They are only "criminals" in the same sense that I am a "criminal" for watching DVDs on my PC using DeCSS -- because some asshat in office with a penchant for power decided to make something so silly illegal on paper. Crossing some immaginary line in the desert at night does not magically make someone a criminal in any meaningful sense.
Of course, the US is far from unique in this position, as all nations seem to attempt to enforce immigration policies. I've yet to see a truly compelling reason to support this practice. The free mingling of peoples and cultures is what's advanced our world to where its at today.
What do you think a witness is? Someone spying on someone else doing something! How do you think prosecutors actually convict murderers? There isn't always a police officer around when someone's getting shot. Usually it's a witness who was "spying" and turning someone in. What about when police officers get caught on video tape beating someone they just pulled out of a car? That was "spying", right? With a video camera nonetheless! To catch a crime, in the act, by a responsible citizen!
This is so disingenuous it hurts!
There's a world of difference between the incidental presence of a witness at a crime scene and some sloth of a redneck busy-body watching Border Cam, getting a hard-on at the thought of making some poor Mexican's life much more difficult.
Do you know how incredibly petty and ignorant most people are? Those fools on afternoon talk shows are representative of real types of people. When we have surveillance of this kind going on a citizen-against-citizen basis, we're fucked. McCarthyism will look quite tame in comparison. Sure, we may have facade of greater law and order, but the loss of true freedom will be staggering.
Of course, the whole premise of this particular debate -- that of immigration w/o papers being "illegal" -- is pretty disingenuous, as well.
I can't fathom that even Shrub's henchmen are dumb enough to think that it's remotely practical to capture *all* data going over the wire -- that would be an insane amount of storage. Unless their plan is to put ISPs smaller than the AOL, the big telcos, and cable companies out of business.
So that leaves, what, stream data? What kind of info is available from a stream capture? Originating/destination IP addresses and ports, time/duration of connection, and maybe number of bytes transferred?
I need to get off my ass and get my site's mixmaster reamiler up and running in order to contribute my part. This government shit's getting spookier by the day!
Even more fun is punching holes throught it with a 50-caliber ball from a muzzle loader rifle. BTW,.22 rounds bounce off, and.223 rounds punch neat little holes w/o "much" damage.
As cool and thought-provoking as Peter Gutmann's original paper was, I think that horse has been beaten to death, been burried in the back 40, and has rotted away. Given the data densities of today's drives, I have serious doubts that his (or anyone else's) recovery methods are viable anymore. Look, I'm a paranoid guy, but I would feel safe using a contemporary version of Gutmann's wipe (used by dban, secure_delete, etc.), plus a couple of 'dd if=/dev/{zero,urandom} of=/dev/hda' for good measure.
The NSA, AT&T, and mob bosses aren't above the laws of physics (just those of man). If they wanted info *that* badly, they'd put a hood on you and wire your genitals to a battery.
Any service that supports not only FreeBSD, but native amd64 binaries of their client deserves some major kudos. When I get tired of my regular playlists, I tune into last.fm for some fresh stuff, and it does a mostly decent job.
Dry ice can be used to make CO2 bombs, which are illegal.
Better ban carbonated soda an Mentos then!:)
Seriously, I recall reading in some book many years ago about a supposedly very dangerous "bomb" using dry ice. You fill up a metal vessel (pipe?) completely with water, not allowing any air, then sealing it tightly. Then you "flash" freeze it by dropping quickly covering it up with dry ice chips. The theory is that the water expands as it freezes (of course), and because it goes so fast, the metal walls of the vessel shatter violently and send shrapnel all over the place.
At best, it seems impractical (limitations of toting bulky dry ice around). At worst, seems like it wouldn't work that well to being with.
That's a cool idea. Simple questions like that may be the next step. I was thinking using animated GIFS w/ fades or changing gradients that might be a pisser for a program to solve, but quite easy for a human to solve. But hell, simple questions sound much simpler to implement and much harder to parse via automation.
Other similar challenges:
A C T --> (if the letters were re-arranged, what common pet would you get?)
F A K ? --> (if the "?" were a vowel, what word meaning "phoney" would you get?)
I'm obviously not that good at this, thus I suspect my problems are a little too difficult (sadly) for the largest possible US-english-speaking audience, and, not being a coder myself, they may actually be easy for programs to parse. However, this trend may be the next step.
No kidding! 10 years ago, I got carded for buying dry ice at a grocery store. Just recently (the past year or so), Red Devil Lye, a staple for home soap makers, has gone missing. Both are purported to be victims of the Neverending War On Drugs. Ditto the behind-the-counter report-too-many-bottles-sold of that cough supressent (robetussin?).
To be fair, you can still buy dry ice (and usually not get carded) at grocery stores around here, and you can still by pure lye online, but the latter just irritates me. I hate leaving a paper trail for any of my purchases, and leaving one for a "watched" substance bugs the shit out of me. I'm surpirsed goddamned gasoline doesn't require a permit to purchase!
I've always wondered... Even if specific, identifiable facts are omitted from "anonymous" online posts, would it be hard for a statistical/Bayesian system to pick out text written by a specific person given a sufficient corpus of material known to be from that person? Seems those techniques do a hell of a decent job with spam. I don't see how normal prose would be any different.
Simply being anonymous may not be enough anymore. You may need to sufficiently change your prose style, which may be very difficult to do, given how each person's vocabulary and grammar skills are unique.
If you're in Utah, vote for Pete Ashdown. He runs (ran?) a great local ISP, and is very much in line with many of the technology-related issues/.'ers agree with.
Even if you're not a resident, you can send him a campaign contribution to help him win.
Couldn't statistical analysis be used effectively? I've been playing with crm114 lately (a "Markov based" filter) for a backup to Spam Assasin on my servers. Once trained, it's ability to pick out spam is almost uncanny at times.
The context of a word seems to me (obviously not a math of CS geek) to be a good, and relatively easy to calculate, indicator of the word's relation to other terms. By context I mean the "physical" proximity to other terms on a page, rather than the normal written language context.
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Of course, the US is far from unique in this position, as all nations seem to attempt to enforce immigration policies. I've yet to see a truly compelling reason to support this practice. The free mingling of peoples and cultures is what's advanced our world to where its at today.
This is so disingenuous it hurts!
There's a world of difference between the incidental presence of a witness at a crime scene and some sloth of a redneck busy-body watching Border Cam, getting a hard-on at the thought of making some poor Mexican's life much more difficult.
Do you know how incredibly petty and ignorant most people are? Those fools on afternoon talk shows are representative of real types of people. When we have surveillance of this kind going on a citizen-against-citizen basis, we're fucked. McCarthyism will look quite tame in comparison. Sure, we may have facade of greater law and order, but the loss of true freedom will be staggering.
Of course, the whole premise of this particular debate -- that of immigration w/o papers being "illegal" -- is pretty disingenuous, as well.
So that leaves, what, stream data? What kind of info is available from a stream capture? Originating/destination IP addresses and ports, time/duration of connection, and maybe number of bytes transferred?
I need to get off my ass and get my site's mixmaster reamiler up and running in order to contribute my part. This government shit's getting spookier by the day!
Even more fun is punching holes throught it with a 50-caliber ball from a muzzle loader rifle. BTW, .22 rounds bounce off, and .223 rounds punch neat little holes w/o "much" damage.
The NSA, AT&T, and mob bosses aren't above the laws of physics (just those of man). If they wanted info *that* badly, they'd put a hood on you and wire your genitals to a battery.
Any service that supports not only FreeBSD, but native amd64 binaries of their client deserves some major kudos. When I get tired of my regular playlists, I tune into last.fm for some fresh stuff, and it does a mostly decent job.
Better ban carbonated soda an Mentos then! :)
Seriously, I recall reading in some book many years ago about a supposedly very dangerous "bomb" using dry ice. You fill up a metal vessel (pipe?) completely with water, not allowing any air, then sealing it tightly. Then you "flash" freeze it by dropping quickly covering it up with dry ice chips. The theory is that the water expands as it freezes (of course), and because it goes so fast, the metal walls of the vessel shatter violently and send shrapnel all over the place.
At best, it seems impractical (limitations of toting bulky dry ice around). At worst, seems like it wouldn't work that well to being with.
Other similar challenges:
A C T --> (if the letters were re-arranged, what common pet would you get?)
F A K ? --> (if the "?" were a vowel, what word meaning "phoney" would you get?)
I'm obviously not that good at this, thus I suspect my problems are a little too difficult (sadly) for the largest possible US-english-speaking audience, and, not being a coder myself, they may actually be easy for programs to parse. However, this trend may be the next step.
To be fair, you can still buy dry ice (and usually not get carded) at grocery stores around here, and you can still by pure lye online, but the latter just irritates me. I hate leaving a paper trail for any of my purchases, and leaving one for a "watched" substance bugs the shit out of me. I'm surpirsed goddamned gasoline doesn't require a permit to purchase!
You forgot: "Think of the children!"
Simply being anonymous may not be enough anymore. You may need to sufficiently change your prose style, which may be very difficult to do, given how each person's vocabulary and grammar skills are unique.
You think in 10 years she'll have problems? :) I wonder how her career is doing these days, anyway.
Even if you're not a resident, you can send him a campaign contribution to help him win.
Take down Hatch!
The context of a word seems to me (obviously not a math of CS geek) to be a good, and relatively easy to calculate, indicator of the word's relation to other terms. By context I mean the "physical" proximity to other terms on a page, rather than the normal written language context.