'We have now moved into an era where the consumer is in control, and where thanks to the Internet and mobile devices, you cannot control access any more,'
Did he actually manage to make that sound like a bad thing?
Some P2P networks work through Tor (more or less) but suffer from a very narrow bandwidth bottleneck. BitTorrent inherently can't work properly with Tor. It uses UDP.
It's a fairly inevitable back and forth development, as the increasing popularity of BitTorrent gives investigators an incentive to track and drives up the risk, after which streaming sites become more popular, leading to take-down efforts targeted at those, making people go back to BitTorrent again.
It's a question of risk evaluation. BitTorrent almost always works, but leaves you personally open for legal attacks. Streaming sites can be used with relative anonymity but go down easily.
If your client is set to automatically synchronize all file operations including deletion (which is usually the default), then your local copy exists at the mercy of the server. Of course you can rest assured that if anyone compromises the server, they would simply take it offline rather than instructing it to send a deletion command to all clients, but if you don't want to rely on that, you should better make sure that your local copy is as safe as you want it to be.
It is correct that anyone participating in this takes a risk of being raided, charged or even jailed. However, out of a large group of attackers, only a small fraction got into trouble. It's similar to using BitTorrent, where you may be monitored and tracked down at any given time, but it's very unlikely. (Except, of course, for the part where BitTorrent users get slapped with a settlement fee instead of going to jail.) These people are kids; they do risk evaluation differently.
Yes, taking down sharing sites is bad. But vigilante attacks at a time when the government is already itching to censor the internet are fucking silly. It's like protesting the TSA by putting bombs in your luggage.
Okay, A) The scientific method does not absolve from the requirement of scientific understanding. Anyone is free to question, but they still have to have relevant knowledge to be taken seriously. B) Questioning science should be done in the public forum among peers, not by a teacher in a classroom using his authority to fabricate a controversy that does not exist in the real world. If scientist A says "I believe scientist B is mistaken" and scientist B responds, then that is a scientific debate. If schoolteacher A tells his students that "I believe scientist B is mistaken", then the students have to take his word for it.
It is not like this issue is something covered on Fox and MSNBC and CNN.
Ever since 2008, elections aren't won by ignoring the internet, and Obama of all people knows it.
Not to say this is all idle campaign talk. I have high hope that whatever we end up with won't be the end-of-democracy-as-we-know-it bill we have now. It might not even be as bad as the DMCA, and the internet survived that one. But it'll still be bad legislation, because the very principle behind it is trying to solve the wrong problem the wrong way.
Science that works cannot be kept secret. Observe that over centuries, every single real invention has been independently discovered by multiple scientists in such close succession that it might as well be simultaneous. That is not a coincidence. New discoveries build upon existing discoveries and technologies, and when their time has come, they will appear. If this invention were based on a theory that actually had some basis in reality, other physicists would have grasped it by now, at the very least by knowing what to look for. This scam is targeted at the gullibility of people who don't understand how scientific advances are made. "No one else has figured it out, so there must be something to it" is the wrong argument. If it's a magic box, we should be treating it as a magician's sideshow: Not to be believed until proved fake, but to consider it fake until all its workings are fully and extensively public and shown to be sound by other scientists.
Five hundred years ago, self-styled alchemists and sorcerers parted investors with their money by claiming to have some secret apparatus to turn lead into gold. It's depressing to see that now, after the periodic table, the theory of relativity and the discovery of the atom, we're falling for the same trick. We shouldn't even be debating whether it's real, just like we don't debate whether the world will end this December. It should be dismissed out of hand until the inventor decides to either cough up how it is done or shuts up and goes away.
That is no different from the old attack model, where a media company (or one of their hired investigators) joins a swarm and then harvests IP addresses. In fact, the old model is likely still superior (for the media companies) since "these users have downloaded and distributed actual pieces of copyrighted material" sounds stronger in court than "these users downloaded.torrent files that are used to download [etc.]". Also, the former attack can catch peers that connected via PEX, who might have gotten the.torrent file from somewhere else entirely.
Long story short, BitTorrent is designed for resilience, not anonymity. If you participate in a swarm, you have to be aware that you're doing it in public and risking consequences if someone is watching. This new model doesn't change that; it merely increases the resilience.
everyone can soon host a full copy of The Pirate Bay on a USB thumb drive, which may come in handy in the future
You could even make the database into a torrent itself, though you'd have to go to some effort to make incremental updates easy to propagate without too much wasted bandwidth. Maybe a core file updated every few months, with regular incremental updates in separate torrents?
When it comes to Wikileaks, the freedom of the internet and the cancerous copyright law we now have, there is no such thing as a voice of sanity in the government. The only reason I'm voting for Obama again is because I know that whatever loonie the Republicans rally behind will put up the exact same platform (with the added bonus of fucking social services and civil rights).
Perhaps any convicted criminal could sue the government for having a law against whatever they did, too. After all, if there were no laws, there'd be no crime.
That's low. Are you seriously saying that preventing black people from voting is as bad as making business owners pay taxes? One of them is an affront to the very essence of American freedom, and the other is merely racism.
The shiny backdoors the US government was so keen on to spy on its own citizens are also used by foreign governments to spy on the US government. Maybe security and privacy is worth something after all.
Slashdot Mirror
But if you don't have cancer, don't worry, because this device has you covered.
I used to be a senator; then I---
on second thought, too easy.
Did he actually manage to make that sound like a bad thing?
Some P2P networks work through Tor (more or less) but suffer from a very narrow bandwidth bottleneck. BitTorrent inherently can't work properly with Tor. It uses UDP.
It's a fairly inevitable back and forth development, as the increasing popularity of BitTorrent gives investigators an incentive to track and drives up the risk, after which streaming sites become more popular, leading to take-down efforts targeted at those, making people go back to BitTorrent again.
It's a question of risk evaluation. BitTorrent almost always works, but leaves you personally open for legal attacks. Streaming sites can be used with relative anonymity but go down easily.
If your client is set to automatically synchronize all file operations including deletion (which is usually the default), then your local copy exists at the mercy of the server. Of course you can rest assured that if anyone compromises the server, they would simply take it offline rather than instructing it to send a deletion command to all clients, but if you don't want to rely on that, you should better make sure that your local copy is as safe as you want it to be.
It is correct that anyone participating in this takes a risk of being raided, charged or even jailed. However, out of a large group of attackers, only a small fraction got into trouble. It's similar to using BitTorrent, where you may be monitored and tracked down at any given time, but it's very unlikely. (Except, of course, for the part where BitTorrent users get slapped with a settlement fee instead of going to jail.)
These people are kids; they do risk evaluation differently.
Only acceptable when done by employers, not employees. Got it.
You almost had a point there until you got around to trolling with the "people who respect the constitution" part.
On the contrary, the point was reinforced by that, if perhaps not on purpose.
Here's someone who respects the constitution who is apparently fair game, though the GP may not have had her in mind as she is not Christian, conservative or Republican.
Yes, taking down sharing sites is bad. But vigilante attacks at a time when the government is already itching to censor the internet are fucking silly. It's like protesting the TSA by putting bombs in your luggage.
Okay, A) The scientific method does not absolve from the requirement of scientific understanding. Anyone is free to question, but they still have to have relevant knowledge to be taken seriously.
B) Questioning science should be done in the public forum among peers, not by a teacher in a classroom using his authority to fabricate a controversy that does not exist in the real world. If scientist A says "I believe scientist B is mistaken" and scientist B responds, then that is a scientific debate. If schoolteacher A tells his students that "I believe scientist B is mistaken", then the students have to take his word for it.
IRAN is an acronym now? What's it stand for?
Ever since 2008, elections aren't won by ignoring the internet, and Obama of all people knows it.
Not to say this is all idle campaign talk. I have high hope that whatever we end up with won't be the end-of-democracy-as-we-know-it bill we have now. It might not even be as bad as the DMCA, and the internet survived that one. But it'll still be bad legislation, because the very principle behind it is trying to solve the wrong problem the wrong way.
Looks like she did know what she was doing after all.
Science that works cannot be kept secret. Observe that over centuries, every single real invention has been independently discovered by multiple scientists in such close succession that it might as well be simultaneous. That is not a coincidence. New discoveries build upon existing discoveries and technologies, and when their time has come, they will appear.
If this invention were based on a theory that actually had some basis in reality, other physicists would have grasped it by now, at the very least by knowing what to look for. This scam is targeted at the gullibility of people who don't understand how scientific advances are made.
"No one else has figured it out, so there must be something to it" is the wrong argument. If it's a magic box, we should be treating it as a magician's sideshow: Not to be believed until proved fake, but to consider it fake until all its workings are fully and extensively public and shown to be sound by other scientists.
Five hundred years ago, self-styled alchemists and sorcerers parted investors with their money by claiming to have some secret apparatus to turn lead into gold. It's depressing to see that now, after the periodic table, the theory of relativity and the discovery of the atom, we're falling for the same trick. We shouldn't even be debating whether it's real, just like we don't debate whether the world will end this December. It should be dismissed out of hand until the inventor decides to either cough up how it is done or shuts up and goes away.
That is no different from the old attack model, where a media company (or one of their hired investigators) joins a swarm and then harvests IP addresses. In fact, the old model is likely still superior (for the media companies) since "these users have downloaded and distributed actual pieces of copyrighted material" sounds stronger in court than "these users downloaded .torrent files that are used to download [etc.]". Also, the former attack can catch peers that connected via PEX, who might have gotten the .torrent file from somewhere else entirely.
Long story short, BitTorrent is designed for resilience, not anonymity. If you participate in a swarm, you have to be aware that you're doing it in public and risking consequences if someone is watching. This new model doesn't change that; it merely increases the resilience.
You could even make the database into a torrent itself, though you'd have to go to some effort to make incremental updates easy to propagate without too much wasted bandwidth. Maybe a core file updated every few months, with regular incremental updates in separate torrents?
(Yo dawg, I heard you like torrents...)
"Straight" is politically incorrect. It's the "Heterosexual of Hormuz".
(Or "Strait of Hormuz" if you want to be pedantic about it.)
When it comes to Wikileaks, the freedom of the internet and the cancerous copyright law we now have, there is no such thing as a voice of sanity in the government. The only reason I'm voting for Obama again is because I know that whatever loonie the Republicans rally behind will put up the exact same platform (with the added bonus of fucking social services and civil rights).
This is depressing.
Perhaps any convicted criminal could sue the government for having a law against whatever they did, too. After all, if there were no laws, there'd be no crime.
Some planets resemble forests in British Columbia, or quarries in Wales. :P
That's low. Are you seriously saying that preventing black people from voting is as bad as making business owners pay taxes? One of them is an affront to the very essence of American freedom, and the other is merely racism.
Do they actually say anywhere that they mean a low price?
The shiny backdoors the US government was so keen on to spy on its own citizens are also used by foreign governments to spy on the US government. Maybe security and privacy is worth something after all.
Is he named Clark Kent? Guy should have become an astronaut, not a politician.