It's ok to protect ordinary people from organised crime, right? I've been writing letters to senators to try and let them know why it was such a bad idea all week. Why is it all the really fucked bills have to be 'rushed through'. I reckon the game for politicians is how well they can deceive the population, en masse to pass these really nasty laws whilst the media serves to keep everyone in the dark. They must be high fiving each other now.
I analysed the bill and whilst I won't include the letters I wrote to the senate, these are the sections of part one I thought needed to be amended to protect the population from fraud and slashdotters will probably get this immediately.
Criticisms of specific sections in Part one:
187AA.3A,3B remove because it introduces the possibility that any e-commerce business that is not a telecommunications provider can be forced to retain data and bare the cost of limiting their business throughput and capacity for expansion. For business this represents a rising linear cost that increases with additional customers.
187B.2 Needs definition of who a CAC (Communications Access Controller) role answers to, which department, and limits to retention demands
187B.2A change 'may' to 'must'
187B.3.c Remove. Additional requirements from the CAC impose incremental infrastructure and capacity restraints on business coupled with forcing them into I.P cost and approval cycles every time infrastructure upgrades are required as a result of demands from the CAC. The business is forced to write for approval for mandatory upgrades to meet retention requirements demanded by the CAC.
187BA.a Specify an minimum standard for encryption of data. Governmental should mandate minimum encryption standards revised regularly to protect consumers from fraud, organised crime, identity theft, harassment and so on. The same standard should control access to the data from all parties.
187BA.c add allow encrypted access to the data by the entity or person that generated it.
187E.2.b,c service providers must never be exempt from section 187BA when storing entity or personally generated data
187F.2.a add ensure adherence to encryption standards in 187BA; and
187F.2.b add: whilst still complying with 187BA
187F.2.f remove for the same reason as 187B.3.c
187G.1 Law enforcement uses a secured access standard under 187BA.a to access the data
187G.2.d change 'may' to 'must'
187G 4,5 Define a criteria for the ACMA's collection requirements
187K.1.d add: not approve an exemption from 187BA
187KA.4 define the ACMA's relation to policing here
187KA.4.f add: input from the PC and T.O
187KA.5 remove: ACMA considerations have nothing to do with policing for terrorists
187LA Should provide protection from abuse from government employees
187M add: Section 187BA(a)(b),
To clue you all in Section 187AA is the meat of the 80 page bill that defines what is captured. Section 187BA(a)(b) define, weakly, how the population will be protected from fraud. Whilst the single word change of 187B.2A is the critical change required to protect people from harrasement. 187G.2.d give ISPs an out for complying with 187BA which further weakens the publics protection.
I feel sorry for my country and it's people. I work in IT, I understand how people will be defrauded because I've seen it and now I think it is inevitable that these cases will be more common. Our constitution says Australians are guaranteed 'responsible government' however I see this bill as a very dangerous instrument that will be abused because it simply doesn't have any protections for Australians - how is that responsible government.
if the Five Eyes slurp it all up anyway? They already have access to these data, why bother making ISPs keep it too?
As a cache. If an analyst decides to pay attention to you the Xkeyscore can query the cache on the ISP and then slurp any future data. It's must be a spooks wet dream - get the target to pay for their own surveillance.
This law is just formalising and making it clearly mandatory. The meta data has been available and used for decades.
As someone who has read the Bill and the requirements under Section 187AA and as someone who is familiar with the billing systems that ISP use I can tell you that this is not true. The items under the section also record the duration and other parts of the communications that weren't previously recorded.
ISP's billing systems were only concerned if your account was financial, not the specifics of what the account was doing.
Who knows our civilisation may be at its peak right now and we will never reach these technological heights again. For all we know our selfishness will drive humanity back to nomads with some crazy old man poking a stick in a fire saying 'We used to have great machines that could fly'. Not what I want, but just as likely.
Could someone fill me in on the economics of nuclear power generation? I'd like to know what the usual payback period for a plant is, and how much it costs to operate a plant over that period.
Absolutely. Here is a link to the peer reviewed science that details net energy return after factoring input costs.
Comparing your mild annoyance at the thought that a company that you don't have to do business with could sell your data to a third party to slavery is incredibly offensive.
People that hide behind the freedom of anonymous speech I fight for to criticize me, offend me. Go an write a letter to your duly elected representative you are wasting your time here.
Any chance we can talk about the meta data laws while there is still a chance to stop it?
I know it's my submission but there is a slim chance that maybe we can do something if enough people know
http://slashdot.org/firehose.p...
please please let there be some hope
What benchmark made you conclude that HFS+ is faster than NTFS when using big block sizes ?
None, NTFS is a crap filesystem. I was just pointing out the comparison there is wasteful vs sluggish.
Does anybody still use reiserfs and what makes it "enterprise grade" ?
It's the fastest filesystem I've tested vs ext(s), xfs, and a few others. I had to do a lot of throughput testing on different filesystems so I wrote a battery of tests that helped me figure it out years ago.
Windozes server 2012 uses some of the principles from reiserfs, I don't know if that counts and I can't speak to who users reiserfs commercially but I use it whenever I need something fast and reliable.
The guy may be a killer but he knows how to write a filesystem and I doubt the US military has given up on their investment in it.
Mac OS X still depends on old mac system 6/7 filesystem functionality like resource forks, these are not that easy to "retrofit" in ufs/zfs.
Interesting - I didn't know that - but still sucks for mac users.
A lot of the IO schedulers are implemented mainly to have some IO fairness because mechanical hard drives are very easy to saturate.
and also to make it look like all the processes running behave smoothly - if you have a dedicated application though your still s.o.o.l on a mac
These aren't that useful anymore when you can push 500.000 IOPS to a set of SSD's. And don't diss the FreeBSD storage subsystem: ufs allows for consistent backups without having to use volume management and creating a snapshot beforehand (LVM2+ext4).
Now way would I dis FreeBSD - I'm might be a linux guy but I still think BSD is a solid offering - and good on them for having apple use their work - they deserve more credit. Though ext4 suffers its own issues if you need to have big directory structures.
I'll stick with my guns here though, any limitations on linux disk performance is a function of how well the controller drivers implement the hardware functionality. Configurable I/O, CPU scheduling, software and hardware raid coupled with filesystem choice make Linux reign supreme in terms of achievable I/O performance.
Nah, I neglected to consider the on board controller quality of laptops - Apple have usually been pretty good in that regard - filesystems though - blech. It might be interesting to do a comparison with linux on a T series lenovo - which is a similar build quality an a mac but in reality mine was an observation about filesystem performance over hardware.
Even more interesting would be a comparison of similar macs with one hosting linux, but even that would just be limited by how well linux supports the apple controller under linux.
I have done extensive testing of filesystem throughput though, however those have been on higher end kit than laptops.
I'm still waiting for the next laptop to even meet 2 years ago Apple's model.
Well, I'm a linux guy too, but to be fair to the windows folk HFS+ only achieves that performance by using a 16kb block size, not by having a performance filesystem and thus was very wasteful with disk space - especially when you consider how many small files exist on an fs.
No the disk performance crown still resides with Linux users that have access to enterprise grade filesystems like murderFS, ahem I mean reiserfs, xfs and other performance kings of that ilk.
I'm sure that there are macOS users out there who know how to retrofit such a filesystem into their BSD kernels, but that is hardly a stock MAC, it's BSD functionality. Even then I'm not sure if BSD supports configurable IO and CPU schedulers or a pre-emptable kernel - not that 99% of mac users would even understand why that is important.
people opposing GMO does not act as they would if they had reasonable cautions about the ecosystem.
Ok, so what has been done by these organizations to protect the contamination of the ecosystem's genome from GMOs. I'm kind of on the fence about GMOs however it seems to me there is as much ground to be cautious about deploying them when they can introduce species extinction by interfering with the germination of seeds.
It seems to me that whilst there are great benefits there are also great risks, especially when there is an abundance of food and the real issue is attempting to manipulate commodity prices through the practice of grain dumping at sea.
If we need more food, wouldn't it be more logical to end grain dumping and improve food distribution than to grow more food that will just be dumped at sea anyway? Maybe we should be trying to understand the genome better before we go modifying it in the ecosystem.
ooohhhh my profit margins bwwaaaaaaaa I'm not going to be able to afford a new learjet sob sob sob oh those mean userrs who want internet ITS NOT FAIR bwwwaaaaaaaaa
Why not just post a story instead of being OT? I mean a new Tails version is actually 'news for nerds' so why post it in a story about an impact crater? Are you saying that this release is so good that it caused an impact crater hundreds of millions of years ago.
Please there is enough stoopid in the world - we don't need it here.
I'm just trying to understand this. Why is there a stigma about being cautious about introducing GMOs the the ecosystem if we don't have an untouched backup of the ecosystem that sustains us. It's not as if we can un-introduce GMOs to the ecosystem once they are there so what is the problem with having strict controls over their deployment? Am I missing something?
People value a stable government. They won't stop paying taxes until they fear their government more than the anarchy that would replace it. They don't fear this enough.
You know that 'anarchy' is "a state of society without government or law" so if a government is ignoring the law it is halfway to anarchy already. I think the thing is that they don't value their freedom enough to stand up to the government that is constantly taking it away by deceiving the population.
If you fear the government then you are not free, if the government fears the people then you are.
This is something that nuclear power has demonstrated, even when faced with extra costs of lawsuits that are placed on them by the environmental and nimby movements
The 2005 Energy act specifically put measures in place that prevents ordinary people from intefering with the placement of a nuclear reactor. It is impossible for a normal person, or a local community, under the law, to prevent the placement of a nuclear reactor in their community.
Nuclear power has too many establishment, operational and ongoing costs to be an attractive investment anymore. The existence of the Price-Anderson act shows investors that Nuclear power is an investment oxymoron. If it waa safe and profitable, then there would be no need for the P-A act.
Do I believe that solar can become cost competitive, sure... eventually. My money is on nuclear for the next hundred years, assume we do not decide to choke ourselves out by sticking to fossil fuels
I think it should be the other way around. We haven't invested enough in solar, wind, geothermal and tidal power sources yet and we should develop them to derive maximum energy yeild from them.
Nuclear was scaled to quickly in the first place - jumping from 100Mw to 1Gw too quickly to understand the proper safety systems required and coming to terms with the surrounding factors that were not well understood when the plants were first conceptualized. Simply put like coal, nuclear power has consequences that weren't well understood.
I think there is a place for Nuclear power, just not in our generation. If you really support nuclear power and want to see it done properly stepping back now and building the foundational infrastructure whilst developing reactor technology means designing and building for 100 years to support a proper nuclear infrastructure that can last 1000-5000 years.
It is an ambitious long term goal that would change the very nature of the world economy to achieve that could guarantee the future of humanity instead of condeming it to reduced birth rates and transgenic disease the way the shortsighted vision the current nuclear industry does. People talk about Nuclear power, but if you engage in the cognitive effort of what is *really* required to make it work you find it is nothing like the nuclear industry we have now.
All of the current accidents show that humans are not mature enough to have the long terms vision required to deal with nuclear power right now.
Transmission losses are a good point, but regardless of the other inputs to the grid I think the really interesting thing about these developments are that it really changes the dynamics of the grid as a supplier and consumer becomes the same thing.
Sometimes people will have power to sell and sometimes they will need to buy it so, to me, it looks like a whole new trading market emerging for who and what will provide certain levels of available capacity. The trading and management technologies that deal with those demand fluctuations look interesting and they don't even exist to service the market that way yet.
I think the thing we are missing is, the deployment of different technologies for managing solar, wind, geothermal, tide and so on are going to create a boom in Information Technology that eclipses every boom in IT we have ever seen and the very nature of how we consume electricity will be nothing like it is today.
We often get lost in the 'which generator is better' however these types of developments herald some of the most interesting and exciting times for IT geeks and gadget builders as the need arises for such solutions.
Slashdot Mirror
It's ok to protect ordinary people from organised crime, right? I've been writing letters to senators to try and let them know why it was such a bad idea all week. Why is it all the really fucked bills have to be 'rushed through'. I reckon the game for politicians is how well they can deceive the population, en masse to pass these really nasty laws whilst the media serves to keep everyone in the dark. They must be high fiving each other now.
I analysed the bill and whilst I won't include the letters I wrote to the senate, these are the sections of part one I thought needed to be amended to protect the population from fraud and slashdotters will probably get this immediately.
Criticisms of specific sections in Part one:
187AA.3A,3B remove because it introduces the possibility that any e-commerce business that is not a telecommunications provider can be forced to retain data and bare the cost of limiting their business throughput and capacity for expansion. For business this represents a rising linear cost that increases with additional customers.
187B.2 Needs definition of who a CAC (Communications Access Controller) role answers to, which department, and limits to retention demands
187B.2A change 'may' to 'must'
187B.3.c Remove. Additional requirements from the CAC impose incremental infrastructure and capacity restraints on business coupled with forcing them into I.P cost and approval cycles every time infrastructure upgrades are required as a result of demands from the CAC. The business is forced to write for approval for mandatory upgrades to meet retention requirements demanded by the CAC.
187BA.a Specify an minimum standard for encryption of data. Governmental should mandate minimum encryption standards revised regularly to protect consumers from fraud, organised crime, identity theft, harassment and so on. The same standard should control access to the data from all parties.
187BA.c add allow encrypted access to the data by the entity or person that generated it.
187E.2.b,c service providers must never be exempt from section 187BA when storing entity or personally generated data 187F.2.a add ensure adherence to encryption standards in 187BA; and
187F.2.b add: whilst still complying with 187BA
187F.2.f remove for the same reason as 187B.3.c
187G.1 Law enforcement uses a secured access standard under 187BA.a to access the data
187G.2.d change 'may' to 'must'
187G 4,5 Define a criteria for the ACMA's collection requirements
187K.1.d add: not approve an exemption from 187BA
187KA.4 define the ACMA's relation to policing here
187KA.4.f add: input from the PC and T.O
187KA.5 remove: ACMA considerations have nothing to do with policing for terrorists
187LA Should provide protection from abuse from government employees
187M add: Section 187BA(a)(b),
To clue you all in Section 187AA is the meat of the 80 page bill that defines what is captured. Section 187BA(a)(b) define, weakly, how the population will be protected from fraud. Whilst the single word change of 187B.2A is the critical change required to protect people from harrasement. 187G.2.d give ISPs an out for complying with 187BA which further weakens the publics protection.
I feel sorry for my country and it's people. I work in IT, I understand how people will be defrauded because I've seen it and now I think it is inevitable that these cases will be more common. Our constitution says Australians are guaranteed 'responsible government' however I see this bill as a very dangerous instrument that will be abused because it simply doesn't have any protections for Australians - how is that responsible government.
Exactly, if I wasn't participating in this discussion I would mod you up.
if the Five Eyes slurp it all up anyway? They already have access to these data, why bother making ISPs keep it too?
As a cache. If an analyst decides to pay attention to you the Xkeyscore can query the cache on the ISP and then slurp any future data. It's must be a spooks wet dream - get the target to pay for their own surveillance.
This law is just formalising and making it clearly mandatory. The meta data has been available and used for decades.
As someone who has read the Bill and the requirements under Section 187AA and as someone who is familiar with the billing systems that ISP use I can tell you that this is not true. The items under the section also record the duration and other parts of the communications that weren't previously recorded.
ISP's billing systems were only concerned if your account was financial, not the specifics of what the account was doing.
and I wrote to the politicians as well, bad day for Australia.
"Just as likely" huh. Seems legit.
as a "a genetically engineered Kaiju that eats Plutonium and shits out crude oil" - for sure
Who knows our civilisation may be at its peak right now and we will never reach these technological heights again. For all we know our selfishness will drive humanity back to nomads with some crazy old man poking a stick in a fire saying 'We used to have great machines that could fly'. Not what I want, but just as likely.
Could someone fill me in on the economics of nuclear power generation? I'd like to know what the usual payback period for a plant is, and how much it costs to operate a plant over that period.
Absolutely. Here is a link to the peer reviewed science that details net energy return after factoring input costs.
Have a great day!
Well at least people will *feel* safe.
Comparing your mild annoyance at the thought that a company that you don't have to do business with could sell your data to a third party to slavery is incredibly offensive.
People that hide behind the freedom of anonymous speech I fight for to criticize me, offend me. Go an write a letter to your duly elected representative you are wasting your time here.
Did anyone using this service expect anything less? The data created by the company is another product that can be consumed.
I used to love being a free person, now I'm a data product to be bought and sold, much like a slave.
Any chance we can talk about the meta data laws while there is still a chance to stop it? I know it's my submission but there is a slim chance that maybe we can do something if enough people know http://slashdot.org/firehose.p... please please let there be some hope
None, NTFS is a crap filesystem. I was just pointing out the comparison there is wasteful vs sluggish.
It's the fastest filesystem I've tested vs ext(s), xfs, and a few others. I had to do a lot of throughput testing on different filesystems so I wrote a battery of tests that helped me figure it out years ago.
Windozes server 2012 uses some of the principles from reiserfs, I don't know if that counts and I can't speak to who users reiserfs commercially but I use it whenever I need something fast and reliable.
The guy may be a killer but he knows how to write a filesystem and I doubt the US military has given up on their investment in it.
Interesting - I didn't know that - but still sucks for mac users.
and also to make it look like all the processes running behave smoothly - if you have a dedicated application though your still s.o.o.l on a mac
Now way would I dis FreeBSD - I'm might be a linux guy but I still think BSD is a solid offering - and good on them for having apple use their work - they deserve more credit. Though ext4 suffers its own issues if you need to have big directory structures.
I'll stick with my guns here though, any limitations on linux disk performance is a function of how well the controller drivers implement the hardware functionality. Configurable I/O, CPU scheduling, software and hardware raid coupled with filesystem choice make Linux reign supreme in terms of achievable I/O performance.
Nah, I neglected to consider the on board controller quality of laptops - Apple have usually been pretty good in that regard - filesystems though - blech. It might be interesting to do a comparison with linux on a T series lenovo - which is a similar build quality an a mac but in reality mine was an observation about filesystem performance over hardware.
Even more interesting would be a comparison of similar macs with one hosting linux, but even that would just be limited by how well linux supports the apple controller under linux.
I have done extensive testing of filesystem throughput though, however those have been on higher end kit than laptops.
I'm still waiting for the next laptop to even meet 2 years ago Apple's model.
Well, I'm a linux guy too, but to be fair to the windows folk HFS+ only achieves that performance by using a 16kb block size, not by having a performance filesystem and thus was very wasteful with disk space - especially when you consider how many small files exist on an fs.
No the disk performance crown still resides with Linux users that have access to enterprise grade filesystems like murderFS, ahem I mean reiserfs, xfs and other performance kings of that ilk.
I'm sure that there are macOS users out there who know how to retrofit such a filesystem into their BSD kernels, but that is hardly a stock MAC, it's BSD functionality. Even then I'm not sure if BSD supports configurable IO and CPU schedulers or a pre-emptable kernel - not that 99% of mac users would even understand why that is important.
people opposing GMO does not act as they would if they had reasonable cautions about the ecosystem.
Ok, so what has been done by these organizations to protect the contamination of the ecosystem's genome from GMOs. I'm kind of on the fence about GMOs however it seems to me there is as much ground to be cautious about deploying them when they can introduce species extinction by interfering with the germination of seeds.
It seems to me that whilst there are great benefits there are also great risks, especially when there is an abundance of food and the real issue is attempting to manipulate commodity prices through the practice of grain dumping at sea.
If we need more food, wouldn't it be more logical to end grain dumping and improve food distribution than to grow more food that will just be dumped at sea anyway? Maybe we should be trying to understand the genome better before we go modifying it in the ecosystem.
ooohhhh my profit margins bwwaaaaaaaa I'm not going to be able to afford a new learjet sob sob sob oh those mean userrs who want internet ITS NOT FAIR bwwwaaaaaaaaa
we use 5.56mm rounds in our rifles, 9mm rounds in our pistols, 7.62mm in our machineguns, 60mm, 81mm & 107mm mortar rounds, 105mm, 155mm & 203mm artillery, 120mm tank guns, 25mm IFV guns,
That's a metric fuckton of metric...
Why not just post a story instead of being OT? I mean a new Tails version is actually 'news for nerds' so why post it in a story about an impact crater? Are you saying that this release is so good that it caused an impact crater hundreds of millions of years ago.
Please there is enough stoopid in the world - we don't need it here.
:wq
GMO-phobe
I'm just trying to understand this. Why is there a stigma about being cautious about introducing GMOs the the ecosystem if we don't have an untouched backup of the ecosystem that sustains us. It's not as if we can un-introduce GMOs to the ecosystem once they are there so what is the problem with having strict controls over their deployment? Am I missing something?
White space, must.use.white.space.
People value a stable government. They won't stop paying taxes until they fear their government more than the anarchy that would replace it. They don't fear this enough.
You know that 'anarchy' is "a state of society without government or law" so if a government is ignoring the law it is halfway to anarchy already. I think the thing is that they don't value their freedom enough to stand up to the government that is constantly taking it away by deceiving the population.
If you fear the government then you are not free, if the government fears the people then you are.
This is something that nuclear power has demonstrated, even when faced with extra costs of lawsuits that are placed on them by the environmental and nimby movements
The 2005 Energy act specifically put measures in place that prevents ordinary people from intefering with the placement of a nuclear reactor. It is impossible for a normal person, or a local community, under the law, to prevent the placement of a nuclear reactor in their community.
Nuclear power has too many establishment, operational and ongoing costs to be an attractive investment anymore. The existence of the Price-Anderson act shows investors that Nuclear power is an investment oxymoron. If it waa safe and profitable, then there would be no need for the P-A act.
Do I believe that solar can become cost competitive, sure... eventually. My money is on nuclear for the next hundred years, assume we do not decide to choke ourselves out by sticking to fossil fuels
I think it should be the other way around. We haven't invested enough in solar, wind, geothermal and tidal power sources yet and we should develop them to derive maximum energy yeild from them.
Nuclear was scaled to quickly in the first place - jumping from 100Mw to 1Gw too quickly to understand the proper safety systems required and coming to terms with the surrounding factors that were not well understood when the plants were first conceptualized. Simply put like coal, nuclear power has consequences that weren't well understood.
I think there is a place for Nuclear power, just not in our generation. If you really support nuclear power and want to see it done properly stepping back now and building the foundational infrastructure whilst developing reactor technology means designing and building for 100 years to support a proper nuclear infrastructure that can last 1000-5000 years.
It is an ambitious long term goal that would change the very nature of the world economy to achieve that could guarantee the future of humanity instead of condeming it to reduced birth rates and transgenic disease the way the shortsighted vision the current nuclear industry does. People talk about Nuclear power, but if you engage in the cognitive effort of what is *really* required to make it work you find it is nothing like the nuclear industry we have now.
All of the current accidents show that humans are not mature enough to have the long terms vision required to deal with nuclear power right now.
Transmission losses are a good point, but regardless of the other inputs to the grid I think the really interesting thing about these developments are that it really changes the dynamics of the grid as a supplier and consumer becomes the same thing.
Sometimes people will have power to sell and sometimes they will need to buy it so, to me, it looks like a whole new trading market emerging for who and what will provide certain levels of available capacity. The trading and management technologies that deal with those demand fluctuations look interesting and they don't even exist to service the market that way yet.
I think the thing we are missing is, the deployment of different technologies for managing solar, wind, geothermal, tide and so on are going to create a boom in Information Technology that eclipses every boom in IT we have ever seen and the very nature of how we consume electricity will be nothing like it is today.
We often get lost in the 'which generator is better' however these types of developments herald some of the most interesting and exciting times for IT geeks and gadget builders as the need arises for such solutions.
Problem solving at its best!