> But to be a part of an "anti-anti-drug movement" > is just too much. I've seen way too many lives > destroyed by the horrors of real drugs.
However the anti-war on drugs movement isn't necissarily about just legalizing drugs so everyone can get smashed.
The idea is to change the focus from "prohibition" ie just saying "drugs are bad and you goto jail for having them" (which is, many times, a fate MORE harmful than the drugs alone ever were) over to educating people.
Many of the problems associated with drug use are a direct result of prohibition and black market economics. I am talking about adulturated drugs. I am talking about "turf wars" between rival drug sellers. I am talking about misinformation that is being given out by users and dealers alike. Even the fact that people are injecting heroine is a product of prohibition. Prohibition has driven the price up so high that IV injection is the only cost-effective way to use it.
Only through legalization and regulation can we reduce the harm associated with drugs. Prohibition has been PROVEN time and again to only drive problems underground and make problems worst.
It happend with Alcohol in the 1920s. It is happening today. There will ALWAYS be drug users. Its been part of human culture since the begining of time. You can't change human nature and society by handing down laws from "on high".
That is exactly what prohibition tries to do. That is exactly why it fails.
> I'll bet a dollar on a lark to win 100 Million > dollars. If I don't win, it is one pop I don't > drink, and I got a little excitement out of it > as entertainment.
Ahhh but you see I have you better there too.
You can get infinite amounts of entertainment for FREE. All from the Lotto. Here is how I do it.
I don't play. Then I adopt an arrogent attitude towards the entire subject. All you need to do is bring on an air of superiority and feel good about yourself knowing "I am better than them, because I don't waste my money". Then I go around saying things like:
"I win the lotto every week. All I have to do is not play. I net $52/year doing it...every year. Which is much more than the average joe who plays it and maybe wins $5 once every other year".
The nice thing is...its free. Its also a bit og a gamble...afterall if one of the people who plays DOES win...then they get to brag about it and bother you. Of course, given the odds...I figure im doing pretty good.
Afterall I win every week...there is 1 chance in a few billion that I will lose. Not bad odds huh?
I get to do it with sports too. Although there its more like "Whats this we stuff? Are you on the team now?" or "Yes big deal, watch a bunch of men get paid alot of money to get sweaty and move a ball around. Fun fun fun."
Best part - there is no end to the entertainment that you can get from it...and its FREE.
"She argued that musicians' willingness to''tolerate'' people making copies..."
Given that an act of congress was passed that SPECIFICALLY stated that individuals may make personal copies of music....it must take real balls (or lack of brains) to stand up before congress and say that - to congress!
As if the record labels were allowing it from the goodness of their hearts. They argued 20 years ago that copying itself was wrong...and congress replied with a law saying "Its ok" on no ncertain terms. Seems someone either has delusions of grandure or needs a history lesson.
Who was it that said: "It is difficult to make a person understand something, when their salary depends on them not understanding it"?
Well it rings true. She defines nothing as fair use because its in her best buisness interest for "Fair Use" to not exist. Given that it does exist, its in her best buiensss interest to make people forget that it exists.
> There will be complaints from many of you that > this bill is ill-conceived and impractical. I > think that it's far more important that > something be done about the sin and > family-destroying habit of gambling.
Even if "something" is at best an empty and ineffective gesture?
If history has shown one thing, it is this...if a large group of people want something, then it is impossible to stop them from getting it.
Look at alcohol prohibition of the 1920s. Some people felt it important to "Do something about the sin and fammily-destroying habit of..." drinking alcohol.
The problem: The masses want to drink alcohol. The result: Criminal elements provide alcohol. Unregulated black markets spring up, bringing violent turf wars and all the associated ills of the black market with them.
Access to alcohol becomes easier for children, who previously couldn't get it...so much so that entire schools had to be closed down due to mass student drunkeness!
Is this an isolated subject? The SAME scenario is happening this very day under the name "The War on Drugs". Should we expect gambling to be any different?
Face it...the unwashed masses (or at least a large enough percentage of them) WANT to gamble. ALL you can do is try to reduce the harm associated with gambling by letting them do it legally, and try to educate them about gambling and its dangers. Anything else simply makes the situation worst.
Of course...this is a lesson that our society has yet to actually learn. Maybe someday it will sink in that you can't just hand down rules from on high and have society suddenly change fundamentally to respect these new rules.
> Why? Because study after study has shown that > the concept of gambling revenues as a > replacement for direct taxation does little more > than shift the tax burden off onto people who > can't afford it (i.e. the poor and lower middle > classes), and away from the people who *can* > afford it.
This reminds of an old friend of mine. He was a very impulsive person. He is horrid with money... just can't seem to save it and keep track of it...always gets himself into jams.
Anyway one day he needed $500 for something. I think his car was going to be reposessed or was rent or something. I forget. He had $200.
What did he do? He got impulsive and figured his only way out was to use all $200 and buy scratch tickets....in hopes of winning the $500 that he needed.
Heh well whats the difference between state sanctioned lotto and gambling? Well the exact same difference between maffia "protection rackets" and taxation.
ie...its "State Sanctioned".
The government just hates it when private citizens try to "muscle in" on their "turf" you know.
Actually this would make ALOT of sense. It would even be incredibly easy to impliment...however did you notice their claims?
They were claiming to be able to go through however many millions of messages per day. No single person gets that many. The ONLY reason to do that would be to sift through the ISPs entire feed for information.
Secondly they said this is specifically for gathering email. This makes sense though. Much of the time I do NOT check my email from my ISP dialup. I often check it from work. Even so...they would really not need such a powerful system to search through 1 persons traffic....hell even 10 peoples traffic. Even if they had DSL lines...they can't truely generate THAT much traffic.
I fyou WANTED to be homosexual...you could force yourself through mental willpower to be sexually attracted to men?
Could you force yourself to be sexually attracted to horses?
Do you really believe that sexual attraction is completely a conscious decision that a person can just sit up and decide?
All I am saying is that a person has no control over what they fantasise about. No I would go farther...no person should be judged merely upon what their fantasy is.
There is a huge difference between tapping a phone line and listening in, and tapping the whole trunk and listening to every call, for every person on the block, simultaneously.
It opens the system up for abuse. It means that ALL email going through the ISP can be logged...once the system is in place, ALL users email is subject to the whims of the human FBI agent who installed it and set it up.
Protecting people from this is a trivial problem, and gives them NO less legitimate information.
> Funny isn't it? Everyone gets their panties in a > wad about the government getting warrents to > check your email, but you flat out say that > IPS's could redirect and read your email without > anyone knowing, and no one cares?
I care...unfortunaly its unavoidable. Its the way that email was implimented, there is no way to stop an eavesdropper on that level.
My point was simply that they can get exactly the information they CLAIM to want, yet they seem to be insisting on a MORE intrusive system where the ONLY protection against them accessing more data than they "should" is well them.
Why would they insist on this, when they can get the SAME data through LESS intrusive channels?
Do I trust my ISP more than the Federal Government? Only because I have no other choice, short of convincing everyone I know to use PGP (fat chance that).
My ONLY objection, in the context of this discussion, is that this system can be abused by the FBI, with, essentially, no oversight. Using the ISP system to divert mail would require complicity between ISP and FBI to be abused...and that at least marginally raises the bar.
FBI agents are human beings. Human beings sometimes do bad things, even with the best intentions. As such, there must always be some level of protection in place to limit the damage that they can do.
Again...what I am suggesting is truely trivial difference, if they are truely only doing what they claim to be doing. However it protects the people at large, if their intions are other than their claims. Seems like a win all around (unless of course your an FBI agent who wants to abuse your carnivorous machine)
Perhaps because you inore history? I would submit that the entire history of the human race is the history of power abused by indivbiduals.
Do we forget that the FBI is the same organization that has abused its powers in the past. Would you consider it part of the FBIs job to forge letters to heads of the Maffia and heads of the US Communist party in attempts to litterally provoke the two organisations to violence against each other? Well they did it! I have seen the declassified papers on it! (www.thesmokinggun.com - an archive of files obtained under the FOIA)
Furthermore....what they CLAIM to want is EASILY obtainable without "Carnivore". It would be TRIVIAL for an ISP to setup their mail server to blindly send copies of all messages and ONLY messages to and from the person being monitored to the FBI system...instead they insist on having THEIR box process EVERYONES messages.
If Carnivore was the ONLY way to do the job, that would be one thing. The fact is, it isn't. In fact its the MOST intrusive method possible. It means THEY are sorting through data that they have NO right to access, in order to get at the data they do have the right to.
What they are doing is going to the post office and saying "There is a person in this city who we are investigating. We have a warrent that lets us read his mail before it gets to him." (assuming thats possible - remember this is an analogy)
Then demanding that the Post office turn over ALL mail that comes to the post office to the FBI and lets the FBI sort out this persons mail from the rest.
They arn't opening the letters per se...(tho in the case of email the distinction is blurred as the envelope doesn't conceal the contents) but demanding to look at "ALL" envelopes and make their own determination as to what they have access to.
> This sounds like it is indeed meant for > targeting specific suspects,
Well it deponds on how you wish to look at it really. Assuming its a given that they have the right to wiretap (I am putting aside the fact that I have major philosophical problems with law and law enforcement here)....they have the right to listen in on "data" (conversations email etc) comming from a known data source (victem er I mean bad guys phone) to gather evidence against him.
Their entire system sounds basically like a system that takes all the email in the system, applies a set of regexs to the headers and takes all email too and from there target.
Here is the problem I have. The "data source" is not a "known one". They are not listening to "His line" they are listening to the whole ISP. Even if its just a header grep...they have NO RIGHT to recieve and look through ANY data except that which comes from or two who they are looking at...even if it is JUST a gheader grep.
The difference may not seem important but it is. If they wiretap your phone line, they can't abuse that to listen to my conversations, unless I use your phone. In this case there is the possibility of abusing their "wiretap" on YOU to listen to MY email because I am on the same ISP as you.
if YOU are the target...they have NO right to have MY mail ever even TOUCH their system.
However....if your friends wife is blond...would he object to knowing that you have a shoebox full of pictures of naked blond women? Who are not necissarily his wife?
The point you are responding to had nothing to do with photographs. What I was commenting on was that merely finding out that a person HAS those urges causes them to be treated differently, whether or not they even have pictures in their posession. COmpletely differnt point.
> However, he makes no provisions for dealing with > or preventing misuse of them that is illegal or > dangerous.
Well he says right out that this is meant from the start to be useful to "political dissidents".
Basically its simple. The system is designed to protect individuals from those who would hunt them down.
What if a person does not agree with what is "illegal"? If the government says "Its illegal to even discuss X" then would you support its ban? or would you support the dissidents who still go on to discuss it? Does it matter what X is?
Does it matter who the government is? Would you suporrt people in Iraq talking about the overthrow of their dictator and the institution of a democratic government in its place?
Something like that is easy to say "Yea I support that...thats a 'bad government'" but what about when its the US government? Sure it may be a differnt story to YOU....but someone else may say the same thing about Iraq...or any number of dictatorships.
There is a bill in congress in the US that would make merely giving out information about drugs illegal. There are people, dissidents if you will, that believe strongly that their body and their mind are their buisness. Are they evil criminals just because the law says so?
And of course, gun access is the ONLY reason for a high murder rate. Its interesting...out in the country where there are few cities...no overcrowding, and horrid poverty (hell can live off the land out there if ya have to)...I would wager that guns actually outnumber people. Yet the murder rate is quite low. (though a rather large number of deer and woodchuck have a tendancy to make it onto diner plates)
But as we know...hammers are the leading cause of nails being pushed through wood violently. And knives are the prime reason that steak gets cut into peices.
> and the number of people who get drunk and > shoot apples off each others heads
Wasn't it an Englishman who came up with the term "Natural Selection"? Nothing wrong with it if you ask me.
> nd none of the idiots who surround me every day > can own a gun either.
Yes well...except the ones who buy them off the black market huh? Heh oh yea...they happen to be the same idiots who have no qualms with breaking into your house in the middle of the night and helping themselves to all of your stuff.
> When I said that censorship should be absolutely > banished, I meant it knowing the consequences. > It means that kiddie porn will be uncensorable, > and to prosecute it you'll have to actually > catch people with it on their computers, > or in production. You won't be able to catch it > in transmission.
This may be a fine point but...I feel the need to state here that I do NOT think mere posession of kiddie porn should be punished.
Remember...Pedophiles are humans. A pedophile is not a child molseter. Child molestation is an ACT. Pedophilia is entirely a psycological thing.
A person has no control over what sexually arouses them. This type of "wireing" is setup very early in life. It is by no means a conscious choice.
Many, hell even most, child molesters may be pedophiles. That does NOT mean that most or even all pedophiles are child molesters.
If they are able to keep their urges under control, and keep a collection of pictures on their computer to help them satiate those urges when they arise...then i say more power to them. Frankly...I pity them, and am extremely thankful that I did not grow up to find myself craving something that is so incredibly verboten in our society.
I think we, as a society, should be expending our effort finding and dealing with those who ACT on these impulses and harm other people, rather than spend our energy condemming and ostracising those who merely HAVE these urges. I think alot would be gained by accepting them and allowing them to come "out of the closet".
To put it in perspective...If I am with a friend and his wife. I am a human male. I can find his wife sexually attractive. I can even fantasise about his wife. He knows I am a human male and I have those urges. As long as I don't make an issue of them or act upon them...there is no problem.
However...think of a pedophile. If his friend had a child, he would generally need to hide the fact that he has these urges...for if it was discovered, in most instances it would be considered a problem...whether he acted upon those fantasies or not.
These people, as much as any other group, need anonymity on the net. There are constantly witch hunts going on for them. The mere association of ones name with pedophilia can have devastating effects on ones life.
--Steve who still mourns anon.penet.fi, even though he only used it once.
Actually with freenet (as I understand it) you CAN tell where the data is stored. Or rather you can find out some subset of locations where it is stored.
However...observation is not a passive act. Simply observing where the data is stored causes it to propagate to new locations. Thus it becomes like trying to nail jello to a tree...
This is a good point. Its as I have heard many times "Security is about managing risk".
I met a person at Usenix last month who keeps his pgp key on a disk, in an undisclosed physically secure location (probably in a safe). When he signs someones key, he boots his laptop (cold boot) off a CDROM, containing ONLY software that he personally audited, with a copy of gpg or pgp (I forget) on the CDROM.
He then uses that to sign the keys.
Now this is all well and good but...very secure. However is it needed? I don't know about others but I figure that if someone is willing to expend the effort to A) Break into my masquerading host, B) break into my workstation host, and then C) invest the energy (CPU time etc) to try and crack the encryption on _MY_ gpg key (given that MY key has a strong passphrase)...
Well if someone had motive to expend THAT MUCH effort to get MY key...then I have larger problems than key protection is going to solve.
All we can really do is protect ourselves with deterrent systems, like the car locks and doors on houses, to make the barrier to entry high enough that its not worth it for most people to attack....then hope its enough.
I think the real problem with the net is the volume. If you want to listen to voice conversations in bedrooms...you need to have listening devices pointed at every bedroom. If you want to listen to email....all you need is a tap at a high volume net juncture...and you can get thousands upon thousands of messages. (our mail exchangers alone do about 100k messages/day..upstream 1 or 2 hops from us..its probably more like 1 million or more)
> You really think five year old children are that > much different, be they European, American, > Indian, Japanese or whatever?
In some ways. by 5 years old children are much more developed mentally than most people give them credit for. They are certainly capable of learning to sit still through a diner by that age.
> Do you really think the notion of proper > behavior (which varies with the different > cultures) has sulked in by that age?
Only partially. The beginings of moral development are in place around 7. (there is an old saying "give me a 7 year old boy, and ill give you a man" or some similar confuguration of words) In fact the whole concept of "childhood" is relativly new (few hundred years old...maybe as many as 500).
Certainly by age 5 they are able to learn more than they are taught.
> This is a favourite of conservatives, people who > long for the "golden days" and suchlike fools.
I tend to agree. I also tend to think that no such "golden days" ever existed. Every era has had its problems.
However, change does happen. Culture changes, society changes. Just because "conservatives" often argue something, doesn't make it wrong (just because they are often very wrong). I believe that people are less disciplined today, in our culture, then they have been in the past. I think our society ENCOURAGES this.
> ou're aware that it is more easily taught by > example than by indoctrination, right?
Actually indoctrination can work wonders in the right setting...but yes example is how children learn. Many adults arn't much better than their children.
> There we go again with the discipline harangue. > Discipline is highly overvalued. It is not > always necessary
Perhaps you miss what I mean by discipline. Discipline is internal. It is the ability to consiously make a decision and stick with it. The ability to supress desire when needed. Control over ones own mind. The ability to say "Ok I have to do this" and go do it.
Take meditiation. It is the ULTIMATE form of discipline. The ability to sit down quietly and just sit there for even 5 mins without stiring, without looking around and doing physical things. To be able to say "I am going to just sit here in an upright position with my eyes closed for at least 5 mins" and then to actually do it....that is discipine. (and yes I realize there is more to meditation than that)
> re actually IMHO, the consequence of people not > using rational thought enough in their lifes.
I definitly agree. Rational thought is important. It is a discipline! Its is about controling oneself. Supressing emotional desires and bias and using rational thought to solve a problem and make a decision.
> Like: buying a cheaper product, even though its > production endangers the environment or the > local economy.
Well no. "cheaper" may be a necessity. How about buying the flashy SUV even though its use endangers the environment, worldwide oil supply and 99% of your driving is JUST you back and forth to work with no cargo.
Look at the car commercials. They play on emotions. Like the recent "Dodge" adds where they constantly mix the words "Dodge" and "Different" to try to connect the two. This advertising has nothing to do with trying to get you to make a rational decision.
I dunno if anyone else has mentioned it (looked didn't see it) but I believe there is has an "Open Hardware Certification" which does NOT garauntee Linux Compatibility but is actually better.
To get the certification vendors must publish enough information to write a driver and make it available to the public.
I dunno about anyone else but this doesn't really bother me much. I mean, I run snort to look for port scans and exploit attempts...but just to know who is looking.
I always think its funny when some loser admin sends us an email saying a host on our network "Attacked" his box and to prove it shows a log saying he was port scanned.
Oh the horrors, a port scan! My god! What will they do next? Traceroute? telnet to it and read the banners to see what its running?
Of course...many of these people run chocolate^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HFire Walls, so I can see why they might have some pretty silly notions of what an attack is....
> Then again, could it be that society implicity > tells boys that they need to be "macho and > manly"? Sort of how society tells girls they > need to be "skinny and beautiful"?
I think its more than that. People always want to blame drug abuse, violence, etc as "the problems" when really, I think they are symptomes of larger, and more fundamental, problems with our societies social structures...specifically they are rotting.
At a start, look at chldren in the US versus other countries. In france or other European countries a 5 year old kid can sit through a formal diner. How many 5 year olds in the US can do the same?
We have stopped teaching our children responsibility and discipline. In fact, we have taught them that they can be irresponsible...its expected of them.
Now as for firearms...they ARE a buzz enhancer in a way. I have used them...holding a gun is a high in and of itself. The realization that YOU now can decided life or death at a whim. Its power.
Does that make them bad? No. It, like anything, is something a person must be taught to control. I have cousins who have owned firearms since they were 11. They are some of the safest people I know with guns. They were taught the simple rules from extremely early ages.
You NEVER point a gun unless you intend to fire it. You NEVER point a gun at a person unless your life is in danger. You ALWAYS treat every gun as if its loaded (even if you have the firing pin in your pocket!). Its all about respect for the power of the tool and for basic life.
It is much harder to aquire discipline later in life than early. Hell I am 22 and just now starting to learn to discipline myself. Its NOT easy. Its a skill that needs to be taught young.
All in all I don't think our society breeds healthy life attitudes. Its a much harder problem to solve than just being reactionary and trying to solve the symptomes (like prohibition of drugs, drunk driving penalties, etc etc) but raising responsible people with healthy life attitudes will solve these at the source.
System cracking is just an extension of adolencent irresponsibility. It is not the problem but the symptom. Catching crackers will no more solve the problem than taking tylanol will get you over your cold faster. (all it does is make you feel better by treating symptoms)
> You said you don't vote. So shut up. No talking > politics for you
Rather then living under the delusion that voting actually will change anything (and I said I wont vote for Candidates...I most certainly will vote for initives or ballot questions)
I prefer to live under the delusion that by talking about the issues I can raise social awareness and help change the world.
Slashdot Mirror
> But to be a part of an "anti-anti-drug movement"
> is just too much. I've seen way too many lives
> destroyed by the horrors of real drugs.
However the anti-war on drugs movement isn't necissarily about just legalizing drugs so everyone can get smashed.
The idea is to change the focus from "prohibition" ie just saying "drugs are bad and you goto jail for having them" (which is, many times, a fate MORE harmful than the drugs alone ever were) over to educating people.
Many of the problems associated with drug use are a direct result of prohibition and black market economics. I am talking about adulturated drugs. I am talking about "turf wars" between rival drug sellers. I am talking about misinformation that is being given out by users and dealers alike. Even the fact that people are injecting heroine is a product of prohibition. Prohibition has driven the price up so high that IV injection is the only cost-effective way to use it.
Only through legalization and regulation can we reduce the harm associated with drugs. Prohibition has been PROVEN time and again to only drive problems underground and make problems worst.
It happend with Alcohol in the 1920s. It is happening today. There will ALWAYS be drug users. Its been part of human culture since the begining of time. You can't change human nature and society by handing down laws from "on high".
That is exactly what prohibition tries to do. That is exactly why it fails.
-Steve
> I'll bet a dollar on a lark to win 100 Million
> dollars. If I don't win, it is one pop I don't
> drink, and I got a little excitement out of it
> as entertainment.
Ahhh but you see I have you better there too.
You can get infinite amounts of entertainment for FREE. All from the Lotto. Here is how I do it.
I don't play. Then I adopt an arrogent attitude towards the entire subject. All you need to do is bring on an air of superiority and feel good about yourself knowing "I am better than them, because I don't waste my money". Then I go around saying things like:
"I win the lotto every week. All I have to do is not play. I net $52/year doing it...every year. Which is much more than the average joe who plays it and maybe wins $5 once every other year".
The nice thing is...its free. Its also a bit og a gamble...afterall if one of the people who plays DOES win...then they get to brag about it and bother you. Of course, given the odds...I figure im doing pretty good.
Afterall I win every week...there is 1 chance in a few billion that I will lose. Not bad odds huh?
I get to do it with sports too. Although there its more like "Whats this we stuff? Are you on the team now?" or "Yes big deal, watch a bunch of men get paid alot of money to get sweaty and move a ball around. Fun fun fun."
Best part - there is no end to the entertainment that you can get from it...and its FREE.
-Steve
You know its funny....
"She argued that musicians' willingness to''tolerate'' people making copies..."
Given that an act of congress was passed that SPECIFICALLY stated that individuals may make personal copies of music....it must take real balls (or lack of brains) to stand up before congress and say that - to congress!
As if the record labels were allowing it from the goodness of their hearts. They argued 20 years ago that copying itself was wrong...and congress replied with a law saying "Its ok" on no ncertain terms. Seems someone either has delusions of grandure or needs a history lesson.
Who was it that said:
"It is difficult to make a person understand something, when their salary depends on them not understanding it"?
Well it rings true. She defines nothing as fair use because its in her best buisness interest for "Fair Use" to not exist. Given that it does exist, its in her best buiensss interest to make people forget that it exists.
Not exactly a NEW buisness practice really.
-Steve
> There will be complaints from many of you that
> this bill is ill-conceived and impractical. I
> think that it's far more important that
> something be done about the sin and
> family-destroying habit of gambling.
Even if "something" is at best an empty and ineffective gesture?
If history has shown one thing, it is this...if a large group of people want something, then it is impossible to stop them from getting it.
Look at alcohol prohibition of the 1920s. Some people felt it important to "Do something about the sin and fammily-destroying habit of..." drinking alcohol.
The problem: The masses want to drink alcohol.
The result: Criminal elements provide alcohol. Unregulated black markets spring up, bringing violent turf wars and all the associated ills of the black market with them.
Access to alcohol becomes easier for children, who previously couldn't get it...so much so that entire schools had to be closed down due to mass student drunkeness!
Is this an isolated subject? The SAME scenario is happening this very day under the name "The War on Drugs". Should we expect gambling to be any different?
Face it...the unwashed masses (or at least a large enough percentage of them) WANT to gamble. ALL you can do is try to reduce the harm associated with gambling by letting them do it legally, and try to educate them about gambling and its dangers. Anything else simply makes the situation worst.
Of course...this is a lesson that our society has yet to actually learn. Maybe someday it will sink in that you can't just hand down rules from on high and have society suddenly change fundamentally to respect these new rules.
> Why? Because study after study has shown that
> the concept of gambling revenues as a
> replacement for direct taxation does little more
> than shift the tax burden off onto people who
> can't afford it (i.e. the poor and lower middle
> classes), and away from the people who *can*
> afford it.
This reminds of an old friend of mine. He was a very impulsive person. He is horrid with money... just can't seem to save it and keep track of it...always gets himself into jams.
Anyway one day he needed $500 for something. I think his car was going to be reposessed or was rent or something. I forget. He had $200.
What did he do? He got impulsive and figured his only way out was to use all $200 and buy scratch tickets....in hopes of winning the $500 that he needed.
sad case really.
Heh well whats the difference between state sanctioned lotto and gambling? Well the exact same difference between maffia "protection rackets" and taxation.
ie...its "State Sanctioned".
The government just hates it when private citizens try to "muscle in" on their "turf" you know.
Actually this would make ALOT of sense. It would even be incredibly easy to impliment...however did you notice their claims?
They were claiming to be able to go through however many millions of messages per day. No single person gets that many. The ONLY reason to do that would be to sift through the ISPs entire feed for information.
Secondly they said this is specifically for gathering email. This makes sense though. Much of the time I do NOT check my email from my ISP dialup. I often check it from work. Even so...they would really not need such a powerful system to search through 1 persons traffic....hell even 10 peoples traffic. Even if they had DSL lines...they can't truely generate THAT much traffic.
So what you are saying then...
I fyou WANTED to be homosexual...you could force yourself through mental willpower to be sexually attracted to men?
Could you force yourself to be sexually attracted to horses?
Do you really believe that sexual attraction is completely a conscious decision that a person can just sit up and decide?
All I am saying is that a person has no control over what they fantasise about. No I would go farther...no person should be judged merely upon what their fantasy is.
Action is not fantasy. Fantasy is not action.
Thats not what I am suggesting at all.
There is a huge difference between tapping a phone line and listening in, and tapping the whole trunk and listening to every call, for every person on the block, simultaneously.
It opens the system up for abuse. It means that ALL email going through the ISP can be logged...once the system is in place, ALL users email is subject to the whims of the human FBI agent who installed it and set it up.
Protecting people from this is a trivial problem, and gives them NO less legitimate information.
> Funny isn't it? Everyone gets their panties in a
> wad about the government getting warrents to
> check your email, but you flat out say that
> IPS's could redirect and read your email without
> anyone knowing, and no one cares?
I care...unfortunaly its unavoidable. Its the way that email was implimented, there is no way to stop an eavesdropper on that level.
My point was simply that they can get exactly the information they CLAIM to want, yet they seem to be insisting on a MORE intrusive system where the ONLY protection against them accessing more data than they "should" is well them.
Why would they insist on this, when they can get the SAME data through LESS intrusive channels?
Do I trust my ISP more than the Federal Government? Only because I have no other choice, short of convincing everyone I know to use PGP (fat chance that).
My ONLY objection, in the context of this discussion, is that this system can be abused by the FBI, with, essentially, no oversight. Using the ISP system to divert mail would require complicity between ISP and FBI to be abused...and that at least marginally raises the bar.
FBI agents are human beings. Human beings sometimes do bad things, even with the best intentions. As such, there must always be some level of protection in place to limit the damage that they can do.
Again...what I am suggesting is truely trivial difference, if they are truely only doing what they claim to be doing. However it protects the people at large, if their intions are other than their claims. Seems like a win all around (unless of course your an FBI agent who wants to abuse your carnivorous machine)
> Because I'm not paranoid?
Perhaps because you inore history? I would submit that the entire history of the human race is the history of power abused by indivbiduals.
Do we forget that the FBI is the same organization that has abused its powers in the past. Would you consider it part of the FBIs job to forge letters to heads of the Maffia and heads of the US Communist party in attempts to litterally provoke the two organisations to violence against each other? Well they did it! I have seen the declassified papers on it!
(www.thesmokinggun.com - an archive of files obtained under the FOIA)
Furthermore....what they CLAIM to want is EASILY obtainable without "Carnivore". It would be TRIVIAL for an ISP to setup their mail server to blindly send copies of all messages and ONLY messages to and from the person being monitored to the FBI system...instead they insist on having THEIR box process EVERYONES messages.
If Carnivore was the ONLY way to do the job, that would be one thing. The fact is, it isn't. In fact its the MOST intrusive method possible. It means THEY are sorting through data that they have NO right to access, in order to get at the data they do have the right to.
To extend your analogy better....
What they are doing is going to the post office and saying "There is a person in this city who we are investigating. We have a warrent that lets us read his mail before it gets to him." (assuming thats possible - remember this is an analogy)
Then demanding that the Post office turn over ALL mail that comes to the post office to the FBI and lets the FBI sort out this persons mail from the rest.
They arn't opening the letters per se...(tho in the case of email the distinction is blurred as the envelope doesn't conceal the contents) but demanding to look at "ALL" envelopes and make their own determination as to what they have access to.
> This sounds like it is indeed meant for
> targeting specific suspects,
Well it deponds on how you wish to look at it really. Assuming its a given that they have the right to wiretap (I am putting aside the fact that I have major philosophical problems with law and law enforcement here)....they have the right to listen in on "data" (conversations email etc) comming from a known data source (victem er I mean bad guys phone) to gather evidence against him.
Their entire system sounds basically like a system that takes all the email in the system, applies a set of regexs to the headers and takes all email too and from there target.
Here is the problem I have. The "data source" is not a "known one". They are not listening to "His line" they are listening to the whole ISP. Even if its just a header grep...they have NO RIGHT to recieve and look through ANY data except that which comes from or two who they are looking at...even if it is JUST a gheader grep.
The difference may not seem important but it is. If they wiretap your phone line, they can't abuse that to listen to my conversations, unless I use your phone. In this case there is the possibility of abusing their "wiretap" on YOU to listen to MY email because I am on the same ISP as you.
if YOU are the target...they have NO right to have MY mail ever even TOUCH their system.
However....if your friends wife is blond...would he object to knowing that you have a shoebox full of pictures of naked blond women? Who are not necissarily his wife?
The point you are responding to had nothing to do with photographs. What I was commenting on was that merely finding out that a person HAS those urges causes them to be treated differently, whether or not they even have pictures in their posession. COmpletely differnt point.
> However, he makes no provisions for dealing with
> or preventing misuse of them that is illegal or
> dangerous.
Well he says right out that this is meant from the start to be useful to "political dissidents".
Basically its simple. The system is designed to protect individuals from those who would hunt them down.
What if a person does not agree with what is "illegal"? If the government says "Its illegal to even discuss X" then would you support its ban? or would you support the dissidents who still go on to discuss it? Does it matter what X is?
Does it matter who the government is? Would you suporrt people in Iraq talking about the overthrow of their dictator and the institution of a democratic government in its place?
Something like that is easy to say "Yea I support that...thats a 'bad government'" but what about when its the US government? Sure it may be a differnt story to YOU....but someone else may say the same thing about Iraq...or any number of dictatorships.
There is a bill in congress in the US that would make merely giving out information about drugs illegal. There are people, dissidents if you will, that believe strongly that their body and their mind are their buisness. Are they evil criminals just because the law says so?
> Thank Christ for that. Looking at the murder
And of course, gun access is the ONLY reason for a high murder rate. Its interesting...out in the country where there are few cities...no overcrowding, and horrid poverty (hell can live off the land out there if ya have to)...I would wager that guns actually outnumber people. Yet the murder rate is quite low. (though a rather large number of deer and woodchuck have a tendancy to make it onto diner plates)
But as we know...hammers are the leading cause of nails being pushed through wood violently. And knives are the prime reason that steak gets cut into peices.
> and the number of people who get drunk and
> shoot apples off each others heads
Wasn't it an Englishman who came up with the term
"Natural Selection"? Nothing wrong with it if you
ask me.
> nd none of the idiots who surround me every day
> can own a gun either.
Yes well...except the ones who buy them off the black market huh? Heh oh yea...they happen to be the same idiots who have no qualms with breaking into your house in the middle of the night and helping themselves to all of your stuff.
Isn't that a coincidence?
> When I said that censorship should be absolutely
> banished, I meant it knowing the consequences.
> It means that kiddie porn will be uncensorable,
> and to prosecute it you'll have to actually
> catch people with it on their computers,
> or in production. You won't be able to catch it
> in transmission.
This may be a fine point but...I feel the need to state here that I do NOT think mere posession of kiddie porn should be punished.
Remember...Pedophiles are humans. A pedophile is not a child molseter. Child molestation is an ACT. Pedophilia is entirely a psycological thing.
A person has no control over what sexually arouses them. This type of "wireing" is setup very early in life. It is by no means a conscious choice.
Many, hell even most, child molesters may be pedophiles. That does NOT mean that most or even all pedophiles are child molesters.
If they are able to keep their urges under control, and keep a collection of pictures on their computer to help them satiate those urges when they arise...then i say more power to them. Frankly...I pity them, and am extremely thankful that I did not grow up to find myself craving something that is so incredibly verboten in our society.
I think we, as a society, should be expending our effort finding and dealing with those who ACT on these impulses and harm other people, rather than spend our energy condemming and ostracising those who merely HAVE these urges. I think alot would be gained by accepting them and allowing them to come "out of the closet".
To put it in perspective...If I am with a friend and his wife. I am a human male. I can find his wife sexually attractive. I can even fantasise about his wife. He knows I am a human male and I have those urges. As long as I don't make an issue of them or act upon them...there is no problem.
However...think of a pedophile. If his friend had a child, he would generally need to hide the fact that he has these urges...for if it was discovered, in most instances it would be considered a problem...whether he acted upon those fantasies or not.
These people, as much as any other group, need anonymity on the net. There are constantly witch hunts going on for them. The mere association of ones name with pedophilia can have devastating effects on ones life.
--Steve
who still mourns anon.penet.fi, even though he only used it once.
Actually with freenet (as I understand it) you CAN tell where the data is stored. Or rather you can find out some subset of locations where it is stored.
:)
However...observation is not a passive act. Simply observing where the data is stored causes it to propagate to new locations. Thus it becomes like trying to nail jello to a tree...
aint replication a bitch?
This is a good point. Its as I have heard many times "Security is about managing risk".
I met a person at Usenix last month who keeps his pgp key on a disk, in an undisclosed physically secure location (probably in a safe). When he signs someones key, he boots his laptop (cold boot) off a CDROM, containing ONLY software that he personally audited, with a copy of gpg or pgp (I forget) on the CDROM.
He then uses that to sign the keys.
Now this is all well and good but...very secure. However is it needed? I don't know about others but I figure that if someone is willing to expend the effort to A) Break into my masquerading host, B) break into my workstation host, and then C) invest the energy (CPU time etc) to try and crack the encryption on _MY_ gpg key (given that MY key has a strong passphrase)...
Well if someone had motive to expend THAT MUCH effort to get MY key...then I have larger problems than key protection is going to solve.
All we can really do is protect ourselves with deterrent systems, like the car locks and doors on houses, to make the barrier to entry high enough that its not worth it for most people to attack....then hope its enough.
I think the real problem with the net is the volume. If you want to listen to voice conversations in bedrooms...you need to have listening devices pointed at every bedroom. If you want to listen to email....all you need is a tap at a high volume net juncture...and you can get thousands upon thousands of messages.
(our mail exchangers alone do about 100k messages/day..upstream 1 or 2 hops from us..its probably more like 1 million or more)
> You really think five year old children are that
> much different, be they European, American,
> Indian, Japanese or whatever?
In some ways. by 5 years old children are much more developed mentally than most people give them credit for. They are certainly capable of learning to sit still through a diner by that age.
> Do you really think the notion of proper
> behavior (which varies with the different
> cultures) has sulked in by that age?
Only partially. The beginings of moral development are in place around 7. (there is an old saying "give me a 7 year old boy, and ill give you a man" or some similar confuguration of words) In fact the whole concept of "childhood" is relativly new (few hundred years old...maybe as many as 500).
Certainly by age 5 they are able to learn more than they are taught.
> This is a favourite of conservatives, people who
> long for the "golden days" and suchlike fools.
I tend to agree. I also tend to think that no such "golden days" ever existed. Every era has had its problems.
However, change does happen. Culture changes, society changes. Just because "conservatives" often argue something, doesn't make it wrong (just because they are often very wrong). I believe that people are less disciplined today, in our culture, then they have been in the past. I think our society ENCOURAGES this.
> ou're aware that it is more easily taught by
> example than by indoctrination, right?
Actually indoctrination can work wonders in the right setting...but yes example is how children learn. Many adults arn't much better than their children.
> There we go again with the discipline harangue.
> Discipline is highly overvalued. It is not
> always necessary
Perhaps you miss what I mean by discipline. Discipline is internal. It is the ability to consiously make a decision and stick with it. The ability to supress desire when needed. Control over ones own mind. The ability to say "Ok I have to do this" and go do it.
Take meditiation. It is the ULTIMATE form of discipline. The ability to sit down quietly and just sit there for even 5 mins without stiring, without looking around and doing physical things. To be able to say "I am going to just sit here in an upright position with my eyes closed for at least 5 mins" and then to actually do it....that is discipine. (and yes I realize there is more to meditation than that)
> re actually IMHO, the consequence of people not
> using rational thought enough in their lifes.
I definitly agree. Rational thought is important. It is a discipline! Its is about controling oneself. Supressing emotional desires and bias and using rational thought to solve a problem and make a decision.
> Like: buying a cheaper product, even though its
> production endangers the environment or the
> local economy.
Well no. "cheaper" may be a necessity. How about buying the flashy SUV even though its use endangers the environment, worldwide oil supply and 99% of your driving is JUST you back and forth to work with no cargo.
Look at the car commercials. They play on emotions. Like the recent "Dodge" adds where they constantly mix the words "Dodge" and "Different" to try to connect the two. This advertising has nothing to do with trying to get you to make a rational decision.
I dunno if anyone else has mentioned it (looked didn't see it) but I believe there is has an "Open Hardware Certification" which does NOT garauntee Linux Compatibility but is actually better.
To get the certification vendors must publish enough information to write a driver and make it available to the public.
http://www.openhardware.org/
-Steve
I dunno about anyone else but this doesn't really bother me much. I mean, I run snort to look for port scans and exploit attempts...but just to know who is looking.
I always think its funny when some loser admin sends us an email saying a host on our network "Attacked" his box and to prove it shows a log saying he was port scanned.
Oh the horrors, a port scan! My god! What will they do next? Traceroute? telnet to it and read the banners to see what its running?
Of course...many of these people run chocolate^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HFire Walls, so I can see why they might have some pretty silly notions of what an attack is....
> Then again, could it be that society implicity
> tells boys that they need to be "macho and
> manly"? Sort of how society tells girls they
> need to be "skinny and beautiful"?
I think its more than that. People always want to blame drug abuse, violence, etc as "the problems" when really, I think they are symptomes of larger, and more fundamental, problems with our societies social structures...specifically they are rotting.
At a start, look at chldren in the US versus other countries. In france or other European countries a 5 year old kid can sit through a formal diner. How many 5 year olds in the US can do the same?
We have stopped teaching our children responsibility and discipline. In fact, we have taught them that they can be irresponsible...its expected of them.
Now as for firearms...they ARE a buzz enhancer in a way. I have used them...holding a gun is a high in and of itself. The realization that YOU now can decided life or death at a whim. Its power.
Does that make them bad? No. It, like anything, is something a person must be taught to control. I have cousins who have owned firearms since they were 11. They are some of the safest people I know with guns. They were taught the simple rules from extremely early ages.
You NEVER point a gun unless you intend to fire it. You NEVER point a gun at a person unless your life is in danger. You ALWAYS treat every gun as if its loaded (even if you have the firing pin in your pocket!). Its all about respect for the power of the tool and for basic life.
It is much harder to aquire discipline later in life than early. Hell I am 22 and just now starting to learn to discipline myself. Its NOT easy. Its a skill that needs to be taught young.
All in all I don't think our society breeds healthy life attitudes. Its a much harder problem to solve than just being reactionary and trying to solve the symptomes (like prohibition of drugs, drunk driving penalties, etc etc) but raising responsible people with healthy life attitudes will solve these at the source.
System cracking is just an extension of adolencent irresponsibility. It is not the problem but the symptom. Catching crackers will no more solve the problem than taking tylanol will get you over your cold faster. (all it does is make you feel better by treating symptoms)
> You said you don't vote. So shut up. No talking
> politics for you
Rather then living under the delusion that voting actually will change anything (and I said I wont vote for Candidates...I most certainly will vote for initives or ballot questions)
I prefer to live under the delusion that by talking about the issues I can raise social awareness and help change the world.
In the end its all worthless...but its fun.