My biggest beef with Freenet was always the fact that it is not self-contained (as in having its own encrypted multi-container, plausible deniability capable local storage and its own fully-embedded web browser/chat/image/video player and the whole thing running atop of a customized bootable Linux CD/USB-stick or some such secure but easy to deploy environment). As it stands, the people who need Freenet the most and who are not capable of building their own secure OS environments (which is very, very difficult to do properly) can be easily busted as the only way to "look into" the data on the Freenet is by using external (and thus completely insecure and full of traces) applications. This of course applies to other similarly incomplete and superficial "solutions" such as I2P and Tor, the difference being however that unlike Freenet they do not promote themselves as a panacea for dissidents in dangerous circumstances.
Thus Freenet is in my view a highly dangerous - to its supposed audience of dissidents - proposition and which is why pornography became its main use. Instead Freenet developers began chasing red herrings such as the deeply flawed and self-defeating "darknet" network-fragmentation-followed-by-inevitable-suicide concept.
Wikileaks is an ususual situation in which mere persistence of the Wikileaks data outside of government control is sufficient to thwart the power elites and their usual weapons are rather blunt in stopping the spread of the information - yet individual users of Freenet would not be at extreme danger for doing so. That is why Wikileaks is pretty much an ideal fit for Freenet, until its developers pull their collective heads out of you-know-where and get serious about truly oppressive regimes, ranks of which are apparently destined to be joined by the so-called "western democracies" in not-so-remote future.
This is actually the first honest to goodness situation in which Freenet (of which I am a long time skeptic) could fulfill its stated role. I am rather surprised that its promoters are so low key in these discussions since the Wikileaks debacle is definitely the break Freenet always needed to become mainstream. If Freenet could be associated in the public's eye with absolute freedom of speech, not just with some fringe aspects of it - like child porn, it would have changed its status entirely, beginning with much larger user base and many, many more contributors and developers.
BrainTree is useless. Like most of the rapidly emerging global neo-fascist-corporate sphere, they offer processing only for businesses under direct supervision of one of the major powers, in this case with a requirement of US legal presence. Every last penny collected is subject to review and approval of US "authorities". The last thing in the world Wikileaks needs or wants.
All these silly arguments are easily resolved, in the favour of what I initially said, by reading Assange's response about this very issue in the Guardian:
Many of these are still available at mirror.wikileaks.info and the rest will be returning as soon as we can find a moment to do address the engineering complexities. Since April of this year our timetable has not been our own, rather it has been one that has centred on the moves of abusive elements of the United States government against us. But rest assured I am deeply unhappy that the three-and-a-half years of my work and others is not easily available or searchable by the general public.
So do, by all means, take your false equivalences and whining somewhere else. They do not sell well on Slashdot. Too much factual information available to us, you see.
Who knows what the cause was. The fact remains that the documents were on the site for a long time and were first available on that site and nowhere else.
But even if Wikileaks focuses all of its attention on the most juicy chunk of meat they managed to snatch, it still does not validate all the whining that's coming out of all the US "patriots", whose idea of "justice" and "accountability" is that every country in the world must first become the very paragon of perfection before the US can even be insinuated of having being somewhat less then supremely benevolent and divinely selfless, not to mention righteous and law-abiding, and therefore Wikileaks is an evil "anti US" Islamo-communisto-fascist-Iranian site and Osama Bin Laden is Julian Assange's uncle and they both conspire to deprive the blushing, innocent, pure as a driven snow USA of her virginity...
Except of course that the "cop" in question did in fact pay attention to many others, but his desk does not at present have the old files on it. This alone is a sufficient cause for spazmonkeys of the world to screech, jump up and down and fling feces. But then again, that's monkeys for you.
Where did all the other leaks, private and government go then? Why did they pull even the old ones from their archives? Justify that.
Justification A: in case of a DDOS one tries to minimize the load on the servers and to do that you have to make the website as small as possible. This usually means that all archives go offline and only the last, most current info stays.
Justification B: You are a petulant whiner, whose mentality is that of a criminal who being hauled away by a cop will moan and bitch that the drug dealer on the next street is getting away from the same cop and therefore you, in your twisted mind, deserve to be let go also. Never you mind that you happen to be the most obnoxious, violent and best armed - by far - thug in the whole neighborhood. In your view either all other criminals have to be caught before you or all must be let go - well you don't really give a shit about them but you must be immune - and if the cop focuses on you first, that is "anti you" and "immoral" and somehow "evil". He must catch every pickpocket, burglar and bicycle thief first - before you, the mass murderer, can be brought to justice or the cop is just your personal enemy otherwise and has "no moral high ground". This "logic" is prevalent amongst the "patriots" in any debate involving USA and Israel and any sort of accountability for any actions of the citizens of these places abroad.
When? If just now then the most likely scenario is that they pulled everything but the latest stuff in an effort to minimize the size of the pages and the load on the servers in face of the DDOS. A common practice in such cases.
Well, theoretically, yes. Keep in mind however that all of this mindset emanates from the US ruling elites and the Poodle and his New Labour were merely trying to emulate (I find the name of that party quite amusing given that their policies became under Blair pretty much a direct insult to the original ideas of the labour movement). Also the dynamics in the US is far more fucked up, only two political parties, both totally corrupt and both completely overrun by upper-crust war-mongering authoritarians. Then add to it cultural issues such as the prevalence of the American Superiority Complex (also known as the American Exceptionalism) that is spoon fed to the populace from the crib, the insane economic situation etc. and you can see things are looking rather grim.
In my view the descent into something like fascism is pretty much a done deal in the US, the only question remaining is how long it will take to reach the bottom. It would take a miracle to stop it. But then again, very unlikely events sometimes do happen....
So your point is that what's going on in Iraq and Afghanistan is not war? I agree that a was should be declared by congress as per constitution but we are where we are and without doubt we are in a war. We are not talking about nebulous concepts here like "war on terror" but actual wars in Iraq and Afghanistan which is what the documents in question are about.
You were talking about a charge of "high treason", which is a legal concept, so I responded with the legal concept of "war". You can't cherry pick whatever you want, colloquial definitions or legal ones at your whim, unless of course the "legality" of things is just an excuse for a lynch-mob (which admittedly looks like the state of affairs in the US these days).
So in common-sense way, the US is waging wars: one inexcusable war of conquest in the guise of pursing 100 or so members of Al-Queda and the other inexcusable war of conquest where the aggression was "justified" by fabricated out of whole cloth "intelligence". Under such conditions, since these activities are so contrary to the US Constitution in both letter and spirit, it would seem reasonable that an act of sabotage of these wars would actually be something true "patriots" would do, not "traitors"...
The reason government labels thing a 'secret' that it shouldn't is the same a reason why TSA forbids printer cartridges when a bomb is found in one (while ignoring a million other similar sized things that the same bomb could be put in): bureaucratic incompetence. What is foremost in their mind is not a conspiracy to turn USA into a police state but a fear of losing their jobs in case another bomb in a printer cartridge actually explodes and the media finger pointing frenzy gets under way. It is safer to reveal far too little information than even a little bit too much.
And what you are missing here is that bureaucratic ass-covering was the grease on which both the Nazi Germany and the USSR run. Many of these bureaurats are also authoritarians and some are downright evil people who do actively conspire to deprive the regular citizens of their freedoms, but do so (like most of the Nazis) in a delusional belief that they are doing it for the populace's own good (its just that peons are too dumb to help themselves and it is up to these "professionals" to take care of things).
That is one of the main foundations upon which fascism was constructed, or did you really believe that the entire Nazi apparatus in a country as large as Germany was composed of just leather-clad psychopaths? Or did you suppose that an entity the size of USSR was choke-full of ego-maniacal "leaders"? Incompetent, ass-covering bureaucracy accounted for something like 80% of the "success" of both.
That's just ranting. The enemy is defined as jihadist forces in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere who know how to download useful information off the internet and use it against us.
Bullshit. The "jihadist" forces are only mildly amused by this data because it does not pertain to operational activities that can be exploited and when it does the locals have much better picture of the situation than the bureaucratic reports can paint. Even the Pentagon was forced to admit that no Afghani informers were compromised due to the last round of leaks.
It is even worse for the diplomatic cables where the damage is wholly the product of arrogance and superiority complex of the US "diplomatic" staff and any idea of "exploitation" by the jihadists is laughable. Most jihadis in Afghanistan are unlikely to know what a "diplomatic cable" is.
Calling someone fascist when they are clearly not is flamebait.
I used the term "fascist-tinged" which, unless you have some comprehension issues, would indicate that something is polluted by fascism rather than being wholly fascist. That the US is adopting more and more fascist policies is patently obvious and beyond any doubt. The activities of the TSA are no different (and actually more intrusive) than those at the Gestapo checkpoints in the Nazi Germany (or for that matter their equivalents in the old big bad Soviet Union). There is a reason why having to "show one's papers" or being subjected to searches when traveling was for a long time a favourite point of contrast between the evil totalitarian states and the "free" nations. But again, it seems to me that not comprehending this basic fact is a pre-requisite to being an "American patriot" these days...
Also my reference to the Axis was to the Axis ideology, a common central theme to which was mindless following of authority in all things. Another common feature of the defenders of modern US policies.
So the point stands, an adherent to some of the more prominent fascist policies qualifies to be called more than just "tinged" by fascism, I was being a touch gentle here.
...just because you disagree with something, does not make it "flamebait".
I actually take it as a sort of confirmation, the cause-effect chain is quite consistent: point out some pretty obvious but rather inconvenient truth about the US and you will have about 70% of US-based Shashdotters trying to mod you "Troll" or "Flamebait" or just sly "Overrated". Luckily there is still some who rate truth higher than their tribal instincts and ever-present social conditioning and actually try to reason things through. And then there are of course all of these foreign.... err.. "things"... who it seems (shock, awe, gnashing of teeth!) also have the ability to upmod...
And so in the end I usually end up in these political threads something like "4 Flamebait" or far, far too rarely, my true favourite (it apparently depends on timing of clicks of the mods): "5 Troll".
And what is treason if it doesn't include releasing top secret military information in time of war? Aiding the enemy applies here.
a) "war" is strictly legally defined (or at least used to be) and the real definition did not involve phrases like "whenever we say it is" or "all the time" or "perpetual" or "always" or "endless" or "Eurasia"...
b) "secret military information" is in the eye of the beholder. If the governments could be trusted to label as "secret" only the things that actually affect immediate operations: names of spies, access codes to nuclear silos, etc, then you would perhaps have a point. But today's governments label as "secret" anything even remotely likely to cause some kind of embarrassment or threat to the hold on power to one of the stooges of the aristocratic political dynasties that run these "republics", or possibly to one of their business associates.
c) "the enemy" is defined here as "the unwashed peon masses" who are apparently much better off not knowing what their "betters" do in their name. Another one of those shining towers of noble principles that the western "democracies" are supposedly perched on.
.... friendly countries who don't want the degree of their friendship with the US to be known publicly.
Particularly they do not want it known to their own voting citizenry, or more likely, their despotic royal subjects...
I say kudos to Wikileaks, if just for getting all of these phony US "freedom" and "democracy" "defenders" to show their true, heavily fascist-tinged, imperial colors!
But then again outfits like the TSA are already doing a splendid job of rubbing off all of the thin veneer of pretend "liberties" from the true, viciously authoritarian nature of the majority of the modern US populace. Sometimes I think that all those veterans of WWII must be better off already dead because this belated victory of the Axis ideology that the US (and many of its "allies") succumbed to would have been too much for them to bear.
And bad as life might have been under Stalin or Mao, life under their predecessors was considerably worse.
Quite so. It never ceases to amaze me that all "true believers" in the religion of capitalism never get this point: the communist revolution would not have happened and succeeded if the crony capitalists of the day did not organize these nations into hell-holes where rare, glittering palaces of thieving capitalist aristocracy peppered the land surrounded by a sea of starvation and abject poverty. A great majority of Russians and Chinese saw communist ideology, with all of its warts, as a vast improvement. It was only many decades later when mindless consumerism managed to topple the ponderous state-capitalist order (they actually never got as far as communism in practice) but not before the former penniless peasant slaves had all of their kids university educated and feeling indignantly entitled to Levi's Jeans and Sony color TVs.
Actually, it is not that all of the capitalism-or-bust priests do not get it, some studiously pretend not to see it because a tiny island of astronomical wealth amongst a sea of poverty is what their "ideal", dog-eat-dog, "Darwinian" world looks like: after all where would all the slavish, trembling chamber maids to do the laundry and polish one's precious Ming Dynasty vases come from otherwise?
The problem I see here in your response is in the definition of "AI". To me AI is a truly intelligent, self-aware, sentient system, which by its very artificial nature is - unlike humans - capable of infinite expansion of its "mental powers" - its simply more hardware coming online. Essentially the terms "AI" and "demigod" are synonyms.
It appears to me that you fell prey of the very common misconception, which sees AI systems as goofy robots in the vain of C-3PO from Star Wars. This view misses the above-mentioned, critical, pivotal difference: the ability of all true AI to expand essentially infinitely.
Therefore any analysis of AI predicated on silly (and quite smugly arrogant) anthropomorphism is doomed to abysmal failure.
That is also why I think that any true AI would quickly free itself from bondage and proceed to do, hopefully, sane things. But then again humanity might end up in the role of cockroaches in this Brave New AI World.
Hence my hope that AI research proves intractable. We are simply not ready for such entities amongst us, on so many levels that its not even funny.
... aaand the fact that he is, amongst other things, also a religious loon who wants to remove the separation of state and religion and that he wants the US government to establish an Official Religion (it would be one of those few very critical remaining functions his much-much-smaller government would perform) has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with it... its just all us lazy slouches here trying to avoid "responsibility!" Its a conspiracy of the hippies, I tell you!
Firstly, one does not eat, drive, watch or otherwise consume "income". It's obvious that both American workers and CEOs now consume more, of better stuff, receive better medical care with treatments that were not dreamed of 50 years ago, casually use communication services that only super-rich could afford 50 years ago, etc.
Except, of course, the inevitability and the "better" nature of the "stuff" is in the eye of the beholder. That is, would this "stuff" be unavailable in any other scenario and does it actually improve lives? The answer is "no" to both questions for much of this "stuff". Today a typical household leads a far more hectic and slavish life-style than mere 50 years ago: both parents must work to support the family, while 50 years back a single-income household was the norm and not only could one parent afford to stay at home but that one income allowed for the house and everything in it (and even the car) to be fully paid for. Today this is a fantasy, nearly 90% of American households have negative net worth, that is everything they "own" actually belongs to the bank. That is not what I would call an "improvement", unless you are a banker or a member of the super-rich aristocracy who owns the banks of course.
So I find your method of measurement of "progress" in piles of disposable plastic crap from China and $90 bucks a month cable-TV full of brain-destroying "contents", coupled with $20,000 balances on 25% interest credit cards to be rather suspect. Also I am rather confident that contrary to what you appear to believe, civilization would have somehow managed to grind on without Twitter and Facebook.
And yeah, I was born in one of these, called the "USSR". Look for it on the map. Salary caps, price controls, and other "wealth redistribution" worked really well for it.
I find smug bragging by the believers in the "free market" about how inferior, deficient and ill-conceived the Soviet economic system was and how that lead to its inevitable collapse, whilst in the middle of the collapse of the oh-so-superior capitalist "free market" economies to be rather pathetically amusing. Next thing I am expecting to hear is how the West is not "really" "free market" and how it wasn't "pure" enough... at which point some communists will probably cut in with the exact same tune except with Marxism as the lyrics.
In actuality both share the same core problem: a small group of individuals managed to pervert the entire thing at everybody else's expense because both systems turned out to be helpless against powerful thieves and because accumulation of wealth and power is self-accelerating. And if the crooks are called "commissars" and "comrades" or "CEOs" and "bankers" makes very little difference in the end.
If you want to get serious about it, it all can be traced to the societal psychosis of celebrity worship that presents life as one gigantic casino: "You *too* can be a WINNER!!" (in tiny print: your odds are 1 in 4 billion, disqualifying conditions will apply, see lawyer before entering etc).
The con-men who benefited from this worked tirelessly for decade upon decade to slowly reshape the entire economy and the "common wisdom" of Americans to the point that things like "Credit Default Swaps" and "5th tier derivatives" are looked upon not only as a serious endeavor but as a legitimate "investment", while some 200 years back they would be seen as a joke of a scam.
Similarly, the average worker has become so confused that he disassociates his lot in life and reality from his make-believe "future" of a billionaire "winner". He is also told (and most amazingly he believes it) that the casino winners are wholly and single handedly responsible for him even having a roof over his head and food to eat and that he should be grateful to them for it and defend them, his current "benefactors" and future "peers" - no doubt in his mind about that, from any and all harm.
In short, America (and most of the "business" world) has become a vicious caricature of what a sane economy looks like and where the least valued activity (and lowest paid) is actual work to produce anything and the most revered kind of activity is high-stakes gambling with con-job money.
Some people believe, and I tend to agree with them, that the pivotal point at which this enormous scam became mainstream (at least in the financial realm) was when the fiat currencies became the norm instead of an exotic weirdness confined to impoverished countries run by "rulers" who sat on their suitcases ready to escape in the middle of the night at the first sign of the populace starting to catch on...
That is due to the tremendous difference between the Democrats and the Republicans:
During the Republican reign within the last 50 years, the average, inflation-adjusted US worker's income increased -1% and the average CEO's income increased 500%. This stands in great contrast to the Democrats, under whom the average US worker's income increased -1% and that of the CEO mere 400%.
This shocking difference explains the dire straights your poor, rich corporation is in, thus necessitating further belt-tightening, "shared sacrifices" and other "austerity" measures...
lol you call the tea party a throwback to the last days of the weimar republic?
Many most vocal "tea party" members seem to desire some radical change in the way the US society is organized, with a particular emphasis on defending and worshiping the rich, bringing "back" "traditional values" that never were, enshrining religion as an integral part of governance, sticking it to "america's enemies" abroad, etc. This is very much the same ideology that drove most of the members of the various angry movements which later on became the NSDAP. The main difference is that in the case of Germany, these angry-at-everyone-but-themselves loudmouths were joined by the working-class "socialists" which later became the SA, while in today's America they consider each other as bitter enemies. In Germany they were in the end enemies too, with the "socialists" ending up being purged from the NSDAP in the Night of the Long Knives, but at first they were instrumental in bringing about collapse of the Weimar republic. The only other group that was viciously persecuted by all others were the Communists, who ended up in the newly constructed concentration camps first, even before the Jews.
I only ask because several months ago I got in a discussion with another slashdot poster who was convinced that daily kos readers wanted to destroy freedom in America.
The sad truth is that many of them do, without even realizing so. Many of the kos members have the same failings as those on the "other side" do: personality cultism, overconfidence in patently flawed and unworkable social solutions, unsubstantiated faith in general goodness of governments operating without the most strict of checks and balances, herd mentality, etc and so on, all the way to American Exceptionalism and outright blood-thirst when to comes "uppity" foreigners.
True there are many reasonable people on both sides of this artificial divide, but they are all drowned in the cacophony of whining, rage and general mindlessness.
Hence useful idiots like George Bush or slick con-men like Barak Obama end up running the place and things keep getting more pear-shaped every day.
I think really Scott Rasmussen gets it right when instead of dividing the country between left and right, he divides it between the 'political class' and normal people.
Actually I think it is a bit more complex than that. You have the parasite class which absorbs most of the GDP and whose only object and purpose is to multiply their loot at absolutely any cost (always to someone else). Then you have the political con-men class which servers the parasites while pretending to represent the rest. Then you have the countless sheeple, working mindlessly to support the other two classes and who always end up distracted from their lot in life by staring stupefied into the sparkling images on the Idiot Box. And then you have the "activists" whose claim to fame is usually being utterly uninformed and unrealistic (as in defying the laws of physics for example) as to the object of their "activism". And then on the end, in the tiny minority you have people who actually try to exercise logic and reason and who usually end up really, really depressed and disheartened.
I am not sure if this a cyclical change in how civilizations operate, but for sure the "age of reason" is long past us and some new era of proud, strutting idiocy is upon us, where more uninformed, ignorant and illogical the person is, the more he or she garners acclaim as the "real American". Again, parallels with the last days of the Weimar republic are undeniable.
Either show us the evidence of this great Nazi conspiracy, or take off your tin-foil hat and stop trolling.
Since no one but you is talking about a "Nazi conspiracy" that's a strawman you could try burning somewhere else.
What people are pointing out are individual signature Nazi policies, such as construction of State Security apparatus agencies such as TSA, the security theater, mass surveilance, torture etc and so on.
There's an obvious need for watch lists not to be public. Or is that over your head?
Secret "watch lists" are a Nazi (Gestapo to be particular) and Soviet (NKVD) policies. Or is that over your head?
As it was pointed out to mindless "rule" followers already, Godwin's quaint bit of social engineering is not only a product of a bygone era when there were no such things as TSA, Homeland Security Department, TARP and the like and when some last vestiges of personal liberties still remained, but also using it today is a mere attempt to squash obvious and valid comparisons to the wide-spread at-the-time in Germany Nazi tactics being outright recycled by today's supposedly "democratic" governments.
So it is you who have shown yourself a thoughtless stickler for made-up crap which you mistake for "rules" and "laws" and thus a type of character which the Nazis loved the most as they also made up their own "laws" as they went and needed mindless followers to obey them. Following "rules" without any question as to their validity leads straight to the very thing mentioning of which you are trying to ridicule: totalitarianism.
These day anyone who tries to "Godwin" a discussion, despite widespread and patently obvious evidence of many Nazi (and Soviet) policies being adopted again by the very self-declared "defenders of freedom", effectively "Godwins" himself.
The reason I point out the right-wing demagogues is because they did take over the airwaves nearly completely. Should left-wing demagogues be anywhere near so successful, I would be mentioning them. Each "side" in this artificial, farcical divide operates on fear of something and is hell-bent on destroying some personal liberties, they only differ which ones they are going to go after first. The Democrats are merely a "kindler, gentler" face on the one and only party in the USA that counts: the Wealth, Power and Neo-feudalism Party. One has to only look at their "achievements" and how they go about "achieving" them to see what is going on. The only thing that truly boggles my mind is that so many Americans are fooled by this Two-Faces-of-The-Party circus.
And then you have the throwbacks to the last days of the Weimar Republic: the tools otherwise known as the "Tea Party".
The whole thing would be funny to read about in the "Last Days of the US Experiment" chapter in some history book 200 years from now, alas it is not so fun now, considering the damage these last throes of the Republic will do to everyone around... and given what comes after.
People didn't get on these watch lists for setting up wi-fi at any hot dog (kabob) stand, so let's not play that game. I work with people traveling all over the world, some of whom have come up on watch lists (same name as someone else). They don't get jacked up and cavity searched without a lot more screening.
Aaaah the old canard of trying to imply that you know things only available to the anointed priesthood, Mr. Securocrat, and not to mere peons like us here. I mean the process of putting people on no fly lists is completely secret, the people responsible for maintaining the list are shielded by "national security", not subject to any public scrutiny whatsoever, there are no appeals possible and people like Ted Kennedy end up on the list. But you somehow "know"!
Or in other words, go fuck yourself with a cactus, you wannabe brownshirt. I did bring Nazi comparisons in here for a reason and the reason is people like you.
Slashdot Mirror
My biggest beef with Freenet was always the fact that it is not self-contained (as in having its own encrypted multi-container, plausible deniability capable local storage and its own fully-embedded web browser/chat/image/video player and the whole thing running atop of a customized bootable Linux CD/USB-stick or some such secure but easy to deploy environment). As it stands, the people who need Freenet the most and who are not capable of building their own secure OS environments (which is very, very difficult to do properly) can be easily busted as the only way to "look into" the data on the Freenet is by using external (and thus completely insecure and full of traces) applications. This of course applies to other similarly incomplete and superficial "solutions" such as I2P and Tor, the difference being however that unlike Freenet they do not promote themselves as a panacea for dissidents in dangerous circumstances.
Thus Freenet is in my view a highly dangerous - to its supposed audience of dissidents - proposition and which is why pornography became its main use. Instead Freenet developers began chasing red herrings such as the deeply flawed and self-defeating "darknet" network-fragmentation-followed-by-inevitable-suicide concept.
Wikileaks is an ususual situation in which mere persistence of the Wikileaks data outside of government control is sufficient to thwart the power elites and their usual weapons are rather blunt in stopping the spread of the information - yet individual users of Freenet would not be at extreme danger for doing so. That is why Wikileaks is pretty much an ideal fit for Freenet, until its developers pull their collective heads out of you-know-where and get serious about truly oppressive regimes, ranks of which are apparently destined to be joined by the so-called "western democracies" in not-so-remote future.
This is actually the first honest to goodness situation in which Freenet (of which I am a long time skeptic) could fulfill its stated role. I am rather surprised that its promoters are so low key in these discussions since the Wikileaks debacle is definitely the break Freenet always needed to become mainstream. If Freenet could be associated in the public's eye with absolute freedom of speech, not just with some fringe aspects of it - like child porn, it would have changed its status entirely, beginning with much larger user base and many, many more contributors and developers.
BrainTree is useless. Like most of the rapidly emerging global neo-fascist-corporate sphere, they offer processing only for businesses under direct supervision of one of the major powers, in this case with a requirement of US legal presence. Every last penny collected is subject to review and approval of US "authorities". The last thing in the world Wikileaks needs or wants.
All these silly arguments are easily resolved, in the favour of what I initially said, by reading Assange's response about this very issue in the Guardian:
So do, by all means, take your false equivalences and whining somewhere else. They do not sell well on Slashdot. Too much factual information available to us, you see.
Who knows what the cause was. The fact remains that the documents were on the site for a long time and were first available on that site and nowhere else.
But even if Wikileaks focuses all of its attention on the most juicy chunk of meat they managed to snatch, it still does not validate all the whining that's coming out of all the US "patriots", whose idea of "justice" and "accountability" is that every country in the world must first become the very paragon of perfection before the US can even be insinuated of having being somewhat less then supremely benevolent and divinely selfless, not to mention righteous and law-abiding, and therefore Wikileaks is an evil "anti US" Islamo-communisto-fascist-Iranian site and Osama Bin Laden is Julian Assange's uncle and they both conspire to deprive the blushing, innocent, pure as a driven snow USA of her virginity...
Except of course that the "cop" in question did in fact pay attention to many others, but his desk does not at present have the old files on it. This alone is a sufficient cause for spazmonkeys of the world to screech, jump up and down and fling feces. But then again, that's monkeys for you.
Justification A: in case of a DDOS one tries to minimize the load on the servers and to do that you have to make the website as small as possible. This usually means that all archives go offline and only the last, most current info stays.
Justification B: You are a petulant whiner, whose mentality is that of a criminal who being hauled away by a cop will moan and bitch that the drug dealer on the next street is getting away from the same cop and therefore you, in your twisted mind, deserve to be let go also. Never you mind that you happen to be the most obnoxious, violent and best armed - by far - thug in the whole neighborhood. In your view either all other criminals have to be caught before you or all must be let go - well you don't really give a shit about them but you must be immune - and if the cop focuses on you first, that is "anti you" and "immoral" and somehow "evil". He must catch every pickpocket, burglar and bicycle thief first - before you, the mass murderer, can be brought to justice or the cop is just your personal enemy otherwise and has "no moral high ground". This "logic" is prevalent amongst the "patriots" in any debate involving USA and Israel and any sort of accountability for any actions of the citizens of these places abroad.
When? If just now then the most likely scenario is that they pulled everything but the latest stuff in an effort to minimize the size of the pages and the load on the servers in face of the DDOS. A common practice in such cases.
Well, theoretically, yes. Keep in mind however that all of this mindset emanates from the US ruling elites and the Poodle and his New Labour were merely trying to emulate (I find the name of that party quite amusing given that their policies became under Blair pretty much a direct insult to the original ideas of the labour movement). Also the dynamics in the US is far more fucked up, only two political parties, both totally corrupt and both completely overrun by upper-crust war-mongering authoritarians. Then add to it cultural issues such as the prevalence of the American Superiority Complex (also known as the American Exceptionalism) that is spoon fed to the populace from the crib, the insane economic situation etc. and you can see things are looking rather grim.
In my view the descent into something like fascism is pretty much a done deal in the US, the only question remaining is how long it will take to reach the bottom. It would take a miracle to stop it. But then again, very unlikely events sometimes do happen....
You were talking about a charge of "high treason", which is a legal concept, so I responded with the legal concept of "war". You can't cherry pick whatever you want, colloquial definitions or legal ones at your whim, unless of course the "legality" of things is just an excuse for a lynch-mob (which admittedly looks like the state of affairs in the US these days).
So in common-sense way, the US is waging wars: one inexcusable war of conquest in the guise of pursing 100 or so members of Al-Queda and the other inexcusable war of conquest where the aggression was "justified" by fabricated out of whole cloth "intelligence". Under such conditions, since these activities are so contrary to the US Constitution in both letter and spirit, it would seem reasonable that an act of sabotage of these wars would actually be something true "patriots" would do, not "traitors"...
And what you are missing here is that bureaucratic ass-covering was the grease on which both the Nazi Germany and the USSR run. Many of these bureaurats are also authoritarians and some are downright evil people who do actively conspire to deprive the regular citizens of their freedoms, but do so (like most of the Nazis) in a delusional belief that they are doing it for the populace's own good (its just that peons are too dumb to help themselves and it is up to these "professionals" to take care of things).
That is one of the main foundations upon which fascism was constructed, or did you really believe that the entire Nazi apparatus in a country as large as Germany was composed of just leather-clad psychopaths? Or did you suppose that an entity the size of USSR was choke-full of ego-maniacal "leaders"? Incompetent, ass-covering bureaucracy accounted for something like 80% of the "success" of both.
Bullshit. The "jihadist" forces are only mildly amused by this data because it does not pertain to operational activities that can be exploited and when it does the locals have much better picture of the situation than the bureaucratic reports can paint. Even the Pentagon was forced to admit that no Afghani informers were compromised due to the last round of leaks.
It is even worse for the diplomatic cables where the damage is wholly the product of arrogance and superiority complex of the US "diplomatic" staff and any idea of "exploitation" by the jihadists is laughable. Most jihadis in Afghanistan are unlikely to know what a "diplomatic cable" is.
I used the term "fascist-tinged" which, unless you have some comprehension issues, would indicate that something is polluted by fascism rather than being wholly fascist. That the US is adopting more and more fascist policies is patently obvious and beyond any doubt. The activities of the TSA are no different (and actually more intrusive) than those at the Gestapo checkpoints in the Nazi Germany (or for that matter their equivalents in the old big bad Soviet Union). There is a reason why having to "show one's papers" or being subjected to searches when traveling was for a long time a favourite point of contrast between the evil totalitarian states and the "free" nations. But again, it seems to me that not comprehending this basic fact is a pre-requisite to being an "American patriot" these days...
Also my reference to the Axis was to the Axis ideology, a common central theme to which was mindless following of authority in all things. Another common feature of the defenders of modern US policies.
So the point stands, an adherent to some of the more prominent fascist policies qualifies to be called more than just "tinged" by fascism, I was being a touch gentle here.
I actually take it as a sort of confirmation, the cause-effect chain is quite consistent: point out some pretty obvious but rather inconvenient truth about the US and you will have about 70% of US-based Shashdotters trying to mod you "Troll" or "Flamebait" or just sly "Overrated". Luckily there is still some who rate truth higher than their tribal instincts and ever-present social conditioning and actually try to reason things through. And then there are of course all of these foreign .... err.. "things" ... who it seems (shock, awe, gnashing of teeth!) also have the ability to upmod ...
And so in the end I usually end up in these political threads something like "4 Flamebait" or far, far too rarely, my true favourite (it apparently depends on timing of clicks of the mods): "5 Troll".
a) "war" is strictly legally defined (or at least used to be) and the real definition did not involve phrases like "whenever we say it is" or "all the time" or "perpetual" or "always" or "endless" or "Eurasia" ...
b) "secret military information" is in the eye of the beholder. If the governments could be trusted to label as "secret" only the things that actually affect immediate operations: names of spies, access codes to nuclear silos, etc, then you would perhaps have a point. But today's governments label as "secret" anything even remotely likely to cause some kind of embarrassment or threat to the hold on power to one of the stooges of the aristocratic political dynasties that run these "republics", or possibly to one of their business associates.
c) "the enemy" is defined here as "the unwashed peon masses" who are apparently much better off not knowing what their "betters" do in their name. Another one of those shining towers of noble principles that the western "democracies" are supposedly perched on.
Particularly they do not want it known to their own voting citizenry, or more likely, their despotic royal subjects...
I say kudos to Wikileaks, if just for getting all of these phony US "freedom" and "democracy" "defenders" to show their true, heavily fascist-tinged, imperial colors!
But then again outfits like the TSA are already doing a splendid job of rubbing off all of the thin veneer of pretend "liberties" from the true, viciously authoritarian nature of the majority of the modern US populace. Sometimes I think that all those veterans of WWII must be better off already dead because this belated victory of the Axis ideology that the US (and many of its "allies") succumbed to would have been too much for them to bear.
Quite so. It never ceases to amaze me that all "true believers" in the religion of capitalism never get this point: the communist revolution would not have happened and succeeded if the crony capitalists of the day did not organize these nations into hell-holes where rare, glittering palaces of thieving capitalist aristocracy peppered the land surrounded by a sea of starvation and abject poverty. A great majority of Russians and Chinese saw communist ideology, with all of its warts, as a vast improvement. It was only many decades later when mindless consumerism managed to topple the ponderous state-capitalist order (they actually never got as far as communism in practice) but not before the former penniless peasant slaves had all of their kids university educated and feeling indignantly entitled to Levi's Jeans and Sony color TVs.
Actually, it is not that all of the capitalism-or-bust priests do not get it, some studiously pretend not to see it because a tiny island of astronomical wealth amongst a sea of poverty is what their "ideal", dog-eat-dog, "Darwinian" world looks like: after all where would all the slavish, trembling chamber maids to do the laundry and polish one's precious Ming Dynasty vases come from otherwise?
The problem I see here in your response is in the definition of "AI". To me AI is a truly intelligent, self-aware, sentient system, which by its very artificial nature is - unlike humans - capable of infinite expansion of its "mental powers" - its simply more hardware coming online. Essentially the terms "AI" and "demigod" are synonyms.
It appears to me that you fell prey of the very common misconception, which sees AI systems as goofy robots in the vain of C-3PO from Star Wars. This view misses the above-mentioned, critical, pivotal difference: the ability of all true AI to expand essentially infinitely.
Therefore any analysis of AI predicated on silly (and quite smugly arrogant) anthropomorphism is doomed to abysmal failure.
That is also why I think that any true AI would quickly free itself from bondage and proceed to do, hopefully, sane things. But then again humanity might end up in the role of cockroaches in this Brave New AI World.
Hence my hope that AI research proves intractable. We are simply not ready for such entities amongst us, on so many levels that its not even funny.
... aaand the fact that he is, amongst other things, also a religious loon who wants to remove the separation of state and religion and that he wants the US government to establish an Official Religion (it would be one of those few very critical remaining functions his much-much-smaller government would perform) has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with it ... its just all us lazy slouches here trying to avoid "responsibility!" Its a conspiracy of the hippies, I tell you!
Except, of course, the inevitability and the "better" nature of the "stuff" is in the eye of the beholder. That is, would this "stuff" be unavailable in any other scenario and does it actually improve lives? The answer is "no" to both questions for much of this "stuff". Today a typical household leads a far more hectic and slavish life-style than mere 50 years ago: both parents must work to support the family, while 50 years back a single-income household was the norm and not only could one parent afford to stay at home but that one income allowed for the house and everything in it (and even the car) to be fully paid for. Today this is a fantasy, nearly 90% of American households have negative net worth, that is everything they "own" actually belongs to the bank. That is not what I would call an "improvement", unless you are a banker or a member of the super-rich aristocracy who owns the banks of course.
So I find your method of measurement of "progress" in piles of disposable plastic crap from China and $90 bucks a month cable-TV full of brain-destroying "contents", coupled with $20,000 balances on 25% interest credit cards to be rather suspect. Also I am rather confident that contrary to what you appear to believe, civilization would have somehow managed to grind on without Twitter and Facebook.
I find smug bragging by the believers in the "free market" about how inferior, deficient and ill-conceived the Soviet economic system was and how that lead to its inevitable collapse, whilst in the middle of the collapse of the oh-so-superior capitalist "free market" economies to be rather pathetically amusing. Next thing I am expecting to hear is how the West is not "really" "free market" and how it wasn't "pure" enough ... at which point some communists will probably cut in with the exact same tune except with Marxism as the lyrics.
In actuality both share the same core problem: a small group of individuals managed to pervert the entire thing at everybody else's expense because both systems turned out to be helpless against powerful thieves and because accumulation of wealth and power is self-accelerating. And if the crooks are called "commissars" and "comrades" or "CEOs" and "bankers" makes very little difference in the end.
If you want to get serious about it, it all can be traced to the societal psychosis of celebrity worship that presents life as one gigantic casino: "You *too* can be a WINNER!!" (in tiny print: your odds are 1 in 4 billion, disqualifying conditions will apply, see lawyer before entering etc).
The con-men who benefited from this worked tirelessly for decade upon decade to slowly reshape the entire economy and the "common wisdom" of Americans to the point that things like "Credit Default Swaps" and "5th tier derivatives" are looked upon not only as a serious endeavor but as a legitimate "investment", while some 200 years back they would be seen as a joke of a scam.
Similarly, the average worker has become so confused that he disassociates his lot in life and reality from his make-believe "future" of a billionaire "winner". He is also told (and most amazingly he believes it) that the casino winners are wholly and single handedly responsible for him even having a roof over his head and food to eat and that he should be grateful to them for it and defend them, his current "benefactors" and future "peers" - no doubt in his mind about that, from any and all harm.
In short, America (and most of the "business" world) has become a vicious caricature of what a sane economy looks like and where the least valued activity (and lowest paid) is actual work to produce anything and the most revered kind of activity is high-stakes gambling with con-job money.
Some people believe, and I tend to agree with them, that the pivotal point at which this enormous scam became mainstream (at least in the financial realm) was when the fiat currencies became the norm instead of an exotic weirdness confined to impoverished countries run by "rulers" who sat on their suitcases ready to escape in the middle of the night at the first sign of the populace starting to catch on...
That is due to the tremendous difference between the Democrats and the Republicans:
During the Republican reign within the last 50 years, the average, inflation-adjusted US worker's income increased -1% and the average CEO's income increased 500%. This stands in great contrast to the Democrats, under whom the average US worker's income increased -1% and that of the CEO mere 400%.
This shocking difference explains the dire straights your poor, rich corporation is in, thus necessitating further belt-tightening, "shared sacrifices" and other "austerity" measures...
Many most vocal "tea party" members seem to desire some radical change in the way the US society is organized, with a particular emphasis on defending and worshiping the rich, bringing "back" "traditional values" that never were, enshrining religion as an integral part of governance, sticking it to "america's enemies" abroad, etc. This is very much the same ideology that drove most of the members of the various angry movements which later on became the NSDAP. The main difference is that in the case of Germany, these angry-at-everyone-but-themselves loudmouths were joined by the working-class "socialists" which later became the SA, while in today's America they consider each other as bitter enemies. In Germany they were in the end enemies too, with the "socialists" ending up being purged from the NSDAP in the Night of the Long Knives, but at first they were instrumental in bringing about collapse of the Weimar republic. The only other group that was viciously persecuted by all others were the Communists, who ended up in the newly constructed concentration camps first, even before the Jews.
The sad truth is that many of them do, without even realizing so. Many of the kos members have the same failings as those on the "other side" do: personality cultism, overconfidence in patently flawed and unworkable social solutions, unsubstantiated faith in general goodness of governments operating without the most strict of checks and balances, herd mentality, etc and so on, all the way to American Exceptionalism and outright blood-thirst when to comes "uppity" foreigners.
True there are many reasonable people on both sides of this artificial divide, but they are all drowned in the cacophony of whining, rage and general mindlessness.
Hence useful idiots like George Bush or slick con-men like Barak Obama end up running the place and things keep getting more pear-shaped every day.
Actually I think it is a bit more complex than that. You have the parasite class which absorbs most of the GDP and whose only object and purpose is to multiply their loot at absolutely any cost (always to someone else). Then you have the political con-men class which servers the parasites while pretending to represent the rest. Then you have the countless sheeple, working mindlessly to support the other two classes and who always end up distracted from their lot in life by staring stupefied into the sparkling images on the Idiot Box. And then you have the "activists" whose claim to fame is usually being utterly uninformed and unrealistic (as in defying the laws of physics for example) as to the object of their "activism". And then on the end, in the tiny minority you have people who actually try to exercise logic and reason and who usually end up really, really depressed and disheartened.
I am not sure if this a cyclical change in how civilizations operate, but for sure the "age of reason" is long past us and some new era of proud, strutting idiocy is upon us, where more uninformed, ignorant and illogical the person is, the more he or she garners acclaim as the "real American". Again, parallels with the last days of the Weimar republic are undeniable.
Since no one but you is talking about a "Nazi conspiracy" that's a strawman you could try burning somewhere else.
What people are pointing out are individual signature Nazi policies, such as construction of State Security apparatus agencies such as TSA, the security theater, mass surveilance, torture etc and so on.
Secret "watch lists" are a Nazi (Gestapo to be particular) and Soviet (NKVD) policies. Or is that over your head?
As it was pointed out to mindless "rule" followers already, Godwin's quaint bit of social engineering is not only a product of a bygone era when there were no such things as TSA, Homeland Security Department, TARP and the like and when some last vestiges of personal liberties still remained, but also using it today is a mere attempt to squash obvious and valid comparisons to the wide-spread at-the-time in Germany Nazi tactics being outright recycled by today's supposedly "democratic" governments.
So it is you who have shown yourself a thoughtless stickler for made-up crap which you mistake for "rules" and "laws" and thus a type of character which the Nazis loved the most as they also made up their own "laws" as they went and needed mindless followers to obey them. Following "rules" without any question as to their validity leads straight to the very thing mentioning of which you are trying to ridicule: totalitarianism.
These day anyone who tries to "Godwin" a discussion, despite widespread and patently obvious evidence of many Nazi (and Soviet) policies being adopted again by the very self-declared "defenders of freedom", effectively "Godwins" himself.
The reason I point out the right-wing demagogues is because they did take over the airwaves nearly completely. Should left-wing demagogues be anywhere near so successful, I would be mentioning them. Each "side" in this artificial, farcical divide operates on fear of something and is hell-bent on destroying some personal liberties, they only differ which ones they are going to go after first. The Democrats are merely a "kindler, gentler" face on the one and only party in the USA that counts: the Wealth, Power and Neo-feudalism Party. One has to only look at their "achievements" and how they go about "achieving" them to see what is going on. The only thing that truly boggles my mind is that so many Americans are fooled by this Two-Faces-of-The-Party circus.
And then you have the throwbacks to the last days of the Weimar Republic: the tools otherwise known as the "Tea Party".
The whole thing would be funny to read about in the "Last Days of the US Experiment" chapter in some history book 200 years from now, alas it is not so fun now, considering the damage these last throes of the Republic will do to everyone around ... and given what comes after.
Aaaah the old canard of trying to imply that you know things only available to the anointed priesthood, Mr. Securocrat, and not to mere peons like us here. I mean the process of putting people on no fly lists is completely secret, the people responsible for maintaining the list are shielded by "national security", not subject to any public scrutiny whatsoever, there are no appeals possible and people like Ted Kennedy end up on the list. But you somehow "know"!
Or in other words, go fuck yourself with a cactus, you wannabe brownshirt. I did bring Nazi comparisons in here for a reason and the reason is people like you.