I did (tried) my part. I got the crap kicked out of me by people with larger social connections and more financial resources. The elected people in power don't react very nicely to people who want to change the status quo. They make lots of money and a good lifestyle off the status quo. Why would they want to change it?
I'm now currently paying off debt and attempting to keep food in my stomach.
I didn't switch topics. You're simplifying because you wanted to win. I never claimed there was a basic human right to unmonitored access on a public computer.
The discussion was about the ethical use of a keylogger especially with respect to monitoring schoolchildren.
There is a natural level of watchfulness which parents keep. There is also an unnecessary level of spying which does more to damage the relationship of trust and communication than it does to protect the children. If the justification for a keylogger is to protect the children then it fails. There is nothing that a keylogger can tell a parent about their child that proper parenting wouldn't have already addressed in a more constructive forum.
Would you like a bandaid for your poor bleeding heart?
No. You're confused. What I've described is a conservative government. A small government. The kind of government that doesn't steal your money to help every rich yuppie brat posing as a homeless hippie with a coin jar. The kind of government that doesn't try to install AgentX on your porch and in your bedroom.
A liberal government is the type of government that wants to become your best friend and get involved with every aspect of your life and help all of the people. It's commonly referred to communism or, in more extensive forms, socialism.
That said though, perhaps you're right about a Republic. A republic may refer to nothing more than the method of turnover of the elected politicians but somehow I think the etymology of "republic" really does lean towards preserving the majority of power and rights with the individual citizens.
To the average user this means nothing. To a bunch of people that want to form a chain while they're walking around the mall, or park, or school lunchroom, this could mean everything.
Secure P2P filesharing? Or how about camping? A group can all contribute to one person to fund a really good high speed satellite uplink. If everyone stays within proximity of each other then the connection is easily shared even as people move around. More people means a larger physical area.
----- By definition, isn't a government supposed to do just that for its people? Protect them, and make them happy? Isn't this what every government around the world does, or is supposed to do for its people? ----- That's what communism and socialism are for. A Republic, as a government, isn't supposed to do either of those things. A Republic is supposed to stay out of the way while the people live their lives and drive society. A Republic isn't meant to do much more than host lots of debate and keep the paperwork running through the courts which should be running on a very small and concise set of laws to prevent any one citizen from flagrantly abusing another citizen.
----- To me, ethics deals with having an appreciation for how one's actions affects others, and morality has to do with how one's actions affects one's self. ----- Absolutely fantastic. That is a concise definition that I will spend many hours thinking about with a good glass of beer.
It may be arrogant but it's also true. What's the rest of the world going to do if the US tells them to shove off? Unless England really is running a shadow government the US holds all the cards in industry, politics, and military.
Politicians can debate and debate and debate all day long but, when it comes right down to it at the end of the day, if the US wants to do something it's going to get done.
While all laws have religious basis it is fairly easy to keep a legal system from becoming intimately tied with a religion. A good premise to start on is to guarantee mutually exclusive life and liberty. Without getting religous about it this premise prohibits murder and stealing.
It does open up an interesting loophole in the case of murderer who finds someone who wants to be murdered. I'd call it euthanasia and, leaving religion out of it, say it's legal.
Unless we plan on patenting every word or utterance or keystroke our child makes the property tack, while it sounds good, won't have any real teeth. There's no confidentiality and word of mouth is 100 times more effective in creating a scapegoat than any formally compiled information.
The only way that I see to avoid the inequities is to avoid getting started on the system of clandestine spying on the children. Many people don't believe in the slippery slope argument but, from my experience, the world is coated with teflon coated with ultra-fine Turtle Wax.
Open communication and trust. That's the only way that I see an improvement. When the government is constantly violating trust, and the schools are constantly violating trust, and paranoid parents are trying to push other parents into violating trust then it's a self-perpetuating road to h-e-double-toothpicks.
----- Did you miss the part where the student has recourse to a higher body if they felt they had been unfairly singled out? ----- I didn't miss it. I ignored it. Our system of zero tolerance and well protected rulemakers leaves no real breathing room for recourse.
We shouldn't give up on enforcing rules. We should better define which rules need to be enforced. This is _the_ central problem in our current society. A vast majority of people are busy writing rules and more rules and more rules to justify their high-horse of righteousness.
Stop and think about the following: Is this really a rule that we will want on the books ten years from now? Is this really a rule that we have the ethical right to enforce? Is there potential for abuse in this rule? Can we better spend our time refining existing rules than adding new rules?
If you've done any complex programming you would understand what I'm getting at. Any idiot with a text editor can write more code and more code and more code. It takes a good programmer to go back and rewrite code to be faster, better, more efficient, more effective, and more productive.
Here in the US we don't have a demand for good politicians. We only have a demand for politicians that can make more rules. In essence, the US political system is writing a crappy operating system with more band-aid style approaches such as key loggers. They never go back to see that the real problem is with the existing US Code. It's causing more page faults than any army of keyloggers can fix.
There's always been a need to monitor children doing something. If it wasn't web-browsing in the 1700s it was something else. I wasn't alive in the 1700s, I don't know what the shenanigans were back then. It probably had more to do with 11 and 12 year olds sneaking off to the woods to play doctor. If you're trying to say that parenting today has more inherent problems than it did in the past I have to disagree.
Now that we've talked about this I'd have to say that I don't have any issue with you as a parent keylogging your children as long as you have an open and honest level of communication and trust. Ideally the children know that you use a keylogger.
What bothers me is when an outside institution wants to use a keylogger--especially if that institution is tied with the government. It's not about privacy or about rights. I have no illusions about the complete subjectivity of privacy and rights in the modern world. The majority of it depends on who you know and how much you can afford for legal counsel. My concern is the government's disposition towards overreaction and misinterpretation. Often overreaction and misinterpretation are used to further personal agendas or even vendettas. How many scapegoats (on one side) and poster children (on the other) does it take to promote a local politician to state Senator?
I'm not on any privacy high horse. You're free to watch over my shoulder all you want. It's not going to fix the problem that you champion as an excuse for Big Brother tactics.
Please don't use the "yet another tool" for parents argument. Parents have had plenty of tools for the 6000 years before the electronic revolution hit the earth. The only thing that spying accomplishes is alienation. Even before the electronic revolution there was never anything good to come of spying on children.
Spying is a destruction of trust. If your relationship with your children is so broken that you don't have a positive level of communication and trust then 1) a keylogger isn't going to fix the problem and 2) a keylogger will only antagonize the problem.
I understand. It's always easier to point out faults with the kid. There's no sense in accepting personal shortcomings at the social or parenting level.
----- You've never had to deal with rule breakers, have you? ----- This sums up my whole issue with Big Brother techniques such as keyloggers.
Even former university sysadmins play favorites. Teachers play favorites, parents play favorites, PEOPLE IN GENERAL play favorites. While playing favorites is a natural part of human existence there's no good to come of installing more and more systems to further antagonize those who aren't the favorite.
In our society the people writing the rules are far too priveleged and too well protected. A natural usefulness of rulebreakers is to identify which rules need to be revised or reconsidered. With all of these Big Brother techniques to catch rule breakers the moment they move a finger the wrong direction we'll never refine our system of rules. We continue adding rules and more rules and more rules. It's only logical that, in a system that never repeals or revises rules but onoy adds them, it will be possible to selectively enforce the rules not for the sake of order but to advance personal agendas.
Let's face it. Until we constructively figure out a way to get out of our descending spiral of zero tolerance and moral elitism (often defined and enforced by those who are the biggest hypocrites) then our society is and will continue to be _broken_. Keyloggers aren't going to fix it. Keyloggers are only going to help make it more broken.
----- I'm more worried about the government that knows whats better for our children, then we as parents do. ----- That contributes to your point that it's a lot harder to be a responsible parent these days. All of this Big Brotherism is self perpetuating. Today it's keyloggers, tomorrow because of two or three misinterpreted keylog sessions, the government will be confiscating and raising all children from birth. All you need to do is go to work 60 hours a week to pay taxes and feed the stock market scam which keeps a small portion of people very comfortable.
----- you can take all kinds of responsibility for your kids and still miss things they hide from you ----- I agree. I made my statement to address the excuse for using keystroke loggers. Your tack is equally applicable: there does exist a point at which nothing can be done.
Keystroke loggers are an exercise in absentee parenting at worst and a paranoid token last ditch effort at best.
You don't watch them intently when they use the bathroom, study, go the library, go out with friends, eat breakfast, read a book, play basketball, or watch television. It's only natural to perceive the microscopic attention during computer use as a violation of a level of personal space (established by the baseline of monitoring in other normal activities).
I understand. It's very easy to be a reactionary armchair parent and to pat yourself on the back for being so vigilant when they're using a computer. Maybe you should try _real_ parenting rather than the selective self-fellatio.
If you're relying on a keystroke logger to clue you in to children who have problems with any of these issues then let it go. You're already too late.
If parents and mentors were even close to taking responsibility for their children they'd pick up on these issues long before a keylogger alerts them to it.
Ode to a generation that is completely self-absorbed until the last possible moment when "DANGER WILL ROBINSON" is blaring over loudspeakers.
Basic human decency. You don't stand over your kid while they're using they're making a bowel movement. You don't stand over them when they're urinating. You don't stand over them while they're showering.
Even more to the point, if you're like most parents, you don't stand over your kid when they're studying, or reading, or playing baseball or basketball or even watching TV. You're not standing watchfully at their shoulder when they go to the library or to the mall. If you're like most armchair parents you basically ignore your kid except when you want to interrogate them.
What message do you honestly think you're sending by intensely scrutinizing them when they sit at a computer? You're indirectly telling them that the computer is the most important part of their life. Then you want to moan and complain around the water cooler that they don't take in interest in the things that you did when you were a child.
Why does everyone use Columbine as an excuse to increase Big Brotherism?
Anyone with an ounce of honest thought realizes that watchful Big Brother wouldn't have prevented Columbine. Watchful Big Brother always sides with the majority popular clique. If anything watchful Big Brother would've helped the priveleged students antagonize their scapegoat prey and would've brought the whole situation to a head much earlier.
Which isn't a bad thing. Armchair parents and water-cooler gossips needed a wakeup call. I don't condone the end result of those actions but, in all honesty, the clique nature of our social system is just begging for it.
Why do I get the impression that this article specifically avoids mentioning software keyloggers? Whether or not they're currently illegal under the law shouldn't they be?
How about spending more effort on identifying and neutralizing teenage cliques which inevitably lead to scapegoating and witchhunting?
I know. Once again it's easier to blame the kids than it is to take responsibility for being armchair parents--omniscient and impotent at the same time.
Yeah. Perhaps the teachers and parents should be in trouble for not properly raising the kid to get a real girlfriend.
I understand. It's much much easier to blame the kid. The kid doesn't have the social connections or life experience to argue back. Even if they did they'd be disciplined for being backtalk and insubordination (ie. putting the blame where it really belongs).
Slashdot Mirror
Didn't some guy get arrested for trying to do something similar to Google.com?
I did (tried) my part. I got the crap kicked out of me by people with larger social connections and more financial resources. The elected people in power don't react very nicely to people who want to change the status quo. They make lots of money and a good lifestyle off the status quo. Why would they want to change it?
I'm now currently paying off debt and attempting to keep food in my stomach.
C is for cookie, that's good enough for me...
I didn't switch topics. You're simplifying because you wanted to win. I never claimed there was a basic human right to unmonitored access on a public computer.
The discussion was about the ethical use of a keylogger especially with respect to monitoring schoolchildren.
There is a natural level of watchfulness which parents keep. There is also an unnecessary level of spying which does more to damage the relationship of trust and communication than it does to protect the children. If the justification for a keylogger is to protect the children then it fails. There is nothing that a keylogger can tell a parent about their child that proper parenting wouldn't have already addressed in a more constructive forum.
Would you like a bandaid for your poor bleeding heart?
No. You're confused. What I've described is a conservative government. A small government. The kind of government that doesn't steal your money to help every rich yuppie brat posing as a homeless hippie with a coin jar. The kind of government that doesn't try to install AgentX on your porch and in your bedroom.
A liberal government is the type of government that wants to become your best friend and get involved with every aspect of your life and help all of the people. It's commonly referred to communism or, in more extensive forms, socialism.
That said though, perhaps you're right about a Republic. A republic may refer to nothing more than the method of turnover of the elected politicians but somehow I think the etymology of "republic" really does lean towards preserving the majority of power and rights with the individual citizens.
To the average user this means nothing. To a bunch of people that want to form a chain while they're walking around the mall, or park, or school lunchroom, this could mean everything.
Secure P2P filesharing? Or how about camping? A group can all contribute to one person to fund a really good high speed satellite uplink. If everyone stays within proximity of each other then the connection is easily shared even as people move around. More people means a larger physical area.
-----
By definition, isn't a government supposed to do just that for its people? Protect them, and make them happy? Isn't this what every government around the world does, or is supposed to do for its people?
-----
That's what communism and socialism are for. A Republic, as a government, isn't supposed to do either of those things. A Republic is supposed to stay out of the way while the people live their lives and drive society. A Republic isn't meant to do much more than host lots of debate and keep the paperwork running through the courts which should be running on a very small and concise set of laws to prevent any one citizen from flagrantly abusing another citizen.
HOLY HOT TAMALES!
Mod the author +10 for insightful and +20 for funny.
I'm going to laugh my bee-hind off for the rest of the weekend.
-----
To me, ethics deals with having an appreciation for how one's actions affects others, and morality has to do with how one's actions affects one's self.
-----
Absolutely fantastic. That is a concise definition that I will spend many hours thinking about with a good glass of beer.
Thank you.
It may be arrogant but it's also true. What's the rest of the world going to do if the US tells them to shove off? Unless England really is running a shadow government the US holds all the cards in industry, politics, and military.
Politicians can debate and debate and debate all day long but, when it comes right down to it at the end of the day, if the US wants to do something it's going to get done.
While all laws have religious basis it is fairly easy to keep a legal system from becoming intimately tied with a religion. A good premise to start on is to guarantee mutually exclusive life and liberty. Without getting religous about it this premise prohibits murder and stealing.
It does open up an interesting loophole in the case of murderer who finds someone who wants to be murdered. I'd call it euthanasia and, leaving religion out of it, say it's legal.
I've already addressed the majority of this in my journal.
There's really nothing that we can do about.
Unless we plan on patenting every word or utterance or keystroke our child makes the property tack, while it sounds good, won't have any real teeth. There's no confidentiality and word of mouth is 100 times more effective in creating a scapegoat than any formally compiled information.
The only way that I see to avoid the inequities is to avoid getting started on the system of clandestine spying on the children. Many people don't believe in the slippery slope argument but, from my experience, the world is coated with teflon coated with ultra-fine Turtle Wax.
Open communication and trust. That's the only way that I see an improvement. When the government is constantly violating trust, and the schools are constantly violating trust, and paranoid parents are trying to push other parents into violating trust then it's a self-perpetuating road to h-e-double-toothpicks.
-----
Did you miss the part where the student has recourse to a higher body if they felt they had been unfairly singled out?
-----
I didn't miss it. I ignored it. Our system of zero tolerance and well protected rulemakers leaves no real breathing room for recourse.
We shouldn't give up on enforcing rules. We should better define which rules need to be enforced. This is _the_ central problem in our current society. A vast majority of people are busy writing rules and more rules and more rules to justify their high-horse of righteousness.
Stop and think about the following:
Is this really a rule that we will want on the books ten years from now?
Is this really a rule that we have the ethical right to enforce?
Is there potential for abuse in this rule?
Can we better spend our time refining existing rules than adding new rules?
If you've done any complex programming you would understand what I'm getting at. Any idiot with a text editor can write more code and more code and more code. It takes a good programmer to go back and rewrite code to be faster, better, more efficient, more effective, and more productive.
Here in the US we don't have a demand for good politicians. We only have a demand for politicians that can make more rules. In essence, the US political system is writing a crappy operating system with more band-aid style approaches such as key loggers. They never go back to see that the real problem is with the existing US Code. It's causing more page faults than any army of keyloggers can fix.
There's always been a need to monitor children doing something. If it wasn't web-browsing in the 1700s it was something else. I wasn't alive in the 1700s, I don't know what the shenanigans were back then. It probably had more to do with 11 and 12 year olds sneaking off to the woods to play doctor. If you're trying to say that parenting today has more inherent problems than it did in the past I have to disagree.
Now that we've talked about this I'd have to say that I don't have any issue with you as a parent keylogging your children as long as you have an open and honest level of communication and trust. Ideally the children know that you use a keylogger.
What bothers me is when an outside institution wants to use a keylogger--especially if that institution is tied with the government. It's not about privacy or about rights. I have no illusions about the complete subjectivity of privacy and rights in the modern world. The majority of it depends on who you know and how much you can afford for legal counsel. My concern is the government's disposition towards overreaction and misinterpretation. Often overreaction and misinterpretation are used to further personal agendas or even vendettas. How many scapegoats (on one side) and poster children (on the other) does it take to promote a local politician to state Senator?
I'm not on any privacy high horse. You're free to watch over my shoulder all you want. It's not going to fix the problem that you champion as an excuse for Big Brother tactics.
Please don't use the "yet another tool" for parents argument. Parents have had plenty of tools for the 6000 years before the electronic revolution hit the earth. The only thing that spying accomplishes is alienation. Even before the electronic revolution there was never anything good to come of spying on children.
Spying is a destruction of trust. If your relationship with your children is so broken that you don't have a positive level of communication and trust then 1) a keylogger isn't going to fix the problem and 2) a keylogger will only antagonize the problem.
I understand. It's always easier to point out faults with the kid. There's no sense in accepting personal shortcomings at the social or parenting level.
-----
You've never had to deal with rule breakers, have you?
-----
This sums up my whole issue with Big Brother techniques such as keyloggers.
Even former university sysadmins play favorites. Teachers play favorites, parents play favorites, PEOPLE IN GENERAL play favorites. While playing favorites is a natural part of human existence there's no good to come of installing more and more systems to further antagonize those who aren't the favorite.
In our society the people writing the rules are far too priveleged and too well protected. A natural usefulness of rulebreakers is to identify which rules need to be revised or reconsidered. With all of these Big Brother techniques to catch rule breakers the moment they move a finger the wrong direction we'll never refine our system of rules. We continue adding rules and more rules and more rules. It's only logical that, in a system that never repeals or revises rules but onoy adds them, it will be possible to selectively enforce the rules not for the sake of order but to advance personal agendas.
Let's face it. Until we constructively figure out a way to get out of our descending spiral of zero tolerance and moral elitism (often defined and enforced by those who are the biggest hypocrites) then our society is and will continue to be _broken_. Keyloggers aren't going to fix it. Keyloggers are only going to help make it more broken.
-----
I'm more worried about the government that knows whats better for our children, then we as parents do.
-----
That contributes to your point that it's a lot harder to be a responsible parent these days. All of this Big Brotherism is self perpetuating. Today it's keyloggers, tomorrow because of two or three misinterpreted keylog sessions, the government will be confiscating and raising all children from birth. All you need to do is go to work 60 hours a week to pay taxes and feed the stock market scam which keeps a small portion of people very comfortable.
-----
you can take all kinds of responsibility for your kids and still miss things they hide from you
-----
I agree. I made my statement to address the excuse for using keystroke loggers. Your tack is equally applicable: there does exist a point at which nothing can be done.
Keystroke loggers are an exercise in absentee parenting at worst and a paranoid token last ditch effort at best.
It's the basic human right to personal space.
You don't watch them intently when they use the bathroom, study, go the library, go out with friends, eat breakfast, read a book, play basketball, or watch television. It's only natural to perceive the microscopic attention during computer use as a violation of a level of personal space (established by the baseline of monitoring in other normal activities).
I understand. It's very easy to be a reactionary armchair parent and to pat yourself on the back for being so vigilant when they're using a computer. Maybe you should try _real_ parenting rather than the selective self-fellatio.
If you're relying on a keystroke logger to clue you in to children who have problems with any of these issues then let it go. You're already too late.
If parents and mentors were even close to taking responsibility for their children they'd pick up on these issues long before a keylogger alerts them to it.
Ode to a generation that is completely self-absorbed until the last possible moment when "DANGER WILL ROBINSON" is blaring over loudspeakers.
Basic human decency. You don't stand over your kid while they're using they're making a bowel movement. You don't stand over them when they're urinating. You don't stand over them while they're showering.
Even more to the point, if you're like most parents, you don't stand over your kid when they're studying, or reading, or playing baseball or basketball or even watching TV. You're not standing watchfully at their shoulder when they go to the library or to the mall. If you're like most armchair parents you basically ignore your kid except when you want to interrogate them.
What message do you honestly think you're sending by intensely scrutinizing them when they sit at a computer? You're indirectly telling them that the computer is the most important part of their life. Then you want to moan and complain around the water cooler that they don't take in interest in the things that you did when you were a child.
You figure it out.
Why does everyone use Columbine as an excuse to increase Big Brotherism?
Anyone with an ounce of honest thought realizes that watchful Big Brother wouldn't have prevented Columbine. Watchful Big Brother always sides with the majority popular clique. If anything watchful Big Brother would've helped the priveleged students antagonize their scapegoat prey and would've brought the whole situation to a head much earlier.
Which isn't a bad thing. Armchair parents and water-cooler gossips needed a wakeup call. I don't condone the end result of those actions but, in all honesty, the clique nature of our social system is just begging for it.
Why do I get the impression that this article specifically avoids mentioning software keyloggers? Whether or not they're currently illegal under the law shouldn't they be?
How about spending more effort on identifying and neutralizing teenage cliques which inevitably lead to scapegoating and witchhunting?
I know. Once again it's easier to blame the kids than it is to take responsibility for being armchair parents--omniscient and impotent at the same time.
Yeah. Perhaps the teachers and parents should be in trouble for not properly raising the kid to get a real girlfriend.
I understand. It's much much easier to blame the kid. The kid doesn't have the social connections or life experience to argue back. Even if they did they'd be disciplined for being backtalk and insubordination (ie. putting the blame where it really belongs).