That ex-privacy Czar wrote: "In Canada, it is well established that we are not required to identify ourselves to police unless we are being arrested or we are carrying out a licensed activity such as driving. This right to anonymity with regard to the state is a crucial privacy right... In Canada, we are not required to carry any identification - let alone to identify ourselves on demand - unless we are carrying out a licensed activity such as driving. Introducing a national identity card, even if it were "voluntary" at first, would push us toward becoming the kind of society where the police can stop anyone on the street and demand, "Your papers, please.""
So unless hoards of private Canadian citizens run about and demand (ever so politely) ID, that seems to be one society where you don't involuntarily have to show ID. You choose to do so when engaged in licenced or business activities.
Within the US it generally has been the same- although we do require carrying ID in most (if not all?) states. But you generally don't have to identify yourself if you are not engaged in a licenced activity (to the gov't) or a business transaction (to the public). If you don't return home or to your car that stalker with a clipboard will have to rely on luck (meeting someone who does know who you are) in order to get your name. Returning to your car alone wouldn't do it in CA: DMV info isn't public. And I'd argue that the instant you discovered a person was following you around all day- that would instantly be considered harrassing and alarming, absent any other activities on their part.
Of course, in California there is an explicit right to privacy built right into our constitution: Article 1 Section 1. It isn't defined there, but it exists there. And privacy as "the right not to be known against [your] will" (which is different from pure anonymity) is an implicit right - a necessary (although not always sufficient) condition - within other rights as well. Freedom of religion or assembly doesn't mean quite as much if you are compeled to reveal your religion or membership, for example.
or "freedom to be anonymous in public" then no, we have no right to privacy- there is no reasonable ability to have privacy- in public. But I'm thinking that the word "privacy" is being applied to too many concepts, here. If it wasn't so late I'd try to distinguish 'privacy as anonymity' vs 'Privacy The Right': two sets that intersect but don't fully overlap.
Generally, the judiciary only comes into play when the police want to go somewhere where you have some reasonable expectation that what you're doing is not something that the public at large is privy to - your house, your place of business, your telephone, and so forth.
If a member of the public was following you around all day, taking notes- you'd get a restraining order for stalking. And while the public at large can see "someone who looks like a Slashdot poster" walking around the mall, that public generally doesn't have the right to know your name: we don't have to wear nametags in public. People can look at us but they won't know us unless we've previously chosen to reveal our names to them.
Going back to the essay within my comment: the former privacy Czar's definition included "the right to control access to ourselves and to personal information about us... The right not to be known against our will - indeed, the right to be anonymous except when we choose to identify ourselves..." Using this definition, one could perhaps have some form of privacy even without pure anonymity, if one's name was the only thing we had to reveal to other people (if such were possible: telling your true name can just about result in a credit report, nowadays)
As to 200 years ago, I'd argue that the Founding Fathers had more ability to "disappear into the crowd" than you give them credit for: they certainly seem to have had enough illegal, back-of-tavern meetings to set up a whole country. During the day they might have had smaller crowds for less anonymity, but at night streets were darker, and collars could be pulled up. The person riding from New York to Boston could probably just plunk down coins to get a room and a beer: far more private than the ID and credit card we have to show now.
What good is a face mask if they know what building you came from? (but I shouldn't comment on Zindell- been a long time since I read Neverness and I haven't read the rest, yet. Maybe Zindell makes it work... I know that in Baxter and Clarke's 'Light...' they also try masks as a way to foil the watchers, but again, what if they know where you live?)
As to going from human to machine memory: I don't know that the number of faulty arrests will drop, either as an absolute or relative number. For example, if we relied on machines, not traffic officers, for speeding violations both the absolute and relative number of speeders would go up in the machine world. Of course bad work by humans is terrible. But I'm thinking that faster, automated and weakly controlled (at least as Ashcroft wants it) work by machines isn't better. As its late I'll just quote:
"But there also will be tangible, specific harm.
The more information government compiles about us, the more of it will be wrong. That's simply a fact of life.
Several years ago, after the existence of Human Resources Development Canada's "Longitudinal Labour Force File" was brought to light by my predecessor, many people demanded to see the information that had been held about them. They were astonished by the number of factual errors. That was only a research database, so its inaccuracies probably would have remained relatively benign even if it had not been dismantled.
But if our privacy becomes ever more systematically invaded by the state for purposes of assessing our behavior and making judgments about us, wrong information and misinterpretations will have potential consequences.
If information that is actually about someone else is wrongly applied to us, if wrong facts make it appear that we've done things we haven't, if perfectly innocent behavior is misinterpreted as suspicious because authorities don't know our reasons or our circumstances, we will be at risk of finding ourselves in trouble in a society where everyone is regarded as a suspect. By the time we clear our names and establish our innocence, we may have suffered irreparable financial or social harm...
Those purposes, by the Government's own account, include everything from routine income tax investigations to trying to flag Canadians as potential pedophiles or money launderers solely on the basis of their travel patterns.
This is unprecedented. The Government of Canada has absolutely no business creating a massive database of personal information about all law-abiding Canadians that is collected without our consent from third parties, not to provide us with any service but simply to have it available to use against us if it ever becomes expedient to do so. Compiling dossiers on the private activities of all law-abiding citizens is the sort of thing the Stasi secret police used to do in the former East Germany. It has no place in a free and democratic society...
looks like they have Interlingua and Esperanto both of the "planned international auxiliary language" category. But nothing says universal like "planned interplanetary auxiliary language," and it looks likes there's as many Klingon speakers as there are Matsés speakers, so where is it? But I guess they haven't finished the Klingon Shakespeare yet.
As to the first point- no, its not much different from a cop with a laptop, but it is very different from a cop with a coffee cup. As I argue elsewhere it all changes when you bring in permanent records, automated searches and Moore's law.
Yes, until a few centuries people didn't have anonymity if they stayed in the towns they were born in. They also didn't have voting rights, freedom of assembly / press / religion / petition / etc. That doesn't make those rights any less real- it just makes olden days seem barbaric. Privacy might be a younger right- but rights don't have an age of majority. And technology today can be used to take away other rights- but that doesn't make those rights "falsely expected," just in need of more guarding.
...the fringe today becomes the mainstream in the future. That is how a healthy, dynamic society works. That is how our society works.
You can't have the same sort of counterculture in a monitored society. It gets driven even further underground. You won't find the counterculture in the small towns where everybody knows one another. Usually the youth, full of anger and novelty and art and invention, leave those small towns to discover themselves in the city. Will they do it as well if mom, or big brother, is watching?...The founders of the USA knew this. They wrote much of their founding doctrine anonymously in the Federalist Papers. That legacy exists today online... They are boiling, opening doors, and changing the world.
We might be safer if people had less privacy. We could be as safe as the people in the small towns, which have low crime rates. We would also be as lukewarm as the people in those towns; content but never boiling."
[and anecdotally, all those Westerns with the "tall dark stranger" coming to town couldn't have happened if you never had strangers. People could see you come to town or go to someone's house. But once you left town, or went around the corner- even the best gossipers weren't going to know too much more about you.]
"...But though we tend to take it for granted, privacy - the right to control access to ourselves and to personal information about us - is at the very core of our lives. It is a fundamental human right precisely because it is an innate human need, an essential condition of our freedom, our dignity and our sense of well-being...
...A popular response is: "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear."
By that reasoning, of course, we shouldn't mind if the police were free to come into our homes at any time just to look around, if all our telephone conversations were monitored, if all our mail were read, if all the protections developed over centuries were swept away. It's only a difference of degree from the intrusions already being implemented or considered.
The truth is that we all do have something to hide, not because it's criminal or even shameful, but simply because it's private. We carefully calibrate what we reveal about ourselves to others. Most of us are only willing to have a few things known about us by a stranger, more by an acquaintance, and the most by a very close friend or a romantic partner. The right not to be known against our will - indeed, the right to be anonymous except when we choose to identify ourselves - is at the very core of human dignity, autonomy and freedom.
Previously in public I might not have had a full expectation of privacy, but I had an expectation of humanity. We all did. A policeman glances at you. Unless he knows you, he doesn't have your name. Even if he does, unless he writes it down he won't remember much more than "I saw Fred earlier this week, perhaps near Crispy Cream?"(1) He knows nothing about where you were or where you're going if you're out of his view.
A camera tapes you. If one tape-reviewer doesn't know you, he can ask until he finds someone who does. The tape can be matched with other tapes to see where you were and where you're going. The tape will be stored and reviewed by ever better automatic recognition tech, and those results stored in ever larger and cheaper databases.
I think this is a quantitative change in the "expectation of privacy" one has in public.
We are getting very close to "P-day" (coined by Brad Templeton): the last day of privacy, because from then on all our actions will be tracked retroactively if not currently. Or, as he puts it: "So you're already being watched. The computer that is watching you just hasn't been born quite yet."
Two good essays on why this type of surveillance hurts society and violates our rights:
From the Best Essay Ever on why privacy is a fundamental right: [Its not too long- just go read it]
"[Talking about Canada...] If these measures are allowed to go forward and the privacy-invasive principles they represent are accepted [then before long] our movements through the public streets will be relentlessly observed through proliferating police video surveillance cameras. Eventually, these cameras will likely be linked to biometric face-recognition technologies... [indentifying] us by name and address as we go about our law-abiding business in the streets... I am well aware that these scenarios are likely to sound, to most people, like alarmist exaggeration. Certainly, the society I am describing bears no relation to the Canada we know. But anyone who is inclined to dismiss the risks out of hand should pause first to consider that the privacy-invasive measures already being implemented or developed right now would have been considered unthinkable in our country just a short year ago."
The place to stop unjustified intrusions on a fundamental human right such as privacy is right at the outset, at the very first attempt to enter where the state has no business treading. Otherwise, the terrain will have been conceded, and the battle lost...
Imagine, then, how we will feel if it becomes routine for bureaucrats, police officers and other agents of the state to paw through all the details of our lives: where and when we travel, and with whom; who are the friends and acquaintances with whom we have telephone conversations or e-mail correspondence; what we are interested in reading or researching; where we like to go and what we like to do...
If we allow the state to sweep away the normal walls of privacy that protect the details of our lives, we will consign ourselves psychologically to living in a fishbowl...Anyone who has lived in a totalitarian society can attest that what often felt most oppressive was precisely the lack of privacy.
A Watched Populace Never Boils "People often ask why a loss of privacy... is a restriction on freedom.... Some welcome it, feeling that the extra surveillance will cut down on crime, and provide some increased level of safety or imagined safety. But the truth is that invasions of privacy invade our freedoms quite directly. This is true even if the surveillance isn't abused by the watchers, even though history shows that it always is.
When we feel watched, we feel less free. We censor ourselve
Rather than giving an example of plant breeding, I think a though experiment can be much more fun and provocative if we talk about us instead.
Lets say that the state of California collectively wakes up and knows it should be strong like Schwarzenegger. Comparing the two methods:
For selective breeding, the state would set up tax breaks and other incentives to get as many people to use as many WWE members as egg and sperm donors as possible, and also to pay non-strong people to move to Nevada. After a few generations of intense ad campaigns about how great it is to use fertility clinics and how sexy it is to bench-press Mini Coopers: voila- stronger Californians.
For genetic engineering, we'd go out and find the different muscle gene that makes chimps 10x as strong as humans. Substitute that into all new CA embryos: voila- stronger Californians in one generation. Unless of course we accidentally spliced in multiple genes: dunno the results but hopefully they'd use Bonobo not troglodytes...
Although perhaps chimps aren't the best example- we could probably use selective breeding for that as well- just a little tweaking needed on chromosome 23. (If Chimps and Humans were essays, the plagarism detector would spit back "98%+ similarity. Human has 23 paragraphs, Chimp has 24 paragraphs, but Human 23 is just Chimp 23 and 24 smashed together with a run-on sentence...")
Instead, for genetic engineering, we find the gene that makes tiger muscle much stronger than human muscle. We splice that into all new CA embryos: voila- stronger Californians in one generation. Unless of course we accidentally spliced in multiple genes: voila: a furry's dream of progressive, recycling, salad loving Kzin-people in one generation.
In this thought experiment- are selective breeding and genetic engineering the same? Stronger humans through ad campaigns are the same as stronger humans through splicing Carnivora genes into primates? That because humans have already done a wonderful job of SB through sexual selection [especially wonderful given the low genetic diversity our species has overall (compared to most other mammals- even the 40k chimps have more diversity than all 6 billion humans)], we're not doing anything new by splicing genes from elsewhere?
Sexual selection within humanity has resulted in both the !Kung and Watusi in the same geographic regions. If we really wanted to we could get all humans to looks far more !Kung or Watusi - using that massive ad campaign first developed in California- without any genetic engineering at all. But that's far different from bringing in genes from other orders/classes/phylums, isn't it? [Speaking of which, perhaps some rhodopsin could be nice for the days you want to work outside but you forgot your lunch. Any Genies (genetic engineers) out there wanting to give this a go?]
As I commented in an earlier story on gen-modded grass, the overall problem with current biotechnology is that it is proprietary / closed source / locked hood genetics. The applications might be wonderful, but the methodology and implementations leave a lot to be desired if you like open source science.
Just like with proprietary software, if you see some nifty new feature you'd like to add you your own application, you can't. In proprietary software you can't just buy the algorithm: you have to buy the whole package (and perhaps the support package and perhaps the computer to run it on). In much of current biotechnology you can't just buy the nifty new gene, you have to buy the whole potato (and you only get a limited choice of potato types if any choice at all) *and* you're just leasing the potato *and* you have to keep buying the upgrades each year. Smart Breeding, in contrast, is a close equivalent of open source software.
Some problems with the current methods of biotech - using software as the analogy / comparison - include:
Specific problems solved by genetic engineering can also be solved in other ways. Word isn't the only way to write a document. Golden rice isn't the only way to get more vitamin A to people.
Opportunity Costs- what do you lose if you spend a big chunk of money on a single proprietary solution? You lose flexibility. Continuing with Golden Rice: sure, its gets people more vitamin A. But if instead you spend the same money to give people wider access to vitamin-rich veggies you *also* give them more of the other vitamins and phytochemicals that we've selected for in those veggies for 3000+ years.
The food itself is secondary to locking you into a company's support products and support cycle. The problem that Montanto is trying to solve isn't "how can farmers improve crop yields and reduce weeds?" Monsanto's problem is "How can we lock farmers into using our weedkillers?"
The proprietary product is often based on (taken from / stolen from) older open source projects.
they're closed source, top-down implementations that lead to monocultures. For example: Andean potato farmers- they developed hundreds of different potato varieties over the years: buttery tasting ones, meaty tasting ones, ones that grow in drought / shade / various altitudes... and these potatoes could be susceptible to a particular pest (quite likely one or more of their varieties already had resistance: smart breeding is how you'd get that trait out from the one potato into the rest). A major North American company came in saying "Hey, our potato + pesticide combination is resistant to the pest. Buy both from us, then you'll have no problems. By the way our potato is patented- don't think about crossbreeding it." At the same time they launched a major advertising (FUD) campaign in major potato buying markets saying "Hey, our potato is the best most modern potato. Don't buy anything else." So farmers couldn't just patch their own potatoes- they had to buy into the product / product cycle upgrade of the NA company. Sounds familiar?
they have all or nothing security models (they focus on zero tolerance for weeds / pests: in the long run this will be more expensive than "accept a marginal and mildly fluctuating loss" as they learned with citrus pests in California and Florida)
They break standards. For example, BT is a bacteria/toxin used by organic farmers for decades to kill certain insect pests. At the previous rate of use- as a spray- there was a very, very low probability of insects developing resistance. Decades of use hadn't produced it. Now that BT has been spliced into crop plants, the widespread planting of monocultures of BT crops means BT resistance is increasingly likely. As this happens the non-organic farmers can mo
Also check out the definitive list of creationist claims, especially "CH400-CH599: Flood" for good answers to the most common creationist claims about the flood.
Going back to the "Major Problems" article, take for example "6. Implications of a Flood," where the author mentions:
How do you explain the relative ages of mountains? For example, why weren't the Sierra Nevadas eroded as much as the Appalachians during the Flood?
Why is there no evidence of a flood in ice core series? Ice cores from Greenland have been dated back more than 40,000 years by counting annual layers. [Johnsen et al, 1992,; Alley et al, 1993] A worldwide flood would be expected to leave a layer of sediments, noticeable changes in salinity and oxygen isotope ratios, fractures from buoyancy and thermal stresses, a hiatus in trapped air bubbles, and probably other evidence. Why doesn't such evidence show up?
How are the polar ice caps even possible? Such a mass of water as the Flood would have provided sufficient buoyancy to float the polar caps off their beds and break them up. They wouldn't regrow quickly. In fact, the Greenland ice cap would not regrow under modern (last 10 ky) climatic conditions.
Why did the Flood not leave traces on the sea floors? A year long flood should be recognizable in sea bottom cores by (1) an uncharacteristic amount of terrestrial detritus, (2) different grain size distributions in the sediment, (3) a shift in oxygen isotope ratios (rain has a different isotopic composition from seawater), (4) a massive extinction, and (n) other characters. Why do none of these show up?
Why is there no evidence of a flood in tree ring dating? Tree ring records go back more than 10,000 years, with no evidence of a catastrophe during that time. [Becker & Kromer, 1993; Becker et al, 1991; Stuiver et al, 1986]
And many, many more reasonable questions that should be answered by anyone claiming that sometime within the past 10k years a global flood covered the entire earth.
On the flip side- one can certainly do a thought experiment of what would happen if a "space ark" landed on a planet otherwise empty of land life. After 10k years- what would one expect to see on this planet?
The "diversity gradient" of land animals should start near the landing site and fade out from there.
Even the largest continents- if disconnected from the landing zone- would show signs of "Island Biogeography". That is, there'd be far less diversity of animals relative to the "landing zone continent." A larger percentage of mammals on the disconnected continents would be flying or swimming mammals, or the descendents of tiny mammals that could have arrived on vegetative rafts.
While non-swimming/flying animals could be brought by humans, one would expect a paucity of non-edible animals. The polynesians brought domesticated animals from island to island: they for some reason didn't bring tigers or Komodo dragons.
Our planet does not look at all like this hypothetical "all life came from one ark" planet. And in our history, the paradigm of "life spread out from a single garden or ark" was severely cracked long before Darwin. Biologists/explorers of the time (almost all creationists) strongly wanted the distribution of animals to match Genesis: it didn't, no matter how hard they tried.
As I wrote elsewhere here, the use rate of encryption for email is ridiculously low (less than 10% for Diffie of all people!?). And the UI and ease of use for encryption add-ons aren't so hot either.
So we've ended up in this strange zone where email could be encrypted as a matter of course, but it isn't. There is no inherent reason why email has to be public, but by our design (or lack thereof), this major massive system of communications is public, and for what benefit?
I'm not saying that people must be forced to use encryption, but that the ability to choose it should be there. To me choice means the two alternatives are sitting there, equally available... If there were big "Send: This is Private" and "Send: This is Public" buttons. Right now the "choice" is "Send" vs "Spend hours retrofitting your system and writing to your recipient to explain to them how to read your email, and getting your grandpa to use it- just give up trying to go there..."
As an analogy, if I say "lets start building doors and doorjams with locks built in," I don't think that equals "force everyone to lock their door." To me it means "make it as easy to choose to lock your door as keep it unlocked."
Imagine an alternative history where we on "Exchange-Dot" are talking about telephone design...
"Phone calls are on party lines, anyone can listen" (Score: 3 Just Delightful)
Of course phone calls are public- if you want privacy send a telegram. Get over it (Score 5: A Pearl of Wisdom)
"If you want privacy, get a private line and ask the person you wish to call to install a private line too."(Score: 2)
"But what if I know I might want to talk with more than that one person, wouldn't it be better if all phones were private lines? What if my elderly aunt cannot easily get a private line?"(Score 3: Quite)
"What, have you something to hide? What type of gentleman are You? (score 0: Moderately Scandalous)
"You should just refuse to talk with people on party lines: if your dear Aunt in Toledo is unable to install a private line then she isn't worthy of conversation" (Score: 1)
"You have the right to a private line, but demanding all lines are private? How about we let people choose?"(Score: 1)
Now an influential company - GoG&G - is proposing a massive new rollout of telephone availability. And a Mr. B. Templeton, chairman of the Telephonic Frontier Foundation asks GoG&G to consider designing private lines right into the system. He's the sort of person who wants widespread private phone calls, writing:
"The key to deploying private phone calls is to make it happen with close to zero involvement by the user... The reason is that I converse with tons of people, not just my closest Bell/linux-using electrophilosopher friends. If I want my conversations to be private, I have to get the general public using private lines...."
It, in retrospect, wouldn't be such a bad request for consideration by Google / GoG&G.
Some posters seem resigned to the idea that email isn't private- its a postcard, its public. True, right now one has to treat it as such: all sorts of conversations you can have on the phone or written out in snailmail ought not to be held via email.
This could be changed. Technologies have gone from public (non-private) to private and protected before. Consider the switch from party lines to private lines in the telephone system. Now that we live in the 21st century shouldn't we demand a similar switch for email?
Because privacy is, at its core, a fundamental human right. Every communication system we use should have privacy built in: if its not, there should be a very good reason why not. "Oh dear, it will take extra computational cycles" is not a good reason, not with the small footprint crypto already here. "Oh, Ashcroft doesn't want it" is even a worse reason.
"If Parliament and the public at large have been slow to react, it is probably because for most people, most of the time, privacy is a pretty abstract concept. Like our health, it's something we tend not to think about until we lose it - and then discover that our lives have been very unpleasantly, and perhaps irretrievably, altered.
But though we tend to take it for granted, privacy - the right to control access to ourselves and to personal information about us - is at the very core of our lives. It is a fundamental human right precisely because it is an innate human need, an essential condition of our freedom, our dignity and our sense of well-being."
"...A popular response is: "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.
"By that reasoning, of course, we shouldn't mind if the police were free to come into our homes at any time just to look around, if all our telephone conversations were monitored, if all our mail were read, if all the protections developed over centuries were swept away. It's only a difference of degree from the intrusions already being implemented or considered.
"The truth is that we all do have something to hide, not because it's criminal or even shameful, but simply because it's private. We carefully calibrate what we reveal about ourselves to others. Most of us are only willing to have a few things known about us by a stranger, more by an acquaintance, and the most by a very close friend or a romantic partner. The right not to be known against our will -- indeed, the right to be anonymous except when we choose to identify ourselves -- is at the very core of human dignity, autonomy and freedom.
"If we allow the state to sweep away the normal walls of privacy that protect the details of our lives, we will consign ourselves psychologically to living in a fishbowl. Even if we suffered no other specific harm as a result, that alone would profoundly change how we feel. Anyone who has lived in a totalitarian society can attest that what often felt most oppressive was precisely the lack of privacy...
"...The bottom line is this: If we have to live our lives weighing every action, every communication, every human contact, wondering what agents of the state might find out about it, analyze it, judge it, possibly misconstrue it, and somehow use it to our detriment, we are not truly free. That sort of life is characteristic of totalitarian countries, not a free and open society..."
"The key to deploying encrypted mail is to make it happen with close to zero involvement by the user. This is hard, and requires some security compromises that have made cryptographers uneasy in the past.
However, I have come down to the view that getting encryption widely deployed, even with some minor flaws, is better than getting perfectly designed encryption (if that's even possible) that hardly anybody uses.
The reason is that I exchange mail with tons of people, not just my closest linux-using nerd friends. If I want my mail to be private, I have to get the general public encrypting. This is a particular concern with new laws just passed granting U.S. law enforcment the power to read the "header" of a message -- including the subject lines of E-mails without a warrant. In addition, other nations have always had such powers, and on top of it all, most ISP backbones and mail servers are poorly secured from snooping by almost any system cracker trying to invade your privacy...
Then you'll ask the technology companies most likely to listen to a request to add easy-to-use encryption to their product. Whatever Google could come up with might be much better than the poor-UI, hard to install, barely any use email encryption systems currently around. Just a nice, clean button saying "I feel Private" or somesuch thing.
Current use of encryption for email is terribly low: I remember when Whitfield Diffie was asked at a Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference a few years back how many emails sent to him were encrypted. Because you'd expect him to be way up at the top of the list of people who get encrypted email... under 10% was his reply. Oh, and Zimmerman was also in the audience... same answer.
In what way is asking a service to have more technology built in from the get-go the same as "handicapping the technological process"? Microsoft, I think, has done a lot more stymieing of technology by not having built in good security from the start... all those million-man-hours of time spent on installing the latest patch that updates the previous patch...
Anyways, if you're a geek who likes new blinking things [and BTempleton is obviously a geek who likes Akihabara and new technologies] you might want those technologies to be widely used without interference from, say, Ashcroft. Note that he isn't saying "lets create great new laws to apply to these new technologies." He is asking "what happens when old laws get applied to great new technologies, and are there ways to get around any obvious upcoming problems?" ECPA already exists, and ASP style email storage could run into ECPA's limitations. Don't we want to think about this now, not later?
Remember that one of the EFF's first cases happened when the US government thought it could seize an entire BBS in order to investigate one user's email? Or that the US government wanted everyone to use weakened encryption with backdoors built in? Or that unchallenged yet idiotic patents hurt technological development?
Its the job of technologists / groups like the EFF to watch for potential crashes at the intersections of rights-reducing governments (or technology-ignorant governments) with great new technologies. And then, as in this case, suggest ways to prevent the intersection from ever happening (built in encryption could be valuable for that). Because otherwise, court cases are very expensive, and the technologists don't always win.
This costume (another view by itself) while actually designed to look like The Man, has been attributed Tron-ness at SF conventions. (Which surprisingly are still light on el-wire as costuming method. At Burning Man El-wire is almost passe, you really need flamethrowers to stand out (which generally are not allowed at SF conventions, though).
Rant mode on...But enough with the body insults! Haven't you ever seen bodies in all their glorious colors and shapes before? If yours isn't in the top 1% of bodies, do you live in a Burka? The costumer is having fun- lots of other posters here seem to be having bitter parties out of some misguided idea that if you aren't perfect- don't be visible? If you don't have the equivalent of a 2004 Mercedes M-class body, don't show up on the road? Have you ever looked at the great minds in our field? You'd really forbid them from being in your hottub (California / silicon valley style) just because they're not the most aesthetically pleasing bodies? Bah! Rant mode sputtering off...
Even legal journals have to (self-censorship)
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AmEx vs. rec.humor.funny
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· Score: 2, Informative
One of the largest newsletters going out to free-speech advocates, lawyers, judges and the like has to do this. This article in 2001 covered it. Its because of all the filters, and is doubly difficult when your newsletter's topics include censorship itself. Thus all the "sez" and "druks" and "Promography" and "Right to Azzemble."
At the minimum you can research their site, see if similar letters have been sent out, and get general information on where your case might stand. If you are Our Welcomed New Overlords you can use Chilling Effects to comply with takedown notices without those site links being lost entirely.
Like the recently settled Pan-IP patent case
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AmEx vs. rec.humor.funny
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As written about in this recent article. PanIP thought they could extort licence fees by going after tiny businesses. If PanIP thought they had a real patent they'd have gone after Amazon or Buy.com: nope- just little people who can't afford to fight. But these little businesses found each other, joined in a group, fought back as a group, and won.
Happy undecimvary and viginti sexary! (11th, 26th)
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Happy Spamiversary!
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· Score: 1
(Which sounds almost like the subject lines of recent spam I've seen... or maybe its undecimus and vicesimus sextus anniversaries as per this latin guide and now don't I wish I'd taken Latin?)
In the comments of 39 days ago, this story from a year earlier was mentioned- it celebrated the 25th anniversary of spam, and the 10th of the first description of Usenet spam as "spam." So now we're up to the 11th and 26th anniversaries!
The traditional gift for the 11th anniversary is steel (knives? axes?), and while I'm not seeing one for the 26th, I'm thinking a hand carved wooden stake would be appropriate, given just how evil spam is... assuming that current spammers even have hearts through which a stake could cure their demonic afflictions.
to misquote Tolkien's somewhat applicable statement. But I find this essay to be a fuzzy mismash of complaints. If I'm following its logic:
Science fiction and fantasy (SF/F) and comic books are popular,
SF/F fans think about other worlds
you can't think about two worlds at once,
internet interactions retreat from the real world
retreating from the real world is bad
on the internet you never have to argue with people who disagree with you
if you feel you can't change the world you read fantasy so
SF/F keeps us from exploring our world and should be less popular.
Where to start? Addressing these in no particular order...
5: Then books in general are bad: there's just nothing worse than someone sitting around thinking.
5: And as the essay point out, many common activities keep people from reality (or make you talk for hours about trivia or statistics): TV, baseball games, video games, golf, martha stewart trials. These are quantiatively different from fandom how?
6: Huh? I suppose if you only IM with a few people and have an interlocked set of livejournal users, perhaps. But otherwise anyone with a blog with comments, or anyone on usenet is exposed to more arguments and opposing viewpoints than ever. You can keep atheists out of your physical church: its much harder to keep them out of Talk.religion.mychurch.
3: Not only can you think about two worlds at once, you have to if you want to understand your own time and milieu. Understanding implies the ability to step outside of it- examine it from the outside. Knowing history and traveling to other countries is critical, of course. But if your goal is understanding humanity overall you need a bigger mental space to step back in: science (evolution, anthropology) and SF/F provide this space.
7: Much popular written SF/F analyzes or confronts our society. For example, I'd done a quick analysis of Hugo award finalists for last year (what SF/F fans consider to be the best of the year). Few of the stories were standard fantasy: most were about how humans might deal with the inevitable changes coming to our society in the short and long terms.
2 & 5: What conventions does he go to? The science fiction conventions I go to are filled with lectures about cutting edge science, technology, health and physiology... they're also filled with scientists [physical, bio and social]. Many fans are scientists, many SF writers are scientists, many scientists were inspired by SF to go into their careers.
2 & 6 & 7: Again, I think he's not at the same conventions: anyone who has seen the debates about Trotskyite libertarian cyberpunks vs. K.S.Robinson style socialism vs. LeGuin's anthro-SF isn't going to think that SF cons are a mutual agreement-fest. (Eric Raymond vs. Charlie Stross: now *that* was fun)
Note- IAAAEAAB (I am an agricultural economist and a biologist). I don't have any fundamental problems with true genetic engineering (moving genes from one species to another which would never have jumped over using regular cross-breeding): I've done it myself. I do have problems with current implementations of GE because
they focus on zero tolerance for weeds / pests: in the long run this will be more expensive than "accept a marginal and mildly fluctuating loss"
they're closed source, top-down implementations that lead to monocultures
They break standards
Their closed-source version is a variant of better dog food.com where they don't just sell you the dogfood. The dog can only eat BDF.com dogfood *and* you only lease the dog *plus* you only can get poodles (and they'll sue you if poodle puppies show up in your neighborhood). The problem that Montanto is trying to solve isn't "how can farmers improve crop yields and reduce weeds?" Monsanto's problem is "How can we lock farmers into using our weedkillers?"
Think of it like a bug patch. Imagine we find a major vulnerability, solved by upgrading some software. The open source method might be to make that software available for people to patch into whatever software they're currently running. The closed source version would be to 1. Sell new software that works with the patch 2. Sell the patch, 3. Insist that all old software is dangerous and outdated and should never be used in business. (4. and then later on when a new worm comes out, a huge percent of programs can be hit all at once due to the monoculture).
With Andean potato farmers this is exactly what happened. You have farmers who've developed hundreds of different potato varieties over the years: buttery tasting ones, meaty tasting ones, ones that grow in drought / shade / various altitudes... and these potatoes could be susceptible to a particular pest (quite likely one or more of their varieties already had resistance: another story). A major North American company came in saying "Hey, our potato + pesticide combination is resistant to the pest. Buy both from us, then you'll have no problems. By the way our potato is patented- don't think about crossbreeding it." At the same time they launched a major advertising (FUD) campaign in major potato buying markets saying "Hey, our potato is the best most modern potato. Don't buy anything else." So farmers couldn't just patch their own potatoes- they had to buy into the product / product cycle upgrade of the NA company. Sounds familiar?
Or look at "golden rice." Who can argue with preventing blindness from vitamin deficiencies? Do you want Blind Babies??? But is upping the vitamin A content of rice the best method to get vitamin A to people? What about veggies which already contain high quantities of beta-carotene (yams? carrots? Other richly-colored veggies and fruits?). The royalty payments for Golden Rice could instead pay for a variety of other seeds. And if you do want to up the A content of rice, should people get to choose which varieties get upgraded?
And sometimes they're breaking standards while they're at it, (think like what VeriSign did recently with their redirect). For example, BT is a bacteria/toxin used by organic farmers for decades to kill certain insect pests. At the previous rate of use- as a spray- there was a very, very low probability of insects developing resistance. Decades of use hadn't produced it. Now that BT has been spliced into crop plants, the widespread planting of monocultures of BT crops means BT resistance is increasingly likely. As this happens the non-organic farmers can move onto other pesticides. But the organic farmers whose old standard- BT sprays- will also become useless have no backup. There was no system set up to compensate these farmers from their soon to be broken standard. Nor was their any "royalty" paid to these farmers who'd discovered BT in the first place.
It was just a few months ago at a BOF-type lecture by a scientist involved with a major chimp study center. The lecture's focus was more on preserving wild chimps and bonobos, but several anecdotes about life with captive bonobos and other great apes were told.
One was about bonobos and movies: a few days after they'd watched "Field of Dreams", one of the bonobos started collecting bricks from around the yard. When asked why, he replied (paraphrased from Lexigraphs) "Let's build another housing building, because more chimps will come."
Given the audience, the lecturer didn't have any motive to exaggerate- it was BOF casual. The collection of anecdotes isn't itself publishable except for fun: they need to do more studies. (all of what was spoken about was from very recent years-long after the 1995 article you mentioned- and was about Bonobos not regular chimps)
An obvious one they hope to do is take a captive who still speaks wild/bonobish and have it attempt to talk to wild bonobos. If we can ask it to translate, and the wild bonobos react, now that would be useful and groundbreaking. As to the mythology, the captive bonobos might have been tainted somehow by hearing it from humans.
For me, I buy into the open secret of Zoology and cladistics: by most standards and naming rights it should be homo troglodytes, homo paniscus, and good ol' homo sap. And I see no reason to think that the other homoninis don't have at least a little language ability.
In Bonobo life the leader is female, the next few in the hierachy (friends, often not related) are mostly female, and then its mixed all the way down. With regular chimps the highest ranking female is lower than the lowest ranking males.
So the post 2 levels up should be "weakly-matriarchal, bisexual polyamorous sexual commune" for Bonobos. Although their sex isn't quite what humans might like- most of it is short 15 second engagements that substitute for apologies or arguments. If two humans grabbed the last eggo waffle, we'd talk back and forth, perhaps apologize or argue for a while and one would eventually take it. If two Bonobos grabbed the last eggo waffle, one would give sex to the other for a few seconds and then take it.
(As for regular chimps: they'd be more "strongly-patriarchal, mostly heterosexual, lots of angry young chimps not getting any, fight clubs.")
One of the common explanations for why chimps (regular or Bonobo) don't have language is that they can't do consonants, only vowels. That is, if all you can do is squeak and squeal, you can't convey as much information and you won't develop language and/or intelligence. (you choose which direction the causality should run)
But recently researchers started listening to those high pitched "simple squeaks" that Bonobos have. They discovered two things:
Bonobos do quite a bit of modulation of those "squeaks"- most of which we can't hear. and
Bonobos process sound much more quickly than humans can.
It doesn't mean humans can't speak Bonobish at all- some researchers studying wild bonobos have learned enough to ask for simple things like "could you bring me some fruit?" [10 minutes later, a wild Bonobo brings back a fruit- not always the original Bonobo either. Not sure how many humans would do that for a stranger in town.] And other researchers with captive Bonobos are seeing how much wild Bonobish the Bonobos remember from their childhood. But most captives were captured fairly young and would have forgotten most of it after a couple of decades.
So while raising human children with Bonobos could be interesting, you'd want to make sure the Bonobos actually knew Bonobish. And if the Bonobos did know Bonobish, the human child would be extremely slow at processing it or speaking it. It might be better to teach both of them ASL or other language both could use.
On the flip side some Bonobos understand spoken English: 2000 words are enough to watch our movies, for example. By watch I don't just mean "be entertained by flashing colors": they can follow the plot lines and identify with the movie characters. (Their understood English vocabulary can be larger than that lexigram / symbol language chimps and Bonobos use to talk back.) Researchers have already been able to ask them about their mythologies *and* get an answer (standard "Giant Mother Bonobo created everything in the great forest years ago" answer. I was hoping they'd have something a bit more creative, not just a variation of what most other humans say.)
"your shift was against company policy because you did not take a 30 minute lunch. We are deducting 30 minutes of pay. Of course, if you had taken a 30 minute lunch, given how understaffed we are, you'd have left customers hanging. Bob your manager carefully implied that leaving customers like that = a negative review, causing you to lose on your possible $0.25 raise later on. If you can catch up on your work so that you've got time to take a lunch, then you must not have enough work to do. -- the Management at Catch-22 Inc."
Especially at the lowest wage jobs, people who can't help but work through lunch will be willing to take the 6% hit on their paycheck- better than the alternative. Even at higher-income jobs this can be true. I've known people who know that they are misclassified as 'overtime exempt' employees - they don't meet the criteria - but they're not going to rock the boat to get their job reclassified. (If those rules make sense or not is a different story, but from a pure legal "these are the rules" viewpoint the job's classification should match the rules.)
Slashdot Mirror
So unless hoards of private Canadian citizens run about and demand (ever so politely) ID, that seems to be one society where you don't involuntarily have to show ID. You choose to do so when engaged in licenced or business activities.
Within the US it generally has been the same- although we do require carrying ID in most (if not all?) states. But you generally don't have to identify yourself if you are not engaged in a licenced activity (to the gov't) or a business transaction (to the public). If you don't return home or to your car that stalker with a clipboard will have to rely on luck (meeting someone who does know who you are) in order to get your name. Returning to your car alone wouldn't do it in CA: DMV info isn't public. And I'd argue that the instant you discovered a person was following you around all day- that would instantly be considered harrassing and alarming, absent any other activities on their part.
Of course, in California there is an explicit right to privacy built right into our constitution: Article 1 Section 1. It isn't defined there, but it exists there. And privacy as "the right not to be known against [your] will" (which is different from pure anonymity) is an implicit right - a necessary (although not always sufficient) condition - within other rights as well. Freedom of religion or assembly doesn't mean quite as much if you are compeled to reveal your religion or membership, for example.
Generally, the judiciary only comes into play when the police want to go somewhere where you have some reasonable expectation that what you're doing is not something that the public at large is privy to - your house, your place of business, your telephone, and so forth.
If a member of the public was following you around all day, taking notes- you'd get a restraining order for stalking. And while the public at large can see "someone who looks like a Slashdot poster" walking around the mall, that public generally doesn't have the right to know your name: we don't have to wear nametags in public. People can look at us but they won't know us unless we've previously chosen to reveal our names to them.
Going back to the essay within my comment: the former privacy Czar's definition included "the right to control access to ourselves and to personal information about us... The right not to be known against our will - indeed, the right to be anonymous except when we choose to identify ourselves..." Using this definition, one could perhaps have some form of privacy even without pure anonymity, if one's name was the only thing we had to reveal to other people (if such were possible: telling your true name can just about result in a credit report, nowadays)
As to 200 years ago, I'd argue that the Founding Fathers had more ability to "disappear into the crowd" than you give them credit for: they certainly seem to have had enough illegal, back-of-tavern meetings to set up a whole country. During the day they might have had smaller crowds for less anonymity, but at night streets were darker, and collars could be pulled up. The person riding from New York to Boston could probably just plunk down coins to get a room and a beer: far more private than the ID and credit card we have to show now.
As to going from human to machine memory: I don't know that the number of faulty arrests will drop, either as an absolute or relative number. For example, if we relied on machines, not traffic officers, for speeding violations both the absolute and relative number of speeders would go up in the machine world. Of course bad work by humans is terrible. But I'm thinking that faster, automated and weakly controlled (at least as Ashcroft wants it) work by machines isn't better. As its late I'll just quote:
"But there also will be tangible, specific harm.
The more information government compiles about us, the more of it will be wrong. That's simply a fact of life.
Several years ago, after the existence of Human Resources Development Canada's "Longitudinal Labour Force File" was brought to light by my predecessor, many people demanded to see the information that had been held about them. They were astonished by the number of factual errors. That was only a research database, so its inaccuracies probably would have remained relatively benign even if it had not been dismantled.
But if our privacy becomes ever more systematically invaded by the state for purposes of assessing our behavior and making judgments about us, wrong information and misinterpretations will have potential consequences.
If information that is actually about someone else is wrongly applied to us, if wrong facts make it appear that we've done things we haven't, if perfectly innocent behavior is misinterpreted as suspicious because authorities don't know our reasons or our circumstances, we will be at risk of finding ourselves in trouble in a society where everyone is regarded as a suspect. By the time we clear our names and establish our innocence, we may have suffered irreparable financial or social harm...
Those purposes, by the Government's own account, include everything from routine income tax investigations to trying to flag Canadians as potential pedophiles or money launderers solely on the basis of their travel patterns.
This is unprecedented. The Government of Canada has absolutely no business creating a massive database of personal information about all law-abiding Canadians that is collected without our consent from third parties, not to provide us with any service but simply to have it available to use against us if it ever becomes expedient to do so. Compiling dossiers on the private activities of all law-abiding citizens is the sort of thing the Stasi secret police used to do in the former East Germany. It has no place in a free and democratic society...
looks like they have Interlingua and Esperanto both of the "planned international auxiliary language" category. But nothing says universal like "planned interplanetary auxiliary language," and it looks likes there's as many Klingon speakers as there are Matsés speakers, so where is it? But I guess they haven't finished the Klingon Shakespeare yet.
Yes, until a few centuries people didn't have anonymity if they stayed in the towns they were born in. They also didn't have voting rights, freedom of assembly / press / religion / petition / etc. That doesn't make those rights any less real- it just makes olden days seem barbaric. Privacy might be a younger right- but rights don't have an age of majority. And technology today can be used to take away other rights- but that doesn't make those rights "falsely expected," just in need of more guarding.
Yet even two centuries ago they knew the value of anonymity: from A Watched Populace Never Boils"
[and anecdotally, all those Westerns with the "tall dark stranger" coming to town couldn't have happened if you never had strangers. People could see you come to town or go to someone's house. But once you left town, or went around the corner- even the best gossipers weren't going to know too much more about you.]
But privacy is far more than whether or not you are recognized... quoting from my favorite essay...
"...But though we tend to take it for granted, privacy - the right to control access to ourselves and to personal information about us - is at the very core of our lives. It is a fundamental human right precisely because it is an innate human need, an essential condition of our freedom, our dignity and our sense of well-being...
...A popular response is: "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear."
By that reasoning, of course, we shouldn't mind if the police were free to come into our homes at any time just to look around, if all our telephone conversations were monitored, if all our mail were read, if all the protections developed over centuries were swept away. It's only a difference of degree from the intrusions already being implemented or considered.
The truth is that we all do have something to hide, not because it's criminal or even shameful, but simply because it's private. We carefully calibrate what we reveal about ourselves to others. Most of us are only willing to have a few things known about us by a stranger, more by an acquaintance, and the most by a very close friend or a romantic partner. The right not to be known against our will - indeed, the right to be anonymous except when we choose to identify ourselves - is at the very core of human dignity, autonomy and freedom.
A camera tapes you. If one tape-reviewer doesn't know you, he can ask until he finds someone who does. The tape can be matched with other tapes to see where you were and where you're going. The tape will be stored and reviewed by ever better automatic recognition tech, and those results stored in ever larger and cheaper databases.
I think this is a quantitative change in the "expectation of privacy" one has in public.
We are getting very close to "P-day" (coined by Brad Templeton): the last day of privacy, because from then on all our actions will be tracked retroactively if not currently. Or, as he puts it: "So you're already being watched. The computer that is watching you just hasn't been born quite yet."
Two good essays on why this type of surveillance hurts society and violates our rights:
"[Talking about Canada...] If these measures are allowed to go forward and the privacy-invasive principles they represent are accepted [then before long] our movements through the public streets will be relentlessly observed through proliferating police video surveillance cameras. Eventually, these cameras will likely be linked to biometric face-recognition technologies ... [indentifying] us by name and address as we go about our law-abiding business in the streets... I am well aware that these scenarios are likely to sound, to most people, like alarmist exaggeration. Certainly, the society I am describing bears no relation to the Canada we know. But anyone who is inclined to dismiss the risks out of hand should pause first to consider that the privacy-invasive measures already being implemented or developed right now would have been considered unthinkable in our country just a short year ago."
The place to stop unjustified intrusions on a fundamental human right such as privacy is right at the outset, at the very first attempt to enter where the state has no business treading. Otherwise, the terrain will have been conceded, and the battle lost...
Imagine, then, how we will feel if it becomes routine for bureaucrats, police officers and other agents of the state to paw through all the details of our lives: where and when we travel, and with whom; who are the friends and acquaintances with whom we have telephone conversations or e-mail correspondence; what we are interested in reading or researching; where we like to go and what we like to do...
If we allow the state to sweep away the normal walls of privacy that protect the details of our lives, we will consign ourselves psychologically to living in a fishbowl...Anyone who has lived in a totalitarian society can attest that what often felt most oppressive was precisely the lack of privacy.
When we feel watched, we feel less free. We censor ourselve
Lets say that the state of California collectively wakes up and knows it should be strong like Schwarzenegger. Comparing the two methods:
- For selective breeding, the state would set up tax breaks and other incentives to get as many people to use as many WWE members as egg and sperm donors as possible, and also to pay non-strong people to move to Nevada. After a few generations of intense ad campaigns about how great it is to use fertility clinics and how sexy it is to bench-press Mini Coopers: voila- stronger Californians.
- For genetic engineering, we'd go out and find the different muscle gene that makes chimps 10x as strong as humans. Substitute that into all new CA embryos: voila- stronger Californians in one generation. Unless of course we accidentally spliced in multiple genes: dunno the results but hopefully they'd use Bonobo not troglodytes...
Although perhaps chimps aren't the best example- we could probably use selective breeding for that as well- just a little tweaking needed on chromosome 23. (If Chimps and Humans were essays, the plagarism detector would spit back "98%+ similarity. Human has 23 paragraphs, Chimp has 24 paragraphs, but Human 23 is just Chimp 23 and 24 smashed together with a run-on sentence...")In this thought experiment- are selective breeding and genetic engineering the same? Stronger humans through ad campaigns are the same as stronger humans through splicing Carnivora genes into primates? That because humans have already done a wonderful job of SB through sexual selection [especially wonderful given the low genetic diversity our species has overall (compared to most other mammals- even the 40k chimps have more diversity than all 6 billion humans)], we're not doing anything new by splicing genes from elsewhere?
Sexual selection within humanity has resulted in both the !Kung and Watusi in the same geographic regions. If we really wanted to we could get all humans to looks far more !Kung or Watusi - using that massive ad campaign first developed in California- without any genetic engineering at all. But that's far different from bringing in genes from other orders/classes/phylums, isn't it? [Speaking of which, perhaps some rhodopsin could be nice for the days you want to work outside but you forgot your lunch. Any Genies (genetic engineers) out there wanting to give this a go?]
Just like with proprietary software, if you see some nifty new feature you'd like to add you your own application, you can't. In proprietary software you can't just buy the algorithm: you have to buy the whole package (and perhaps the support package and perhaps the computer to run it on). In much of current biotechnology you can't just buy the nifty new gene, you have to buy the whole potato (and you only get a limited choice of potato types if any choice at all) *and* you're just leasing the potato *and* you have to keep buying the upgrades each year. Smart Breeding, in contrast, is a close equivalent of open source software.
Some problems with the current methods of biotech - using software as the analogy / comparison - include:
Also check out the definitive list of creationist claims, especially "CH400-CH599: Flood" for good answers to the most common creationist claims about the flood.
Going back to the "Major Problems" article, take for example "6. Implications of a Flood," where the author mentions:
- How do you explain the relative ages of mountains? For example, why weren't the Sierra Nevadas eroded as much as the Appalachians during the Flood?
- Why is there no evidence of a flood in ice core series? Ice cores from Greenland have been dated back more than 40,000 years by counting annual layers. [Johnsen et al, 1992,; Alley et al, 1993] A worldwide flood would be expected to leave a layer of sediments, noticeable changes in salinity and oxygen isotope ratios, fractures from buoyancy and thermal stresses, a hiatus in trapped air bubbles, and probably other evidence. Why doesn't such evidence show up?
- How are the polar ice caps even possible? Such a mass of water as the Flood would have provided sufficient buoyancy to float the polar caps off their beds and break them up. They wouldn't regrow quickly. In fact, the Greenland ice cap would not regrow under modern (last 10 ky) climatic conditions.
- Why did the Flood not leave traces on the sea floors? A year long flood should be recognizable in sea bottom cores by (1) an uncharacteristic amount of terrestrial detritus, (2) different grain size distributions in the sediment, (3) a shift in oxygen isotope ratios (rain has a different isotopic composition from seawater), (4) a massive extinction, and (n) other characters. Why do none of these show up?
- Why is there no evidence of a flood in tree ring dating? Tree ring records go back more than 10,000 years, with no evidence of a catastrophe during that time. [Becker & Kromer, 1993; Becker et al, 1991; Stuiver et al, 1986]
And many, many more reasonable questions that should be answered by anyone claiming that sometime within the past 10k years a global flood covered the entire earth.On the flip side- one can certainly do a thought experiment of what would happen if a "space ark" landed on a planet otherwise empty of land life. After 10k years- what would one expect to see on this planet?
- The "diversity gradient" of land animals should start near the landing site and fade out from there.
- Even the largest continents- if disconnected from the landing zone- would show signs of "Island Biogeography". That is, there'd be far less diversity of animals relative to the "landing zone continent." A larger percentage of mammals on the disconnected continents would be flying or swimming mammals, or the descendents of tiny mammals that could have arrived on vegetative rafts.
- While non-swimming/flying animals could be brought by humans, one would expect a paucity of non-edible animals. The polynesians brought domesticated animals from island to island: they for some reason didn't bring tigers or Komodo dragons.
Our planet does not look at all like this hypothetical "all life came from one ark" planet. And in our history, the paradigm of "life spread out from a single garden or ark" was severely cracked long before Darwin. Biologists/explorers of the time (almost all creationists) strongly wanted the distribution of animals to match Genesis: it didn't, no matter how hard they tried.So we've ended up in this strange zone where email could be encrypted as a matter of course, but it isn't. There is no inherent reason why email has to be public, but by our design (or lack thereof), this major massive system of communications is public, and for what benefit?
I'm not saying that people must be forced to use encryption, but that the ability to choose it should be there. To me choice means the two alternatives are sitting there, equally available... If there were big "Send: This is Private" and "Send: This is Public" buttons. Right now the "choice" is "Send" vs "Spend hours retrofitting your system and writing to your recipient to explain to them how to read your email, and getting your grandpa to use it- just give up trying to go there..."
As an analogy, if I say "lets start building doors and doorjams with locks built in," I don't think that equals "force everyone to lock their door." To me it means "make it as easy to choose to lock your door as keep it unlocked."
Imagine an alternative history where we on "Exchange-Dot" are talking about telephone design...
- "Phone calls are on party lines, anyone can listen" (Score: 3 Just Delightful)
- Of course phone calls are public- if you want privacy send a telegram. Get over it (Score 5: A Pearl of Wisdom)
- "If you want privacy, get a private line and ask the person you wish to call to install a private line too."(Score: 2)
- "But what if I know I might want to talk with more than that one person, wouldn't it be better if all phones were private lines? What if my elderly aunt cannot easily get a private line?"(Score 3: Quite)
- "What, have you something to hide? What type of gentleman are You? (score 0: Moderately Scandalous)
- "You should just refuse to talk with people on party lines: if your dear Aunt in Toledo is unable to install a private line then she isn't worthy of conversation" (Score: 1)
- "You have the right to a private line, but demanding all lines are private? How about we let people choose?"(Score: 1)
Now an influential company - GoG&G - is proposing a massive new rollout of telephone availability. And a Mr. B. Templeton, chairman of the Telephonic Frontier Foundation asks GoG&G to consider designing private lines right into the system. He's the sort of person who wants widespread private phone calls, writing:"The key to deploying private phone calls is to make it happen with close to zero involvement by the user... The reason is that I converse with tons of people, not just my closest Bell/linux-using electrophilosopher friends. If I want my conversations to be private, I have to get the general public using private lines...."
It, in retrospect, wouldn't be such a bad request for consideration by Google / GoG&G.
This could be changed. Technologies have gone from public (non-private) to private and protected before. Consider the switch from party lines to private lines in the telephone system. Now that we live in the 21st century shouldn't we demand a similar switch for email?
Because privacy is, at its core, a fundamental human right. Every communication system we use should have privacy built in: if its not, there should be a very good reason why not. "Oh dear, it will take extra computational cycles" is not a good reason, not with the small footprint crypto already here. "Oh, Ashcroft doesn't want it" is even a worse reason.
Why is privacy a basic right? From the well-written essay by Canada's former privacy Czar
"If Parliament and the public at large have been slow to react, it is probably because for most people, most of the time, privacy is a pretty abstract concept. Like our health, it's something we tend not to think about until we lose it - and then discover that our lives have been very unpleasantly, and perhaps irretrievably, altered.
But though we tend to take it for granted, privacy - the right to control access to ourselves and to personal information about us - is at the very core of our lives. It is a fundamental human right precisely because it is an innate human need, an essential condition of our freedom, our dignity and our sense of well-being."
" ...A popular response is: "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.
"By that reasoning, of course, we shouldn't mind if the police were free to come into our homes at any time just to look around, if all our telephone conversations were monitored, if all our mail were read, if all the protections developed over centuries were swept away. It's only a difference of degree from the intrusions already being implemented or considered.
"The truth is that we all do have something to hide, not because it's criminal or even shameful, but simply because it's private. We carefully calibrate what we reveal about ourselves to others. Most of us are only willing to have a few things known about us by a stranger, more by an acquaintance, and the most by a very close friend or a romantic partner. The right not to be known against our will -- indeed, the right to be anonymous except when we choose to identify ourselves -- is at the very core of human dignity, autonomy and freedom.
"If we allow the state to sweep away the normal walls of privacy that protect the details of our lives, we will consign ourselves psychologically to living in a fishbowl. Even if we suffered no other specific harm as a result, that alone would profoundly change how we feel. Anyone who has lived in a totalitarian society can attest that what often felt most oppressive was precisely the lack of privacy...
"...The bottom line is this: If we have to live our lives weighing every action, every communication, every human contact, wondering what agents of the state might find out about it, analyze it, judge it, possibly misconstrue it, and somehow use it to our detriment, we are not truly free. That sort of life is characteristic of totalitarian countries, not a free and open society..."
Current use of encryption for email is terribly low: I remember when Whitfield Diffie was asked at a Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference a few years back how many emails sent to him were encrypted. Because you'd expect him to be way up at the top of the list of people who get encrypted email... under 10% was his reply. Oh, and Zimmerman was also in the audience... same answer.
Anyways, if you're a geek who likes new blinking things [and BTempleton is obviously a geek who likes Akihabara and new technologies] you might want those technologies to be widely used without interference from, say, Ashcroft. Note that he isn't saying "lets create great new laws to apply to these new technologies." He is asking "what happens when old laws get applied to great new technologies, and are there ways to get around any obvious upcoming problems?" ECPA already exists, and ASP style email storage could run into ECPA's limitations. Don't we want to think about this now, not later?
Remember that one of the EFF's first cases happened when the US government thought it could seize an entire BBS in order to investigate one user's email? Or that the US government wanted everyone to use weakened encryption with backdoors built in? Or that unchallenged yet idiotic patents hurt technological development?
Its the job of technologists / groups like the EFF to watch for potential crashes at the intersections of rights-reducing governments (or technology-ignorant governments) with great new technologies. And then, as in this case, suggest ways to prevent the intersection from ever happening (built in encryption could be valuable for that). Because otherwise, court cases are very expensive, and the technologists don't always win.
Rant mode on...But enough with the body insults! Haven't you ever seen bodies in all their glorious colors and shapes before? If yours isn't in the top 1% of bodies, do you live in a Burka? The costumer is having fun- lots of other posters here seem to be having bitter parties out of some misguided idea that if you aren't perfect- don't be visible? If you don't have the equivalent of a 2004 Mercedes M-class body, don't show up on the road? Have you ever looked at the great minds in our field? You'd really forbid them from being in your hottub (California / silicon valley style) just because they're not the most aesthetically pleasing bodies? Bah! Rant mode sputtering off...
One of the largest newsletters going out to free-speech advocates, lawyers, judges and the like has to do this. This article in 2001 covered it. Its because of all the filters, and is doubly difficult when your newsletter's topics include censorship itself. Thus all the "sez" and "druks" and "Promography" and "Right to Azzemble."
At the minimum you can research their site, see if similar letters have been sent out, and get general information on where your case might stand. If you are Our Welcomed New Overlords you can use Chilling Effects to comply with takedown notices without those site links being lost entirely.
For C&D letters Chilling Effects is our group defense, as is the EFF in general.
For Everybody else there's The Chilling Effects Clearinghouse. Don't leave a threat to your homepage without it. As the ever busy EFF is part of ChillingEffects, if Brad Templeton hadn't hadn't already known about the right to parody vs. scare tactic legal letters he could just call them up and ask.
But if you yourself have received one of these letters, you also can report it to Chilling Effects and ask for help from the EFF. But the EFF can only be there to help you later if you support the EFF through joining now.
In the comments of 39 days ago, this story from a year earlier was mentioned- it celebrated the 25th anniversary of spam, and the 10th of the first description of Usenet spam as "spam." So now we're up to the 11th and 26th anniversaries!
The traditional gift for the 11th anniversary is steel (knives? axes?), and while I'm not seeing one for the 26th, I'm thinking a hand carved wooden stake would be appropriate, given just how evil spam is... assuming that current spammers even have hearts through which a stake could cure their demonic afflictions.
Where to start? Addressing these in no particular order...
Their closed-source version is a variant of better dog food.com where they don't just sell you the dogfood. The dog can only eat BDF.com dogfood *and* you only lease the dog *plus* you only can get poodles (and they'll sue you if poodle puppies show up in your neighborhood). The problem that Montanto is trying to solve isn't "how can farmers improve crop yields and reduce weeds?" Monsanto's problem is "How can we lock farmers into using our weedkillers?"
Think of it like a bug patch. Imagine we find a major vulnerability, solved by upgrading some software. The open source method might be to make that software available for people to patch into whatever software they're currently running. The closed source version would be to 1. Sell new software that works with the patch 2. Sell the patch, 3. Insist that all old software is dangerous and outdated and should never be used in business. (4. and then later on when a new worm comes out, a huge percent of programs can be hit all at once due to the monoculture).
With Andean potato farmers this is exactly what happened. You have farmers who've developed hundreds of different potato varieties over the years: buttery tasting ones, meaty tasting ones, ones that grow in drought / shade / various altitudes... and these potatoes could be susceptible to a particular pest (quite likely one or more of their varieties already had resistance: another story). A major North American company came in saying "Hey, our potato + pesticide combination is resistant to the pest. Buy both from us, then you'll have no problems. By the way our potato is patented- don't think about crossbreeding it." At the same time they launched a major advertising (FUD) campaign in major potato buying markets saying "Hey, our potato is the best most modern potato. Don't buy anything else." So farmers couldn't just patch their own potatoes- they had to buy into the product / product cycle upgrade of the NA company. Sounds familiar?
Or look at "golden rice." Who can argue with preventing blindness from vitamin deficiencies? Do you want Blind Babies??? But is upping the vitamin A content of rice the best method to get vitamin A to people? What about veggies which already contain high quantities of beta-carotene (yams? carrots? Other richly-colored veggies and fruits?). The royalty payments for Golden Rice could instead pay for a variety of other seeds. And if you do want to up the A content of rice, should people get to choose which varieties get upgraded?
And sometimes they're breaking standards while they're at it, (think like what VeriSign did recently with their redirect). For example, BT is a bacteria /toxin used by organic farmers for decades to kill certain insect pests. At the previous rate of use- as a spray- there was a very, very low probability of insects developing resistance. Decades of use hadn't produced it. Now that BT has been spliced into crop plants, the widespread planting of monocultures of BT crops means BT resistance is increasingly likely. As this happens the non-organic farmers can move onto other pesticides. But the organic farmers whose old standard- BT sprays- will also become useless have no backup. There was no system set up to compensate these farmers from their soon to be broken standard. Nor was their any "royalty" paid to these farmers who'd discovered BT in the first place.
One was about bonobos and movies: a few days after they'd watched "Field of Dreams", one of the bonobos started collecting bricks from around the yard. When asked why, he replied (paraphrased from Lexigraphs) "Let's build another housing building, because more chimps will come."
Given the audience, the lecturer didn't have any motive to exaggerate- it was BOF casual. The collection of anecdotes isn't itself publishable except for fun: they need to do more studies. (all of what was spoken about was from very recent years-long after the 1995 article you mentioned- and was about Bonobos not regular chimps)
An obvious one they hope to do is take a captive who still speaks wild /bonobish and have it attempt to talk to wild bonobos. If we can ask it to translate, and the wild bonobos react, now that would be useful and groundbreaking. As to the mythology, the captive bonobos might have been tainted somehow by hearing it from humans.
For me, I buy into the open secret of Zoology and cladistics: by most standards and naming rights it should be homo troglodytes, homo paniscus, and good ol' homo sap. And I see no reason to think that the other homoninis don't have at least a little language ability.
So the post 2 levels up should be "weakly-matriarchal, bisexual polyamorous sexual commune" for Bonobos. Although their sex isn't quite what humans might like- most of it is short 15 second engagements that substitute for apologies or arguments. If two humans grabbed the last eggo waffle, we'd talk back and forth, perhaps apologize or argue for a while and one would eventually take it. If two Bonobos grabbed the last eggo waffle, one would give sex to the other for a few seconds and then take it.
(As for regular chimps: they'd be more "strongly-patriarchal, mostly heterosexual, lots of angry young chimps not getting any, fight clubs.")
But recently researchers started listening to those high pitched "simple squeaks" that Bonobos have. They discovered two things:
- Bonobos do quite a bit of modulation of those "squeaks"- most of which we can't hear. and
- Bonobos process sound much more quickly than humans can.
It doesn't mean humans can't speak Bonobish at all- some researchers studying wild bonobos have learned enough to ask for simple things like "could you bring me some fruit?" [10 minutes later, a wild Bonobo brings back a fruit- not always the original Bonobo either. Not sure how many humans would do that for a stranger in town.] And other researchers with captive Bonobos are seeing how much wild Bonobish the Bonobos remember from their childhood. But most captives were captured fairly young and would have forgotten most of it after a couple of decades.So while raising human children with Bonobos could be interesting, you'd want to make sure the Bonobos actually knew Bonobish. And if the Bonobos did know Bonobish, the human child would be extremely slow at processing it or speaking it. It might be better to teach both of them ASL or other language both could use.
On the flip side some Bonobos understand spoken English: 2000 words are enough to watch our movies, for example. By watch I don't just mean "be entertained by flashing colors": they can follow the plot lines and identify with the movie characters. (Their understood English vocabulary can be larger than that lexigram / symbol language chimps and Bonobos use to talk back.) Researchers have already been able to ask them about their mythologies *and* get an answer (standard "Giant Mother Bonobo created everything in the great forest years ago" answer. I was hoping they'd have something a bit more creative, not just a variation of what most other humans say.)
"your shift was against company policy because you did not take a 30 minute lunch. We are deducting 30 minutes of pay. Of course, if you had taken a 30 minute lunch, given how understaffed we are, you'd have left customers hanging. Bob your manager carefully implied that leaving customers like that = a negative review, causing you to lose on your possible $0.25 raise later on. If you can catch up on your work so that you've got time to take a lunch, then you must not have enough work to do. -- the Management at Catch-22 Inc."
Especially at the lowest wage jobs, people who can't help but work through lunch will be willing to take the 6% hit on their paycheck- better than the alternative. Even at higher-income jobs this can be true. I've known people who know that they are misclassified as 'overtime exempt' employees - they don't meet the criteria - but they're not going to rock the boat to get their job reclassified. (If those rules make sense or not is a different story, but from a pure legal "these are the rules" viewpoint the job's classification should match the rules.)