There are digicams out there that record to CD-R.
Also, there are portable CD-Burner that accept memory cards and burn them directly to CD-R. This could be done on scene.
And the article mentionned the possibility to store images on the CD and lock them away before manipulating the image.
Ok, this is still missing the md5sum, but it could be computed before locking the CD and stored on another CD.
And the main point of pop-up ads is that they attract attention, instead of banner ads that are just scrolled away.
Opera ads cannot be scrolled away, and everytime you type in a new URL, you come close to the ad and may look at it.
I personnaly think that Opera ads are far more effective than pop-ups. At least personnaly, I've never clicked intentionnaly on a pop-up ad (I was just once confused by a fake close button). But I did click a couple of times on Opera ads, so for me it works way better.
That's why I dont think they will ever change their ad-presentation.
The first is obviously that ShareAlike and GPL are incompatible. That's annoying and it would be nice if they would merge.
The second, not so obvious, difference is in a little, but dangerous legal detail:
From CC-ShareAlike: 8.c If any provision of this License is invalid or unenforceable under applicable law, it shall not affect the validity or enforceability of the remainder of the terms of this License,
IANAL, but I guess that, if someone challenge succesfully the requirement that you have to license derivated work alike, (as SCO is trying to) the other terms remain intakt, INCLUDING the right to make derivates. Therefor, such a challenge would actually transform the licence to the "Share" (or BSD) type.
The GPL, however, explicitly forbits this.
So when succesfully challenged, CC ShareAlike transforms into Share, GPL transforms into standard copyright (= no rights)
And I prefere GPL because of this protection, that gives the time to evaluate new licenses. There's a reason why I havent choosen BSD from the beginning.
Shitty commercial is released, doesnt sell, the company goes bankrupt and is gone. Shitty GPL'd software will be on Freshmeat/SourceForge forever.
However, when commercial software is good and becomes popular, it sells well, the company makes money, starts a new project, every good developper wants to work on the new "cool" project and the once good software slowly bitrots in the hands of the maintenance crew to mediocrity. When GPL'd software is good and becomes popular, it attracts user and developpers, so even more good developpers work on it and it becomes excellent.
Conclusions:
- Bad commercial software disappears, Good degrades.
- Bad GPL'd software stays (and haunts SF), Good excels
- Commercial software tends to be mediocre
- GPL'd software tends to be extrem (either crap or excellent)
Yes, CVS (or bitkeeper in this case) make it possible to know who put it in the kernel tree.
However, this person is not necessarily the one that submitted the code. Only a limited number of people have write access to the bitkeeper server and the other submit patches to them.
And then, the person that submitted the patch is not necessarly the original author of the code.
There is code in Linux that originated at AT&T, became part of BSD, and was later ported to Linux.
So, just knowing who put it in the kernel is far from suffisent to find it's origin and decide if it is infringing or not.
BTW, others have said that all of this code has been submitted by IBM. And this brings us right back to the lawsuite.
Less permanent, nonbinary (you can't be half-castrated), and can be repeated.
Every day, you get shocked by a voltage relative to the number of people that reported mail comming from your machine as spam. If a "friend" will just make a prank on you by reporting one of your mails as spam, you wont even noticed it. If, however, you send millions of spam-mails, the charge will make you scream in pain. This will make admins fix open relays and users update their machines.
And seriously, how lame is a button "clicking here will charge the spammer 1 cent" compared to "clicking here will shock the spammer";-p
In RL, a warranty usual is the value of the purchase, that is from 1$ to... unlimited.
Now, who has ever returned a floppy disk to the store to claim the warranty... right, noone.
Warranties ONLY make sense if they are expensive, at least 50$ or so, but 1cent warranties just dont work. The money at steak must be important enough for the customer to actually justify the trouble for claiming the warranty.
In their proposal, the trouble of claiming is minimized for the recipient, so that they may be more kin to claim the warranty. However, even then, this still doesnt make sense. I wouldnt do more than click on ONE button to claim 1 cent. If I had to click on two buttons, it wouldnt be worth it. (I might, however, do it anyway, but in this case not for me, but to punish the spammer, hoping that others do it too)
BUT : the warrant must also be large to justify the trouble of FIGHTING a false claim. As well as the spammer will be harmed by millions of claimed warranties, a hacker could make the world send him 1cent warranted emails and claim the warranty on all of them. This is far more realistic then the 1000$ warrant someone mentioned. If I'm charged 1000$, I go to the police. Will you go to the police if someone steals you 1 cent? But with computers, a hacker could easily steal 1cent from millions of people, making tens of tousands of money. As the warrant is to small to make it worth fighting a false claim, we will see a complete new wave of cyber-crime here.
And this even without the technical problems of actually tracing an email.
Link description to feed your curiosity - DONT GO
on
Remotely Crash OpenBSD
·
· Score: 1
If you think of going to page linked by the grand-grand-parent, dont. I did out of curiosity
If your curious, read this:
DISCLAIMER : Even the text version might be highly offensive to some, but I hope that this will kill the curiosity of some people.
The link is one large image composed by multiple sub-images, there is (ROT13):
- Ghotvey
- Tbngfr
- fbzr fgenatr irel htyl intvan-vasrpgvba
- n guvat gung ybbxf yvxr n urnq ghearq vafvqr bhg
- n yrt jvgu gur fxva evccrq bss
- n navzr cvpgher bs n tvey jvgu na bcra fgbznpu
- guerr irel byq zra univat frk
- n jbzna rngvat cbbc pbzvat serfu bhg bs fbzrbarf nffubyr
- one more pictures I dont remember (and I WONT go there again, once was twice too much)
And I can just agree with the parent:
NO AMOUNT OF CURIOSITY IS WORTH SEEING THAT.
(But I know that your curiosity will win anyway... sigh, why do I even make the effort?)
Now, where can I get a mind-altering drug to forget what I just saw, that I just saw it and that I even remotly know of it existence?
I did too and while my wording is not as articulated as some of the other posts (kudos to them), I found some more errors (basicly about the lawsuit).
So, here's mine:
The article written by Stephen Evans about MyDoom is factual incorrect.
Error 1) "run-of-the-mill geeks who wreak damage on the unsuspecting computer user"
If, Mr. Evans had any knowledge of the domain, he would know that today most viruses are NOT written by computer geeks, but by professional spammers that use the infected computers to send spam. Their motivation is money.
Error 2) "It has attacked a company based in Utah called SCO, bringing down its website with a barrage of data"
This is completly wrong. http://sco.com is alive and serving data. www.sco.com is not resolvable. That means, that SCO *themself* decided to take www.sco.com out of the DNS-System. SCO made their website invisible, granted, to avoid handling the bandwidth possibly generated by virus, but it was SCO who took their website off the net, NOT the virus.
By the way, nobody knows for sure if the virus really does make an attack against www.sco.com, some people suggested that the A-Variant only looks up www.sco.com to make sure that the infected computer is connected to the net, but now that SCO made their site invisible, we will never now.
The B-Variant, however, appears to really make an attack against www.sco.com and www.microsoft.com.
Error 3) "There seems little doubt that SCO was targeted [...] because it has enraged many people devoted to the Linux operating system."
WRONG again.
First, several antivirus researchers are convinced that this virus is also written by spammers and that the SCO part is just there to hide the true nature of the virus.
After all, if the virus was from a Linux enthusiast, why would it leave an open backdoor on the infected computers?
Second, this is a succesful virus and therefor the author needs to have inside knowledge of Windows system programming to make it small and efficient.
Linux zealots generally wont even touch anything Windows, so where does this knowledge should come from and on who's computer was the virus tested?
Error 4) "Two years ago, SCO claimed..."
Actually, this was one year ago.
Error 5) "On top of that, SCO has sued IBM, accusing it of infringing on SCO intellectual property in the way it uses Linux."
Wrong. SCO has sued IBM for *contract violations*, not IP infringing.
Actually, SCO's argument is something like this : IBM developped JFS for AIX, therefor - even though JFS is IBM's intellectual property - SCO argues that IBM has no right to put JFS into Linux due to some obscure contract obligation.
This has nothing to do with SCO's intellectual property and everything with a complicated contract between AT&T and IBM, where the AT&T side is now represented by SCO.
Error 6) "For good measure, SCO is seeking at least a billion dollars from IBM."
Actually, the one billion dollar was in the first filing, since then SCO had changed it to three billions dollars.
Error 7) "Meanwhile the court dispute between SCO and Linux users"
Wrong. While SCO claims that it will sue "one prominent Linux user" "anytime soon now," the current court dispute is between SCO and IBM only. NOT between SCO and "linux users."
Inaccuracy 8) " It's hard to see how any website could withstand that kind of clever evil."
This is not the first time it happens.
Half a year ago, there was the Blaster virus that made a similar attack against windowsupdate.com.
Microsoft bougth help from a specialized hosting company and resisted the attack.
SCO however, doesnt even care about his website. They dont use their website to make business, this is done by their resellers (This is their own claim). Basicly, they only use their website to post their press releases that they own Linux. Therefor they choose to abandon their site in
Today, spammers are using virus's. Almost all the last major virus's have been written by spammers (including Sobig and MyDoom)
When you have 100 000 infested machines, sending 100 million spam-messages is only a matter of 1000 per box. (and 100 000 is a LOW number of infested machines) As there are mailing lists with more than 1000 recipients, the computational challenge must permit this in reaconable time, so there is no problem for the spammer.
Sure, it might kill those low-budget-hobby spammers, but the few big ones will be completly unaffected. And allmost all spam DOES come from a few big spammers.
You have no privacy in your home, your IP is logged and your ISP can be forced to give out all your personal informations.
The RIAA is currently doing exactly this.
Now, with Cyber Cafes required to keep their customers on tape, the combination (IP/timestamp) can be resolved to a picture of you.
Anonymous proxys are a matter of trust, you dont know if they arent really run by the feds or if someone has a backdoor planted in.
With this new law, there is no legal way left to stay truly anonymous.
So the only option for REAL privacy is to either crack a system and proxy through it, or use someone else's unsecured network (for convenience a wireless one, less work than tapping into a phone/network line)
What always bothered me with ternary logic (and especially with this definition): What is the value of : FAIL AND (NOT FAIL) ?
NOT FAIL = FAIL (because NOT TRUE =/= NOT FALSE) FAIL AND TRUE = FAIL (because FALSE AND TRUE =/= TRUE AND TRUE) FAIL AND FALSE = FALSE (because FALSE AND FALSE = TRUE AND FALSE) FAIL AND FAIL = FAIL (because FAIL AND FALSE =/= FAIL AND TRUE)
Therefor : FAIL AND (NOT FAIL) = FAIL AND FAIL = FAIL
However : be f(x) = x AND (NOT x)
- f(TRUE) = FALSE
- f(FALSE) = FALSE
-> f(FAIL) = FALSE
Therefor:
- FAIL AND (NOT FAIL) = FAIL
- FAIL AND (NOT FAIL) = FALSE
=> Contradiction
So this model is flawed.
And this is the main problem of ALL ternary logic. Intuitively (and according to your rule !), f(FAIL) should be FALSE However, any normal definition of the basic operators makes it FAIL.
The problem is that x AND (NOT y) with x = FAIL and y = FAIL should be FAIL, if x = y however, it should be FALSE. So we'd have to make a difference between "both unknown" and "both unknown, but known to be equal".
This, however, is impossible in pure ternary logic, so it is bound to be counter-intuitive.
Your rule is only useful to construct the thruth tables of the most basic operations, otherwise you may introduce inconsistencies.
The 27. February 1933 a fire broke out in the Reichstag (Parlament building).
While it was never known who was really behind it (some say the Nazis themself, but the Dutch anarchist Marinus van der Lubbe was found in the burning building), the Nazis claimed instantly that it was the work of a communist conspirancy.
They passed an "Act for the protection of the people and the state" in a hurry. (REAL hurry, it was signed the 28. February)
This act allowed them to arrest anybody for an unlimited amount of time and restricted all civil rights.
They then used it to arrest their main political opponent (the communists) and restrict press freedom to fit their needs in the upcomming election.
By the way, WW2 was (between other things) proclaimed as a war against the "global communist conspiracy".
-skip time-
The 11. September 2001 two planes crashed into the twin towers.
While investigations were still underway, the US governement claimed it to be the work of terrorists. (Namely ObL)
They passed a "PATRIOT act" in a hurry.
This act allowed them to arrest anybody for an unlimited amount of time and restrict civil rights.
They arrested tousands of people, many of them are still neither released nor charged with anything.
They began a war (actually two) and claimed that it was against "global terrorism".
-skip-
Currently, the US governement isnt arresting democrats and I dont think they ever will, even the television controlled american people would notice this.
However, who can tell that those several hundreds "terrorists" that are still contained really are terrorists and that there is nobody that is disliked by the governement for other reasons.
As the Arar-case showes, it is suffisent to have once met a suspected terrorist to become a suspected terrorist. By chaining this argument, everyone is a suspected terrorist, so eventually the governement can arrest whoever it wants.
However, fascists have learned, today they no longer use violence as their main mean to gain control, but "managed democracy".
It gives the people the fealing that everything is all right, which makes it even easier to control them.
In Russia, Putin is very open about his model of "managed democracy" where the state controlled television makes sure the majority votes for the president or his supporters.
And the US democracy is becomming more and more "managed" too.
"... the chains of managed democracy are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken."
- freely from Warren Buffet
Slashdot Mirror
There are digicams out there that record to CD-R. Also, there are portable CD-Burner that accept memory cards and burn them directly to CD-R. This could be done on scene. And the article mentionned the possibility to store images on the CD and lock them away before manipulating the image. Ok, this is still missing the md5sum, but it could be computed before locking the CD and stored on another CD.
And the main point of pop-up ads is that they attract attention, instead of banner ads that are just scrolled away. Opera ads cannot be scrolled away, and everytime you type in a new URL, you come close to the ad and may look at it. I personnaly think that Opera ads are far more effective than pop-ups. At least personnaly, I've never clicked intentionnaly on a pop-up ad (I was just once confused by a fake close button). But I did click a couple of times on Opera ads, so for me it works way better. That's why I dont think they will ever change their ad-presentation.
Addicted to CocaCola?
;-p
Considering what the "Coca" stands for, thats no surprise
The first is obviously that ShareAlike and GPL are incompatible. That's annoying and it would be nice if they would merge.
:
:
The second, not so obvious, difference is in a little, but dangerous legal detail
From CC-ShareAlike
8.c If any provision of this License is invalid or unenforceable under applicable law, it shall not affect the validity or enforceability of the remainder of the terms of this License,
IANAL, but I guess that, if someone challenge succesfully the requirement that you have to license derivated work alike, (as SCO is trying to) the other terms remain intakt, INCLUDING the right to make derivates.
Therefor, such a challenge would actually transform the licence to the "Share" (or BSD) type.
The GPL, however, explicitly forbits this.
So when succesfully challenged,
CC ShareAlike transforms into Share,
GPL transforms into standard copyright (= no rights)
And I prefere GPL because of this protection, that gives the time to evaluate new licenses.
There's a reason why I havent choosen BSD from the beginning.
Most software is shit.
:
Shitty commercial is released, doesnt sell, the company goes bankrupt and is gone.
Shitty GPL'd software will be on Freshmeat/SourceForge forever.
However, when commercial software is good and becomes popular, it sells well, the company makes money, starts a new project, every good developper wants to work on the new "cool" project and the once good software slowly bitrots in the hands of the maintenance crew to mediocrity.
When GPL'd software is good and becomes popular, it attracts user and developpers, so even more good developpers work on it and it becomes excellent.
Conclusions
- Bad commercial software disappears, Good degrades.
- Bad GPL'd software stays (and haunts SF), Good excels
- Commercial software tends to be mediocre
- GPL'd software tends to be extrem (either crap or excellent)
Yes, CVS (or bitkeeper in this case) make it possible to know who put it in the kernel tree.
However, this person is not necessarily the one that submitted the code. Only a limited number of people have write access to the bitkeeper server and the other submit patches to them.
And then, the person that submitted the patch is not necessarly the original author of the code.
There is code in Linux that originated at AT&T, became part of BSD, and was later ported to Linux.
So, just knowing who put it in the kernel is far from suffisent to find it's origin and decide if it is infringing or not.
BTW, others have said that all of this code has been submitted by IBM. And this brings us right back to the lawsuite.
Less permanent, nonbinary (you can't be half-castrated), and can be repeated.
;-p
Every day, you get shocked by a voltage relative to the number of people that reported mail comming from your machine as spam.
If a "friend" will just make a prank on you by reporting one of your mails as spam, you wont even noticed it.
If, however, you send millions of spam-mails, the charge will make you scream in pain.
This will make admins fix open relays and users update their machines.
And seriously, how lame is a button "clicking here will charge the spammer 1 cent" compared to "clicking here will shock the spammer"
They miss an important point in the article :
... unlimited.
... right, noone.
In RL, a warranty usual is the value of the purchase, that is from 1$ to
Now, who has ever returned a floppy disk to the store to claim the warranty
Warranties ONLY make sense if they are expensive, at least 50$ or so, but 1cent warranties just dont work. The money at steak must be important enough for the customer to actually justify the trouble for claiming the warranty.
In their proposal, the trouble of claiming is minimized for the recipient, so that they may be more kin to claim the warranty. However, even then, this still doesnt make sense. I wouldnt do more than click on ONE button to claim 1 cent. If I had to click on two buttons, it wouldnt be worth it.
(I might, however, do it anyway, but in this case not for me, but to punish the spammer, hoping that others do it too)
BUT : the warrant must also be large to justify the trouble of FIGHTING a false claim. As well as the spammer will be harmed by millions of claimed warranties, a hacker could make the world send him 1cent warranted emails and claim the warranty on all of them.
This is far more realistic then the 1000$ warrant someone mentioned. If I'm charged 1000$, I go to the police. Will you go to the police if someone steals you 1 cent? But with computers, a hacker could easily steal 1cent from millions of people, making tens of tousands of money.
As the warrant is to small to make it worth fighting a false claim, we will see a complete new wave of cyber-crime here.
And this even without the technical problems of actually tracing an email.
If you think of going to page linked by the grand-grand-parent, dont.
:
:
... sigh, why do I even make the effort?)
I did out of curiosity
If your curious, read this
DISCLAIMER : Even the text version might be highly offensive to some, but I hope that this will kill the curiosity of some people.
The link is one large image composed by multiple sub-images, there is (ROT13):
- Ghotvey
- Tbngfr
- fbzr fgenatr irel htyl intvan-vasrpgvba
- n guvat gung ybbxf yvxr n urnq ghearq vafvqr bhg
- n yrt jvgu gur fxva evccrq bss
- n navzr cvpgher bs n tvey jvgu na bcra fgbznpu
- guerr irel byq zra univat frk
- n jbzna rngvat cbbc pbzvat serfu bhg bs fbzrbarf nffubyr
- one more pictures I dont remember (and I WONT go there again, once was twice too much)
And I can just agree with the parent
NO AMOUNT OF CURIOSITY IS WORTH SEEING THAT.
(But I know that your curiosity will win anyway
Now, where can I get a mind-altering drug to forget what I just saw, that I just saw it and that I even remotly know of it existence?
I did too and while my wording is not as articulated as some of the other posts (kudos to them), I found some more errors (basicly about the lawsuit).
So, here's mine :
The article written by Stephen Evans about MyDoom is factual incorrect.
Error 1) "run-of-the-mill geeks who wreak damage on the unsuspecting computer user"
If, Mr. Evans had any knowledge of the domain, he would know that today most viruses are NOT written by computer geeks, but by professional spammers that use the infected computers to send spam. Their motivation is money.
Error 2) "It has attacked a company based in Utah called SCO, bringing down its website with a barrage of data"
This is completly wrong. http://sco.com is alive and serving data. www.sco.com is not resolvable. That means, that SCO *themself* decided to take www.sco.com out of the DNS-System. SCO made their website invisible, granted, to avoid handling the bandwidth possibly generated by virus, but it was SCO who took their website off the net, NOT the virus.
By the way, nobody knows for sure if the virus really does make an attack against www.sco.com, some people suggested that the A-Variant only looks up www.sco.com to make sure that the infected computer is connected to the net, but now that SCO made their site invisible, we will never now.
The B-Variant, however, appears to really make an attack against www.sco.com and www.microsoft.com.
Error 3) "There seems little doubt that SCO was targeted [...] because it has enraged many people devoted to the Linux operating system."
WRONG again.
First, several antivirus researchers are convinced that this virus is also written by spammers and that the SCO part is just there to hide the true nature of the virus.
After all, if the virus was from a Linux enthusiast, why would it leave an open backdoor on the infected computers?
Second, this is a succesful virus and therefor the author needs to have inside knowledge of Windows system programming to make it small and efficient.
Linux zealots generally wont even touch anything Windows, so where does this knowledge should come from and on who's computer was the virus tested?
Error 4) "Two years ago, SCO claimed ..."
Actually, this was one year ago.
Error 5) "On top of that, SCO has sued IBM, accusing it of infringing on SCO intellectual property in the way it uses Linux."
Wrong. SCO has sued IBM for *contract violations*, not IP infringing.
Actually, SCO's argument is something like this : IBM developped JFS for AIX, therefor - even though JFS is IBM's intellectual property - SCO argues that IBM has no right to put JFS into Linux due to some obscure contract obligation.
This has nothing to do with SCO's intellectual property and everything with a complicated contract between AT&T and IBM, where the AT&T side is now represented by SCO.
Error 6) "For good measure, SCO is seeking at least a billion dollars from IBM."
Actually, the one billion dollar was in the first filing, since then SCO had changed it to three billions dollars.
Error 7) "Meanwhile the court dispute between SCO and Linux users"
Wrong. While SCO claims that it will sue "one prominent Linux user" "anytime soon now," the current court dispute is between SCO and IBM only. NOT between SCO and "linux users."
Inaccuracy 8) " It's hard to see how any website could withstand that kind of clever evil."
This is not the first time it happens.
Half a year ago, there was the Blaster virus that made a similar attack against windowsupdate.com.
Microsoft bougth help from a specialized hosting company and resisted the attack.
SCO however, doesnt even care about his website. They dont use their website to make business, this is done by their resellers (This is their own claim). Basicly, they only use their website to post their press releases that they own Linux. Therefor they choose to abandon their site in
Today, spammers are using virus's.
Almost all the last major virus's have been written by spammers (including Sobig and MyDoom)
When you have 100 000 infested machines, sending 100 million spam-messages is only a matter of 1000 per box. (and 100 000 is a LOW number of infested machines)
As there are mailing lists with more than 1000 recipients, the computational challenge must permit this in reaconable time, so there is no problem for the spammer.
Sure, it might kill those low-budget-hobby spammers, but the few big ones will be completly unaffected.
And allmost all spam DOES come from a few big spammers.
You have no privacy in your home, your IP is logged and your ISP can be forced to give out all your personal informations. The RIAA is currently doing exactly this. Now, with Cyber Cafes required to keep their customers on tape, the combination (IP/timestamp) can be resolved to a picture of you. Anonymous proxys are a matter of trust, you dont know if they arent really run by the feds or if someone has a backdoor planted in. With this new law, there is no legal way left to stay truly anonymous. So the only option for REAL privacy is to either crack a system and proxy through it, or use someone else's unsecured network (for convenience a wireless one, less work than tapping into a phone/network line)
What always bothered me with ternary logic :
:
(and especially with this definition)
What is the value of : FAIL AND (NOT FAIL) ?
NOT FAIL = FAIL (because NOT TRUE =/= NOT FALSE)
FAIL AND TRUE = FAIL (because FALSE AND TRUE =/= TRUE AND TRUE)
FAIL AND FALSE = FALSE (because FALSE AND FALSE = TRUE AND FALSE)
FAIL AND FAIL = FAIL (because FAIL AND FALSE =/= FAIL AND TRUE)
Therefor : FAIL AND (NOT FAIL) = FAIL AND FAIL = FAIL
However : be f(x) = x AND (NOT x)
- f(TRUE) = FALSE
- f(FALSE) = FALSE
-> f(FAIL) = FALSE
Therefor
- FAIL AND (NOT FAIL) = FAIL
- FAIL AND (NOT FAIL) = FALSE
=> Contradiction
So this model is flawed.
And this is the main problem of ALL ternary logic.
Intuitively (and according to your rule !), f(FAIL) should be FALSE
However, any normal definition of the basic operators makes it FAIL.
The problem is that x AND (NOT y) with x = FAIL and y = FAIL should be FAIL, if x = y however, it should be FALSE.
So we'd have to make a difference between "both unknown" and "both unknown, but known to be equal".
This, however, is impossible in pure ternary logic, so it is bound to be counter-intuitive.
Your rule is only useful to construct the thruth tables of the most basic operations, otherwise you may introduce inconsistencies.
The 27. February 1933 a fire broke out in the Reichstag (Parlament building).
While it was never known who was really behind it (some say the Nazis themself, but the Dutch anarchist Marinus van der Lubbe was found in the burning building), the Nazis claimed instantly that it was the work of a communist conspirancy.
They passed an "Act for the protection of the people and the state" in a hurry. (REAL hurry, it was signed the 28. February)
This act allowed them to arrest anybody for an unlimited amount of time and restricted all civil rights.
They then used it to arrest their main political opponent (the communists) and restrict press freedom to fit their needs in the upcomming election.
By the way, WW2 was (between other things) proclaimed as a war against the "global communist conspiracy".
-skip time-
The 11. September 2001 two planes crashed into the twin towers.
While investigations were still underway, the US governement claimed it to be the work of terrorists. (Namely ObL)
They passed a "PATRIOT act" in a hurry.
This act allowed them to arrest anybody for an unlimited amount of time and restrict civil rights.
They arrested tousands of people, many of them are still neither released nor charged with anything.
They began a war (actually two) and claimed that it was against "global terrorism".
-skip-
Currently, the US governement isnt arresting democrats and I dont think they ever will, even the television controlled american people would notice this.
However, who can tell that those several hundreds "terrorists" that are still contained really are terrorists and that there is nobody that is disliked by the governement for other reasons.
As the Arar-case showes, it is suffisent to have once met a suspected terrorist to become a suspected terrorist. By chaining this argument, everyone is a suspected terrorist, so eventually the governement can arrest whoever it wants.
However, fascists have learned, today they no longer use violence as their main mean to gain control, but "managed democracy".
It gives the people the fealing that everything is all right, which makes it even easier to control them.
In Russia, Putin is very open about his model of "managed democracy" where the state controlled television makes sure the majority votes for the president or his supporters.
And the US democracy is becomming more and more "managed" too.
"... the chains of managed democracy are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken."
- freely from Warren Buffet