My point is that there's no logical reason to prefer either model. The model with a God in it requires a single assumption (assume there's a God, who has no cause, and who causes everything else), as does the model without a God in it (assume there's a Big Bang, which has no cause, and which causes everything else).
To play the devil's advocate (or in this case, God's), the problem with your argument is that qualifiers such as "likely" and "unlikely" only make sense for events that are in principle repeatable, even if only in thought experiments. It's legitimate to argue that a china tea set orbiting the sun is "unlikely" because we have a good understanding of how china tea sets come to exist, so we can conduct a thought experiment in which the tea set construction process is run a million times, and no tea sets are produced in deep space. So we call such a tea set "unlikely".
When it comes to God, on the other hand, we have no such generative model. If you assume the Big Bang emerging from nothing then you have a model from that point on, but equally if you assume God creating the Big Bang then you have a model from that point on, and both models produce identical results from different assumptions. There's no basis on which to say "likely" or "unlikely" - all we can say is "under this assumption" or "under that assumption".
On behalf of the British technology industry, it's my privilege to issue this response: Mr Sharkey, fuck yourself in the eye. After thirty years of smear campaigns and righteous hysteria you've finally realised that you can't make money without us, and now you want to be friends? Sorry old man, but it's too little, too late. Everybody knows your house is on fire and we're not going to help you put it out. All we wanted was a share of the groupies and the coke, Feargal. Was that too much to ask? But supplies are drying up, standards are dropping and in the meantime we've invented Craigslist. What do you have left to offer us? Box sets? Get the fuck off my doorstep, Sharkey.
Potable water, good infrastructure, lots of various industry, a very good, middle-class standard of living, and less-than-average corruption in their police force.
This makes me wonder whether the scanners should be installed in Ciudad Juarez instead - because if you want to know whether technology like this would be dangerous in the hands of a corrupt government, that's the place to find out.
From the Haystack FAQ we can surmise that you run some small client program and point your browser at that.
That makes sense, but if the local proxy's going to encode your request for whyweprotest.net in a stream of requests for weather.com, there needs to be a proxy on the other side of the firewall that intercepts those requests and extracts the request for whyweprotest.net.
So here's the problem: how does your local proxy get the address of the remote proxy, without the Iranian secret police being able to run their own copy of Haystack, get the address of the remote proxy, and block it (or, worse, use the firewall to record all the addresses that connect to it)?
In the literature, this goes by the imaginative name of the "proxy discovery problem". Solutions include privately sharing proxy addresses with trusted friends, distributing addresses by email, requiring clients to solve computational puzzles, requiring users to solve captchas, and using the structure of social networks to limit the number of proxies an attacker can discover.
Which method does Haystack use? We don't know, because Austin Heap hasn't published any technical details of the design, or submitted it for review by a trusted party like the EFF, despite calls for him to do so.
The gold standard here is Tor: all the code is open source, there are detailed design documents, they submit their designs for peer review by the security community, and they have an excellent track record of fixing the weaknesses that are found. Austin Heap needs to learn a lesson from them, because just saying "It's ok, we encipher everything" doesn't cut it in 2010.
Someone please just tell me: are they nailing down a protocol spec first so that we can all do our own interoperable implementations, or at least all contribute code, and so not have the time wasting nightmare that was the Freenet project?
They've done better than that: they've written the code, bundled it into a convenient cross-platform installer, documented everything, and ported a ton of apps to run on top of it, including BitTorrent clients, web servers, anonymous email and IRC. It's all free as in speech and free as in beer, and there's a supportive community of developers and users.
Sorry, but you need to check your facts. The UN Security Council did not authorise the invasion of Afghanistan, which was illegal under the UN Charter, a treaty ratified by the United States, meaning it was also illegal under US law. The fact that other countries supported the invasion does not make it legal.
The force then met resistance from the Taliban and (under UN authorization) removed the government.
Not true - the UN Security Council did not authorise the removal of the government; it only approved the creation of the International Security Assistance Force after the government had been replaced.
You'll have to point out to me the treaty all nations signed giving up the right to ever engage in war with another nation thereby making it "illegal".
The treaty is called the United Nations Charter. Perhaps you've heard of it. "All nations" haven't signed it, but the United States signed it on 26 June, 1945. Article 2, Principle 4 of the treaty reads:
All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.
The treaty makes it illegal to use force against any state without a specific resolution of support from the UN Security Council, which was not granted in the case of Afghanistan or Iraq. It might be argued that the invasion of Afghanistan was an act of self-defence following the attacks of 11 September, 2001, but no such justification exists for the invasion of Iraq.
That makes it an illegal war. Illegal, not in some vague rhetorical sense, but in the very specific sense of breaking a treaty that the United States signed.
You can't expect everyone to have working technical knowledge in cryptographic systems and anonymity.I think it would be the duty of those who still have free speech to spread the information to the rest of the population.
Specifically, it's the duty of geeks. We built this fucked-up mess of a privacy-eroding network, it's our responsibility to fix it. And then teach everyone how to use it, again. (And then watch them break it, again. But hey, if you don't have a sense of humour, why did you study computer science?)
Since his talk had no discernible structure, said the same thing in a dozen different ways and won't make any sense this time next year, I'd assume he's a fan.
So because a private company operating under its own volition shuts down its server, that's the United States government's fault and equates them to China?
You're over-simplifying. In both the US and China, censorship involves complex relationships between government and corporate actors, and the censorship that actually occurs isn't coextensive with the censorship the law theoretically demands. Yes, burst.net was "operating under its own volition" and merely enforcing its own terms of service -- so are Chinese companies when they draw up internal guidelines regarding political speech, including extreme speech that incites violence, and censor their customers accordingly. The US and Chinese governments prefer things to work that way -- they don't like kicking in doors unless they have to, which in most cases they don't, because companies tend to be run by people who understand the parameters within which they actually operate, rather than those the law theoretically describes.
That's not to say that the US and China are identical, of course -- but neither is one simply oppressing its people and the other simply protecting them. 'US == China' and 'US > China' are equally nonsensical.
"Consumers everywhere want to have confidence that the internet companies they rely on will provide comprehensive search results and act as responsible stewards of their information."
No economist can accurately predict how an individual game can turn out, just like no economist can accurately predict how an individual actor will choose. However, the law of large numbers means that given a sufficiently large population, mass scale behavior can be predicted.
The law of large numbers doesn't work for predicting human behaviour because, unlike coins, people pay attention to what other people are doing. People betting on the stock market, doubly so.
Let's say I hear a rumour that FooBank is about to have its assets seized by the US government. Even if I know the rumour to be false, it's rational for me to sell my shares in FooBank before everybody else does so, then buy them back at a lower price before the rumour's disproved. And everybody else is in the same position - so even if every one of us individually knows the rumour to be false, the price of FooBank will drop as we sell our shares, then rise as we buy them back. Something that each of us would have ignored alone has caused all of us to react together. That's about as far from the law of large numbers as you can get.
No, but you just gave me a great idea for a movie.
In a time... of persecution.
(Long panning shot of writers slaving in the irony mines.)
In a world... ruled... by cliches.
(A single drop of ink falls from a fountain pen onto a concrete floor.)
One writer... showed that the pen... is mightier than the sword.
(Tribal drums, montage of a man scribbling in a darkened room and the usual exploding buses and such.)
Jerry Bruckheimer presents: Enemy of the Plot
This summer... get ready... for the end... of happy endings.
Take a thousand families, with two children, where one of the children was a boy born on a Tuesday.
At least one of the children. That's the crucial difference. If you look at two-child families where the first child's a boy born on a Tuesday, then yes, the probability that the second child's a boy is 1/2. Similarly, if you look at two-child families where the second child's a boy born on a Tuesday, then the probability that the first child's a boy is 1/2. But if you look at two-child families where either or both of the children is a boy born on a Tuesday, the probability that both children are boys is 13/27.
You piss off a local crime ring, you can expect a bullet.
Likewise if you piss off a bunch of "patriots" by leaking videos that embarrass the military. The US government doesn't need to kill Assange, it just needs to look the other way.
Using short-term (biodegradable?) identifiers is an interesting idea, but I think it goes against two of the reasons companies collect data in the first place. The first is to confirm that you're a real, tangible human being, which means they want to connect your present data to the past. The second is to bombard you with marketing crap for the rest of your life, which means they want to connect your present data to the future. So using short-term identifiers is no better aligned with their interests than degrading data.
Random degradation sounds like an ad hoc solution to me anyway. Data privacy research has established a pretty firm theoretical foundation in the last few years, and ideas like "let's swap some stuff around until it's all random" are starting to sound as shonky as homebrew encryption algorithms.
When I try to visit the site with cookies disabled, Firefox warns me that "the server is redirecting the request for this address in a way that will never complete".
I think you're correct that workers need to persuade managers that, as wage-earners, they share the same class interests. I haven't seen anyone on the left doing that, however; union disputes are invariably between workers and managers, rather than workers and owners. There are good reasons for that: managers are identifiable, physically present and somewhat accountable, whereas shareholders are anonymous, absent and untouchable. But as good as the reasons may be, there's no denying that class conflict and workplace conflict are parting ways.
This is a form of false conciousness and needs to be defeated through education. That's not newspeak for totalitarian brainwashing btw, I simply mean pointing out how being involved in exploitation is ultimately self defeating.
I mean, the Merrill Lynchs of the world are still doing OK even though the market is tanking. Here in the UK, the 1,000 richest people are 30% richer than last year! Small investors and small businesspeople will almost always get screwed under Capitalism.
To be clear, I was talking about small investors in large businesses, such as people with their pensions invested in the stock market, rather than investors in small businesses. You're quite right that investing in small firms is a loser's game, but if Merrill Lynch is doing well, so are its shareholders - and that means they have a genuine conflict of interest when it comes to the question of working class emancipation. It's not simply a matter of false consciousness - they may realise where their class interests lie, but their class interests, like their individual interests, are divided.
Slashdot Mirror
My point is that there's no logical reason to prefer either model. The model with a God in it requires a single assumption (assume there's a God, who has no cause, and who causes everything else), as does the model without a God in it (assume there's a Big Bang, which has no cause, and which causes everything else).
When it comes to God, on the other hand, we have no such generative model. If you assume the Big Bang emerging from nothing then you have a model from that point on, but equally if you assume God creating the Big Bang then you have a model from that point on, and both models produce identical results from different assumptions. There's no basis on which to say "likely" or "unlikely" - all we can say is "under this assumption" or "under that assumption".
On behalf of the British technology industry, it's my privilege to issue this response: Mr Sharkey, fuck yourself in the eye. After thirty years of smear campaigns and righteous hysteria you've finally realised that you can't make money without us, and now you want to be friends? Sorry old man, but it's too little, too late. Everybody knows your house is on fire and we're not going to help you put it out. All we wanted was a share of the groupies and the coke, Feargal. Was that too much to ask? But supplies are drying up, standards are dropping and in the meantime we've invented Craigslist. What do you have left to offer us? Box sets? Get the fuck off my doorstep, Sharkey.
Apple users consider the platform semi-open because you can look through the glass at the front and see your apps.
This makes me wonder whether the scanners should be installed in Ciudad Juarez instead - because if you want to know whether technology like this would be dangerous in the hands of a corrupt government, that's the place to find out.
That makes sense, but if the local proxy's going to encode your request for whyweprotest.net in a stream of requests for weather.com, there needs to be a proxy on the other side of the firewall that intercepts those requests and extracts the request for whyweprotest.net.
So here's the problem: how does your local proxy get the address of the remote proxy, without the Iranian secret police being able to run their own copy of Haystack, get the address of the remote proxy, and block it (or, worse, use the firewall to record all the addresses that connect to it)?
In the literature, this goes by the imaginative name of the "proxy discovery problem". Solutions include privately sharing proxy addresses with trusted friends, distributing addresses by email, requiring clients to solve computational puzzles, requiring users to solve captchas, and using the structure of social networks to limit the number of proxies an attacker can discover.
Which method does Haystack use? We don't know, because Austin Heap hasn't published any technical details of the design, or submitted it for review by a trusted party like the EFF, despite calls for him to do so.
The gold standard here is Tor: all the code is open source, there are detailed design documents, they submit their designs for peer review by the security community, and they have an excellent track record of fixing the weaknesses that are found. Austin Heap needs to learn a lesson from them, because just saying "It's ok, we encipher everything" doesn't cut it in 2010.
I can't help thinking this is how the Communist Manifesto would have sounded if it had been written by Marvin the Paranoid Android. ;-)
They've done better than that: they've written the code, bundled it into a convenient cross-platform installer, documented everything, and ported a ton of apps to run on top of it, including BitTorrent clients, web servers, anonymous email and IRC. It's all free as in speech and free as in beer, and there's a supportive community of developers and users.
Yeah, I know, I couldn't believe it either. It's called I2P.
The force then met resistance from the Taliban and (under UN authorization) removed the government.
Not true - the UN Security Council did not authorise the removal of the government; it only approved the creation of the International Security Assistance Force after the government had been replaced.
The treaty is called the United Nations Charter. Perhaps you've heard of it. "All nations" haven't signed it, but the United States signed it on 26 June, 1945. Article 2, Principle 4 of the treaty reads:
The treaty makes it illegal to use force against any state without a specific resolution of support from the UN Security Council, which was not granted in the case of Afghanistan or Iraq. It might be argued that the invasion of Afghanistan was an act of self-defence following the attacks of 11 September, 2001, but no such justification exists for the invasion of Iraq.
That makes it an illegal war. Illegal, not in some vague rhetorical sense, but in the very specific sense of breaking a treaty that the United States signed.
Specifically, it's the duty of geeks. We built this fucked-up mess of a privacy-eroding network, it's our responsibility to fix it. And then teach everyone how to use it, again. (And then watch them break it, again. But hey, if you don't have a sense of humour, why did you study computer science?)
Lamo was also the star of the "leaked" documentary Hackers Wanted , a thinly-disguised attempt to recruit hackers to the US military.
It would march a little slower if hackers refused to buy locked-down devices.
Since his talk had no discernible structure, said the same thing in a dozen different ways and won't make any sense this time next year, I'd assume he's a fan.
You're over-simplifying. In both the US and China, censorship involves complex relationships between government and corporate actors, and the censorship that actually occurs isn't coextensive with the censorship the law theoretically demands. Yes, burst.net was "operating under its own volition" and merely enforcing its own terms of service -- so are Chinese companies when they draw up internal guidelines regarding political speech, including extreme speech that incites violence, and censor their customers accordingly. The US and Chinese governments prefer things to work that way -- they don't like kicking in doors unless they have to, which in most cases they don't, because companies tend to be run by people who understand the parameters within which they actually operate, rather than those the law theoretically describes.
That's not to say that the US and China are identical, of course -- but neither is one simply oppressing its people and the other simply protecting them. 'US == China' and 'US > China' are equally nonsensical.
"Consumers everywhere want to have confidence that the internet companies they rely on will provide comprehensive search results and act as responsible stewards of their information."
"Censorship should not be in any way accepted by any company anywhere," Clinton declared. "American companies should take a principled stand."
-- US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, referring to Chinese internet censorship.
The law of large numbers doesn't work for predicting human behaviour because, unlike coins, people pay attention to what other people are doing. People betting on the stock market, doubly so.
Let's say I hear a rumour that FooBank is about to have its assets seized by the US government. Even if I know the rumour to be false, it's rational for me to sell my shares in FooBank before everybody else does so, then buy them back at a lower price before the rumour's disproved. And everybody else is in the same position - so even if every one of us individually knows the rumour to be false, the price of FooBank will drop as we sell our shares, then rise as we buy them back. Something that each of us would have ignored alone has caused all of us to react together. That's about as far from the law of large numbers as you can get.
No, but you just gave me a great idea for a movie.
In a time... of persecution.
(Long panning shot of writers slaving in the irony mines.)
In a world... ruled... by cliches.
(A single drop of ink falls from a fountain pen onto a concrete floor.)
One writer... showed that the pen... is mightier than the sword.
(Tribal drums, montage of a man scribbling in a darkened room and the usual exploding buses and such.)
Jerry Bruckheimer presents: Enemy of the Plot
This summer... get ready... for the end... of happy endings.
So true. A Slashdot post without a car analogy is like a car without that little light that comes on when you open the door with the engine running.
At least one of the children. That's the crucial difference. If you look at two-child families where the first child's a boy born on a Tuesday, then yes, the probability that the second child's a boy is 1/2. Similarly, if you look at two-child families where the second child's a boy born on a Tuesday, then the probability that the first child's a boy is 1/2. But if you look at two-child families where either or both of the children is a boy born on a Tuesday, the probability that both children are boys is 13/27.
Seriously. Here's the code. Try it for yourself.
Likewise if you piss off a bunch of "patriots" by leaking videos that embarrass the military. The US government doesn't need to kill Assange, it just needs to look the other way.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Martin_Luther_King,_Jr.
A high profile isn't much of a bulletproof vest.
Random degradation sounds like an ad hoc solution to me anyway. Data privacy research has established a pretty firm theoretical foundation in the last few years, and ideas like "let's swap some stuff around until it's all random" are starting to sound as shonky as homebrew encryption algorithms.
Recursive Ventures indeed...
This is a form of false conciousness and needs to be defeated through education. That's not newspeak for totalitarian brainwashing btw, I simply mean pointing out how being involved in exploitation is ultimately self defeating.
I mean, the Merrill Lynchs of the world are still doing OK even though the market is tanking. Here in the UK, the 1,000 richest people are 30% richer than last year! Small investors and small businesspeople will almost always get screwed under Capitalism.
To be clear, I was talking about small investors in large businesses, such as people with their pensions invested in the stock market, rather than investors in small businesses. You're quite right that investing in small firms is a loser's game, but if Merrill Lynch is doing well, so are its shareholders - and that means they have a genuine conflict of interest when it comes to the question of working class emancipation. It's not simply a matter of false consciousness - they may realise where their class interests lie, but their class interests, like their individual interests, are divided.