Nature is a peer reviewed journal, and one of the more prestigious ones to boot. This means that there is nothing wrong (unless very subtle) with the setup or analysis of their experiment provided the data they report is accurate. Of course something might still be wrong with their results, but that will found out when other scientists try to replicate the experiement.
It's very simple, they puts the characters in extraordinary circumstances against unrealistic odds and 9 times out of 10 every important character needs to be alive at the end of the day. Without superior abilities everyone of those ships would have been destroyed before the end of their first season.
Human beings simply aren't suited to the Star Trek universe unless they can pull out the Hand of God(TM) in the form of alien powers or uber tech to save their asses every once in a while.
Also the series provide a framework for telling lots of different stories. Some about people in a serious and realistic way. Others are just excuses for huge space battles. Once in a while they even have insightful satire of modern concerns. I think it's hard to say that the series as a whole are actually about anything. To me they seem more like a vehicle for invention that gets used in many different ways.
Maybe so, but they aren't listed as one of the charter members. From their FAQ:
Charter members include ActivCard, American Airlines, the Apache Software Foundation, Bank of America, Bell Canada Enterprises, Cingular Wireless, Cisco Systems, CollabNet, Dun and Bradstreet, eBay, Entrust, Fidelity Investments, Gemplus, GM, Global Crossing, i2, Intuit, Liberate Technologies, Nokia, NTT DoCoMo, OpenWave, O'Reilly and Associates, RealNetworks, RSA Security, Sabre, Schlumberger, Sony Corporation, Sprint, Sun Microsystems, Travelocity, United Airlines, Verisign, Vodafone and More.
Of course I'm not sure that I would want to mention any association with Microsoft, for as long as I could avoid it. I do like that they say "open standard", "open solution" a lot in their FAQ. Hopefully they really will let people inspect for themselves what is going on.
I take a lot of photos each year, and I've never had a problem in malls or restraunts provided I'm with a group of people and they were clearly the subject of the photos.
One case in fact I was with a group of 12 or so on a dinner outing, and after taking lots of photos of the group, I took quite a few of the "ambience", picking up lots of strangers along the way. Admittedly this is something that has drawn complaints in the past, but with so many people (and the fact we had been ordering multiple rounds) no one said anything.:-)
Can anyone suggest a non-registration source for this story?
So do you guys take bets on when the first archives link will appear?
Or maybe you just like throwing Karma to the horde?
Now we all know it would be trivially easy to replace each "http://www.nytimes.com/" with "http://archives.nytimes.com/" automatically when it's submitted, but apparently/. staff enjoy watching posters trip over themselves to be the first to get it in.
Having glasses that let others see through his eyes and can modify what he sees to provide information or block nuisances seems nice enough at first glance. I can imagine alot of neat uses for this tech and can even imagine it becoming somewhat common, if made portable and high quality enough. But what about ways this might be exploited in the future?
Once it's common, what's to stop a hacker or the government from breaking in to look through my eyes. Now, that's a scary thought. How about a worse one? Programmers and their backers designing these things to filter out aspects of the world because they are politically unpopular or show competitor's products? Or how about inserting ads into other parts of life? I wouldn't want to look at walls in my own house and be shown advertisements.
So long as the user is truly in control I suppose it's okay, but who knows what a greedy corporation might try to do with his tech.
According to this page, ground based stations can track things down to 10 cm (about 4 inches). Admittedly they would be harder to see by an astronaut, but they typically aren't responsible for spotting the things visually. So long as people on the ground keep track of the satellites, it shouldn't be a problem.
maybe they just never thought to go back and grab the copyright. Really... its such a little thing. The code works without it. Very easy to forget, especially when your involved in a real problem (like coding or debugging or just plain testing).
Well that suggests an interesting solution, you could insist your copyright be retained with a particular filename in the same directory as any executable using your code, and then write your code to check for the copyright before it runs. Anal and unfriendly certainly, but at least people would have to stop and think about the copyright.
I know only the basics behind MRI, not the details, but while related I don't think they are dealing with quite the same principle.
As I understand it, the purpose of the large magnetic field in MRI is to force all the nuclear magnetic moments (which are directly related to nuclear spin states) into the same alignment. Then you study the emitted radiation when they relax into a normal normal configuration, or something like that.
In any case quantum computing depends on the entanglement between states which large applied magnetic fields would effectively destroy. So, my impression is that while MRI depends on the presence of distinct spin states, it doesn't concern itself with the type of spin interaction that quantum computing cares about.
PS The article talks about electron spin states, MRI uses nuclear spin states AFAIK. There are however serious attempts to create qubits with nuclear spins.
Having been in an NSA funded quantum computing lab, I can tell you they do throw gobs of money at this problem. The interesting part is that the security is not what you would think. No armed guards (like some government facilities, I've been in) and for the most part the researchers can publish their results.
Why? You might ask.
Because the NSA realizes that any quantum computer is going to be horribly expensive and complicated at least at first. They are perfectly happy to fund people looking for new ways to make qubits. Last I recall the largest quantum computer could sorta manage 7 qubits, but quantum cryptography will take hundreds if not thousands of qubits to be useful.
Hence the plan seems to be to throw money at people to get them to figure out how to build a scalable system and encourage publication to spur on research, and then go back to the ultra secure compound and spend oodles of cash making the system work. From what I know I'm pretty sure they don't have a useful system yet either, but it's not for lack of resources.
Terrorism is well defined as any of the already existing crimes listed under section ATA Sec. 309.
To know what those crimes are you would have to reference the original legislation that made them crimes. I discuss the computer crimes in this post. To expand terrorism statutes would require additional laws, not just a drop of the hat.
That advice clause of ATA refers to the Sec. 306 modifications of US Title 18, Section 2339A which makes giving "expert advice" or "training" illegal if done so with the "knowledge or intent" that this information be used in a terrorism offense. There is no culpability if you believe that your advice is being used for legitimate purposes.
Actually it does contain provisions to allow one to continue holding foreign nationals believed to be associated with terrorism, which is immediately relevant. But for the most part, okay lets review the thing for a while. Sure. Sometimes I think the government would be well served if they offered interpretation of proposed law, so people didn't make stupid conclusions about it before they could argue where the intended interpretation disagreed with the letter of the law.
monetary or material gain to me != loss to the company. There is plenty of precedent for costing the company large amounts of money without any personal gain.
Schartz was tried under Oregon law not US, and without knowing more, I would doubt that attacking an internal network would meet the standard of "protected computer" which applies to (a)(4) as well as (a)(5)(A), although I didn't mention it in my summary. Secondly it's not clear that Schartz gained anything of value to him for what he did? If you wanted to attack him as terrorist I'd guarantee you a much harder case than the easy Oregon law.
You are confusing (a)(4) which deals with only my gains, with (a)(5)(A) which can deal with your losses. I'd dare say I could challenge your $5000 figure and the fact that your server at home qualifies as a "protected computer". Oh an also note that the damages only count intentional losses, losses dealing with unintentional/reckless acts fall under (a)(5)(B,C) which are not terrorist statutes. If you want to prosecute me for attacking you then there are other non-terrorism laws that make more sense and would be easier for you to win in court.
The article that started all this is largely FUD, and a poor representation of the legislation being past. If you are going to write to Congress at least read the intelligent posts on this page, if not the legislation itself. Making statements which are factually wrong will more than likely cause them to dismiss the whole letter without considering your opinion.
If you look around at the other posts, you'd realize these modifications only applies to 4 of the more severe computer crimes for which we have laws (though one can be legitimately concerned about stretching them to cover less serious crime than what were intended). Also it allows life sentences to be applied but it doesn't mandate them, and any applicable lesser sentence can also still stand. Ex Post Facto doesn't apply because it's not making things illegal retroactively, only removing the time limits on how soon actions that were already illegal can get prosecuted.
Finally, remember that the computer provisions are only a small part of ATA, and I for one don't mind tougher rules for kidnapping congressmen or attacking nuclear power plants, etc. Know what you are upset about and have good reasons why.
"...the term "computer" means an electronic, magnetic, optical, electrochemical, or other high speed data processing device..."
The song and the CD it is on are not data processing devices. Furthermore they certainly don't meet the standard of "protected computer" which refer to computers used by US Government, financial institutions, interstate and foreign commerce or communications. Also, remember people have granted you permission to access their computers via Napster, it's only the files that carry copyright protection. Breaking copyright is still a DMCA issue but I doubt you could apply any of the ATA terrorism provisions.
Ex post facto doesn't apply to extending statute of limitations. You aren't allowed to make something illegal retroactively, but you can change the punishments and way things are prosecuted when they were already illegal. Provided the person hasn't already been tried and sentenced (double jeopardy). Incidently, collecting DNA isn't a punishment, rather a law enforcement tool and thus neither argument applies against it.
The ATA would allow life imprisonment as a possible punishment for some computer crimes, that doesn't mean it automatically gets applied. All other remedies still remain possible. In fact courts have a history of reducing punishments that are unduly harsh.
For a description of what those crimes actually are (as opposed to the article's FUD) see my earlier post.
The part about giving advice only applies to advice given while knowing or intending that the knowledge be used to violate the law.
The ATA advice clause appends Title 18, Sec 2339A to include expert advice and training as criminally punishable aid and federal terrorism offenses as crimes applicable to this section.
Also the law only applies to relatively major crimes (with perhaps a couple provisos), for a discussion see my earlier post.
There are only 4 computer related offenses that would be designated under the ATA as "Federal terrorism offenses". Of these 4, the first deals solely with stealing or communicating classified information. The second requires the hacking be used for monetary or material gain beyond just gaining unauthorized access to the computer (unless access is valued over $5000). The third requires that one intentionally cause damage (exceeding $5000, in most cases) to a protected computer, where "protected computer" means US Government, financial institutions, interstate and foreign commerce and communications. The last involves threatening a computer system for purposes of extortion.
This list hardly seems to encompass "most computer crimes". For instance merely accessing or stealing non-classified information is not a terrorist act. Nor does it include breaking encryption ala DMCA. Defacing websites is not a terrorist act unless the computer belongs to one of the above categories and changing the website results in nontrivial financial losses. Writing viruses/worms is not a terrorist act unless you intentionally use it in a way that damages "protected" computers. (From the wording, I wouldn't interpret this to include merely releasing it into the wild, but a judicial ruling would have to clarify that issue). The crimes they are signaling out are pretty significant stuff and not just any old act of hacking. Let's not further contribute to the FUD.
What follows are excerpts of the laws in question:
Sec. 309: "...the term 'Federal terrorism offense' means a violation of, or an attempt or conspiracy to violate...1030(a)(1), (a)(4), (a)(5)(A), or (a)(7) (relating to protection of computers)..."
(a)(1) having knowingly accessed a computer without authorization or exceeding authorized access, and by means of such conduct having obtained information that has been determined by the United States Government pursuant to an Executive order or statute to require protection against unauthorized disclosure for reasons of national defense or foreign relations, or any restricted data, as defined in paragraph y. of section 11 of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, with reason to believe that such information so obtained could be used to the injury of the United States, or to the advantage of any foreign nation willfully communicates, delivers, transmits, or causes to be communicated, delivered, or transmitted, or attempts to communicate, deliver, transmit or cause to be communicated, delivered, or transmitted the same to any person not entitled to receive it, or willfully retains the same and fails to deliver it to the officer or employee of the United States entitled to receive it;
(a)(4) knowingly and with intent to defraud, accesses a protected computer without authorization, or exceeds authorized access, and by means of such conduct furthers the intended fraud and obtains anything of value, unless the object of the fraud and the thing obtained consists only of the use of the computer and the value of such use is not more than $5,000 in any 1-year period;
(a)(5)(A) knowingly causes the transmission of a program, information, code, or command, and as a result of such conduct, intentionally causes damage without authorization, to a protected computer;
(a)(7) with intent to extort from any person, firm, association, educational institution, financial institution, government entity, or other legal entity, any money or other thing of value, transmits in interstate or foreign commerce any communication containing any threat to cause damage to a protected computer; shall be punished as provided in subsection (c) of this section
Under the same Section, part (d)(e)(2) and (8):
(2) the term "protected computer" means a computer -
(A) exclusively for the use of a financial institution or the
United States Government, or, in the case of a computer not
exclusively for such use, used by or for a financial
institution or the United States Government and the conduct
constituting the offense affects that use by or for the
financial institution or the Government; or
(B) which is used in interstate or foreign commerce or
communication;
(8) the term "damage" means any impairment to the integrity
or availability of data, a program, a system, or information,
that -
(A) causes loss aggregating at least $5,000 in value during
any 1-year period to one or more individuals;
(B) modifies or impairs, or potentially modifies or impairs,
the medical examination, diagnosis, treatment, or care of one
or more individuals;
I'd say my string of numbers is pretty meaningful to me at least.
Besides that, this whole time we are still dependant on some form of commerce to get goods and services. Where is Star Trek when you need them? I want my unlimited supply of energy, replicators for goods and machines/holograms to take care of all the things no one wants to do.
Cashless society? How about a moneyless society? Of course if any one did manage to invent a way to eliminate money, you'd have to imagine they wouldn't get paid for doing so.
Or might we come to the point where we assume that people carrying any cash are no good criminal types?
I doubt that bars and games will always only take cash. How much nicer might it be to scan a card once and then keep adding charges while the customer keeps drinking or playing? Maybe strip bars could use some form of internal paper "coupons" that they sell you to use on the girls. Of course the idea of a stripper "wearing" only a card reader is somewhat amusing to me.
Fair enough, but what will the default settings be? I think it's obvious enough that most people won't concern themselves much with managing their information, or who learns what.
If it includes too much information then we worry that this information can be too easily exploited to harm people. If it includes too little, advertisers will still require some other monitoring system when you make purchases etc. Of course you could make other systems illegal but that has lots of other problems.
Putting in a bunch of personal controls is useful for you, but what about your grandma or neighbor or cousin? We still have to figure out what an appropriate level of privacy is in general, cause most people won't deviate much from what they are told they ought to have. Perhaps this means it should be totally opt-in. Or, maybe the National ID should only be tied to activities that legitimately require ID now, such as driving, bank records, military, credit cards, etc.
Given the complexity of modern life and the amount of goods and services we use for with others are responsible, where should the limits on privacy be? And what is the level of acceptable intrusion, if any?
I lot of them are killed by automobiles, but I can still say "that's a nifty car"; more of them are killed by diet related problems, but I can still say that I know a place that serves nifty deserts.
As true as that is, I can't imagine many people actually associate cars or deserts with people dying. On the other hand everyone is going to associate anything relating to the WTC with the tragic loss of life. Death shouldn't be trivialized by calling it or things directly associated with it, "nifty". No more so than I would want people calling gruesome fatal car wrecks nifty.
IIRC from my psychology classes, the average period of grief for family members of someone who dies unexpectedly is around 6 weeks. Of course it varies with culture and circumstance, but grief is generally a very naturally and productive response to tragedy.
I don't know how long it will take for the average US citizen to move on, but I'd expect you'd need to get going on the response process. Whether that means war, bombings, arrests and trials, or whatever, I don't know.
In any case I don't think it will ever be appropriate to throw random words aroundin the context of the WTC tragedy. Just in the same way we shouldn't call anything associatted with the Nazis as being "cool" or "awesome". It's just far to inconsiderate to those people closely involved with the disaster.
gtk-gnutella is coming along nicely for Linux, but more competition is always better.
No offense Michael, but I disagree. I don't know how it is with file sharing systems on Linux, but Windows is glutted with the things. I've used a few and my college roommate experimented with tons of the things. I don't want a lot of variety, I just want a simple interface and a simple system that finds what I want and is relatively lawsuit proof.
Google is the ideal for web searching and something approaching that caliber for file searching would be wonderful. Make it easy, stable to use, and uncomplicated, then get everyone to use it (or make it interoperable with other networks) so that you have the best chance of finding what you want.
It takes funding and coordination to commit acts of terrorism in foriegn countries, it doesn't take that much to wage a guerilla resistance war on your own turf.
The main concern is food and given that much of the population is starving all ready I'm not sure how much worse that could get. Besides the regular civilians will starve long before the Taliban leaders or their troops do.
This is a country littered with landmines and the weapons of countless wars. Military grade rifles are common place, and bullets are sold cheaply and often by the sackful. For a poverty wracked nation it's amazing how much money has already been spent on the implements of war. For hiding in mountains and ambushing troops, guns and ammo are about all you need. Sure if we made the borders tight enough then we could wait for them to starve or run out of ammunition, but it would be a long time before the effects really benefitted us.
With no one aiding them we'll have a better time than Russia did, but that won't make it easy.
I agree, the state of Afghanistan before the Taliban wasn't wonderful. Under the former government, whose remnants form the Northern Alliance there was sexual exploitation, murder, all forms of lawlessness, etc., etc. When the Taliban arrived they even cured a number of these ills with their harsh form of Islam and very rigid style of justice. However over the last several years, the Taliban has gotten more extermist, in part because of internal divisions within the government.
Which is not to say that the Taliban were ever angels, the harsh laws regarding women were created in part as an answer to sexual exploitation and rape. Some women even embraced them for the security they offered. But of course this is a solution where half of society surrenders most of their rights to prevent crimes which they would never be at fault for in the first place.
Neither the Northern Alliance nor the Taliban are good or effective governments from the US standpoint. The Taliban alleviated some problems but created others and became intolerable by supporting terrorism. The Northern Alliance is the remains of the previous ethnically biased oligarchy, who's main claim to fame is that they are the historical rulers prior to the Taliban coup, not that they were especially good at ruling.
Even if the whole of the Taliban curled up and died tommorrow, the Northern Alliance has not the manpower or support to unite the country. If we were to bring them to power, the US would have to support them in very significant and visible ways to maintain any kind of hold over the country. Certainly with that level of support you can be sure that whatever government is in charge following a successful US war, it won't strongly reflect any of the recent historical governments.
Slashdot Mirror
Nature is a peer reviewed journal, and one of the more prestigious ones to boot. This means that there is nothing wrong (unless very subtle) with the setup or analysis of their experiment provided the data they report is accurate. Of course something might still be wrong with their results, but that will found out when other scientists try to replicate the experiement.
It's very simple, they puts the characters in extraordinary circumstances against unrealistic odds and 9 times out of 10 every important character needs to be alive at the end of the day. Without superior abilities everyone of those ships would have been destroyed before the end of their first season.
Human beings simply aren't suited to the Star Trek universe unless they can pull out the Hand of God(TM) in the form of alien powers or uber tech to save their asses every once in a while.
Also the series provide a framework for telling lots of different stories. Some about people in a serious and realistic way. Others are just excuses for huge space battles. Once in a while they even have insightful satire of modern concerns. I think it's hard to say that the series as a whole are actually about anything. To me they seem more like a vehicle for invention that gets used in many different ways.
Maybe so, but they aren't listed as one of the charter members. From their FAQ:
Charter members include ActivCard, American Airlines, the Apache Software Foundation, Bank of America, Bell Canada Enterprises, Cingular Wireless, Cisco Systems, CollabNet, Dun and Bradstreet, eBay, Entrust, Fidelity Investments, Gemplus, GM, Global Crossing, i2, Intuit, Liberate Technologies, Nokia, NTT DoCoMo, OpenWave, O'Reilly and Associates, RealNetworks, RSA Security, Sabre, Schlumberger, Sony Corporation, Sprint, Sun Microsystems, Travelocity, United Airlines, Verisign, Vodafone and More.
Of course I'm not sure that I would want to mention any association with Microsoft, for as long as I could avoid it. I do like that they say "open standard", "open solution" a lot in their FAQ. Hopefully they really will let people inspect for themselves what is going on.
I take a lot of photos each year, and I've never had a problem in malls or restraunts provided I'm with a group of people and they were clearly the subject of the photos.
:-)
One case in fact I was with a group of 12 or so on a dinner outing, and after taking lots of photos of the group, I took quite a few of the "ambience", picking up lots of strangers along the way. Admittedly this is something that has drawn complaints in the past, but with so many people (and the fact we had been ordering multiple rounds) no one said anything.
Can anyone suggest a non-registration source for this story?
/. staff enjoy watching posters trip over themselves to be the first to get it in.
So do you guys take bets on when the first archives link will appear?
Or maybe you just like throwing Karma to the horde?
Now we all know it would be trivially easy to replace each "http://www.nytimes.com/" with "http://archives.nytimes.com/" automatically when it's submitted, but apparently
Does this kind of technology scare anyone else?
Having glasses that let others see through his eyes and can modify what he sees to provide information or block nuisances seems nice enough at first glance. I can imagine alot of neat uses for this tech and can even imagine it becoming somewhat common, if made portable and high quality enough. But what about ways this might be exploited in the future?
Once it's common, what's to stop a hacker or the government from breaking in to look through my eyes. Now, that's a scary thought. How about a worse one? Programmers and their backers designing these things to filter out aspects of the world because they are politically unpopular or show competitor's products? Or how about inserting ads into other parts of life? I wouldn't want to look at walls in my own house and be shown advertisements.
So long as the user is truly in control I suppose it's okay, but who knows what a greedy corporation might try to do with his tech.
According to this page, ground based stations can track things down to 10 cm (about 4 inches). Admittedly they would be harder to see by an astronaut, but they typically aren't responsible for spotting the things visually. So long as people on the ground keep track of the satellites, it shouldn't be a problem.
maybe they just never thought to go back and grab the copyright. Really... its such a little thing. The code works without it. Very easy to forget, especially when your involved in a real problem (like coding or debugging or just plain testing).
Well that suggests an interesting solution, you could insist your copyright be retained with a particular filename in the same directory as any executable using your code, and then write your code to check for the copyright before it runs. Anal and unfriendly certainly, but at least people would have to stop and think about the copyright.
I know only the basics behind MRI, not the details, but while related I don't think they are dealing with quite the same principle.
As I understand it, the purpose of the large magnetic field in MRI is to force all the nuclear magnetic moments (which are directly related to nuclear spin states) into the same alignment. Then you study the emitted radiation when they relax into a normal normal configuration, or something like that.
In any case quantum computing depends on the entanglement between states which large applied magnetic fields would effectively destroy. So, my impression is that while MRI depends on the presence of distinct spin states, it doesn't concern itself with the type of spin interaction that quantum computing cares about.
PS The article talks about electron spin states, MRI uses nuclear spin states AFAIK. There are however serious attempts to create qubits with nuclear spins.
Having been in an NSA funded quantum computing lab, I can tell you they do throw gobs of money at this problem. The interesting part is that the security is not what you would think. No armed guards (like some government facilities, I've been in) and for the most part the researchers can publish their results.
Why? You might ask.
Because the NSA realizes that any quantum computer is going to be horribly expensive and complicated at least at first. They are perfectly happy to fund people looking for new ways to make qubits. Last I recall the largest quantum computer could sorta manage 7 qubits, but quantum cryptography will take hundreds if not thousands of qubits to be useful.
Hence the plan seems to be to throw money at people to get them to figure out how to build a scalable system and encourage publication to spur on research, and then go back to the ultra secure compound and spend oodles of cash making the system work. From what I know I'm pretty sure they don't have a useful system yet either, but it's not for lack of resources.
Terrorism is well defined as any of the already existing crimes listed under section ATA Sec. 309.
To know what those crimes are you would have to reference the original legislation that made them crimes. I discuss the computer crimes in this post. To expand terrorism statutes would require additional laws, not just a drop of the hat.
That advice clause of ATA refers to the Sec. 306 modifications of US Title 18, Section 2339A which makes giving "expert advice" or "training" illegal if done so with the "knowledge or intent" that this information be used in a terrorism offense. There is no culpability if you believe that your advice is being used for legitimate purposes.
Actually it does contain provisions to allow one to continue holding foreign nationals believed to be associated with terrorism, which is immediately relevant. But for the most part, okay lets review the thing for a while. Sure. Sometimes I think the government would be well served if they offered interpretation of proposed law, so people didn't make stupid conclusions about it before they could argue where the intended interpretation disagreed with the letter of the law.
monetary or material gain to me != loss to the company. There is plenty of precedent for costing the company large amounts of money without any personal gain.
Schartz was tried under Oregon law not US, and without knowing more, I would doubt that attacking an internal network would meet the standard of "protected computer" which applies to (a)(4) as well as (a)(5)(A), although I didn't mention it in my summary. Secondly it's not clear that Schartz gained anything of value to him for what he did? If you wanted to attack him as terrorist I'd guarantee you a much harder case than the easy Oregon law.
You are confusing (a)(4) which deals with only my gains, with (a)(5)(A) which can deal with your losses. I'd dare say I could challenge your $5000 figure and the fact that your server at home qualifies as a "protected computer". Oh an also note that the damages only count intentional losses, losses dealing with unintentional/reckless acts fall under (a)(5)(B,C) which are not terrorist statutes. If you want to prosecute me for attacking you then there are other non-terrorism laws that make more sense and would be easier for you to win in court.
The article that started all this is largely FUD, and a poor representation of the legislation being past. If you are going to write to Congress at least read the intelligent posts on this page, if not the legislation itself. Making statements which are factually wrong will more than likely cause them to dismiss the whole letter without considering your opinion.
If you look around at the other posts, you'd realize these modifications only applies to 4 of the more severe computer crimes for which we have laws (though one can be legitimately concerned about stretching them to cover less serious crime than what were intended). Also it allows life sentences to be applied but it doesn't mandate them, and any applicable lesser sentence can also still stand. Ex Post Facto doesn't apply because it's not making things illegal retroactively, only removing the time limits on how soon actions that were already illegal can get prosecuted.
Finally, remember that the computer provisions are only a small part of ATA, and I for one don't mind tougher rules for kidnapping congressmen or attacking nuclear power plants, etc. Know what you are upset about and have good reasons why.
I excised the bit where they defined "computer":
..."
"...the term "computer" means an electronic, magnetic, optical, electrochemical, or other high speed data processing device
The song and the CD it is on are not data processing devices. Furthermore they certainly don't meet the standard of "protected computer" which refer to computers used by US Government, financial institutions, interstate and foreign commerce or communications. Also, remember people have granted you permission to access their computers via Napster, it's only the files that carry copyright protection. Breaking copyright is still a DMCA issue but I doubt you could apply any of the ATA terrorism provisions.
Ex post facto doesn't apply to extending statute of limitations. You aren't allowed to make something illegal retroactively, but you can change the punishments and way things are prosecuted when they were already illegal. Provided the person hasn't already been tried and sentenced (double jeopardy). Incidently, collecting DNA isn't a punishment, rather a law enforcement tool and thus neither argument applies against it.
The ATA would allow life imprisonment as a possible punishment for some computer crimes, that doesn't mean it automatically gets applied. All other remedies still remain possible. In fact courts have a history of reducing punishments that are unduly harsh.
For a description of what those crimes actually are (as opposed to the article's FUD) see my earlier post.
The part about giving advice only applies to advice given while knowing or intending that the knowledge be used to violate the law.
The ATA advice clause appends Title 18, Sec 2339A to include expert advice and training as criminally punishable aid and federal terrorism offenses as crimes applicable to this section.
Also the law only applies to relatively major crimes (with perhaps a couple provisos), for a discussion see my earlier post.
This list hardly seems to encompass "most computer crimes". For instance merely accessing or stealing non-classified information is not a terrorist act. Nor does it include breaking encryption ala DMCA. Defacing websites is not a terrorist act unless the computer belongs to one of the above categories and changing the website results in nontrivial financial losses. Writing viruses/worms is not a terrorist act unless you intentionally use it in a way that damages "protected" computers. (From the wording, I wouldn't interpret this to include merely releasing it into the wild, but a judicial ruling would have to clarify that issue). The crimes they are signaling out are pretty significant stuff and not just any old act of hacking. Let's not further contribute to the FUD.
What follows are excerpts of the laws in question:
From The Anti-Terrorism Act of 2001 (Draft 2)
http://www.eff.org/Privacy/Surveillance/20010919_
Sec. 309: "...the term 'Federal terrorism offense' means a violation of, or an attempt or conspiracy to violate...1030(a)(1), (a)(4), (a)(5)(A), or (a)(7) (relating to protection of computers)..."
From US Code Title 18, Section 1030
http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/1030.html
(a)(1) having knowingly accessed a computer without authorization or exceeding authorized access, and by means of such conduct having obtained information that has been determined by the United States Government pursuant to an Executive order or statute to require protection against unauthorized disclosure for reasons of national defense or foreign relations, or any restricted data, as defined in paragraph y. of section 11 of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, with reason to believe that such information so obtained could be used to the injury of the United States, or to the advantage of any foreign nation willfully communicates, delivers, transmits, or causes to be communicated, delivered, or transmitted, or attempts to communicate, deliver, transmit or cause to be communicated, delivered, or transmitted the same to any person not entitled to receive it, or willfully retains the same and fails to deliver it to the officer or employee of the United States entitled to receive it;
(a)(4) knowingly and with intent to defraud, accesses a protected computer without authorization, or exceeds authorized access, and by means of such conduct furthers the intended fraud and obtains anything of value, unless the object of the fraud and the thing obtained consists only of the use of the computer and the value of such use is not more than $5,000 in any 1-year period;
(a)(5)(A) knowingly causes the transmission of a program, information, code, or command, and as a result of such conduct, intentionally causes damage without authorization, to a protected computer;
(a)(7) with intent to extort from any person, firm, association, educational institution, financial institution, government entity, or other legal entity, any money or other thing of value, transmits in interstate or foreign commerce any communication containing any threat to cause damage to a protected computer; shall be punished as provided in subsection (c) of this section
Under the same Section, part (d)(e)(2) and (8): (2) the term "protected computer" means a computer -
- (A) exclusively for the use of a financial institution or the
United States Government, or, in the case of a computer not
exclusively for such use, used by or for a financial
institution or the United States Government and the conduct
constituting the offense affects that use by or for the
financial institution or the Government; or
- (B) which is used in interstate or foreign commerce or
communication;
(8) the term "damage" means any impairment to the integrity or availability of data, a program, a system, or information, that -I'd say my string of numbers is pretty meaningful to me at least.
Besides that, this whole time we are still dependant on some form of commerce to get goods and services. Where is Star Trek when you need them? I want my unlimited supply of energy, replicators for goods and machines/holograms to take care of all the things no one wants to do.
Cashless society? How about a moneyless society? Of course if any one did manage to invent a way to eliminate money, you'd have to imagine they wouldn't get paid for doing so.
So does less and less cash mean less vice?
Or might we come to the point where we assume that people carrying any cash are no good criminal types?
I doubt that bars and games will always only take cash. How much nicer might it be to scan a card once and then keep adding charges while the customer keeps drinking or playing? Maybe strip bars could use some form of internal paper "coupons" that they sell you to use on the girls. Of course the idea of a stripper "wearing" only a card reader is somewhat amusing to me.
Fair enough, but what will the default settings be? I think it's obvious enough that most people won't concern themselves much with managing their information, or who learns what.
If it includes too much information then we worry that this information can be too easily exploited to harm people. If it includes too little, advertisers will still require some other monitoring system when you make purchases etc. Of course you could make other systems illegal but that has lots of other problems.
Putting in a bunch of personal controls is useful for you, but what about your grandma or neighbor or cousin? We still have to figure out what an appropriate level of privacy is in general, cause most people won't deviate much from what they are told they ought to have. Perhaps this means it should be totally opt-in. Or, maybe the National ID should only be tied to activities that legitimately require ID now, such as driving, bank records, military, credit cards, etc.
Given the complexity of modern life and the amount of goods and services we use for with others are responsible, where should the limits on privacy be? And what is the level of acceptable intrusion, if any?
I lot of them are killed by automobiles, but I can still say "that's a nifty car"; more of them are killed by diet related problems, but I can still say that I know a place that serves nifty deserts.
As true as that is, I can't imagine many people actually associate cars or deserts with people dying. On the other hand everyone is going to associate anything relating to the WTC with the tragic loss of life. Death shouldn't be trivialized by calling it or things directly associated with it, "nifty". No more so than I would want people calling gruesome fatal car wrecks nifty.
IIRC from my psychology classes, the average period of grief for family members of someone who dies unexpectedly is around 6 weeks. Of course it varies with culture and circumstance, but grief is generally a very naturally and productive response to tragedy.
I don't know how long it will take for the average US citizen to move on, but I'd expect you'd need to get going on the response process. Whether that means war, bombings, arrests and trials, or whatever, I don't know.
In any case I don't think it will ever be appropriate to throw random words around in the context of the WTC tragedy. Just in the same way we shouldn't call anything associatted with the Nazis as being "cool" or "awesome". It's just far to inconsiderate to those people closely involved with the disaster.
gtk-gnutella is coming along nicely for Linux, but more competition is always better.
No offense Michael, but I disagree. I don't know how it is with file sharing systems on Linux, but Windows is glutted with the things. I've used a few and my college roommate experimented with tons of the things. I don't want a lot of variety, I just want a simple interface and a simple system that finds what I want and is relatively lawsuit proof.
Google is the ideal for web searching and something approaching that caliber for file searching would be wonderful. Make it easy, stable to use, and uncomplicated, then get everyone to use it (or make it interoperable with other networks) so that you have the best chance of finding what you want.
It takes funding and coordination to commit acts of terrorism in foriegn countries, it doesn't take that much to wage a guerilla resistance war on your own turf.
The main concern is food and given that much of the population is starving all ready I'm not sure how much worse that could get. Besides the regular civilians will starve long before the Taliban leaders or their troops do.
This is a country littered with landmines and the weapons of countless wars. Military grade rifles are common place, and bullets are sold cheaply and often by the sackful. For a poverty wracked nation it's amazing how much money has already been spent on the implements of war. For hiding in mountains and ambushing troops, guns and ammo are about all you need. Sure if we made the borders tight enough then we could wait for them to starve or run out of ammunition, but it would be a long time before the effects really benefitted us.
With no one aiding them we'll have a better time than Russia did, but that won't make it easy.
I agree, the state of Afghanistan before the Taliban wasn't wonderful. Under the former government, whose remnants form the Northern Alliance there was sexual exploitation, murder, all forms of lawlessness, etc., etc. When the Taliban arrived they even cured a number of these ills with their harsh form of Islam and very rigid style of justice. However over the last several years, the Taliban has gotten more extermist, in part because of internal divisions within the government.
Which is not to say that the Taliban were ever angels, the harsh laws regarding women were created in part as an answer to sexual exploitation and rape. Some women even embraced them for the security they offered. But of course this is a solution where half of society surrenders most of their rights to prevent crimes which they would never be at fault for in the first place.
Neither the Northern Alliance nor the Taliban are good or effective governments from the US standpoint. The Taliban alleviated some problems but created others and became intolerable by supporting terrorism. The Northern Alliance is the remains of the previous ethnically biased oligarchy, who's main claim to fame is that they are the historical rulers prior to the Taliban coup, not that they were especially good at ruling.
Even if the whole of the Taliban curled up and died tommorrow, the Northern Alliance has not the manpower or support to unite the country. If we were to bring them to power, the US would have to support them in very significant and visible ways to maintain any kind of hold over the country. Certainly with that level of support you can be sure that whatever government is in charge following a successful US war, it won't strongly reflect any of the recent historical governments.