"support" is a tricky term. Note that I did not talk about secretaries or other employees of the church, but specifically priests. I do agree that the discussion gets more interesting if we talk about a secretary or a simple parisher. But to claim that a priest of a religion is not very much part of it would be laughable.
The usual stupid argument that any kind of remote interaction is automatically a support action. It's idiotic. At least make it comparable, people actively working for the central bank, that is something we could discuss. But even then, I was not talking about secretaries or other employees, I was talking about priests. So we're down to the actual bankers of the central banks. And on that account I would have to say: Yes, if you consider the central banks an evil institution, you should consider the bankers evil people. Because institutions by themselves are neither good nor evil, actions of people are the only actions that happen. The distribution of power and responsibility in institutions can make it easier for slightly evil people to do very evil things, but it's still people acting, not virtual entities.
You know, people are strange. That they minimize rape is one of the less strange facts, but the fact that many minimize their own rape is much stranger, but it does happen.
To two different women, one of which is a feminist and used to work as equality officer? Not impossible, I will grant that, but unlikely.
So, whether the alleged victime "continued a positive relation" with the guy after the alleged rape is no more exculpatory evidence of rape than it would be of domestic abuse. By that standard, lots of clear cases of either would fail.
Why then would one of them delete heir Twitter posts where she goes on about how great a guy he is?
Ockhams razor tells me this story: Assange sleeps with both women, consensually. Then they find out about each other. Women have this tendency to either hate their rivals like crazy, or bond with them against the male. In this case, the later happens, and both seek revenge on a guy they think cheated them both.
It appears to me to be the most simple, straightforward explanation that is in line with all the details I know. Every other explanation has the burden of proof.
I am an American male and yet I am still horrified that you think those actions are okay. Just because the victim does not have the wherewithal to say "no" during the act does not mean it is not rape.
I did not say that it's ok.
I did say that it is quite unfair to prosecute someone for rape if the alleged "victim" explicitly said "yes" before, during AND afterwards. And don't try the "you should've known" angle. I know a few women who can down 5-6 strong drinks, which puts them definitely way beyond being allowed to drive so it probably would count as "could not really consent", and yet they appear perfectly sober, and after a few more drinks, only slightly drunk.
Maybe marketing a "ONS emergency package" in Sweden would be a good market. You know, contents: A few condoms, a breathalizer, and a form of consent to be signed by both parties before the first kiss is exchanged. Actually, as some crazy feminists want to construct sexual molestation charges out of things you say, maybe that form should be signed before anything else. Might make a good pickup line "excuse me, before I can say how cute I think you are, could you please sign this for me?"
Some priests are actually good people. I'm not sure I would lump them in with rapists, child molesters and torturers.
I am and I do. There are "good people" in priesthood in the same way there are "good people" in the Mafia, or with the Taliban, or in another example I can't spell out without invoking Godwin's law.
The story certainly is more complicated than that. Especially with the women continuing a positive relation with him for several days, and the alleged tweets that happened after the fact.
But it gets more tricky. Sweden reports four times as many rapes (per capita) as other european countries. This is not because they actually happen, but because of the way the law treats and counts those. Basically, swedish rape laws are weird. You can be charged for raping someone who explicitly and repeatedly said "yes" and never once "no", due to a construct of "power difference" that voids their consent. That is one of the attack angles the prosecution is using in this case. Another example is that the girl can call in the next day and call it rape if she was really drunk. She can claim she was too drunk to know what she was doing, again voiding the consent even if it was explicitly given (and let's face it, how often does that occur? In most ONS you never really ask the question, or if you do you don't record the answer, it just happens if both parties want it). So a voided consent means no consent and sex without consent equals rape. Whoops. You fucked a girl who went with you all the way, enjoyed it a ton, even encouraged you - and the next day you're a rapist because she had a few drinks and now regrets it.
Don't get me wrong, rapists are right up there with child molesters, torturers and priests in my personal list of highly despicable people. But there is a huge difference between a guy who grabs a woman from the street, rips off her clothes and forces his dick into her while she's struggling for her life - and a guy who doesn't notice that the woman has had a few too many and may think differently in the morning.
And a law that doesn't acknowledge that difference is an unjust law.
Every partnership, company, country, etc, must have the ability to have frank internal conversations about various relationship with others, that must be private.
Can we agree to accept that if and when the governments accept that there are things in our lives that must be private, too ?
A government that respects the privacy of its citizens has earned some trust and respect for their backroom deals. But a government that violates the privacy of its citizens given half an excuse does not.
There's a core concept in decision making, called cost/benefit analysis, that our modern day society has completely forgotten. I mean this very seriously: Once you move from cost/benefit analysis decision making to Precautionary Principle decision making, you are officially insane, because you believe things that are contradictory.
I'm a big fan of that myself, but here's the catch: People in general, and politicians even more so, refuse to deal with human lives in units of $. It's not easy, but entirely possible, to calculate the value of a human being to society. But we don't like to do it, because our subjective feeling of importance (that could be us!) gets in the way. For politicians, they also fear the fallout because no matter what the number, people/voters will complain.
The horse has left the barn, but people in power always insist on closing the door afterwards. That was clearly visible with DeCSS, it's visible now, it's a general trait. Maybe you have to be this kind of fucked-up idiot to rise to power in our western party-ocracies.
The best you can do is laugh about it. I know I'd rather cry knowing that people with a negative IQ are ruling over me, but it doesn't change anything. It's a big satire on the human race, really, that the dumbest of the dumb are governing us.
This is being touted as a way to bring in tourist revenue. It can't be treated any differently than any other tourist attraction proposed by a non-profit organization.
Public executions used to bring in crowds of visitors. While attracting tourists is a point that can be brought fourth, it should not in itself suffice. The object that brings them should still be something that we, the public, want.
No, we live in an age where vigilante justice and violent overreactions are not the accepted solutions to problems.
Age or not, vigilante justice appears whenever the public justice system fails. And it is failing with regards to large-scale distributed crimes, whether it be spam, copyright extortion, copyright infringement or sub-prime credit fraud.
What i don't understand, is how does he find customers who want to advertise through him ?!?
Well, what do you think? Never received a spam mail that advertised a spam business? Spam is advertised through spam, simple as that. If you're sitting on your very own marketing channel, why would you not use it?
Community projects generally advance the common good. You or someone like you could one day profit from or simply enjoy them.
This stuff requires you to subscribe to a certain world-view in order to have the slighest chance of maybe being considered slightly useful. For everyone else, it is pure propaganda.
but did this really need and act of Congress to solve?
Well, apparently, the "invisible hand" that magically fixes world hunger, world peace, climate change and all other troubles that ever ailed mankind has failed in this one.
Hm, could be because you as the viewer aren't a participant in the market - the market exchange is between the TV station and the marketing company.
Yes, lets forget about laws and giving sentences that are in line with the crime. No matter how you want to spin it, spamming clearly isn't as big crime as rape, violence or killing someone.
Number of offenses counts for something, you know? Raping ten women does and should yield you a higher sentence then raping one.
So while each individual crime is tiny, do sum it up. So, for all I care, give him one second of jailtime for every spam message he sent. That'd get him put away for a couple hundred years.
Oh, I forgot. We live in an age where the general public is not something that anyone stands up for anymore. Our politicians are all bought, we ourselves are too lazy and scared, and most of what we have in NGOs has become a political quagmire of commercialized selling of "feel good".
Sending the same amount of traffic to an individual company would result in charges for a DOS attack, no questions asked. But no, as long as you have enough victims and only minor damage to each, nobody really cares very much.
Wow. You really don't know a whole lot about security.
Pfft. And you know that thanks to a few sentences on/.? Remind me to not let you profile people.:-)
Wrong. When you're doing security right, *nothing happens*. The bad guys don't send you a congratulatory memo.
No, really? Damn, all those years I was waiting... "Nothing happens" is nonsense. A reduced number of incidents, a lower impact of those that do happen, quicker discovery of compromises are all measurable items. If we were at the point where no incidents would ever happen, then we wouldn't be able to measure improvement, but we aren't.
You can't eliminate risk. You can however manage it.
Yes, I know. Happens to be part of my day job.
Houses are seldom robbed due to people actions.
I think you'll find houses are robbed 100% because of people's actions - the robber's.
And here I was thinking those houses rob themselves. Well of course the robbers are people. That was not the context in which "people's actions" was used in your original response. Are we here to discuss grammar or security?
In residential burglary, the point of intrusion is not always via a door. Moreover, a wholly pick-resistant lock may not stand up to a well aimed kick, if it's installed on a weak door or frame.
Yes, I already wrote that the door is often not the weakest point, a sentence you chose not to quote. If you have a point, could you please make it?
Security can not disregard the people, but it isn't about them.
Umm... Yeah it is. No people = nothing to protect.
You are confusing the object to be protected with the protection measures. Security is not the to-be-protected object. Houses don't have those alarm sirens so the burglary alarm can scream if someone tries to steal the burglary alarm. Building a good safe is not "about money", even though money may be stored in it. In fact, the construction of the safe is not affected by whether you put money, gold or diamonds into it. Your burglary alarm is the same whether you are afraid of people raping you or stealing your TV while you're asleep.
Obsessive focus on technology and 'things' instead of people, is a fail waiting to happen. To use everyone's favourite whipping boy, have a look at aviation security. TSA spend their time looking for weapons. Israeli security spend their time looking for terrorists. Guess who's better at it?
Oh, I totally agree on that, and consider the whole of airport security a big theatre.
There are two important points to be made, however. One is that even the Israelis do not ignore technology, they simply use it as one of many tools instead of putting blind trust in some high-tech magic box. Two is that an airplane and a database are not the same thing and what works for one does not automatically apply to the other.
A) People are people. You can spend a year giving speeches and lectures and expect the next wave on employees to magically have that information.
Yes, which is why I don't buy the "security awareness" crap anymore. We've been doing security awareness for 20 years now, if it would solve anything, you'd expect to be seeing some results by now.
I don't give lectures to common employees for that reason. I speak (used to speak, been doing different stuff for a few years now) at conferences for security people.
B) Comparing the state of the art to security is ignorant.
There is a state of the art in security as in any other field. There was a time when IDS/IPS systems were cutting edge, now they are standard. There was a time when complicated passwords where all the hype, fortunately many people are re-thinking that approach now. There is best practice, standards - it isn't as if security were somehow magical.
C) technology is just a TINY part of IT security.
Yes and no. IT is by definition a technical field, in which technology does and always will be a major component. It isn't the only one and in many areas not the most important one, but "tiny" is not right.
D) Security it a process that needs to be part of the culture. Sending some people to a lecture and giving them a book does not make it part of the culture.
Security isn't a process. We're not in the late 90s anymore and here on/. we don't need to throw marketing buzzwords around in order to get long-term consulting contracts. You are right that it needs to be part of the culture, but it runs deeper than even that. As long as the tools, processes and systems people use invite, if not encourage, unsafe behaviour, we can't expect people nor their culture to be better than that.
We've made locks for years, yet houses still get robbed.
Security is about the people. Always has been, and always will be.
Houses are seldom robbed due to people actions. They are robbed because, quite frankly, most of our locks suck (you can pick up enough lockpicking skills to open most regular locks in a week or so) and more often than not they're not even the weakest link. For most of us geeks, our servers are fortresses compared to our homes.
Security can not disregard the people, but it isn't about them. A lot of good security solutions are invisible or transparent to the users. SSL is a great example - it isn't a perfect technology, but it is good enough and it is simple enough for the average consumer to use, and he doesn't need to know any of the technical details.
Seriously? I gave and listend to speeches about this kind of stuff six years ago. I know people who've done this stuff in their security consulting work for five years. Granted, those are cutting-edge people, but the general state of the security industry is not five years behind the state of the art, is it?
I'm afraid you overestimate the number of people willing to risk their lives (ruined or taken away, how much difference does it really make?) for the ideal of free information.
It's easy to post your political views on/. - it's a lot harder to do it when it means hiding from authorities and seriously fearing someone could put a bullet into you. Whatever else Assange may be, he certainly is brave.
Slashdot Mirror
"support" is a tricky term. Note that I did not talk about secretaries or other employees of the church, but specifically priests. I do agree that the discussion gets more interesting if we talk about a secretary or a simple parisher. But to claim that a priest of a religion is not very much part of it would be laughable.
*sigh*
The usual stupid argument that any kind of remote interaction is automatically a support action. It's idiotic. At least make it comparable, people actively working for the central bank, that is something we could discuss. But even then, I was not talking about secretaries or other employees, I was talking about priests. So we're down to the actual bankers of the central banks. And on that account I would have to say: Yes, if you consider the central banks an evil institution, you should consider the bankers evil people. Because institutions by themselves are neither good nor evil, actions of people are the only actions that happen. The distribution of power and responsibility in institutions can make it easier for slightly evil people to do very evil things, but it's still people acting, not virtual entities.
You know, people are strange. That they minimize rape is one of the less strange facts, but the fact that many minimize their own rape is much stranger, but it does happen.
To two different women, one of which is a feminist and used to work as equality officer? Not impossible, I will grant that, but unlikely.
So, whether the alleged victime "continued a positive relation" with the guy after the alleged rape is no more exculpatory evidence of rape than it would be of domestic abuse. By that standard, lots of clear cases of either would fail.
Why then would one of them delete heir Twitter posts where she goes on about how great a guy he is?
Ockhams razor tells me this story: Assange sleeps with both women, consensually. Then they find out about each other. Women have this tendency to either hate their rivals like crazy, or bond with them against the male. In this case, the later happens, and both seek revenge on a guy they think cheated them both.
It appears to me to be the most simple, straightforward explanation that is in line with all the details I know. Every other explanation has the burden of proof.
I am an American male and yet I am still horrified that you think those actions are okay. Just because the victim does not have the wherewithal to say "no" during the act does not mean it is not rape.
I did not say that it's ok.
I did say that it is quite unfair to prosecute someone for rape if the alleged "victim" explicitly said "yes" before, during AND afterwards. And don't try the "you should've known" angle. I know a few women who can down 5-6 strong drinks, which puts them definitely way beyond being allowed to drive so it probably would count as "could not really consent", and yet they appear perfectly sober, and after a few more drinks, only slightly drunk.
Maybe marketing a "ONS emergency package" in Sweden would be a good market. You know, contents: A few condoms, a breathalizer, and a form of consent to be signed by both parties before the first kiss is exchanged. Actually, as some crazy feminists want to construct sexual molestation charges out of things you say, maybe that form should be signed before anything else. Might make a good pickup line "excuse me, before I can say how cute I think you are, could you please sign this for me?"
Some priests are actually good people. I'm not sure I would lump them in with rapists, child molesters and torturers.
I am and I do. There are "good people" in priesthood in the same way there are "good people" in the Mafia, or with the Taliban, or in another example I can't spell out without invoking Godwin's law.
Real good people don't support evil systems.
The story certainly is more complicated than that. Especially with the women continuing a positive relation with him for several days, and the alleged tweets that happened after the fact.
But it gets more tricky. Sweden reports four times as many rapes (per capita) as other european countries. This is not because they actually happen, but because of the way the law treats and counts those. Basically, swedish rape laws are weird. You can be charged for raping someone who explicitly and repeatedly said "yes" and never once "no", due to a construct of "power difference" that voids their consent. That is one of the attack angles the prosecution is using in this case. Another example is that the girl can call in the next day and call it rape if she was really drunk. She can claim she was too drunk to know what she was doing, again voiding the consent even if it was explicitly given (and let's face it, how often does that occur? In most ONS you never really ask the question, or if you do you don't record the answer, it just happens if both parties want it). So a voided consent means no consent and sex without consent equals rape. Whoops. You fucked a girl who went with you all the way, enjoyed it a ton, even encouraged you - and the next day you're a rapist because she had a few drinks and now regrets it.
Don't get me wrong, rapists are right up there with child molesters, torturers and priests in my personal list of highly despicable people. But there is a huge difference between a guy who grabs a woman from the street, rips off her clothes and forces his dick into her while she's struggling for her life - and a guy who doesn't notice that the woman has had a few too many and may think differently in the morning.
And a law that doesn't acknowledge that difference is an unjust law.
There are these things called "condoms" which are not only useful as contraceptives.
Yes, they're not 100% safe, but then again, life in general isn't safe, either.
Every partnership, company, country, etc, must have the ability to have frank internal conversations about various relationship with others, that must be private.
Can we agree to accept that if and when the governments accept that there are things in our lives that must be private, too ?
A government that respects the privacy of its citizens has earned some trust and respect for their backroom deals. But a government that violates the privacy of its citizens given half an excuse does not.
Quid pro quo.
There's a core concept in decision making, called cost/benefit analysis, that our modern day society has completely forgotten. I mean this very seriously: Once you move from cost/benefit analysis decision making to Precautionary Principle decision making, you are officially insane, because you believe things that are contradictory.
I'm a big fan of that myself, but here's the catch: People in general, and politicians even more so, refuse to deal with human lives in units of $. It's not easy, but entirely possible, to calculate the value of a human being to society. But we don't like to do it, because our subjective feeling of importance (that could be us!) gets in the way. For politicians, they also fear the fallout because no matter what the number, people/voters will complain.
The horse has left the barn, but people in power always insist on closing the door afterwards. That was clearly visible with DeCSS, it's visible now, it's a general trait. Maybe you have to be this kind of fucked-up idiot to rise to power in our western party-ocracies.
The best you can do is laugh about it. I know I'd rather cry knowing that people with a negative IQ are ruling over me, but it doesn't change anything. It's a big satire on the human race, really, that the dumbest of the dumb are governing us.
This is being touted as a way to bring in tourist revenue. It can't be treated any differently than any other tourist attraction proposed by a non-profit organization.
Public executions used to bring in crowds of visitors. While attracting tourists is a point that can be brought fourth, it should not in itself suffice. The object that brings them should still be something that we, the public, want.
I'm sorry your remote control lacks a Mute button.
Yes, and spam only takes a button press to delete...
The argument "this is only a minor inconvenience" fails when there is a lot of that "minor inconvenience".
No, we live in an age where vigilante justice and violent overreactions are not the accepted solutions to problems.
Age or not, vigilante justice appears whenever the public justice system fails. And it is failing with regards to large-scale distributed crimes, whether it be spam, copyright extortion, copyright infringement or sub-prime credit fraud.
What i don't understand, is how does he find customers who want to advertise through him ?!?
Well, what do you think? Never received a spam mail that advertised a spam business? Spam is advertised through spam, simple as that. If you're sitting on your very own marketing channel, why would you not use it?
The tourism development law doesn't care about the possible ulterior motives of the developers
Which is stupid. You should always care about the motives of your business partners. Lest you find out that their goals don't match yours.
There's a bit of a difference here.
Community projects generally advance the common good. You or someone like you could one day profit from or simply enjoy them.
This stuff requires you to subscribe to a certain world-view in order to have the slighest chance of maybe being considered slightly useful. For everyone else, it is pure propaganda.
but did this really need and act of Congress to solve?
Well, apparently, the "invisible hand" that magically fixes world hunger, world peace, climate change and all other troubles that ever ailed mankind has failed in this one.
Hm, could be because you as the viewer aren't a participant in the market - the market exchange is between the TV station and the marketing company.
Cool. I hope those "inflating to impress the girls" ones become common. Hacking one should be trivial. :-)
Yes, lets forget about laws and giving sentences that are in line with the crime. No matter how you want to spin it, spamming clearly isn't as big crime as rape, violence or killing someone.
Number of offenses counts for something, you know? Raping ten women does and should yield you a higher sentence then raping one.
So while each individual crime is tiny, do sum it up. So, for all I care, give him one second of jailtime for every spam message he sent. That'd get him put away for a couple hundred years.
So what are we waiting for? Someone shoot him.
Oh, I forgot. We live in an age where the general public is not something that anyone stands up for anymore. Our politicians are all bought, we ourselves are too lazy and scared, and most of what we have in NGOs has become a political quagmire of commercialized selling of "feel good".
Sending the same amount of traffic to an individual company would result in charges for a DOS attack, no questions asked. But no, as long as you have enough victims and only minor damage to each, nobody really cares very much.
Wow. You really don't know a whole lot about security.
Pfft. And you know that thanks to a few sentences on /.? Remind me to not let you profile people. :-)
Wrong. When you're doing security right, *nothing happens*. The bad guys don't send you a congratulatory memo.
No, really? Damn, all those years I was waiting...
"Nothing happens" is nonsense. A reduced number of incidents, a lower impact of those that do happen, quicker discovery of compromises are all measurable items. If we were at the point where no incidents would ever happen, then we wouldn't be able to measure improvement, but we aren't.
You can't eliminate risk. You can however manage it.
Yes, I know. Happens to be part of my day job.
Houses are seldom robbed due to people actions.
I think you'll find houses are robbed 100% because of people's actions - the robber's.
And here I was thinking those houses rob themselves. Well of course the robbers are people. That was not the context in which "people's actions" was used in your original response. Are we here to discuss grammar or security?
In residential burglary, the point of intrusion is not always via a door. Moreover, a wholly pick-resistant lock may not stand up to a well aimed kick, if it's installed on a weak door or frame.
Yes, I already wrote that the door is often not the weakest point, a sentence you chose not to quote. If you have a point, could you please make it?
Security can not disregard the people, but it isn't about them.
Umm... Yeah it is. No people = nothing to protect.
You are confusing the object to be protected with the protection measures. Security is not the to-be-protected object. Houses don't have those alarm sirens so the burglary alarm can scream if someone tries to steal the burglary alarm. Building a good safe is not "about money", even though money may be stored in it. In fact, the construction of the safe is not affected by whether you put money, gold or diamonds into it. Your burglary alarm is the same whether you are afraid of people raping you or stealing your TV while you're asleep.
Obsessive focus on technology and 'things' instead of people, is a fail waiting to happen. To use everyone's favourite whipping boy, have a look at aviation security. TSA spend their time looking for weapons. Israeli security spend their time looking for terrorists. Guess who's better at it?
Oh, I totally agree on that, and consider the whole of airport security a big theatre.
There are two important points to be made, however. One is that even the Israelis do not ignore technology, they simply use it as one of many tools instead of putting blind trust in some high-tech magic box. Two is that an airplane and a database are not the same thing and what works for one does not automatically apply to the other.
A) People are people. You can spend a year giving speeches and lectures and expect the next wave on employees to magically have that information.
Yes, which is why I don't buy the "security awareness" crap anymore. We've been doing security awareness for 20 years now, if it would solve anything, you'd expect to be seeing some results by now.
I don't give lectures to common employees for that reason. I speak (used to speak, been doing different stuff for a few years now) at conferences for security people.
B) Comparing the state of the art to security is ignorant.
There is a state of the art in security as in any other field. There was a time when IDS/IPS systems were cutting edge, now they are standard. There was a time when complicated passwords where all the hype, fortunately many people are re-thinking that approach now. There is best practice, standards - it isn't as if security were somehow magical.
C) technology is just a TINY part of IT security.
Yes and no. IT is by definition a technical field, in which technology does and always will be a major component. It isn't the only one and in many areas not the most important one, but "tiny" is not right.
D) Security it a process that needs to be part of the culture. Sending some people to a lecture and giving them a book does not make it part of the culture.
Security isn't a process. We're not in the late 90s anymore and here on /. we don't need to throw marketing buzzwords around in order to get long-term consulting contracts. You are right that it needs to be part of the culture, but it runs deeper than even that. As long as the tools, processes and systems people use invite, if not encourage, unsafe behaviour, we can't expect people nor their culture to be better than that.
We've made locks for years, yet houses still get robbed.
Security is about the people. Always has been, and always will be.
Houses are seldom robbed due to people actions. They are robbed because, quite frankly, most of our locks suck (you can pick up enough lockpicking skills to open most regular locks in a week or so) and more often than not they're not even the weakest link. For most of us geeks, our servers are fortresses compared to our homes.
Security can not disregard the people, but it isn't about them. A lot of good security solutions are invisible or transparent to the users. SSL is a great example - it isn't a perfect technology, but it is good enough and it is simple enough for the average consumer to use, and he doesn't need to know any of the technical details.
Seriously? I gave and listend to speeches about this kind of stuff six years ago. I know people who've done this stuff in their security consulting work for five years. Granted, those are cutting-edge people, but the general state of the security industry is not five years behind the state of the art, is it?
I'm afraid you overestimate the number of people willing to risk their lives (ruined or taken away, how much difference does it really make?) for the ideal of free information.
It's easy to post your political views on /. - it's a lot harder to do it when it means hiding from authorities and seriously fearing someone could put a bullet into you. Whatever else Assange may be, he certainly is brave.
Sarah Palin is an stupid moron. News at 11.