And let's further make it a fair comparison by saying build a SuSe computer using a distro that was created 3 years ago. Either that or use the current version of SuSe when Longhorn is finally released commercially.
But how do you stop being a monopoly? That depends on things that are outside of your control. PEOPLE use Windows, not because there are no other operating systems, but because it's what they want to use. To my knowledge, there's nothing stopping anyone else from developing something that people would rather use... so where is it? Linux has been in the making for over a decade and it's STILL not appealling to users (which makes all those jokes about longhorn development taking so long seem kinda foolish to me). OS-X is making nice strides, maybe Linux will catch up too, but until SOMEONE does there's nothing Microsoft can do to magically stop being a monopoly because people want to use their products.
People say Linux is as good as Windows, but is it? If it's so great then why aren't people using it instead of Windows? Is it because Microsoft markets Windows better than Linux gets marketted? Is that Microsoft's fault? I'd say that's a failure in the Linux business model. Maybe that's part of the reason OS-X is being adopted by users faster than Linux.
I'm rambling, I don't know what i'm talking about but I'm pretty sure the answer isn't as simple as "stop being a monopoly" especially from Microsoft's point of view.
Pick up a telephone and look at the numbers the letters G, O, L, and E are on. People have browsers on their cell phones now, if you accidentally type the word google in numeric entry mode, you get 466453. I guess they're depending on the phone browser to fill in the www. and.com parts.
Off-topic here, but where is that focus option?
on
Steam Users Steamed
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· Score: 1
Oh, and in the course of starting it, it stole my focus twice despite Windows being set to disallow that.
How/where do you set this in Windows (2K/XP I'm assuming)? It pisses me off when applications keep steeling focus from what I'm doing to show me something I can safely deal with later at my leisure. Of course if Steam steals the focus anyway, I suppose it's of rather limited use to begin with. But still, I'd love to know how to set this option.
People also hit puberty sooner due to better nutrition since a century or so ago; this makes it doubly surprising that UK age of consent used to be 10.
What you might be forgetting is that the average lifespan back in the 19th and earlier centuries was like 40's or 50's, not 80's or 90's. This would necessitate beginning life at an earlier age. That and people probably didn't think too much about the issue back then as there wasn't the media we have today to bring widespread attention to it. I don't know, but these are things that would be interesting and probably useful to know.
What I wonder about things like this is, where are the victim's rights? Sure I can understand why you'd hate someone who would do something like this, but he didn't do it to you, nor to me, nor to parents everywhere. He did it to the girl, where is her say in this? If she is the one affected by his actions, then shouldn't her opinions be the ones we give weight to?
Secondly, how much will the suffering these girls may endure as a result of these incidents be the result of the incidents themselves, and how much of the suffering will be induced by people who spread nothing but vile hatred of the people who committed the acts?
As an example, ask people who were raised in extremely fundamentalist Christian homes how they feel about sex? Are they even able to discuss the subject comfortably? The ones I know can't, and it isn't because there is something wrong with sex, it's because they've been told all their lives by those around them that sex is dirty or disgusting or evil. The damage done in this example isn't commited by a child molester, it's perpetrated by the society they were brought up in by telling them these things.
So again I wonder, just how psychologically damaging to these girls are the actions taken by Roy in and of themselves (he never actually so much as touched their private parts) without society telling the victim that the people who did these things (in this case, her step-father, and in the case of her friend, her friend's step-father) are nothing but disgusting, repugnant monsters, less than human, worth less than nothing, worthy only of being tortured by the most violent, hardened criminals for as long as they can survive such treatment? These aren't monsters to these children, they are their parents. The only adults they're supposed to be able to trust implicitly no matter what. Do you honestly believe you're not doing more damage to the children who've been unfortunate enough to have suffered these crimes than the criminals who commited them in the first place?
If you have any familiarity with people who've actually been victims of these crimes, what you'll often find is that they themselves feel responsible for what took place. They feel that they themselves are somehow less than human, that there is something fundamentally wrong with them to have caused the molestation to take place. This leads them to grow up with little or no self-esteem, unable to feel a part of greater society, separated and different in some way that they can't put their finger on. And yet we wonder why such a high percentage of child molesters were victims of child molestation themselves? Can we truly be that stupid?
Perhaps it's just these sorts of reactions which perpetuate the problem of child molestation beyond what would otherwise occur "naturally". Perhaps it's views such as these held by society at large which cause these victims to recluse from that same society because of the fear of being associated with such "monsters" or being thought of as monsters themselves which leads a victim of child abuse into a life of detachment or social reclusion/ineptitude and eventually lead a person to become a child molester themselves.
Personally, I believe the reactions of some people to these subjects are easily just as wrong as, and certainly as damaging as the very act of molesting a child; and that if we as a society really do care about our children, we ought to deal with these subjects rationally and intelligently, and not allow our own personal fears and hatred to pollute the young minds of our children anymore than may already be done by some child molester. After all, once they've already suffered, don't we in society owe them the fairest chance still possible at a normal life?
And finally, have you ever considered that it's your view which is new, that your view is the abberation in human nature, in history? As pointed out in the article, the legal age of sexual consent in the UK was 10 until the late 19th century. Considering anyone under the age of 18 as a child
Most likely BitDefender was seen as spyware because by necessity, an anti-spyware program would have spyware signatures in it to recognize spyware. This sort of thing has been common in the anti-virus market for years, in fact it has always been recommended that no more than one anti-virus package be installed on a system at one time because of unresolved/unresolveable conflicts between the packages.
I'd say it's more likely that MSAS didn't have an exception for that version of BitDefender, or possibly that version of BitDefender was infected, or had its quarantine folder unencrypted or in a non-standard location. This kind of thing is not at all uncommon, and not at all surprising in beta software either.
I've seen a few instances where windows fdisk was not able to do anything with the drive. There can be conditions where it will neither create a new partition, nor delete the existing partitions. It takes Linux fdisk to fix it, or Partition Magic or similar program. So fdisk is out, if you're refering to the Windows/DOS version.;)
Re:This is not the channel you are looking for...
on
Is IRC All Bad?
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· Score: 1
Haha, thank you for that, especially numbers 4, 5 and 10-12.
It can be an exercise of free speech when it becomes a political protest against unfair copyright laws.
When the vast majority of media consumers have decided to go against those laws, and further, when the vast majority of jurors refuse to convict those charged with violating those laws, (which has not happened as yet) it becomes a way for the citizenry to send the message to their elected representatives that they do not feel they are being properly represented in government.
This is the exact same way that prohibition came to an end. The vast majority of people did not abide by the prohibition amendment, and jurors would not convict those charged with violation. It's one of the last restraints upon government that the governed have before armed revolution.
Yes, copyright violation sucks, but the way to fix it isn't to extend it indefinitely and prosecute more and more people. The way to fix it is to recognize bad law early and correct it before the whole society suffers needlessly under it.
So the question then becomes, will the general public begin to prefer a filesharing system that must transfer 400 MB of data over the network for every 100 MB of information it saves to disk, if that system is nearly impossible to audit or prosecute?
That's basically what usenet does, and the 400 MB of data for 100 MB of information is basically what UU-Encoding does. Except I think it's 3:1 rather than 4:1. So I'd say that by and large, the vast majority of the general public probably doesn't prefer a system like this, but a still significant number of them do.
I think this idea is simply being marketed at us with a message of "prevention" when in fact it can't do anything (or close to anything) to prevent any kind of attack. What it actually can be useful for however, is in an investigation after the fact.
Once you've had some horrible thing happen and you've caught a couple suspects, you can go back over the data that's been gathered and narrow down who else was involved, giving you a sharper focus on where to expend limited resources. No, it's not perfect, but it could realistically help in an investigation after the fact.
Still, I'll just hang on to my freedom thanks, and live with the risks. Standard investigations take more time, but they still work, and they don't really interfere all that much with innocent people's ability to live their own lives without subjecting them to additional risks that haven't been forseen by some godawful plan of cataloging all communications everywhere.
What happens when THAT falls into the wrong hands? And don't think it can't or won't. Just like terrorism up until today, it WILL happen eventually, it's a question of when and how.
Making an investigation easier later may seem at first to be a useful tool, but what it does additionally is create new links in a chain which has already been proven several times to be too weak. Why do that to ourselves?
It could be argued that it's actually designed to PREVENT the breaking of the (criminal) law, to keep federal courts unclogged with individual user's copyright violations so they can get on with more important things like cases involving kidnapping or murder and fleeing prosecution. Things that are really important for the federal government to do.
Of course that still woudln't help whoever wrote it, if they were in the U.S., but I'd consider it more a form of civil disobedience than a tool for simply getting stuff for free myself. That kind of thing is at the heart of the American way.:)
How about this instead, the same bit-torrent client from above, but one that only seeded parts of a file and never stored more than a certain percentage of the original file. Now that WOULD be nothing but civil disobedience as a protest of current copyright laws since you'd never actually HAVE the whole file. Maybe it could be written around fair use precedent so that anyone who ran the client never had more than the amount that courts have traditionally held as fair use. Hmm... could be an interesting project.
Most people don't, and it's a bit of a pain in the ass (and I haven't actually done it on my LAN at home so I don't *know* that it works properly), but it's an option.
mailblocks.com already does this, but they hold a patent on it and it was fairly recently purchased by AOL after the founder died. Oh well, bye bye great email!:(
I get these too. As an interesting note, they did not start until I received the following message (my address removed because duh) and sent off a complaint to t35.com to the abuse address listed under the domain. I never received a response from that complaint, but over the next 48 hours I had received about 25 spams, all the same type, just as you describe, in my spam folder.
I sent a complaint to ev1.net who hosts t35.com including copies of ALL the spam messages I'd received up to that point and explained how I'd had only 3 spams to my address up until then (address has been kept in the strictest confidence and never submitted anywhere online), and none of them had remotely resembled these new spams.
These new spams also started arriving about 20 minutes after I sent my complaint to the t35.com abuse address. I'm 100% certain the spammer either runs this server, or has/had compromised this server. I doubt the compromise theory because my address was obtained from the abuse address, not the removal script (I'm not *THAT* dumb).
I also submitted complaints to the ftc and tried to submit to the arizona attorney general since spamming is illegal here, but couldn't find any submition forms online or contact addresses for reporting spam here. Grrr!
X-Gmail-Received: 4eb2806511171eac5c4e9d3c78c9aee 12180b41f Delivered-To: ********@gmail.com Received: by 10.54.41.21 with SMTP id o21cs9025wro;
Wed, 1 Dec 2004 18:27:12 -0800 (PST) Received: by 10.54.27.79 with SMTP id a79mr99889wra;
Wed, 01 Dec 2004 18:27:12 -0800 (PST) Return-Path: <kcadailynewssubscription@gmail.com> Received: from gmail.com (virtua-cwb214-114.ctb.virtua.com.br [200.250.214.114])
by mx.gmail.com with SMTP id 43si6240wri;
Wed, 01 Dec 2004 18:27:12 -0800 (PST) Received-SPF: neutral (gmail.com: 200.250.214.114 is neither permitted nor denied by domain of kcadailynewssubscription@gmail.com) From: "Advertisements & News" <kcadailynewssubscription@GMAIL.COM> To: ********@gmail.com Subject: Subscription User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:0.9.4.1) Gecko/20020314 Netscape6/6.2.2 X-Accept-Language: en-us Content-Transfer-Encoding: Quoted-Printable MIME-Version: 1.0
Hello ********,
Thank you for subscribe for our News. Also you will receive our daily advertisements and offers.
Click here to unsubscribe: http://removal.t35.com/?********@gmail.com
In addition to what the reply above says, 3 weeks later they now know not only that the call was related to the attack, but they know where the call originated from and they have more information on where to find the people involved and who else they've communicated with.
Likewise, if they should happen to find someone who they reasonably suspect was involved, now they have a huge database they can query against what communication this person has been involved with, and who else they should be tracking down if that information points to their being involved. That doesn't even require any pre-processing for keywords, just indexing by various key data. It's really not that complicated.
None of these things are likely to make you and I safer, they just make law enforcement's job easier after the fact. Remember, it isn't the government's job to STOP crime, it's to enforce the law on those who commit crimes AFTER THE FACT. But telling you that up front isn't likely to make you want to give up your freedom for their desired power, so they have to market it as preventing the crime before it happens. Believing it can prevent crimes in the first place is just plain naive.
It really doesn't matter if you use public servers. All internet traffic at some point must go through one of a handful of backbone routers. Chances are that communications between terrorists will be going through several before arriving at their destination. Setup all the private servers you want, unless you're not using existing public infrastructure you can be monitored anyway.
There was an episode of The West Wing in which a girl came and asked for a posthumous pardon for her grandfather who had been accused of being a spy and convicted of some lesser related charge, but the government couldn't convict him because it didn't have enough evidence. However, she wanted his family name to be cleared because her father was going to die in the next 6 months and he had felt his family's name had been tarnished because of the event.
Upon investigating, it was found that this person was in fact a spy, and people had been killed because of him. The character who found this out was shown classified documents (with the classified information blacked out) proving that he was in fact a spy. This evidence had not been presented in the court trial however.
The reason? It would have let the enemy know that we had broken their cryptography, and it was determined more important to keep it a secret that we had broken their crypto than to convict a single spy using the decrypted evidence, because keeping that information hidden would allow us to continue to easily monitor their communications. (The lesson to be learned here is to never assume that encryption affords privacy. So long as you assume so, you are setting yourself up for a trap.)
The point this episode made was that we typically only hear about the government's failures, and even that only if we're lucky. Do you really believe we would hear about their successes? The cost of that information being made public would be astronomical from a national security standpoint.
It's interesting to note that part of the reason we won the cold war against the Soviet Union was that Reagan had convinced them that we had a functional SDI program when in fact we did not. Wars are not won entirely by battle, they are won by information and disinformation as well.
I don't know if the episode was based on an actual event or not, but it's an interesting philisophical point to think about nonetheless.
That said, I still don't support the idea of monitoring everything. I'll take liberty, and the risks so inherent thanks.
So essentially what we need is a bit-torrent client in which the torrent files contain the retail value of a piece of intellectual property and tracks the value per byte of data distributed over a 180 day period and prevents you from exceeding the $1,000 mark per 180 days and we should all be fine. At least under the federal criminal provisions.
Perhaps the mere creation of such a system could be used as an argument in court about the relative disregard of the public for the current state of the law?
I wonder how long it would take before the economy was wrecked to the point that any piece of software or media or other intellectual property would be valued at $1,000.01.
An authorized FAQ is basically the same as an authorized biography. It does not mean that no one can mirror the FAQ elsewhere on the net, it means that the information contained in that FAQ is authorized by those with first-hand knowledge. Any unauthorized information may in fact be wrong. This has nothing to do with copyright and there is absolutely no irony whatsoever.
Slashdot Mirror
And let's further make it a fair comparison by saying build a SuSe computer using a distro that was created 3 years ago. Either that or use the current version of SuSe when Longhorn is finally released commercially.
But how do you stop being a monopoly? That depends on things that are outside of your control. PEOPLE use Windows, not because there are no other operating systems, but because it's what they want to use. To my knowledge, there's nothing stopping anyone else from developing something that people would rather use... so where is it? Linux has been in the making for over a decade and it's STILL not appealling to users (which makes all those jokes about longhorn development taking so long seem kinda foolish to me). OS-X is making nice strides, maybe Linux will catch up too, but until SOMEONE does there's nothing Microsoft can do to magically stop being a monopoly because people want to use their products.
People say Linux is as good as Windows, but is it? If it's so great then why aren't people using it instead of Windows? Is it because Microsoft markets Windows better than Linux gets marketted? Is that Microsoft's fault? I'd say that's a failure in the Linux business model. Maybe that's part of the reason OS-X is being adopted by users faster than Linux.
I'm rambling, I don't know what i'm talking about but I'm pretty sure the answer isn't as simple as "stop being a monopoly" especially from Microsoft's point of view.
Pick up a telephone and look at the numbers the letters G, O, L, and E are on. People have browsers on their cell phones now, if you accidentally type the word google in numeric entry mode, you get 466453. I guess they're depending on the phone browser to fill in the www. and .com parts.
Oh, and in the course of starting it, it stole my focus twice despite Windows being set to disallow that.
How/where do you set this in Windows (2K/XP I'm assuming)? It pisses me off when applications keep steeling focus from what I'm doing to show me something I can safely deal with later at my leisure. Of course if Steam steals the focus anyway, I suppose it's of rather limited use to begin with. But still, I'd love to know how to set this option.
letting people correct their spelling mistackes and reword their awkwardly-worded phrases
:)
Thank you for that, that made me chuckle.
You seem to have left your slashdot login intact!
People also hit puberty sooner due to better nutrition since a century or so ago; this makes it doubly surprising that UK age of consent used to be 10.
What you might be forgetting is that the average lifespan back in the 19th and earlier centuries was like 40's or 50's, not 80's or 90's. This would necessitate beginning life at an earlier age. That and people probably didn't think too much about the issue back then as there wasn't the media we have today to bring widespread attention to it. I don't know, but these are things that would be interesting and probably useful to know.
What I wonder about things like this is, where are the victim's rights? Sure I can understand why you'd hate someone who would do something like this, but he didn't do it to you, nor to me, nor to parents everywhere. He did it to the girl, where is her say in this? If she is the one affected by his actions, then shouldn't her opinions be the ones we give weight to?
Secondly, how much will the suffering these girls may endure as a result of these incidents be the result of the incidents themselves, and how much of the suffering will be induced by people who spread nothing but vile hatred of the people who committed the acts?
As an example, ask people who were raised in extremely fundamentalist Christian homes how they feel about sex? Are they even able to discuss the subject comfortably? The ones I know can't, and it isn't because there is something wrong with sex, it's because they've been told all their lives by those around them that sex is dirty or disgusting or evil. The damage done in this example isn't commited by a child molester, it's perpetrated by the society they were brought up in by telling them these things.
So again I wonder, just how psychologically damaging to these girls are the actions taken by Roy in and of themselves (he never actually so much as touched their private parts) without society telling the victim that the people who did these things (in this case, her step-father, and in the case of her friend, her friend's step-father) are nothing but disgusting, repugnant monsters, less than human, worth less than nothing, worthy only of being tortured by the most violent, hardened criminals for as long as they can survive such treatment? These aren't monsters to these children, they are their parents. The only adults they're supposed to be able to trust implicitly no matter what. Do you honestly believe you're not doing more damage to the children who've been unfortunate enough to have suffered these crimes than the criminals who commited them in the first place?
If you have any familiarity with people who've actually been victims of these crimes, what you'll often find is that they themselves feel responsible for what took place. They feel that they themselves are somehow less than human, that there is something fundamentally wrong with them to have caused the molestation to take place. This leads them to grow up with little or no self-esteem, unable to feel a part of greater society, separated and different in some way that they can't put their finger on. And yet we wonder why such a high percentage of child molesters were victims of child molestation themselves? Can we truly be that stupid?
Perhaps it's just these sorts of reactions which perpetuate the problem of child molestation beyond what would otherwise occur "naturally". Perhaps it's views such as these held by society at large which cause these victims to recluse from that same society because of the fear of being associated with such "monsters" or being thought of as monsters themselves which leads a victim of child abuse into a life of detachment or social reclusion/ineptitude and eventually lead a person to become a child molester themselves.
Personally, I believe the reactions of some people to these subjects are easily just as wrong as, and certainly as damaging as the very act of molesting a child; and that if we as a society really do care about our children, we ought to deal with these subjects rationally and intelligently, and not allow our own personal fears and hatred to pollute the young minds of our children anymore than may already be done by some child molester. After all, once they've already suffered, don't we in society owe them the fairest chance still possible at a normal life?
And finally, have you ever considered that it's your view which is new, that your view is the abberation in human nature, in history? As pointed out in the article, the legal age of sexual consent in the UK was 10 until the late 19th century. Considering anyone under the age of 18 as a child
Most likely BitDefender was seen as spyware because by necessity, an anti-spyware program would have spyware signatures in it to recognize spyware. This sort of thing has been common in the anti-virus market for years, in fact it has always been recommended that no more than one anti-virus package be installed on a system at one time because of unresolved/unresolveable conflicts between the packages.
I'd say it's more likely that MSAS didn't have an exception for that version of BitDefender, or possibly that version of BitDefender was infected, or had its quarantine folder unencrypted or in a non-standard location. This kind of thing is not at all uncommon, and not at all surprising in beta software either.
I've seen a few instances where windows fdisk was not able to do anything with the drive. There can be conditions where it will neither create a new partition, nor delete the existing partitions. It takes Linux fdisk to fix it, or Partition Magic or similar program. So fdisk is out, if you're refering to the Windows/DOS version. ;)
Haha, thank you for that, especially numbers 4, 5 and 10-12.
It can be an exercise of free speech when it becomes a political protest against unfair copyright laws.
When the vast majority of media consumers have decided to go against those laws, and further, when the vast majority of jurors refuse to convict those charged with violating those laws, (which has not happened as yet) it becomes a way for the citizenry to send the message to their elected representatives that they do not feel they are being properly represented in government.
This is the exact same way that prohibition came to an end. The vast majority of people did not abide by the prohibition amendment, and jurors would not convict those charged with violation. It's one of the last restraints upon government that the governed have before armed revolution.
Yes, copyright violation sucks, but the way to fix it isn't to extend it indefinitely and prosecute more and more people. The way to fix it is to recognize bad law early and correct it before the whole society suffers needlessly under it.
So the question then becomes, will the general public begin to prefer a filesharing system that must transfer 400 MB of data over the network for every 100 MB of information it saves to disk, if that system is nearly impossible to audit or prosecute?
That's basically what usenet does, and the 400 MB of data for 100 MB of information is basically what UU-Encoding does. Except I think it's 3:1 rather than 4:1. So I'd say that by and large, the vast majority of the general public probably doesn't prefer a system like this, but a still significant number of them do.
I think this idea is simply being marketed at us with a message of "prevention" when in fact it can't do anything (or close to anything) to prevent any kind of attack. What it actually can be useful for however, is in an investigation after the fact.
Once you've had some horrible thing happen and you've caught a couple suspects, you can go back over the data that's been gathered and narrow down who else was involved, giving you a sharper focus on where to expend limited resources. No, it's not perfect, but it could realistically help in an investigation after the fact.
Still, I'll just hang on to my freedom thanks, and live with the risks. Standard investigations take more time, but they still work, and they don't really interfere all that much with innocent people's ability to live their own lives without subjecting them to additional risks that haven't been forseen by some godawful plan of cataloging all communications everywhere.
What happens when THAT falls into the wrong hands? And don't think it can't or won't. Just like terrorism up until today, it WILL happen eventually, it's a question of when and how.
Making an investigation easier later may seem at first to be a useful tool, but what it does additionally is create new links in a chain which has already been proven several times to be too weak. Why do that to ourselves?
It could be argued that it's actually designed to PREVENT the breaking of the (criminal) law, to keep federal courts unclogged with individual user's copyright violations so they can get on with more important things like cases involving kidnapping or murder and fleeing prosecution. Things that are really important for the federal government to do.
:)
Of course that still woudln't help whoever wrote it, if they were in the U.S., but I'd consider it more a form of civil disobedience than a tool for simply getting stuff for free myself. That kind of thing is at the heart of the American way.
How about this instead, the same bit-torrent client from above, but one that only seeded parts of a file and never stored more than a certain percentage of the original file. Now that WOULD be nothing but civil disobedience as a protest of current copyright laws since you'd never actually HAVE the whole file. Maybe it could be written around fair use precedent so that anyone who ran the client never had more than the amount that courts have traditionally held as fair use. Hmm... could be an interesting project.
ARP poisoning is fairly easy to detect too. Panda Antivirus Platinum 7 detects it and alerts the user. And even Windows can be locked down to hard-coded MAC-IP pairs if you know what you're doing.
Most people don't, and it's a bit of a pain in the ass (and I haven't actually done it on my LAN at home so I don't *know* that it works properly), but it's an option.
mailblocks.com already does this, but they hold a patent on it and it was fairly recently purchased by AOL after the founder died. Oh well, bye bye great email! :(
I sent a complaint to ev1.net who hosts t35.com including copies of ALL the spam messages I'd received up to that point and explained how I'd had only 3 spams to my address up until then (address has been kept in the strictest confidence and never submitted anywhere online), and none of them had remotely resembled these new spams.
These new spams also started arriving about 20 minutes after I sent my complaint to the t35.com abuse address. I'm 100% certain the spammer either runs this server, or has/had compromised this server. I doubt the compromise theory because my address was obtained from the abuse address, not the removal script (I'm not *THAT* dumb).
I also submitted complaints to the ftc and tried to submit to the arizona attorney general since spamming is illegal here, but couldn't find any submition forms online or contact addresses for reporting spam here. Grrr!
In addition to what the reply above says, 3 weeks later they now know not only that the call was related to the attack, but they know where the call originated from and they have more information on where to find the people involved and who else they've communicated with.
Likewise, if they should happen to find someone who they reasonably suspect was involved, now they have a huge database they can query against what communication this person has been involved with, and who else they should be tracking down if that information points to their being involved. That doesn't even require any pre-processing for keywords, just indexing by various key data. It's really not that complicated.
None of these things are likely to make you and I safer, they just make law enforcement's job easier after the fact. Remember, it isn't the government's job to STOP crime, it's to enforce the law on those who commit crimes AFTER THE FACT. But telling you that up front isn't likely to make you want to give up your freedom for their desired power, so they have to market it as preventing the crime before it happens. Believing it can prevent crimes in the first place is just plain naive.
It really doesn't matter if you use public servers. All internet traffic at some point must go through one of a handful of backbone routers. Chances are that communications between terrorists will be going through several before arriving at their destination. Setup all the private servers you want, unless you're not using existing public infrastructure you can be monitored anyway.
There was an episode of The West Wing in which a girl came and asked for a posthumous pardon for her grandfather who had been accused of being a spy and convicted of some lesser related charge, but the government couldn't convict him because it didn't have enough evidence. However, she wanted his family name to be cleared because her father was going to die in the next 6 months and he had felt his family's name had been tarnished because of the event.
Upon investigating, it was found that this person was in fact a spy, and people had been killed because of him. The character who found this out was shown classified documents (with the classified information blacked out) proving that he was in fact a spy. This evidence had not been presented in the court trial however.
The reason? It would have let the enemy know that we had broken their cryptography, and it was determined more important to keep it a secret that we had broken their crypto than to convict a single spy using the decrypted evidence, because keeping that information hidden would allow us to continue to easily monitor their communications. (The lesson to be learned here is to never assume that encryption affords privacy. So long as you assume so, you are setting yourself up for a trap.)
The point this episode made was that we typically only hear about the government's failures, and even that only if we're lucky. Do you really believe we would hear about their successes? The cost of that information being made public would be astronomical from a national security standpoint.
It's interesting to note that part of the reason we won the cold war against the Soviet Union was that Reagan had convinced them that we had a functional SDI program when in fact we did not. Wars are not won entirely by battle, they are won by information and disinformation as well.
I don't know if the episode was based on an actual event or not, but it's an interesting philisophical point to think about nonetheless.
That said, I still don't support the idea of monitoring everything. I'll take liberty, and the risks so inherent thanks.
The MPAA knew about your favourite .torrent site before you did!
;D
That's because they probably run it!
So essentially what we need is a bit-torrent client in which the torrent files contain the retail value of a piece of intellectual property and tracks the value per byte of data distributed over a 180 day period and prevents you from exceeding the $1,000 mark per 180 days and we should all be fine. At least under the federal criminal provisions.
Perhaps the mere creation of such a system could be used as an argument in court about the relative disregard of the public for the current state of the law?
I wonder how long it would take before the economy was wrecked to the point that any piece of software or media or other intellectual property would be valued at $1,000.01.
An authorized FAQ is basically the same as an authorized biography. It does not mean that no one can mirror the FAQ elsewhere on the net, it means that the information contained in that FAQ is authorized by those with first-hand knowledge. Any unauthorized information may in fact be wrong. This has nothing to do with copyright and there is absolutely no irony whatsoever.
Maybe the question hasn't been frequently asked yet? ;)