I was thinking along the same lines. It's influence over opinion that is truer power. As long as the population here continues to glue themselves to TV sets, broadcast media will continue to be the ones setting agendas and programming opinions, thus ultimately making laws and directing the flow of more power (money).
Kind of points to how great a force for good NPR is.
The EFF's server compares the SSL certificate your browser submits with the SSL certificates for the same hostname that the EFF has on file from other users who submitted certificates (or maybe the EFF also tries to connect to the https server themselves).
So, similar in effect to the "multiple views" or "notaries" method of validation (a là Perspectives / Convergence). How do you know this is what HTTPS Everywhere is doing? I wondered about it and wasn't able to find any information on it, including mentions in feature lists.
Correct, FLAC is not inherently "CD quality" — it's more flexible.
CD quality is (two channel) 16 bit samples at a 44.1 kHz rate. FLAC can handle CD quality because it handles a range from 4 to 32 bit samples and frequencies from 1 Hz up to about 650 kHz stored in up to 8 channels. So FLAC has your quality range covered. You could not want for a more capable format. (I think the frequency range means you could encode a substantial chunk of commercial AM radio signal?)
As others note, this the capability range of FLAC, not necessarily the quality of the source signal you're encoding.
The attitudes you're ascribing to me are a matter of your expectations of my thinking, not anything I've said and certainly not my actual feelings.
I believe needle programs are a great idea. There are many, many sad addicted people out there who could use help. There are many, many people who have been grievously harmed by heroin and other drugs (narcotics and all sorts).
I don't believe drug addicts are evil. They're mostly unfortunate. Telling people that heroin is dangerous is one way of helping future generations to avoid falling into the trap.
If you're seeing me as vilifying addicts, you are not seeing me as much as you are seeing what you're sensitive to.
You're saying so long as the users can legally acquire high quality heroin there's no serious harm? But what about being addicted in the first place? I count that as harm.
Meth didn't make me violent. And, thankfully, I never got addicted, but that's not to say it didn't feel intensely pleasurable. But that's anecdote. Further in contradiction to the idea that methamphetamine inherently increases violence:
Methamphetamine was associated with reports of violence, but the link was very weak. Derlet and colleagues examined methamphetamine-related emergency room admissions and concluded that about one in five admissions was agitated and the symptoms of this agitation included screaming loudly, belligerence, aggression, and hyperactivity. Viewed differently, about 80 percent of the admissions exhibited no agitation or aggression. Thus, while methamphetamine may lead to aggression, there is no "one-size-fits-all" model of the link between methamphetamine and violence. Perhaps, as Ellinwood suggested, rather than causing violence in the peaceful user, methamphetamine merely amplifies preexisting violent tendencies.
That guy wrote a book. Here on Slashdot we're all talking out our butts, but that's okay, that's how conversations usually go. I don't know a lot about heroin, but the thing that I'm pretty certain of is that it feels damned good. And that alone is a serious problem.
Let me ask you: Why are you asking what makes heroin worse than LSD? Are you just being pedagogical? Do you really not know? Do you just not know what this particular person thinks are the criteria?
Do you realize your presentation here strongly hints at the implication that you feel, aside from the specifically excepted points, heroin is no worse than LSD? I personally feel it's much, much more dangerous, again aside from the excepted points. If you'd like details on why I think so, please feel free to ask.
Ubiquitous, easy to access computing. We keep heading that direction. Glasses and convenient input devices like bracelets (I hadn't thought of that, very clever) will be a fantastic summit. Eventually, the interface will evolve beyond even glasses into implants. 50 years til that?
It's a safer, more polite world. The latest Amber Alert system allows people to opt in to automatically search the last few minutes of their SPEKZ data stream against a possible match. Road rage is also much less frequent, and not only because most cars are driving themselves. People even stoop and scoop because other fed-up dog owners forward SPEKZ videos of the culprits caught in the act to the city and post them on the Net.
This is an image of what I refer to when I say that privacy is gradually and inexorably evaporating. We'll have to revise our thinking so we can cope with our public lives being truly public, not just potentially so. These days we can pick our noses in our cars and expect de facto privacy, but as time goes on the chances that our nose pickings will end up recorded and available to the world increase. Where we go every day, conversations with our partners, even what we look at as we're walking down the street, these will all eventually be public knowledge. I'm thinking we won't be able to get by on outdated notions of right and wrong behavior and that we'll need a more mature ethics and sophisticated outlook.
Part of the problem is that Mike Goldman makes as if to outline precise technical constraints on the problem (data file of such size, you tell me this, I send you that, you send me those, they output so-and-so) but includes without being explicit the spirit of the bet. The challenge is about compression, yes, but if you start to give precise constraints on how the bet can be won, you start to imply that any activity within the constraints is fair game.
The confusion here is about the nature of human communication and phrasing wagers, not compression.
Mike Goldman ought to acknowledge that the spirit is meant to be a constraint in the challenge. He should acknowledge that he was not explicit regarding this in his specification of constraints, and he should update the challenge to reflect it.
Patrick Craig needs to understand that achieving dataset size reduction via compression is the actual objective and a valid constraint, even if unstated. And, yes, also that what he did was not compress the data, he just transformed the characters elided from the original file into something else stored outside the files' contents, into the fact that the input files to his "decompressor" are distinct entities.
Meanwhile, I'm writing a decompressor that will use its own name as the source for the "decompressed" result. Granted, it'll be a large name, but the upshot is that it should be a tiny program and the "compressed" file it processes can be 0 bytes long. A substantial savings.
If they track you for a week are they still not getting useful information?
Indeed, you could build not just a person's regular itinerary, but a network of who they are associated with. Arguably, you could build a pretty good profile of a person, including religious and political beliefs with probably high accuracy.
Not an awful lot, since seeds produced by GM crops are not viable.
This is a problem either way. If there's a chance of creating a dangerous organism, there's still a chance the organism will find a way to reproduce. Viable means "capable of living" and, again, "life finds a way". On the other side, you're right that it's a problem even if harmful organisms aren't produced, because farmers can't grow crops from the seeds.
There's no contradiction in the fact that both these scenarios are real concerns. Terminator seeds at once bankrupt farmers and fail to stop potential catastrophe. They do this by being too much a block to continued growing and too little a block to catastrophe. I grant you it is ironic — because irony is based on perception, and we could misperceive hippies to want farmers to continue growing GMOs. Or we could resolve the apparent paradox by just realizing that it's bad that farmers are suffering, even if they were trying to do something dangerous.
A 2007 study[21] compiling research from 293 different comparisons into a single study to assess the overall efficiency of the two agricultural systems has concluded that
...organic methods could produce enough food on a global per capita basis to sustain the current human population, and potentially an even larger population, without increasing the agricultural land base.
(from the abstract)
A study of the sustainability of apple production systems showed that in comparing a conventional farming system to an organic method of farming, the organic system is more energy efficient.
Also, not all biofuels are ethanol. Some, like algal oil, can be produced using marginal lands. Maybe you should denigrate specific biofuels.
Eating poison ivy or fire: Co-evolution with a species is critically dependent on the manner of interaction between the species. That is, using a plant as a poison for millennia does not mean it's also safe to eat. It does mean it's likely to be a good poison.
Modern crops are different from older species, just by hybridization/breeding: Yes. But they're based on the genes of crops that have co-evolved with humans, using a process that's also naturally occurring (though using it somewhat artificially). And they may indeed be lacking benefits afforded by progenitor cultivars and species. Likely no one tested the resulting breeds for the subtle (and certainly not the unknown) benefits of the original species when selecting their "successes". Older species are probably better for you, generally, if not as tasty or pretty.
Many or most modern food plants are a novelty to any given person's ancestry: True, but not a novelty to humans in general. So the question here is how much pressure is put on the humans to evolve versus the crops? Also, there are differences between what foods different races can tolerate.
What's precaution and what's science-stifling irrational fear:
Yes, absence of evidence is not the same thing as evidence of absence....but in the absence of hard evidence, how are the opponents of GMO any different that the opponents of vaccination?
As stupid as that may sound at first, there is actually a very important concept being asked about. What's prudent and what's ignorantly fearful?
We need to weigh several factors. The possibility and degree of benefit. The possibility and degree of harm. The amount of knowledge we have about the topic. The amount of knowledge we have about the scope of the topic. (Rumsfeld's "known knowns" and "unknown unknowns" idea.) My review of these leaves me on the side of playing it safe.
The primary wildcard that makes me sit up and pay close attention to folks playing with the genes of food crops is the fact that "Life finds a way." Crops breed out of our control. We've seen it already with GMO. If you're not using a time-tested method for changing crop genes (breeding, for example), you want to figure out more clearly what kind of results you'll be making. Fuck it up in a bad way and the "life finds a way" factor could leverage your mistake into a catastrophe.
But, even if life does tend to find a way, I'd be for scientists experimenting with Frankenstein GMO crops in tightly controlled environments, and testing the results over the course of a couple generations of test subjects. But I guess that's infeasible.
Likely we'll all be test subjects. And then we'll just have to wait a few generations to iron out the big problems, and a few hundred generations to smooth out the relationship, and a few hundred more generations to polish it out to a beautifully symbiotic sheen.
For all those who think that because they can't see the problems with GMO there's nothing to worry about, this is one of the most important things to grasp.
Compared with thousands of years of human agricultural co-evolution, these modifications are nowhere near as thoroughly-tested.
Millennia of co-evolution is why all those soft-headed hippies are so keen on "whoa, man, natural". It's extremely thorough testing of interoperability. Not only that, it's continued refinement, of both plants and humans, so that the co-evolved plants approach ideal foods for the co-evolved humans. Ironically, rather a sophisticated scientific concept that these hippies grokked out intuitively.
It's not necessarily Luddite or anti-technology to be opposed to GMO and other "scientific" advances in food. Opposition may be based on a deeper understanding of how these systems operate.
The contempt that GMO advocates have for their opposition is embarrassingly hypocritical. It's a special kind of ignorance that leads one to believe that a lack of seeing problems is the same thing as an actual absence of problems. Folks, these are complex systems.
Because people generally fail to make distinctions is not a persuasive argument that we should avoid finer discerning.
Just because the average IQ is about 100 doesn't mean we should all be aiming to think at that level.
Generally, blunting your vocabulary blunts your thinking.
When you actually try to address the problem you stop calling the tailgater a "psycho" and you get more precise. He was he was "unnecessarily endangering people". You quit emotionally flailing with epithets and you try to get at the real problem, using more precise speech.
Heated debate about emotionally charged and contentious topics is exactly when you need to ratchet up your precision in thought and speech.
Specifically, he was defending laws banning gay sex and offered this explanation:
If the Supreme Court says that you have a right to consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything.
Note that Santorum was effectively addressing every one of us, claiming that the state should regulate our private, consensual sex. Even if you were het, you had reason to oppose this man. If you just enjoyed anal sex, or even just oral sex. If you just thought liberty was a good idea.
The disclaimer they were talking about is mentioned near the end of the original article.
Why these results? These results may seem politically slanted. Here's what happened.
So you can see (after reading the Blogger entry) that they're not talking about merely stating that the voice of the people is political, but that the search results are "slanted" by persons gaming the system. Presumably they think their results are now game-proof enough to no longer merit such disclaimers, and that the idea that
"Santorum means the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that's occasionally the byproduct of anal sex."
is just a popular enough idea to rank highly in search results (i.e., is the "voice of the people" as you put it). Otherwise, except for nits, I agree with your comment.
Bob Parsons is the ugliest face of America. Hateful and uninformed, but pushing to make things work the way he thinks they should. Don't be like Bob. And don't empower him with your money.
Oh, that's ironic. Not a very effective protest of corporate greed, paying royalties, buying something made in China. Stopping fascism is in large part done by people being aware of their participation in the system and opting out of it. Someone needs to make a free version. Maybe base it off the original. Not the movie version.
That's an old, tired, indulgent falsehood posing as a joke.
It irritates me not just because it's unfunny, but more because it takes a certain kind of mindset to think it's funny. You have to like beating down on others for their being dumb (whether that's actually what's going on), while simultaneously making yourself feel superior.
Basically, you have to be a bully at heart.
I find it irritating seeing bullies smugly picking on people. At least this "joke" serves a good purpose: to spotlight who's a bully.
Maybe also have the padlock be an animation like the "page is loading" icon. A padlock trying to lock closed.
Anyway, mu. The Certificate Authority infrastructure is fundamentally broken. Faulty by nature. Fussing with CRLs matters little when your browser already trusts a dozen discount CAs who either are not reporting break-ins or aren't even noticing them.
Those aren't problems with social networks; those are problems with governments.
Trying to find the "one true cause" is harmfully simplistic thinking. I understand that we like to place blame in a single place. It's simpler, comforting, and helps us to focus our contempt and attacks. But a better understanding of this situation may be that the combination of social networks governments is problematic.
Besides the term doesn't apply -- in a man in the middle attack, the man in the middle needs to be invisible.
Not exactly. The requirement you're trying to conjure is that the parties believe their communication is private.
And, as you suggest, users may expect privacy for a number of reasons. They may not understand how their workaday drivel could be of value to corporations and governments, and so wouldn't expect detailed analysis of their updates and taggings. Or they may not understand the infrastructure, perhaps partly from ignorance (and not caring to look into how computer communications work), perhaps partly from obliviousness (not even consciously registering that there's infrastructure, let alone how it might work).
Otherwise, users may lull themselves into thinking that it doesn't matter if their blathering is monitored. That is, they think they have virtual privacy because they think the information they're giving up is useless. This is where more technically savvy advocates of Facebook fall, I'm guessing. They're not so stupid they don't realize that Facebook has detailed access to their every comment and action on the site (often even realizing that web bugs track them even when they're not even at the Facebook website), they just don't think it's a concern. Well, the truth is that lots of data add up, and even individual comments or tags can be of great value. It's hard to judge the usefulness of these things from the perspective of a little person, without the perspective of a large corporation or government agency. There is no virtual privacy resulting from the unimportance of your social communications. There is only a failure of insight or imagination to reveal the value to be wrung from your information.
Another important connotation of MitM, and one that is not analogously mirrored in this situation, is the ability to alter messages. It's implied to be related to MitM, but I don't know if it's generally agreed that message alteration is a necessary attribute for defining what is a MitM attack. (For instance, merely intercepting data is a valuable result of interposing in believed private communication — gathering credit cards this way is a profitable attack.) Oh, but then again, the ability actually is there. My mistake. It's just not one that we would expect to be actively used. Not regularly, anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
I was thinking along the same lines. It's influence over opinion that is truer power. As long as the population here continues to glue themselves to TV sets, broadcast media will continue to be the ones setting agendas and programming opinions, thus ultimately making laws and directing the flow of more power (money).
Kind of points to how great a force for good NPR is.
So, similar in effect to the "multiple views" or "notaries" method of validation (a là Perspectives / Convergence). How do you know this is what HTTPS Everywhere is doing? I wondered about it and wasn't able to find any information on it, including mentions in feature lists.
Correct, FLAC is not inherently "CD quality" — it's more flexible.
CD quality is (two channel) 16 bit samples at a 44.1 kHz rate. FLAC can handle CD quality because it handles a range from 4 to 32 bit samples and frequencies from 1 Hz up to about 650 kHz stored in up to 8 channels. So FLAC has your quality range covered. You could not want for a more capable format. (I think the frequency range means you could encode a substantial chunk of commercial AM radio signal?)
As others note, this the capability range of FLAC, not necessarily the quality of the source signal you're encoding.
The attitudes you're ascribing to me are a matter of your expectations of my thinking, not anything I've said and certainly not my actual feelings.
I believe needle programs are a great idea. There are many, many sad addicted people out there who could use help. There are many, many people who have been grievously harmed by heroin and other drugs (narcotics and all sorts).
I don't believe drug addicts are evil. They're mostly unfortunate. Telling people that heroin is dangerous is one way of helping future generations to avoid falling into the trap.
If you're seeing me as vilifying addicts, you are not seeing me as much as you are seeing what you're sensitive to.
You're saying so long as the users can legally acquire high quality heroin there's no serious harm? But what about being addicted in the first place? I count that as harm.
Meth didn't make me violent. And, thankfully, I never got addicted, but that's not to say it didn't feel intensely pleasurable. But that's anecdote. Further in contradiction to the idea that methamphetamine inherently increases violence:
That guy wrote a book. Here on Slashdot we're all talking out our butts, but that's okay, that's how conversations usually go. I don't know a lot about heroin, but the thing that I'm pretty certain of is that it feels damned good. And that alone is a serious problem.
Here's one way to reckon abuse potential for a drug:
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/File:Rational_scale_to_assess_the_harm_of_drugs_(mean_physical_harm_and_mean_dependence).svg
Heroin: far and away a leader!
Let me ask you: Why are you asking what makes heroin worse than LSD? Are you just being pedagogical? Do you really not know? Do you just not know what this particular person thinks are the criteria?
Do you realize your presentation here strongly hints at the implication that you feel, aside from the specifically excepted points, heroin is no worse than LSD? I personally feel it's much, much more dangerous, again aside from the excepted points. If you'd like details on why I think so, please feel free to ask.
NB: I have not done heroin.
Good article.
Ubiquitous, easy to access computing. We keep heading that direction. Glasses and convenient input devices like bracelets (I hadn't thought of that, very clever) will be a fantastic summit. Eventually, the interface will evolve beyond even glasses into implants. 50 years til that?
This is an image of what I refer to when I say that privacy is gradually and inexorably evaporating. We'll have to revise our thinking so we can cope with our public lives being truly public, not just potentially so. These days we can pick our noses in our cars and expect de facto privacy, but as time goes on the chances that our nose pickings will end up recorded and available to the world increase. Where we go every day, conversations with our partners, even what we look at as we're walking down the street, these will all eventually be public knowledge. I'm thinking we won't be able to get by on outdated notions of right and wrong behavior and that we'll need a more mature ethics and sophisticated outlook.
Part of the problem is that Mike Goldman makes as if to outline precise technical constraints on the problem (data file of such size, you tell me this, I send you that, you send me those, they output so-and-so) but includes without being explicit the spirit of the bet. The challenge is about compression, yes, but if you start to give precise constraints on how the bet can be won, you start to imply that any activity within the constraints is fair game.
The confusion here is about the nature of human communication and phrasing wagers, not compression.
Mike Goldman ought to acknowledge that the spirit is meant to be a constraint in the challenge. He should acknowledge that he was not explicit regarding this in his specification of constraints, and he should update the challenge to reflect it.
Patrick Craig needs to understand that achieving dataset size reduction via compression is the actual objective and a valid constraint, even if unstated. And, yes, also that what he did was not compress the data, he just transformed the characters elided from the original file into something else stored outside the files' contents, into the fact that the input files to his "decompressor" are distinct entities.
Meanwhile, I'm writing a decompressor that will use its own name as the source for the "decompressed" result. Granted, it'll be a large name, but the upshot is that it should be a tiny program and the "compressed" file it processes can be 0 bytes long. A substantial savings.
If they track you for a week are they still not getting useful information?
Indeed, you could build not just a person's regular itinerary, but a network of who they are associated with. Arguably, you could build a pretty good profile of a person, including religious and political beliefs with probably high accuracy.
Procedural and even legal barriers to spying on citizens are not very effective.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillance_controversy
This is a problem either way. If there's a chance of creating a dangerous organism, there's still a chance the organism will find a way to reproduce. Viable means "capable of living" and, again, "life finds a way". On the other side, you're right that it's a problem even if harmful organisms aren't produced, because farmers can't grow crops from the seeds.
There's no contradiction in the fact that both these scenarios are real concerns. Terminator seeds at once bankrupt farmers and fail to stop potential catastrophe. They do this by being too much a block to continued growing and too little a block to catastrophe. I grant you it is ironic — because irony is based on perception, and we could misperceive hippies to want farmers to continue growing GMOs. Or we could resolve the apparent paradox by just realizing that it's bad that farmers are suffering, even if they were trying to do something dangerous.
(Though studies need yet to be performed to find out whether this translates to improved health.)
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Organic_food#Environmental_impact :
Also, not all biofuels are ethanol. Some, like algal oil, can be produced using marginal lands. Maybe you should denigrate specific biofuels.
Addressing the lot of responses...
Eating poison ivy or fire: Co-evolution with a species is critically dependent on the manner of interaction between the species. That is, using a plant as a poison for millennia does not mean it's also safe to eat. It does mean it's likely to be a good poison.
Modern crops are different from older species, just by hybridization/breeding: Yes. But they're based on the genes of crops that have co-evolved with humans, using a process that's also naturally occurring (though using it somewhat artificially). And they may indeed be lacking benefits afforded by progenitor cultivars and species. Likely no one tested the resulting breeds for the subtle (and certainly not the unknown) benefits of the original species when selecting their "successes". Older species are probably better for you, generally, if not as tasty or pretty.
Many or most modern food plants are a novelty to any given person's ancestry: True, but not a novelty to humans in general. So the question here is how much pressure is put on the humans to evolve versus the crops? Also, there are differences between what foods different races can tolerate.
What's precaution and what's science-stifling irrational fear:
As stupid as that may sound at first, there is actually a very important concept being asked about. What's prudent and what's ignorantly fearful?
We need to weigh several factors. The possibility and degree of benefit. The possibility and degree of harm. The amount of knowledge we have about the topic. The amount of knowledge we have about the scope of the topic. (Rumsfeld's "known knowns" and "unknown unknowns" idea.) My review of these leaves me on the side of playing it safe.
The primary wildcard that makes me sit up and pay close attention to folks playing with the genes of food crops is the fact that "Life finds a way." Crops breed out of our control. We've seen it already with GMO. If you're not using a time-tested method for changing crop genes (breeding, for example), you want to figure out more clearly what kind of results you'll be making. Fuck it up in a bad way and the "life finds a way" factor could leverage your mistake into a catastrophe.
But, even if life does tend to find a way, I'd be for scientists experimenting with Frankenstein GMO crops in tightly controlled environments, and testing the results over the course of a couple generations of test subjects. But I guess that's infeasible.
Likely we'll all be test subjects. And then we'll just have to wait a few generations to iron out the big problems, and a few hundred generations to smooth out the relationship, and a few hundred more generations to polish it out to a beautifully symbiotic sheen.
For all those who think that because they can't see the problems with GMO there's nothing to worry about, this is one of the most important things to grasp.
Millennia of co-evolution is why all those soft-headed hippies are so keen on "whoa, man, natural". It's extremely thorough testing of interoperability. Not only that, it's continued refinement, of both plants and humans, so that the co-evolved plants approach ideal foods for the co-evolved humans. Ironically, rather a sophisticated scientific concept that these hippies grokked out intuitively.
It's not necessarily Luddite or anti-technology to be opposed to GMO and other "scientific" advances in food. Opposition may be based on a deeper understanding of how these systems operate.
The contempt that GMO advocates have for their opposition is embarrassingly hypocritical. It's a special kind of ignorance that leads one to believe that a lack of seeing problems is the same thing as an actual absence of problems. Folks, these are complex systems.
"What could possibly go wrong?"
Because people generally fail to make distinctions is not a persuasive argument that we should avoid finer discerning.
Just because the average IQ is about 100 doesn't mean we should all be aiming to think at that level.
Generally, blunting your vocabulary blunts your thinking.
When you actually try to address the problem you stop calling the tailgater a "psycho" and you get more precise. He was he was "unnecessarily endangering people". You quit emotionally flailing with epithets and you try to get at the real problem, using more precise speech.
Heated debate about emotionally charged and contentious topics is exactly when you need to ratchet up your precision in thought and speech.
Specifically, he was defending laws banning gay sex and offered this explanation:
Note that Santorum was effectively addressing every one of us, claiming that the state should regulate our private, consensual sex. Even if you were het, you had reason to oppose this man. If you just enjoyed anal sex, or even just oral sex. If you just thought liberty was a good idea.
As the rotten.com article notes, the Supreme Court ruled just a couple months later that no, the state could not indeed regulate that. It is your right to sex up, however you please, a consenting adult in private.
So, rejoice that we're not being ruled by Santorums. Celebrate. Get yourself a sex partner, draw the curtains, and hump freely.
The disclaimer they were talking about is mentioned near the end of the original article.
So you can see (after reading the Blogger entry) that they're not talking about merely stating that the voice of the people is political, but that the search results are "slanted" by persons gaming the system. Presumably they think their results are now game-proof enough to no longer merit such disclaimers, and that the idea that
"Santorum means the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that's occasionally the byproduct of anal sex."
is just a popular enough idea to rank highly in search results (i.e., is the "voice of the people" as you put it). Otherwise, except for nits, I agree with your comment.
Bob Parsons on Guantamo Bay:
"The interrogation techniques at Gitmo are very mild."
(Note from Wikipedia: By May 2011 there had been at least six suicides and hundreds of suicide attempts in GuantÃnamo that are in public knowledge.)
"Key prisoners at Gitmo still have not talked -- because our interrogation methods are so weak."
(Are we really going to get into a sincere discussion about the efficacy of torture? What about we pause first at the idea of whether it's ethical?)
"Given the type of individuals we have incarcerated at Gitmo (all of them would love to gouge out your eyes-"
(including children and old men?)
Bob Parsons is the ugliest face of America. Hateful and uninformed, but pushing to make things work the way he thinks they should. Don't be like Bob. And don't empower him with your money.
Oh, that's ironic. Not a very effective protest of corporate greed, paying royalties, buying something made in China. Stopping fascism is in large part done by people being aware of their participation in the system and opting out of it. Someone needs to make a free version. Maybe base it off the original. Not the movie version.
Something nicer than some DIY versions.
I suppose you could illegally copy the design...
Are these originals? mask1 mask 2
Ah, here are some more. And another kind.
another and another.
more
another
Or you could base it on a portrait of Guy himself.
That's an old, tired, indulgent falsehood posing as a joke.
It irritates me not just because it's unfunny, but more because it takes a certain kind of mindset to think it's funny. You have to like beating down on others for their being dumb (whether that's actually what's going on), while simultaneously making yourself feel superior.
Basically, you have to be a bully at heart.
I find it irritating seeing bullies smugly picking on people. At least this "joke" serves a good purpose: to spotlight who's a bully.
Maybe also have the padlock be an animation like the "page is loading" icon. A padlock trying to lock closed.
Anyway, mu. The Certificate Authority infrastructure is fundamentally broken. Faulty by nature. Fussing with CRLs matters little when your browser already trusts a dozen discount CAs who either are not reporting break-ins or aren't even noticing them.
Trying to find the "one true cause" is harmfully simplistic thinking. I understand that we like to place blame in a single place. It's simpler, comforting, and helps us to focus our contempt and attacks. But a better understanding of this situation may be that the combination of social networks governments is problematic.
Summary might say:
Even quoting 'man in the middle attack' as if to quote Moglen.
But article only says:
It's actually vague.
Not exactly. The requirement you're trying to conjure is that the parties believe their communication is private.
And, as you suggest, users may expect privacy for a number of reasons. They may not understand how their workaday drivel could be of value to corporations and governments, and so wouldn't expect detailed analysis of their updates and taggings. Or they may not understand the infrastructure, perhaps partly from ignorance (and not caring to look into how computer communications work), perhaps partly from obliviousness (not even consciously registering that there's infrastructure, let alone how it might work).
Otherwise, users may lull themselves into thinking that it doesn't matter if their blathering is monitored. That is, they think they have virtual privacy because they think the information they're giving up is useless. This is where more technically savvy advocates of Facebook fall, I'm guessing. They're not so stupid they don't realize that Facebook has detailed access to their every comment and action on the site (often even realizing that web bugs track them even when they're not even at the Facebook website), they just don't think it's a concern. Well, the truth is that lots of data add up, and even individual comments or tags can be of great value. It's hard to judge the usefulness of these things from the perspective of a little person, without the perspective of a large corporation or government agency. There is no virtual privacy resulting from the unimportance of your social communications. There is only a failure of insight or imagination to reveal the value to be wrung from your information.
Another important connotation of MitM, and one that is not analogously mirrored in this situation, is the ability to alter messages. It's implied to be related to MitM, but I don't know if it's generally agreed that message alteration is a necessary attribute for defining what is a MitM attack. (For instance, merely intercepting data is a valuable result of interposing in believed private communication — gathering credit cards this way is a profitable attack.) Oh, but then again, the ability actually is there. My mistake. It's just not one that we would expect to be actively used. Not regularly, anyway.
Commercial incentive isn't the only creative force in the world.
Plenty of protocols and programs have been made without monetary motivation.