oldspewey spewed:
"I am secretly hopeful that this will eventually turn into a great big litigation circle-jerk."
Turn into? Isn't that what we've had for the last ten years? Big tech companies saying, "I'll let you jerk my patent if I can jerk yours . .." And "Hey, small fry! His portfolio is unzipped. Let's all jerk his patent. He won't fight back."
And then there are the trolls walking around fully exposed. "I got this biiggg patent from a friend, and you seem to be jerking it. Pay up! And pay up big!"
This big auto-erotic drama has taken the place of a working patent system. Patents are supposed to increase innovation. But under the current orgy, patents are government subsidized tools of aggression that can be hurled at a less-than-witting enemy.
My strategy seems to be clearer and clearer.
1) have a facebook account in your real name for old friends and new acquaintances to find you. Don't put many details there. Check to make sure no one is taggin photos of you under your real name as well.
2) When people friend you there, send them to your relaxed, open other facebook account under an alias where they can discuss and post photos under your alternate ID relatively freely.
Period.
Why people accept any system that forces them to use their real name on internet forums is beyond me. The Australian "sheeple" term comes to mind.
We can get so much more exploration done using many small and comparatively inexpensive probes sent on special missions than we can by spending HUGE amounts to send people to the moon -- again. As they say, "been there done that".
Much better to have two satellites apiece orbiting around every planet, more robots for Mars, Mercury, Titan, etc. We can do this now with our current budget and learn much from it.
When we get the technology to send people to space, we'll go. Going now would be like Columbus trying to discover the Indies in a rowboat with his elementary school friends.
I personally think ID cards and pervasive CCTV monitoring would be a good thing IFF the data were fed directly into an independent, accredited agency which only released or confirmed data under strict guidelines.
However:
A national ID doesn't have a prayer of being implemented in America anytime soon. The UK can't even pull this off, and those "apathetes" let their government watch them everywhere.
One strategy would be to flood such sites with scripts that make salacious stories and insert random names and hacked student lists if available. Flood the sites with everyone's name. That is the most direct way to finally convince the low-hanging fruit that the sites have no credibility.
You want to strap a gas engine onto an electric car? Why don't you go all out? Just run a belt from the rear axle to your generator and then you can charge as you go. You'll never need to charge it again;-)
I don't know why anybody hasn't linked the two together, but SMS control codes are how the police get your phone to send your GPS coordinates when making a 911 call. Control codes are also there for turning the mic on and broadcasting the audio -- and who knows what else? (look up "roaming bug" for more info.)
She is a minor. Minor's are protected by child porn laws because they cannot give their consent for sexual activity. So, how can she be accountable for posting what she is unaccountable for appearing in? Either she is a minor deserving protection, or she is an adult who can consent to being photographed. You can't have it both ways!
I don't want to undermine the protest against the general creep of privacy invasion, but this should also be seen as a call to use aliases, TOR, proxy servers, incognito, or the like anytime you search for something potentially sensitive.
I like posting under my real name, but I've started posting more political/taboo musings under aliases, which also develop their own reputations. My IP address is still recorded somewhere, but what I'm saying is not so bad. And yes, I know I'm late to the alias game . . .
For the more revolutionary stuff that the NSA or the like *might* find interesting one day, I use incognito (TOR).
Having a net where I didn't have to do this would be great, but depending on corporations words that they don't record IP addresses, etc., is producing a situation even more dangerous, one in which there is a false sense of security.
You buy/make 2 NAS with RAID 5 or 6. Your friend somewhere far away does the same. One of your NAS's becomes his, and vice versa. You set them up to mirror each other. If your house burns down or the contents get stolen, you buy/make two new NAS and get the data back from your friend.
Upgrade in 5 years and continue indefinitely.
All this talk of just using Photoshop to alter the images is just wrong-headed.
Photoshop's code is closed. Adobe, as well as every other closed-source image editor, could have long ago been "contacted" by agents from the NSA et al. and been "persuaded" under terms of an NDA to include watermark analogs in all images passing through their apps.
This happened with printer manufacturers; why would anyone assume it hasn't happened with image editors (and video and music everything else)?
http://w2.eff.org/Privacy/printers/docucolor/
The cameras themselves may even have such tagging info included. Just 1% of the pixels shifted in a predetermined matrix (and compensated for in neighboring pixels) could easily and practically invisibly contain make, model, serial number, and date of file creation.
If this info is in thew hardware, even using open-source editors wouldn't ensure ID-free files.
What is needed, for images, would be an open-source photo ID stripper. This would be an app that:
1) removes all EXIF data from jpegs.
2) reconstitutes the photo by rendering, then applying an algorithm that slightly changes nearly every pixel (including slightly altering progressively larger sections of the photo in case specific pixels don't hold the data but areas do), and then re-compressing the image.
It could even be trained on specific cameras to remove hot and cold pixels.
If some hobbyists were to put together images of ubuntu netbook remix and similar for the more popular netbooks, with their fairly consistent hardware, then Joe-Six-Pack and Sarah-Hockey-Mom could do a simple "refresh install" themselves.
Since many won't have optical drives, this would be best done by apps (Windows, Mac, and Linux) that automatically format a USB flash drive into a system recovery drive.
Can't you just imagine who would love have a biometric list of all Jews? The first step in exterminating a whole people would be to get a list of them all. (note: I am not trying to sound anti-Semitic; I didn't create this situation...)
This is just weird. Are all national ID systems going to result in such absurdities? Britain has show absolute daftness in handling the overabundance of data they already have; and they pretend its reasonable to want more.
I'll take that wager. With something on the order of one atom of hydrogen per cubic centimeter of interstellar space (http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2000/DaWeiCai.shtml), or even two to four atoms per cubic meter of space (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_space), I think interstellar atomic hydrogen just in the Milky Way will be multiple orders of magnitude greater than all hydrogen on earth, including the hydrogen bound in molecules of water, etc.
If you care to quantify the number of said molecules on earth, I'll compute the amount of space needed to equal that.
Take the battery out, and the phone becomes a brick -- not trackable at all. Put the battery back in a make a call. Take the battery back out and breathe easy . . . This will also render the "roaming bug" *feature* of a cell phone useless as well.
The more the masses continue with bad privacy protection, the bigger and more vibrant will be the cracker population feeding on them. This cracker community will get its training and sustenance from the easy marks, but many of them will always be trying for the higher hanging fruit -- that's you and me.
If we can vastly reduce the low-hanging fruit, the masses who don't protect their privacy, then we can snuff out much of this cracker community. Many of those crackers will get other jobs as hackers never becoming dependent on cracking, and we'll all live better.
Greg
I've never before heard this. Latin/old English pairs (people/folk, pork/pig, etc.) did not come from the Roman invasion of England. It came from the Norman Conquest of England in 1066:
http://community.middlebury.edu/~harris/EngLatGrammar.html The Norman Invasion of the 11th century made French the court and official language of England for several centuries, during which time English as a language came under the influence of French, not only in terms of words and manners of speech, but also in the way French grammar functions.
Compatibility makes HD-DVD a natural PC component. There are no downsides. I wouldn't get a stand-alone player of any kind now. I'll stay with regular DVD and use my hard drive and HTPC for HD content for the next several years. However, in building a new PC, putting in an HD-DVD is becoming a nice option. You still have the ability to read and burn regular DVD+/-R's, and you can can burn a HD-DVD as well, though these will not be readable till HD-DVD replaces regular DVD on PC's.
In the initial editing, they need to dispose of obvious over-runs. Then a copy goes on fault-tolerant servers. The servers need to be mirrored around the world as well. Codecs are included on the servers.
Amazon could do this for them today. Google could really set them up -- and make a backup copy of their own.
G-)
.....Great post, beyondkaoru. I think what is needed is for the public education system to educate us all to be skeptical of advertisers, snake oil salesmen, and anonymous claims to knowledge...
.....As a species, we humans tend to grow and develop always thinking that someone else is better than us... knows more than us... or has the right or might to tell us what to do. We are never taught, at least in American public schools, to investigate and question assertions of authority. Creating such a consensus alone would works wonders.
.....It is a fundamental oversight in culture design, it seems to me. Yet how to carry it out the change is the problem. I cannot clearly characterize what exactly needs to be taught, and I think it must be clearly characterized before it be considered worth serious inquiry. I strongly sense it *is* definable. But if it were to be named and taught effectively to the masses of humanity, then generic drugs would be more popular, Gucci would make a lot less money, scores of snake-oil salesmen would never get past their first two sentences, and the Church would . . . wow. I see a pattern here . . .
.....Maybe someone here can help in the attempt at defining this, if you please. I can give an analogy with my view of the missing component:
.....Assertiveness is to aggression as skepticism is to ?????
.....I almost want to say we should teach "skepticism", but like the example analogy shows, "skepticism" is not the correct concept. Skepticism is more of a challenge, a reaction, than it is a healthy, maintainable outlook on life.
Here is an aerial/satellite view from google maps (full link further below):
http://snipurl.com/racetrackplaya
The resolution is perhaps greater than one meter, based on the road to the west and the smallest objects (bushes?) visible nearby. The moving rocks in the photos seem to all be much smaller than this resolution, so they're not going to be visible on google maps, but you can look around the field to get an idea of the hydrologic forces in operation based on the very visible erosion patterns.
Another thing, two of the rocks in the photos appear very angular -- presumably on the bottom as well. None of the "condensation-pressure-floating" ideas would seem to work on such heavy objects with such a small, irregular footprints. We need photos of the bottom of the rocks, and occasional photos from fixed positions to measure the movement of the rocks.
Also notice that there are no wind/current ripples on the mud. This means the mud dried in the absence of strong winds! And water currents? This too would produce ripples, larger dunes...
Greg Conquest
http://snipurl.com/racetrackplaya
is short for
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Racetrack+Playa&ll=36.697105,-117.557552&spn=0.006572,0.014377&t=h&z=16&om=1
Slashdot Mirror
oldspewey spewed:
." And "Hey, small fry! His portfolio is unzipped. Let's all jerk his patent. He won't fight back."
"I am secretly hopeful that this will eventually turn into a great big litigation circle-jerk."
Turn into? Isn't that what we've had for the last ten years? Big tech companies saying, "I'll let you jerk my patent if I can jerk yours . .
And then there are the trolls walking around fully exposed. "I got this biiggg patent from a friend, and you seem to be jerking it. Pay up! And pay up big!"
This big auto-erotic drama has taken the place of a working patent system. Patents are supposed to increase innovation. But under the current orgy, patents are government subsidized tools of aggression that can be hurled at a less-than-witting enemy.
What's the failure? Even about photos, what's the failure? And you mention others?
My strategy seems to be clearer and clearer. 1) have a facebook account in your real name for old friends and new acquaintances to find you. Don't put many details there. Check to make sure no one is taggin photos of you under your real name as well. 2) When people friend you there, send them to your relaxed, open other facebook account under an alias where they can discuss and post photos under your alternate ID relatively freely. Period. Why people accept any system that forces them to use their real name on internet forums is beyond me. The Australian "sheeple" term comes to mind.
We can get so much more exploration done using many small and comparatively inexpensive probes sent on special missions than we can by spending HUGE amounts to send people to the moon -- again. As they say, "been there done that". Much better to have two satellites apiece orbiting around every planet, more robots for Mars, Mercury, Titan, etc. We can do this now with our current budget and learn much from it. When we get the technology to send people to space, we'll go. Going now would be like Columbus trying to discover the Indies in a rowboat with his elementary school friends.
I personally think ID cards and pervasive CCTV monitoring would be a good thing IFF the data were fed directly into an independent, accredited agency which only released or confirmed data under strict guidelines. However: A national ID doesn't have a prayer of being implemented in America anytime soon. The UK can't even pull this off, and those "apathetes" let their government watch them everywhere.
One strategy would be to flood such sites with scripts that make salacious stories and insert random names and hacked student lists if available. Flood the sites with everyone's name. That is the most direct way to finally convince the low-hanging fruit that the sites have no credibility.
You want to strap a gas engine onto an electric car? Why don't you go all out? Just run a belt from the rear axle to your generator and then you can charge as you go. You'll never need to charge it again ;-)
I don't know why anybody hasn't linked the two together, but SMS control codes are how the police get your phone to send your GPS coordinates when making a 911 call. Control codes are also there for turning the mic on and broadcasting the audio -- and who knows what else? (look up "roaming bug" for more info.)
You're missing a few GB of hard disk space for each DVD you've ripped.
She is a minor. Minor's are protected by child porn laws because they cannot give their consent for sexual activity. So, how can she be accountable for posting what she is unaccountable for appearing in? Either she is a minor deserving protection, or she is an adult who can consent to being photographed. You can't have it both ways!
I don't want to undermine the protest against the general creep of privacy invasion, but this should also be seen as a call to use aliases, TOR, proxy servers, incognito, or the like anytime you search for something potentially sensitive. I like posting under my real name, but I've started posting more political/taboo musings under aliases, which also develop their own reputations. My IP address is still recorded somewhere, but what I'm saying is not so bad. And yes, I know I'm late to the alias game . . . For the more revolutionary stuff that the NSA or the like *might* find interesting one day, I use incognito (TOR). Having a net where I didn't have to do this would be great, but depending on corporations words that they don't record IP addresses, etc., is producing a situation even more dangerous, one in which there is a false sense of security.
You buy/make 2 NAS with RAID 5 or 6. Your friend somewhere far away does the same. One of your NAS's becomes his, and vice versa. You set them up to mirror each other. If your house burns down or the contents get stolen, you buy/make two new NAS and get the data back from your friend. Upgrade in 5 years and continue indefinitely.
All this talk of just using Photoshop to alter the images is just wrong-headed.
Photoshop's code is closed. Adobe, as well as every other closed-source image editor, could have long ago been "contacted" by agents from the NSA et al. and been "persuaded" under terms of an NDA to include watermark analogs in all images passing through their apps.
This happened with printer manufacturers; why would anyone assume it hasn't happened with image editors (and video and music everything else)? http://w2.eff.org/Privacy/printers/docucolor/
The cameras themselves may even have such tagging info included. Just 1% of the pixels shifted in a predetermined matrix (and compensated for in neighboring pixels) could easily and practically invisibly contain make, model, serial number, and date of file creation.
If this info is in thew hardware, even using open-source editors wouldn't ensure ID-free files.
What is needed, for images, would be an open-source photo ID stripper. This would be an app that: 1) removes all EXIF data from jpegs. 2) reconstitutes the photo by rendering, then applying an algorithm that slightly changes nearly every pixel (including slightly altering progressively larger sections of the photo in case specific pixels don't hold the data but areas do), and then re-compressing the image.
It could even be trained on specific cameras to remove hot and cold pixels.
This would be true anonymity.
They're free not to.
If some hobbyists were to put together images of ubuntu netbook remix and similar for the more popular netbooks, with their fairly consistent hardware, then Joe-Six-Pack and Sarah-Hockey-Mom could do a simple "refresh install" themselves. Since many won't have optical drives, this would be best done by apps (Windows, Mac, and Linux) that automatically format a USB flash drive into a system recovery drive.
The incentive is freedom. You know that.
Can't you just imagine who would love have a biometric list of all Jews? The first step in exterminating a whole people would be to get a list of them all. (note: I am not trying to sound anti-Semitic; I didn't create this situation...) This is just weird. Are all national ID systems going to result in such absurdities? Britain has show absolute daftness in handling the overabundance of data they already have; and they pretend its reasonable to want more.
I'll take that wager. With something on the order of one atom of hydrogen per cubic centimeter of interstellar space (http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2000/DaWeiCai.shtml), or even two to four atoms per cubic meter of space (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_space), I think interstellar atomic hydrogen just in the Milky Way will be multiple orders of magnitude greater than all hydrogen on earth, including the hydrogen bound in molecules of water, etc. If you care to quantify the number of said molecules on earth, I'll compute the amount of space needed to equal that.
Take the battery out, and the phone becomes a brick -- not trackable at all. Put the battery back in a make a call. Take the battery back out and breathe easy . . . This will also render the "roaming bug" *feature* of a cell phone useless as well.
The more the masses continue with bad privacy protection, the bigger and more vibrant will be the cracker population feeding on them. This cracker community will get its training and sustenance from the easy marks, but many of them will always be trying for the higher hanging fruit -- that's you and me. If we can vastly reduce the low-hanging fruit, the masses who don't protect their privacy, then we can snuff out much of this cracker community. Many of those crackers will get other jobs as hackers never becoming dependent on cracking, and we'll all live better. Greg
I've never before heard this. Latin/old English pairs (people/folk, pork/pig, etc.) did not come from the Roman invasion of England. It came from the Norman Conquest of England in 1066:
http://community.middlebury.edu/~harris/EngLatGrammar.html
The Norman Invasion of the 11th century made French the court and official language of England for several centuries, during which time English as a language came under the influence of French, not only in terms of words and manners of speech, but also in the way French grammar functions.
French comes from Latin.
Greg
Compatibility makes HD-DVD a natural PC component. There are no downsides. I wouldn't get a stand-alone player of any kind now. I'll stay with regular DVD and use my hard drive and HTPC for HD content for the next several years. However, in building a new PC, putting in an HD-DVD is becoming a nice option. You still have the ability to read and burn regular DVD+/-R's, and you can can burn a HD-DVD as well, though these will not be readable till HD-DVD replaces regular DVD on PC's.
In the initial editing, they need to dispose of obvious over-runs. Then a copy goes on fault-tolerant servers. The servers need to be mirrored around the world as well. Codecs are included on the servers. Amazon could do this for them today. Google could really set them up -- and make a backup copy of their own. G-)
.....Great post, beyondkaoru. I think what is needed is for the public education system to educate us all to be skeptical of advertisers, snake oil salesmen, and anonymous claims to knowledge...
.....As a species, we humans tend to grow and develop always thinking that someone else is better than us ... knows more than us ... or has the right or might to tell us what to do. We are never taught, at least in American public schools, to investigate and question assertions of authority. Creating such a consensus alone would works wonders.
.....It is a fundamental oversight in culture design, it seems to me. Yet how to carry it out the change is the problem. I cannot clearly characterize what exactly needs to be taught, and I think it must be clearly characterized before it be considered worth serious inquiry. I strongly sense it *is* definable. But if it were to be named and taught effectively to the masses of humanity, then generic drugs would be more popular, Gucci would make a lot less money, scores of snake-oil salesmen would never get past their first two sentences, and the Church would . . . wow. I see a pattern here . . .
.....Maybe someone here can help in the attempt at defining this, if you please. I can give an analogy with my view of the missing component:
.....Assertiveness is to aggression as skepticism is to ?????
.....I almost want to say we should teach "skepticism", but like the example analogy shows, "skepticism" is not the correct concept. Skepticism is more of a challenge, a reaction, than it is a healthy, maintainable outlook on life.
Greg Conquest
Here is an aerial/satellite view from google maps (full link further below): http://snipurl.com/racetrackplaya The resolution is perhaps greater than one meter, based on the road to the west and the smallest objects (bushes?) visible nearby. The moving rocks in the photos seem to all be much smaller than this resolution, so they're not going to be visible on google maps, but you can look around the field to get an idea of the hydrologic forces in operation based on the very visible erosion patterns. Another thing, two of the rocks in the photos appear very angular -- presumably on the bottom as well. None of the "condensation-pressure-floating" ideas would seem to work on such heavy objects with such a small, irregular footprints. We need photos of the bottom of the rocks, and occasional photos from fixed positions to measure the movement of the rocks. Also notice that there are no wind/current ripples on the mud. This means the mud dried in the absence of strong winds! And water currents? This too would produce ripples, larger dunes... Greg Conquest http://snipurl.com/racetrackplaya is short for http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Racetrack+Playa&ll=36.697105,-117.557552&spn=0.006572,0.014377&t=h&z=16&om=1