As I understand it, any language with unchecked array bounds is subject to buffer overflow problems. Java, for instance, can't have buffer overflow problems; if i declare and int buffer[4] and try to write into memory location buffer[5], an exception is thrown. In C, however, writing into location buffer[5] simply means that I write into memory adjacent to the end of the array
(Nitpickers: yeah, I know, buffer[3] is really the last allocated space, meaning that the starting address of buffer[5] is actually 4 * sizeof(int) from the start of the array, and not adjacent to the end of the buffer. Children should be taught to count starting at zero.)
So, it is a vulerability specific to languages that don't check bounds on arrays. However, it is just as much the fault of the programmer. If you don't validate input, you shouldn't be surprised when things don't go as planned. In a Java program that wasn't given special bounds checking, the program would die on the exception, better than providing an exploit, but bad form nonetheless.
Yesterday, the White House announced that it planned to propose legislation that would set legal requirements for surveillance in cyberspace by law enforcement authorities
So it did. But it was my perception that in many cases the legislation raised the barrier to law enforcement having a little look-see at your personal life. The current wire-tap laws are inconsistant; it is easier, for instance, to tap a phone modem than a cable modem, due to regulations on the cable industry. The proposed legislation would set the same standard for tapping any Internet connection. It also gives judges more leeway in determining if a tap or trace is actually warranted. The big hole in the legislation the White House proposed is that it makes no mention of use of or restrictions on Carnavore, and other systems that mass-trap email, rather than a targeted trace.
Hm, I thought I recalled hearing something about Al knowing Emo through some random event- living near eachother was what came to mind (I know they didn't grow up together, as you mentioned.) Apperantly I just had the crack pipe set to "stun" when I was posting. ..
Emo actually was some guy that lived near weird Al, IIRC. I don't know that he ever really tried to make it as a comedian on his own. Too bad, in a way.
"Just call me Mr. Butterfingers. .."
Note: My views do not represent those of Mr. Butterfingers, his employers, or any subsidiary.
That's what it seems like to me; the web is inherantly non-hierarchical. Unless they put security in front of something and block retrieving their data (like a web mailbox) than it really doesn't seem logical that they should declare publicly available documents off-limit to certain types of lookers. I'd like to know by what piece of logic they say spiders are tresspassing, and people who browser but don't buy aren't.
It is my opinion that very few people type anything into that Location: line in Netscape or IE. They use search engines or click links that are mailed to them by friends. One result of this is that it really doesn't matter what the address/domain looks like as long as the content is there. If you as a web page operator want more hits, refine your metadata tags so that your page moves up the list! They actually did a study at some point and found this to be true; I don't remember the source, but they looked at search logs and found that people were hitting Yahoo with the query 'www.hotmail.com' and the like all the time. But at the same time, for slightly higher order users, it can be beneficial for someone to have their own domain. Yeah, a lot of people use search engines, but there will always be people typing 'computers.com' because they want computer info- and Cnet gets their ad revenue and mindshare.
Another aspect is that in the minds of a lot of people, having your own domain equates to being Internet-saavy. Small businesses that could have their needs met by sitting in a subdirectory on someone else's box register domain names because it looks more profesional. Having worked with some small businesses looking for web hosting, I know that it is one of the first things that they think of. It just presents a more professional looking face, and that image is important for small businesses. As a result, small business web hosting places are helping people register domain names as part of set-up.
Another factor is memorability. Directory levels tend to be more obscurely named than domain names. I have pictures from school on my website- telling my grandma to look at www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~collier is a lot harder than if I could say "clay.org" or something (it erases the "what's a tilde?" discussion, for instance). This is even more of a boon to small businesses, who want to do anything that they can to stick out in the minds of their customers. Nobody wants to be one of 1,000 angelfire.com or aol addresses that someone writes down or tries to surf through.
Anybody interested in seriously bashing SUV drivers ought to check out this article on the Times. Auto companies have put a lot of cash into figuring out why people drive SUV's, with some interesting results. ..
The fact that Microsoft can't deliver on existing standards is weak. If you are going to extend past a standard, at least make it work to begin with.
However, as people have mentioned, MS is not alone. The reason that we have a lot of the features that we do on the web now (Javascript, Java, dynamic content, etc.) is because Netscape MS, and others kept trying to outdo eachother in expanding what the web could do (with their technoligy). What I would like to see is for other browsers to pick up the enhancements that MS makes, and do a better job than them of implementing the existing standards. Let W3 catch up when the de facto standard settles down. The odds that the commitee on rule minting can keep up with the pace of development in the web world are approaching zero.
People who are saying "now web developers will rush to use these features and lock out everyone else" are oversimplifying. Anyone who has the web as the bread and butter of their business cannot afford to kill off 20% of their business by using MS only technoligy. People are greedy, and also like to eat. 80% of the already diminished pool of people who might be interested in your site is not enough for most web developers. I work for a company developing a massive web presence, and they took great pains to craft standards that wouldn't exclude any segment of the market, if possible. If MS makes something possible that wasn't before, than people with special needs will use it. If it just makes something easier, people worried about their bottom line aren't going to bite.
A good point. But I think that the general principle still holds, even if my recollection of that particular event was incorrect. I would say that the fact that noone was killed in that situation was probably a fluke of probability. I doubt that any of the officers involved would care to try their luck again.
Still, I think that the main point is that while a gun isn't the only thing that lets people kill, it it the only thing (other than explosives, nuclear armaments, etc.) that lets killing be done on such a scale by a single person. You would have a hard time rushing into a restaurant and strangling 12 people before being overpowered, and very few people die in drive-by knifings (to the best of my knowledge, at least),
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
Re:How many chickens was it?
on
Endgame For SCO
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· Score: 2
Actually, saying "osOpinions expands on this in further depth" is not really paraphrasing. It is a simple statement of common fact. Saying "Author Bill Billson provides a in-depth discussion of trout wrangling" is not paraphrasing; "According to Bill Billson, the most important aspect of trout wrangling is knowing your knots" is paraphrasing. He was not presenting someone's ideas (summerising the points made in the article), he was stating the topic and existance of the article.
Of course, all of this is probably tangential, seeing as how he copied verbatim significant portions of the article as his "summary". But, IMOO, the last sentance would not constitute a paraphrase or require attribution.
Of course, according to my writing teacher freshman year in college, every time you wiped your nose while typing, you should attribute it to someone, as they probably provided you with the idea.
Man storms into office, pushes 35 people out window
Police officers outpushed, unable to stop murderous rage
Nah.
That for me is the difference. Killing 25,000 people with a gun requires 25,000 pissed off people twitching their fingers. Pushing 25,000 people out a window requires much more effort, and is a lot easier to stop. Remember when bank robbers in California held off cops for hours with body armor and automatic weapons? I'd like to have seen them try and do it with pen knives or upper body strength. Probably have been fewer funerals.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
Re:How many chickens was it?
on
Endgame For SCO
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· Score: 2
Um, actually he just cut and pasted the entire thing from the article. The only 'commentary' he added was the very last line- the sentance that said that there was an interesting article. I'd zap him for plagiarizing, but not for editorializing.
But I think for the most part, one would not have the expectation that those would be kept secret. The phone company has the same information about the calls that you make. What is important then is to make sure that there are policies in place that determines who gets that information, and for what purpose. If you are going to keep any sort of logs or records of activity, who/where/when is probably one of the most basic ones, and I would expect most people know it will be logged. Just important to 1)make sure people know that sort of information is subject to logging 2)Clearly define the circumstances when the logs will be made available, and make sure your customers know that too.
Unfortunately, empirically speaking, it's also a tax on the poor
Yup. I never had a problem with Lotteries until I started visiting Quick-e marts in the city late at night. You quickly discover that the lottery is not people with disposable income coming out their ears laughing at the joy and suspense of playing the numbers. It's mostly the poor and the homeless, realizing that a dollar doesn't but much else than a tenth of a shot at getting out of poverty. Wacthing old homeless men throw away their last few dollars on lottery tickets that never come in is not my idea of entertainment. The lottery isn't just a tax on bad math; it's an effort to redistribute income from the poorest to the rest of society. Not exactly a progressive tax system.
Seems appropriate. A lot of information about the lifestyles of early "common people" was retrieved by sifting through piles of garbage where the lack of oxygen to objects deep inside the pile preserved them. I think it would be perfect for the future to learn about our p0rn viewing habits from Doubleclick- the modern equivalent of a massive garbage pile;)
For the morality legality issue, my point was that the author of the protocals acknowledged that he was aiming at assissting people in illegal ares. Illegal, as in those things that are binding upon all, as you pointed to here. I thought that by your remarks concerning morality, you were indicating that it would be permissable for one to act in accordance with one's personal morality even if that contradicted the law. I was not intending to open a discussion of civil disobedience, but rather to point out that the fact that he is aiming at aiding illegal trades diminishes the credibility of the project.
By "some things that are illegal are rightly so" I meant this: there are things that are illegal because they impinge upon other's rights. It is find for someone to be bound by their personal morality, but where it impedes another person's rights (as defined by law, typically), it is the role of the law to set boundaries that everyone abides by. Certainly, the law oversteps that guideline sometimes. But that is a whole other discussion.
I specified the US when I spoke of people justifying personal wants with high faluting rhetoric because you pointed out in earlier posts that the situation varies greatly in different countries, something that I agree with. I was certainly not implying that I thought that the phenomenon was unique to the US, or the West, or New Jersey. Obviously, such things happen everywhere. But the US is not Burma, it is not Serbia, it is not Tibet. Civil disobedience in this country is not so often the life-or-death issue that it is in other countries. This tends to greater abuse, as the stakes are not so high in the US. If you could be imprisoned for using secure communications like the ones being developed, as is the situation in restrictive regimes, you almost certainly would not use it to swap porn and MP3's. In the US, where we take for granted our right to basic communication, such tools are more likely to be abused.
Yes, you can use a telophone to commit a crime. I can use a hand saw to behead my in-laws. Any tool is subject to misuse. Again, this is obvious. But there is some responsability to protect against misuse. This needs not be legislated, by a conscientous and skilled tool-maker takes it into account. I was not saying that anything that can be misused should be banned or destroyed, but that the maker of such a tool should be responsable enough to take steps to safeguard their work, and at the very least to think through the consequences of their system. The fact that the creator acknowledges that the system is useful for money laundering but makes no effort to prevent it is, to me, a bit irreponsible. I'm not saying tap everyone's phone lines and take away their guns. I am saying take modest and reasonable steps to ward against abuses that you already know about.
You understand the difference between legality and morality, don't you? Right? Err... you do understand?
Yup. Everything that is illegal is not immoral. But not everything that you think ought to be legal is moral. The catagories of legality and morality are not the exact same thing, but they are not mutually exclusive. Some things that are illegal are rightly so. Not everyone who violates the law is following a "higher morality", no matter what they say.
You do have a point about anonimity in countries where politicol opposition is dangerous. And anonymous politicol opposition will probably be the best that most people can manage in such places. But many such countries don't have adequite internet infrastructure to take advantage of this. Secondly, I wasn't saying something about them "following politicol process". I was saying something about the impact of people that are willing to give their lives (and their names) to a cause. I wasn't saying that they should be happy to die after making themselves public as opposition to the powes that be. But people do not rally to the cause of Anonymous Coward. They have rallied to the causes of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, George Washington, Nelson Mandela, and Aung San Suu Kyi. These are the people who have exposed themselves to the most danger, and they are the people leading the opposition. I was not critisizing people in danger for wanting to be anonymous; I was critisizing the assumption that you can only protest when anonymous.
As for the pot smoking- frankly, I can tell cops anything I want. If I confess to a murder, they'll probably look into it. If I tell them I smoke grass, but possess none at the time, they can't do anything. I have commited no offense. More relevantly, I can join an organization like NORML and agitate for the alteration of Marijuana laws across the US. Publicly, with the face I was born with. Wether it is a useful thing to do depends on your opinion of lobbying. But I wouldn't do that, because smoking weed seems like a waste of my time.
You seem not to understand what "freedom" means. Think about it. What I meant by that is this: rhetoric, and even sincerity, do not equate with morality. There are always people willing to take up a banner to further their own status and position. And there are always people who believe very sincerely in causes that are detrimental to the people around them. Ask a Klansmen some day. They wear masks. Civil rights marchers didn't. I realize that anonymity can protect good people that need it because of their situation. The situation varies a lot from country to country. What distresses me is people in this country (the US) using complex rationalizations to justify their own greed. It happens. It isn't a reason to roll back everyone's freedom. But it is a reason to be a little wary when someone offers some handy dandy thing that will guarantee your freedom, but has the 'negligable' side effect of giving people a clean way to circumvent laws that may (but not always, yes I know) intersect with morality
I guess you missed the "philosophy" page where he explores the complex moral issues.
Read it, actually. He makes a number of points concerning why there are legitimate uses for these protocals. Great. However, he makes no provisions for dealing with or preventing misuse of them that is illegal or dangerous. It is one thing to say that there are plenty of existing things that can be misused that should not be regulated; it is another to introduce a new technoligy that is geared towards misuse without taking any precautionary measures.
As for the assault rifle exchange protocal, when I wrote that I was actually aware that one cannot move assault rifles through your normal modem connection. They are simply too wide. However, I am curious as to what the creators of Fling mean when they say that they want to aid the "sale of government-disapproved goods". That is goods mind you, not information. If they are talking about goods that can be converted into 1's and 0's, than they are talking about 1)copywriten works, 2)kiddie porn, 3)Classified documents, or 4)people's private records (health, credit, etc.). There are others, I am sure, and to be frank I feel we have enough distribution chanels for all of them as it stands.
And if they find a way to move AK-47's throguh a T3, I won't like that either.
Yeah, this whole thing seems to be just the opposite of well thought out. Most people think "my work raises complex moral issues. I should explore them." This project seems to have the train of thought "This project raises serious moral isssues. I'll let someone else take care of it." This seems very irresponsable to me. This guy is targeting illegal markets ("Sale of government-disapproved goods", "Anonymous, unreported e-cash transactions"). He acknowledges that it could be a tool for money laundering, but then adds that it offers even more functionality. Money laundering and the Secure Assault Rifle eXchange Protocal (SARXP)? How could you not support it!? In addition to the ethical concerns over enabling exchange of contraband and money laundering, I'm concerned that his idea of how to address disagreement with the policies of your local governing body is to hide your identity and disregard the law. I liked the article that was posted around the 4th about what happened to the signers of the Declaration of Independance in the US; it's a reminder that civil disobediance doesn't require anonimity. Using high ideals to justify being a punk and a thief does.
Considering how many innocent persons have already been convicted and NEARLY executed by sloppy police/"justice" system work, do we really wanna sit back and say, "Oh, well..." Funny you should mention that. Guess what is starting to free a lot of wrongly imprisoned and nearly executed people: DNA evidence.
In most areas in the US, it is perfectly legal for the police to stop and check every driver on the road, as long as they check EVERY driver who comes to the checkpoint. It sucks, but the courts have upheld it. They have, because while you might not like passing through a roadblock that stops everyone on New Years Eve, it beats the alternative: Police stopping 1)Only every black person that comes through or 2)Every person that looks suspicious (see above, add "poor people", "people with facial hair", "foreigners", and "people under 30") Random stops on everyone that comes through are a pain. But it sure beats being targeted by security forces because of the color of your skin or the bad rap your belief system gets. I would much rather see every single person that goes through an airport get a DNA or chemical scan than have them target "profiles". The volume of data and the scrutiny involved in tagging that many people is in itself a gaurantee of some privacy (ways to protect privacy: 1) be alone 2) be in a whacking big crowd), whereas only targeting "profiled" and marginalized groups risks everyone's rights (the hangman's story phenomena: eventually, your group is next.)
Just install these machines everywhere, catch all who went past a joint-smoking guy, and solve the drug problem by transfering the majority of the population to prison. Won't work. As someone mentioned before, having smoked pot in the past is not illegal as long as you do not have it on your person at the time you get caught. There have to be measurable quantities of drugs on you (think quarters and eigths of ounces, not quarters and eigths of a half mole) for the cops to arrest you. Those limits keep getting stiffer penalties for lower quantities, but they aren't going to be pushing the molcular level anytime soon. It would be a legal nightmare for the police; they would loose as many rel convictions and suffer so many civil rights suits due to false positives and the like that it would be totally impossible.
This device could be used to collect DNA cheaply and invisibly (probably cross-indexed with video images of people passing through). Once you've done the collection, you can do the analysis at your leisure later. Yeah, possibly. But if you do that, you have almost no way of correlating what DNA you got from what body passing through the detector. You also increase the cross-polination problem, as you have lots of samples sitting in a collector together for long periods of time. If the sequence is not done fast, you loose what information you might have pulled. You want to go back and sort 5,000 piles of skin cells against the security camera photos of 5,000 identical midwesterners passing through the security check at an airport? Me neither. Also, for security applications (what this thing is geared for right now- it's a bomb detector), there is no value to letting things sit. "Well, plane exploded. Better go sift through our DNA collection and figure out which terrorist group we let through security last thursday". Nobody likes that.
But most DNA ID tests don't look at the whole thing; they simple test certain areas that we know to have high variability among individuals. Unless the DNA test looked specifically at those areas, than they could appear identical under conventional identification procedures.
The technology CAN do it, and that is all that counts
Well, my point above was that the technoligy can't do it right now. This gizmo is basically a vaccum cleaner hooked to a chemical residue detector. Both of these are things that we have had the technical know-how to do for years; this guy is simply the first to pair them and get a working framework for them. What we don't have is the ability to 1)Quickly determine who's skin cells belong to who, to reduce false positives, and 2)To quickly (like O(1 sec)) do enough of a DNA sequence to positively identify someone. And frankly, once those two problems are solved, this dandruff-sucker will be irrelevant. Who needs to take a random wiff of you as you pass through a turnstile when they can wipe down your luggage, sweep crumbs off of the seat of the plain- anything. At any rate, I doubt that even if those problems were solved there would be many companies eager to use it. It isn't going to be cheap to do DNA sequences for a while, and for most industries, the information that you get is nothing that they couldn't get somewhere else (security cameras, credit card charges, phone bills and central phone records).
If you notice, the bit about DNA is just a throw-away at the bottom of the article. The main purpose of this is to scan for explosives residue, something that we already have a way to do very quickly and cheaply (I should know- happens to me every time I got through the airport). It is certainly extensable to taking DNA samples, but until there are some big breakthroughs in fast, cheap DNA sequencing, and the solve the problem of making sure they get the right DNA, this particular device isn't going to be turning you over to the GATTACA police just yet.
Slashdot Mirror
(Nitpickers: yeah, I know, buffer[3] is really the last allocated space, meaning that the starting address of buffer[5] is actually 4 * sizeof(int) from the start of the array, and not adjacent to the end of the buffer. Children should be taught to count starting at zero.)
So, it is a vulerability specific to languages that don't check bounds on arrays. However, it is just as much the fault of the programmer. If you don't validate input, you shouldn't be surprised when things don't go as planned. In a Java program that wasn't given special bounds checking, the program would die on the exception, better than providing an exploit, but bad form nonetheless.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
So it did. But it was my perception that in many cases the legislation raised the barrier to law enforcement having a little look-see at your personal life. The current wire-tap laws are inconsistant; it is easier, for instance, to tap a phone modem than a cable modem, due to regulations on the cable industry. The proposed legislation would set the same standard for tapping any Internet connection. It also gives judges more leeway in determining if a tap or trace is actually warranted. The big hole in the legislation the White House proposed is that it makes no mention of use of or restrictions on Carnavore, and other systems that mass-trap email, rather than a targeted trace.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
Hm, I thought I recalled hearing something about Al knowing Emo through some random event- living near eachother was what came to mind (I know they didn't grow up together, as you mentioned.) Apperantly I just had the crack pipe set to "stun" when I was posting. . .
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
"Just call me Mr. Butterfingers. . ."
Note: My views do not represent those of Mr. Butterfingers, his employers, or any subsidiary.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
That's what it seems like to me; the web is inherantly non-hierarchical. Unless they put security in front of something and block retrieving their data (like a web mailbox) than it really doesn't seem logical that they should declare publicly available documents off-limit to certain types of lookers. I'd like to know by what piece of logic they say spiders are tresspassing, and people who browser but don't buy aren't.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
They actually did a study at some point and found this to be true; I don't remember the source, but they looked at search logs and found that people were hitting Yahoo with the query 'www.hotmail.com' and the like all the time. But at the same time, for slightly higher order users, it can be beneficial for someone to have their own domain. Yeah, a lot of people use search engines, but there will always be people typing 'computers.com' because they want computer info- and Cnet gets their ad revenue and mindshare.
Another aspect is that in the minds of a lot of people, having your own domain equates to being Internet-saavy. Small businesses that could have their needs met by sitting in a subdirectory on someone else's box register domain names because it looks more profesional. Having worked with some small businesses looking for web hosting, I know that it is one of the first things that they think of. It just presents a more professional looking face, and that image is important for small businesses. As a result, small business web hosting places are helping people register domain names as part of set-up.
Another factor is memorability. Directory levels tend to be more obscurely named than domain names. I have pictures from school on my website- telling my grandma to look at www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~collier is a lot harder than if I could say "clay.org" or something (it erases the "what's a tilde?" discussion, for instance). This is even more of a boon to small businesses, who want to do anything that they can to stick out in the minds of their customers. Nobody wants to be one of 1,000 angelfire.com or aol addresses that someone writes down or tries to surf through.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
Anybody interested in seriously bashing SUV drivers ought to check out this article on the Times. Auto companies have put a lot of cash into figuring out why people drive SUV's, with some interesting results. . .
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
Still, I think that the main point is that while a gun isn't the only thing that lets people kill, it it the only thing (other than explosives, nuclear armaments, etc.) that lets killing be done on such a scale by a single person. You would have a hard time rushing into a restaurant and strangling 12 people before being overpowered, and very few people die in drive-by knifings (to the best of my knowledge, at least),
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
Of course, all of this is probably tangential, seeing as how he copied verbatim significant portions of the article as his "summary". But, IMOO, the last sentance would not constitute a paraphrase or require attribution.
Of course, according to my writing teacher freshman year in college, every time you wiped your nose while typing, you should attribute it to someone, as they probably provided you with the idea.
"snort"- Prof. Mafi
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
Police officers outpushed, unable to stop murderous rage
Nah.
That for me is the difference. Killing 25,000 people with a gun requires 25,000 pissed off people twitching their fingers. Pushing 25,000 people out a window requires much more effort, and is a lot easier to stop. Remember when bank robbers in California held off cops for hours with body armor and automatic weapons? I'd like to have seen them try and do it with pen knives or upper body strength. Probably have been fewer funerals.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
Um, actually he just cut and pasted the entire thing from the article. The only 'commentary' he added was the very last line- the sentance that said that there was an interesting article. I'd zap him for plagiarizing, but not for editorializing.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
But I think for the most part, one would not have the expectation that those would be kept secret. The phone company has the same information about the calls that you make. What is important then is to make sure that there are policies in place that determines who gets that information, and for what purpose. If you are going to keep any sort of logs or records of activity, who/where/when is probably one of the most basic ones, and I would expect most people know it will be logged. Just important to 1)make sure people know that sort of information is subject to logging 2)Clearly define the circumstances when the logs will be made available, and make sure your customers know that too.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
Yup. I never had a problem with Lotteries until I started visiting Quick-e marts in the city late at night. You quickly discover that the lottery is not people with disposable income coming out their ears laughing at the joy and suspense of playing the numbers. It's mostly the poor and the homeless, realizing that a dollar doesn't but much else than a tenth of a shot at getting out of poverty. Wacthing old homeless men throw away their last few dollars on lottery tickets that never come in is not my idea of entertainment. The lottery isn't just a tax on bad math; it's an effort to redistribute income from the poorest to the rest of society. Not exactly a progressive tax system.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
Seems appropriate. A lot of information about the lifestyles of early "common people" was retrieved by sifting through piles of garbage where the lack of oxygen to objects deep inside the pile preserved them. I think it would be perfect for the future to learn about our p0rn viewing habits from Doubleclick- the modern equivalent of a massive garbage pile ;)
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
By "some things that are illegal are rightly so" I meant this: there are things that are illegal because they impinge upon other's rights. It is find for someone to be bound by their personal morality, but where it impedes another person's rights (as defined by law, typically), it is the role of the law to set boundaries that everyone abides by. Certainly, the law oversteps that guideline sometimes. But that is a whole other discussion.
I specified the US when I spoke of people justifying personal wants with high faluting rhetoric because you pointed out in earlier posts that the situation varies greatly in different countries, something that I agree with. I was certainly not implying that I thought that the phenomenon was unique to the US, or the West, or New Jersey. Obviously, such things happen everywhere. But the US is not Burma, it is not Serbia, it is not Tibet. Civil disobedience in this country is not so often the life-or-death issue that it is in other countries. This tends to greater abuse, as the stakes are not so high in the US. If you could be imprisoned for using secure communications like the ones being developed, as is the situation in restrictive regimes, you almost certainly would not use it to swap porn and MP3's. In the US, where we take for granted our right to basic communication, such tools are more likely to be abused.
Yes, you can use a telophone to commit a crime. I can use a hand saw to behead my in-laws. Any tool is subject to misuse. Again, this is obvious. But there is some responsability to protect against misuse. This needs not be legislated, by a conscientous and skilled tool-maker takes it into account. I was not saying that anything that can be misused should be banned or destroyed, but that the maker of such a tool should be responsable enough to take steps to safeguard their work, and at the very least to think through the consequences of their system. The fact that the creator acknowledges that the system is useful for money laundering but makes no effort to prevent it is, to me, a bit irreponsible. I'm not saying tap everyone's phone lines and take away their guns. I am saying take modest and reasonable steps to ward against abuses that you already know about.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
Yup. Everything that is illegal is not immoral. But not everything that you think ought to be legal is moral. The catagories of legality and morality are not the exact same thing, but they are not mutually exclusive. Some things that are illegal are rightly so. Not everyone who violates the law is following a "higher morality", no matter what they say.
You do have a point about anonimity in countries where politicol opposition is dangerous. And anonymous politicol opposition will probably be the best that most people can manage in such places. But many such countries don't have adequite internet infrastructure to take advantage of this. Secondly, I wasn't saying something about them "following politicol process". I was saying something about the impact of people that are willing to give their lives (and their names) to a cause. I wasn't saying that they should be happy to die after making themselves public as opposition to the powes that be. But people do not rally to the cause of Anonymous Coward. They have rallied to the causes of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, George Washington, Nelson Mandela, and Aung San Suu Kyi. These are the people who have exposed themselves to the most danger, and they are the people leading the opposition. I was not critisizing people in danger for wanting to be anonymous; I was critisizing the assumption that you can only protest when anonymous.
As for the pot smoking- frankly, I can tell cops anything I want. If I confess to a murder, they'll probably look into it. If I tell them I smoke grass, but possess none at the time, they can't do anything. I have commited no offense. More relevantly, I can join an organization like NORML and agitate for the alteration of Marijuana laws across the US. Publicly, with the face I was born with. Wether it is a useful thing to do depends on your opinion of lobbying. But I wouldn't do that, because smoking weed seems like a waste of my time.
You seem not to understand what "freedom" means. Think about it.
What I meant by that is this: rhetoric, and even sincerity, do not equate with morality. There are always people willing to take up a banner to further their own status and position. And there are always people who believe very sincerely in causes that are detrimental to the people around them. Ask a Klansmen some day. They wear masks. Civil rights marchers didn't. I realize that anonymity can protect good people that need it because of their situation. The situation varies a lot from country to country. What distresses me is people in this country (the US) using complex rationalizations to justify their own greed. It happens. It isn't a reason to roll back everyone's freedom. But it is a reason to be a little wary when someone offers some handy dandy thing that will guarantee your freedom, but has the 'negligable' side effect of giving people a clean way to circumvent laws that may (but not always, yes I know) intersect with morality
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
Read it, actually. He makes a number of points concerning why there are legitimate uses for these protocals. Great. However, he makes no provisions for dealing with or preventing misuse of them that is illegal or dangerous. It is one thing to say that there are plenty of existing things that can be misused that should not be regulated; it is another to introduce a new technoligy that is geared towards misuse without taking any precautionary measures.
As for the assault rifle exchange protocal, when I wrote that I was actually aware that one cannot move assault rifles through your normal modem connection. They are simply too wide. However, I am curious as to what the creators of Fling mean when they say that they want to aid the "sale of government-disapproved goods". That is goods mind you, not information. If they are talking about goods that can be converted into 1's and 0's, than they are talking about 1)copywriten works, 2)kiddie porn, 3)Classified documents, or 4)people's private records (health, credit, etc.). There are others, I am sure, and to be frank I feel we have enough distribution chanels for all of them as it stands.
And if they find a way to move AK-47's throguh a T3, I won't like that either.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
Yeah, this whole thing seems to be just the opposite of well thought out. Most people think "my work raises complex moral issues. I should explore them." This project seems to have the train of thought "This project raises serious moral isssues. I'll let someone else take care of it."
This seems very irresponsable to me. This guy is targeting illegal markets ("Sale of government-disapproved goods", "Anonymous, unreported e-cash transactions"). He acknowledges that it could be a tool for money laundering, but then adds that it offers even more functionality. Money laundering and the Secure Assault Rifle eXchange Protocal (SARXP)? How could you not support it!?
In addition to the ethical concerns over enabling exchange of contraband and money laundering, I'm concerned that his idea of how to address disagreement with the policies of your local governing body is to hide your identity and disregard the law. I liked the article that was posted around the 4th about what happened to the signers of the Declaration of Independance in the US; it's a reminder that civil disobediance doesn't require anonimity. Using high ideals to justify being a punk and a thief does.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
Considering how many innocent persons have already been convicted and NEARLY executed by sloppy police/"justice" system work, do we really wanna sit back and say, "Oh, well..."
Funny you should mention that. Guess what is starting to free a lot of wrongly imprisoned and nearly executed people: DNA evidence.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
In most areas in the US, it is perfectly legal for the police to stop and check every driver on the road, as long as they check EVERY driver who comes to the checkpoint. It sucks, but the courts have upheld it.
They have, because while you might not like passing through a roadblock that stops everyone on New Years Eve, it beats the alternative: Police stopping 1)Only every black person that comes through or 2)Every person that looks suspicious (see above, add "poor people", "people with facial hair", "foreigners", and "people under 30")
Random stops on everyone that comes through are a pain. But it sure beats being targeted by security forces because of the color of your skin or the bad rap your belief system gets. I would much rather see every single person that goes through an airport get a DNA or chemical scan than have them target "profiles". The volume of data and the scrutiny involved in tagging that many people is in itself a gaurantee of some privacy (ways to protect privacy: 1) be alone 2) be in a whacking big crowd), whereas only targeting "profiled" and marginalized groups risks everyone's rights (the hangman's story phenomena: eventually, your group is next.)
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
Won't work. As someone mentioned before, having smoked pot in the past is not illegal as long as you do not have it on your person at the time you get caught. There have to be measurable quantities of drugs on you (think quarters and eigths of ounces, not quarters and eigths of a half mole) for the cops to arrest you. Those limits keep getting stiffer penalties for lower quantities, but they aren't going to be pushing the molcular level anytime soon. It would be a legal nightmare for the police; they would loose as many rel convictions and suffer so many civil rights suits due to false positives and the like that it would be totally impossible.
Yeah, possibly. But if you do that, you have almost no way of correlating what DNA you got from what body passing through the detector. You also increase the cross-polination problem, as you have lots of samples sitting in a collector together for long periods of time. If the sequence is not done fast, you loose what information you might have pulled. You want to go back and sort 5,000 piles of skin cells against the security camera photos of 5,000 identical midwesterners passing through the security check at an airport? Me neither. Also, for security applications (what this thing is geared for right now- it's a bomb detector), there is no value to letting things sit. "Well, plane exploded. Better go sift through our DNA collection and figure out which terrorist group we let through security last thursday". Nobody likes that.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
But most DNA ID tests don't look at the whole thing; they simple test certain areas that we know to have high variability among individuals. Unless the DNA test looked specifically at those areas, than they could appear identical under conventional identification procedures.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
The technology CAN do it, and that is all that counts
Well, my point above was that the technoligy can't do it right now. This gizmo is basically a vaccum cleaner hooked to a chemical residue detector. Both of these are things that we have had the technical know-how to do for years; this guy is simply the first to pair them and get a working framework for them. What we don't have is the ability to 1)Quickly determine who's skin cells belong to who, to reduce false positives, and 2)To quickly (like O(1 sec)) do enough of a DNA sequence to positively identify someone. And frankly, once those two problems are solved, this dandruff-sucker will be irrelevant. Who needs to take a random wiff of you as you pass through a turnstile when they can wipe down your luggage, sweep crumbs off of the seat of the plain- anything. At any rate, I doubt that even if those problems were solved there would be many companies eager to use it. It isn't going to be cheap to do DNA sequences for a while, and for most industries, the information that you get is nothing that they couldn't get somewhere else (security cameras, credit card charges, phone bills and central phone records).
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
If you notice, the bit about DNA is just a throw-away at the bottom of the article. The main purpose of this is to scan for explosives residue, something that we already have a way to do very quickly and cheaply (I should know- happens to me every time I got through the airport). It is certainly extensable to taking DNA samples, but until there are some big breakthroughs in fast, cheap DNA sequencing, and the solve the problem of making sure they get the right DNA, this particular device isn't going to be turning you over to the GATTACA police just yet.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"