Explain to me what part of your idea actually makes sense outside of the geek community.
First of all your VM thing is a bit of a pipe dream. People are already upset about the cost of Windows. Do you think they are going to be happy about having to purchase multiple copies AND licenses for a VM? Tack on all the latest licensing issues and limited install issues and you have a recipe for great fun. Nevermind that its only been relatively recently that hardware has made this much of a feasable possibility for the desktop. Now take all those computers out there that aren't leet hot off the shelf gaming machines...you know...the ones that most of the people affected by this kind of security issue actually use...and try to run VMs on them.
The people who figure out to go use something like VMPlayer and some of the free applications like the ubuntu/browser appliance thing are not the people who are hit hardest by this kind of security problem. Quite frankly I think blacklisting was a moronic idea from day 1. Marcus Ranum has a good paper on the dumbest ideas in security and "Enumerating Badness" and "Default Permit" are both in there. Whitelisting is actually the correct solution that was supposed to happen ages ago.
By the way, your solution doesn't really solve much unless those VMs are clean on every boot, no writing anything, and that makes things terribly difficult. Explain to grandma that she has to turn off the freeze, install program XYZ, and then turn the freeze back on. You are frequently lucky to explain the install program XYZ part. So your default permit virtual machine gets infected, stays running as a VM zombie now. Sure its easier to clean up, but rather than solving the problem of getting tagged in the first place you just raise the bar of complexity an order of magnitude and expect joe sixpack user to understand how to operate the new monstrosity.
The best part will be when joe sixpack gets 3 VMs zombied without shutting them down...now his 1 zombie box is instead 3 zombie boxes! Hooray. Oh and please ignore the fact that more modern malicious code can tell when they are in a VM enviroment and behave differently. And god forbid there be a vulnerability in the VM part.
Seriously. If you can't tell that that was very tongue in cheek please go shoot yourself before you do something damaging like voting or going out in public. I do find it amusing that you would think I was being serious and then laughing about the tin foil wearing folks. You seem to have alot more in common with them then you might think. Believing the most absurd thing to be true is sorta their trademark.
By playing RIAA music in the background. Didn't you read that? They can't touch me because the RIAA would be all over their asses, and they already support the RIAA doing that.
And I don't think they listen to every phone call, though that is certainly the wet dream of any intelligence agency. Its the same reason these organizations get involved in infiltrating peaceful protest groups. Information is a terribly powerful thing. Its the same reason good ol Hoover had a profile on damn near everyone, blackmail is king. The list goes on and on of why they want all the information they can get and why they want technology to listen to everything and then sort out the interesting bits for later analysis. Do I think they have that capability now? Probably not to the degree the paranoids believe. Do I think they are trying to develop it? Uhm, duh of course. Do I think the current warrantless secret wiretap business is about laying the groundwork for that possible future? Absolutely.
Beyond that, perception is everything. If they can determine enough people are angry upset or talking about person XYZ you can bet the bread and circuses will be ramped us to keep people placated and distracted. This is nothing new, this is not some giant conspiracy belief. This is I have taken some basic history classes and it is a VERY common theme in how governments go about gaining power, oppressing the people, and then collapsing. The part that bothers me is that almost everyone sees it getting out of hand, but everyone says "But that would never happen to us". Go read interviews with (Godwin's Law just cuz its fun) jews that didn't leave Germany. "It would never happen to us" is a pretty common theme. One hell of an oops I'd say.
I have already defeated their wiretaps.
1. First you must understand that these kind of wiretaps are not designed to catch terrorists. They don't work for shit for that goal. They are designed to monitor the population, which they do VERY well because you can get excellent statistical samples AND track down dissenters (remember, who cares about individual dissenters, its about the chilling effect). This is the same reason every government has ever done this, and under the same lies they do it with, and for some dumb reason everyone here goes "But the USA is different, we would NEVER do what everyone else has always done".
2. The government doing it is capitalistic in nature, big profit, big business, big happy. They have passed all manner of assinine copyright laws and the like.
THE MAGIC BULLET
When you are talking to friends and family or even osama bin laden himself, just play RIAA music in the background. Now when the government starts recording your ass they are making illegal copies of the music and sharing it between the agencies! People like Orin Hatch will implode trying to determine if draconian copyright laws or draconian police state spying takes precedence.
On a serious note, that is really the threat of the march of technology. It gets faster and easier to thin the herd out to "interesting" people. It takes precious little to distinguish yourself from the vast majority as a "person of interest". (With the exception of talking bad about our government. 20-30% approval for both congress and president makes it hard to find people who are talking GOOD about them)
They aren't islamofacists that hate our freedom. They didn't try to kill our glorious leaders Daddy. They don't have vast...ok, well they do have a lot of oil, but its a hell of a lot more work to take it from them cuz they have "the bomb" already among other things. What are you confused about?
"unless you are a suspected terrorist" - You mean like all those people who use phones and internet access tapped in the central rooms of our favorite Telcos?
"and the feds get a warrant to activate your beaming and tracing" - Wow...took me a minute to stop laughing about this before I could type. Uhm...since when have the feds bothered with warrants in the last decade or so? You are aware of the major lawsuits, the states secret issues, the refusing subpoenas, the people "stepping down" from their positions...I mean seriously...have you been living under a rock? Feds need warrants...that is the funniest thing in your entire post.
I seriously hope you are joking. You can't possibly be serious that Direct Democracy is a good thing. I can tell you EXACTLY what would happen with the USA PATRIOT Act and net neutrality. It would be over, the USA PATRIOT Act would have cameras on every street corner and the major phone/cable companies would have their way with things. You must be insane.
I swear to God I know a guy that voted for Bush because a cartoon fucking donkey on a Snickers commercial said "I invented the internet" and he knew that was a lie! These people shouldn't be allowed to vote as it is now, and you want to give them more power?! Christ at least in the current systems the lobbyists have to give something to get something, under Direct Democracy all it would take is a few flashy ad campaigns and the whole thing would be a done deal. Now aside from the fact that our easily swayed undeducated populace would vote for whatever the magic picture box told them to, we have the tyranny of the majority problem as well. So a few trivial issues would get sorted out quicker...yay people don't care about smoking pot so maybe it will be legal, but most people still don't like them gays so good luck on that one.
Pull your head out of your tiny little world and look how many people AREN'T outraged about the USA PATRIOT nonsense. It is a rather small and loud minority that is upset about it, everyone else drank the fucking koolaid and chants "If you aren't doing anything wrong you have nothing to hide". Which is a PRECIOUS short step from rounding up all the people that are upset about it with "You must be hiding something and we are going to find out what it is you terrorist supporter!" Then they all grab their torches and pitchforks and lock your ass away to be tortured into a confession. But hey, thats what most people wanted so its Direct Democracy goodness.
Criminals (not the oops I screwed up once on something minor type) are dysfunctional and in the animal kingdom would be killed off. To me the guy who steals from the 401k and the guy who takes your car at gunpoint aren't different. The 401k guy is just more of a coward. They still have the same thing wrong in their head that allows them to make the decision that preying on their own kind is acceptable. I don't buy for one second "they were abused too" or "they were in a hard place". I have known lots of people who have been abused that have never done that, and of the people that I know who have abused children, none of them were abused themselves. I have known a ton of people who have been in really hard places that didn't turn to crime. (Now mind you, I don't really call stealing food from a grocery store criminal, its illegal, but not the same as stealing the jewelry to sell for drugs, guns, or whatever else you may want at the moment). Stealing to survive is not at all the same as stealing to have what you want, and stealing to survive is such an overplayed card that its becomming worthless for the people who actually ARE trying to survive.
It may sound heartless and cold, and quite frankly I have a hard time accepting it completely, but we have done this to ourselves because we strive to be better. The people striving to be better refuse to remove the ones that need to be removed from the gene pool. Through being more socially aware, through better medical technology, we bypass natures way of dealing with the diseased and disabled. Again, I don't subscribe to the kill em all theory, and human compassion is an important develeopment, but these are the problems it causes. I do believe in the death penelty in certain cases, but I'm still wary of allowing the government to execute citizens. I see absolutely no reason to "rehabilitate" someone who has been raping a 5yr old girl, nor do I see any reason to waste my tax dollars that could be used to help someone by supporting him living in our prison system. I would just as soon as spend the $0.20 for the bullet to make damned sure he can't do it again or further drain resources from our society. The cost no one seems to catch on is the cost of leaving this guy locked away forever or "rehabilitating" him FAR exceeds his value to society and that time/money/resources could be used to feed multiple families, put many kids through school, clean up our streets, and have a much higher net gain for society as a whole.
That said, profiling is extremely difficult. It does work, but its not a sure thing by any means, there are always exceptions. Look at all major serial killers. Perfect freaking neighbors, members of the church, great with kids (until they raped them, killed them, and buried them under the floor). This is where that human factor comes in rather than vast networks of spy equipment. It takes people knowing people to really stop this stuff.
Once again, let me point out this wasn't putting soldiers on the street. This was putting soldiers on a military installation and then letting them catch bad guys that try to sneak around the military installation. I think this is WAY better than the surveillance crap Mr. Numb Nuts was claiming saved us all so he could push farther forward with it. Also, I might remind you that most of these soldiers actually do go home and take their uniform off. They live in the same community and are trained to be constantly aware of people doing suspicious things around them. So rather than going off about the soldiers on the street everywhere maybe you should be happy that these guys were aware enough to catch them before they blew up some place on the town that a bunch of Americans happen to hang out, because you can bet your ass it would have killed alot of people other than those soldiers. Or maybe just be happy that it wasn't the super invasive spying agenda that caught it.
I didn't once say that I support a militaristic/police state environment to prevent this. I support the military and police that already exist and are a necessity to a safe society being trained and aware to spot this sort of thing without massive surveillance society crap like wiretaps and the like. I would really like people to meet their fucking neighbors and know what is out of place in their neighborhoods, because in every neighborhood that actually watches out for each other instead of just relying on the police...low crime rates...less police presense...I don't know what there isn't to like here. Just because normal people like you and I don't have ten million reasons to kill people does not mean there aren't a lot of sick fucks out there that do. Your argument there basically entails "The rape victim must be lying because I wouldn't rape anyone that means noone would". Look, I would love for the world to completely disarm and have a big group hug and say "Well fuck guys, I'm really sorry we have been trying to kill each other over stupid shit for so long." But that isn't going to happen, and when you lose the ability or will to defend yourself someone is going to put a bullet in your dome and take your shit or otherwise oppress and abuse you, hooray for human nature.
I hope you aren't trying to blame the military for following legal orders based on really shitty foreign policy. The constitution says the US will have a military controlled by the public. Which is why the Commander in Cheif is an elected civilian. Now you can bitch and moan all day about how "he stole the election" or whatever, but he is a civilian, and the other civilians aren't doing a damned thing about it. Trust me, you don't want the military doing anything about it themselves. You want a military that obeys orders from the elected leaders...period. Anything else is a military coup and I think there have been enough of those around the world to know how that turns out. People are much better off standing up and controlling the civilians in charge, because if the military was in charge it wouldn't be so simple.
I am tired of hearing the military blamed for the craptastic foreign policy of our elected civilian leaders. The military has restored more water, power, medical, and educational systems in Iraq than Saddam did. The military is in a really shitty situation trying to do the best they can, getting blown the fuck up, psychologically torn apart (PTSD, the highest suicide rate in 20 something years, and the people snapping and doing other deranged things). The civilians don't seem to give a shit because they won't actually do anything about the ass clowns of leaders they have elected other than cry and whine about how bad they are and talk about how soldiers are demons for anything that bad happens without ever looking at anything positive that they do, or bothering to understand that a warzone is a psychological nightmare that has been extended from 6mo to 12mo to 15mo to 18mo etc etc.
Oh come on. They were going after military people and military installations. I would fully expect to be watched by armed soldiers if I was sneaking around a military base or military people. I'm sorry but the only time the military/police isn't a good thing is when individual members are doing bad things, or in happy fantasy land where everyone holds hands and sings in perfect unison without finding ten million reasons to want to kill eachother.
Even the larger fiascos boiled down to a few individuals making piss poor decisions, and others not having the integrity to stand up to it. Which by the way, they do teach in the military, you only have to follow legal orders, so its your own damned fault if your commander tells you to do something illegal and you do it.
I didn't say you did, and my frustration comes from having explicitly mentioned the use of identifying real people and how. Just about every reply has included "Think about it, they can use it to identify real people" Well freaking duh. In the first few minutes of the story being posted not one person had bothered to read anything and every single post aside from 2-3 offtopic jokes was going on about how evil it was for being able to identify people with 95% accuracy. So some of that rant wasn't directed at you specifically, you just happened to be the right person in line to repeat "it can be used to identify people"
I didn't change my mind. The technique doesn't bother me, its common sense, and people have been doing it for a long time. I didn't say they could do better without it, I said a handwriting match has higher accuracy than what this thing does. It isn't useless, it can be a very useful tool. My main point that all the crying about the "95% accuracy" is bullshit because that isn't what was being claimed. You do understand that even if it can be 95% sure that I have written more than one thing in a pool of sources, that IS NOT THE SAME as it can be 95% sure of my ownership of specific items? Noone seems to want to get that.
In typical mindless media consumer fashion people latched on to a little bit of "sounds like important numbers" and ran with it. This is coming from the same crowd that frequently rants about media control and over reaction to dumb stories. Being a useful tool the watchers do need to be watched with it, and I would argue you need to watch the watchers with useless tools too just to keep tabs on what they are attempting.
Even in your scenario of filtering out people you just latched on to that 95% accuracy completely out of context of what they were talking about.
Again, people keep responding with "but they will be able to use it to identify individuals". Even in my original post I said this, people keep telling me this like I don't get it. Of course the goal is to identify individuals, hell even in the infinitely inefficiency of our government I expect them to get that part right. My point is a bunch of paranoid tin foil wearing nut jobs are up in arms about this because of poor understanding, not reading the article, and relying on a slashdot summary to tell them the whole story. Quite honestly, if it keeps some of the Michael Moore quality nutjobs out of the limelight and acting as the perfect scapegoat for right wing asshats I will be happy. While the paranoid are hiding under their beds with tin foil on their heads too afraid to type anything online, and the psychotics are out chasing the pipe dream of complete information control in this day and age, MAYBE just MAYBE the rational ones left will stop being amused by watching this and actually get something done while they are distracted.
Look, I have huge issues with governments invading privacy, but I have equally large issues with a bunch of jackasses getting sick fucks off the hook with the whole "but they violated his civil rights, you can't do anything to him". No...I can...and I will...civil rights violated or not a criminal is still a criminal and that is no fucking excuse to let them go. Now, what it DOES mean is you realize that the people violating the civil rights are ALSO criminals and you handle them accordingly. I have problems with the censorship/monitoring of everyone to try and catch the heart string pulling criminal type of the day (terrorist/child molester/whatever), but I don't really have much of a problem with the stings designed to draw them out. The same crew that screams and cries about privacy trumps all are the same ones that cheer when Mark Foley's IMs got his pervert ass busted, or that got Senator "I'm not gay" Craig nailed. Just a tad hypocritical.
The magical word here is OVERSIGHT. The problem we have now is that our oversight is completely fucking borked. That is the whole fucking issue with this wiretap nonsense. Carter signed it in saying FISA was the only way you can do it, and it went that way for a long time until King George said "Fuck off, I'm the king, I don't need approval and oversight". Catching criminals is something the government is responsible for, and they need the tools to do it, but the citizens need the tools to make sure the government isn't abusing the power and a way to hold them accountable when they do. THAT is where the real threat is. Not the watching, but the oversight of the watchers.
My point is the screaming about 95% accuracy is shit because people aren't reading what was said and instead jump off the deep end of paranoia. Of course the point is to tie anonymous posts to real people. This kind of thing is nothing new...nothing...absolutely nothing new. A bunch of wound up tin foil hat wearing government hating paranoids are making this into a big deal. People have been identifying each other by common threads like this in real life for a long long time, now it makes it to the internet and suddenly everyone has gone stupid. The article even covers the topic of some of the countermeasures. The very fact that all of the information exists in predictable patterns out there in the public view makes this possible, not some super fancy new system. People are more than capable of doing this type of analysis, it just takes longer and they can only focus on fewer targets. This door swings both ways, this isn't some mystical technology that only the super secret shadow government bad guys can use. This is a common task with a new technological solution. This same concept has been used for good and bad by lots of people for a long time. I swear its like hearing people cry about how evil guns are when the reality is the trigger man is the good/evil part of the equation.
That is not what the article says. The article says "By analyzing these certain features, it can determine with more than 95 percent accuracy if the author has produced other content in the past." At no point does it actually say that it can identify a real individual, or that it can even identify each contributions source. Literally what it says is given enough information it can make a 95% accurate guess that an individual has contributed more than once. This does not mean it can identify all of that persons writings with a 95% accuracy, just that given a large pool of writings it can make a 95% accurate guess that a single person is responsible for more than one entry. There is a significant mathmatical difference here.
I mentioned that it could do exactly what you said in terms of tying AC posts to your account, but the significant part here is that its not the same as the 95% accuracy part that was so misquoted in the summary. I can identfy you as the writer of an anonymous love note by using your credit card or check signature with more accuracy than this thing does. You leave thouands of more clues to your identity all over that can be used with a greater degree of accuracy than this can. Remember, the article does not say what the summary claims it does in regards to accuracy in true slashdot fearmongering fashion.
Not if you read the article. The summary lied to you. You are still anonymous, they just know what other anonymous things you did.
By analyzing these certain features, it can determine with more than 95 percent accuracy if the author has produced other content in the past.
By analyzing these certain features, it can determine with more than 95 percent accuracy if the author has produced other content in the past.
How fucking hard is that to read? Seriously? Every comment right now is on some bullshit tangent about hunting people down or other such nonsense, or how its impossible to figure out who it is without blah blah fucking blah. What it DOES say is that they can take a large ammount of anonymous information and tie it together to a single player. Not that it gives the identity of that player, but that it can link all the things that player has done. So they are still an anonymous player, they just have their anonymous works attributed to them as an anonymous individual. Learn to fucking read people before jumping to insane conclusions.
The best thing this could do would be to tie a group of anonymous sources together as coming from one source and then hope and pray you can get enough matches between that pool from the single anonymous source to a single identified source. Let's not forget computers don't give a rats ass who they work for, so the door swings both ways on this one. It can be used to catch dissenters (bad for freedom), terrorists (good for safety), and government/media misinformation agents (good for freedom).
Things to note.
1. "12oz curls" is not "athletic". Neither are any actions accomplished in a virtual sense.
2. +5 post can be +5 funny so maybe they were just laughing at you
3. Not wearing glasses doesn't mean you don't need them.
4. "high on the physical attractiveness scale" doesn't mean much if you do need glasses
5. I won't even touch the moderation system.
6. It sounds to me like this poster is your typical slashdot poster that didn't RTFA and realize the whole thing is a damned joke.
You would honestly equate a company stealing a programmers work to make a profit and grandma letting her grandkids use her computer and then getting the shit sued out of her when they download music?
1. Company KNOWS it is illegal and is intentionally violating the law. Frequently does any number of actions to hide the fact they are stealing code, which further acknowledges that they are breaking the law. When legal issues do come out of this it usually boils down to "you hafta give the code away!"
2. Dumb kid with kazaa more often than not doesn't even know the files are being shared, he went to a website that said "download music!" and assumed it was legal. When legal action comes here its you must pay us thousands of dollars for tens of dollars in "stolen" music and thousands more in legal fees.
Sure there are asshats that just assume they won't get caught, but look at who they are sueing and what they are doing. This is not even REMOTELY the same thing. If you notice most people don't cheer on the downloaders, in fact, most that I have seen agree they should be busted and fined A FAIR AMMOUNT. The RIAA nonsense is not about fairness, it is not about justice, it is about fear, intimidation, price fixing, racketeering, AND THEFT. Because we can go all day back and forth about the "theft" of IP, but I will tell you point fucking blank that when that organization collects royalties on music that they don't own the copyright for...THAT IS THEFT.
Actually. I think the policy violation was the monetary offer. As I understand it the new policy is taping a note to a chair thrown through a window. Much more cost effective.
Slashdot Mirror
Explain to me what part of your idea actually makes sense outside of the geek community.
First of all your VM thing is a bit of a pipe dream. People are already upset about the cost of Windows. Do you think they are going to be happy about having to purchase multiple copies AND licenses for a VM? Tack on all the latest licensing issues and limited install issues and you have a recipe for great fun. Nevermind that its only been relatively recently that hardware has made this much of a feasable possibility for the desktop. Now take all those computers out there that aren't leet hot off the shelf gaming machines...you know...the ones that most of the people affected by this kind of security issue actually use...and try to run VMs on them.
The people who figure out to go use something like VMPlayer and some of the free applications like the ubuntu/browser appliance thing are not the people who are hit hardest by this kind of security problem. Quite frankly I think blacklisting was a moronic idea from day 1. Marcus Ranum has a good paper on the dumbest ideas in security and "Enumerating Badness" and "Default Permit" are both in there. Whitelisting is actually the correct solution that was supposed to happen ages ago.
By the way, your solution doesn't really solve much unless those VMs are clean on every boot, no writing anything, and that makes things terribly difficult. Explain to grandma that she has to turn off the freeze, install program XYZ, and then turn the freeze back on. You are frequently lucky to explain the install program XYZ part. So your default permit virtual machine gets infected, stays running as a VM zombie now. Sure its easier to clean up, but rather than solving the problem of getting tagged in the first place you just raise the bar of complexity an order of magnitude and expect joe sixpack user to understand how to operate the new monstrosity.
The best part will be when joe sixpack gets 3 VMs zombied without shutting them down...now his 1 zombie box is instead 3 zombie boxes! Hooray. Oh and please ignore the fact that more modern malicious code can tell when they are in a VM enviroment and behave differently. And god forbid there be a vulnerability in the VM part.
Seriously. If you can't tell that that was very tongue in cheek please go shoot yourself before you do something damaging like voting or going out in public. I do find it amusing that you would think I was being serious and then laughing about the tin foil wearing folks. You seem to have alot more in common with them then you might think. Believing the most absurd thing to be true is sorta their trademark.
I would like to point out that it would also be Poetic Justice.
By playing RIAA music in the background. Didn't you read that? They can't touch me because the RIAA would be all over their asses, and they already support the RIAA doing that.
And I don't think they listen to every phone call, though that is certainly the wet dream of any intelligence agency. Its the same reason these organizations get involved in infiltrating peaceful protest groups. Information is a terribly powerful thing. Its the same reason good ol Hoover had a profile on damn near everyone, blackmail is king. The list goes on and on of why they want all the information they can get and why they want technology to listen to everything and then sort out the interesting bits for later analysis. Do I think they have that capability now? Probably not to the degree the paranoids believe. Do I think they are trying to develop it? Uhm, duh of course. Do I think the current warrantless secret wiretap business is about laying the groundwork for that possible future? Absolutely.
Beyond that, perception is everything. If they can determine enough people are angry upset or talking about person XYZ you can bet the bread and circuses will be ramped us to keep people placated and distracted. This is nothing new, this is not some giant conspiracy belief. This is I have taken some basic history classes and it is a VERY common theme in how governments go about gaining power, oppressing the people, and then collapsing. The part that bothers me is that almost everyone sees it getting out of hand, but everyone says "But that would never happen to us". Go read interviews with (Godwin's Law just cuz its fun) jews that didn't leave Germany. "It would never happen to us" is a pretty common theme. One hell of an oops I'd say.
I have already defeated their wiretaps.
1. First you must understand that these kind of wiretaps are not designed to catch terrorists. They don't work for shit for that goal. They are designed to monitor the population, which they do VERY well because you can get excellent statistical samples AND track down dissenters (remember, who cares about individual dissenters, its about the chilling effect). This is the same reason every government has ever done this, and under the same lies they do it with, and for some dumb reason everyone here goes "But the USA is different, we would NEVER do what everyone else has always done".
2. The government doing it is capitalistic in nature, big profit, big business, big happy. They have passed all manner of assinine copyright laws and the like.
THE MAGIC BULLET
When you are talking to friends and family or even osama bin laden himself, just play RIAA music in the background. Now when the government starts recording your ass they are making illegal copies of the music and sharing it between the agencies! People like Orin Hatch will implode trying to determine if draconian copyright laws or draconian police state spying takes precedence.
On a serious note, that is really the threat of the march of technology. It gets faster and easier to thin the herd out to "interesting" people. It takes precious little to distinguish yourself from the vast majority as a "person of interest". (With the exception of talking bad about our government. 20-30% approval for both congress and president makes it hard to find people who are talking GOOD about them)
They aren't islamofacists that hate our freedom. They didn't try to kill our glorious leaders Daddy. They don't have vast...ok, well they do have a lot of oil, but its a hell of a lot more work to take it from them cuz they have "the bomb" already among other things. What are you confused about?
"unless you are a suspected terrorist" - You mean like all those people who use phones and internet access tapped in the central rooms of our favorite Telcos?
"and the feds get a warrant to activate your beaming and tracing" - Wow...took me a minute to stop laughing about this before I could type. Uhm...since when have the feds bothered with warrants in the last decade or so? You are aware of the major lawsuits, the states secret issues, the refusing subpoenas, the people "stepping down" from their positions...I mean seriously...have you been living under a rock? Feds need warrants...that is the funniest thing in your entire post.
I seriously hope you are joking. You can't possibly be serious that Direct Democracy is a good thing. I can tell you EXACTLY what would happen with the USA PATRIOT Act and net neutrality. It would be over, the USA PATRIOT Act would have cameras on every street corner and the major phone/cable companies would have their way with things. You must be insane.
I swear to God I know a guy that voted for Bush because a cartoon fucking donkey on a Snickers commercial said "I invented the internet" and he knew that was a lie! These people shouldn't be allowed to vote as it is now, and you want to give them more power?! Christ at least in the current systems the lobbyists have to give something to get something, under Direct Democracy all it would take is a few flashy ad campaigns and the whole thing would be a done deal. Now aside from the fact that our easily swayed undeducated populace would vote for whatever the magic picture box told them to, we have the tyranny of the majority problem as well. So a few trivial issues would get sorted out quicker...yay people don't care about smoking pot so maybe it will be legal, but most people still don't like them gays so good luck on that one.
Pull your head out of your tiny little world and look how many people AREN'T outraged about the USA PATRIOT nonsense. It is a rather small and loud minority that is upset about it, everyone else drank the fucking koolaid and chants "If you aren't doing anything wrong you have nothing to hide". Which is a PRECIOUS short step from rounding up all the people that are upset about it with "You must be hiding something and we are going to find out what it is you terrorist supporter!" Then they all grab their torches and pitchforks and lock your ass away to be tortured into a confession. But hey, thats what most people wanted so its Direct Democracy goodness.
Criminals (not the oops I screwed up once on something minor type) are dysfunctional and in the animal kingdom would be killed off. To me the guy who steals from the 401k and the guy who takes your car at gunpoint aren't different. The 401k guy is just more of a coward. They still have the same thing wrong in their head that allows them to make the decision that preying on their own kind is acceptable. I don't buy for one second "they were abused too" or "they were in a hard place". I have known lots of people who have been abused that have never done that, and of the people that I know who have abused children, none of them were abused themselves. I have known a ton of people who have been in really hard places that didn't turn to crime. (Now mind you, I don't really call stealing food from a grocery store criminal, its illegal, but not the same as stealing the jewelry to sell for drugs, guns, or whatever else you may want at the moment). Stealing to survive is not at all the same as stealing to have what you want, and stealing to survive is such an overplayed card that its becomming worthless for the people who actually ARE trying to survive.
It may sound heartless and cold, and quite frankly I have a hard time accepting it completely, but we have done this to ourselves because we strive to be better. The people striving to be better refuse to remove the ones that need to be removed from the gene pool. Through being more socially aware, through better medical technology, we bypass natures way of dealing with the diseased and disabled. Again, I don't subscribe to the kill em all theory, and human compassion is an important develeopment, but these are the problems it causes. I do believe in the death penelty in certain cases, but I'm still wary of allowing the government to execute citizens. I see absolutely no reason to "rehabilitate" someone who has been raping a 5yr old girl, nor do I see any reason to waste my tax dollars that could be used to help someone by supporting him living in our prison system. I would just as soon as spend the $0.20 for the bullet to make damned sure he can't do it again or further drain resources from our society. The cost no one seems to catch on is the cost of leaving this guy locked away forever or "rehabilitating" him FAR exceeds his value to society and that time/money/resources could be used to feed multiple families, put many kids through school, clean up our streets, and have a much higher net gain for society as a whole.
That said, profiling is extremely difficult. It does work, but its not a sure thing by any means, there are always exceptions. Look at all major serial killers. Perfect freaking neighbors, members of the church, great with kids (until they raped them, killed them, and buried them under the floor). This is where that human factor comes in rather than vast networks of spy equipment. It takes people knowing people to really stop this stuff.
Once again, let me point out this wasn't putting soldiers on the street. This was putting soldiers on a military installation and then letting them catch bad guys that try to sneak around the military installation. I think this is WAY better than the surveillance crap Mr. Numb Nuts was claiming saved us all so he could push farther forward with it. Also, I might remind you that most of these soldiers actually do go home and take their uniform off. They live in the same community and are trained to be constantly aware of people doing suspicious things around them. So rather than going off about the soldiers on the street everywhere maybe you should be happy that these guys were aware enough to catch them before they blew up some place on the town that a bunch of Americans happen to hang out, because you can bet your ass it would have killed alot of people other than those soldiers. Or maybe just be happy that it wasn't the super invasive spying agenda that caught it.
I didn't once say that I support a militaristic/police state environment to prevent this. I support the military and police that already exist and are a necessity to a safe society being trained and aware to spot this sort of thing without massive surveillance society crap like wiretaps and the like. I would really like people to meet their fucking neighbors and know what is out of place in their neighborhoods, because in every neighborhood that actually watches out for each other instead of just relying on the police...low crime rates...less police presense...I don't know what there isn't to like here. Just because normal people like you and I don't have ten million reasons to kill people does not mean there aren't a lot of sick fucks out there that do. Your argument there basically entails "The rape victim must be lying because I wouldn't rape anyone that means noone would". Look, I would love for the world to completely disarm and have a big group hug and say "Well fuck guys, I'm really sorry we have been trying to kill each other over stupid shit for so long." But that isn't going to happen, and when you lose the ability or will to defend yourself someone is going to put a bullet in your dome and take your shit or otherwise oppress and abuse you, hooray for human nature.
I hope you aren't trying to blame the military for following legal orders based on really shitty foreign policy. The constitution says the US will have a military controlled by the public. Which is why the Commander in Cheif is an elected civilian. Now you can bitch and moan all day about how "he stole the election" or whatever, but he is a civilian, and the other civilians aren't doing a damned thing about it. Trust me, you don't want the military doing anything about it themselves. You want a military that obeys orders from the elected leaders...period. Anything else is a military coup and I think there have been enough of those around the world to know how that turns out. People are much better off standing up and controlling the civilians in charge, because if the military was in charge it wouldn't be so simple.
I am tired of hearing the military blamed for the craptastic foreign policy of our elected civilian leaders. The military has restored more water, power, medical, and educational systems in Iraq than Saddam did. The military is in a really shitty situation trying to do the best they can, getting blown the fuck up, psychologically torn apart (PTSD, the highest suicide rate in 20 something years, and the people snapping and doing other deranged things). The civilians don't seem to give a shit because they won't actually do anything about the ass clowns of leaders they have elected other than cry and whine about how bad they are and talk about how soldiers are demons for anything that bad happens without ever looking at anything positive that they do, or bothering to understand that a warzone is a psychological nightmare that has been extended from 6mo to 12mo to 15mo to 18mo etc etc.
I don't think the Bush family dog lies about where he shit on the lawn. But I could be wrong.
Oh come on. They were going after military people and military installations. I would fully expect to be watched by armed soldiers if I was sneaking around a military base or military people. I'm sorry but the only time the military/police isn't a good thing is when individual members are doing bad things, or in happy fantasy land where everyone holds hands and sings in perfect unison without finding ten million reasons to want to kill eachother.
Even the larger fiascos boiled down to a few individuals making piss poor decisions, and others not having the integrity to stand up to it. Which by the way, they do teach in the military, you only have to follow legal orders, so its your own damned fault if your commander tells you to do something illegal and you do it.
I didn't say you did, and my frustration comes from having explicitly mentioned the use of identifying real people and how. Just about every reply has included "Think about it, they can use it to identify real people" Well freaking duh. In the first few minutes of the story being posted not one person had bothered to read anything and every single post aside from 2-3 offtopic jokes was going on about how evil it was for being able to identify people with 95% accuracy. So some of that rant wasn't directed at you specifically, you just happened to be the right person in line to repeat "it can be used to identify people"
I didn't change my mind. The technique doesn't bother me, its common sense, and people have been doing it for a long time. I didn't say they could do better without it, I said a handwriting match has higher accuracy than what this thing does. It isn't useless, it can be a very useful tool. My main point that all the crying about the "95% accuracy" is bullshit because that isn't what was being claimed. You do understand that even if it can be 95% sure that I have written more than one thing in a pool of sources, that IS NOT THE SAME as it can be 95% sure of my ownership of specific items? Noone seems to want to get that.
In typical mindless media consumer fashion people latched on to a little bit of "sounds like important numbers" and ran with it. This is coming from the same crowd that frequently rants about media control and over reaction to dumb stories. Being a useful tool the watchers do need to be watched with it, and I would argue you need to watch the watchers with useless tools too just to keep tabs on what they are attempting.
Even in your scenario of filtering out people you just latched on to that 95% accuracy completely out of context of what they were talking about.
Again, people keep responding with "but they will be able to use it to identify individuals". Even in my original post I said this, people keep telling me this like I don't get it. Of course the goal is to identify individuals, hell even in the infinitely inefficiency of our government I expect them to get that part right. My point is a bunch of paranoid tin foil wearing nut jobs are up in arms about this because of poor understanding, not reading the article, and relying on a slashdot summary to tell them the whole story. Quite honestly, if it keeps some of the Michael Moore quality nutjobs out of the limelight and acting as the perfect scapegoat for right wing asshats I will be happy. While the paranoid are hiding under their beds with tin foil on their heads too afraid to type anything online, and the psychotics are out chasing the pipe dream of complete information control in this day and age, MAYBE just MAYBE the rational ones left will stop being amused by watching this and actually get something done while they are distracted. Look, I have huge issues with governments invading privacy, but I have equally large issues with a bunch of jackasses getting sick fucks off the hook with the whole "but they violated his civil rights, you can't do anything to him". No...I can...and I will...civil rights violated or not a criminal is still a criminal and that is no fucking excuse to let them go. Now, what it DOES mean is you realize that the people violating the civil rights are ALSO criminals and you handle them accordingly. I have problems with the censorship/monitoring of everyone to try and catch the heart string pulling criminal type of the day (terrorist/child molester/whatever), but I don't really have much of a problem with the stings designed to draw them out. The same crew that screams and cries about privacy trumps all are the same ones that cheer when Mark Foley's IMs got his pervert ass busted, or that got Senator "I'm not gay" Craig nailed. Just a tad hypocritical. The magical word here is OVERSIGHT. The problem we have now is that our oversight is completely fucking borked. That is the whole fucking issue with this wiretap nonsense. Carter signed it in saying FISA was the only way you can do it, and it went that way for a long time until King George said "Fuck off, I'm the king, I don't need approval and oversight". Catching criminals is something the government is responsible for, and they need the tools to do it, but the citizens need the tools to make sure the government isn't abusing the power and a way to hold them accountable when they do. THAT is where the real threat is. Not the watching, but the oversight of the watchers.
My point is the screaming about 95% accuracy is shit because people aren't reading what was said and instead jump off the deep end of paranoia. Of course the point is to tie anonymous posts to real people. This kind of thing is nothing new...nothing...absolutely nothing new. A bunch of wound up tin foil hat wearing government hating paranoids are making this into a big deal. People have been identifying each other by common threads like this in real life for a long long time, now it makes it to the internet and suddenly everyone has gone stupid. The article even covers the topic of some of the countermeasures. The very fact that all of the information exists in predictable patterns out there in the public view makes this possible, not some super fancy new system. People are more than capable of doing this type of analysis, it just takes longer and they can only focus on fewer targets. This door swings both ways, this isn't some mystical technology that only the super secret shadow government bad guys can use. This is a common task with a new technological solution. This same concept has been used for good and bad by lots of people for a long time. I swear its like hearing people cry about how evil guns are when the reality is the trigger man is the good/evil part of the equation.
That is not what the article says. The article says "By analyzing these certain features, it can determine with more than 95 percent accuracy if the author has produced other content in the past." At no point does it actually say that it can identify a real individual, or that it can even identify each contributions source. Literally what it says is given enough information it can make a 95% accurate guess that an individual has contributed more than once. This does not mean it can identify all of that persons writings with a 95% accuracy, just that given a large pool of writings it can make a 95% accurate guess that a single person is responsible for more than one entry. There is a significant mathmatical difference here.
I mentioned that it could do exactly what you said in terms of tying AC posts to your account, but the significant part here is that its not the same as the 95% accuracy part that was so misquoted in the summary. I can identfy you as the writer of an anonymous love note by using your credit card or check signature with more accuracy than this thing does. You leave thouands of more clues to your identity all over that can be used with a greater degree of accuracy than this can. Remember, the article does not say what the summary claims it does in regards to accuracy in true slashdot fearmongering fashion.
Not if you read the article. The summary lied to you. You are still anonymous, they just know what other anonymous things you did. By analyzing these certain features, it can determine with more than 95 percent accuracy if the author has produced other content in the past.
By analyzing these certain features, it can determine with more than 95 percent accuracy if the author has produced other content in the past. How fucking hard is that to read? Seriously? Every comment right now is on some bullshit tangent about hunting people down or other such nonsense, or how its impossible to figure out who it is without blah blah fucking blah. What it DOES say is that they can take a large ammount of anonymous information and tie it together to a single player. Not that it gives the identity of that player, but that it can link all the things that player has done. So they are still an anonymous player, they just have their anonymous works attributed to them as an anonymous individual. Learn to fucking read people before jumping to insane conclusions.
The best thing this could do would be to tie a group of anonymous sources together as coming from one source and then hope and pray you can get enough matches between that pool from the single anonymous source to a single identified source. Let's not forget computers don't give a rats ass who they work for, so the door swings both ways on this one. It can be used to catch dissenters (bad for freedom), terrorists (good for safety), and government/media misinformation agents (good for freedom).
Pft. I do at least 1.75L curls on glass rum bottles!
12oz curls being the act of lifting a 12oz beverage to your mouth in a repetitive fashion.
Things to note. 1. "12oz curls" is not "athletic". Neither are any actions accomplished in a virtual sense. 2. +5 post can be +5 funny so maybe they were just laughing at you 3. Not wearing glasses doesn't mean you don't need them. 4. "high on the physical attractiveness scale" doesn't mean much if you do need glasses 5. I won't even touch the moderation system. 6. It sounds to me like this poster is your typical slashdot poster that didn't RTFA and realize the whole thing is a damned joke.
Presumably at some point after being found guilty of murdering the language.
You would honestly equate a company stealing a programmers work to make a profit and grandma letting her grandkids use her computer and then getting the shit sued out of her when they download music?
1. Company KNOWS it is illegal and is intentionally violating the law. Frequently does any number of actions to hide the fact they are stealing code, which further acknowledges that they are breaking the law. When legal issues do come out of this it usually boils down to "you hafta give the code away!"
2. Dumb kid with kazaa more often than not doesn't even know the files are being shared, he went to a website that said "download music!" and assumed it was legal. When legal action comes here its you must pay us thousands of dollars for tens of dollars in "stolen" music and thousands more in legal fees.
Sure there are asshats that just assume they won't get caught, but look at who they are sueing and what they are doing. This is not even REMOTELY the same thing. If you notice most people don't cheer on the downloaders, in fact, most that I have seen agree they should be busted and fined A FAIR AMMOUNT. The RIAA nonsense is not about fairness, it is not about justice, it is about fear, intimidation, price fixing, racketeering, AND THEFT. Because we can go all day back and forth about the "theft" of IP, but I will tell you point fucking blank that when that organization collects royalties on music that they don't own the copyright for...THAT IS THEFT.
Actually. I think the policy violation was the monetary offer. As I understand it the new policy is taping a note to a chair thrown through a window. Much more cost effective.