"If only the guilty have anything to fear, then why do you have the right to remain silent after an arrent? Why aren't you required to testify against yourself in court? If you're not guilty, you have nothing to fear, so you might as well be forced to speak, right?"
Damn good point.
No argument is more naive or simpleminded than "I have nothing to hide".
Irrelevant. Who cares? People have rights which are to be respected regardless of the situation.
If "I have nothing to hide" is the grandparent poster's attitude, then he should walk into a police station today, give full blood and fingerprint samples, submit to a full psychoanalysis to look for criminal tendencies and then give an account of his whereabouts from birth to the present while strapped to a polygraph machine and voice/stress analyzer.
If the grandparent is not willing to do that, then either he is naively spouting "I have nothing to hide" without really considering the consequences or he is one of those hypocrites who likes to think up draconian laws "for the good of all" but wants to exempt himself from being held to them.
It's ridiculous. It used to be just morons who either forgot they subscribed to something or think reporting something as spam was an easy way to unsubscribe. Now they're reporting emails as spam by accident because of AOL's bad design.
I've solved it for me by blacklisting aol.com from my newsletter. Lost 400 readers at a stroke when I purged them from the database, but that's 400 less chances of my mail server being blacklisted. I direct anyone who complains over to aol's complaint address as it's their fault.
"Oh, and while we're on the topic of emtymology and history--remember that both the USSR and communist China were (or are) "republics." If you don't see a difference between the two, you really weren't paying attention even during the last five years of the cold war."
I've always considered that to be an Orwellian practical joke, sort of like 1984's "Ministry of Truth" which was charged with creating propoganda that clearly was untrue.
"Union (wrong) of Soviet Socialist (close enough) Republics (WRONG)"
"Peoples (wrong) Republic (WRONG) of China" as well as the "Peoples (wrong) Liberation (liberated from what? Their human rights?) Army"
"German Democratic Republic (Hah! Two for one!)"
And then, we have the ultimate example of a false national name, the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea. Not democratic. Not for the people. Not a republic. At least is it *is* in Korea.
-"Only a very dumb company would try that. The negative publicity when they were caught would be worse than the original criticism sites."
I wish you were right. Unfortunately, that is not true. NetNanny-type programs have blocked sites such as Angelfire because they criticize their products.
Angelfire also shows how to disable or circumvent those filters, so some people (not me, but some people) might find that justifiable. However, at least one company actually threatened that site's ISP with blacklisting every single web site hosted by them if they did not drop Angelfire. That was extortion and honestly I would have had them arrested. Extortion is illegal in most places.
How has this hurt their business? It hasn't. No one cares except the people who already don't like net filters.
-"Which is worse, kiddie porn, or the outside chance of collateral damage?"
The outside chance of collateral damage is worse, just as it is worse to convict an innocent man of a crime than it is to let a guilty man go free.
-"If you say collateral damage, then you must also be against real time block lists for anti-spam purposes."
Only those, such as SPEWS, who deliberately seek to cause collateral damage. If a list is willing to minimize the chance an innocent server is blacklisted and are willing to remove one if it does end up listed, then I have no problem with them.
The ORBS list I have no trouble with as its concerned only with open relays.
I recycled my old computer by giving it to my mother. Before I handed it over, I set up Proxomitron with just enough rules to block pop-ups and third-party cookies. I disabled the other filters so it shouldn't interfere with anything she tries to do.
When my grandmother bought a computer, I installed FireFox, hid all the MSIE icons and locked MSIE behind the firewall (That's right all you people who say FF is confusing, my 65 yr old grandmother can use FF, so what's your excuse?). I log in once in a while over VNC to make sure everything is up to date.
Other than one infection of WhenU (bundled with some other program), neither of them have had anything worse than cookies for me to deal with when I decide to run a Spybot scan. And neither of them have any idea what a "pop-up" ad is and don't understand what all the fuss is about.
I called for a boycott of a company threatening to sue the maker of Spybot S&D. The person had been running the site www.spybot.com for years without doing much with it.
One day last year, he trademarked the word "spybot", then sent threats to Spybot S&D's maker in an attempt to make him stop using the name "spybot" while he sold a commercial product under that name.
A few days later, he gave up and even agreed to transfer the trademark to SSD's maker. It wasn't the boycott so much as the bad press, but either way it worked.
Not that I know of. Maybe if their company is based there.
Out of state drivers fuel up out of state, drop off their load across the border and get out as fast as they can. If there is some sort of tax or fee for shipping to CA I imagine the company passes it off on whoever is paying for the load.
You are exactly right. I trained to be a trucker once upon a time (didn't work out in the end). It's a well known fact among all long haul truckers in the US that you HAVE to fuel up before going into California. Arizona, Nevada and Oregon probably sell more diesel fuel within 10 miles of their California borders than they do in the rest of their states combined.
You were correct until you got past that first comma.
You seem to be missing the point of open source software. Anyone with the interest to do so can look at the code. If there is an exploitable flaw, it will be spotted and corrected. If the system allows someone to rig it to favor a certain candidate, that also will be spotted.
You're absolutely right. Thankfully most of the provisions of that abomination are about to expire. Hopefully it will be allowed to do so.
It's been three years since the sept 11 attacks. Hopefully some of these idiots in Congress have actually READ the damned thing by now, something most of them did NOT do when it passed.
The overwhelming majority of hits for my site is MSIE.
The reason being is that most of them are infected with sort of parasite and need help getting rid of it. People running Mozilla/FF/Opera really don't have much of a need for my site. *grin*
No. Switched to Linux about a week or so ago. I'm trying to get away from Windows before Microsoft's Digital Rights Eliminator..... Sorry, meant Longhorn... comes out and makes XP obsolete.
That flash plugin installed fine and I wasn't logged in as root. I guess it's possible I gave my root pass to another installer a little earlier and it cached the password. I don't know if Linux allows that or not. I was on an installation spree at the time getting the newly installed system set up.
That's just how it worked when I installed the flash plugin. My start page at myway.com has a flash element and it gave me the plugin prompt the first time I went there after installing FF.It installed without a problem.
I downloaded java myself from Sun rather than waiting for it to pop up the prompt somewhere. I couldn't tell you whether it was source code or not. All I know is I downloaded the tar.gz they offered for Linux, extracted it and did the 'make' 'make install' bit.
I haven't had this problem at all. I have it installed in/home/mike/apps/firefox/. I did have to 'su root' to compile and install java, but otherwise it works fine logged in as a regular user.
This was filed at bugzilla and has been fixed. Some of them considered it a "showstopper" bug and were willing to delay Moz 1.7 until it was fixed.
The next version of Mozilla (and I assume FireFox) will disallow XPI installers from anywhere but approved sites, with the main download sites being pre-approved. The user will be able to whitelist other sites if they choose.
The problem you refer to was an advertiser running an I-Frame to load a javascript. The javascript triggered an XPI install of a spyware with an onload command. All it did was pop up a dialog, it never installed automatically because extensions aren't allowed to do that by Mozilla.
At worst, it gave what is a best case scenario for MSIE in that the user was given a prompt asking permission to install the thing. That particlar spyware (xxxtoolbar) regularly hijacks MSIE and it's damned hard to remove it.
"Not to defend unsafe driving, but the reason that nearly everyone speeds is that many speed limits are set so such a low common denominator that you'd assume that brain-damaged chimpanzees were used as the baseline cases."
That's because some people drive like brain-damaged chimps. I've driven behind people like that.
the funny part is that speeding does NOT get you there any faster than the guy driving the speed limit.
What kind of idiotic statement is this? Simple math proves that faster speeds equate to less time spent in travel.
Actually, he is right as far as city driving is concerned. As a teenager I'd floor it to go around someone and drive like I was in the Indy 500, only to see the same cars I've passed pull up next to me at the next stoplight.
As an adult (who prefers not to burn gas needlessly by flooring it constantly), I notice myself pulling up even at the red lights with the people who pulled around me earlier with their engines racing.
Speeding in the city only burns gas. You don't get to your destination any faster unless you're lucky with the traffic lights.
"If you don't know what you're buying...don't buy it."
So, you believe you shouldn't buy something if you don't know what it does, but are against a requirement that forces the maker to explain what it does?
The difference between a freedom fighter/patriot/revolutionary/guerilla and a terrorist is that they fight the military and politcal structure of what they consider to be an oppressive occupier. A terrorists kills children by blowing up ice cream parlors.
To put it in simpler terms, freedom fighters fight people trained for combat. Terrorists are cowards who attack the helpless.
I agree about the NSA. They have more to worry about than reading an average person's email. Your statement about privacy vs security is just ignorant however.
If you want security instead of privacy, move to North Korea. There's no food, no jobs, no privacy, no liberties and you can be shot for speaking your mind but by God you'll be *secure* won't you?
Me, I'd prefer a civilized country where I can speak my mind privately as long as I do nothing illegal.
Because PGP was open source in the beginning. It was reviewed by.... whoever reviews such things.... and there were no back doors. Phil himself made a big deal of the fact that NAI refused to release the source code after they bought PGP. He said that he would not guarantee that a back door was not placed in the code in the closed source versions they produced.
But the things you describe here, are far more likely to occur with private/hidden camera's. A government camera cannot be used for posting pictures to a nosepicking fetish site or wathever.. Unless of course somebody is willing to sacrifice his job for this..
Unfortunately, in the case of the Tuscaloosa Peeping Tom, he was caught, but his superiors won't do anything about it. The camera feed was available to the public over a local cable channel. The public watched as an officer of the Alabama State Police used the camera to zoom in on the breasts and rear ends of pretty young women, but his superiors refuse to take any action to sanction him.
The State Police spokesman wouldn't even admit that the abuse occurred, despite the fact that it was witnessed on public television and despite the fact that State Troopers have been blocked from further access to the controls of the cameras.
In a perfect world, these companies would realize they'd make a hell of a lot more money selling games instead of consoles.
Rather than making a kick ass game for the Xbox and being able to sell it only to those who buy an Xbox, why not make a kick ass game that works on anything? Then you are selling to gamers, not Xbox gamers.
This is why I don't buy anything but PC games. I'm not paying $300 or thereabouts for a console to play one game I like, and hope to hell there are other games worth playing.
If they won't make a version that works on my PC, then I assume they aren't interested in selling it to me anyway. I'll spend my money elsewhere in that case. Or wait for someone to make an illegal ROM and play it on an emulator (hint, if we're willing to break the license to play it on unauthorized equipment, you're snubbing potential buyers.)
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"If only the guilty have anything to fear, then why do you have the right to remain silent after an arrent? Why aren't you required to testify against yourself in court? If you're not guilty, you have nothing to fear, so you might as well be forced to speak, right?"
Damn good point.
No argument is more naive or simpleminded than "I have nothing to hide".
Irrelevant. Who cares? People have rights which are to be respected regardless of the situation.
If "I have nothing to hide" is the grandparent poster's attitude, then he should walk into a police station today, give full blood and fingerprint samples, submit to a full psychoanalysis to look for criminal tendencies and then give an account of his whereabouts from birth to the present while strapped to a polygraph machine and voice/stress analyzer.
If the grandparent is not willing to do that, then either he is naively spouting "I have nothing to hide" without really considering the consequences or he is one of those hypocrites who likes to think up draconian laws "for the good of all" but wants to exempt himself from being held to them.
My web host does this. Each one of his boxes accepts SMTP on ports 25 and 2525. About a month after he did this, his own home ISP started blocking 25.
It's ridiculous. It used to be just morons who either forgot they subscribed to something or think reporting something as spam was an easy way to unsubscribe. Now they're reporting emails as spam by accident because of AOL's bad design.
I've solved it for me by blacklisting aol.com from my newsletter. Lost 400 readers at a stroke when I purged them from the database, but that's 400 less chances of my mail server being blacklisted. I direct anyone who complains over to aol's complaint address as it's their fault.
"Oh, and while we're on the topic of emtymology and history--remember that both the USSR and communist China were (or are) "republics." If you don't see a difference between the two, you really weren't paying attention even during the last five years of the cold war."
I've always considered that to be an Orwellian practical joke, sort of like 1984's "Ministry of Truth" which was charged with creating propoganda that clearly was untrue.
"Union (wrong) of Soviet Socialist (close enough) Republics (WRONG)"
"Peoples (wrong) Republic (WRONG) of China" as well as the "Peoples (wrong) Liberation (liberated from what? Their human rights?) Army"
"German Democratic Republic (Hah! Two for one!)"
And then, we have the ultimate example of a false national name, the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea.
Not democratic. Not for the people. Not a republic. At least is it *is* in Korea.
-"Only a very dumb company would try that. The negative publicity when they were caught would be worse than the original criticism sites."
I wish you were right. Unfortunately, that is not true. NetNanny-type programs have blocked sites such as Angelfire because they criticize their products.
Angelfire also shows how to disable or circumvent those filters, so some people (not me, but some people) might find that justifiable. However, at least one company actually threatened that site's ISP with blacklisting every single web site hosted by them if they did not drop Angelfire. That was extortion and honestly I would have had them arrested. Extortion is illegal in most places.
How has this hurt their business? It hasn't. No one cares except the people who already don't like net filters.
-"Which is worse, kiddie porn, or the outside chance of collateral damage?"
The outside chance of collateral damage is worse, just as it is worse to convict an innocent man of a crime than it is to let a guilty man go free.
-"If you say collateral damage, then you must also be against real time block lists for anti-spam purposes."
Only those, such as SPEWS, who deliberately seek to cause collateral damage. If a list is willing to minimize the chance an innocent server is blacklisted and are willing to remove one if it does end up listed, then I have no problem with them.
The ORBS list I have no trouble with as its concerned only with open relays.
I recycled my old computer by giving it to my mother. Before I handed it over, I set up Proxomitron with just enough rules to block pop-ups and third-party cookies. I disabled the other filters so it shouldn't interfere with anything she tries to do.
When my grandmother bought a computer, I installed FireFox, hid all the MSIE icons and locked MSIE behind the firewall (That's right all you people who say FF is confusing, my 65 yr old grandmother can use FF, so what's your excuse?). I log in once in a while over VNC to make sure everything is up to date.
Other than one infection of WhenU (bundled with some other program), neither of them have had anything worse than cookies for me to deal with when I decide to run a Spybot scan. And neither of them have any idea what a "pop-up" ad is and don't understand what all the fuss is about.
I called for a boycott of a company threatening to sue the maker of Spybot S&D. The person had been running the site www.spybot.com for years without doing much with it.
One day last year, he trademarked the word "spybot", then sent threats to Spybot S&D's maker in an attempt to make him stop using the name "spybot" while he sold a commercial product under that name.
A few days later, he gave up and even agreed to transfer the trademark to SSD's maker. It wasn't the boycott so much as the bad press, but either way it worked.
All of the details of this are at http://www.spywareinfo.com/articles/inboxcop/
Not that I know of. Maybe if their company is based there.
Out of state drivers fuel up out of state, drop off their load across the border and get out as fast as they can. If there is some sort of tax or fee for shipping to CA I imagine the company passes it off on whoever is paying for the load.
You are exactly right. I trained to be a trucker once upon a time (didn't work out in the end). It's a well known fact among all long haul truckers in the US that you HAVE to fuel up before going into California. Arizona, Nevada and Oregon probably sell more diesel fuel within 10 miles of their California borders than they do in the rest of their states combined.
"I could be mistaken,"
You were correct until you got past that first comma.
You seem to be missing the point of open source software. Anyone with the interest to do so can look at the code. If there is an exploitable flaw, it will be spotted and corrected. If the system allows someone to rig it to favor a certain candidate, that also will be spotted.
You're absolutely right. Thankfully most of the provisions of that abomination are about to expire. Hopefully it will be allowed to do so.
It's been three years since the sept 11 attacks. Hopefully some of these idiots in Congress have actually READ the damned thing by now, something most of them did NOT do when it passed.
The overwhelming majority of hits for my site is MSIE.
The reason being is that most of them are infected with sort of parasite and need help getting rid of it. People running Mozilla/FF/Opera really don't have much of a need for my site. *grin*
No. Switched to Linux about a week or so ago. I'm trying to get away from Windows before Microsoft's Digital Rights Eliminator ..... Sorry, meant Longhorn ... comes out and makes XP obsolete.
That flash plugin installed fine and I wasn't logged in as root. I guess it's possible I gave my root pass to another installer a little earlier and it cached the password. I don't know if Linux allows that or not. I was on an installation spree at the time getting the newly installed system set up.
That's just how it worked when I installed the flash plugin. My start page at myway.com has a flash element and it gave me the plugin prompt the first time I went there after installing FF.It installed without a problem.
I downloaded java myself from Sun rather than waiting for it to pop up the prompt somewhere. I couldn't tell you whether it was source code or not. All I know is I downloaded the tar.gz they offered for Linux, extracted it and did the 'make' 'make install' bit.
I haven't had this problem at all. I have it installed in /home/mike/apps/firefox/. I did have to 'su root' to compile and install java, but otherwise it works fine logged in as a regular user.
This was filed at bugzilla and has been fixed. Some of them considered it a "showstopper" bug and were willing to delay Moz 1.7 until it was fixed.
The next version of Mozilla (and I assume FireFox) will disallow XPI installers from anywhere but approved sites, with the main download sites being pre-approved. The user will be able to whitelist other sites if they choose.
The problem you refer to was an advertiser running an I-Frame to load a javascript. The javascript triggered an XPI install of a spyware with an onload command. All it did was pop up a dialog, it never installed automatically because extensions aren't allowed to do that by Mozilla.
At worst, it gave what is a best case scenario for MSIE in that the user was given a prompt asking permission to install the thing. That particlar spyware (xxxtoolbar) regularly hijacks MSIE and it's damned hard to remove it.
"Not to defend unsafe driving, but the reason that nearly everyone speeds is that many speed limits are set so such a low common denominator that you'd assume that brain-damaged chimpanzees were used as the baseline cases."
That's because some people drive like brain-damaged chimps. I've driven behind people like that.
Actually, he is right as far as city driving is concerned. As a teenager I'd floor it to go around someone and drive like I was in the Indy 500, only to see the same cars I've passed pull up next to me at the next stoplight.
As an adult (who prefers not to burn gas needlessly by flooring it constantly), I notice myself pulling up even at the red lights with the people who pulled around me earlier with their engines racing.
Speeding in the city only burns gas. You don't get to your destination any faster unless you're lucky with the traffic lights.
"If you don't know what you're buying...don't buy it."
So, you believe you shouldn't buy something if you don't know what it does, but are against a requirement that forces the maker to explain what it does?
The difference between a freedom fighter/patriot/revolutionary/guerilla and a terrorist is that they fight the military and politcal structure of what they consider to be an oppressive occupier. A terrorists kills children by blowing up ice cream parlors.
To put it in simpler terms, freedom fighters fight people trained for combat. Terrorists are cowards who attack the helpless.
I agree about the NSA. They have more to worry about than reading an average person's email. Your statement about privacy vs security is just ignorant however.
If you want security instead of privacy, move to North Korea. There's no food, no jobs, no privacy, no liberties and you can be shot for speaking your mind but by God you'll be *secure* won't you?
Me, I'd prefer a civilized country where I can speak my mind privately as long as I do nothing illegal.
Because PGP was open source in the beginning. It was reviewed by .... whoever reviews such things.... and there were no back doors. Phil himself made a big deal of the fact that NAI refused to release the source code after they bought PGP. He said that he would not guarantee that a back door was not placed in the code in the closed source versions they produced.
Wrong. A state trooper was caught by the entire town panning a traffic camera to watch teenage girls and nothing happened to him. All that happened was the Department of Transportation forbade state troopers from controlling the cameras in the future.
In a perfect world, these companies would realize they'd make a hell of a lot more money selling games instead of consoles.
Rather than making a kick ass game for the Xbox and being able to sell it only to those who buy an Xbox, why not make a kick ass game that works on anything? Then you are selling to gamers, not Xbox gamers.
This is why I don't buy anything but PC games. I'm not paying $300 or thereabouts for a console to play one game I like, and hope to hell there are other games worth playing.
If they won't make a version that works on my PC, then I assume they aren't interested in selling it to me anyway. I'll spend my money elsewhere in that case. Or wait for someone to make an illegal ROM and play it on an emulator (hint, if we're willing to break the license to play it on unauthorized equipment, you're snubbing potential buyers.)
Damned site took down the article. Here is the Google cache