The law makes me potentially liable for everything that happens on my property, and even without SWAT raids that gives me pause. So I lock down my router for the same reason I have a fence around my pool with a locked gate, as well as locking my garden shed and my car doors
I'd lock the shed and the car doors because people would probably damage or steal things if I didn't. Same way that I firewall my local network if I'm allowing them to use my connection.
As always, analogies with physical situations will lack nuance, but if I had large plots of land that I opened to hikers, I wouldn't expect to be held responsible if someone broke the law while on that land. Similarly, I see no reason to hold a person responsible for any potential crimes of others while using their shared connection, and it appears that the law agrees with me.
When you can demonstrate loss of freedom, as opposed to tin foil hat rantings, we'll talk.
It's the SWAT raids that most people are referring to when they say people shouldn't provide public access. That sounds to me very much like violent intimidation being used to modify the behaviour of those who have done nothing wrong.
Loss of freedom to share resources or remain anonymous without the risk of an armed unit invading your home, treating you as guilty, and demanding that you prove your innocence.
If the increasing absurdity of the CAPTCHAs I tend to see is anything to go by, there are programs out there that'll read normal printed text from even the crappiest photo without missing a beat. The question is, are the spammers using standard commercial solutions, or have they got some useful tech of their own that we might be able to get our hands on (seize it as part of a settlement and make it public domain, for instance).
Run a Tor node, you mean? I'm looking at the documentation now.
Were I in a financial position to attempt setting up my own ISP and going toe-to-toe with the authorities at that level, I assure you I would do so; as it stands, unless I can secure investment on the basis that people would pay a little more for privacy, that'll have to remain on the back burner.
Assuming that were a workable solution, I can see a market for it: as the summary mentions, these cameras are (unreasonably?) expensive and generally marketed at law enforcement - bundling a 3G modem and a service package to handle the authentication doesn't sound so onerous when the whole thing is required for legal compliance and goes down on the department budget.
That said, the assumption of workability is a higher bar than it might sound. Hackers are smart people, after all, and as another poster mentioned, the only thing worse than an insecure system is an insecure system that looks secure.
You know, I don't want other people using my bandwidth.
And that's absolutely fine. If you don't want to share because it's something you paid for, I see nothing unreasonable there.
If you don't want to share because you're scared of what the government might do to you, then we have a problem. The reasoning behind your choice matters a lot, and many people are talking about the latter, not the former.
Romanticism? It's romanticism to offer a free public service in the hope that the government won't try to destroy you personally for the crimes of others? Is this really where we've ended up?
Sure, specifically inviting a cult into your living room might cause a few problems, but if you opened up your land to hikers and the Ra worshippers happened to come along with their sacrificing knives there isn't a sane court in the world that'd hold you responsible. You might have some questions to answer, but the same could be said of many situations one has no control over. Same with putting a connection out there for public consumption - you remain neutral, and you are not responsible.
There's no dissonance whatsoever in complaining about an ISP (often with a local monopoly or near-monopoly) doing something, but considering it quite acceptable for a home user who is freely sharing their connection as a public service to do that same thing. Just think of the difference between "Comcast are capping my transfer limits at an unreasonably low level, even though I pay them $50/month, and I can't even vote with my wallet because they signed an exclusive deal with the city." and "It was really useful that I could hop on that guy's WiFi to check Google maps and see if I had any new email to deal with. It throttled down a bit when I tried to download that big attachment, but hey, I was getting free use from someone else's connection after all!". As for the people providing the service, your final sentence makes no sense - sharing a piece of one's connection with some limitations is still useful and beneficial to passers-by, while causing minimal inconvenience to the owner; why on earth would you imply it's a problem that they aren't sharing all of their bandwidth indiscriminately?
As for the EFF recommending it, I can't help but think it's something of a call to help provide anonymity for each other, and to resist the government's recent actions to severely intimidate those who happened to share their connections with people who misused them.
I couldn't agree more. To see the government and police attempting abuses like this is disappointing but ultimately unsurprising. To see people who should know better cowering at the thought of it happening to them rather than standing to fight is infinitely more depressing.
The fact that so many technically inclined Slashdot types are crying 'liability' and 'log everything' is almost as saddening as the fact that our government has pushed us to this. That some guy got thrown down the stairs by a rifle-wielding mob from nothing more than an IP address isn't a sign that we should all lock down our precious connections lest the same happen to us, it's a sign that every fucking one of us should open up our connections and tell the government that we refuse to be intimidated. Whether it was just intended as a PR move, allowing the police to say "Look at the nasty paedophile we caught. Aren't we good at our jobs?", whether it was an excuse to give the SWAT team something to do to justify their budget, whether it's a nefarious conspiracy to destroy anonymity, limiting each person to their own easily-surveilled connection, the reason matters far less than the fact that the only reaction that will stop it from continuing is outright defiance.
Every abuse which we allow to happen, every time we modify our behaviour because of one rather than standing our ground, it only further legitimises the abuse, validates the government in their action, and brings us one more step along the road to greater loss of freedom. For all our sakes, I can't bear to see that happen.
Fuck that. There are people in SPACE. That's awesome. Just because it's not new and shiny any more, and just because they're engaging with the public in a somewhat contrived and engineered fashion, doesn't change how amazing it is even a tiny little bit. If clumsy PR is what it takes to sustain enough public interest to keep their budget going, then so be it.
Of course, if you're arguing that whatever money they spent on PR over the years would have been better spent bribing the Chinese to launch a harmless but ominous-looking 'secret' satellite that goes beep every thirty seconds, I will concede that they probably could've raised their budget by an order of magnitude by now...
I'm a little surprised how polarised the issue of regulation becomes - maybe it's just that those with the strongest views speak the loudest, but it always seems to end up framed as a heated debate about near total control vs. little to no control. It seems to me that the real problem is that much of the regulation is stupid and/or disproportionately favours certain groups, and that arguing about the quantity is a little counter-productive.
More or less regulation would be better than what we have now, assuming that 'more' was actually put together sensibly and genuinely designed to benefit the public at large. If we can't have 'more' under those constraints, then 'less' is the next best thing. I guess you would probably reverse that order of priorities, and while I disagree, I see the merits of both sides. I think we'd all do much better to recognise that the status quo sucks and either option would be somewhat preferable, rather than shooting each other down with hyperbole about an FBI agent in every living room/the evil corporations buying our children.
In fact, at this point the entire editing process is far down the list of Slashdot annoyances: the freaking browser window keeps scrolling up several pages to expand the fucking parent post when I just want to middle- or right-click a link, leaving it up to me to find the post and sentence I was just reading. I swear I have never seen a more aggravating non-feature than this.
(PS: I know I can just disable the new UI to stop Slashdot from messing with mouse clicks. I actually like the new UI, but I might have to do that. I keep hoping they're going to fix it RSN.)
I hadn't thought of that, but it still doesn't really make sense. Not only the fact that (as you said) you don't need much to pass a note, but that the memory sizes were all of the order of tens of kB - several pages at least. Unless your prisoners are communicating by means of epic verse, that shouldn't be too onerous a limitation for them. Perhaps it's just a stupid rule, I suppose, but I would have hoped for more satisfying logic.
I think it's something that we geeks will never get our heads around (and it's certainly not limited to computers), but evidently many people genuinely don't care, or even think to ask: "How does that work?"
Even matters we would consider absurdly basic (computers run on code, which can be repetitively executed using loops, for example) aren't necessarily self-evident if you don't stop to think and/or ask about it. The bit I find hard to understand, though, is how someone can sit at a computer every day and not want to think and/or ask about it. It's just a totally different mindset, and one that I can't really empathise with, if I'm honest.
What I dislike, is that people (some tech types included) will say "Well most people won't go into IT, why should they bother knowing?" as if it explains this absence of curiosity. To use the inevitable car analogy: I'm not planning to become a mechanic, but I can point out the major components of an engine and perform basic maintenance. I wouldn't allow myself to use a tool every day without giving myself a rough idea of how it works, partly for practical reasons (understanding a mechanism often allows one to use it much more efficiently than memorising 'press button A, pull lever B...') and partly because I enjoy understanding the world I interact with, even if it is only on a superficial level in many cases.
I spent a few minutes clicking around on the site, and I'm intrigued by a few things: the first is that there's a market for typewriters for use by prison inmates, the second is that the different versions (marked for different states) appear to vary only in memory size, and the listings state that "Memory sizes greater than those permitted in any specific correctional facility will be rejected at the facility property room.".
Anyone know enough to elaborate on that? I can imagine situations where a typewriter would be allowable but a computer wouldn't, I guess, but I can't fathom what the memory limit is about.
I'm paranoid enough to believe that most commercial services will fold/are backdoored already, especially as the user is normally not the only ones with access to the keys, but I draw the line at thinking any government will be able to crack a GnuPG (or similar) encrypted email in reasonable time, however much horsepower they throw at it. Multiply that by the many billions of messages sent every day, and attempting to crack even the tiny fraction that are encrypted would be absurd (unless the NSA or their foreign counterparts have made some serious breakthroughs that haven't yet been leaked, I guess). Start forwarding encrypted spam to random addresses if you're really paranoid, so they can't even analyse based on size or destination.
Of course, hardly anyone actually uses encryption at the endpoints, and (depending on your government) the simple use of encryption might be enough to cast suspicion. The solution, of course, is to make open-source point-to-point encryption transparent enough that it's usable for the average person, and then encourage them to do so. Much easier said than done, though, obviously.
The main problem here, of course, is deciding on what the email address should be.
Could just let the users pick, same as 'normal' services. I assume the system will tie addresses to real names, since it's to be used for official business, so systematic assignment seems unnecessary.
The inevitable car analogy is perhaps apt here - your license plate does identify your car to some extent, so if the police see it on a vehicle driving away from the scene of a crime at 90mph then you'll have some explaining to do, but there is plenty of reasonable doubt brought in by the fact that criminals could steal the plates, steal the whole car, duplicate the plates, obscure a digit on their actual plates, and so forth. I'd say it's reasonable to treat IP addresses similarly.
I'm more bothered about the fact that a screenshot and an IP address is enough to warrant (no pun intended) an armed unit (from Immigration and Customs, for some reason) smashing the door down and throwing the guy down the stairs. When the evidence is that slim, I'd suggest maybe turning up in the daytime and knocking on the door with a warrant to search/confiscate the computers would be a more measured response.
Not difficult, but as the article (briefly) points out, there are plenty of people who are quite happy to share a little of their bandwidth in exchange for the knowledge that others will do the same for them. There are even businesses based on that very premise.
Sure, pointing at an open hotspot as if it exonerates one from any suspicion would be foolish, but I'm inclined to think that so is smashing down someone's door and throwing them down the stairs based on an IP address.
In reality, Japanese officials already have caused a few 10'000 cancer deaths beyond what was unavoidable.
Reasonable estimates don't put the total extra cancer death toll due to Chernobyl at more than 1000, so I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that your figure of 10,000 is either totally fabricated or based on faulty assumptions.
I'm not saying Tepco have necessarily behaved reasonably, and I'd hate to see them unnecessarily muddying the reputation of nuclear power further, but that doesn't justify totally spurious accusations against them.
By the way, if you do happen to have a reputably sourced paper (free of any glaring omissions or logical errors) with that 10,000 deaths figure stated as a realistic scenario, I will quite willingly eat my hat.
Y'know all those people in China who disappear for pissing off the state? That tends to be justified under censorship legislation using nebulous terms such as "harmful to public order and morality". The government are there to keep order, after all, and if you're speaking against the government, then you must be disrupting public order. Or so the horrifically oppressive reasoning goes.
Slashdot Mirror
The law makes me potentially liable for everything that happens on my property, and even without SWAT raids that gives me pause. So I lock down my router for the same reason I have a fence around my pool with a locked gate, as well as locking my garden shed and my car doors
I'd lock the shed and the car doors because people would probably damage or steal things if I didn't. Same way that I firewall my local network if I'm allowing them to use my connection.
As always, analogies with physical situations will lack nuance, but if I had large plots of land that I opened to hikers, I wouldn't expect to be held responsible if someone broke the law while on that land. Similarly, I see no reason to hold a person responsible for any potential crimes of others while using their shared connection, and it appears that the law agrees with me.
When you can demonstrate loss of freedom, as opposed to tin foil hat rantings, we'll talk.
It's the SWAT raids that most people are referring to when they say people shouldn't provide public access. That sounds to me very much like violent intimidation being used to modify the behaviour of those who have done nothing wrong.
Loss of freedom to share resources or remain anonymous without the risk of an armed unit invading your home, treating you as guilty, and demanding that you prove your innocence.
If the increasing absurdity of the CAPTCHAs I tend to see is anything to go by, there are programs out there that'll read normal printed text from even the crappiest photo without missing a beat. The question is, are the spammers using standard commercial solutions, or have they got some useful tech of their own that we might be able to get our hands on (seize it as part of a settlement and make it public domain, for instance).
Run a Tor node, you mean? I'm looking at the documentation now.
Were I in a financial position to attempt setting up my own ISP and going toe-to-toe with the authorities at that level, I assure you I would do so; as it stands, unless I can secure investment on the basis that people would pay a little more for privacy, that'll have to remain on the back burner.
Assuming that were a workable solution, I can see a market for it: as the summary mentions, these cameras are (unreasonably?) expensive and generally marketed at law enforcement - bundling a 3G modem and a service package to handle the authentication doesn't sound so onerous when the whole thing is required for legal compliance and goes down on the department budget.
That said, the assumption of workability is a higher bar than it might sound. Hackers are smart people, after all, and as another poster mentioned, the only thing worse than an insecure system is an insecure system that looks secure.
You know, I don't want other people using my bandwidth.
And that's absolutely fine. If you don't want to share because it's something you paid for, I see nothing unreasonable there.
If you don't want to share because you're scared of what the government might do to you, then we have a problem. The reasoning behind your choice matters a lot, and many people are talking about the latter, not the former.
Romanticism? It's romanticism to offer a free public service in the hope that the government won't try to destroy you personally for the crimes of others? Is this really where we've ended up?
Sure, specifically inviting a cult into your living room might cause a few problems, but if you opened up your land to hikers and the Ra worshippers happened to come along with their sacrificing knives there isn't a sane court in the world that'd hold you responsible. You might have some questions to answer, but the same could be said of many situations one has no control over. Same with putting a connection out there for public consumption - you remain neutral, and you are not responsible.
There's no dissonance whatsoever in complaining about an ISP (often with a local monopoly or near-monopoly) doing something, but considering it quite acceptable for a home user who is freely sharing their connection as a public service to do that same thing. Just think of the difference between "Comcast are capping my transfer limits at an unreasonably low level, even though I pay them $50/month, and I can't even vote with my wallet because they signed an exclusive deal with the city." and "It was really useful that I could hop on that guy's WiFi to check Google maps and see if I had any new email to deal with. It throttled down a bit when I tried to download that big attachment, but hey, I was getting free use from someone else's connection after all!". As for the people providing the service, your final sentence makes no sense - sharing a piece of one's connection with some limitations is still useful and beneficial to passers-by, while causing minimal inconvenience to the owner; why on earth would you imply it's a problem that they aren't sharing all of their bandwidth indiscriminately?
As for the EFF recommending it, I can't help but think it's something of a call to help provide anonymity for each other, and to resist the government's recent actions to severely intimidate those who happened to share their connections with people who misused them.
I couldn't agree more. To see the government and police attempting abuses like this is disappointing but ultimately unsurprising. To see people who should know better cowering at the thought of it happening to them rather than standing to fight is infinitely more depressing.
To quote the ever-apt XKCD: Fuck. That. Shit.
The fact that so many technically inclined Slashdot types are crying 'liability' and 'log everything' is almost as saddening as the fact that our government has pushed us to this. That some guy got thrown down the stairs by a rifle-wielding mob from nothing more than an IP address isn't a sign that we should all lock down our precious connections lest the same happen to us, it's a sign that every fucking one of us should open up our connections and tell the government that we refuse to be intimidated. Whether it was just intended as a PR move, allowing the police to say "Look at the nasty paedophile we caught. Aren't we good at our jobs?", whether it was an excuse to give the SWAT team something to do to justify their budget, whether it's a nefarious conspiracy to destroy anonymity, limiting each person to their own easily-surveilled connection, the reason matters far less than the fact that the only reaction that will stop it from continuing is outright defiance.
Every abuse which we allow to happen, every time we modify our behaviour because of one rather than standing our ground, it only further legitimises the abuse, validates the government in their action, and brings us one more step along the road to greater loss of freedom. For all our sakes, I can't bear to see that happen.
Fuck that. There are people in SPACE. That's awesome. Just because it's not new and shiny any more, and just because they're engaging with the public in a somewhat contrived and engineered fashion, doesn't change how amazing it is even a tiny little bit. If clumsy PR is what it takes to sustain enough public interest to keep their budget going, then so be it.
Of course, if you're arguing that whatever money they spent on PR over the years would have been better spent bribing the Chinese to launch a harmless but ominous-looking 'secret' satellite that goes beep every thirty seconds, I will concede that they probably could've raised their budget by an order of magnitude by now...
I'm a little surprised how polarised the issue of regulation becomes - maybe it's just that those with the strongest views speak the loudest, but it always seems to end up framed as a heated debate about near total control vs. little to no control. It seems to me that the real problem is that much of the regulation is stupid and/or disproportionately favours certain groups, and that arguing about the quantity is a little counter-productive.
More or less regulation would be better than what we have now, assuming that 'more' was actually put together sensibly and genuinely designed to benefit the public at large. If we can't have 'more' under those constraints, then 'less' is the next best thing. I guess you would probably reverse that order of priorities, and while I disagree, I see the merits of both sides. I think we'd all do much better to recognise that the status quo sucks and either option would be somewhat preferable, rather than shooting each other down with hyperbole about an FBI agent in every living room/the evil corporations buying our children.
In fact, at this point the entire editing process is far down the list of Slashdot annoyances: the freaking browser window keeps scrolling up several pages to expand the fucking parent post when I just want to middle- or right-click a link, leaving it up to me to find the post and sentence I was just reading. I swear I have never seen a more aggravating non-feature than this.
(PS: I know I can just disable the new UI to stop Slashdot from messing with mouse clicks. I actually like the new UI, but I might have to do that. I keep hoping they're going to fix it RSN.)
This. A million times this.
I hadn't thought of that, but it still doesn't really make sense. Not only the fact that (as you said) you don't need much to pass a note, but that the memory sizes were all of the order of tens of kB - several pages at least. Unless your prisoners are communicating by means of epic verse, that shouldn't be too onerous a limitation for them. Perhaps it's just a stupid rule, I suppose, but I would have hoped for more satisfying logic.
I think it's something that we geeks will never get our heads around (and it's certainly not limited to computers), but evidently many people genuinely don't care, or even think to ask: "How does that work?"
Even matters we would consider absurdly basic (computers run on code, which can be repetitively executed using loops, for example) aren't necessarily self-evident if you don't stop to think and/or ask about it. The bit I find hard to understand, though, is how someone can sit at a computer every day and not want to think and/or ask about it. It's just a totally different mindset, and one that I can't really empathise with, if I'm honest.
What I dislike, is that people (some tech types included) will say "Well most people won't go into IT, why should they bother knowing?" as if it explains this absence of curiosity. To use the inevitable car analogy: I'm not planning to become a mechanic, but I can point out the major components of an engine and perform basic maintenance. I wouldn't allow myself to use a tool every day without giving myself a rough idea of how it works, partly for practical reasons (understanding a mechanism often allows one to use it much more efficiently than memorising 'press button A, pull lever B...') and partly because I enjoy understanding the world I interact with, even if it is only on a superficial level in many cases.
I spent a few minutes clicking around on the site, and I'm intrigued by a few things: the first is that there's a market for typewriters for use by prison inmates, the second is that the different versions (marked for different states) appear to vary only in memory size, and the listings state that "Memory sizes greater than those permitted in any specific correctional facility will be rejected at the facility property room.".
Anyone know enough to elaborate on that? I can imagine situations where a typewriter would be allowable but a computer wouldn't, I guess, but I can't fathom what the memory limit is about.
I'm paranoid enough to believe that most commercial services will fold/are backdoored already, especially as the user is normally not the only ones with access to the keys, but I draw the line at thinking any government will be able to crack a GnuPG (or similar) encrypted email in reasonable time, however much horsepower they throw at it. Multiply that by the many billions of messages sent every day, and attempting to crack even the tiny fraction that are encrypted would be absurd (unless the NSA or their foreign counterparts have made some serious breakthroughs that haven't yet been leaked, I guess). Start forwarding encrypted spam to random addresses if you're really paranoid, so they can't even analyse based on size or destination.
Of course, hardly anyone actually uses encryption at the endpoints, and (depending on your government) the simple use of encryption might be enough to cast suspicion. The solution, of course, is to make open-source point-to-point encryption transparent enough that it's usable for the average person, and then encourage them to do so. Much easier said than done, though, obviously.
The main problem here, of course, is deciding on what the email address should be.
Could just let the users pick, same as 'normal' services. I assume the system will tie addresses to real names, since it's to be used for official business, so systematic assignment seems unnecessary.
Wow, the GPS resolution on those things must be better than I thought.
The inevitable car analogy is perhaps apt here - your license plate does identify your car to some extent, so if the police see it on a vehicle driving away from the scene of a crime at 90mph then you'll have some explaining to do, but there is plenty of reasonable doubt brought in by the fact that criminals could steal the plates, steal the whole car, duplicate the plates, obscure a digit on their actual plates, and so forth. I'd say it's reasonable to treat IP addresses similarly.
I'm more bothered about the fact that a screenshot and an IP address is enough to warrant (no pun intended) an armed unit (from Immigration and Customs, for some reason) smashing the door down and throwing the guy down the stairs. When the evidence is that slim, I'd suggest maybe turning up in the daytime and knocking on the door with a warrant to search/confiscate the computers would be a more measured response.
Not difficult, but as the article (briefly) points out, there are plenty of people who are quite happy to share a little of their bandwidth in exchange for the knowledge that others will do the same for them. There are even businesses based on that very premise.
Sure, pointing at an open hotspot as if it exonerates one from any suspicion would be foolish, but I'm inclined to think that so is smashing down someone's door and throwing them down the stairs based on an IP address.
In reality, Japanese officials already have caused a few 10'000 cancer deaths beyond what was unavoidable.
Reasonable estimates don't put the total extra cancer death toll due to Chernobyl at more than 1000, so I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that your figure of 10,000 is either totally fabricated or based on faulty assumptions.
I'm not saying Tepco have necessarily behaved reasonably, and I'd hate to see them unnecessarily muddying the reputation of nuclear power further, but that doesn't justify totally spurious accusations against them.
By the way, if you do happen to have a reputably sourced paper (free of any glaring omissions or logical errors) with that 10,000 deaths figure stated as a realistic scenario, I will quite willingly eat my hat.
Y'know all those people in China who disappear for pissing off the state? That tends to be justified under censorship legislation using nebulous terms such as "harmful to public order and morality". The government are there to keep order, after all, and if you're speaking against the government, then you must be disrupting public order. Or so the horrifically oppressive reasoning goes.
I farm giraffes, you insensitive clod.