My vote is teenagers, the stupid to signal ratio is too high for psy-ops.
as journalists seem to continue to report this unaware
I assume you mean the assumption that this is 1) by anonymous 2) related to WikiLeaks, correct?
You write "my vote". Indeed, this is my point: we can only speculate on the source of these attacks. And if teenagers, manipulated or not? Do you assume, or vote, for a public opinion shaping event on the scale of WikiLeaks and the sudden irruption of Anonymous on the story not to be the concern of intelligence agencies with a view on policy shaping?
Whoever was at the beginning of Anonymous, there is absolutely no way to verify the source of a given attack. As a consequence, responsible journalists should stop speculating on their sources. By "unaware", I mean unaware that whenever they write that a DDoS attack is done by Anonymous, they actually don't know what they are talking about.
This is one of those times where I feel a sense of justification for the anonymous attacks. Mugabe should be run out of office sooner than later.
Problem is, this kind of attack against his governments sites will have one effect: It will bolster his insane claims of overseas meddling causing his countries problems. It is a lie, Mugabe is the no1 cause for the problems Zim is having now, but all anonymous have done is lend credibility to his claims of overseas "agents" (yes he has used that term) causing trouble in Zimbabwe.
This will have the effect that his supporter base will grow, and lend him greater power.
Spot on. Furthermore, responsible reporting of these events would avoid speculating on the source for these attacks, eg.: "Hit by Pro-WikiLeaks DDoS attacks". It will, or it already is, all too easy for a tyrant to justify repression by perpetrating an attack on his own servers, just like the Reichstag fire, except that you don't need to really burn the parliamant to justify what will follow but just cause yourself a minor annoyance and then cry murder.
This Anonymous thing, if it is done by teenagers, is the stupidest thing ever, and if done by psy-ops, quite clever, as journalists seem to continue to report this unaware.
Faking that without unrelated members crying foul over obvious subversion attempts would be incredibly difficult, even even harder would be attempting to sway the actual anonymous DDOS attackers themselves....
tl;dr version: any agency attempting to spam with a target would be called out. Performing a DDOS then claiming it was anonymous without any corroboration would be equally obvious. Any attempting to sway opinion through a false majority would be promptly accused of samefaggotry and ignored.
You might as well be saying that black-ops in anti-globalization demonstrations cannot be manipulated, or cannot be themselves undercover agents, because it would be too difficult to fake a demonstration. By the way, there are videos on Youtube showing some particularly unruly of those black-ops to be members of the police force. This is the same thing here on the Web with Anonymous, but even easier to manipulate and to fake as they operate under the cover of deeper level of anonymity. Same approach, same techniques, same motives.
When you have a large DDoS tool at your beck and call, who has time to bother with accuracy and trifling details like the truth? This is just further evidence that "anonymous" is some unemployed young adult.
The profile of anonymous becomes less and less one of sophistication and intelligence and more that of teenage angst and a limited understanding of technology daily.
From TFA:
The Webalta 92.241.160.0/19 netblock has been listed on the Spamhaus Block List (SBL) since October 2008. Spamhaus regards the Russian Webalta host (also known as Wahome) as being "blackhat" - a known cybercrime host from whose IP space Spamhaus only sees malware/virus hosting, botnet C&Cs, phishing and other cybercriminal activities.
I sympathize with your impatience with the idiocy that is Anonymous, but what this goes on to show here is that Anonymous, or now better referred to as AnonOps, is NOT unruly teenagers as media have been dutifully reporting, but something else.
The poster above referring to Anonymous as a potential 'false flag' operation has it right. Whether it was started by real teenagers or not is inconsequential: it plays in the interests of those wanting to swerve public opinion in the direction of repressive legislation and it is all too easy to attribute any kind of stunt on "Anonymous", whomever is really behind it.
I'm beginning to wonder if AnonOps/Anonymous is a false flag operation. They seem to be doing more harm than help to Wikileaks. Their targeting is inept (they previously targeted the wrong DNS provider), their timing is inept, and Wikileaks doesn't need them to stay on line.
At last, this is coming out! I've been repeating this obvious thing on every Anonymous story that Slashdot has echoed out until now: we have no idea who is behind so called "Anonymous". A naive teenager is arrested from time to time to give credence to the myth that the Web is under the threat of unruly teenagers, opening the door to repressive legislation.
Now with this, we are beginning to get to hard facts, which should help us awaken our traditional media journalist friends: press, TV, radio. Congratulation for coming up with the term AnonOps. It tells the whole story in a nutshell.
Long after DARPA's research, commercial entities such as AOL, Prodigy, and CompuServe had their own ideas about how computer networks should function. If a commercial entity had invented the Internet it would have functioned like the AOL of 1993 where all content has to be approved by a single corporation. That corporation would collect a tax on all transactions. It would kick out anyone it did not agree with. It would be far, far different than the Internet we have today and it would have undoubtedly happened much later.
Right on. Furthermore, as a consequence, this network would not have grown, and its size would have been at most one of a medium size national service, connected to your phone line of something, that a small percentage of the population would have subscribe to, but not much, because there would not have had much useful information there. In other words, the Internet that we know WOULD NOT HAVE EXISTED, and we would not know what we had been missing.
Just to underscore the "for worse" part of what the Time person is defined as: "for better or for worse,...has done the most to influence the events of the year." Examples: 1938 Nazi Germany Adolf Hitler 1939 Soviet Union Joseph Stalin...
To elaborate on "for the worse", a recent article by Tim Berners Lee (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=long-live-the-web) is quite relevant here to appreciate the impact of sites like Facebook:
Facebook, LinkedIn, Friendster and others typically provide value by capturing information as you enter it: your birthday, your e-mail address, your likes, and links indicating who is friends with whom and who is in which photograph. The sites assemble these bits of data into brilliant databases and reuse the information to provide value-added service—but only within their sites. Once you enter your data into one of these services, you cannot easily use them on another site. Each site is a silo, walled off from the others. Yes, your site’s pages are on the Web, but your data are not. You can access a Web page about a list of people you have created in one site, but you cannot send that list, or items from it, to another site.
The isolation occurs because each piece of information does not have a URI. Connections among data exist only within a site. So the more you enter, the more you become locked in.
Have these guys ever disrupted any company significantly? TFA mentions they've taken down the RIAA, MPAA and Mastercard front pages, but none of those have affected their core businesses. It seems like in order to have a Waterloo, they would first need to have some real accomplishments beforehand.
I concur with you on this. I would say that their only accomplishment is that, before Anonymous threw their antics, corporations were seen in public opinion as bullies who sued teenagers and who corrupted politicians to pass laws that screwed the consumers. Now, with the help of those self-elected heroes, the same corporations are getting free press staging as victims.
With folks like that, Hitler would not have needed to burn the Reichtag, it would have been done for him by 'Anonymous'! Oh, wait, do we know who are those behind 'Anonymous'? Because if I had been on the evil side, as an advisor to those corporations standing in the eye of public attention, like the RIAA and the MPAA, the attempt to turn the table that we are witnessing is exactly what I would have advised. Next action is going to be to push law to restore 'order' on the Internet. Thanks Anonymous...
Bloody fools!
Either that or tools. In any case, the media, and Slashdot, should stop reporting as if we knew who is behind this. We don't.
It is not DDoS or cyber-war it is cyber-picketing.
It used to be that when you had a disagreement with a company people picked it and disrupted its business that way. Well, welcome to the 21 century you can now picket the business from the comfort of your own home.
Picketing is a public act. DDoS is not. There is an essential difference. The media orchestration that we have seen over the last few days around DDoD lend me to think me that if there are a few teenagers behind these attacks, they are manipulated by those who want to influence public opinion in the direction of a kill-switch as one poster has mentioned above, and in the direction of measures to rein in on the Internet.
It is all too easy for provocateurs to do as they please, as these actions are anonymous. But the media go on reporting on this ascribing these actions to "a movement in support of Wikileaks". We don't know that, they don't know that.
Good idea, crappy implementation. All this does to the public perception of Wikileaks and their supports is make them look like a bunch of hackers and deviant cybercrooks. It won't make a damned difference in the long run.
I've always found it sadly ironic that Anonymous, who very much wants to keep online anonymity alive, is doing more than almost anyone to destroy it. Their antics just keep giving politicians reasons to clamp down on the internet. Way to go, idiots!
Pity, I don't have mod points. You express the whole point of these antics succinctly and clearly.
The fact is, we have no idea who these people are, and it is obvious to anyone with half a brain cell that their actions has for immediate effect to discredit whatever cause they ostensibly support. If they had not been there already, those who want to clamp down the Internet ought to have invented them...
When it was done, it was fully in the open, and no one reacted.
Thank you for mentioning this. This is historically significant.
However, from you own account, it hardly qualifies as having been done in the open. They ostensibly and hypocritically presented an act which turned out to be of collusion as a one of collaborative rationalization. At the time, I assume it would have been easy to greet the announcement as good news.
This might sound petty a point to make, but the nuance has legal, as well as public relations, ramifications.
Well, I wouldn't assassinate her. Hell, if she pulls this off, she's my hero (especially if Norway adopts it as part of the EEC which often confuses itself with the EU when convenient).
I'm just scared that someone else will
I gathered as much from the tone of your posts. However, voicing such fears, in such wording --I mean, you CASUALLY evoke this possibility-- strikes me as utterly irresponsible.
Therefore, the parent's reference to your posts: "If you are literally talking about assassinating her, you're way too crazy for me." is apt. Posts such as yours, on a public forum such as this one, now, here, may well have an intimidating effect, however well intended they are, however unintended.
Go spend a weekend in a Zen dojo or something, but please think before posting. Don't become the echo-box of bullies.
With the Paypal DDOS, the attempt to characterize this as terrorism has widened from targeting Assange to targeting everyone supporting the movement.
Those behind the DDOS attack are doing the work of the police, or, I think more and more, ARE the police. In any case, there is absolutely no way of knowing whom is really behind that, or who is taking over, and when.
DDOS attacks have consistently been condemned on Slashdot. Still, it is assumed they are done by anarchist teenagers. I believe this less and less.
I can agree with every one of your point, and yet at every point wonder: in what way exactly is keeping the population ignorant supposed to pave the way to more democratic institutions? Yes, I would be dismayed at seeing China ends up in the hand of the mob as it has happened in Russia. However, I do not rejoice at the view of seeing it going the way of Myanmar, and I do not rejoice when I see their government whipping up nationalism as a manner of maintaining unity, and I don't see any kind of progress there.
Your arguments are the very same than those that were used in the 18th century when the people in various countries of Europe began the process of taking their destinies into their own hands: the peasants are just a mob of ignorant Yahoos (the very word Yahoo was coined by Jonathan Swift in these times) and we are safer keeping them in their crass ignorance.
I would add that I don't have any idea about the right answer to these questions and no inkling about the kind of future we are headed to, but I don't think either that it is wise to justify the suppression of freedom for other people when we would not accept the same treatment for ourselves.
You say that the Americans are able to handle Fox News type of propaganda.
Are you sure of that? The educated one seem to be doing fine. The Yahoos not so much. The total effect looks much like a mess. In the end, propaganda is propaganda.
then there is the 'noncriminal', legal ways of doing that eh ? like, battling them in courts, where they have multiples of money to win over you ? excuse me but what you speak of can only work in an ideal world.
I suspect that just like there are provocateurs sent by the police in peaceful anti-globalizing demonstrations, there are provocateurs at the source of these kinds of vengeful, reactive actions. And there is no way to insure that there isn't. These actions are in now way controllable under a sensible strategy. The goal of this is pretty simple: present any protest against corporate abuse as the doing of unlawful elements, and not as the expression of public opinion.
This goes exactly against of what you are pretending here: you say that there is no legal way to advance the views of public ownership of its culture, yet public opinion HAS an effect, since so much effort is put into skewing and misrepresenting it, and stupid actions such as this Operations Payback go a long way to do RIAA and MPAA's bidding to discredit it.
What Apple is doing in the realm of video with h264 tells where Apple stands on open standards.
Google, one the other hand, is putting its money where its mouth is, with WebM and VP8, which have been released as open standards, without any tricky ambiguity.
I am not saying that there is clear case for profit via spoofing these tags, just that if there ever is profit to gain by rigging the tags, Google will be in no position to stop it. Therefore this move can be seen only as a method for Google to defend against those that says it profits from serving copyrighted content with a license.
You say "if" and you proceed without demonstration to your conclusion. Please demonstrate that there is a profit to be made in spoofing the tag, and I will then consider the validity of your conclusion that Google is doing this just for the show.
Sorry to reply to my own post, but to put Microsoft, Apple and Google contentions on the same plane is just wrong. Of these, only Google is purely a Web company, and is also the only one who defends the public standards that have made the Web, and its own existence, possible.
You and I, silly people. Why are we deluding ourselves into believing only massive multinational companies can control the web,
You are right that the Web belongs to you and I. And it goes further. TFA asks the question backwards:
Control of this new evolution of the web is up for grabs. Each of the big three computing companies – Microsoft, Apple and Google – has its own radically different vision to promote.
This question is biased. The Web has not been created by corporate entities and is not "up for grabs". The web has evolved out of the cumulative connectedness of public networks through public standards, which development is still overseen by the WWW Consortium. Attempts to privatize parts of it (eg. AOL) have failed and new attempts must fail if we wish to see the Web further innovate.
Well how about you don't expect to be able to get stuff when you don't have the money. I get tired of their shit.
The parent never said that people should have it for free. He just pointed out, with the support of facts, that the claim about companies being hurt by piracy are unfounded.
The difference this point makes is in the legitimacy of the amount of damage that is claimed when teenagers get sued over this.
Should there not be words of support on Slashdot for such a clear and unambiguous stand from the FCC Commissioner and the FCC Chairman? This is exactly what we need to begin turning the tide.
Look at the discussion below: sidetracked in a shouting match and out of topic all the way down (at least at the time I write this...).
I don't have the time to actually RTFP, but would like to make sure that you don't miss the comment of evanism (here somewhere below), who did:
What a monstrous pile of drivel. Pages and pages of confused circular talk couched in language so broad you could apply it to anything you want. It's insane when a patent is awarded for something like this, when it was designed for a lightbulb, or an electric motor or gunpowder, but this pseudo-IT-speak is dreadful. I would say the lawyer who wrote it didn't know what the Internet was or how it operates. Bloody American patent system
Which makes the quote in the post worth repeating, and I like the typical Biritish understatement in which it is formulated:
It is exceedingly unfortunate that the US legal system can force a company with a sole presence in Cambridge, UK to incur a seven-digit expense and waste over a year of management time on a case with absolutely no merit.
If enough people do that, instead of voting for Coke or Pepsi when they really wanted water, they'd get their glass of water eventually.
Right now seems like >98% vote for Coke/Pepsi.
Yeah... "eventually"... So if I follow you, if you can get a further 2% of voters wishing for this "eventuality", who are necessarily politically educated voting Democrat, you will succeed in getting Republicans elected for the intervening decades. I wish I could get a glass of water, but if I have to see Palin as President for getting it, I will think twice.
You know, if I were a Republican PR person, I would try to push this meme into every forum I could, Oh, wait....
Slashdot Mirror
My vote is teenagers, the stupid to signal ratio is too high for psy-ops.
as journalists seem to continue to report this unaware
I assume you mean the assumption that this is 1) by anonymous 2) related to WikiLeaks, correct?
You write "my vote". Indeed, this is my point: we can only speculate on the source of these attacks. And if teenagers, manipulated or not? Do you assume, or vote, for a public opinion shaping event on the scale of WikiLeaks and the sudden irruption of Anonymous on the story not to be the concern of intelligence agencies with a view on policy shaping?
Whoever was at the beginning of Anonymous, there is absolutely no way to verify the source of a given attack. As a consequence, responsible journalists should stop speculating on their sources. By "unaware", I mean unaware that whenever they write that a DDoS attack is done by Anonymous, they actually don't know what they are talking about.
This is one of those times where I feel a sense of justification for the anonymous attacks. Mugabe should be run out of office sooner than later.
Problem is, this kind of attack against his governments sites will have one effect: It will bolster his insane claims of overseas meddling causing his countries problems. It is a lie, Mugabe is the no1 cause for the problems Zim is having now, but all anonymous have done is lend credibility to his claims of overseas "agents" (yes he has used that term) causing trouble in Zimbabwe.
This will have the effect that his supporter base will grow, and lend him greater power.
Spot on. Furthermore, responsible reporting of these events would avoid speculating on the source for these attacks, eg.: "Hit by Pro-WikiLeaks DDoS attacks". It will, or it already is, all too easy for a tyrant to justify repression by perpetrating an attack on his own servers, just like the Reichstag fire, except that you don't need to really burn the parliamant to justify what will follow but just cause yourself a minor annoyance and then cry murder.
This Anonymous thing, if it is done by teenagers, is the stupidest thing ever, and if done by psy-ops, quite clever, as journalists seem to continue to report this unaware.
Faking that without unrelated members crying foul over obvious subversion attempts would be incredibly difficult, even even harder would be attempting to sway the actual anonymous DDOS attackers themselves. ...
tl;dr version: any agency attempting to spam with a target would be called out. Performing a DDOS then claiming it was anonymous without any corroboration would be equally obvious. Any attempting to sway opinion through a false majority would be promptly accused of samefaggotry and ignored.
You might as well be saying that black-ops in anti-globalization demonstrations cannot be manipulated, or cannot be themselves undercover agents, because it would be too difficult to fake a demonstration. By the way, there are videos on Youtube showing some particularly unruly of those black-ops to be members of the police force. This is the same thing here on the Web with Anonymous, but even easier to manipulate and to fake as they operate under the cover of deeper level of anonymity. Same approach, same techniques, same motives.
When you have a large DDoS tool at your beck and call, who has time to bother with accuracy and trifling details like the truth? This is just further evidence that "anonymous" is some unemployed young adult.
The profile of anonymous becomes less and less one of sophistication and intelligence and more that of teenage angst and a limited understanding of technology daily.
From TFA:
The Webalta 92.241.160.0/19 netblock has been listed on the Spamhaus Block List (SBL) since October 2008. Spamhaus regards the Russian Webalta host (also known as Wahome) as being "blackhat" - a known cybercrime host from whose IP space Spamhaus only sees malware/virus hosting, botnet C&Cs, phishing and other cybercriminal activities.
I sympathize with your impatience with the idiocy that is Anonymous, but what this goes on to show here is that Anonymous, or now better referred to as AnonOps, is NOT unruly teenagers as media have been dutifully reporting, but something else.
The poster above referring to Anonymous as a potential 'false flag' operation has it right. Whether it was started by real teenagers or not is inconsequential: it plays in the interests of those wanting to swerve public opinion in the direction of repressive legislation and it is all too easy to attribute any kind of stunt on "Anonymous", whomever is really behind it.
I'm beginning to wonder if AnonOps/Anonymous is a false flag operation. They seem to be doing more harm than help to Wikileaks. Their targeting is inept (they previously targeted the wrong DNS provider), their timing is inept, and Wikileaks doesn't need them to stay on line.
At last, this is coming out! I've been repeating this obvious thing on every Anonymous story that Slashdot has echoed out until now: we have no idea who is behind so called "Anonymous". A naive teenager is arrested from time to time to give credence to the myth that the Web is under the threat of unruly teenagers, opening the door to repressive legislation.
Now with this, we are beginning to get to hard facts, which should help us awaken our traditional media journalist friends: press, TV, radio. Congratulation for coming up with the term AnonOps. It tells the whole story in a nutshell.
Long after DARPA's research, commercial entities such as AOL, Prodigy, and CompuServe had their own ideas about how computer networks should function. If a commercial entity had invented the Internet it would have functioned like the AOL of 1993 where all content has to be approved by a single corporation. That corporation would collect a tax on all transactions. It would kick out anyone it did not agree with. It would be far, far different than the Internet we have today and it would have undoubtedly happened much later.
Right on. Furthermore, as a consequence, this network would not have grown, and its size would have been at most one of a medium size national service, connected to your phone line of something, that a small percentage of the population would have subscribe to, but not much, because there would not have had much useful information there. In other words, the Internet that we know WOULD NOT HAVE EXISTED, and we would not know what we had been missing.
Just to underscore the "for worse" part of what the Time person is defined as: "for better or for worse, ...has done the most to influence the events of the year." Examples: ...
1938 Nazi Germany Adolf Hitler
1939 Soviet Union Joseph Stalin
To elaborate on "for the worse", a recent article by Tim Berners Lee (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=long-live-the-web) is quite relevant here to appreciate the impact of sites like Facebook:
Facebook, LinkedIn, Friendster and others typically provide value by capturing information as you enter it: your birthday, your e-mail address, your likes, and links indicating who is friends with whom and who is in which photograph. The sites assemble these bits of data into brilliant databases and reuse the information to provide value-added service—but only within their sites. Once you enter your data into one of these services, you cannot easily use them on another site. Each site is a silo, walled off from the others. Yes, your site’s pages are on the Web, but your data are not. You can access a Web page about a list of people you have created in one site, but you cannot send that list, or items from it, to another site.
The isolation occurs because each piece of information does not have a URI. Connections among data exist only within a site. So the more you enter, the more you become locked in.
Have these guys ever disrupted any company significantly? TFA mentions they've taken down the RIAA, MPAA and Mastercard front pages, but none of those have affected their core businesses. It seems like in order to have a Waterloo, they would first need to have some real accomplishments beforehand.
I concur with you on this. I would say that their only accomplishment is that, before Anonymous threw their antics, corporations were seen in public opinion as bullies who sued teenagers and who corrupted politicians to pass laws that screwed the consumers. Now, with the help of those self-elected heroes, the same corporations are getting free press staging as victims.
With folks like that, Hitler would not have needed to burn the Reichtag, it would have been done for him by 'Anonymous'! Oh, wait, do we know who are those behind 'Anonymous'? Because if I had been on the evil side, as an advisor to those corporations standing in the eye of public attention, like the RIAA and the MPAA, the attempt to turn the table that we are witnessing is exactly what I would have advised. Next action is going to be to push law to restore 'order' on the Internet. Thanks Anonymous...
Bloody fools!
Either that or tools. In any case, the media, and Slashdot, should stop reporting as if we knew who is behind this. We don't.
It is not DDoS or cyber-war it is cyber-picketing.
It used to be that when you had a disagreement with a company people picked it and disrupted its business that way. Well, welcome to the 21 century you can now picket the business from the comfort of your own home.
Picketing is a public act. DDoS is not. There is an essential difference. The media orchestration that we have seen over the last few days around DDoD lend me to think me that if there are a few teenagers behind these attacks, they are manipulated by those who want to influence public opinion in the direction of a kill-switch as one poster has mentioned above, and in the direction of measures to rein in on the Internet.
It is all too easy for provocateurs to do as they please, as these actions are anonymous. But the media go on reporting on this ascribing these actions to "a movement in support of Wikileaks". We don't know that, they don't know that.
Good idea, crappy implementation. All this does to the public perception of Wikileaks and their supports is make them look like a bunch of hackers and deviant cybercrooks. It won't make a damned difference in the long run.
I've always found it sadly ironic that Anonymous, who very much wants to keep online anonymity alive, is doing more than almost anyone to destroy it. Their antics just keep giving politicians reasons to clamp down on the internet. Way to go, idiots!
Pity, I don't have mod points. You express the whole point of these antics succinctly and clearly.
The fact is, we have no idea who these people are, and it is obvious to anyone with half a brain cell that their actions has for immediate effect to discredit whatever cause they ostensibly support. If they had not been there already, those who want to clamp down the Internet ought to have invented them...
Oh wait...
Saying we discover it today is just a shame.
When it was done, it was fully in the open, and no one reacted.
Thank you for mentioning this. This is historically significant.
However, from you own account, it hardly qualifies as having been done in the open. They ostensibly and hypocritically presented an act which turned out to be of collusion as a one of collaborative rationalization. At the time, I assume it would have been easy to greet the announcement as good news.
This might sound petty a point to make, but the nuance has legal, as well as public relations, ramifications.
Well, I wouldn't assassinate her. Hell, if she pulls this off, she's my hero (especially if Norway adopts it as part of the EEC which often confuses itself with the EU when convenient).
I'm just scared that someone else will
I gathered as much from the tone of your posts. However, voicing such fears, in such wording --I mean, you CASUALLY evoke this possibility-- strikes me as utterly irresponsible.
Therefore, the parent's reference to your posts: "If you are literally talking about assassinating her, you're way too crazy for me." is apt. Posts such as yours, on a public forum such as this one, now, here, may well have an intimidating effect, however well intended they are, however unintended.
Go spend a weekend in a Zen dojo or something, but please think before posting. Don't become the echo-box of bullies.
Do you actually know this?
You are making a wild assumption here, and I don't think it is a wise one.
The principle of transparency will survive is this leak is handled in a responsible manner, as I has been done until know.
The government does everything to give the impression that this is done irresponsibly and out of control.
Your suggestion lends support to this, up until now, false impression.
With the Paypal DDOS, the attempt to characterize this as terrorism has widened from targeting Assange to targeting everyone supporting the movement.
Those behind the DDOS attack are doing the work of the police, or, I think more and more, ARE the police. In any case, there is absolutely no way of knowing whom is really behind that, or who is taking over, and when.
DDOS attacks have consistently been condemned on Slashdot. Still, it is assumed they are done by anarchist teenagers. I believe this less and less.
I can agree with every one of your point, and yet at every point wonder: in what way exactly is keeping the population ignorant supposed to pave the way to more democratic institutions? Yes, I would be dismayed at seeing China ends up in the hand of the mob as it has happened in Russia. However, I do not rejoice at the view of seeing it going the way of Myanmar, and I do not rejoice when I see their government whipping up nationalism as a manner of maintaining unity, and I don't see any kind of progress there.
Your arguments are the very same than those that were used in the 18th century when the people in various countries of Europe began the process of taking their destinies into their own hands: the peasants are just a mob of ignorant Yahoos (the very word Yahoo was coined by Jonathan Swift in these times) and we are safer keeping them in their crass ignorance.
I would add that I don't have any idea about the right answer to these questions and no inkling about the kind of future we are headed to, but I don't think either that it is wise to justify the suppression of freedom for other people when we would not accept the same treatment for ourselves.
You say that the Americans are able to handle Fox News type of propaganda.
Are you sure of that? The educated one seem to be doing fine. The Yahoos not so much. The total effect looks much like a mess. In the end, propaganda is propaganda.
then there is the 'noncriminal', legal ways of doing that eh ? like, battling them in courts, where they have multiples of money to win over you ? excuse me but what you speak of can only work in an ideal world.
I suspect that just like there are provocateurs sent by the police in peaceful anti-globalizing demonstrations, there are provocateurs at the source of these kinds of vengeful, reactive actions. And there is no way to insure that there isn't. These actions are in now way controllable under a sensible strategy. The goal of this is pretty simple: present any protest against corporate abuse as the doing of unlawful elements, and not as the expression of public opinion.
This goes exactly against of what you are pretending here: you say that there is no legal way to advance the views of public ownership of its culture, yet public opinion HAS an effect, since so much effort is put into skewing and misrepresenting it, and stupid actions such as this Operations Payback go a long way to do RIAA and MPAA's bidding to discredit it.
Stupid stupid stupid! And fucking naive.
h264
Spot on!
What Apple is doing in the realm of video with h264 tells where Apple stands on open standards.
Google, one the other hand, is putting its money where its mouth is, with WebM and VP8, which have been released as open standards, without any tricky ambiguity.
I am not saying that there is clear case for profit via spoofing these tags, just that if there ever is profit to gain by rigging the tags, Google will be in no position to stop it. Therefore this move can be seen only as a method for Google to defend against those that says it profits from serving copyrighted content with a license.
You say "if" and you proceed without demonstration to your conclusion. Please demonstrate that there is a profit to be made in spoofing the tag, and I will then consider the validity of your conclusion that Google is doing this just for the show.
Sorry to reply to my own post, but to put Microsoft, Apple and Google contentions on the same plane is just wrong. Of these, only Google is purely a Web company, and is also the only one who defends the public standards that have made the Web, and its own existence, possible.
The other two are, indeed, grabbers.
You and I, silly people. Why are we deluding ourselves into believing only massive multinational companies can control the web,
You are right that the Web belongs to you and I. And it goes further. TFA asks the question backwards:
Control of this new evolution of the web is up for grabs. Each of the big three computing companies – Microsoft, Apple and Google – has its own radically different vision to promote.
This question is biased. The Web has not been created by corporate entities and is not "up for grabs". The web has evolved out of the cumulative connectedness of public networks through public standards, which development is still overseen by the WWW Consortium. Attempts to privatize parts of it (eg. AOL) have failed and new attempts must fail if we wish to see the Web further innovate.
Read Tim Berners-Lee latest article. It articulates the questions facing the evolution of the Web so much more clearly:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=long-live-the-web
Well how about you don't expect to be able to get stuff when you don't have the money.
I get tired of their shit.
The parent never said that people should have it for free. He just pointed out, with the support of facts, that the claim about companies being hurt by piracy are unfounded.
The difference this point makes is in the legitimacy of the amount of damage that is claimed when teenagers get sued over this.
Should there not be words of support on Slashdot for such a clear and unambiguous stand from the FCC Commissioner and the FCC Chairman? This is exactly what we need to begin turning the tide.
Look at the discussion below: sidetracked in a shouting match and out of topic all the way down (at least at the time I write this...).
Please!
Immersion's patents were very, very valid,
I don't have the time to actually RTFP, but would like to make sure that you don't miss the comment of evanism (here somewhere below), who did:
What a monstrous pile of drivel. Pages and pages of confused circular talk couched in language so broad you could apply it to anything you want. It's insane when a patent is awarded for something like this, when it was designed for a lightbulb, or an electric motor or gunpowder, but this pseudo-IT-speak is dreadful. I would say the lawyer who wrote it didn't know what the Internet was or how it operates. Bloody American patent system
Which makes the quote in the post worth repeating, and I like the typical Biritish understatement in which it is formulated:
It is exceedingly unfortunate that the US legal system can force a company with a sole presence in Cambridge, UK to incur a seven-digit expense and waste over a year of management time on a case with absolutely no merit.
Vote for a glass of water then.
If enough people do that, instead of voting for Coke or Pepsi when they really wanted water, they'd get their glass of water eventually.
Right now seems like >98% vote for Coke/Pepsi.
Yeah... "eventually"... So if I follow you, if you can get a further 2% of voters wishing for this "eventuality", who are necessarily politically educated voting Democrat, you will succeed in getting Republicans elected for the intervening decades. I wish I could get a glass of water, but if I have to see Palin as President for getting it, I will think twice.
You know, if I were a Republican PR person, I would try to push this meme into every forum I could, Oh, wait....
What can this piece of crap do that i can't ??? And yet it's the one going to space ... The guy who takes decision at nasa is a total idiot !!!
It can stay there forever.
The cost of bringing you back, among other inconveniences, is a serious drag to the science we can do on any exploration mission.
Also, it will not freak out in space, like you just did here.