I guess they didn't have passports or birth certificates back when you were born. Or driver's licenses in every state, reciprocally honored in every state (gosh, you could call that a "national ID system!").
As for "spying on citizens"... there have been law enforcement people stealithily pursuing domestic criminals and foreign operatives for over two hundred years. Our government, and every government, does some things "hidden from the citizens" because, in a culture as free as ours, doing things in public also means doing them in front of the people that use that information to harm us. Should every security mechanism we employ, or military code we use to protect people, or the home addresses of unpopular judges, or everyone's tax returns be listed on some web site somewhere?
It will still carry certain aspects of holiness, but it will not be usable for the obligational public readings.
Well, then you can see how someone not raised in that tradition might find that a little baffling. One could come to the conclusion that there's an object being worshipped, rather than a state of being (or a spiritual/philosophical goal) being embraced. I'd have thought that it was more of a "holy is as holy does" rather than the provenance of a particular object having anything other symbolic meaning. Can it be that people truly don't consider their behavior or thoughts or relations to be appropriately worthy because of the nature of the hardcopy that's read from during a ceremony? I'm not being glib - I'm just trying to distill this down to the basics so that I understand it. The boundaries between symbols of history or symbols designed to remind one and inspire one towards purity/integrity of character seem easily confused with the investment of mystical power into a particular collection of paper and ink - the object itself.
Does anyone ever ask "why" to these things? Meaning, if a social custom obliges one to read certain specific words aloud - is the physical material upon which the words are written in any way going to alter the meaning or import of the words themselves? The same words are the same words, aren't they?
I'm truly not trying to be a smart-aleck here, but because I just can't convincingly put my mind somewhere that reason won't take it, I've got to hear someone else explain the thought process. I find this arena (slashdot) to be an interesting venue for such things because people using this site are usually technologists of a sort, and thus can't get through their day without cold reason helping them work through what are ultimately unyielding, irreducible binary issues. So people that can put away their daily exercises in hard logic and then turn towards two printed copies of exactly the same words while considering one "not usable" - well, it's hard for me to reconcile. I certainly understand the urge to mark serious occasions with symbols of the gravity, joy, or tradition that they represent (and hence the appreciation of, essentially, Genuine Antique Written Material - it's nice to know that, say, Great Grandpa in the Old Country used exactly the same book when he got married - it connects one to history a bit), but I can't imagine, then, that anything other than perhaps the very first original of anything would be any more significant than any copy, made by any person or mechanism. The concepts, myths, stories, truths - what have you - should be just as valid regardless of the binding, the fiber in the paper, or the way the ink got on that paper.
That being said, I'm actually pretty sentimental, and do have certain family heirlooms that make certain events just feel right. But certain family concepts are going to be true no matter what I jot them down on, or whether or not I digitize them. Damn us cold-hearted atheists! We're an annoying bunch, aren't we.
Like any linguistic/cultural "tic," devices like "Surely," or "certainly" are of course much abused and are inserted into a lot of sentences just because the speaker feels like they're sounding more authoritative or important when they utter that phrase. I like to think that I only use it when I actually mean it.
Too much use, and these become un-heard (meaning, we tune them out entirely when we hear them... like, "ummm" between words).
I noticed a while ago: you watch or/and listen to quite a bit of BBC news broadcasts, don't you?
I am guessing that from your frequent usage of "surely".
Heh! Actually, no, I only rarely watch the BBC's news broadcasts. I do, though, find the word "surely" to be a useful rhetorical device, as it allows you to begin a sentence with an assertive tone that puts the reader (in the case of slashdot, usually someone that isn't thinking the way I am about something) in a bit of a defensive posture. "Surely, since A=B and B=C, then A=C" translates loosely to "Of course you can't disagree about what I'm about to say about A, B, and C." I believe I picked this up watching too much Monty Python as a child.
I used to worry about sounding pretentious when I deliberately use somewhat more formal or subtle prose in a geek-oriented message forum, but I've seen that taking the high(er) road, tone-wise, often helps to filter out the complete jackasses who communicate only through references to maternal heritage, things scatalogical, or by calling me "stoopid." It's actually pretty amazing how quickly - even on Slashdot - you can draw other, more rational people into a thread just by sticking to a more thoughtful style of prose. There's no question that when I'm tired, or have somehow fallen into a troll's trap, that I'll shoot from the hip with some ill-considered response, but that's not very constructive (though it can feel pretty good!). Anyhow, if there's ever a British tone to my rhetoric, then I'll consider myself lucky, in that I know of no other place with a greater collection (and history of) orators, rhetoriticians, and talented communicators. That British schools still seem, at least more than their US counterparts, to hold their students to that traditional standard, is a delight. It must come from growing up on the same island that spawned Shakespeare. And the Spice Girls, of course.
As an observant Jew, I'd be a little bit skeptical about reading from one...
OK, so I'm entirely too Scando-Anglo in my heritage (considering the topic), and specifically not religious... so this will seem, well, cheeky (at best).
How does any modification to the physical nature of the book/scroll, other than a change that actually alters the words therein, change the message? Meaning, Shakespeare is still Shakespeare whether in paperback, parchement, or HTML. Aren't the (apparently never changing) 300k-some characters in the Torah, well, the same every time? I understand that handling a carefully loved artifact can help put on into an introspective mood, but surely one with invisible changes (microscopic holes) isn't damaging to your spirituality - isn't content king, as it were?
Now, all that being said, how about high-res digital images of a few of the pages? If they're hand made, no two are exactly the same, and matching a high-contrast calligraphic image against a database would surely be no harder than matching digitized finger prints, right?
Anyway, I guess I'm just scratching my head about the "unfit for use" part. Surely the things Moses said and did, for example, aren't any different if the very same words telling the story are on a piece of paper with microscopic holes you can't even see? And, aren't whatever cultural and contemporary spiritual lessons one is supposed to glean from reading those words what really matter? I'd always thougth that "observant Jews" (as you put it) would be more about the message than the medium. But then, I suppose this is really a larger-scale, lukewarm semi-rant about orthodoxy and dogma in general - no need to pick on any particular flavor, but I saw your comment and thus you win my rant-prize for the evening.
That's like saying you're "outside" a video game. I think Neo's body and mind were always right there in the normal physical universe, bounded by all of the normal rules, and he was just (along with everyone else) unusually plugged into a particularly good simulation. You're not in the simulation, the simulation's in you (perceptually, cognitively). So, dreaming (no matter how convincingly) you're superman and can fly doesn't change the laws of physics. My two cents' worth, anyway.
Rather, how long before the nice Men in Black show up at their door, confiscate the code, throw them all in jail, and get Con-gress to pass a law against this sort of thing, on the grounds that it could be used to ADVANCE bioterrorism?
Why is that tinfoil-clad perspective any better (more likely) than wondering how long it will be before they're offered jobs at Fort Dietrich or at any of a number of big contractors that are working on exactly this sort of stuff with defense in mind? They can't hire good people fast enough in that area, they pay's good, the need is real... oh, never mind. That sort of info takes all fun out of wearing the hat. My bad!
And just how do we know our entire reality isn't simply a large scale version of this? Is our universe simply the inside of a box? Does it even matter?
Well, first, no - if we're in a giant box, and the laws of physics defined therein cause us to see and experience what we're seeing and experiencing, then... no. That's the framework of our universe. We can't operate outside of that framework, so kvetching about it isn't very productive.
And second, you'll be getting the munchies very soon, I'm guessing.
Because people who work for companies are fake open source people? Sometimes the only people who can still eat, have a roof over their head, and still be able to put in 14 hours a day on a large project (open source or otherwise) are those working for an organization with some actual money to spend. Some of those are (gasp!) corporations.
Now, if you're suggesting that "big biotech" is going to deliberately break a license clause, that's another story. But the big ones are publicly help companies, and are under unbelievable scrutiny, with a lot at stake if they do the wrong things IP-wise.
I wouldn't replace that, I would append to it for clarity. Make it clear that people there have the same expectation of privacy that they have at, say, their doctor's office - where even the most intimate details, no matter how appropriately protected by HIPAA, can be dug out by court-approved investigations if it looks serious enough (just ask Rush Limbaugh!). Privacy, while using publicly provided equipment and networks, is not the same thing as absolute anonymity. Operating international communications hubs from which people can remotely plant or manipulate data anonymously cannot be considered a long-term, historical, traditional library activity. You indicated earlier that if a librarian thought a user was up to no good that that would the time to act. But how would the librarian know? Looking over the user's shoulder? Evaluating shifty-looking visitor hair styles? And even with those suspicions, however justified, what mechanism would the librarian use to demonstrate the user's illegal activities, absent some form of logging and user identity?
I deal with sensitive (very) private (very) information that could impact people's family finances, careers, businesses, employers, investors and more every day. I value my privacy, and the privacy of others to a nearly religious degree. Now, I also spend a good part of my day dealing with criminals trying to break into, steal, deface, and otherwise devalue the very things that I build and protect. Many, many of those attacks originate from public networks - including schools, libraries, dorms, etc. Because I know that information can be properly squirreled away, and I know that I don't have to give it up absent court orders, I'm comfortable with my position. Privacy and law enforcement are not mutually exclusive.
But isn't that the whole point of logs of all sorts? It's data you can go to if you need to, and if a judge says you have the authority to. That's just as true of a publicly held companies books as it is school enrollment records, medical records, and all sorts of other quite private things that are only made not private when there's a convincing reason for it. But to spend tax dollars on services that are shown to be regularly used for nefarious things, and not even have the capacity to know, under court orders, who was (say, cracking into school records, or sending ZIPed up financial files to a recipient in Hamas or crypto goodies to North Korea, whatever) from a library's equipment - that's just dumb, when that info can be secured just fine, but can't be synthesized if it's never logged.
We protect each library user's right to privacy and confidentiality with respect to information sought or received and resources consulted, borrowed, acquired or transmitted.
I guess I'm wondering if that principle was written before or after libraries started doubling as internet cafes? I'm not being glib, I'm just thinking that it makes perfect sense when you look at the library as research tool, but it's a little anachronistic now that they can be used as cybercrime field offices. Just wondering, in real life, how many library IT or management people truly don't worry about that sort of thing, and can't conceive of any means or measure they'd embrace to discourage or, in the case of a court order, manage to dig up logs related to, illegal use.
Because librarians think that distributing information is good, even when some of it is false.
But in the case of sitting down at a web-connected workstation in a library to launch a worm, or interact with a bot network, or send fraudulant mail, you're not dealing with the same issues. The library is less and less about shelves full of books, and they can't really make their web access useful if people can't type things into web browsers. Making such things minimally useful to patrons immediately makes them very useful to criminals, too.
but surely getting something for free or getting it for $0.25 shouldn't make such a fundamental difference to whether you have a right to expect privacy or not.
First, nothing is free. You're paying for it, or someone else (like taxpayers) is paying for it. Taxpayers, individually, have no choice in the specifics of how those funds are used, and so there are rules and regs about taxpayer-funded facilities of all sorts that keep the use of those things reasonable to most people. Whether you're using a web workstation at a library (paid for out of local taxes) or you're using a payphone into which you're putting a quarter - someone is paying. But when you're paying, you can certainly expect a different privacy framework than when you use something that I'm paying for.
No, I'm not confused about this. The thread was initially about biometrics (like a thumbprint scan) as the user sits down to use the machine in question. That's exactly what prevents the "old chap" from being implicated in the illegal activities of someone else attempting to act in his name. Agreed that the original article is talking about anonymous borrowing (using a cash balance as collateral), but the thread wandered off into the earlier discussions about biometrics in the library - and that's what I was responding too. Sorry if it's off topic.
But you're not walking up to a payphone and getting it "free" because it's been funded with tax dollars. And your friend's house, phone, and net access is not a taxpayer-funded "public" facility. That's the whole point: if someone wants to use something that we (as taxpayers) have paid for, then that person can't complain when there are some limitations in the nature of that thing we bought for them. If they don't like it, they can use their own personal systems (just like we do), and if their reason for going to the library to surf is so that they don't leave a trail from their personal system, you've got to wonder what they're hiding. Never the less, this isn't any different than any other government-provided service. You can't get welfare, medicare, city services, a license to drive on public roads, or really much of anything else like that without introducing yourself. Why should sitting down in front of a computer and network paid for by me (and you) be a wide-open avenue, with no recourse, for people to attack me (and you)? None of this applies when you put money into a payphone, because you're purchasing a service from a common or private carrier. None of this applies when you use your friend's equipment and services, because he's doing the same.
Well, I think anonymity really is what it's all about. We're not talking about who's borrowing which books, here, anyway. We're talking about who's walking in to use net-connected boxes to, say, interact with sites and message boards that are being hosted by killers, or who are using them to log into a mailbox somewhere and download the day's collections from their phishing bots, or who are using them to send threatening e-mails to fellow students, etc.
Certainly the "cost" of retrieving that data should be in the cost of persuading a panel of judges that it's appropriate to do so. I don't think there's any merit in deliberately ratcheting up the actual tax dollars it costs to pursue a scam artist, stalker, or Hamas money launderer just because it's a form of brake on the law enforcement people. You're saying make it actually expensive and time consuming because we can't trust ourselves. I'm saying set the legal bar higher, and save the money (or spend it on things, like education, that might convince some twits to do something besides rip people off for a living).
Huh. You learn something every day. Now, I suppose I'm not supposed to consider that a term of endearment, am I? You know, like when I use "squareheads" when referring to my Scandinavian relatives? I mean, sure, "tanks" rhymes with "yanks," but I always thought that the Brits were a bit more poetic than that, even when they're just in the mood to insult someone. Hell, especially when they're in the mood to insult someone.
Remember the old, completely paper-driven library cards of 30+ years ago? The borrower's name was written on the card, and every borrower before them was on a permanent list. No anonymity there at all. More recently, you were issued a bar-coded card that tracked what you borrowed against your name. No anonymity there, either (because, if you don't return the book, they need to know who's running around with a $50 copy of a coffee-table Leonardo DaVinci collection, or whatever).
Now, you walk into a library, as you've been able to do for centuries, pull a book off the shelf, sit down, and read it. Put it back. There's no tracking involved, never has been (except perhaps at the Library Of Congress and some other huge collections where you have to put in a request for the book to be brought out - and there's been no anonymity there, either). But if you want to walk away with the book, they want to know who's got it. Why is that a bad thing? If you want to temporarily take posession of something that the taxpayers paid for (or which was donated to the community by a private party), it's certainly reasonable for the community to have in place a way to get hold of that person when they don't return the item, or to charge them a fee if they hang onto it for longer than is reasonable.
Now, you walk into a library and want to use the internet. Fine. But suppose your entire purpose of using that service is to phish, defraud, or otherwise be bad? If some merchant somewhere tracks a fraud attempt, or a bank tracks the use of a stolen credit card back to an IP address mapped to a machine in a facility provided by taxpayers, isn't it reasonable to be able to figure out who was driving at the time they were committing a crime? The fingerprinting issue was about computer use. Biometrics are about making sure you are who you say you are, so that lifting an acquaintence's card doesn't allow you to commit crimes in her name using public facilities.
That said, I don't think I'd want a bored IT intern at a library able to troll through proxy logs and see, by name, who was looking at what on the web. Biometrics should just be a hash, and that sort of log data should be just like financial transaction data, with need-to-know one-way storage. Yes, that can be cracked. But so can everything if you can't trust anyone, ever. If a municipality, county, or school wants to continue to offer free computer/net use, but wants to mitigate the obviously real risk of people running scams from their network, they should certainly have the option of doing something about it. It's all about transparency, though: letting the users know what's being collected when they sign on, and generally how it's being protected and under what circumstances (subpeona, etc) it can be retrieved.
Um... septics? As much as I enjoy translating British witticisms so that us poor, dumb rebellious colonials can unnerstan 'em, that one's just not cross-referencing, I'm afraid. You'll have to find another, less subtle way to make your rhetorical points.
we have morals and laws
Which definately explains the huge public surveillance infrastructure that you've built, largely in reaction to years of bombings in your own smoldering little civil conflict. Darn those high-falutin' laws and morals! They don't seem to stop people from being evil, or from having to react to (and prepare for action by) those people. To the extent that both the UK and the US are proponents of democracy, intelligence work on both sides of the Atlantic absolutely goes both ways. There is a steady stream of people from your agencies and ours visiting their counterparts and working together. And, I'm sure that the landlords, restauranteurs, pub owners, launderers, and everyone else in Yorkshire that takes money from NSA employees stationed there don't mind them much at all. And, of course, your own law enforcement folks are facing all sorts of ne'er-do-wells with ties to international crazies about whom we have better info, and about which our agencies brief your folks every day. Ask, really ask MI5/6 whether they consider their relationship with our FBI/CIA/DIA to be reciprocal or not. My sense is that you're not really interested in the actual day-to-day give and take in those circles because you're pretty much just a crank, anyway. That's OK! Our intel people all get along well enough regardless of what you think.
I can't see how 150 million dollars is not enough to take down at least a couple of the big rings given that they operate on Jolt and Hot Pockets (or whatever passes for that in Romania).
It seems that way, but do some math. It can cost millions just to prosecute a couple of local New York mobsters and have the case stand up to judicial review. Say, $2M. That's 75 such cases, and doesn't take into account the huge overhead of turning up the cases in the first place. Combine that with the costs of international logistics, legal system integration, and the higher cost of acquiring the prosecution targets in the first place, and those overseas bad guy groups are pretty hard to hit. And if the budget is fairly static, the remaining bad guys would probably take delight in getting some of their competition hung out to dry just so they'll know that budget-limited heat will be off of them.
Taking down "at least a couple" of the big rings doesn't put much of dent in it, either. Getting individual offenders (and their friends) to come to terms with cracking/phishing as a lousy way of life - that's worth something because it erodes the new-recruit foundation for the more organized mobs.
About which, of course, the UK would complain mightily if they didn't, themselves, benefit hugely from the intel that the NSA (and the NRO, and the CIA, and the DIA, and the FBI and so on) gather. It's not about the NSA, it's about intel gathering at all. People who whine about the NSA whine about the more local, home-grown MI5/6, too, no doubt. So, that just sounds a little shrill. Oh: and the NSA isn't using stolen credit card info to buy flat screen televisions and sticking the merchants with the bogus charges.
but it is too easy anymore to question why authorities give us this information
Actually, if you've ever met anyone in counter intelligence, or their bretheren in law enforcement that deal with these somewhat less tangible threats, being able to crow about a successful bust is a rare thing. Most of the time these guys have to go home every day without even being able to talk about what they do all day, even when they've really mopped up after a particularly unpleasant character or group. They can talk to each other, but they really feel (correctly, I think) that without coverage of some of their more high profile victories, that people will either not get what they do, or (worse) dream up versions of what they do, mostly based on X-Files re-runs.
Certainly there are always going to be political components to public releases of this sort of thing. But by that I mean "political" in the sense of "making sure that people appreciate you." Not partisan politics, per se, just run of the mill See, I'm Valuable spin. No different than what happens in every office/school/church/family every day. The real accomplishments of a lot of the stealthier intel and defense people are simply never going to make the news, and it's a great frustration to the people that work in those fields. A lot of them quit and go back to the private sector just so they feel they can breathe a little. Of course, anyone in the R&D lab of a private company is going to feel the same way about drug research or battery engineering.
The HangUp Team has been operating in Russia with impunity for years. Some members are allegedly based in Archangelsk, an Arctic Circle city of rusting Soviet nuclear submarines and nearly perpetual winter.
The people we put in jail for cracking and phishing are more comfortable than pretty much anyone living (with impunity or otherwise) in Archangelsk. Never the less, this whole concept of phishing/malware 'colonies' sure implies a complicit (or way, way negligent) government.
Slashdot Mirror
When were you born, the 1700's?
I guess they didn't have passports or birth certificates back when you were born. Or driver's licenses in every state, reciprocally honored in every state (gosh, you could call that a "national ID system!").
As for "spying on citizens"... there have been law enforcement people stealithily pursuing domestic criminals and foreign operatives for over two hundred years. Our government, and every government, does some things "hidden from the citizens" because, in a culture as free as ours, doing things in public also means doing them in front of the people that use that information to harm us. Should every security mechanism we employ, or military code we use to protect people, or the home addresses of unpopular judges, or everyone's tax returns be listed on some web site somewhere?
It will still carry certain aspects of holiness, but it will not be usable for the obligational public readings.
Well, then you can see how someone not raised in that tradition might find that a little baffling. One could come to the conclusion that there's an object being worshipped, rather than a state of being (or a spiritual/philosophical goal) being embraced. I'd have thought that it was more of a "holy is as holy does" rather than the provenance of a particular object having anything other symbolic meaning. Can it be that people truly don't consider their behavior or thoughts or relations to be appropriately worthy because of the nature of the hardcopy that's read from during a ceremony? I'm not being glib - I'm just trying to distill this down to the basics so that I understand it. The boundaries between symbols of history or symbols designed to remind one and inspire one towards purity/integrity of character seem easily confused with the investment of mystical power into a particular collection of paper and ink - the object itself.
Does anyone ever ask "why" to these things? Meaning, if a social custom obliges one to read certain specific words aloud - is the physical material upon which the words are written in any way going to alter the meaning or import of the words themselves? The same words are the same words, aren't they?
I'm truly not trying to be a smart-aleck here, but because I just can't convincingly put my mind somewhere that reason won't take it, I've got to hear someone else explain the thought process. I find this arena (slashdot) to be an interesting venue for such things because people using this site are usually technologists of a sort, and thus can't get through their day without cold reason helping them work through what are ultimately unyielding, irreducible binary issues. So people that can put away their daily exercises in hard logic and then turn towards two printed copies of exactly the same words while considering one "not usable" - well, it's hard for me to reconcile. I certainly understand the urge to mark serious occasions with symbols of the gravity, joy, or tradition that they represent (and hence the appreciation of, essentially, Genuine Antique Written Material - it's nice to know that, say, Great Grandpa in the Old Country used exactly the same book when he got married - it connects one to history a bit), but I can't imagine, then, that anything other than perhaps the very first original of anything would be any more significant than any copy, made by any person or mechanism. The concepts, myths, stories, truths - what have you - should be just as valid regardless of the binding, the fiber in the paper, or the way the ink got on that paper.
That being said, I'm actually pretty sentimental, and do have certain family heirlooms that make certain events just feel right. But certain family concepts are going to be true no matter what I jot them down on, or whether or not I digitize them. Damn us cold-hearted atheists! We're an annoying bunch, aren't we.
Like any linguistic/cultural "tic," devices like "Surely," or "certainly" are of course much abused and are inserted into a lot of sentences just because the speaker feels like they're sounding more authoritative or important when they utter that phrase. I like to think that I only use it when I actually mean it.
Too much use, and these become un-heard (meaning, we tune them out entirely when we hear them... like, "ummm" between words).
I noticed a while ago: you watch or/and listen to quite a bit of BBC news broadcasts, don't you?
I am guessing that from your frequent usage of "surely".
Heh! Actually, no, I only rarely watch the BBC's news broadcasts. I do, though, find the word "surely" to be a useful rhetorical device, as it allows you to begin a sentence with an assertive tone that puts the reader (in the case of slashdot, usually someone that isn't thinking the way I am about something) in a bit of a defensive posture. "Surely, since A=B and B=C, then A=C" translates loosely to "Of course you can't disagree about what I'm about to say about A, B, and C." I believe I picked this up watching too much Monty Python as a child.
I used to worry about sounding pretentious when I deliberately use somewhat more formal or subtle prose in a geek-oriented message forum, but I've seen that taking the high(er) road, tone-wise, often helps to filter out the complete jackasses who communicate only through references to maternal heritage, things scatalogical, or by calling me "stoopid." It's actually pretty amazing how quickly - even on Slashdot - you can draw other, more rational people into a thread just by sticking to a more thoughtful style of prose. There's no question that when I'm tired, or have somehow fallen into a troll's trap, that I'll shoot from the hip with some ill-considered response, but that's not very constructive (though it can feel pretty good!). Anyhow, if there's ever a British tone to my rhetoric, then I'll consider myself lucky, in that I know of no other place with a greater collection (and history of) orators, rhetoriticians, and talented communicators. That British schools still seem, at least more than their US counterparts, to hold their students to that traditional standard, is a delight. It must come from growing up on the same island that spawned Shakespeare. And the Spice Girls, of course.
As an observant Jew, I'd be a little bit skeptical about reading from one...
OK, so I'm entirely too Scando-Anglo in my heritage (considering the topic), and specifically not religious... so this will seem, well, cheeky (at best).
How does any modification to the physical nature of the book/scroll, other than a change that actually alters the words therein, change the message? Meaning, Shakespeare is still Shakespeare whether in paperback, parchement, or HTML. Aren't the (apparently never changing) 300k-some characters in the Torah, well, the same every time? I understand that handling a carefully loved artifact can help put on into an introspective mood, but surely one with invisible changes (microscopic holes) isn't damaging to your spirituality - isn't content king, as it were?
Now, all that being said, how about high-res digital images of a few of the pages? If they're hand made, no two are exactly the same, and matching a high-contrast calligraphic image against a database would surely be no harder than matching digitized finger prints, right?
Anyway, I guess I'm just scratching my head about the "unfit for use" part. Surely the things Moses said and did, for example, aren't any different if the very same words telling the story are on a piece of paper with microscopic holes you can't even see? And, aren't whatever cultural and contemporary spiritual lessons one is supposed to glean from reading those words what really matter? I'd always thougth that "observant Jews" (as you put it) would be more about the message than the medium. But then, I suppose this is really a larger-scale, lukewarm semi-rant about orthodoxy and dogma in general - no need to pick on any particular flavor, but I saw your comment and thus you win my rant-prize for the evening.
That's like saying you're "outside" a video game. I think Neo's body and mind were always right there in the normal physical universe, bounded by all of the normal rules, and he was just (along with everyone else) unusually plugged into a particularly good simulation. You're not in the simulation, the simulation's in you (perceptually, cognitively). So, dreaming (no matter how convincingly) you're superman and can fly doesn't change the laws of physics. My two cents' worth, anyway.
Rather, how long before the nice Men in Black show up at their door, confiscate the code, throw them all in jail, and get Con-gress to pass a law against this sort of thing, on the grounds that it could be used to ADVANCE bioterrorism?
Why is that tinfoil-clad perspective any better (more likely) than wondering how long it will be before they're offered jobs at Fort Dietrich or at any of a number of big contractors that are working on exactly this sort of stuff with defense in mind? They can't hire good people fast enough in that area, they pay's good, the need is real... oh, never mind. That sort of info takes all fun out of wearing the hat. My bad!
And just how do we know our entire reality isn't simply a large scale version of this? Is our universe simply the inside of a box? Does it even matter?
Well, first, no - if we're in a giant box, and the laws of physics defined therein cause us to see and experience what we're seeing and experiencing, then... no. That's the framework of our universe. We can't operate outside of that framework, so kvetching about it isn't very productive.
And second, you'll be getting the munchies very soon, I'm guessing.
Hopefully some real open source people
Because people who work for companies are fake open source people? Sometimes the only people who can still eat, have a roof over their head, and still be able to put in 14 hours a day on a large project (open source or otherwise) are those working for an organization with some actual money to spend. Some of those are (gasp!) corporations.
Now, if you're suggesting that "big biotech" is going to deliberately break a license clause, that's another story. But the big ones are publicly help companies, and are under unbelievable scrutiny, with a lot at stake if they do the wrong things IP-wise.
I'd have thought that if you wanted to get something running for the horizon you'd just trot out some Howard Dean recordings.
I wouldn't replace that, I would append to it for clarity. Make it clear that people there have the same expectation of privacy that they have at, say, their doctor's office - where even the most intimate details, no matter how appropriately protected by HIPAA, can be dug out by court-approved investigations if it looks serious enough (just ask Rush Limbaugh!). Privacy, while using publicly provided equipment and networks, is not the same thing as absolute anonymity. Operating international communications hubs from which people can remotely plant or manipulate data anonymously cannot be considered a long-term, historical, traditional library activity. You indicated earlier that if a librarian thought a user was up to no good that that would the time to act. But how would the librarian know? Looking over the user's shoulder? Evaluating shifty-looking visitor hair styles? And even with those suspicions, however justified, what mechanism would the librarian use to demonstrate the user's illegal activities, absent some form of logging and user identity?
I deal with sensitive (very) private (very) information that could impact people's family finances, careers, businesses, employers, investors and more every day. I value my privacy, and the privacy of others to a nearly religious degree. Now, I also spend a good part of my day dealing with criminals trying to break into, steal, deface, and otherwise devalue the very things that I build and protect. Many, many of those attacks originate from public networks - including schools, libraries, dorms, etc. Because I know that information can be properly squirreled away, and I know that I don't have to give it up absent court orders, I'm comfortable with my position. Privacy and law enforcement are not mutually exclusive.
But isn't that the whole point of logs of all sorts? It's data you can go to if you need to, and if a judge says you have the authority to. That's just as true of a publicly held companies books as it is school enrollment records, medical records, and all sorts of other quite private things that are only made not private when there's a convincing reason for it. But to spend tax dollars on services that are shown to be regularly used for nefarious things, and not even have the capacity to know, under court orders, who was (say, cracking into school records, or sending ZIPed up financial files to a recipient in Hamas or crypto goodies to North Korea, whatever) from a library's equipment - that's just dumb, when that info can be secured just fine, but can't be synthesized if it's never logged.
We protect each library user's right to privacy and confidentiality with respect to information sought or received and resources consulted, borrowed, acquired or transmitted.
I guess I'm wondering if that principle was written before or after libraries started doubling as internet cafes? I'm not being glib, I'm just thinking that it makes perfect sense when you look at the library as research tool, but it's a little anachronistic now that they can be used as cybercrime field offices. Just wondering, in real life, how many library IT or management people truly don't worry about that sort of thing, and can't conceive of any means or measure they'd embrace to discourage or, in the case of a court order, manage to dig up logs related to, illegal use.
Because librarians think that distributing information is good, even when some of it is false.
But in the case of sitting down at a web-connected workstation in a library to launch a worm, or interact with a bot network, or send fraudulant mail, you're not dealing with the same issues. The library is less and less about shelves full of books, and they can't really make their web access useful if people can't type things into web browsers. Making such things minimally useful to patrons immediately makes them very useful to criminals, too.
but surely getting something for free or getting it for $0.25 shouldn't make such a fundamental difference to whether you have a right to expect privacy or not.
First, nothing is free. You're paying for it, or someone else (like taxpayers) is paying for it. Taxpayers, individually, have no choice in the specifics of how those funds are used, and so there are rules and regs about taxpayer-funded facilities of all sorts that keep the use of those things reasonable to most people. Whether you're using a web workstation at a library (paid for out of local taxes) or you're using a payphone into which you're putting a quarter - someone is paying. But when you're paying, you can certainly expect a different privacy framework than when you use something that I'm paying for.
No, I'm not confused about this. The thread was initially about biometrics (like a thumbprint scan) as the user sits down to use the machine in question. That's exactly what prevents the "old chap" from being implicated in the illegal activities of someone else attempting to act in his name. Agreed that the original article is talking about anonymous borrowing (using a cash balance as collateral), but the thread wandered off into the earlier discussions about biometrics in the library - and that's what I was responding too. Sorry if it's off topic.
But you're not walking up to a payphone and getting it "free" because it's been funded with tax dollars. And your friend's house, phone, and net access is not a taxpayer-funded "public" facility. That's the whole point: if someone wants to use something that we (as taxpayers) have paid for, then that person can't complain when there are some limitations in the nature of that thing we bought for them. If they don't like it, they can use their own personal systems (just like we do), and if their reason for going to the library to surf is so that they don't leave a trail from their personal system, you've got to wonder what they're hiding. Never the less, this isn't any different than any other government-provided service. You can't get welfare, medicare, city services, a license to drive on public roads, or really much of anything else like that without introducing yourself. Why should sitting down in front of a computer and network paid for by me (and you) be a wide-open avenue, with no recourse, for people to attack me (and you)? None of this applies when you put money into a payphone, because you're purchasing a service from a common or private carrier. None of this applies when you use your friend's equipment and services, because he's doing the same.
Well, I think anonymity really is what it's all about. We're not talking about who's borrowing which books, here, anyway. We're talking about who's walking in to use net-connected boxes to, say, interact with sites and message boards that are being hosted by killers, or who are using them to log into a mailbox somewhere and download the day's collections from their phishing bots, or who are using them to send threatening e-mails to fellow students, etc.
Certainly the "cost" of retrieving that data should be in the cost of persuading a panel of judges that it's appropriate to do so. I don't think there's any merit in deliberately ratcheting up the actual tax dollars it costs to pursue a scam artist, stalker, or Hamas money launderer just because it's a form of brake on the law enforcement people. You're saying make it actually expensive and time consuming because we can't trust ourselves. I'm saying set the legal bar higher, and save the money (or spend it on things, like education, that might convince some twits to do something besides rip people off for a living).
Septic Tanks - Yanks
Huh. You learn something every day. Now, I suppose I'm not supposed to consider that a term of endearment, am I? You know, like when I use "squareheads" when referring to my Scandinavian relatives? I mean, sure, "tanks" rhymes with "yanks," but I always thought that the Brits were a bit more poetic than that, even when they're just in the mood to insult someone. Hell, especially when they're in the mood to insult someone.
Remember the old, completely paper-driven library cards of 30+ years ago? The borrower's name was written on the card, and every borrower before them was on a permanent list. No anonymity there at all. More recently, you were issued a bar-coded card that tracked what you borrowed against your name. No anonymity there, either (because, if you don't return the book, they need to know who's running around with a $50 copy of a coffee-table Leonardo DaVinci collection, or whatever).
Now, you walk into a library, as you've been able to do for centuries, pull a book off the shelf, sit down, and read it. Put it back. There's no tracking involved, never has been (except perhaps at the Library Of Congress and some other huge collections where you have to put in a request for the book to be brought out - and there's been no anonymity there, either). But if you want to walk away with the book, they want to know who's got it. Why is that a bad thing? If you want to temporarily take posession of something that the taxpayers paid for (or which was donated to the community by a private party), it's certainly reasonable for the community to have in place a way to get hold of that person when they don't return the item, or to charge them a fee if they hang onto it for longer than is reasonable.
Now, you walk into a library and want to use the internet. Fine. But suppose your entire purpose of using that service is to phish, defraud, or otherwise be bad? If some merchant somewhere tracks a fraud attempt, or a bank tracks the use of a stolen credit card back to an IP address mapped to a machine in a facility provided by taxpayers, isn't it reasonable to be able to figure out who was driving at the time they were committing a crime? The fingerprinting issue was about computer use. Biometrics are about making sure you are who you say you are, so that lifting an acquaintence's card doesn't allow you to commit crimes in her name using public facilities.
That said, I don't think I'd want a bored IT intern at a library able to troll through proxy logs and see, by name, who was looking at what on the web. Biometrics should just be a hash, and that sort of log data should be just like financial transaction data, with need-to-know one-way storage. Yes, that can be cracked. But so can everything if you can't trust anyone, ever. If a municipality, county, or school wants to continue to offer free computer/net use, but wants to mitigate the obviously real risk of people running scams from their network, they should certainly have the option of doing something about it. It's all about transparency, though: letting the users know what's being collected when they sign on, and generally how it's being protected and under what circumstances (subpeona, etc) it can be retrieved.
Unlike you septics
Um... septics? As much as I enjoy translating British witticisms so that us poor, dumb rebellious colonials can unnerstan 'em, that one's just not cross-referencing, I'm afraid. You'll have to find another, less subtle way to make your rhetorical points.
we have morals and laws
Which definately explains the huge public surveillance infrastructure that you've built, largely in reaction to years of bombings in your own smoldering little civil conflict. Darn those high-falutin' laws and morals! They don't seem to stop people from being evil, or from having to react to (and prepare for action by) those people. To the extent that both the UK and the US are proponents of democracy, intelligence work on both sides of the Atlantic absolutely goes both ways. There is a steady stream of people from your agencies and ours visiting their counterparts and working together. And, I'm sure that the landlords, restauranteurs, pub owners, launderers, and everyone else in Yorkshire that takes money from NSA employees stationed there don't mind them much at all. And, of course, your own law enforcement folks are facing all sorts of ne'er-do-wells with ties to international crazies about whom we have better info, and about which our agencies brief your folks every day. Ask, really ask MI5/6 whether they consider their relationship with our FBI/CIA/DIA to be reciprocal or not. My sense is that you're not really interested in the actual day-to-day give and take in those circles because you're pretty much just a crank, anyway. That's OK! Our intel people all get along well enough regardless of what you think.
I can't see how 150 million dollars is not enough to take down at least a couple of the big rings given that they operate on Jolt and Hot Pockets (or whatever passes for that in Romania).
It seems that way, but do some math. It can cost millions just to prosecute a couple of local New York mobsters and have the case stand up to judicial review. Say, $2M. That's 75 such cases, and doesn't take into account the huge overhead of turning up the cases in the first place. Combine that with the costs of international logistics, legal system integration, and the higher cost of acquiring the prosecution targets in the first place, and those overseas bad guy groups are pretty hard to hit. And if the budget is fairly static, the remaining bad guys would probably take delight in getting some of their competition hung out to dry just so they'll know that budget-limited heat will be off of them.
Taking down "at least a couple" of the big rings doesn't put much of dent in it, either. Getting individual offenders (and their friends) to come to terms with cracking/phishing as a lousy way of life - that's worth something because it erodes the new-recruit foundation for the more organized mobs.
About which, of course, the UK would complain mightily if they didn't, themselves, benefit hugely from the intel that the NSA (and the NRO, and the CIA, and the DIA, and the FBI and so on) gather. It's not about the NSA, it's about intel gathering at all. People who whine about the NSA whine about the more local, home-grown MI5/6, too, no doubt. So, that just sounds a little shrill. Oh: and the NSA isn't using stolen credit card info to buy flat screen televisions and sticking the merchants with the bogus charges.
but it is too easy anymore to question why authorities give us this information
Actually, if you've ever met anyone in counter intelligence, or their bretheren in law enforcement that deal with these somewhat less tangible threats, being able to crow about a successful bust is a rare thing. Most of the time these guys have to go home every day without even being able to talk about what they do all day, even when they've really mopped up after a particularly unpleasant character or group. They can talk to each other, but they really feel (correctly, I think) that without coverage of some of their more high profile victories, that people will either not get what they do, or (worse) dream up versions of what they do, mostly based on X-Files re-runs.
Certainly there are always going to be political components to public releases of this sort of thing. But by that I mean "political" in the sense of "making sure that people appreciate you." Not partisan politics, per se, just run of the mill See, I'm Valuable spin. No different than what happens in every office/school/church/family every day. The real accomplishments of a lot of the stealthier intel and defense people are simply never going to make the news, and it's a great frustration to the people that work in those fields. A lot of them quit and go back to the private sector just so they feel they can breathe a little. Of course, anyone in the R&D lab of a private company is going to feel the same way about drug research or battery engineering.
I liked this:
The HangUp Team has been operating in Russia with impunity for years. Some members are allegedly based in Archangelsk, an Arctic Circle city of rusting Soviet nuclear submarines and nearly perpetual winter.
The people we put in jail for cracking and phishing are more comfortable than pretty much anyone living (with impunity or otherwise) in Archangelsk. Never the less, this whole concept of phishing/malware 'colonies' sure implies a complicit (or way, way negligent) government.