- I deserve it." - Jean-Louis Gassée
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." - George Santayana
You continue to be shortsighted and naive. These technologies exist, and one way or another they will be used against you, with your knowledge or without it. The only thing your laws against it will do is ensure the latter case.
btw, my city has no council, my district has no congressman, and my country has no president, but that is somewhat beside the point...
So you are proposing the invention of a magic camera detection beam? You should have said so, since though I doubt it is technically possible, it is a much better idea than believing that you can make the cameras go away by asking that they not be used...
Shit does not start at the local level. Give technology a couple of years and your face will be recognizable from satelites whenever you happen to look upwards, while ground based cameras will be sized like flies and fly like them. And face recognition is just one technology like this - your smell, your voice, you skin flakings and hair, you body shape, etc etc, all betray your identity. And many of those don't even require line of sight, and have no real limit as to distance from which they can be applied. Will your model continue to be to decide that these technologies don't exist and to believe that they won't be used without your permission?
I don't know enough about the technology itself to say whether wearing masks is adequate counter-technology. I would guess that at this point it is. Maybe better counter-technology will be developed if we just accept that is how we must maintain the balance, rather than playing pretend.
In the long run, however, I strongly suspect that the cause of trying to keep our identities private in public is a lost cause - from the government or from anybody else. As I said from the beginning, the correct thing to do is to decrease the power that others excert over us to compensate (we grant government power over so that it can fight crime against us - since the decrease in privacy helps the fight against crime it is natural that government thus needs less power).
Yes, you go around waving your bar code, I mean face, in public pretending that this technology does not exist, because you have made your government promise-pretty-please not to use it. But the fact is that this technology WILL still exist, and cameras will not get larger, and software will not get harder to use or less precise (well, unless M$ is involved) - can you really trust the government to stay true to its promise?
By the same argument, why don't we ware bar codes? It would be quite convenient when you want to people to know who you are, and all we need to do is get the bar code readers we don't want pulled out and sent to England!
You are fighting the progress of technology because what you want to do is continue your life the same as it was before these technologies existed by making people promise not to use them. The liberty of the dangerously naive will hurt us more than any government.
You misunderstand me. I propose that you accept the fact that your ass is a shit hole, and accordingly keep your thumb out of it. I dunno if you need technology for that...
... but you can't stop shit from coming out of it.
The author of the article is probably right that it is not pertinent for government accelerate the trend towards automatic recognition at this point, but the just the topic betrays a dangerous fallacy in his reasoning. If it is possible to use your face to identify you (and it is, of course, we evolved that way) then your face is, for all intents and purposes, a human barcode. You can throw a fit and argue all you like about how horrible that is, but by denying the simple inevitable truth you will just be making your situation worse.
Your ass is a shit hole, and your face is a bar code. Get over it, and start from there. The right thing to do when technology starts infringing on our integrity and liberty is not to fight technology, because that is futile and stupid, but to develop technology that evens the scale, or to compensate by other means.
In this case there is no need to develope new technology, masks have been around for some time. If you are not willing to pay the price of inconvience of wearing masks in public, then you do not deserve your freedom. The true infringement on liberty is, of course, when somebody tells you that you cannot use a mask (just like Carnivore is not an issue, while bans against encryption are crimes against humanity).
As for compensating, the best way to compensate against a loss of privacy is to decrease the amount of power over you that you grant to others. As governments are able to track us better, we need to make sure that the amount of power we grant to them decreases accordingly.
Well,
Jim = Publisher
Bob = Your computer
Carol = You
It works fine as long as your computer is not allowed to work for you, but instead works for the publisher - which is what the DMCA is all about: making it clear who your computer/DVD player/ebook reader actually belongs to and works for, and that you are merely a servant to it (What? You say you bought it? HAHAHAHAHAHA - you probably paid more for it to install the functionality so it would obey us!).
If the forces of evil thought that these technologies could work, they wouldn't have needed to buy the DMCA and WIPO (legislation costs!) Their agenda is very clear - to wrestle the control of the agents away from the users, so that those agents can act against and control them, returning customers (those things that used to be people when they were capable of cognent thought) into their rightful position as passive money pumps in the global economy.
The difference here is that I can't accidentally eat too much food. But it is easy to accidentally use a bunch of bandwidth (at least given the state of software and networks today).
You can leave food out and have it spoiled. Or forget to eat it before it goes bad. The real difference is that food is prepaid not billed afterwards (unless your living out of the hotel minibar) but there is no reason why bandwidth can't be prepaid if that is what you want (my cellphone usage is prepaid, I "charge" the account with $25 worth of usage when I need it - no rolling costs at all).
Somebody else mentioned natural gas for which you are billed by usage. And electicity. And water. And hot water. And telephony. Do those really keep you up at night?
Help me out here, Hobbex. I can't figure out whether you're pro-supermarket or anti-supermarket.
That you even need to ask indicates a lot about you...
I also can't figure out how morons don't know the difference between "lose" and "loose".
... and this confirms it.
Actually, we do it on purpose so that we can find more people for our "shallow fucks who I shall ignore in the future" lists.