> Now, perhaps a few of them have
expired visas, but I have serious doubts that these are 1000 terrorists.
Actually, that might be one legitimate excuse for grepping all mail and recording for the identities of noncitizens - finding people with expired visas who've gone underground, whether terrorists or not.
Given that INS is short-staffed and can barely afford to do its jobs (serving legal immigrants, while guarding the border against illegals), I've always wondered why INS - who knows everyone's visa status and expiry dates, and who knows where all legal aliens reside (failure of an alien to report a change in address is in itself grounds for deportation, so if the alien isn't where he's supposed to be, he's already guilty) - can't just forward this information to local law enforcement and let them take care of the knocking-down-doors stuff.
A simple FAX would be all it'd take. "Fred Bloggs' visa expired six months ago. He's not just out of status, he's in unlawful status. The email-grepper shows he's still within local calling distance of his home at 111 Any Street, Anytown USA, and is usually online from 5pm to 8pm. We can't afford to get him ourselves, because we only have $20 to spend. We spent it on two dozen Krispy Kremes and some good coffee, which are up for grabs for the officers in the first squad car that shows up on our doorstep with Mr. Bloggs in the back seat. Drop by and see us sometime."
> Exactly how is your freedom and/or liberty curtailed by this bill? Exactly what are you unable to do now that you were able to do
before?
Criticize some of the provisions in this bill without having the supporters and enforcers of those provisions simultaneously being aware of it.
A crime requires both a motive and an opportunity. The supporters and enforcers of those provisions now have the opportunity -- and in such a regime, it becomes incumbent upon me not to provide them with a motive.
This, for instance, will be the last time I criticize this bill.
> Google does pay attention to quotation marks, although it ignores small common words like 'a' and 'the' making it
a little annoying.
I recognize this is important from an indexing and performance point of view, but it makes some queries extremely difficult.
For instance, how would you search for the source of the quotation "Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party"? That'll get cut down to "now time good men come aid party", and while I can think of a lot of web sites that might appear as a result of such a query, about 99% of them will probably not be what I'm looking for.
The problem is particularly annoying when you're looking for things like song lyrics. (Curse you, Harry Fox, may you rot in hell for eternity for what you pigfuckers did to lyrics.ch.)
> For a real bit of fun try setting up a screen saver that "counts down" when the machine is powered up.
Yeah, I've gotta change my "Danger / Self-Destruct System Activated" BIOS boot-logo. Looks great when plugged into a projector or big-screen TV and I'm about to start DJing with a pile of MP3z on the hard drive. Probably looks less-than-great if I have to power up at an airport.
> > I just found it interesting that one of two surviving Enigma boxen is "valued at" $144,000. > What? Didn't we just hear an announcement [slashdot.org] that Enigma is free (as in beer AND speech)?
And besides, why pay $144,000 for a cryptosystem that was cracked 60 years ago?
Oh, I get it, that's gonna be the "civilian-grade" encryption US companies will be allowed to use when all this terrorist mess is over;-)
(And under DMCA, reading about Bletchley Park is illegal -- so evidently the first American to buy an Enigma and cr4x0r it again will have a big leg up on the rest of us;-)
> Land a fscking probe there and tell me if there's life or not.
C'mon, we land a probe on Mars every year or so. Only problem is, if there's life on Mars, any life around the vicinity of our landing sites is vaporized or crushed by our landing technique.
("Oh, you mean you wanted the probe to be functional after it lands. Sorry, that'll cost extra! And one guy forgot to specify whether he wanted his probe in solid, liquid, or gaseous form upon landing. He was on a budget, so we went with gaseous.")
Tell me about it. I nearly shat myself with surprise when I laid out some bait, saw it getting mobbed with hundreds of ants, including a queen. I remember asking myself "WTF's the queen doing out here where she could get crushed?"
Then I did some research, and I'm glad I didn't kill the queen on sight - presumably she took the bait back to the rest of the nest, or it was a small nest with only one or two queens, because I never saw another ant in the building again.
But yeah, that was weird, seeing the queen showing up for dinner.
> perhaps [the poster of SOS] could try posting that in afghanistan.. oh, no, they outlawed COMMUNICATING IN ENGLISH THERE.
OK, that's Afghanistan, France, and Quebec;-)
(More seriously - thanks for posting Orwell's notes on pacifism - I liked the irony of SOS, but I do wish the site designer had stuck to the issue, namely the erosion of civil liberties as a result of this war, rather than just calling for pacifism. Speaking for myself, I believe this particular war is just; the erosion of civil liberties is not, and the SOS site maintainer's inability to distinguish between the two issues detracts from the value of the satire.)
Because these are two largest examples of nations who have have set their networks up such that all traffic within their borders is monitored by law enforcement.
While I agree that Chinese and Russian citizens are arguably more free than the citizens in certain Arab regimes (interesting, why didn't you list the Taliban in your list of Bad Places? Embarassed about something?), and I agree that even when FBI gets its hands on everyone's communications, US citizens will still be more free than those of Russia and China, I'm still distressed at the fact that US citizens will be less-free than they were before FBI instituted its "webtap" -- which appears to be nothing more than a carbon copy of the systems instituted by Russia and China.
> Tapping the net is chickenshit compared to this [thetimes.co.uk report - FBI considers torture]. I am not suprised to see neither the American media or BBC reporting this.
I disagree.
Torture takes effort - an FBI permitted to use torture would be physically unable to use it in the violation of the civil liberties of 300,000,000 Americans, simply because it'd take too long to work their way through the population, even if every FBI agent went berzerk and started torturing everyone they met for the sheer hell of it.
Passive electronic monitoring doesn't take effort - every citizen's right to be secure against unreasonable search and seizure is violated the instant they flip the switch on the Mother Of All Carnivores.
Put another way - there's a reason why people get dozens of spams per day (sometimes per hour), while still only getting three or four telemarketing calls per week.
> What a useless waste of time on the government's part. I mean really, let's say they manage to tap the whole internet, that's what, 1,
2 billion using it? Okay, most of those people doing things like "hi how's it going emails". Let's say there's an equal distribution of 1
terrorist for ever 100 000 legitimate users. Oh yah, they're going catch them. What, doing a word search on the packets?
Conclusion obvious: Because it's plainly obvious that this will not locate terrorists, the logical conclusion is that finding terrorists is not why they want to implement this.
> That is why some friends and I have formed the Students for an Orwellian
Society [studentsfororwell.org] (SOS). Because 2001 is 17 years too late.
Confession: I read this and thought it was really good satire. I have already contacted Miniluv to report my thoughtcrime, or rather, they have already contacted me;-)
> don't overlook that this will slow internet traffic down considerably. Imagine peeking
in on every packet sent! Further, to accomodate this I have a feeling the cost will be passed down to you and I--the taxpaying
public.
Yeah, that's the other reason I prefer leaving stuff like this to spooks instead of cops, namely that if it's gotta be done, NSA's geeks can probably do it without bogging down the 'net. (I have a hunch that if by some miracle FBI does it without screwing up performance, they'll bog down the 'net on purpose just to ask for more funding next year;-)
Awright feebs, I've ragged on you enough for one day. I'll stop now before you knock my door down in the middle of the night.
> I always though the NSA was doing this already. So why worry?
The difference is that NSA is an intelligence organization, not a law enforcement organization.
That is, NSA doesn't care about who you slept with last night, your tastes in g0at-pr0n, whether you may or may not have indulged in recreational pharmaceuticals in your misspent youth, how many MP3z and warez you download, or whether you traffic in copy control circumvention devices. Even if you assume (incorrectly) that they want to spy on US citizens, keeping track of jaywalkers is not their mandate, and they're busy enough with the stuff that is their mandate.
It is, however, entirely within the FBI's mandate, as enforcers of the law, to "sweat the small stuff". Today, they hunt terrorists with guns, when they're gone, they'll scour the database to find the terrorists with drugs, and next year, they'll start earning their keep by nailing the copyright terrorists.
Spooks have better things to do with their time. Cops don't.
If he'll forgive the armchair quarterbacking, perhaps Mr. Gates will allow someone to give him a primer on "industrial terrorism":
Scanning port 137.
Zombifying some machines to DDOS eBay.
writing c0de r3d and writing 4LL J00r IIS R B3L0NG 2 US on your website.
Flying three commercial aircraft, fully-loaded with fuel, into office buildings, murdering 6000-7000 people in the process, wiping out $100B in property, shutting down all commercial air traffic for days, practically bankrupting half the airline industry, knocking out Wall Street for a week, and making hundreds of millions in profits by buying put options on airline stocks the week before you attack.
"One of these things is not like the other. One of these things does not belong."
> As for your claims that "DRM hurts our economy...very badly", well I have to basically
leave that since you provide no evidence - just faith - that the absence of DRM would HELP the economy.
I can't see how preventing people from illegally distributing and copying music and software they don't own
can possibly HELP the economy.
Really? Consider this:
Suppose I produce $50,000 worth of code in a year. My employer hands me a fat check. After taxes and living expenses, I have about $10,000.
Scenario 1: I purchase 588 compact discs (at $17 each, for $10,000) of RIAA-approved content.
Some artists get $600 to spend on tax, living expenses, guitars, and syntheziers.
The music seller gets about $2500 or so. He buys food with it.
A CD pressing factory gets about $1000. They buy fancy chemicals and mastering equipment with it.
Hilary Rosen and her friends get about $4100 to spend on hookers and booze Congresscritters, to pass more laws to restrict my freedom.
Scenario 2: I download the music "for free".
A premium USENET provider gets $500 to buy servers and fat pipes with.
My ISP gets $500 to buy servers and fat pipes with.
588 CDs is about 700 hours of music, and at 192kbps. A CD-R pressing factory gets about $50 for a spindle of 200 quality CD-Rs. (one for originals, one for backups)
A hard drive manufacturer gets $250 for a 100G drive.
I drop about $1000 on hardware - mostly wiring and cabling and speakers - and wire my entire house for sound. When my friends can hear any song they want, in any room of the house they want, any time they want, they ph33r me, and want to do the same themselves.
Oh, shit, I still have $7700 left!
...$7100 when I'm paying $600 through Fairtunes.
In the pretense of evening this out, I decide I'm willing to operate under the same economic handicap that Hilary Rosen has, so I drop the $4100 to EFF and let them buy Congresscritters instead.
Even after this, I still have $3000 of capital left over to invest in an IPO - the direct funding of new ideas and businesses.
Now... explain to me again why paying $17 per CD is good for overall economic growth?
> Ha ha. The way they're posing makes it look like they're a bunch of pro wrestlers or something.
That guy in the background on the left... classic! And the guy pointing at the camera? woohoo.
They're going to lay the legislative smack down on y'all!
Geez, that photo's so fake I looked for "Tourist Guy" in it!
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, that might be one legitimate excuse for grepping all mail and recording for the identities of noncitizens - finding people with expired visas who've gone underground, whether terrorists or not.
Given that INS is short-staffed and can barely afford to do its jobs (serving legal immigrants, while guarding the border against illegals), I've always wondered why INS - who knows everyone's visa status and expiry dates, and who knows where all legal aliens reside (failure of an alien to report a change in address is in itself grounds for deportation, so if the alien isn't where he's supposed to be, he's already guilty) - can't just forward this information to local law enforcement and let them take care of the knocking-down-doors stuff.
A simple FAX would be all it'd take. "Fred Bloggs' visa expired six months ago. He's not just out of status, he's in unlawful status. The email-grepper shows he's still within local calling distance of his home at 111 Any Street, Anytown USA, and is usually online from 5pm to 8pm. We can't afford to get him ourselves, because we only have $20 to spend. We spent it on two dozen Krispy Kremes and some good coffee, which are up for grabs for the officers in the first squad car that shows up on our doorstep with Mr. Bloggs in the back seat. Drop by and see us sometime."
Criticize some of the provisions in this bill without having the supporters and enforcers of those provisions simultaneously being aware of it.
A crime requires both a motive and an opportunity. The supporters and enforcers of those provisions now have the opportunity -- and in such a regime, it becomes incumbent upon me not to provide them with a motive.
This, for instance, will be the last time I criticize this bill.
I love my country. I fear my government.
My jaw dropped when I saw these things on TV and heard the word "nervous network". Very cool, for those who don't want to build their own.
Great. Does this mean we have to have an unconstitutional DMPA to go along with the unconstitutional DMCA?
I recognize this is important from an indexing and performance point of view, but it makes some queries extremely difficult.
For instance, how would you search for the source of the quotation "Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party"? That'll get cut down to "now time good men come aid party", and while I can think of a lot of web sites that might appear as a result of such a query, about 99% of them will probably not be what I'm looking for.
The problem is particularly annoying when you're looking for things like song lyrics. (Curse you, Harry Fox, may you rot in hell for eternity for what you pigfuckers did to lyrics.ch.)
As did I, many moons ago. I'd forgotten Altavista even existed.
At least Astalavista is still useful.
Yeah, I've gotta change my "Danger / Self-Destruct System Activated" BIOS boot-logo. Looks great when plugged into a projector or big-screen TV and I'm about to start DJing with a pile of MP3z on the hard drive. Probably looks less-than-great if I have to power up at an airport.
> What? Didn't we just hear an announcement [slashdot.org] that Enigma is free (as in beer AND speech)?
And besides, why pay $144,000 for a cryptosystem that was cracked 60 years ago?
Oh, I get it, that's gonna be the "civilian-grade" encryption US companies will be allowed to use when all this terrorist mess is over ;-)
(And under DMCA, reading about Bletchley Park is illegal -- so evidently the first American to buy an Enigma and cr4x0r it again will have a big leg up on the rest of us ;-)
Thanks, Slashdot, for the best belly-laugh I've had all morning.
C'mon, we land a probe on Mars every year or so. Only problem is, if there's life on Mars, any life around the vicinity of our landing sites is vaporized or crushed by our landing technique.
("Oh, you mean you wanted the probe to be functional after it lands. Sorry, that'll cost extra! And one guy forgot to specify whether he wanted his probe in solid, liquid, or gaseous form upon landing. He was on a budget, so we went with gaseous.")
Tell me about it. I nearly shat myself with surprise when I laid out some bait, saw it getting mobbed with hundreds of ants, including a queen. I remember asking myself "WTF's the queen doing out here where she could get crushed?"
Then I did some research, and I'm glad I didn't kill the queen on sight - presumably she took the bait back to the rest of the nest, or it was a small nest with only one or two queens, because I never saw another ant in the building again.
But yeah, that was weird, seeing the queen showing up for dinner.
OK, that's Afghanistan, France, and Quebec ;-)
(More seriously - thanks for posting Orwell's notes on pacifism - I liked the irony of SOS, but I do wish the site designer had stuck to the issue, namely the erosion of civil liberties as a result of this war, rather than just calling for pacifism. Speaking for myself, I believe this particular war is just; the erosion of civil liberties is not, and the SOS site maintainer's inability to distinguish between the two issues detracts from the value of the satire.)
Because these are two largest examples of nations who have have set their networks up such that all traffic within their borders is monitored by law enforcement.
Russia: Civilians worried about blackmail, KGB tactics
China: Operating an Internet service under government restrictions in China is just business as usual
While I agree that Chinese and Russian citizens are arguably more free than the citizens in certain Arab regimes (interesting, why didn't you list the Taliban in your list of Bad Places? Embarassed about something?), and I agree that even when FBI gets its hands on everyone's communications, US citizens will still be more free than those of Russia and China, I'm still distressed at the fact that US citizens will be less-free than they were before FBI instituted its "webtap" -- which appears to be nothing more than a carbon copy of the systems instituted by Russia and China.
I disagree.
Torture takes effort - an FBI permitted to use torture would be physically unable to use it in the violation of the civil liberties of 300,000,000 Americans, simply because it'd take too long to work their way through the population, even if every FBI agent went berzerk and started torturing everyone they met for the sheer hell of it.
Passive electronic monitoring doesn't take effort - every citizen's right to be secure against unreasonable search and seizure is violated the instant they flip the switch on the Mother Of All Carnivores.
Put another way - there's a reason why people get dozens of spams per day (sometimes per hour), while still only getting three or four telemarketing calls per week.
Conclusion obvious: Because it's plainly obvious that this will not locate terrorists, the logical conclusion is that finding terrorists is not why they want to implement this.
Confession: ;-)
I read this and thought it was really good satire. I have already contacted Miniluv to report my thoughtcrime, or rather, they have already contacted me
Yeah, that's the other reason I prefer leaving stuff like this to spooks instead of cops, namely that if it's gotta be done, NSA's geeks can probably do it without bogging down the 'net. (I have a hunch that if by some miracle FBI does it without screwing up performance, they'll bog down the 'net on purpose just to ask for more funding next year ;-)
Awright feebs, I've ragged on you enough for one day. I'll stop now before you knock my door down in the middle of the night.
Hey, it's nice to know we Americans are finally catching up with our freedom-loving friends in Russia and China!
I was beginning to worry we were gonna be left behind on the information superhighway!
The difference is that NSA is an intelligence organization, not a law enforcement organization.
That is, NSA doesn't care about who you slept with last night, your tastes in g0at-pr0n, whether you may or may not have indulged in recreational pharmaceuticals in your misspent youth, how many MP3z and warez you download, or whether you traffic in copy control circumvention devices. Even if you assume (incorrectly) that they want to spy on US citizens, keeping track of jaywalkers is not their mandate, and they're busy enough with the stuff that is their mandate.
It is, however, entirely within the FBI's mandate, as enforcers of the law, to "sweat the small stuff". Today, they hunt terrorists with guns, when they're gone, they'll scour the database to find the terrorists with drugs, and next year, they'll start earning their keep by nailing the copyright terrorists.
Spooks have better things to do with their time. Cops don't.
> You know that's what they're after. Hoover left a more lasting legacy than we know...
I dunno, transvestite pr0n may be your thing, but it's not mine. Then again, I don't work for the Feebs.
("When I asked for a color TV in my hotel room, this is not what I meant!")
"One of these things is not like the other. One of these things does not belong."
> then Windows must equivalent to the National Guard
Yeah, but of whose country? Afghanistan?
Really? Consider this:
Suppose I produce $50,000 worth of code in a year. My employer hands me a fat check. After taxes and living expenses, I have about $10,000.
Scenario 1: I purchase 588 compact discs (at $17 each, for $10,000) of RIAA-approved content.
- Some artists get $600 to spend on tax, living expenses, guitars, and syntheziers.
- The music seller gets about $2500 or so. He buys food with it.
- A CD pressing factory gets about $1000. They buy fancy chemicals and mastering equipment with it.
- Hilary Rosen and her friends get about $4100 to spend on hookers and booze Congresscritters, to pass more laws to restrict my freedom.
Scenario 2: I download the music "for free".Now... explain to me again why paying $17 per CD is good for overall economic growth?
Geez, that photo's so fake I looked for "Tourist Guy" in it!
If I was a car whose designers tried to make me look like a Mac cube, I'd cry too.