Good point. Shouldn't the government be obligated to somehow set up a big, free database of tax schemes, or at least significantly deconvolute them (as they have been claiming?) Additionally, a database alone wouldn't solve the problem without also streamlining payment.
One thing that people have been saying is that online taxes are imminent. Yes and no - walmart.com, for example, has been in violation of the law for a long time if they haven't been collecting. Amazon.com hasn't been in violation. So this is a clear example of places like Walmart saying "If I get screwed, screw everybody else too." Nice.
That might be true if the tripe that got to the theaters wasn't pre-selected for the regurgitated crap that they know will make money. Come on, derivative films are wildly successful - it doesn't mean they're good.
I agree that the academy makes some (ok, pretty much all) crappy choices, but I don't believe the moviegoing public is any better. I think the average person is a moron who is incapable of comprehending the subtlety that make great movies great. The moviegoing public made "10 ways to lose a guy" #1 last week. That speaks volumes.
That said, I agree with your general conclusion - I am so sick of overly-dramatic drivel like Monster's Ball or Bedroom Window, where people have these ridiculously contrived existences, and everything has this Russian-style fatalism. I don
t want to spend $10 and 3 hours watching 3 over-the-top drama queens scream about how shitty their lives are.
-Rows (pardon me if this is not the correct english word, something like Sum[v=0,eternity] of 1/v!).
-Functions (differential, integral)
- Differential Equations
- Function theory
Sheevus, I hope this guy is kidding. I had all that crap - minimal spannign trees, Dijkstra's algorithm, proofs - and I have NEVER used any of it. What I could REALLY have used was a far better grounding in linear algebra and such - fast matrix inverting schemes, etc. A class in pattern classification would be GREAT and would be a perfect lead-in to AI.
The best arguments I have heard is that these classes serve as good weed-out classes to get the idiots out of a CS program ASAP. OK, they work to that end, but wouldn't a hard but USEFUL class be better? Or just teach assembly for CS 101 (hell, if we're doing things chronologically, that should be first anyway...assuming we don't teach low-level machine language).
Canada, for instance, has a parliamentry democracy that is very different from the US. The US is one of the few representative republics in the world.
I'm not going to split hairs, but the original Greek-style democracy basically meant that every decision was a referendum, all the people knew about everything (or close), etc. Canada doesn't have this. So in this sense, Athens was the first and only true democracy.
and your FAITH in the fact that the US gov. doesnt hide things from congress during times of "peace" (we have been at war for the last 60 years: WWII, cold war, gulf war, war on poverty, war on drugs and war on terrorism) is rather silly. How could Congress become "cranky" if they DONT KNOW ABOUT IT? The only thing Congress can do is manipulate domestic policy: taxes, judges, health care, etc. etc. matters of "security" and foreign policy dont need Congress. The US was WAGED WAR without congress.
Yeah. So? Ultimately, you vote for the president too - this might be more egregious if we had a prime minister, who you DON'T vote for - but you vote for the President. And if a majority of the people think that having a warmonger president is bad, and that's their priority, they'll vote for one who isn't. And nothing stays secret forever - Congress does get cranky when they aren't consulted. There was massive whining from the Dems that they were out of the loop after 9/11, and it forced Bush to include them more.
Finally, you cleary hold as a matter of faith that security and peace are best when they are enforced. This is a long standing American myth as old as Ulysses S. Grant and is reflected in the gun laws and American foreing policy since Roosevelt.
Not following you here - I never said anything about peace (ie, foreign policy) - but a free, open society tends to be an insecure one, and this is simple fact. Note that autocracies tend not to have security problems (USSR comes to mind...), whereas we do. Is that a fair tradeoff? For some. But others, such as me, would prefer to have a free, secure society, even if it is less than transparent. Total freedom (well, a hobbes/locke/rousseau social-contract style of freedom) and total openness (ie, no secrets) WILL lead to vulnerability. The question is, how much is too much?
So I would say your last interpretation of what I said is off - I'm not saying we need a perpetual state of war to be secure, and I'm not saying people need a bunch of damned guns to be secure. But some secrets? Yeah, sorry. You just can't have *domestic* security, openness, and freedom simultaneously and completely.
What it comes down to is that there is no *right* answer in terms of choice of government- you might prefer to live in a society where you know what's going on and can do whatever you want, but I'd prefer to know that our country can't be infiltrated, and no important secrets lost...but still do what *I* want, even if I don't know what *you* do.
Naturally, there are degrees - and, as in my original post on the matter, I don't support ALL the shit our government has covered up. But since this originally came out of a discussion on the A-bomb, come clean - you think that should have been completely open, our methods for producing it?
Aren't they? God, you're such a sheep. If "the governmnent" owns the footage, then YOU own it. They're obligated unless they have a hugely important reason not to do so, not just to cover their asses. What do you get in exchange for your freedoms, their protection or their mistrust and irresponsibility?
See, again, you're missing the whole "democracy is open, republic isn't" argument. I'm not a sheep because I understand both arguments and choose a bit of governmental secrecy - not because I don't want to know their secrets, but because I don't trust everyone they would be telling. I guess irresponsibility is in the eye of the beholder.
As for footage, first, I'm waiting for a source. Second, for the first few years (even up to 10-15 years), seeing footage of the destruction pattern could actually help other countries (ie, USSR, our mortal enemy at the time - ugh) develop their own bomb. Think about it - if they see exactly how geography, buildings, and such affect the destruction pattern, it could help in planning a bomb. And if they had as much footage as was claimed, the footage was likely collected for development of our next-generation bombs. Remember, as grisly as it was, Hiroshima and Nagasaki presented the only full-scale tests of the bombs, and the only in urban settings (ie, more around than tumbleweed). Hell, why else did we take the film, if not for ruture bomb development - it sure as hell wasn't tourist shots!
And for chrissake, it wasn't a secret what happened - the fatality statistics were fairly well-known - so there was no motive for cover-your-ass here.
Also, when a government is concerned, never ascribe to malice what you can ascribe to beuracracy and incompetence.
So before you go getting all conspiracy-theorist and Stallman on us (information wants to be free...), think about other possibilities. 1, that it was legitimately classified for reasons you don't necessarily understand. 2, that they forgot about it or lost it, or whatever. 3, that the correct 20 people didn't get around to signing off on it's public release.
The US isn't a democray where every citizen has equal decision-making power -- It's a republic where the citizens elect representatives to determine law/government action.
Sorry - I muddied the concepts in my original post, and the difference between a democracy and a republic is integral to the free vs. open debate. I fixed it in my followup, but of course the one that gets modded up is the one where I made the mistake.;)
If you give out some kinds of information that's treason. Other kinds of information may get you in civil court for violation of intellectual property agreements. Giving out false information can be fraud. This is not such a novel concept.
OK, fair enough. Let's look at the categories of info that are illegal to give out. First, information that is dangerous to national security (treason). No doubter there. Second, information that isn't true, as stated, can be fraudulent. Information you have been trusted with (insider trading, release of trade secrets, etc) can be illegal too. Also, information you steal (opening mail, Mitnick-ing).
However, this is the first time I can think of that you can be busted for releasing information that is NOT dangerous to the country (Oh God! DirecTV has been h4X0r3d!!!), is NOT false, and NOT entrusted to the person releasing it - ie, he figured it out on his own. And really, this is NOT stealing, again in the sense he figured out on his own (he didn't hack them to steal the plans). Note that he doesn't actually have to take the SERVICE to get busted here - although that's a different argument, too.
This is pretty scary to me.
Can anyone think of a prior situation that fits these three scenarios?
In above post, paragraph 4 should have read "And for those who say that democracies have to be open, you're right. That's why there aren't any democracies, but a bunch of representative republics. The difference is subtle, but important here. We appoint people to make our decisions - not necessarily to tell us what all those decisions are.
No, I didn't miss the damned point, I simply don't care. Yes, the government can do this during any time of national crisis. No, they can't do it anytime they want, because the non-White House-occupying party in Congress gets cranky. And Congress, even the minority party, has enough power to totally screw the President if it wants (see the filibustered confirmation hearing of District Court judge nominee Daniel Estrada). So that's a deterrent.
I'm GLAD the government has the ability to hide huge national secrets like the atomic bomb. If it couldn't, we might have had it used on us.
There's a difference between free government and an open government. The Nazi government was kind of open, in the sense that if you weren't Arayan you knew you were screwed. Didn't make it free. Free means you can do what you want - open means you get to know what everybody else does.
And for those who say that democracies have to be free, you're right. That's why there aren't any democracies, but a bunch of representative republics. The difference is subtle, but important here. We appoint people to make our decisions - not necessarily to tell us what all those decisions are.
When it comes right down to it, it's impossible to simultaneously maintain a free, open, secure society. You can maybe pick two out of the three, but those two will compromise the third.
First off, if this is a troll, good job, you got me...;)
Of the 85,000 feet of film shot in Japan depicting the massive chaos and suffering the bomb inflicted, ZERO made it onto television because of a STRICT GOVERNMENT PRESS BAN until the 1980s.
I want to see something regarding the press ban. If you mean that the government owned the footage and didn't release it, they're not obligated. If you mean supression of privately owned footage after the 50's, I want to see a source.
All this was hidden from congress, the vice president, and many other high ranking gov. officials. It was strictly censored from the media as well.
No shit it was. If you haven't noticed, Congress is about as secure with secrets as a gaggle of schoolgirls. They've gotten many of our operatives killed overseas by blabbing about classified material. So the fact that congress is off the distribution list for something as secret (well, supposedly) as the ATOMIC BOMB...well, duh. As for the media, you have GOT to be kidding. It was wartime. It was an experimental weapon. Yeah, it was concealed, as anything else would have been downright irresponsible.
So, your beef is that EVERYTHING in a democracy should be absolutely open, with no secrets, right? Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way, nor should it. We vote for the people we theoretically trust to deal with such matters, or to appoint others who can. Naturally, it doesn't always work, but keeping atomic research secret during WWII was pretty much a necessity. I do believe, of course, that our government has FAR overused secrecy as a tool, too often to cover its own ass. But I don't at all believe that this was an example - you can find MUCH more egregious examples (where are those Kennedy files, anyway? No, the REAL ones, Mr. Warren...)
Sorry, but war kind of necessitates secrecy. Otherwise, you tend to lose them.
I used to be a big fan of C&C. Problem is, Red Alert was just like the original, Tiberian Sun was just like Red Alert, Red Alert II was just like the original Red Alert. Each game has new graphics and different names for the same things.
Well, yeah, especially in the way that pretty much all RTS's are about the same. But we keep buying them to see new eye candy with the units and get different missions. I think there is more diversity among the different races/factions in one game than between games.
Again, 6 letters is OK, there's a whole lot of 'em - and as I mentioned, you could punt out of that if it proved unworkable and find another solution. I don't claim to be the Turing expert, but there will be problems that can't be brute-forced. Again, you can't get a dictionary to solve all "fuzzy" problems (recall my last point about the computer answering a series of multiple choice questions regarding contextual information from pictures or even short passages).
As for the DoS stuff, yes, he can prevent ONE SUBNET from signing up with yahoo. Again, this is not even worth a script kiddie's time. You're throwing out a bunch of numbers, but think about them. Can you do 1200 per hour when there are only 255 addresses on a subnet, before they all get locked? No...so you can only lock a single subnet, which is 255 people. And if any of those people start bitching about not having access, you can look forward to losing your ISP, and finding another one.
Also, is a DoS attack that does not spread very much fun? NO! (That's why they do DDoS's instead). And, as I mentioned, websites already do IP lockouts (like slashdot, for instance, for frequent posting). Has anyone DoS'd slashdot? NO! Because no one CARES enough to do it.
As for security, again, and I repeat myself, this is NOT about security. They do not NEED the same kind of security that you want with your email. If 1% of bots manage to make an account before getting locked out, or each bot succeeds in making a fake account every once in a while, WHO CARES - they don't.
Yes, the original was screen scraping, but responses tended to take it out of the original context. But if a web site cares enough about scraping to make sure a human is on the other end, then they'll develop more sophisticated tests. And when will they care? At account creation, mainly, to ensure that a human at some point interacted with them. Outside of that, yes, the prevention will be worse than the cure.
But I maintain, if they care enough, they WILL keep you out. It's all a tradeoff with how many people they piss off, but no one has yet been able to fool a well-designed test to determine person from machine. You will, of course, always be able to get those that don't care enough, which will be the vast majority, I expect. Be satisfied with that, and you'll be fine.
OK, two things here basically, right? We have the weakness of 4 letter words, and we have the "1% is enough argument."
As for the four letter, ok - let's make them 6-letter. That should give us enough ground.
As for the 1%, remember this has to be considered with the lockout scheme. Let's assume that the lockout is as lenient as possible - that is, unique IP's only (no subnet blocking). Under that, he could basically try 255 times per hour. Assuming a 1% guess rate (which should be generous), we have 2 accounts per hour. That ain't much, even considering automation. Add in subnet blocking, and it drops a ton - 2 tries per hour (it takes 2 tries to establish a subnet-based attack), or one new account every few DAYS.
There will be a way to make this work - from what I've heard, this is the way that a lot of places (like yahoo) will be going - easier but more "fuzzy" Turing tests.
Oh, and if you don't like the "fill in the blank" tests, how about something like this. Show a picture and require a human to guess contextual information, at which computers are horrible. Say, a picture of a guy in a suit, and ask if he's going to "a meeting," "a party," "the beach"... Have five choices, and make the user get 4 questions right out of 5. Less than 1% chance of guessing it for a computer. (0.64% actually).
Here's a test case - the ruling would allow the utilities to put measuring equipment on all my private electrical equipment, right? What if I do well enough to get entirely off grid - meaning I buy NO power from them. Under law, I should be able to tell them to piss off. If I have no business relationship with them, they have no right at all to make me do a damned thing.
And if they try, I think this would be a great court case. Of course, it would probably only apply to those people who get entirely off-grid, which won't be much. But maybe not - does an existing business relationship make spyware from a private organization legal? Can such an exclusivity agreement be made part of a contract - particularly with a monopoly, and a utility (both of which are usually held to higher standards than typical companies)?
From a pragmatic point of view, Davis needs to crush this. If he still has ANY hopes of running for Pres in 2004, he better not let it go through - pissing off the Sierra Club crowd would be political suicide.
...is easier. Just slice the thing open....c a r e f u l l y....make copies of the disks, then put everything back. Then slowly, with a few beads of superglue, repair the damage to the wrap. Make the cut at the seam to minimize appearance of damage, and that's also the easiest place to re-glue.
Great tactic to help anyone do a DoS - just get yourself an account at a big ISP, then write a script to, every hour, make 2 guesses, and make sure they're wrong (use random chars, for ex.)
First, that would have to be the LAMEST DoS attack ever. Second, such practices are already used - I didn't make it up. And there seems to be no flurry of such attacks - I mean come on, how hard are you going to work to keep 255 people from getting a new account at yahoo? If any of them WANT to right then anyway...that's not even worth the effort.
How many common nouns are there that begin with a 't' and have 4 letters. Not that many, and we can't be too fancy. (Download a scrabble word list).
Enough to make it hard to guess in three tries. And I just made up an example off the top of my head, I'm not exactly engineering this. So pick six letter examples instead. Computers will be able to guess less than 1% of the time.
As I said before, you're missing the picture - this doesn't HAVE to be secure. All you have to do is make it so that a person, sitting at a computer, could make new accounts quicker than the bot would. That alone is enough to discourage the use of bots.
All they have to do, since most IPs are dynamic, is have the script disconnect and reconnect, & check that their IP has changed, and try again.
Well, you'd have to be smarter than that. Basically, what ends up happening is that an entire subnet gets locked out if someone starts playing games. Basically, the first time someone gets locked, you only lock that IP. The second time from the same subnet within a short time, lock the entire subnet. People may get screwed, but them's the breaks.
But with the tree example - what if they try the following 3 answers, also valid responses, but not right?
1. bush
2. elm
3. forest
Give 'em a short answer blank with four spaces. And give 'em the T. Computer probably STILL won't get it. Have a thousand simple problems like this with about 10 different pictures each, and rotate them occasionally, and a computer will do no better than occasionally get "lucky." That won't worry paypal or yahoo - they don't need airtight security for this, just general discouragement of bots - and such an approach, I think, would do it.
Now, of course, this is my take on the matter, not theirs...
I think, as someone mentioned in reply, that the difference is one of scale - if they were to only go after the big fish, it would effectively weed out the pirates from the multiple site users. One brightline would be a P2P server - that can pretty much be assumed to be piracy in most instances (if the RIAA can SEE the server, it's public)
Naturally, what this comes down to is "will they EVER endorse fair use." My plan assumes they do, or would - after all, if they can nail pirates, what's the harm in fair use? It completely negates all their arguments except one...namely, that they want us to buy a separate copy for every place we want to listen to the song.
I didn't express it well in my original post, but if the community accepts the tags, it would serve as a perfect litmus test for where the RIAA stands on fair use when the spectre of piracy has been dealt with. In other words, I like the tags idea because it strips them of excuses. We know that "anti-fair-use" is already the position of the MPAA, as Jack was kind enough to provide great quotes like "What is fair use? There's no such thing..." and "If you lose your copy, you buy another..." Let's see where the RIAA stands on this when piracy goes out the window.
You know, as much as I usually hate this crap, I don't really have that much of a problem with it (as long as it isn't paired with spyware). If they do this, then they could do away with copy protection, because they wouldn't need it.
So, how about this - mp3's have tags in them, and if your stuff shows up repeatedly online, then you eventually get busted. In return, NO copy protection is used, and you can have copies anywhere you want, so long as you don't share them. No spyware either.
Honestly, I think that's the best deal we're likely to get.
I know you didn't ask me, but the FSF isn't asking for new legislation to protect the GPL - simply considering the use of well-established, existing laws to defend copyright. No lobbying, no bludgeoning.
If anything, it's only remotely comparable to Rambus - and here there was no deception. It would be one thing if someone thought something was BSD licensed because of a confusing README and it turned out to be GPL'd...but the Linux kernel? Not a chance.
Look, I believe in the benefits of a free society AND software, and while I see the connection, most people won't. Their response will be somewhere along the lines of "crazy damned communist geek." Again, I agree, but I don't think this "software as a model for society" argument is going to change any minds that it hasn't already. If anything, it will simply paint the entire OSS movement as a bunch of neo-hippies.
I think the best route is to keep hammering on the differences. Consider our targets for conversion - it's not MS, and it's not governments here - it's potential users of Shared Source, ie companies. And, though you believe they may bess less compelling, companies only care about pragmatic arguments - they could care less about freedom in the abstract, only in the immediate. You don't have to use the "free as in speech vs. beer" argument. Just explain why seeing the source is useless if you can't touch it. I think most people of even moderate intelligence can understand that.
Slashdot Mirror
One thing that people have been saying is that online taxes are imminent. Yes and no - walmart.com, for example, has been in violation of the law for a long time if they haven't been collecting. Amazon.com hasn't been in violation. So this is a clear example of places like Walmart saying "If I get screwed, screw everybody else too." Nice.
...for not showing up to the goddamned meetings with his bugfixes.
I agree that the academy makes some (ok, pretty much all) crappy choices, but I don't believe the moviegoing public is any better. I think the average person is a moron who is incapable of comprehending the subtlety that make great movies great. The moviegoing public made "10 ways to lose a guy" #1 last week. That speaks volumes.
That said, I agree with your general conclusion - I am so sick of overly-dramatic drivel like Monster's Ball or Bedroom Window, where people have these ridiculously contrived existences, and everything has this Russian-style fatalism. I don t want to spend $10 and 3 hours watching 3 over-the-top drama queens scream about how shitty their lives are.
I haven't seen goatse for a while ;)
You've obviously not met my ex-girlfriend. Wait - snakes are reptiles. My bad.
Well, it's recipient usually is...
- Logic
- How to set up proofs
-full induction
-Rows (pardon me if this is not the correct english word, something like Sum[v=0,eternity] of 1/v!).
-Functions (differential, integral)
- Differential Equations
- Function theory
Sheevus, I hope this guy is kidding. I had all that crap - minimal spannign trees, Dijkstra's algorithm, proofs - and I have NEVER used any of it. What I could REALLY have used was a far better grounding in linear algebra and such - fast matrix inverting schemes, etc. A class in pattern classification would be GREAT and would be a perfect lead-in to AI.
The best arguments I have heard is that these classes serve as good weed-out classes to get the idiots out of a CS program ASAP. OK, they work to that end, but wouldn't a hard but USEFUL class be better? Or just teach assembly for CS 101 (hell, if we're doing things chronologically, that should be first anyway...assuming we don't teach low-level machine language).
I'm not going to split hairs, but the original Greek-style democracy basically meant that every decision was a referendum, all the people knew about everything (or close), etc. Canada doesn't have this. So in this sense, Athens was the first and only true democracy.
and your FAITH in the fact that the US gov. doesnt hide things from congress during times of "peace" (we have been at war for the last 60 years: WWII, cold war, gulf war, war on poverty, war on drugs and war on terrorism) is rather silly. How could Congress become "cranky" if they DONT KNOW ABOUT IT? The only thing Congress can do is manipulate domestic policy: taxes, judges, health care, etc. etc. matters of "security" and foreign policy dont need Congress. The US was WAGED WAR without congress.
Yeah. So? Ultimately, you vote for the president too - this might be more egregious if we had a prime minister, who you DON'T vote for - but you vote for the President. And if a majority of the people think that having a warmonger president is bad, and that's their priority, they'll vote for one who isn't. And nothing stays secret forever - Congress does get cranky when they aren't consulted. There was massive whining from the Dems that they were out of the loop after 9/11, and it forced Bush to include them more.
Finally, you cleary hold as a matter of faith that security and peace are best when they are enforced. This is a long standing American myth as old as Ulysses S. Grant and is reflected in the gun laws and American foreing policy since Roosevelt.
Not following you here - I never said anything about peace (ie, foreign policy) - but a free, open society tends to be an insecure one, and this is simple fact. Note that autocracies tend not to have security problems (USSR comes to mind...), whereas we do. Is that a fair tradeoff? For some. But others, such as me, would prefer to have a free, secure society, even if it is less than transparent. Total freedom (well, a hobbes/locke/rousseau social-contract style of freedom) and total openness (ie, no secrets) WILL lead to vulnerability. The question is, how much is too much?
So I would say your last interpretation of what I said is off - I'm not saying we need a perpetual state of war to be secure, and I'm not saying people need a bunch of damned guns to be secure. But some secrets? Yeah, sorry. You just can't have *domestic* security, openness, and freedom simultaneously and completely.
What it comes down to is that there is no *right* answer in terms of choice of government- you might prefer to live in a society where you know what's going on and can do whatever you want, but I'd prefer to know that our country can't be infiltrated, and no important secrets lost...but still do what *I* want, even if I don't know what *you* do.
Naturally, there are degrees - and, as in my original post on the matter, I don't support ALL the shit our government has covered up. But since this originally came out of a discussion on the A-bomb, come clean - you think that should have been completely open, our methods for producing it?
See, again, you're missing the whole "democracy is open, republic isn't" argument. I'm not a sheep because I understand both arguments and choose a bit of governmental secrecy - not because I don't want to know their secrets, but because I don't trust everyone they would be telling. I guess irresponsibility is in the eye of the beholder.
As for footage, first, I'm waiting for a source. Second, for the first few years (even up to 10-15 years), seeing footage of the destruction pattern could actually help other countries (ie, USSR, our mortal enemy at the time - ugh) develop their own bomb. Think about it - if they see exactly how geography, buildings, and such affect the destruction pattern, it could help in planning a bomb. And if they had as much footage as was claimed, the footage was likely collected for development of our next-generation bombs. Remember, as grisly as it was, Hiroshima and Nagasaki presented the only full-scale tests of the bombs, and the only in urban settings (ie, more around than tumbleweed). Hell, why else did we take the film, if not for ruture bomb development - it sure as hell wasn't tourist shots!
And for chrissake, it wasn't a secret what happened - the fatality statistics were fairly well-known - so there was no motive for cover-your-ass here.
Also, when a government is concerned, never ascribe to malice what you can ascribe to beuracracy and incompetence.
So before you go getting all conspiracy-theorist and Stallman on us (information wants to be free...), think about other possibilities. 1, that it was legitimately classified for reasons you don't necessarily understand. 2, that they forgot about it or lost it, or whatever. 3, that the correct 20 people didn't get around to signing off on it's public release.
The US isn't a democray where every citizen has equal decision-making power -- It's a republic where the citizens elect representatives to determine law/government action.
Sorry - I muddied the concepts in my original post, and the difference between a democracy and a republic is integral to the free vs. open debate. I fixed it in my followup, but of course the one that gets modded up is the one where I made the mistake. ;)
My bad. ;)
OK, fair enough. Let's look at the categories of info that are illegal to give out. First, information that is dangerous to national security (treason). No doubter there. Second, information that isn't true, as stated, can be fraudulent. Information you have been trusted with (insider trading, release of trade secrets, etc) can be illegal too. Also, information you steal (opening mail, Mitnick-ing).
However, this is the first time I can think of that you can be busted for releasing information that is NOT dangerous to the country (Oh God! DirecTV has been h4X0r3d!!!), is NOT false, and NOT entrusted to the person releasing it - ie, he figured it out on his own. And really, this is NOT stealing, again in the sense he figured out on his own (he didn't hack them to steal the plans). Note that he doesn't actually have to take the SERVICE to get busted here - although that's a different argument, too.
This is pretty scary to me.
Can anyone think of a prior situation that fits these three scenarios?
In above post, paragraph 4 should have read "And for those who say that democracies have to be open, you're right. That's why there aren't any democracies, but a bunch of representative republics. The difference is subtle, but important here. We appoint people to make our decisions - not necessarily to tell us what all those decisions are.
I'm GLAD the government has the ability to hide huge national secrets like the atomic bomb. If it couldn't, we might have had it used on us.
There's a difference between free government and an open government. The Nazi government was kind of open, in the sense that if you weren't Arayan you knew you were screwed. Didn't make it free. Free means you can do what you want - open means you get to know what everybody else does.
And for those who say that democracies have to be free, you're right. That's why there aren't any democracies, but a bunch of representative republics. The difference is subtle, but important here. We appoint people to make our decisions - not necessarily to tell us what all those decisions are.
When it comes right down to it, it's impossible to simultaneously maintain a free, open, secure society. You can maybe pick two out of the three, but those two will compromise the third.
First off, if this is a troll, good job, you got me...;)
Of the 85,000 feet of film shot in Japan depicting the massive chaos and suffering the bomb inflicted, ZERO made it onto television because of a STRICT GOVERNMENT PRESS BAN until the 1980s.
I want to see something regarding the press ban. If you mean that the government owned the footage and didn't release it, they're not obligated. If you mean supression of privately owned footage after the 50's, I want to see a source.
All this was hidden from congress, the vice president, and many other high ranking gov. officials. It was strictly censored from the media as well.
No shit it was. If you haven't noticed, Congress is about as secure with secrets as a gaggle of schoolgirls. They've gotten many of our operatives killed overseas by blabbing about classified material. So the fact that congress is off the distribution list for something as secret (well, supposedly) as the ATOMIC BOMB...well, duh. As for the media, you have GOT to be kidding. It was wartime. It was an experimental weapon. Yeah, it was concealed, as anything else would have been downright irresponsible.
So, your beef is that EVERYTHING in a democracy should be absolutely open, with no secrets, right? Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way, nor should it. We vote for the people we theoretically trust to deal with such matters, or to appoint others who can. Naturally, it doesn't always work, but keeping atomic research secret during WWII was pretty much a necessity. I do believe, of course, that our government has FAR overused secrecy as a tool, too often to cover its own ass. But I don't at all believe that this was an example - you can find MUCH more egregious examples (where are those Kennedy files, anyway? No, the REAL ones, Mr. Warren...)
Sorry, but war kind of necessitates secrecy. Otherwise, you tend to lose them.
Well, yeah, especially in the way that pretty much all RTS's are about the same. But we keep buying them to see new eye candy with the units and get different missions. I think there is more diversity among the different races/factions in one game than between games.
As for the DoS stuff, yes, he can prevent ONE SUBNET from signing up with yahoo. Again, this is not even worth a script kiddie's time. You're throwing out a bunch of numbers, but think about them. Can you do 1200 per hour when there are only 255 addresses on a subnet, before they all get locked? No...so you can only lock a single subnet, which is 255 people. And if any of those people start bitching about not having access, you can look forward to losing your ISP, and finding another one.
Also, is a DoS attack that does not spread very much fun? NO! (That's why they do DDoS's instead). And, as I mentioned, websites already do IP lockouts (like slashdot, for instance, for frequent posting). Has anyone DoS'd slashdot? NO! Because no one CARES enough to do it.
As for security, again, and I repeat myself, this is NOT about security. They do not NEED the same kind of security that you want with your email. If 1% of bots manage to make an account before getting locked out, or each bot succeeds in making a fake account every once in a while, WHO CARES - they don't.
Yes, the original was screen scraping, but responses tended to take it out of the original context. But if a web site cares enough about scraping to make sure a human is on the other end, then they'll develop more sophisticated tests. And when will they care? At account creation, mainly, to ensure that a human at some point interacted with them. Outside of that, yes, the prevention will be worse than the cure.
But I maintain, if they care enough, they WILL keep you out. It's all a tradeoff with how many people they piss off, but no one has yet been able to fool a well-designed test to determine person from machine. You will, of course, always be able to get those that don't care enough, which will be the vast majority, I expect. Be satisfied with that, and you'll be fine.
As for the four letter, ok - let's make them 6-letter. That should give us enough ground.
As for the 1%, remember this has to be considered with the lockout scheme. Let's assume that the lockout is as lenient as possible - that is, unique IP's only (no subnet blocking). Under that, he could basically try 255 times per hour. Assuming a 1% guess rate (which should be generous), we have 2 accounts per hour. That ain't much, even considering automation. Add in subnet blocking, and it drops a ton - 2 tries per hour (it takes 2 tries to establish a subnet-based attack), or one new account every few DAYS.
There will be a way to make this work - from what I've heard, this is the way that a lot of places (like yahoo) will be going - easier but more "fuzzy" Turing tests.
Oh, and if you don't like the "fill in the blank" tests, how about something like this. Show a picture and require a human to guess contextual information, at which computers are horrible. Say, a picture of a guy in a suit, and ask if he's going to "a meeting," "a party," "the beach"... Have five choices, and make the user get 4 questions right out of 5. Less than 1% chance of guessing it for a computer. (0.64% actually).
And if they try, I think this would be a great court case. Of course, it would probably only apply to those people who get entirely off-grid, which won't be much. But maybe not - does an existing business relationship make spyware from a private organization legal? Can such an exclusivity agreement be made part of a contract - particularly with a monopoly, and a utility (both of which are usually held to higher standards than typical companies)?
From a pragmatic point of view, Davis needs to crush this. If he still has ANY hopes of running for Pres in 2004, he better not let it go through - pissing off the Sierra Club crowd would be political suicide.
...is easier. Just slice the thing open....c a r e f u l l y....make copies of the disks, then put everything back. Then slowly, with a few beads of superglue, repair the damage to the wrap. Make the cut at the seam to minimize appearance of damage, and that's also the easiest place to re-glue.
First, that would have to be the LAMEST DoS attack ever. Second, such practices are already used - I didn't make it up. And there seems to be no flurry of such attacks - I mean come on, how hard are you going to work to keep 255 people from getting a new account at yahoo? If any of them WANT to right then anyway...that's not even worth the effort.
How many common nouns are there that begin with a 't' and have 4 letters. Not that many, and we can't be too fancy. (Download a scrabble word list).
Enough to make it hard to guess in three tries. And I just made up an example off the top of my head, I'm not exactly engineering this. So pick six letter examples instead. Computers will be able to guess less than 1% of the time.
As I said before, you're missing the picture - this doesn't HAVE to be secure. All you have to do is make it so that a person, sitting at a computer, could make new accounts quicker than the bot would. That alone is enough to discourage the use of bots.
Well, you'd have to be smarter than that. Basically, what ends up happening is that an entire subnet gets locked out if someone starts playing games. Basically, the first time someone gets locked, you only lock that IP. The second time from the same subnet within a short time, lock the entire subnet. People may get screwed, but them's the breaks.
But with the tree example - what if they try the following 3 answers, also valid responses, but not right?
1. bush
2. elm
3. forest
Give 'em a short answer blank with four spaces. And give 'em the T. Computer probably STILL won't get it. Have a thousand simple problems like this with about 10 different pictures each, and rotate them occasionally, and a computer will do no better than occasionally get "lucky." That won't worry paypal or yahoo - they don't need airtight security for this, just general discouragement of bots - and such an approach, I think, would do it.
I think, as someone mentioned in reply, that the difference is one of scale - if they were to only go after the big fish, it would effectively weed out the pirates from the multiple site users. One brightline would be a P2P server - that can pretty much be assumed to be piracy in most instances (if the RIAA can SEE the server, it's public)
Naturally, what this comes down to is "will they EVER endorse fair use." My plan assumes they do, or would - after all, if they can nail pirates, what's the harm in fair use? It completely negates all their arguments except one...namely, that they want us to buy a separate copy for every place we want to listen to the song.
I didn't express it well in my original post, but if the community accepts the tags, it would serve as a perfect litmus test for where the RIAA stands on fair use when the spectre of piracy has been dealt with. In other words, I like the tags idea because it strips them of excuses. We know that "anti-fair-use" is already the position of the MPAA, as Jack was kind enough to provide great quotes like "What is fair use? There's no such thing..." and "If you lose your copy, you buy another..." Let's see where the RIAA stands on this when piracy goes out the window.
So, how about this - mp3's have tags in them, and if your stuff shows up repeatedly online, then you eventually get busted. In return, NO copy protection is used, and you can have copies anywhere you want, so long as you don't share them. No spyware either.
Honestly, I think that's the best deal we're likely to get.
If anything, it's only remotely comparable to Rambus - and here there was no deception. It would be one thing if someone thought something was BSD licensed because of a confusing README and it turned out to be GPL'd...but the Linux kernel? Not a chance.
I think the best route is to keep hammering on the differences. Consider our targets for conversion - it's not MS, and it's not governments here - it's potential users of Shared Source, ie companies. And, though you believe they may bess less compelling, companies only care about pragmatic arguments - they could care less about freedom in the abstract, only in the immediate. You don't have to use the "free as in speech vs. beer" argument. Just explain why seeing the source is useless if you can't touch it. I think most people of even moderate intelligence can understand that.