Well, if you're willing to walk away from the game entirely, then why sweat being banned? You've already soaked the bridge in gasoline, but you're stocking up on fire extinguishers?
Also, I do believe that unavoidable societal change is upon us. Online people will soon know us as well or better than our physical neighbors. Identity is coming to the internet, and there's really no avoiding it. We need to start taking steps to adapt - if for no other reason than to avoid painful scenarios going forward.
You clearly have a personal beef against Assange, and I assume that's what's clouding the conversation. In my view, however, the actions themselves can stand alone with or without condom use.
You speak as though Assange hacked the Pentagon, stole the files, and handed them to the enemy. That's not true. He was given the files by a party that wanted them published, with the stated purpose being that the world needed to know. At that point the choice to publish had been made. Everything was already moving in that direction, and to stop it would have been to assist in the evils within the documents.
And while I agree that not every revolutionary is making the right choice, I do fully support their right to make it. They're not sitting here on slashdot arguing from the safety of their homes, those people risked something to try and change the world.
Here in NZ, that expense is $3 a week. Really. $156 a year. I can't imagine what business turning any sort of profit wouldn't be using swipe readers. Honestly, even American Express growls at us if we use imprint machines (zip zaps) nowadays, and those guys are so 1990s it isn't funny.
No, no, no, not imprint machines. Maybe at a gunshow or something, but rarely seen these days. Usually they are swipe readers, but not of a portable sort. All the wait staff at a single restaurant would share the same one back at their cash register, for example.
Not so, seeing as he only published the info. He didn't actually steal it. Further, he isn't subject to American laws being neither a citizen, nor a resident, nor even a visitor.
So, I expect we'll see a new one soon enough.
...and Assange is not "the press" in any case.
In the internet age, just as before Gutenberg, we're all journalists. The First guarantees that right.
The secret is being kept because releasing it would put them in peril; that is the definition of a legal secret.
This is what I was referring to as 'lazy' before. It is possible to go only so far as securing something with a secret and stopping there. That is true. But that is the flaw, not the exposure of the secret. More measures need to be taken if actual security is desired.
But in this "evil empire" of America, we have rules that make it such that the people currently in the government have not only a right but a duty to do that, and a procedure for doing it such that the secrets that should be kept are kept.
Their moral duty as human beings comes first, though. Were there ever a scenario where telling the secret is the right thing to do, it should be done without hesitation, by a moral person.
But because we have it anyone who circumvents the rules is rightfully a criminal.
But that's often the only right thing to do, to be a criminal. Look again at George and the boys back in the 1770's. They did the RIGHT THING, and were guilty of HIGH TREASON. It just so happens that they won the war and their 'crimes' went unprosecuted.
FWIW, I didn't find anything in your original comment to indicate humor, either. Claiming so now may well give you an 'out', but it didn't fly that way on first read.
You do seem to be right about the origin of crackers, though. That was unexpected.
You are, by believing that Assange is not guilty of crimes simply because some of the things released are things we should have been told about already
You remind me of an old-school D&D Paladin. I never said that Assange could never be found in violation of any laws. There's no basis for me to make that assertion, per se, because the laws are fluid, as I said. The law that eventually submits him to capital punishment at the hands of the US government is probably being penned as we speak.
That has nothing to do with who is 'right' and who is 'wrong'. Something can easily be illegal and right at the same time, especially when the law is imperfect or just plain wrong.
Even moreso, it's not legal to put people in mortal peril just to release information without going through the proper procedure.
It isn't Assange that puts these people in peril. It is the secret itself. It may well be wrong for him to tell it, to be sure, but it would have been a deeper wrong for him to perpetuate the lie.
My wife turns to me and asks, 'does this dress make me look fat'. I cannot win, so I make the best choice I can in that scenario. Vis-a-vis Assange.
In a world with evil empires committing heinous acts under immoral secrecy, someone needs to leak the facts to the people. Everyone who keeps such an abomination of a secret is doing something evil.
They have it at gas pumps and checkout stands, but that's pretty much it. I'm confident that the carry-around ones exist, but I'd be surprised to see a business go to that expense around here.
The fraudster still needs to have a physical presence. They're not ethereal, they have bodies. There's a gap between connecting that to reality, to be sure, but that itself is the issue, rather than the internet being somehow different.
No cloud provider has ever passed a third party inspection of their facilities, while an offsite data center can deal with third party audits (government, ISO) and show that no data leaves the premises other than through customer-created connections with ironclad audit trails.
Again, these are far from insurmountable obstacles.
I do think that their current offerings are still unfit for many purposes requiring security, BUT I also stop short of declaring them DoA due to this. They're still new. They're evolving.
I have never, ever seen what you're describing. In fact, one of my coworkers had his card swapped with a complete stranger's once. It was a SNAFU when both parties used them all over town, but the bank got it sorted out in a few days.
Either my law is the law I want everywhere, or I should accept your law. But accepting two different sets of law for the same species of human being is irrational.
False. Denying separations between governments is like denying them between people themselves. If two governments cannot have differing jurisdictions and laws, then two people cannot have differing opinions either. Because that is the origin of such things.
I believe in a government without any secrets.
Then you will lose every war brought by every enemy.
Secrets are necessary to security.
Security by obscurity is fail. Things need to be secure DESPITE their being known. I'd think that someone on slashdot would be aware of this by now.
Same reason you have passwords on your online accounts and hide your PIN when you're at the ATM.
False. I have these things because the organizations operating them are lazy. They're trusting that the secrets will keep them safe, or that they'll fix it after the fact. Once those organizations catch up to the times, those features of 'security' will go away.
Not all things need to be secret, and, AS I SAID, the law spells out what is not to be made secret. And, AS I SAID, the fact that the released information included some things that shouldn't have been secret does not mitigate the crime of releasing all of the information, nor even the crime of improperly releasing the illegally classified information.
I apologize for giving you the impression that I have not heard what you're saying. I have heard 'WHAT YOU SAID' - I just 'DISAGREE'.
Besides, your view on a human's right to select his own laws is defective, so what would it matter what the laws say? The prince of everything could snap fingers in China, and being legal, suddenly we'd have to comply. Because there's no such thing is abuse of power in your world. There's no limit. There's one law that cannot be questioned and we're all happy sheeple.
In my world people are a constituency, and any laws they don't like can be changed and/or nullified. They're fluid things, and the fact that they exist doesn't have much bearing on the fundamental concepts of right and wrong. The fact that something is 'legal' does not mean that one is automatically in the right when they do it. Vis-a-vis 'illegal'. These are separate concepts, and sometimes it is very right, proper, and necessary to violate the law.
Don't confuse the principle of self-defense for a blanket vacation of the principle that two wrongs don't make a right. And don't confuse a rule against making crimes secret for a blanket vacation of the need to keep some things secret.
I'm not confusing these things, but your assertion that I am goes a LONG way towards illustrating the degree to which you're able to participate in a conversation about this topic.
My distaste for Mr Moore is that HE lies to prove that US lies. Lies begetting lies doesn't make for truth. Your support of Mr Moore doesn't support the truth anymore than blindly supporting our country does.
And you can stop right there. I'm not supporting Moore, I'm opposing asshattry. There's a difference, and it is salient.
We don't need to kill the baby because it keeps getting dirty.
Tell that to George, Thomas, Benjamin, and the bunch. Your only criteria is 'it is a baby', and that's not nearly good enough when applied to government.
You're not fit to judge which laws are valid and which are not unless you're likewise prepared to back that up with full strength of government.
So, yes, that is a double standard. It is the very definition of a double standard to say that China is not permitted to have secrets while we are. That's insane.
And just because the law has details within it does not mean that the secrets being exposed were worth keeping.
I believe in a government without any secrets. Governments aren't people, so they have no rights, including no right to privacy. All this 'treason' stuff is just laziness and deceit.
The day I need my phone number in a phone book to look is the day I hang it up.
Phonebooks were ubiquitous for 75 years or so. Nobody died from lack of privacy.
As for the CC/waitress example - the law (and the CC industry) takes a dim view of waitresses that charge themselves a little something extra with your card.
And so does that law protect you online, so what's your point?
They are a corporation and have a self-interest governed by a hive-mind that has no sense of personal accountability other than demonstration of positive advancement of the corporate agenda.
Um, none of that is genuinely 'evil'. 'Self serving', sure. But one needs to be a bit selfish to be successful in any scheme involving limited resources.
The rest of your point is valid, but without at least some evidence of Google using the data to do harm to you or another party, you can't really flip the switch all the way to 'evil' like that.
Software and information licensing is a trade-off, too, and cloud users are clearly happy with that trade-off.
I don't think that this is at all clearly established at this point. In fact, I don't believe you can even describe the bulk of 'cloud users' as being AWARE of the trade-off.
As an example: My wife went through a phase of buying a lot of wma's from Walmart, all while I was explaining how evil DRM was and that she'd eventually regret it. She understood the technical aspects of it, and believed that it was possible that she'd eventually get screwed over - she just didn't imagine a company ever actually doing anything like that. She 'bought' the song, so it was 'hers', right?
Fast-forward to the day they shut down their DRM servers. None of those songs work now. She still keeps all the files on her hard drive, hoping that one day I'll hear about a crack for them. But only NOW does she really GET what the risks are. Now one could call her 'aware' of the trade-offs of DRM. Today she buys mp3's from Amazon, and would never buy another DRM'ed song from anywhere.
Until the cloud burns enough users to make them imagine how the negatives of the trade-off might impact them on a personal level, human nature would dictate that people really are not measuring the decision with much care. Ergo 'careless computing' really is valid.
What if annual security training was mandatory for all the IT staff connected with law enforcement IT equipment -- just like weapons training is mandatory for all law enforcement officers.
Good idea, except:
1) Better trained IT staff would get better-paying IT jobs elsewhere. 2)...would demand higher wages. 3)...which would raise your taxes. 4)...and if they could do THAT, they'd rather hire more officers, buy more guns - like maybe some AR14s! HELL YEAH!
etc
They're using bad IT staff because they're not an 'IT shop'. They point guns at people for a living - that's their core business. The 'database people' or 'website people' are going to be low on the totem pole, under paid, under appreciated, etc. And that's very normal for any organization with limited means.
It wouldn't be very hard to have 200,000 entries in 21 years. Police investigations take in info on friends of friends and acquaintances. The data set likely includes most of the Mexican drug cartel's known players.
Just exactly how many people get murdered in Colorado?!?!
I ask about murder, because that's about the only possible justification for keeping names in a database for a time period stretching beyond the statute of limitations. Otherwise, they're violating the right to be "secure in one's papers" by retaining this data without a warrant, are they not?
Slashdot Mirror
Well, if you're willing to walk away from the game entirely, then why sweat being banned? You've already soaked the bridge in gasoline, but you're stocking up on fire extinguishers?
Also, I do believe that unavoidable societal change is upon us. Online people will soon know us as well or better than our physical neighbors. Identity is coming to the internet, and there's really no avoiding it. We need to start taking steps to adapt - if for no other reason than to avoid painful scenarios going forward.
lol, well, 3G data plans alone are roughly $50 each/month as far as I know.
You clearly have a personal beef against Assange, and I assume that's what's clouding the conversation. In my view, however, the actions themselves can stand alone with or without condom use.
You speak as though Assange hacked the Pentagon, stole the files, and handed them to the enemy. That's not true. He was given the files by a party that wanted them published, with the stated purpose being that the world needed to know. At that point the choice to publish had been made. Everything was already moving in that direction, and to stop it would have been to assist in the evils within the documents.
And while I agree that not every revolutionary is making the right choice, I do fully support their right to make it. They're not sitting here on slashdot arguing from the safety of their homes, those people risked something to try and change the world.
Ah, alrighty then. You want all to suffer as you have suffered. Why not just say so from the very beginning?
Oh, that's right, because it would have made the whole conversation a non-starter.
Never mind, then.
Being trans-gendered, non-white, or employed by gamer-haters isn't strictly relevant.
We're talking about the future here.
You might want to consider an alias.
Without meaningful choice, there's no expectation of lower prices, period.
Here in NZ, that expense is $3 a week. Really. $156 a year. I can't imagine what business turning any sort of profit wouldn't be using swipe readers. Honestly, even American Express growls at us if we use imprint machines (zip zaps) nowadays, and those guys are so 1990s it isn't funny.
No, no, no, not imprint machines. Maybe at a gunshow or something, but rarely seen these days. Usually they are swipe readers, but not of a portable sort. All the wait staff at a single restaurant would share the same one back at their cash register, for example.
It was written in 1917, actually.
Not so, seeing as he only published the info. He didn't actually steal it. Further, he isn't subject to American laws being neither a citizen, nor a resident, nor even a visitor.
So, I expect we'll see a new one soon enough.
...and Assange is not "the press" in any case.
In the internet age, just as before Gutenberg, we're all journalists. The First guarantees that right.
The secret is being kept because releasing it would put them in peril; that is the definition of a legal secret.
This is what I was referring to as 'lazy' before. It is possible to go only so far as securing something with a secret and stopping there. That is true. But that is the flaw, not the exposure of the secret. More measures need to be taken if actual security is desired.
But in this "evil empire" of America, we have rules that make it such that the people currently in the government have not only a right but a duty to do that, and a procedure for doing it such that the secrets that should be kept are kept.
Their moral duty as human beings comes first, though. Were there ever a scenario where telling the secret is the right thing to do, it should be done without hesitation, by a moral person.
But because we have it anyone who circumvents the rules is rightfully a criminal.
But that's often the only right thing to do, to be a criminal. Look again at George and the boys back in the 1770's. They did the RIGHT THING, and were guilty of HIGH TREASON. It just so happens that they won the war and their 'crimes' went unprosecuted.
FWIW, I didn't find anything in your original comment to indicate humor, either. Claiming so now may well give you an 'out', but it didn't fly that way on first read.
You do seem to be right about the origin of crackers, though. That was unexpected.
Wow. Slashdotters must never cook or something. Amazing, considering how fat you all are.
Don't look now, but you just posted on slashdot - fatty.
You are, by believing that Assange is not guilty of crimes simply because some of the things released are things we should have been told about already
You remind me of an old-school D&D Paladin. I never said that Assange could never be found in violation of any laws. There's no basis for me to make that assertion, per se, because the laws are fluid, as I said. The law that eventually submits him to capital punishment at the hands of the US government is probably being penned as we speak.
That has nothing to do with who is 'right' and who is 'wrong'. Something can easily be illegal and right at the same time, especially when the law is imperfect or just plain wrong.
Even moreso, it's not legal to put people in mortal peril just to release information without going through the proper procedure.
It isn't Assange that puts these people in peril. It is the secret itself. It may well be wrong for him to tell it, to be sure, but it would have been a deeper wrong for him to perpetuate the lie.
My wife turns to me and asks, 'does this dress make me look fat'. I cannot win, so I make the best choice I can in that scenario. Vis-a-vis Assange.
In a world with evil empires committing heinous acts under immoral secrecy, someone needs to leak the facts to the people. Everyone who keeps such an abomination of a secret is doing something evil.
They have it at gas pumps and checkout stands, but that's pretty much it. I'm confident that the carry-around ones exist, but I'd be surprised to see a business go to that expense around here.
The fraudster still needs to have a physical presence. They're not ethereal, they have bodies. There's a gap between connecting that to reality, to be sure, but that itself is the issue, rather than the internet being somehow different.
No cloud provider has ever passed a third party inspection of their facilities, while an offsite data center can deal with third party audits (government, ISO) and show that no data leaves the premises other than through customer-created connections with ironclad audit trails.
Again, these are far from insurmountable obstacles.
I do think that their current offerings are still unfit for many purposes requiring security, BUT I also stop short of declaring them DoA due to this. They're still new. They're evolving.
I have never, ever seen what you're describing. In fact, one of my coworkers had his card swapped with a complete stranger's once. It was a SNAFU when both parties used them all over town, but the bank got it sorted out in a few days.
I disagree, because for the really expensive stuff, you can't genuinely refuse it. You could just die, I guess, but that's a false choice.
Oh yea, my credit card company is required by law to offer consumer protection from such theft.
That sounds like the fix, then, right there.
Either my law is the law I want everywhere, or I should accept your law. But accepting two different sets of law for the same species of human being is irrational.
False. Denying separations between governments is like denying them between people themselves. If two governments cannot have differing jurisdictions and laws, then two people cannot have differing opinions either. Because that is the origin of such things.
I believe in a government without any secrets.
Then you will lose every war brought by every enemy.
Secrets are necessary to security.
Security by obscurity is fail. Things need to be secure DESPITE their being known. I'd think that someone on slashdot would be aware of this by now.
Same reason you have passwords on your online accounts and hide your PIN when you're at the ATM.
False. I have these things because the organizations operating them are lazy. They're trusting that the secrets will keep them safe, or that they'll fix it after the fact. Once those organizations catch up to the times, those features of 'security' will go away.
Not all things need to be secret, and, AS I SAID, the law spells out what is not to be made secret. And, AS I SAID, the fact that the released information included some things that shouldn't have been secret does not mitigate the crime of releasing all of the information, nor even the crime of improperly releasing the illegally classified information.
I apologize for giving you the impression that I have not heard what you're saying. I have heard 'WHAT YOU SAID' - I just 'DISAGREE'.
Besides, your view on a human's right to select his own laws is defective, so what would it matter what the laws say? The prince of everything could snap fingers in China, and being legal, suddenly we'd have to comply. Because there's no such thing is abuse of power in your world. There's no limit. There's one law that cannot be questioned and we're all happy sheeple.
In my world people are a constituency, and any laws they don't like can be changed and/or nullified. They're fluid things, and the fact that they exist doesn't have much bearing on the fundamental concepts of right and wrong. The fact that something is 'legal' does not mean that one is automatically in the right when they do it. Vis-a-vis 'illegal'. These are separate concepts, and sometimes it is very right, proper, and necessary to violate the law.
Don't confuse the principle of self-defense for a blanket vacation of the principle that two wrongs don't make a right. And don't confuse a rule against making crimes secret for a blanket vacation of the need to keep some things secret.
I'm not confusing these things, but your assertion that I am goes a LONG way towards illustrating the degree to which you're able to participate in a conversation about this topic.
My distaste for Mr Moore is that HE lies to prove that US lies. Lies begetting lies doesn't make for truth. Your support of Mr Moore doesn't support the truth anymore than blindly supporting our country does.
And you can stop right there. I'm not supporting Moore, I'm opposing asshattry. There's a difference, and it is salient.
We don't need to kill the baby because it keeps getting dirty.
Tell that to George, Thomas, Benjamin, and the bunch. Your only criteria is 'it is a baby', and that's not nearly good enough when applied to government.
You're not fit to judge which laws are valid and which are not unless you're likewise prepared to back that up with full strength of government.
So, yes, that is a double standard. It is the very definition of a double standard to say that China is not permitted to have secrets while we are. That's insane.
And just because the law has details within it does not mean that the secrets being exposed were worth keeping.
I believe in a government without any secrets. Governments aren't people, so they have no rights, including no right to privacy. All this 'treason' stuff is just laziness and deceit.
The day I need my phone number in a phone book to look is the day I hang it up.
Phonebooks were ubiquitous for 75 years or so. Nobody died from lack of privacy.
As for the CC/waitress example - the law (and the CC industry) takes a dim view of waitresses that charge themselves a little something extra with your card.
And so does that law protect you online, so what's your point?
They are a corporation and have a self-interest governed by a hive-mind that has no sense of personal accountability other than demonstration of positive advancement of the corporate agenda.
Um, none of that is genuinely 'evil'. 'Self serving', sure. But one needs to be a bit selfish to be successful in any scheme involving limited resources.
The rest of your point is valid, but without at least some evidence of Google using the data to do harm to you or another party, you can't really flip the switch all the way to 'evil' like that.
Software and information licensing is a trade-off, too, and cloud users are clearly happy with that trade-off.
I don't think that this is at all clearly established at this point. In fact, I don't believe you can even describe the bulk of 'cloud users' as being AWARE of the trade-off.
As an example: My wife went through a phase of buying a lot of wma's from Walmart, all while I was explaining how evil DRM was and that she'd eventually regret it. She understood the technical aspects of it, and believed that it was possible that she'd eventually get screwed over - she just didn't imagine a company ever actually doing anything like that. She 'bought' the song, so it was 'hers', right?
Fast-forward to the day they shut down their DRM servers. None of those songs work now. She still keeps all the files on her hard drive, hoping that one day I'll hear about a crack for them. But only NOW does she really GET what the risks are. Now one could call her 'aware' of the trade-offs of DRM. Today she buys mp3's from Amazon, and would never buy another DRM'ed song from anywhere.
Until the cloud burns enough users to make them imagine how the negatives of the trade-off might impact them on a personal level, human nature would dictate that people really are not measuring the decision with much care. Ergo 'careless computing' really is valid.
People store personal information [in a phone book]...
When I [hand my credit card to a waitress at a restaurant], who knows what could happen without my knowledge or consent.
People never seem to think of the meatspace equivalents - why?
What if annual security training was mandatory for all the IT staff connected with law enforcement IT equipment -- just like weapons training is mandatory for all law enforcement officers.
Good idea, except:
1) Better trained IT staff would get better-paying IT jobs elsewhere. ...would demand higher wages. ...which would raise your taxes. ...and if they could do THAT, they'd rather hire more officers, buy more guns - like maybe some AR14s! HELL YEAH!
2)
3)
4)
etc
They're using bad IT staff because they're not an 'IT shop'. They point guns at people for a living - that's their core business. The 'database people' or 'website people' are going to be low on the totem pole, under paid, under appreciated, etc. And that's very normal for any organization with limited means.
It wouldn't be very hard to have 200,000 entries in 21 years. Police investigations take in info on friends of friends and acquaintances. The data set likely includes most of the Mexican drug cartel's known players.
Just exactly how many people get murdered in Colorado?!?!
I ask about murder, because that's about the only possible justification for keeping names in a database for a time period stretching beyond the statute of limitations. Otherwise, they're violating the right to be "secure in one's papers" by retaining this data without a warrant, are they not?