That's perfectly OK: you don't like it, you don't use it. Nobody will abuse you for not using it:)
What's more important is that nobody steps in and tries to limit it or shut it down. So that those who do want to use it can do so.
An of course it can be used to do just about anything. It's a smart tool, all smart tools have several uses.
Will I then see some politician try to pass legislation against anonymizer type software?
Well, it's already happened. I can't remember the details but some court in the USA ruled against some guy who had encrypted stuff on his box *because* he had it. The reason: you have suspicious stuff -> you are guilty.
So the real question is not "will they pass such legislation" but "how long until the whole world adopts china's standards of sentencing you to death for the mere possession of unapproved software?". And I'm not kidding, check it on the web.
wow, hypocrysy is rampant in modern america... "send your children off to wars"? pray tell me, when did they come and abduct your children and forced them to war? oh i see you're referring to the vietnam era...
you're not forced to join the army. and don't even try to tell us it's the only source of income in your poor redneck country. what about the poor ones who actually chose NOT to go to war? what about CHOOSING eh?
"benefit the rich and israel"... wake up man! bush wants (almost)free oil for the USA. and that includes YOU. or, at the very least, the half of the population that voted for him.
Of course, of course. I'm not ruling out the role of the OS but I feel that the role of the user is way underestimated. They both count.
And of course the worms you mention where nasty stuff (the place where I work had 10 new PCs on a LAN segment supposed to be almost locked down infected in like half an hour after deployment. Tell the IT guys about security) that, being worms, didn't require user intervention. Here, it all boils down to how much exploitable the remote service is: if you write an easily hackable daemon and maybe even run it as root, you guess what happens on *any* platform. If it is not that hackable and you run it in a jail just to be on the safe side, again you guess what happens. It still requires the user (well, not the *end* user) to show some responsibility.
are users really stupid for believing when ms tells them it's safe to browse sites with msie?
Yes. I will trust anybody I ask for directions to a museum; I will *not* trust the first passer-by when it comes to security. No matter what, even when SecurityFocus warns me about something or tells me it is safe to do something I will go out and search for evidence on other sites. So if MS tells me something which directly contradicts what everyone else is saying, not getting suspicious is stupid. Moreover, MSIE is a tool. You *have* to know what's secure and insecure about the tool you use. How about actually using that "Protection" tab in MSIE options?. If you just don't care, well, of course MS should have done a better job but you should have too.
And you can only trash his homedir, not the whole machine
Definitely. This is exactly what I'm talking about: smart users use unprivileged accounts. Run as root all time and see what happens. If all users began being smart, Windows would be less exploited. Of course Linux helps a lot by making you tweak stuff before you blow up your machine; that's factor n. 1. Factor n. 2 is the user, and they both need to be taken into account. It's just that smarter users happen to use smarter systems. Combine stupid users with not so smart systems and all their base are belong to us.
My point is that there are more factors to be considered in an argument about OS's and viruses than just the technicalities. Otherwise, how could one explain the existance of Windows users who are not infected, owned or whatever?
16 percent of all computer users are not affected by viruses because they use Macs
100% of my PC is not affected by viruses because... the main user is not someone who clicks on just about anything that reaches his mailbox and visits pr0n sites with MSIE!
Seriously, I might send a Linux user a nice shell script that wipes his home folder; if he's an idiot and chmods it in order to run it and *does* run it and loses all of his files, does that make Linux less secure? Or does that make such user an idiot?
Maybe we should stop blaming or praising OS's so much and concentrate on the user base from time to time. Now, of course the typical Linux user will be savvy enough not to destroy his machine, while I'm not so sure about the typical Windows user. But this just shows that smarter people choose smarter OS's, just like smarter people catch fewer viruses than not so smart ones. See the pattern? The "virus catching" is certainly linked to the "OS choosing", but you have to take the third variable into account: the "user cluelessness".
So why don't we stop correlating a variance in "virus catching" to a variance in "OS choosing" and attributing the consequences to the technicalities of the chosen OS? The user plays a far more important role IMHO.
Impossible as it is to track the perpetrators of these actions, I still don't see what prevents the police from tracking the payments! I mean, it's not like the dudez meet in an airport and swap a case filled with money with one filled with IPs... or is it? If you (the police) monitor the marketplace, buy the botnet, then track your (bogus) payment to the dudez, all should be solved pretty quickly.
"Shalt" is the archaic 2nd person sing. ending. In modern english, only the 3rd person sing. form differs from the other ones (go -> goes) but in the past there used to be endings for other persons too.
Looks like the smartest ones have understood what "innovate or die" means. Small companies will innovate while behemoths will slowly disappear... or not?
I see your point. Your reasoning is quite similar to what philosophers in the Renaissance thought about society: society is born when people surrender some rights in order to receive some benefit. In this case, the benefit consists in the feeling of security: "we are basically good guys, but when a (rare) evil-doer messes with us, our country will defend us and punish him". As we can see everyday, the usefulness and correctness of such a pragmatic liberal system ultimately depend on the powers who are appointed to enforce it. I think that we have reached/are reaching the point where the powers appointed to serve society (because this is their role in the system you describe) are doing everything but this. I am sure you would not find it inappropriate for a Chinese to use anon & crypto to defend himself from his own gov't, even though these tools are effectively making him immune to the law. Now, of course in old Europe we are not dealt with like the chinese masses, yet... how long before we are? And in the case of the US, I think you already are in a worse condition than us, regarding freedom. Most people would label the system I describe as utopyan (and they'd be right), but I think that *nowadays* (because it hasn't always been like this) a pragmatic view is just as utopyan.
Well, in the end it's always the same argument as in Linux vs Windows vs Whatever(tm): a monitor is a *tool*. What do you need to do with it? Play games/do some real graphics/do some publishing/spend way less:) -> use a CRT. Anything else -> use an LCD. As for CRTs disappearing anytime soon... That just won't happen. There are just too many pros who depend on them. Maybe they will rise in price a bit as they become more and more of a specialty, but they won't disappear.
Well, in the end I guess we pretty much think the same:)
I fully understand your concerns about making people immune to the law, and I must say this is something that still needs to be worked on a lot; the circumstances to which these new tools can lead us are somewhat new and the legal system will probably have some problems assimilating them.
Two points, though. I am worried because I am pretty sure that, just like ancient behemoths seem to like doing these days (see MS, *AA, and other ones), the legal system will choose to enforce its old model against a new one (whose existance will be acutely felt by the average tech-savvy progressist) by ways of more and more draconian laws. This worries me quite a lot.
Also, on the subject of responsibility to balance freedom: honestly, I reject the notion that a system has to balance freedom. It is the most valuable and the single most important thing in our lives -- it IS our lives, and as such nothing should step in and limit it. I do not wish to compromise at *all* on my freedom. So I will go on and admit what most supposed freedom fighters around here are loath to admit: that there is a price to pay for freedom. In the case we are discussing, such price consists in not being able to identify the perpetrator of a crime. I am willing to pay this price, more people are not, I seem to understand you are not, too -- perfectly fine. When the day comes that I suffer some kind of harm and the &$$hole responsible for it can't be found, I will say: That's ok, that's the price. I value my freedom more than this.
Of course this argument of mine is made easier by my strong belief (and past experiences including robbery and aggression confirm this) that our systems do not protect us *anyway*, so why would I want to pay for a service I do not receive? Might as well do without it and at least enjoy my freedom. From your posts I understand that you have more faith in your system, so you are willing to compromise because you see a value in this service called "country", "state" or whatever it is.
I just wish it could be easier for people like you to enjoy your system while people more like me enjoy a different one; a situation where everyone can find something for his taste. But I really don't see this coming.
I don't really agree with you on the subject of the courts having this right to basically ask you to turn everything over to them because they're Good Guys -- however I do not wish to discuss that, we're all entitled to opinions.
What I would like to stress is that, to paraphrase your words, you may be required to disclose that information if it's relevant and if it's known to exist!
I can use crypto systems where it's simply not possible to be sure of the existance of info; where you cannot tell bogus data apart from meaningful data. This destroys accountability very well, as courts would not ask me for info they are not even aware of.
Of course, anonimity is dangerous. Just like everything else, just like any other technology; but we should not base a judgement about people's right to use it on the potential dangers. Rather, we should discern, case by case, whether people are abusing it to perpetrate evil, in which case they should be punished for their evil deeds and not for using anonimity, or using it to further some good cause. (OK, overly simplistic:) In the end, it should be a matter of punishing offenders for what they do rather than demonizing tools which are inherently neutral.
Nice to meet people who can debate with self control on/., BTW.
for everyone who could genuinely take advantage of true anonymity [...] how many spammers, virus writers, phishers, fraudsters, copyright violators, organised criminals, paedophiles, and even (really, for once) terrorists are we letting get away with it?
Well, probably a LOT of them. But that has not stopped us, and must not in the future stop us, from using crypto & friends. Your argument might be valid or not, I'm not supporting either side here; but I think that such reasoning should be applied to any use of "defensive techniques". Why are you not taking the same position against PGP and friends?
Pretty unilateral, yes, I was a bit angry at the PP. Anyway the point I was to trying to get across is that all of this has got nothing to do with fairness, as the OP seems to imply with his "oh it's so unfair" claims. All revolves around economical interests here and, being quite a powerful economical entity, the EU has decided to flex her (yes, female:) muscles in a fight.
In the end, sovereign authority is about just that - the will to enter a pissing contest about who will outlast whom: in a real war, in an power struggle for dominance in a market, etc. So in a way you can argue that the US do understand what sov. auth. means:) perhaps better than anyone else, come to think of it. Ah, sophisms...
And of course the remark about banning products was sarcastic. I guess you know that, so why answer with such a "go on, see if we care" attitude? what good would it do to you (or us, of course) if MS products happened to be really banned from the EU? Kind of... interesting scenario though...
Finally, I really don't get your point about the recent vote. What's that got do to with anything we're discussing here?
Or more simply, because we can and *will* milk MS a bit? After all they can choose not to pay our "fines". That's fine as long as they're not surprised when we ban their products from our markets. You know, it's got to do with "sovereign countries" etc... oh wait you're from the US so you probably don't know what that means now do you? -> ZING!
btw, i really don't understand what the big deal about tabs in msie is... people who cared have been using them for ages with products like slimbrowser, like i did before using firefox. people who don't will continue not to care and will not use them, probably they'll never even see them because ms will make it so that, by default, when there's only one tab it is hidden.
No, moguls would have reacted to piracy anyway, either real or perceived. The fact that actual piracy is taking place has nothing to do with their long-term policies. They're just trying to steal as much freedom as possible away from everybody that can earn them cash, so that they can later treat them like docile cattle when the time comes (yes, I do consider exposing someone to Britney's latest hit slaughter). It's very normal for someone who's in a position of power to try and strengthen such power, be a real threat to said power present or not.
WTF! first day on./ and they have already found out i'm a script?
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, they are so hard pressed that they had to buy Macromedia (= Fireworks) in order to make such package. I wonder what the result will be.
That's perfectly OK: you don't like it, you don't use it. Nobody will abuse you for not using it :)
What's more important is that nobody steps in and tries to limit it or shut it down. So that those who do want to use it can do so.
An of course it can be used to do just about anything. It's a smart tool, all smart tools have several uses.
Will I then see some politician try to pass legislation against anonymizer type software?
Well, it's already happened. I can't remember the details but some court in the USA ruled against some guy who had encrypted stuff on his box *because* he had it. The reason: you have suspicious stuff -> you are guilty.
So the real question is not "will they pass such legislation" but "how long until the whole world adopts china's standards of sentencing you to death for the mere possession of unapproved software?". And I'm not kidding, check it on the web.
wow, hypocrysy is rampant in modern america... "send your children off to wars"? pray tell me, when did they come and abduct your children and forced them to war? oh i see you're referring to the vietnam era... you're not forced to join the army. and don't even try to tell us it's the only source of income in your poor redneck country. what about the poor ones who actually chose NOT to go to war? what about CHOOSING eh? "benefit the rich and israel"... wake up man! bush wants (almost)free oil for the USA. and that includes YOU. or, at the very least, the half of the population that voted for him.
Easy. They abuse freedom by putting tons of useless stuff on harmless innocent servers and by wasting the *world's* bandwidth with said useless stuff.
Of course, of course. I'm not ruling out the role of the OS but I feel that the role of the user is way underestimated. They both count.
And of course the worms you mention where nasty stuff (the place where I work had 10 new PCs on a LAN segment supposed to be almost locked down infected in like half an hour after deployment. Tell the IT guys about security) that, being worms, didn't require user intervention. Here, it all boils down to how much exploitable the remote service is: if you write an easily hackable daemon and maybe even run it as root, you guess what happens on *any* platform. If it is not that hackable and you run it in a jail just to be on the safe side, again you guess what happens. It still requires the user (well, not the *end* user) to show some responsibility.
are users really stupid for believing when ms tells them it's safe to browse sites with msie?
Yes. I will trust anybody I ask for directions to a museum; I will *not* trust the first passer-by when it comes to security. No matter what, even when SecurityFocus warns me about something or tells me it is safe to do something I will go out and search for evidence on other sites. So if MS tells me something which directly contradicts what everyone else is saying, not getting suspicious is stupid.
Moreover, MSIE is a tool. You *have* to know what's secure and insecure about the tool you use. How about actually using that "Protection" tab in MSIE options?. If you just don't care, well, of course MS should have done a better job but you should have too.
And you can only trash his homedir, not the whole machine
Definitely. This is exactly what I'm talking about: smart users use unprivileged accounts. Run as root all time and see what happens. If all users began being smart, Windows would be less exploited. Of course Linux helps a lot by making you tweak stuff before you blow up your machine; that's factor n. 1. Factor n. 2 is the user, and they both need to be taken into account. It's just that smarter users happen to use smarter systems. Combine stupid users with not so smart systems and all their base are belong to us.
My point is that there are more factors to be considered in an argument about OS's and viruses than just the technicalities. Otherwise, how could one explain the existance of Windows users who are not infected, owned or whatever?
16 percent of all computer users are not affected by viruses because they use Macs
100% of my PC is not affected by viruses because... the main user is not someone who clicks on just about anything that reaches his mailbox and visits pr0n sites with MSIE!
Seriously, I might send a Linux user a nice shell script that wipes his home folder; if he's an idiot and chmods it in order to run it and *does* run it and loses all of his files, does that make Linux less secure? Or does that make such user an idiot?
Maybe we should stop blaming or praising OS's so much and concentrate on the user base from time to time. Now, of course the typical Linux user will be savvy enough not to destroy his machine, while I'm not so sure about the typical Windows user. But this just shows that smarter people choose smarter OS's, just like smarter people catch fewer viruses than not so smart ones. See the pattern? The "virus catching" is certainly linked to the "OS choosing", but you have to take the third variable into account: the "user cluelessness".
So why don't we stop correlating a variance in "virus catching" to a variance in "OS choosing" and attributing the consequences to the technicalities of the chosen OS? The user plays a far more important role IMHO.
Impossible as it is to track the perpetrators of these actions, I still don't see what prevents the police from tracking the payments! I mean, it's not like the dudez meet in an airport and swap a case filled with money with one filled with IPs... or is it? If you (the police) monitor the marketplace, buy the botnet, then track your (bogus) payment to the dudez, all should be solved pretty quickly.
...Profit?
... will my Flashblock block this too?
"Shalt" is the archaic 2nd person sing. ending. In modern english, only the 3rd person sing. form differs from the other ones (go -> goes) but in the past there used to be endings for other persons too.
Looks like the smartest ones have understood what "innovate or die" means. Small companies will innovate while behemoths will slowly disappear... or not?
... welcome our new XoverXlordX
I see your point. Your reasoning is quite similar to what philosophers in the Renaissance thought about society: society is born when people surrender some rights in order to receive some benefit. In this case, the benefit consists in the feeling of security: "we are basically good guys, but when a (rare) evil-doer messes with us, our country will defend us and punish him".
As we can see everyday, the usefulness and correctness of such a pragmatic liberal system ultimately depend on the powers who are appointed to enforce it.
I think that we have reached/are reaching the point where the powers appointed to serve society (because this is their role in the system you describe) are doing everything but this. I am sure you would not find it inappropriate for a Chinese to use anon & crypto to defend himself from his own gov't, even though these tools are effectively making him immune to the law. Now, of course in old Europe we are not dealt with like the chinese masses, yet... how long before we are? And in the case of the US, I think you already are in a worse condition than us, regarding freedom.
Most people would label the system I describe as utopyan (and they'd be right), but I think that *nowadays* (because it hasn't always been like this) a pragmatic view is just as utopyan.
Well, in the end it's always the same argument as in Linux vs Windows vs Whatever(tm): a monitor is a *tool*. What do you need to do with it? Play games/do some real graphics/do some publishing/spend way less :) -> use a CRT. Anything else -> use an LCD.
As for CRTs disappearing anytime soon... That just won't happen. There are just too many pros who depend on them. Maybe they will rise in price a bit as they become more and more of a specialty, but they won't disappear.
Well, in the end I guess we pretty much think the same :)
I fully understand your concerns about making people immune to the law, and I must say this is something that still needs to be worked on a lot; the circumstances to which these new tools can lead us are somewhat new and the legal system will probably have some problems assimilating them.
Two points, though. I am worried because I am pretty sure that, just like ancient behemoths seem to like doing these days (see MS, *AA, and other ones), the legal system will choose to enforce its old model against a new one (whose existance will be acutely felt by the average tech-savvy progressist) by ways of more and more draconian laws. This worries me quite a lot.
Also, on the subject of responsibility to balance freedom: honestly, I reject the notion that a system has to balance freedom. It is the most valuable and the single most important thing in our lives -- it IS our lives, and as such nothing should step in and limit it. I do not wish to compromise at *all* on my freedom. So I will go on and admit what most supposed freedom fighters around here are loath to admit: that there is a price to pay for freedom. In the case we are discussing, such price consists in not being able to identify the perpetrator of a crime. I am willing to pay this price, more people are not, I seem to understand you are not, too -- perfectly fine. When the day comes that I suffer some kind of harm and the &$$hole responsible for it can't be found, I will say: That's ok, that's the price. I value my freedom more than this.
Of course this argument of mine is made easier by my strong belief (and past experiences including robbery and aggression confirm this) that our systems do not protect us *anyway*, so why would I want to pay for a service I do not receive? Might as well do without it and at least enjoy my freedom. From your posts I understand that you have more faith in your system, so you are willing to compromise because you see a value in this service called "country", "state" or whatever it is.
I just wish it could be easier for people like you to enjoy your system while people more like me enjoy a different one; a situation where everyone can find something for his taste. But I really don't see this coming.
I don't really agree with you on the subject of the courts having this right to basically ask you to turn everything over to them because they're Good Guys -- however I do not wish to discuss that, we're all entitled to opinions.
What I would like to stress is that, to paraphrase your words, you may be required to disclose that information if it's relevant and if it's known to exist! I can use crypto systems where it's simply not possible to be sure of the existance of info; where you cannot tell bogus data apart from meaningful data. This destroys accountability very well, as courts would not ask me for info they are not even aware of.
Of course, anonimity is dangerous. Just like everything else, just like any other technology; but we should not base a judgement about people's right to use it on the potential dangers. Rather, we should discern, case by case, whether people are abusing it to perpetrate evil, in which case they should be punished for their evil deeds and not for using anonimity, or using it to further some good cause. (OK, overly simplistic :) In the end, it should be a matter of punishing offenders for what they do rather than demonizing tools which are inherently neutral.
Nice to meet people who can debate with self control on /., BTW.
for everyone who could genuinely take advantage of true anonymity [...] how many spammers, virus writers, phishers, fraudsters, copyright violators, organised criminals, paedophiles, and even (really, for once) terrorists are we letting get away with it?
Well, probably a LOT of them. But that has not stopped us, and must not in the future stop us, from using crypto & friends. Your argument might be valid or not, I'm not supporting either side here; but I think that such reasoning should be applied to any use of "defensive techniques". Why are you not taking the same position against PGP and friends?
Pretty unilateral, yes, I was a bit angry at the PP. Anyway the point I was to trying to get across is that all of this has got nothing to do with fairness, as the OP seems to imply with his "oh it's so unfair" claims. All revolves around economical interests here and, being quite a powerful economical entity, the EU has decided to flex her (yes, female :) muscles in a fight.
In the end, sovereign authority is about just that - the will to enter a pissing contest about who will outlast whom: in a real war, in an power struggle for dominance in a market, etc. So in a way you can argue that the US do understand what sov. auth. means :) perhaps better than anyone else, come to think of it. Ah, sophisms...
And of course the remark about banning products was sarcastic. I guess you know that, so why answer with such a "go on, see if we care" attitude? what good would it do to you (or us, of course) if MS products happened to be really banned from the EU? Kind of... interesting scenario though...
Finally, I really don't get your point about the recent vote. What's that got do to with anything we're discussing here?
Or more simply, because we can and *will* milk MS a bit? After all they can choose not to pay our "fines". That's fine as long as they're not surprised when we ban their products from our markets.
You know, it's got to do with "sovereign countries" etc... oh wait you're from the US so you probably don't know what that means now do you? -> ZING!
btw, i really don't understand what the big deal about tabs in msie is... people who cared have been using them for ages with products like slimbrowser, like i did before using firefox. people who don't will continue not to care and will not use them, probably they'll never even see them because ms will make it so that, by default, when there's only one tab it is hidden.
No, moguls would have reacted to piracy anyway, either real or perceived. The fact that actual piracy is taking place has nothing to do with their long-term policies. They're just trying to steal as much freedom as possible away from everybody that can earn them cash, so that they can later treat them like docile cattle when the time comes (yes, I do consider exposing someone to Britney's latest hit slaughter).
./ and they have already found out i'm a script?
It's very normal for someone who's in a position of power to try and strengthen such power, be a real threat to said power present or not.
WTF! first day on