Just to add that the one thing that lets me function in Camino (or Safari) at all, is Cocoa Gestures, although if anyone can tell how to tie this into "top of page" and "bottom of page" actions I'd be a happy man.
Yeah, I use Camino on the Mac because Firefox is just too clunky, but I do miss the extensions - and have to keep Firefox for occasional use of those extensions I can't live without (Webdeveloper toolbar principly).
The US economy is moving towards the only area which has longterm viability - IP.
With the inevitable invention of machines capable of fabricating any item at a molecular scale, the US is fortunate that its economy has already started to transition away from the soon-to-be-obsolete area of manufacturing.
Not going to happen quite yet, but I bet we have Diamond Age type manufacturing long before we ever see an end to IP law.
The thing about image hotlinking without permission is that it is 1) Generally undesirable from the site owners point of view, and 2) relatively complicated for a non-technical person (eg a great many small site operators) to block without password protecting the whole site.
I don't think the argument works that by operating a public webserver you are permitting any action which it is configured to allow. This would legitimise DOS attacks for example. IMO you need to judge these kind of grey area uses on the merits, weighing up benefits and harm to both the entities involved and the internet as a whole. In the case of hotlinking without permission, there don't seem to be any benefits to anyone apart from the hotlinker, so I incline towards a default deny as being sensible.
Whether it's copyright infringement is another question, but there are definitely elements of passing off and the use of others resources.
Who does it, based on what criteria and how are the criteria enforced?
I agree that this is the key issue. The answer has to be, *the entity that guarantees the losses if they get it wrong*. If (big if) you can get a workable system based on this, then it will be meaningful. Otherwise it will just be a moneyspinning scam like secuirty certificates.
I completely agree that the PR side of global warming is being too alarmist - not that I don't agree that we need to take action, just that from the point of view of convincing people it would be better to avoid exaggerations and oversimplifications. The reason we need to act IMO is not that the science is now so strong that anthropomorphic global warming is undoubtable, but rather that the science is strong enough, that coupled with the potential consequences of inaction, the rational course is to act now.
People frequently assess the relative strength of arguments by looking for these kind of exaggerations, and marking down the side that uses them. This is a good heuristic technique which allows us to sort through large amounts of the crap we are bombarded with everyday.
It is just that however; heuristic - a man with a placard saying "The End of the World is Nigh" may not be worthy of listening to, but the fact he's got the placard doesn't actually make it any less likely that the world is about to end .
That's a little arrogant; the US has a free for all in terms of the amount of campaigning candidates can do, limited only by candidates funding. Therefore you say the whole world should follow suit. This despite the fact that this policy results in your politicians whoring themselves for corporate funding.
Other countries really don't have this problem to the extent you see it in the US, so maybe you shouldn't dismiss it so quickly - although I tend to agree that trying to regulate foreign internet servers is highly unlikely to actually work in the long term.
You can't govern without the consent of the governed - as eastern Europe discovered 15odd years ago.
You may be able to coerce that consent in a country with little democratic heritage or influence, but it simply isn't going to happen to any stable democracy unless the majority wants it at the time.
The only way I can see this happening in Britain, or any other western European country, is in response to a massive crisis - ie where the majority (temporally at least) want the dictator. This is certainly possible (although I hope unlikely), but it wouldn't be a case of creep, rather thunderous applause.
I'm not saying you don't have reasonable concerns. And I'm certainly not saying that you shouldn't vocally air those concerns.
There is a leap being made however IMO, between democracies moving slightly towards control, and incipient totalitarianism. Avoiding this fate certainly requires people to protest against it, but at the end of the day people will. The British parliamentary system has a long history from a complete oligarchy under Cromwell to universal suffrage, and at every stage there has always been agitation for more reform: more extension of the voting right, more guarantees of freedom of association etc. Political parties have been born, obtained power, and died, but the fundamental trend has been constant for centuries.
I just really don't see the creeping argument. Right at this moment, there may be a sway in the direction of control, but there is already kickback against it, and if it ever gets to the extent of denying people the rights they feel they deserve (and people always feel they deserve lots of rights) then any government that stands against it will fall.
CCTV just seems a complete non-issue to me: it's very useful for deterring petty crime, and lets face it terrorism (yes its an overused bogeyman, but if you traveled to work everyday in London via the tube, it would seem important to you). If it becomes a problem, protest about it then, but until it does there are many more valid issues, even just in the area of privacy.
To be honest I agree with you regarding a constitution: we have an "unwritten constitution" apparently, which is basically a bad joke, as I'm sure any American would agree. Unfortunately it's not exactly easy (or safe) to go out and get a constitution, so we're pretty much stuck with where we are. This does mean that British politics may swing into areas that would be sacrosanct in the US, but at the end of the day we are, and will remain, a stable democracy, which IMO means we are self-correcting.
I take the view that we have elections to protect us from government. Yes the "tyranny of the majority" makes mistakes, but it does actually learn from them. A decade or two down the line you have an electorate the majority of whom has learnt from those mistakes; this is probably the best that can be hoped for from a system of government.
Yeah I actually would rather like a constitution, but I wouldn't trust any politician to make one.
Hitler got to power on the promise of bread, work, economic stability and the restoration of national pride. Lenin overturned the world's most fragile proto-democracy mainly by the promise of land reform. Neither example has much relevance here.
Massive economic collapse seized upon by a demagogue who promised bread, work and an end to inflation to the electorate. Sorry to be rude, but what the fuck does this have to do with the subject under discussion?
I am happy with CCTV as it is now, and I've tried to be fairly specific that that is what I am defending.
The whole facial recognition thing is a real issue that will probably confront us a way down the line, I agree. But as I see it making a stand about the current implementation of CCTV is both wrongheaded (in that CCTV is currently a beneficial technology), and weakens (crying wolf analogy) the arguments of people who protest against it when they talk about current relevant privacy issues - ISPs being forced to retain longterm records for example.
This is asked out of genuine curiosity, it's not meant to be a dismissal of what you say:
Do you have any non-fictional examples of this kind of creeping totalitarianism? I'm not talking about the normal political give and take, but a mature democracy that has slowly become a dictatorship - which I would define as reaching a point where it is difficult to elect a new government to repeal the objectionable laws, if the majority of the populace wanted this to happen.
You think, CCTV is a great idea, it's going to stop petty crime. But in your head you're really thinking, it's going to stop there, obviously, because that's where you draw the line as to the potential benefits.
I think this is probably the core to your post, so I'll respond to this specifically.
Firstly on the benefits; it is a major deterrent of petty crime and has been for years (weird ideas about talking CCTV cameras not withstanding) - Britain is a little different from America in that the inner cities are largely not no-go areas, and are in fact being redeveloped very quickly. Without CCTV I don't think this would be possible - you need to control the low level street crime if you want inner cities to be anything apart from sinks for those who are unable to get out of them.
On the question of the downside - ie the slippery slope towards a surveillance society: I think this is something of a false dichotomy. You are offering the choices of either no CCTV, or an inevitable progression towards 1984esq total surveillance totalitarianism. This ignores what I would consider the obvious choice of keeping things as they are - using CCTV for the benefits it can provide, without the wholesale abandonment of civil liberties that you seem to fear.
The two dangers you raise as I see it are:
Decent facial recognition coupled with massive prevalent CCTV in public spaces, that allows the authorities to track any person they choose retrospectively and with little or no effort. I agree this could be a problem, but really it is a problem that needs to be addressed if and when it is possible - crying wolf now will simply mean you are ignored when you actually have a current problem. Certainly warn about the dangers that could come from this route, but objecting to all CCTV on these grounds doesn't make sense IMO.
Government surveillance in peoples homes. To be honest this is so far away from anything I can ever see happening that I can't take it seriously.
I'd be interested in any non-fictional examples of developed democracies becoming totalitarian by this kind of mission-creep; I really can't think of any myself. To me the examples seem to be much more economic collapse which a populist fascist/communist demagogue takes advantage of, or extreme pressure from a neighboring power.
Do you not see a slight difference between cameras in public spaces, usually put there at the insistance of residents, and government mandated survailence in peoples homes?
It's all part of the extended surveilence network. As facial recognition progresses, soon your face (combined with your mobile, oyster, number plate) will be able to be automatically tracked across the country. People would complain if the police were stalking them when they are innocent.
When that happens, I'll join you in protesting. But it isn't there yet, and refusing to use one of the most effective measures for combating petty crime on the basis of what it might turn in to a decade or two down the line seems to me a) irrational, and b) likely to convince society at large that privacy campaigners are nuts who shouldn't be listened to.
ok, thanks for the correction. I presume their location is a matter of public record if you really wanted to know where they are - if they are truly secret that would be going a bit far IMO.
The whole point is that you are sacrificing privacy bit-by-bit to the point where there is no privacy anymore. You can't pick your nose or fart because there are CCTVs everywhere, a luxury that used to be afforded to use if no person was around, but now, we have to look for cameras as well. If you use your credit or debit card to buy things or if you use a supermarket savings card, your purchases get tracked. You can't make offensive jokes amongst friends in emails because emails can get leaked or read from tape backups, or your TV habits will be sent to Tivo, or your searches done on Google will be tracked. Where does it end? Can you do anything these days without leaving an inadvertent trail? Or am I wrong to ask that because only guilty people care about leaving a trail?
Most of the other examples you cite are far worse threats to privacy than CCTV in it's current form. All of these suffer from the fact that we don't have any laws that protect privacy, since privacy has always been guaranteed by the physical difficulty of violating it - all of your other examples apart from CCTV are ones where computers and the internet have changed the balance of power. This might happen to CCTV in conjunction with a nationwide network and effective facial recognition software (which is why I've been careful to say "CCTV in its current form"), but we are a way off from that, and CCTV in it's current form gives major benefits in terms of crime reduction and safety.
So I agree that the modern, western world needs to address the imbalance that has emerged in terms of privacy, but I think this anti-CCTV reaction on slashdot misses the main point, and is definately a massive overextrapolation of 1984.
You pretty much nail it I think. CCTV is simply not seen in the 1984esq light of the typical slashdot story, and "antisocial behavior" (which is a somewhat totalitarian name for it I agree) is/is perceived as a major problem.
Maybe it's a difference between an armed and unarmed society - a group of 15 year olds is going to think twice about harresing someone who might possibly be carrying a gun.
That sounds more like an argument for having a more sensible legal code, rather than against CCTV. I reckon you could use the exact same argument against having a police force.
Slashdot Mirror
Just to add that the one thing that lets me function in Camino (or Safari) at all, is Cocoa Gestures, although if anyone can tell how to tie this into "top of page" and "bottom of page" actions I'd be a happy man.
Yeah, I use Camino on the Mac because Firefox is just too clunky, but I do miss the extensions - and have to keep Firefox for occasional use of those extensions I can't live without (Webdeveloper toolbar principly).
The US economy is moving towards the only area which has longterm viability - IP.
With the inevitable invention of machines capable of fabricating any item at a molecular scale, the US is fortunate that its economy has already started to transition away from the soon-to-be-obsolete area of manufacturing.
Not going to happen quite yet, but I bet we have Diamond Age type manufacturing long before we ever see an end to IP law.
Whole new meaning to the concept of a head count...
The thing about image hotlinking without permission is that it is 1) Generally undesirable from the site owners point of view, and 2) relatively complicated for a non-technical person (eg a great many small site operators) to block without password protecting the whole site.
I don't think the argument works that by operating a public webserver you are permitting any action which it is configured to allow. This would legitimise DOS attacks for example. IMO you need to judge these kind of grey area uses on the merits, weighing up benefits and harm to both the entities involved and the internet as a whole. In the case of hotlinking without permission, there don't seem to be any benefits to anyone apart from the hotlinker, so I incline towards a default deny as being sensible.
Whether it's copyright infringement is another question, but there are definitely elements of passing off and the use of others resources.
I agree that this is the key issue. The answer has to be, *the entity that guarantees the losses if they get it wrong*. If (big if) you can get a workable system based on this, then it will be meaningful. Otherwise it will just be a moneyspinning scam like secuirty certificates.
I completely agree that the PR side of global warming is being too alarmist - not that I don't agree that we need to take action, just that from the point of view of convincing people it would be better to avoid exaggerations and oversimplifications. The reason we need to act IMO is not that the science is now so strong that anthropomorphic global warming is undoubtable, but rather that the science is strong enough, that coupled with the potential consequences of inaction, the rational course is to act now.
People frequently assess the relative strength of arguments by looking for these kind of exaggerations, and marking down the side that uses them. This is a good heuristic technique which allows us to sort through large amounts of the crap we are bombarded with everyday.
It is just that however; heuristic - a man with a placard saying "The End of the World is Nigh" may not be worthy of listening to, but the fact he's got the placard doesn't actually make it any less likely that the world is about to end .
That's a little arrogant; the US has a free for all in terms of the amount of campaigning candidates can do, limited only by candidates funding. Therefore you say the whole world should follow suit. This despite the fact that this policy results in your politicians whoring themselves for corporate funding.
Other countries really don't have this problem to the extent you see it in the US, so maybe you shouldn't dismiss it so quickly - although I tend to agree that trying to regulate foreign internet servers is highly unlikely to actually work in the long term.
You can't govern without the consent of the governed - as eastern Europe discovered 15odd years ago.
You may be able to coerce that consent in a country with little democratic heritage or influence, but it simply isn't going to happen to any stable democracy unless the majority wants it at the time.
The only way I can see this happening in Britain, or any other western European country, is in response to a massive crisis - ie where the majority (temporally at least) want the dictator. This is certainly possible (although I hope unlikely), but it wouldn't be a case of creep, rather thunderous applause.
I refer the honorable gentleman to the answer I gave some moments ago ;)
I'm not saying you don't have reasonable concerns. And I'm certainly not saying that you shouldn't vocally air those concerns.
There is a leap being made however IMO, between democracies moving slightly towards control, and incipient totalitarianism. Avoiding this fate certainly requires people to protest against it, but at the end of the day people will. The British parliamentary system has a long history from a complete oligarchy under Cromwell to universal suffrage, and at every stage there has always been agitation for more reform: more extension of the voting right, more guarantees of freedom of association etc. Political parties have been born, obtained power, and died, but the fundamental trend has been constant for centuries.
I just really don't see the creeping argument. Right at this moment, there may be a sway in the direction of control, but there is already kickback against it, and if it ever gets to the extent of denying people the rights they feel they deserve (and people always feel they deserve lots of rights) then any government that stands against it will fall.
CCTV just seems a complete non-issue to me: it's very useful for deterring petty crime, and lets face it terrorism (yes its an overused bogeyman, but if you traveled to work everyday in London via the tube, it would seem important to you). If it becomes a problem, protest about it then, but until it does there are many more valid issues, even just in the area of privacy.
To be honest I agree with you regarding a constitution: we have an "unwritten constitution" apparently, which is basically a bad joke, as I'm sure any American would agree. Unfortunately it's not exactly easy (or safe) to go out and get a constitution, so we're pretty much stuck with where we are. This does mean that British politics may swing into areas that would be sacrosanct in the US, but at the end of the day we are, and will remain, a stable democracy, which IMO means we are self-correcting.
Radical idea here, but how about voting?
I take the view that we have elections to protect us from government. Yes the "tyranny of the majority" makes mistakes, but it does actually learn from them. A decade or two down the line you have an electorate the majority of whom has learnt from those mistakes; this is probably the best that can be hoped for from a system of government.
Yeah I actually would rather like a constitution, but I wouldn't trust any politician to make one.
Hitler got to power on the promise of bread, work, economic stability and the restoration of national pride. Lenin overturned the world's most fragile proto-democracy mainly by the promise of land reform. Neither example has much relevance here.
Massive economic collapse seized upon by a demagogue who promised bread, work and an end to inflation to the electorate. Sorry to be rude, but what the fuck does this have to do with the subject under discussion?
I am happy with CCTV as it is now, and I've tried to be fairly specific that that is what I am defending.
The whole facial recognition thing is a real issue that will probably confront us a way down the line, I agree. But as I see it making a stand about the current implementation of CCTV is both wrongheaded (in that CCTV is currently a beneficial technology), and weakens (crying wolf analogy) the arguments of people who protest against it when they talk about current relevant privacy issues - ISPs being forced to retain longterm records for example.
This is asked out of genuine curiosity, it's not meant to be a dismissal of what you say:
Do you have any non-fictional examples of this kind of creeping totalitarianism? I'm not talking about the normal political give and take, but a mature democracy that has slowly become a dictatorship - which I would define as reaching a point where it is difficult to elect a new government to repeal the objectionable laws, if the majority of the populace wanted this to happen.
I think this is probably the core to your post, so I'll respond to this specifically.
Firstly on the benefits; it is a major deterrent of petty crime and has been for years (weird ideas about talking CCTV cameras not withstanding) - Britain is a little different from America in that the inner cities are largely not no-go areas, and are in fact being redeveloped very quickly. Without CCTV I don't think this would be possible - you need to control the low level street crime if you want inner cities to be anything apart from sinks for those who are unable to get out of them.
On the question of the downside - ie the slippery slope towards a surveillance society: I think this is something of a false dichotomy. You are offering the choices of either no CCTV, or an inevitable progression towards 1984esq total surveillance totalitarianism. This ignores what I would consider the obvious choice of keeping things as they are - using CCTV for the benefits it can provide, without the wholesale abandonment of civil liberties that you seem to fear.
The two dangers you raise as I see it are:
I'd be interested in any non-fictional examples of developed democracies becoming totalitarian by this kind of mission-creep; I really can't think of any myself. To me the examples seem to be much more economic collapse which a populist fascist/communist demagogue takes advantage of, or extreme pressure from a neighboring power.
Ah good old slippery slope, nothing beats that!
Do you not see a slight difference between cameras in public spaces, usually put there at the insistance of residents, and government mandated survailence in peoples homes?
When that happens, I'll join you in protesting. But it isn't there yet, and refusing to use one of the most effective measures for combating petty crime on the basis of what it might turn in to a decade or two down the line seems to me a) irrational, and b) likely to convince society at large that privacy campaigners are nuts who shouldn't be listened to.
ok, thanks for the correction. I presume their location is a matter of public record if you really wanted to know where they are - if they are truly secret that would be going a bit far IMO.
Most of the other examples you cite are far worse threats to privacy than CCTV in it's current form. All of these suffer from the fact that we don't have any laws that protect privacy, since privacy has always been guaranteed by the physical difficulty of violating it - all of your other examples apart from CCTV are ones where computers and the internet have changed the balance of power. This might happen to CCTV in conjunction with a nationwide network and effective facial recognition software (which is why I've been careful to say "CCTV in its current form"), but we are a way off from that, and CCTV in it's current form gives major benefits in terms of crime reduction and safety.
So I agree that the modern, western world needs to address the imbalance that has emerged in terms of privacy, but I think this anti-CCTV reaction on slashdot misses the main point, and is definately a massive overextrapolation of 1984.
You pretty much nail it I think. CCTV is simply not seen in the 1984esq light of the typical slashdot story, and "antisocial behavior" (which is a somewhat totalitarian name for it I agree) is/is perceived as a major problem.
Maybe it's a difference between an armed and unarmed society - a group of 15 year olds is going to think twice about harresing someone who might possibly be carrying a gun.
That sounds more like an argument for having a more sensible legal code, rather than against CCTV. I reckon you could use the exact same argument against having a police force.