i strongly support this kind of idiocy: there's no better way to discredit the DMCA than to let it do the work for you. in fact, developers should start naming their software after their favorite songs, movies, books -- the sky's the limit! any suggestions?:)
Basically, the info was available to him for internal purposes, but they would then not have allowed him to divulge what he learned to the masses.
the state of california grants a director of a public-benefit corporation -- i.e., karl -- the "absolute right" to inspect the organization's papers; there's no blabla about NDAs.
it took ICANN some ludicous amount of time (10 months? a year+) after karl asked for the general ledger to invent "procedures" that he would have to submit to before they'd hand it over. the procedures they finally came up with would have forced him to sign away his rights and, worse, would have forced him to agree in advance to NOT fulfill his dury as a director if he had found anything possibly illegal.
karl neither intended nor said he intended to publish anything. that was a canard that ICANN's staff and lawyer (who's not accredited to practice in california) concocted, then clung to with the full fury of delusion, because they believed karl was the devil incarnate. and the proof is in the pudding: they got slammed in court, he was granted access to enormous amounts of material, and -- mysteriously -- he didn't publish it.
the Board still CAN make comments and hold this up for a long time
well...
(1) no one who follows ICANN would ever suggest that the board, which rubberstamps anything that comes its way, will "hold this up."
(2) again and again, I've seen/. editors make remarks in which public input is presented as bad because it slows things down. ICANN's big problem is that the staff -- which includes the president -- runs amok, with no accountability whatsoever. it's a shame the board doesn't function as a mechanism for presenting public input; but the fact that it does not doesn't mean that the solution is for the staff to do whatever it wants.
new gTLDs are a good thing. an ICANN dominated by an unaccountable staff is a bad thing. in the balance, i'd rather see accountability first and then new gTLDs. and it's not like the two are mutually exclusive.
...are very nice but, by definition, they are a way of presenting the new in terms of the old. i do NOT believe that 'the net' automagically transforms everything, because it doesn't: it too, by definition, exists within a preestablished social context. both fortunately and unfortunately, one aspect of that context is the legacy of modernism, which tends to trumpet everything as new and revolutionary. obviously, not everything is. but, maybe less obviously, aspects of many, many things are new and revolutionary. the difficulty lies in figuring out which aspects are, and how, and why.
privacy is a particularly complex issue. as i try to teach my students, it's a subject we only began to talk about when it began to disappear. as such, it's a name for a thing that doesn't exist -- or the wrong name for something new that does now exist. the trick comes in specifying what exactly that thing is and is not -- and, in that regard, i think it's reasonable to say that metaphors are ultimately counterproductive, because they try to describe something new in terms of the old.
but eric grimm is a very, very thoughtful person, and i hope that these remarks might serve to build on what he has written, rather than to tear it down.
interesting. not only does NSI jumpstart it's new auction operation but it prevents "competitive" registrars from ever getting a potshot at SLDs freed up due to nonpayment. oh, and what exactly happens to the resale price in excess of the unpaid bill? gee, i wonder.
that question is especially important because arbiters under ICANN's UDRP have tended to regard reselling an SLD as a sign of "bad faith" -- punishment for which is the loss of the SLD. but here we have NSI, a registrar/registry, auctioning off SLDs itself!
i can't wait to see what ICANN has to say about this dubious maneuver. of course, if ICANN and "competence" could fit in the same sentence, this possibility would have been solved when the UDRP was first imposed by its yet-to-be-elected board. but they can't fit in the same sentence, and the problem remains. oops, NSI just solved it.
and roger cochetti, the former IBM washington cheese largely responsible for installing dyson at ICANN, now works for NSI -- so i imagine what with the rather large favor she owes him, she might not have much to say all. what a pity.
scoundrels and incompetents, the lot of them. i do hope slashdotters wake up en masse to what a scam ICANN is.
The music industry wants you to believe that it's fighting to keep things the way they've always been. But it ain't true: from the rise of vinyl singles, to albums, to 8-tracks, to changes in radio markets, to CDs, to the growth of touring and merchandising, all this stuff is new. God didn't give any company the right to make profits obscene enough to support these fat-cat trade organizations: they made it by screwing people who listen to music. That's what profits are: extra money.
The music industry's complaints are just the new, improved white-collar version of what's been happening to blue-collar workers, small farmers, and mom-n-pop shops. They'll lose this fight. But it's up to you to help them lose, by whatever means you consider to be ethical. If women, African-Americans, or immigrant groups had listened to what The Man said was Right, they'd still be on their knees working for pennies if they were lucky. They didn't - and the world's a better place for all of us because they fought for what they thought was right. Oh my! And sometimes they even broke the law by doing so!
The music industry is trying to take control of the oldest tradition humanity has of a shared, free, and open experience. And how do they make all theri money? Exploiting technical innovations. Oh, I see - MP3s are "different." Yeah, right: do the math and tell me please, who are the real pirates?
Just make sure, if you decide to break the rules, that you can and do explain why you made that choice. And that, beyond just "profiting" from breaking those rules, you've done everything you can to change those rules through established political processes.
Laws can be wrong, and if enough people oppose them they can be changed. No one ever said opposing them was fun or easy or even safe, though. But sometimes you have to do what you think is right. As always, the most important aspect of doing so is teaching others to think the issues through, instead of just snapping to attention because The Man told them to.
RMS is right. I could quibble with his wording, but his basic point is spot-on: the political goal of substantive patent reform requires sustained pressure. A continued boycott campaign - that is, half boycott, half outreach to explain the hows and whys of the boycott - will help Amazon (not just Bezos) focused on following through.
There's no question that the ideals, methods, and social networks of the OS movement have an intense political potential. Some of that expresses itself in derivative ways, for example, by forcing businesses to reexamine their financial assumption, therefore act differently, therefore affecting employee/buyer/vendo, practices - "trickle-down" social impact. But even more important is to find ways to express those ideals, methods, and networks directly beyond the field of software.
A lot of that goes on already, but the more the merrier.
Is it really "worth a try"? In it's short history (18 months), ICANN has shown at every turn that it prefers vacuous PR about "transparency," "bottom-up governance," and "consensus" to the messy facts of actually functioning according to those ideals. By signing up for At-large Membership -- a body that has no direct power whatsoever within ICANN's policy-defining structure -- you give ICANN grounds for claiming that it's listening to netizens. ICANN has managed to outmaneuver and circumvent hundreds of people who've been involved in net-governance processes for decades; what makes you think it won't be able to diddle thousands of ill-informed newbies?
For some history of ICANN's hijinks, take a look at the long essays by Gordon Cook, an expert on telecom issues: What's Behind ICANN (Sept 1999) and ICANN Internet Takeover" (June 1999). "ICANN Watch" is another good resource for learning about ICANN's dubious dealings, though it hasn't been updated much lately. For an explanation of the strange circumstances under which ICANN passed the Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy before its board was elected, see this short "roving reporter" column and Keith Dawson's excellent chronology of the DNS debates. And here's a summary of some critical views of ICANN from a conference last fall.
There are lots more resources. If you plan to "get involved," you'd do well to know what you're getting involved with. But if you think your voice will be heard, you've got another thing coming. Don't believe me? Here's ICANN's organizational chart.
"I would be absolutely amazed if there was an Internet company that did not have problems this holiday season," said industry analyst Ken Cassar of Jupiter Communications. "It's a new business model. People are just figuring out how to make it work."
After several years of net-hype and decades of retail catalogs, to say that [ahem] "e-commerce" is new... Hm, yeah, getting buyers to give you nicely formatted entries in a database for fulfilment--whoa, really radical concept. Stand back kids, it might bite..
Things aren't getting shipped on time because these companies aren't shipping them on time. And the reason they aren't shipping them on time is that their collective heads are spinning with visions of all the money to be made "on the internet" instead of the boring details of running a real-world business. Hate to break the news to you newly minted e-businesspeople, but maybe if you spent more time getting your sh*t together and less time drooling over the wealth of Solomon that flows to anyone who uses the letter "e," you wouldn't have these problems.
Personally, problems like this make me really happy. I hope to god that "consumers" decide that e-commerce is a load of hooey so the whole PR front collapses and we can god back to the Good Old Days of the net.:)
Get the e out of e-xmas and put the x back in xmas, I say.
This "gold rush" metaphor is very misleading. First of all, can you name a single company that began amidst the original gold rush and still exists? You bet you can: Levi-Strauss. They did well because they were selling to all the prospectors. The big winners from this new "gold rush" won't be the prospectors, it'll be the service industry that supports it: lawyers and so on.
If the patent system keeps on running amok, it'll have to be reformed - and most of those patents will turn out to be worth the paper they're printed on, if that much. But the lawyers will survive even that fiasco quite well.
Ultimately, the idea that someone can own and control something simply because s/he thought of it is a pretty good definition of evil. The universe of techniques, procedures, and mechanisms that could make the world a better place is a bit like natural resources. Working day and night to use them up as fast as possible is just a way of stealing them from future generations. They won't look very kindly on this period, I think.
Open source, of course, is the solution.;) Why? Because it allows for others, now or in the future, to build on and improve our efforts now. And that's a pretty good definition of Good.
Well, how do you think they would have felt if it had been a matter of state security personnel sniffing about the distinction and siding with the communism in Marx's works? But, honestly, I don't remember seeing any mention of the USSR in ESR's essay. I do, however, distinctly remember him contrasting China's human rights with the US's, but failing to note that the US merely *exports* its human rights abuses. Well, unless you're young and black, of course...
I wonder how all those Guatemalans, Columbians, Nicaraguans, Salvadorans, Peruvians, Bolivians, Chileans, Argentines, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians, Indonesians, Timorese, Iranians, Iraqis, Haitians, Angolans, Congolese, Zairians--the list could go on a lot longer--who've been murdered at the behest of (if not by) the US in the name of anticommu^W corporate profits would view ESR's righteous sniffings about "freedom, increased choice, and *voluntary* cooperation." He might try reading Michael McClintock's _Instruments of Statecraft_ or Mark Danner's _Massacre at El Mozote_ before pontificating on the subject of human rights again.
this IETF statement smells a little too much like the kind of letter a telco sends when it's rais^W giving you a discount. the fact that the IETF isn't requiring a unique identifier isn't very comforting: they could just as easily recommend - which goes a long way - that no packets carry a persistent identifier other than an IP address. let vendors and sysadmins build in optional peristent IDs for those who want them or situations where they're needed.
the vast majority of traffic on the net involves this statement's second category, "less trusted targets," and that proportion will only grow over time, to the point where implicitly trusted traffic is a barely expressible nanopercentage. if in fact the IETF is interested in articulating a structure that will reflect those plain facts, then they should skip this kind of condescending "explanation," with it's "there's two situations" stuff, and base their analysis on the actual directions in which the net is developing.
IPv6 offers a chance to develop a protocol that will allow the net to develop into a field for truly open, random, and free social engagement - or to become a tool for systematic surveillance by those in a position to do so. and note well: encouraging persistent, unique IDs will put a lot of people in a position to do so.
I figger we agree pretty much across the board. And you definitely didn't dumb down anything at all. It's clear you've thought about (and dealt with) these questions a lot; the fact is, there are no simple answers. (I hope this thread's been useful for other/.ers:) Cheers.
In outline, your argument is made by lots of people--it used to be called "consciousness raising." And in many ways it's right: lowering the technical barrier to entry to activism (e.g., by downplaying the details) definitely encourages broader awareness and participation. But the two approches aren't mutually exclusive: the "hacktivists" *could* provide pointers to accurate info. But the main people who've associated themselves with these efforts *don't* do that - and have *repeatedly* ignored very articulate discussions of the flaws in their methods.
As for your argument that this discussion proves that their methods are successful, one could just as easily - and more correctly, imo - argue that "hacktivism" is a vindication of the tremendous work others have put into understanding how surveillance systems really work. It's a chicken-and-egg question. But the main point is that effective opposition to Echelon hasn't come from bouncing half-baked emails around - it's coming from the diligent work of people like Nicky Hager, whose research has brought about intense opposition to Echelon from, for example, the EU and Duncan Campbell's report. These results have played a big part in European liberalizations of (or active governmental support for) crypto. Now that there's much more accurate info about how these systems work available, promoting misunderstandings of these systems is just perverse.
The conversation about surveillance regimes should be smarted up, not dumbed down. If these "hacktivists" would smart it up, I'd support their efforts wholeheartedly, but that's not what they're doing.
I think we probably agree that an effective program of making mass surveillance much more difficult is a good idea, and that the "hacktivists" behind "jam Echelon day" aren't accomplishing that. It wouldn't be very hard to cobble together dictionaries dealing with sensitive topics and use markov techniques to generate texts (say, a CGI-enabled web page running on SSL) that would give context analysis tools a run for their money. But something like that would even follow the principles of an effective online action instead of STOP THE MODEM-TAX!!!!-style of half-baked announcements, which the "hacktivists" seem to prefer.
These "hacktivists" seem to think that peppering their email with naughty words is a new idea. It isn't: "spook fodder" is at least ten years old (take a look at Tim May's 1992 Cypherno micon). The idea that they can "jam" Echelon is incredibly naive; if they're really concerned, they'd do better to encourage people to understand these surveillance systems and to use PGP - spreading misinformation about surveillance and encouraging one-day actions is counterproductive. Some of the hacktivist organizers have been told again and again (for example, by the foounders of Hack-Tic/xs4all) that their methods are misguided and useless, but they never listen. Hacking is about, among other things, understanding technical systems: if you promote misunderstanding, you've got no business calling yourself a "hack"-anything.
I'm afraid Cringely does say why: he attributes a motive to _Jane's_ ("hoping for some inexpensive proofreading to keep Jane's from making their own big mistakes") and concludes "only way to write the news is to write the news"--as if to suggest that voluntary collaborative authoring or editing isn't a normal procedure in many situations. I'm sure he has many more specific things to say, but the idea that submitting an open call for comment is a form of "censorship" (his term) isn't something I'm very curious to hear him expand on. It's a shame that he uses censorship in this case as a catch-all category for thinking about the dynamics of communication. What _Jane's_ did was important because it crossed a big line: it was an informal peer review--but with a twist in how they defined "peer." Normally, it involves institutional credentials, which definitely serves to suppress contributions; but Slashdot doesn't impose credentials as a barrier to entry. The idea that motivated people might offer valuable input regardless of their officially acknowledged stature in a field could be an excellent precedent.
ICANN is imposing specific conditions on alternative registrars that effectively reduce them to sales agents for NSI; they're "competitors" with NSI mostly in the sense that the bulk of your money goes to the registrar, not NSI. (This isn't true of registars for ccTLDs [country codes]--.to, etc.) Note that, in order to be accredited, a registrar must agree to "dispute resolution policies" that are (uniformly) biased in favor of intellectual property interests. Take a look at TBTF for a good summary of the recent agreements and a list of useful links.
Slashdot Mirror
i strongly support this kind of idiocy: there's no better way to discredit the DMCA than to let it do the work for you. in fact, developers should start naming their software after their favorite songs, movies, books -- the sky's the limit! any suggestions? :)
IANA is ICANN. specifically, it is ICANN's least accountable segment: its staff.
it took ICANN some ludicous amount of time (10 months? a year+) after karl asked for the general ledger to invent "procedures" that he would have to submit to before they'd hand it over. the procedures they finally came up with would have forced him to sign away his rights and, worse, would have forced him to agree in advance to NOT fulfill his dury as a director if he had found anything possibly illegal.
karl neither intended nor said he intended to publish anything. that was a canard that ICANN's staff and lawyer (who's not accredited to practice in california) concocted, then clung to with the full fury of delusion, because they believed karl was the devil incarnate. and the proof is in the pudding: they got slammed in court, he was granted access to enormous amounts of material, and -- mysteriously -- he didn't publish it.
well...
(1) no one who follows ICANN would ever suggest that the board, which rubberstamps anything that comes its way, will "hold this up."
(2) again and again, I've seen /. editors make remarks in which public input is presented as bad because it slows things down. ICANN's big problem is that the staff -- which includes the president -- runs amok, with no accountability whatsoever. it's a shame the board doesn't function as a mechanism for presenting public input; but the fact that it does not doesn't mean that the solution is for the staff to do whatever it wants.
new gTLDs are a good thing. an ICANN dominated by an unaccountable staff is a bad thing. in the balance, i'd rather see accountability first and then new gTLDs. and it's not like the two are mutually exclusive.
privacy is a particularly complex issue. as i try to teach my students, it's a subject we only began to talk about when it began to disappear. as such, it's a name for a thing that doesn't exist -- or the wrong name for something new that does now exist. the trick comes in specifying what exactly that thing is and is not -- and, in that regard, i think it's reasonable to say that metaphors are ultimately counterproductive, because they try to describe something new in terms of the old.
but eric grimm is a very, very thoughtful person, and i hope that these remarks might serve to build on what he has written, rather than to tear it down.
interesting. not only does NSI jumpstart it's new auction operation but it prevents "competitive" registrars from ever getting a potshot at SLDs freed up due to nonpayment. oh, and what exactly happens to the resale price in excess of the unpaid bill? gee, i wonder.
that question is especially important because arbiters under ICANN's UDRP have tended to regard reselling an SLD as a sign of "bad faith" -- punishment for which is the loss of the SLD. but here we have NSI, a registrar/registry, auctioning off SLDs itself!
i can't wait to see what ICANN has to say about this dubious maneuver. of course, if ICANN and "competence" could fit in the same sentence, this possibility would have been solved when the UDRP was first imposed by its yet-to-be-elected board. but they can't fit in the same sentence, and the problem remains. oops, NSI just solved it.
and roger cochetti, the former IBM washington cheese largely responsible for installing dyson at ICANN, now works for NSI -- so i imagine what with the rather large favor she owes him, she might not have much to say all. what a pity.
scoundrels and incompetents, the lot of them. i do hope slashdotters wake up en masse to what a scam ICANN is.
The music industry wants you to believe that it's fighting to keep things the way they've always been. But it ain't true: from the rise of vinyl singles, to albums, to 8-tracks, to changes in radio markets, to CDs, to the growth of touring and merchandising, all this stuff is new. God didn't give any company the right to make profits obscene enough to support these fat-cat trade organizations: they made it by screwing people who listen to music. That's what profits are: extra money.
The music industry's complaints are just the new, improved white-collar version of what's been happening to blue-collar workers, small farmers, and mom-n-pop shops. They'll lose this fight. But it's up to you to help them lose, by whatever means you consider to be ethical. If women, African-Americans, or immigrant groups had listened to what The Man said was Right, they'd still be on their knees working for pennies if they were lucky. They didn't - and the world's a better place for all of us because they fought for what they thought was right. Oh my! And sometimes they even broke the law by doing so!
The music industry is trying to take control of the oldest tradition humanity has of a shared, free, and open experience. And how do they make all theri money? Exploiting technical innovations. Oh, I see - MP3s are "different." Yeah, right: do the math and tell me please, who are the real pirates?
Just make sure, if you decide to break the rules, that you can and do explain why you made that choice. And that, beyond just "profiting" from breaking those rules, you've done everything you can to change those rules through established political processes.
Laws can be wrong, and if enough people oppose them they can be changed. No one ever said opposing them was fun or easy or even safe, though. But sometimes you have to do what you think is right. As always, the most important aspect of doing so is teaching others to think the issues through, instead of just snapping to attention because The Man told them to.
RMS is right. I could quibble with his wording, but his basic point is spot-on: the political goal of substantive patent reform requires sustained pressure. A continued boycott campaign - that is, half boycott, half outreach to explain the hows and whys of the boycott - will help Amazon (not just Bezos) focused on following through.
There's no question that the ideals, methods, and social networks of the OS movement have an intense political potential. Some of that expresses itself in derivative ways, for example, by forcing businesses to reexamine their financial assumption, therefore act differently, therefore affecting employee/buyer/vendo, practices - "trickle-down" social impact. But even more important is to find ways to express those ideals, methods, and networks directly beyond the field of software.
A lot of that goes on already, but the more the merrier.
Is it really "worth a try"? In it's short history (18 months), ICANN has shown at every turn that it prefers vacuous PR about "transparency," "bottom-up governance," and "consensus" to the messy facts of actually functioning according to those ideals. By signing up for At-large Membership -- a body that has no direct power whatsoever within ICANN's policy-defining structure -- you give ICANN grounds for claiming that it's listening to netizens. ICANN has managed to outmaneuver and circumvent hundreds of people who've been involved in net-governance processes for decades; what makes you think it won't be able to diddle thousands of ill-informed newbies?
For some history of ICANN's hijinks, take a look at the long essays by Gordon Cook, an expert on telecom issues: What's Behind ICANN (Sept 1999) and ICANN Internet Takeover" (June 1999). "ICANN Watch" is another good resource for learning about ICANN's dubious dealings, though it hasn't been updated much lately. For an explanation of the strange circumstances under which ICANN passed the Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy before its board was elected, see this short "roving reporter" column and Keith Dawson's excellent chronology of the DNS debates. And here's a summary of some critical views of ICANN from a conference last fall.
There are lots more resources. If you plan to "get involved," you'd do well to know what you're getting involved with. But if you think your voice will be heard, you've got another thing coming. Don't believe me? Here's ICANN's organizational chart.
After several years of net-hype and decades of retail catalogs, to say that [ahem] "e-commerce" is new... Hm, yeah, getting buyers to give you nicely formatted entries in a database for fulfilment--whoa, really radical concept. Stand back kids, it might bite..
Things aren't getting shipped on time because these companies aren't shipping them on time. And the reason they aren't shipping them on time is that their collective heads are spinning with visions of all the money to be made "on the internet" instead of the boring details of running a real-world business. Hate to break the news to you newly minted e-businesspeople, but maybe if you spent more time getting your sh*t together and less time drooling over the wealth of Solomon that flows to anyone who uses the letter "e," you wouldn't have these problems.
Personally, problems like this make me really happy. I hope to god that "consumers" decide that e-commerce is a load of hooey so the whole PR front collapses and we can god back to the Good Old Days of the net.
Get the e out of e-xmas and put the x back in xmas, I say.
This "gold rush" metaphor is very misleading. First of all, can you name a single company that began amidst the original gold rush and still exists? You bet you can: Levi-Strauss. They did well because they were selling to all the prospectors. The big winners from this new "gold rush" won't be the prospectors, it'll be the service industry that supports it: lawyers and so on.
;) Why? Because it allows for others, now or in the future, to build on and improve our efforts now. And that's a pretty good definition of Good.
If the patent system keeps on running amok, it'll have to be reformed - and most of those patents will turn out to be worth the paper they're printed on, if that much. But the lawyers will survive even that fiasco quite well.
Ultimately, the idea that someone can own and control something simply because s/he thought of it is a pretty good definition of evil. The universe of techniques, procedures, and mechanisms that could make the world a better place is a bit like natural resources. Working day and night to use them up as fast as possible is just a way of stealing them from future generations. They won't look very kindly on this period, I think.
Open source, of course, is the solution.
and be polite...
Ellen Messmer
Senior Editor, Enterprise Applications
emessmer@nww.com
(202) 879-6752
Fax: (202) 347-2365
Network World
1331 Pennsylvania Ave., Suite 505
Washington, DC 20004
No.
Well, how do you think they would have felt if it had been a matter of state security personnel sniffing about the distinction and siding with the communism in Marx's works? But, honestly, I don't remember seeing any mention of the USSR in ESR's essay. I do, however, distinctly remember him contrasting China's human rights with the US's, but failing to note that the US merely *exports* its human rights abuses. Well, unless you're young and black, of course...
I wonder how all those Guatemalans, Columbians, Nicaraguans, Salvadorans, Peruvians, Bolivians, Chileans, Argentines, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians, Indonesians, Timorese, Iranians, Iraqis, Haitians, Angolans, Congolese, Zairians--the list could go on a lot longer--who've been murdered at the behest of (if not by) the US in the name of anticommu^W corporate profits would view ESR's righteous sniffings about "freedom, increased choice, and *voluntary* cooperation." He might try reading Michael McClintock's _Instruments of Statecraft_ or Mark Danner's _Massacre at El Mozote_ before pontificating on the subject of human rights again.
this IETF statement smells a little too much like the kind of letter a telco sends when it's rais^W giving you a discount. the fact that the IETF isn't requiring a unique identifier isn't very comforting: they could just as easily recommend - which goes a long way - that no packets carry a persistent identifier other than an IP address. let vendors and sysadmins build in optional peristent IDs for those who want them or situations where they're needed.
the vast majority of traffic on the net involves this statement's second category, "less trusted targets," and that proportion will only grow over time, to the point where implicitly trusted traffic is a barely expressible nanopercentage. if in fact the IETF is interested in articulating a structure that will reflect those plain facts, then they should skip this kind of condescending "explanation," with it's "there's two situations" stuff, and base their analysis on the actual directions in which the net is developing.
IPv6 offers a chance to develop a protocol that will allow the net to develop into a field for truly open, random, and free social engagement - or to become a tool for systematic surveillance by those in a position to do so. and note well: encouraging persistent, unique IDs will put a lot of people in a position to do so.
we'll see what the IETF decides on this - and on the question of whether "the IETF [should] develop new protocols or modify existing protocols to support mechanisms whose primary purpose is to support wiretapping or other law enforcement activities."
I figger we agree pretty much across the board. And you definitely didn't dumb down anything at all. It's clear you've thought about (and dealt with) these questions a lot; the fact is, there are no simple answers. (I hope this thread's been useful for other /.ers :) Cheers.
In outline, your argument is made by lots of people--it used to be called "consciousness raising." And in many ways it's right: lowering the technical barrier to entry to activism (e.g., by downplaying the details) definitely encourages broader awareness and participation. But the two approches aren't mutually exclusive: the "hacktivists" *could* provide pointers to accurate info. But the main people who've associated themselves with these efforts *don't* do that - and have *repeatedly* ignored very articulate discussions of the flaws in their methods.
As for your argument that this discussion proves that their methods are successful, one could just as easily - and more correctly, imo - argue that "hacktivism" is a vindication of the tremendous work others have put into understanding how surveillance systems really work. It's a chicken-and-egg question. But the main point is that effective opposition to Echelon hasn't come from bouncing half-baked emails around - it's coming from the diligent work of people like Nicky Hager, whose research has brought about intense opposition to Echelon from, for example, the EU and Duncan Campbell's report. These results have played a big part in European liberalizations of (or active governmental support for) crypto. Now that there's much more accurate info about how these systems work available, promoting misunderstandings of these systems is just perverse.
The conversation about surveillance regimes should be smarted up, not dumbed down. If these "hacktivists" would smart it up, I'd support their efforts wholeheartedly, but that's not what they're doing.
I think we probably agree that an effective program of making mass surveillance much more difficult is a good idea, and that the "hacktivists" behind "jam Echelon day" aren't accomplishing that. It wouldn't be very hard to cobble together dictionaries dealing with sensitive topics and use markov techniques to generate texts (say, a CGI-enabled web page running on SSL) that would give context analysis tools a run for their money. But something like that would even follow the principles of an effective online action instead of STOP THE MODEM-TAX!!!!-style of half-baked announcements, which the "hacktivists" seem to prefer.
These "hacktivists" seem to think that peppering their email with naughty words is a new idea. It isn't: "spook fodder" is at least ten years old (take a look at Tim May's 1992 Cypherno micon). The idea that they can "jam" Echelon is incredibly naive; if they're really concerned, they'd do better to encourage people to understand these surveillance systems and to use PGP - spreading misinformation about surveillance and encouraging one-day actions is counterproductive. Some of the hacktivist organizers have been told again and again (for example, by the foounders of Hack-Tic/xs4all) that their methods are misguided and useless, but they never listen. Hacking is about, among other things, understanding technical systems: if you promote misunderstanding, you've got no business calling yourself a "hack"-anything.
I'm afraid Cringely does say why: he attributes a motive to _Jane's_ ("hoping for some inexpensive proofreading to keep Jane's from making their own big mistakes") and concludes "only way to write the news is to write the news"--as if to suggest that voluntary collaborative authoring or editing isn't a normal procedure in many situations. I'm sure he has many more specific things to say, but the idea that submitting an open call for comment is a form of "censorship" (his term) isn't something I'm very curious to hear him expand on. It's a shame that he uses censorship in this case as a catch-all category for thinking about the dynamics of communication. What _Jane's_ did was important because it crossed a big line: it was an informal peer review--but with a twist in how they defined "peer." Normally, it involves institutional credentials, which definitely serves to suppress contributions; but Slashdot doesn't impose credentials as a barrier to entry. The idea that motivated people might offer valuable input regardless of their officially acknowledged stature in a field could be an excellent precedent.
ICANN is imposing specific conditions on alternative registrars that effectively reduce them to sales agents for NSI; they're "competitors" with NSI mostly in the sense that the bulk of your money goes to the registrar, not NSI. (This isn't true of registars for ccTLDs [country codes]--.to, etc.) Note that, in order to be accredited, a registrar must agree to "dispute resolution policies" that are (uniformly) biased in favor of intellectual property interests. Take a look at TBTF for a good summary of the recent agreements and a list of useful links.