The term anarchist is usually reserved for people who use violent means to protest or overthrow governments and who aren't organized enough to be called "insurrectionists" or "rebels."
People who want only a minimal or no government and who use peaceful means to express their opinion or achieve that end are almost never called "anarchists" b the average person, at least not in my country.
Here's what the judge at the forfeiture hearing should say once the government has successfully made its case for keeping the booty:
Judge: Mr. Ulbricht, you claim that Bitcoins are not currency and are not subject to seizure, right?
Ulbricht: Right.
Judge: And this is because they are just numbers, right?
Ulbricht: Right.
Judge: Okay, here is what we are going to do. I am going to let the government have a copy of these numbers and let them do what they want to with them for the next business day. After that, they will have to destroy their copy. I will return the originals to you this time tomorrow.
[the next day]
Judge: Are the attorneys for The People prepared to testify that they have destroyed all copies of the "bitcoins" per my order of yesterday?
Attorneys for The People: Yes, Your Honor, and we so attest.
Judge: Ulbricht, here are the numbers you are entitled to.
[meanwhile, 23 hours earlier]
Attorneys for the people, to their technical team: Please spend this.
Technical team, 5 minutes later: Done. In a few hours the transaction will be irrevocable.
Technical team, several hours later: The transaction is irrevocable.
[back to the present]
Ulbricht, to the Judge: Thank you.
Ulbricht, to his lawyer: Spend these.
[later]
Ulbricht's lawyer, to Ulbricht: Sorry, when we tried to spend them, we couldn't. Someone spent them the day before we go them back.
If he said this without his criminal defense lawyers telling him that it wouldn't hurt his criminal case, he's stupid and his lawyers should consider asking the court permission to drop him as a client.
If his lawyers told him it wouldn't hurt his criminal case, their state bar association should sanction the lawyers for incompetence, and the prosecution should seek to have them removed now to prevent an "incompetent attorney" motion on appeal after a conviction.
One solution is to simply not communicate outside of a domain you trust. Go offline. I the extreme, use pen and paper to store information you don't want others to see, and if you need to share that information with others, memorize it and tell it to them in person. As a compromise, use a trusted courier. But even that requires trusting someone.
Basically, adopt the same "off the communications grid" techniques that Osama bin Laden was thought to use.
As I said, you give up a lot, and for 99+% of us, that's not going to be the best option out there. But for a few, it is.
For most companies, trademarks and trade secrets are much more important.
The local bakery probably doesn't care about the copyrights on its secret recipes (yes, making and testing new recipes is a form of R&D). But if an employee pilfers them and leaks them to the competition, they would care very much that their trade secret was compromised. Likewise, if another bakery started using a nearly-identical logo or other "trade dress" in a way that caused confusion in the marketplace, they would care.
Dollar for dollar, I'd gladly trade 1/3 my current speed with bursts of large numbers of dropped packets (esp. packets over 4000-5000 bytes) in exchange for almost-no-dropped packets.
Due to bursts of high packet losses, ordinary web browsers typically abort long downloads after 20-40 minutes. While SSL web pages typically load fine with the occasional glitch that requires re-loading, other secure data connections fail unless the application has a good recovery mechanism.
Is that an upper bound? Thank you for pointing out the ambiguity.
Here's a clearer version: He can't possibly have revealed more data from the NSA than what the NSA actually [ever] had, cumulatively, over its entire existence.
Many banks were, in effect seized in that they were shut down and their assets and liabilities transferred to other banks and the top executives (and, sadly in some cases, low-level employees) left without a paycheck, at least temporarily.
By the way, the post several up from here said "and the fact that no one went to jail." I provided a counter-example.
There is a big difference between saying you are mad because nobody went to jail and then being informed otherwise and presumably no longer being upset, or at least not as upset, and being upset because you (probably correctly) believe that dozens of executives should have gone to jail but didn't.
And then there is the brain-deadness of your second statement. The nukes did not have to be dropped on a populated area in order to compel Japan to capitulate.
I stand by what I said with respect to the "nukes vs. no nukes" decision favoring the use of nukes for the reasons I stated.
I concede that you may have a valid point on the "nuke a populated area vs. a non-populated area" distinction and concede that, for the moment, I am not well-studied enough to debate that particular point.
Others who have already responded to you have offered reasons besides revenge to go for a populated area, such as "maximum psychological impact" (I'm assuming the/. contributor was referring to the psychological impact on the Japanese government, military, and civilians, not the rest of the world as you suggest in your "#2," but no doubt it had that effect as well.).
1) Where the "shelf life" of the item is so short that by the time the protection is defeated, it's no longer relevant.
2) Where the protection is so hard to defeat that #1 is a matter of months or years instead of hours or days.
Here's some examples:
1) Hot new video uses a form of DRM that is expected to last a week or two before being fully broken and "almost no time" before a low-quality (1080p-equivalent) is on the Internet. The studio plans on releasing a 4K 3D DVD the same day as it is released in theaters, and they don't want piracy of the 4K 3D version to cut into 1st-week movie revenues.
2) An industry-specific, high-dollar, low-sales-volume software vendor is concerned that unscrupulous potential customers in certain countries might pirate it instead of buying it. He uses a strong form of copy-protection that involves hardware dongles, signed code, code that expires and that needs to be "refreshed" every few weeks, etc. to protect those customers who could afford it but who might pirate it. His only competitors in the business use similar forms of copy protection. Due to the nature of the product, "this year's" product will be of limited value next year and essentially useless except for retrieving historical data in future years. In fact, it's a standard industry practice to "give away" versions that are 2 years old "for evaluation purposes." The industry has found that, while there are occasional efforts to break the piracy, the protection has never been broken within 1 year of a new release.
They would've had a much better PR situation if they had said something like
Although the legal debt to the American taxpayer was settled years ago when the Government agreed to take payment in the form of stock, we owe a great debt of gratitude and plan to voluntarily give [some amount, at least $0.25, preferably $1.00] to the American taxpayer for every $1.00 of dividends that are paid to stockholders for the next [large number of years], or until the balance is paid off, whichever comes first.
All consumer PCs and similar equipment should have a "safe BIOS boot mode" which does nothing but allow re-loading of the BIOS from a specific source (e.g. USB port #1, CDROM, etc.).
It would be fine to required that the user hold down a switch or install a jumper or some such to enable this mode, but it must be there for mass-produced consumer devices.
For companies and individuals who don't want this feature, a hardware fuse (NOT "blowable" in software) or something similar could be blown rendering the "safe BOOT mode" useless. Vendors who cater to corporate customers could pre-blow this fuse.
To prevent "compliance in name only" (sorry, sir, we are out of stock of model XYZ except for some from an order that was canceled, but oh by the way the fuses were blown), vendors and retailers would be prohibited from offering machines "pre-blown" unless they also offered the "non-crippled" version at the same or better terms or they sold them as "used" goods.
-- Note: This suggestion is not meant to address the the "locked down bootloader" problem (which IMHO is a real problem). Unless that issue is also addressed, vendors would still be able to set the "safe BIOS boot mode" so that only signed BIOSes would load. But at least a computer that got bricked by either a corrupt BIOS or a bogus one signed by a compromised signing key would be over-writable by one obtained from a known-good source.
I know this was fiction but I disagree with the sentiments of the Lyta and Garibaldi characters here:
Sometimes you use the big weapons when you believe, rightly or wrongly, that using the big weapon now is better than using the not-so-bit weapons now.
Take Truman's decision to drop the two nukes on Japan in 1945: Assuming what was reported to the public is somewhere near accurate, the United States and its allies could have defeated Japan without nukes, but it would have costs far more in American lives, possibly far more Japanese lives, and because the Russians would've become more involved it would've decreased American's say-so in post-war Japan and raised Russia's influence.
So Truman went with the big weapons rather than continuing a non-nuclear war.
I think you replied to the wrong person. My comment was more of a "meta-discussion" about when it is appropriate to direct outrage at a hosting provider: When they are faced with a novel situation and react in a given way, or when they are faced with a situation similar to one they have face before but react in a different way, creating the appearance of treating one end-user differently than another.
As a matter of being polite, free hosting services like GitHub should have a "standard practice" of providing an "easy download of all data" for discontinued accounts.
For collaborative projects, this might be either putting the thing in "read only" mode for several weeks or bundling up the whole thing in a tarball-like dataset (in a non-proprietary format of course) and letting anyone who previously contributed download the thing for a reasonable period of time.
This would be "standard practice." There would be case-by-case exceptions for things which cannot be hosted in this way, such as material that would put an undue burden on the hosting service or which is otherwise infeasible or impossible for the hosting service to provide this kind of "graceful exit."
In short: To maintain good public relations, services should make reasonable efforts to assist those who uploaded data or who participated in collaborative projects can get their data back if the account is suddenly terminated by the hosting service.
The only relevant issues I see here are: 1) Is this parody within the scope of GitHub's reason-for-existance? 2) If it is outside of this scope, how has and how will GitHub treat similar repositories?
Unless GitHub has had a similar situation in the past and treated this repository differently, save the outrage until someone else comes along and pushes the boundaries in a similar way and GitHub reacts in a significantly different way without explaining why.
Choice A: Live in a more free country that is more vulnerable to a surprise attack. Choice B: Live in a less free country that is less vulnerable to a surprise attack.
While I'm not one to say "stop all spying" I am one to say "I'm willing to take my chances at being the next victim of a 9/11-style attack in exchange for greatly reducing the amount of spying."
Put a medium-sized antenna mast in every neighborhood with a few hundred highly-directional antennae pointing a clusters of 4-16 houses and put highly-directional rooftop antennae on each roof, and you can re-use the spectrum many times over.
Serve these neighborhood antennae with fibre if you can or highly-directional wireless if you can't.
The issues under this system will be that it's a whole new infrastructure including antenna sites, you will need to pick radio frequencies that are largely unaffected by weather and which don't compete with existing frequencies, etc. etc.
But assuming a weather-resistant block of frequencies that can feed lots of bandwidth to dozens of users at once is available, you won't have a frequency-allocation problem.
Another solution, one that may be more practical, is to just chuck the whole wire-to-the-home infrastructure and beef up the cell phone system so everyone can feed their home internet via cellular. Heck, in areas where the cellular network is already robust customers can simply "vote with their feet" now and cancel their land-line service entirely. You guys do have "number portability," don't you? If not, you should. It's nice.
Slashdot Mirror
The term anarchist is usually reserved for people who use violent means to protest or overthrow governments and who aren't organized enough to be called "insurrectionists" or "rebels."
People who want only a minimal or no government and who use peaceful means to express their opinion or achieve that end are almost never called "anarchists" b the average person, at least not in my country.
Typo fix near the bottom:
Someone spent them the day before we got them back.
Slashdot keeps a letter as a transaction fee now? Who knew?
Here's what the judge at the forfeiture hearing should say once the government has successfully made its case for keeping the booty:
Judge: Mr. Ulbricht, you claim that Bitcoins are not currency and are not subject to seizure, right?
Ulbricht: Right.
Judge: And this is because they are just numbers, right?
Ulbricht: Right.
Judge: Okay, here is what we are going to do. I am going to let the government have a copy of these numbers and let them do what they want to with them for the next business day. After that, they will have to destroy their copy. I will return the originals to you this time tomorrow.
[the next day]
Judge: Are the attorneys for The People prepared to testify that they have destroyed all copies of the "bitcoins" per my order of yesterday?
Attorneys for The People: Yes, Your Honor, and we so attest.
Judge: Ulbricht, here are the numbers you are entitled to.
[meanwhile, 23 hours earlier]
Attorneys for the people, to their technical team: Please spend this.
Technical team, 5 minutes later: Done. In a few hours the transaction will be irrevocable.
Technical team, several hours later: The transaction is irrevocable.
[back to the present]
Ulbricht, to the Judge: Thank you.
Ulbricht, to his lawyer: Spend these.
[later]
Ulbricht's lawyer, to Ulbricht: Sorry, when we tried to spend them, we couldn't. Someone spent them the day before we go them back.
Ulbricht: NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!
If he said this without his criminal defense lawyers telling him that it wouldn't hurt his criminal case, he's stupid and his lawyers should consider asking the court permission to drop him as a client.
If his lawyers told him it wouldn't hurt his criminal case, their state bar association should sanction the lawyers for incompetence, and the prosecution should seek to have them removed now to prevent an "incompetent attorney" motion on appeal after a conviction.
I bet that's more interesting with a 23-letter alphabet than the ROT-13 algorithm I sometimes use in my 26-letter alphabet.
Trust No One!
And I should believe you why?
One solution is to simply not communicate outside of a domain you trust. Go offline. I the extreme, use pen and paper to store information you don't want others to see, and if you need to share that information with others, memorize it and tell it to them in person. As a compromise, use a trusted courier. But even that requires trusting someone.
Basically, adopt the same "off the communications grid" techniques that Osama bin Laden was thought to use.
As I said, you give up a lot, and for 99+% of us, that's not going to be the best option out there. But for a few, it is.
For most companies, trademarks and trade secrets are much more important.
The local bakery probably doesn't care about the copyrights on its secret recipes (yes, making and testing new recipes is a form of R&D). But if an employee pilfers them and leaks them to the competition, they would care very much that their trade secret was compromised. Likewise, if another bakery started using a nearly-identical logo or other "trade dress" in a way that caused confusion in the marketplace, they would care.
Oh wait, that's not an option. "Informative" sounds good.
Dollar for dollar, I'd gladly trade 1/3 my current speed with bursts of large numbers of dropped packets (esp. packets over 4000-5000 bytes) in exchange for almost-no-dropped packets.
Due to bursts of high packet losses, ordinary web browsers typically abort long downloads after 20-40 minutes. While SSL web pages typically load fine with the occasional glitch that requires re-loading, other secure data connections fail unless the application has a good recovery mechanism.
Is that an upper bound?
Thank you for pointing out the ambiguity.
Here's a clearer version:
He can't possibly have revealed more data from the NSA than what the NSA actually [ever] had, cumulatively, over its entire existence.
Many banks were, in effect seized in that they were shut down and their assets and liabilities transferred to other banks and the top executives (and, sadly in some cases, low-level employees) left without a paycheck, at least temporarily.
By the way, the post several up from here said "and the fact that no one went to jail." I provided a counter-example.
There is a big difference between saying you are mad because nobody went to jail and then being informed otherwise and presumably no longer being upset, or at least not as upset, and being upset because you (probably correctly) believe that dozens of executives should have gone to jail but didn't.
And then there is the brain-deadness of your second statement. The nukes did not have to be dropped on a populated area in order to
compel Japan to capitulate.
I stand by what I said with respect to the "nukes vs. no nukes" decision favoring the use of nukes for the reasons I stated.
I concede that you may have a valid point on the "nuke a populated area vs. a non-populated area" distinction and concede that, for the moment, I am not well-studied enough to debate that particular point.
Others who have already responded to you have offered reasons besides revenge to go for a populated area, such as "maximum psychological impact" (I'm assuming the /. contributor was referring to the psychological impact on the Japanese government, military, and civilians, not the rest of the world as you suggest in your "#2," but no doubt it had that effect as well.).
1) Where the "shelf life" of the item is so short that by the time the protection is defeated, it's no longer relevant.
2) Where the protection is so hard to defeat that #1 is a matter of months or years instead of hours or days.
Here's some examples:
1) Hot new video uses a form of DRM that is expected to last a week or two before being fully broken and "almost no time" before a low-quality (1080p-equivalent) is on the Internet. The studio plans on releasing a 4K 3D DVD the same day as it is released in theaters, and they don't want piracy of the 4K 3D version to cut into 1st-week movie revenues.
2) An industry-specific, high-dollar, low-sales-volume software vendor is concerned that unscrupulous potential customers in certain countries might pirate it instead of buying it. He uses a strong form of copy-protection that involves hardware dongles, signed code, code that expires and that needs to be "refreshed" every few weeks, etc. to protect those customers who could afford it but who might pirate it. His only competitors in the business use similar forms of copy protection. Due to the nature of the product, "this year's" product will be of limited value next year and essentially useless except for retrieving historical data in future years. In fact, it's a standard industry practice to "give away" versions that are 2 years old "for evaluation purposes." The industry has found that, while there are occasional efforts to break the piracy, the protection has never been broken within 1 year of a new release.
GM is absolutely correct, legally speaking.
Morally speaking, they are in the wrong.
They would've had a much better PR situation if they had said something like
Although the legal debt to the American taxpayer was settled years ago when the Government agreed to take payment in the form of stock, we owe a great debt of gratitude and plan to voluntarily give [some amount, at least $0.25, preferably $1.00] to the American taxpayer for every $1.00 of dividends that are paid to stockholders for the next [large number of years], or until the balance is paid off, whichever comes first.
All consumer PCs and similar equipment should have a "safe BIOS boot mode" which does nothing but allow re-loading of the BIOS from a specific source (e.g. USB port #1, CDROM, etc.).
It would be fine to required that the user hold down a switch or install a jumper or some such to enable this mode, but it must be there for mass-produced consumer devices.
For companies and individuals who don't want this feature, a hardware fuse (NOT "blowable" in software) or something similar could be blown rendering the "safe BOOT mode" useless. Vendors who cater to corporate customers could pre-blow this fuse.
To prevent "compliance in name only" (sorry, sir, we are out of stock of model XYZ except for some from an order that was canceled, but oh by the way the fuses were blown), vendors and retailers would be prohibited from offering machines "pre-blown" unless they also offered the "non-crippled" version at the same or better terms or they sold them as "used" goods.
--
Note: This suggestion is not meant to address the the "locked down bootloader" problem (which IMHO is a real problem). Unless that issue is also addressed, vendors would still be able to set the "safe BIOS boot mode" so that only signed BIOSes would load. But at least a computer that got bricked by either a corrupt BIOS or a bogus one signed by a compromised signing key would be over-writable by one obtained from a known-good source.
I know this was fiction but I disagree with the sentiments of the Lyta and Garibaldi characters here:
Sometimes you use the big weapons when you believe, rightly or wrongly, that using the big weapon now is better than using the not-so-bit weapons now.
Take Truman's decision to drop the two nukes on Japan in 1945: Assuming what was reported to the public is somewhere near accurate, the United States and its allies could have defeated Japan without nukes, but it would have costs far more in American lives, possibly far more Japanese lives, and because the Russians would've become more involved it would've decreased American's say-so in post-war Japan and raised Russia's influence.
So Truman went with the big weapons rather than continuing a non-nuclear war.
Economic Meltdown in 2008, and the fact that no one went to jail and CEO's got big ass bonuses
Bernie Madoff made off with billions and as a reward the American taxpayers gave him 150 years of free room and board, should he live that long.
A phone call from BHO to Mr. Putin
I've heard of browser helper objects phoning home, but never phoning heads of state.
I wonder if this BHO can make my experience at healthcare.gov any more pleasant?
He can't possibly have revealed more data from the NSA than what the NSA actually had.
Okay, that's probably a huge upper bound, but it is an upper bound.
I think you replied to the wrong person. My comment was more of a "meta-discussion" about when it is appropriate to direct outrage at a hosting provider: When they are faced with a novel situation and react in a given way, or when they are faced with a situation similar to one they have face before but react in a different way, creating the appearance of treating one end-user differently than another.
As a matter of being polite, free hosting services like GitHub should have a "standard practice" of providing an "easy download of all data" for discontinued accounts.
For collaborative projects, this might be either putting the thing in "read only" mode for several weeks or bundling up the whole thing in a tarball-like dataset (in a non-proprietary format of course) and letting anyone who previously contributed download the thing for a reasonable period of time.
This would be "standard practice." There would be case-by-case exceptions for things which cannot be hosted in this way, such as material that would put an undue burden on the hosting service or which is otherwise infeasible or impossible for the hosting service to provide this kind of "graceful exit."
In short: To maintain good public relations, services should make reasonable efforts to assist those who uploaded data or who participated in collaborative projects can get their data back if the account is suddenly terminated by the hosting service.
The only relevant issues I see here are:
1) Is this parody within the scope of GitHub's reason-for-existance?
2) If it is outside of this scope, how has and how will GitHub treat similar repositories?
Unless GitHub has had a similar situation in the past and treated this repository differently, save the outrage until someone else comes along and pushes the boundaries in a similar way and GitHub reacts in a significantly different way without explaining why.
Choice A: Live in a more free country that is more vulnerable to a surprise attack.
Choice B: Live in a less free country that is less vulnerable to a surprise attack.
While I'm not one to say "stop all spying" I am one to say "I'm willing to take my chances at being the next victim of a 9/11-style attack in exchange for greatly reducing the amount of spying."
Put a medium-sized antenna mast in every neighborhood with a few hundred highly-directional antennae pointing a clusters of 4-16 houses and put highly-directional rooftop antennae on each roof, and you can re-use the spectrum many times over.
Serve these neighborhood antennae with fibre if you can or highly-directional wireless if you can't.
The issues under this system will be that it's a whole new infrastructure including antenna sites, you will need to pick radio frequencies that are largely unaffected by weather and which don't compete with existing frequencies, etc. etc.
But assuming a weather-resistant block of frequencies that can feed lots of bandwidth to dozens of users at once is available, you won't have a frequency-allocation problem.
Another solution, one that may be more practical, is to just chuck the whole wire-to-the-home infrastructure and beef up the cell phone system so everyone can feed their home internet via cellular. Heck, in areas where the cellular network is already robust customers can simply "vote with their feet" now and cancel their land-line service entirely. You guys do have "number portability," don't you? If not, you should. It's nice.