Yeah, online property records are a big privacy leak. You can do things to obfuscate it -- put the property in a land trust if your state permits it (do it when you buy it, as historical information is also available) or buy it in the name of a new mexico llc (which have minimal reporting requirements, so you don't have to disclose your ownership of the llc - you can use a NM llc in any state).
The federal Australian government is also attempting to have the old growth forests in Tasmania de-listed as a world heritage area so they can log there.
If anyone wants to see how gorgeous Tasmania is, check out the Willem Dafoe movie "The Hunter" - the landscapes are stunning.
FWIW, the overwhelming number of acts of terrorism are nationalist/separatist. Something like 95% of cases. That includes stuff like white power in the US as well as things like the chechen conflict. Surprisingly, over the last 30 years or so the FBI logged more cases of puerto-rican nationalist terrorism than any other single motivation.
I'm calling BS on this. It sounds like it comes from a source that wants it to be true. At any rate, while I've heard it numerous times, I've seen no compelling evidence that it's true.
I'm willing to believe it. it isn't something people just talk about with anyone. Roughly two-thirds of all the women who have been close enough to trust me with private details like that has told me they have experienced at least one sexual assault and they have all been middle and upper-class. I'm sure that women who live in poverty have it even worse.
A recent article shows that the Pentagon is reconsidering uniform requirements to permit beards and turbans for Muslims. Now consider that beards have been outlawed by our military for decades, based on "discipline" considerations. No redneck, no Jew, no mountain man has been permitted to display a beard while in uniform. Suddenly - we are courting Muslims, so out of the goodness of our hearts, we are going to allow them to wear beards and turbans.
Hey dumbfuck! It isn't boogyman muslims, it is sikhs. Turbans have no religious significance to muslims.
Also, "decades" is technically correct, but only barely so - it was 1986 that beards were banned. Given the two centuries of beards being permitted in uniform before that, those deacdes are hardly a big deal.
Maybe we should update our privacy laws and stop allowing companies and the government to store all this information about us in shitty databases to begin with.
This.
When even the cops use these databases on on other cops you know the only solution is to stop building the databases in the first place.
Stalking pretty girls makes for a good visceral story, but the larger problem is one of political repression -- essentially using these databases to make it harder for political upstarts to instigate change, basically co-opting democracy.
Never quite understood this whole 'privacy of license plates' thing. If I look out the window right now I can see a dozen+ license plates. If I went for a walk I'd see hundreds. How is it private if there are two of them on every car for everyone to see?
The word privacy has multiple definitions. In this case, the apropriate definition is ephemeral. You looking at a license plate informs one person, you, about the time and location of that plate. You posting a picture of that online creates a perment record that potentially millions of people can access.
It is the same thing as using a debit card and the clerk looking at the card number versus the POS computer making a permanent record of the card number. The first is a very small risk, the second is essentially an unbounded risk as customers of Target, Neiman-Marcus and Michaels have come to find out.
It's a leash. Like your Sam's, BJ's or Costco membership. It makes you want to buy more stuff at Amazon (on account of you don't want to waste that $80 you handed them) and they make it all up on volume and margins.
This, 100% this. Prime is about making sure Amazon is at the top of your list of places to shop at. We all have such a list, and very few of us have the time to check thee or four merchants. Lots of people don't even have the time to do more than one merchant. Having a prime "membership" helps to make sure amazon always gets a chance at your money whenever you are ready to spend it.
> That's ~50 attacks short of the total, not counting ones they can't disclose due to classification rules.
Not according to NSA deputy director John C Inglis:
"The NSA has previously claimed that 54 terrorist plots had been disrupted "over the lifetime" of the bulk phone records collection and the separate program collecting the internet habits and communications of people believed to be non-Americans. On Wednesday, Inglis said that at most one plot might have been disrupted by the bulk phone records collection alone. "There is an example that comes close to a 'but for' example," Inglis said."
And, there are no secret undisclosed successes - they never disclosed the details of the "54" attacks either, just the totals, keeping the details classified.
And you cannot fight irrationality, you cannot fight stupid, and you cannot fight well-intentioned ignorance.
I disagree. Irrationality is an argument that fundamentally people can't be trusted to govern themselves.
Sure, at the margins there are people who will never be rational. But what we've been doing is catering to those extremists and we don't have too. When we treat them as the norm of course the entire gestalt becomes one of irrational fear. We'll never be completely rid of that, but we can have a more level-headed society if we focus on our stengths and resilience rather than those rare-as-hen's-teeth vulnerabilities.
And as the US discovers very quickly, it happened due to intentional inefficiencies and silo-ization of intelligence.
No, that is not why it happened but framing it that way is seductively authoritarian and one of the main reasons for the creation of the modern surveillance state. Having spent billions to stop more attacks, what do we have to show for it? The Boston bombers plus a whole host of "white" attacks like mass shootings and the NSA's official record of having stopped precisely zero attacks on USA soil.
The reason these things happen is because the real world is an immensely complex system - to say that significant acts of violence are "easily prevented" is to indulge in the fallacy of perfect knowledge after the fact.
The real inefficiency here is the futile attempt to model the real world through "collect it all" surveillance. It's been a huge bust for its stated purpose and it's had the knock-on effect of jamming up everybody trying to get on with the business of living their lives - businesses and people spending time and money to shield themselves from the surveillance as well as the psychological toll on the entire populace that in the back of their heads they are evaluating if their actions might be misinterpreted by the invisible and unaccountable watchers.
The only way to win is not to play the game. We need to get away with from the authoritarian framing of the problem of our society being constantly vulnerable and change from a surveillance state to a resilience state - where we accept life has risks, where we will take precautions proportional to the risks and spend the rest of our resources on living productive lives instead of lives of irrational fear.
Right! Slashdot's target audience are people who hear "back door" and think physical door. Stupid editors don't have a clue who reads their own website.
The AC OP's point is a terrible one because it could apply to nearly everything more complicated than a primetime tv show. It isn't about the 99.999% who can't use the information, it is the 0.001% who can use it that matter and it is no one's job to decide who qualifies.
Is Google, like MS, willing to break the Web to do this? Evidently so. Is this a big deal. Maybe not right now, but recall MS started small, the integrated the entire COM architecture into IE.
That's a stretch. Google is doing the opposite of MS - they are leaving functionality out of the browser, they are not adding proprietary functionality. Firefox and Opera are leaving out the same functions too.
I think you don't really understand the point of those rights. They aren't rights simply for being rights. They are rights because they are a necessary component of a healthy civilization. An "all seeing police state" perpetuates violence - the kind that a state visits on its citizens - it is just one or two steps removed from the actual violence that it creates.
This is probably nothing that should surprise or alert the average US citizen.
I have a vivid memory of watching congressional testimony by top Boeing executives over 20 years ago where they swore up and down that they did not want any help from american spy agencies. I'm sure they were talking about Airbus. I don't remember exactly what prompted congress to get involved, maybe it was the outing of some french industrial espionage that had recently come to light.
Bingo! To the "government is bad" zealots, nothing can interfere with their ideology. The many successes of government must be ignored, downplayed, or historically rewritten as failures or "less successful than they should have been."
I'm not even going that far. What I'm saying is that "starving the beast" without also putting the effort in to make sure that the government that remains is well managed means we get the worst of both worlds. The carrot and the stick.
Interestingly, Obama always supported the all-powerful teachers union in Chicago, who managed to get working conditions so good for their members that the schools had to cut the number of teaching days to afford those gold-plated teachers.
Interestingly, that seems to be completely made up.
In 2012 there were 170 teaching days for elementary school teachers. After the strike and contract negotiations there were 180 teaching days in 2013. High school teachers also had a 10 day increase. In both cases, the length of the work day also increased (see the same link as before).
Therein lies the problem. "good governance", to so very many people, means "making someone else do these things I think they should do (that I am usually unwilling to do myself)".
Anyone who thinks that is an idiot. Good governance is good management. It means things like no cronyism, honest book-keeping, effective planning. In short competency. And it requires public participation way beyond voting - it requires citizen review boards, contributions of expertise, etc.
They sure are... Have you been in a Target since their breech? It is a ghost town in the one here.
Sounds like it was a ghost town before the breach too. In my case, I've been to the nearest store about a dozen times and it has been no different than before the news broke. I always use cash so it made no difference to me.
Oh please, if we characterized each political movement by the lowest members,
How about we characterize each political movement by its most effective members? When things like food-stamp programs get cut while subsidies to ADM and the like are renewed, then you have to wonder what part of the tea party is in control.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, online property records are a big privacy leak. You can do things to obfuscate it -- put the property in a land trust if your state permits it (do it when you buy it, as historical information is also available) or buy it in the name of a new mexico llc (which have minimal reporting requirements, so you don't have to disclose your ownership of the llc - you can use a NM llc in any state).
The federal Australian government is also attempting to have the old growth forests in Tasmania de-listed as a world heritage area so they can log there.
If anyone wants to see how gorgeous Tasmania is, check out the Willem Dafoe movie "The Hunter" - the landscapes are stunning.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt17...
FWIW, the overwhelming number of acts of terrorism are nationalist/separatist. Something like 95% of cases. That includes stuff like white power in the US as well as things like the chechen conflict. Surprisingly, over the last 30 years or so the FBI logged more cases of puerto-rican nationalist terrorism than any other single motivation.
I'm calling BS on this. It sounds like it comes from a source that wants it to be true. At any rate, while I've heard it numerous times, I've seen no compelling evidence that it's true.
I'm willing to believe it. it isn't something people just talk about with anyone. Roughly two-thirds of all the women who have been close enough to trust me with private details like that has told me they have experienced at least one sexual assault and they have all been middle and upper-class. I'm sure that women who live in poverty have it even worse.
A recent article shows that the Pentagon is reconsidering uniform requirements to permit beards and turbans for Muslims. Now consider that beards have been outlawed by our military for decades, based on "discipline" considerations. No redneck, no Jew, no mountain man has been permitted to display a beard while in uniform. Suddenly - we are courting Muslims, so out of the goodness of our hearts, we are going to allow them to wear beards and turbans.
Hey dumbfuck! It isn't boogyman muslims, it is sikhs. Turbans have no religious significance to muslims.
Also, "decades" is technically correct, but only barely so - it was 1986 that beards were banned. Given the two centuries of beards being permitted in uniform before that, those deacdes are hardly a big deal.
Citation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Maybe we should update our privacy laws and stop allowing companies and the government to store all this information about us in shitty databases to begin with.
This.
When even the cops use these databases on on other cops you know the only solution is to stop building the databases in the first place.
Stalking pretty girls makes for a good visceral story, but the larger problem is one of political repression -- essentially using these databases to make it harder for political upstarts to instigate change, basically co-opting democracy.
BTW, that same database the cops used to stalk other cops? Also used to stalk political candidates.
Never quite understood this whole 'privacy of license plates' thing. If I look out the window right now I can see a dozen+ license plates. If I went for a walk I'd see hundreds. How is it private if there are two of them on every car for everyone to see?
The word privacy has multiple definitions. In this case, the apropriate definition is ephemeral. You looking at a license plate informs one person, you, about the time and location of that plate. You posting a picture of that online creates a perment record that potentially millions of people can access.
It is the same thing as using a debit card and the clerk looking at the card number versus the POS computer making a permanent record of the card number. The first is a very small risk, the second is essentially an unbounded risk as customers of Target, Neiman-Marcus and Michaels have come to find out.
Yeah, KDE is a freaking klassic desktop.
Fixed that for you.
It's a leash. Like your Sam's, BJ's or Costco membership. It makes you want to buy more stuff at Amazon (on account of you don't want to waste that $80 you handed them) and they make it all up on volume and margins.
This, 100% this. Prime is about making sure Amazon is at the top of your list of places to shop at. We all have such a list, and very few of us have the time to check thee or four merchants. Lots of people don't even have the time to do more than one merchant. Having a prime "membership" helps to make sure amazon always gets a chance at your money whenever you are ready to spend it.
I've been reading that guy's blog since day one:
http://takingsenseaway.wordpre...
> That's ~50 attacks short of the total, not counting ones they can't disclose due to classification rules.
Not according to NSA deputy director John C Inglis:
"The NSA has previously claimed that 54 terrorist plots had been disrupted "over the lifetime" of the bulk phone records collection and the separate program collecting the internet habits and communications of people believed to be non-Americans. On Wednesday, Inglis said that at most one plot might have been disrupted by the bulk phone records collection alone. "There is an example that comes close to a 'but for' example," Inglis said."
http://www.theguardian.com/wor...
And, there are no secret undisclosed successes - they never disclosed the details of the "54" attacks either, just the totals, keeping the details classified.
And you cannot fight irrationality, you cannot fight stupid, and you cannot fight well-intentioned ignorance.
I disagree. Irrationality is an argument that fundamentally people can't be trusted to govern themselves.
Sure, at the margins there are people who will never be rational. But what we've been doing is catering to those extremists and we don't have too. When we treat them as the norm of course the entire gestalt becomes one of irrational fear. We'll never be completely rid of that, but we can have a more level-headed society if we focus on our stengths and resilience rather than those rare-as-hen's-teeth vulnerabilities.
a well-intentioned plan to prevent the next 9/11,
Road to hell...
And as the US discovers very quickly, it happened due to intentional inefficiencies and silo-ization of intelligence.
No, that is not why it happened but framing it that way is seductively authoritarian and one of the main reasons for the creation of the modern surveillance state. Having spent billions to stop more attacks, what do we have to show for it? The Boston bombers plus a whole host of "white" attacks like mass shootings and the NSA's official record of having stopped precisely zero attacks on USA soil.
The reason these things happen is because the real world is an immensely complex system - to say that significant acts of violence are "easily prevented" is to indulge in the fallacy of perfect knowledge after the fact.
The real inefficiency here is the futile attempt to model the real world through "collect it all" surveillance. It's been a huge bust for its stated purpose and it's had the knock-on effect of jamming up everybody trying to get on with the business of living their lives - businesses and people spending time and money to shield themselves from the surveillance as well as the psychological toll on the entire populace that in the back of their heads they are evaluating if their actions might be misinterpreted by the invisible and unaccountable watchers.
The only way to win is not to play the game. We need to get away with from the authoritarian framing of the problem of our society being constantly vulnerable and change from a surveillance state to a resilience state - where we accept life has risks, where we will take precautions proportional to the risks and spend the rest of our resources on living productive lives instead of lives of irrational fear.
Way to write a headline, editors.
Right! Slashdot's target audience are people who hear "back door" and think physical door.
Stupid editors don't have a clue who reads their own website.
This!
The AC OP's point is a terrible one because it could apply to nearly everything more complicated than a primetime tv show. It isn't about the 99.999% who can't use the information, it is the 0.001% who can use it that matter and it is no one's job to decide who qualifies.
Is Google, like MS, willing to break the Web to do this? Evidently so. Is this a big deal. Maybe not right now, but recall MS started small, the integrated the entire COM architecture into IE.
That's a stretch. Google is doing the opposite of MS - they are leaving functionality out of the browser, they are not adding proprietary functionality. Firefox and Opera are leaving out the same functions too.
I think you don't really understand the point of those rights. They aren't rights simply for being rights. They are rights because they are a necessary component of a healthy civilization. An "all seeing police state" perpetuates violence - the kind that a state visits on its citizens - it is just one or two steps removed from the actual violence that it creates.
This is probably nothing that should surprise or alert the average US citizen.
I have a vivid memory of watching congressional testimony by top Boeing executives over 20 years ago where they swore up and down that they did not want any help from american spy agencies. I'm sure they were talking about Airbus. I don't remember exactly what prompted congress to get involved, maybe it was the outing of some french industrial espionage that had recently come to light.
Bingo! To the "government is bad" zealots, nothing can interfere with their ideology. The many successes of government must be ignored, downplayed, or historically rewritten as failures or "less successful than they should have been."
I'm not even going that far. What I'm saying is that "starving the beast" without also putting the effort in to make sure that the government that remains is well managed means we get the worst of both worlds. The carrot and the stick.
Interestingly, Obama always supported the all-powerful teachers union in Chicago, who managed to get working conditions so good for their members that the schools had to cut the number of teaching days to afford those gold-plated teachers.
Interestingly, that seems to be completely made up.
In 2012 there were 170 teaching days for elementary school teachers. After the strike and contract negotiations there were 180 teaching days in 2013. High school teachers also had a 10 day increase. In both cases, the length of the work day also increased (see the same link as before).
Yeah, meaningless quips are definitely a good basis for political philosophy.
The government that skips competitive bid processes because it doesn't have the funding to effectively evaluate the bids is totally governing best.
Therein lies the problem. "good governance", to so very many people, means "making someone else do these things I think they should do (that I am usually unwilling to do myself)".
Anyone who thinks that is an idiot. Good governance is good management. It means things like no cronyism, honest book-keeping, effective planning. In short competency. And it requires public participation way beyond voting - it requires citizen review boards, contributions of expertise, etc.
They sure are... Have you been in a Target since their breech? It is a ghost town in the one here.
Sounds like it was a ghost town before the breach too. In my case, I've been to the nearest store about a dozen times and it has been no different than before the news broke. I always use cash so it made no difference to me.
Oh please, if we characterized each political movement by the lowest members,
How about we characterize each political movement by its most effective members? When things like food-stamp programs get cut while subsidies to ADM and the like are renewed, then you have to wonder what part of the tea party is in control.