The version on the download page is ancient. If you read VERY CAREFULLY to the bottom of the download page then you might end up running the "upgrade.sh" script which might actually give you performance. Then after about a day of struggle you may stumble upon the "Nubile Tutorial" so that you actually know how to use Freenet.
It had always seemed that Freenet leadership is obsessively interested in getting press, yet at the same time embarrased enough by the actual system that they make it impossible for anyone but the most dedicated techies to get started using it. Considering that at startup some of the first content encountered is (quite unfortunately) child pornography collections, I wouldn't be surprised if this is almost intentional to keep the Press talking about the high ideals without seeing the current reality. Maybe it's even best for the project at this stage.
If freenet is to succeed, and we all desperately need it to, it's going to have to make itself both USABLE and RESPECTABLE. That means new potential users should not be confronted with stomach wrenching content even if such things are available by the nature of the system.
Shouldn't there be a concept of eminent domain that applies to patents? I mean, this patent seems broad enough to severely criple the internet economy. If my house was in the way of an information super highway on-ramp, it would be knocked down before I could say "private property".
Comparator works by eliminating white-space and comparing overlapping three-line snippits.
Remember, the (sco released) "Ancient Unix" sources are publically avilable, as well as all BSD/FreeBSD/NetBSD and all versions of Linux. And comparator is FAST...it only hashes each snippit once.
It would not be hard for ESR to Comparator all publically available Unixes/Linuxes to his SVr4 tree and find any matches between Linux and his copy of SVr4 that don't appear in any of the other public unix variants.
That should provide VERY meaningful results. It wouldn't be perfect, but it would tell a LOT.
This shouldn't take ESR (or any guru out there who has access to proprietary Unix sources...) more than a day for the initial results.
The areas of Linux code which match could be made public on a Wiki or other web site and the community can comment on them. The community can then play clean-up and research and try to find the overlapping code matches, adding any additional source trees.
I can't honestly think of any reason ESR hasn't done this, except that he doesn't like the results he obtained. He did, after all, already go through the trouble of writing Comparator, which is most of the work. If I had access to proprietary unix code I'd do it myself.
Has Eric Raymond found incriminating similarities between Linux and the System V r4 source trees???
1) August 20th: In his "Smoking Gun Fizzles", Raymond agressively attacks SCO's claims. He even reveals that he has access to proprietary System V R4 sources.
2) Sept 3rd: Eric Raymond publishes "Comparator", a program for the comparison of things like large source trees, with the obvious intention of using it in the context of the SCO case. Eric says "I am grinning a grin that should frighten the thieves and liars at SCO out of a week's sleep." (see eweek)
3) Sept 9th - Eric writes his response to Darl McBride's Open Letter. He defends himself against Darl's personal attacks and misrepresentations. However, it is notable that he makes no claims that he believes SCO has no evidence, and he ends with:
"We will swiftly meet our responsibilities under law, either removing the allegedly infringing code or establishing that it entered Linux by routes which foreclose proprietary claims."
His comments today refer very strictly to the indemnity issue.
Surely Raymond has run comparator on the System V R4 source tree. What are the results? In his Smoking Gun Fizzles piece he had no hesitation to release a diff of Linux and his SVr4 sources, flouting it in the face of SCO lawyers. Yet now he is unwilling to compile an analysis of his Comparator results??
Does Eric Raymond's gaurded comments since releasing Comparator indicate that the results were not favorable????
Thinking in percentages when it comes to human rights is _bad_. What percentage of the US population consisted of interned japanese americans during WWII?
If I could be assured that a _WELL_RESEARCHED_, _THOROUGHLY_INVESTIGATED_ list of PROBABLE terrorists existed, I would not be upset. However, when shrouded in secrecy with only vague claims of threat VERY much akin to those used to justify the Japanese Internment we should all be mortified.
My only indication of the quality of this list is that there are 78,000 people on it, and I only know of a single reasonably defined terrorist on trial in US courts. If these are legitimate "suspects" I would expect a lot more convictions; otherwise I can only assume that the "suspicion" is only a 1-in-78,000 chance of being correct.
How on earth does the government come up with a list of _78,000_ suspected terrorists? This is the type of indiscriminant prejudice that a seige mentality creates. This is a list of everyone who ever talked to anyone who ever talked to someone who might be a terrorist. In many ways these people's rights are now forfeit.
If the US government actually cared about human lives, it would be spending this type of attention on automobile safety (50k dead a year in US) or malaria (>1 million dead a year worldwide) or cancer (half a million dead in US per year). Compare this to "terrorism" which has claimed maybe 5000 lives in the past 30 years.
Instead we spend more on a "war on terror" in a year than has been spent in the entire history of cancer research.
I'm betting there is going to be a lot of patent litigation in this area of location-based web searching. This is an area that a lot of small R&D companies have been toying with for years now, and they all think they're really damn clever. A friend of mine applied for a job with a location-based web search start-up in Massachusetts, and they allowed him onto their demo server; it was quite impressive (far better than this google system), but they had such an air of secrecy about them that you could smell the patents being printed in the back room.
If the RIAA can be sued for false advertising for offering immunity to file swappers in their "Clean Slate" program, why can't we sue SCO?
SCO is making even stronger claims, and charging money for the "immunity". This seems to be grand consumer fraud and clear false advertising.
-braddock
ESR doing his own source comparison to SCO UNIX...
on
Back To SCO
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I haven't seen this anywhere yet, but yesterday Raymond apparently announced that he had written a "Comparator" program to compare source trees and that now he is 'grinning a grin that should frighten the thieves and liars at SCO out of a week's sleep...'
Remember, ESR has previously stated that he has a copy of the SCO Unix source tree. He could theoretically now do the full analysis.
I find it amusing that SCO hadn't picked on SGI until Perens mentioned them in passing. If they really have some sort of coherent investigation going on, one would think they would have picked up SGI on their own.
This letter seems to be Darl saying "oh no, press... coverage...failing...must...pump... stock...aaaagggghhhh..."
Do we really need to wait two years for trial to end this FUD?
This may be a good thing in the long haul. The idea that Gnutella provides any amount of real anonymity has always been laughable, but it is a commonly held misconception. In reality, Gnutella provides little more anonymity than putting your files on a web page, except that google doesn't search Gnutella.
Hopefully this will move the p2p community to more hardened anonymity technologies like Freenet et al. The community has gotten complacent in recent years.
It is essential that these privacy-protecting technologies are developed and widely deployed. Not for sharing music, but for protecting the anonymous whistle blower, the political dissident, and the right of assembly and communication without prejudice for oppressed communities everywhere.
If this is combined with an unrestricted service contract, than this is a much saner model for broadband. SOMEONE has to pay for increased bandwidth usage. I'd prefer to have the option of running my own web server/freenet node/ftp site or anything else I want, and have to pay for what I use, than instead never be able to run a web server or a neighborhood WLAN from any ISP (with all the flexible local guys killed off) because of a service contract and blocked network ports.
On the other hand, if this is just a punative measure, and you're still not allowed to do anything with your broadband and in addition they're going to "fine" you with disproportionate fees for not being the customer they want, then it is a bad bad thing.
In particular, I think the worst thing these broadband contracts are starting to do is make it impossible to run a co-op or shared neighborhood WLAN. Pay-per-bandwidth instead of pay-by-residence could make things much better.
Some of the details about the hijacking of HBO by breaking a communications satellite by John R. MacDougall (who had the night shift at a satellite transmission center with the required equipment) can be found at:
This was done in 1986, and MacDougall transmitted a few messages and a test pattern over HBO interrupting normal programming. It seems likely to me he just transmitted video on HBO's frequency, so this probably wasn't a command and control hack.
The need for and means to protect the command/control uplink associated with civil satellite systems, intended exclusively for unclassified missions, will be determined by the organization responsible for the satellite system in coordination with the National Security Agency....
...Approved techniques as they pertain to space COMSEC equate to National Security Agency (NSA) endorsed encryption and authentication systems....
..Government or Government contractor use of... commercial satellites... shall be limited to space systems using accepted techniques necessary to protect the command/control uplink.
Basically, if your group is doing as little as what you say they're doing, they may be in violation of law.
Military and commerical birds often employ encryption on both the uplink and the downlink. However, it seems that none of the science-oriented satellites my company operates do this.
Wow, really?
(imaging how many/.er are ebay bidding on dishes right now....)
As an undergraduate I worked on a small student-built scientific satellite, and even though the satellite barely had any need of an uplink, I seem to recall we still required strong command authentication, and that we also required the ability to be able to turn off the satellite transmitter and receiver in certain regions of the world, and that these requirements came straight from the DoD. My understanding is that we had to be prepared to respond to certain possible DoD advisories. In fact we probably would have done away with the uplink except for them.
The trasmitter turn-off requirement was apparently so that rogue states could not use the bird for navigation purposes or possible sensing.
Now the advising engineers on this project came from a lab (JHU APL) that does a TON of military birds, so it's very possible they were just imposing good practice on us. Maybe someone in the know could tell us more.
heheh, if they put 802.11 in the cabin, get your rooftop servo controlled directional antenna up, 'cause I'm getting my broadband from that spec at 35,000 feet! (damn shielding...:()
Braddock
who has often wondered about bouncing boosted 802.11 off passing aircraft for 100+ mile range.
Cryptography is the strongest weapon we have against cyber-terror.
Whatever is done, don't put limits on cryptography.
I design secure cryptographic-based architectures for a living. I can't design a secure information system without strong cryptography.
It's a shame that in the public eye cryptography became a "tool of terrorism" in the days following 911, when in reality it's our only hope for an attack-resilient Internet infrastructure.
At the same time, it is a merit to Congress that crypto limits have NOT yet emerged in the reactionary aftermath.
It's all well and good to propose holding Microsoft responsible for security holes in their software, but please keep in mind that this also means that Open Source Software authors will ALSO be held fiscally responsible for holes in THEIR software.
Microsoft will be far more able to pay up for massive holes in IIS than, say, the author of BIND or Sendmail. I would imagine that one successful suit could take out RedHat altogether.
Don't hurt community-oriented authors for making their code public.
One of the nice things about the Geek Corps is that instead of trying to do it all themselves, they instead concentrate on educating local's and helping local businesses to build an information infrastructure.
In addition, it sounds like it would be a great time because Geekcorp volunteers all live together during their stay.
-Braddock Gaskill
Does Jon Katz think himself a modern Franklin?
on
Message from Kabul
·
· Score: 1
You know, Ben Franklin used to pull this type of crap all the time, both in the colonies when trying to rally support against the UK, and in France where he had published outrageous lies about British soldiers massacaring women and children during the war to boost French support in money and aid.
Is Katz thinking himself grand and trying to do likewise for the "benefit of society"? Thinking "if it just saves one childs life by making the slashdotters support aid to those Afghan geeks"? And trying to anti-globally disgust us with the tounge-in-cheek suggestion of Afghans watching Temptation Island. urgh..
I would really like a statement from Katz on this.
Unemployment is an opportunity for community service and personal improvement.
In this way, Open Source projects should benefit from a technology slump. People should see this as a chance to learn what they want, and pad their resume with community-oriented achievements and new skills. A potential employer will see this self-motivation as a fantastic quality.
This country was founded and GOVERNED by self-made experts. If I want to become an expert on bio-terrorism, computer security, US water distribution systems, nuclear weapons, or post-modern cinema, am I going to be told:
"No, you don't need to and are not allowed, but here's a fine job at McDonalds; we're saving all those uninteresting curiosities for select Harvard graduates with connections since we only trust people who were raised and work in the establishment already."
I think maybe the reason this so agitates me (and many of you) is that I am a self-educated college-dropout security and technology "expert" with a successful consulting career. Many of America's greatest "expert" figures past and present: Franklin, Gates, Jobs, Wozniak, Ellison, Dell, Edison, Turner, F Scott Fitzgerald, were not college graduates.
Is denial of information not most importantly an insult to the merits of self-education and curiosity? Isn't that why it rightfully pisses off this community?
Those of you arguing that reduced civil liberties during a "time of declared war" may want to think about that. Does that argument justify the US Japanese internment during WWII?
Secondly, this "war" seems more in line with the "war on drugs"...political rhetoric which never really ends in a well defined way. Are you counting on some future politician to say "oh, well there's no one left who doesn't love American's now, so we can roll back the civil libery infringements"?
Thirdly, folks should read up on the Counter Terrorism Act which just flew unopposed through the Senate on Friday...it will make network monitoring and wiretapping without a warrent legal in the use of fighting terrorism or COMPUTER SECURITY. It was passed 97 to 0 in the Senate with no debate. I saw no "time of war only" clause in it.
Slashdot Mirror
The version on the download page is ancient. If you read VERY CAREFULLY to the bottom of the download page then you might end up running the "upgrade.sh" script which might actually give you performance. Then after about a day of struggle you may stumble upon the "Nubile Tutorial" so that you actually know how to use Freenet.
It had always seemed that Freenet leadership is obsessively interested in getting press, yet at the same time embarrased enough by the actual system that they make it impossible for anyone but the most dedicated techies to get started using it. Considering that at startup some of the first content encountered is (quite unfortunately) child pornography collections, I wouldn't be surprised if this is almost intentional to keep the Press talking about the high ideals without seeing the current reality. Maybe it's even best for the project at this stage.
If freenet is to succeed, and we all desperately need it to, it's going to have to make itself both USABLE and RESPECTABLE. That means new potential users should not be confronted with stomach wrenching content even if such things are available by the nature of the system.
-braddock
Shouldn't there be a concept of eminent domain that applies to patents? I mean, this patent seems broad enough to severely criple the internet economy. If my house was in the way of an information super highway on-ramp, it would be knocked down before I could say "private property".
-braddock gaskill
It wasn't meant to be satirical. I'm dead serious.
braddock gaskill
Comparator works by eliminating white-space and comparing overlapping three-line snippits.
Remember, the (sco released) "Ancient Unix" sources are publically avilable, as well as all BSD/FreeBSD/NetBSD and all versions of Linux. And comparator is FAST...it only hashes each snippit once.
It would not be hard for ESR to Comparator all publically available Unixes/Linuxes to his SVr4 tree and find any matches between Linux and his copy of SVr4 that don't appear in any of the other public unix variants.
That should provide VERY meaningful results. It wouldn't be perfect, but it would tell a LOT.
This shouldn't take ESR (or any guru out there who has access to proprietary Unix sources...) more than a day for the initial results.
The areas of Linux code which match could be made public on a Wiki or other web site and the community can comment on them. The community can then play clean-up and research and try to find the overlapping code matches, adding any additional source trees.
I can't honestly think of any reason ESR hasn't done this, except that he doesn't like the results he obtained. He did, after all, already go through the trouble of writing Comparator, which is most of the work. If I had access to proprietary unix code I'd do it myself.
braddock gaskill
Has Eric Raymond found incriminating similarities between Linux and the System V r4 source trees???
1) August 20th: In his "Smoking Gun Fizzles", Raymond agressively attacks SCO's claims. He even reveals that he has access to proprietary System V R4 sources.
2) Sept 3rd: Eric Raymond publishes "Comparator", a program for the comparison of things like large source trees, with the obvious intention of using it in the context of the SCO case. Eric says "I am grinning a grin that should frighten the thieves and liars at SCO out of a week's sleep." (see eweek)
3) Sept 9th - Eric writes his response to Darl McBride's Open Letter. He defends himself against Darl's personal attacks and misrepresentations. However, it is notable that he makes no claims that he believes SCO has no evidence, and he ends with:
"We will swiftly meet our responsibilities under law, either removing the allegedly infringing code or establishing that it entered Linux by routes which foreclose proprietary claims."
His comments today refer very strictly to the indemnity issue.
Surely Raymond has run comparator on the System V R4 source tree. What are the results? In his Smoking Gun Fizzles piece he had no hesitation to release a diff of Linux and his SVr4 sources, flouting it in the face of SCO lawyers. Yet now he is unwilling to compile an analysis of his Comparator results??
Does Eric Raymond's gaurded comments since releasing Comparator indicate that the results were not favorable????
braddock gaskill
Thinking in percentages when it comes to human rights is _bad_. What percentage of the US population consisted of interned japanese americans during WWII?
If I could be assured that a _WELL_RESEARCHED_, _THOROUGHLY_INVESTIGATED_ list of PROBABLE terrorists existed, I would not be upset. However, when shrouded in secrecy with only vague claims of threat VERY much akin to those used to justify the Japanese Internment we should all be mortified.
My only indication of the quality of this list is that there are 78,000 people on it, and I only know of a single reasonably defined terrorist on trial in US courts. If these are legitimate "suspects" I would expect a lot more convictions; otherwise I can only assume that the "suspicion" is only a 1-in-78,000 chance of being correct.
braddock gaskill
How on earth does the government come up with a list of _78,000_ suspected terrorists? This is the type of indiscriminant prejudice that a seige mentality creates. This is a list of everyone who ever talked to anyone who ever talked to someone who might be a terrorist. In many ways these people's rights are now forfeit.
If the US government actually cared about human lives, it would be spending this type of attention on automobile safety (50k dead a year in US) or malaria (>1 million dead a year worldwide) or cancer (half a million dead in US per year). Compare this to "terrorism" which has claimed maybe 5000 lives in the past 30 years.
Instead we spend more on a "war on terror" in a year than has been spent in the entire history of cancer research.
-braddock
I'm betting there is going to be a lot of patent litigation in this area of location-based web searching. This is an area that a lot of small R&D companies have been toying with for years now, and they all think they're really damn clever. A friend of mine applied for a job with a location-based web search start-up in Massachusetts, and they allowed him onto their demo server; it was quite impressive (far better than this google system), but they had such an air of secrecy about them that you could smell the patents being printed in the back room.
-braddock
If the RIAA can be sued for false advertising for offering immunity to file swappers in their "Clean Slate" program, why can't we sue SCO?
SCO is making even stronger claims, and charging money for the "immunity". This seems to be grand consumer fraud and clear false advertising.
-braddock
I haven't seen this anywhere yet, but yesterday Raymond apparently announced that he had written a "Comparator" program to compare source trees and that now he is 'grinning a grin that should frighten the thieves and liars at SCO out of a week's sleep...'
Remember, ESR has previously stated that he has a copy of the SCO Unix source tree. He could theoretically now do the full analysis.
Here is the Linux Today article about Raymond's Comparator:
-braddock
I find it amusing that SCO hadn't picked on SGI until Perens mentioned them in passing. If they really have some sort of coherent investigation going on, one would think they would have picked up SGI on their own.
This letter seems to be Darl saying "oh no, press... coverage...failing...must...pump... stock...aaaagggghhhh..."
Do we really need to wait two years for trial to end this FUD?
-braddock
This may be a good thing in the long haul. The idea that Gnutella provides any amount of real anonymity has always been laughable, but it is a commonly held misconception. In reality, Gnutella provides little more anonymity than putting your files on a web page, except that google doesn't search Gnutella.
Hopefully this will move the p2p community to more hardened anonymity technologies like Freenet et al. The community has gotten complacent in recent years.
It is essential that these privacy-protecting technologies are developed and widely deployed. Not for sharing music, but for protecting the anonymous whistle blower, the political dissident, and the right of assembly and communication without prejudice for oppressed communities everywhere.
-braddock
citeseer is a great thing, and this is a great T-wave overview article:
"Recent Advances in Terahertz Imaging", Mittleman et al
If this is combined with an unrestricted service contract, than this is a much saner model for broadband. SOMEONE has to pay for increased bandwidth usage. I'd prefer to have the option of running my own web server/freenet node/ftp site or anything else I want, and have to pay for what I use, than instead never be able to run a web server or a neighborhood WLAN from any ISP (with all the flexible local guys killed off) because of a service contract and blocked network ports.
On the other hand, if this is just a punative measure, and you're still not allowed to do anything with your broadband and in addition they're going to "fine" you with disproportionate fees for not being the customer they want, then it is a bad bad thing.
In particular, I think the worst thing these broadband contracts are starting to do is make it impossible to run a co-op or shared neighborhood WLAN. Pay-per-bandwidth instead of pay-by-residence could make things much better.
-Braddock
Some of the details about the hijacking of HBO by breaking a communications satellite by John R. MacDougall (who had the night shift at a satellite transmission center with the required equipment) can be found at:
http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/3.24.html#subj3
This was done in 1986, and MacDougall transmitted a few messages and a test pattern over HBO interrupting normal programming. It seems likely to me he just transmitted video on HBO's frequency, so this probably wasn't a command and control hack.
--Braddock Gaskill
Here is a memo that explains the National Policy on Application of Communication Security to U.S. Civil and Commercial Space Systems, NTISSP No. 1.
...Approved techniques as they pertain to space COMSEC equate to National Security Agency (NSA) endorsed encryption and authentication systems....
..Government or Government contractor use of ... commercial satellites ... shall be limited to space systems using accepted techniques necessary to protect the command/control uplink.
http://www.tscm.com/communsec.html
Some excerpts:
The need for and means to protect the command/control uplink associated with civil satellite systems, intended exclusively for unclassified missions, will be determined by the organization responsible for the satellite system in coordination with the National Security Agency....
Basically, if your group is doing as little as what you say they're doing, they may be in violation of law.
--Braddock Gaskill
Military and commerical birds often employ encryption on both the uplink and the downlink. However, it seems that none of the science-oriented satellites my company operates do this.
/.er are ebay bidding on dishes right now....)
Wow, really? (imaging how many
As an undergraduate I worked on a small student-built scientific satellite, and even though the satellite barely had any need of an uplink, I seem to recall we still required strong command authentication, and that we also required the ability to be able to turn off the satellite transmitter and receiver in certain regions of the world, and that these requirements came straight from the DoD. My understanding is that we had to be prepared to respond to certain possible DoD advisories. In fact we probably would have done away with the uplink except for them.
The trasmitter turn-off requirement was apparently so that rogue states could not use the bird for navigation purposes or possible sensing.
Now the advising engineers on this project came from a lab (JHU APL) that does a TON of military birds, so it's very possible they were just imposing good practice on us. Maybe someone in the know could tell us more.
--Braddock Gaskill
heheh, if they put 802.11 in the cabin, get your rooftop servo controlled directional antenna up, 'cause I'm getting my broadband from that spec at 35,000 feet! (damn shielding...:()
Braddock
who has often wondered about bouncing boosted 802.11 off passing aircraft for 100+ mile range.
Cryptography is the strongest weapon we have against cyber-terror.
Whatever is done, don't put limits on cryptography.
I design secure cryptographic-based architectures for a living. I can't design a secure information system without strong cryptography.
It's a shame that in the public eye cryptography became a "tool of terrorism" in the days following 911, when in reality it's our only hope for an attack-resilient Internet infrastructure.
At the same time, it is a merit to Congress that crypto limits have NOT yet emerged in the reactionary aftermath.
-Braddock
It's all well and good to propose holding Microsoft responsible for security holes in their software, but please keep in mind that this also means that Open Source Software authors will ALSO be held fiscally responsible for holes in THEIR software.
Microsoft will be far more able to pay up for massive holes in IIS than, say, the author of BIND or Sendmail. I would imagine that one successful suit could take out RedHat altogether.
Don't hurt community-oriented authors for making their code public.
-Braddock
www.geekcorps.org
One of the nice things about the Geek Corps is that instead of trying to do it all themselves, they instead concentrate on educating local's and helping local businesses to build an information infrastructure.
In addition, it sounds like it would be a great time because Geekcorp volunteers all live together during their stay.
-Braddock Gaskill
You know, Ben Franklin used to pull this type of crap all the time, both in the colonies when trying to rally support against the UK, and in France where he had published outrageous lies about British soldiers massacaring women and children during the war to boost French support in money and aid.
Is Katz thinking himself grand and trying to do likewise for the "benefit of society"? Thinking "if it just saves one childs life by making the slashdotters support aid to those Afghan geeks"? And trying to anti-globally disgust us with the tounge-in-cheek suggestion of Afghans watching Temptation Island. urgh..
I would really like a statement from Katz on this.
Silence Dogood
Unemployment is an opportunity for community service and personal improvement.
In this way, Open Source projects should benefit from a technology slump. People should see this as a chance to learn what they want, and pad their resume with community-oriented achievements and new skills. A potential employer will see this self-motivation as a fantastic quality.
Braddock Gaskill
This country was founded and GOVERNED by self-made experts. If I want to become an expert on bio-terrorism, computer security, US water distribution systems, nuclear weapons, or post-modern cinema, am I going to be told:
"No, you don't need to and are not allowed, but here's a fine job at McDonalds; we're saving all those uninteresting curiosities for select Harvard graduates with connections since we only trust people who were raised and work in the establishment already."
I think maybe the reason this so agitates me (and many of you) is that I am a self-educated college-dropout security and technology "expert" with a successful consulting career. Many of America's greatest "expert" figures past and present: Franklin, Gates, Jobs, Wozniak, Ellison, Dell, Edison, Turner, F Scott Fitzgerald, were not college graduates.
Is denial of information not most importantly an insult to the merits of self-education and curiosity? Isn't that why it rightfully pisses off this community?
Braddock Gaskill
Those of you arguing that reduced civil liberties during a "time of declared war" may want to think about that. Does that argument justify the US Japanese internment during WWII?
Secondly, this "war" seems more in line with the "war on drugs"...political rhetoric which never really ends in a well defined way. Are you counting on some future politician to say "oh, well there's no one left who doesn't love American's now, so we can roll back the civil libery infringements"?
Thirdly, folks should read up on the Counter Terrorism Act which just flew unopposed through the Senate on Friday...it will make network monitoring and wiretapping without a warrent legal in the use of fighting terrorism or COMPUTER SECURITY. It was passed 97 to 0 in the Senate with no debate. I saw no "time of war only" clause in it.
--Braddock Gaskill