However, your solution, although practical still relies on the first strike which is bad news for those in that strike. It is reactionary and quite active mitigation. No matter how many holes you plug it is impossible to plug them all. A weakness will be found. All you have done is reacted irrationally to a threat that has succeeded and thrown billions of dollars at a ghost. All of our disaster related mitigation programs require a benefit cost analysis which is something lacking in the homeland security grants. Even a cursory glance at the TSA shows it is security theater unlikely to catch real threats.
Since you are in mitigation as well, you should know that the goal of it is to lessen the impacts of risk. It doesn't necessarily eliminate it. In the short term, proximate cause analysis works but the root causes still need to be addressed or you simply wind up chasing that ghost.
its always worth trying to understand why and how and what it would take to prevent it or reduce the risk.
Dealing with risk and mitigating against it is my primary job. So lets examine your comments from a mitigation point of view and see where it leads us...
To mitigate the risk you have to go to the root cause. Namely our foreign policy. The US has been building its empire trying to think of itself as the world's police. We meddle in other countries affairs both political and economic whether they asked for our help or not. We have supported dictatorial regimes as well as provide blind support for allies, especially Israel, whether they were right or wrong. We have invaded countries for natural resources and have economically sanctioned countries that refused to cooperate with the corporate interests of the US. Our belief in American Exceptionalism (the belief that we are somehow superior to everyone else) leads to an attitude that other countries see as arrogance. Our largest export isn't food or energy, it is weapons both advanced and deadly accurate.
So far, all our mitigation efforts have been reactionary to the incident as your comment points out without addressing the root causes. Our reaction to a terrorist with explosives in his shoes? Require everyone to take off their shoes for deep inspection. Our reaction to another terrorist with explosives in his drawers? Invasive pat downs and explicit x-ray machines that display everything under the clothing. Our reaction to the possibility of liquid explosives? Ban liquids on flights.
To truly mitigate this, we need to change our foreign policy to leave other countries alone to fight their own battles. We need to scale back our consumption of resources dramatically and ditch the attitude that we are the best thing since sliced bread. We need to stop the empire building and support of dictators that we use as proxies for that empire building. We need to stifle our corporate overlords in their quest for world domination and exploitation in the "global economy".
Lastly, we need to stop exporting weapons to everyone especially to those same regimes that are committing the worst atrocities whether they are allies or not.
Again, how do you beat those that make it available even before you do as I outlined above.
Make it easy for people to do the right thing.
Doing the right thing involves education to know right from wrong. Circumstances can override that education such as the ease it is in getting the content with little to no repercussions for doing the wrong thing.
Remember that pirated copies are almost never lost sales
Agreed, however they are a dent to your ability to realize sales absent the illegal activity. In short, although they can't be counted as sales lost it can be argued that at least some of those that pirated would have purchased it legally had the illegal avenue not existed.
Maybe in the future, things like crowd-funded software and open-source will take over if it isn't profitable enough.
Ah, but open source software relies on the very same copyright laws to exist. Absent copyright, or more importantly, copyright enforcement, open source itself couldn't exist. Crowd-funded seems more realistic to me to overcome that.
same for entertainment. Perhaps live theatre will make a comeback.
It has been a while since I have seen a live theater show. We have them in town from time to time. Worth seeing but it lacks the special effects that draws the younger crowd to the theaters to begin with. Who knows though...
Education would have at least some mention about the public domain and its advantages, and the fact that copyright is a privilege, not a right.
I am probably going to draw flack for this but WTF, here we go...
Article 1 Section 8 Clause 8 of the US Constitution makes it a right in the US. Besides that, let's play Devil's advocate here for a while:
Tell me just how an artist or distributor of content is supposed to make a living regardless of the length of time given for the "limited time" as listed in the Constitution? Right now, things are showing up on the illegal sites even before they are officially released by the rightful owner. Just how do you overcome that? Look at software piracy for example, as soon as a vendor of a popular program (think Photoshop) makes a new version, it is usually up at the torrent sites at most 2 days after initial release and sometimes before initial release. So just how are they to reap the benefits of their work when the next day it is being distributed with no benefits being returned?
Don't get me wrong, I do think the term of copyrights are too long. I also think the public domain is getting the shaft. But given that they can't win in today's connected world, just what is the solution? You see many here bitching about copyrights and the "old business model failure" but no proposals for how to realize benefit out of your hard work. Because you see, regardless of what you think as you download that pre-release program, it still boils down to putting food on the table for those making it to begin with.
Using one service to describe another service is doing a huge no-no in definitions. Namely using the term you want to define in the definition. So in this example, what if you have no idea what Google Reader was? That is a total assumption on TFS editor's part. I certainly had no idea what either was until I went to the site and did a bit of investigation.
This summary aside, there is at least one valid reason a project should drop support after EOL. Namely reputation. When a flaw in the OS gets exploited via the browser, people tend to blame the instrument that first started the failure. It happens all the time today even on patched systems. The browser will catch the blame for the failure in the OS since it is where the trouble started.
Hell, we've all seen it with granny getting infected because the pre-installed version of Norton's timed out and hasn't seen an update in years. Does Symantic get blamed for the failure? Does granny blame herself for not purchasing the updates? No. To granny it is the computer that is bad.
That's where you are conflating these issues. PRISM was engaged in without even FISA warrants. That is what they mean when they say "warrantless wire tapping". This isn't FBI Security Letters we are talking about here. This is a wholesale fishing expedition.
NSA doesn't have police powers. CIA doesn't have police powers. DIA doesn't have police powers. NRO doesn't have police powers. NGA doesn't have police powers.
No, they don't DIRECTLY have police power but they do have regulatory power and the ability to turn those that are in some form of violation of their powers over to those that do have police powers such as the FBI, DEA, Secret Service and IRS.
There is a reason there was put up a wall between the intelligence gathering community and police community. Namely to prevent the McCarthyism ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism ) that preceded it from happening again. Then came along 9/11 and whole new laws known as the Patriot Act and Homeland Security Act that tore down those barriers leading to a new era of McCarthyism this time substituting "communist" for "terrorist".
And what is the driving force? Well, in the McCarthy era it was the military industrial complex. Today, it is the security industrial complex. There is huge money to be had in peddling fear.
Then you would still have to overcome the "but in a manner to be prescribed by law." part. Since the "national security" part (I am assuming at least in the Patriot Act and / or Homeland Security Act) would satisfy that.
No, a better way would be to take back our Congress and get them to revoke those acts that allow stuff like this. Of course, that requires a ground swell against the established parties and is likely to not succeed because of the campaign financing / media control mess.
That's really grabbing at straws. Several things would have to be resolved for that to stick.
1. Is the FBI and / or the court considered "soldiers"? 2. Is an email service considered "home"? 3. Is the Supreme Court likely to make such a broad interpretation especially since they tend to take a very narrow view on just about everything? 4. And lastly, is it even likely to make it that far?
No soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.
It sounds to me then that your beef is with the provider who removed the sites for relying solely on a single source. Yes, confusion could have been avoided but your real target should be the provider who removed the sites based on the RBL.
The largest cry that spam filter providers hear is, "I am in your filter by mistake!". Spamhaus in particular is also known for blocking spam resource providers. Have you checked that your upstream provider isn't housing spammers or other spam resources? The idea behind that is to curtail providers that do nothing about their spam problems. It forces the users of those domains to complain to the provider raising the noise level to get them off their ass and fix their spam problems. And it works too. Hit them where it counts.... The wallet when their users leave in droves because their emails are blocked nine ways to hell.
Web-bugs are also only effective for HTML based clients. I routinely setup my client to only deal in plain text. And no, I don't use webmail in any form. It boils down to using the right tool for the right job. A web browser is NOT an email client any more than an email client is a web browser. They have differing security concerns not least of which are things like web-bugs.
I work in state government and can tell you that the arbitrary and capricious manner employed in this state's filtering boggles the imagination. A site that was accessible for weeks suddenly gets blocked today. They have even blocked federal sites from time to time and those truly are work related. And given that most agencies have a social network presence blocking them really doesn't make sense anymore. Instead of counseling or disciplining those that abuse the rules, they are punishing everyone and doing it poorly.
A better solution is to allow specific times that the system can be used for personal use such as lunch or in the case of the school, after the last class has dismissed. Still block the most egregious sites (porn) but allow the others at those specific times. The employees know exactly when they can do outside personal business (such as banking, shopping, chatting with friends and family, etc) which will make a happier employee. And a happy employee is far more productive than an unhappy one.
Then as an educator you should know what the real problem is. It breaks down to 3:
1. Localized school boards more interested in political gains than education. They are busy trying to maintain their kingdoms that they have built and trying to expand it.That leads to differing results from community to community.
2. Changes in laws such as No Child Left Behind (an Orwellian title if ever there was one) mandating that teacher retention be tied to student performance has made it necessary for self preservation for teachers to teach to the tests. Add in dwindling budgets and anything not directly related to those tests gets cut from the curriculum. Many primary schools have dropped music, art and classics from their teaching programs all together.
3. Lack of parental involvement in their children's education. This may be one of the most important reasons that education is failing in the US. With both parents needing to work just to make ends meet because the average income level has declined while costs have increased, it makes it difficult for parents to spend the proper amount of time with their kids education.
Until these issues are addressed, we will continue to see a decline in education in the US.
Still, 3,382 requests in a three-month span doesn't sound like all that much.
Maybe not to you, but that's where the value of the comparison you are so quick to dismiss comes into play.
Not only that, but if you have never had to respond to one then you really don't know what is involved. It is gathering all requested documents within the time limit the laws (yes, there are differing state FOIA laws) allow as well as knowing what is exempt in those laws and should not be disclosed. There is the tedious process of redacting documents of data not covered as well as preparing the deliverable. It isn't as easy as you would think.
There are legitimate reasons to deny a FOIA request that the law allows for like it or not. National Security is one of those reasons.
As people grow older, they tend to get more conservative. The baby boomers are retiring now and when they do finally retire, that is when you will see havoc. Why? Because old people have nothing better to do with their time than visit their friends and family in the cemetery and vote! So if you think it is conservative now, just wait... The worst is yet to come.
The 4th Amendment allows the government to wiretap as long as a warrant has been sought.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
With restrictions, the US Government can wiretap. Further, see
In the Olmstead case, the courts upheld the Federal Government's argument that wiretapping doesn't require a warrant. In Katz, that ruling was overturned.
The NSA case remains at odds with these two cases since FISA is in play.
Private companies are governed by both federal and state privacy laws such as the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (18 U.S.C. 2510 et. seq.) That authority comes from Article 4:
This Constitution and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land.
You might suggest this is an over-reaction, that you're merely pointing out that the internet isn't for people who want to hide. But the point is, it should be.
No, it shouldn't. You are doing the same exact thing you are accusing the poster of doing. Imposing your will on the entire Internet when you do that. The whole intent of the Internet is to share data. What form that data takes is irrelevant. It is far easier if you are that paranoid that you leave the Internet than to ask the Internet to conform to your paranoia.
I also had a combination of public and private school with military training (Field Radio Repair) and graduated that in the top 5. I started out taking apart gadgets as a kid. I progressed to the 150 in 1 electronics projects kit from Radio Shack (back when they actually sold electronics parts instead of becoming just another cell phone store). My dad was very supportive of my technical learning. And that is what it all comes down to. Do the parents actually take an interest in what their kids do and support them in their efforts.
The same goes with the choice of schools. Why would anyone support a failing school and risk their kids future just to prolong that failing school's agony so they can force the same substandard education on other victims? This whole argument is based on the premise that parents have the time or inclination to keep that substandard school around for nostalgic reasons alone. The best thing for those schools is to vote with your feet.
Add to that a crappy market where even secretary positions ask for college educations. Schools know how valuable their diplomas are, so they dangle them over our heads on a platinum barb.
The value of a college degree is decreasing as your two statements show. As more jobs require them, justified or not, more people will get the degree just to satisfy that job requirement. As more people do get it, the higher the degree level requirement will become since having say an undergraduate degree will no longer distinguish individual achievement. The cost will go even higher as higher levels of degree become the norm.
Essentially the problem boils down to that the president doesn't have the mandate to enter into an international treaties and other nations tend to not know this.
Poppycock! In fact, the President is the ONLY one in the federal government with a mandate to enter into treaty with other nations. Article 2 Section 2 gives him the power with the advice and consent of the Senate. Without the President initiating it, you have no treaty.
"Article 2 Section 2 Clause 2: He shall have the power, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, to make treaties..."
It doesn't get any clearer than that. It's the President who does the negotiating with the Senate. It starts with the President.
Slashdot Mirror
However, your solution, although practical still relies on the first strike which is bad news for those in that strike. It is reactionary and quite active mitigation. No matter how many holes you plug it is impossible to plug them all. A weakness will be found. All you have done is reacted irrationally to a threat that has succeeded and thrown billions of dollars at a ghost. All of our disaster related mitigation programs require a benefit cost analysis which is something lacking in the homeland security grants. Even a cursory glance at the TSA shows it is security theater unlikely to catch real threats.
Since you are in mitigation as well, you should know that the goal of it is to lessen the impacts of risk. It doesn't necessarily eliminate it. In the short term, proximate cause analysis works but the root causes still need to be addressed or you simply wind up chasing that ghost.
Dealing with risk and mitigating against it is my primary job. So lets examine your comments from a mitigation point of view and see where it leads us...
To mitigate the risk you have to go to the root cause. Namely our foreign policy. The US has been building its empire trying to think of itself as the world's police. We meddle in other countries affairs both political and economic whether they asked for our help or not. We have supported dictatorial regimes as well as provide blind support for allies, especially Israel, whether they were right or wrong. We have invaded countries for natural resources and have economically sanctioned countries that refused to cooperate with the corporate interests of the US. Our belief in American Exceptionalism (the belief that we are somehow superior to everyone else) leads to an attitude that other countries see as arrogance. Our largest export isn't food or energy, it is weapons both advanced and deadly accurate.
So far, all our mitigation efforts have been reactionary to the incident as your comment points out without addressing the root causes. Our reaction to a terrorist with explosives in his shoes? Require everyone to take off their shoes for deep inspection. Our reaction to another terrorist with explosives in his drawers? Invasive pat downs and explicit x-ray machines that display everything under the clothing. Our reaction to the possibility of liquid explosives? Ban liquids on flights.
To truly mitigate this, we need to change our foreign policy to leave other countries alone to fight their own battles. We need to scale back our consumption of resources dramatically and ditch the attitude that we are the best thing since sliced bread. We need to stop the empire building and support of dictators that we use as proxies for that empire building. We need to stifle our corporate overlords in their quest for world domination and exploitation in the "global economy".
Lastly, we need to stop exporting weapons to everyone especially to those same regimes that are committing the worst atrocities whether they are allies or not.
How do you price fairly to beat free?
Again, how do you beat those that make it available even before you do as I outlined above.
Doing the right thing involves education to know right from wrong. Circumstances can override that education such as the ease it is in getting the content with little to no repercussions for doing the wrong thing.
Agreed, however they are a dent to your ability to realize sales absent the illegal activity. In short, although they can't be counted as sales lost it can be argued that at least some of those that pirated would have purchased it legally had the illegal avenue not existed.
Ah, but open source software relies on the very same copyright laws to exist. Absent copyright, or more importantly, copyright enforcement, open source itself couldn't exist. Crowd-funded seems more realistic to me to overcome that.
It has been a while since I have seen a live theater show. We have them in town from time to time. Worth seeing but it lacks the special effects that draws the younger crowd to the theaters to begin with. Who knows though...
I am probably going to draw flack for this but WTF, here we go...
Article 1 Section 8 Clause 8 of the US Constitution makes it a right in the US. Besides that, let's play Devil's advocate here for a while:
Tell me just how an artist or distributor of content is supposed to make a living regardless of the length of time given for the "limited time" as listed in the Constitution? Right now, things are showing up on the illegal sites even before they are officially released by the rightful owner. Just how do you overcome that? Look at software piracy for example, as soon as a vendor of a popular program (think Photoshop) makes a new version, it is usually up at the torrent sites at most 2 days after initial release and sometimes before initial release. So just how are they to reap the benefits of their work when the next day it is being distributed with no benefits being returned?
Don't get me wrong, I do think the term of copyrights are too long. I also think the public domain is getting the shaft. But given that they can't win in today's connected world, just what is the solution? You see many here bitching about copyrights and the "old business model failure" but no proposals for how to realize benefit out of your hard work. Because you see, regardless of what you think as you download that pre-release program, it still boils down to putting food on the table for those making it to begin with.
So you mean my date isn't a French model???
Using one service to describe another service is doing a huge no-no in definitions. Namely using the term you want to define in the definition. So in this example, what if you have no idea what Google Reader was? That is a total assumption on TFS editor's part. I certainly had no idea what either was until I went to the site and did a bit of investigation.
More importantly, this is a non-news story since they have since rolled back those changes.
This summary aside, there is at least one valid reason a project should drop support after EOL. Namely reputation. When a flaw in the OS gets exploited via the browser, people tend to blame the instrument that first started the failure. It happens all the time today even on patched systems. The browser will catch the blame for the failure in the OS since it is where the trouble started.
Hell, we've all seen it with granny getting infected because the pre-installed version of Norton's timed out and hasn't seen an update in years. Does Symantic get blamed for the failure? Does granny blame herself for not purchasing the updates? No. To granny it is the computer that is bad.
That's where you are conflating these issues. PRISM was engaged in without even FISA warrants. That is what they mean when they say "warrantless wire tapping". This isn't FBI Security Letters we are talking about here. This is a wholesale fishing expedition.
No, they don't DIRECTLY have police power but they do have regulatory power and the ability to turn those that are in some form of violation of their powers over to those that do have police powers such as the FBI, DEA, Secret Service and IRS.
There is a reason there was put up a wall between the intelligence gathering community and police community. Namely to prevent the McCarthyism ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism ) that preceded it from happening again. Then came along 9/11 and whole new laws known as the Patriot Act and Homeland Security Act that tore down those barriers leading to a new era of McCarthyism this time substituting "communist" for "terrorist".
And what is the driving force? Well, in the McCarthy era it was the military industrial complex. Today, it is the security industrial complex. There is huge money to be had in peddling fear.
Then you would still have to overcome the "but in a manner to be prescribed by law." part. Since the "national security" part (I am assuming at least in the Patriot Act and / or Homeland Security Act) would satisfy that.
No, a better way would be to take back our Congress and get them to revoke those acts that allow stuff like this. Of course, that requires a ground swell against the established parties and is likely to not succeed because of the campaign financing / media control mess.
That's really grabbing at straws. Several things would have to be resolved for that to stick.
1. Is the FBI and / or the court considered "soldiers"?
2. Is an email service considered "home"?
3. Is the Supreme Court likely to make such a broad interpretation especially since they tend to take a very narrow view on just about everything?
4. And lastly, is it even likely to make it that far?
What does the 3rd Amendment have to do with it???
It sounds to me then that your beef is with the provider who removed the sites for relying solely on a single source. Yes, confusion could have been avoided but your real target should be the provider who removed the sites based on the RBL.
The largest cry that spam filter providers hear is, "I am in your filter by mistake!". Spamhaus in particular is also known for blocking spam resource providers. Have you checked that your upstream provider isn't housing spammers or other spam resources? The idea behind that is to curtail providers that do nothing about their spam problems. It forces the users of those domains to complain to the provider raising the noise level to get them off their ass and fix their spam problems. And it works too. Hit them where it counts.... The wallet when their users leave in droves because their emails are blocked nine ways to hell.
Web-bugs are also only effective for HTML based clients. I routinely setup my client to only deal in plain text. And no, I don't use webmail in any form. It boils down to using the right tool for the right job. A web browser is NOT an email client any more than an email client is a web browser. They have differing security concerns not least of which are things like web-bugs.
I work in state government and can tell you that the arbitrary and capricious manner employed in this state's filtering boggles the imagination. A site that was accessible for weeks suddenly gets blocked today. They have even blocked federal sites from time to time and those truly are work related. And given that most agencies have a social network presence blocking them really doesn't make sense anymore. Instead of counseling or disciplining those that abuse the rules, they are punishing everyone and doing it poorly.
A better solution is to allow specific times that the system can be used for personal use such as lunch or in the case of the school, after the last class has dismissed. Still block the most egregious sites (porn) but allow the others at those specific times. The employees know exactly when they can do outside personal business (such as banking, shopping, chatting with friends and family, etc) which will make a happier employee. And a happy employee is far more productive than an unhappy one.
Then as an educator you should know what the real problem is. It breaks down to 3:
1. Localized school boards more interested in political gains than education. They are busy trying to maintain their kingdoms that they have built and trying to expand it.That leads to differing results from community to community.
2. Changes in laws such as No Child Left Behind (an Orwellian title if ever there was one) mandating that teacher retention be tied to student performance has made it necessary for self preservation for teachers to teach to the tests. Add in dwindling budgets and anything not directly related to those tests gets cut from the curriculum. Many primary schools have dropped music, art and classics from their teaching programs all together.
3. Lack of parental involvement in their children's education. This may be one of the most important reasons that education is failing in the US. With both parents needing to work just to make ends meet because the average income level has declined while costs have increased, it makes it difficult for parents to spend the proper amount of time with their kids education.
Until these issues are addressed, we will continue to see a decline in education in the US.
Not only that, but if you have never had to respond to one then you really don't know what is involved. It is gathering all requested documents within the time limit the laws (yes, there are differing state FOIA laws) allow as well as knowing what is exempt in those laws and should not be disclosed. There is the tedious process of redacting documents of data not covered as well as preparing the deliverable. It isn't as easy as you would think.
There are legitimate reasons to deny a FOIA request that the law allows for like it or not. National Security is one of those reasons.
As people grow older, they tend to get more conservative. The baby boomers are retiring now and when they do finally retire, that is when you will see havoc. Why? Because old people have nothing better to do with their time than visit their friends and family in the cemetery and vote! So if you think it is conservative now, just wait... The worst is yet to come.
The 4th Amendment allows the government to wiretap as long as a warrant has been sought.
With restrictions, the US Government can wiretap. Further, see
Olmstead v. United States
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olmstead_v._United_States
and Katz v. United States
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katz_v._United_States
In the Olmstead case, the courts upheld the Federal Government's argument that wiretapping doesn't require a warrant. In Katz, that ruling was overturned.
The NSA case remains at odds with these two cases since FISA is in play.
Private companies are governed by both federal and state privacy laws such as the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (18 U.S.C. 2510 et. seq.) That authority comes from Article 4:
No, it shouldn't. You are doing the same exact thing you are accusing the poster of doing. Imposing your will on the entire Internet when you do that. The whole intent of the Internet is to share data. What form that data takes is irrelevant. It is far easier if you are that paranoid that you leave the Internet than to ask the Internet to conform to your paranoia.
Good for you...
I also had a combination of public and private school with military training (Field Radio Repair) and graduated that in the top 5. I started out taking apart gadgets as a kid. I progressed to the 150 in 1 electronics projects kit from Radio Shack (back when they actually sold electronics parts instead of becoming just another cell phone store). My dad was very supportive of my technical learning. And that is what it all comes down to. Do the parents actually take an interest in what their kids do and support them in their efforts.
The same goes with the choice of schools. Why would anyone support a failing school and risk their kids future just to prolong that failing school's agony so they can force the same substandard education on other victims? This whole argument is based on the premise that parents have the time or inclination to keep that substandard school around for nostalgic reasons alone. The best thing for those schools is to vote with your feet.
The value of a college degree is decreasing as your two statements show. As more jobs require them, justified or not, more people will get the degree just to satisfy that job requirement. As more people do get it, the higher the degree level requirement will become since having say an undergraduate degree will no longer distinguish individual achievement. The cost will go even higher as higher levels of degree become the norm.
Poppycock! In fact, the President is the ONLY one in the federal government with a mandate to enter into treaty with other nations. Article 2 Section 2 gives him the power with the advice and consent of the Senate. Without the President initiating it, you have no treaty.
It doesn't get any clearer than that. It's the President who does the negotiating with the Senate. It starts with the President.