More, I don't even see what the point is, with regard to "but these are not tested for in standard testing" part. Why would it be? What is the point of testing kids in school to find out they are exceptional in any way when you aren't going to aid their education to make the most of that exceptional potential?
If you ever find a solution that still involves the internet, but doesn't have obvious weak points (website, colo, service provider, vpn provider, etc) you should let us know. Unfortunately, I see absolutely no practical solution for privacy. Like free speech, privacy is something that you only have the benefit of as long as the state lets you have the benefit of it.
I think you are missing the point. This is 2013 and the concern for Google serving you with targeted ads in return for a service has been superseded by the reality that they are essentially a massive data collection service (directly and systematically or indirectly and by coercion -- but let's not act like there aren't nefarious ties to the government, here) for state.
It is 2013 and people *long* for the more carefree days of the past when the biggest security/privacy concern was targeted ads.
I don't care what it adds to my life. It is still wrong.
Unfortunately, there's not really a lot of other solutions. Running your own server doesn't solve anything. You think that big-name colos aren't either tapped or obligated to hand over access to your content on servers in their buildings or on their systems? You think your ISP doesn't have access to everything passing over the internet from your end? Even if you use a VPN, there is very little certainty that you are entirely protected at the provider's side to the extent of whatever data they can dish out (not to mention, it is hard to find a VPN service that can handle your full bandwidth -- I use a pretty reputable professional service and it's constantly up and down and fading in and out and can never handle more than maybe 5-8mbps of my 30mbps connection).
That isn't even considering if they want to specifically target you, as an individual . . . in which case all they have to do is plant something on your system (physical or software) while you're out of your house and capture everything on your end before it hits encryption and transmission.
By the way, I should clarify that I'm not saying "good on this kid" for perpetrating this, exactly, but good on him for treating it as the joke that it is (because you know how fucking painfully seriously much of the student body of many schools -- not even just colleges) take the whole student government bullshit.
And that is exactly the problem with our society. Instead of allowing judges and juries to perform the function they exist for, we want to say that some dipshit stealing 259 passwords to vote in a meaningless school event is the same as stealing 259 people's identities (and though I know this isn't the legal definition, I have a hard time calling it identity theft if what he "took" can't be used to open up lines of credit or acquire state identifications in their names) is exactly as bad as if he were a hardened criminal running an identity theft crime ring or breaking into the Pentagon. We don't want people thinking rationally or using context. We want to say "they violated this certain law and therefore must be punished for the lightest outcome of that crime as if he had actually produced the most hideous potential of that crime".
Yes, the guy is a dipshit and he should be punished, but I have a hard time justifying taking away one or two percent of a human being's life for something that happened on a school campus and only impacted school activities. How would expulsion, community service, and some probation not be adequate?
Let's remember, while we are suddenly treating this guy like a hardened criminal, society (and colleges) otherwise treat college kids as these precious defenseless darlings that can't function on their own and need our help. There have to be special programs and rules about drinking, even though they're all adults and they still get money from mom and dad to pay for laundry soap and ramen and they often live on campus and are generally treated like they are *not* adults and are *not* part of society, yet.
Sorry, but I simply can't agree that it should be a crime punishable by prison time. As I posted elsewhere, what he did with the passwords absolutely has to weigh in on the impact of his crime and the extent of his punishment. If he used these stolen logins to commit serious crimes and do serious harm to students, then by all means, stick him in jail.... but rigging a shitty school election? What is wrong with expulsion by the school and community service by the state? *Maybe* with a year of probation or something.
This kind of heavy handed "but he broke a law ermagherd, throw the book at him!" bullshit is exactly the same kind of bullshit that ends up with someone doing prison time for innocently (and out of curiosity) using nmap.
It comes from reality and the fact that this idiot didn't steal people's identities and charge up their credit lines or anything else and the only things he applied this idiocy to was a meaningless school election. He's an idiot and what he did was shitty and in the real world, it would have real implications and should be punished. Colleges have established plenty of precedence for exceptions to things that happen on campus or by students not being treated as if it is the "real world", so why suddenly pick and choose?
Further more, if it has to be a criminal matter for the courts, how is a good chunk of community service not more fitting? You know, again, because as far as I can tell all he did was grab some logins and vote in a school election. You can't simply dismiss what he used the data for. If he was buying cars under people's names or something, then by all means - throw him in the clink.
Yeah, the idea of letting them access my desktop (or even just potentially capture video of my desktop interactions) is fucking gross. It's sad that we're now in a world where this fear is entirely substantiated and not simple paranoia.
Students are idiots. They should be disabused of this bullshit early on. Otherwise you end up with these fucking twats running out there every election (usually their first or second one, ever) and believing that after 230 years of this government and some 45 presidents -- the one they're going to vote for THIS time is finally going to be the GOOD one that totally fixes EVERYTHING.
Frankly, good on this kid and shame on those treating it like anything more than an expulsion-worthy triviality. He treated the school election exactly as seriously and respectfully as a real election should be and far too much for what a school election should be.
And he was caught, so he never got the money. He should have been expelled and nothing more. This wasn't a government election. It was just some douchy kid rigging a meaningless school election it is pretty gross that it got this far.
It is in the interest of politicians (especially those getting in on the Al Gore ground-floor) to penalize pollution and generate a "carbon credit" economy where pollution is "okay as long as you're paying money to trade credits for it". It's a no-brainer investment. Corporations get to keep polluting and people who gin up fervor over pollution get to actually personally profit from pollution.
(Hint: If they actually cared, they would just put pollution limits to protect people and land. That they're just using it as a mechanic for revenue generation in a secondary market makes it pretty clear they give no fucks).
That seems to completely miss the point. The CIA doesn't give a shit about "climate change" or whatever we're calling it this week. They care about ability to and implications of controlling and weaponizing weather. Some asian country giving the USA shit? Send a hurricane their way. Some south american country not playing along with US policy or making us look bad? Cause an earthquake. Want to bolster US corn syrup? Cause an extensive drought in sugar producing regions of other nations.
I wonder what the reaction would be, socially. I mean, when people correct deafness or blindness, they are often attacked by the blind and deaf communities.
I didn't listen for years. When I listened again, Noorey had taken over. I listened for a week and never tuned in again. It shouldn't even have the name of the same show. Art wasn't about politics and religion. He was about crazy conspiracies and ghosts and aliens and absurd scientific claims and interdimensional stuff and One-World-Government crazy stuff. And he was clearly often just having a laugh to himself as he interviewed nutjobs with their nutjob claims.
Noorey is like one long infomercial where he alternates between promoting books and promoting religion/politics. It's damn gross (as are almost all of the people who came out of it like Howell, and even Simpson and so on).
I still remember the one show in the 90s when a guy called in and claimed to be in a cesna or something, flying toward and then over Area 51 -- live on the air -- and Art played along. The guy got into Area 51 and was going over the base, when he started shouting that he saw a laser and they tractor beamed him or something... then it went silent. Art totally played along, wondering if it was real or if it was a tall tale.. asking callers to report with more information when they had it. It was fucking ridiculous and insane and such a joy, as an adult, to listen to. It made me imagine that's what War of the Worlds must have been like for our grandparents in the earlier part of the century.
Then, there was the ongoing thing about "Mel's Hole"... a hole on some guy's property that was supposedly infinitely deep and if you stuck a recording device in, you could hear the screams of people in hell being tortured. Dumb as fuck, but working at a tech desk in the middle of the night on a weekend on the twelfth floor of a downtown building that was otherwise dark and unoccupied in the late 90s as a 19 or 20 year old kid . . . the recording of the voices and the discussion gave me chills and I was creeped out the entire night.
It's really kind of sad that there isn't anything like that anymore and probably never will be. Everyone else takes the shit too seriously or mixes in too much religious bullshit or is selling seeds or gold or something dumb. Art was just a pure showman and it showed.
Coast to Coast with Art Bell was an amazing show. His voice was a great partner through late dark nights (Noorey's is bland and annoying). He had on crazy guests and random-ass callers and they reveled in alien/conspiracy/ghost/multi-dimensional/pseudo-science-bullshit glory for like five hours every night. Yeah, you had to suspend your disbelief (and you got the sense that Art Bell felt the same way -- he entertained his guests and callers, but was always questioning and clearly sort of "in on the fun"), but it was just the sort of late night story-telling BS kind of thing that could occasionally get past your reality and critical-thinking and for just a second or two, send a chill up your spine (especially when it was 2am, dark as hell, and you were totally alone).
Then, he left and Noorey took over the show that Art created. He turned it into a right-wing religious love-fest. He never *ever* questions his callers or guests, never really digs deeper into the things they say or claim, never even seems prepared for interviews. All he does is have guests on who are pimping books, promotes their books, and sound like a piece of silly putty. Worse, he's a shitty interviewer and every topic he ever has is based around religion (angels, etc). It sucks so fucking bad. It's just a shill hack pimping a tired point of view with a bunch of goofy paranormal mumbo-jumbo coating it.
Apparently Art Bell even left a comment once somewhere basically referencing how the show had turned to total crap.
Seriously - go dig up some 1990s shows, when Art was in his prime and hadn't handed the show over to Noorey. It was fantastic (and so was Whitley Strieber, the author, who hosted every weekend). It was just this fantastic tall-tale-telling late-night-around-the-campfire party, even though you know everything they talk about in it is bullshit (well, except when they had people like John T. Drake aka Cap'n Crunch on there).
Slashdot Mirror
Spatial ability is the new aspergers.
More, I don't even see what the point is, with regard to "but these are not tested for in standard testing" part. Why would it be? What is the point of testing kids in school to find out they are exceptional in any way when you aren't going to aid their education to make the most of that exceptional potential?
If you ever find a solution that still involves the internet, but doesn't have obvious weak points (website, colo, service provider, vpn provider, etc) you should let us know. Unfortunately, I see absolutely no practical solution for privacy. Like free speech, privacy is something that you only have the benefit of as long as the state lets you have the benefit of it.
I think you are missing the point. This is 2013 and the concern for Google serving you with targeted ads in return for a service has been superseded by the reality that they are essentially a massive data collection service (directly and systematically or indirectly and by coercion -- but let's not act like there aren't nefarious ties to the government, here) for state.
It is 2013 and people *long* for the more carefree days of the past when the biggest security/privacy concern was targeted ads.
I don't care what it adds to my life. It is still wrong.
Unfortunately, there's not really a lot of other solutions. Running your own server doesn't solve anything. You think that big-name colos aren't either tapped or obligated to hand over access to your content on servers in their buildings or on their systems? You think your ISP doesn't have access to everything passing over the internet from your end? Even if you use a VPN, there is very little certainty that you are entirely protected at the provider's side to the extent of whatever data they can dish out (not to mention, it is hard to find a VPN service that can handle your full bandwidth -- I use a pretty reputable professional service and it's constantly up and down and fading in and out and can never handle more than maybe 5-8mbps of my 30mbps connection).
That isn't even considering if they want to specifically target you, as an individual . . . in which case all they have to do is plant something on your system (physical or software) while you're out of your house and capture everything on your end before it hits encryption and transmission.
By the way, I should clarify that I'm not saying "good on this kid" for perpetrating this, exactly, but good on him for treating it as the joke that it is (because you know how fucking painfully seriously much of the student body of many schools -- not even just colleges) take the whole student government bullshit.
Not really an NSA thing. The CIA, however, has rigged and/or heavily (and shadily) rigged many elections abroad. That isn't a closely guarded secret.
And that is exactly the problem with our society. Instead of allowing judges and juries to perform the function they exist for, we want to say that some dipshit stealing 259 passwords to vote in a meaningless school event is the same as stealing 259 people's identities (and though I know this isn't the legal definition, I have a hard time calling it identity theft if what he "took" can't be used to open up lines of credit or acquire state identifications in their names) is exactly as bad as if he were a hardened criminal running an identity theft crime ring or breaking into the Pentagon. We don't want people thinking rationally or using context. We want to say "they violated this certain law and therefore must be punished for the lightest outcome of that crime as if he had actually produced the most hideous potential of that crime".
Yes, the guy is a dipshit and he should be punished, but I have a hard time justifying taking away one or two percent of a human being's life for something that happened on a school campus and only impacted school activities. How would expulsion, community service, and some probation not be adequate?
Let's remember, while we are suddenly treating this guy like a hardened criminal, society (and colleges) otherwise treat college kids as these precious defenseless darlings that can't function on their own and need our help. There have to be special programs and rules about drinking, even though they're all adults and they still get money from mom and dad to pay for laundry soap and ramen and they often live on campus and are generally treated like they are *not* adults and are *not* part of society, yet.
It wasn't me, man. I can't be accountable for what some PAC does in my name! :D
Sorry, but I simply can't agree that it should be a crime punishable by prison time. As I posted elsewhere, what he did with the passwords absolutely has to weigh in on the impact of his crime and the extent of his punishment. If he used these stolen logins to commit serious crimes and do serious harm to students, then by all means, stick him in jail. ... but rigging a shitty school election? What is wrong with expulsion by the school and community service by the state? *Maybe* with a year of probation or something.
This kind of heavy handed "but he broke a law ermagherd, throw the book at him!" bullshit is exactly the same kind of bullshit that ends up with someone doing prison time for innocently (and out of curiosity) using nmap.
It comes from reality and the fact that this idiot didn't steal people's identities and charge up their credit lines or anything else and the only things he applied this idiocy to was a meaningless school election. He's an idiot and what he did was shitty and in the real world, it would have real implications and should be punished. Colleges have established plenty of precedence for exceptions to things that happen on campus or by students not being treated as if it is the "real world", so why suddenly pick and choose?
Further more, if it has to be a criminal matter for the courts, how is a good chunk of community service not more fitting? You know, again, because as far as I can tell all he did was grab some logins and vote in a school election. You can't simply dismiss what he used the data for. If he was buying cars under people's names or something, then by all means - throw him in the clink.
Yeah, the idea of letting them access my desktop (or even just potentially capture video of my desktop interactions) is fucking gross. It's sad that we're now in a world where this fear is entirely substantiated and not simple paranoia.
That isn't the weak-point, anyway. Employees with access to the plan are.
I dunno. How many elderly wheelchair bound american women have blown up domestic flights?
Was he liberal or conservative?
Yes.
You take school elections way too seriously. They aren't even worth taking a shit on.
Students are idiots. They should be disabused of this bullshit early on. Otherwise you end up with these fucking twats running out there every election (usually their first or second one, ever) and believing that after 230 years of this government and some 45 presidents -- the one they're going to vote for THIS time is finally going to be the GOOD one that totally fixes EVERYTHING.
Frankly, good on this kid and shame on those treating it like anything more than an expulsion-worthy triviality. He treated the school election exactly as seriously and respectfully as a real election should be and far too much for what a school election should be.
And he was caught, so he never got the money. He should have been expelled and nothing more. This wasn't a government election. It was just some douchy kid rigging a meaningless school election it is pretty gross that it got this far.
Rendering 10% of Tumblr invisible is an improvement and a great start. Please get to work on the other 90%, too.
Uh. Yeah. Corn syrup comes from corn. And competes with sugar. Duh.
It is in the interest of politicians (especially those getting in on the Al Gore ground-floor) to penalize pollution and generate a "carbon credit" economy where pollution is "okay as long as you're paying money to trade credits for it". It's a no-brainer investment. Corporations get to keep polluting and people who gin up fervor over pollution get to actually personally profit from pollution.
(Hint: If they actually cared, they would just put pollution limits to protect people and land. That they're just using it as a mechanic for revenue generation in a secondary market makes it pretty clear they give no fucks).
That seems to completely miss the point. The CIA doesn't give a shit about "climate change" or whatever we're calling it this week. They care about ability to and implications of controlling and weaponizing weather. Some asian country giving the USA shit? Send a hurricane their way. Some south american country not playing along with US policy or making us look bad? Cause an earthquake. Want to bolster US corn syrup? Cause an extensive drought in sugar producing regions of other nations.
I wonder what the reaction would be, socially. I mean, when people correct deafness or blindness, they are often attacked by the blind and deaf communities.
I didn't listen for years. When I listened again, Noorey had taken over. I listened for a week and never tuned in again. It shouldn't even have the name of the same show. Art wasn't about politics and religion. He was about crazy conspiracies and ghosts and aliens and absurd scientific claims and interdimensional stuff and One-World-Government crazy stuff. And he was clearly often just having a laugh to himself as he interviewed nutjobs with their nutjob claims.
Noorey is like one long infomercial where he alternates between promoting books and promoting religion/politics. It's damn gross (as are almost all of the people who came out of it like Howell, and even Simpson and so on).
I still remember the one show in the 90s when a guy called in and claimed to be in a cesna or something, flying toward and then over Area 51 -- live on the air -- and Art played along. The guy got into Area 51 and was going over the base, when he started shouting that he saw a laser and they tractor beamed him or something... then it went silent. Art totally played along, wondering if it was real or if it was a tall tale.. asking callers to report with more information when they had it. It was fucking ridiculous and insane and such a joy, as an adult, to listen to. It made me imagine that's what War of the Worlds must have been like for our grandparents in the earlier part of the century.
OH! I found it on youtube!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4ASP3aKVj4
Then, there was the ongoing thing about "Mel's Hole"... a hole on some guy's property that was supposedly infinitely deep and if you stuck a recording device in, you could hear the screams of people in hell being tortured. Dumb as fuck, but working at a tech desk in the middle of the night on a weekend on the twelfth floor of a downtown building that was otherwise dark and unoccupied in the late 90s as a 19 or 20 year old kid . . . the recording of the voices and the discussion gave me chills and I was creeped out the entire night.
It's really kind of sad that there isn't anything like that anymore and probably never will be. Everyone else takes the shit too seriously or mixes in too much religious bullshit or is selling seeds or gold or something dumb. Art was just a pure showman and it showed.
Coast to Coast with Art Bell was an amazing show. His voice was a great partner through late dark nights (Noorey's is bland and annoying). He had on crazy guests and random-ass callers and they reveled in alien/conspiracy/ghost/multi-dimensional/pseudo-science-bullshit glory for like five hours every night. Yeah, you had to suspend your disbelief (and you got the sense that Art Bell felt the same way -- he entertained his guests and callers, but was always questioning and clearly sort of "in on the fun"), but it was just the sort of late night story-telling BS kind of thing that could occasionally get past your reality and critical-thinking and for just a second or two, send a chill up your spine (especially when it was 2am, dark as hell, and you were totally alone).
Then, he left and Noorey took over the show that Art created. He turned it into a right-wing religious love-fest. He never *ever* questions his callers or guests, never really digs deeper into the things they say or claim, never even seems prepared for interviews. All he does is have guests on who are pimping books, promotes their books, and sound like a piece of silly putty. Worse, he's a shitty interviewer and every topic he ever has is based around religion (angels, etc). It sucks so fucking bad. It's just a shill hack pimping a tired point of view with a bunch of goofy paranormal mumbo-jumbo coating it.
Apparently Art Bell even left a comment once somewhere basically referencing how the show had turned to total crap.
Seriously - go dig up some 1990s shows, when Art was in his prime and hadn't handed the show over to Noorey. It was fantastic (and so was Whitley Strieber, the author, who hosted every weekend). It was just this fantastic tall-tale-telling late-night-around-the-campfire party, even though you know everything they talk about in it is bullshit (well, except when they had people like John T. Drake aka Cap'n Crunch on there).