It seems like this would only affect long distance service, not local service (like 911). To destroy local service is already really easy. You just destroy the CO (or the 911 dispatch center).
Personally I'll take publicity over publication records. In the job market it's more about who you know than what you know. I figure knowing a bunch of high ranking government officials must go a long way.
Good for you. When you come up with something that the government thinks should be classified, you be as proud as you like and keep it all to yourself. The title and subject matter of what is classified will also probably be classified because letting people know about what was classified is likely to be deemed sensitive information that should be classified. See where this is going?
I see where you are going, but that's not where this is going. The title and subject matter are not being classified.
Sean Gorman wants to graduate with his degree, publish and continue academic research.
How do you know what Sean Gorman wants?
Just because his professor lacks imagination, vision and insight (not uncommon in academic circles I assure you) it doesn't mean this prof is right.
You're right. But do you have any reason to believe that this is the case?
In this case, based on the attention this research is getting, there are obviously many people who think otherwise.
Sure, clearly the information is important to some. I'll give you that. GIS information is usually quite expensive. I bet there are a lot of government officials who would lose quite a lot of kickback revenue if this information got released for free. But I was mainly referring to the information's importance academically, and I assumed the professor was as well. Something can be quite trivial, but also quite important, after all.
they want it classified so they can systematically go through the information that has been collected and come up with strategies for securing those installations. it takes a lot of time to do all of this.
The federal government isn't going to come up with strategies for every single municipality in the country. This is something that is going to be done in large part by individuals in the municipalities themselves, and cutting through the red tape to obtain the information will take long periods of times that people's lives will be at risk. Are you under the impression that the local police and fire departments have easy access to classified information? That's completely untrue.
why publish all of this in a nice neat little package that could put the lives of your fellow citizens in danger?
Because I have a right to know how my life is put in danger so I can protect myself from it. I'm not sure exactly how this is going to put lives in danger. It's really easy to find my CO, for instance. I'd hope that there are redundant lines from the various COs to the 911 dispatch for the county. If not, then maybe I should invest in a two-way radio. But unless this information is published, I'm not going to know.
News flash for you: professors don't have perfect knowledge. Yes, they can make mistakes.
Yeah, but at least the professor has at least seen the work! You haven't seen it, and yet you think you're in a better position to judge its importance than the professor?
Is this the extent of your critical thinking skills? Not all classified information is important, therefore this information must not be important either?
No. My critical thihnking is that the professor called the work unimportant, and no one with any knowledge of the work has disagreed, so anyone who makes the statement that the work is not trivial is talking out of his ass.
By your logic, nuclear launch codes aren't important either.
Please explain how my logic implies that. I merely said that it was possible for classified information to be unimportant. I never said it was necessarily true.
Ask any of the CIOs at the meeting (you know, the ones who blanched and "shit their pants" when they saw his work) if it is unimportant. They might give you some insight which is more than a hand-waving argument.
Maybe they will. Maybe they won't. Have you spoken to them?
Of course, the government's response to your story would be to classify the information you just provided, rather than to tell the building security to close the door.
He's worked hard on his research and doesn't want it to get seen by him, his professor, and a few miscellaneous others. He wants to be proud and publish his results...
Why does he have to publish to be proud? I'd be pretty damn proud to have my work classified.
You are making his work seem trivial and it's not.
His own professor called the work "tedious and unimportant." Do you have more knowledge about this work than this guy's professor?
It is exactly the question "Why?" that has me concerned about this. I'm concerned about "why" this research is often done.
Seems like there's a large market for self-improvement tools. People want to be able to reach their full potential. You can't do that when you have addictions holding you back.
What I see often is not a desire to understand behavior, as a desire to control behavior. As a Libertarian, that grates me the most.
As a Libertarian, you probably are a top candidate for mind-altering drugs:). You Libertarians are nuts.
I agree that this is just mostly mental masturbation at this point, but I do think that the bad effects of this can happen in lesser degrees
At the same time, if we never explained any behaviors with a biochemical or external environmental cause, bad effects would happen.
it's not necessary to take it all the way to the absurd borg world state before we have major trouble.
I'm not sure that's true, but in any case you have to factor in that it's human nature to ask the question "why." If you don't do it, someone else eventually will. Kind of a natural prisoner's dilemma.
Just look at Soviet Russia, or many other great plans for society that have failed.
I'm not sure where you're going with that one. Knowledge can be used in a bad way, but overall it is generally a positive thing.
But can we tolerate the alternative? Mandatory state funded re-education camps?
If we ever truly discovered the cause of crime, it seems these re-education camps would be a lot cheaper and more tolerable than the current prison system. Of course, we're really talking about an impossible scenario.
Crime is not an invariant thing. The patriots who founded the USA could have been considered criminals in many people's eyes. Many inventors, great innovators, and scientists were charged and punished (and sometimes killed) as criminals.
OK, but does it really matter? If it's a crime, it's a crime. This criminal otherwise would be in jail. And I never suggested that we force drugs upon criminals. Of course, in a perfect world, the choice of whether or not to take drugs would itself probably become a crime! But again, we're talking here about an impossible scenario. We don't have much of a clue how Ritalin works. Forcing it upon criminals would be disastrous. Right now we have a lot more experience with the results and side-effects of punishment.
So I guess the question morphs to this, once we know the cause of every behaviour, what's to stop society from becoming 100% conformist with completely suppressed individuality?
Well, if you consider completely suppresed individuality to be a bad thing, then the reasons you think it's bad are exactly the reasons that society would stop it from happening. But we never will know the cause of every behavior. So it's not something we should worry about anyway.
Suppose we explained every behavior with a biochemical or external environmental cause. How could we, under any system of morality, ever punish anyone for a crime?
If we could explain every behavior with a biochemical or external environmental cause, then we wouldn't need to punish anyone for a crime. Punishment is very poor solution to the problem of crime. It just sometimes turns out to be the best solution we have, which is why we use it.
A kid who has been told he has a "medical problem" that makes him get bad grades may never realize his full potential, and overcome his lack of willpower to develop a long attention span, and put forth the effort required for learning.
That's one possible scenario. Another is that the kid might be able to take some drug which corrects his "medical problem."
It's quite clear that this behavior is designed as a copyright protection mechanism. I think you'd have quite a hard time convincing a jury otherwise. Feel free to try, though.
I didn't say gathering the data is something you can do from the privacy of your own home. I said the cracking part was. Whether you have WEP or not, the person needs to have physical access to your network in order to gain the data.
Of course, smart economists may realize why MSFT is paying these huge dividends (because the stock would suck otherwise), and the move might have just the opposite effect..
A smart economist is going to look at the fundamentals. When Microsoft pays $10 billion in dividends, their stock is worth $10 billion less. For a company like Microsoft, announcing a dividend is slightly good fundamentally, I guess. They weren't earning a great return on their excess cash, and you can almost surely earn a better return after taxes than they do.
I'd guess a slight rise in Microsoft due to the announcement/rumor, and a $1 drop in Microsoft the day they actually pay the $1 dividend.
I know. I was being sarcastic. Money == Money. That's about it.
And I think one should compare the earned amounts on logarithmic scale.
Sure. But that's the whole point of progressive taxation. If $1 billion is only 5 times as much as $10,000, then I'm sure gates won't mind as much if we tax him at a significantly higher rate. I mean, it's all a big game (once you get out of the poverty level, anyway). Why shouldn't Gates earn dividends on his shares? I think a better question is why should he?
The only thing that I have to wonder is how come BillG only needs to invest on MSFT and it just happens to become largest corporation of all? Pure luck?
Look, I'm not a Bill Gates basher. I think he's made some great innovations in the area of Operating Systems. He's also an excellent businessman. And of course some of it is luck, and some of it is that he started out with enough money to take the risks he's been forced to take. He's made some dirty moves through Microsoft and in his personal decisions, but most of them have been legal, and the system has punished him (IMO too lightly) for the illegal ones.
What's happened has happened. Bill Gates has lots and lots of money. Some of us have a little, and others have none. That's not an attack, it's just the simple truth.
If you need really strong security, you probably shouldn't be using the internet. The first question you should be asking yourself is why do you need your network traffic to be secure in the first place? If it's for any reason other than the fact that one of your other lines of defenses might have been breached, then you need to rethink some things. Bank accounts are usually the most sensitive part, but even then the place the money is being sent is usually tracable. If you're really paranoid though, you should probably have the majority of your money in an account which can't be accessed over the internet, or at the very least one that doesn't have online bill pay.
I agree. WEP is good, if you have a situation where it's easy to set up, anyway. Copying those keys from one computer to another is quite a pain, and it's just plain impossible if you do a lot of roaming. Personally I have WEP on my home network, but I try to treat the network as though it's completely unsecured. Part of that means putting a random "answer" to those "recover your password" questions that my bank has. My email account is far too easy to break into to trust my life savings to. In the unlikely event that I forget my password I'll wait a week to receive a new one by mail.
And with some patience, very little in fact, your car door can be opened, and your car stolen, or your house door opened, and your house cleaned out... but that doens't mean we run around leaving our doors unlocked and open.
A lot of people do leave their doors unlocked. Besides, your analogy is flawed because breaking into a car or house attracts people to the presense of the crime. Cracking WEP encryption is something that can be done in the privacy of your own home.
Is sniffing out POP passwords in this way illegal?
Maybe not, but using that sniffed POP password certainly is.
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It seems like this would only affect long distance service, not local service (like 911). To destroy local service is already really easy. You just destroy the CO (or the 911 dispatch center).
Personally I'll take publicity over publication records. In the job market it's more about who you know than what you know. I figure knowing a bunch of high ranking government officials must go a long way.
Good for you. When you come up with something that the government thinks should be classified, you be as proud as you like and keep it all to yourself. The title and subject matter of what is classified will also probably be classified because letting people know about what was classified is likely to be deemed sensitive information that should be classified. See where this is going?
I see where you are going, but that's not where this is going. The title and subject matter are not being classified.
Sean Gorman wants to graduate with his degree, publish and continue academic research.
How do you know what Sean Gorman wants?
Just because his professor lacks imagination, vision and insight (not uncommon in academic circles I assure you) it doesn't mean this prof is right.
You're right. But do you have any reason to believe that this is the case?
In this case, based on the attention this research is getting, there are obviously many people who think otherwise.
Sure, clearly the information is important to some. I'll give you that. GIS information is usually quite expensive. I bet there are a lot of government officials who would lose quite a lot of kickback revenue if this information got released for free. But I was mainly referring to the information's importance academically, and I assumed the professor was as well. Something can be quite trivial, but also quite important, after all.
they want it classified so they can systematically go through the information that has been collected and come up with strategies for securing those installations. it takes a lot of time to do all of this.
The federal government isn't going to come up with strategies for every single municipality in the country. This is something that is going to be done in large part by individuals in the municipalities themselves, and cutting through the red tape to obtain the information will take long periods of times that people's lives will be at risk. Are you under the impression that the local police and fire departments have easy access to classified information? That's completely untrue.
why publish all of this in a nice neat little package that could put the lives of your fellow citizens in danger?
Because I have a right to know how my life is put in danger so I can protect myself from it. I'm not sure exactly how this is going to put lives in danger. It's really easy to find my CO, for instance. I'd hope that there are redundant lines from the various COs to the 911 dispatch for the county. If not, then maybe I should invest in a two-way radio. But unless this information is published, I'm not going to know.
News flash for you: professors don't have perfect knowledge. Yes, they can make mistakes.
Yeah, but at least the professor has at least seen the work! You haven't seen it, and yet you think you're in a better position to judge its importance than the professor?
Is this the extent of your critical thinking skills? Not all classified information is important, therefore this information must not be important either?
No. My critical thihnking is that the professor called the work unimportant, and no one with any knowledge of the work has disagreed, so anyone who makes the statement that the work is not trivial is talking out of his ass.
By your logic, nuclear launch codes aren't important either.
Please explain how my logic implies that. I merely said that it was possible for classified information to be unimportant. I never said it was necessarily true.
Ask any of the CIOs at the meeting (you know, the ones who blanched and "shit their pants" when they saw his work) if it is unimportant. They might give you some insight which is more than a hand-waving argument.
Maybe they will. Maybe they won't. Have you spoken to them?
If the government wants it classified, if it scares CEOs, and if he's giving talks to businesses, I would say that his research is VERY important.
Oh yeah, cause the government has never classified unimportant information before.
Of course, the government's response to your story would be to classify the information you just provided, rather than to tell the building security to close the door.
He's worked hard on his research and doesn't want it to get seen by him, his professor, and a few miscellaneous others. He wants to be proud and publish his results...
Why does he have to publish to be proud? I'd be pretty damn proud to have my work classified.
You are making his work seem trivial and it's not.
His own professor called the work "tedious and unimportant." Do you have more knowledge about this work than this guy's professor?
You cannot be free if you do not have any security.
While we're being cliche, I might as well note that security through obscurity is no security at all.
It is exactly the question "Why?" that has me concerned about this. I'm concerned about "why" this research is often done.
Seems like there's a large market for self-improvement tools. People want to be able to reach their full potential. You can't do that when you have addictions holding you back.
What I see often is not a desire to understand behavior, as a desire to control behavior. As a Libertarian, that grates me the most.
As a Libertarian, you probably are a top candidate for mind-altering drugs :). You Libertarians are nuts.
I agree that this is just mostly mental masturbation at this point, but I do think that the bad effects of this can happen in lesser degrees
At the same time, if we never explained any behaviors with a biochemical or external environmental cause, bad effects would happen.
it's not necessary to take it all the way to the absurd borg world state before we have major trouble.
I'm not sure that's true, but in any case you have to factor in that it's human nature to ask the question "why." If you don't do it, someone else eventually will. Kind of a natural prisoner's dilemma.
Just look at Soviet Russia, or many other great plans for society that have failed.
I'm not sure where you're going with that one. Knowledge can be used in a bad way, but overall it is generally a positive thing.
But can we tolerate the alternative? Mandatory state funded re-education camps?
If we ever truly discovered the cause of crime, it seems these re-education camps would be a lot cheaper and more tolerable than the current prison system. Of course, we're really talking about an impossible scenario.
Crime is not an invariant thing. The patriots who founded the USA could have been considered criminals in many people's eyes. Many inventors, great innovators, and scientists were charged and punished (and sometimes killed) as criminals.
OK, but does it really matter? If it's a crime, it's a crime. This criminal otherwise would be in jail. And I never suggested that we force drugs upon criminals. Of course, in a perfect world, the choice of whether or not to take drugs would itself probably become a crime! But again, we're talking here about an impossible scenario. We don't have much of a clue how Ritalin works. Forcing it upon criminals would be disastrous. Right now we have a lot more experience with the results and side-effects of punishment.
So I guess the question morphs to this, once we know the cause of every behaviour, what's to stop society from becoming 100% conformist with completely suppressed individuality?
Well, if you consider completely suppresed individuality to be a bad thing, then the reasons you think it's bad are exactly the reasons that society would stop it from happening. But we never will know the cause of every behavior. So it's not something we should worry about anyway.
Suppose we explained every behavior with a biochemical or external environmental cause. How could we, under any system of morality, ever punish anyone for a crime?
If we could explain every behavior with a biochemical or external environmental cause, then we wouldn't need to punish anyone for a crime. Punishment is very poor solution to the problem of crime. It just sometimes turns out to be the best solution we have, which is why we use it.
A kid who has been told he has a "medical problem" that makes him get bad grades may never realize his full potential, and overcome his lack of willpower to develop a long attention span, and put forth the effort required for learning.
That's one possible scenario. Another is that the kid might be able to take some drug which corrects his "medical problem."
Yeah, but if your kid is an inch shorter than average you don't get them doped up to make them 'normal', do you?
If it were possible, why not?
You don't have to have the WEP key to sniff encrypted packets. Duh.
It's quite clear that this behavior is designed as a copyright protection mechanism. I think you'd have quite a hard time convincing a jury otherwise. Feel free to try, though.
I didn't say gathering the data is something you can do from the privacy of your own home. I said the cracking part was. Whether you have WEP or not, the person needs to have physical access to your network in order to gain the data.
Of course, smart economists may realize why MSFT is paying these huge dividends (because the stock would suck otherwise), and the move might have just the opposite effect..
A smart economist is going to look at the fundamentals. When Microsoft pays $10 billion in dividends, their stock is worth $10 billion less. For a company like Microsoft, announcing a dividend is slightly good fundamentally, I guess. They weren't earning a great return on their excess cash, and you can almost surely earn a better return after taxes than they do.
I'd guess a slight rise in Microsoft due to the announcement/rumor, and a $1 drop in Microsoft the day they actually pay the $1 dividend.
Money != quality.
I know. I was being sarcastic. Money == Money. That's about it.
And I think one should compare the earned amounts on logarithmic scale.
Sure. But that's the whole point of progressive taxation. If $1 billion is only 5 times as much as $10,000, then I'm sure gates won't mind as much if we tax him at a significantly higher rate. I mean, it's all a big game (once you get out of the poverty level, anyway). Why shouldn't Gates earn dividends on his shares? I think a better question is why should he?
The only thing that I have to wonder is how come BillG only needs to invest on MSFT and it just happens to become largest corporation of all? Pure luck?
Look, I'm not a Bill Gates basher. I think he's made some great innovations in the area of Operating Systems. He's also an excellent businessman. And of course some of it is luck, and some of it is that he started out with enough money to take the risks he's been forced to take. He's made some dirty moves through Microsoft and in his personal decisions, but most of them have been legal, and the system has punished him (IMO too lightly) for the illegal ones.
What's happened has happened. Bill Gates has lots and lots of money. Some of us have a little, and others have none. That's not an attack, it's just the simple truth.
If you need really strong security, you probably shouldn't be using the internet. The first question you should be asking yourself is why do you need your network traffic to be secure in the first place? If it's for any reason other than the fact that one of your other lines of defenses might have been breached, then you need to rethink some things. Bank accounts are usually the most sensitive part, but even then the place the money is being sent is usually tracable. If you're really paranoid though, you should probably have the majority of your money in an account which can't be accessed over the internet, or at the very least one that doesn't have online bill pay.
I agree. WEP is good, if you have a situation where it's easy to set up, anyway. Copying those keys from one computer to another is quite a pain, and it's just plain impossible if you do a lot of roaming. Personally I have WEP on my home network, but I try to treat the network as though it's completely unsecured. Part of that means putting a random "answer" to those "recover your password" questions that my bank has. My email account is far too easy to break into to trust my life savings to. In the unlikely event that I forget my password I'll wait a week to receive a new one by mail.
I'm amazed that people still use unencrypted anything over the Internet (well, except http. I don't really care if someone knows I read /.)
What do you care if someone reads your spam?
And with some patience, very little in fact, your car door can be opened, and your car stolen, or your house door opened, and your house cleaned out... but that doens't mean we run around leaving our doors unlocked and open.
A lot of people do leave their doors unlocked. Besides, your analogy is flawed because breaking into a car or house attracts people to the presense of the crime. Cracking WEP encryption is something that can be done in the privacy of your own home.
Is sniffing out POP passwords in this way illegal?
Maybe not, but using that sniffed POP password certainly is.
Exactly. Bill Gates is 100,000 times better of a person than I am. He obviously deserves 100,000 times as much money.
Face it, wealth is NOT a zero-sum game
So why doesn't the government just print $1 billion for each of us? The per capita GDP would soar!