My worry is that this will be extended. Consider that old favourite, the Terrorist's Handbook. Quite popular pre-2001, it's basically a year ten chemistry and metalwork textbook. But we must block it or else the terrorists win. Information on chemistry, physics, engineering and biology could be blocked because it could be used to help terrorists. You're right. But censoring the information isn't going to change the fact that nitrogen-based fertilisers are explosive.
The ISP's will use a hash database provided by the Center of pictures they've collected, blocking anything tha matches the hash.
You have got to be shitting me. This is the worst idea I have ever heard and I work in the public sector.
Cryptographic hash? Flip the least significant bit. Quality degrader? Hope it doesn't object to the flesh tones of my regular porn! Anyway, the kiddie stuff is just gzipped. Or 40-bit DES encrypted with the key published. Or fucking base64 encoded and ROT13'd.
Blocking either spam or phishing sites could be considered censorship by the way. You can talk about protected speech but as soon as you classify some speech as protected and other as not you start down a slippery slope.
Absolutely. Google has a good solution to this. There's the badware warning on certain clicks and there's the spam folder in gmail. In both cases you're not prevented from viewing the material based on its source, just warned about its content so you can make an informed decision about whether or not to view said content.
Everything can be abused that doesn't prove that it will be again. That is also a logical fallacy.
Just because an idea is the result of a deductive fallacy doesn't mean it's incorrect - there's a sig somewhere around here that mentions that. Plus, inductively we can safely say things tend to get abused more often than not.
Any abuse is a different and separate issue...
No, it's the same issue, because:
Can the abuse be avoid while keeping the benefits?
Is the core question that needs to be answered before we decide that it's a good idea to implement it.
So, to recap:
Preventing child pornography: good idea.
Blacklists: often a bad idea due to abuse.
Blacklisting child porn sites: subject of discussion.
I think we should not use a blacklist to censor (and it is censoring) child pornography. I believe this because the list will necessarily lack accountability. It is unlikely the blacklist will be published, as that's basically providing a list of links to child porn. The result is the possibility for abuse resulting in censorship with very little recourse.
I believe a better solution would be to monitor access in accordance with existing law, without censoring anything. People who access the material can then be investigated, once again in accordance with current law.
Re:Are you sure? (Score:5, Funny)
"Yes, truecrypt.org DOES contain child porn, so does wikileaks.org"
"Do you have proof?"
"Why are you asking? You must be looking for child porn! STONE HIM!" There, fixed it for you.
And you shouldn't refer to such individuals as "children" - even though they might be from a legal perspective - in the context of "child abuse". It detracts from those who have suffered genuine abuse, rather than voluntarily engaged in completely normal "coming of age" activities.
Well, more than that, "child" generally refers to someone 12 and under. The accepted term for 12-25s is "young person". The reason we have these distinctions is because we recognise that while young people need some assistance and support, they do have the capacity to make decisions for themselves.
I think it's important to point out that in most of the civilised world at least (UK, Canada, Australia, NZ) we let people make decisions about medical consent, as long as the person has capacity to understand the issue in question. This is known as the Gillick Test. Seems like a good idea to me. Laws don't need hard and fast age limits to be good. We have a judiciary so fuzzy laws can be enforced. Let's think about why we protect children and make that the law, rather than simply saying people under a certain age are necessarily incapable of making a decision.
I firmly believe that where a person gives true consent they should be allowed to do whatever they want, regardless of age. People under a certain age would invariably lack the capacity to consent, but let that be the basis for the decision, rather than an arbitrary line in the sand.
Of course, they may or may not be able to get a warrant for the records, and just getting the ISP's to turn over the records may make the records inadmissible in court...
If an ISP has reason to suspect illegal activity and the communication between you and the ISP is not privileged then the ISP can voluntarily provide evidence without breaching anything other than the odd privacy policy (which contains exemptions for such circumstances). This can then be used in evidence without issue. It's only when information is obtained forcibly without a warrant that it's inadmissible.
In fact, I think it would be cool if I could "tag" with icons. [...] Adding little "icons" would (I think) greatly increase my ability to visually parse a page of many different types of tagged messages.
This is one of the new GMail Labs features you can enable.
And when I say "Not Spam" about a logwatch email from a server, how about you remember that and not classify the daily logwatch emails FROM THE SAME ADDRESS as spam in the future?
Messages from (with RDNS checks) people in your contacts are never placed in the spambox. Spam/Not Spam classifications are content-learning mechanisms and are applied after white- and black-lists.
Using an undelete utility means you risk recovering many corrupt files. That may be better than nothing or sending money to a malware author, which as much as I hate to say it may legitimately be classed as "funding terrorism".
No. It's giving in to extortion and blackmail. It might be funding terrorism, just as your local Starbucks might be owned by some dude who gives money to terrorists. Alternately it might be funding criminals.
Just because a criminal uses fear - terror - to execute a crime does not make them terrorists. Distinctions are important!
I was going to agree with you, but then I RTFA. Quoth CNN:
But the posted videos were shot by fans and, obviously, the song isn't Prince's. So no, Prince doesn't own the copyright on the recording of the performance.
Prince owns the copyright in the performance. That's different to the copyright in the recording (owned by whoever recorded it, assuming they had permission to record it) and different to the copyright in the song (owned by Radiohead, or more likely their overly-restrictive studio).
Wait.. zero tolerance? As in, they don't even allow orange juice consumption because it has the same alcohol content as "non-alcoholic" beer?
Or, as in, they don't allow anyone at all to drive because human blood has a minimum amount of alcohol in it, even in teetotalers.
In furtherance of this aim, they got the.08% BAC legislation enacted. Not directly, for they're a spineless bunch of bastards. Instead, they bought sufficient Congress-castrati to wield the hammer of "no federal highway funds" to impose their will on states not adopting "the new standard". By the way, there's no solid medical evidence that any level below.16% really impairs driving ability.
I call bullshit. To quote s 4.1: "By BACs of 0.080 g/dl, 94% of the studies reviewed reported impairment."
In one case, a woman had one glass of wine with dinner and got red-lighted when she left the brightly-lit parking lot without her headlights on. She explained to the "officer of the law" that it was only because her sister had borrowed her car and had mistakenly turned off the auto headlights. The cop asked if she had had anything to drink with dinner. She replied that she had had one glass of wine earlier in the evening. So the rampant son of a bitch DUIed her, declaring, "We have a zero tolerance policy here."
Which is why there is a BAC limit. One glass of dinner - unless it was port in a big mug - will not put you over 0.08% BAC and you won't get DUI.
Cocksucking, swaggering, power-mad bastard -- I'll bet he felt like a real stallion with the wifey when he got home that night. I'll bet her pussy and asshole are still sore.
Your profanity and unfounded allegations of spousal abuse really complement your unreferenced anecdote well. I'm certainly convinced.
Except if you bought a product and then found out it was stolen, it still wouldn't be yours. And you wouldn't be allowed to keep it. If you paid money for a stolen product (say a stolen car), that's a shame, because you won't get it back.
I don't know what jurisdiction you're in but the general rule is that if you purchase property on good faith for value then it's yours. There may be circumstances where you are refunded and lose the property, but it's never just "a shame" as long as you didn't suspect that the property was stolen and you paid a reasonable price for it.
So what happens if they note you are using truecrypt and ask for both passwords?
I only use one password on my truecrypt volume. The only reason I have a TC volume is to limit access to certain embarrassing files and TC is the best free, multi-platform virtual-drive encryption software available. There ain't no second password buddy - and my mtime stamps proves it!
Or perhaps there is a second password. That's why it's called plausible deniability.
I've been lucky, knock on wood. The only time I was really hassled was one day when apparently they had an alert to watch for someone with my birth date. Even then, it wasn't a huge deal; I just had to verify all sorts of information about myself so they would be sure that it wasn't someone with a forged or stolen passport trying to get through.
This makes a lot of sense. If I were a terrorist using a stolen passport I'd be certain to make sure it had my actual birthday on it.
You can get 8Gb microSD cards for under $100 retail. You can hide that shit inside your belt buckle, shoe, watch, zipper, underwear, keyboard, seams of your jeans, label of your shirt, mobile phone, binding of a book. Hell, you could hide it physically inside your innocent thumb drive.
If you have more than 8Gb of super-sensitive data that you don't want customs to find and can't transfer over the internet you're smuggling way too much to be going through customs. The ease of bypassing these searches makes the idea of performing them laughable. The only thing they will do is piss off legitimate laptop-carriers.
Does our constitution apply outside the US?
Does it apply to non citizens?
No and yes. The constitution governs how the three branches of government can govern. That means it applies to any governmental action, be it on a citizen or a non-citizen. However, since the government can only govern within the country it only applies within the USA itself.
Does that mean I can shoot the border agent and not be prosecuted under American laws?
Try not to confuse 'legal fictions' with reality:-)
This isn't a legal fiction. The presumption in law is that the US constitution and US law applies only within the United States of America.
There are certain laws that have extra-territorial jurisdiction. That means that if you engage in certain unlawful conduct outside the general jurisdiction of a country you can still be prosecuted for that crime while you are inside the country.
Most commonly laws with extended geographic application are things like paedophilia (to punish child sex tourists), rape, murder, interference with the operation of the government etc.
Laws which have extended geographic application are a dubious legal area. They are based on the constitution only insofar as it applies to how the case is prosecuted. That's why rendition works. You can torture someone elsewhere and that evidence is admissible because it's in accordance with the laws of that jurisdiction, despite the fact that it's being prosecuted in this.
Seem a bit like a double standard? Yeah, but I don't know that the courts care.
Slashdot Mirror
My worry is that this will be extended. Consider that old favourite, the Terrorist's Handbook. Quite popular pre-2001, it's basically a year ten chemistry and metalwork textbook. But we must block it or else the terrorists win. Information on chemistry, physics, engineering and biology could be blocked because it could be used to help terrorists. You're right. But censoring the information isn't going to change the fact that nitrogen-based fertilisers are explosive.
Congressional funding is probably a poor judge of legitimacy...
You have got to be shitting me. This is the worst idea I have ever heard and I work in the public sector.
Cryptographic hash? Flip the least significant bit. Quality degrader? Hope it doesn't object to the flesh tones of my regular porn! Anyway, the kiddie stuff is just gzipped. Or 40-bit DES encrypted with the key published. Or fucking base64 encoded and ROT13'd.
Absolutely. Google has a good solution to this. There's the badware warning on certain clicks and there's the spam folder in gmail. In both cases you're not prevented from viewing the material based on its source, just warned about its content so you can make an informed decision about whether or not to view said content.
Everything can be abused that doesn't prove that it will be again. That is also a logical fallacy.
Just because an idea is the result of a deductive fallacy doesn't mean it's incorrect - there's a sig somewhere around here that mentions that. Plus, inductively we can safely say things tend to get abused more often than not.
Any abuse is a different and separate issue...No, it's the same issue, because:
Can the abuse be avoid while keeping the benefits?Is the core question that needs to be answered before we decide that it's a good idea to implement it.
So, to recap:
I think we should not use a blacklist to censor (and it is censoring) child pornography. I believe this because the list will necessarily lack accountability. It is unlikely the blacklist will be published, as that's basically providing a list of links to child porn. The result is the possibility for abuse resulting in censorship with very little recourse.
I believe a better solution would be to monitor access in accordance with existing law, without censoring anything. People who access the material can then be investigated, once again in accordance with current law.
I'd say it's more +5 Fucking Terrifying.
And you shouldn't refer to such individuals as "children" - even though they might be from a legal perspective - in the context of "child abuse". It detracts from those who have suffered genuine abuse, rather than voluntarily engaged in completely normal "coming of age" activities.
Well, more than that, "child" generally refers to someone 12 and under. The accepted term for 12-25s is "young person". The reason we have these distinctions is because we recognise that while young people need some assistance and support, they do have the capacity to make decisions for themselves.
I think it's important to point out that in most of the civilised world at least (UK, Canada, Australia, NZ) we let people make decisions about medical consent, as long as the person has capacity to understand the issue in question. This is known as the Gillick Test. Seems like a good idea to me. Laws don't need hard and fast age limits to be good. We have a judiciary so fuzzy laws can be enforced. Let's think about why we protect children and make that the law, rather than simply saying people under a certain age are necessarily incapable of making a decision.
I firmly believe that where a person gives true consent they should be allowed to do whatever they want, regardless of age. People under a certain age would invariably lack the capacity to consent, but let that be the basis for the decision, rather than an arbitrary line in the sand.
If an ISP has reason to suspect illegal activity and the communication between you and the ISP is not privileged then the ISP can voluntarily provide evidence without breaching anything other than the odd privacy policy (which contains exemptions for such circumstances). This can then be used in evidence without issue. It's only when information is obtained forcibly without a warrant that it's inadmissible.
In fact, I think it would be cool if I could "tag" with icons. [...] Adding little "icons" would (I think) greatly increase my ability to visually parse a page of many different types of tagged messages.
This is one of the new GMail Labs features you can enable.
Messages from (with RDNS checks) people in your contacts are never placed in the spambox. Spam/Not Spam classifications are content-learning mechanisms and are applied after white- and black-lists.
No. It's giving in to extortion and blackmail. It might be funding terrorism, just as your local Starbucks might be owned by some dude who gives money to terrorists. Alternately it might be funding criminals.
Just because a criminal uses fear - terror - to execute a crime does not make them terrorists. Distinctions are important!
Only if you don't have an honest belief that you're Radiohead ;).
Prince owns the copyright in the performance. That's different to the copyright in the recording (owned by whoever recorded it, assuming they had permission to record it) and different to the copyright in the song (owned by Radiohead, or more likely their overly-restrictive studio).
Crimes that only apply to criminals? That's a slippery slope, my friend...
Citation needed.
In furtherance of this aim, they got the .08% BAC legislation enacted. Not directly, for they're a spineless bunch of bastards. Instead, they bought sufficient Congress-castrati to wield the hammer of "no federal highway funds" to impose their will on states not adopting "the new standard". By the way, there's no solid medical evidence that any level below .16% really impairs driving ability.
I call bullshit. To quote s 4.1: "By BACs of 0.080 g/dl, 94% of the studies reviewed reported impairment."
In one case, a woman had one glass of wine with dinner and got red-lighted when she left the brightly-lit parking lot without her headlights on. She explained to the "officer of the law" that it was only because her sister had borrowed her car and had mistakenly turned off the auto headlights. The cop asked if she had had anything to drink with dinner. She replied that she had had one glass of wine earlier in the evening. So the rampant son of a bitch DUIed her, declaring, "We have a zero tolerance policy here."
Which is why there is a BAC limit. One glass of dinner - unless it was port in a big mug - will not put you over 0.08% BAC and you won't get DUI.
Cocksucking, swaggering, power-mad bastard -- I'll bet he felt like a real stallion with the wifey when he got home that night. I'll bet her pussy and asshole are still sore.
Your profanity and unfounded allegations of spousal abuse really complement your unreferenced anecdote well. I'm certainly convinced.
Then write to your Congresscritters and tell them you can't stand your hard earned tax dollars being spent on their little crusade.
Get your friends. Organize rallies. Rent a skywriter. Do something.
You're right! If we all rally together, they'll definitely get out of Iraq!
I don't know what jurisdiction you're in but the general rule is that if you purchase property on good faith for value then it's yours. There may be circumstances where you are refunded and lose the property, but it's never just "a shame" as long as you didn't suspect that the property was stolen and you paid a reasonable price for it.
I only use one password on my truecrypt volume. The only reason I have a TC volume is to limit access to certain embarrassing files and TC is the best free, multi-platform virtual-drive encryption software available. There ain't no second password buddy - and my mtime stamps proves it!
Or perhaps there is a second password. That's why it's called plausible deniability.
This makes a lot of sense. If I were a terrorist using a stolen passport I'd be certain to make sure it had my actual birthday on it.
You can get 8Gb microSD cards for under $100 retail. You can hide that shit inside your belt buckle, shoe, watch, zipper, underwear, keyboard, seams of your jeans, label of your shirt, mobile phone, binding of a book. Hell, you could hide it physically inside your innocent thumb drive.
If you have more than 8Gb of super-sensitive data that you don't want customs to find and can't transfer over the internet you're smuggling way too much to be going through customs. The ease of bypassing these searches makes the idea of performing them laughable. The only thing they will do is piss off legitimate laptop-carriers.
No and yes. The constitution governs how the three branches of government can govern. That means it applies to any governmental action, be it on a citizen or a non-citizen. However, since the government can only govern within the country it only applies within the USA itself.
This isn't a legal fiction. The presumption in law is that the US constitution and US law applies only within the United States of America.
There are certain laws that have extra-territorial jurisdiction. That means that if you engage in certain unlawful conduct outside the general jurisdiction of a country you can still be prosecuted for that crime while you are inside the country.
Most commonly laws with extended geographic application are things like paedophilia (to punish child sex tourists), rape, murder, interference with the operation of the government etc.
Laws which have extended geographic application are a dubious legal area. They are based on the constitution only insofar as it applies to how the case is prosecuted. That's why rendition works. You can torture someone elsewhere and that evidence is admissible because it's in accordance with the laws of that jurisdiction, despite the fact that it's being prosecuted in this.
Seem a bit like a double standard? Yeah, but I don't know that the courts care.
Most importantly this study fails to consider signal-to-noise. It could be a stronger signal with higher noise. Poor scientific rigour.
Yes.
If the government won't tell us, well, we have to find out somehow.
If everybody takes the path of least resistance then it will only get worse.