The stuff that Google chooses to blur is very, very strange.
As you pointed out, certain sites that you would think would be blurred, like Millstore, aren't, and there are some sites that are blurred, for no particularly apparent reason.
I've stumbled a few times across sites that were pixelated, but I can't for the life of me come up with a good reason why, or who would put them on a "censor me" list. I would really like to know what their criteria are for blurring sites -- is there some sort of DHS master list? Or do they do it based on requests from local governments? There's zero transparency to the whole process, so we'll probably never know what drives the decisions.
I think the blurring must be done by the aerial-photo or sat-photo providers, because sometimes there are sites blurred on one services' images (say, Google Maps) but not on another (Yahoo's), or vice versa. Sometimes there is stuff blurred on Google Maps and not on Google Earth -- they're not even consistent within their own services.
In particular, I think this railroad bridge and small hydroelectric dam in Lewiston, Maine, were both heavily censored on Yahoo, but totally clear on Google Maps' satellite photos. This isn't even a secure location -- you can stand on a sidewalk on a bridge on a main road and see everything there is to see there (and the whole reason I was looking at the site in the first place was to geotag a photo).
I'd really like to see some sort of transparency or accountability in what sites get censored and why, because as people begin to depend and expect data like this in the future, it's going to become more and more inconvenient to suddenly fire up your map service, only to find that whole regions have been mysteriously "redacted," like Janet Jackson's nipple.
I'm fine with blurring sensitive sites (places where overflights and conventional photography are already barred), if valid reasons exist for doing so, but to do it without published guidelines just seems like it could lead down a dangerous path.
So, in that sense -- yes, we could use other standards, but this one is technically dirt-simple to implement
That's where I tend to disagree with you. Blocking a TLD is technically simple, yes, but somehow putting all the porn sites into that TLD, is basically impossible, by any stretch of the imagination. Every scheme to do so is suspiciously short on details.
Ubuntu is, despite what some of its proponents will say, not really a solution for low-end hardware that you want to keep running. It's designed for systems that are only one or two upgrade cycles out, not elderly sub-600MHz systems. I had a devil of a time getting it running on an older Celeron system (a crappy Compaq that was a "$500 special" at Staples when it was brand new) even after tossing in a ton of ram (ironically the LiveCD would run, but the install disk just blackscreened, even in recovery modes).
There are other distros, even other Ubuntu variants like Xubuntu, that are better choices for the hardware you're discussing. In my case, I grabbed an Xubuntu install CD and it ran perfectly, and the old 600MHz is now a nice light-office workstation.
Ubuntu has diverged from some other distros in that it's no longer what I would consider "lightweight." In some ways, it's even topheavy; for most people, this is an OK tradeoff, because it makes it feature-comparable with a modern XP system in most cases. But it also means that it doesn't do well, or sometimes run at all, on less-than-modern hardware (with some exceptions -- sometimes it works great). As a general rule, I'm hesitant to install mainline Ubuntu or Kubuntu on a machine that wasn't designed or previously running Windows XP; Xubuntu is a better match for Win98-era systems, and DSL, Vector, or Puppy are best if you want a snappy, responsive GUI on "Designed for Windows 95" gear.
1) When are you, George Bush (either one will do), the Pope, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad going to sit down and flesh out (pardon the pun) these rules, as to what is "tasteful," "artful" and "erotic"? Because my copy of Websters is falling a bit short. Where, in particular, are you going to put Sally Mann? How about Jock Sturges? Or, for that matter, the lingerie section of the Sears Catalog? I think Mahmoud might have some feelings on what constitutes tasteful female attire, maybe he can help us.
2) Assuming you get the rules all fixed, how do you plan on enforcing them? Let's assume that there are a few "rogue states" out there that don't see eye-to-eye on this; you know, like maybe France, or Belgium. Aside from thermonuclear war or a Giant Firewall, which seem to be the best options that come to mind, how do you keep their content off of our entirely "tasteful," "artful," "technical," and wholly un-"erotic" TLD?
Extra points for answers that don't involve attaining godlike superpowers, takeover by aliens, forked DNS roots, or destroying the network in order to save it.
Type in a name (say, whitehouse.com) and they magically retrieve an IP (in this case 66.129.115.23). Neat, eh?
These were all in the first five Google results for "DNS lookup," which isn't that hard a phrase to remember, even if you don't know what it means. I have seen middle-schoolers use SOCKS and CGI proxies to bypass filters on MySpace; you are gravely mistaken if you think they're not capable of something as trivial as performing manual lookups of a few well-known domain names.
What is your scheme going to do with all the "adult" sites that pack up and move to other countries, so they can retain their.com address, and -- as you yourself just noted -- keep the business of all those 3PM browsing-from-work customers?
You illustrated exactly why those sites have a reason to want to keep their.com domains, and not get shoved into the.xxx ghetto; their cash-flow depends on people being able to access them. If the.xxx domain existed, that would become the focus of blocking, making a.com porn site even more valuable!
So you've created twofold incentives for porn sites to maintain their.com TLDs. Do you really think that they're not going to move the domain registrations to the Netherlands, or Russia, or Sealand? Of course they are.
So what are you going to do at that point? You're going to have 3 categories of adult sites: first, you're going to have U.S.-based adult sites that shuffled off into.xxx as ordered; second, you're going to have U.S.-based adult sites that gave your plan the finger, and moved their operations abroad, behind shell companies; third, you're going to have non-U.S. based sites, which may carry "adult" content, but are legitimately not subject to any of this U.S. stuff (which might be benign where it comes from, but NSFW here in the easily-titillated USA; e.g. Danish lingerie ads). So that leaves a bit of a problem. If you block sites in 1, then you give the advantage to 2. And there's no way to block 2, without building a Great Firewall around the United States, like China, and also blocking 3. At that point, you might as well unplug the United States from the rest of the world and just call this Internet thing quits.
It doesn't matter if it's "the right thing to do," because it will never work. Okay? Look, getting rid of all crime would also be the right thing to do, but we can't do that, so it's a stupid discussion to have. A heavyhanded scheme like creating an ".adult" or ".xxx" TLD would be a terrible idea, and it might fracture the entire concept of the Internet, which is probably only the most significant achievement of our civilization in the last 50 years. Let's not fuck it up.
If we really want to protect kids from porn, there's a fairly easy way to do it. Create a "kid-safe" domain, under the country-code domain. So, things deemed safe for the U.S's kneebiters can be at ".kids.us", while those safe for France's can be at ".kids.fr" (or whatever the French word for 'kids' is, I'm a little rusty). Schools, libraries, etc., would then be free to limit their users' browsing to the approved domains. Companies could do the same, if they desired.
It's just not practical to try and pen all the "offensive" content into some sort of adult zone. If kids need to be kept away from porn, and I'm not even convinced that they do, then they need to have a kiddie area on the Internet; it's just not feasible to make the entire net 'kid safe.'
An even smarter industry would just have put the decoding and decryption chip in the disc reader itself.
I'm sure they've thought of this. The problem is that if you put the decryption there, then necessarily the reader must output a decrypted stream to the computer, which is anathema to the whole concept. If the drive just spits out a decrypted stream, why bother making the content on the disc encrypted at all?
No, the whole point is to carry it in encrypted form as far along the signal chain as possible. This is why the decryption is done in the computer/player, rather than in the drive itself. They want the computer/player to authenticate the rest of the downstream signal chain (the HDCP compliant monitor, generally) and only then decrypt the video content and send it onwards (and even then, re-encrypt it specifically for the display, so that you can't just attach some alligator clips to the HDMI cable and get the unencrypted hi-def version).
In the optimal arrangement, the decryption would be done as far "down" the signal chain as possible (where you, the viewer, are at the absolute bottom, where you belong), preferably in the display, just before the last-minute conversion to analog signals of some sort. However, for various technical (and political) reasons, this isn't practical, and so the decryption of the disc content is done by the player, which then decides what level of content to send out to the display device depending on its credentials.
You know, I think I'm going to bookmark this post, because it describes the situation with every government office and employee that I've ever encountered in my life, to perfection. And to a lesser extent, most large corporations.
I'm not sure you know how right you are. (In fact, I hope you don't; and if you do, I feel your pain.)
The "training problem" is something that most technical people fail to appreciate, because it almost universally doesn't apply to them, because they generally have some conceptual understanding of how their software and hardware operates. Once you have that conceptual understanding, it's nearly impossible to imagine how it would appear without it. It changes the way you think about the tools you use, on a fundamental level.
Unfortunately, imparting that type of conceptual understanding to someone who isn't interested in learning it, is nearly impossible as well -- even when in the long run, it's almost certainly to their benefit to have it.
A girl I knew in my hometown OD'ed on caffeine and died. Basically the story that I got was she was taking too many pills, drinking coffee and worked herself to death.
There sounds like there could be a lot of confounding factors at work there besides caffeine. It's not unheard of for people to "work themselves to death" due to lack of sleep and the associated immuno-compromising effects, coupled with a high-stress environment; I think the caffeine use there is probably more likely a symptom than the actual cause.
I think the lesson here is not that the substance per se is unsafe, but that almost anything that makes it even slightly easier for people to exceed their physical capacities or ignore their body's warning signs can lead to disaster, when used improperly.
It's not just the government that does things like that.
I used to have around somewhere, a dividend check from a rather large (think "blue" chip) company, that was for an amount significantly less than the postage to mail it to me, even taking into account discounts for bulk mailings, etc.
I was eventually told that the reason these companies do this, is because the paperwork associated with reporting unclaimed dividends (which have to be put into some sort of escrow fund for a long period of time) is greater than the loss they take on mailing the check out. So they'll cut a check in virtually any amount, just in the hope that someone will cash it, and they won't have to deal with it ever again.
I cashed the check. I can only hope that I was doing somebody a favor, somewhere, because it didn't even buy me a cup of coffee.
As for the legality, if you or I were to spoof the UA and ignore robots.txt, then it would be illegal.
Can you cite any precedent to show that this is the case? I was under the impression that robots.txt was merely an agreement that many web-spidering operators had agreed to follow, and was without any real tested legal standing. It seems to be at most a sort of "gentlemen's agreement" that most everyone has agreed to follow, but that isn't really enforced.
Unfortunately, if you present different data to spiders than you do to normal surfers, you'll find yourself booted out of Google and other automated web indexes, which can be a fate worse than death for many Internet businesses.
Giving one result to government IP addresses and another to private sector addresses would work for a time, but it would be trivial for the government to recruit some private-sector contractor to do the crawling for them, and that would be the end of that game. So if you wanted to go down this route, you'd have to block all spiders (somehow), and that would effectively knock you off the web, unless you derive all your traffic by handing out business cards with your URL printed on them.
Ok, I can see where you're coming from for the most part. But if you want bring up the fact that China had access to the regular Google site 90% of the time, then what difference does it make if Google gives a censored version the other 10% of the time? 90% of the time, the people who had access to Google's regular site still have access to it, but the 10% of the time that they don't they have access to a censored version. This is still more information than if there is only the regular Google version.
Because when they launched Google.cn, they changed it so that typing "google.com" in China redirected to the Chinese version, just like going to Google.com in Germany actually brings you to Google.de. The result is that it's effectively impossible to bring up the US version in mainland China; most users will only ever see the "cn" version.
They effectively replaced the 90%-available, uncensored, US version, with a 100% available, censored, Chinese version, on which they were able to sell ads.
Sounds reasonable. I'd trade my old copy of W98 for half a dead chicken.
Sounds like a bad trade to me. You can make soup out of that chicken, but what are you going to do with those Windows discs? Even sauteed, I think they'd be pretty tough.
Amen. What's ironic, is that as I drove around certain parts of Western Pennsylvania a few weeks ago, is that it's not as if we don't have the capability to make "stuff" anymore -- the machinery, the productive capacity, is mostly all still there, albeit rusted, and the workforce is there, albeit unemployed and twenty years out-of-date -- it's just that the desire to do it disappeared and moved elsewhere, by virtue of some pieces of paper that swapped hands and certain handshakes between heads of state.
We have a government run by the "paper traders," as you put it, for their own kin; they have sold off the economy, piecemeal, to the benefit foreign interests and themselves, despite the obvious outcome: you cannot maintain a first-world economy and standard of living, when you are competing in a labor market with a billion-plus Chinese and Indian peasants. It just isn't going to happen, it's unsustainable: either the first-world country's costs and standards of living are going to sink, or the third-world's are going to rise, and the former is a whole lot easier and a lot more likely than the latter. (Think of it in terms of economic "mass," and of two bodies orbiting around each other; it's a lot easier to move 300 million people down towards the level of a billion poor ones than it is to move the billion up to meet the 300M.)
When the shell game is done, the U.S. is going to become a nation of aristocrats: the same paper-traders who have run the place into the ground, and thus knew from the beginning where it would end, and have moved their wealth into hard currencies; and everyone else, who will be stuck with their savings in a currency suddenly not worth the paper it's printed on (it's already not worth the metal its minted with), and forced to buy everything from abroad (since the country has long since ceased to produce anything of value), who will be stuck with the bill.
Take a look around: you're witnessing the decline of one of the world's great empires, which, like many before it, was brought down not by invaders from afar, but from mismanagement and greed from within.
Here's my reasoning: for an action to be "morrally wrong", you must first have a choice in whether or not to do the action, and Google obviously had a choice. Furthermore, for an action to be morally wrong, there must be a choice which is more morally right than the the alternative/s. One of the Exorcist remakes had a scene where a priest was forced by Nazis to choose a few people out of large group to die, and if he did not choose, then they would all die. I would argue that by choosing people to die, the priest did not do anything morally wrong because the alternative was worse (not to mention selfish because he is avoiding the pain of knowing that he killed the people he picked). IMO, this was analogous to the situation Google was in. Google could either choose to give some information to the Chinese people or none. By not providing the service, the Chinese people would could not get around the great firewall would be worse off, so Google's choice was the morally right decision.
I think the points you make are quite right, but they ignore one key fact: uncensored, U.S.-based google.com was available in mainland China prior to Google's introduction of the censored version, around 90% of the time. What they gained, by adding a censored Chinese version, was the ability to do business in China, and therefore sell ads and draw revenue from their Chinese users.
Google admitted as much in their blog at a time, when they admitted that the U.S. page was still accessible to Chinese users most of the time. The decision wasn't "censored or nothing," it was "revenue or less revenue?" Google didn't compromise for the good of the Chinese people, they compromised in order to tap into the fat revenue stream that they would have otherwise missed.
With Google's technical skills, they almost certainly could have kept their page accessible to Chinese users most of the time, had they really wanted to. But doing so would have meant missing out on much of the revenue from that market, since money is a lot easier to restrict than Internet traffic. They made a straightforward choice: money, or ideals? They chose money.
I, personally, do not fault them for this; I think most people, given a choice between their "ideals" and money, would do the same thing. The only thing I think they're guilty of is hypocrisy. Had any other company done the same thing, I wouldn't have blinked an eye: most companies seek nothing but profit at any cost, and don't act any better than you would expect from such goals. (And many have done well by such dealings; the public has a short memory -- you can use a man for slave labor, then later sell cars to his grandchildren, and nobody will think less of you. Such is the world we live in.) However, Google billed itself, both to investors and the public, as having higher motives, and when they were put to the test they failed dismally.
There is no comparison between Google, and your hypothetical priest, because Google had a third option: they could have walked away from the dilemma, and simply refused to offer a censored version of their service, told their investors that they could not accept advertising revenue from China in clear conscience while maintaining their principles, and attempted to give Chinese users the best uncensored service that they could provide.
They didn't.
When it came time to choose between money and idealism, money won. For what it's worth, I'm fine with it, I just wish they would be more direct about their decisions and state their motivations more directly. It's only mildly irritating to see evil done these days, but it's substantially worse to see evil done while under the banner of good.
If your motive is profit, seek profit, and don't clothe your amorality behind a facade of good intentions. You can only have one primary goal. If you want profit, and profit leads you to deal with the Nazis, the Chinese, or the Devil himself, be proud; at the end of the day, at least you can say you didn't compromise, and you followed the path you had chosen to its end. Google can't even say that. They chose a direction, or so they say, but veered from it when the going got tough.
During Desert storm, there was a slow-burning fight over whether or not a young American would be safer fighting in Desert Storm than living in DC. I never did hear the end of that one.
The last I heard of it was that it depended on what statistics you used, and how you chose your prototypical "young American." If the young American was black, male, and between the age of 18 and 21, or something similar to that, it was possible to show that the chances of a violent death were smaller in the Army than in DC. I doubt that you would be able to show that service in Iraq was safer than DC for demographic groups where homicide isn't as prevalent, so it's really an exercise in choosing your samples.
The Maine turnpike (one of the few roads that receives federal funds) is just fine. The vast majority of it has been repaved in the last 3 years during the widening project.
Well, that's why they're going eye-to-eye with the Federal government now. They must have decided that with the new pavement, they're set for the next 25 or 30 years!
(In my defense, I used to live in Maine, loved the place, and would move back in a second if I could find gainful employment there. The "Boston-Atlanta Metro Area," as Gibson put it, doesn't suit me.)
Several reasons. First and foremost, your friends aren't representative of most users. Going into my office on an average day, there are probably a 5:1 or 10:1 ratio of CRT displays to LCDs. Monitors just don't burn out that fast -- most of them are probably 10+ years old now, and still running fine. Not everyone is going to go out and buy (or their manager is going to approve!) a LCD monitor, when they have 50 perfectly good 17" CRTs sitting in a closet.
Not that it really matters to this motherboard's market, but graphic design and video users are mostly still on CRTs, because the gamut of LCD sucks terribly. If you're doing prepress on a LCD, you are wrong. (Or else you're so good you can just tell what the colors are going to look like via ESP, in which case, why not get rid of the monitor completely?)
Also, even with LCD displays, a lot of low-end ones still use VGA as an interface. I don't really know why they do this, except that they wanted to market to people who didn't have DVI-based motherboards or graphics cards, but it's the situation. Most of the sub-$150 LCDs that I've seen (not that I've looked in the past few months) had VGA interfaces. And sometimes, this isn't even as bad as you think; as long as you drive it at the right resolution, most people can't tell the difference anyway.
VGA is the lingua franca of the computer-graphics world, and will be for some time. Eventually, DVI is going to take over, but there are probably billions of dollars of VGA-equipped gear sitting around, that people don't want to have to use expensive DAC boxes to connect to their new system. (Not just monitors, but projectors and the like, too.) I suspect that VGA is one of those things, like ISA, that you're going to find hanging around on equipment -- like a sort of digital appendix -- long after its utility to most users has gone, simply because people have grown to expect it.
I just don't see how politicians, "asshats," blacklists, talking about viagra, sabotage of public networks, email not being free, or killing people has anything to do with the proposal. Did you just random check boxes on yours?
Well, I figured that politicians figured into it, because inevitably, any system that creates a single or centralized point of control (or failure) can also be used to deny service for political ends. My test is, would the [Nazis, Chinese Communists, Soviet Politburo] think this is a good idea? Does it put more hands into the control of a central authority? If yes, it's probably subject to political manipulation in some way. Which is bad. Hence, politicians.
As for Viagra, I didn't mean that quite literally; I took it as a stand-in for "legitimate users ought to be able to use the full capabilities of the network all the time, not subject to artificially-imposed restrictions aimed at abusers." E.g., discussing Viagra shouldn't get you marked as spam; similarly, sending out a high volume of email messages for some legitimate purpose shouldn't get your connection throttled. It's the 'guilty by suspicion' problem. Same for email not being 'free,' anything that imposes artificial restrictions on the amount or frequency of mail that you can send, seems like it impinges on the 'freeness' of email (which may in fact be a good thing, but I didn't write the list).
Sabotage of public networks is probably a weak checkbox, but in general, anything that seems like it blocks, delays, or otherwise purposefully restricts the flow of traffic across the network could fall under this one, since they undermine the idea of the net being "public" and the traffic traveling across it all being equal, and not subject to restrictions on content. We could argue all day as to whether this is a legitimate objection, and whether having all traffic transiting with equal priority is a good thing or not, but I don't think that's really the purpose.
As to killing people, since the proposal doesn't painfully execute spammers, it's clearly unsatisfactory.
Your list probably contains more defensible objections, but I'll freely admit I didn't put that much thought into mine. The point of the list is that every possible solution you could possibly propose to solve spam will fail it, in one or (usually) more ways.
Actually I've often thought it would be an interesting social experiment to give every student in a boarding school a one-shot Taser. One of those compressed-air things that you can only use once. I think the results would be fairly interesting.
By making them one-shots, you have a motivation to conserve it, and not use it frivolously, because then you're left defenseless. But you can't mess too much with other people, because eventually they'll decide it's worth using their one shot on you, and turn you into a twitching mass on the floor, writhing in your own urine and feces.
You'd have to have some sort of a safeguard to keep people from stealing others' weapons, because that could unbalance everything, but I think you'd pretty quickly end up with a very polite campus.
It's sort of like those proposals to end aircraft hijacking by giving everyone a hand grenade, or a single-shot pistol: by giving everyone the power to suppress undesirable behavior, you distribute authority among the group, rather than concentrating it in a small number of individuals, as is normally done.
I'm not sure I care. Those "legitimate" "opt-in" lists tend to get reported by users as spam eventually anyway. Meaning even if they did originally 'opt in,' it's basically nothing but a nuisance eventually. (Usually people opt in, allegedly or actually, and then can't figure out how to opt out, or don't want to spend the effort to do so.) The effect is the same as spam, even if the intent isn't.
I would consider the elimination of commercial mass email a very small price to pay for the elimination of spam. In fact, I'd consider it a bonus.
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses (X) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected ( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks (X) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it ( ) Users of email will not put up with it ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it ( ) The police will not put up with it ( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers ( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once ( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists ( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it ( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email (X) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses (X) Asshats ( ) Jurisdictional problems ( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money ( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP (X) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email ( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes (X) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches ( ) Extreme profitability of spam ( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft (X) Technically illiterate politicians (X) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers ( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves (X) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering ( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation (X) Blacklists suck ( ) Whitelists suck (X) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud (X) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks ( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually (X) Sending email should be free ( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses ( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome ( ) I don't want the government reading my email (X) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
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The stuff that Google chooses to blur is very, very strange.
As you pointed out, certain sites that you would think would be blurred, like Millstore, aren't, and there are some sites that are blurred, for no particularly apparent reason.
I've stumbled a few times across sites that were pixelated, but I can't for the life of me come up with a good reason why, or who would put them on a "censor me" list. I would really like to know what their criteria are for blurring sites -- is there some sort of DHS master list? Or do they do it based on requests from local governments? There's zero transparency to the whole process, so we'll probably never know what drives the decisions.
I think the blurring must be done by the aerial-photo or sat-photo providers, because sometimes there are sites blurred on one services' images (say, Google Maps) but not on another (Yahoo's), or vice versa. Sometimes there is stuff blurred on Google Maps and not on Google Earth -- they're not even consistent within their own services.
In particular, I think this railroad bridge and small hydroelectric dam in Lewiston, Maine, were both heavily censored on Yahoo, but totally clear on Google Maps' satellite photos. This isn't even a secure location -- you can stand on a sidewalk on a bridge on a main road and see everything there is to see there (and the whole reason I was looking at the site in the first place was to geotag a photo).
I'd really like to see some sort of transparency or accountability in what sites get censored and why, because as people begin to depend and expect data like this in the future, it's going to become more and more inconvenient to suddenly fire up your map service, only to find that whole regions have been mysteriously "redacted," like Janet Jackson's nipple.
I'm fine with blurring sensitive sites (places where overflights and conventional photography are already barred), if valid reasons exist for doing so, but to do it without published guidelines just seems like it could lead down a dangerous path.
So, in that sense -- yes, we could use other standards, but this one is technically dirt-simple to implement
That's where I tend to disagree with you. Blocking a TLD is technically simple, yes, but somehow putting all the porn sites into that TLD, is basically impossible, by any stretch of the imagination. Every scheme to do so is suspiciously short on details.
Ubuntu is, despite what some of its proponents will say, not really a solution for low-end hardware that you want to keep running. It's designed for systems that are only one or two upgrade cycles out, not elderly sub-600MHz systems. I had a devil of a time getting it running on an older Celeron system (a crappy Compaq that was a "$500 special" at Staples when it was brand new) even after tossing in a ton of ram (ironically the LiveCD would run, but the install disk just blackscreened, even in recovery modes).
There are other distros, even other Ubuntu variants like Xubuntu, that are better choices for the hardware you're discussing. In my case, I grabbed an Xubuntu install CD and it ran perfectly, and the old 600MHz is now a nice light-office workstation.
Ubuntu has diverged from some other distros in that it's no longer what I would consider "lightweight." In some ways, it's even topheavy; for most people, this is an OK tradeoff, because it makes it feature-comparable with a modern XP system in most cases. But it also means that it doesn't do well, or sometimes run at all, on less-than-modern hardware (with some exceptions -- sometimes it works great). As a general rule, I'm hesitant to install mainline Ubuntu or Kubuntu on a machine that wasn't designed or previously running Windows XP; Xubuntu is a better match for Win98-era systems, and DSL, Vector, or Puppy are best if you want a snappy, responsive GUI on "Designed for Windows 95" gear.
Two questions:
1) When are you, George Bush (either one will do), the Pope, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad going to sit down and flesh out (pardon the pun) these rules, as to what is "tasteful," "artful" and "erotic"? Because my copy of Websters is falling a bit short. Where, in particular, are you going to put Sally Mann? How about Jock Sturges? Or, for that matter, the lingerie section of the Sears Catalog? I think Mahmoud might have some feelings on what constitutes tasteful female attire, maybe he can help us.
2) Assuming you get the rules all fixed, how do you plan on enforcing them? Let's assume that there are a few "rogue states" out there that don't see eye-to-eye on this; you know, like maybe France, or Belgium. Aside from thermonuclear war or a Giant Firewall, which seem to be the best options that come to mind, how do you keep their content off of our entirely "tasteful," "artful," "technical," and wholly un-"erotic" TLD?
Extra points for answers that don't involve attaining godlike superpowers, takeover by aliens, forked DNS roots, or destroying the network in order to save it.
I wish our elected leaders would find some real problems to solve.
They will, just as soon as they're done creating them!
http://www.network-tools.com/
http://www.bankes.com/nslookup.htm
http://www.zoneedit.com/lookup.html
Type in a name (say, whitehouse.com) and they magically retrieve an IP (in this case 66.129.115.23). Neat, eh?
These were all in the first five Google results for "DNS lookup," which isn't that hard a phrase to remember, even if you don't know what it means. I have seen middle-schoolers use SOCKS and CGI proxies to bypass filters on MySpace; you are gravely mistaken if you think they're not capable of something as trivial as performing manual lookups of a few well-known domain names.
What is your scheme going to do with all the "adult" sites that pack up and move to other countries, so they can retain their .com address, and -- as you yourself just noted -- keep the business of all those 3PM browsing-from-work customers?
.com domains, and not get shoved into the .xxx ghetto; their cash-flow depends on people being able to access them. If the .xxx domain existed, that would become the focus of blocking, making a .com porn site even more valuable!
.com TLDs. Do you really think that they're not going to move the domain registrations to the Netherlands, or Russia, or Sealand? Of course they are.
.xxx as ordered; second, you're going to have U.S.-based adult sites that gave your plan the finger, and moved their operations abroad, behind shell companies; third, you're going to have non-U.S. based sites, which may carry "adult" content, but are legitimately not subject to any of this U.S. stuff (which might be benign where it comes from, but NSFW here in the easily-titillated USA; e.g. Danish lingerie ads). So that leaves a bit of a problem. If you block sites in 1, then you give the advantage to 2. And there's no way to block 2, without building a Great Firewall around the United States, like China, and also blocking 3. At that point, you might as well unplug the United States from the rest of the world and just call this Internet thing quits.
You illustrated exactly why those sites have a reason to want to keep their
So you've created twofold incentives for porn sites to maintain their
So what are you going to do at that point? You're going to have 3 categories of adult sites: first, you're going to have U.S.-based adult sites that shuffled off into
It doesn't matter if it's "the right thing to do," because it will never work. Okay? Look, getting rid of all crime would also be the right thing to do, but we can't do that, so it's a stupid discussion to have. A heavyhanded scheme like creating an ".adult" or ".xxx" TLD would be a terrible idea, and it might fracture the entire concept of the Internet, which is probably only the most significant achievement of our civilization in the last 50 years. Let's not fuck it up.
If we really want to protect kids from porn, there's a fairly easy way to do it. Create a "kid-safe" domain, under the country-code domain. So, things deemed safe for the U.S's kneebiters can be at ".kids.us", while those safe for France's can be at ".kids.fr" (or whatever the French word for 'kids' is, I'm a little rusty). Schools, libraries, etc., would then be free to limit their users' browsing to the approved domains. Companies could do the same, if they desired.
It's just not practical to try and pen all the "offensive" content into some sort of adult zone. If kids need to be kept away from porn, and I'm not even convinced that they do, then they need to have a kiddie area on the Internet; it's just not feasible to make the entire net 'kid safe.'
An even smarter industry would just have put the decoding and decryption chip in the disc reader itself.
I'm sure they've thought of this. The problem is that if you put the decryption there, then necessarily the reader must output a decrypted stream to the computer, which is anathema to the whole concept. If the drive just spits out a decrypted stream, why bother making the content on the disc encrypted at all?
No, the whole point is to carry it in encrypted form as far along the signal chain as possible. This is why the decryption is done in the computer/player, rather than in the drive itself. They want the computer/player to authenticate the rest of the downstream signal chain (the HDCP compliant monitor, generally) and only then decrypt the video content and send it onwards (and even then, re-encrypt it specifically for the display, so that you can't just attach some alligator clips to the HDMI cable and get the unencrypted hi-def version).
In the optimal arrangement, the decryption would be done as far "down" the signal chain as possible (where you, the viewer, are at the absolute bottom, where you belong), preferably in the display, just before the last-minute conversion to analog signals of some sort. However, for various technical (and political) reasons, this isn't practical, and so the decryption of the disc content is done by the player, which then decides what level of content to send out to the display device depending on its credentials.
You know, I think I'm going to bookmark this post, because it describes the situation with every government office and employee that I've ever encountered in my life, to perfection. And to a lesser extent, most large corporations.
I'm not sure you know how right you are. (In fact, I hope you don't; and if you do, I feel your pain.)
The "training problem" is something that most technical people fail to appreciate, because it almost universally doesn't apply to them, because they generally have some conceptual understanding of how their software and hardware operates. Once you have that conceptual understanding, it's nearly impossible to imagine how it would appear without it. It changes the way you think about the tools you use, on a fundamental level.
Unfortunately, imparting that type of conceptual understanding to someone who isn't interested in learning it, is nearly impossible as well -- even when in the long run, it's almost certainly to their benefit to have it.
A girl I knew in my hometown OD'ed on caffeine and died. Basically the story that I got was she was taking too many pills, drinking coffee and worked herself to death.
There sounds like there could be a lot of confounding factors at work there besides caffeine. It's not unheard of for people to "work themselves to death" due to lack of sleep and the associated immuno-compromising effects, coupled with a high-stress environment; I think the caffeine use there is probably more likely a symptom than the actual cause.
I think the lesson here is not that the substance per se is unsafe, but that almost anything that makes it even slightly easier for people to exceed their physical capacities or ignore their body's warning signs can lead to disaster, when used improperly.
It's not just the government that does things like that.
I used to have around somewhere, a dividend check from a rather large (think "blue" chip) company, that was for an amount significantly less than the postage to mail it to me, even taking into account discounts for bulk mailings, etc.
I was eventually told that the reason these companies do this, is because the paperwork associated with reporting unclaimed dividends (which have to be put into some sort of escrow fund for a long period of time) is greater than the loss they take on mailing the check out. So they'll cut a check in virtually any amount, just in the hope that someone will cash it, and they won't have to deal with it ever again.
I cashed the check. I can only hope that I was doing somebody a favor, somewhere, because it didn't even buy me a cup of coffee.
As for the legality, if you or I were to spoof the UA and ignore robots.txt, then it would be illegal.
Can you cite any precedent to show that this is the case? I was under the impression that robots.txt was merely an agreement that many web-spidering operators had agreed to follow, and was without any real tested legal standing. It seems to be at most a sort of "gentlemen's agreement" that most everyone has agreed to follow, but that isn't really enforced.
Unfortunately, if you present different data to spiders than you do to normal surfers, you'll find yourself booted out of Google and other automated web indexes, which can be a fate worse than death for many Internet businesses.
Giving one result to government IP addresses and another to private sector addresses would work for a time, but it would be trivial for the government to recruit some private-sector contractor to do the crawling for them, and that would be the end of that game. So if you wanted to go down this route, you'd have to block all spiders (somehow), and that would effectively knock you off the web, unless you derive all your traffic by handing out business cards with your URL printed on them.
Ok, I can see where you're coming from for the most part. But if you want bring up the fact that China had access to the regular Google site 90% of the time, then what difference does it make if Google gives a censored version the other 10% of the time? 90% of the time, the people who had access to Google's regular site still have access to it, but the 10% of the time that they don't they have access to a censored version. This is still more information than if there is only the regular Google version.
Because when they launched Google.cn, they changed it so that typing "google.com" in China redirected to the Chinese version, just like going to Google.com in Germany actually brings you to Google.de. The result is that it's effectively impossible to bring up the US version in mainland China; most users will only ever see the "cn" version.
They effectively replaced the 90%-available, uncensored, US version, with a 100% available, censored, Chinese version, on which they were able to sell ads.
Sounds reasonable. I'd trade my old copy of W98 for half a dead chicken.
Sounds like a bad trade to me. You can make soup out of that chicken, but what are you going to do with those Windows discs? Even sauteed, I think they'd be pretty tough.
Jesus we used to make some good stuff.
Amen. What's ironic, is that as I drove around certain parts of Western Pennsylvania a few weeks ago, is that it's not as if we don't have the capability to make "stuff" anymore -- the machinery, the productive capacity, is mostly all still there, albeit rusted, and the workforce is there, albeit unemployed and twenty years out-of-date -- it's just that the desire to do it disappeared and moved elsewhere, by virtue of some pieces of paper that swapped hands and certain handshakes between heads of state.
We have a government run by the "paper traders," as you put it, for their own kin; they have sold off the economy, piecemeal, to the benefit foreign interests and themselves, despite the obvious outcome: you cannot maintain a first-world economy and standard of living, when you are competing in a labor market with a billion-plus Chinese and Indian peasants. It just isn't going to happen, it's unsustainable: either the first-world country's costs and standards of living are going to sink, or the third-world's are going to rise, and the former is a whole lot easier and a lot more likely than the latter. (Think of it in terms of economic "mass," and of two bodies orbiting around each other; it's a lot easier to move 300 million people down towards the level of a billion poor ones than it is to move the billion up to meet the 300M.)
When the shell game is done, the U.S. is going to become a nation of aristocrats: the same paper-traders who have run the place into the ground, and thus knew from the beginning where it would end, and have moved their wealth into hard currencies; and everyone else, who will be stuck with their savings in a currency suddenly not worth the paper it's printed on (it's already not worth the metal its minted with), and forced to buy everything from abroad (since the country has long since ceased to produce anything of value), who will be stuck with the bill.
Take a look around: you're witnessing the decline of one of the world's great empires, which, like many before it, was brought down not by invaders from afar, but from mismanagement and greed from within.
Google admitted as much in their blog at a time, when they admitted that the U.S. page was still accessible to Chinese users most of the time. The decision wasn't "censored or nothing," it was "revenue or less revenue?" Google didn't compromise for the good of the Chinese people, they compromised in order to tap into the fat revenue stream that they would have otherwise missed.
With Google's technical skills, they almost certainly could have kept their page accessible to Chinese users most of the time, had they really wanted to. But doing so would have meant missing out on much of the revenue from that market, since money is a lot easier to restrict than Internet traffic. They made a straightforward choice: money, or ideals? They chose money.
I, personally, do not fault them for this; I think most people, given a choice between their "ideals" and money, would do the same thing. The only thing I think they're guilty of is hypocrisy. Had any other company done the same thing, I wouldn't have blinked an eye: most companies seek nothing but profit at any cost, and don't act any better than you would expect from such goals. (And many have done well by such dealings; the public has a short memory -- you can use a man for slave labor, then later sell cars to his grandchildren, and nobody will think less of you. Such is the world we live in.) However, Google billed itself, both to investors and the public, as having higher motives, and when they were put to the test they failed dismally.
There is no comparison between Google, and your hypothetical priest, because Google had a third option: they could have walked away from the dilemma, and simply refused to offer a censored version of their service, told their investors that they could not accept advertising revenue from China in clear conscience while maintaining their principles, and attempted to give Chinese users the best uncensored service that they could provide.
They didn't.
When it came time to choose between money and idealism, money won. For what it's worth, I'm fine with it, I just wish they would be more direct about their decisions and state their motivations more directly. It's only mildly irritating to see evil done these days, but it's substantially worse to see evil done while under the banner of good.
If your motive is profit, seek profit, and don't clothe your amorality behind a facade of good intentions. You can only have one primary goal. If you want profit, and profit leads you to deal with the Nazis, the Chinese, or the Devil himself, be proud; at the end of the day, at least you can say you didn't compromise, and you followed the path you had chosen to its end. Google can't even say that. They chose a direction, or so they say, but veered from it when the going got tough.
During Desert storm, there was a slow-burning fight over whether or not a young American would be safer fighting in Desert Storm than living in DC. I never did hear the end of that one.
The last I heard of it was that it depended on what statistics you used, and how you chose your prototypical "young American." If the young American was black, male, and between the age of 18 and 21, or something similar to that, it was possible to show that the chances of a violent death were smaller in the Army than in DC. I doubt that you would be able to show that service in Iraq was safer than DC for demographic groups where homicide isn't as prevalent, so it's really an exercise in choosing your samples.
Something tells me I might like Maine...
Even better, in Maine you can own a machine gun (just as long as you pay the $200 BATF transfer tax to the Feds).
All the better to keep those crazy kids off your lawn...
The Maine turnpike (one of the few roads that receives federal funds) is just fine. The vast majority of it has been repaved in the last 3 years during the widening project.
Well, that's why they're going eye-to-eye with the Federal government now. They must have decided that with the new pavement, they're set for the next 25 or 30 years!
(In my defense, I used to live in Maine, loved the place, and would move back in a second if I could find gainful employment there. The "Boston-Atlanta Metro Area," as Gibson put it, doesn't suit me.)
Several reasons. First and foremost, your friends aren't representative of most users. Going into my office on an average day, there are probably a 5:1 or 10:1 ratio of CRT displays to LCDs. Monitors just don't burn out that fast -- most of them are probably 10+ years old now, and still running fine. Not everyone is going to go out and buy (or their manager is going to approve!) a LCD monitor, when they have 50 perfectly good 17" CRTs sitting in a closet.
Not that it really matters to this motherboard's market, but graphic design and video users are mostly still on CRTs, because the gamut of LCD sucks terribly. If you're doing prepress on a LCD, you are wrong. (Or else you're so good you can just tell what the colors are going to look like via ESP, in which case, why not get rid of the monitor completely?)
Also, even with LCD displays, a lot of low-end ones still use VGA as an interface. I don't really know why they do this, except that they wanted to market to people who didn't have DVI-based motherboards or graphics cards, but it's the situation. Most of the sub-$150 LCDs that I've seen (not that I've looked in the past few months) had VGA interfaces. And sometimes, this isn't even as bad as you think; as long as you drive it at the right resolution, most people can't tell the difference anyway.
VGA is the lingua franca of the computer-graphics world, and will be for some time. Eventually, DVI is going to take over, but there are probably billions of dollars of VGA-equipped gear sitting around, that people don't want to have to use expensive DAC boxes to connect to their new system. (Not just monitors, but projectors and the like, too.) I suspect that VGA is one of those things, like ISA, that you're going to find hanging around on equipment -- like a sort of digital appendix -- long after its utility to most users has gone, simply because people have grown to expect it.
I just don't see how politicians, "asshats," blacklists, talking about viagra, sabotage of public networks, email not being free, or killing people has anything to do with the proposal. Did you just random check boxes on yours?
Well, I figured that politicians figured into it, because inevitably, any system that creates a single or centralized point of control (or failure) can also be used to deny service for political ends. My test is, would the [Nazis, Chinese Communists, Soviet Politburo] think this is a good idea? Does it put more hands into the control of a central authority? If yes, it's probably subject to political manipulation in some way. Which is bad. Hence, politicians.
As for Viagra, I didn't mean that quite literally; I took it as a stand-in for "legitimate users ought to be able to use the full capabilities of the network all the time, not subject to artificially-imposed restrictions aimed at abusers." E.g., discussing Viagra shouldn't get you marked as spam; similarly, sending out a high volume of email messages for some legitimate purpose shouldn't get your connection throttled. It's the 'guilty by suspicion' problem. Same for email not being 'free,' anything that imposes artificial restrictions on the amount or frequency of mail that you can send, seems like it impinges on the 'freeness' of email (which may in fact be a good thing, but I didn't write the list).
Sabotage of public networks is probably a weak checkbox, but in general, anything that seems like it blocks, delays, or otherwise purposefully restricts the flow of traffic across the network could fall under this one, since they undermine the idea of the net being "public" and the traffic traveling across it all being equal, and not subject to restrictions on content. We could argue all day as to whether this is a legitimate objection, and whether having all traffic transiting with equal priority is a good thing or not, but I don't think that's really the purpose.
As to killing people, since the proposal doesn't painfully execute spammers, it's clearly unsatisfactory.
Your list probably contains more defensible objections, but I'll freely admit I didn't put that much thought into mine. The point of the list is that every possible solution you could possibly propose to solve spam will fail it, in one or (usually) more ways.
Actually I've often thought it would be an interesting social experiment to give every student in a boarding school a one-shot Taser. One of those compressed-air things that you can only use once. I think the results would be fairly interesting.
By making them one-shots, you have a motivation to conserve it, and not use it frivolously, because then you're left defenseless. But you can't mess too much with other people, because eventually they'll decide it's worth using their one shot on you, and turn you into a twitching mass on the floor, writhing in your own urine and feces.
You'd have to have some sort of a safeguard to keep people from stealing others' weapons, because that could unbalance everything, but I think you'd pretty quickly end up with a very polite campus.
It's sort of like those proposals to end aircraft hijacking by giving everyone a hand grenade, or a single-shot pistol: by giving everyone the power to suppress undesirable behavior, you distribute authority among the group, rather than concentrating it in a small number of individuals, as is normally done.
I'm not sure I care. Those "legitimate" "opt-in" lists tend to get reported by users as spam eventually anyway. Meaning even if they did originally 'opt in,' it's basically nothing but a nuisance eventually. (Usually people opt in, allegedly or actually, and then can't figure out how to opt out, or don't want to spend the effort to do so.) The effect is the same as spam, even if the intent isn't.
I would consider the elimination of commercial mass email a very small price to pay for the elimination of spam. In fact, I'd consider it a bonus.
Your post advocates a
(X) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(X) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(X) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(X) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(X) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
(X) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(X) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
(X) Technically illiterate politicians
(X) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
(X) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
(X) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
(X) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
(X) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
(X) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
(X) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!