While I broadly agree with Shirky that free communication between people in authoritarian societies is a more important driver of social change than communication with the outside world, we have to recognise that the two can't be neatly separated. One of the reasons people currently use circumvention tools is to reach social media sites where they can communicate with other people who are behind the same firewall. That's a crazy situation for two reasons.
First, it turns commercial entities like Facebook, which couldn't give a fuck about fighting censorship, into vital tools for opposition movements. If there's one thing the WikiLeaks/Anonymous bunfight has shown, it's that internet companies aren't mature enough as institutions to balance their short term political and financial interests against their long term responsibility to protect free speech. We can't rely on them.
Second, it means that all communication between people in authoritarian societies has to cross the border twice, even though borders are among the easiest places to monitor and control. If you wanted to design a communication system for prisoners in neighbouring cells, I doubt your design sketch would begin, "First get the message to a trusted third party outside the prison."
Unfortunately, moving the social media sites inside the firewall doesn't solve the problem. Take China for example. There are already Chinese equivalents of Facebook, Twitter, and other firewalled sites, but they're subject to a variety of pressures to police their users, especially those that start to form political groups. If Facebook isn't going to stand up for Chinese dissidents then Baidu certainly won't.
It's also pretty tough to maintain social media sites outside the firewall that are dedicated to supporting opposition movements - such sites are susceptible to DDoS attacks and subtler forms of infiltration and monitoring, as in the Ghostnet case. The basic problem is that the web wasn't designed or implemented with censorship-resistance in mind. Let's not ask anyone to bet their life on the security of Wordpress.
So what do we do? In my opinion we need new tools. Tools that are designed with security in mind, that don't rely on servers inside or outside the firewall, that can be used from an internet cafe or a mobile phone, that don't produce easily recognised traffic patterns, that can be used to hold meetings, plan rallies, or just tell jokes - in short, to talk to people you trust without revealing anything to people you don't. We already have some partial solutions we can learn from - Freenet, WASTE, txtmob, CryptoSMS, Gazzera, Retroshare, SocialVPN - and a million research papers that never made it as far as implementation. Now we need some specs, some code, many eyes and regular backups.:-)
I agree, there's a sad lack of vision in America today. The whole country seems bitter and afraid. Nobody talks about principles. Of course the same's true in Europe, but I feel like we've been suffering from that disease for longer - America used to be different. Perhaps it's a symptom of post-imperial decline, which America's only just beginning to enter. Or perhaps I've fallen for the golden age myth after all - Americans must have been bitter during the Great Depression, afraid during the Cold War - why did we ever think they were different?
When the iPad was first announced, I dismissed it as an insignificant device - little more than a giant phone or a netbook without a keyboard.
How wrong I was.
What Jobs & Co have developed is nothing less than a fucking time machine. The iPad offers to transport us back to the comfort and safety of the mid-twentieth century. A time when citizens' minds were untroubled by pornographic smut or government leaks. A time when the news was delivered to your doorstep once a day, and you were happy to pay for the privilege. A time when anyone who disagreed with the policies designed to keep them safe was quietly taken away and never heard from again.
What next from these technological wizards? Here are my predictions:
The iDollar, a digital currency based on the rock-solid security of the Gold Standard.
The iCadillac, a car the size of a house, with stylish white-wall tires and a DRM-equipped stereo.
The iWife, a lifelong companion and domestic servant who will teach your iKids strict gender roles and other Apple-approved family values.
The iCigar, a relaxing treat for gentlemen, with no proven medical link to cancer.
The iMac, a dapper yet practical wrap-around raincoat, available in beige, light brown, or camel.
I'm truly excited to be living in the future my grandparents dreamed of!
When was the last Northern Ireland-related terrorist incident outside of Northern Ireland? Looks to me like it was the Ealing car bomb, nine years ago.
Getting out of Afghanistan won't bring an end to violence in Afghanistan - but it will make it a lot harder for people to justify spreading that violence abroad.
Sorry, I don't really buy the argument that copying a fashion design is as easy as copying a photograph - have you every tried to reproduce a skillfully made piece of clothing?
In fact, most of the items in your first list require considerable skill, investment, or both to reproduce (exception: rules of games), whereas most of the items in the second list don't (exceptions: choreography, architecture). While I don't believe that current copyright laws strike the right balance between protecting artists from cheap copies, allowing audiences to benefit from cheap copies, and encouraging creative derivative works, I can understand why copyright would be more important for things that are easy to copy than for things that aren't - and your lists seem to show that copyright applies almost exclusively to things that can be copied without much skill.
I absolutely agree with you, however, that the argument about protecting creativity is badly framed. The question should not be, "Is the work creative?", but rather, "Does the work require creativity to copy?"
Reframing the question in that way suggests an interesting alternative rationale for copyright law: if we want to maximise the benefit of copyright to creative people as a whole, we should remove protection from anything that requires creativity to reproduce, in order that those who reproduce it can access it as freely as possible, maximising the number of creative reproductions. Furthermore, we should create exceptions to copyright for substantially creative derivative works.
For example, copyright would be removed for songs and musical scores, since performance requires both creativity and skill, but it would be maintained for recordings of songs, since replicating a recording requires neither.
But then we get into some interesting grey areas. Is a recording that samples another recording sufficiently creative to justify an exception to the copyright protection of the sampled work? What about a mashup of two recordings, with no original material? What about a mixtape?
Fortunately, we have judges and case law to deal with grey areas like this: after an initial period of boundary-testing I hope we'd establish some rules of thumb about what's "creative use" of a copyrighted work and what's "mere replication". Once we reached that point we'd have a system that encouraged substantially more creativity than the current system, much of it based on the forms of creative reuse that fans of Larry Lessig's Free Culture (myself among them) like to point out as being ill-served by the current system.
Do you have any alternative to bombing other then letting the terrorist thrive to plot more attacks and put more innocent lives in danger?
So your justification for killing innocent people is that not doing so would put innocent people in danger? Want to take a minute to ponder that logic?
I mean seriously, what is the other options here?
This might sound a little extreme, but the other option is not to invade and occupy an ungovernable country. Fine, the U.S. wanted to destroy Al Qaeda's base in Afghanistan. That was accomplished by the end of 2001. What the fuck are large numbers of NATO troops still doing in Afghanistan nine years later?
Does the U.S. seriously think that "nation building" is either (a) possible, or (b) going to keep Al Qaeda out of the country? If so, I've got bad news: nation building is not possible (Afghanistan has never been a nation state and won't be one in the next 100 years, political power is divided among too many tribal, ethnic and religious groups), and nation building is not going to keep Al Qaeda out (Bin Laden is quite happy sheltering in Pakistan, which is, guess what, one of the most advanced nation states in the region). The only sane solution is for the U.S. to go the fuck home and launch the occasional special forces raid against any Al Qaeda bases that might emerge... which does not require a permanent presence on the ground or widespread civilian casualties.
Please consider uploading some information about Cisco's involvement to WikiLeaks (or any other site that you trust to preserve your anonymity).
Pressuring American companies to end their involvement in internet censorship would be more effective in the long term than a 40ft shipping container full of Kindles, and would help to undermine some of the "USA good, China evil" hypocrisy surrounding this issue.
Are you talking about restriction regarding books, or all areas of life? I feel a Libertarian wind blowing.
Hey, that wind is private property - I hope you've signed a service contract with the wind supplier. We don't need no commie freeloaders feelin' our Libertarian wind without paying!
China's kind of like the neighbor kid that knocks on my door and offers to mow the lawn for $20. It's not that I can't mow myself, but when it's so cheap to pay someone else why do it myself? If he ever didn't show up for a couple weeks I'd just do it myself, but as long as he's offering I'll keep paying him.
So you keep paying the kid to mow your lawn for a couple of years. One day he shows up with his own lawnmower. No point having your own mower when it's not being used, so you put your mower on eBay. A few years later you lose your job at the lawnmower factory and find yourself mowing lawns for $20 a time, of which $5 goes to the kid for borrowing his mower.
Oh, also the kid is exerting increasingly firm control over the South China Sea, but I'm not sure how to work that into the analogy.;-)
In his first ever public speech a few days ago, the head of GCHQ, Britain's equivalent of the NSA, explicity stated that nuclear deterrence was not a suitable model for cyber defence "because small-scale but significant cyber attacks happen every day".
It's unusual to see open disagreement between such statements, which are usually carefully orchestrated; I wonder whether it reflects an underlying conflict between DHS and the new Cyber Command, with GCHQ siding with Cyber Command?
"Cyber" has had an interesting history - from military research in 1948 (Norbert Weiner coined "cybernetics" while working on anti-aircraft guns), to 1980s science fiction, to 1990s business buzzword, to military strategy in 2010. Which raises the question, can military planners only understand their own technology through the lens of science fiction?
If I want to take down some government, I don't have to do the hard work any more.
Just find any insecure organisation in the same country and use it to launch some trivial attack against the US government.
The US government then does my attack for me, bombing the entire country and my target.
Here on Slashdot there tends to exist the mindset of "blame the shooter not the gun" and the corollary "and certainly don't blame the maker of the gun". For most civil libertarians, those are axioms: that tools are value-neutral, and you criminalize their improper use, not their mere existence or the act of manufacture.
I'm glad you've raised this issue, because I think it points to a deep contradiction in the way many technologists think. We worry about the misuse of technology, and yet we refuse to take any responsibility when we create technologies that are easily misused - or, worse, that have no morally defensible purpose. We need to crack this debate open - we need to move beyond the childishly simplistic statement that "tools are value-neutral" and start asking how much responsibility we have for deciding what kind of tools exist and how they can be used, and we need to start acting on those responsibilities, even if it means a pay cut.
A few years ago I was on holiday in Vietnam. While touring a rural area, I saw cluster bomb canisters that had been dropped on villages. You probably know what a cluster bomb is: a large canister that scatters small 'bomblets' over a wide area, which later explode when people disturb them. If you drop a cluster bomb on a village, children who are playing or herding animals or collecting water are going to be killed or horribly injured, some of them months or years after the bomb is dropped. What really struck me about these canisters was that the manufacturer's name was proudly painted on the side. AEROJET GENERAL CORPORATION, USA.
I just couldn't understand who could be proud of making such a thing. This is a device that is designed to tear beautiful human bodies into shreds of meat. Some engineer in California spent a lot of late nights perfecting those child-shredding bomblets, and then he went home and kissed his own children goodnight, and he didn't see the contradiction, because he was hiding behind the mantra "tools are value-neutral". But it's bullshit. Some tools have moral uses, some have immoral uses, some have both, and people disagree about what's moral. Yes, it's complex! But you can't just whitewash all that complexity by saying "tools are value-neutral". It's nothing more than a lie that helps engineers to sleep at night. That's all it is.
How do you block Freenet? Seriously, how do you block it and not other services?
If Freenet is banned, the government can collect the address of every "opennet" Freenet node in a matter of hours. Then it's a question of finding the "darknet" nodes. A simple heuristic will probably catch most of them: recursively look for any address that has at least three long-lived, encrypted, two-way UDP streams to known or suspected Freenet nodes. The standard of proof at this stage is probable cause (or the French equivalent), rather than overwhelming evidence, so a heuristic approach is good enough. Wholesale traffic interception isn't needed: it's sufficient to monitor known or suspected nodes.
Now the government raids the owners of all the French nodes, confiscates their hard drives and decrypts their Freenet caches. There's bound to be some nasty stuff cached there on behalf of other nodes, even if the owners never uploaded or downloaded anything bad. The government charges the owners with "running a Freenet node" (so it's not necessary to prove what they uploaded or downlaoded) and makes a highly public announcement that it busted an extensive child porn / terrorist / neo-Nazi network thanks to the new anti-Freenet law. Then it waits for the handful of node operators it didn't catch to shut down their nodes and never say the word "Freenet" again.
Part of the problem here is that Freenet's design requires all nodes to belong to a single network, so if you have a heuristic for identifying Freenet traffic you can start from any node and 'unravel' the whole network. But to be fair to the Freenet designers, the alternative - lots of small, isolated darknets - isn't very appealing to users, because the only people you end up communicating with belong to the small intersection of "people I trust" and "privacy nuts". I'm a privacy nut who trusts his friends, and even for me that intersection isn't large enough to make for much of a conversation.
I've always wondered why people in this situation didn't build private networks based on protocols other than IP. A quick glance at/etc/protocols shows dozens of different protocols that can be carried by ethernet --- there must be something there that's sufficiently flexible to build a useful network out of but can't be carried by the Internet without protocol conversion.
It's even easier than that - just patch every host (and every router, unfortunately - but hey, Cisco, here's where you get your billion dollar contract) to set the version field of IP packets to something that's invalid on the internet - let's say 3 - and to reject all other versions. That's got to be, what, a ten line patch? After that you can use off-the-shelf software for all the higher protocol layers, but if someone accidentally connects the private network to the internet, no packets will pass between the two networks.
If the above happens, no one will want to invest in research, because they'd lose money, even if they "invented" the next IPod.
But Apple didn't invent the portable MP3 player. "Research, invent, commoditise, sell" is a plausible-sounding business plan, and I'm sure it sometimes works out that way, but much more commonly, companies learn from each other's mistakes and release competing products with small improvements. Apple realised people wanted an MP3 player that was slick rather than geeky-looking, so they repackaged it. That was their innovation. And it's a good thing - I'm not knocking that kind of incremental innovation. Patents harm that way of innovating, though, because the only companies that can play the game are those with big enough patent portfolios to deter their competitors from suing.
The portfolio problem applies to blue-sky innovation too. Imagine you invented the portable MP3 player from scratch in your garage and patented it. A year later, Apple releases the iPod. What are you going to do? If you sue, they can just pull some ridiculously broad patent out of their portfolio and counter-sue until you lose everything. The best you can do is to sell your patent to one of their competitors for use in their portfolio, and good luck getting a decent price when the buyer has all the lawyers.
There is one area where patents work more or less as expected, though, and that's drug development. Drug companies have a pretty good track record of throwing money at a problem until they get a usable drug (often usable for a different problem, admittedly), patenting the drug, and recouping their investment within the lifetime of the patent. Everything would be wonderful except for two catches: the money available to pay for a drug doesn't always match its social importance (the malaria problem), and the price of the drug while it's under patent may be too high for many of the people who need it (the HIV problem).
We've tried to patch the malaria problem through charitable funding of drug development, and the HIV problem through charitable subsidisation of drug prices, but both patches exacerbate the underlying problem by putting yet more patents and yet more money into the hands of the incumbent drug developers, meaning that next time we run into similar problems they'll be even more expensive to solve. The only solution I can think of is to create a public interest exception for patent licenses, coupled with public funding of socially important research, because the private money will move to areas that aren't covered by the public interest exception. But that sounds too much like dirty commie talk for a lot of people's liking.;-)
The idea of libertarian (small 'l') thought is simplicity itself.
That alone should make you skeptical.
Consenting adults should be free to do whatever they please with their property and their own body and should be free to believe whatever they want. They should be able to exercise those freedoms whether or not someone else doesn't like it; anyone who doesn't like their actions is free to provide a counter-example in the form of how they deal with their own body, property, and beliefs.
The selfish asshats are the ones who would use the force of law to tell you what you may not do with your own body or your own property.
Not all attempts to restrict what people do with their property are motivated by selfishness. Example: pollution.
They typically do this out of some kind of Puritannical desire to enforce their morality on others.
That's a very limited and, if I may say so, typically American view of the world. Not everyone's a libertarian or a Puritan. Some parts of the world still remember feudalism (some are still enduring it), and are consequently skeptical of the idea that property rights alone are sufficient to ensure a free and just society.
You like simplicity, so here's a simple model of how libertarianism devolves into something less pretty. Assume we have a population of individuals who all start out with equal wealth, and who are free to invest that wealth in enterprises, some of which succeed, leading to a multiplicative increase in the invested wealth, and some of which fail, leading to a multiplicative decrease. Now, if there's an arbitrarily small random factor involved in the success or failure of enterprises, the distribution of wealth will over time approach the lognormal distribution. In short, a few people will become very rich, and most people will become relatively poor, even if they're all equally skilled investors. (I say "relatively poor" in anticipation of some hand-waving argument about how removing the shackles of taxation will lead to a jump in productivity. My argument doesn't depend on whether or not that's true.)
Now we have two problems. (1) The very rich people may be able to use their wealth to distort the perfect libertarian free market, entrenching their advantage. A shocking idea, I know, but please remember that this is just a thought experiment. (2) The poor people may be forced by short-term needs such as food and shelter to enter contracts that are not in their long-term interest. As long as any employer exists who offers them only the means of survival in return for their labour, the market will drive any more generous employer out of business. Having earned nothing but the means of survival, the poor will invest nothing and leave nothing to their children. So the underclass, once created, will persist.
We are now quite far from a libertarian utopia in which everyone frolics freely in his private meadow and shits in the collective river - we have an entrenched ruling class, a political process corrupted by money and an exploited underclass trapped in a hand-to-mouth existence. Sound familiar? Yet we've been brought here by nothing but property rights and free markets.
The people who want to be left alone by them so long as they don't violate anyone else's freedoms are not selfish in the slightest. They are reasonable.
I think this can be answered by looking at how the question is framed. The question doesn't ask why politically radical people are likely to be engineers. It asks why that subset of politically radical people who decide that the best solution to political problems is through the direct application of technology are likely to be engineers. Well guess what? That subset of any group that tries to solve every problem by applying technology probably contains a lot of engineers.
It's unfortunate for the world that most problems can't be solved that way. But that doesn't stop a lot of technically adept people from trying.
It simply isn't practical to keep a bunch of pigeons for every destination you would want to go.
Sure, but nor is it practical to run a wire to every destination - that's why we have routers. Same principle here: each pigeon travels one hop, packets are removed from the pigeon and assigned to outgoing pigeons for the next hop, meanwhile the pigeon goes back the other way carrying data in the opposite direction. The 'router' is a wooden box with a solar-powered computer that wirelessly updates the pigeons' memory cards and gives them a treat every round-trip and an extra one at Christmas.
While the situation described in TFA is clearly a stunt, there are actually serious proposals to use vehicle- or animal-based networks for extremely remote areas. NICTA in Australia is working with IIT to develop a delay-tolerant network for rural India, and there's work out there that uses devices attached to animals to collect data from remote environmental sensors. The only limits I can think of on the use of pigeons for such purposes would be the durability of large containers of pigeon treats and the lifetime of the pigeons. Judging by the pigeons here in London, you could addict them to nicotine to solve the former problem, though that might exacerbate the latter...
Thanks, that's a useful distinction and I'll bear it in mind. However, I wasn't arguing with either a theist or a deist - I was arguing with an atheist. The argument that there's some conception of God that doesn't require any more assumptions than atheism and that isn't contradicted by the evidence is still valid for refuting atheism, even if that conception of God doesn't happen to be the one that's popular among religious people.
Slashdot Mirror
First, it turns commercial entities like Facebook, which couldn't give a fuck about fighting censorship, into vital tools for opposition movements. If there's one thing the WikiLeaks/Anonymous bunfight has shown, it's that internet companies aren't mature enough as institutions to balance their short term political and financial interests against their long term responsibility to protect free speech. We can't rely on them.
Second, it means that all communication between people in authoritarian societies has to cross the border twice, even though borders are among the easiest places to monitor and control. If you wanted to design a communication system for prisoners in neighbouring cells, I doubt your design sketch would begin, "First get the message to a trusted third party outside the prison."
Unfortunately, moving the social media sites inside the firewall doesn't solve the problem. Take China for example. There are already Chinese equivalents of Facebook, Twitter, and other firewalled sites, but they're subject to a variety of pressures to police their users, especially those that start to form political groups. If Facebook isn't going to stand up for Chinese dissidents then Baidu certainly won't.
It's also pretty tough to maintain social media sites outside the firewall that are dedicated to supporting opposition movements - such sites are susceptible to DDoS attacks and subtler forms of infiltration and monitoring, as in the Ghostnet case. The basic problem is that the web wasn't designed or implemented with censorship-resistance in mind. Let's not ask anyone to bet their life on the security of Wordpress.
So what do we do? In my opinion we need new tools. Tools that are designed with security in mind, that don't rely on servers inside or outside the firewall, that can be used from an internet cafe or a mobile phone, that don't produce easily recognised traffic patterns, that can be used to hold meetings, plan rallies, or just tell jokes - in short, to talk to people you trust without revealing anything to people you don't. We already have some partial solutions we can learn from - Freenet, WASTE, txtmob, CryptoSMS, Gazzera, Retroshare, SocialVPN - and a million research papers that never made it as far as implementation. Now we need some specs, some code, many eyes and regular backups. :-)
I agree, there's a sad lack of vision in America today. The whole country seems bitter and afraid. Nobody talks about principles. Of course the same's true in Europe, but I feel like we've been suffering from that disease for longer - America used to be different. Perhaps it's a symptom of post-imperial decline, which America's only just beginning to enter. Or perhaps I've fallen for the golden age myth after all - Americans must have been bitter during the Great Depression, afraid during the Cold War - why did we ever think they were different?
How wrong I was.
What Jobs & Co have developed is nothing less than a fucking time machine. The iPad offers to transport us back to the comfort and safety of the mid-twentieth century. A time when citizens' minds were untroubled by pornographic smut or government leaks. A time when the news was delivered to your doorstep once a day, and you were happy to pay for the privilege. A time when anyone who disagreed with the policies designed to keep them safe was quietly taken away and never heard from again.
What next from these technological wizards? Here are my predictions:
I'm truly excited to be living in the future my grandparents dreamed of!
Getting out of Afghanistan won't bring an end to violence in Afghanistan - but it will make it a lot harder for people to justify spreading that violence abroad.
That'll be $5, please.
In fact, most of the items in your first list require considerable skill, investment, or both to reproduce (exception: rules of games), whereas most of the items in the second list don't (exceptions: choreography, architecture). While I don't believe that current copyright laws strike the right balance between protecting artists from cheap copies, allowing audiences to benefit from cheap copies, and encouraging creative derivative works, I can understand why copyright would be more important for things that are easy to copy than for things that aren't - and your lists seem to show that copyright applies almost exclusively to things that can be copied without much skill.
I absolutely agree with you, however, that the argument about protecting creativity is badly framed. The question should not be, "Is the work creative?", but rather, "Does the work require creativity to copy?"
Reframing the question in that way suggests an interesting alternative rationale for copyright law: if we want to maximise the benefit of copyright to creative people as a whole, we should remove protection from anything that requires creativity to reproduce, in order that those who reproduce it can access it as freely as possible, maximising the number of creative reproductions. Furthermore, we should create exceptions to copyright for substantially creative derivative works.
For example, copyright would be removed for songs and musical scores, since performance requires both creativity and skill, but it would be maintained for recordings of songs, since replicating a recording requires neither.
But then we get into some interesting grey areas. Is a recording that samples another recording sufficiently creative to justify an exception to the copyright protection of the sampled work? What about a mashup of two recordings, with no original material? What about a mixtape?
Fortunately, we have judges and case law to deal with grey areas like this: after an initial period of boundary-testing I hope we'd establish some rules of thumb about what's "creative use" of a copyrighted work and what's "mere replication". Once we reached that point we'd have a system that encouraged substantially more creativity than the current system, much of it based on the forms of creative reuse that fans of Larry Lessig's Free Culture (myself among them) like to point out as being ill-served by the current system.
So your justification for killing innocent people is that not doing so would put innocent people in danger? Want to take a minute to ponder that logic?
This might sound a little extreme, but the other option is not to invade and occupy an ungovernable country. Fine, the U.S. wanted to destroy Al Qaeda's base in Afghanistan. That was accomplished by the end of 2001. What the fuck are large numbers of NATO troops still doing in Afghanistan nine years later?
Does the U.S. seriously think that "nation building" is either (a) possible, or (b) going to keep Al Qaeda out of the country? If so, I've got bad news: nation building is not possible (Afghanistan has never been a nation state and won't be one in the next 100 years, political power is divided among too many tribal, ethnic and religious groups), and nation building is not going to keep Al Qaeda out (Bin Laden is quite happy sheltering in Pakistan, which is, guess what, one of the most advanced nation states in the region). The only sane solution is for the U.S. to go the fuck home and launch the occasional special forces raid against any Al Qaeda bases that might emerge... which does not require a permanent presence on the ground or widespread civilian casualties.
That is the other option.
Gah, accidentally modded you Redundant instead of Insightful... replying so my moderation gets discarded. Bloody trackpads. ;)
For those who aren't familiar with Shoreditch, this music video provides a quick primer.
The plaintiff has not proven distribution in this case, so the damages in question are for copying the songs, not for distributing them.
Pressuring American companies to end their involvement in internet censorship would be more effective in the long term than a 40ft shipping container full of Kindles, and would help to undermine some of the "USA good, China evil" hypocrisy surrounding this issue.
Hey, that wind is private property - I hope you've signed a service contract with the wind supplier. We don't need no commie freeloaders feelin' our Libertarian wind without paying!
So you keep paying the kid to mow your lawn for a couple of years. One day he shows up with his own lawnmower. No point having your own mower when it's not being used, so you put your mower on eBay. A few years later you lose your job at the lawnmower factory and find yourself mowing lawns for $20 a time, of which $5 goes to the kid for borrowing his mower.
Oh, also the kid is exerting increasingly firm control over the South China Sea, but I'm not sure how to work that into the analogy. ;-)
It's unusual to see open disagreement between such statements, which are usually carefully orchestrated; I wonder whether it reflects an underlying conflict between DHS and the new Cyber Command, with GCHQ siding with Cyber Command?
"Cyber" has had an interesting history - from military research in 1948 (Norbert Weiner coined "cybernetics" while working on anti-aircraft guns), to 1980s science fiction, to 1990s business buzzword, to military strategy in 2010. Which raises the question, can military planners only understand their own technology through the lens of science fiction?
You have a bright future at the CIA. ;-)
Oh fantastic, so we're creating selection pressure for ADHD? Now we'll have to bomb the island with live kittens laced with Ritalin...
I'm glad you've raised this issue, because I think it points to a deep contradiction in the way many technologists think. We worry about the misuse of technology, and yet we refuse to take any responsibility when we create technologies that are easily misused - or, worse, that have no morally defensible purpose. We need to crack this debate open - we need to move beyond the childishly simplistic statement that "tools are value-neutral" and start asking how much responsibility we have for deciding what kind of tools exist and how they can be used, and we need to start acting on those responsibilities, even if it means a pay cut.
A few years ago I was on holiday in Vietnam. While touring a rural area, I saw cluster bomb canisters that had been dropped on villages. You probably know what a cluster bomb is: a large canister that scatters small 'bomblets' over a wide area, which later explode when people disturb them. If you drop a cluster bomb on a village, children who are playing or herding animals or collecting water are going to be killed or horribly injured, some of them months or years after the bomb is dropped. What really struck me about these canisters was that the manufacturer's name was proudly painted on the side. AEROJET GENERAL CORPORATION, USA.
I just couldn't understand who could be proud of making such a thing. This is a device that is designed to tear beautiful human bodies into shreds of meat. Some engineer in California spent a lot of late nights perfecting those child-shredding bomblets, and then he went home and kissed his own children goodnight, and he didn't see the contradiction, because he was hiding behind the mantra "tools are value-neutral". But it's bullshit. Some tools have moral uses, some have immoral uses, some have both, and people disagree about what's moral. Yes, it's complex! But you can't just whitewash all that complexity by saying "tools are value-neutral". It's nothing more than a lie that helps engineers to sleep at night. That's all it is.
If Freenet is banned, the government can collect the address of every "opennet" Freenet node in a matter of hours. Then it's a question of finding the "darknet" nodes. A simple heuristic will probably catch most of them: recursively look for any address that has at least three long-lived, encrypted, two-way UDP streams to known or suspected Freenet nodes. The standard of proof at this stage is probable cause (or the French equivalent), rather than overwhelming evidence, so a heuristic approach is good enough. Wholesale traffic interception isn't needed: it's sufficient to monitor known or suspected nodes.
Now the government raids the owners of all the French nodes, confiscates their hard drives and decrypts their Freenet caches. There's bound to be some nasty stuff cached there on behalf of other nodes, even if the owners never uploaded or downloaded anything bad. The government charges the owners with "running a Freenet node" (so it's not necessary to prove what they uploaded or downlaoded) and makes a highly public announcement that it busted an extensive child porn / terrorist / neo-Nazi network thanks to the new anti-Freenet law. Then it waits for the handful of node operators it didn't catch to shut down their nodes and never say the word "Freenet" again.
Part of the problem here is that Freenet's design requires all nodes to belong to a single network, so if you have a heuristic for identifying Freenet traffic you can start from any node and 'unravel' the whole network. But to be fair to the Freenet designers, the alternative - lots of small, isolated darknets - isn't very appealing to users, because the only people you end up communicating with belong to the small intersection of "people I trust" and "privacy nuts". I'm a privacy nut who trusts his friends, and even for me that intersection isn't large enough to make for much of a conversation.
It's even easier than that - just patch every host (and every router, unfortunately - but hey, Cisco, here's where you get your billion dollar contract) to set the version field of IP packets to something that's invalid on the internet - let's say 3 - and to reject all other versions. That's got to be, what, a ten line patch? After that you can use off-the-shelf software for all the higher protocol layers, but if someone accidentally connects the private network to the internet, no packets will pass between the two networks.
But Apple didn't invent the portable MP3 player. "Research, invent, commoditise, sell" is a plausible-sounding business plan, and I'm sure it sometimes works out that way, but much more commonly, companies learn from each other's mistakes and release competing products with small improvements. Apple realised people wanted an MP3 player that was slick rather than geeky-looking, so they repackaged it. That was their innovation. And it's a good thing - I'm not knocking that kind of incremental innovation. Patents harm that way of innovating, though, because the only companies that can play the game are those with big enough patent portfolios to deter their competitors from suing.
The portfolio problem applies to blue-sky innovation too. Imagine you invented the portable MP3 player from scratch in your garage and patented it. A year later, Apple releases the iPod. What are you going to do? If you sue, they can just pull some ridiculously broad patent out of their portfolio and counter-sue until you lose everything. The best you can do is to sell your patent to one of their competitors for use in their portfolio, and good luck getting a decent price when the buyer has all the lawyers.
There is one area where patents work more or less as expected, though, and that's drug development. Drug companies have a pretty good track record of throwing money at a problem until they get a usable drug (often usable for a different problem, admittedly), patenting the drug, and recouping their investment within the lifetime of the patent. Everything would be wonderful except for two catches: the money available to pay for a drug doesn't always match its social importance (the malaria problem), and the price of the drug while it's under patent may be too high for many of the people who need it (the HIV problem).
We've tried to patch the malaria problem through charitable funding of drug development, and the HIV problem through charitable subsidisation of drug prices, but both patches exacerbate the underlying problem by putting yet more patents and yet more money into the hands of the incumbent drug developers, meaning that next time we run into similar problems they'll be even more expensive to solve. The only solution I can think of is to create a public interest exception for patent licenses, coupled with public funding of socially important research, because the private money will move to areas that aren't covered by the public interest exception. But that sounds too much like dirty commie talk for a lot of people's liking. ;-)
That alone should make you skeptical.
Not all attempts to restrict what people do with their property are motivated by selfishness. Example: pollution.
That's a very limited and, if I may say so, typically American view of the world. Not everyone's a libertarian or a Puritan. Some parts of the world still remember feudalism (some are still enduring it), and are consequently skeptical of the idea that property rights alone are sufficient to ensure a free and just society.
You like simplicity, so here's a simple model of how libertarianism devolves into something less pretty. Assume we have a population of individuals who all start out with equal wealth, and who are free to invest that wealth in enterprises, some of which succeed, leading to a multiplicative increase in the invested wealth, and some of which fail, leading to a multiplicative decrease. Now, if there's an arbitrarily small random factor involved in the success or failure of enterprises, the distribution of wealth will over time approach the lognormal distribution. In short, a few people will become very rich, and most people will become relatively poor, even if they're all equally skilled investors. (I say "relatively poor" in anticipation of some hand-waving argument about how removing the shackles of taxation will lead to a jump in productivity. My argument doesn't depend on whether or not that's true.)
Now we have two problems. (1) The very rich people may be able to use their wealth to distort the perfect libertarian free market, entrenching their advantage. A shocking idea, I know, but please remember that this is just a thought experiment. (2) The poor people may be forced by short-term needs such as food and shelter to enter contracts that are not in their long-term interest. As long as any employer exists who offers them only the means of survival in return for their labour, the market will drive any more generous employer out of business. Having earned nothing but the means of survival, the poor will invest nothing and leave nothing to their children. So the underclass, once created, will persist.
We are now quite far from a libertarian utopia in which everyone frolics freely in his private meadow and shits in the collective river - we have an entrenched ruling class, a political process corrupted by money and an exploited underclass trapped in a hand-to-mouth existence. Sound familiar? Yet we've been brought here by nothing but property rights and free markets.
It's possible to be both.
It's unfortunate for the world that most problems can't be solved that way. But that doesn't stop a lot of technically adept people from trying.
Sure, but nor is it practical to run a wire to every destination - that's why we have routers. Same principle here: each pigeon travels one hop, packets are removed from the pigeon and assigned to outgoing pigeons for the next hop, meanwhile the pigeon goes back the other way carrying data in the opposite direction. The 'router' is a wooden box with a solar-powered computer that wirelessly updates the pigeons' memory cards and gives them a treat every round-trip and an extra one at Christmas.
While the situation described in TFA is clearly a stunt, there are actually serious proposals to use vehicle- or animal-based networks for extremely remote areas. NICTA in Australia is working with IIT to develop a delay-tolerant network for rural India, and there's work out there that uses devices attached to animals to collect data from remote environmental sensors. The only limits I can think of on the use of pigeons for such purposes would be the durability of large containers of pigeon treats and the lifetime of the pigeons. Judging by the pigeons here in London, you could addict them to nicotine to solve the former problem, though that might exacerbate the latter...
Thanks, that's a useful distinction and I'll bear it in mind. However, I wasn't arguing with either a theist or a deist - I was arguing with an atheist. The argument that there's some conception of God that doesn't require any more assumptions than atheism and that isn't contradicted by the evidence is still valid for refuting atheism, even if that conception of God doesn't happen to be the one that's popular among religious people.