> What do you want to bet that the reason the FBI is keeping the widgets of Carnivore hidden is that it contains all the language-seeking algorithms ("dictionaries") of Echelon?
I'd bet $1M that's not the reason.
I think you're generallyspecific hypothesis you state, namely a supposed link between Echelon and Carnivore, is wholly bogus.
I can't believe anyone in the intelligence community would never entrust FBI with the nitty-gritty of something as advanced as what Echelon is rumored to be. I can't think of a single situation in which FBI personnel would have a "need to know".
FBI may have a want to know, sure. But need to know, at the levels required by the SIGINT guys, not bloody likely:-)
>And what about bans on computer calling? Or do they have a real human talk to the answering machine
That's why they're hanging up when a human answers the phone!
It's illegal to have a machine dial up and play a recorded spiel. It's easy to prove it if you live in a state that allows a single party to tape a phone call with or without the consent of the other party. A taped call with a spiel that drones on and on despite repeated queries of "Hello? Are you a human or a recording?" is pretty damning evidence that it's a robo-dialer.
But it's much harder to prove that the message on your answering machine was generated by a machine. Telemarketers can, have, and will continue to, perjure themselves on the stand by saying "Yes, that message was left by a live human", thereby turning the burden of proof on the person charging them under the TCPA.
Yet more reason why the entire industry should be outlawed.
>Call rejection is a scam. You pay to have anonymous calls blocked. OK, fine so far. > > The problem is that the phone company turns around and offers a service to businesses: blocked anonymous call rejection override. That way, the businesses that pay the fee can still get through. > > They need to start selling is a blocked anonymous call rejection override override.
Why? So we can pay the phone company more to prevent marketers - whose harassment the phone companies already endorse by selling them ACR overriding services - from harassing us?
Why? So that after we've paid (twice!) for protection from harassment, the phone company can then sell ACR-override-override-override ability to the goddamn telemarketers, putting us right back where we started?
Fuck that. What we need is legislation such as the ballot initiative currently going around in California that would ban telemarketing altogether, thereby stopping the problem at its source.
Call rejection isn't the scam. The real scam is the fact thet the phone company makes a small fortune selling weapons to the combatants on both sides of the ongoing privacy arms race.
>I don't see why the FBI can't continue to simply tap the phone lines, the traditional practice under current law.
For dialup users, I think you're bang-on. Even if the tap were to somehow degrade line quality, there's no way a dialup user could tell that the drop from 49,333 to 48,000 was due to a tap or to the phase of the moon. Computers and DSPs are fast enough that I'd imagine such a device could be built very cheaply.
And there's no privacy concern. You're guaranteed that you've got the subject's entire communication. If he's smart enough to leave his home to use a fortress fone or Internet Cafe, just put a tail on his ass and monitor him with a Mk. 1 eyeball from there. The few criminals smart enough to go that far to evade electronic surveillance are probably doing stuff that's sufficiently naughty to warrant physical surveillance anyways.
Where tapping gets tricky is cable, xDSL, and other access methods.
Cable, because there are privacy issues in the law to deal with, and because you're effectively gonna end up installing a sniffer on a LAN segment anyways. (Though in the latter case, at least only the privacy of the people on the same LAN segment as the suspect would be affected, as opposed to everyone with Carnivore slurping down whatever it slurps at the ISP level.)
xDSL, I don't know about. Can someone with clue (and, umm, assuming there's no security implications of divulging it) tell us how feasible it is for a device to be attached to a DSL line (or a T1) and snarf down all data going through that line without the subject being aware of it?
To be more precise on my xDSL question, of course it's possible, if your target is dangerous enough and you've got the budget. From what's been made public about the intelligence community and its transoceanic cable eavesdropping hacks, DSL-tapping is trivial.
What I mean is "can a tap for xDSL be built cheaply enough to be of use to the general law enforcement community, as opposed to solely the intelligence community?"
(But the original poster's point still stands - I think FBI's doing this because it's expedient, not because it's right. These kinds of abuses are exactly what the Constitution tries to prevent. Not that I have any faith that our representatives will even try to, let alone be able to, defend it.)
We don't need congresscritters talking to FBI about this, we need people with clue.
There's a lot of scary shit that's being danced around, because nobody in the media or government has enough technical clue to ask the right questions.
The more I read from the CNN article, the more convinced I am that this is something Very Wrong.
"the FBI on Friday put Carnivore, stored in a simple laptop, on display for the media [... ]
A simple laptop. Good to see it wasn't a complicated laptop, that might've sounded like they had real power. Just a simple one, nothing to be scared of, totally harmless. Nice spin, CNN. I hope they gave your news teams "ideal camera positioning to catch the flames and explosions^W^W^Wnews footage" from the next massacre in exchange for the favor.
According to officials at the FBI, Carnivore will only scan the identifying addresses in the 'to' and 'from' fields but not the content of electronics messages. They liken it to looking at the front of an envelope
In geek, that sounds like, at best, it listens to *all* SMTP traffic and stores *ALL* From: and To: headers.
Whaddyawannabet that, court order or no, since "it's just like looking at the envelope", all those headers get kept, just in case some day they decide they want to do traffic analysis on everyone in the future, and/or use the data they've gathered on you when they do decide they feel you've been using one too many anonymizing relays?
But one top FBI official said the name had been intended only for internal use and conceded that criticism of the name had been "somewhat sobering."
Fedspeak for "Next time, we'll call it 'Guardian' or 'Defender' and maybe our PR lackeys will begin buying us beer and pussy at the local strip club again."
Hey, Fed. If you're worried about the name of your technology because it's too goddamn accurate for your PR lackeys' tastes, isn't that a hint that you might be Doing The Wrong Thing?
If they want a name for your next universal surveillance product that sounds friendlier to the public, might I suggest "Night Watch"? People too stupid to get the B5 reference will see right through it. And anyone who did watch B5 would have seen through your naming choice even if you'd called it "FluffyBunnyProtector". But at least we'll appreciate the combination of honesty and irony.
I trust NSA and CIA. I don't trust FBI. The first two are intelligence agencies; it's their job to weed out the irrelevant crap their dragnets snag. The more of us NSA and CIA can ignore, the better they can do their jobs, conserving their resources for the real threats.
FBI, on the other hand, isn't an intelligence agency, it's an enforcement agency. The more of us it can keep tabs on - whether for pr0n, oral sex in certain states, MP3z, DeCSS, expressing non-Demipublican political leanings, or anything else that might someday become criminalized - the happier it is, because every citizen is guilty of something, even if it's just spitting on the sidewalk. Every sidewalk-spitter they can find is another source of funding, because every crime, however minor, serves as an indication that More Enforcemnt Needs To Be Done.
CIA and NSA are Big Brother, but would prefer not to be so they can just get their jobs done effectively. FBI isn't Big Brother yet, but it's trying very hard to catch up. Sadly, there's nothing more dangerous than a wannabe-Big-Brother trying to prove its worth to itself.
Actually, I was describing a totally hypothetical scenario in order to illustrate why certain people take the position that elements of ORBS' conduct have-been-in-the-past / are-currently abusive. (Ummm... and since I haven't been probed, and don't even admin a box in any meaningful sense of the word, it wasn't me who called you. So someone else must know how to get in touch with you without knowing your number:-)
Anyways, to get to the motivation of my post, the discussion consisted largely about the "big flamewar between/. and k5", not about why ORBS might have been Deemed Naughty, so I figured I'd illustrate the argument against ORBS in the interests of completeness.
My apologies for the inaccuracies in my post - and my thanks for your clarification of the situation.
In all honesty, if I adminned a box and noticed ORBS probing it, I personally wouldn't mind that much, (assuming I wasn't one of the unfortunate souls for whom the probing apparently crashed the box!) 'cuz I know you're whitehats. But I can see why other admins (Umm... especially the poor guy whose box went down!) would react otherwise.
Although I personally have no real beef with "contact abuse@relaytest.orbs.wherever" (again, because I know you're fundamentally good guys), that gets into a whole 'nother ball of wax, probably too esoteric for the purposes of a/. discussion, about the opt-in/out implication of "hit reply to remove our probes".
Which is a pity, since it's at the heart of the question of whether or not what ORBS does should be considered abusive.
I have no really firm opinion of it, but if pressed, I'd say it's not a problem when there are only one or two trusted relay-checkers. The problem comes from the slippery slope aspect of the problem.
In addition to the "is reply-to-stop-being-probed merely a form of opt-out" question, the other big issue that was totally ignored in Slashdot today, was the question of "at what quantity of relay-checkers does a sysadmin cease to be able to keep track of them all?" At what point does it become impossible to differentiate the whitehats (ORBS, RSS) from the blackhats ("Foo's Relay Checking Service, Established July 2000, honest, we're legit, we don't sell our blacklist of open hosts to spammers, no sirree!")?
I don't know. There's no good answer to that - it's all up to the admin you ask. But when that point gets reached for any given admin, he's likely to throw up his hands and regard all relay probes as hostile.
(Pi: Yeah, I know the principals in both sides of the ORBS debate already know that, and that this too has been talked to death in nanae... I'm just pointing it out for the benefit of readers who've obviously been getting real work done or reading Slashdot instead of reading USENET like they're supposed to. Unless they're reading/. with lynx, don't they realize that a text-based newsreader like trn or tin in an xterm looks exactly like working?!?!;-)
MAPS - is about preventing abuse of the mail system, in any form. Present methods of abuse are mainly centered around direct-to-MX spam from dialups with lax signup policies, DOS attacks in the form of multi-megabyte mainsleaze "we sent you an MPEG of our latest 30-second TV spot" marketing firms, and yes, spam relayed through insecure relays.
Loosely categorized, that's MAPS DUL (the dialup project), MAPS RBL (The Realtime Blackhole List, designed for firms which continue to spam unrepentantly and for which every other means to have meaningful discussion has failed, and MAPS RSS (Relay Spam Stopper, a blacklist of open relays.)
ORBS, by contrast, concentrates only on adding open relays to its block list, and has a method of checking those relays which results in it probing machines, often repeatedly, and most importantly, even against the express wishes of the system administrators of the machines being probed.
ORBS is not a spammer, but there's a legitimate argument that says they're abusing the servers they contact. They have great intentions (with which the road to the RBL is paved). But the bottom line is that if you - be ye a spammer or be ye a relay-checker - probe my box, I'm gonna be pissed. If you repeatedly probe it after I ask you not to, I'm gonna be real pissed.
This is nothing new. ISTR that ORBS lost their connectivity for a period of time from BCTel as far back as 1997/8ish for this - people being probed complained to ORBS, ORBS didn't stop probing, so they did the right thing --- complained to ORBS' upstream.
Back to the present day and "pissed". If ORBS' current upstream isn't gonna stop 'em, then I'm gonna document my efforts. Having emailed ORBS folks, spoken to them on the phone, and having found their upstream unresponsive to my concerns, I as a sysadmin would have everything I needed to make a well-documented RBL nomination.
If the story is true, (and I'm still skeptical that ORBS is actually on the RBL, as opposed to there merely being a nomination under consideration, but I haven't been following nanae this week), then someone who fell into the "really really pissed" category did just that, and the RBL team was subsequently unable to have meaningful negotations with ORBS.
I like ORBS. If I had a personal box, I'd probably use their blacklist. But my liking them, even when combined with the fact that I know their intentions are good, doesn't change the fact that repeatedly launching probes against sites which have requested no longer to be probed, is/EM. abuse of the email system, and it's a form of abuse which subscribers to the MAPS RBL ought to be entitled to protection against.
I have fond memories of hacking limbs off in the original version, in glorious 280x192 resolution at four real colors and 8 pseudo-colors. It was the bloodiest thing I'd ever seen at the time:)
I first found out about Bilestoad in a full-page print ad in Nibble magazine. I believe the phrases "graphic violence and bloodletting" and "suitable for adults only" were used. I don't think the game was ever released where I lived; I never saw it on the shelves.
One of my happier gaming moments came when someone in our user group got his hands on a copy from some warez BBS in the States. It spread like wildfire. It was bloody, shocked the parents, and more importantly after the first 15 minutes, featured really good gameplay.
"The city controller computers were worried. If trends continued on their present course, the city would be engulfed in holocaust. The mobs were at the breaking point between frustrated apathy and psychotic violence. It was plain that drastic change was needed. [... ] Most never got beyond the battle. For them, it was enough to hack away at an opponent. An opportunity to release their anger and cleanse their souls was all they wanted. They could wash themselves in blood. The mobs were quelled and quieted."
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Double irony: This is the first time in my life that I'd actually read the premise of the game - a society held together by the use of virtual violence as catharsis. I'm doubly impressed by the designers' insight.
- Easy to turn image autoload off, and I can click the "images" toolbar button to load 'em when I need 'em.
- Javascript on/off is two keystrokes away. (Options->Preferences-> and it comes up with "Languages" if it's the last thing I fooled with. No burying the Javashit checkboxen in a 3-layer hierarchical menu that has to be navigated every time.)
- It's a web browser, not a marketing tool for "My Nutscrape", "People who've paid us to tell you where to shop", or "People who paid us to get space on a 'Personal Toolbar'" program.
(Aside on that damn personal toolbar - you KNOW it's designed to be annoyware when the way to turn it off - at http://developer.netscape.com/docs/manuals/communi cator/preferences/newprefc.html - is to set custtoolbar.has_toolbar_folder to false, but this preference is labelled "For Netscape Internal Use". Bah. At least they gave us Disable_MyShopping and Disable_NetscapeRadio)
What I want:
- Javashite is togglable via a menu button.
- Image autoload togglable via a menu button.
- Cookie control togglable via a menu button.
- Preserve the "bug" for Windoze builds where a write-only COOKIES.TXT results in all cookies, whether accepted or not by the user, being ignored:)
- Proxying on/off from a menu button. Why? Because the Internet Junkbuster and other banner-filtering and cookie-eating products run as proxies. Sometimes you have to turn 'em off and accept "everything". It should be maximally easy to turn things like this off and turn 'em back on again. As another poster said, lots of these things are dynamic preferences, not static prefs.
It's funny - the only real thing I can think of to improve Nutscrape's feature list that could reasonably be considered "bloatwaresque" would be to build in a banner blocker. I don't want a development environment, mail client, or newsreader. Already got those. The only thing I'm *still* missing after all these years of "development" is a better web browser.
> So they can have easy access to loads of parrot pr0n, of course.
I presume the LCD screen comes from Viewsonic, and come with the requisite screen savers showing three parrots, each naked as a jaybird, in various tropical settings?
True, DiskKeeper was linked to the clams, and equally true that MSFT should be trusted on privacy as far as one trusts the clams, which is to say, "not at all", but that's not evidence that MSFT is acting on behalf of the Cult. (I do, however, think it extremely wise of the BSI to investigate very carefully. Although there's no evidence that they've done so with DiskKeeper, "trojaning" MSFT would be a major intelligence coup for the clams, as there are many cases where they've been caught red-handed infiltrating government and law enforcement agencies. Good thing the BSI isn't subject to DMCA's provisions against reverse-engineering:)
The bit about the US govermnent asking the German government to lighten up on the Co$ probably has more to do with direct Co$ influence (legal or otherwise:) on US politicians than indirect influence of MSFT acting on Co$' behalf.
Not to say that Co$ aren't a right bunch of bastards, but the evidence (IMHO) for Co$ influence at MSFT doesn't yet stack up. MSFT may well be an evil monopoly bent on world domination, but they're not a stupid evil monopoly bent on world domination... *rimshot*
The flip side of that rimshot is that it implies Gates and Ballmer, despite showing the classic psychological signs of "dinosaurs looking at an asteroid", may well be smart enough to still attain world domination.
True, DiskKeeper was linked to the clams, and equally true that MSFT should be trusted on privacy as far as one trusts the clams, which is to say, "not at all", but that's not evidence that MSFT is acting on behalf of the Cult. (I do, however, think it extremely wise of the BSI to investigate very carefully. Although there's no evidence that they've done so with DiskKeeper, "trojaning" MSFT would be a major intelligence coup for the clams, as there are many cases where they've been caught red-handed infiltrating government and law enforcement agencies. Good thing the BSI isn't subject to DMCA's provisions against reverse-engineering:)
The bit about the US govermnent asking the German government to lighten up on the Co$ probably has more to do with direct Co$ influence (legal or otherwise:) on US politicians than indirect influence of MSFT acting on Co$' behalf.
Not to say that Co$ aren't a right bunch of bastards, but the evidence (IMHO) for Co$ influence at MSFT doesn't yet stack up. MSFT may well be an evil monopoly bent on world domination, but they're not a stupid evil monopoly bent on world domination... *rimshot*
The flip side of that rimshot is that it implies Gates and Ballmer, despite showing the classic psychological signs of "dinosaurs looking at an asteroid", may well be smart enough to still attain world domination.
The last time I saw "astroturf" (as in "fake grassroots") like this was in 1997 in a "60 minutes" documentary on the Cult of $cientology:
[... ] hundreds of Scientologists from around the country wrote virtually identical letters [... ] Included among them was this model letter with instruction "to be put in your own words."
[ picture of bunch of letters sent by Scienos to CAN, including "Model Letter" with "(to be put in own words)" hand written on top ]
I'm emphatically not saying that Micros~1 is linked with the Co$.
What I am saying is that Micros~1's upper management and grunt personnel are exhibiting similar reactions to a crisis where the facts, once exposed, threaten their world view:
Delusion: all the forged testimony during the trial, in particular the videotape that MSFT tried to pass off as "real" footage, was forced to admit was "just a simulation" when exposed, and whose justification for the faked evidence was "well, the simulation shows what it would have been like had we really done the experiment".
Denial: Endless trumpeting about how Micros~1's triumph during the trial was somehow inevitable, ignoring the mounting evidence that indicated that they'd lost all credibility before the Judge.
Astroturfing: Countless brainwashed minions and bald-faced propaganda campaigns, all writing essentially identical letters supporting the party line...
Demonization of the Other: Slogans and buzzwords in Co$ for its opponents include words like "bigot", and for themselves, the notion that they fight for "religious freedom". Likewise, opponents of MSFT are anti-free-market radicals, and supporters are people who fight for "freedom to innovate". The more evidence to the contrary (Co$: "Clear the planet" - exterminate all who do not join the Cult, MSFT: "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish"), the stronger the rhetoric becomes. The red, white, and blue in the MSFT pamphlet was so blatantly propagandistic that it was almost comical.
I could go on, but you get the idea.
I wonder if this is universal? These behaviors appear throughout history, but are most common in top-heavy authoritarian regimes faced with an imminent demise brought about by a new paradigm.
(Thinking back to the dying days of the cold war, when former Soviet republics seemed to break away and collapse on a weekly basis -- Romainian dictator Nikolai Ceaucescu appeared to sincerely believe that his people loved him, right up until they booed him in public, summarily revolted, and put him up against the wall within the week...)
Prediction: Therapists who want a guaranteed clientele over the next 15-20 years should set up shop within 100 miles of Redmond:)
> why the fuck would we want to put Genesis on this thing, in 300 languages???
The fine print in the article mentioned that not only Genesis, but other creation myths, up to and including the Big Bang theory, be recorded and translated.
The goal is to provide - in as many languages as possible - a set of boilerplate text, at least one instance of which is likely to survive 10,000 years.
Creation myths are among the most enduring of human stories. They're compact and easily-understood by humans, and we have existence proofs that they can be passed down over the millennia, even without advanced technology.
As such, if your core audience is "humans 10000 years from now", they're ideal material for a "Rosetta Stone" project.
The inclusion of the Big Bang (and/or hyperinflation theory, etc) is also a wise idea. The absence of theories beyond this level precisely dates the "stone" as "no older than the early 21st century". (After all, had it been written in the 43rd century, they'd have realized the universe really is "all turtles, all the way down!", and written their Stone accordingly:-)
I say "make a million of 'em, scatter 'em around the planet, drop a few over Antarctica, and stick one on every soft-landing space probe we build from this day forward."
(Aside: I really like the space probe idea. We screw up and our civilization collapses, BFD. Once our descendants develop spaceflight, they'll know we were here, and they'll know when we were here. I can't think of a better place than the Moon for long-term preservation of micro-etched materials, and we know that big hunks of metal on extraterrestrial bodies will be the first things explored once our descendants develop the technology to detect them. Luna:WesternCiv::Desert:AncientEgypt)
> I think a large majority of the audiophiles that you talk to [... ] will tell you that there is an audible difference between a $2 cable and a $200 cable.
Today's concept: "Cognitive Dissonance".
Maybe there's no difference other than the fact that the audiophile says "damnit, I spent $200 on these s00per-s33kr1t speaker cables made from depleted uranium, and if I don't hear a difference, by God I'm gonna feel like an idiot! So I must be able to hear the difference! I don't care if it's beyond the oscilloscope's ability to detect it, any evidence that threatens my worldview is the work of the devil! I can hear the difference, I tell you!"
More seriously: MP3 is a whole lot more lossy than cheap cable. Yes, even at high bitrate and a good encoder, I believe it's possible for a trained listener to tell the difference between an MP3 and the real thing. (And for a crappy encoder or a low bitrate, anyone can tell!)
IMHO "audiophile" is marketroid-speak for "guy who'll spend $10,000 on pseudoscience in order to convince himself he's cooler than his friend who also calls himself an audiophile." Of course, that's because I can't hear the difference. Maybe there are people who can tell what metal a cable is made of by the way it sounds, and if you're in that unfortunate 0.0001% of the population you have to spend $10,000 on gear in order to get something that sounds good. (I'm not advocating buying the cheapest crap on the market, just saying that once you get past a certain level, you're merely throwing money down a hole:-)
Let the "audiophiles are weenies" vs "you have tin ears" flamewars commence.
But to get back on topic: There are enough people whose ears are tinny enough to listen to Blade/128 MP3s. Given that level of awareness in the mass market, nobody's gonna care whether the MP3s of the future come from DAE off a CD or from an analog hookup with $0.50 alligator clips to the speaker lugs.
> [when it's cracked, the RIAA] can point to the DMCA and [nail the cracker to the wall]
So? If you're smart, you crack it quietly, and rather than bragging 'bout how 3733+ you are, you just walk into an Internet cafe 500 miles from your home town, wearing a disguise, and then you upload it anonym00zely to Sealand or some other data haven. Then you go home and get wildly drunk and laugh like a maniac while RIAA tries to stuff the genie back in the bottle.
> Cryptography kicks ass, but not when it's used to strip people's rights away.
s/"but not..."//g. Cryptography kicks ass. End of sentence.
Yes, I realize what you're getting at in the context of your original post, but with the encryption system being discussed, crypto isn't being used to strip us of our rights; our rights have already been stripped by DMCA.
In such an environment (i.e., a cryptographically-weak system intended to be cracked in order to expose the cracker to DMCA charges), crypto is what you use to forcibly reclaim said rights after DMCA has stripped them.
> You[r] sound card will have hard ware encryption. It will only connect to special digital speakers
The only way to stop people from using current technology in favor of a new one is to force them to throw out the old stuff. Yes, force. It's been what, 50 years, and there are still people using vacuum tubes, fer chrissake!
And although our benighted Republic has spent much time of late wiping its arse with its Constitution, even I, in my most paranoid delusional fantasies, don't forsee RIAA and MPAA linking arms with DOJ and conducting house-to-house sweeps to smash and burn all "insecure" audio gear. Hell, DOJ can't do it for (some:) drugs and guns, what hope do they have in taking our stereos!
And where's the justification? DiVX (the pay-per-view DVD, not the video compression codec!) died because the consumer realized it was a value-subtracted technology. Somehow "home tapers of music" don't quite rank up there with Eeeevul druggiez and militia whackos on the Scapegoat-Of-The-Day scale. RIAA and MPAA may think they're just as dangerous, but even the general public (who are dumb enough to swallow the War On Some Drugs and War On Some Guns) isn't that dumb. Nobody will buy copy-protected audio gear because it's demonstrably worse than what they already own!
As of now, you can still buy 15-year-old PCs for $10 in surplus stores for peanuts. If every manufacturer stopped building unprotected AV gear today, there would not be a serious shortage of non-secured gear for at least 20-30 years.
And even if there was, so what? Do you believe that there'll be no hardware platforms in 20 years on which open-source operating systems can run? Do you propose that there'll be no MP3, CDDA, or similar unprotected decoder software on the face of this earth, even though the hardware platforms of 20 years from now will be able to emulate today's P166-level boxen in their idle cycles?
RIAA and MPAA can lead the consumer to their poisoned wells all day long, but the demise of DiVX proved they still can't make us drink.
> COPPA states that a website may not KNOWINGLY require or track personal information (age, name, address, email > address, etc) of anyone underage. All ICQ has to do to remove itself from any concern is take the age category out of > their demographic marketing information gathering registration section. Suddenly, they'll no longer knowingly be > tracking anything from a child under 13.
So all we have to do is bribe^H^H^H^H^Hlobby enough scumb^H^H^H^H^Hrepresentatives to s/13/999/g in the law, and at least America will be rid of Doublefuck and the rest of their ilk for once and for all:-)
> [The HGP is ] like any other huge and potentially dangerous human advance. People will first misuse it, they will get burned very badly, and then they will learn how to control it and how to use it in such a way as to benefit them and not burn them.
Thanks for putting this so succinctly.
Natural selection still applies even in the presence of genetic engineering technology. It's just that "silly hominids tinkering with genomes" becomes part of the environment in which we live.
If a given genetic modification enhances survivability, the mod will propagate. If it doesn't, the mod will die out.
The first few humans to engineer "better" babies will introduce some fascinating mutations into the gene pool. Some will choose to breed Schwarznegger-like hulking giants because they always wanted to be captain of the football team, and they can now live their dream through their mutant sprog. Others will attempt to get the aforementioned hulking giants with IQs of 200. Still others will try for IQs of 300 even if it means the resulting mutant is basically a brain in a vat of amniotic fluid, hooked up to a bunch of robotic actuators.
Some of these mutations will be "successful", in that they'll catch on because the mutant "does better" in society. Ask yourself, though... do we live in a society in which captains of football teams really have enhanced survivability? They may get the chicks in high school, but unless they've got the brains to make it through college, most of 'em end up pumping gas for geeks. How "survivable" is that? Likewise, any megacephalic cyborg-brainmen thrown into our school system will be beaten to death before puberty, and will never live long enough to revolutionize physics. (A few wealthy families may raise their brainmen outside of the school system, and maybe they'll end up well-adjusted and productive. Or not. But maybe it's worth trying. We're humans -- "maybe it's worth trying" is what we done since the first primate touched the monolith in 2001 and invented the "tool".)
Right now, we rub our wabbily bits together and make do with whatever random assemblage of genetic detritus comes out of the womb. The phrase "regress to the mean" comes to mind. The technology to engineer for desired traits merely means that even the wabilly-bit-rubbers will have a wider and more diverse selection of genetic material to work with in the future. (The really extreme examples probably won't mate with wabilly-bits, but will use test tubes, eggs, sperm, and other bits of genetic code. All this means is that we'll have more than one mechanism of reproduction and that our defintion of survivability will likewise have to be adjusted.) Whacked-out gene hackers will add to the diversity in the gene pool, not detract from it.
In practical terms, all this means is that we'll have upped the mutation rate. Just as with evolution, 99% of the mutants will probably fail. 1% might be viable on their own. Big deal. (And as an aside - a 99:1 ratio is probably pretty damn good, evolutionarily-speaking. With technology progressing as fast as it is, conventional mutation rates just aren't fast enough to keep up. Maybe we need this.)
Finally, the claims that this will somehow threaten all of humanity are hogwash. This technology - when it's finally developed - is going to be extremely expensive for the next 100-odd years. This will render it totally inaccessible to 90% of the world's population. There'll be plenty of "au naturel" human genetic stock to go around for centuries.
Let's see. Lots of unadulterated human stock around as a matter of necessity for the next 200-odd years. An increase in both the absolute mutation rate and the "beneficial" mutation rate among one segment of the population.
> New York Times reporter Jim Risen, who first obtained the classified document and made the decision to release a redacted version, is unsparing in his assessment of Young and Cryptome. "I think that what they are doing is endangering people's lives," said Risen.
Open letter to Mr. Risen:
Dear Mr. Risen:
...the guy on Cryptome is endangering lives due to the security breach? The guy on Cryptome?!?! is breaching security?
Mr. Risen, just what the high-tailed rambling fsck did you think you were doing just being in posession of this document -- still classified in its unedited form, and obviously not having been released by CIA in any edited form -- in the first place?
What part of "need to know" don't you fscking understand?
Sincerely, Tackhead.
End letter. I'm no fan of Big Brother, but frankly, I hope CIA nails the reporter's ass - and his source's ass - to the wall. Stupid fscks.
Back on topic - I've learned lots of things about idjits and their companies from M$Turd docs. The "Quick-save" feature is great, in that it keeps all the things the writer says about security-ignorant assholes like Mr. Ri^W^W^W^W^W^W^Wpeople with less awareness of security issues and makes them visible to anyone with a hex editor.
Finding out company-confidential things notwithstanding, I also had a blast nailing an MMFool to the wall by digging the name under which he registered his copy of Turd (which matched one of the mailing addresses in the spam) after he sent me a spam with a Turd.doc in it and forwarding it to a local USPS inspector.
Us UNIX guys aren't immune from attacks on covert channels. An attacker can learn a lot from "vi"'s temporary files, though he's usually gotta 0wn r00t to get to them first. Ditto clever usage of "ps" on a system full of un-clever users specifying passwords on command lines.
But in general, many binary file formats make great covert channels for digging up leaked information. "od" is your friend, as is the hex mode of Vern Beurg's LIST.COM in a WinDOS environment. (I'd say Beurg's LIST utility is the single most useful DOS utility I own. Text-based "file browser" with the ability to view in ASCII or hex anything you hit ENTER on. Damn sweet!)
Re:Does anyone posting on this know ANYTHING about
on
Pretty Poor Privacy
·
· Score: 2
> HOPEFULLY you'll be able to say, check next to each item you're willing to allow.
Or, when faced with a huge list of "age/sex/favecolor/modelofcar/SSN/creditcardnumber " choices, the end user will click on "Send All" to save time.
Stupid user? Yes -- but how many folks turned cookies back on (and then used another technology to block them) after clicking on "NO" 500 times per page?
This technology is designed to facilitate data collection. You can bet your ass that the user interface will be designed to make any negotiation other than "send all data" extremely cumbersome.
> You are _optionally_ *INFORMED* of each piece of information the site wants from you, and what they're going to do with it.
And without enforceability, that's about as valuable as a TrustE seal of approval. Wow, the marketing guys told me via P3P that they wouldn't resell my data! They'd never lie, would they?
Bottom line: Privacy is a right, not a preference.
Admiral Burrito writes: > Can't the user simply claim "fair use"? [... ] Might it at least drag things out long enough to make the case too expensive for the copyright holder?
In short, you're suggesting that people sued make frivolous claims that their infringement falls under fair use in order to effect a DDoS on the RIAA's lawyers.
Sounds like Elron Blubbard and the Co$ doctrine that "The purpose of a lawsuit is not to win, but to harass".
Sadly, this tactic only works if you've got a lot of money behind you, material to blackmail judges, (or a timely drowning of the offending judge's dog in order to force him to recuse himself:) or otherwise rig the legal system in your favor.
The goal of the RIAA here isn't to prosecute everyone who dips into the honey pot, merely to ensure that enough people get sued, and that honey pots are prevalent enough, to create a "chilling effect" that encourages compliance.
To dig up an old comment I made about spammers - it's like putting a few heads on pikes to encourage the others to comply.
Whether this would be effective in the context of a distributed system such as Gnutella or not is open to debate. It's rather like the War On Some Drugs. Posession is illegal, but only a tiny minority of "downloaders" get nailed to the wall.
What's interesting is that for USE^H^H^Hat least one distribution system out there whose scrutiny appears to have escaped RIAA thus far, nailing downloaders is nearly impossible, but nailing the top uploader by volume on a monthly basis would be trivial. This would create one hell of a chilling effect.
But as for a Gnutella, I'm skeptical, unless RIAA agents set up a network of dozens (or hundreds) of honeypots. If they go that route, the honeypots would have to be geographically distributed (in meatspace - in order to be distributed throughout the providers' IP-spaces), and it would be nontrivial to set up such a network of honeypots without the cooperation of the ISPs themselves.
The future will be "interesting" to say the least.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd bet $1M that's not the reason.
I think you're generallyspecific hypothesis you state, namely a supposed link between Echelon and Carnivore, is wholly bogus.
I can't believe anyone in the intelligence community would never entrust FBI with the nitty-gritty of something as advanced as what Echelon is rumored to be. I can't think of a single situation in which FBI personnel would have a "need to know".
FBI may have a want to know, sure. But need to know, at the levels required by the SIGINT guys, not bloody likely :-)
I think you mean:
ABC: Finding yet another use for the color yellow.
That's why they're hanging up when a human answers the phone!
It's illegal to have a machine dial up and play a recorded spiel. It's easy to prove it if you live in a state that allows a single party to tape a phone call with or without the consent of the other party. A taped call with a spiel that drones on and on despite repeated queries of "Hello? Are you a human or a recording?" is pretty damning evidence that it's a robo-dialer.
But it's much harder to prove that the message on your answering machine was generated by a machine. Telemarketers can, have, and will continue to, perjure themselves on the stand by saying "Yes, that message was left by a live human", thereby turning the burden of proof on the person charging them under the TCPA.
Yet more reason why the entire industry should be outlawed.
>
> The problem is that the phone company turns around and offers a service to businesses: blocked anonymous call rejection override. That way, the businesses that pay the fee can still get through.
>
> They need to start selling is a blocked anonymous call rejection override override.
Why? So we can pay the phone company more to prevent marketers - whose harassment the phone companies already endorse by selling them ACR overriding services - from harassing us?
Why? So that after we've paid (twice!) for protection from harassment, the phone company can then sell ACR-override-override-override ability to the goddamn telemarketers, putting us right back where we started?
Fuck that. What we need is legislation such as the ballot initiative currently going around in California that would ban telemarketing altogether, thereby stopping the problem at its source.
Call rejection isn't the scam. The real scam is the fact thet the phone company makes a small fortune selling weapons to the combatants on both sides of the ongoing privacy arms race.
For dialup users, I think you're bang-on. Even if the tap were to somehow degrade line quality, there's no way a dialup user could tell that the drop from 49,333 to 48,000 was due to a tap or to the phase of the moon. Computers and DSPs are fast enough that I'd imagine such a device could be built very cheaply.
And there's no privacy concern. You're guaranteed that you've got the subject's entire communication. If he's smart enough to leave his home to use a fortress fone or Internet Cafe, just put a tail on his ass and monitor him with a Mk. 1 eyeball from there. The few criminals smart enough to go that far to evade electronic surveillance are probably doing stuff that's sufficiently naughty to warrant physical surveillance anyways.
Where tapping gets tricky is cable, xDSL, and other access methods.
- Cable, because there are privacy issues in the law to deal with, and because you're effectively gonna end up installing a sniffer on a LAN segment anyways. (Though in the latter case, at least only the privacy of the people on the same LAN segment as the suspect would be affected, as opposed to everyone with Carnivore slurping down whatever it slurps at the ISP level.)
- xDSL, I don't know about. Can someone with clue (and, umm, assuming there's no security implications of divulging it) tell us how feasible it is for a device to be attached to a DSL line (or a T1) and snarf down all data going through that line without the subject being aware of it?
To be more precise on my xDSL question, of course it's possible, if your target is dangerous enough and you've got the budget. From what's been made public about the intelligence community and its transoceanic cable eavesdropping hacks, DSL-tapping is trivial.What I mean is "can a tap for xDSL be built cheaply enough to be of use to the general law enforcement community, as opposed to solely the intelligence community?"
(But the original poster's point still stands - I think FBI's doing this because it's expedient, not because it's right. These kinds of abuses are exactly what the Constitution tries to prevent. Not that I have any faith that our representatives will even try to, let alone be able to, defend it.)
There's a lot of scary shit that's being danced around, because nobody in the media or government has enough technical clue to ask the right questions.
The more I read from the CNN article, the more convinced I am that this is something Very Wrong.
A simple laptop. Good to see it wasn't a complicated laptop, that might've sounded like they had real power. Just a simple one, nothing to be scared of, totally harmless. Nice spin, CNN. I hope they gave your news teams "ideal camera positioning to catch the flames and explosions^W^W^Wnews footage" from the next massacre in exchange for the favor.
In geek, that sounds like, at best, it listens to *all* SMTP traffic and stores *ALL* From: and To: headers.
Whaddyawannabet that, court order or no, since "it's just like looking at the envelope", all those headers get kept, just in case some day they decide they want to do traffic analysis on everyone in the future, and/or use the data they've gathered on you when they do decide they feel you've been using one too many anonymizing relays?
Fedspeak for "Next time, we'll call it 'Guardian' or 'Defender' and maybe our PR lackeys will begin buying us beer and pussy at the local strip club again."
Hey, Fed. If you're worried about the name of your technology because it's too goddamn accurate for your PR lackeys' tastes, isn't that a hint that you might be Doing The Wrong Thing?
If they want a name for your next universal surveillance product that sounds friendlier to the public, might I suggest "Night Watch"? People too stupid to get the B5 reference will see right through it. And anyone who did watch B5 would have seen through your naming choice even if you'd called it "FluffyBunnyProtector". But at least we'll appreciate the combination of honesty and irony.
I trust NSA and CIA. I don't trust FBI. The first two are intelligence agencies; it's their job to weed out the irrelevant crap their dragnets snag. The more of us NSA and CIA can ignore, the better they can do their jobs, conserving their resources for the real threats.
FBI, on the other hand, isn't an intelligence agency, it's an enforcement agency. The more of us it can keep tabs on - whether for pr0n, oral sex in certain states, MP3z, DeCSS, expressing non-Demipublican political leanings, or anything else that might someday become criminalized - the happier it is, because every citizen is guilty of something, even if it's just spitting on the sidewalk. Every sidewalk-spitter they can find is another source of funding, because every crime, however minor, serves as an indication that More Enforcemnt Needs To Be Done.
CIA and NSA are Big Brother, but would prefer not to be so they can just get their jobs done effectively. FBI isn't Big Brother yet, but it's trying very hard to catch up. Sadly, there's nothing more dangerous than a wannabe-Big-Brother trying to prove its worth to itself.
Anyways, to get to the motivation of my post, the discussion consisted largely about the "big flamewar between /. and k5", not about why ORBS might have been Deemed Naughty, so I figured I'd illustrate the argument against ORBS in the interests of completeness.
My apologies for the inaccuracies in my post - and my thanks for your clarification of the situation.
In all honesty, if I adminned a box and noticed ORBS probing it, I personally wouldn't mind that much, (assuming I wasn't one of the unfortunate souls for whom the probing apparently crashed the box!) 'cuz I know you're whitehats. But I can see why other admins (Umm... especially the poor guy whose box went down!) would react otherwise.
Although I personally have no real beef with "contact abuse@relaytest.orbs.wherever" (again, because I know you're fundamentally good guys), that gets into a whole 'nother ball of wax, probably too esoteric for the purposes of a /. discussion, about the opt-in/out implication of "hit reply to remove our probes".
Which is a pity, since it's at the heart of the question of whether or not what ORBS does should be considered abusive.
I have no really firm opinion of it, but if pressed, I'd say it's not a problem when there are only one or two trusted relay-checkers. The problem comes from the slippery slope aspect of the problem.
In addition to the "is reply-to-stop-being-probed merely a form of opt-out" question, the other big issue that was totally ignored in Slashdot today, was the question of "at what quantity of relay-checkers does a sysadmin cease to be able to keep track of them all?" At what point does it become impossible to differentiate the whitehats (ORBS, RSS) from the blackhats ("Foo's Relay Checking Service, Established July 2000, honest, we're legit, we don't sell our blacklist of open hosts to spammers, no sirree!")?
I don't know. There's no good answer to that - it's all up to the admin you ask. But when that point gets reached for any given admin, he's likely to throw up his hands and regard all relay probes as hostile.
(Pi: Yeah, I know the principals in both sides of the ORBS debate already know that, and that this too has been talked to death in nanae... I'm just pointing it out for the benefit of readers who've obviously been getting real work done or reading Slashdot instead of reading USENET like they're supposed to. Unless they're reading /. with lynx, don't they realize that a text-based newsreader like trn or tin in an xterm looks exactly like working?!?! ;-)
MAPS - is about preventing abuse of the mail system, in any form. Present methods of abuse are mainly centered around direct-to-MX spam from dialups with lax signup policies, DOS attacks in the form of multi-megabyte mainsleaze "we sent you an MPEG of our latest 30-second TV spot" marketing firms, and yes, spam relayed through insecure relays.
Loosely categorized, that's MAPS DUL (the dialup project), MAPS RBL (The Realtime Blackhole List, designed for firms which continue to spam unrepentantly and for which every other means to have meaningful discussion has failed, and MAPS RSS (Relay Spam Stopper, a blacklist of open relays.)
ORBS, by contrast, concentrates only on adding open relays to its block list, and has a method of checking those relays which results in it probing machines, often repeatedly, and most importantly, even against the express wishes of the system administrators of the machines being probed.
ORBS is not a spammer, but there's a legitimate argument that says they're abusing the servers they contact. They have great intentions (with which the road to the RBL is paved). But the bottom line is that if you - be ye a spammer or be ye a relay-checker - probe my box, I'm gonna be pissed. If you repeatedly probe it after I ask you not to, I'm gonna be real pissed.
This is nothing new. ISTR that ORBS lost their connectivity for a period of time from BCTel as far back as 1997/8ish for this - people being probed complained to ORBS, ORBS didn't stop probing, so they did the right thing --- complained to ORBS' upstream.
Back to the present day and "pissed". If ORBS' current upstream isn't gonna stop 'em, then I'm gonna document my efforts. Having emailed ORBS folks, spoken to them on the phone, and having found their upstream unresponsive to my concerns, I as a sysadmin would have everything I needed to make a well-documented RBL nomination.
If the story is true, (and I'm still skeptical that ORBS is actually on the RBL, as opposed to there merely being a nomination under consideration, but I haven't been following nanae this week), then someone who fell into the "really really pissed" category did just that, and the RBL team was subsequently unable to have meaningful negotations with ORBS.
I like ORBS. If I had a personal box, I'd probably use their blacklist. But my liking them, even when combined with the fact that I know their intentions are good, doesn't change the fact that repeatedly launching probes against sites which have requested no longer to be probed, is/EM. abuse of the email system, and it's a form of abuse which subscribers to the MAPS RBL ought to be entitled to protection against.
Fsck that. How 'bout the early 80s bloodfest "The Bilestoad" on the Apple ][?
Pictures of a 3-D port to the Mac
I have fond memories of hacking limbs off in the original version, in glorious 280x192 resolution at four real colors and 8 pseudo-colors. It was the bloodiest thing I'd ever seen at the time :)
I first found out about Bilestoad in a full-page print ad in Nibble magazine. I believe the phrases "graphic violence and bloodletting" and "suitable for adults only" were used. I don't think the game was ever released where I lived; I never saw it on the shelves.
One of my happier gaming moments came when someone in our user group got his hands on a copy from some warez BBS in the States. It spread like wildfire. It was bloody, shocked the parents, and more importantly after the first 15 minutes, featured really good gameplay.
Your irony for the day: From the Bilestoad Manual:
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Double irony: This is the first time in my life that I'd actually read the premise of the game - a society held together by the use of virtual violence as catharsis. I'm doubly impressed by the designers' insight.
1983, folks. The original came out in 1983.
What you said
i cator/preferences/newprefc.html - is to set custtoolbar.has_toolbar_folder to false, but this preference is labelled "For Netscape Internal Use". Bah. At least they gave us Disable_MyShopping and Disable_NetscapeRadio)
:)
I'm still running Netscape 3.01. Why?
- Easy to turn image autoload off, and I can click the "images" toolbar button to load 'em when I need 'em.
- Javascript on/off is two keystrokes away. (Options->Preferences-> and it comes up with "Languages" if it's the last thing I fooled with. No burying the Javashit checkboxen in a 3-layer hierarchical menu that has to be navigated every time.)
- It's a web browser, not a marketing tool for "My Nutscrape", "People who've paid us to tell you where to shop", or "People who paid us to get space on a 'Personal Toolbar'" program.
(Aside on that damn personal toolbar - you KNOW it's designed to be annoyware when the way to turn it off - at http://developer.netscape.com/docs/manuals/commun
What I want:
- Javashite is togglable via a menu button.
- Image autoload togglable via a menu button.
- Cookie control togglable via a menu button.
- Preserve the "bug" for Windoze builds where a write-only COOKIES.TXT results in all cookies, whether accepted or not by the user, being ignored
- Proxying on/off from a menu button. Why? Because the Internet Junkbuster and other banner-filtering and cookie-eating products run as proxies. Sometimes you have to turn 'em off and accept "everything". It should be maximally easy to turn things like this off and turn 'em back on again. As another poster said, lots of these things are dynamic preferences, not static prefs.
It's funny - the only real thing I can think of to improve Nutscrape's feature list that could reasonably be considered "bloatwaresque" would be to build in a banner blocker. I don't want a development environment, mail client, or newsreader. Already got those. The only thing I'm *still* missing after all these years of "development" is a better web browser.
I presume the LCD screen comes from Viewsonic, and come with the requisite screen savers showing three parrots, each naked as a jaybird, in various tropical settings?
No, the reason they can't catch the evil pr0n-runners is because all their agents are too busy pretending to be under 13 while on ICQ! :) :) :)
The bit about the US govermnent asking the German government to lighten up on the Co$ probably has more to do with direct Co$ influence (legal or otherwise :) on US politicians than indirect influence of MSFT acting on Co$' behalf.
Not to say that Co$ aren't a right bunch of bastards, but the evidence (IMHO) for Co$ influence at MSFT doesn't yet stack up. MSFT may well be an evil monopoly bent on world domination, but they're not a stupid evil monopoly bent on world domination... *rimshot*
The flip side of that rimshot is that it implies Gates and Ballmer, despite showing the classic psychological signs of "dinosaurs looking at an asteroid", may well be smart enough to still attain world domination.
Maybe I should have s/rimshot/shudder/g ?
The bit about the US govermnent asking the German government to lighten up on the Co$ probably has more to do with direct Co$ influence (legal or otherwise :) on US politicians than indirect influence of MSFT acting on Co$' behalf.
Not to say that Co$ aren't a right bunch of bastards, but the evidence (IMHO) for Co$ influence at MSFT doesn't yet stack up. MSFT may well be an evil monopoly bent on world domination, but they're not a stupid evil monopoly bent on world domination... *rimshot*
The flip side of that rimshot is that it implies Gates and Ballmer, despite showing the classic psychological signs of "dinosaurs looking at an asteroid", may well be smart enough to still attain world domination.
Maybe I should have s/rimshot/shudder/g ?
What I am saying is that Micros~1's upper management and grunt personnel are exhibiting similar reactions to a crisis where the facts, once exposed, threaten their world view:
- Delusion: all the forged testimony during the trial, in particular the videotape that MSFT tried to pass off as "real" footage, was forced to admit was "just a simulation" when exposed, and whose justification for the faked evidence was "well, the simulation shows what it would have been like had we really done the experiment".
- Denial: Endless trumpeting about how Micros~1's triumph during the trial was somehow inevitable, ignoring the mounting evidence that indicated that they'd lost all credibility before the Judge.
- Astroturfing: Countless brainwashed minions and bald-faced propaganda campaigns, all writing essentially identical letters supporting the party line...
- Demonization of the Other: Slogans and buzzwords in Co$ for its opponents include words like "bigot", and for themselves, the notion that they fight for "religious freedom". Likewise, opponents of MSFT are anti-free-market radicals, and supporters are people who fight for "freedom to innovate". The more evidence to the contrary (Co$: "Clear the planet" - exterminate all who do not join the Cult, MSFT: "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish"), the stronger the rhetoric becomes. The red, white, and blue in the MSFT pamphlet was so blatantly propagandistic that it was almost comical.
I could go on, but you get the idea.I wonder if this is universal? These behaviors appear throughout history, but are most common in top-heavy authoritarian regimes faced with an imminent demise brought about by a new paradigm.
(Thinking back to the dying days of the cold war, when former Soviet republics seemed to break away and collapse on a weekly basis -- Romainian dictator Nikolai Ceaucescu appeared to sincerely believe that his people loved him, right up until they booed him in public, summarily revolted, and put him up against the wall within the week...)
Prediction: Therapists who want a guaranteed clientele over the next 15-20 years should set up shop within 100 miles of Redmond :)
The fine print in the article mentioned that not only Genesis, but other creation myths, up to and including the Big Bang theory, be recorded and translated.
The goal is to provide - in as many languages as possible - a set of boilerplate text, at least one instance of which is likely to survive 10,000 years.
Creation myths are among the most enduring of human stories. They're compact and easily-understood by humans, and we have existence proofs that they can be passed down over the millennia, even without advanced technology.
As such, if your core audience is "humans 10000 years from now", they're ideal material for a "Rosetta Stone" project.
The inclusion of the Big Bang (and/or hyperinflation theory, etc) is also a wise idea. The absence of theories beyond this level precisely dates the "stone" as "no older than the early 21st century". (After all, had it been written in the 43rd century, they'd have realized the universe really is "all turtles, all the way down!", and written their Stone accordingly :-)
I say "make a million of 'em, scatter 'em around the planet, drop a few over Antarctica, and stick one on every soft-landing space probe we build from this day forward."
(Aside: I really like the space probe idea. We screw up and our civilization collapses, BFD. Once our descendants develop spaceflight, they'll know we were here, and they'll know when we were here. I can't think of a better place than the Moon for long-term preservation of micro-etched materials, and we know that big hunks of metal on extraterrestrial bodies will be the first things explored once our descendants develop the technology to detect them. Luna:WesternCiv::Desert:AncientEgypt)
Today's concept: "Cognitive Dissonance".
Maybe there's no difference other than the fact that the audiophile says "damnit, I spent $200 on these s00per-s33kr1t speaker cables made from depleted uranium, and if I don't hear a difference, by God I'm gonna feel like an idiot! So I must be able to hear the difference! I don't care if it's beyond the oscilloscope's ability to detect it, any evidence that threatens my worldview is the work of the devil! I can hear the difference, I tell you!"
More seriously: MP3 is a whole lot more lossy than cheap cable. Yes, even at high bitrate and a good encoder, I believe it's possible for a trained listener to tell the difference between an MP3 and the real thing. (And for a crappy encoder or a low bitrate, anyone can tell!)
IMHO "audiophile" is marketroid-speak for "guy who'll spend $10,000 on pseudoscience in order to convince himself he's cooler than his friend who also calls himself an audiophile." Of course, that's because I can't hear the difference. Maybe there are people who can tell what metal a cable is made of by the way it sounds, and if you're in that unfortunate 0.0001% of the population you have to spend $10,000 on gear in order to get something that sounds good. (I'm not advocating buying the cheapest crap on the market, just saying that once you get past a certain level, you're merely throwing money down a hole :-)
Let the "audiophiles are weenies" vs "you have tin ears" flamewars commence.
But to get back on topic: There are enough people whose ears are tinny enough to listen to Blade/128 MP3s. Given that level of awareness in the mass market, nobody's gonna care whether the MP3s of the future come from DAE off a CD or from an analog hookup with $0.50 alligator clips to the speaker lugs.
So? If you're smart, you crack it quietly, and rather than bragging 'bout how 3733+ you are, you just walk into an Internet cafe 500 miles from your home town, wearing a disguise, and then you upload it anonym00zely to Sealand or some other data haven. Then you go home and get wildly drunk and laugh like a maniac while RIAA tries to stuff the genie back in the bottle.
> Cryptography kicks ass, but not when it's used to strip people's rights away.
s/"but not..."//g.
Cryptography kicks ass. End of sentence.
Yes, I realize what you're getting at in the context of your original post, but with the encryption system being discussed, crypto isn't being used to strip us of our rights; our rights have already been stripped by DMCA.
In such an environment (i.e., a cryptographically-weak system intended to be cracked in order to expose the cracker to DMCA charges), crypto is what you use to forcibly reclaim said rights after DMCA has stripped them.
Or as I said earlier: "Cryptography kicks ass".
The only way to stop people from using current technology in favor of a new one is to force them to throw out the old stuff. Yes, force. It's been what, 50 years, and there are still people using vacuum tubes, fer chrissake!
And although our benighted Republic has spent much time of late wiping its arse with its Constitution, even I, in my most paranoid delusional fantasies, don't forsee RIAA and MPAA linking arms with DOJ and conducting house-to-house sweeps to smash and burn all "insecure" audio gear. Hell, DOJ can't do it for (some :) drugs and guns, what hope do they have in taking our stereos!
And where's the justification? DiVX (the pay-per-view DVD, not the video compression codec!) died because the consumer realized it was a value-subtracted technology. Somehow "home tapers of music" don't quite rank up there with Eeeevul druggiez and militia whackos on the Scapegoat-Of-The-Day scale. RIAA and MPAA may think they're just as dangerous, but even the general public (who are dumb enough to swallow the War On Some Drugs and War On Some Guns) isn't that dumb. Nobody will buy copy-protected audio gear because it's demonstrably worse than what they already own!
As of now, you can still buy 15-year-old PCs for $10 in surplus stores for peanuts. If every manufacturer stopped building unprotected AV gear today, there would not be a serious shortage of non-secured gear for at least 20-30 years.
And even if there was, so what? Do you believe that there'll be no hardware platforms in 20 years on which open-source operating systems can run? Do you propose that there'll be no MP3, CDDA, or similar unprotected decoder software on the face of this earth, even though the hardware platforms of 20 years from now will be able to emulate today's P166-level boxen in their idle cycles?
RIAA and MPAA can lead the consumer to their poisoned wells all day long, but the demise of DiVX proved they still can't make us drink.
> address, etc) of anyone underage. All ICQ has to do to remove itself from any concern is take the age category out of
> their demographic marketing information gathering registration section. Suddenly, they'll no longer knowingly be
> tracking anything from a child under 13.
So all we have to do is bribe^H^H^H^H^Hlobby enough scumb^H^H^H^H^Hrepresentatives to s/13/999/g in the law, and at least America will be rid of Doublefuck and the rest of their ilk for once and for all :-)
Oh, sure, and Doubleclick would never continue to collect data on people who've clicked on their opt-out cookie.
'Cuz that'd be, like, not honest, and they've got a Trust-E seal on their site, which means they never lie!
(Irony: The state of being highly enriched in iron.)
Data miners can have my privacy when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers. Opt-out is a cop-out.
Thanks for putting this so succinctly.
Natural selection still applies even in the presence of genetic engineering technology. It's just that "silly hominids tinkering with genomes" becomes part of the environment in which we live.
If a given genetic modification enhances survivability, the mod will propagate. If it doesn't, the mod will die out.
The first few humans to engineer "better" babies will introduce some fascinating mutations into the gene pool. Some will choose to breed Schwarznegger-like hulking giants because they always wanted to be captain of the football team, and they can now live their dream through their mutant sprog. Others will attempt to get the aforementioned hulking giants with IQs of 200. Still others will try for IQs of 300 even if it means the resulting mutant is basically a brain in a vat of amniotic fluid, hooked up to a bunch of robotic actuators.
Some of these mutations will be "successful", in that they'll catch on because the mutant "does better" in society. Ask yourself, though... do we live in a society in which captains of football teams really have enhanced survivability? They may get the chicks in high school, but unless they've got the brains to make it through college, most of 'em end up pumping gas for geeks. How "survivable" is that? Likewise, any megacephalic cyborg-brainmen thrown into our school system will be beaten to death before puberty, and will never live long enough to revolutionize physics. (A few wealthy families may raise their brainmen outside of the school system, and maybe they'll end up well-adjusted and productive. Or not. But maybe it's worth trying. We're humans -- "maybe it's worth trying" is what we done since the first primate touched the monolith in 2001 and invented the "tool".)
Right now, we rub our wabbily bits together and make do with whatever random assemblage of genetic detritus comes out of the womb. The phrase "regress to the mean" comes to mind. The technology to engineer for desired traits merely means that even the wabilly-bit-rubbers will have a wider and more diverse selection of genetic material to work with in the future. (The really extreme examples probably won't mate with wabilly-bits, but will use test tubes, eggs, sperm, and other bits of genetic code. All this means is that we'll have more than one mechanism of reproduction and that our defintion of survivability will likewise have to be adjusted.) Whacked-out gene hackers will add to the diversity in the gene pool, not detract from it.
In practical terms, all this means is that we'll have upped the mutation rate. Just as with evolution, 99% of the mutants will probably fail. 1% might be viable on their own. Big deal. (And as an aside - a 99:1 ratio is probably pretty damn good, evolutionarily-speaking. With technology progressing as fast as it is, conventional mutation rates just aren't fast enough to keep up. Maybe we need this.)
Finally, the claims that this will somehow threaten all of humanity are hogwash. This technology - when it's finally developed - is going to be extremely expensive for the next 100-odd years. This will render it totally inaccessible to 90% of the world's population. There'll be plenty of "au naturel" human genetic stock to go around for centuries.
Let's see. Lots of unadulterated human stock around as a matter of necessity for the next 200-odd years. An increase in both the absolute mutation rate and the "beneficial" mutation rate among one segment of the population.
In evolutionary terms, this is a problem how?!?
Open letter to Mr. Risen:
End letter. I'm no fan of Big Brother, but frankly, I hope CIA nails the reporter's ass - and his source's ass - to the wall. Stupid fscks.Back on topic - I've learned lots of things about idjits and their companies from M$Turd docs. The "Quick-save" feature is great, in that it keeps all the things the writer says about security-ignorant assholes like Mr. Ri^W^W^W^W^W^W^Wpeople with less awareness of security issues and makes them visible to anyone with a hex editor.
Finding out company-confidential things notwithstanding, I also had a blast nailing an MMFool to the wall by digging the name under which he registered his copy of Turd (which matched one of the mailing addresses in the spam) after he sent me a spam with a Turd .doc in it and forwarding it to a local USPS inspector.
Us UNIX guys aren't immune from attacks on covert channels. An attacker can learn a lot from "vi"'s temporary files, though he's usually gotta 0wn r00t to get to them first. Ditto clever usage of "ps" on a system full of un-clever users specifying passwords on command lines.
But in general, many binary file formats make great covert channels for digging up leaked information. "od" is your friend, as is the hex mode of Vern Beurg's LIST.COM in a WinDOS environment. (I'd say Beurg's LIST utility is the single most useful DOS utility I own. Text-based "file browser" with the ability to view in ASCII or hex anything you hit ENTER on. Damn sweet!)
Or, when faced with a huge list of "age/sex/favecolor/modelofcar/SSN/creditcardnumber " choices, the end user will click on "Send All" to save time.
Stupid user? Yes -- but how many folks turned cookies back on (and then used another technology to block them) after clicking on "NO" 500 times per page?
This technology is designed to facilitate data collection. You can bet your ass that the user interface will be designed to make any negotiation other than "send all data" extremely cumbersome.
> You are _optionally_ *INFORMED* of each piece of information the site wants from you, and what they're going to do with it.
And without enforceability, that's about as valuable as a TrustE seal of approval. Wow, the marketing guys told me via P3P that they wouldn't resell my data! They'd never lie, would they?
Bottom line: Privacy is a right, not a preference.
> Can't the user simply claim "fair use"? [
In short, you're suggesting that people sued make frivolous claims that their infringement falls under fair use in order to effect a DDoS on the RIAA's lawyers.
Sounds like Elron Blubbard and the Co$ doctrine that "The purpose of a lawsuit is not to win, but to harass".
Sadly, this tactic only works if you've got a lot of money behind you, material to blackmail judges, (or a timely drowning of the offending judge's dog in order to force him to recuse himself :) or otherwise rig the legal system in your favor.
The goal of the RIAA here isn't to prosecute everyone who dips into the honey pot, merely to ensure that enough people get sued, and that honey pots are prevalent enough, to create a "chilling effect" that encourages compliance.
To dig up an old comment I made about spammers - it's like putting a few heads on pikes to encourage the others to comply.
Whether this would be effective in the context of a distributed system such as Gnutella or not is open to debate. It's rather like the War On Some Drugs. Posession is illegal, but only a tiny minority of "downloaders" get nailed to the wall.
What's interesting is that for USE^H^H^Hat least one distribution system out there whose scrutiny appears to have escaped RIAA thus far, nailing downloaders is nearly impossible, but nailing the top uploader by volume on a monthly basis would be trivial. This would create one hell of a chilling effect.
But as for a Gnutella, I'm skeptical, unless RIAA agents set up a network of dozens (or hundreds) of honeypots. If they go that route, the honeypots would have to be geographically distributed (in meatspace - in order to be distributed throughout the providers' IP-spaces), and it would be nontrivial to set up such a network of honeypots without the cooperation of the ISPs themselves.
The future will be "interesting" to say the least.