So true... both desktop environments are missing the point. You have misguided ego-hounds like Aaron Seigo chasing after some elusive new "desktop paradigm" which no one has asked for nor wants.
The formula for a popular successful desktop is so simple: something fully integrated with all options available via menus (program launching, suspend/hibernate, screensaver, etc), and something fast and stable. Very few everyday users care about some translucent twitter widget on the desktop. They want a platform to launch applications from that is simple, fast and stable. That should be priority number one.
It troubles me that the developers of a supposedly anonymous network applaud freedom of expression but then stake out areas that are off limits. Anonet is not a pirate network, CP network, etc.
If the majority of anonet users decide that they want to trade copyrighted movies (or OMG child pornography), would the developers pull the plug on the whole project?
Yes, and if a group of people can easily censor an "anonymous" network, it is next to useless. Any reasonably sized government could effectively censor anonet if it is indeed that easy to block certain content from your machine (and by extension, prevent the information from moving on to others).
Anonymity is first and foremost. Along with that true freedom of expression. We are not a pirate network, although due to the nature of the network you can expect there to be some. We also (unlike Freenet) are NOT a kiddie porn network. In the truest sense Freenet is more "free" than anoNet. On Freenet if someone is hosting kiddie porn there is not much that can be done. On anoNet however, we can. We may not know who you are, but we can block your link at our routers if it is discovered. The good news is that so far everyone that has joined has been (for the most part) like minded
Due to a post on Slashdot we felt this needed some elaboration. No one person controls anoNet. If person XYZ decided they wanted to host kiddie porn, that is their business. However each individual person on anoNet can decide if they want that kind of traffic moving across their box. You have a right to free speech. You DON'T have a right to force someone to listen to you.
So Anonet devs are all for "true" freedom of expression, as long as it is something they agree with.
Because our punishments are mild compared to those elsewhere.
Right. Because the US is all the way down to number 4 in the number of executed prisoners per year by country.
For some, being ostracized would be a very severe punishment.
So like the sex offender registry?
You're also making some specious claims about the deterrent effect of harsh punishments. 20+ years of the war on drugs should be ample evidence that just ratcheting up punishments does not necessarily lead to fewer offenders. And US punishments across the board are almost all more severe than their european counterparts. Why doesn't France or Norway have a higher prison population?
Way to avoid the question (and get modded up for it). Are you implying that the United States' high incarceration rate has no correlation with a lack of personal freedom or government control?
No, I'm just not willing to use my resources to promote the exploitation of children.
But do you think Tor should exist at all? Or should governments aggressively stamp out any programs which attempt to provide their users with anonymity?
For countries like the U.S., Japan, and most European countries, the citizens are fairly free to go about their business without fear of government reprisal.
How do you square this with the U.S. having the highest incarceration rate in the world?
My guess is that it won't make a difference at many outlets like the NYT. It'll be a cold day in hell before they get actual conservatives and libertarians writing for them, do serious journalism again, etc.
Very true. The liberal NYT would never let a far-right conservative like Bill Kristol write for them.
One is "why are sex offenders treated worse than murderers". The answer is because *some* types of sex offenders have an extremely high recidivism rate. They're very likely to commit repeat offenses, while *most* murderers are not.
Citation needed. Every statistic on the matter I've seen has shown that sex offenders have a relatively low recidivism rate. For example:
That aside, suppose among the gigs of pictures of adult females, there happen to be 3-4 of some 14-16 year olds' web cam self-shots, or some Traci Lords video of her at age 17? Among a hundred thousand Ok photos and four hundred videos involving 2000+ hours?
While one might question the packrat nature of this "collector", would the police consider that some kind of "pervert child porn downloader"?
Absolutely. Just look at recent child pornography busts in the news. If prosecutors feel justified in arresting teenagers for taking pictures of themselves they sure as hell will go after your "collector" example.
Police/prosecutors only care about their arrest and conviction numbers, and they get little negative feedback from busting borderline cases because most of the public is all CHILD PORN OMG KILL THEM.
How about spending the resources on busting pedophiles and exposing pedophile rings instead? Or was that too straightforward and precise?
But that might drop the arrest numbers down considerably, which means cutting funding, which means less sweet desk jobs for law enforcement officials.
Think about it. You can bust a guy who is molesting a child and taking photos of it, and that's one arrest. But if you bust all the people who download, trade, or look at those photos, you can potentially makes thousands of arrests! That's thousands of arrests based off of one sexual abuse incident. Best of all, you can keep arresting people who look at those photos for many years into the future. It's the gift that keeps on giving!
No, it's best that these photos and videos continue to be produced. At least until everyone finally agrees to make stories and drawings just as illegal.
There's no way it could snowball. The NZ government is well aware of the possibility of a slippery slope and will do everything it can to avoid that situation. From the FAQ:
Can other types of material be censored in the future?
There is no reason why the same technology could not be extended to block websites with other types of content.
What type of material is censored?
The trial scheme was used to filter child pornography including video, photos, stories and drawings. Other illegal material (as defined by New Zealand law) is not filtered.
Stories and drawings. Because icky thoughts must be banned.
KDE 4.0 was CLEARLY labeled as "WILL EAT YOUR CHILDREN" everywhere...
Everywhere as in random developer blogs and obscure mailing lists?
...except for in the release notes which someone screwed up.
Which is probably the most important place to notify people that the release is barely alpha quality.
Why do people have such short memories? The KDE developers pimped KDE4 as being the best thing since sliced bread for months before the 4.0 release. They dismissed criticism that the beta and RC weren't close to being ready by claiming that they were just beta and RC releases. Then they attended a big release party held by google when 4.0 came out.
It wasn't until there was a tidal wave of negative reviews that the KDE team started to backtrack and claim that 4.0 wasn't ready for anyone.
And it's important to note that in order to be found obscene, the work must meet all three prongs of the test, and the last prong is not a local community standard, but that of a reasonable person in the United States as a whole.
In that respect, the OP is not entirely correct that obscenity is just a local standard.
say i have kiddie porn, real or fantasy: WHY do i have that? there is no reason you can give me for having that that doesn't imply some sort of mal intent
But what is kiddie porn? That is the question you are ignoring. Is a picture of a topless 17 year old child porn? Is a picture of Miley Cyrus topless child porn? Are people attracted to Miley Cyrus pedophile perverts who should be locked up? This isn't a black and white issue, no matter how much you like to believe it is.
oh right, i'm the fascist.
I've seen your posts before regarding this type of topic, and while I wouldn't exactly call you fascist, I would consider you extremely close-minded and an opponent of free speech and the first amendment.
So, what am I arguing here?
Well, I'll tell you what, I'm not arguing anything, I'm just pointing out what needs to be thought about.
Of course you are making an argument. Presenting both sides to certain issues makes it obvious that you lean towards a position. For many people, the idea that some sort of photoshopping at home (with two completely legal pictures) can even be remotely compared to child pornography is the height of absurdity.
If I say we must examine both sides of the infant cannibalism issue, would you say I'm just "pointing out what needs to be thought about"? After all, roasted babies can provide lots of protein and nutrients.
And as for psychological damages to the victim? Or social damages?
Should slander be okay? What about parodies? Misrepresentation of other people's opinions either through intent or mistake?
Good points. All art and social commentary should be made illegal! It's the only way to save everyone from potential embarassment or psychological damage.
Another issue with this type of material is an argument you could give for copyright; the benefit of society. If we allow these pictures to propagate are we fostering child molestors or children who are susceptible to grooming?
Which is why violent movies, tv and books should also be banned. Aren't they just propagating violence?
I think there's more here than just a 'victimless crime' and that, due to its potency, slow and cautionary steps should be made in producing ideological priorities.
It certainly wasn't victimless. Who knows what harm may have befallen society if this creep had been allowed to keep his photoshopped Miley Cyrus picture in the privacy of his own home!
I guess you haven't tried the 2.0 version yet. It most certainly can be beat.
KDE is all in all considerably less annoying than GNOME, more complete and better integrated, so these notifications are not worth turning into showstoppers.
Are we talking about KDE4 here? Because I'd hardly call KDE4 more complete than GNOME at this point. In fact it seems like KDE now prides itself on incompleteness, what with the new desktop paradigm and all (translation: lots of desktop widgets and buggy as hell). I don't mean to judge too quickly though... perhaps in 2 or 3 years KDE4 might even have all the features of KDE 3.5.x, which would make it a pretty nice desktop environment.
Slashdot Mirror
So true... both desktop environments are missing the point. You have misguided ego-hounds like Aaron Seigo chasing after some elusive new "desktop paradigm" which no one has asked for nor wants.
The formula for a popular successful desktop is so simple: something fully integrated with all options available via menus (program launching, suspend/hibernate, screensaver, etc), and something fast and stable. Very few everyday users care about some translucent twitter widget on the desktop. They want a platform to launch applications from that is simple, fast and stable. That should be priority number one.
It troubles me that the developers of a supposedly anonymous network applaud freedom of expression but then stake out areas that are off limits. Anonet is not a pirate network, CP network, etc.
If the majority of anonet users decide that they want to trade copyrighted movies (or OMG child pornography), would the developers pull the plug on the whole project?
Yes, and if a group of people can easily censor an "anonymous" network, it is next to useless. Any reasonably sized government could effectively censor anonet if it is indeed that easy to block certain content from your machine (and by extension, prevent the information from moving on to others).
Anonymity is first and foremost. Along with that true freedom of expression. We are not a pirate network, although due to the nature of the network you can expect there to be some. We also (unlike Freenet) are NOT a kiddie porn network. In the truest sense Freenet is more "free" than anoNet. On Freenet if someone is hosting kiddie porn there is not much that can be done. On anoNet however, we can. We may not know who you are, but we can block your link at our routers if it is discovered. The good news is that so far everyone that has joined has been (for the most part) like minded
Due to a post on Slashdot we felt this needed some elaboration. No one person controls anoNet. If person XYZ decided they wanted to host kiddie porn, that is their business. However each individual person on anoNet can decide if they want that kind of traffic moving across their box. You have a right to free speech. You DON'T have a right to force someone to listen to you.
So Anonet devs are all for "true" freedom of expression, as long as it is something they agree with.
Because our punishments are mild compared to those elsewhere.
Right. Because the US is all the way down to number 4 in the number of executed prisoners per year by country.
For some, being ostracized would be a very severe punishment.
So like the sex offender registry?
You're also making some specious claims about the deterrent effect of harsh punishments. 20+ years of the war on drugs should be ample evidence that just ratcheting up punishments does not necessarily lead to fewer offenders. And US punishments across the board are almost all more severe than their european counterparts. Why doesn't France or Norway have a higher prison population?
Way to avoid the question (and get modded up for it). Are you implying that the United States' high incarceration rate has no correlation with a lack of personal freedom or government control?
No, I'm just not willing to use my resources to promote the exploitation of children.
But do you think Tor should exist at all? Or should governments aggressively stamp out any programs which attempt to provide their users with anonymity?
So you're willing to dismiss the 10% of legitimate speech?
For countries like the U.S., Japan, and most European countries, the citizens are fairly free to go about their business without fear of government reprisal.
How do you square this with the U.S. having the highest incarceration rate in the world?
Of course, mouth breathers and trolls will claim that developers dont listen to users.
KDE developers don't listen to users. If they did, they would remove the $%*@%&#% cashew from the desktop.
My guess is that it won't make a difference at many outlets like the NYT. It'll be a cold day in hell before they get actual conservatives and libertarians writing for them, do serious journalism again, etc.
Very true. The liberal NYT would never let a far-right conservative like Bill Kristol write for them.
One is "why are sex offenders treated worse than murderers". The answer is because *some* types of sex offenders have an extremely high recidivism rate. They're very likely to commit repeat offenses, while *most* murderers are not.
Citation needed. Every statistic on the matter I've seen has shown that sex offenders have a relatively low recidivism rate. For example:
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/crimoff.htm#recidivism
People like yourself continually repeat that there is high recidivism for sex offenders, without ever backing it up.
That aside, suppose among the gigs of pictures of adult females, there happen to be 3-4 of some 14-16 year olds' web cam self-shots, or some Traci Lords video of her at age 17? Among a hundred thousand Ok photos and four hundred videos involving 2000+ hours? While one might question the packrat nature of this "collector", would the police consider that some kind of "pervert child porn downloader"?
Absolutely. Just look at recent child pornography busts in the news. If prosecutors feel justified in arresting teenagers for taking pictures of themselves they sure as hell will go after your "collector" example.
Police/prosecutors only care about their arrest and conviction numbers, and they get little negative feedback from busting borderline cases because most of the public is all CHILD PORN OMG KILL THEM.
Would you want to see what happens when I try to quit?
You'd live longer?
The slipperly slope argument reduces everything to extremes of action or inaction.
And when the topic is internet censorship, inaction is exactly what is needed.
How about spending the resources on busting pedophiles and exposing pedophile rings instead? Or was that too straightforward and precise?
But that might drop the arrest numbers down considerably, which means cutting funding, which means less sweet desk jobs for law enforcement officials.
Think about it. You can bust a guy who is molesting a child and taking photos of it, and that's one arrest. But if you bust all the people who download, trade, or look at those photos, you can potentially makes thousands of arrests! That's thousands of arrests based off of one sexual abuse incident. Best of all, you can keep arresting people who look at those photos for many years into the future. It's the gift that keeps on giving!
No, it's best that these photos and videos continue to be produced. At least until everyone finally agrees to make stories and drawings just as illegal.
Can other types of material be censored in the future?
There is no reason why the same technology could not be extended to block websites with other types of content.
Oh. Nevermind.
What type of material is censored? The trial scheme was used to filter child pornography including video, photos, stories and drawings. Other illegal material (as defined by New Zealand law) is not filtered.
Stories and drawings. Because icky thoughts must be banned.
KDE 4.0 was CLEARLY labeled as "WILL EAT YOUR CHILDREN" everywhere...
Everywhere as in random developer blogs and obscure mailing lists?
...except for in the release notes which someone screwed up.
Which is probably the most important place to notify people that the release is barely alpha quality.
Why do people have such short memories? The KDE developers pimped KDE4 as being the best thing since sliced bread for months before the 4.0 release. They dismissed criticism that the beta and RC weren't close to being ready by claiming that they were just beta and RC releases. Then they attended a big release party held by google when 4.0 came out.
It wasn't until there was a tidal wave of negative reviews that the KDE team started to backtrack and claim that 4.0 wasn't ready for anyone.
And it's important to note that in order to be found obscene, the work must meet all three prongs of the test, and the last prong is not a local community standard, but that of a reasonable person in the United States as a whole.
In that respect, the OP is not entirely correct that obscenity is just a local standard.
say i have kiddie porn, real or fantasy: WHY do i have that? there is no reason you can give me for having that that doesn't imply some sort of mal intent
But what is kiddie porn? That is the question you are ignoring. Is a picture of a topless 17 year old child porn? Is a picture of Miley Cyrus topless child porn? Are people attracted to Miley Cyrus pedophile perverts who should be locked up? This isn't a black and white issue, no matter how much you like to believe it is.
oh right, i'm the fascist.
I've seen your posts before regarding this type of topic, and while I wouldn't exactly call you fascist, I would consider you extremely close-minded and an opponent of free speech and the first amendment.
So, what am I arguing here? Well, I'll tell you what, I'm not arguing anything, I'm just pointing out what needs to be thought about.
Of course you are making an argument. Presenting both sides to certain issues makes it obvious that you lean towards a position. For many people, the idea that some sort of photoshopping at home (with two completely legal pictures) can even be remotely compared to child pornography is the height of absurdity.
If I say we must examine both sides of the infant cannibalism issue, would you say I'm just "pointing out what needs to be thought about"? After all, roasted babies can provide lots of protein and nutrients.
And as for psychological damages to the victim? Or social damages? Should slander be okay? What about parodies? Misrepresentation of other people's opinions either through intent or mistake?
Good points. All art and social commentary should be made illegal! It's the only way to save everyone from potential embarassment or psychological damage.
Another issue with this type of material is an argument you could give for copyright; the benefit of society. If we allow these pictures to propagate are we fostering child molestors or children who are susceptible to grooming?
Which is why violent movies, tv and books should also be banned. Aren't they just propagating violence?
I think there's more here than just a 'victimless crime' and that, due to its potency, slow and cautionary steps should be made in producing ideological priorities.
It certainly wasn't victimless. Who knows what harm may have befallen society if this creep had been allowed to keep his photoshopped Miley Cyrus picture in the privacy of his own home!
"that the 29-year-old -- who was 24 just five years ago" I was told there wouldn't be math.
Where to start...
I know what you mean.
If music is your poison, Amarok can't be beat.
I guess you haven't tried the 2.0 version yet. It most certainly can be beat.
KDE is all in all considerably less annoying than GNOME, more complete and better integrated, so these notifications are not worth turning into showstoppers.
Are we talking about KDE4 here? Because I'd hardly call KDE4 more complete than GNOME at this point. In fact it seems like KDE now prides itself on incompleteness, what with the new desktop paradigm and all (translation: lots of desktop widgets and buggy as hell). I don't mean to judge too quickly though... perhaps in 2 or 3 years KDE4 might even have all the features of KDE 3.5.x, which would make it a pretty nice desktop environment.