Why "bulk"? Is it not spam if some company sends just me a targetted advert I didn't want?
And should there be some "commercial" element? Spam is often known as UCE: unsolicited commercial e-mail. But that allows the political stuff, which is a somewhat different consideration.
Say what you will about historical context, but I very much doubt you can twist it (or untwist it, as you say?) to mean anything other than "The people can say whatever the fuck they want." Because that is pretty close to what it literally says.
And yet the law recognises concepts such as defamation, certain types of intellectual property, incitement to commit certain crimes...
Either all these laws are unconstitutional, or the free speech right isn't completely universal after all.
I think there is a rational explanation for this apparent contradiction, which I've written about here before, but how do you reconcile these facts (assuming your previous comment was meant to be taken literally)?
It seems to me that we could do a lot better just by taking a few smaller, more realistic steps.
For example, "e-mail 2.0" could provide a standardised way of identifying legitimate sending relays for given domain names, the kind of technique currently used (but in a non-standard, loophole-ridden, poorly-supported fashion) by SenderID, DomainKeys et al.
We could improve the error message system, as well. Just this week, a domain I administer got hit with hundreds of bounce messages per minute for a while, because someone kindly sent out a mass spam run with "webmaster@my.domain" as the From: address and a zillion lemming sysadmins kindly bounced it back to me. This is not a commercial set-up and beyond a certain threshold I have to pay for the bandwidth I use, so this did not amuse me: I have decent spam filtering myself, and I don't need thousands of systems who don't to wrap up the spam in a nice, relatively filter-proof way and send it right back to me!
Yes, and it appears there's a good reason. Maybe you should reconsider it, too!
Buying a $200 tool for each developer starts getting expensive, no matter how much morale it builds.
Really? Depending on where you are, the realistic cost of employing a skilled developer could easily be upwards of $100/hour. That makes a $200 tool good value for money, even in absolute terms with linear cost scaling, if it saves just two hours of each developer's time.
Of course, for most software tools, the costs do not scale linearly with the number of users, and some sort of multi-user or site-wide licence deal makes kitting out your whole organisation with it still cheaper.
Even if you just get it for that one guy, everyone else starts getting annoyed, and morale goes down.
If it is only useful for some people, it's unlikely that others will object. If it's useful for everyone, then buy it for everyone. In the context we're talking about, quibbling over a $200 tool is like quibbling over the brand of toilet paper.
"Most passengers don't think it's any big deal," Schear said.
Unless I misunderstood TFA, most passengers don't actually know what the machine does.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that if they instead asked most passengers to step into a little room marked "strip search office" and take all their clothes off, the number of protests would be significant.
They can send you to prison for not paying your council tax, and do so regularly.
No, they can't. A court may send you to prison. A council can merely bring a case against you, just as you yourself may bring a case against someone who has wronged you. But you don't get to spy on HM Revenue and Customs' e-mails about your tax return under the RIP Act, even though it is known that HMRC screw up thousands of tax calculations every year to the detriment of the citizens concerned and waste billions of pounds of taxpayers' money every year by failing to run their own systems properly.
As the GP said, there is no legitimate reason to grant councils (and numerous other pseudo-government agencies) access to such personal information. On the occasions where there are legitimate grounds for a serious investigation — and they are rare at council level, very rare — it should be possible for the council to go via the court system and/or police to find the information they need with judicial oversight, just like they used to.
There is an increasing mound of evidence to show that laws providing for gross invasion of privacy are being abused on a massive scale for the most trivial of things by pencil pushers who fancy themselves important. There is almost no evidence that councils are using these sweeping powers to get good results in genuine cases where they couldn't have achieved similar results without the powers. It's just a screwed up law, and the sooner it's repealed the better.
And if they spend the resources, how do they know they can trust what the person they pay tells them? After all, this entire discussion is predicated on the fact that they already can't trust other people who are being paid for their services and software.
It was intended as a generic "you", i.e., "A freedom is only worth as much as one can do because of it."
Your point about others being able to do things even if you personally can't is valid, but this is where my trust argument comes in: just because some hypothetical other person could check the source code, that doesn't help you unless you trust the other person. In practice, just as it is unlikely that any individual has the resources to fully audit and fix the code, so it is unlikely that any individual will have a contact they personally know well enough to trust on this who is able to do the auditing and fixing. Instead, some sort of organisation with more resources would have to do it. But then how do you know you can trust that auditing organisation any more than you trusted the people who supplied the software in the first place? And so the cycle continues, ad infinitum.
I don't think the GP's arguments are as flawed as you claim.
A freedom is only worth as much as what you can do because of it. Since most people lack the resources to audit source code and change anything they don't like, the only advantage open source software offers them from the perspective under discussion is that they are trusting an anonymous group of people who talk up freedom a lot rather than trusting a group of people working for a company who have commercial interests.
This most certainly does undermine the original argument, because it contradicts the claims about all the things you can do just because you're using "free" software.
In short, you could make an argument that open source is a necessary condition for the personal control under discussion, but that is not the same as demonstrating that it is sufficient for the same. And realistically, you ultimately get a "who watches the watchers" problem either way, so I'm not convinced that even the necessity argument is a particularly strong one in practice.
It was always the information collected from other users that bothered me about Facebook. I signed up briefly in the early days, keen to see what all the fuss was about. Despite deliberately giving them almost no personal information about me, within a few days they practically had half my life story, generously volunteered by my friends with no doubt the best of intentions but certainly not my permission or consent. I deleted my account soon after joining, only to discover later that they don't really delete the information anyway.
There doesn't seem to be much point suggesting on Slashdot that this is unreasonable, maybe even dangerous, behaviour, though: last time I just got heavily down-modded and told I should read some Ts&Cs page on an obscure URL that I was supposed to have found before signing up (which, as far as I could tell, was not even available to non-users at the time). I guess "information wants to be free" mentality trumps "identity theft can ruin your life" and "privacy is important" around here.:-(
"Where an individual is not previously known to the operators of a sophisticated multi-camera town centre CCTV system, but the operators are able to distinguish that individual on the basis of physical characteristics, that individual is identified. Therefore, where the operators are tracking a particular individual that they have singled out in some way (perhaps using such physical characteristics) they will be processing 'personal data'."
Oh, I'm quite sure some Microsoft software is actually worse than nothing. Much of the on-line help in recent versions of some products is just an annoying distraction when you accidentally hit F1 and it takes several seconds to appear, for example, and it's usually faster to use a search engine to find useful answers on the web anyway if you actually wanted some help.
But most of the time, I agree: Microsoft's software is useful, and substantially better than nothing.
The problem is when they take the third dollar from your two-dollar account, you default on the "bad debt", and then you can't get a mortgage for several years because you're a "credit risk".
I think you've pretty much got to the root of the problem there: if this behaviour isn't criminally negligent, it should be. In a world where identity theft is one of the fastest growing (and most damaging) crimes in town, dealing with a business that has previously shown itself to be incompetent in handling personal data and is actively avoiding improving the situation, it's time to start throwing the directors in jail.
Mirrored surveillance will never be a complete solution to the Big Brother problem, for the simple reason that power to act on the information is not equal on both sides. You can write a blog post about how unfair some cop busting you was, but you're still spending the night in jail and he's still at work the next day. The authorities, on the other hand, can abuse information to set you up, and you're still spending the night in jail and they're still at work the next day. Whichever side appears to have the information upper-hand, you're the loser.
Remember, you (assuming you're in the US) have a president who thinks your constitution is scrap paper and is busily ignoring it whenever it suits his purposes. We're not doing any better here in the UK: we have a Prime Minister who gained the office on an almost unbelievable series of political technicalities and has no popular mandate, who is busily trying to push through lots similarly abusive and unpopular legislation. Everyone who watches the news or reads a paper knows this, but what good does it do when there is now way to remove such people from office, or put them in a court where they must defend their actions or face the consequences?
I never understand this idea, either. It seems to be a peculiarly American concept; I've never encountered it in practice here in Europe.
Why would you assume that someone you have paid for their services for a long time and trusted enough to give high level access will suddenly turn into an evil corporate cracker/spy/bitter old man and abuse that access just because they handed in their notice? If they were going to screw you, they would have done it years ago and made darn sure the logs pointed at someone else.
If you're actually firing someone, particularly as a result of their misconduct, then sure, you take steps like cutting them off immediately and physically escorting them off the premises. But handicapping a productive employee during the vital handover period just because they're moving house or wanting a break to look after a young family is just a stupid waste of resources.
Personally, I'm much more pro-copyright (the principle, not the unbalanced application in certain jurisdictions) than many on Slashdot. However, I think copyright is a fair economic bargain only when it's used to balance multiplication, since that allows things like realistic prices for mass-market products where the production costs are effectively shared between all who benefit. It's not there to be used to impose an artificial limited lifetime on a single copy that has been properly obtained, though; I see neither an economic nor an ethical argument that the law should support this.
The licence agreement for it (at least as supplied with Crysis) is pretty close to saying that you agree they may upload any data of any kind from your machine to their servers to be used however they wish. It even contains CYA terms about how you understand that this might be considered invasive. It's so bad that I imagine it's actually illegal in some places. Oh, and there's plenty of evidence on the web that they actually do grab data from your machine that is nothing to do with cheating at all. Personally, I just refused outright to even install it, but that dramatically diminishes the value of the game to me.
I think we could distill the kinds of annoyance exhibited by your list and those of others here into a fairly concise list of "bad behaviours":
Software that phones home or automatically updates without permission (numerous media players, Java...)
Software that installs stuff you don't want, or stuff you want where you don't want it (anything that puts icons on my desktop, new auto-start things that live in my system tray, new entries on my Start menu buried under several layers of company branding...)
Software that interrupts what you're doing (Clippy, anything that steals the focus, and especially that damned "Windows needs to be restarted" dialog that keeps popping up and trying to steal a keystroke until either you give in or you happen to be hitting the wrong letter when it pops up and it goes anyway)
Games that only let you play on-line if you install spyware pretending to be anti-cheat software (I'm looking at you, PunkBuster)
And of course, the one we all love to hate: software that meddles with your system beyond its remit (Why does Adobe Creative Suite need to splat crap all over my boot sector and mess up my dual-booting? Applications have no business doing that, particularly not without warning!)
In other words, software that can't just do its job and leave everything else well alone.
OK, I'm not going to take sides on the gun control debate at this point, but if you are, please make at least some effort to be objective in your presentation. If you're going to compare figures in a meaningful way, you need to look at a sample of countries that both do and don't allow personal ownership of firearms, to control for other tendencies in society that may affect the figures but have nothing to do with guns. You also need to compare crime rates with guns and the rates of the same crimes overall across those countries, to control for the fact that in a place where guns aren't as easily available, the alternative to committing a crime with a gun may be committing the crime with another weapon rather than not committing the crime at all.
By 2009, they'll be actively extracting a list of your friends (that is, anyone who you communicate with regularly) and sending them personalised e-mails...
Slashdot Mirror
Lacks sufficient definition? Are you kidding me?
Spam is unsolicited bulk mail.
One could quibble with that on several counts.
Why "bulk"? Is it not spam if some company sends just me a targetted advert I didn't want?
And should there be some "commercial" element? Spam is often known as UCE: unsolicited commercial e-mail. But that allows the political stuff, which is a somewhat different consideration.
Say what you will about historical context, but I very much doubt you can twist it (or untwist it, as you say?) to mean anything other than "The people can say whatever the fuck they want." Because that is pretty close to what it literally says.
And yet the law recognises concepts such as defamation, certain types of intellectual property, incitement to commit certain crimes...
Either all these laws are unconstitutional, or the free speech right isn't completely universal after all.
I think there is a rational explanation for this apparent contradiction, which I've written about here before, but how do you reconcile these facts (assuming your previous comment was meant to be taken literally)?
It seems to me that we could do a lot better just by taking a few smaller, more realistic steps.
For example, "e-mail 2.0" could provide a standardised way of identifying legitimate sending relays for given domain names, the kind of technique currently used (but in a non-standard, loophole-ridden, poorly-supported fashion) by SenderID, DomainKeys et al.
We could improve the error message system, as well. Just this week, a domain I administer got hit with hundreds of bounce messages per minute for a while, because someone kindly sent out a mass spam run with "webmaster@my.domain" as the From: address and a zillion lemming sysadmins kindly bounced it back to me. This is not a commercial set-up and beyond a certain threshold I have to pay for the bandwidth I use, so this did not amuse me: I have decent spam filtering myself, and I don't need thousands of systems who don't to wrap up the spam in a nice, relatively filter-proof way and send it right back to me!
Quoth the AC:
You obviously don't work where I work.
Yes, and it appears there's a good reason. Maybe you should reconsider it, too!
Buying a $200 tool for each developer starts getting expensive, no matter how much morale it builds.
Really? Depending on where you are, the realistic cost of employing a skilled developer could easily be upwards of $100/hour. That makes a $200 tool good value for money, even in absolute terms with linear cost scaling, if it saves just two hours of each developer's time.
Of course, for most software tools, the costs do not scale linearly with the number of users, and some sort of multi-user or site-wide licence deal makes kitting out your whole organisation with it still cheaper.
Even if you just get it for that one guy, everyone else starts getting annoyed, and morale goes down.
If it is only useful for some people, it's unlikely that others will object. If it's useful for everyone, then buy it for everyone. In the context we're talking about, quibbling over a $200 tool is like quibbling over the brand of toilet paper.
"Most passengers don't think it's any big deal," Schear said.
Unless I misunderstood TFA, most passengers don't actually know what the machine does.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that if they instead asked most passengers to step into a little room marked "strip search office" and take all their clothes off, the number of protests would be significant.
They can send you to prison for not paying your council tax, and do so regularly.
No, they can't. A court may send you to prison. A council can merely bring a case against you, just as you yourself may bring a case against someone who has wronged you. But you don't get to spy on HM Revenue and Customs' e-mails about your tax return under the RIP Act, even though it is known that HMRC screw up thousands of tax calculations every year to the detriment of the citizens concerned and waste billions of pounds of taxpayers' money every year by failing to run their own systems properly.
As the GP said, there is no legitimate reason to grant councils (and numerous other pseudo-government agencies) access to such personal information. On the occasions where there are legitimate grounds for a serious investigation — and they are rare at council level, very rare — it should be possible for the council to go via the court system and/or police to find the information they need with judicial oversight, just like they used to.
There is an increasing mound of evidence to show that laws providing for gross invasion of privacy are being abused on a massive scale for the most trivial of things by pencil pushers who fancy themselves important. There is almost no evidence that councils are using these sweeping powers to get good results in genuine cases where they couldn't have achieved similar results without the powers. It's just a screwed up law, and the sooner it's repealed the better.
And if they spend the resources, how do they know they can trust what the person they pay tells them? After all, this entire discussion is predicated on the fact that they already can't trust other people who are being paid for their services and software.
It was intended as a generic "you", i.e., "A freedom is only worth as much as one can do because of it."
Your point about others being able to do things even if you personally can't is valid, but this is where my trust argument comes in: just because some hypothetical other person could check the source code, that doesn't help you unless you trust the other person. In practice, just as it is unlikely that any individual has the resources to fully audit and fix the code, so it is unlikely that any individual will have a contact they personally know well enough to trust on this who is able to do the auditing and fixing. Instead, some sort of organisation with more resources would have to do it. But then how do you know you can trust that auditing organisation any more than you trusted the people who supplied the software in the first place? And so the cycle continues, ad infinitum.
I don't think the GP's arguments are as flawed as you claim.
A freedom is only worth as much as what you can do because of it. Since most people lack the resources to audit source code and change anything they don't like, the only advantage open source software offers them from the perspective under discussion is that they are trusting an anonymous group of people who talk up freedom a lot rather than trusting a group of people working for a company who have commercial interests.
This most certainly does undermine the original argument, because it contradicts the claims about all the things you can do just because you're using "free" software.
In short, you could make an argument that open source is a necessary condition for the personal control under discussion, but that is not the same as demonstrating that it is sufficient for the same. And realistically, you ultimately get a "who watches the watchers" problem either way, so I'm not convinced that even the necessity argument is a particularly strong one in practice.
I tend to think of stock markets like a game of poker: if you don't know who the weak player at the table is, that's because it's you.
Hey, flyingsquid, you seem like a smart guy. Do you want to buy some Northern Rock shares? I'll sell them to you really cheap!
It was always the information collected from other users that bothered me about Facebook. I signed up briefly in the early days, keen to see what all the fuss was about. Despite deliberately giving them almost no personal information about me, within a few days they practically had half my life story, generously volunteered by my friends with no doubt the best of intentions but certainly not my permission or consent. I deleted my account soon after joining, only to discover later that they don't really delete the information anyway.
There doesn't seem to be much point suggesting on Slashdot that this is unreasonable, maybe even dangerous, behaviour, though: last time I just got heavily down-modded and told I should read some Ts&Cs page on an obscure URL that I was supposed to have found before signing up (which, as far as I could tell, was not even available to non-users at the time). I guess "information wants to be free" mentality trumps "identity theft can ruin your life" and "privacy is important" around here. :-(
The DPA does not apply to CCTV. CCTV information is simply in a recording in chronological order - it has no filing system based on an individual.
It's not as simple as that. Whether something is personal data often depends on the context. For example, quoting the ICO web site you linked to yourself:
"Where an individual is not previously known to the operators of a sophisticated multi-camera town centre CCTV system, but the operators are able to distinguish that individual on the basis of physical characteristics, that individual is identified. Therefore, where the operators are tracking a particular individual that they have singled out in some way (perhaps using such physical characteristics) they will be processing 'personal data'."
Oh, I'm quite sure some Microsoft software is actually worse than nothing. Much of the on-line help in recent versions of some products is just an annoying distraction when you accidentally hit F1 and it takes several seconds to appear, for example, and it's usually faster to use a search engine to find useful answers on the web anyway if you actually wanted some help.
But most of the time, I agree: Microsoft's software is useful, and substantially better than nothing.
The problem is when they take the third dollar from your two-dollar account, you default on the "bad debt", and then you can't get a mortgage for several years because you're a "credit risk".
I think you've pretty much got to the root of the problem there: if this behaviour isn't criminally negligent, it should be. In a world where identity theft is one of the fastest growing (and most damaging) crimes in town, dealing with a business that has previously shown itself to be incompetent in handling personal data and is actively avoiding improving the situation, it's time to start throwing the directors in jail.
So you think the solution to having an unelected Prime Minister that the people don't want is for the unelected Monarch to remove him?
I'm not sure that fills me with confidence... :o)
Mirrored surveillance will never be a complete solution to the Big Brother problem, for the simple reason that power to act on the information is not equal on both sides. You can write a blog post about how unfair some cop busting you was, but you're still spending the night in jail and he's still at work the next day. The authorities, on the other hand, can abuse information to set you up, and you're still spending the night in jail and they're still at work the next day. Whichever side appears to have the information upper-hand, you're the loser.
Remember, you (assuming you're in the US) have a president who thinks your constitution is scrap paper and is busily ignoring it whenever it suits his purposes. We're not doing any better here in the UK: we have a Prime Minister who gained the office on an almost unbelievable series of political technicalities and has no popular mandate, who is busily trying to push through lots similarly abusive and unpopular legislation. Everyone who watches the news or reads a paper knows this, but what good does it do when there is now way to remove such people from office, or put them in a court where they must defend their actions or face the consequences?
I never understand this idea, either. It seems to be a peculiarly American concept; I've never encountered it in practice here in Europe.
Why would you assume that someone you have paid for their services for a long time and trusted enough to give high level access will suddenly turn into an evil corporate cracker/spy/bitter old man and abuse that access just because they handed in their notice? If they were going to screw you, they would have done it years ago and made darn sure the logs pointed at someone else.
If you're actually firing someone, particularly as a result of their misconduct, then sure, you take steps like cutting them off immediately and physically escorting them off the premises. But handicapping a productive employee during the vital handover period just because they're moving house or wanting a break to look after a young family is just a stupid waste of resources.
I agree.
Personally, I'm much more pro-copyright (the principle, not the unbalanced application in certain jurisdictions) than many on Slashdot. However, I think copyright is a fair economic bargain only when it's used to balance multiplication, since that allows things like realistic prices for mass-market products where the production costs are effectively shared between all who benefit. It's not there to be used to impose an artificial limited lifetime on a single copy that has been properly obtained, though; I see neither an economic nor an ethical argument that the law should support this.
The licence agreement for it (at least as supplied with Crysis) is pretty close to saying that you agree they may upload any data of any kind from your machine to their servers to be used however they wish. It even contains CYA terms about how you understand that this might be considered invasive. It's so bad that I imagine it's actually illegal in some places. Oh, and there's plenty of evidence on the web that they actually do grab data from your machine that is nothing to do with cheating at all. Personally, I just refused outright to even install it, but that dramatically diminishes the value of the game to me.
I think we could distill the kinds of annoyance exhibited by your list and those of others here into a fairly concise list of "bad behaviours":
In other words, software that can't just do its job and leave everything else well alone.
We also do not have cameras everywhere - I can't think of a single one in the area of London that I live in.
Regrettably, that probably says more about your lack of awareness than anything else.
OK, I'm not going to take sides on the gun control debate at this point, but if you are, please make at least some effort to be objective in your presentation. If you're going to compare figures in a meaningful way, you need to look at a sample of countries that both do and don't allow personal ownership of firearms, to control for other tendencies in society that may affect the figures but have nothing to do with guns. You also need to compare crime rates with guns and the rates of the same crimes overall across those countries, to control for the fact that in a place where guns aren't as easily available, the alternative to committing a crime with a gun may be committing the crime with another weapon rather than not committing the crime at all.
so they can lose the entire database in the post.
Oh, man, that's soooo 2007.
In 2008, governments just put your personal information on a public web site.
By 2009, they'll be actively extracting a list of your friends (that is, anyone who you communicate with regularly) and sending them personalised e-mails...