> So if a member of the government asks you to do something that you know is illegal you would do it?
If the price was right (in terms of increasing the likelihood of getting more government contracts in the future), and if you were so big that there's nothing that could be done to you even if the government stabs you in the back, absolutely.
AT&T meets both of these requirements. Lots of money to be made working for the government, and the threat of an Enron- or Worldcom-sized shock to the economy if any future administration should dare to doublecross it by permitting it to be sued for 300,000,000 privacy violations carrying a $10,000 fine for each violation.
That's the dangerous precedent that's been set here. Working with the intelligence community was the thin edge of the wedge. In the case of the intel community, there's no controlling legal authority... not because our spies are such s00per-s33krit-d00dz of l33t that we dare not expose their actions to the light of day, but because everyone (the judges included) took a hard look at the situation and decided to legalize any behavior that might otherwise result in a $3T lawsuit and the effective shutdown of the nation's re-assembled telecom monopoly.
Given that precedent, it's no big jump for a MAFIAA goon to ponder what it'll cost to get AT&T do do the same for its clients. The reason there's no controlling legal authority because no legal authority dare impose the sort of control that'd be necessary to dissuade an entity like AT&T.
> We're left to wonder about the legal implications of that
No we're not. When AT&T permitted NSA to infiltrate/subvert its network in order to monitor all domestic and foreign Intarweb traffic, it broke enough privacy laws that the legal consequences would require the dissolution of the company.
Unlike Arthur Andersen and the Enron scandal, AT&T and the other US telcos are "too big to fail". Because no penalty can be assessed without bankrupting AT&T, no penalty can be assessed, period.
Now that the precedent has been set for some crimes (to date, those involving national security), there's nothing to stop it from being applied to other crimes (namely, those involving copying pictures of a cartoon mouse, or sounds emitted from a plastic-titted starlet).
As prophesized by the late, great Douglas Adams, the legal implications to AT&T are as follows:
"Have you any idea how much damage that bulldozer would suffer if I just let it roll straight over you?" said Mr. Prosser.
"How much?" asked Arthur. "None at all," replied Prosser.
> I tested a table-top demonstration model, but here's how it works in the field.
No, the table-top demonstration model is the one that's intended for use in the field. For values of "field" ranging towards "dark basements in former Soviet bloc countries, to whom we've paid good money for plausible deniability".
Unless the "production" model is composed of an array of those table-top demonstration models (and to give Raytheon the benefit of the doubt, it might be), there are very few military applications to even try to scale the device down to "trade-show booth" form factor.
Either way, I'm glad I'm long Raytheon. From WW2-era radar stations, to the microwave oven, to new and emerging markets including crowd control and individual torture, manipulation of RF energy has been a consistent profit generator.
"...I tossed off in 10 minutes to something that has spread all around the world", Fahlman was quoted as saying in a university statement.
Well, haven't we all?
It's the absence of a smiley that differentiates academic discourse from the sort of things that are transmitted by chatting softwares, or leaked through editorial boardses.;-)
> "You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem".
> >It's not exactly true. You can very well do so. To expect a determinable result is to court dissapointment, however.
Or as Scott Adams put it (01/23/1996):
(Dilbert is working on a "new technology to prevent kids from seeing smut on the Internet") Dogbert:"So, you're pitting your intelligence against the collective sex drive of all the teenagers who own computers?"
Dilbert: "What is your point?"
Dogbert: "Did you know that if you put a little hat on a snowball it can last a long time in hell?"
> How do I prove I landed a robot on the Moon? Can I just email a link to a YouTube video (that I shot at Capricorn One Studios)?
Use a solar-powered antenna to broadcast this on a HAM band. Once a month.
Then kick back and enjoy the FCC going into paroxysms of incoherent rage trying to shut down a pirate radio broadcaster who happens to have a transmitter on The Fucking Moon. (Sure, the FCC can pull your licnese, but it'll still have to divert half its budget into a followup lunar mission to shut the transmitter off!)
> One good thing about all these things is that, pretty soon people will be so horrified by the user experience in the Windows, they will be pushed into adopting Linux. After all it is the well integrated pop-up blocker that created the initial mass of downloads for Firefox.
The day after this patent is approved, Firefox may well be subject to an infringement claim. After all, you have to know something about how Microsoft's next-gen operating-system-generated pop-ups in order to block them.
> The difference, is those very same 'some people' contributes a lot to the congresscritters' re-election funds while the 'a lot of people' do not. Take a wild guess which way the IP laws tilt for.
It used to be RIAA over CCIA, because pop starlets were generally hotter than technology geeks, even if technology was a bigger industry than recorded music.
On the upside, after seeing Britney Spears' comeback attempt this week (ironically, on YouTube, and under fair use)... maybe snorting one's cocaine from 'twixt RMS's manboobs is the better offer. Particularly for the Republican senators, even the heterosexual ones:)
Re:I'd only recommend the 360 version
on
BioShock Review
·
· Score: 4, Funny
> I was hoping they would release a patch, but so far nothing.
> If your phone is a node how easy would it be to listen in on conversations compared to how the phone systems currently work?
Probably a lot easier for another node to listen in. Probably a lot harder for the Government to listen in, until they write some tracking software.
Unfortunately for anyone building a P2P wireless mesh network, the way you solve the first problem (casual eavesdroppers) involves crypto of sufficient strength to make government eavesdropping impractical.
We're therefore presented with a technology that's in the interest of the consumer, but counter to the interests of the telcos and the government. No P2P wireless mesh networks will be permitted to proliferate.
> Just like eavesdropping on conversations helped the KGB find and arrest dissidents in the (former) Soviet Union. > >
Which we appear to be heading towards faster and faster with each passing day!
USSR's NKVD/GRU/KGB/FSB: Proof-of-concept, R&D labs, etc.
DDR's STASI: Alpha release. A society of informers, all recordkeeping on paper. Economy collapses due to 25% of the population being informants instead of doing anything productive.
China's Great Firewall: Beta programme. Deploy Western technology (CSCO, YHOO, GOOG) to automate the process. Scalability problems prevent tracking of dissidents, but at least it's possible to censor material from the population and limit dissident growth rates.
USSA: Live deployment. Smaller population (300M vs. 1+B) permits monitoring of dissidents without the requirement for censorship. Why censor when you can simply watch what your citizens look at, and disappear the ones that look problematic?:)
> BioWare titles are huge, from a writing standpoint. Most are in the neighborhood of some 500,000 words, with more than a million possible in some of their games.
Reminds me of an old Infocom slogan: The best graphics are in the mind.
Good writing is a way to bring immersion into a game, and bad writing is an equally effective way to break it. Morrowind:TES was a good example of both -- the static dialog trees were instantly abstracted into "click here to get the next quest".
But the books... I wound up with a house full of books, and spent hours reading them.
Things that, on first reading, seemed like random theological mumbo-jumbo, became vitally important backstory. My greatest disappointment with TES was the final battle -- I not only knew what precisely what the Bad Guy was up to and why the Dwarves disappeared, I had all the tools (and knowledge, in the form of the books) to complete the project and/or replicate the experiment. That woulda been a hell of an ending, and it would have been an ending that would have been unachievable without a lot of in-game independent study (trivial to check for; simply have an invisible flag that's set, per book, after it's been open for more than 15 seconds. If every book on a certain list has been "read", unlock the "player figured out what was really going on" alternate ending.)
A MMORPG that did something like this -- selectively unlocking quests based on the player's experience with backstory-related items and silently tagging those experiences to the character -- could have great immersion potential. At the very least, it would be a great refresher from the traditional "$ANIMAL are overpopulated due to $EVENT, please find $NUMBER of $BODYPARTS and return them to $NPC for $REWARD" dreck.
> This problem -- with user-generated content not being properly vetted by marketing departments before being juxaposed with ads -- is common to the "Web 2.0". Nobody has a "solution" to it, and the true solution is that advertisers need to buck up and learn that they can't micromanage every single waking moments of our day.
I propose the following solution: Fuck Web 2.0, fuck marketing departments, and fuck advertisers.
> Not to be some kind of bizarre technoutopian, but actually people think and act in ways that may be unpleasant to their fellows. The world doesn't actually look like one of those 1980s "Buy the World a Coke" ads.
Fuck the world. I just wanted a Pepsi. (And they wouldn't give it to me...)
> > Plot idea 2: Now-ish. Script kiddie unleashes attack using enormous botnet. Runs out of control. Becomes so deeply imbedded into internet that it's impossible to shut down without "rebooting" the whole infrastructure. With hilarious consequences. > >
>Pat Cadigan, Synners, 1991 >
(for various versions of "script kiddie", I guess)
Plot Idea 4: 2010. You're a hacker for hire, working with others under the umbrella of the Uplink Corporation. Breaking into other companies' networks, and stealing data is how you pay your bills. A few weeks after you get started, you hear rumors that Andromeda Research Corporation is working on a big project. A really big project. A project so big that when information about it starts to leak out, people start dying. If you're clever enough to figure out what ARC's up to... do you try to join them or try to fight them?
Most fun-per-buck I had on any software I bought in 2002. Great game, slick interface, fantastic soundtrack, and runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux.
That's the 1966 version. Obsolete. Get the 1982 upgrade.
("This is very important, Mister Gant. You must think in Russian -- you can't think in English and transpose it...")
The tech described in the article is surprisingly like the movie, right down to Clint Eastwood's subvocalizing the commands in his head after attempting (and failing) to fire the rearward missile in English, and only succeeding when he subvocalized the command while thinking in Russian.
> On the other hand, things like this make me wonder about biological weapons. As this technology matures, it will get easier and easier, and be available cheaper and cheaper to create artificial lifeforms. You see it on the Internet... script kiddies have an immense amount of power to destroy property. Once biolife is cheap and easy, and you get a human-hating nut who *wants* to destroy humanity, how can you stop it?
> >
It won't be war that kills everyone, it'll be the lone Unibomber type.
Greg Egan's The Moral Virologist indirectly addresses your point, and is one of the most fascinating short stories you'll ever read.
"We hold life to be sacred, but we also know the foundation of life consists in a stream of codes not so different from the successive frames of a watchvid. Why then cannot we cut one code short here, and start another there? Is life so fragile that it can withstand no tampering? Does the sacred brook no improvement?" - Chairman Sheng-ji Yang (The Human Hive), Dynamics of Mind
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, didn't you mean "Change them to 'American dollar jokes', eh?", you hoser?
So, anyways, today will be a day long remembered, eh? It has seen the end of the the US Dollar, it will soon see the end of the Empire, eh?
If the price was right (in terms of increasing the likelihood of getting more government contracts in the future), and if you were so big that there's nothing that could be done to you even if the government stabs you in the back, absolutely.
AT&T meets both of these requirements. Lots of money to be made working for the government, and the threat of an Enron- or Worldcom-sized shock to the economy if any future administration should dare to doublecross it by permitting it to be sued for 300,000,000 privacy violations carrying a $10,000 fine for each violation.
That's the dangerous precedent that's been set here. Working with the intelligence community was the thin edge of the wedge. In the case of the intel community, there's no controlling legal authority... not because our spies are such s00per-s33krit-d00dz of l33t that we dare not expose their actions to the light of day, but because everyone (the judges included) took a hard look at the situation and decided to legalize any behavior that might otherwise result in a $3T lawsuit and the effective shutdown of the nation's re-assembled telecom monopoly.
Given that precedent, it's no big jump for a MAFIAA goon to ponder what it'll cost to get AT&T do do the same for its clients. The reason there's no controlling legal authority because no legal authority dare impose the sort of control that'd be necessary to dissuade an entity like AT&T.
No we're not. When AT&T permitted NSA to infiltrate/subvert its network in order to monitor all domestic and foreign Intarweb traffic, it broke enough privacy laws that the legal consequences would require the dissolution of the company.
Unlike Arthur Andersen and the Enron scandal, AT&T and the other US telcos are "too big to fail". Because no penalty can be assessed without bankrupting AT&T, no penalty can be assessed, period.
Now that the precedent has been set for some crimes (to date, those involving national security), there's nothing to stop it from being applied to other crimes (namely, those involving copying pictures of a cartoon mouse, or sounds emitted from a plastic-titted starlet).
As prophesized by the late, great Douglas Adams, the legal implications to AT&T are as follows:
"Have you any idea how much damage that bulldozer would suffer if I just let it roll straight over you?" said Mr. Prosser.
"How much?" asked Arthur.
"None at all," replied Prosser.
No, the table-top demonstration model is the one that's intended for use in the field. For values of "field" ranging towards "dark basements in former Soviet bloc countries, to whom we've paid good money for plausible deniability".
Unless the "production" model is composed of an array of those table-top demonstration models (and to give Raytheon the benefit of the doubt, it might be), there are very few military applications to even try to scale the device down to "trade-show booth" form factor.
Either way, I'm glad I'm long Raytheon. From WW2-era radar stations, to the microwave oven, to new and emerging markets including crowd control and individual torture, manipulation of RF energy has been a consistent profit generator.
"...I tossed off in 10 minutes to something that has spread all around the world", Fahlman was quoted as saying in a university statement.
Well, haven't we all?
It's the absence of a smiley that differentiates academic discourse from the sort of things that are transmitted by chatting softwares, or leaked through editorial boardses. ;-)
>
>It's not exactly true. You can very well do so. To expect a determinable result is to court dissapointment, however.
Or as Scott Adams put it (01/23/1996):
(Dilbert is working on a "new technology to prevent kids from seeing smut on the Internet")
Dogbert:"So, you're pitting your intelligence against the collective sex drive of all the teenagers who own computers?"
Dilbert: "What is your point?"
Dogbert: "Did you know that if you put a little hat on a snowball it can last a long time in hell?"
"Customers." They keep using that word. I do not think that word means what most of us think it means.
OEMs are the customer. The end user who purchases a PC from an OEM and finds himself dependent on Microsoft is not the customer, he is the product.
Use a solar-powered antenna to broadcast this on a HAM band. Once a month.
Then kick back and enjoy the FCC going into paroxysms of incoherent rage trying to shut down a pirate radio broadcaster who happens to have a transmitter on The Fucking Moon. (Sure, the FCC can pull your licnese, but it'll still have to divert half its budget into a followup lunar mission to shut the transmitter off!)
The day after this patent is approved, Firefox may well be subject to an infringement claim. After all, you have to know something about how Microsoft's next-gen operating-system-generated pop-ups in order to block them.
It used to be RIAA over CCIA, because pop starlets were generally hotter than technology geeks, even if technology was a bigger industry than recorded music.
On the upside, after seeing Britney Spears' comeback attempt this week (ironically, on YouTube, and under fair use)... maybe snorting one's cocaine from 'twixt RMS's manboobs is the better offer. Particularly for the Republican senators, even the heterosexual ones :)
"Who is Bill Gates?"
- Microsoft Shrugged
>
> Before running into the office all by himself?
Hey, at least I got a red stapler.
Probably a lot easier for another node to listen in. Probably a lot harder for the Government to listen in, until they write some tracking software.
Unfortunately for anyone building a P2P wireless mesh network, the way you solve the first problem (casual eavesdroppers) involves crypto of sufficient strength to make government eavesdropping impractical.
We're therefore presented with a technology that's in the interest of the consumer, but counter to the interests of the telcos and the government. No P2P wireless mesh networks will be permitted to proliferate.
>
> Which we appear to be heading towards faster and faster with each passing day!
USSR's NKVD/GRU/KGB/FSB: Proof-of-concept, R&D labs, etc. :)
DDR's STASI: Alpha release. A society of informers, all recordkeeping on paper. Economy collapses due to 25% of the population being informants instead of doing anything productive.
China's Great Firewall: Beta programme. Deploy Western technology (CSCO, YHOO, GOOG) to automate the process. Scalability problems prevent tracking of dissidents, but at least it's possible to censor material from the population and limit dissident growth rates.
USSA: Live deployment. Smaller population (300M vs. 1+B) permits monitoring of dissidents without the requirement for censorship. Why censor when you can simply watch what your citizens look at, and disappear the ones that look problematic?
Gates: You got your Javascript in my Windows!
Web2.0: You got your Windows in my Javascript!
Your USB stick is easier to use and faster. But behold! My block of swiss cheese has a stronger security model!
Reminds me of an old Infocom slogan: The best graphics are in the mind.
Good writing is a way to bring immersion into a game, and bad writing is an equally effective way to break it. Morrowind:TES was a good example of both -- the static dialog trees were instantly abstracted into "click here to get the next quest". But the books... I wound up with a house full of books, and spent hours reading them.
Things that, on first reading, seemed like random theological mumbo-jumbo, became vitally important backstory. My greatest disappointment with TES was the final battle -- I not only knew what precisely what the Bad Guy was up to and why the Dwarves disappeared, I had all the tools (and knowledge, in the form of the books) to complete the project and/or replicate the experiment. That woulda been a hell of an ending, and it would have been an ending that would have been unachievable without a lot of in-game independent study (trivial to check for; simply have an invisible flag that's set, per book, after it's been open for more than 15 seconds. If every book on a certain list has been "read", unlock the "player figured out what was really going on" alternate ending.)
A MMORPG that did something like this -- selectively unlocking quests based on the player's experience with backstory-related items and silently tagging those experiences to the character -- could have great immersion potential. At the very least, it would be a great refresher from the traditional "$ANIMAL are overpopulated due to $EVENT, please find $NUMBER of $BODYPARTS and return them to $NPC for $REWARD" dreck.
I propose the following solution: Fuck Web 2.0, fuck marketing departments, and fuck advertisers.
> Not to be some kind of bizarre technoutopian, but actually people think and act in ways that may be unpleasant to their fellows. The world doesn't actually look like one of those 1980s "Buy the World a Coke" ads.
Fuck the world. I just wanted a Pepsi. (And they wouldn't give it to me...)
It's sorta like Alien vs. Predator, but backwards. Whoever loses, we win.
>
>
>Pat Cadigan, Synners, 1991
> (for various versions of "script kiddie", I guess)
Plot Idea 4: 2010. You're a hacker for hire, working with others under the umbrella of the Uplink Corporation. Breaking into other companies' networks, and stealing data is how you pay your bills. A few weeks after you get started, you hear rumors that Andromeda Research Corporation is working on a big project. A really big project. A project so big that when information about it starts to leak out, people start dying. If you're clever enough to figure out what ARC's up to... do you try to join them or try to fight them?
Most fun-per-buck I had on any software I bought in 2002. Great game, slick interface, fantastic soundtrack, and runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Done!.
Disclaimer: Doesn't actually come with a thought-controlled interface, but what did you expect from 1982's technology?
That's the 1966 version. Obsolete. Get the 1982 upgrade.
("This is very important, Mister Gant. You must think in Russian -- you can't think in English and transpose it...")
The tech described in the article is surprisingly like the movie, right down to Clint Eastwood's subvocalizing the commands in his head after attempting (and failing) to fire the rearward missile in English, and only succeeding when he subvocalized the command while thinking in Russian.
s/viv/nam/
(Fixed it for you.)
>
> It won't be war that kills everyone, it'll be the lone Unibomber type.
Greg Egan's The Moral Virologist indirectly addresses your point, and is one of the most fascinating short stories you'll ever read.
"We hold life to be sacred, but we also know the foundation of life consists in a stream of codes not so different from the successive frames of a watchvid. Why then cannot we cut one code short here, and start another there? Is life so fragile that it can withstand no tampering? Does the sacred brook no improvement?"
- Chairman Sheng-ji Yang (The Human Hive), Dynamics of Mind
AT&T: Your world, delivered. To NSA.
Cingular: Lowering the bar.
> We're screwing you for your own good.
OK, fess up. Which telco are you working for?