> So far no one involved has raised that as a concern. PARANOIA co-designer Greg Costikyan has been inalterably opposed to such thought control for many years, as have I. I'll be writing the rulebook with the attitude that it's better to ask forgiveness than permission.
Serious question:
Is waiting until after you've released PARANOIA XP, and until after I've purchased my copy, before reporting both of you for treason on the grounds of that remark, itself an act of treason?
(Or is reporting you for "being inalterably opposed to such thought control" treason, on the grounds that as the sole protector of our freedoms, The Computer is also inalterably opposed to such thought control?)
> Why don't these people just get over themselves and go for prohibition again?
Speaking of prohibition, if we add a second sensor to the device that detects THC in your breath... if the vehicle has OnStar installed, the device silently phones the cops and reports your GPS location!
> BTW, please don't ask how we satisfy our fundamentalist Christian constituency while at the same time enacting laws that go against the most basic tenets of the Judeo-Christian ethic: the Golden Rule and the admonishment to help those less fortunate...we can't figure it out either!
I'll bite.
But doesn't the Golden Rule say "Do unto others as you would have them to unto you" and/or "Love thy neighbor as thyself"?
On the first part of that, Christ may have said to pay your taxes -- to "render unto Caesar what is Caesar's" -- but he sure as hell didn't say "Petition Caesar that he rob Peter to pay Paul." The Biblical stance on charity is that it's only a good deed when you're voluntarily putting your own money down in the name of your spiritual convictions lie.
And what if all I want from my neighbor to be doing unto me is to be letting me live my life free from his meddling interference?
And as for the second part, I really don't think God intends that I be jerking my neighbor off. Coveting my neighbor's ass is also off the list. Coveting his wife? Also out. Doesn't say nuthin' about coveting my neighbor's wife's ass, though. (Woohoo! God is merciful!)
> doesn't the government have to have some proof that you are trading, hosting, or otherwise involved with whatever they are charging you with?
In the West, and specifically, the US, the rules are something like this:
To convict you, they need proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
To charge you -- that is, "to break down your door, take all your stuff, destroy your life and reputation, and make you do the perp walk in front of the cameras", they only need probable cause.
To get probable cause, they need only investigate you, and the outdated laws that used to hamstring government agencies from performing an effective investigation on the 'net have been amended.
In fact, the same laws that empower law enforcement to aggressively investigate clandestine criminal networks have also lowered the bar for seizure to less than "probable cause" in many cases!
Or did you miss every nauseating bleat from every ACLU-sympathizing Slashdot reader in every USA PATRIOT Act thread that's been posted since the smoke cleared in New York and DC?
Even if the ACLU sheep are wrong, it's clear that a Freenet node likely exposes you to legal risks far beyond what you run if you run a Kazaa node.
Choosing to take part in a civil conspiracy to piss off the RIAA and MPAA risks only your bank account. You might even land a contract with a soft drink producer to appear on television during the SuperBowl.
Choosing to take part of a criminal conspiracy to piss off law enforcement and intelligence agencies is a whole 'nother ball game. If you live in China, you might even land a contract with your government to appear in the stadium during the halftime public executions.
> That sounds good on paper (to me anyway), but as more offenses become punishable by summary
execution it becomes increasingly trivial for corrupt cops to frame someone they want dead.
"Knowing How Not To Piss Off Cops" is a pretty good survival trait, even in our lenient legal system, and even when dealing with cops that aren't corrupt.
> In the United States, soldiers take Metabolic Dominance nutraceuticals that dampen their pain sensors, raise the metabolism while maintaining lowered temperatures, and kick Mitochondria into hyperdrive. > In the Soviet Union soldiers drink coffee.
In Soviet Union, coffno, that's just what you want me to say, so I'm not gonna make the obvious cliche. Obviously, IT'S A TRAP!
> Rummy's wet dream: fully armed and armored high school dropouts jacked up into an amphetamine-induced paranoid killing frenzy sweeping through Baghdad, Tehran, Paris.... Frightening, sort of like Oakland on Saturday night.
Put some giant mecha-robots with mounted flamethrower attachments, C-130 Spectre gunships, and broadcast the whole thing in HDTV from remotely-operated (or better yet, autonomous) UAVs.
Call it "The Sack of Oaktown", and sell it as the Best. Reality. Show. Evah. On FOX!
> Hey, don't dis Carly!
> >She may not have the looks but powerful professional women like her (and Hillary C) turn me on. > > Either of them is free to whip my ass raw with a riding crop and ream me with a strap-on dildo - anytime, anywhere.
> Personally, I would not want to live in a world where the authorities have so many opportunities to take lives. On the other hand people who drive while impaired are sociopaths and should be treated accordingly. > >(This comment reminds me of that early ST:TNG episode where Wesley is to be executed for stepping on some flowers.)
Are you sure you're still against the death penalty to petty crimes?:)
I piss everyone off because I think that both the law enforcement and the prison industries consume far too many tax dollars. On grounds of fiscal sanity, I argue favor of legalizing (and taxing!) drugs, and in favor of eliminating the appeals process / expanding the use of the death penalty. Smoke and drink what you want at home, but if you drive to the 7-11 while under the influence, expect your next of kin to be notified within the hour as to where they can pick up your body and pay for the cost of the executing officer's bullet.
> 'Direct' requests to a node are not necessarily answered by that node. There is no way for a particular attacker to know whether the node it requested the data from answered it directly from it's data store or routed the request to another node which subsequently answered it.
And this protects you from the following scenario, how?
"Your Honor. Agent Smith clicked on this link, which he reasonably believed to contain illegal content. A request went out from his machine to another machine on the network. Some packets got sent back from different machines. Illegal content was stored on our hard drive. Our client happens to have been modified to record the IP addresses of each encrypted chunk of every file as it's being downloaded. Our logs tell us that the 12 chunks that make up the illegal content came from the following 12 machines. With data shared from a source we're not necessarily going to talk much about, we were able to determine that 12 of these nodes were relaying requests (trafficking) but that 8 responded to requests from within their datastore (possession).
In order to prove that the owners of all 20 of these machines are cooperating as part of an illegal content distribution ring, we require a warrant that enables us to seize their equipment."
At this point, your life is over. You just don't know it until the flash-bang hits. All that's left (in the West) is to determine who get part of their life back after six-digit legal fees and several years in the legal system, or whether you get the Grand Prize of 15-20 in the Federal pound-me-in-the-ass pen. (The Chinese get no such choice; a healthy supply of organs is a nice source of hard currency.)
"After we have the warrants, we plan to take the copies of the hard drives from all 20 machines, set them up on a 21-machine lab LAN, and with a few fancy routers, re-create the network as it existed at the time of the crime. By clearing the datastore on our 21st machine and requesting the same key we did in the warrant, we intend to prove that all 20 defendants are engaged in a conspiracy to distribute illegal content. If we get the content from an air-gap isolated LAN, we've proved our case - the 20 defendants' machines collectively hold the illegal content and distribute it to anyone requesting a key."
Furthermore, a smart adversary will file based on a bunch of "popular" keys that are likely to be stored on any subset of 20 nodes based on its traffic analysis and/or profiles of time-taken-to-respond-to-request certain requests versus certain nodes as sampled over time without even making a request itself, simply by passively monitoring data from many chokepoints on the network for a sufficiently long period of time, but even if the adversary is dumb and only gets a warrant for a key it requested and is somehow unable to recreate the content in the crime lab, you're proven Not Guilty.
Big deal. It doesn't matter if you don't get the Grand Prize of 15-20 years. The damage (to your gear, your reputation, and your career) is done when the warrant is signed, not 6 years later when the dust settles.
If you want to run a Freenet node because you believe in anonymous free speech, and you understand that you could well become the test case for Ian and Matt's political stance, go right ahead. If you agree with Ian and Matt's stance, go right ahead -- it's a free country, which means you're allowed to do things that are of untested legality. You just have to be prepared to face the charges when people with differing legal opinions, differing political agendas, and overwhelmingly superior firepower decide to bring the matter before the courts.
I have a principled objection to running a Freenet node. My gear, my network, my rules. Freenet doesn't allow me to enforce my rules. So I enforced my rules the only way I could -- by not installing it.
As is your absolute right, but if you were the same AC to which I'd responded who thought that by "someone getting hurt", I was playing the old Fed line about "protecting some poor kid who downloads bombmaking information", you you missed the point.
> > Ian, Matt: You made your point -- absolute anonymity means we'll have to face
some things we don't like. Now pull the plug before someone gets killed. > > What, so things can happen now with the internet which couldn't have happened before? No doubt you're thinking of bomb making or something? That's the example you always here. You know how easy it is to make an explosive? They practically tell you how on the news every time there's an attack on the American troops currently occupying Iraq, or on Israelis.
Boy did you miss the point. (Or you confused me with someone else.)
Seriously, I couldn't care less about Joe "One-beer-short-of-a" Sixpack downloadin' his good ol' self a copy of the Anarchist's Cookbook and promptly evolving himself out of the gene pool.
But I am worried about the one really unlucky Joe Sixpacks who get chosen as the first few test cases in the West. Some poor slob who think Freenet's just another way to "freely" swap MP3s with reduced risks of getting a nastygram from RIAA, but who wakes up to black-masked agents screaming "FEDERAL AGENT! WE KNOW YOU'RE HOSTING ILLEGAL PR0N! DON'T MOVE, YOU PERVERTED FREAK!"
The reference to someone getting killed is the fact that Unlucky Joe Sixpack isn't the worst case. The worst case is the prototypical pro-democracy dissident in China -- who (just like Unlucky Joe) thinks he and his friends are free to communicate using Ian and Matt's shiny toy, only to wake up to the sound of a round being chambered, and to never hear anything else again.
Take a close look at how Freenet nodes operate, and realize the minimal amount of traffic analysis that would be required on the part of any government agency to identify node operators and direct queries to guarantee that for any value of "contraband" required, some data corresponding to "contraband" exists on the node of the person selected to be the test case.
When Freenet was created, the technology to perform such an attack didn't exist in China, and the legal infrastructure of the West made any evidence gleaned as the result of such monitoring inadmissable. Neither of those two things are true any longer.
On a moral level, Freenet was a success: it proved the point that arguing for absolute anonymity really does mean having to deal with things you might find repugnant. (And I agree with its creators' stand -- if you can't deal with the ramifications of absolute anonymity, you have principled, not merely practical, grounds not to be a part of it.)
On a practical level, however, due to its susceptibility to traffic analysis and other forms of attack by a sufficiently well-motivated and well-funded opponent, and given that a sufficiently well-motivated-and-funded opponent exists on every chunk of addressable IP space on the planet, Freenet is a hazard to anyone actually using it.
Freenet is not Kazaa. The risks you face from running a Freenet node are far, far, far greater than what you risk from running a Kazaa node. In the case of the perverts, I'm OK with that. But I'm not OK with that when it's MP3 downloaders getting the perp walk for sex charges, and I'm very very not OK with that when it's the Chinese democracy movement getting a perp walk to the organ bank.
> What about the Communist dissidents in countries like China where their government won't
let them publish their views? Should they also be deprived of their freedom of expression?
In China, Freenet is a tool used by mystics and political criminals to spread destabilizing propaganda and destroy the lawful government. The mystics and propagandists hide their subversion by claiming they're only interested in undermining America by hosting child pornography.
In America, Freenet is a tool used by scuzzball freaks to spread child porn. They hide their scuzzball freakism by claiming they're only using it to support the activities of pro-democracy activists in China.
Doesn't matter where you live. If you install Freenet, you're providing an attractive nuisance, and because the documentation clearly states that by running a Freenet node, you may be hosting content that is illegal in your jurisdiction, you knowingly make yourself an accessory to any and every crime committed by whatever brand of criminals happens to be living in your nation and trafficking data through your node.
FreeNet was a superb demonstration of how decoupling the right to speak freely from the responsibilities that come with that right can lead to disaster.
It was an interesting social experiment, but it's served its purpose, and IMO the time to pull the plug is long overdue.
Finally, on a practical level, for all the high sentiment about "countries with sane laws" touted by Ian and Matt, if you run a Freenet node, it's your door, not theirs, that will be broken down. If Ian and Matt want to take such a radical stand for free speech, let them host the illegal content, and let them take the risks.
Foisting that risk off onto a bunch of noobs who think "oooh! P2P shiny! MP3z and b00bies!" without being made fully aware of the legal risk that comes with the phrase "attractive nuisance" in a Western legal system is reckless and irresponsible of the Freenet team. When the first Freenet test cases come down (and these cases will come down as traffic analysis without a warrant is now fully legal under USA PATRIOT, and always was legal behind the Great Firewall), I hope that those charged in the test cases conclude that they have civil grounds to sue the organizers, maintainers, and contributors to the Freenet project into well-deserved legal oblivion.
Users on the Western nations' monitored networks have it easy - they only get faced with seizure of their hardware, a sex crime record, and 10-15 years. Users of Freenet in China get to supply corneas, kidneys, and lungs to Westerners smart enough not to run it.
Ian, Matt: You made your point -- absolute anonymity means we'll have to face some things we don't like. Now pull the plug before someone gets killed.
> Clark is fascinating despite his age - we should treasure the elderly, there is much knowledge there to be gained, but all too often we simply shuffle them to the side like a pair of worn shoes. Enjoy his insights while you still can.
Amen to that.
> He has some fascinating opinions on Martian life, for example.
From the article: "Well, I think they've already found life. There's some pictures from the laboratories which seem to me to be unmistakably vegetation-leaves and stems and things. I don't see what else it could possibly be."
But with all due respect, Sir Clarke, what pictures are these again? Fark photoshops don't count.
His Dark Dune Spots look a lot more like some sort of outgassing (well, out-watering or out-CO2ing, which would in itself be interesting, but isn't proof of life) or wind-related phenomenon than trees.
With the new orbiter, we should get some new data that could resolve this question.
> I work for an outsourced Telemarketing company and i can tell you the DNC lists are NO fun at all to manage! > >
And now that its got wide coverage , everyone we call wants to be or has applied to be on the FTC's list.All this is besides the numerous state lists that are maintained by all the states.
"Good!"
If that doesn't make my opinion clear, I have another response that should make it three times as clear.
> Marketer: Hi we are a nonprofit agency. > > Guy at home: Sorry, I am on the do-no-call list > > Marketer: Yes, but we have an exceptional product which you might be interested in, in exchange for
your donation. > >Guy at home: How the hell can you be nonprofit and sell shit at the same time?
Simple! Use this price list from a representative 501(c)3 UFO cult!
How do you get to be a 501(c)3 UFO cult? You DDOS the IRS with "individual" subpoenas, and if you've got enough dirt on enough politicians, the IRS caves.
> Ah. I take it you don't have a wife and children.
Correct. I'm not interested in acquiring either one, and even if I had a wife, I don't have enough money to adequately fund the raising of offspring. I'd therefore choose not to reproduce, even if I had a spouse.
> And investments? You *have* any?
I do, however, have investments. Having no children leaves me with plenty of disposable income to invest as I see fit.:)
Anyone could have made an easy easier 50% by buying the semi-random basket of stocks that make up the NASDAQ 100 index, symbol QQQ, or 22% by investing in the S&P 500 (SPX).
You could have made an even better return if you'd realized that not only is the economy doing well, but that the right time to invest is often when the bombs start to fall. Bombs falling mean the elimination of uncertainty, and with the uncertainty eliminated about when the inevtiable war would begin, traders could refocus on the growing economy.
Look at archive.org's news headlines. Every day the UN seemed to gain the upper hand, indicating "peace" (as in, a prolonging of the uncertainty), the markets dropped. Every day the headlines reflected the US's increasing willingness to ignore the UN, the markets went up.
The exact bottom of the market was within 72 hours of the first bomb's drop, and coincided precisely with the news media touting "quagmire" as the fastest mechanised infantry advance in military history stopped for 12 hours to refuel.
In short, the UN and the punditocracy got it all wrong, as they usually do. Following the pattern set during Gulf War I, the week of trade immediately following 9/11, Gulf War II was yet another case in point that periods of war and uncertainty are more often than not, the best buying opportunities an individual investor will ever see in his or her life.
I still have no use for a family, but if I trade the next couple of wars as well as I did the last ones (I missed 9/11, but I caught Gulf War II), I'd probably have enough money to acquire and support one.
Trading is a great game. Money's just a way of keeping score.
> > Please remit $50 plus $25 in penalties for the following items:
>> > > TX25 Super Dildo $500 >> Best of Jenna Jameson DVD Collection $100 >> Hello Clitty Leatherette S&M Collection $400 > >These were business related expenses about and thus a tax credit is due. Included is a sample of my work. > >Thank You, >John Doe Taxpayer
"P.S. Aren't you glad I produced this work, rather than applying for a state arts grant for my artistic project entitled The Goatse Guy Enema Monologues Part IX?":)
> This is a state goverment and most state goverments are required by their constitutions to have 'balanced' budgets. They just can't sell bonds like the feds can.
I'm from Kalifornia. Your comment is an automatic (+5, Funny) around here.
> I don't think higher taxes, to pay ditchdiggers at ditchdigger wages, is the answer to bringing good jobs back to US citizens, and pushing the economy forward...IMHO
It is, however, a great way of making sure productive citizens never accumulate sufficient wealth to flee to places where their capital is respected.
It's also a great way of making sure that there's a willing army of ditchdiggers who can always be counted upon to vote for more publicly-funded ditch-digging projects.
> I, for one, welcome our new, um..... well, overlords.
AS WELL YOU SHOULD, CITIZEN! - Your Overlords. Because Without Us, Old People Would Starve And Your Children Would Suffer, Because We'd Have To Cut Schools, Hospitals, Police, and Fire Departments Again.
Slashdot Mirror
Serious question:
Is waiting until after you've released PARANOIA XP, and until after I've purchased my copy, before reporting both of you for treason on the grounds of that remark, itself an act of treason?
(Or is reporting you for "being inalterably opposed to such thought control" treason, on the grounds that as the sole protector of our freedoms, The Computer is also inalterably opposed to such thought control?)
>
> What's your clearance citizen?
The Computer has instructed me that are not cleared to know my clearence, Citizen. Why are you asking me to commit treason?
Why are you not watching CNN and reading the Federal Register, Citizen?
Speaking of prohibition, if we add a second sensor to the device that detects THC in your breath... if the vehicle has OnStar installed, the device silently phones the cops and reports your GPS location!
I'll bite.
But doesn't the Golden Rule say "Do unto others as you would have them to unto you" and/or "Love thy neighbor as thyself"?
On the first part of that, Christ may have said to pay your taxes -- to "render unto Caesar what is Caesar's" -- but he sure as hell didn't say "Petition Caesar that he rob Peter to pay Paul." The Biblical stance on charity is that it's only a good deed when you're voluntarily putting your own money down in the name of your spiritual convictions lie.
And what if all I want from my neighbor to be doing unto me is to be letting me live my life free from his meddling interference?
And as for the second part, I really don't think God intends that I be jerking my neighbor off. Coveting my neighbor's ass is also off the list. Coveting his wife? Also out. Doesn't say nuthin' about coveting my neighbor's wife's ass, though. (Woohoo! God is merciful!)
In the West, and specifically, the US, the rules are something like this:
To convict you, they need proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
To charge you -- that is, "to break down your door, take all your stuff, destroy your life and reputation, and make you do the perp walk in front of the cameras", they only need probable cause.
To get probable cause, they need only investigate you, and the outdated laws that used to hamstring government agencies from performing an effective investigation on the 'net have been amended.
In fact, the same laws that empower law enforcement to aggressively investigate clandestine criminal networks have also lowered the bar for seizure to less than "probable cause" in many cases!
Or did you miss every nauseating bleat from every ACLU-sympathizing Slashdot reader in every USA PATRIOT Act thread that's been posted since the smoke cleared in New York and DC?
Even if the ACLU sheep are wrong, it's clear that a Freenet node likely exposes you to legal risks far beyond what you run if you run a Kazaa node.
Choosing to take part in a civil conspiracy to piss off the RIAA and MPAA risks only your bank account. You might even land a contract with a soft drink producer to appear on television during the SuperBowl.
Choosing to take part of a criminal conspiracy to piss off law enforcement and intelligence agencies is a whole 'nother ball game. If you live in China, you might even land a contract with your government to appear in the stadium during the halftime public executions.
"Knowing How Not To Piss Off Cops" is a pretty good survival trait, even in our lenient legal system, and even when dealing with cops that aren't corrupt.
> In the Soviet Union soldiers drink coffee.
In Soviet Union, coffno, that's just what you want me to say, so I'm not gonna make the obvious cliche. Obviously, IT'S A TRAP!
Put some giant mecha-robots with mounted flamethrower attachments, C-130 Spectre gunships, and broadcast the whole thing in HDTV from remotely-operated (or better yet, autonomous) UAVs.
Call it "The Sack of Oaktown", and sell it as the Best. Reality. Show. Evah. On FOX!
>
>She may not have the looks but powerful professional women like her (and Hillary C) turn me on.
>
> Either of them is free to whip my ass raw with a riding crop and ream me with a strap-on dildo - anytime, anywhere.
You worked at HP too, huh?
>
>(This comment reminds me of that early ST:TNG episode where Wesley is to be executed for stepping on some flowers.)
Are you sure you're still against the death penalty to petty crimes? :)
I piss everyone off because I think that both the law enforcement and the prison industries consume far too many tax dollars. On grounds of fiscal sanity, I argue favor of legalizing (and taxing!) drugs, and in favor of eliminating the appeals process / expanding the use of the death penalty. Smoke and drink what you want at home, but if you drive to the 7-11 while under the influence, expect your next of kin to be notified within the hour as to where they can pick up your body and pay for the cost of the executing officer's bullet.
And this protects you from the following scenario, how?
"Your Honor. Agent Smith clicked on this link, which he reasonably believed to contain illegal content. A request went out from his machine to another machine on the network. Some packets got sent back from different machines. Illegal content was stored on our hard drive. Our client happens to have been modified to record the IP addresses of each encrypted chunk of every file as it's being downloaded. Our logs tell us that the 12 chunks that make up the illegal content came from the following 12 machines. With data shared from a source we're not necessarily going to talk much about, we were able to determine that 12 of these nodes were relaying requests (trafficking) but that 8 responded to requests from within their datastore (possession).
In order to prove that the owners of all 20 of these machines are cooperating as part of an illegal content distribution ring, we require a warrant that enables us to seize their equipment."
At this point, your life is over. You just don't know it until the flash-bang hits. All that's left (in the West) is to determine who get part of their life back after six-digit legal fees and several years in the legal system, or whether you get the Grand Prize of 15-20 in the Federal pound-me-in-the-ass pen. (The Chinese get no such choice; a healthy supply of organs is a nice source of hard currency.)
"After we have the warrants, we plan to take the copies of the hard drives from all 20 machines, set them up on a 21-machine lab LAN, and with a few fancy routers, re-create the network as it existed at the time of the crime. By clearing the datastore on our 21st machine and requesting the same key we did in the warrant, we intend to prove that all 20 defendants are engaged in a conspiracy to distribute illegal content. If we get the content from an air-gap isolated LAN, we've proved our case - the 20 defendants' machines collectively hold the illegal content and distribute it to anyone requesting a key."
Furthermore, a smart adversary will file based on a bunch of "popular" keys that are likely to be stored on any subset of 20 nodes based on its traffic analysis and/or profiles of time-taken-to-respond-to-request certain requests versus certain nodes as sampled over time without even making a request itself, simply by passively monitoring data from many chokepoints on the network for a sufficiently long period of time, but even if the adversary is dumb and only gets a warrant for a key it requested and is somehow unable to recreate the content in the crime lab, you're proven Not Guilty.
Big deal. It doesn't matter if you don't get the Grand Prize of 15-20 years. The damage (to your gear, your reputation, and your career) is done when the warrant is signed, not 6 years later when the dust settles.
If you want to run a Freenet node because you believe in anonymous free speech, and you understand that you could well become the test case for Ian and Matt's political stance, go right ahead. If you agree with Ian and Matt's stance, go right ahead -- it's a free country, which means you're allowed to do things that are of untested legality. You just have to be prepared to face the charges when people with differing legal opinions, differing political agendas, and overwhelmingly superior firepower decide to bring the matter before the courts.
I have a principled objection to running a Freenet node. My gear, my network, my rules. Freenet doesn't allow me to enforce my rules. So I enforced my rules the only way I could -- by not installing it.
There's also a practical objection
As is your absolute right, but if you were the same AC to which I'd responded who thought that by "someone getting hurt", I was playing the old Fed line about "protecting some poor kid who downloads bombmaking information", you you missed the point.
>
> What, so things can happen now with the internet which couldn't have happened before? No doubt you're thinking of bomb making or something? That's the example you always here. You know how easy it is to make an explosive? They practically tell you how on the news every time there's an attack on the American troops currently occupying Iraq, or on Israelis.
Boy did you miss the point. (Or you confused me with someone else.)
Seriously, I couldn't care less about Joe "One-beer-short-of-a" Sixpack downloadin' his good ol' self a copy of the Anarchist's Cookbook and promptly evolving himself out of the gene pool.
But I am worried about the one really unlucky Joe Sixpacks who get chosen as the first few test cases in the West. Some poor slob who think Freenet's just another way to "freely" swap MP3s with reduced risks of getting a nastygram from RIAA, but who wakes up to black-masked agents screaming "FEDERAL AGENT! WE KNOW YOU'RE HOSTING ILLEGAL PR0N! DON'T MOVE, YOU PERVERTED FREAK!"
The reference to someone getting killed is the fact that Unlucky Joe Sixpack isn't the worst case. The worst case is the prototypical pro-democracy dissident in China -- who (just like Unlucky Joe) thinks he and his friends are free to communicate using Ian and Matt's shiny toy, only to wake up to the sound of a round being chambered, and to never hear anything else again.
Take a close look at how Freenet nodes operate, and realize the minimal amount of traffic analysis that would be required on the part of any government agency to identify node operators and direct queries to guarantee that for any value of "contraband" required, some data corresponding to "contraband" exists on the node of the person selected to be the test case.
When Freenet was created, the technology to perform such an attack didn't exist in China, and the legal infrastructure of the West made any evidence gleaned as the result of such monitoring inadmissable. Neither of those two things are true any longer.
On a moral level, Freenet was a success: it proved the point that arguing for absolute anonymity really does mean having to deal with things you might find repugnant. (And I agree with its creators' stand -- if you can't deal with the ramifications of absolute anonymity, you have principled, not merely practical, grounds not to be a part of it.)
On a practical level, however, due to its susceptibility to traffic analysis and other forms of attack by a sufficiently well-motivated and well-funded opponent, and given that a sufficiently well-motivated-and-funded opponent exists on every chunk of addressable IP space on the planet, Freenet is a hazard to anyone actually using it.
Freenet is not Kazaa. The risks you face from running a Freenet node are far, far, far greater than what you risk from running a Kazaa node. In the case of the perverts, I'm OK with that. But I'm not OK with that when it's MP3 downloaders getting the perp walk for sex charges, and I'm very very not OK with that when it's the Chinese democracy movement getting a perp walk to the organ bank.
In China, Freenet is a tool used by mystics and political criminals to spread destabilizing propaganda and destroy the lawful government. The mystics and propagandists hide their subversion by claiming they're only interested in undermining America by hosting child pornography.
In America, Freenet is a tool used by scuzzball freaks to spread child porn. They hide their scuzzball freakism by claiming they're only using it to support the activities of pro-democracy activists in China.
Doesn't matter where you live. If you install Freenet, you're providing an attractive nuisance, and because the documentation clearly states that by running a Freenet node, you may be hosting content that is illegal in your jurisdiction, you knowingly make yourself an accessory to any and every crime committed by whatever brand of criminals happens to be living in your nation and trafficking data through your node.
FreeNet was a superb demonstration of how decoupling the right to speak freely from the responsibilities that come with that right can lead to disaster.
It was an interesting social experiment, but it's served its purpose, and IMO the time to pull the plug is long overdue.
Finally, on a practical level, for all the high sentiment about "countries with sane laws" touted by Ian and Matt, if you run a Freenet node, it's your door, not theirs, that will be broken down. If Ian and Matt want to take such a radical stand for free speech, let them host the illegal content, and let them take the risks.
Foisting that risk off onto a bunch of noobs who think "oooh! P2P shiny! MP3z and b00bies!" without being made fully aware of the legal risk that comes with the phrase "attractive nuisance" in a Western legal system is reckless and irresponsible of the Freenet team. When the first Freenet test cases come down (and these cases will come down as traffic analysis without a warrant is now fully legal under USA PATRIOT, and always was legal behind the Great Firewall), I hope that those charged in the test cases conclude that they have civil grounds to sue the organizers, maintainers, and contributors to the Freenet project into well-deserved legal oblivion.
Users on the Western nations' monitored networks have it easy - they only get faced with seizure of their hardware, a sex crime record, and 10-15 years. Users of Freenet in China get to supply corneas, kidneys, and lungs to Westerners smart enough not to run it.
Ian, Matt: You made your point -- absolute anonymity means we'll have to face some things we don't like. Now pull the plug before someone gets killed.
Yes, that's what he meant. You, I, and Sir Clarke are all talking about the same "Dark Dune Spot" phenomena.
>
> "Reverse Polish Notation, in which he speaks."
"In days of Warsaw Pact, he spoke in Reverse Polish Notation!"
Amen to that.
> He has some fascinating opinions on Martian life, for example.
From the article: "Well, I think they've already found life. There's some pictures from the laboratories which seem to me to be unmistakably vegetation-leaves and stems and things. I don't see what else it could possibly be."
But with all due respect, Sir Clarke, what pictures are these again? Fark photoshops don't count.
His Dark Dune Spots look a lot more like some sort of outgassing (well, out-watering or out-CO2ing, which would in itself be interesting, but isn't proof of life) or wind-related phenomenon than trees.
With the new orbiter, we should get some new data that could resolve this question.
>
> And now that its got wide coverage , everyone we call wants to be or has applied to be on the FTC's list.All this is besides the numerous state lists that are maintained by all the states.
"Good!"
If that doesn't make my opinion clear, I have another response that should make it three times as clear.
"Good! Fuck you!"
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> Guy at home: Sorry, I am on the do-no-call list
>
> Marketer: Yes, but we have an exceptional product which you might be interested in, in exchange for your donation.
>
>Guy at home: How the hell can you be nonprofit and sell shit at the same time?
Simple! Use this price list from a representative 501(c)3 UFO cult!
How do you get to be a 501(c)3 UFO cult? You DDOS the IRS with "individual" subpoenas, and if you've got enough dirt on enough politicians, the IRS caves.
Correct. I'm not interested in acquiring either one, and even if I had a wife, I don't have enough money to adequately fund the raising of offspring. I'd therefore choose not to reproduce, even if I had a spouse.
> And investments? You *have* any?
I do, however, have investments. Having no children leaves me with plenty of disposable income to invest as I see fit. :)
Anyone could have made an easy easier 50% by buying the semi-random basket of stocks that make up the NASDAQ 100 index, symbol QQQ, or 22% by investing in the S&P 500 (SPX).
You could have made an even better return if you'd realized that not only is the economy doing well, but that the right time to invest is often when the bombs start to fall. Bombs falling mean the elimination of uncertainty, and with the uncertainty eliminated about when the inevtiable war would begin, traders could refocus on the growing economy.
Look at archive.org's news headlines. Every day the UN seemed to gain the upper hand, indicating "peace" (as in, a prolonging of the uncertainty), the markets dropped. Every day the headlines reflected the US's increasing willingness to ignore the UN, the markets went up.
The exact bottom of the market was within 72 hours of the first bomb's drop, and coincided precisely with the news media touting "quagmire" as the fastest mechanised infantry advance in military history stopped for 12 hours to refuel.
In short, the UN and the punditocracy got it all wrong, as they usually do. Following the pattern set during Gulf War I, the week of trade immediately following 9/11, Gulf War II was yet another case in point that periods of war and uncertainty are more often than not, the best buying opportunities an individual investor will ever see in his or her life.
I still have no use for a family, but if I trade the next couple of wars as well as I did the last ones (I missed 9/11, but I caught Gulf War II), I'd probably have enough money to acquire and support one.
Trading is a great game. Money's just a way of keeping score.
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> > TX25 Super Dildo $500
>> Best of Jenna Jameson DVD Collection $100
>> Hello Clitty Leatherette S&M Collection $400
>
>These were business related expenses about and thus a tax credit is due. Included is a sample of my work.
>
>Thank You,
>John Doe Taxpayer
"P.S. Aren't you glad I produced this work, rather than applying for a state arts grant for my artistic project entitled The Goatse Guy Enema Monologues Part IX?" :)
I'm from Kalifornia. Your comment is an automatic (+5, Funny) around here.
It is, however, a great way of making sure productive citizens never accumulate sufficient wealth to flee to places where their capital is respected.
It's also a great way of making sure that there's a willing army of ditchdiggers who can always be counted upon to vote for more publicly-funded ditch-digging projects.
AS WELL YOU SHOULD, CITIZEN!
- Your Overlords. Because Without Us, Old People Would Starve And Your Children Would Suffer, Because We'd Have To Cut Schools, Hospitals, Police, and Fire Departments Again.