The old DOS/Windows had security as a pretty secondary concern
Lets be honest, the people who originally wrote DOS
(which was Seattle Computing not Microsoft) and everything after that up until the early 90's never considered security at all. It wasn't even on their radar and with good reason because DOS was just a program loader and disk
drive controller. There were plenty of real operating systems such as Multics, VMS and UNIX around from the seventies but since DOS was only running on single user machines that weren't much better than a ZX Spectrum or C64 it didn't really matter. The problem is that somehow Microsoft managed to wallpaper a crappy GUI over the top
of DOS and convince people if was a real operating
system.
So it kept rolling on and the hardware
got a lot more powerful but the basic guts of the
"OS" remained little different from CP/M and its
ilk. Alright NT was finally written from scratch
but by then DOS was everywhere and so to this day
all sorts of compromises are made to ensure backward compatability which severely compromise
security. It is a testiment to Microsoft's marketing that people don't look at their OS's
and laugh the guts up because really they are just
the bastard spawn of a primitive (no disrespect to Gary Kildall) operating system
that was only ever ment for use on the first primative home computers.
While MS Excel may have an extensive array of features it is somewhat lacking on the accuracy
front. At least as far back as Sawitski (1994)
various scientific analyses have been critising Excel using phases like "can be judged inadequate" and "it can be deduced that Excel uses an unstable algorithm". However as McCullough & Wilson (1999)
note Microsoft has done little to address these
concerns. The problems Sawitski found in Excel 4
were still present in Excel 97 and Excel 2000 for that matter. In fact critisism of the accuracy of
Excel 2002 and XP in the scientific literature continues e.g. McCullough & Wilson (2002).
To quote the The Gartner Group, "Enterprises should advise their scientists and professional statisticians not to use Microsoft Excel for substantive statistical analysis". Of course
if you do not need to do accurate statistical analysis then these problems will not effect you
but given that Microsoft knows about and has largely ignored these problems and scientists
are the people most likely to check that a given
piece of software really does what if claims to
do rather than using it blindly, it seems quite possible that similar problems exist in other
parts of Excel but have yet to be exposed.
Rather than blindly copying Excel, the Gnumeric
team might do better by trying to bring on board
some of these scientists who have been testing and critising Excel in order to improve the accuracy
of Gnumeric, so that not only does Gnumeric beat
Excel on features but also, and far more importantly, on accuracy. See the following links
for more info on the problems with Excel,
1,
2,
3,
4.
It sounds like you were asked to show ID more often than that; what were the circumstances?
Well almost any time I have bought alcohol for a
start, and I am almost dead (30) so I don't look
like I could be under 21. The local convience store where they know me don't ask, but they do in almost every bar I have been in. I had to show my
passport to get a pint after work not an hour ago for instance. Not that a lot of drinking is possible in the US with all the puritan anti-drinking laws and culture. Frankly that alone is grounds for another revolution in my opinion.
Then there is buying train tickets or though that
is a relatively recent thing I think post 11/9/01.
I don't have a car here so I have never had any
interaction with the cops but I get the impression
that they effectively used drivers licenses as ID
cards (correct me if I'm wrong) and demand to see
them whenever they stop anyone. My UK drivers license is a large piece of paper folded up in
a plastic wallet and I have never carried it with
me when I drive in the UK.
Internal flights is another example and in the UK
they don't ask to see peoples passports to fly
internally to my knowledge, although it is possible that it has changed very recently. That
is what John Gilmore is suing the US government
about at the moment. As I said once you have a
form of ID that most people carry it then encourages people to ask for it and the whole
situation gets worst with time. I have been asked
for ID in shops in the US a few times when I am
buying some random stuff, I have always refused
and they have eventually sold the stuff to me
anyway but there is definitely a trend towards
shops wanting to know who their customers are
even if they pay cash.
One assumes that eventually they will have "smart"
post boxes that will snap a digital photo of you
or require some sort of biometric scan (fingerprint/iris) when you deposit a letter. And of course the biometric database of the whole population they will need to run this, seems inevitable at this point. It will just be too tempting for these sort of people, plus people in the US are already habituated to showing ID to do
just about everything, drink, buy train tickets etc.
Apparently US audiences fifty years ago used to boo and hiss everytime some nazi said "your papers, please" in a war film but you wouldn't know it now, they are totally whipped. The new
photocard drivers licenses that they have
been trying to phase-in in the UK over the last
few years, really are the thin end of the wedge.
In the US which has had them for decades they
have become de facto national ID cards, everyone
has them and as a result you are asked for ID
all the time. I have to carry may passport everywhere I go (since I don't have a US drivers
licence) or I wouldn't be able to do anything.
The situation in the UK where no one can reasonably expect people to have any sort of
ID and hence no one asks for it is pretty cushy
compared to most of the world and unfortunately
unlikely to last much longer. I'm sure once these practices become common in the US they will be
exported to the rest of the world. It already
looks like US is going to get its way in forcing
other coutries to include biometric imformation
on their passports, if they want their citizens
to be able to enter the US, and similar pressure
can be used for sender ID on mail. If the post office in the UK has to collect sender ID for mail to the US, of it won't be let in, there are plenty
of fascists in the UK to may sure it is done for
domestic post as well.
In case you don't realise, this is where the police make up some plausible sounding stuff, go to a friendly judge and get him to rubber stamp it. Then they execute the warrant in an attempt to find some real evidense that will stand up in an actual court. In this case despite removing all the computers, books, and documents in his house they found nothing. Which is why he wasn't immediately charged with anything. In the end they were forced to fall back on the linking to information on explosives (18 USC 842) and scare
him with threats of 20 years in jail into pleading
so they never had to present any evidense at all.
He has only been convicted under 18 USC 842
and therefore I think we can safely assume that the computer fraud stuff was just something they
used to pad out their search warrant with. This
is purely an issue of free speach (linking to information the US government doesn't like) since
that is the only thing he has been convicted of.
The conviction is for not deleting links to information on explosives that were posted to
his site by someone else:
Raisethefist.com, Sherman Austin will be convicted on Monday, Sept
23rd as he pleads guilty to felony count: 18 U.S.C. 842 (p)(2)(A):
Distribuion of Information Relating to Explosives, Destructive
Devices, and Weapons of Mass Destruction with the Intent that such
Information be used in Furtherance of a Federal Crime of Violence.
All this crap about hacking is obviously fake
or they would certainly have convicted him of that too.
But of course it is all far too late. If realisticpredictions
are anything to go by, world oil production will peak in the next decade and
then begin to fall at about 2 percent per year
soon afterwards. Even if the US started building
wind turbines (the most promising renewable energy
source) at a rate of 20,000 a year right now, there
would still be major problems. As it is, it looks
like everyone is going to carry on as usual until
the energy shortages begin, at which point there will not be enough spare energy available to undertake a massive renewable energy building program. Given that more than 4 billion of the
worlds 6 billion people are only alive because
of the energy subsidy of fossil fuels, which allows chemical fertilizers and mechanised agriculture, the resulting resource wars and famines are likely to be very bad.
Note that the reason the kernel is not POSIX-compliant is:
- the POSIX standard is technically stupid. Linus Torvalds
As far as I can see the policy seems to be to comply with the POSIX standard as much as possible, except in cases where it is idiotic,
in which case it seems reasonable to implement
something better, as in the case of threading:
POSIX threads is a braindamaged pile of crap. Alan Cox
There is already a solution
on
Saving the Net
·
· Score: 1
Didn't you watch Demolition Man? They will change the constitution to allow him to run.
In terms of food safety I think there is real issue in that non-GM plants have been extensively
tested (in a trial and error sort of way) for the
last 7,000 years or so, and as a result we have a
very good idea about which plants are safe to eat
or which are not. GM foods have not undergone this testing and so I think it is quite reasonable that anyone who wants to sell them should demonstrate on a case by case basis that they are safe to eat.
In terms of enviromental safety there is also an
issue. There are many examples of humans introducing foreign organisms into a particular
enviroment and causing absolute havoc. I do not
see any difference between a plant from another
continent and a genetically modified version of
a native plant. They both have the potential to
interact in unexpacted ways with enviroment and
so should be treated with extreme care.
However the most important question that should
be asked in my opinion is why these crops are
needed in the first place. Most of the use of GM
crops at the moment appears to be in developed
countries but these are the places that need them
the least. Certainly in the UK the government
pays farmers not to use land and buys up surplus
production to stop prices from falling, and this
seems the norm for the developed world. Farming
in developed countries is already too efficent for
its own good.
There just doesn't appear to be any need for GM
crops in the developed world, although in the developing world a case might be made. So why if
they aren't needed are GM crops being introduced.
I would guess because their developers are pushing
them and individual farmers don't want to be left
behind. For an individual farmer the extra efficiency will help him compete better in a tight
market but overall it is bad for farmers since
the extra efficiency will mean the need for fewer
farmers and some will be driven out of business.
In an ideal world things should be going the other way. Without GM crops and with less use of fertiliser and pesticides efficiency would fall but since modern agriculture is crisis because it is too efficient this is a good thing. The enviroment will be cleaner, and food will purer and less harmful. However in reality it looks like a small number of biotech companies are going to hijack world agriculture and collect a tax on every plant grown despite the fact that GM crops are entirely unneeded.
I think to some extent we are talking at cross purposes. Certainly the contents of a mail might give away your identity, if intercepted, without encryption. But the header of the mail cannot
be encrypted or it would be impossible to deliver
it, so without an "anonymous" e-mail account even
encrypted e-mail is traceable. Also encryption
does not help you at all in being anonymous to
the recipient of the mail since by definition they
must be able to decrypt it.
There is also the case
of the e-mail address it self. Many services (such as slashdot) require you to supply an e-mail address to use them. In this case no e-mail might actually be sent at all (so encryption is irrelevant) but given that e-mail address you do not want them to trace your real indentity.
Who actually sends mail from free accounts? The point is to just have an address. The sort of people I give my free account address to aren't the sort of people I would ever mail. Hell I wouldn't even give them an e-mail address if I didn't have too. The problem is the number of things that require an e-mail address is growing all the time and if you gave out your real e-mail address you would a) not have any privacy and b) be drowning in spam.
The real fix to all this would be a better messaging protocol. E-mail just wasn't designed
for anonimity (or security for that matter). A radically different protocol that allowed anonimity, was always encrypted, and preferably
fixed the spam problem as well, would be the real anwser.
The reason free email accounts are so useful is not because of their security but becuase of their anonimity. This isn't about people reading your mail. It is about them not being able to trace who
you are even if they read your mail. Obviously this isn't the case with something like hotmail that wants to your entire cv to let you sign up but a service like yahoo is relatively anonymous. Given the vast number of people that demand an e-mail address to do anything (even slashdot) you
would not have any privacy at all if you didn't have a free e-mail front account to hide behind and take all the spam.
Of course the real problem is at the protocol level. E-mail wasn't designed with anonimity (or
security for that matter) in mind. We really need
an entirely new messaging protocol that has been
designed to properly handle anonimity and security. Then there would be no need for the questionable anonimity of free accounts.
Re:So then what IS the point?
on
RFID Explained
·
· Score: 1
Once the government picks this up and runs with it
there may well be RFID readers buried in the road
at every intersection (just to identify people who
run red lights obviously). Also your chain of people the $5 note passes through is very atypical. I would guess the most likely "lifecycle" for a note is to get withdrawn from an ATM and spent in a shop, restaurant etc. and then paid back into a bank by the shop. The higher the
denomination of note the more likely it will be
that it will not be given out as change to anyone
else. But all this assumes that the RFID's in the
note only get read every time they go in and out
of a bank. In reality the first thing that will
happen after RFID's are put in notes is that readers will be put in cash registers (to stop light fingered employees). So eventually I would
expect all shops to read the ID's of all money
they take in and give out in change.
During development the closed source software will
only be used by the developers, and in general the
developers are not like their end users and may
have little interest in actually using the software they have been payed to write. For open source however the software is likely to be available to users from a very early stage and the developers are likely to be active users of the software as well. It would be very surprising if the bugs were not squashed faster.
Once the software is released closed source has the problem that bugs will only be fixed if the
producer sees profit in it. Major security bugs
will be fixed "relatively" quickly, as they might
impact future sales otherwise, but with closed source the producer may not fix known non-security
critical bugs if they don't feel like it, and no one else can.
There is also a problem with bug reporting in the closed source world. Who actually
reports closed source non-security critical bugs?
There isn't a lot of incentive since they may not
be fixed anyway and if they are the fix will likely just go into then next version (that could
be a year or two away) and you will have to pay for. Also the fraction of the users that do not
have a licenced copy are unlikely to report bugs.
Whatever the merits of this particular study's methodology the results are just plain common
sense anyway.
Could you please explain what place currency has in an anarchy driven society?
None. However Ken McLeod's books deal with many
different political systems and mixtures thereof,
not just anarchism. Things are also confused by the fact that there are many people today that
call themselves anarchists, but are not. There are some people (mostly americans) who describe themselves as anarcho-capitalists, but
the anarcho bit of it is at best an affectation
and often just delusional. The state and capitalism are two sides of the same coin.
However
due to the tension between capitalists who want to crush the workers (conservatives) and those that want to buy the workers off with a few scraps (liberals), it has become fashionable for conservatives to critise the state. Some people
(not the real capitalists that own most of the world) have taken this critisism out of context (social welfare etc.) and advocate the capitalism
without most or all of the state. These people are
called "libertarians" in the US. In reality capitalism could not exist without the state but
this hardly matters since the main purpose of
"libertarians" appears to be to stalking horses
for conservatives. Anarcho-capitalists are just
rather extreme "libertarians".
Money itself is best viewed as a routing mechanism
analogous to IP in the internet. You could destroy
all the money on Earth (very easy since most money has no physical form but is just numbers in bank computers) and it would have no effect effect on
the amount of resources available. However what
it would seriously effect is the ability of the people who previously had all that money to route resources as they desired. In an anarchist society
since there are no elite to which the majority
of the societies resources must be routed there
is no need for money.
Anarchism? Is it anything like Somalia, or Chechnya?
No it is not like Somalia. Anarchy is no rulers ("No Gods, No Masters"). A load of warlords fighting over who gets to own the country sounds like rulers to me. One man robbing another at gun point or G. W. Bush, it is just a matter of scale, but the princple is the same. If you have hierarchical power relations based on force or the threat of force then it isn't anarchy. For future reference:
Anarchy: No rulers or hierarchical social structures based on coersion. May be highly organised or totally chaotic, or anything in
between, but any organisation involved is based on free agreement between equals.
In cases like Somalia the word you are looking for
is chaos. Since there is still vast amounts of hierarchical social structures and coersion involved it cannot, by definition, be anarchy.
As an aside, on the topic of Somalia, it is worth noting that if all you know about it comes from
Black Hawk Down you have be sadly misinformed. The political background portrayed in the flim is a
total fiction and the makers go to great lengths to hide the truth. For instance they show Adid's militia armed with AK-47s when in reality they
would mostly be armed with M16s since Somalia was
a US client for the previous decade under the dictatorship of Siad Barre.
No. Anarchy is no rulers. Chaos is "a lack of order". Obviously out esteemed masters would like
us to believe that the whole world would cease to
exist without them but logically the lack of a
heirarchically structure does not have too mean
no structure at all.
It seems like one solution to having a highly functional Digital Video Recorder would would
be to use a PC running Linux with a tuner card
in it and use MythTV or Freevo. This database
of people's setups suggests that there are quite
a few people our there trying this. It certainly
has the advantage that if you are lacking some
feature you can just roll up your sleeves and
code it rather than just moaning about the vendor
not supplying it.
However there is some disconnect between the way
most people want to use a computer and how they
watch TV and in general you will want to have
your computer and TV in two entirely separate rooms. While I would be interested in anyones
solutions involving wireless etc., since I don't
have a desktop handy anyway, only a laptop, another option presents itself. Plop the laptop
down next to the TV connect it up and use it as
a DVR and when you are finished and want a computer you can pick just pick it up, carry it
next door and put it on a desk.
It looks like Sony amoung others are just bringing
out DVR ready laptops but if you don't want to
fork out for a new one is it possible to get an
older laptop working as a DVR? I guess you would
be restricted to USB TV tuners (are there any good ones?) such as the Pinnacle PCTV Deluxe. However there is the question
of whether there are USB tuners for which linux drivers are available (obviously not from
the vendor that would be too easy!) and how easy
it would be to get one working with Freevo/MythTV. Just some thoughts in case there
is someone out there who has already tried this?
You can certainly do it manually but it could be refined considerably by using a computer. Ideally
you would obtain copies of government databases
containing the registration and licensing details
to run the system. Then when you want to steal
a black BMW 5 series you would have the computer
generate a plate of a random black BMW 5 series
whose owner is not really local but also does not live a huge distance away. Other selection criteria could be used to select cars that are
less likely to be driven that often (age of owner or owner is car dealership etc.). The system could
also give you details on the owner so you could
pretend to be them if stopped and even select cars
whose owners match your physical appearance (in the US anyway) to make that easier. The system might even print a fake drivers license and other
paperwork to go with the plates so eveything would
hang together if you were stopped.
If you copy a license plate from one car to steal another that looks just like it, you may as well have just stolen the first. The cops will recognize the duplicate plates and know that one is stolen.
No, when the second car is reported stolen they will be looking for the its plates. If you alter
the plates to those of a similar but different
car, since the cops will now be relying on their infalible camera system, and be sitting around eating dounuts, the cameras will flag you as a different car and you will not be stopped. For
the cops to notice that there are two cars with the same plates driving around will need to be logging the movements of all cars and looking for
unrealistic events such as the same car passing
two cameras a hundred miles appart within a minute. However if the database of cars is picked
to select cars that are not driven that often,
the probability of this being a problem is
fairly small.
Just to be anal because I feel like it today, a plaid is a sort of sash come toga wrapped around
the upper body in traditional highland dress. It is a garment not a cloth pattern. The family of cloth patterns used by the highland clans is called
tartan. To quote this page:
Originally, the Scottish Tartan was a distinction of rank or position. It was not identified by weave but by the number of colours in the weave. If only one colour was used it depicted a servant, two, a farmer rank, three, an officer rank, five, a chieftain, six for a poet, and seven for a Chief. Eventually, clans or families adopted their own tartan, using a range of animal and earth colours which were frequently secret, only known to the weavers of the islands. They included yellows, blues, whites, greens, browns, reds, black and purple. Some say that a keen eye can identify the colour with a particular island, almost like a wine taster can identify the year and the vineyard.
Of course in reality when this system is widespread a thief will turn up to steal your car with new plates laser printed onto sticky-backed paper. He sticks them over the cars plates and drives away. Bingo! Problem solved. A traffic camera with some OCR software attached will not be able tell the difference. The most important tool for the car thief will just become a computer program that has a database of plate numbers and generates random plates for cars of a specified
model and colour.
There is always some counter measure to something like this and the effect on criminals is minimal. But everyone else loses a little bit more privacy and freedom and since this measure will not work like all the others before it, there will be more such measures in the future that chip away at our freedom. Which is no doubt the real motivebehind
this.
Funny, the allegory I saw in the Matrix was capitalism. The humans in their pods are the
wage slaves and the machines living off them
are the capitalist elite. The matrix is the corporate
media working to hide the true nature of their
situation from slaves and keep them distracted
and entertained. The agents are the police using violence to control those you question the system.
This all works on many levels since the "reality"
that the matrix is simulating is a capitalist society itself.
While it is likely that this allegory is
"probably
inadvertent"
seeing as Hollywood is part of the Matrix of the real world and not prone to spreading such thoughtcrime, it may be that the original idea
came from someone who had this allegory in mind
and some of it has survived in the Wachowski
brothers script.
In addition the all the religious conections the
film also seems to appeal to fans of
Nietzsche,
so perhaps in the end the reason for its popularity is that it has something for everyone
in it and it is subtle enough not to push any of
its possible messages down anyones throat.
The Russian Soyuz single-use rocket, for example, has a far higher safety rating (no accidents on manned flights since 1971), and costs about 30 TIMES LESS per flight.
While they have not lost any cosmonauts since the
redesign after the Soyuz 11 failure in 1971 and I think it is clear that the Soyuz spacecraft is far
safer than the Shuttle, this isn't really proven.
Between 1972 and 1999 manned Soyuz flights break
down roughly like this:
There will have been a handful more TM flights
since 1999 and one Soyuz TMA flight which was
successful if slightly off course. So in all there
have been about 90 manned Soyuz flights since 1972
with no failures, but this only proves than the mean failure is probably better than 1:90, which
while better than the Shuttle is not outstandingly
so. Of course the failure rate may be much better
than 1:90 but there is no proof of that.
However the Soyuz would win anyway since it is so
much cheaper. One intresting point is the rate of
change that the Soyuz has undergone since 1971. This appears very health in comparison with the
US Shuttle. While keeping an example of a mature
technology like comercial airliners flying for decades is desirable I would question whether the
same is true for spaceflight. It still seems analogous to aircraft development in the very
early years and therefore short design lifetimes
seem called for since new and better designs should be just around the corner. Even if reusable
spacecraft were a good idea in theory they are
a huge road block to fast development while the
technology is immature.
Slashdot Mirror
The old DOS/Windows had security as a pretty secondary concern
Lets be honest, the people who originally wrote DOS (which was Seattle Computing not Microsoft) and everything after that up until the early 90's never considered security at all. It wasn't even on their radar and with good reason because DOS was just a program loader and disk drive controller. There were plenty of real operating systems such as Multics, VMS and UNIX around from the seventies but since DOS was only running on single user machines that weren't much better than a ZX Spectrum or C64 it didn't really matter. The problem is that somehow Microsoft managed to wallpaper a crappy GUI over the top of DOS and convince people if was a real operating system.
So it kept rolling on and the hardware got a lot more powerful but the basic guts of the "OS" remained little different from CP/M and its ilk. Alright NT was finally written from scratch but by then DOS was everywhere and so to this day all sorts of compromises are made to ensure backward compatability which severely compromise security. It is a testiment to Microsoft's marketing that people don't look at their OS's and laugh the guts up because really they are just the bastard spawn of a primitive (no disrespect to Gary Kildall) operating system that was only ever ment for use on the first primative home computers.
While MS Excel may have an extensive array of features it is somewhat lacking on the accuracy front. At least as far back as Sawitski (1994) various scientific analyses have been critising Excel using phases like "can be judged inadequate" and "it can be deduced that Excel uses an unstable algorithm". However as McCullough & Wilson (1999) note Microsoft has done little to address these concerns. The problems Sawitski found in Excel 4 were still present in Excel 97 and Excel 2000 for that matter. In fact critisism of the accuracy of Excel 2002 and XP in the scientific literature continues e.g. McCullough & Wilson (2002).
To quote the The Gartner Group, "Enterprises should advise their scientists and professional statisticians not to use Microsoft Excel for substantive statistical analysis". Of course if you do not need to do accurate statistical analysis then these problems will not effect you but given that Microsoft knows about and has largely ignored these problems and scientists are the people most likely to check that a given piece of software really does what if claims to do rather than using it blindly, it seems quite possible that similar problems exist in other parts of Excel but have yet to be exposed.
Rather than blindly copying Excel, the Gnumeric team might do better by trying to bring on board some of these scientists who have been testing and critising Excel in order to improve the accuracy of Gnumeric, so that not only does Gnumeric beat Excel on features but also, and far more importantly, on accuracy. See the following links for more info on the problems with Excel, 1, 2, 3, 4.
It sounds like you were asked to show ID more often than that; what were the circumstances?
Well almost any time I have bought alcohol for a start, and I am almost dead (30) so I don't look like I could be under 21. The local convience store where they know me don't ask, but they do in almost every bar I have been in. I had to show my passport to get a pint after work not an hour ago for instance. Not that a lot of drinking is possible in the US with all the puritan anti-drinking laws and culture. Frankly that alone is grounds for another revolution in my opinion.
Then there is buying train tickets or though that is a relatively recent thing I think post 11/9/01. I don't have a car here so I have never had any interaction with the cops but I get the impression that they effectively used drivers licenses as ID cards (correct me if I'm wrong) and demand to see them whenever they stop anyone. My UK drivers license is a large piece of paper folded up in a plastic wallet and I have never carried it with me when I drive in the UK.
Internal flights is another example and in the UK they don't ask to see peoples passports to fly internally to my knowledge, although it is possible that it has changed very recently. That is what John Gilmore is suing the US government about at the moment. As I said once you have a form of ID that most people carry it then encourages people to ask for it and the whole situation gets worst with time. I have been asked for ID in shops in the US a few times when I am buying some random stuff, I have always refused and they have eventually sold the stuff to me anyway but there is definitely a trend towards shops wanting to know who their customers are even if they pay cash.
One assumes that eventually they will have "smart" post boxes that will snap a digital photo of you or require some sort of biometric scan (fingerprint/iris) when you deposit a letter. And of course the biometric database of the whole population they will need to run this, seems inevitable at this point. It will just be too tempting for these sort of people, plus people in the US are already habituated to showing ID to do just about everything, drink, buy train tickets etc.
Apparently US audiences fifty years ago used to boo and hiss everytime some nazi said "your papers, please" in a war film but you wouldn't know it now, they are totally whipped. The new photocard drivers licenses that they have been trying to phase-in in the UK over the last few years, really are the thin end of the wedge. In the US which has had them for decades they have become de facto national ID cards, everyone has them and as a result you are asked for ID all the time. I have to carry may passport everywhere I go (since I don't have a US drivers licence) or I wouldn't be able to do anything.
The situation in the UK where no one can reasonably expect people to have any sort of ID and hence no one asks for it is pretty cushy compared to most of the world and unfortunately unlikely to last much longer. I'm sure once these practices become common in the US they will be exported to the rest of the world. It already looks like US is going to get its way in forcing other coutries to include biometric imformation on their passports, if they want their citizens to be able to enter the US, and similar pressure can be used for sender ID on mail. If the post office in the UK has to collect sender ID for mail to the US, of it won't be let in, there are plenty of fascists in the UK to may sure it is done for domestic post as well.
In case you don't realise, this is where the police make up some plausible sounding stuff, go to a friendly judge and get him to rubber stamp it. Then they execute the warrant in an attempt to find some real evidense that will stand up in an actual court. In this case despite removing all the computers, books, and documents in his house they found nothing. Which is why he wasn't immediately charged with anything. In the end they were forced to fall back on the linking to information on explosives (18 USC 842) and scare him with threats of 20 years in jail into pleading so they never had to present any evidense at all. He has only been convicted under 18 USC 842 and therefore I think we can safely assume that the computer fraud stuff was just something they used to pad out their search warrant with. This is purely an issue of free speach (linking to information the US government doesn't like) since that is the only thing he has been convicted of.
The conviction is for not deleting links to information on explosives that were posted to his site by someone else:
All this crap about hacking is obviously fake or they would certainly have convicted him of that too.
But of course it is all far too late. If realistic predictions are anything to go by, world oil production will peak in the next decade and then begin to fall at about 2 percent per year soon afterwards. Even if the US started building wind turbines (the most promising renewable energy source) at a rate of 20,000 a year right now, there would still be major problems. As it is, it looks like everyone is going to carry on as usual until the energy shortages begin, at which point there will not be enough spare energy available to undertake a massive renewable energy building program. Given that more than 4 billion of the worlds 6 billion people are only alive because of the energy subsidy of fossil fuels, which allows chemical fertilizers and mechanised agriculture, the resulting resource wars and famines are likely to be very bad.
As far as I can see the policy seems to be to comply with the POSIX standard as much as possible, except in cases where it is idiotic, in which case it seems reasonable to implement something better, as in the case of threading:
Didn't you watch Demolition Man? They will change the constitution to allow him to run.
In terms of food safety I think there is real issue in that non-GM plants have been extensively tested (in a trial and error sort of way) for the last 7,000 years or so, and as a result we have a very good idea about which plants are safe to eat or which are not. GM foods have not undergone this testing and so I think it is quite reasonable that anyone who wants to sell them should demonstrate on a case by case basis that they are safe to eat.
In terms of enviromental safety there is also an issue. There are many examples of humans introducing foreign organisms into a particular enviroment and causing absolute havoc. I do not see any difference between a plant from another continent and a genetically modified version of a native plant. They both have the potential to interact in unexpacted ways with enviroment and so should be treated with extreme care.
However the most important question that should be asked in my opinion is why these crops are needed in the first place. Most of the use of GM crops at the moment appears to be in developed countries but these are the places that need them the least. Certainly in the UK the government pays farmers not to use land and buys up surplus production to stop prices from falling, and this seems the norm for the developed world. Farming in developed countries is already too efficent for its own good.
There just doesn't appear to be any need for GM crops in the developed world, although in the developing world a case might be made. So why if they aren't needed are GM crops being introduced. I would guess because their developers are pushing them and individual farmers don't want to be left behind. For an individual farmer the extra efficiency will help him compete better in a tight market but overall it is bad for farmers since the extra efficiency will mean the need for fewer farmers and some will be driven out of business.
In an ideal world things should be going the other way. Without GM crops and with less use of fertiliser and pesticides efficiency would fall but since modern agriculture is crisis because it is too efficient this is a good thing. The enviroment will be cleaner, and food will purer and less harmful. However in reality it looks like a small number of biotech companies are going to hijack world agriculture and collect a tax on every plant grown despite the fact that GM crops are entirely unneeded.
I think to some extent we are talking at cross purposes. Certainly the contents of a mail might give away your identity, if intercepted, without encryption. But the header of the mail cannot be encrypted or it would be impossible to deliver it, so without an "anonymous" e-mail account even encrypted e-mail is traceable. Also encryption does not help you at all in being anonymous to the recipient of the mail since by definition they must be able to decrypt it.
There is also the case of the e-mail address it self. Many services (such as slashdot) require you to supply an e-mail address to use them. In this case no e-mail might actually be sent at all (so encryption is irrelevant) but given that e-mail address you do not want them to trace your real indentity.
Who actually sends mail from free accounts? The point is to just have an address. The sort of people I give my free account address to aren't the sort of people I would ever mail. Hell I wouldn't even give them an e-mail address if I didn't have too. The problem is the number of things that require an e-mail address is growing all the time and if you gave out your real e-mail address you would a) not have any privacy and b) be drowning in spam.
The real fix to all this would be a better messaging protocol. E-mail just wasn't designed for anonimity (or security for that matter). A radically different protocol that allowed anonimity, was always encrypted, and preferably fixed the spam problem as well, would be the real anwser.
The reason free email accounts are so useful is not because of their security but becuase of their anonimity. This isn't about people reading your mail. It is about them not being able to trace who you are even if they read your mail. Obviously this isn't the case with something like hotmail that wants to your entire cv to let you sign up but a service like yahoo is relatively anonymous. Given the vast number of people that demand an e-mail address to do anything (even slashdot) you would not have any privacy at all if you didn't have a free e-mail front account to hide behind and take all the spam.
Of course the real problem is at the protocol level. E-mail wasn't designed with anonimity (or security for that matter) in mind. We really need an entirely new messaging protocol that has been designed to properly handle anonimity and security. Then there would be no need for the questionable anonimity of free accounts.
Once the government picks this up and runs with it there may well be RFID readers buried in the road at every intersection (just to identify people who run red lights obviously). Also your chain of people the $5 note passes through is very atypical. I would guess the most likely "lifecycle" for a note is to get withdrawn from an ATM and spent in a shop, restaurant etc. and then paid back into a bank by the shop. The higher the denomination of note the more likely it will be that it will not be given out as change to anyone else. But all this assumes that the RFID's in the note only get read every time they go in and out of a bank. In reality the first thing that will happen after RFID's are put in notes is that readers will be put in cash registers (to stop light fingered employees). So eventually I would expect all shops to read the ID's of all money they take in and give out in change.
During development the closed source software will only be used by the developers, and in general the developers are not like their end users and may have little interest in actually using the software they have been payed to write. For open source however the software is likely to be available to users from a very early stage and the developers are likely to be active users of the software as well. It would be very surprising if the bugs were not squashed faster.
Once the software is released closed source has the problem that bugs will only be fixed if the producer sees profit in it. Major security bugs will be fixed "relatively" quickly, as they might impact future sales otherwise, but with closed source the producer may not fix known non-security critical bugs if they don't feel like it, and no one else can.
There is also a problem with bug reporting in the closed source world. Who actually reports closed source non-security critical bugs? There isn't a lot of incentive since they may not be fixed anyway and if they are the fix will likely just go into then next version (that could be a year or two away) and you will have to pay for. Also the fraction of the users that do not have a licenced copy are unlikely to report bugs.
Whatever the merits of this particular study's methodology the results are just plain common sense anyway.
Could you please explain what place currency has in an anarchy driven society?
None. However Ken McLeod's books deal with many different political systems and mixtures thereof, not just anarchism. Things are also confused by the fact that there are many people today that call themselves anarchists, but are not. There are some people (mostly americans) who describe themselves as anarcho-capitalists, but the anarcho bit of it is at best an affectation and often just delusional. The state and capitalism are two sides of the same coin.
However due to the tension between capitalists who want to crush the workers (conservatives) and those that want to buy the workers off with a few scraps (liberals), it has become fashionable for conservatives to critise the state. Some people (not the real capitalists that own most of the world) have taken this critisism out of context (social welfare etc.) and advocate the capitalism without most or all of the state. These people are called "libertarians" in the US. In reality capitalism could not exist without the state but this hardly matters since the main purpose of "libertarians" appears to be to stalking horses for conservatives. Anarcho-capitalists are just rather extreme "libertarians".
Money itself is best viewed as a routing mechanism analogous to IP in the internet. You could destroy all the money on Earth (very easy since most money has no physical form but is just numbers in bank computers) and it would have no effect effect on the amount of resources available. However what it would seriously effect is the ability of the people who previously had all that money to route resources as they desired. In an anarchist society since there are no elite to which the majority of the societies resources must be routed there is no need for money.
Anarchism? Is it anything like Somalia, or Chechnya?
No it is not like Somalia. Anarchy is no rulers ("No Gods, No Masters"). A load of warlords fighting over who gets to own the country sounds like rulers to me. One man robbing another at gun point or G. W. Bush, it is just a matter of scale, but the princple is the same. If you have hierarchical power relations based on force or the threat of force then it isn't anarchy. For future reference:
Anarchy: No rulers or hierarchical social structures based on coersion. May be highly organised or totally chaotic, or anything in between, but any organisation involved is based on free agreement between equals.
In cases like Somalia the word you are looking for is chaos. Since there is still vast amounts of hierarchical social structures and coersion involved it cannot, by definition, be anarchy.
As an aside, on the topic of Somalia, it is worth noting that if all you know about it comes from Black Hawk Down you have be sadly misinformed. The political background portrayed in the flim is a total fiction and the makers go to great lengths to hide the truth. For instance they show Adid's militia armed with AK-47s when in reality they would mostly be armed with M16s since Somalia was a US client for the previous decade under the dictatorship of Siad Barre.
Anarchy is chaos
No. Anarchy is no rulers. Chaos is "a lack of order". Obviously out esteemed masters would like us to believe that the whole world would cease to exist without them but logically the lack of a heirarchically structure does not have too mean no structure at all.
It seems like one solution to having a highly functional Digital Video Recorder would would be to use a PC running Linux with a tuner card in it and use MythTV or Freevo. This database of people's setups suggests that there are quite a few people our there trying this. It certainly has the advantage that if you are lacking some feature you can just roll up your sleeves and code it rather than just moaning about the vendor not supplying it.
However there is some disconnect between the way most people want to use a computer and how they watch TV and in general you will want to have your computer and TV in two entirely separate rooms. While I would be interested in anyones solutions involving wireless etc., since I don't have a desktop handy anyway, only a laptop, another option presents itself. Plop the laptop down next to the TV connect it up and use it as a DVR and when you are finished and want a computer you can pick just pick it up, carry it next door and put it on a desk.
It looks like Sony amoung others are just bringing out DVR ready laptops but if you don't want to fork out for a new one is it possible to get an older laptop working as a DVR? I guess you would be restricted to USB TV tuners (are there any good ones?) such as the Pinnacle PCTV Deluxe. However there is the question of whether there are USB tuners for which linux drivers are available (obviously not from the vendor that would be too easy!) and how easy it would be to get one working with Freevo/MythTV. Just some thoughts in case there is someone out there who has already tried this?
You can certainly do it manually but it could be refined considerably by using a computer. Ideally you would obtain copies of government databases containing the registration and licensing details to run the system. Then when you want to steal a black BMW 5 series you would have the computer generate a plate of a random black BMW 5 series whose owner is not really local but also does not live a huge distance away. Other selection criteria could be used to select cars that are less likely to be driven that often (age of owner or owner is car dealership etc.). The system could also give you details on the owner so you could pretend to be them if stopped and even select cars whose owners match your physical appearance (in the US anyway) to make that easier. The system might even print a fake drivers license and other paperwork to go with the plates so eveything would hang together if you were stopped.
If you copy a license plate from one car to steal another that looks just like it, you may as well have just stolen the first. The cops will recognize the duplicate plates and know that one is stolen.
No, when the second car is reported stolen they will be looking for the its plates. If you alter the plates to those of a similar but different car, since the cops will now be relying on their infalible camera system, and be sitting around eating dounuts, the cameras will flag you as a different car and you will not be stopped. For the cops to notice that there are two cars with the same plates driving around will need to be logging the movements of all cars and looking for unrealistic events such as the same car passing two cameras a hundred miles appart within a minute. However if the database of cars is picked to select cars that are not driven that often, the probability of this being a problem is fairly small.
Just to be anal because I feel like it today, a plaid is a sort of sash come toga wrapped around the upper body in traditional highland dress. It is a garment not a cloth pattern. The family of cloth patterns used by the highland clans is called tartan. To quote this page:
Originally, the Scottish Tartan was a distinction of rank or position. It was not identified by weave but by the number of colours in the weave. If only one colour was used it depicted a servant, two, a farmer rank, three, an officer rank, five, a chieftain, six for a poet, and seven for a Chief. Eventually, clans or families adopted their own tartan, using a range of animal and earth colours which were frequently secret, only known to the weavers of the islands. They included yellows, blues, whites, greens, browns, reds, black and purple. Some say that a keen eye can identify the colour with a particular island, almost like a wine taster can identify the year and the vineyard.
Of course in reality when this system is widespread a thief will turn up to steal your car with new plates laser printed onto sticky-backed paper. He sticks them over the cars plates and drives away. Bingo! Problem solved. A traffic camera with some OCR software attached will not be able tell the difference. The most important tool for the car thief will just become a computer program that has a database of plate numbers and generates random plates for cars of a specified model and colour.
There is always some counter measure to something like this and the effect on criminals is minimal. But everyone else loses a little bit more privacy and freedom and since this measure will not work like all the others before it, there will be more such measures in the future that chip away at our freedom. Which is no doubt the real motivebehind this.
Funny, the allegory I saw in the Matrix was capitalism. The humans in their pods are the wage slaves and the machines living off them are the capitalist elite. The matrix is the corporate media working to hide the true nature of their situation from slaves and keep them distracted and entertained. The agents are the police using violence to control those you question the system. This all works on many levels since the "reality" that the matrix is simulating is a capitalist society itself.
While it is likely that this allegory is "probably inadvertent" seeing as Hollywood is part of the Matrix of the real world and not prone to spreading such thoughtcrime, it may be that the original idea came from someone who had this allegory in mind and some of it has survived in the Wachowski brothers script.
In addition the all the religious conections the film also seems to appeal to fans of Nietzsche, so perhaps in the end the reason for its popularity is that it has something for everyone in it and it is subtle enough not to push any of its possible messages down anyones throat.
While they have not lost any cosmonauts since the redesign after the Soyuz 11 failure in 1971 and I think it is clear that the Soyuz spacecraft is far safer than the Shuttle, this isn't really proven. Between 1972 and 1999 manned Soyuz flights break down roughly like this:
Soyuz 7K-T 31 flights (1972-1981)
Soyuz T 21 flights (1979-1986)
Soyuz TM 32 flight (1986-1999)
There will have been a handful more TM flights since 1999 and one Soyuz TMA flight which was successful if slightly off course. So in all there have been about 90 manned Soyuz flights since 1972 with no failures, but this only proves than the mean failure is probably better than 1:90, which while better than the Shuttle is not outstandingly so. Of course the failure rate may be much better than 1:90 but there is no proof of that.
However the Soyuz would win anyway since it is so much cheaper. One intresting point is the rate of change that the Soyuz has undergone since 1971. This appears very health in comparison with the US Shuttle. While keeping an example of a mature technology like comercial airliners flying for decades is desirable I would question whether the same is true for spaceflight. It still seems analogous to aircraft development in the very early years and therefore short design lifetimes seem called for since new and better designs should be just around the corner. Even if reusable spacecraft were a good idea in theory they are a huge road block to fast development while the technology is immature.