Every story on Slashdot about the NSA revelations has been followed by a deluge of comments who for the most part been extremely pessimistic, sprinkled with doses of paranoia that almost border on hysteria. All I seem to read now is that it won't make any difference, we're stuck in this forever, "they" won't let us have our liberty back, &c. &c. ad nauseum.
Whether the leaks are 100% accurate or not (and I can't tell either way), something monumental has happened this year. I would tentatively suggest that we're finally seeing the edifice fall, not just of surveillance, but of our entire socio-economic system. These are the sort of paper cuts that can eventually topple an entire way of thinking.
The two are linked. The NSA does not live in a vacuum, but as a result of economic and social policies that have consolidated power and influence in the hands of a few people.
A panopticon cannot survive in the same way our winner-takes-all-and-debt-for-the-rest neoliberal economic system cannot survive. Both rely on holding all the cards, forever. It took one contractor to snatch the deck with Snowden, and whether other/. posters believe it or not, it will change things. In the last five years, we've seen the inevitable failure of our lunatic economic decisions. Things are actually changing, and changing quickly.
The only question is what do we look to do next?
We aren't beholden to continue the way things are forever. There is no obligation to constantly think within the same ridiculous boxes, to grant power to the same shitty people. We can look to the future and actually try and level the playing field. A society where power and money are not amassed in such obscene quantities would scarcely be able to enable the sort of panopticon people are now afraid of.
It is evident that agencies that have access to so many resources cannot help but abuse them. Perhaps now is the time to think of something new, not communism or capitalism or even anarchism, but a way of preserving the pieces of our society that we want and discarding the abuses.
This is *not* the only way things can be, no more than absolute monarchy, slavery or feudalism were in the past.
Rather than simply being afraid, I'd rather put my energy into believing, rightly or wrongly, that we can have something better in the future.
There's plenty of applications around still without a 64 bit binary. From what I understand this layer just allows 32 bit programs to utilize some performance enhancing features of 64 bit architecture. It seems a genuinely good idea.
A pardon implies that he was actually guilty of something worthy of criminalization.
Quite. A pardon for Turing does nothing to condemn the law he was convicted under.
I wonder if the UK government would be so kind as to pardon *everybody* convicted under these laws going back as long as required? Not to dismiss Turing's contributions, but why should it just be for him?
There is no expectation of privacy when driving a vehicle on public roads.
This is the tricky bit, where a line needs to be drawn. There is a difference between "no expectation of privacy" and "expectation of unencumbered, constant surveillance".
Lets say I was walking down a public high street, having a conversation with my girlfriend. I have no expectation of privacy there either, but I would feel somewhat violated if in ten years time I was presented with a written transcript of what we were saying to each other on that day.
ANPR (number plate recognition) has been used in UK petrol stations for nigh on a decade now, so a car can be pinpointed to a certain area. That is quite different to having a permanent record of everywhere I have driven, kept for decades.
The comparison with NSA surveillance seems quite obvious. It is one thing to have a record kept by an ISP, by the site you visited, by your own machine and so on. It is quite different to have a full and complete record of all your actions logged by a third party and kept for years on end.
What we really lack at the minute is strict laws over what is and isn't acceptable to monitor without a court order.
In one of the universes in Robert Anton Wilson's Schrodinger's Cat novels, everyone convicted of a violent or harmful crime (there are no non-crimes like drugs offences) is either rehabilitated or sent to "Hell". Hell is simply a large area with a force field around it, and in it the criminals or others are free to do as they wish.
I like the idea of doing that. The rich and powerful could then live by their own predatory instincts without constriction, completely unable to harm the rest of us.
What's so frustrating is that nuclear power *is* the next generation on from fossil fuels. First Uranium sources, then we could move onto MSR, then Thorium reactors. By that time we might have improved the process enough to eventually be able to produce small reactors suitable for powering cars or individual homes. Hell, we might even be able to get into space again.
We shouldn't be still building gas fired and coal fired stations. We shouldn't be still heavily relying on oil. The price of fuel should be going down, instead it is quickly rising.
This seems to me to display perfectly the disruptive influence of vested interests. We could have adopted the technology in the 50's and refined it so that today we have clean, safe, abundant energy. But no, there was too much money to be made.
Instead, we're intent on doing anything *but* use nuclear. We have people pointing 20% efficient PV panels at the sky and hoping that we can make back the cost in the fifteen years before the panels stop working. We're injecting high pressure streams of liquid into the earth for gas, like an addict desperately scraping the last bit of heroin out of a wrap.
The trouble isn't Neo-Nazi CD compilations leading upstanding, bright young people down an alley into right wing extremism. If they're disaffected, for whatever reason, they will continue to be so even after the CDs are destroyed or the books are burned.
Yeah alright, ban it all. Ban the CDs, ban the literature, ban the swastica. No-one will be a Neo-Nazi anymore, right? All the problems are solved.
Wrong. You don't become a Neo-Nazi because you love and respect the society you live in. You become one because you want to tear it down. They'll just funnel their dissatisfaction elsewhere.
The key to learning from history isn't to ban it, but to educate and prevent the social and economic conditions that would mean repeating it.
How long until "disagreeing with the politics of the ruling party" becomes a mental illness?
Perhaps, but more likely is how long before we start lowering the threshold for which someone requires "help". Especially if the facilities were private, which is 99% certain these days.
In 2008 in Pennsylvania two judges were convicted of accepting bribes from Robert Mericle, who owned private youth detention facilities. In return, they would sentence kids to incarceration in his facilities for such heinous crimes as shoplifting a DVD from Wal-Mart, trespassing, or in one case making a video on Myspace mocking the principle of a school.
Considering that mental health is so subjective and still poorly understood, could you imagine the amount of abuse that would occur? I would measure in seconds the time between such a facility opening and doctors being bribed to incarcerate patients, "for their own good".
This is a problem which has become endemic in private prisons. When it becomes profitable to incarcerate someone, the last real barrier to simply incarcerating anyone deemed undesirable is removed.
It has been long argued that drug laws in the US are mainly only used to convict unemployed, poor and predominantly black men in large cities, for whom there are few prospects and no jobs. With meth, this has extended to white people in the same position, in the same way opium laws did to the Chinese in the past.
How long before a new system of mental health facilities serve precisely the same purpose?
Most of the submitter's issues stem from inadequecies in the law. Drones, CCTV etc. can't really be fought with technological measures. Outlawing invasive behaviours (or having strict rules over their use) seems the only option.
Yes, our technology enables easy mass surveillance. Does that mean we simply accept it? Do we accept a future where those with the most technology and money simply do whatever the fuck they want? That seems to be the conclusion of a lot of people.
It's a long shot, especially when government seems so authoritarian and adversarial to the populace, but I'd suggest it to be the only solution.
with an expanding mass of outsiders and a shrinking core of insiders and with income distribution within gangs extremely skewed in favor of those at the top, while the rank-and-file street sellers earned even less than employees in legitimate low-skilled activities.
So academia is just like the rest of the world, then.
There's just a glut of employers who want just-in-time employees cheap.
I was going to make exactly the same point. I imagine what they're really after is to have such a enormous supply of suitable workers that they can get away with paying next to fuck all.
It's in their financial interest to make coding or admin just another low paid job.
The trouble is that antibiotics and livestock seems to have allowed the industry to be completely negligent of conditions and the health of their animals. I have no doubt that your grandparents will have treated theirs such better than hormone pumped, antibiotic loaded factory farm livestock we have today. Then again, antibiotics can also save herds from infectious diseases.
In the same way you can't compete with Walmart on price using a hand loom, it seems you can't compete with agri-business without using some of these techniques.
The only solution seems to be to regulate it, and I believe some countries are already doing so in part. That and advances in synthetic or vat grown meat would go towards solving a lot of problems and help remove anti-biotics from the food chain.
Winamp, FFDShow and Haali is a potent combination as well. Adding the correct extensions to the DirectShow decoder allows you to play mkv and other formats easily, and the performance is superb.
I think this is absolutely right. I expect it'll be a generational change. Look at how differently we treat sex compared to sixty years ago, there is still a lot of repression around, but progress is being made.
The other thing I believe we have to do is push hard for privacy. Until recently privacy was almost a default state, which took specific actions to unveil. We're at the point now where lack of privacy is becoming the default state. Companies and governments in particular need to be bound such that they can't invade privacy by default.
They recently made an announcement that contrary to their election pledge (again) they would look to make economic austerity permanent, instead of scaling back on cuts once the economy recovered.
I would have a bet that in a couple of days if the pressure is still on that they'll either claim it was a mistake, or hackers. Who knows, it might even be true.
I could easily believe that they are stupid enough to think that deleting a few pages erases the past.
How on earth would you define something so vague as "the national interest"?
So presumably the national interest is whatever the Republican/Democrat party say it is. Fine. But don't bullshit everyone with some fanciful semantic spook like a "national interest".
Slashdot Mirror
Every story on Slashdot about the NSA revelations has been followed by a deluge of comments who for the most part been extremely pessimistic, sprinkled with doses of paranoia that almost border on hysteria. All I seem to read now is that it won't make any difference, we're stuck in this forever, "they" won't let us have our liberty back, &c. &c. ad nauseum.
Whether the leaks are 100% accurate or not (and I can't tell either way), something monumental has happened this year. I would tentatively suggest that we're finally seeing the edifice fall, not just of surveillance, but of our entire socio-economic system. These are the sort of paper cuts that can eventually topple an entire way of thinking.
The two are linked. The NSA does not live in a vacuum, but as a result of economic and social policies that have consolidated power and influence in the hands of a few people.
A panopticon cannot survive in the same way our winner-takes-all-and-debt-for-the-rest neoliberal economic system cannot survive. Both rely on holding all the cards, forever. It took one contractor to snatch the deck with Snowden, and whether other /. posters believe it or not, it will change things. In the last five years, we've seen the inevitable failure of our lunatic economic decisions. Things are actually changing, and changing quickly.
The only question is what do we look to do next?
We aren't beholden to continue the way things are forever. There is no obligation to constantly think within the same ridiculous boxes, to grant power to the same shitty people. We can look to the future and actually try and level the playing field. A society where power and money are not amassed in such obscene quantities would scarcely be able to enable the sort of panopticon people are now afraid of.
It is evident that agencies that have access to so many resources cannot help but abuse them. Perhaps now is the time to think of something new, not communism or capitalism or even anarchism, but a way of preserving the pieces of our society that we want and discarding the abuses.
This is *not* the only way things can be, no more than absolute monarchy, slavery or feudalism were in the past.
Rather than simply being afraid, I'd rather put my energy into believing, rightly or wrongly, that we can have something better in the future.
It'll be the first data jubilee.
I'd dig my totally bitchin' PAE-enabled Pentium Pro rig out of the basement, assuming the rats haven't eaten it...
Because as we all know rats are well known for eating computer components, or even entire base units.
There's plenty of applications around still without a 64 bit binary. From what I understand this layer just allows 32 bit programs to utilize some performance enhancing features of 64 bit architecture. It seems a genuinely good idea.
A pardon implies that he was actually guilty of something worthy of criminalization .
Quite. A pardon for Turing does nothing to condemn the law he was convicted under.
I wonder if the UK government would be so kind as to pardon *everybody* convicted under these laws going back as long as required? Not to dismiss Turing's contributions, but why should it just be for him?
But don't worry, Slashdot still allows any poorly researched knee jerk blog post onto the front page.
There is no expectation of privacy when driving a vehicle on public roads.
This is the tricky bit, where a line needs to be drawn. There is a difference between "no expectation of privacy" and "expectation of unencumbered, constant surveillance".
Lets say I was walking down a public high street, having a conversation with my girlfriend. I have no expectation of privacy there either, but I would feel somewhat violated if in ten years time I was presented with a written transcript of what we were saying to each other on that day.
ANPR (number plate recognition) has been used in UK petrol stations for nigh on a decade now, so a car can be pinpointed to a certain area. That is quite different to having a permanent record of everywhere I have driven, kept for decades.
The comparison with NSA surveillance seems quite obvious. It is one thing to have a record kept by an ISP, by the site you visited, by your own machine and so on. It is quite different to have a full and complete record of all your actions logged by a third party and kept for years on end.
What we really lack at the minute is strict laws over what is and isn't acceptable to monitor without a court order.
You want a solution?
In one of the universes in Robert Anton Wilson's Schrodinger's Cat novels, everyone convicted of a violent or harmful crime (there are no non-crimes like drugs offences) is either rehabilitated or sent to "Hell". Hell is simply a large area with a force field around it, and in it the criminals or others are free to do as they wish.
I like the idea of doing that. The rich and powerful could then live by their own predatory instincts without constriction, completely unable to harm the rest of us.
What's so frustrating is that nuclear power *is* the next generation on from fossil fuels. First Uranium sources, then we could move onto MSR, then Thorium reactors. By that time we might have improved the process enough to eventually be able to produce small reactors suitable for powering cars or individual homes. Hell, we might even be able to get into space again.
We shouldn't be still building gas fired and coal fired stations. We shouldn't be still heavily relying on oil. The price of fuel should be going down, instead it is quickly rising.
This seems to me to display perfectly the disruptive influence of vested interests. We could have adopted the technology in the 50's and refined it so that today we have clean, safe, abundant energy. But no, there was too much money to be made.
Instead, we're intent on doing anything *but* use nuclear. We have people pointing 20% efficient PV panels at the sky and hoping that we can make back the cost in the fifteen years before the panels stop working. We're injecting high pressure streams of liquid into the earth for gas, like an addict desperately scraping the last bit of heroin out of a wrap.
It just all seems so completely backwards.
The trouble isn't Neo-Nazi CD compilations leading upstanding, bright young people down an alley into right wing extremism. If they're disaffected, for whatever reason, they will continue to be so even after the CDs are destroyed or the books are burned.
Yeah alright, ban it all. Ban the CDs, ban the literature, ban the swastica. No-one will be a Neo-Nazi anymore, right? All the problems are solved.
Wrong. You don't become a Neo-Nazi because you love and respect the society you live in. You become one because you want to tear it down. They'll just funnel their dissatisfaction elsewhere.
The key to learning from history isn't to ban it, but to educate and prevent the social and economic conditions that would mean repeating it.
You can do it for less than that. Just use a fishing net with a very long pole.
CAPTCHA: patience.
Er, "shoe-shining"? What do you mean?
You never used the integrated shoe polishing functionality of LTO drives? It's right there in the spec.
How long until "disagreeing with the politics of the ruling party" becomes a mental illness?
Perhaps, but more likely is how long before we start lowering the threshold for which someone requires "help". Especially if the facilities were private, which is 99% certain these days.
In 2008 in Pennsylvania two judges were convicted of accepting bribes from Robert Mericle, who owned private youth detention facilities. In return, they would sentence kids to incarceration in his facilities for such heinous crimes as shoplifting a DVD from Wal-Mart, trespassing, or in one case making a video on Myspace mocking the principle of a school.
Considering that mental health is so subjective and still poorly understood, could you imagine the amount of abuse that would occur? I would measure in seconds the time between such a facility opening and doctors being bribed to incarcerate patients, "for their own good".
This is a problem which has become endemic in private prisons. When it becomes profitable to incarcerate someone, the last real barrier to simply incarcerating anyone deemed undesirable is removed.
It has been long argued that drug laws in the US are mainly only used to convict unemployed, poor and predominantly black men in large cities, for whom there are few prospects and no jobs. With meth, this has extended to white people in the same position, in the same way opium laws did to the Chinese in the past.
How long before a new system of mental health facilities serve precisely the same purpose?
Cretins! I built a working Difference Engine before even leaving the womb!
Most of the submitter's issues stem from inadequecies in the law. Drones, CCTV etc. can't really be fought with technological measures. Outlawing invasive behaviours (or having strict rules over their use) seems the only option.
Yes, our technology enables easy mass surveillance. Does that mean we simply accept it? Do we accept a future where those with the most technology and money simply do whatever the fuck they want? That seems to be the conclusion of a lot of people.
It's a long shot, especially when government seems so authoritarian and adversarial to the populace, but I'd suggest it to be the only solution.
with an expanding mass of outsiders and a shrinking core of insiders and with income distribution within gangs extremely skewed in favor of those at the top, while the rank-and-file street sellers earned even less than employees in legitimate low-skilled activities.
So academia is just like the rest of the world, then.
Follow the porn industry, they have an unblemished track record going back decades
I seem to remember the porn industry backed HD-DVD rather than Blu-ray in the earlier days of that format war.
It's like that zen koan - Who is the master who makes the grass green?
There's just a glut of employers who want just-in-time employees cheap.
I was going to make exactly the same point. I imagine what they're really after is to have such a enormous supply of suitable workers that they can get away with paying next to fuck all.
It's in their financial interest to make coding or admin just another low paid job.
The trouble is that antibiotics and livestock seems to have allowed the industry to be completely negligent of conditions and the health of their animals. I have no doubt that your grandparents will have treated theirs such better than hormone pumped, antibiotic loaded factory farm livestock we have today. Then again, antibiotics can also save herds from infectious diseases.
In the same way you can't compete with Walmart on price using a hand loom, it seems you can't compete with agri-business without using some of these techniques.
The only solution seems to be to regulate it, and I believe some countries are already doing so in part. That and advances in synthetic or vat grown meat would go towards solving a lot of problems and help remove anti-biotics from the food chain.
Milkdrop is also still damned pretty.
Winamp, FFDShow and Haali is a potent combination as well. Adding the correct extensions to the DirectShow decoder allows you to play mkv and other formats easily, and the performance is superb.
I think this is absolutely right. I expect it'll be a generational change. Look at how differently we treat sex compared to sixty years ago, there is still a lot of repression around, but progress is being made.
The other thing I believe we have to do is push hard for privacy. Until recently privacy was almost a default state, which took specific actions to unveil. We're at the point now where lack of privacy is becoming the default state. Companies and governments in particular need to be bound such that they can't invade privacy by default.
Pretty soon, dinosaurs will be pouring out of the hollow earth.
Ridden by the Deros.
They recently made an announcement that contrary to their election pledge (again) they would look to make economic austerity permanent, instead of scaling back on cuts once the economy recovered.
I would have a bet that in a couple of days if the pressure is still on that they'll either claim it was a mistake, or hackers. Who knows, it might even be true.
I could easily believe that they are stupid enough to think that deleting a few pages erases the past.
This was a practice also done at Enron.
Hey, Steve Balmer is leaving.. Jeff Skilling left Enron just before it imploded...
Quick, sell your shares now!
How on earth would you define something so vague as "the national interest"?
So presumably the national interest is whatever the Republican/Democrat party say it is. Fine. But don't bullshit everyone with some fanciful semantic spook like a "national interest".