And here is probably a good benchmark for whether a security measure is theatre or not:
How effective would it be, and to what degree would it be regarded as intrusive, if the exact same measures were applied in a parallel venue?
Your example of driving vs flying is the most obvious, of course -- NO ONE would submit to airport-style security measures before being allowed to drive on the public streets (despite that a malicious driver could cause even more havoc than a hijacker). Oh, but you can opt for a less-secure transportation method, so not really a problem, eh? Okay, how about being sec-screened before you're allowed to walk on the public sidewalks? Because you COULD be packing a vest-bomb and it MIGHT go off in a crowd... yeah, better scan everyone before letting 'em out of their house!
Exactly so. And fact is, if we weren't so accustomed to being sheep (keep your head down, and maybe YOU won't get picked to be slaughtered today!), stuff like hijackings would never have been successful in the first place, because the passengers would have swarmed the perps and beat their heads square. I'll see your box cutter, and raise you Aunt Mamie's spike-heeled shoe, smack in your eyeball. Try it again, punk...
As to other attack vectors... well, the main difference seems to be the opportunity for theatre. Yeah, you can secure your municipal water facility, but you can't stop Random Terrorist from dropping nefarious substances into any of the hundreds of miles of the California Aquaduct.
So, given that threat, we all panic and all buy bottled water. Great! now all I need to do is compromise one batch of Popular Bottled Water and I've got a captive audience! (And it's not like someone couldn't -- remember the Great Tylenol Scare??) But because this offers a choke point, Security Theatre can again rear its ugly head.
I'm not sure where I was going with this, other than... my response to a terrorist is not to be afraid; it's a desire to knock their teeth in.
Shit, why not just blow up the damned airport? You don't even need to step inside the security perimeter. Just drop a bomb in the lobby, or near the front entrance. That would be much more spectacular than anything you could do in flight, with what little you can sneak aboard in your hand luggage.
Or hie yourself to the back fence, outside the airport entirely, and lob a few incidiaries in the direction of the fuel pumps. Fireworks for everyone!!
Goes to show how stupid the whole security theatre thing is...
I used to have this bamboo forest surrounding my house -- it was really quite impressive. People always asked why it was there, and I'd say, "It keeps the elephants away. You don't see any elephants, do you??"
And everyone agreed as to how it must work, since there weren't any invading elephants. But one day someone had a different response: "Only the pink ones..."
It's the same thing with these scanners. They keep the terrorists away -- you don't see any terrorists, do you?? Nope, only the imaginary ones.
And I defy you to find cites for everything you've read in print in the past 20-odd years. Do you keep cites for everything you remember reading? No?? Hmm...
I vaguely recall it was from the gov't of Kenya (in conjunction with a Wildlife Conservation Spasm because tourism was suffering), and it was a good 25 years ago. But there's little reason to believe much has changed; if anything, African grasslands are becoming MORE restricted.
"I didn't say it moves people to violent acts. But is often damaging to forming healthy relationships."
Or more likely people who can be moved to violent acts *already* had trouble forming healthy relationships, and IF they CAN be moved to violent acts, that is a symptom of their underlying problem, NOT the cause of it.
So... do you want to have restrictive laws based on the behaviour of abnormal people, or of normal people?
How about the FBI's own stats, which show that as first BBSs (ca. 1990) and later the Internet (which really took off in 1996) let anyone view porn in the privacy of their own computer, the sex crimes rate dropped dramatically?
Yeah, correlation doesn't prove causation. Maybe the real reason the sex crime rate dropped was cuz starting in 1996, all the would-be rapists were castrated the moment they had a heinous thought.
2) The images were manufactured. They included real faces of his daughters and kids on his soccer team that he coached. These were just as damaging as any other "child porn" you can think of.
Were any of his daughters or the kids on the soccer team actually damaged? I mean the real person, not just their image.
If not, please explain how these images are "just as damaging". What, exactly, was damaged?
Several decades back, one of the major animal control agencies in Africa investigated the issue of ivory poaching -- and to their own astonishment, discovered it was entirely a myth. Poaching simply wasn't happening.
And they discovered that those huge "elephant graveyards" had another cause entirely.
Elephants are grazers, NOT browsers. This means they eat, and are designed to eat, GRASSES. They are NOT designed to eat shoots and twigs, nor can they digest that much cellulose.
The elephants found dead in those mass graveyards all had one thing in common: a large ball of half-digested tree branches lying inside each carcass. NONE of them had the large-calibre bullet hole in their skull or ribcage that would be left by an elephant gun (you don't hunt elephants with a deer rifle; you hunt them with armor-piercing shells the size of a Polish sausage. And you get ONE shot -- and if it's not a clean kill, the elephant kills YOU.)
And their tusks had not been CUT off, as would be the case with a fresh corpse -- they'd been removed from the tooth socket entirely, as can only be done if the flesh has already rotted away.
Suddenly, all was explained. These elephants died not from being poached, but of impacted bowels (which if untreated is 100% fatal).
And why was that happening? It's a direct result of Africa's exploding population, and its need to feed that population:
Over the past 100 years, African agriculture has radically expanded. Huge tracts of grassland that were formerly open range are now fenced off, and have been variously cultivated for human crops, or overgrazed down to dirt. Along with several major droughts, this has pretty well destroyed the grasslands that were the African elephants' original habitat AND their major food source.
Starving elephants took to eating whatever they could find that looked halfway like food -- and that too-often meant brushy shoots and small tree branches, which they could not digest. And they died of it. Being social herd animals, they tended to die in groups.
When one of these graveyards was found by humans, they rejoiced to see all the free ivory laying around (already conveniently rotted loose from the skull), carried it off, and sold it. No harm was done to any living elephant.
But international opinion and law had already decided that all ivory must come from poaching, so these facts were, and still are, entirely ignored. Especially since this mythical "poaching" makes great press for animal rights extremists.
And impoverished Africans either lose the money they gain from selling the ivory left behind by long-dead elephants, or they sell it on the black market.
You probably meant this as a joke, but I think you make a good point regardless. If the "war on drugs" is really a war on ordinary behaviour by average citizens, then drug dealers are doing a form of Civil Disobedience.
I grew up during the Cold War. My college roommates' family had escaped from Soviet Ukraine. So yes, I DO remember when all these evils only happened on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain. And you are absolutely right -- we are becoming the very thing we fought against.:(
They don't need "significant investment". All they need is to be allowed to confiscate property from those citizens they've decided to watch, much as the "War on Drugs" does, and the program will rapidly fund itself, and will grow to whatever scale the gov't cares to pursue.
Don't think it won't happen -- confiscation is an increasingly popular sport among cash-strapped governments, and your mere observation of a crime suffices (such as confiscating cars from anyone caught *watching* a street race).
Also, it makes the assumption that opensource programmers are inherently more ethical than closedsource programmers. And this is not necessarily so, since there are good and bad people everywhere, in every field of endeavour.
[flamebait]If anything, my observations of the slashdot herd mentality lead me to believe it's probably the other way around.[/flamebait]
Hmm... I've always wondered why my Norwegian ancestors so vehemently denied being related to any of the Swedes in our pedigree.... could be this fundamental difference in attitudes is the real reason. Cuz when someone shoots at Norwegians, they don't bend over; they shoot back.
More telling are his quotes of comments from Sweden's own law enforcement: ============ Responses to the bill
How did the bureaucrats respond? In unusually plain language, actually.
The Department of Justice, among other similar comments, simply called the bill "completely alien to our form of government".
The Police Board said that the bill "indicates a frightening lack of understanding for the requirements regarding the protection of citizens' privacy that follow from our Constitution and the European Convention on Human Rights".
The National Registry Authority replied that this bill "is compatible with neither the Swedish Constitution nor the European Convention on Human Rights. Such an immense expansion of wiretapping of telephony and other forms of communication cannot be legislated under any circumstance." ============
Okay, say you make microwave ovens. The processor inside said oven requires firmware to make it run. Someone inadavertently includes some GPL3'd code in said firmware. Now what?? are you therefore supposed to give away your microwave ovens? or only use them in the office? way to go out of business instantly!
Since the nature of the violation may not be well-understood by the businessmen involved (note that 99.9% of these are NOT coders, let alone FOSS advocates) they will not distinguish between an actual violation, and the threat of lawsuits over what is perceived as a nebulous line between violation and allowed behaviour. Business tends to be extremely conservative about risks, especially risks with fuzzy boundaries. The GPL, especially in its newest incarnation, increases the fuzziness of legal risks surrounding FOSS.
And that's the point where company lawyers will say NO, the money saved here is not worth the risk. In their mind, it is better to buy something with a license that says "You may use NN copies of it and do absolutely nothing else with it" rather than wonder when they're going to inadvertently miss some GPL restriction and wind up sued for it.
(I know most people here won't RTentireFA, but the last part is the most relevant, and it's what I'm talking about.)
And yes, it's "just a license". But it's inherently understood that you can't do as you please with for-pay software, like M$'s stuff. Conversely, the GPL is supposed to be all about "free software" and that sets up a conflict in the *understanding* of what its license requires, that even lawyers will look askance at.
A non-coder businessman's *perception* will go like this:
"I thought this was free. What do you mean, it comes with all these weird requirements? How do I make sense of this part being 'free' and that part requiring that I give away part of my business? WTF??"
Conversely, something you buy NN-uses of outright, that sort of license he understands. Money in, uses out.
I read it exactly as you did. The author understands the GPL, and its implications, quite well. Trouble is, most FOSS advocates are wilfully blind to those implications, having never run a business that's large enough to have to worry about legal threats.
If I were a PHB, this article alone would be enough to scare me off GPL'd software -- because I would interpret this as a potential threat of unknown magnitude. Remember the average PHB isn't going to distinguish between GPL2 and GPL3, either. A lawsuit against a GPL3 violator WILL be perceived as a lawsuit against ALL companies that use GPL'd software, regardless of which license version. And in at corporate management levels, the perception is what counts.
Once upon a time I called Bonita to complain about bananas that rather than ripening from green through the spotted stage and finally to the sweet black phase (best for banana bread!) the green bananas would simply rot without ever becoming ripe.
Bonita told me it was because they were not being ripened properly in storage (remember, bananas are picked VERY green), which involves keeping them in (ethylene? I forget too) gas at a particular temperature, so they will start to and continue to ripen correctly. If they're just stored in the plain air during the green phase, they will rot instead of ripening.
======
I hadn't realised til I RTFA that the bananas of my childhood were gone... but it does explain the change I noticed starting in the 1960s, where the average banana was smaller and not as good anymore, and the brief period where I consider them edible as-is got even shorter (it had been a couple days, now it's only about 4 hours).
Slashdot Mirror
Good points either way you put it.
And here is probably a good benchmark for whether a security measure is theatre or not:
How effective would it be, and to what degree would it be regarded as intrusive, if the exact same measures were applied in a parallel venue?
Your example of driving vs flying is the most obvious, of course -- NO ONE would submit to airport-style security measures before being allowed to drive on the public streets (despite that a malicious driver could cause even more havoc than a hijacker). Oh, but you can opt for a less-secure transportation method, so not really a problem, eh? Okay, how about being sec-screened before you're allowed to walk on the public sidewalks? Because you COULD be packing a vest-bomb and it MIGHT go off in a crowd... yeah, better scan everyone before letting 'em out of their house!
Exactly so. And fact is, if we weren't so accustomed to being sheep (keep your head down, and maybe YOU won't get picked to be slaughtered today!), stuff like hijackings would never have been successful in the first place, because the passengers would have swarmed the perps and beat their heads square. I'll see your box cutter, and raise you Aunt Mamie's spike-heeled shoe, smack in your eyeball. Try it again, punk...
... my response to a terrorist is not to be afraid; it's a desire to knock their teeth in.
As to other attack vectors... well, the main difference seems to be the opportunity for theatre. Yeah, you can secure your municipal water facility, but you can't stop Random Terrorist from dropping nefarious substances into any of the hundreds of miles of the California Aquaduct.
So, given that threat, we all panic and all buy bottled water. Great! now all I need to do is compromise one batch of Popular Bottled Water and I've got a captive audience! (And it's not like someone couldn't -- remember the Great Tylenol Scare??) But because this offers a choke point, Security Theatre can again rear its ugly head.
I'm not sure where I was going with this, other than
Shit, why not just blow up the damned airport? You don't even need to step inside the security perimeter. Just drop a bomb in the lobby, or near the front entrance. That would be much more spectacular than anything you could do in flight, with what little you can sneak aboard in your hand luggage.
Or hie yourself to the back fence, outside the airport entirely, and lob a few incidiaries in the direction of the fuel pumps. Fireworks for everyone!!
Goes to show how stupid the whole security theatre thing is...
I used to have this bamboo forest surrounding my house -- it was really quite impressive. People always asked why it was there, and I'd say, "It keeps the elephants away. You don't see any elephants, do you??"
And everyone agreed as to how it must work, since there weren't any invading elephants. But one day someone had a different response: "Only the pink ones..."
It's the same thing with these scanners. They keep the terrorists away -- you don't see any terrorists, do you?? Nope, only the imaginary ones.
And I defy you to find cites for everything you've read in print in the past 20-odd years. Do you keep cites for everything you remember reading? No?? Hmm...
I vaguely recall it was from the gov't of Kenya (in conjunction with a Wildlife Conservation Spasm because tourism was suffering), and it was a good 25 years ago. But there's little reason to believe much has changed; if anything, African grasslands are becoming MORE restricted.
"I didn't say it moves people to violent acts. But is often damaging to forming healthy relationships."
Or more likely people who can be moved to violent acts *already* had trouble forming healthy relationships, and IF they CAN be moved to violent acts, that is a symptom of their underlying problem, NOT the cause of it.
So... do you want to have restrictive laws based on the behaviour of abnormal people, or of normal people?
How about the FBI's own stats, which show that as first BBSs (ca. 1990) and later the Internet (which really took off in 1996) let anyone view porn in the privacy of their own computer, the sex crimes rate dropped dramatically?
Yeah, correlation doesn't prove causation. Maybe the real reason the sex crime rate dropped was cuz starting in 1996, all the would-be rapists were castrated the moment they had a heinous thought.
Maybe so -- but what if you find it's all just him indulging a stupid fantasy, and no real children were harmed at all?
Were any of his daughters or the kids on the soccer team actually damaged? I mean the real person, not just their image.
If not, please explain how these images are "just as damaging". What, exactly, was damaged?
Several decades back, one of the major animal control agencies in Africa investigated the issue of ivory poaching -- and to their own astonishment, discovered it was entirely a myth. Poaching simply wasn't happening.
And they discovered that those huge "elephant graveyards" had another cause entirely.
Elephants are grazers, NOT browsers. This means they eat, and are designed to eat, GRASSES. They are NOT designed to eat shoots and twigs, nor can they digest that much cellulose.
The elephants found dead in those mass graveyards all had one thing in common: a large ball of half-digested tree branches lying inside each carcass. NONE of them had the large-calibre bullet hole in their skull or ribcage that would be left by an elephant gun (you don't hunt elephants with a deer rifle; you hunt them with armor-piercing shells the size of a Polish sausage. And you get ONE shot -- and if it's not a clean kill, the elephant kills YOU.)
And their tusks had not been CUT off, as would be the case with a fresh corpse -- they'd been removed from the tooth socket entirely, as can only be done if the flesh has already rotted away.
Suddenly, all was explained. These elephants died not from being poached, but of impacted bowels (which if untreated is 100% fatal).
And why was that happening? It's a direct result of Africa's exploding population, and its need to feed that population:
Over the past 100 years, African agriculture has radically expanded. Huge tracts of grassland that were formerly open range are now fenced off, and have been variously cultivated for human crops, or overgrazed down to dirt. Along with several major droughts, this has pretty well destroyed the grasslands that were the African elephants' original habitat AND their major food source.
Starving elephants took to eating whatever they could find that looked halfway like food -- and that too-often meant brushy shoots and small tree branches, which they could not digest. And they died of it. Being social herd animals, they tended to die in groups.
When one of these graveyards was found by humans, they rejoiced to see all the free ivory laying around (already conveniently rotted loose from the skull), carried it off, and sold it. No harm was done to any living elephant.
But international opinion and law had already decided that all ivory must come from poaching, so these facts were, and still are, entirely ignored. Especially since this mythical "poaching" makes great press for animal rights extremists.
And impoverished Africans either lose the money they gain from selling the ivory left behind by long-dead elephants, or they sell it on the black market.
You probably meant this as a joke, but I think you make a good point regardless. If the "war on drugs" is really a war on ordinary behaviour by average citizens, then drug dealers are doing a form of Civil Disobedience.
Or, it might mean that 11% of *everyone's* behaviour is something they'd prefer to hide.
Which 11% of your life do you not want me to see? Inquiring minds want to know!!
I grew up during the Cold War. My college roommates' family had escaped from Soviet Ukraine. So yes, I DO remember when all these evils only happened on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain. And you are absolutely right -- we are becoming the very thing we fought against. :(
They don't need "significant investment". All they need is to be allowed to confiscate property from those citizens they've decided to watch, much as the "War on Drugs" does, and the program will rapidly fund itself, and will grow to whatever scale the gov't cares to pursue.
Don't think it won't happen -- confiscation is an increasingly popular sport among cash-strapped governments, and your mere observation of a crime suffices (such as confiscating cars from anyone caught *watching* a street race).
Do I smell a Bill of Rights burning??
Also, it makes the assumption that opensource programmers are inherently more ethical than closedsource programmers. And this is not necessarily so, since there are good and bad people everywhere, in every field of endeavour.
[flamebait]If anything, my observations of the slashdot herd mentality lead me to believe it's probably the other way around.[/flamebait]
The price will be when the country is no longer Sweden or Swedish. Where will you, as Swedes, go when your country no longer exists??
Hmm... I've always wondered why my Norwegian ancestors so vehemently denied being related to any of the Swedes in our pedigree.... could be this fundamental difference in attitudes is the real reason. Cuz when someone shoots at Norwegians, they don't bend over; they shoot back.
More telling are his quotes of comments from Sweden's own law enforcement:
============
Responses to the bill
How did the bureaucrats respond? In unusually plain language, actually.
The Department of Justice, among other similar comments, simply called the bill "completely alien to our form of government".
The Police Board said that the bill "indicates a frightening lack of understanding for the requirements regarding the protection of citizens' privacy that follow from our Constitution and the European Convention on Human Rights".
The National Registry Authority replied that this bill "is compatible with neither the Swedish Constitution nor the European Convention on Human Rights. Such an immense expansion of wiretapping of telephony and other forms of communication
cannot be legislated under any circumstance."
============
Okay, say you make microwave ovens. The processor inside said oven requires firmware to make it run. Someone inadavertently includes some GPL3'd code in said firmware. Now what?? are you therefore supposed to give away your microwave ovens? or only use them in the office? way to go out of business instantly!
Because by definition, any joke that is on-topic is automatically off-topic!!
Since the nature of the violation may not be well-understood by the businessmen involved (note that 99.9% of these are NOT coders, let alone FOSS advocates) they will not distinguish between an actual violation, and the threat of lawsuits over what is perceived as a nebulous line between violation and allowed behaviour. Business tends to be extremely conservative about risks, especially risks with fuzzy boundaries. The GPL, especially in its newest incarnation, increases the fuzziness of legal risks surrounding FOSS.
And that's the point where company lawyers will say NO, the money saved here is not worth the risk. In their mind, it is better to buy something with a license that says "You may use NN copies of it and do absolutely nothing else with it" rather than wonder when they're going to inadvertently miss some GPL restriction and wind up sued for it.
(I know most people here won't RTentireFA, but the last part is the most relevant, and it's what I'm talking about.)
What CodeBuster said.
And yes, it's "just a license". But it's inherently understood that you can't do as you please with for-pay software, like M$'s stuff. Conversely, the GPL is supposed to be all about "free software" and that sets up a conflict in the *understanding* of what its license requires, that even lawyers will look askance at.
A non-coder businessman's *perception* will go like this:
"I thought this was free. What do you mean, it comes with all these weird requirements? How do I make sense of this part being 'free' and that part requiring that I give away part of my business? WTF??"
Conversely, something you buy NN-uses of outright, that sort of license he understands. Money in, uses out.
I read it exactly as you did. The author understands the GPL, and its implications, quite well. Trouble is, most FOSS advocates are wilfully blind to those implications, having never run a business that's large enough to have to worry about legal threats.
If I were a PHB, this article alone would be enough to scare me off GPL'd software -- because I would interpret this as a potential threat of unknown magnitude. Remember the average PHB isn't going to distinguish between GPL2 and GPL3, either. A lawsuit against a GPL3 violator WILL be perceived as a lawsuit against ALL companies that use GPL'd software, regardless of which license version. And in at corporate management levels, the perception is what counts.
Once upon a time I called Bonita to complain about bananas that rather than ripening from green through the spotted stage and finally to the sweet black phase (best for banana bread!) the green bananas would simply rot without ever becoming ripe.
Bonita told me it was because they were not being ripened properly in storage (remember, bananas are picked VERY green), which involves keeping them in (ethylene? I forget too) gas at a particular temperature, so they will start to and continue to ripen correctly. If they're just stored in the plain air during the green phase, they will rot instead of ripening.
======
I hadn't realised til I RTFA that the bananas of my childhood were gone... but it does explain the change I noticed starting in the 1960s, where the average banana was smaller and not as good anymore, and the brief period where I consider them edible as-is got even shorter (it had been a couple days, now it's only about 4 hours).