"Now, where does cyberspace belong to? Electonic surveillance is certainly not hassling, but is it spying or just looking? Cypherpunks certainly claim that it is a private area and that nobody should even so much as look what they are doing. Cops claim that it is public, and that using monitoring tools is equivalent to street patrolling : taking a quick look in order to detect crime."
Overall, an insightful analysis. If I carry the analogy further, I could even admit that internet traffic is public, matching your analogy for legitimate police surveillance. It does travels through paths that are controlled and owned by others. Any techno-geek knows that email ~could~ be read by anybody in between source and destination.
So.. what's the big deal about encrypting? I can go to a public park and sit on the bench with a bag over my head. Let the police look, and they don't know who I am. I can whisper to my bench-mate. They can get a super duper parabolic evesdropping device. I can whisper more quietly or turn my head away or shield the conversation with background generating devices. Encryption is nothing more than the tit-for-tat that has always gone on between bad-guy and good-guy.
But only recently, am I hearing advocation to take a techology from everybody so that the bad guys can't use it. Well, actually, I can think of some older examples of this. Maybe this is an antiquated issue with a new techno-coating?
Back to the article...
In the article, the author ends with the presumption that the escalation of capability is to the "detriment to us all".
He demonstrated a mechanism -- a sequence of events that exhibits some phenomena. But he definitely didn't establish any of it is to our collective detriment. Is he suggesting that developers should intentionally not encrypt things so that web traffic can be shaped by ISPs, and monitored by good guys chasing bad guys?
Politely put, it seems as though this whole issue of encryption was dreamed up as a surrogate for what the original article was suppose to have been about, since what the original article really was about was so blatantly wrong.
After Seeing the Bad, Please Show Me the Good
on
The Patent Epidemic
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I've seen this critique of the PTO growing from multiple directions. What bothers me is that it's all too easy to find the bad patents we can all laugh at. If we need non-obvious, and non-trivial, and truly unique patents, how about if someone provides a few examples they judget to be just so? I don't want to hear of Patent XX which is bad. I want you to point out a half dozen patents that you think DO meet an acceptable standard of non-obvious.
Instead of taking the cheap shot saying what has not met standard, how about the harder job of truly judging what non-obvious looks like and put it out on the table for people to learn from?
I'd have to agree with the orignal poster. Web sites don't do anything until an end-user requests files from the site. A better title might be "Government computer users download hacks from web sites." This would also put a healthier spin on the problem which might yield a solution. For example, I think government classified network users shouldn't/can't cruise hostile websites in China. "Web sites attack" is a poor phrase hoisted on a technically shallow public. IMHO.
Slashdot Mirror
TekNoGos wrote:
"Now, where does cyberspace belong to? Electonic surveillance is certainly not hassling, but is it spying or just looking? Cypherpunks certainly claim that it is a private area and that nobody should even so much as look what they are doing. Cops claim that it is public, and that using monitoring tools is equivalent to street patrolling : taking a quick look in order to detect crime."
Overall, an insightful analysis. If I carry the analogy further, I could even admit that internet traffic is public, matching your analogy for legitimate police surveillance. It does travels through paths that are controlled and owned by others. Any techno-geek knows that email ~could~ be read by anybody in between source and destination.
So.. what's the big deal about encrypting? I can go to a public park and sit on the bench with a bag over my head. Let the police look, and they don't know who I am. I can whisper to my bench-mate. They can get a super duper parabolic evesdropping device. I can whisper more quietly or turn my head away or shield the conversation with background generating devices. Encryption is nothing more than the tit-for-tat that has always gone on between bad-guy and good-guy.
But only recently, am I hearing advocation to take a techology from everybody so that the bad guys can't use it. Well, actually, I can think of some older examples of this. Maybe this is an antiquated issue with a new techno-coating?
Back to the article...
In the article, the author ends with the presumption that the escalation of capability is to the "detriment to us all".
He demonstrated a mechanism -- a sequence of events that exhibits some phenomena. But he definitely didn't establish any of it is to our collective detriment. Is he suggesting that developers should intentionally not encrypt things so that web traffic can be shaped by ISPs, and monitored by good guys chasing bad guys?
Politely put, it seems as though this whole issue of encryption was dreamed up as a surrogate for what the original article was suppose to have been about, since what the original article really was about was so blatantly wrong.
I've seen this critique of the PTO growing from multiple directions. What bothers me is that it's all too easy to find the bad patents we can all laugh at. If we need non-obvious, and non-trivial, and truly unique patents, how about if someone provides a few examples they judget to be just so? I don't want to hear of Patent XX which is bad. I want you to point out a half dozen patents that you think DO meet an acceptable standard of non-obvious.
Instead of taking the cheap shot saying what has not met standard, how about the harder job of truly judging what non-obvious looks like and put it out on the table for people to learn from?
I'd have to agree with the orignal poster. Web sites don't do anything until an end-user requests files from the site. A better title might be "Government computer users download hacks from web sites." This would also put a healthier spin on the problem which might yield a solution. For example, I think government classified network users shouldn't/can't cruise hostile websites in China. "Web sites attack" is a poor phrase hoisted on a technically shallow public. IMHO.