The only thing which I find amusing with security at the airport is the amount of people it takes to X-Ray. Often, I will see 9 to 11 individuals on one X-Ray machine, standing shoulder to shoulder. At least three are 'managing' the others. I find it to be wasteful and unnecessary.
The only thing less efficient than a union is a government bureaucracy.
If they didn't find (you) a threat, then WHY THROW THE FREAKIN' LIQUIDS IN THE TRASH?!?!?
Because they're engaging in some security theater in order to justify the existence of their own jobs, and the bureaucracies that support those jobs.
If they thought the liquids were really hazardous (as in, 'might be a bomb') then they'd need to put it in some sort of special disposal container. That they don't makes it clear that they know they're just taking people's shampoo.
It's all for effect. The idea is to make the shee--I mean, taxpayers--feel like they're getting something for their dollars.
Except that those camera-enforcement systems actually cause more accidents, not less. So if you're OK with the automatic license-plate system, I'd probably try to distance them from the red-light cameras. They're a disaster, and the only reason they're around is because they generate revenue.
Hopefully B.C. isn't re-inventing the wheel and they will have a similar system.
Well, based on what at least one of TFAs said, they're not going to. They're just planning on handing everything over to a group of electronics manufacturers, who'll then ship everything to a smelter to be incinerated.
Good way to eliminate the secondary market for electronics.
That reminds me of the infamous Bonsai Kitten Website fiasco where a university student did a farcical Website "selling" Bonsai Kitten paraphernalia. The site got banned from just about every hosting company that PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) found out about, and the FBI even investigated the site and the people behind it. PETA actually wanted the people behind the site arrested.
Well, to be fair, before it became clear (particularly to those who weren't familiar with the magic that is Adobe Photoshop) that Bonsai Kitten was a hoax, I think there was a pretty good argument for pulling the plug on it and going after the people involved -- had it been real, it would have been pretty clear animal cruelty and abuse.
If someone describes some sort of criminal activity on a web page -- documents it, even -- I expect the police whose jurisdiction the crime occurred in to investigate it, and if it's true, to punish those involved. That's not really even censorship per se, it's just going after someone who's standing on the proverbial rooftops, shouting "look at me, look what I did!" when what they're bragging about is clearly illegal.
Where on the web can a person go to have highly controversial political content hosted? The guys at NearlyFreeSpeech.net are pretty cool; their policies seem to basically be, "we'll comply with whatever laws we have to, and as long as you're not hurting or spamming anyone, we'll stay out of your way."
I don't know exactly what their limits would be / how open they would be to very controversial sites, but I suppose it might be worth sending them an email and asking whether they would be interested in having your business.
But I really don't think there's a dearth of providers willing to get into that type of service; it probably costs more than average, but if places like Stormfront can find an ISP, as long as you're not advocating anything that's actually illegal, I doubt you'll have that much of a problem.
That's still an internal, law-enforcement matter. The Geneva Convention doesn't apply.
The Geneva Convention also prohibits the use of chemical agents, even non-lethal ones like CN and CS (tear gas), but they get used domestically all the time.
The rules outlined in the Geneva Convention apply to conflicts between the organized armies of signatory states; they don't govern what those states can do internally, and they have a more limited effect on what those states can do against irregular troops, or the soldiers of non-signatory countries.
To be perfectly honest, I'd be a little annoyed if the brain surgeons in our intelligence agencies -- who I, along with the rest of the taxpayers, bankroll -- weren't at least aware of Wikipedia.
Okay, so in this case they get zero points for subtlety (and when your cover gets blown editing an encyclopedia that anyone can edit, that's not a good sign...), but they're not doing anything I wouldn't expect them to be doing.
I fully expect that the Chinese, Russians, Iranians, etc., probably have propaganda agencies astroturfing Wikipedia and other web sites to their own advantage. This is what countries do.
I think the problem with connections in the U.S. is mostly related to problems with the last mile, or the "last few miles" (the backhaul from the local node to the C.O.).
I suppose that this might make the node-to-CO link faster/cheaper, which would be good because it would raise the amount of actual capacity that the ISPs have to oversell, meaning that when everyone else in your neighborhood is trying to get online and play WoW, there's still some bandwidth left... but in terms of actually making your internet connection dramatically faster? I don't really think so.
What's holding back domestic broadband right now is less technological than economic problems. The ISPs know they can get away with taking a 256kb/s connection and sell it as a "6 megabit!!!111" pipe, and I don't see why they'd change that, particularly when there's basically no competition to speak of.
The article (and summary) mentions reassembling e-mails as their being typed. Is this accurate? I have, for some time, wondered if some text entry forms in web pages are "active" in that they exchange keystrokes with the remote end at real-time intervals. Again, from an ethical point of view, I would never make use of anything but passive entry boxes where none of the user's text is transferred across the network until they actually deliberately send it. The main reason it's done is so that the form auto-saves. Gmail and Google Docs both do this; as you type into the form, every few seconds it will send the data to the server, and save the document. This way, if your connection hiccups, or if your browser crashes, or if you spill that Big Gulp into your keyboard, the text you've entered doesn't disappear.
Granted, Firefox these days is pretty good about remembering what you had typed into a form field if the browser crashes (how many of us have lost a long Slashdot post because something happened?), but many other browsers don't, and for an email or word processing program, it's a compelling feature.
But especially considering that Gmail defaults to plain-text HTTP, it does seem screamingly insecure. But then again, email in general is screamingly insecure; they're just not giving you any false sense of security.
That wouldn't be a bad idea, come to think of it. I only discovered that you could use Gmail with end-to-end encryption by just typing 'https' on a lark one day, and being pleasantly surprised that it worked. It does make me wonder if there are any other sites that would work via HTTPS, but just don't do it by default.
Not that it's exactly what you're looking for, but the CustomizeGoogle FF extension is pretty neat.
E. There isn't a business case for it that I can find.
I disagree. I could see a lot of business cases for them.
It's only that most of them are illegal, immoral, or just plain evil, but it's not like that's going to stop anybody.
There's a lot of marketing-related stuff you could do with DPI, particularly in conjunction with a transparent proxying system that would swap out ads in real time, replacing the ads that the user would normally see as they browse with your own (targeted to their desires, of course). You'd be able to build up an incredibly detailed customer profile of exactly what they do, what they buy, and what kind of stuff they like. Those kinds of profiles would be worth serious money.
That's just a trivial example; there's a ton of stuff you could do with a system like that. Particularly if you got the Feds to pick up the initial cost of the hardware (for catching the terr'ists/pedophiles/evildoers-du-jour), so that you only had to derive a benefit from the system equal to its upkeep costs.
Best way to do it is just to create a bookmark to https://mail.google.com/mail/ and then ALWAYS use that link to get your mail (don't click on any of Google's Gmail links from your homepage, etc.).
If you use POP access, you can enable SSL both for incoming and outgoing mail, I believe.
Yeah but you also need the overhead for enforcement. If you're not constantly sending people around to check that people have tags, and arrest/fine/beat-senseless those who don't, then there's no point in doing it in the first place.
Your rant would make more sense if it were consistent. The Russians, who you seem to be lauding, are the very definition of "mil-spec overengineered devices". Have you ever seen their Venus probes? Some of them were so overbuilt there really wasn't any room for scientific instruments. But they were going to get to the surface, by golly, and they threw titanium at the problem like it was going out of style.
I think the success of the Russian space program is attributable in large part to the fact that they could assign a lot more engineering talent to the problem at any given time than governments in the West could. Their designs were just better, at least in many cases. It wasn't luck, they just spent a lot of man-hours beating at a lot of tough problems.
Actually reading about GM cross-contamination, I think it's probably to Monsanto's advantage that the terminator gene isn't used.
This way, they can sell GM crops, wait for them to spread onto the fields of people who didn't pay for them, and then sue them into oblivion. It's great.
Every once in a while when there's a discussion about the latest ".xxx" or ".porn" TLD, the idea of a ".kids" or ".kids.[countrycode]" domain comes up. (Actually I think ".kids.us" already exists, there's just very little there.)
While I still think it's a conceptually flawed idea, it's at least better than trying to either censor or round up all of the 'smut' and put it into some sort of a blacklist. Fundamentally, if you're trying to make a 'clean internet,' whitelists are the way to go; not blacklists.
Putting the 'kids' domain under the CC TLDs is even better, because it avoids having to create some sort of international consensus on what's appropriate for children, which isn't feasible. Whatever the Congresscritters decide is OK for kids (violence = okay!, sex = bad!) in the U.S. can get into.kids.us, and what's OK for kids in France goes in.kids.fr (though I doubt they'd call it "kids"...) and people can restrict access based on their personal values. Enforcement takes place at the name-registrar level; if you don't comply to the standards for that domain, the registration gets pulled.
The problem with this is is that it's a solution looking for a problem that most people really don't seem to care about.
I was never a big CompuServe user -- I tried the service once, but it was too expensive and I never got involved in the discussion-forum aspect of it, which if TFA is to be believed, was the main draw (I always wondered what the hell people liked about it). I pretty much stuck with BBSes and the occasional tryst with AOL (hey, they had a good shareware archive) until the local university started handing out SLIP accounts, and after that I pretty much forgot about online services.
I wonder though -- if CompuServe's forums were so active, did they make any effort to archive them at all? I've always thought that the DejaNews/Google Usenet archive is pretty cool; it's the closest thing that the Internet has to a historical record. But I never really thought about the vast amount of stuff that was in online services and even major BBSes. I assume most of it has been lost/deleted over the years (probably wasn't practical to retain much when data storage was in the tens of dollars per MB), but it would be neat if any of it was still out there. Sure, 90% of it is probably garbage, flamewars, and ASCII porn, but there'd undoubtedly be some interesting stuff in there too. (Just like there's some neat gems in the Usenet archives.)
Well, consider the people involved. From TFA:
Commerce Committee Chairman Daniel K. Inouye (D-Hawaii) and Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee Vice Chairman Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) both argued that Internet was a dangerous place where parents alone will not be able to protect their children. For those not keeping track at home, that's Daniel "1.3%" Inouye* and Ted "Series of Tubes" Stevens. Not exactly the two sharpest knives in the drawer, particularly on technology issues. They're both 'zombie politicians,' kept around by their respective constituencies only because their seniority puts them in positions to funnel pork-barrel projects back home.
* Referring, of course, to Inouye's absolutely dismal record at actually getting anything passed, or for that matter, even supporting anything that gets passed. Of 289 bills he sponsored since Jan 21, 1997, only FOUR have become law. And for that, I think we can all be grateful. (source)
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The only thing which I find amusing with security at the airport is the amount of people it takes to X-Ray. Often, I will see 9 to 11 individuals on one X-Ray machine, standing shoulder to shoulder. At least three are 'managing' the others. I find it to be wasteful and unnecessary.
The only thing less efficient than a union is a government bureaucracy.
(Just think if we unionized the bureaucrats!)
If they didn't find (you) a threat, then WHY THROW THE FREAKIN' LIQUIDS IN THE TRASH?!?!?
Because they're engaging in some security theater in order to justify the existence of their own jobs, and the bureaucracies that support those jobs.
If they thought the liquids were really hazardous (as in, 'might be a bomb') then they'd need to put it in some sort of special disposal container. That they don't makes it clear that they know they're just taking people's shampoo.
It's all for effect. The idea is to make the shee--I mean, taxpayers--feel like they're getting something for their dollars.
It would be funnier if some people didn't think it was such a good idea.
Except that those camera-enforcement systems actually cause more accidents, not less. So if you're OK with the automatic license-plate system, I'd probably try to distance them from the red-light cameras. They're a disaster, and the only reason they're around is because they generate revenue.
E.g.: 2007 Virginia DOT Report Shows Red Light Cameras Increase Accidents
Hopefully B.C. isn't re-inventing the wheel and they will have a similar system.
Well, based on what at least one of TFAs said, they're not going to. They're just planning on handing everything over to a group of electronics manufacturers, who'll then ship everything to a smelter to be incinerated.
Good way to eliminate the secondary market for electronics.
No, HTTP is over. Maybe even SMTP and POP.
Is Gopher cool again yet?
That reminds me of the infamous Bonsai Kitten Website fiasco where a university student did a farcical Website "selling" Bonsai Kitten paraphernalia. The site got banned from just about every hosting company that PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) found out about, and the FBI even investigated the site and the people behind it. PETA actually wanted the people behind the site arrested.
Well, to be fair, before it became clear (particularly to those who weren't familiar with the magic that is Adobe Photoshop) that Bonsai Kitten was a hoax, I think there was a pretty good argument for pulling the plug on it and going after the people involved -- had it been real, it would have been pretty clear animal cruelty and abuse.
If someone describes some sort of criminal activity on a web page -- documents it, even -- I expect the police whose jurisdiction the crime occurred in to investigate it, and if it's true, to punish those involved. That's not really even censorship per se, it's just going after someone who's standing on the proverbial rooftops, shouting "look at me, look what I did!" when what they're bragging about is clearly illegal.
I don't know exactly what their limits would be / how open they would be to very controversial sites, but I suppose it might be worth sending them an email and asking whether they would be interested in having your business.
But I really don't think there's a dearth of providers willing to get into that type of service; it probably costs more than average, but if places like Stormfront can find an ISP, as long as you're not advocating anything that's actually illegal, I doubt you'll have that much of a problem.
They must have noticed the productivity drop when everyone took extended lunch breaks and left early. :)
That's still an internal, law-enforcement matter. The Geneva Convention doesn't apply.
The Geneva Convention also prohibits the use of chemical agents, even non-lethal ones like CN and CS (tear gas), but they get used domestically all the time.
The rules outlined in the Geneva Convention apply to conflicts between the organized armies of signatory states; they don't govern what those states can do internally, and they have a more limited effect on what those states can do against irregular troops, or the soldiers of non-signatory countries.
To be perfectly honest, I'd be a little annoyed if the brain surgeons in our intelligence agencies -- who I, along with the rest of the taxpayers, bankroll -- weren't at least aware of Wikipedia.
Okay, so in this case they get zero points for subtlety (and when your cover gets blown editing an encyclopedia that anyone can edit, that's not a good sign...), but they're not doing anything I wouldn't expect them to be doing.
I fully expect that the Chinese, Russians, Iranians, etc., probably have propaganda agencies astroturfing Wikipedia and other web sites to their own advantage. This is what countries do.
I think the problem with connections in the U.S. is mostly related to problems with the last mile, or the "last few miles" (the backhaul from the local node to the C.O.).
... but in terms of actually making your internet connection dramatically faster? I don't really think so.
I suppose that this might make the node-to-CO link faster/cheaper, which would be good because it would raise the amount of actual capacity that the ISPs have to oversell, meaning that when everyone else in your neighborhood is trying to get online and play WoW, there's still some bandwidth left
What's holding back domestic broadband right now is less technological than economic problems. The ISPs know they can get away with taking a 256kb/s connection and sell it as a "6 megabit!!!111" pipe, and I don't see why they'd change that, particularly when there's basically no competition to speak of.
It didn't happen in this thread, apparently.
Granted, Firefox these days is pretty good about remembering what you had typed into a form field if the browser crashes (how many of us have lost a long Slashdot post because something happened?), but many other browsers don't, and for an email or word processing program, it's a compelling feature.
But especially considering that Gmail defaults to plain-text HTTP, it does seem screamingly insecure. But then again, email in general is screamingly insecure; they're just not giving you any false sense of security.
That wouldn't be a bad idea, come to think of it. I only discovered that you could use Gmail with end-to-end encryption by just typing 'https' on a lark one day, and being pleasantly surprised that it worked. It does make me wonder if there are any other sites that would work via HTTPS, but just don't do it by default.
Not that it's exactly what you're looking for, but the CustomizeGoogle FF extension is pretty neat.
E. There isn't a business case for it that I can find.
I disagree. I could see a lot of business cases for them.
It's only that most of them are illegal, immoral, or just plain evil, but it's not like that's going to stop anybody.
There's a lot of marketing-related stuff you could do with DPI, particularly in conjunction with a transparent proxying system that would swap out ads in real time, replacing the ads that the user would normally see as they browse with your own (targeted to their desires, of course). You'd be able to build up an incredibly detailed customer profile of exactly what they do, what they buy, and what kind of stuff they like. Those kinds of profiles would be worth serious money.
That's just a trivial example; there's a ton of stuff you could do with a system like that. Particularly if you got the Feds to pick up the initial cost of the hardware (for catching the terr'ists/pedophiles/evildoers-du-jour), so that you only had to derive a benefit from the system equal to its upkeep costs.
Best way to do it is just to create a bookmark to https://mail.google.com/mail/ and then ALWAYS use that link to get your mail (don't click on any of Google's Gmail links from your homepage, etc.).
If you use POP access, you can enable SSL both for incoming and outgoing mail, I believe.
Yeah but you also need the overhead for enforcement. If you're not constantly sending people around to check that people have tags, and arrest/fine/beat-senseless those who don't, then there's no point in doing it in the first place.
Your rant would make more sense if it were consistent. The Russians, who you seem to be lauding, are the very definition of "mil-spec overengineered devices". Have you ever seen their Venus probes? Some of them were so overbuilt there really wasn't any room for scientific instruments. But they were going to get to the surface, by golly, and they threw titanium at the problem like it was going out of style.
I think the success of the Russian space program is attributable in large part to the fact that they could assign a lot more engineering talent to the problem at any given time than governments in the West could. Their designs were just better, at least in many cases. It wasn't luck, they just spent a lot of man-hours beating at a lot of tough problems.
Actually reading about GM cross-contamination, I think it's probably to Monsanto's advantage that the terminator gene isn't used.
This way, they can sell GM crops, wait for them to spread onto the fields of people who didn't pay for them, and then sue them into oblivion. It's great.
Talk about a product that sells itself.
We had that. It was called "The Internet."
But then AOL came along and messed it all up.
Every once in a while when there's a discussion about the latest ".xxx" or ".porn" TLD, the idea of a ".kids" or ".kids.[countrycode]" domain comes up. (Actually I think ".kids.us" already exists, there's just very little there.)
.kids.us, and what's OK for kids in France goes in .kids.fr (though I doubt they'd call it "kids"...) and people can restrict access based on their personal values. Enforcement takes place at the name-registrar level; if you don't comply to the standards for that domain, the registration gets pulled.
While I still think it's a conceptually flawed idea, it's at least better than trying to either censor or round up all of the 'smut' and put it into some sort of a blacklist. Fundamentally, if you're trying to make a 'clean internet,' whitelists are the way to go; not blacklists.
Putting the 'kids' domain under the CC TLDs is even better, because it avoids having to create some sort of international consensus on what's appropriate for children, which isn't feasible. Whatever the Congresscritters decide is OK for kids (violence = okay!, sex = bad!) in the U.S. can get into
The problem with this is is that it's a solution looking for a problem that most people really don't seem to care about.
I was never a big CompuServe user -- I tried the service once, but it was too expensive and I never got involved in the discussion-forum aspect of it, which if TFA is to be believed, was the main draw (I always wondered what the hell people liked about it). I pretty much stuck with BBSes and the occasional tryst with AOL (hey, they had a good shareware archive) until the local university started handing out SLIP accounts, and after that I pretty much forgot about online services.
I wonder though -- if CompuServe's forums were so active, did they make any effort to archive them at all? I've always thought that the DejaNews/Google Usenet archive is pretty cool; it's the closest thing that the Internet has to a historical record. But I never really thought about the vast amount of stuff that was in online services and even major BBSes. I assume most of it has been lost/deleted over the years (probably wasn't practical to retain much when data storage was in the tens of dollars per MB), but it would be neat if any of it was still out there. Sure, 90% of it is probably garbage, flamewars, and ASCII porn, but there'd undoubtedly be some interesting stuff in there too. (Just like there's some neat gems in the Usenet archives.)
* Referring, of course, to Inouye's absolutely dismal record at actually getting anything passed, or for that matter, even supporting anything that gets passed. Of 289 bills he sponsored since Jan 21, 1997, only FOUR have become law. And for that, I think we can all be grateful. (source)