``My usual response is "You don't have now. Are you sure you won't have in the future?"''
This is a good argument. Just because something can't be used against you _now_ doesn't mean it won't be used against you later. And once collected, it stays collected - at least, it's safe to assume so.
But for the rest, I think the problem is more with allowing people to be harmed (arrested, convicted, harassed, discriminated) for the wrong reasons. Just to pick a few examples:
``Who says they won't create some correlation between people who enjoy watching model shows with people who rape women?''
That's fine. And if you watch model shows, they can indeed charge you for rape. Just as they could if you didn't watch model shows. It doesn't matter. What matters is if you actually did commit rape (which we will assume you did if you got convicted for it during the trial). If so, good job on them for accusing you. If you didn't, boo on them for falsely accusing you, and they'd better make it up to you.
``That convenience store you shopped at? That funny talking guy running it was arrested because we think he has contacts with some terrorists. Maybe you did more than just shop there, too?''
Yes, yes. And if the guy really is a terrorist, wouldn't it make sense to check up on the people he dealt with? That doesn't mean they will all be arrested and locked up. And if they do all end up arrested and locked up - without having been found guilty - then the problem is that innocent (because they haven't been found guilty) people are being arrested and locked up.
If the government, or anyone else, can harm you based on what is really innocuous information, I don't think the solution is to keep that information hidden from them. In fact, if you so strenuously try to keep it hidden from them, that is a piece of information that they can use against you. The problem isn't that they have the information. The problem is that that they can use it against you, even though it isn't conclusive evidence that you harmed anyone.
With regard to privacy, what I do have a problem with is that I am the one paying the cost of the whole system. It starts with the gathering of the information. That costs effort. Often, that's my effort. Even if it isn't, it's my tax money that pays for it. If, subsequently, the information gets used to send me spam, that's more cost and effort to me. If it is used to chase after innocent people, that's more of my tax money gone to waste. And if these innocent people are subsequently harmed (by the government or by the masses - it wouldn't be the first time someone was harassed by the neigborhood after having been acquitted) for crimes they didn't commit, my money and effort has paid to do harm to innocent people. So there are real costs associated with lessened privacy. I want to see evidence that there are benefits that outweigh these costs, before I am willing to pay them.
So let's turn the question around. By default, only you know private things about yourself. It's not about you hiding something. It's about you disclosing something. "If you have nothing to hide" is a red herring. The real question is "Why would you want to disclose your private information?"
I think the first question to ask is "Why do you want to convince them that their privacy is important?" I suppose it is because if their privacy can be violated, so can yours. Now, why don't _you_ want your privacy to be violated? Perhaps the same argument works for them.
But then again, I honestly don't have a problem with people knowing things about me. It's not like I'm going about blathering about my private life, but if you want to put in the effort to find out what strange things I might be doing, go ahead. I am not ashamed of anything I do, and if you can use any of it against me, I think that is more a problem with people's attitudes than with me not keeping things hidden well enough.
``Corporate control of Press should be banned by law.''
Please, no. That will give the government an easy way to make any press agency they don't like illegal. I think that's the _last_ thing we want.
I agree with you that there is something problematic with the press being dominated by large corporations: those corporations' interests do not always align with those of you and me. The solution, I believe, is to make spreading your own news as easy as possible (the Internet has worked wonders for this), and to educate people about the importance of informing themselves and looking for indications of good and bad reporting. The former is necessary to allow the weak and oppressed to get out their message, the latter is necessary so that people don't get brainwashed by tons of misinformation. Unfortunately, we have to contend with a very powerful enemy: laziness.
Wrong with the governments? Not so much, I think. The people who make up these governments are looking after their own interests, as always.
The problem is more with the people who elect the governments. They are buying into the scares that the government presents them with and giving the governments more control - ostensibly to catch the bad guys, but definitely restricting the freedom, privacy, and security of the good guys.
I am happy to see that the Swedes are standing up against this new restriction of their privacy. Good luck to them, and let's follow their example.
``the problem is that our religions have moved into the present, theirs are still stuck in the Cursades''
Let's not pretend things are the same for every claimed follower of a religion. There are peaceful muslims and murderous muslims, just like there are peaceful and murderous christians, and even peaceful and murderous atheists. The important thing is not what religion a person claims to follow, but the things they do that affect other people. At least, I have a problem with someone who harms people, no matter what their religion, and if a person doesn't harm others, I don't have a problem with them, no matter what their religion. If you do have a problem with someone based solely on what religion you or that person claim they follow, then you are no better than the religious zealot who hates you for not following his religion.
If I am allowed to slightly modify your words, you do have a good point: many _people_ still have a mentality remniscent of the days of the Crusades. It's us vs. them, and it's us and them because they have the wrong religion. This is a mentality that, indeed, had mostly been abandoned in Western societies. Most countries in western Europe and North America are secular and have laws against discrimination based on religion. People with various cultures and religions live peacefully together in the same country. Sadly, the mentality of the crusades seems to have come right back to where it was in recent years. It's us vs. them once again. And here I thought that we had decided not to do that anymore after World War 2...
See, that's insightful. If we take away our enemies' incentive to fight us, we will be safer. I'm glad you actually got modded up for saying it, rather than modded to -1 and buried under "boohooo you're letting the terrorists win" replies. That's not what it's about. It's not about giving in to our enemies, it's about preventing people from becoming our enemies in the first place.
Mutually Assured Destruction may work when you are fighting an enemy who owns something you can destroy. The USA and the Soviet Union had a lot to lose by a nuclear war, so they would have been crazy to start one. Garage nukes are another matter. Joe Terrorist doesn't run a country. Which country will you threaten to destroy to prevent Joe Terrorist from attacking you?
``Spammers don't care about bounces, they deliver the message and move on. They don't linger around for a bounce, since that would require a valid return path, thus a trace back to the spammer's mail server.''
The "spammer's mail server" is Joe Sixpack's exploited PC.
``The poster makes it sound like the sky is falling. OMG, if you download terrabytes of data/month on your residental account they might *gasp* charge you!''
That's fine, but then they have to be upfront about it. If they tell you you get so many bits per second, you should be able to expect to get that many bits per second. If they throttle your connection or send you extra charges if you generate more than some set limit of traffic, without having told you they would do so, you are not getting what you signed up for.
Of course, the ISPs can get around this by saying something generic like "Fair Use Policy" or "we reserve the right to..." or "indicated speeds are maximum speeds", etc. But, in that case, what you are really signing up for is something very vague, where you may or may not get the speed that was advertised. I would much prefer if the ISPs told you exactly where the limits are and what happens when you exceed them, but if you want to sign up for a vague unlimited-but-not-really plan, that is your choice.
What annoys me far more is ISPs that outright block certain traffic (such as TCP port 25) or simply offer bad service (e.g. routing problems a few hours each week). I understand that it costs the ISP money if people generate a lot of traffic, and I would actually be happy to pay on an "amount of traffic" basis, but if I do pay you, I expect you to do your job. I can understand occassional mishaps, but outright refusing to handle traffic or frequent outages are enough to send me looking for alternatives.
Actually, it's funny that we do, these days, regard the Neanderthals as dumb. It's a bit sacrilegous, even. I mean, they were smart enough to solve the problem of artificial intelligence. Not only that, they managed to go as far as shaping it after themselves, making it just like them, only smarter. So smart, even, that we wiped them out.
The real question as far as I am concerned is "What is artificial intelligence?"
What I think it boils down to is automating things that we don't know how to automate. If we know the rules that determine which decision must be taken, we can construct a machine that makes those decisions correctly. This is already happening on a large scale. But, sometimes, the rules are unknown, too hard to define, too complex, or too volatile to simply embed in a machine. In those cases, we use humans to make the decisions. Artificial intelligence, then, would allow a machine to take these decisions. We don't write the rules into a computer program, but we write a computer program that _somehow_ makes the right decisions. Since it wasn't our intelligence that came up with the rules for these decisions, we ascribe it to artificial intelligence.
I also think artificial intelligence is already there. It isn't something that is suddenly going to come around and cause machines to talk to us or take over the world. It's something that slowly gets introduced in more and more places and allows machines to perform more and more tasks without human intervention.
Now, I could cite a number of examples of things that I think are artificial intelligence. But instead I am going to ask you a question: does it matter? When you enter a query on Google and you misspell one of the words, it often offers you a suggestion of the form "Did you mean...?". How does it come up with those suggestions? Is it a human reading your query and correcting your spelling mistakes? Is it a set of static rules of the form "if they wrote X, suggest that they might have meant Y"? Does it match what you entered against commonly entered words? Is it AI? The end result is the same: you get offered your suggestion. I think that is the way a lot of AI works. It's exciting to fantasize about talking computers or machines ruling the Earth, but, for the most part, artificial intelligence is just another way to program machines.
By the way, the other day I was wondering what the point is in releasing your software as freeware, rather than as open source. I can see the point of _selling_ closed source software (you make money), and I can see the point of releasing as open source (you get a lot of mind share and free contributions), but when you release as freeware, you get neither advantage. So why do it?
I'm happy to see Opera is getting the mind share it deserves. From the first time I've used it, I've always thought it's a great browser. Unfortunately, it's always been nearly invisible in browser usage statistics...
Now, that's reasonable security measures you're talking about. The study found that most places that got breached didn't do any of that.
Also, working without Internet access can be a real pain. It obviously depends on what you are doing, but many things grind to a halt when there is no web access.
Fortunately, there is WWW over SMTP. And seakernet. And ad-hoc networks.
I guess if you try to lock down the place too much, you'll have a plethora of access vectors beyond your control in no time.
Sometimes, better security is achieved through less intrusive measures.
``It shares similar concepts, but its performance far exceeds it.''
I'll take your word for it. I still wonder about the latency sensitivity, though. I am really curious what would happen if I ran Eclipse over it. For some reason, the delay between me pressing a key and the next character being rendered on my screen is extremely long in Eclipse, with every remoting protocol I have tried, except RFB (VLC).
``There are foss client implementations for everything but windows pretty much which is unfortunate, but when I'm forced to use a non free os I find little sense in demanding a foss client to throw on top of it so I just use the free commercial client.''
Fair enough. That still leaves me without an open source NX server.
First of all, because I have been unable to find completely open-source implementations of both the NX client and server.
Secondly, because I think that NX still sends a lot of latency-sensitive events over the network. At least, that's what DXPC does, and NX is, as far as I understand, an enhanced version of DXPC.
``Windows Remote Desktop works on slow connections. It works on fast ones. It works on wireless ones that drop out a lot. It is smart, it is secure, it is dandier than anything FOSS has ever been able to even concieve of.''
Which is true, but strikes me as strange. As far as I can tell, RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol, used by Microsoft) is about as primitive as RFB (Remote Frame Buffer, used by VNC). So how come Windows Remote Desktop performs so much better?
Re:Anything else out there?
on
The State of X.Org
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I think the network transparency in X (which I use quite a lot) is both underrated and overrated (by different people, to be sure).
Many people don't know it, but when they discover they can use a computer remotely, they go "wow". With X, that has been possible for over 20 years now.
Unfortunately, many X clients don't work very well over medium to high latency links. When I want to use the Eclipse at work from home, I'm better off using VNC than X over the remote link.
For years, I've been sitting on an idea to improve remote applications by, basically, pushing more code to the display side of the connection. That would reduce the amount of information to be sent over the link, in particular latency-sensitive things like pointer positions and key strokes.
Of course, this could probably be implemented (among other ways) as an X extension.
``Since plenty of people here on/. think the U.S.'s policy on mail order drugs is there just to prop up U.S. company's monopoly status, they obviously could use the information that there are some real problem cases that the law is attempting to address.''
Or could it be that, because the law makes selling drugs by mail order illegal, only outlaws sell drugs by mail order...and since they're already breaking the law anyway, why not sell cheap junk to maximize profits?
Slashdot Mirror
``My usual response is "You don't have now. Are you sure you won't have in the future?"''
This is a good argument. Just because something can't be used against you _now_ doesn't mean it won't be used against you later. And once collected, it stays collected - at least, it's safe to assume so.
But for the rest, I think the problem is more with allowing people to be harmed (arrested, convicted, harassed, discriminated) for the wrong reasons. Just to pick a few examples:
``Who says they won't create some correlation between people who enjoy watching model shows with people who rape women?''
That's fine. And if you watch model shows, they can indeed charge you for rape. Just as they could if you didn't watch model shows. It doesn't matter. What matters is if you actually did commit rape (which we will assume you did if you got convicted for it during the trial). If so, good job on them for accusing you. If you didn't, boo on them for falsely accusing you, and they'd better make it up to you.
``That convenience store you shopped at? That funny talking guy running it was arrested because we think he has contacts with some terrorists. Maybe you did more than just shop there, too?''
Yes, yes. And if the guy really is a terrorist, wouldn't it make sense to check up on the people he dealt with? That doesn't mean they will all be arrested and locked up. And if they do all end up arrested and locked up - without having been found guilty - then the problem is that innocent (because they haven't been found guilty) people are being arrested and locked up.
If the government, or anyone else, can harm you based on what is really innocuous information, I don't think the solution is to keep that information hidden from them. In fact, if you so strenuously try to keep it hidden from them, that is a piece of information that they can use against you. The problem isn't that they have the information. The problem is that that they can use it against you, even though it isn't conclusive evidence that you harmed anyone.
With regard to privacy, what I do have a problem with is that I am the one paying the cost of the whole system. It starts with the gathering of the information. That costs effort. Often, that's my effort. Even if it isn't, it's my tax money that pays for it. If, subsequently, the information gets used to send me spam, that's more cost and effort to me. If it is used to chase after innocent people, that's more of my tax money gone to waste. And if these innocent people are subsequently harmed (by the government or by the masses - it wouldn't be the first time someone was harassed by the neigborhood after having been acquitted) for crimes they didn't commit, my money and effort has paid to do harm to innocent people. So there are real costs associated with lessened privacy. I want to see evidence that there are benefits that outweigh these costs, before I am willing to pay them.
So let's turn the question around. By default, only you know private things about yourself. It's not about you hiding something. It's about you disclosing something. "If you have nothing to hide" is a red herring. The real question is "Why would you want to disclose your private information?"
I think the first question to ask is "Why do you want to convince them that their privacy is important?" I suppose it is because if their privacy can be violated, so can yours. Now, why don't _you_ want your privacy to be violated? Perhaps the same argument works for them.
But then again, I honestly don't have a problem with people knowing things about me. It's not like I'm going about blathering about my private life, but if you want to put in the effort to find out what strange things I might be doing, go ahead. I am not ashamed of anything I do, and if you can use any of it against me, I think that is more a problem with people's attitudes than with me not keeping things hidden well enough.
*gasp* Wow...I don't even make half of that.
Maybe I should move to California. Oh, no, wait, I can't, because they limited the number of visas.
And people wonder why jobs are being given to people in other countries...
So, yeah. It's lock-in and leveraging one's monopoly in one market to gain market share in another once again.
The one I like best is "If you have nothing to hide, why don't you take off your clothes?"
``Corporate control of Press should be banned by law.''
Please, no. That will give the government an easy way to make any press agency they don't like illegal. I think that's the _last_ thing we want.
I agree with you that there is something problematic with the press being dominated by large corporations: those corporations' interests do not always align with those of you and me. The solution, I believe, is to make spreading your own news as easy as possible (the Internet has worked wonders for this), and to educate people about the importance of informing themselves and looking for indications of good and bad reporting. The former is necessary to allow the weak and oppressed to get out their message, the latter is necessary so that people don't get brainwashed by tons of misinformation. Unfortunately, we have to contend with a very powerful enemy: laziness.
Wrong with the governments? Not so much, I think. The people who make up these governments are looking after their own interests, as always.
The problem is more with the people who elect the governments. They are buying into the scares that the government presents them with and giving the governments more control - ostensibly to catch the bad guys, but definitely restricting the freedom, privacy, and security of the good guys.
I am happy to see that the Swedes are standing up against this new restriction of their privacy. Good luck to them, and let's follow their example.
``the problem is that our religions have moved into the present, theirs are still stuck in the Cursades''
Let's not pretend things are the same for every claimed follower of a religion. There are peaceful muslims and murderous muslims, just like there are peaceful and murderous christians, and even peaceful and murderous atheists. The important thing is not what religion a person claims to follow, but the things they do that affect other people. At least, I have a problem with someone who harms people, no matter what their religion, and if a person doesn't harm others, I don't have a problem with them, no matter what their religion. If you do have a problem with someone based solely on what religion you or that person claim they follow, then you are no better than the religious zealot who hates you for not following his religion.
If I am allowed to slightly modify your words, you do have a good point: many _people_ still have a mentality remniscent of the days of the Crusades. It's us vs. them, and it's us and them because they have the wrong religion. This is a mentality that, indeed, had mostly been abandoned in Western societies. Most countries in western Europe and North America are secular and have laws against discrimination based on religion. People with various cultures and religions live peacefully together in the same country. Sadly, the mentality of the crusades seems to have come right back to where it was in recent years. It's us vs. them once again. And here I thought that we had decided not to do that anymore after World War 2...
Why convert into crude oil substitute, rather than directly converting it into purer components?
See, that's insightful. If we take away our enemies' incentive to fight us, we will be safer. I'm glad you actually got modded up for saying it, rather than modded to -1 and buried under "boohooo you're letting the terrorists win" replies. That's not what it's about. It's not about giving in to our enemies, it's about preventing people from becoming our enemies in the first place.
Mutually Assured Destruction may work when you are fighting an enemy who owns something you can destroy. The USA and the Soviet Union had a lot to lose by a nuclear war, so they would have been crazy to start one. Garage nukes are another matter. Joe Terrorist doesn't run a country. Which country will you threaten to destroy to prevent Joe Terrorist from attacking you?
``Spammers don't care about bounces, they deliver the message and move on. They don't linger around for a bounce, since that would require a valid return path, thus a trace back to the spammer's mail server.''
The "spammer's mail server" is Joe Sixpack's exploited PC.
``The poster makes it sound like the sky is falling. OMG, if you download terrabytes of data/month on your residental account they might *gasp* charge you!''
..." or "indicated speeds are maximum speeds", etc. But, in that case, what you are really signing up for is something very vague, where you may or may not get the speed that was advertised. I would much prefer if the ISPs told you exactly where the limits are and what happens when you exceed them, but if you want to sign up for a vague unlimited-but-not-really plan, that is your choice.
That's fine, but then they have to be upfront about it. If they tell you you get so many bits per second, you should be able to expect to get that many bits per second. If they throttle your connection or send you extra charges if you generate more than some set limit of traffic, without having told you they would do so, you are not getting what you signed up for.
Of course, the ISPs can get around this by saying something generic like "Fair Use Policy" or "we reserve the right to
What annoys me far more is ISPs that outright block certain traffic (such as TCP port 25) or simply offer bad service (e.g. routing problems a few hours each week). I understand that it costs the ISP money if people generate a lot of traffic, and I would actually be happy to pay on an "amount of traffic" basis, but if I do pay you, I expect you to do your job. I can understand occassional mishaps, but outright refusing to handle traffic or frequent outages are enough to send me looking for alternatives.
``I'm going to invent a car that runs on strawmen.''
Hey, I never said you couldn't!
Actually, it's funny that we do, these days, regard the Neanderthals as dumb. It's a bit sacrilegous, even. I mean, they were smart enough to solve the problem of artificial intelligence. Not only that, they managed to go as far as shaping it after themselves, making it just like them, only smarter. So smart, even, that we wiped them out.
The real question as far as I am concerned is "What is artificial intelligence?"
...?". How does it come up with those suggestions? Is it a human reading your query and correcting your spelling mistakes? Is it a set of static rules of the form "if they wrote X, suggest that they might have meant Y"? Does it match what you entered against commonly entered words? Is it AI? The end result is the same: you get offered your suggestion. I think that is the way a lot of AI works. It's exciting to fantasize about talking computers or machines ruling the Earth, but, for the most part, artificial intelligence is just another way to program machines.
What I think it boils down to is automating things that we don't know how to automate. If we know the rules that determine which decision must be taken, we can construct a machine that makes those decisions correctly. This is already happening on a large scale. But, sometimes, the rules are unknown, too hard to define, too complex, or too volatile to simply embed in a machine. In those cases, we use humans to make the decisions. Artificial intelligence, then, would allow a machine to take these decisions. We don't write the rules into a computer program, but we write a computer program that _somehow_ makes the right decisions. Since it wasn't our intelligence that came up with the rules for these decisions, we ascribe it to artificial intelligence.
I also think artificial intelligence is already there. It isn't something that is suddenly going to come around and cause machines to talk to us or take over the world. It's something that slowly gets introduced in more and more places and allows machines to perform more and more tasks without human intervention.
Now, I could cite a number of examples of things that I think are artificial intelligence. But instead I am going to ask you a question: does it matter? When you enter a query on Google and you misspell one of the words, it often offers you a suggestion of the form "Did you mean
By the way, the other day I was wondering what the point is in releasing your software as freeware, rather than as open source. I can see the point of _selling_ closed source software (you make money), and I can see the point of releasing as open source (you get a lot of mind share and free contributions), but when you release as freeware, you get neither advantage. So why do it?
I'm happy to see Opera is getting the mind share it deserves. From the first time I've used it, I've always thought it's a great browser. Unfortunately, it's always been nearly invisible in browser usage statistics...
Now, that's reasonable security measures you're talking about. The study found that most places that got breached didn't do any of that.
Also, working without Internet access can be a real pain. It obviously depends on what you are doing, but many things grind to a halt when there is no web access.
Fortunately, there is WWW over SMTP. And seakernet. And ad-hoc networks.
I guess if you try to lock down the place too much, you'll have a plethora of access vectors beyond your control in no time.
Sometimes, better security is achieved through less intrusive measures.
``It shares similar concepts, but its performance far exceeds it.''
I'll take your word for it. I still wonder about the latency sensitivity, though. I am really curious what would happen if I ran Eclipse over it. For some reason, the delay between me pressing a key and the next character being rendered on my screen is extremely long in Eclipse, with every remoting protocol I have tried, except RFB (VLC).
``There are foss client implementations for everything but windows pretty much which is unfortunate, but when I'm forced to use a non free os I find little sense in demanding a foss client to throw on top of it so I just use the free commercial client.''
Fair enough. That still leaves me without an open source NX server.
``Why not just use NX?''
First of all, because I have been unable to find completely open-source implementations of both the NX client and server.
Secondly, because I think that NX still sends a lot of latency-sensitive events over the network. At least, that's what DXPC does, and NX is, as far as I understand, an enhanced version of DXPC.
``Windows Remote Desktop works on slow connections. It works on fast ones. It works on wireless ones that drop out a lot. It is smart, it is secure, it is dandier than anything FOSS has ever been able to even concieve of.''
Which is true, but strikes me as strange. As far as I can tell, RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol, used by Microsoft) is about as primitive as RFB (Remote Frame Buffer, used by VNC). So how come Windows Remote Desktop performs so much better?
I think the network transparency in X (which I use quite a lot) is both underrated and overrated (by different people, to be sure).
Many people don't know it, but when they discover they can use a computer remotely, they go "wow". With X, that has been possible for over 20 years now.
Unfortunately, many X clients don't work very well over medium to high latency links. When I want to use the Eclipse at work from home, I'm better off using VNC than X over the remote link.
For years, I've been sitting on an idea to improve remote applications by, basically, pushing more code to the display side of the connection. That would reduce the amount of information to be sent over the link, in particular latency-sensitive things like pointer positions and key strokes.
Of course, this could probably be implemented (among other ways) as an X extension.
Not saying that this is the case here, but it wouldn't be the first time that large groups of people voted against their best interests.
``Since plenty of people here on /. think the U.S.'s policy on mail order drugs is there just to prop up U.S. company's monopoly status, they obviously could use the information that there are some real problem cases that the law is attempting to address.''
Or could it be that, because the law makes selling drugs by mail order illegal, only outlaws sell drugs by mail order...and since they're already breaking the law anyway, why not sell cheap junk to maximize profits?