Did you read the article? They're suing because they think Airbus lost a few billion francs to Boeing because the US gave Boeing information about Airbus's bidding strategy that had been obtained through echelon.
Yes, I read it. THE PUZZLE PALACE also documents examples where american intelligence gathering agencies used data they had gathered to help american corporations.
My point was not to refute the article, but to question the SURPRISE that everyone up here seems to be showing about this.
It's been happening a long time, and their intelligence agencies are helping their corporations also.
I'm not agreeing with the practice, just talking about it.
Our intelligence agencies kill people too. We tried to kill Castro. Face it, deal with it, get over it, move on.
It's going to continue to happen. Don't be shocked next time.
I don't understand this. Allies have been spying on one another for hundreds of years, if not longer.
Just read The Puzzle Palace, there are many documented cases, and our allies know it, so what's the big deal? They do the same thing.
Occasionally there are prices to be paid for such actions. In the late 1960's Israel attacked one of our intelligence gathering ships when they realized we were probably listening to them. Dozens of americans were killed and it was essentially buried.
We go to amazing lengths in our SIGINT (signals intelligence) efforts.
There was once a project to build a dish antenna (a damn BIG one) for the NSA that was intended to pick up faint radio signals that were being reflected by THE MOON. I believe this project was cancelled. The engineering problems were myriad to say the least.
Well, we all know how much NASA has perfected the art of orbiting large planetary-sized objects without crashing into them, like Mars, right? C'mon, back me up on this one, right? Please, someone tell me they didn't make their calculations in stones and furlongs again?
An orbit like this, around an irregularly shaped object is very difficult due to different concentrations of mass.
Even our moon, though more regularly shaped, makes stable orbits impossible. We discovered MASSCONS (mass concentrations) in the 1960's and didn't actually have a good map of them until the recent CLEMENTINE mission.
Orbitting the moon requires regular orbital corrections, else you become crater ejecta.
Of course, that would be using PGP to carry out an illegal action so if they had done the sensible thing the publicity from this case would easily have turned into a massive 'encryption is evil' media bun-fight. It could also have provided a way for law enforcement to bring key escrow issues back to the forefront.
That would have been a good thing.
It's only a matter of time before these encryption issues really hit the front pages, anyway. I say bring'em on.
I'm eager for en encryption fight. It's these kinds of things that get my blood flowing. The current DVD issue, encryption in general.
Government employees generally don't rank high on the trust or confidence scales. Sometimes, a few of the high-ranking ones get caught doing something illegal. But the vast majority of government employees, IMO, have two major concerns in their day-to-day work experience: "When do I get off of work?" and "How can I cover my own ass?"
And you're basing this on WHAT? Your friend the postman?
READ THE BOOKS BEFORE YOU CRITICIZE ANYTHING.
Killing their own citizens or costing their country's corporations millions of dollars are not on the agenda.
That's just naive. How do you explain the CIA projects that our government has ADMITTED TO wherein the CIA injected people with horrible toxins and exposed them to horrible amounts of radiation to see what would happen?
I'm not even factoring in that much-rediculed characteristic, patriotism, which would keep a lot of folks from taking part in such plans.
Patriotism is the reason people DO this stuff. I remember a former government employee being asked questions about a nuclear test in the deserts of nevada. They KNEW fallout would land on this particular town (I forget which one) and the interviewer accused this guy of being a criminal for exposing american citizens to ratiation and not telling them. He said, "I did it for my country, how else were we going to beat Hitler and Japan?"
That sounds like blind patriotism to me.
Basically, your argument is based on this naive belief that our government "wouldn't do anything wrong cuz we're the GOOD GUYS" when if you'd open your eyes, you'd see that the history of our government is no different than any other's. It's littered with deceipt and dead bodies.
I could give you a list of references indicting out government, but I suggest you start with the two I already mentioned.
But I'm sure you'll just dismiss them as the works of angry, former US gov't employees who have an axe to grind because they didn't get their pension or something.
Noam Chomsky has a great phrase to explain these kinds of arguments.
They're true because they have to be. No reason, they just have to be.
Is it paranoid to note that we're being hit with unprecedented attacks, with no known motive, at the same time as the government is pushing for yet another expansion of their surveillance powers?
This isn't so crazy. If any of you have ever read the books by Phillip Agee (Inside The Company) and John Stockwell, men who were actual CIA operations directors, you would be surprised at the horrible things these organizations do to "encourage" trends in the US and our allies.
According to some reports, the CIA has been known to plant bombs in airliners... naturally these types of events are always blamed on middle eastern countries and terrorists, and we certainly DO like to hate middle-eastern countries.
OK, in my first message here I talked about a French web site with a catalog of satellite photos of the earth.
After searching far and wide (I even checked on floppies) I found the URL. I don't know if it will work for you, because friends have told me that they occasionally get locked out being asked for a password, but here it is:
So will they point that sattelite and get pics of that little airforce base 100 miles north of Las Vegas for me?
Actually, about 2 years ago when I was reading the sci.space.* newsgroups regularly there was a reference to a french satellite that was taking pictures (resolution not as good however) and keeping them in a database. They had a web page and you could punch in some coordinates and it would pull up the most recent photo in its database of that area.
Someone did type in the Area 51 coordinates and when the photo came up you could see a runway. Not much else though due to poorer resolution.
I just checked some of my old bookmarks and I couldn't find the link. I'll look some more later.
Considering all the problems the holodeck has caused on Star Trek, I don't see anything good coming from this project.
Amen to that! Either people are getting locked in there with the safety protocols turned off, or people are getting addicted to the alternate realities that you can create in there.
Although I do not have an addictive personality (unless you count my recent addiction to/.) I could see myself possibly getting addicted to a holodeck type of technology.
Hell, who wouldn't want to go live in their favorite TV show brought to life?
Let's just hope they never create a Commander Data, he was always malfunctioning too.:-)
Recently I attended a local PC User Group meeting because a friend invited me to see the Corel Linux demo that Corel was putting on.
First, my idea of a UG needs to be updated... because when I was younger a UG consisted of kids who've never kissed a girl pirating software, so imagine my surprise when this UG had only people in it who were 45 years old and up. I saw more grey hair than I had in a while.
They seemed to enjoy the Corel Linux demo, but I finally got a real view of the typical computing world when the Corel woman asked, "Has anyone here ever installed an operating system?", and only 3 hands went up. Me and the 2 other youngest people who happened to be in attendance. This shocked me because in my little computing world, everyone I know has done dozens, if not hundreds of installs of many OS's.
She then asked, "Who has installed linux?" and of course mine was the only hand to go up, and people were looking at me as if I had 3 heads (I don't).
Once she had convinced the people there that Corel Linux looks EXACTLY like Windows she bothered to point out that you could even open up a terminal window "if you ever felt like typing MSDOS commands." (At that point I think several people shuddered and at least one person dry-heaved).
She also forced me to say that I frequently "mount my CDROM drive" and that made some people laugh and confused the rest. This was all part of her way to show that corel automounts the CD.
Why am I rambling you ask? Because like many here I also do not think that the fellow this thread is discussing is a typical "suit" user.
Wake up people! The typical desktop user doesn't understand the difference between "netscape" and their operating system! If you unplug their keyboards in the night they will call tech support in the morning! They run their monitors in 640x480x256 because they don't realize there are any other settings!
Yes! I love it when I see someone get a system shipped to their door with a 19" monitor and the screen settings are exactly that, 640x480x256.
The Start button is roughly the size of a house on a 19" monitor in that resolution. I don't switch them to 800x600 or 1024x768 because it's likely a better resolution for them with that monitor, I switch them because I swear that once the huge start button tried to kill me.
One day, before Netscape.com was a portal, I was asked by a cousin what search engine I used, "Yahoo or Netscape."
It was difficult helping him to understand the difference.
Sorry, but I completely disagree. I'm not being reactionary, just pragmatic. The EFF aren't blind; they know where we are and they (surely) know we're discussing the subject continually. They also ought to know that if they need extra pairs of hands there are plenty of us here willing to help. The only two things that could stop them from using Slashdot as a source of ideas and information are incompetence and "not-invented-here" syndrome. If they're guilty of either of those (which I doubt) then we're fscked anyway.
This is a completely different argument from your original post. Yes, the EFF probably knows that they should look to Slashdot and the open-source community in general for ideas and inspiration.
But your original argument could be reworded to say, "Just because the EFF doesn't have infinite resources the entire open-source community deserves to suffer within the EFF's loss".
I tend to agree more with your latter more reasonable point, not the former.
Maybe 97% of the Slashdot posts on copyright/DeCSS/DMCA/UCITA subjects are lame or repetitious
And this MIGHT be the reason they can not real all of slashdot.
but the other 3% is a vital source of new ideas and intelligent debate that I don't believe for a minute they could get for free anywhere else. If the EFF aren't already keeping a close eye on Slashdot then they don't even deserve to win.
Well, that's all very cute and reactionary, but hardly a good point.
We have no idea how large their staff is, and I think are doing the open-source community a great disservice to display attitudes like that.
It seems to me that this simply seems to mirror life. There are few women in most areas, from business executives to auto racing. Even my field is full of men. Though not specifically computer related, we do use computers and are sometimes considered geeks (sometimes we even perform cool hacks!).
Much of what the author says is true, but little will probably change until all "old boy networks" open up.
All in all this has more to do with our culture than hackerdom, specifically.
The ability to tap a line on both Nortel (DMS?) and Lucent (5ESS, etc) phone switches existed long before Oklahoma City. It has been a legal requirement for as long as I can remember.
As I recall, this new law required the phone companies to make it easier for the feds to perform the tap remotely, and will less assistance (if any at all) from the phone companies themselves.
In other words a veritable blank check if the feds wanted to abuse the abiility to do so (and I suspect they do).
The point being, that infrastructures like this seldom (if ever) go away.
Why is all AC in this country 120V 60Hz? There's no law that says there has to be such a standard, but once it was in place, it stuck, as is the case with all technical infrastructure.
Now I can't speak for you, but the idea of a less-friendly, elected governing body (never forget that Hitler was elected by popular vote) inheriting such technology terrifies me.
For that matter the thought of Bill Clinton listening to phone sex calls using that technology is pretty frightening too.
I wonder if it woudl be a good idea to appeal to prominent filmmakers
Call me crazy but I left Michael Moore a lengthy email about this with a few good links for him to do more research.
With his anti-corporate policy and very liberal (almost left-wing) attitude he would very likely be on our side.
The good news is that I've emailed him before and he actually read it and replied.
The bad news is that he just started filming his new season of THE AWFUL TRUTH and is also POLITICALLY INCORRECT'S politcal correspondent and might be too busy to be reading his email right now.
But if he does read it, it might be just the kind of thing he'd feature on his show.
How to get rid of it is the more interesting question.
Well, we quite simply need to do what we've been doing.
Attacking it aggressively at the grassroots level by contributing to the EFF, writing our politicians (I have my senator's and congresman's email addresses in my addressbook, as should you), and writing editorials to any and all publications you can find time for (it goes without saying that these should be to the point and intelligently written).
Naturally, assembling the best legal team that we possibly can is also a must.
But frankly, what else is there TO do? They have HUGE loads of cash, and we have less. We need VA or Red Hat to jump in on the legal defense end, and the rest of us need to work our asses off getting the word out.
I'm just curious as to how many hackers and crackers use drugs to enhance their cognitive abilities for brief periods of time?
This is such a great question. For me it involves being a little drunk and playing the guitar. At that particular moment in time my command of the instrument was never better. It was as if I was having an out of body experience and BECAME the guitar (I know that's cliche, but it was true). I've never had so lucid a moment in my life, prior to, or since then.
Drugs certainly can break down barriers.
As an experiment, the next time I record a friend of mine in the studio we are going to fool around with different levels of intoxication and see what our creative results are. It should be fascinating.
I agree with the person here who suggested that computer users seem to be the least likely group of people to do drugs. I have found that to be the case also.
Hackers tend to be more political than anything getting more involved with left-wing political ideals that mind altering substances.
And as someone else pointed out, do we really need drugs when very soon we'll be able to alter our states of mind with VR?
That's basically thr direction Timothy Leary was heading with computers. He was looking for a ming altering experience with computers, as great as his experiences with drugs. He was an Amiga developer and interested in ultimately wiring it directly to the brain. Interesting and also probably very likely, one day.
Now on the other side of the coin, as an audio engineer I tend to be around a lot of musicians, and I can definitely say there is a larger link to drug use with them (bug surprise) than computer users. (of course the most addicted pot smoker I have ever seen was a fellow audio engineer, and some of you probably have CD's in your collection that he worked on, but that's another story entirely).
I must confess that the idea of altering my mind with drugs in intriguing, but I have yet to raise the courage to try an halucinagenic. And the thought of smoking appalls me to no end (though I did eat a pot-brownie once and it seemed to have little effect).
For me the, my mind altering comes from occasionally drinking alchohol, good conversation, and listening to a lot of very cool music.
Slashdot Mirror
The photos were horrific. Total bush-league.
Yes we should get OUR SIDE of the story out, simply because we have the truth on our side, but ultimately this is a legal issue.
In the 1950's public opinion said that black people weren't allowed to go to white schools. When this was challenged it LOST.
In matters of rights, public opinion doesn't matter. It might take time for this to come to the surface, but it will.
Yes, I read it. THE PUZZLE PALACE also documents examples where american intelligence gathering agencies used data they had gathered to help american corporations.
My point was not to refute the article, but to question the SURPRISE that everyone up here seems to be showing about this.
It's been happening a long time, and their intelligence agencies are helping their corporations also.
I'm not agreeing with the practice, just talking about it.
Our intelligence agencies kill people too. We tried to kill Castro. Face it, deal with it, get over it, move on.
It's going to continue to happen. Don't be shocked next time.
Just read The Puzzle Palace, there are many documented cases, and our allies know it, so what's the big deal? They do the same thing.
Occasionally there are prices to be paid for such actions. In the late 1960's Israel attacked one of our intelligence gathering ships when they realized we were probably listening to them. Dozens of americans were killed and it was essentially buried.
We go to amazing lengths in our SIGINT (signals intelligence) efforts.
There was once a project to build a dish antenna (a damn BIG one) for the NSA that was intended to pick up faint radio signals that were being reflected by THE MOON. I believe this project was cancelled. The engineering problems were myriad to say the least.
An orbit like this, around an irregularly shaped object is very difficult due to different concentrations of mass.
Even our moon, though more regularly shaped, makes stable orbits impossible. We discovered MASSCONS (mass concentrations) in the 1960's and didn't actually have a good map of them until the recent CLEMENTINE mission.
Orbitting the moon requires regular orbital corrections, else you become crater ejecta.
Yes. :-)
That would have been a good thing.
It's only a matter of time before these encryption issues really hit the front pages, anyway. I say bring'em on.
I'm eager for en encryption fight. It's these kinds of things that get my blood flowing. The current DVD issue, encryption in general.
Let the revolution begin now.
And you're basing this on WHAT? Your friend the postman?
READ THE BOOKS BEFORE YOU CRITICIZE ANYTHING.
That's just naive. How do you explain the CIA projects that our government has ADMITTED TO wherein the CIA injected people with horrible toxins and exposed them to horrible amounts of radiation to see what would happen?
Patriotism is the reason people DO this stuff. I remember a former government employee being asked questions about a nuclear test in the deserts of nevada. They KNEW fallout would land on this particular town (I forget which one) and the interviewer accused this guy of being a criminal for exposing american citizens to ratiation and not telling them. He said, "I did it for my country, how else were we going to beat Hitler and Japan?"
That sounds like blind patriotism to me.
Basically, your argument is based on this naive belief that our government "wouldn't do anything wrong cuz we're the GOOD GUYS" when if you'd open your eyes, you'd see that the history of our government is no different than any other's. It's littered with deceipt and dead bodies.
I could give you a list of references indicting out government, but I suggest you start with the two I already mentioned.
But I'm sure you'll just dismiss them as the works of angry, former US gov't employees who have an axe to grind because they didn't get their pension or something.
Noam Chomsky has a great phrase to explain these kinds of arguments.
They're true because they have to be. No reason, they just have to be.
This isn't so crazy. If any of you have ever read the books by Phillip Agee (Inside The Company) and John Stockwell, men who were actual CIA operations directors, you would be surprised at the horrible things these organizations do to "encourage" trends in the US and our allies.
According to some reports, the CIA has been known to plant bombs in airliners... naturally these types of events are always blamed on middle eastern countries and terrorists, and we certainly DO like to hate middle-eastern countries.
After searching far and wide (I even checked on floppies) I found the URL. I don't know if it will work for you, because friends have told me that they occasionally get locked out being asked for a password, but here it is:
It's called DALI.
Use it, but don't abuse it. :-)
If it gets slashdotted they'll probably cut us off.
Actually, about 2 years ago when I was reading the sci.space.* newsgroups regularly there was a reference to a french satellite that was taking pictures (resolution not as good however) and keeping them in a database. They had a web page and you could punch in some coordinates and it would pull up the most recent photo in its database of that area.
Someone did type in the Area 51 coordinates and when the photo came up you could see a runway. Not much else though due to poorer resolution.
I just checked some of my old bookmarks and I couldn't find the link. I'll look some more later.
Amen to that! Either people are getting locked in there with the safety protocols turned off, or people are getting addicted to the alternate realities that you can create in there.
Although I do not have an addictive personality (unless you count my recent addiction to /.) I could see myself possibly getting addicted to a holodeck type of technology.
Hell, who wouldn't want to go live in their favorite TV show brought to life?
Let's just hope they never create a Commander Data, he was always malfunctioning too. :-)
You guys just like it because CAVE is a recursive acronym... admit it.
First, my idea of a UG needs to be updated... because when I was younger a UG consisted of kids who've never kissed a girl pirating software, so imagine my surprise when this UG had only people in it who were 45 years old and up. I saw more grey hair than I had in a while.
They seemed to enjoy the Corel Linux demo, but I finally got a real view of the typical computing world when the Corel woman asked, "Has anyone here ever installed an operating system?", and only 3 hands went up. Me and the 2 other youngest people who happened to be in attendance. This shocked me because in my little computing world, everyone I know has done dozens, if not hundreds of installs of many OS's.
She then asked, "Who has installed linux?" and of course mine was the only hand to go up, and people were looking at me as if I had 3 heads (I don't).
Once she had convinced the people there that Corel Linux looks EXACTLY like Windows she bothered to point out that you could even open up a terminal window "if you ever felt like typing MSDOS commands." (At that point I think several people shuddered and at least one person dry-heaved).
She also forced me to say that I frequently "mount my CDROM drive" and that made some people laugh and confused the rest. This was all part of her way to show that corel automounts the CD.
Why am I rambling you ask? Because like many here I also do not think that the fellow this thread is discussing is a typical "suit" user.
Hell, I haven't even networked my house yet.
Yes! I love it when I see someone get a system shipped to their door with a 19" monitor and the screen settings are exactly that, 640x480x256.
The Start button is roughly the size of a house on a 19" monitor in that resolution. I don't switch them to 800x600 or 1024x768 because it's likely a better resolution for them with that monitor, I switch them because I swear that once the huge start button tried to kill me.
One day, before Netscape.com was a portal, I was asked by a cousin what search engine I used, "Yahoo or Netscape."
It was difficult helping him to understand the difference.
This is a completely different argument from your original post. Yes, the EFF probably knows that they should look to Slashdot and the open-source community in general for ideas and inspiration.
But your original argument could be reworded to say, "Just because the EFF doesn't have infinite resources the entire open-source community deserves to suffer within the EFF's loss".
I tend to agree more with your latter more reasonable point, not the former.
And this MIGHT be the reason they can not real all of slashdot.
Well, that's all very cute and reactionary, but hardly a good point.
We have no idea how large their staff is, and I think are doing the open-source community a great disservice to display attitudes like that.
Much of what the author says is true, but little will probably change until all "old boy networks" open up.
All in all this has more to do with our culture than hackerdom, specifically.
As I recall, this new law required the phone companies to make it easier for the feds to perform the tap remotely, and will less assistance (if any at all) from the phone companies themselves.
In other words a veritable blank check if the feds wanted to abuse the abiility to do so (and I suspect they do).
The point being, that infrastructures like this seldom (if ever) go away.
Why is all AC in this country 120V 60Hz? There's no law that says there has to be such a standard, but once it was in place, it stuck, as is the case with all technical infrastructure.
Now I can't speak for you, but the idea of a less-friendly, elected governing body (never forget that Hitler was elected by popular vote) inheriting such technology terrifies me.
For that matter the thought of Bill Clinton listening to phone sex calls using that technology is pretty frightening too.
Say "it can't happen here."
I dare ya! :-)
Why doesn't someone forward this to the EFF's legal staff? This might be the kind of precedent for which they're looking.
Just because they're the experts we shouldn't assume that they have the resources to have found every relevent precedent.
Call me crazy but I left Michael Moore a lengthy email about this with a few good links for him to do more research.
With his anti-corporate policy and very liberal (almost left-wing) attitude he would very likely be on our side.
The good news is that I've emailed him before and he actually read it and replied.
The bad news is that he just started filming his new season of THE AWFUL TRUTH and is also POLITICALLY INCORRECT'S politcal correspondent and might be too busy to be reading his email right now.
But if he does read it, it might be just the kind of thing he'd feature on his show.
This is of course "to protect Americans from terrorism".
Well, we quite simply need to do what we've been doing.
Attacking it aggressively at the grassroots level by contributing to the EFF, writing our politicians (I have my senator's and congresman's email addresses in my addressbook, as should you), and writing editorials to any and all publications you can find time for (it goes without saying that these should be to the point and intelligently written).
Naturally, assembling the best legal team that we possibly can is also a must.
But frankly, what else is there TO do? They have HUGE loads of cash, and we have less. We need VA or Red Hat to jump in on the legal defense end, and the rest of us need to work our asses off getting the word out.
This is such a great question. For me it involves being a little drunk and playing the guitar. At that particular moment in time my command of the instrument was never better. It was as if I was having an out of body experience and BECAME the guitar (I know that's cliche, but it was true). I've never had so lucid a moment in my life, prior to, or since then.
Drugs certainly can break down barriers.
As an experiment, the next time I record a friend of mine in the studio we are going to fool around with different levels of intoxication and see what our creative results are. It should be fascinating.
Hackers tend to be more political than anything getting more involved with left-wing political ideals that mind altering substances.
And as someone else pointed out, do we really need drugs when very soon we'll be able to alter our states of mind with VR?
That's basically thr direction Timothy Leary was heading with computers. He was looking for a ming altering experience with computers, as great as his experiences with drugs. He was an Amiga developer and interested in ultimately wiring it directly to the brain. Interesting and also probably very likely, one day.
Now on the other side of the coin, as an audio engineer I tend to be around a lot of musicians, and I can definitely say there is a larger link to drug use with them (bug surprise) than computer users. (of course the most addicted pot smoker I have ever seen was a fellow audio engineer, and some of you probably have CD's in your collection that he worked on, but that's another story entirely).
I must confess that the idea of altering my mind with drugs in intriguing, but I have yet to raise the courage to try an halucinagenic. And the thought of smoking appalls me to no end (though I did eat a pot-brownie once and it seemed to have little effect).
For me the, my mind altering comes from occasionally drinking alchohol, good conversation, and listening to a lot of very cool music.