Legal has been the biggest threat in the US to any individual for some time. When previous protections of the worker ants' individuality get litigated away, suddenly it's ok to get the police to nab. Violators and cripple them under huge charges. It's the finesse version of police state - most "law abiding" citizens looking to stay that way simply go along.
Now here's the situation, after government access to networks in which we're basically entrenched is litigated in, policy regarding that access is left solely in the gov't hands under the guise of classification and executive privledge. With access to our streams of existance, trends can be identified and then publically litigated away, in effect coecing social change while the news deseminates. Then the targetting starts. Sure, back in the day when information was either written, oral or visual (being followed for instance), the gov't seeking total control needed those check-points with force-backed interrogators. With the explosion of blogging, social networking, and even things like twitter, most people in the generation growing up right now are giving that information across these gov't networks by necessity to get it posted. My 50 something co-workers aren't as exposed directly, but the kids that blog about their parents open that door somewhat.
So now the police state gov't doesn't need the many checkpoints, they are by proxy now in nearly every home and on nearly all desks in business. Monitoring becomes brain-dead easy under this kind of access. Then patterns can be harrassed by executive order. So no, it's not your classic police state, but when this clears the house, it will be a mere single step to become the first virtual police state of the 21st century.
So some product is coming down the pipe. Create the hype, send marketing a check, send the sticker through management commitee, order distributors to slap it on any new machine now carrying Vista while pulling XP, and many complaints later...
What do you mean it takes 10 minutes to open my email?
Seriously, this is a technical industry. MS botched the match up with what technology could do, and sold the equivolent CPU demand of 2 full-render instances of 3D Studio Max on machines barely able to handle 3D flash rendering to people who just want to do email and Yahoo games? Yeah, glad I wasn't the technical advisor on that project.
They now have their answer as to what happens when you sanction the breaking of one side of the anonymity wall on the internet. A daughter of Iran suffers the unveiling of family skeletons from which she unwittingly benefitted. Can we move on or simply require students to register on the board using student ids so there's little motivation for this kind of behavior. Mostly for fear of flame-war reprisals.
Firstly, IANAL, but...When you read through the actual bill (here), and take into account things like ISO's, it really does seem that the clause regarding *character of the applicant* could be used as a jupiter-sized loophole to deny applications to private citizens en masse. You'd probably be right, but...When you take into account the government's handling of contracts with Raytheon, one of the primary defense contractors for the US, you might think that lack of standards is how the gov't has always worked for lack of understanding the concept. For those more cynical of us on slashdot, the two combine to look like an effective cop-out of responsibility to free information and standards activists in the "we've always done it this way" motif. Long story short, the reasons illustrated in the bill make a minute amount of sense, then they sucker-punch you by claiming the right to deny you if the commissioner or any other involved partner agency don't like you. Yeah, great way to protect people's rights.
Patch the format, move on. No comms are ever going to be 100% secure, but we should work to fix publicized holes like this rather than flintch from the impications.
Right, so the 7 years of financial proof the business needs to keep (which include WHY the hell they charged Mr. X for 500 Cell Minutes) gets chucked by the servers maintaining the calls the moment the call ends? I don't think so. It's a billing issue. Live with it, it's saved.
In the meantime the unknown numbers is probably more of a privacy issue - The common person shouldn't know that number if the other party didn't wish to share it. Most phone companies have a harassment policy you can activate, but they warn against doing so falsely as it could induce fines. So, you train your CSRs that if 'Unknown Number' is displayed that it's simply not available in the company. The law enforcement should* (until Bush and his NSA bullshit) need to send in warrants where the manager logs in, and rattles off the numbers, because they're logged for a reason. (Cell-activated explosives are not unheard of, and if it ever happens you want to know who the hell placed that call and from where!)
In other words, it's Microsoft's way of shutting any open source project out of Vista development. Think about it, unless they all use the 'commercially accepted drivers', without using drivers of their own, then the project can't go anywhere. The cost as such is also prohibitive for any but the big players to develop their own windows extensions. (like Direct X)
Are there seriously going to be any adopters for Vista beyond MS lackeys, and those in congress who received the top limit on campaign donations?
That's what spin doctoring is for. If your opinion is that your low security demonstration was only so that you could present the state with a viable secure alternative in contrast to a now publicized failure, the statemen will listen to that.
I wonder if it occured to the clerk who approved this drivvel that those three words are basically normal state of a pressurized body. (waiting to explode)
Wait, wouldn't that be any launched space vehicle?
Seriously, if someone has the knowledge of the system you just proposed, why not take the long shot and propose to work for the gov't and put that together? Not only would you be able to demonstrate how insecure Diebold's system is with a tiny PDA that can read/write their memory sticks, but you'd also be able to demonstrate that you can't do that to yours. At least not on the fly with a PDA.
Steps to stopping the stupidity:
1) Put down (favorite game) when you're off work.
2) Write plan, put something together.
3) Get in touch with someone with the power to make the (smart) decision.
4) Show off.
When technology first came along and swept music into our lives, it did so en mass. Further broadening the broadcasts will cost someone, that's for sure, but locking codecs into laws, linking ridiculous software patents to laws that won't expire without being smited by a judge with common sense? Here's a funny story. When Phillips and Sony finalized Red Book in 1979, it was done based off another technology source, Laserdiscs. If someone tried that today, they would be swamped by roughly 30 letters of patent infringment warnings, and if this law passes a startup that builds it's own machine (and for arguement's sake avoids stepping on toes) based on HD broadcasts would get slapped with a violation of this new ridiculous bill. (by way of bypassing the Customary Historic Use hardware regulations) Not only is this a blatant slap in the face for creativity in business, but it is also a "Pay to use our patented broadcast flag technology in your hardware or get sued for not doing so anyways!"
And just so I don't fire people up without giving them an outlet, here's some useful links. We need to hound the government EN MASS to get this proposal squashed.
Contact List U.S. Chamber of Commerce - This law is anti-competitive for the above reasons (and likely more). Let them know.
State-sorted contact list of state senators - Can you write effectively, and do you want to make a difference? Go here and DO it. There's no reason to sit idle if you, as a citizen here, have an objection. Get others to do it too. Send them the link. Mass email it, mail in an old fashioned petition. Senators don't read Slashdot, and don't consult geeks unless it involves upgrading computers. Go here.
I agree this is totally possible without massive amounts of information being collected. (A big issue among privacy advocates of slashdot) First off, local ridings, cities of residency, etc, can be derived from one simple piece of information; your zip code. While not proof against multiple accounts for achieving many clustered zip code comments, having only highly moderated comments filter into it would help eliminate dupe account holders from voicing twice. The emails, or for bigger impact printed and mailed in (by a doner of costs and labor), could then be sent to the appropriate people (yes, reach multiple levels) by a simple database query.
Hell I'll even offer to do the monkey's job of doing data entry for the zip codes versus congress' emails. If someone's willing to start the project and do the database, and those of us who want comments submitted agree to enter our zip codes in the system, we could create a torrent of response to anything, similar to the response over the whole.xxx domain debacle.
As chairman of the board for ICANN over the past 6-7 years, you must have been part of the political decisions (even if only being told what ICANN should do) regarding remaining under US exclusive control after the UN summit on the topic, and subsequently the decision to not start.xxx domains.
Here's two questions then.
1. Was US control over ICANN a unilateral decision handed down to you, or was it actually discussed at board meetings?
2. When the US received such a flood of responses to the.xxx domain issue, was the department of commerce 'helped along the way' to a resolution of the issue, (i.e. educating the public on the ease with which the new domain could be blocked as opposed to how easily these sites are accessed right now?) or did it become a grossly complicated web of meetings between reps regarding complex blocking mechanisms in browsers, thus giving Microsoft yet another thing to toot it's horn about? Or are you just standing by while the politicians hash it out?
Rumor of such legistlation has been around for a long while. Now that it's hitting the table in this form, though, this letter and MANY more like it will need to hit the desks of every MP and MPP from Victoria to Halifax, each with 'courtesy' copies sent to the PM's office in Ottawa.
If you want to start a ruckus about it don't think small (political discussion boards), think big (massively distributed petitions, using capital papers to draw public interest and motivate them to call their locally-elected official, etc). Media circus' aren't the best way to do things, but may be effective. At least it gets the word out. And better you get your word into them first before the 'benefits' of a BS bill like this gets passed out with next week's Sun.
I've used text stripping algorythyms to look for and obtain information in an email that may include a story about how grandma's fruitcake didn't get delivered last year. Maybe I can patent that and stop this ridiculous patent by overcharging for use of their own system.
But then again, Yahoo's basically got no tech staff, so maybe they'll have it first.
One of the ways to take it back to the original idea is to bar software patents altogether. The industry got along fine for YEARS without having to resort to it. While companies like ID may be proud over their new engine, use agreements prohibit anti-competitive acts like reverse engineering - at least legally.
But of course the USPTO won't reverse it's position on this, cause it obviously sucks money out of the little guys and produces more taxes from the big guys. So how do you solve it? Minimum requirements perhaps. Slap a compiled code size on what it takes to get a patent and then maybe stupidity over that 50k server process in the background won't bug the rest of the people in the world who're trying to make it better. The patents themselves would have to be algorythym-based, not process-based. The difference being that if I can patent a summary of my code in 5 sentences or less (process), I own the software market. But if I have to ensure my compiled size is large enough (complex algorythym) AND the source code is what's being patented, then it's harder for corps to bar the market to the rest of the small guys, like what happened with force-feedback.
The alternative to that is for USPTO to only grant patents to individuals and not corporate or company names. That would help ease the whole "I worked on x for y hours, only got paid z, while the company is making 4000*z off my work". Unfortunately, that's not realistic either. Keeping corps happy is the govt's top priority, so it'll never happen.
A physical world example of this would be if a privately developed highway paid an advertiser to make the roadway ads more active. So they stick the damn things on helicopters and fly low and follow traffic a few miles before circling again. Then the developer would complain cause they all switched to taking the back roads and advertising companies pulled their money.
If I see a stationary ad for a DQ and I want one, I'll bite, but don't stick yourself persistently in my face or you've just lost a customer.
You'd think Advertising would take a tip or two from Sales; pushing too hard pushes them away.
Slashdot Mirror
Legal has been the biggest threat in the US to any individual for some time. When previous protections of the worker ants' individuality get litigated away, suddenly it's ok to get the police to nab. Violators and cripple them under huge charges. It's the finesse version of police state - most "law abiding" citizens looking to stay that way simply go along.
Now here's the situation, after government access to networks in which we're basically entrenched is litigated in, policy regarding that access is left solely in the gov't hands under the guise of classification and executive privledge. With access to our streams of existance, trends can be identified and then publically litigated away, in effect coecing social change while the news deseminates. Then the targetting starts. Sure, back in the day when information was either written, oral or visual (being followed for instance), the gov't seeking total control needed those check-points with force-backed interrogators. With the explosion of blogging, social networking, and even things like twitter, most people in the generation growing up right now are giving that information across these gov't networks by necessity to get it posted. My 50 something co-workers aren't as exposed directly, but the kids that blog about their parents open that door somewhat.
So now the police state gov't doesn't need the many checkpoints, they are by proxy now in nearly every home and on nearly all desks in business. Monitoring becomes brain-dead easy under this kind of access. Then patterns can be harrassed by executive order. So no, it's not your classic police state, but when this clears the house, it will be a mere single step to become the first virtual police state of the 21st century.
So some product is coming down the pipe. Create the hype, send marketing a check, send the sticker through management commitee, order distributors to slap it on any new machine now carrying Vista while pulling XP, and many complaints later...
What do you mean it takes 10 minutes to open my email?
Seriously, this is a technical industry. MS botched the match up with what technology could do, and sold the equivolent CPU demand of 2 full-render instances of 3D Studio Max on machines barely able to handle 3D flash rendering to people who just want to do email and Yahoo games? Yeah, glad I wasn't the technical advisor on that project.
They now have their answer as to what happens when you sanction the breaking of one side of the anonymity wall on the internet. A daughter of Iran suffers the unveiling of family skeletons from which she unwittingly benefitted. Can we move on or simply require students to register on the board using student ids so there's little motivation for this kind of behavior. Mostly for fear of flame-war reprisals.
Firstly, IANAL, but...When you read through the actual bill (here), and take into account things like ISO's, it really does seem that the clause regarding *character of the applicant* could be used as a jupiter-sized loophole to deny applications to private citizens en masse. You'd probably be right, but...When you take into account the government's handling of contracts with Raytheon, one of the primary defense contractors for the US, you might think that lack of standards is how the gov't has always worked for lack of understanding the concept. For those more cynical of us on slashdot, the two combine to look like an effective cop-out of responsibility to free information and standards activists in the "we've always done it this way" motif. Long story short, the reasons illustrated in the bill make a minute amount of sense, then they sucker-punch you by claiming the right to deny you if the commissioner or any other involved partner agency don't like you. Yeah, great way to protect people's rights.
Patch the format, move on. No comms are ever going to be 100% secure, but we should work to fix publicized holes like this rather than flintch from the impications.
Right, so the 7 years of financial proof the business needs to keep (which include WHY the hell they charged Mr. X for 500 Cell Minutes) gets chucked by the servers maintaining the calls the moment the call ends? I don't think so. It's a billing issue. Live with it, it's saved.
In the meantime the unknown numbers is probably more of a privacy issue - The common person shouldn't know that number if the other party didn't wish to share it. Most phone companies have a harassment policy you can activate, but they warn against doing so falsely as it could induce fines. So, you train your CSRs that if 'Unknown Number' is displayed that it's simply not available in the company. The law enforcement should* (until Bush and his NSA bullshit) need to send in warrants where the manager logs in, and rattles off the numbers, because they're logged for a reason. (Cell-activated explosives are not unheard of, and if it ever happens you want to know who the hell placed that call and from where!)
In other words, it's Microsoft's way of shutting any open source project out of Vista development. Think about it, unless they all use the 'commercially accepted drivers', without using drivers of their own, then the project can't go anywhere. The cost as such is also prohibitive for any but the big players to develop their own windows extensions. (like Direct X)
Are there seriously going to be any adopters for Vista beyond MS lackeys, and those in congress who received the top limit on campaign donations?
Have a simple pressure plate to stand on, machine reseting to 'ready' only when the pressure was relieved. Make it wide enough for disabled access.
That's what spin doctoring is for. If your opinion is that your low security demonstration was only so that you could present the state with a viable secure alternative in contrast to a now publicized failure, the statemen will listen to that.
I wonder if it occured to the clerk who approved this drivvel that those three words are basically normal state of a pressurized body. (waiting to explode)
Wait, wouldn't that be any launched space vehicle?
Seriously, if someone has the knowledge of the system you just proposed, why not take the long shot and propose to work for the gov't and put that together? Not only would you be able to demonstrate how insecure Diebold's system is with a tiny PDA that can read/write their memory sticks, but you'd also be able to demonstrate that you can't do that to yours. At least not on the fly with a PDA.
Steps to stopping the stupidity:
1) Put down (favorite game) when you're off work.
2) Write plan, put something together.
3) Get in touch with someone with the power to make the (smart) decision.
4) Show off.
When technology first came along and swept music into our lives, it did so en mass. Further broadening the broadcasts will cost someone, that's for sure, but locking codecs into laws, linking ridiculous software patents to laws that won't expire without being smited by a judge with common sense? Here's a funny story. When Phillips and Sony finalized Red Book in 1979, it was done based off another technology source, Laserdiscs. If someone tried that today, they would be swamped by roughly 30 letters of patent infringment warnings, and if this law passes a startup that builds it's own machine (and for arguement's sake avoids stepping on toes) based on HD broadcasts would get slapped with a violation of this new ridiculous bill. (by way of bypassing the Customary Historic Use hardware regulations) Not only is this a blatant slap in the face for creativity in business, but it is also a "Pay to use our patented broadcast flag technology in your hardware or get sued for not doing so anyways!"
And just so I don't fire people up without giving them an outlet, here's some useful links. We need to hound the government EN MASS to get this proposal squashed.
Contact List
U.S. Chamber of Commerce - This law is anti-competitive for the above reasons (and likely more). Let them know.
State-sorted contact list of state senators - Can you write effectively, and do you want to make a difference? Go here and DO it. There's no reason to sit idle if you, as a citizen here, have an objection. Get others to do it too. Send them the link. Mass email it, mail in an old fashioned petition. Senators don't read Slashdot, and don't consult geeks unless it involves upgrading computers. Go here.
I agree this is totally possible without massive amounts of information being collected. (A big issue among privacy advocates of slashdot) First off, local ridings, cities of residency, etc, can be derived from one simple piece of information; your zip code. While not proof against multiple accounts for achieving many clustered zip code comments, having only highly moderated comments filter into it would help eliminate dupe account holders from voicing twice. The emails, or for bigger impact printed and mailed in (by a doner of costs and labor), could then be sent to the appropriate people (yes, reach multiple levels) by a simple database query. Hell I'll even offer to do the monkey's job of doing data entry for the zip codes versus congress' emails. If someone's willing to start the project and do the database, and those of us who want comments submitted agree to enter our zip codes in the system, we could create a torrent of response to anything, similar to the response over the whole .xxx domain debacle.
As chairman of the board for ICANN over the past 6-7 years, you must have been part of the political decisions (even if only being told what ICANN should do) regarding remaining under US exclusive control after the UN summit on the topic, and subsequently the decision to not start .xxx domains.
.xxx domain issue, was the department of commerce 'helped along the way' to a resolution of the issue, (i.e. educating the public on the ease with which the new domain could be blocked as opposed to how easily these sites are accessed right now?) or did it become a grossly complicated web of meetings between reps regarding complex blocking mechanisms in browsers, thus giving Microsoft yet another thing to toot it's horn about? Or are you just standing by while the politicians hash it out?
Here's two questions then.
1. Was US control over ICANN a unilateral decision handed down to you, or was it actually discussed at board meetings?
2. When the US received such a flood of responses to the
Rumor of such legistlation has been around for a long while. Now that it's hitting the table in this form, though, this letter and MANY more like it will need to hit the desks of every MP and MPP from Victoria to Halifax, each with 'courtesy' copies sent to the PM's office in Ottawa.
If you want to start a ruckus about it don't think small (political discussion boards), think big (massively distributed petitions, using capital papers to draw public interest and motivate them to call their locally-elected official, etc). Media circus' aren't the best way to do things, but may be effective. At least it gets the word out. And better you get your word into them first before the 'benefits' of a BS bill like this gets passed out with next week's Sun.
I've used text stripping algorythyms to look for and obtain information in an email that may include a story about how grandma's fruitcake didn't get delivered last year. Maybe I can patent that and stop this ridiculous patent by overcharging for use of their own system.
But then again, Yahoo's basically got no tech staff, so maybe they'll have it first.
One of the ways to take it back to the original idea is to bar software patents altogether. The industry got along fine for YEARS without having to resort to it. While companies like ID may be proud over their new engine, use agreements prohibit anti-competitive acts like reverse engineering - at least legally.
But of course the USPTO won't reverse it's position on this, cause it obviously sucks money out of the little guys and produces more taxes from the big guys. So how do you solve it? Minimum requirements perhaps. Slap a compiled code size on what it takes to get a patent and then maybe stupidity over that 50k server process in the background won't bug the rest of the people in the world who're trying to make it better. The patents themselves would have to be algorythym-based, not process-based. The difference being that if I can patent a summary of my code in 5 sentences or less (process), I own the software market. But if I have to ensure my compiled size is large enough (complex algorythym) AND the source code is what's being patented, then it's harder for corps to bar the market to the rest of the small guys, like what happened with force-feedback. The alternative to that is for USPTO to only grant patents to individuals and not corporate or company names. That would help ease the whole "I worked on x for y hours, only got paid z, while the company is making 4000*z off my work". Unfortunately, that's not realistic either. Keeping corps happy is the govt's top priority, so it'll never happen.
A physical world example of this would be if a privately developed highway paid an advertiser to make the roadway ads more active. So they stick the damn things on helicopters and fly low and follow traffic a few miles before circling again. Then the developer would complain cause they all switched to taking the back roads and advertising companies pulled their money. If I see a stationary ad for a DQ and I want one, I'll bite, but don't stick yourself persistently in my face or you've just lost a customer. You'd think Advertising would take a tip or two from Sales; pushing too hard pushes them away.