Funny how you bring up North Korea and forget all about Red China. Corporations love China -- the fact that they have an oppressive one-party political system and independent unions are outlawed is why everything nowadays says "made in China" and why they were just admitted to the WTO.
If "lefists" like me had our way and the Chinese people rose up and took democratic control of their political system and legalized independent unions, corporations would flee.
And, I imagine the "conservatives" would be quick to defend the Communists and try to prop up their dictatorship.
We're living in crazy times.
Re:It's not globalization, it's who controls it.
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Defining Globalism
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· Score: 1
You can't tell me that Nike and Ford created the environment that they are moving into. That's just preposterous, otherwise they would just create the environment within the United States.
The specific corporations might not have created the environment, but their actions are tending to preserve that environment and cause it to spread. It's simple economics. By giving corporations more freedom to move and forcing countries to accept their products, that will put pressure on other countries to "compete" with third world dictatorships for investment. How does a country compete? By removing laws that protect working people and enacting new laws that restrict their right to stand up for themselves.
The more hours you work, the less money you make, and the less ability you have to do anything about it, the more "competitive" your country is. And the fact is the U.S. is becoming more competitive every day. The average hours worked has been steadily climbing for decades with no sign of slowing, while wages in the U.S. have stagnated. We're working harder for less. Partly it is due to explicit actions of specific corporations, but mostly it is an indirect effect of the U.S. government acting in the interests of corporations in general, to the detriment of the interests of the vast majority of the American people.
But what can be done? Well, if the corporations are uniting globally to pursue their interests, maybe the rest of us should unite globally to pursue our interests? I don't pretend to have all the answers about a solution, but I do know that as isolated individuals we have little power and we'll all lose. One choice for organizing together globally is the IWW.
It's not globalization, it's who controls it.
on
Defining Globalism
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· Score: 5, Insightful
The problem isn't globalization. What's wrong with people from different countries trading, communicating, and working together? Nah. The problem is that "globalization" is being carried out by unelected bodies of government appointees and corporations.
It's like saying leftists are against the idea of cities just because we think mayors should be elected by the people that live in them instead of appointed by General Electric and Microsoft.
And then, of course, there are the results of corporations determining the course of globalization -- "free trade" means corporations are free to go whereever they want and do nearly whatever they want, but the people who work for them get stopped at borders and are forced to endure corrupt, despotic governments that limit their actions. Corporations can shop around for the country with the lowest wages and oppressive anti-worker laws, but the workers in those countries are forced at gunpoint to remain.
And anyone that knows anything about how a "free market" works can see that this is anything but a free market. Given that corporations have the right to move into any country regardless of human rights, and given that all other countries are forced to accept the products, you have a situation where corporations are always seeking more and more oppressive and corrupt governments, and have a financial incentive to make them worse. Government leaders, on the other hand, have a financial incentive to cooperate. And when a worker in one of those countries tries to improve their situation, by moving to a better country, by organizing a union, by trying to change their government, etc. they are met with soldiers with guns keeping them back.
Final result -- lower wages, longer hours, and less rights for everyone around the world, higher profits for corporations.
Now what would happen if globalization was controlled democratically by the people whose lives it will affect? Short of revolution, we won't know.
Hell, given that bombing various countries around the world is the status quo for the U.S., I'd say that bombing the hell out of Afghanistan is doing nothing. Now if we really wanted to do something, we'd be stepping up the bombing to include any country that ever supported Bin Laden.
That would be Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the U.S., etc...
Read how Senator Orrin Hatch said supporting Bin Laden was "worth it".
Check out FatBabies before deciding on a career in the game industry. There are pluses, but there are a lot of minuses. For one thing, when you look at game companies and see a bunch of programmers in their 20's your first thought might be that that's a good thing because everyone is fresh and excited, but then you start to realize that a lot of people get burnt out of the game industry by the time they are 30. It's hard to find anyone over 30 in game companies, and most of them are pretty cynical.
And forget about games as an artform -- game publishers are the most conservative businessmen on the planet. Not conservative in the sense of right-wing christians, but conservative in the sense that they will only back a game that they know will make them money. That's why out of the hundreds of games that come out every year, only a couple stand out as unique. If you go into the game industry, you will most likely be putting out one of the hundreds of clones (assuming your game isn't shit-canned before release, which happens to about half of them).
And after two weeks of development, they want to be able to walk across the bridge, even if you have to stop pouring concrete to quickly rig up a rope bridge. Then you tear down the rope bridge and keep pouring concrete, only to have them demand that they be able to ride a donkey across in two more weeks, etc.
Second, and most importantly, being denied the right to free speech is some pretty darn serious stuff to have to live with. You can't put a dollar figure on that, and you shouldn't have to in order to justify the importance of your rights to some corporation.
Yes you can. If someone steals my car and it would take $10,000 to replace it, then you might say the car is worth $10,000. If someone takes away my free speech, then how much would I have to spend in bribes to get it back? How much do American judges cost these days? $500,000? $10 Million? $50 Million? ???
The nice part about this is that when you sue the DVD guys for damages, the judge will know how much of a bribe he would take to give you your free speech back.
We can all still do that, but if someone says (or writes) that they're intending to do something criminal, then why not check it out?
Except the new "anti-terrorism" laws don't apply in such a case. If police already have probable cause that a crime is going to be committed, they easily get search warrants, wiretaps, etc. The new law says that they can spy on and disrupt groups even if there is no probable cause. Do you really have free speech and democratic rights if a peaceful/legal organization can be secretly spied on and disrupted? Imagine an immigrant rights group that is seeking to influence policy to limit powers of INS agents. Now imagine the INS spying on the group and being allowed to arrest and hold members of the group for 7 days without charging them with a crime. Do you think this might discourage people from joining the group? Might it damage their effectiveness? Can you have a free and democratic society when agents of the government use their power to fight against any attempts to limit their power?
Think about the fact that terrorism is being defined as using violence to create an atmosphere of fear in order to change government policies, but it is not considered terrorism to do the same thing in order to preserve government policies.
And viruses, hacking, etc. are rarely "terrorism." They might be criminal, they might be politically motivated sabotage, they might even be scary. But if you are not trying to kill or bodily injure civillians to further a political goal, you are not a terrorist.
It's pretty scary how words get slippery in times like this. Its bad enough that politicians and others are throwing the word "terrorism" around to apply to anyone they don't like, but the real danger is when the entire limits of the spectrum get shifted. Real terrorists blow up some buildings and kill thousands of civillians and everyone is screaming for revenge. Next, everyone is calling for the death of all terrorists. And, heck, few would argue that the lives of the perpetrators of 9/11 should be spared. But next, we start expanding terrorism to include destruction of property, and then hacking. And the calls for "death to all terrorists" continue.
If an arsonist burns down a building and nobody is hurt and steps were taken to prevent harm to people, they are an arsonist, and the law says they should go to prison for many years. But are we really saying that Bin Laden, with a bodycount of thousands is in the same class of criminals as an arsonist? Or someone who costs businesses millions of dollars in computer down time?
If someone targets a virus or DOS attack on a hospital or some other place where there is some known chance of actually bodily injuring real human beings, and the perpetrator was doing it for a political purpose, then, sure, they are a terrorist. But if it isn't reasonably expected to result in human injuries or deaths, then it is a politically motivated crime, not terrorism.
Think about it. The U.S. state department has a list of terrorist groups based on a very specific definition. If that definition were expanded to include actions that don't target civillians for injury or death, then the inescapable conclusion is that most acts to further foreign policy by any nation are actually terrorism.
Remember Watergate? Nixon's henchmen broke many laws to spy on his opponent. If computers had been around, they would have been hacked. Was Watergate an act of terrorism? Certainly not. Politically motivated breaking-and-entering and obstruction of justice, sure, subversion of democracy, no doubt. But it wasn't terrorism.
And forget about CIA actions that actually involved killing civillians. How many times have CIA employees broken laws in various countries for political purposes? While many would argue about whether the CIA are terrorists, if you allow non-violent crime to be terrorist, then there is no argument.
Even with the 9/11 tragedy, all the attacks were terrorist attacks because they all targetted civillians. But the attack on the pentagon was terrorism because of the civillians killed, not the military personel. If they had flown a bomber over D.C. and dropped a bomb on the pentagon, it would have been an act of war -- even a war atrocity, and maybe even a war crime, but not terrorism.
When you are watching the bombing of Afghanistan on TV, according to the state department's definition of terrorism, the U.S. bombing is not terrorism, even if hundreds or thousands of civillians are killed, even if the attack is being done for political reasons. The reason is that civillians are not being targetted. If Bin Laden could afford a modern airforce and carried out similar bombing raids on U.S. military targets (including power stations, government buildings, etc.) that would be no more terrorism than the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan. Yes, it would be an act of war, yes, it would be deplorable, etc. But it wouldn't be terrorism.
And if Bin Laden bombing every U.S. military base, power station, government building, etc. isn't terrorism, it's a hell of a stretch to say that some piddly DOS attack is.
Like many things, Work to Rule only works when organized. That means getting many people to obey the rule just the right way and at the right time in order to maximize its effect. It's also important that the target, be it a politician or a boss, be made aware of what is going on and that the rule in question is the source of the problem.
Actually, this is an example of Work to Rule. It's a tactic often used in the workplace to win against a boss. Unionized workers often use the strategy when laws or contracts forbid strikes and other activities, but even non-unionized workers often use it to effectively protest (and eliminate) ridiculous rules.
While this current example won't take down the DMCA, the idea is that the DMCA will hurt U.S. corporations in the long run. Specifically, it will hurt the vast majority of corporations that don't get any benefits from the DMCA. We can only hope that these corporations give bigger bribes than the record and movie corporations.
I think getting an open source project going is similar to organizing anything. In past projects, software and otherwise, I've tried two bad methods.
The first was to get a core of an idea and then hunt down people interested in helping. The problem with this is that the people you will attract will not be so interested in getting work done. At best you'll get a lot of armchair coders that are most interested in shaping the idea, often in directions you completely disagree with.
The second was to do it all by myself and hope others will be inspired and jump in. They won't.
What you need to do is put yourself in the shoes of your potential fellow coders. What will get them excited enough to put time into the project? The best example I've seen is GIMP. They got a framework up and working in a short time and made the project modular and extensible. They then primed the pump by getting some cool modules written. Quickly others made modules and next thing you knew there was a large group of developers making plug-ins and actively improving the architecture to make their plug-ins work better.
At least Microsoft is using the term Anarchy correctly. Anarchism means people helping each other with mutual aid without trusting our security to a self-appointed entity acting in its own interest.
When it comes to running computers safely and productively, protecting the interests of the users (us), who should we trust, Microsoft or ourselves?
What do you mean "no one has tried to benefit by it"? Everyone is cashing in. All sorts of companies are milking people's patriotism in ads asking people to help America unite by buying their product. Bush is using his new-found popularity to ram through all sorts of policies that wouldn't fly when people were looking. Russia is using the attack as an excuse to step up attacks on their enemies. China put out a statement trying to link their fight against Tibetan dissidents to the U.S. fight against terrorism. Many companies announced layoffs immediately after the attack, either to cash in on government hand-outs or just taking advantage of the fact that few would question anything blamed on the attacks.
Bin Laden hasn't claimed responsibility for it, but amongst his own people, he's taking credit for it. But it sounds like "credit" wasn't the biggest priority. Assuming it was Bin Laden that did it, the motivation appears to be achieving two main goals.
1) Showing that it is possible to hurt the U.S. If a big bully is causing trouble in your neighborhood, even a symbolic attack on the bully can embolden the neighborhood.
2) Everyone knows that if you hit the U.S., the U.S. responds with an embarrassingly over-the-top military response. And just as the attack on the U.S. united many people who previously hated each others' guts and drew people farther to the right, American cruise missiles blowing up muslims is sure to bring muslims together and strengthen the fundamentalists.
It's an age-old trick -- provoke an attack on your own people, and then step up as the only leader strong enough to lead. The Nazis did it with the Reichstag fire, Saddam Hussein did it to maintain power in Iraq, etc. It works. And one nice thing about the trick is that when you do it, it often has the effect of creating a symbiotic relationship with the extreme elements of your enemy. That was how the Cold War worked and it's the strategy for the extreme minority factions within the Palestinians and Israelis.
After the attacks, Bush said, "Freedom itself was attacked this morning by a faceless coward and freedom will be defended."
The irony is that the terrorists did attack our freedoms, though not in any way Bush may have meant. They attacked our freedom, and the freedom of nearly everyone around the world, by giving a large amount of power to people like Bush. After the attacks in September, few people (and certainly no politician) would dare question that Americans must sacrifice civil liberties for the promise of "security".
And around the world, governments declared they were in solidarity with the U.S. government - China vowed to step up their efforts against "terrorists, extremists, and separatists" (separatists, as in Tibetans...), the Israeli government killed some more Palestinians, Russia vowed to step up their efforts to crush opposition in Chechnya, etc.
If Bin Laden wanted to decrease the power of George Bush, he made a serious miscalculation -- Americans are uniting behind Bush's efforts to take away our civil liberties, and around the world, everyone seems happy to allow Bush to bomb the hell out of anyone he wants.
Unfortunately, if "freedom will be defended," it won't be by the likes of Bush -- that will be up to us.
Ok, now, think of the largest, positive social changes in the last 200 years or so. In every case, the current powers-that-be used any tools at their disposal to try to stop the changes. Meanwhile, many of the people resposible for those changes had to break or bend existing laws, or at least to use anonymity and a bit of stealth at times to avoid the unlawful acts of the authorities.
Imagine the night after the Boston Tea Party, all of the patriots that participated are dragged out of bed by the British authorities after being identified by hidden cameras and matched in a large database.
Imagine everyone involved in the underground railroad -- people risking their lives to bring runaway slaves to freedom -- imagine them all being identified and arrested (killed if they are black).
Imagine when advocating birth-control was illegal and feminists went to prison trying to educate other women -- now imagine an all-encompassing system of cameras and databases being used to effectively eliminate this whole crime by identifying all of the "criminals".
The problem with the argument about totalitarian security eliminating all sorts of nasty crimes is that it rarely works that way in practice. Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia both had quite of lot of extreme security measures in place, yet crime by citizens were not eliminated -- I would doubt if they decreased at all. And at the same time, the crimes of the authorities greatly increased -- that's how it works. You give them a new tool to hunt down rapists and murderers and they use it instead to hunt down people who would take away the tool, as well as anyone else who might threaten their power. As they abuse their power more and more, the population has less ability to restrict their power.
And of course they will abuse their power -- that is the nature of power. Power corrupts. The ability for citizens to freely challenge the government's power, and ultimately, to overthrow it, is the one thing that can keep a government in check.
It is a shame that after the cold war ended, so did the need to differentiate between the U.S. and a totalitarian state like the Soviet Union. I remember liberals and conservatives, even Ronald Reagan, George Bush, and Rush Limbaugh going on and on about how evil the Soviet Union was for spying on its citizens. After the wall came down, U.S. journalists toured secret police offices filled with TV monitors and expressed horror at the thought of living in such a society. Everyone celebrated the closing down of these security offices. And damn it, they were right. It was evil.
Am I the only one that feels like I'm living in some cheesy sci-fi show where everyone's mind has been wiped clean? If, in the end, the Soviet Union was right, and citizens have no need for privacy and freedom, then what the hell was the whole Cold War for? Why did countless people have to be killed in wars in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Nicaragua, etc.?
According to the U.S. government, "terrorism" is defined as:
"premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant(1) targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience."
This is a reasonable enough definition, though it clearly makes it impossible for the acts of a nations military to be referred to as terrorism.
Using this definition, cracking is not terrorism, though cracking can be a part of terrorism, just as stealing someone's shirt isn't terrorism, but if you steal a pilot's uniform so that you can hijack a plane to kill the passengers for some political motive, then the theft is one part of the bigger terrorist act.
You claimed that "Malicious cracking is more of a petty terrorism in which lives aren't lost". But that is nonsense. According to any reasonable definition of terrorism, if there is no violence, there is no terrorism. In some very specific rare cases, malicious cracking can be violent (somehow cracking air-traffic controller or hospital computers and purposely endanging lives), but I don't know that I've ever heard of such a thing actually happening.
It might seem like a minor quibble, but if you remove the requirement of violence for an act to be terrorism, and instead say that terrorism is when you break the law to make some political point, you are venturing into very dangerous territory. Because by changing the definition, you are now saying that any political action that is illegal is terrorism, and obviously terrorism is a menace that must be stopped. Remember, the vast majority of socio-political improvements in any country have come about by people who broke laws - in some cases specifically unjust laws, and in other cases, ordinary laws were used as a pretense to try to stop a social movement.
Just remember, just because something is bad doesn't mean it's terrorism, and just because something is illegal doesn't mean it's bad.
The idea is that the more totalitarian the society, the more secure and ordered it is. The truth is that as the society becomes totalitarian, it starts running counter to more and more people's lives -- creating chaos in their lives and prompting them to take action, which results in yet more chaos.
The full on totalitarian society is actually the height of insecurity and the height of chaos. Yes, giving up a little bit of freedom can give you a little bit more security, but we're already way past that. From here on out, it only gets worse.
Any sort of proto-fascist laws they were having trouble to push through before this week they will now railroad through before people come to their senses.
Expect politicians to very cynically use this tragedy to its fullest, and not just in the U.S. Apparently Russia has been making noises about joining in the fight against terrorism, which to them means killing more Chechens. China just signed a regional agreement to fight against "terrorism, seperatism, and extremism" -- yeah, kill some more Tibetan nuns before the bodies are even cold in New York.
Here in the U.S., it'll mean scary crypto laws, scary wire-tap laws, "anti-terrorism" laws that greatly extend the power of police to spy on and disrupt legal dissident groups, bigger defense budgets, bigger CIA/NSA/??? budgets, etc. That's what Bush means when he says "this is war." He means war as in concentration camps for Japanese-Americans during WWII, long prison sentences for disagreeing with government policies like during WWI, etc. Sure, he won't get all that he wants, at least not unless we have some more useful casualties in the U.S.
Of course, that's why we have to resist this every step along the way...
I'm usually fairly detached during times like this, but by myself, watching the coverage, and imagining the enormity of the loss of life, mental health, peace, property, and productivity -- I couldn't help but cry in frustration at not being able to do anything.
I also cried in frustration. Frustation at the thousands of innocent lives lost, the horror the injured and killed must have gone through, the tragedy for family and friends left behind. Frustration at the lives that will be destroyed in much the same way in the U.S. government's inevitable retaliation.
And I am also very scared of what will inevitably happen to Arab-Americans -- vigilante violence, FBI interrogations, racial and religious intolerance.
To tell you the truth, I am about out of tears. I can't help but become cynical. When the Oklahoma City federal building was blown up, I was shocked and saddened. But while I saw Time magazine printing pictures of every last person killed and information about their lives and families, the U.S. military had recently blown up an Iraqi apartment building killing a comparable number of women, children, and men. Each of them had as tragic a story, each of them had a family that was distrought. Here we had two situations of innocent civillians blown to bits for a political cause. I cried at both. I had empathy for their pain. Yet, I saw plenty of people brought to tears over the Time story that actually cheered on the Iraqi bombing.
It is very easy to have empathy for your fellow countrymen while ignoring the suffering of others. Plenty of good Germans cried when fellow Germans were blown to bits by American bombs in WWII. That wasn't empathy or conscience, that was nationalism.
To get back to the point of totalitarian security measures. You say to ignore the question of trust for now, but that is the central question. Do we have any proof that these new totalitarian security measures such as face recognition systems, echelon-style filters on phones and email, etc. will make the world a safer, freer place? And if they are abused, how might one start a dissident movement to correct the abuses?
It's like asking, ok, suppose you are in Stalinist Russia, how do you fight for freedom of the press? The answer is it is best to never let it get that bad in the first place because it will be damn hard.
Ah, but it will never happen here. No thanks. I feel the best way to stop terrorist attacks against the U.S. is for the U.S. to immediately stop it's support of terrorism around the world. Here we have a government that continually gives billions of dollars worth of weapons to various dictators that are torturing and killing their people, and you think it would be better to give our government more power over us rather than the much more effective solution of not giving people a reason to want revenge against us.
Just like enclosure in the 19th century stole common land from the public and gave it to the rich, the DCMA and other new "intellectual property" laws are seeking to expand corporate property rights at the expense of 99% of the population.
In the 19th century, small farmers and landless farmers were forced off their land and into the factories. Now, software patents and other IP nonsense is making it more and more difficult for independent programmers and small businesses. Since we can't afford enough lawyers to own the patents for the software we create, we will be left with less and less choices. And already we're working 10+ hours a day.
It's time we stood up for ourselves and starting looking out for our own interests. It's time we started fighting back where we have the most power -- in our workplaces. As individuals, we can't change much, but at all the Microsofts, Adobes, AOLs, and IBMs, there are thousands of programmers that keep these companies running, that create the "intellectual property" these corporations value so highly. If we join together, we can take back some of our power and turn things around.
Whining on websites, protesting in the street, or writing letters to your congressman can't measure up to multi-million dollar "contributions" made by these corporations to politicians. And being isolated and hopeless won't get anywhere either.
That's why we have to organize where we are most powerful. If programmers at Adobe had made it clear to management that they would not tolerate this sort of thing, it would not have happened. As programmers, we create the "intellectual property" these corporations are trying so hard to protect and monopolize. We have the power to create this software, so we have the power to bring it all to a halt.
And power is the only thing they are going to listen to. It's time we stood up for ourselves.
After considering the case for almost four weeks, Judge Charles Gray ruled against Mr Irving, saying he had failed to prove his reputation had been damaged.
[...]
Under British law, Prof Lipstadt and her co-defendant were not able to rely solely on truth as a defence.
I don't know about the case in question or if the article correctly represents British law, but the article clearly says that proving truth is not enough, even if it is important. And the article also clearly suggests that the lack of damage was the deciding factor.
The article implies that if the defendant's claims were true and the plaintiff had suffered a damaged reputation as a result of truthful accusations, that it would be libel, and the plaintiff would win.
Slashdot Mirror
Funny how you bring up North Korea and forget all about Red China. Corporations love China -- the fact that they have an oppressive one-party political system and independent unions are outlawed is why everything nowadays says "made in China" and why they were just admitted to the WTO.
If "lefists" like me had our way and the Chinese people rose up and took democratic control of their political system and legalized independent unions, corporations would flee.
And, I imagine the "conservatives" would be quick to defend the Communists and try to prop up their dictatorship.
We're living in crazy times.
The more hours you work, the less money you make, and the less ability you have to do anything about it, the more "competitive" your country is. And the fact is the U.S. is becoming more competitive every day. The average hours worked has been steadily climbing for decades with no sign of slowing, while wages in the U.S. have stagnated. We're working harder for less. Partly it is due to explicit actions of specific corporations, but mostly it is an indirect effect of the U.S. government acting in the interests of corporations in general, to the detriment of the interests of the vast majority of the American people.
But what can be done? Well, if the corporations are uniting globally to pursue their interests, maybe the rest of us should unite globally to pursue our interests? I don't pretend to have all the answers about a solution, but I do know that as isolated individuals we have little power and we'll all lose. One choice for organizing together globally is the IWW.
The problem isn't globalization. What's wrong with people from different countries trading, communicating, and working together? Nah. The problem is that "globalization" is being carried out by unelected bodies of government appointees and corporations.
It's like saying leftists are against the idea of cities just because we think mayors should be elected by the people that live in them instead of appointed by General Electric and Microsoft.
And then, of course, there are the results of corporations determining the course of globalization -- "free trade" means corporations are free to go whereever they want and do nearly whatever they want, but the people who work for them get stopped at borders and are forced to endure corrupt, despotic governments that limit their actions. Corporations can shop around for the country with the lowest wages and oppressive anti-worker laws, but the workers in those countries are forced at gunpoint to remain.
And anyone that knows anything about how a "free market" works can see that this is anything but a free market. Given that corporations have the right to move into any country regardless of human rights, and given that all other countries are forced to accept the products, you have a situation where corporations are always seeking more and more oppressive and corrupt governments, and have a financial incentive to make them worse. Government leaders, on the other hand, have a financial incentive to cooperate. And when a worker in one of those countries tries to improve their situation, by moving to a better country, by organizing a union, by trying to change their government, etc. they are met with soldiers with guns keeping them back.
Final result -- lower wages, longer hours, and less rights for everyone around the world, higher profits for corporations.
Now what would happen if globalization was controlled democratically by the people whose lives it will affect? Short of revolution, we won't know.
That would be Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the U.S., etc...
Read how Senator Orrin Hatch said supporting Bin Laden was "worth it".
Check out FatBabies before deciding on a career in the game industry. There are pluses, but there are a lot of minuses. For one thing, when you look at game companies and see a bunch of programmers in their 20's your first thought might be that that's a good thing because everyone is fresh and excited, but then you start to realize that a lot of people get burnt out of the game industry by the time they are 30. It's hard to find anyone over 30 in game companies, and most of them are pretty cynical.
And forget about games as an artform -- game publishers are the most conservative businessmen on the planet. Not conservative in the sense of right-wing christians, but conservative in the sense that they will only back a game that they know will make them money. That's why out of the hundreds of games that come out every year, only a couple stand out as unique. If you go into the game industry, you will most likely be putting out one of the hundreds of clones (assuming your game isn't shit-canned before release, which happens to about half of them).
And after two weeks of development, they want to be able to walk across the bridge, even if you have to stop pouring concrete to quickly rig up a rope bridge. Then you tear down the rope bridge and keep pouring concrete, only to have them demand that they be able to ride a donkey across in two more weeks, etc.
Yes you can. If someone steals my car and it would take $10,000 to replace it, then you might say the car is worth $10,000. If someone takes away my free speech, then how much would I have to spend in bribes to get it back? How much do American judges cost these days? $500,000? $10 Million? $50 Million? ???
The nice part about this is that when you sue the DVD guys for damages, the judge will know how much of a bribe he would take to give you your free speech back.
Except the new "anti-terrorism" laws don't apply in such a case. If police already have probable cause that a crime is going to be committed, they easily get search warrants, wiretaps, etc. The new law says that they can spy on and disrupt groups even if there is no probable cause. Do you really have free speech and democratic rights if a peaceful/legal organization can be secretly spied on and disrupted? Imagine an immigrant rights group that is seeking to influence policy to limit powers of INS agents. Now imagine the INS spying on the group and being allowed to arrest and hold members of the group for 7 days without charging them with a crime. Do you think this might discourage people from joining the group? Might it damage their effectiveness? Can you have a free and democratic society when agents of the government use their power to fight against any attempts to limit their power?
Think about the fact that terrorism is being defined as using violence to create an atmosphere of fear in order to change government policies, but it is not considered terrorism to do the same thing in order to preserve government policies.
And viruses, hacking, etc. are rarely "terrorism." They might be criminal, they might be politically motivated sabotage, they might even be scary. But if you are not trying to kill or bodily injure civillians to further a political goal, you are not a terrorist.
It's pretty scary how words get slippery in times like this. Its bad enough that politicians and others are throwing the word "terrorism" around to apply to anyone they don't like, but the real danger is when the entire limits of the spectrum get shifted. Real terrorists blow up some buildings and kill thousands of civillians and everyone is screaming for revenge. Next, everyone is calling for the death of all terrorists. And, heck, few would argue that the lives of the perpetrators of 9/11 should be spared. But next, we start expanding terrorism to include destruction of property, and then hacking. And the calls for "death to all terrorists" continue.
If an arsonist burns down a building and nobody is hurt and steps were taken to prevent harm to people, they are an arsonist, and the law says they should go to prison for many years. But are we really saying that Bin Laden, with a bodycount of thousands is in the same class of criminals as an arsonist? Or someone who costs businesses millions of dollars in computer down time?
If someone targets a virus or DOS attack on a hospital or some other place where there is some known chance of actually bodily injuring real human beings, and the perpetrator was doing it for a political purpose, then, sure, they are a terrorist. But if it isn't reasonably expected to result in human injuries or deaths, then it is a politically motivated crime, not terrorism.
Think about it. The U.S. state department has a list of terrorist groups based on a very specific definition. If that definition were expanded to include actions that don't target civillians for injury or death, then the inescapable conclusion is that most acts to further foreign policy by any nation are actually terrorism.
Remember Watergate? Nixon's henchmen broke many laws to spy on his opponent. If computers had been around, they would have been hacked. Was Watergate an act of terrorism? Certainly not. Politically motivated breaking-and-entering and obstruction of justice, sure, subversion of democracy, no doubt. But it wasn't terrorism.
And forget about CIA actions that actually involved killing civillians. How many times have CIA employees broken laws in various countries for political purposes? While many would argue about whether the CIA are terrorists, if you allow non-violent crime to be terrorist, then there is no argument.
Even with the 9/11 tragedy, all the attacks were terrorist attacks because they all targetted civillians. But the attack on the pentagon was terrorism because of the civillians killed, not the military personel. If they had flown a bomber over D.C. and dropped a bomb on the pentagon, it would have been an act of war -- even a war atrocity, and maybe even a war crime, but not terrorism.
When you are watching the bombing of Afghanistan on TV, according to the state department's definition of terrorism, the U.S. bombing is not terrorism, even if hundreds or thousands of civillians are killed, even if the attack is being done for political reasons. The reason is that civillians are not being targetted. If Bin Laden could afford a modern airforce and carried out similar bombing raids on U.S. military targets (including power stations, government buildings, etc.) that would be no more terrorism than the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan. Yes, it would be an act of war, yes, it would be deplorable, etc. But it wouldn't be terrorism.
And if Bin Laden bombing every U.S. military base, power station, government building, etc. isn't terrorism, it's a hell of a stretch to say that some piddly DOS attack is.
Like many things, Work to Rule only works when organized. That means getting many people to obey the rule just the right way and at the right time in order to maximize its effect. It's also important that the target, be it a politician or a boss, be made aware of what is going on and that the rule in question is the source of the problem.
Actually, this is an example of Work to Rule. It's a tactic often used in the workplace to win against a boss. Unionized workers often use the strategy when laws or contracts forbid strikes and other activities, but even non-unionized workers often use it to effectively protest (and eliminate) ridiculous rules.
While this current example won't take down the DMCA, the idea is that the DMCA will hurt U.S. corporations in the long run. Specifically, it will hurt the vast majority of corporations that don't get any benefits from the DMCA. We can only hope that these corporations give bigger bribes than the record and movie corporations.
I think getting an open source project going is similar to organizing anything. In past projects, software and otherwise, I've tried two bad methods.
The first was to get a core of an idea and then hunt down people interested in helping. The problem with this is that the people you will attract will not be so interested in getting work done. At best you'll get a lot of armchair coders that are most interested in shaping the idea, often in directions you completely disagree with.
The second was to do it all by myself and hope others will be inspired and jump in. They won't.
What you need to do is put yourself in the shoes of your potential fellow coders. What will get them excited enough to put time into the project? The best example I've seen is GIMP. They got a framework up and working in a short time and made the project modular and extensible. They then primed the pump by getting some cool modules written. Quickly others made modules and next thing you knew there was a large group of developers making plug-ins and actively improving the architecture to make their plug-ins work better.
When it comes to running computers safely and productively, protecting the interests of the users (us), who should we trust, Microsoft or ourselves?
Piracy: "One in every three pieces of software used by businesses worldwide in 1999 was illegal, costing software makers $12.2 billion for the year"
Bugs: "Faulty software costs businesses $78 billion per year"
hmmm... so pirates have $66 Billion to catch up?
What do you mean "no one has tried to benefit by it"? Everyone is cashing in. All sorts of companies are milking people's patriotism in ads asking people to help America unite by buying their product. Bush is using his new-found popularity to ram through all sorts of policies that wouldn't fly when people were looking. Russia is using the attack as an excuse to step up attacks on their enemies. China put out a statement trying to link their fight against Tibetan dissidents to the U.S. fight against terrorism. Many companies announced layoffs immediately after the attack, either to cash in on government hand-outs or just taking advantage of the fact that few would question anything blamed on the attacks.
Bin Laden hasn't claimed responsibility for it, but amongst his own people, he's taking credit for it. But it sounds like "credit" wasn't the biggest priority. Assuming it was Bin Laden that did it, the motivation appears to be achieving two main goals.
1) Showing that it is possible to hurt the U.S. If a big bully is causing trouble in your neighborhood, even a symbolic attack on the bully can embolden the neighborhood.
2) Everyone knows that if you hit the U.S., the U.S. responds with an embarrassingly over-the-top military response. And just as the attack on the U.S. united many people who previously hated each others' guts and drew people farther to the right, American cruise missiles blowing up muslims is sure to bring muslims together and strengthen the fundamentalists.
It's an age-old trick -- provoke an attack on your own people, and then step up as the only leader strong enough to lead. The Nazis did it with the Reichstag fire, Saddam Hussein did it to maintain power in Iraq, etc. It works. And one nice thing about the trick is that when you do it, it often has the effect of creating a symbiotic relationship with the extreme elements of your enemy. That was how the Cold War worked and it's the strategy for the extreme minority factions within the Palestinians and Israelis.
After the attacks, Bush said, "Freedom itself was attacked this morning by a faceless coward and freedom will be defended."
The irony is that the terrorists did attack our freedoms, though not in any way Bush may have meant. They attacked our freedom, and the freedom of nearly everyone around the world, by giving a large amount of power to people like Bush. After the attacks in September, few people (and certainly no politician) would dare question that Americans must sacrifice civil liberties for the promise of "security".
And around the world, governments declared they were in solidarity with the U.S. government - China vowed to step up their efforts against "terrorists, extremists, and separatists" (separatists, as in Tibetans...), the Israeli government killed some more Palestinians, Russia vowed to step up their efforts to crush opposition in Chechnya, etc.
If Bin Laden wanted to decrease the power of George Bush, he made a serious miscalculation -- Americans are uniting behind Bush's efforts to take away our civil liberties, and around the world, everyone seems happy to allow Bush to bomb the hell out of anyone he wants.
Unfortunately, if "freedom will be defended," it won't be by the likes of Bush -- that will be up to us.
Ok, now, think of the largest, positive social changes in the last 200 years or so. In every case, the current powers-that-be used any tools at their disposal to try to stop the changes. Meanwhile, many of the people resposible for those changes had to break or bend existing laws, or at least to use anonymity and a bit of stealth at times to avoid the unlawful acts of the authorities.
Imagine the night after the Boston Tea Party, all of the patriots that participated are dragged out of bed by the British authorities after being identified by hidden cameras and matched in a large database.
Imagine everyone involved in the underground railroad -- people risking their lives to bring runaway slaves to freedom -- imagine them all being identified and arrested (killed if they are black).
Imagine when advocating birth-control was illegal and feminists went to prison trying to educate other women -- now imagine an all-encompassing system of cameras and databases being used to effectively eliminate this whole crime by identifying all of the "criminals".
The problem with the argument about totalitarian security eliminating all sorts of nasty crimes is that it rarely works that way in practice. Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia both had quite of lot of extreme security measures in place, yet crime by citizens were not eliminated -- I would doubt if they decreased at all. And at the same time, the crimes of the authorities greatly increased -- that's how it works. You give them a new tool to hunt down rapists and murderers and they use it instead to hunt down people who would take away the tool, as well as anyone else who might threaten their power. As they abuse their power more and more, the population has less ability to restrict their power.
And of course they will abuse their power -- that is the nature of power. Power corrupts. The ability for citizens to freely challenge the government's power, and ultimately, to overthrow it, is the one thing that can keep a government in check.
It is a shame that after the cold war ended, so did the need to differentiate between the U.S. and a totalitarian state like the Soviet Union. I remember liberals and conservatives, even Ronald Reagan, George Bush, and Rush Limbaugh going on and on about how evil the Soviet Union was for spying on its citizens. After the wall came down, U.S. journalists toured secret police offices filled with TV monitors and expressed horror at the thought of living in such a society. Everyone celebrated the closing down of these security offices. And damn it, they were right. It was evil.
Am I the only one that feels like I'm living in some cheesy sci-fi show where everyone's mind has been wiped clean? If, in the end, the Soviet Union was right, and citizens have no need for privacy and freedom, then what the hell was the whole Cold War for? Why did countless people have to be killed in wars in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Nicaragua, etc.?
Using this definition, cracking is not terrorism, though cracking can be a part of terrorism, just as stealing someone's shirt isn't terrorism, but if you steal a pilot's uniform so that you can hijack a plane to kill the passengers for some political motive, then the theft is one part of the bigger terrorist act.
You claimed that "Malicious cracking is more of a petty terrorism in which lives aren't lost". But that is nonsense. According to any reasonable definition of terrorism, if there is no violence, there is no terrorism. In some very specific rare cases, malicious cracking can be violent (somehow cracking air-traffic controller or hospital computers and purposely endanging lives), but I don't know that I've ever heard of such a thing actually happening.
It might seem like a minor quibble, but if you remove the requirement of violence for an act to be terrorism, and instead say that terrorism is when you break the law to make some political point, you are venturing into very dangerous territory. Because by changing the definition, you are now saying that any political action that is illegal is terrorism, and obviously terrorism is a menace that must be stopped. Remember, the vast majority of socio-political improvements in any country have come about by people who broke laws - in some cases specifically unjust laws, and in other cases, ordinary laws were used as a pretense to try to stop a social movement.
Just remember, just because something is bad doesn't mean it's terrorism, and just because something is illegal doesn't mean it's bad.
Except Voyager isn't a superhero show, it's Gilligan's Island in Space.
The full on totalitarian society is actually the height of insecurity and the height of chaos. Yes, giving up a little bit of freedom can give you a little bit more security, but we're already way past that. From here on out, it only gets worse.
Expect politicians to very cynically use this tragedy to its fullest, and not just in the U.S. Apparently Russia has been making noises about joining in the fight against terrorism, which to them means killing more Chechens. China just signed a regional agreement to fight against "terrorism, seperatism, and extremism" -- yeah, kill some more Tibetan nuns before the bodies are even cold in New York.
Here in the U.S., it'll mean scary crypto laws, scary wire-tap laws, "anti-terrorism" laws that greatly extend the power of police to spy on and disrupt legal dissident groups, bigger defense budgets, bigger CIA/NSA/??? budgets, etc. That's what Bush means when he says "this is war." He means war as in concentration camps for Japanese-Americans during WWII, long prison sentences for disagreeing with government policies like during WWI, etc. Sure, he won't get all that he wants, at least not unless we have some more useful casualties in the U.S.
Of course, that's why we have to resist this every step along the way...
I also cried in frustration. Frustation at the thousands of innocent lives lost, the horror the injured and killed must have gone through, the tragedy for family and friends left behind. Frustration at the lives that will be destroyed in much the same way in the U.S. government's inevitable retaliation.
And I am also very scared of what will inevitably happen to Arab-Americans -- vigilante violence, FBI interrogations, racial and religious intolerance.
To tell you the truth, I am about out of tears. I can't help but become cynical. When the Oklahoma City federal building was blown up, I was shocked and saddened. But while I saw Time magazine printing pictures of every last person killed and information about their lives and families, the U.S. military had recently blown up an Iraqi apartment building killing a comparable number of women, children, and men. Each of them had as tragic a story, each of them had a family that was distrought. Here we had two situations of innocent civillians blown to bits for a political cause. I cried at both. I had empathy for their pain. Yet, I saw plenty of people brought to tears over the Time story that actually cheered on the Iraqi bombing.
It is very easy to have empathy for your fellow countrymen while ignoring the suffering of others. Plenty of good Germans cried when fellow Germans were blown to bits by American bombs in WWII. That wasn't empathy or conscience, that was nationalism.
To get back to the point of totalitarian security measures. You say to ignore the question of trust for now, but that is the central question. Do we have any proof that these new totalitarian security measures such as face recognition systems, echelon-style filters on phones and email, etc. will make the world a safer, freer place? And if they are abused, how might one start a dissident movement to correct the abuses?
It's like asking, ok, suppose you are in Stalinist Russia, how do you fight for freedom of the press? The answer is it is best to never let it get that bad in the first place because it will be damn hard.
Ah, but it will never happen here. No thanks. I feel the best way to stop terrorist attacks against the U.S. is for the U.S. to immediately stop it's support of terrorism around the world. Here we have a government that continually gives billions of dollars worth of weapons to various dictators that are torturing and killing their people, and you think it would be better to give our government more power over us rather than the much more effective solution of not giving people a reason to want revenge against us.
In the 19th century, small farmers and landless farmers were forced off their land and into the factories. Now, software patents and other IP nonsense is making it more and more difficult for independent programmers and small businesses. Since we can't afford enough lawyers to own the patents for the software we create, we will be left with less and less choices. And already we're working 10+ hours a day.
It's time we stood up for ourselves and starting looking out for our own interests. It's time we started fighting back where we have the most power -- in our workplaces. As individuals, we can't change much, but at all the Microsofts, Adobes, AOLs, and IBMs, there are thousands of programmers that keep these companies running, that create the "intellectual property" these corporations value so highly. If we join together, we can take back some of our power and turn things around.
That's why we have to organize where we are most powerful. If programmers at Adobe had made it clear to management that they would not tolerate this sort of thing, it would not have happened. As programmers, we create the "intellectual property" these corporations are trying so hard to protect and monopolize. We have the power to create this software, so we have the power to bring it all to a halt.
And power is the only thing they are going to listen to. It's time we stood up for ourselves.
The article implies that if the defendant's claims were true and the plaintiff had suffered a damaged reputation as a result of truthful accusations, that it would be libel, and the plaintiff would win.