Uncompromising and unforgiving are two very different things... And if the do or don't of a single persons actions means the end result happens or doesn't it's safe to say it's impossible without someone standing up and taking action first. Please try to realize that without heroes some fights are utterly hopelessly impossible. It's easy to look at it logically in retrospect and say that it obviously was possible because it happened... but would anything have happened without true heroes standing up? I know it's speculating but I'm willing to bet that if everyone was a mindless drone no revolutionary advances of society would ever have been made.
Oh, and I fully agree with that quote especially because I don't regard myself as a static unchanging personality and my beliefs constantly evolve... But I can respect people who do die for a noble cause.
I believe there is no evil master plan, but the system is corrupt in such a way that any person in the system is capable of (unwittingly) participating in evil deeds. So the degree I would assign is probably oblivious participation in evil. You can't really hold those people accountable for the evil they are involved in, but you can hold them accountable for choosing to remain oblivious for the ramifications of their actions.
So you were exactly right about your examples, but the consequences of it are undeniably evil... the people who wrote that law, work for TSA and fight in Iraq are not inherently evil... Sometimes far from it! But it really takes a special kind of awareness not to participate in one way or another with those kinds of evil. We need to identify and fight the true culprit, the corrupt system, and not the scapegoat individual of the day, who are merely a symptom of whats wrong on a larger scale.
There are degrees of evil, and degrees of participation in evil. What Stanley Milgram (and more recent experiments with deadly shocks) showed with his experiments is that any person has the potential for evil deeds... So it's not black-and-white indeed.
So you hit the nail on the head, exactly *because* these measures are 1000x more expensive is why they are being pushed... The smell of fear smells like profit to some.
Being realistic never meant you should just accept everything that is wrong. Compromising with evil makes you an accessory to evil. And even the impossible is worth fighting for, especially since sometimes taking on this impossible fight makes previously impossible things possible. People who fight an impossible fight like Rosa Parks, Nelson Mandela or even Thich Quang Duc are heroes because they refuse to compromise with injustice even in the face of prosecution, imprisonment and death.
Yeah, that's what we get for putting up so many solar panels in recent years, notice how this coincides with the graphs... How can we keep tapping the suns energy without thinking about mother earth and father sun... We are doomed! Donate now, and we *might* be able to prevent it (and take full credit for it), but if we can't it's your fault for not donating enough!!! Act now because peak solar is a proven fact, we have some scientists saying something to back it up!
Well, didn't the women change their story only after finding out Assange slept with both of them around the same time? It may not be infidelity but it's close enough... Just like Swedish rape is not rape in the usual sense Swedish infidelity is not infidelity in the usual sense either.:-)
Fuck man, I bet a thousand lawyers just came in their pants when they read your post... A system imploding upon peoples stupidity sounds like a sexy golden opportunity in the ears of those money-grubbing vultures...
No, vigilantism would be when I found pictures of a guy raping a kid and I would kill him myself or post his address on the web with the intent of letting other vigilantes 'take care' of the problem. The morally right thing to do is leak/report this information to the authorities and give the guy a fair trial. Are you really saying to me that because the guy *might* be innocent you would just do nothing and *possibly* allow him to continue to rape other children? Are you the guy who would just stand by and look away and let terrible shit happen? You have to admit there is a line you have to draw somewhere...
I mentioned that I considered the option that the photo in question did not show a crime, but it was a deliberately tricky example. When there is sufficient reason to suspect a crime you can report it and still assume innocence, but leave the person to the court and to exercise his right to a defense and fair trial.
You are right that corporations and government are a different matter, but mostly because there are no authorities to go to (and if you do you might find yourself in a shitload of trouble). Because of this leaking anonymously is the only option available to bring this to the publics attention. In this case you can reasonably call it vigilantism because you don't involve authorities, but take matters into your own hand to force the hand of the corporation and government. When the authorities fail at their duties you have a right to this 'vigilantism'.
They probably didn't know the citizen recorded, otherwise it could very well have been possible that he forgot to put the tape in the camera... Just like with a high profile incident such as the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes where the hard drives from the CCTV camera's all went missing... It's funny how CCTV is used so actively by government to check on citizens, but when citizens want to check on the government there just happens to be a malfunction... It's almost as if they don't want citizens having proof of their failures...
So all we citizens can do is hope we don't get shot in the head 7 times because we look like a terrorist or behave suspiciously like for example going into a hypoglycemic coma!
Yes, I agree. In my personal opinion governments should be fully transparent. Even for state secrets information should be publicly made available exactly why something is secret, by who's authority and for how long. And the reason 'for national security' is not admissible, only a description of what threats would come from releasing the information publicly.
You can have transparency *and* some secrets, as long as it's transparent how much is secret and why.
Right now governments have shown that they do not responsibly label things secret, so citizens have no transparent way of checking if their reasons are valid (and they have been proven multiple times to be completely invalid reasons like covering up war crimes and corruption). Because of this I think it's the right of the people to leak all secret information they come upon. It's the government who brought this upon themselves, and the only way to prevent this is transparency the people can check and trust in.
You find video of rape and murder, it may be real, it may be acted. Let the court decide after the people involved have their say... Just assuming nothing is up and leaving it at that is morally despicable. You can still assume innocence, but that does not mean you should not act on the information.
You make no sense. Making a private thing publicly available violates privacy by definition. And you can still presume innocence even when you come upon evidence you can think: 'this guy could just as well be innocent, I'd better leave it to the proper authorities to figure this out and let the guy defend himself in a court'. Just violating the privacy for one wrong thing does not negate the presumption of innocence, and given the fact that you cannot establish guilt but a court can doesn't that imply you should leak this information especially to honor the persons right to a fair trial.
Only a court can establish guilt, and without proof there is no way this can happen. You have a catch 22 there if you value privacy so much that you cannot 'leak' proof of wrongdoing. So in my opinion when you find proof that in your best judgement implicates someone you have a right to violate that persons privacy by releasing this proof to the authorities (same goes for corporations or governments).
Note that what is happening to Assange has nothing to do with anything remotely connected to proof or even the semblance of a proper legal process. But still, if I were to come upon photo's of Assange fucking a handcuffed and beaten woman I would violate his privacy and release that photo even if it may be a fake and I don't like what is going on at all. I can't establish guilt alone and I surely would not censor this information because I think it's in the greater good, as if I know what's best for everyone... That would go against everything Wikileaks stands for.
I agree that a government should be fully transparent, realistically however they need to be able to keep some secrets 'private'... And in that regard people and governments privacy are roughly the same... Privacy should be respected unless you have proof of a crime. It does not mean posting all personal data of someone online nor does it mean invalidation of all privacy, it just means that relevant data for prosecution of the crime ceases to be private.
I strongly agree with you. Possession should not be punished so harshly because it probably reduces the chances of catching the perpetrators.
However I still think these pictures should be reported (and in some cases anonymous leaking might help protect the person who finds this pictures from prosecution) to be able to catch the guys actually molesting the kids...
Leaking is what you do when you come across information that is evidence of some wrongdoing and you want to serve justice by exposing this. Most leakers are people within the organization who feel a moral obligation to do their part in stopping wrongdoings, not people looking for wrong stuff to leak.
Your example:
- When you hack into someone's PC and find images of a crime and leak those (I would suspect after the owner refuses to be blackmailed in this scenario) you are morally wrong and in fact committing a crime.
- When on the other hand you fix the guys broken PC and during the backup come across said photo's you are morally right to report this individual. And before going into detail of what to report and what not just use your judgement, I for one would not report a guy when I find a photo of him doing some drugs but I would report him when I found child-pornography. In fact some pedophiles have been caught this way and the technicians who reported them 'leaked' this information to the authorities like any sane person would.
I personally think that leakers are heroes who put the spotlight on crimes and wrongdoings (that would otherwise continue for a long time) at great personal risk. The worse the crime or more powerful the person/corporation/government they are in fact at risk of losing their livelihood or even life over this.
And *if* I ever commit a severe crime that causes harm to other people I fucking hope someone around me has the guts to leak this information. And when they are afraid that I might pressure or even kill them before a trial I hope there is still an organization that will allow them to leak this information anonymously. You can't be sure that I didn't commit any crime, but nothing is ever sure, you're just going to have to trust my word for now until proven otherwise. But you can help create the circumstance that it's a little more sure by making it easier and accepted to leak...
You have a right to a degree of privacy, and there is a hard line when you commit a crime because the right of victims outweighs the right to privacy.
For example your sexlife is private, you can do with your partner(s) in your own house what you both want. But when someone commits rape, or has sex with a much younger minor what would you do when you found out about it? You have a moral duty to report or 'leak' this information about a terrible wrongdoing... While gossip about who has consensual sex with who is a private matter... 'Leaking' information like that is sleazy gossip and deserves no protection.
Your example of the CC-statement is normally private, but when you come upon someone's CC-statement that has a payment for something that is clearly wrong (and I'm not talking a sex-shop item, but more along the lines of large quantities of chemicals they have no business using under any normal circumstances) you can of course 'leak' this information.
Evidence can be leaked (and in my opinion deserves protection), other stuff that people want to keep private should remain private.
Indeed, this fallacy keeps popping up. If I commit severe crimes and attempt to cover it up you have the right, and I would even dare to say *duty*, to violate my privacy for justice. People and governments alike may keep some things hidden, but there is a limit to both.
But even given the intended operation you have to admit there still might be a bit of unintended operations possible. If there is a preprogrammed code the management server can learn from the processor during the activation process you are not sure this code isn't already on some list before the CPU leaves the Intel factory. When the encrypted SMS arrives with the proper code the CPU has no way of knowing if the source was the management server or some government or hacker. And even when the agreed code is signed by the management server private key (which seems to be the case when I read your description) the CPU can just as well be programmed to also always accept an alternate master key...
And before you try to convince us the NSA would not pull tricks like this consider the fact that backdoors have been added to encryption technology for quite some time. Especially given the fact that you are tying this into the whole disk encryption screams 'exploitable by the government'. And not just able to kill at a distance but more along the lines of being able to retrieve disk encryption keys... full disk encryption is a headache for intelligence agencies and using the largest CPU manufacturer to sneak in a backdoor in would seem like a completely logical action from an intelligence perspective so they can decrypt the drive when they come upon a laptop with this kind of CPU. And what better way of hiding this than by claiming it's a corporate thing that keeps your data safe...
I'm not about to get all paranoid tinfoil hat here, but reasoning with some historic facts it doesn't seem so unlikely. From the intelligence perspective an addition like this would be too great an opportunity to assume they haven't jumped on this.
In this enclosed package you will find one item labeled: democracy (made in USA)
We would like to return this product you have sent us "for free(dom)" (quote from your shipment letter).
The product was DOA. We suspect problems with the design schematics, manufacturing process *and* shipment method were the cause for the havoc wreaked on this product.
Please refrain from sending us any more of this product, we have no interest in dangerous cheap replica's of democracy.
Yeah, the credit card is a problem for me too. For lot's of sites the only option is Mastercard/Visa or Paypal... Discover and American Express are not available everywhere outside the US, so like you suspected much less useful. Even donating to the EFF is not possible without Paypal or a credit card!
Instead of boycotting them I try to look for shops that take other payment methods instead, so in effect some of their clients may lose a customer because of the actions of their payment processor when an alternative webshop is available that offers another payment method. But especially for imports from the US it's unavoidable to use a credit card or Paypal, it's just not possible to stop using them without sacrificing a lot of what the internet has to offer. And some hardware I just need and isn't available otherwise, so what am I gonna do otherwise?
Slashdot Mirror
Uncompromising and unforgiving are two very different things... And if the do or don't of a single persons actions means the end result happens or doesn't it's safe to say it's impossible without someone standing up and taking action first. Please try to realize that without heroes some fights are utterly hopelessly impossible. It's easy to look at it logically in retrospect and say that it obviously was possible because it happened... but would anything have happened without true heroes standing up? I know it's speculating but I'm willing to bet that if everyone was a mindless drone no revolutionary advances of society would ever have been made.
Oh, and I fully agree with that quote especially because I don't regard myself as a static unchanging personality and my beliefs constantly evolve... But I can respect people who do die for a noble cause.
I believe there is no evil master plan, but the system is corrupt in such a way that any person in the system is capable of (unwittingly) participating in evil deeds. So the degree I would assign is probably oblivious participation in evil. You can't really hold those people accountable for the evil they are involved in, but you can hold them accountable for choosing to remain oblivious for the ramifications of their actions.
So you were exactly right about your examples, but the consequences of it are undeniably evil... the people who wrote that law, work for TSA and fight in Iraq are not inherently evil... Sometimes far from it! But it really takes a special kind of awareness not to participate in one way or another with those kinds of evil. We need to identify and fight the true culprit, the corrupt system, and not the scapegoat individual of the day, who are merely a symptom of whats wrong on a larger scale.
There are degrees of evil, and degrees of participation in evil. What Stanley Milgram (and more recent experiments with deadly shocks) showed with his experiments is that any person has the potential for evil deeds... So it's not black-and-white indeed.
Real reason: Dog's are unpatentable.
So you hit the nail on the head, exactly *because* these measures are 1000x more expensive is why they are being pushed... The smell of fear smells like profit to some.
Being realistic never meant you should just accept everything that is wrong. Compromising with evil makes you an accessory to evil. And even the impossible is worth fighting for, especially since sometimes taking on this impossible fight makes previously impossible things possible. People who fight an impossible fight like Rosa Parks, Nelson Mandela or even Thich Quang Duc are heroes because they refuse to compromise with injustice even in the face of prosecution, imprisonment and death.
Yeah, that's what we get for putting up so many solar panels in recent years, notice how this coincides with the graphs... How can we keep tapping the suns energy without thinking about mother earth and father sun... We are doomed! Donate now, and we *might* be able to prevent it (and take full credit for it), but if we can't it's your fault for not donating enough!!! Act now because peak solar is a proven fact, we have some scientists saying something to back it up!
Well, didn't the women change their story only after finding out Assange slept with both of them around the same time? It may not be infidelity but it's close enough... Just like Swedish rape is not rape in the usual sense Swedish infidelity is not infidelity in the usual sense either. :-)
Fuck man, I bet a thousand lawyers just came in their pants when they read your post... A system imploding upon peoples stupidity sounds like a sexy golden opportunity in the ears of those money-grubbing vultures...
No, vigilantism would be when I found pictures of a guy raping a kid and I would kill him myself or post his address on the web with the intent of letting other vigilantes 'take care' of the problem. The morally right thing to do is leak/report this information to the authorities and give the guy a fair trial. Are you really saying to me that because the guy *might* be innocent you would just do nothing and *possibly* allow him to continue to rape other children? Are you the guy who would just stand by and look away and let terrible shit happen? You have to admit there is a line you have to draw somewhere...
I mentioned that I considered the option that the photo in question did not show a crime, but it was a deliberately tricky example. When there is sufficient reason to suspect a crime you can report it and still assume innocence, but leave the person to the court and to exercise his right to a defense and fair trial.
You are right that corporations and government are a different matter, but mostly because there are no authorities to go to (and if you do you might find yourself in a shitload of trouble). Because of this leaking anonymously is the only option available to bring this to the publics attention. In this case you can reasonably call it vigilantism because you don't involve authorities, but take matters into your own hand to force the hand of the corporation and government. When the authorities fail at their duties you have a right to this 'vigilantism'.
They probably didn't know the citizen recorded, otherwise it could very well have been possible that he forgot to put the tape in the camera... Just like with a high profile incident such as the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes where the hard drives from the CCTV camera's all went missing... It's funny how CCTV is used so actively by government to check on citizens, but when citizens want to check on the government there just happens to be a malfunction... It's almost as if they don't want citizens having proof of their failures...
So all we citizens can do is hope we don't get shot in the head 7 times because we look like a terrorist or behave suspiciously like for example going into a hypoglycemic coma!
Yes, I agree. In my personal opinion governments should be fully transparent. Even for state secrets information should be publicly made available exactly why something is secret, by who's authority and for how long. And the reason 'for national security' is not admissible, only a description of what threats would come from releasing the information publicly. You can have transparency *and* some secrets, as long as it's transparent how much is secret and why.
Right now governments have shown that they do not responsibly label things secret, so citizens have no transparent way of checking if their reasons are valid (and they have been proven multiple times to be completely invalid reasons like covering up war crimes and corruption). Because of this I think it's the right of the people to leak all secret information they come upon. It's the government who brought this upon themselves, and the only way to prevent this is transparency the people can check and trust in.
You find video of rape and murder, it may be real, it may be acted. Let the court decide after the people involved have their say... Just assuming nothing is up and leaving it at that is morally despicable. You can still assume innocence, but that does not mean you should not act on the information.
You make no sense. Making a private thing publicly available violates privacy by definition. And you can still presume innocence even when you come upon evidence you can think: 'this guy could just as well be innocent, I'd better leave it to the proper authorities to figure this out and let the guy defend himself in a court'. Just violating the privacy for one wrong thing does not negate the presumption of innocence, and given the fact that you cannot establish guilt but a court can doesn't that imply you should leak this information especially to honor the persons right to a fair trial.
Use your own best judgement. But I personally would say yes.
Only a court can establish guilt, and without proof there is no way this can happen. You have a catch 22 there if you value privacy so much that you cannot 'leak' proof of wrongdoing. So in my opinion when you find proof that in your best judgement implicates someone you have a right to violate that persons privacy by releasing this proof to the authorities (same goes for corporations or governments).
Note that what is happening to Assange has nothing to do with anything remotely connected to proof or even the semblance of a proper legal process. But still, if I were to come upon photo's of Assange fucking a handcuffed and beaten woman I would violate his privacy and release that photo even if it may be a fake and I don't like what is going on at all. I can't establish guilt alone and I surely would not censor this information because I think it's in the greater good, as if I know what's best for everyone... That would go against everything Wikileaks stands for.
I agree that a government should be fully transparent, realistically however they need to be able to keep some secrets 'private'... And in that regard people and governments privacy are roughly the same... Privacy should be respected unless you have proof of a crime. It does not mean posting all personal data of someone online nor does it mean invalidation of all privacy, it just means that relevant data for prosecution of the crime ceases to be private.
I strongly agree with you. Possession should not be punished so harshly because it probably reduces the chances of catching the perpetrators. However I still think these pictures should be reported (and in some cases anonymous leaking might help protect the person who finds this pictures from prosecution) to be able to catch the guys actually molesting the kids...
Bullshit! You can presume innocence until you have proof of wrongdoing. But when that proof is covered up you have a moral obligation to leak it..
Leaking is what you do when you come across information that is evidence of some wrongdoing and you want to serve justice by exposing this. Most leakers are people within the organization who feel a moral obligation to do their part in stopping wrongdoings, not people looking for wrong stuff to leak.
Your example:
- When you hack into someone's PC and find images of a crime and leak those (I would suspect after the owner refuses to be blackmailed in this scenario) you are morally wrong and in fact committing a crime.
- When on the other hand you fix the guys broken PC and during the backup come across said photo's you are morally right to report this individual. And before going into detail of what to report and what not just use your judgement, I for one would not report a guy when I find a photo of him doing some drugs but I would report him when I found child-pornography. In fact some pedophiles have been caught this way and the technicians who reported them 'leaked' this information to the authorities like any sane person would.
I personally think that leakers are heroes who put the spotlight on crimes and wrongdoings (that would otherwise continue for a long time) at great personal risk. The worse the crime or more powerful the person/corporation/government they are in fact at risk of losing their livelihood or even life over this.
And *if* I ever commit a severe crime that causes harm to other people I fucking hope someone around me has the guts to leak this information. And when they are afraid that I might pressure or even kill them before a trial I hope there is still an organization that will allow them to leak this information anonymously. You can't be sure that I didn't commit any crime, but nothing is ever sure, you're just going to have to trust my word for now until proven otherwise. But you can help create the circumstance that it's a little more sure by making it easier and accepted to leak...
You have a right to a degree of privacy, and there is a hard line when you commit a crime because the right of victims outweighs the right to privacy.
For example your sexlife is private, you can do with your partner(s) in your own house what you both want. But when someone commits rape, or has sex with a much younger minor what would you do when you found out about it? You have a moral duty to report or 'leak' this information about a terrible wrongdoing... While gossip about who has consensual sex with who is a private matter... 'Leaking' information like that is sleazy gossip and deserves no protection.
Your example of the CC-statement is normally private, but when you come upon someone's CC-statement that has a payment for something that is clearly wrong (and I'm not talking a sex-shop item, but more along the lines of large quantities of chemicals they have no business using under any normal circumstances) you can of course 'leak' this information.
Evidence can be leaked (and in my opinion deserves protection), other stuff that people want to keep private should remain private.
Indeed, this fallacy keeps popping up. If I commit severe crimes and attempt to cover it up you have the right, and I would even dare to say *duty*, to violate my privacy for justice. People and governments alike may keep some things hidden, but there is a limit to both.
Thanks for the interesting details of this tech.
But even given the intended operation you have to admit there still might be a bit of unintended operations possible. If there is a preprogrammed code the management server can learn from the processor during the activation process you are not sure this code isn't already on some list before the CPU leaves the Intel factory. When the encrypted SMS arrives with the proper code the CPU has no way of knowing if the source was the management server or some government or hacker. And even when the agreed code is signed by the management server private key (which seems to be the case when I read your description) the CPU can just as well be programmed to also always accept an alternate master key...
And before you try to convince us the NSA would not pull tricks like this consider the fact that backdoors have been added to encryption technology for quite some time. Especially given the fact that you are tying this into the whole disk encryption screams 'exploitable by the government'. And not just able to kill at a distance but more along the lines of being able to retrieve disk encryption keys... full disk encryption is a headache for intelligence agencies and using the largest CPU manufacturer to sneak in a backdoor in would seem like a completely logical action from an intelligence perspective so they can decrypt the drive when they come upon a laptop with this kind of CPU. And what better way of hiding this than by claiming it's a corporate thing that keeps your data safe...
I'm not about to get all paranoid tinfoil hat here, but reasoning with some historic facts it doesn't seem so unlikely. From the intelligence perspective an addition like this would be too great an opportunity to assume they haven't jumped on this.
Dear sirs/madams,
In this enclosed package you will find one item labeled: democracy (made in USA)
We would like to return this product you have sent us "for free(dom)" (quote from your shipment letter).
The product was DOA. We suspect problems with the design schematics, manufacturing process *and* shipment method were the cause for the havoc wreaked on this product.
Please refrain from sending us any more of this product, we have no interest in dangerous cheap replica's of democracy.
Kind regards,
Rest of the world
I call shenanigans! Zuckerberg is not even 1/20th the man Assange is (actually 4,8% according to these stats)...
Yeah, the credit card is a problem for me too. For lot's of sites the only option is Mastercard/Visa or Paypal... Discover and American Express are not available everywhere outside the US, so like you suspected much less useful. Even donating to the EFF is not possible without Paypal or a credit card!
Instead of boycotting them I try to look for shops that take other payment methods instead, so in effect some of their clients may lose a customer because of the actions of their payment processor when an alternative webshop is available that offers another payment method. But especially for imports from the US it's unavoidable to use a credit card or Paypal, it's just not possible to stop using them without sacrificing a lot of what the internet has to offer. And some hardware I just need and isn't available otherwise, so what am I gonna do otherwise?