The problem lies not so much in the bringing up of fears, more that people are being conditioned to be afraid. Let's face it -- flying is dangerous, yet millions of people fly successfully with no problem. The odds are very low that you will be involved in a plane crash; the odds are much better that you will be in a car crash on the way to the airport. Fear is a healthy reaction to things -- it's a first line of defense in unknown situations, making people more cautious. Eventually, once enough knowledge is gained, that fear can be overridden. What happens nowadays is that fear-mongers chant these things, almost like fear mantras, playing on them and reinforcing the fact that you should be afraid, even though in most cases, rational judgment will show you that you have little to fear.
All valid points. What good is a system of state-sponsored punishment if after you've paid your debt, you're still considered guilty? Why would that make any prisoner want to reform, if he/she knew they would be treated the same no matter what? Yes, there is the problem of recidivism, but I think that is exacerbated by this kind of thing.
No... it sounds juvenile, puerile, and self-serving. The only thing that would make it worse is if the trademark is actually granted. Really, is this what you have to do to get people to notice you. If he's really hot for attention, walk through town in a purple plaid suit with neon orange tie, but leave the internet community out of it.
Frankly I don't trust either. I look at anything I read on-line with heavy-handed skepticism, because I've been burned a time or two. Also, haven't the editors of The Register been feuding with Jimmy Wales for years now? You have to take what both sides say with a large grain of salt. I give the edge to The Register simply because independent groups have uncovered the abuses going on with Wikipedia.
It's not the idea. The idea was "everyone contributes, and everyone is equal." If that was still the idea, we wouldn't be hearing all these stories of editorial abuse, because things are now unequal, and that inequality is what's breeding all these problems.
Put a group in charge, and you're going to get abuse. That's just a fact. To get around this, most other organizations add some checks and balances, some oversight, some limitations on power. WP didn't do this, and now they're suffering for it.
An amazing parallel to representative government. In the beginning, we set up a government where everyone has their say by voting for the people who represent them. We invest those people with tremendous power. 535 people make the laws in the United States, 1 person gets to review them before they become law, and 9 others get to review them after they become law. Despite the system of checks and balances the original framers of the Constitution tried to create, the country is run at the behest of 300 million+ citizens by only 545 of their countrymen. That it works at all is amazing; that it is corrupt to some degree is to be understood.
The Wikipedia problem won't really be easily solvable, because at some point it needs to make the same trade-offs that the Constitutional Convention made. Eventually, if you want a higher degree of accuracy, you're going to have to reduce the number of people who have access to the data and you're going to have to trust that they have no ulterior motives in their editing, and you're going to have to keep track of just what they do and call them on it when it's clear there is malfeasance.
Definitely funny, but as with all Penny Arcade strips, holds a great grain of truth. Wikipedia is billed as on-line encyclopedia, and while it may contain encyclopedic (and in many cases, overabundant) knowledge, it is actually a system whereby groups can vie for control of the information that others see about a particular topic. How many scandals have their been with entries being edited by groups/individuals on the sly, to make an opposing idea or person seem unpalatable or to spread falsehoods or innuendo? And given its size, how much potential inaccuracy or outright prevarication goes unnoticed?
It's pretty simple: Wikipedia the concept is excellent. The execution lacks quite a bit. At some point, you have to limit the number of people who can actually edit it, and remove the possibility of it going from encyclopedia of knowledge to something more like Facebook or MySpace. And yes, I know, who do you get to edit it? Eventually you have to bite the bullet, trust some people to be full-time editors, watch them to prevent abuse, and cultivate a culture of accuracy in information transmission.
That's my point. Security should be something that is taken out of the hands of the average user. They shouldn't be expected to become security experts. They should be taught how to be a little more web-savvy. I hear a commercial all the time on the radio in NYC for CyberStreetSmart.org, which is run by the New York Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG), trying to do just that. The commercial is compelling because they say (paraphrasing) "If someone came up to you on the street and said they had a million dollars to give you and all you had to do is give them $1000 to get it, you'd laugh at them, but on-line, most people don't think twice." That's why security has to be built-in rather than added-on: the average user has been sold the idea that the Internet is magic. They don't apply the same rules to information there that they would to things that happen to them directly.
Most people have a yellow light on their dashboard that tells them when they are running low on gas, and yet people still run out of gas. I suspect most people wouldn't know what the green light meant if you asked them.
My idea is that the security has to be built-in. An application, web or standalone, has to be built to be secure enough that it would not require the user's intervention (or outside third-party software) to secure it. As to the user's too dumb not to click on links in Viagra emails, well I'm of two minds. On the one hand, the Darwin idea -- if you're not smart enough to avoid the pitfall, then natural selection takes over and your computer is hash when it gets overrun by viruses/trojans. On the other hand, my original principle holds: if the systems are designed to be as secure as possible, then they should be able to survive low-grade attacks, so that even those morons would gain some sort of protection. But if their stupidity exceeds a certain limit, then they will just have to suffer the consequences.
It's not like this hasn't been noted before: PEBKAC Still Plagues PC Security. Your average user firmly believes what they are told by "experts" or the guy who sells them the computer. They are not web-savvy and don't dig into the background on computer security. They think that all they have to do is run their spyware remover and update their anti-virus and their fine. Heck, too many don't even know they have such utilities, and if the do know, aren't actually aware if they are running or not!
Computer security must be taken out of the hands of the user where the user is likely to not have a clue how it works.
Also, OLPC initiated the "Buy 1, 1 Gets Donated" program in time for the holiday season, so it would be possible for an American school district to shell out $200 a copy for them and thereby send an equivalent number to under-developed countries.
Welcome to the Garden State. Never let it be said local officials were ever too happy about having their judgment questioned. When it comes to mayors, school boards, and township committees, N.J. is a hotbed for corruption, and whenever someone calls someone else out, there's always some under-handed move by local government to quash the opposition. The sad part is, despite his campaign promises, out illustrious governor hasn't done a damned thing about political corruption on any level in New Jersey.
I frankly don't think this subpoena has a chance in hell of surviving, but I do feel it's going to have to go pretty far up the chain before it gets choked off. NJ just has the kind of effect.
Taken from the blog Recording Industry vs The People
Carlos Linares, upon whose declaration the subpoena was issued, had no first hand information whatsoever;
the RIAA's "data mining" investigation does not reveal how the files were obtained or whether they were ever shared with anyone;
the RIAA papers did not show that any infringing activity actually took place;
MediaSentry appears to have been conducting an investigation without an investigator's license, in violation of ORS 703.405 and ORS 703.993(s), which is a crime;
in Atlantic v. Andersen, based on the same theories and investigative techniques as those used here, they had been found by the Court to have stalled and resisted discovery, before abandoning their case rather than oppose Ms. Andersen's summary judgment motion;
the RIAA appears to have been abusing the judicial process by obtaining information through subpoenas which it then hands over to "collection firms" using them "to leverage payment of arbitrary sums of money, based on threats and evidence from the data mining";
the RIAA concealed a material fact from its original ex parte motion papers, which sought to create the aura of an emergency and the need for immediate ex parte action -- the fact that the University had informed the RIAA in July that the requested information had been gathered and would be preserved;
the RIAA lawyers falsely implied that the Attorney General's office had failed to "meet and confer" with them prior to making the motion to quash, even though the AG's office had in fact conferred with the RIAA's lawyers;
the deposition testimony of the RIAA's expert witness Doug Jacobson in UMG v. Lindor tends to indicate that the RIAA has already accessed private information on the computers of University of Oregon students; and
the RIAA has failed to provide an affidavit of the individual who actually conducted the 'investigation'.
I think they have enough ammunition here to put the RIAA on the defensive. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out, especially what counter-arguments the RIAA comes up with. This smells like the SCO all over again.
In case you haven't noticed, most sites have become Advertising agents, deriving their revenue almost exclusively from adverts. I personally would like to see a shift toward a pay-for-service model where I could avoid all the advertising. I go to web sites to find information, not to be bombarded with flash-driven crap hawking things I wouldn't buy in a million years. If Google wanted me to pay $10 a month so I could do searches and use Gmail and all their other tools without the constant Madison Ave pitch, I'd sign up. Plus, if I'm paying them my money, I could hold them accountable more easily.
Facebook is for the masses. I suspect that most/.ers are tech-savvy enough to have no desire to have anything to do with it. I could be wrong. If I want a presence on the Internet, I'll build my own site, maintain it, control its content, and make damned sure the information isn't being abused to the best of my ability. Call it tin-hat paranoia if you like, but I can't unequivocally trust any web application/service, though I've started to use Gmail and the new on-line service Sandy to a limited extent. But I continue to watch my Net footprint to make sure it doesn't get too large. Facebook is nothing I want to have anything to do with -- I think that most users don't even understand the context of the problem, let alone just what they are being exposed to, so in that way the owners are right. It's only the techie-geek minority that see this for what it is: an invasion of privacy.
Of course there's a lot of spin: law enforcement is having a terrible time shutting these things down. More to the point, did this "arrest" actually cause the botnet to go down? Doubt it. Even if this kid wrote something that aided the botnet ring to operate, I suspect that he can't simply turn off what he did and render the botnet dead. Not to mention they did not actually charge him with anything -- which shows me that the authorities aren't actually sure what he did.
I have an old Yahoo! account that I check on every so often. It's nothing but a spam magnet now, and no matter how many times I've reported all the spam, it's still getting through. I guess they're trying to be a spam lightning rod by letting it all through.
Actually, I don't think that's a bad analogy. Making liquor illegal only drove liquor production and distribution underground, brought about the rise of organized crime (remember Al Capone?), and probably increased the amount of alcoholism prevalent at the time. Face it -- if the liquor supply is limited, and you know where to get it, you're going to try and get as much of it as you can. Same thing is happening to music -- making file sharing and ripping illegal is simply driving the illegal file sharing economy, and it's costing the music industry far more money to try and stamp it out than it would be to embrace it and try to work with buyers.
At least Google is getting back on track dumping those bastards. While most people probably don't change their default settings to see anything more than the first 10 results, I am constantly looking through the first 100 on various searches and have seen more and more of that. I was wondering if some of the claims of Google's drop from #1 would imminent if something didn't change.
Well, they may be getting back at them, but...
Ironically, Google itself refused to confirm or deny that it had cleansed its index of the more than 40,000 malware hosting sites, or even that they had existed. "Google takes the security of our users very seriously, especially when it comes to malware," a company spokeswoman said today in an e-mail. "In our search results, we try to warn users of potentially dangerous sites when we know of them. Sites that clearly exploit browser security holes to install software, such as malware, spyware, viruses, adware and Trojan horses, are in violation of the Google quality guidelines and may be removed from Google's index."
What is Google afraid of? That their stock price will plunge if everyone finds out they were manipulated by malware sites?
[U.S. Magistrate Judge Stephen] Crocker -- who unsealed documents detailing the showdown against prosecutors' wishes -- said he believed prosecutors were seeking the information for a legitimate purpose. But he said First Amendment concerns were justified and outweighed the subpoena's law enforcement purpose.
"The subpoena is troubling because it permits the government to peek into the reading habits of specific individuals without their knowledge or permission," Crocker wrote. "It is an unsettling and un-American scenario to envision federal agents nosing through the reading lists of law-abiding citizens while hunting for evidence against somebody else."
So, not everybody in the American legal system is providing a rubber stamp for Federal nosiness. I can't believe the Feds actually thought this was a viable thing -- perhaps they've been swayed by all the success with warrant-less wiretapping and private snooping. I think this may be representative of a desire by the lower courts to put the breaks on rampant violations of American civil rights. At least, one can hope.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem lies not so much in the bringing up of fears, more that people are being conditioned to be afraid. Let's face it -- flying is dangerous, yet millions of people fly successfully with no problem. The odds are very low that you will be involved in a plane crash; the odds are much better that you will be in a car crash on the way to the airport. Fear is a healthy reaction to things -- it's a first line of defense in unknown situations, making people more cautious. Eventually, once enough knowledge is gained, that fear can be overridden. What happens nowadays is that fear-mongers chant these things, almost like fear mantras, playing on them and reinforcing the fact that you should be afraid, even though in most cases, rational judgment will show you that you have little to fear.
All valid points. What good is a system of state-sponsored punishment if after you've paid your debt, you're still considered guilty? Why would that make any prisoner want to reform, if he/she knew they would be treated the same no matter what? Yes, there is the problem of recidivism, but I think that is exacerbated by this kind of thing.
No... it sounds juvenile, puerile, and self-serving. The only thing that would make it worse is if the trademark is actually granted. Really, is this what you have to do to get people to notice you. If he's really hot for attention, walk through town in a purple plaid suit with neon orange tie, but leave the internet community out of it.
Frankly I don't trust either. I look at anything I read on-line with heavy-handed skepticism, because I've been burned a time or two. Also, haven't the editors of The Register been feuding with Jimmy Wales for years now? You have to take what both sides say with a large grain of salt. I give the edge to The Register simply because independent groups have uncovered the abuses going on with Wikipedia.
Put a group in charge, and you're going to get abuse. That's just a fact. To get around this, most other organizations add some checks and balances, some oversight, some limitations on power. WP didn't do this, and now they're suffering for it.
An amazing parallel to representative government. In the beginning, we set up a government where everyone has their say by voting for the people who represent them. We invest those people with tremendous power. 535 people make the laws in the United States, 1 person gets to review them before they become law, and 9 others get to review them after they become law. Despite the system of checks and balances the original framers of the Constitution tried to create, the country is run at the behest of 300 million+ citizens by only 545 of their countrymen. That it works at all is amazing; that it is corrupt to some degree is to be understood.
The Wikipedia problem won't really be easily solvable, because at some point it needs to make the same trade-offs that the Constitutional Convention made. Eventually, if you want a higher degree of accuracy, you're going to have to reduce the number of people who have access to the data and you're going to have to trust that they have no ulterior motives in their editing, and you're going to have to keep track of just what they do and call them on it when it's clear there is malfeasance.
Definitely funny, but as with all Penny Arcade strips, holds a great grain of truth. Wikipedia is billed as on-line encyclopedia, and while it may contain encyclopedic (and in many cases, overabundant) knowledge, it is actually a system whereby groups can vie for control of the information that others see about a particular topic. How many scandals have their been with entries being edited by groups/individuals on the sly, to make an opposing idea or person seem unpalatable or to spread falsehoods or innuendo? And given its size, how much potential inaccuracy or outright prevarication goes unnoticed?
It's pretty simple: Wikipedia the concept is excellent. The execution lacks quite a bit. At some point, you have to limit the number of people who can actually edit it, and remove the possibility of it going from encyclopedia of knowledge to something more like Facebook or MySpace. And yes, I know, who do you get to edit it? Eventually you have to bite the bullet, trust some people to be full-time editors, watch them to prevent abuse, and cultivate a culture of accuracy in information transmission.
That's my point. Security should be something that is taken out of the hands of the average user. They shouldn't be expected to become security experts. They should be taught how to be a little more web-savvy. I hear a commercial all the time on the radio in NYC for CyberStreetSmart.org, which is run by the New York Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG), trying to do just that. The commercial is compelling because they say (paraphrasing) "If someone came up to you on the street and said they had a million dollars to give you and all you had to do is give them $1000 to get it, you'd laugh at them, but on-line, most people don't think twice." That's why security has to be built-in rather than added-on: the average user has been sold the idea that the Internet is magic. They don't apply the same rules to information there that they would to things that happen to them directly.
Most people have a yellow light on their dashboard that tells them when they are running low on gas, and yet people still run out of gas. I suspect most people wouldn't know what the green light meant if you asked them.
My idea is that the security has to be built-in. An application, web or standalone, has to be built to be secure enough that it would not require the user's intervention (or outside third-party software) to secure it. As to the user's too dumb not to click on links in Viagra emails, well I'm of two minds. On the one hand, the Darwin idea -- if you're not smart enough to avoid the pitfall, then natural selection takes over and your computer is hash when it gets overrun by viruses/trojans. On the other hand, my original principle holds: if the systems are designed to be as secure as possible, then they should be able to survive low-grade attacks, so that even those morons would gain some sort of protection. But if their stupidity exceeds a certain limit, then they will just have to suffer the consequences.
It's not like this hasn't been noted before: PEBKAC Still Plagues PC Security. Your average user firmly believes what they are told by "experts" or the guy who sells them the computer. They are not web-savvy and don't dig into the background on computer security. They think that all they have to do is run their spyware remover and update their anti-virus and their fine. Heck, too many don't even know they have such utilities, and if the do know, aren't actually aware if they are running or not!
Computer security must be taken out of the hands of the user where the user is likely to not have a clue how it works.
Also, OLPC initiated the "Buy 1, 1 Gets Donated" program in time for the holiday season, so it would be possible for an American school district to shell out $200 a copy for them and thereby send an equivalent number to under-developed countries.
XP?!? Bah! I'm trying to "upgrade" to Windows 3.11 for Workgroups!
Welcome to the Garden State. Never let it be said local officials were ever too happy about having their judgment questioned. When it comes to mayors, school boards, and township committees, N.J. is a hotbed for corruption, and whenever someone calls someone else out, there's always some under-handed move by local government to quash the opposition. The sad part is, despite his campaign promises, out illustrious governor hasn't done a damned thing about political corruption on any level in New Jersey.
I frankly don't think this subpoena has a chance in hell of surviving, but I do feel it's going to have to go pretty far up the chain before it gets choked off. NJ just has the kind of effect.
To be accurate, they should have used chimpanzees who were attending college.
...it reveals my latent mutant abilities. I'm personally hoping to find out I can generate fire.
Taken from the blog Recording Industry vs The People
I think they have enough ammunition here to put the RIAA on the defensive. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out, especially what counter-arguments the RIAA comes up with. This smells like the SCO all over again.
In case you haven't noticed, most sites have become Advertising agents, deriving their revenue almost exclusively from adverts. I personally would like to see a shift toward a pay-for-service model where I could avoid all the advertising. I go to web sites to find information, not to be bombarded with flash-driven crap hawking things I wouldn't buy in a million years. If Google wanted me to pay $10 a month so I could do searches and use Gmail and all their other tools without the constant Madison Ave pitch, I'd sign up. Plus, if I'm paying them my money, I could hold them accountable more easily.
Facebook is for the masses. I suspect that most /.ers are tech-savvy enough to have no desire to have anything to do with it. I could be wrong. If I want a presence on the Internet, I'll build my own site, maintain it, control its content, and make damned sure the information isn't being abused to the best of my ability. Call it tin-hat paranoia if you like, but I can't unequivocally trust any web application/service, though I've started to use Gmail and the new on-line service Sandy to a limited extent. But I continue to watch my Net footprint to make sure it doesn't get too large. Facebook is nothing I want to have anything to do with -- I think that most users don't even understand the context of the problem, let alone just what they are being exposed to, so in that way the owners are right. It's only the techie-geek minority that see this for what it is: an invasion of privacy.
No, the kid is eye candy for law enforcement... he does the perp walk so that they can be seen to be doing something about the problem.
Of course there's a lot of spin: law enforcement is having a terrible time shutting these things down. More to the point, did this "arrest" actually cause the botnet to go down? Doubt it. Even if this kid wrote something that aided the botnet ring to operate, I suspect that he can't simply turn off what he did and render the botnet dead. Not to mention they did not actually charge him with anything -- which shows me that the authorities aren't actually sure what he did.
I have an old Yahoo! account that I check on every so often. It's nothing but a spam magnet now, and no matter how many times I've reported all the spam, it's still getting through. I guess they're trying to be a spam lightning rod by letting it all through.
Spammer 1: We can't get anything past Google's filter.
Spammer 2: Agreed. [sighs]
Spammer 1: I guess we'll have to give up spamming.
Spammer 2: Seems that way.
Spammer 1: Unless...
Spammer 2: You have an idea?
Spammer 1: Why don't we keep spamming everyone else!
Spammer 2: Rapture! You're so smart!
Actually, I don't think that's a bad analogy. Making liquor illegal only drove liquor production and distribution underground, brought about the rise of organized crime (remember Al Capone?), and probably increased the amount of alcoholism prevalent at the time. Face it -- if the liquor supply is limited, and you know where to get it, you're going to try and get as much of it as you can. Same thing is happening to music -- making file sharing and ripping illegal is simply driving the illegal file sharing economy, and it's costing the music industry far more money to try and stamp it out than it would be to embrace it and try to work with buyers.
Well, they may be getting back at them, but...
Ironically, Google itself refused to confirm or deny that it had cleansed its index of the more than 40,000 malware hosting sites, or even that they had existed. "Google takes the security of our users very seriously, especially when it comes to malware," a company spokeswoman said today in an e-mail. "In our search results, we try to warn users of potentially dangerous sites when we know of them. Sites that clearly exploit browser security holes to install software, such as malware, spyware, viruses, adware and Trojan horses, are in violation of the Google quality guidelines and may be removed from Google's index."What is Google afraid of? That their stock price will plunge if everyone finds out they were manipulated by malware sites?
"The subpoena is troubling because it permits the government to peek into the reading habits of specific individuals without their knowledge or permission," Crocker wrote. "It is an unsettling and un-American scenario to envision federal agents nosing through the reading lists of law-abiding citizens while hunting for evidence against somebody else."
So, not everybody in the American legal system is providing a rubber stamp for Federal nosiness. I can't believe the Feds actually thought this was a viable thing -- perhaps they've been swayed by all the success with warrant-less wiretapping and private snooping. I think this may be representative of a desire by the lower courts to put the breaks on rampant violations of American civil rights. At least, one can hope.