I don't see why it would be so difficult. Take some geeks, enlist them into a bootcamp and train them just as you do all the other warriors with emphasis on the intellectual rather than physical side of the training (as geeks might not have good vision and might have asthma or whatever), but beyond the physical part I don't see why it would be hard to train geeks at all. In fact I think for complex strategic or tactical missions it would be easier to train geeks.
There are things that you would have to have been in the culture for a while to understand. Yesterdays story about the predator code showed a lot of smart people don't know shit about laser-guided missiles.
It may be easier to teach tech to warriors than it is to make warriors out of techs. YMMV obviously.
Warriors aren't born. You can take a tech and make them into a warrior. Give them some philosophy classes. Make them read Sun Tzu and several other quality books. And then actually test them to see if they have the discipline and other necessary traits.
There is no reason to make an inaccurate generated claim that "Why warriors, Not geeks", thats like saying "Why Brutes, Not Intellectuals."
Assuming that the ideal warrior is a brute and that the ideal intellectual is a wuss is exactly the reason why they can't find their geek warriors in the first place.
Remember how the government classifies encryption as munitions? Yet only the geeks actually understand how encryption works and know how to use it.
90% of war is intellectual. Weapons are invented by geeks. Some weapons are information based, some weapons are ideas, some weapons are memes, some weapons are nuclear, biological, or digital, but the fact of the matter is that geeks create the weapons of war at a higher rate than any other group.
On top of that geeks create the strategies. Who else is going to make a good cyber warrior? I don't know why they'd think anyone other than a geek could even do that job and I don't know why the assumption that geeks aren't warriors. Someone who dedicates themselves to the internet 24/7, who has the discipline and all the traits, only really needs to be given training and a chain of command.
You might like to think that. I might think that a warrior, who has to learn or die, learns at a quicker pace than most people, and is more adept at problem solving.
By the way, I'm a geek, not a warrior. I'd love to think that geeks are smarter and maybe even sexier. I just haven't seen any evidence yet.
I consider myself a warrior geek. My intellect is a deadly weapon. It's a surprise the government hasn't made me register my brain in the way a martial artist has to register his hands and feet. The simple fact of the matter is, you don't have to be a wuss if you have an intellect.
Yeah you might be a wuss physically, but you probably are smart enough to make up for it in intellect and because of this you can say geeks are intellectual warriors or information warriors, I don't see why the trend exists to see geeks as being harmless when Einstein and other geeks built all these weapons of mass destruction.
I don't understand the assumption that geeks have to be wussies. I'm certainly not a wuss on the intellectual level. Physically I'd get my ass beat down but intellectually I can hold my own with anybody.
We can ask the artificial intelligence to simulate all what multiple people would feel in response to an action, and then give these calculators to sociopaths who might make use of it to better prey upon their victims/friends.
For the most part those things do need to be connected to the internet on some level, it's just this sort of information isn't very secure. Even information on Google isn't secure.
All they'd have to do is post the information to random sites, forums, 4chan, chatrooms, via a webcrawler botnet.
And it doesn't even have to be that sophisticated, a volunteer could post it or email it directly to certain people who could post it on their blogs or on their facebooks or their twitter.
If they block the Wikileaks site then some volunteer will post the information on 4chan and then they'd have to block that, and a whole bunch of other sites because volunteers can basically post the information to random websites. This is a complete and utter waste of time.
Try to get your head around the idea that they might have possession of your hard disk but not have possession of you. Or they don't even know who you are. Or they are honest cops, trying to determine if you have violated the rules. They've asked you if there is encrypted data on the laptop, you said no, and they are doing a routine check to verify that. Contrary to popular opinion, "The Man" is not always ready, willing, and able to administer a beating.
Then there is the possibility that your opponent is not "the Man" but some sort of furtive criminal...
Most investigators who investigate these sorts of issues are criminals. They don't follow the law so they are criminals, the difference is the laws don't apply to these national security investigations.
Only governments have the resources to protect Alice and Bob from Gordon. Basically only governments can use encryption, you can experiment with it to see how it works but you wont be able to practically use it and it doesn't matter what algorithm you choose because all algorithms are only as strong as Alice and Bob, and usually Alice and Bob are physically defenseless.
If you have information that they want and it's encrypted, the laws no longer apply in situations like these. They'll covertly torture and drug you until you tell them some lies or tell them the truth.
I'm a libertarian. I don't think like that. In fact, i would call people you describe as Psuedo-anarchist Socialists.
They want to do what they want to do, then have everyone else clean up their mess. And yes, they are spoiled brats, because the responsible people tend to clean up after such brats as these.
At some point, we have to stop coddling the brats and start holding them accountable. Cutting Socialist "safety nets" would work, but some how I doubt you'd be up for that.
If you climb Mt Shasta, get caught in a snow storm and die of hypothermia, sucks to be you. We'll get your body next spring, or your next of kin can pay someone to get it now if they can afford it.
The cost of cutting safety nets is higher crime. So unless you get rid of the authoritarian laws first cutting the safety net will simply fill the prisons and create more jobs for police, judges and lawyers, and it costs more to keep a person in prison each year $30,000, than to give them welfare, or give them a job.
Actually, libertarians tend to shy away from government involvement or implied responsibility. As such, they would be much less likely to call on government services to rescue them. In fact, libertarians would be inclined to shrug their shoulders and say good luck getting down from the mountain.
It's one thing to disagree with the libertarian mentality--which I do. It's another to imply that they contradict themselves by wanting one thing (the right to jump off of a mountain without government interference) and its opposite (wanting government interaction if they run into trouble). That's simply not the case. Simply put, they are very much for the government taking a minimalistic role. Don't wear seatbelts, jump off of a mountain, and legalize marijuana. Similarly, the FDA shouldn't be telling corporations what's safe (the market will work it out), don't expect any kind of handouts if you're down on your luck, and the government doesn't owe you anything. In short, the government won't interfere with you, but it doesn't owe you anything either. If you earn it, it's yours. There are no handouts.
Whether you agree with libertarians or not is quite irrelevant. It's still not fair to completely misrepresent their views.
Not every libertarian agrees that there shouldn't be an FDA. Thats like saying libertarians agree to privatize the police and law enforcement or that libertarians agree to privatize prisons. I don't agree with privatization of prisons, law enforcement, or regulatory agencies. I believe part of the role of government is as a hedge or regulatory check to balance against corporations. I don't want to trade one authoritarian regime (government) in exchange for another authoritarian regime (corporation).
Well the people i have encountered that most loudly proclaim "i am a libertarian!" seems to be spoiled brats that want to drink and drive 24/7, no matter who those activities may endanger beyond themselves (either directly or via the cleanup that follows). Or want to proclaim their right to jump of a mountain, but then call on the "accursed" government services to risk their people to rescue them when their jump got them stuck in a difficult to reach location.
In essence, where are the libertarians with some sense of social responsibility?
There are libertarians of different stripes. The libertarian mentality is mainly anti authoritarian. You can be libertarian socialist and allow for socialist government as long as it's done in a way which does not reduce the liberty or options for the citizen. It's not really necessarily about big or small government or big or small corporations, it's about anti authoritarianism which manifests itself in smaller government because most governments are authoritarian.
Most corporations are authoritarian as well so thats why it's important to support unions if you are a libertarian. But once again it has nothing to do with denying social responsibility, it's a matter of not relying on large powerful institutions which you do not control to conduct social policy.
Social policy should be conducted outside of government and government should fund it but not run it. Government does not have any skill in running social policy initiatives but the government does have the money to fund state and local initiatives and as a libertarian I'm not against having federal government fund certain initiatives which are proven to strengthen the nation.
National broadband infrastructure. National rail infrastructure. Roads, bridges, education, basics like food, water and shelter, because these things have to be paid for one way or the other and having the government pay for it actually preserves liberty more than hiring police and building prisons.
And your comment should be rated "ignorant" not funny.
Libertarians believe liberty should be the guiding principle to all law making because liberty allows an individual to pursue happiness. You can't pursue happiness if all your actions and behaviors are "recommended" by bosses and other people who view you as property.
Also among libertarians you have the cryptofascists who aren't libertarians at all who want to give all authority to corporations. Just as you have authoritarians who claim to be Democrat or Republican but what they all have in common is how they view us. They view you and I as either "consumers" or "taxpayers" and neither view us as individuals.
A true libertarian values individual liberty above all other principles, because only individual liberty allows for happiness. The other principles allow for security in the form of a prison without walls. You don't have to make any difficult decisions becomes you don't have to make any decisions at all because you are too stupid. Not making decisions at all combined with technology leads to robotization.
You say other sites like Facebook as if it's a hypothetical. It's not. The difference is, in this case, the guy wasn't able to conceal his snooping, whereas with Facebook no one even knows if and how many times anything like this may have happened.
End of the day, you can't really complain about the state of the universe if there's no way to change it. What's GOOG supposed to do, encrypt all the data they keep in their own databases? How would they index stuff to support even the most basic user functionality, much less their business model?
It's naive to think you are uploading data to a company and no one in that company has access to it. It's also naive to think that any company of significant size doesn't have a few bad apples running around, even in the most sensitive areas, even with all of the care they could possibly take.
You don't have to encrypt the data you just encrypt the personal identifiers. You then only let employees access it as part of their job, which means for a specific reason.
And not only call logs, chat transcripts and contact lists. The article notes:
he pulled up the person's email account, contact list, chat transcripts, Google Voice call logs—even a list of other Gmail addresses that the friend had registered but didn't think were linked to their main account—within seconds.
So even if you think logging out and making a new separate account is enough, it's all linked
And what about Google Analytics and everything else? They can see everywhere you've been on the internet, and obviously abuse it.
Shouldn't these people be backround checked? Why should ANYONE see this kind of information unless they somehow have a reason to see it and pass checks?
I know nothing about it, but my guess is that it's only 1 Gbps to the router room of the Electric Power Board of Chattanooga. From there it presumably rides their T1 to the Internet. (Or whatever they have.) Also, it's probably 1 Gbps download / 128 Kbps upload.
You're correct. You certainly know nothing about it. However, 1Gbps runs $349.99/month and 30Mbps runs $57.99/month.
Anyone who has a good job in an internet related field would pay the $349.99 a month. The price will come down eventually, the point is if you offer it people will buy it, there is no "too fast". We thought at one point that DSL would be too fast.
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Geeks can be warriors. Warriors can be geeks. It's just a matter of training.
If the government were serious they'd just train the geeks to be warriors and the problem would be solved.
I don't see why it would be so difficult. Take some geeks, enlist them into a bootcamp and train them just as you do all the other warriors with emphasis on the intellectual rather than physical side of the training (as geeks might not have good vision and might have asthma or whatever), but beyond the physical part I don't see why it would be hard to train geeks at all. In fact I think for complex strategic or tactical missions it would be easier to train geeks.
Not that you would know.
There are things that you would have to have been in the culture for a while to understand. Yesterdays story about the predator code showed a lot of smart people don't know shit about laser-guided missiles.
It may be easier to teach tech to warriors than it is to make warriors out of techs. YMMV obviously.
Warriors aren't born. You can take a tech and make them into a warrior. Give them some philosophy classes. Make them read Sun Tzu and several other quality books. And then actually test them to see if they have the discipline and other necessary traits.
There is no reason to make an inaccurate generated claim that "Why warriors, Not geeks", thats like saying "Why Brutes, Not Intellectuals."
Assuming that the ideal warrior is a brute and that the ideal intellectual is a wuss is exactly the reason why they can't find their geek warriors in the first place.
Remember how the government classifies encryption as munitions? Yet only the geeks actually understand how encryption works and know how to use it.
90% of war is intellectual. Weapons are invented by geeks. Some weapons are information based, some weapons are ideas, some weapons are memes, some weapons are nuclear, biological, or digital, but the fact of the matter is that geeks create the weapons of war at a higher rate than any other group.
On top of that geeks create the strategies. Who else is going to make a good cyber warrior? I don't know why they'd think anyone other than a geek could even do that job and I don't know why the assumption that geeks aren't warriors. Someone who dedicates themselves to the internet 24/7, who has the discipline and all the traits, only really needs to be given training and a chain of command.
You might like to think that. I might think that a warrior, who has to learn or die, learns at a quicker pace than most people, and is more adept at problem solving.
By the way, I'm a geek, not a warrior. I'd love to think that geeks are smarter and maybe even sexier. I just haven't seen any evidence yet.
I consider myself a warrior geek. My intellect is a deadly weapon. It's a surprise the government hasn't made me register my brain in the way a martial artist has to register his hands and feet. The simple fact of the matter is, you don't have to be a wuss if you have an intellect.
Yeah you might be a wuss physically, but you probably are smart enough to make up for it in intellect and because of this you can say geeks are intellectual warriors or information warriors, I don't see why the trend exists to see geeks as being harmless when Einstein and other geeks built all these weapons of mass destruction.
I don't understand the assumption that geeks have to be wussies. I'm certainly not a wuss on the intellectual level. Physically I'd get my ass beat down but intellectually I can hold my own with anybody.
We can ask the artificial intelligence to simulate all what multiple people would feel in response to an action, and then give these calculators to sociopaths who might make use of it to better prey upon their victims/friends.
For the most part those things do need to be connected to the internet on some level, it's just this sort of information isn't very secure. Even information on Google isn't secure.
All they'd have to do is post the information to random sites, forums, 4chan, chatrooms, via a webcrawler botnet.
And it doesn't even have to be that sophisticated, a volunteer could post it or email it directly to certain people who could post it on their blogs or on their facebooks or their twitter.
If they block the Wikileaks site then some volunteer will post the information on 4chan and then they'd have to block that, and a whole bunch of other sites because volunteers can basically post the information to random websites. This is a complete and utter waste of time.
Try to get your head around the idea that they might have possession of your hard disk but not have possession of you. Or they don't even know who you are. Or they are honest cops, trying to determine if you have violated the rules. They've asked you if there is encrypted data on the laptop, you said no, and they are doing a routine check to verify that. Contrary to popular opinion, "The Man" is not always ready, willing, and able to administer a beating.
Then there is the possibility that your opponent is not "the Man" but some sort of furtive criminal...
Most investigators who investigate these sorts of issues are criminals. They don't follow the law so they are criminals, the difference is the laws don't apply to these national security investigations.
They can torture you for the rest of your life whether they find out or not.
Only governments have the resources to protect Alice and Bob from Gordon. Basically only governments can use encryption, you can experiment with it to see how it works but you wont be able to practically use it and it doesn't matter what algorithm you choose because all algorithms are only as strong as Alice and Bob, and usually Alice and Bob are physically defenseless.
If you have information that they want and it's encrypted, the laws no longer apply in situations like these. They'll covertly torture and drug you until you tell them some lies or tell them the truth.
I'm a libertarian. I don't think like that. In fact, i would call people you describe as Psuedo-anarchist Socialists.
They want to do what they want to do, then have everyone else clean up their mess. And yes, they are spoiled brats, because the responsible people tend to clean up after such brats as these.
At some point, we have to stop coddling the brats and start holding them accountable. Cutting Socialist "safety nets" would work, but some how I doubt you'd be up for that.
If you climb Mt Shasta, get caught in a snow storm and die of hypothermia, sucks to be you. We'll get your body next spring, or your next of kin can pay someone to get it now if they can afford it.
The cost of cutting safety nets is higher crime. So unless you get rid of the authoritarian laws first cutting the safety net will simply fill the prisons and create more jobs for police, judges and lawyers, and it costs more to keep a person in prison each year $30,000, than to give them welfare, or give them a job.
Actually, libertarians tend to shy away from government involvement or implied responsibility. As such, they would be much less likely to call on government services to rescue them. In fact, libertarians would be inclined to shrug their shoulders and say good luck getting down from the mountain.
It's one thing to disagree with the libertarian mentality--which I do. It's another to imply that they contradict themselves by wanting one thing (the right to jump off of a mountain without government interference) and its opposite (wanting government interaction if they run into trouble). That's simply not the case. Simply put, they are very much for the government taking a minimalistic role. Don't wear seatbelts, jump off of a mountain, and legalize marijuana. Similarly, the FDA shouldn't be telling corporations what's safe (the market will work it out), don't expect any kind of handouts if you're down on your luck, and the government doesn't owe you anything. In short, the government won't interfere with you, but it doesn't owe you anything either. If you earn it, it's yours. There are no handouts.
Whether you agree with libertarians or not is quite irrelevant. It's still not fair to completely misrepresent their views.
Not every libertarian agrees that there shouldn't be an FDA. Thats like saying libertarians agree to privatize the police and law enforcement or that libertarians agree to privatize prisons. I don't agree with privatization of prisons, law enforcement, or regulatory agencies. I believe part of the role of government is as a hedge or regulatory check to balance against corporations. I don't want to trade one authoritarian regime (government) in exchange for another authoritarian regime (corporation).
Well the people i have encountered that most loudly proclaim "i am a libertarian!" seems to be spoiled brats that want to drink and drive 24/7, no matter who those activities may endanger beyond themselves (either directly or via the cleanup that follows). Or want to proclaim their right to jump of a mountain, but then call on the "accursed" government services to risk their people to rescue them when their jump got them stuck in a difficult to reach location.
In essence, where are the libertarians with some sense of social responsibility?
There are libertarians of different stripes. The libertarian mentality is mainly anti authoritarian. You can be libertarian socialist and allow for socialist government as long as it's done in a way which does not reduce the liberty or options for the citizen. It's not really necessarily about big or small government or big or small corporations, it's about anti authoritarianism which manifests itself in smaller government because most governments are authoritarian.
Most corporations are authoritarian as well so thats why it's important to support unions if you are a libertarian. But once again it has nothing to do with denying social responsibility, it's a matter of not relying on large powerful institutions which you do not control to conduct social policy.
Social policy should be conducted outside of government and government should fund it but not run it. Government does not have any skill in running social policy initiatives but the government does have the money to fund state and local initiatives and as a libertarian I'm not against having federal government fund certain initiatives which are proven to strengthen the nation.
National broadband infrastructure. National rail infrastructure. Roads, bridges, education, basics like food, water and shelter, because these things have to be paid for one way or the other and having the government pay for it actually preserves liberty more than hiring police and building prisons.
And your comment should be rated "ignorant" not funny.
Libertarians believe liberty should be the guiding principle to all law making because liberty allows an individual to pursue happiness. You can't pursue happiness if all your actions and behaviors are "recommended" by bosses and other people who view you as property.
Also among libertarians you have the cryptofascists who aren't libertarians at all who want to give all authority to corporations. Just as you have authoritarians who claim to be Democrat or Republican but what they all have in common is how they view us. They view you and I as either "consumers" or "taxpayers" and neither view us as individuals.
A true libertarian values individual liberty above all other principles, because only individual liberty allows for happiness. The other principles allow for security in the form of a prison without walls. You don't have to make any difficult decisions becomes you don't have to make any decisions at all because you are too stupid. Not making decisions at all combined with technology leads to robotization.
Power is all that matters. Thats all anyone cares about, thats all governments care about, thats all that matters because might is right.
You say other sites like Facebook as if it's a hypothetical. It's not. The difference is, in this case, the guy wasn't able to conceal his snooping, whereas with Facebook no one even knows if and how many times anything like this may have happened.
End of the day, you can't really complain about the state of the universe if there's no way to change it. What's GOOG supposed to do, encrypt all the data they keep in their own databases? How would they index stuff to support even the most basic user functionality, much less their business model?
It's naive to think you are uploading data to a company and no one in that company has access to it. It's also naive to think that any company of significant size doesn't have a few bad apples running around, even in the most sensitive areas, even with all of the care they could possibly take.
You don't have to encrypt the data you just encrypt the personal identifiers. You then only let employees access it as part of their job, which means for a specific reason.
If someone can read your emails, watch your search records, they have an awful lot of power.
But come on? They didn't have enough sense to have access control procedures?
And not only call logs, chat transcripts and contact lists. The article notes:
he pulled up the person's email account, contact list, chat transcripts, Google Voice call logs—even a list of other Gmail addresses that the friend had registered but didn't think were linked to their main account—within seconds.
So even if you think logging out and making a new separate account is enough, it's all linked
And what about Google Analytics and everything else? They can see everywhere you've been on the internet, and obviously abuse it.
Shouldn't these people be backround checked? Why should ANYONE see this kind of information unless they somehow have a reason to see it and pass checks?
Just do what pidgin did and let people connect to all their social networks from the social network they control.
I know nothing about it, but my guess is that it's only 1 Gbps to the router room of the Electric Power Board of Chattanooga. From there it presumably rides their T1 to the Internet. (Or whatever they have.) Also, it's probably 1 Gbps download / 128 Kbps upload.
You're correct. You certainly know nothing about it. However, 1Gbps runs $349.99/month and 30Mbps runs $57.99/month.
Anyone who has a good job in an internet related field would pay the $349.99 a month. The price will come down eventually, the point is if you offer it people will buy it, there is no "too fast". We thought at one point that DSL would be too fast.