Without a demand there is no motivation for supply. duh.
No, the motivation for the supplier is not just demand -- it is demand coupled with a willingness on the part of the consumer to actually pay for a product. This point has been made over and over again, but you do not seem to be listening: the overwhelming majority of child pornography consumers are not paying for it, neither with money or through a system of barter. The point at which the economic argument applies is only at the very highest levels of the distribution chain, and those are the levels law enforcement agencies should be focusing their efforts on -- it is at the highest levels that the dangerous people who actually abuse children are. The lower levels are just people with a psychological issue, who should be encouraged to seek help rather than being imprisoned.
Most of the people who are arrested for possession or downloading of child pornography are not paying for it, and are far removed from the source of the material. They are not producing the material nor are they encouraging others to produce it.
Law enforcement is not the problem.
When we have police forces that have deployed signals intelligence vans and are sending in SWAT teams to arrest someone who is merely suspected of downloading child pornography, yes, law enforcement has become a problem. You keep talking about a broken system; yet you are encouraging the problem by encouraging the police to arrest even more people, at a time when our courts are clogged and our prisons are overflowing, and when the only nations in the history of the world that ever imprisoned more people than the United States are Nazi Germany and the USSR.
Sorry, but despite your complete lack of respect for a constitution designed to protect you from tyranny, that is precisely the constitution that we have, and we are straying further and further from it. You might think it is a good idea for the police to become a paramilitary force, but that is how societies degenerate into tyranny. Already, law enforcement agencies are pressuring legislators to give them shortcuts and enable them to avoid the very judicial processes that are intended to prevent abuse and protect people from an overreaching government.
You want a workable solution? How about the police subpoena a person known to be in possession of child pornography, and determine the source of the material? You know, so they can actually track down the people who produce it, instead of wasting time prosecuting some guy who happened to download it? While they are at it, perhaps the police can keep an eye out on forums for users who post new and unseen material, then subpoena the forums for the IP addresses of those people, so they can track the flow of the images and videos? Again, why spend law enforcement resources going after people who are not actually abusing children, when instead the police could track down those who are?
No, it is not easy to find them. I have heard them described as "ghosts" and as being some of the most technologically sophisticated criminals out there. These are the dangerous people that need to be in prison for the safety and benefit of the public, and the police should be spending their time finding them.
Not that you seem to be in favor of legal approaches that fall within the bounds of the constitution.
The problem is the definition of "implementation." If I patent, say, linear discriminant analysis, and implement it using C++, what did I get a patent on? A C++ implementation? My own personal implementation? No, in the current patent system, I get a patent on any implementation -- or in other words, a patent on the mathematics itself, to within a particular interpretation of the variables and results of the computation.
This point has been made repeatedly, but nobody cares. The eHarmony patent was shown to be nothing more than linear algebra with particular names assigned to each variable. People have been pointing out the relationship between software and lambda calculus since before most Slashdot users were in high school, but it has had practically no impact on the legality or public opinion of software patents.
So, in your view of the world, a person who is viewing an image of child abuse is a child abuser, even if the person who actually produced the image is in prison, the child who was abused has been rescued, and the person viewing the image neither paid for it nor encouraged someone to produce it? Do you even listen to your own argument, or are you so filled with hatred for people who have a particular psychological problem (enjoying images of child abuse) that you no longer bother to think about what you say? Your argument sounds more like the argument of someone who is blinded by hatred, and who is no longer able to distinguish the people who are harming children from those who are not.
I am interested in the defense of people who are found to possess child pornography because of the broader impacts that the current policy has on my country. As another example, beyond what I wrote earlier, the Department of Justice is continuing to push for cryptography products to include back doors -- and pressuring the vendors of those products to do so voluntarily. Child pornography is being used as one of the reasons why these things are "necessary" -- why it is necessary to sneak back doors into cryptographic software and devices while broadening police surveillance powers.
Get past your hatred and open your eyes: law enforcement agencies at the local, state, and federal levels are going after people who are not harming children, and using them as an excuse to increase their power.
Except that we do not arrest people who "might" commit crimes, nor do we arrest people who are predisposed to committing crimes, at least not in theory. As an Internet user, you might have viewed child pornography and you might have it on your hard drive, but nobody is going to bust down your door and arrest you for that. Yes, there are child molesters in the world, although I do not hear about it with the same frequency that you apparently do (perhaps you are seeking out news of such things?), and it may be the case that many of those child molesters are also people who enjoy watching child pornography, but none of that implies that the right course of action is to seek down and arrest people who merely viewed such material. It certainly does not justify the FBI spending so many tax dollars hunting down people who are viewing child pornography.
Now, on the other hand, it may be the case that a person who possesses child pornography is also a child abuser; there is some evidence of this, although it is difficult to pin down an exact number. In that case, the crime is abusing children, and the possession of child pornography is nothing more than an indication of the possibility of a crime being committed. That means that child pornography possession should be grounds for a search warrant to be issued, not an arrest warrant. The goal is to protect children, not to police what people masturbate to, and so the investigation should be limited to looking for child abuse.
Your post sounds more like a personal rationalization, short eyes.
Is that supposed to be some sort of argument, or are you just trying to shut down the critical thinking areas of everyone's brains by hinting at the possibility that the only reason I might hold these views is because I want to look at child pornography? This is the problem with the current policy on child pornography: rational, calm discussion on whether or not we are taking the right approach can instantly be stopped by simply suggesting that anyone who does not agree with the current policy is some sort of a child abuser or child pornography consumer, or even that they are just sympathizers.
The party line is that there are sick perverts around every corner and in every Internet chat room, and that we need a strong police force with more surveillance and arrest powers than ever before to keep us and our children safe. Have you taken a moment to question why, in a country that arrests and imprisons more people than any other nation in the entire world, we are still talking about increasing the ability of law enforcement agencies to investigate and arrest people? The war on drugs created paramilitary police units and an entire paramilitary law enforcement agency; that has not gone away, and now child pornography is being used as an excuse to give law enforcement agencies greater surveillance powers, to the point where some police forces have begun to deploy vans loaded with signals intelligence equipment. Responsible citizens should be questioning these things, and questioning whether it is really worth it for law enforcement agencies at every level of government to have their power and authority so vastly increased.
If there exists a demand for a good, eventually someone will fill that demand.
Not at no cost; were you not paying attention in your economics course? Most of the "consumers" of child pornography are paying nothing for it -- they are not paying for it with money, they are not paying for it with new images of child abuse, they are just leeching off the small minority who are fueling the production.
My understanding of the economics of child pornography is this: at the highest levels of production and distribution, pedophiles are trading new and unseen images and videos with each other. The market is based on barter, not money, to thwart efforts at tracing the participants.
Eventually this material is somehow leaked to lower level forums which are more easily accessible, and from there the images are reposted again and again. Below a certain level in the distribution chain, the incentive for the producers to keep producing is entirely lost; the material is reposted on various forums at no cost. The overwhelming majority of people who view child pornography are viewing it at a level that is far below this point, and are contributing nothing to its production.
In simpler terms, arrested the "low hanging fruit" is nothing more than showmanship; it has little affect on the people who are actually abusing children. Every few years we hear about some big deal arrest, where law enforcement agencies manage to gain access to a high level production network, and those are good things in terms of thwarting child abuse. Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of child pornography arrests are not in that category.
I think the point there is that they can't be sure who is producing and who is trading until they investigate
Somehow, I doubt this -- the FBI has agents who search for and patrol pedophile forums, and has a large database of known child pornography images. Someone who is producing or is higher in the distribution chain would stand out like a sore thumb when they start posting new material. What is the point in going after someone who is just collecting the images?
The real problem the FBI faces, as far as I understand it, is that people involved in the production of child pornography are paranoid and technically sophisticated. Unlike the drug trade, which people generally become involved with out of desperation, being a pedophile is a psychological problem that can affect people at various levels of society. Pedophiles actively exchange information on remaining anonymous and avoiding police attention, encrypting evidence, etc. At the higher levels of production and distribution, the paranoia and the operational security measures increase drastically, and it can take many years of work for law enforcement agents to gain access to groups that operate at the highest levels.
In the end, though, someone still has to post new material on pedophile boards. The FBI should not waste time with people who are reposting the same old images, they should go after the new material. The person who has new material is the person who is connected to sources higher in the distribution chain. I doubt that it would take 41% of the FBI's Internet crime resources to track those people down.
Moreover, people who view or collect child pornography may do no harm whatsoever. The overwhelming majority of people who watch child pornography are not paying for it, and most of what gets "traded" are old pictures and videos. Some guy who is sitting in his home masturbating to images of child abuse may have some psychological problems, but that in and of itself does not cause harm and it is a waste of law enforcement time and resources to arrest such a person.
Of course, the FBI has released official statements in the past that promote the idea that, in fact, just by looking at images of child abuse, a person is harming children, even if the children have been rescued and their abusers have been put in prison (unless, one is looking at those images as part of their job as an FBI agent, in which case it is not harmful).
Hopefully this kind of censorship will die, like it died in Australia.
No, censorship will not die. Too many politicians are kept in power by it, too many businesses make their money because of it. The Internet as we know it, the network of unrestricted international communication will die, replaced with a computer network that has succumb to all the greed and problems of "old media."
Most people never took the time to learn about the Internet or their computers, and they will never do anything proactive to evade these firewalls and restore their freedom to communicate. Worse, most people will applaud these moves as fair compromises, necessary, or even a gain for society -- after all, now all that "illicit content" is being blocked.
Not to mention that the ISP has to get those certs onto Windows, Macs, iOS devices and Android too.
Well, without specification regulations (ahem net neutrality) prohibiting this, couldn't an ISP just dictate that only certain operating systems are allowed to be used? That would make the task a whole lot easier. Windows and Mac OS X only? No problem for the ISPs.
On the other hand, they could be a little less aggressive, and only perform the attack on customers who actually make use of the disk that they are given. You would be surprised as to just how many customers actually insert those disks into their computers.
Also what would the legal implication be of an ISP commiting a MITM attach on a customers HTTPS session.
I would like to think that it would be the same as the legal implications of hijacking search queries, since some random hacker would not receive a less harsh sentence for performing such hijacking without an MITM attack than with one.
You could make your own ISP. It is not terribly expensive to deploy an 802.11y service, I actually know someone who is doing so in the mountains near where I live. All it would take are a couple dozen people in a small town who are sick of Mediacom's crap to get a few thousand dollars together for equipment and a T1 line (not saying that this is a particularly fast connection for a couple dozen people to share, but it's a start).
Now, depending on Mediacom's situation and just how comfortable it is, these people may face some sort of non-technical issue in executing such a plan, but that is another story entirely.
$10 says that ISPs will encourage their customers to use special "installation disks," which add an ISP's signing certificate to the list of trusted CAs and then start using MITM attacks. It takes more than HTTPS, it takes users who both care and understand what they are doing.
On the other hand, there are a lot of people out there who could be contributing to scientific progress, but who lack access to the journals and conference proceedings they need in order to do a basic literature search. Try giving a journal citation in an online discussion with people who may not be affiliated with a university, and you will see what I mean (this is more true of some fields than others).
Yeah, OK -- you have been watching far too many cop movies. It is not a war out there, it is just another step toward tyranny in America. If law enforcement requires a paramilitary force, then there is something wrong with the laws and the way the country is being run. Perhaps we could start by asking, "Why is it necessary to arrest people for possession of a particular plant? Why is it necessary to arrest people for possession of a particular digital image?"
This country was founded as a rebellion against tyranny, which people seem to have forgotten.
The police never know how a suspect will react. That is not an excuse for turning our police forces into paramilitary organizations.
For all anyone knows, you could have several kids tied up waiting for the next production to go ahead. The guy was not accused of producing child pornography, and it is ludicrous to think that a person who downloads child pornography is likely to be a producer of it (perhaps if he were uploading new material, this would be a justified assumption). There was never any evidence that the guy had ever actually abused a child.
Talk about missing the point. Take a look some time at the modern realities of child pornography: most collectors of child pornography, to the point where it is an overwhelming majority, are not paying for it.
If we were to legalise the possession of it, then how could we attack the producers?
In precisely the same manner we go after them now. Most collectors of child pornography are so far down the supply chain that they can provide little useful information about the origin of the images; many times, the producers of the images have already been caught anyway. The police can always use legal means to obtain information about the origin of child pornography, perhaps by subpoenaing people who possess it for information on its origin.
Furthermore, if you wish to prevent people from profiting by producing child pornography -- an admirable goal -- then the answer is simple: make it illegal to pay for child pornography. Not just to possess it, but to pay for it. Don't arrest people for some hypothetical situation in which they might have possibly paid for it, but arrest people who are actually supplying money or material support to child pornographers in exchange for child pornography.
The problem with criminalizing the possession of particular information -- in this case, images of child abuse -- is that it amounts to...criminalizing the possession of particular information. The question is not, "when does it stop," but rather, "how far down that road are we willing to go?" Already, as a result of criminalizing the possession of certain information, the police are pushing for backdoors to be inserted into cryptography products, for broader surveillance rights, and for more power to invade homes and perform searches. Think of the children indeed, as they may grow up in a society where bill of rights is meaningless and where men must live in constant fear of being attacked by paramilitary police units.
Was it enough to justify sending a paramilitary unit into his home in the early morning? This guy was suspected of trafficking in child pornography, not smuggling machine guns. I doubt that the police would have even needed to use a handgun to arrest this guy if he had been guilty.
The problem here is not that he received a visit from the police, but rather the manner in which that visit had been carried out.
For the same reason that the SS would shout "Jew" when they were arrested German Jews during the 1930s and 40s. The police are not just convinced that this guy is guilty; they are convinced that he is guilty of being a sick pedophile, which of course is worse than being a murderer. What was the point of bringing in a paramilitary force to arrest him, when he is suspected of a nonviolent crime, if not to send a message about how we should view people who like child pornography?
If I remember correctly, CA Cert had a web-of-trust method of verifying X509 certificates, which can theoretically be used for TLS. Additionally, you can probably write a simple program that uses GPG to verify a certificate and then import that certificate into your browser's certificate DB (GPG can export X509 certificates, I think).
Yes, and this is the excuse Sony apologists have been using for its removal.
Does it cost too much to maintain?
In a sense, yes: people who use OtherOS are far less likely to buy games for the PS3, and so Sony does not get as much money from game publishers. This is probably the real reason Sony wanted to remove OtherOS, and the hacking incident was just a convenient excuse for doing so.
Slashdot Mirror
Without a demand there is no motivation for supply. duh.
No, the motivation for the supplier is not just demand -- it is demand coupled with a willingness on the part of the consumer to actually pay for a product. This point has been made over and over again, but you do not seem to be listening: the overwhelming majority of child pornography consumers are not paying for it, neither with money or through a system of barter. The point at which the economic argument applies is only at the very highest levels of the distribution chain, and those are the levels law enforcement agencies should be focusing their efforts on -- it is at the highest levels that the dangerous people who actually abuse children are. The lower levels are just people with a psychological issue, who should be encouraged to seek help rather than being imprisoned.
Most of the people who are arrested for possession or downloading of child pornography are not paying for it, and are far removed from the source of the material. They are not producing the material nor are they encouraging others to produce it.
Law enforcement is not the problem.
When we have police forces that have deployed signals intelligence vans and are sending in SWAT teams to arrest someone who is merely suspected of downloading child pornography, yes, law enforcement has become a problem. You keep talking about a broken system; yet you are encouraging the problem by encouraging the police to arrest even more people, at a time when our courts are clogged and our prisons are overflowing, and when the only nations in the history of the world that ever imprisoned more people than the United States are Nazi Germany and the USSR.
Sorry, but despite your complete lack of respect for a constitution designed to protect you from tyranny, that is precisely the constitution that we have, and we are straying further and further from it. You might think it is a good idea for the police to become a paramilitary force, but that is how societies degenerate into tyranny. Already, law enforcement agencies are pressuring legislators to give them shortcuts and enable them to avoid the very judicial processes that are intended to prevent abuse and protect people from an overreaching government.
You want a workable solution? How about the police subpoena a person known to be in possession of child pornography, and determine the source of the material? You know, so they can actually track down the people who produce it, instead of wasting time prosecuting some guy who happened to download it? While they are at it, perhaps the police can keep an eye out on forums for users who post new and unseen material, then subpoena the forums for the IP addresses of those people, so they can track the flow of the images and videos? Again, why spend law enforcement resources going after people who are not actually abusing children, when instead the police could track down those who are?
No, it is not easy to find them. I have heard them described as "ghosts" and as being some of the most technologically sophisticated criminals out there. These are the dangerous people that need to be in prison for the safety and benefit of the public, and the police should be spending their time finding them.
Not that you seem to be in favor of legal approaches that fall within the bounds of the constitution.
The problem is the definition of "implementation." If I patent, say, linear discriminant analysis, and implement it using C++, what did I get a patent on? A C++ implementation? My own personal implementation? No, in the current patent system, I get a patent on any implementation -- or in other words, a patent on the mathematics itself, to within a particular interpretation of the variables and results of the computation.
This point has been made repeatedly, but nobody cares. The eHarmony patent was shown to be nothing more than linear algebra with particular names assigned to each variable. People have been pointing out the relationship between software and lambda calculus since before most Slashdot users were in high school, but it has had practically no impact on the legality or public opinion of software patents.
are people so desperate to go back to playing CoD multiplayer that they're willing to take any sandpaper-wrapped anal raping that Sony will give them?
Yes, there are such people in the world. Did you even have to ask?
So, in your view of the world, a person who is viewing an image of child abuse is a child abuser, even if the person who actually produced the image is in prison, the child who was abused has been rescued, and the person viewing the image neither paid for it nor encouraged someone to produce it? Do you even listen to your own argument, or are you so filled with hatred for people who have a particular psychological problem (enjoying images of child abuse) that you no longer bother to think about what you say? Your argument sounds more like the argument of someone who is blinded by hatred, and who is no longer able to distinguish the people who are harming children from those who are not.
I am interested in the defense of people who are found to possess child pornography because of the broader impacts that the current policy has on my country. As another example, beyond what I wrote earlier, the Department of Justice is continuing to push for cryptography products to include back doors -- and pressuring the vendors of those products to do so voluntarily. Child pornography is being used as one of the reasons why these things are "necessary" -- why it is necessary to sneak back doors into cryptographic software and devices while broadening police surveillance powers.
Get past your hatred and open your eyes: law enforcement agencies at the local, state, and federal levels are going after people who are not harming children, and using them as an excuse to increase their power.
Real hackers use netcat.
Now, on the other hand, it may be the case that a person who possesses child pornography is also a child abuser; there is some evidence of this, although it is difficult to pin down an exact number. In that case, the crime is abusing children, and the possession of child pornography is nothing more than an indication of the possibility of a crime being committed. That means that child pornography possession should be grounds for a search warrant to be issued, not an arrest warrant. The goal is to protect children, not to police what people masturbate to, and so the investigation should be limited to looking for child abuse.
Your post sounds more like a personal rationalization, short eyes.
Is that supposed to be some sort of argument, or are you just trying to shut down the critical thinking areas of everyone's brains by hinting at the possibility that the only reason I might hold these views is because I want to look at child pornography? This is the problem with the current policy on child pornography: rational, calm discussion on whether or not we are taking the right approach can instantly be stopped by simply suggesting that anyone who does not agree with the current policy is some sort of a child abuser or child pornography consumer, or even that they are just sympathizers.
The party line is that there are sick perverts around every corner and in every Internet chat room, and that we need a strong police force with more surveillance and arrest powers than ever before to keep us and our children safe. Have you taken a moment to question why, in a country that arrests and imprisons more people than any other nation in the entire world, we are still talking about increasing the ability of law enforcement agencies to investigate and arrest people? The war on drugs created paramilitary police units and an entire paramilitary law enforcement agency; that has not gone away, and now child pornography is being used as an excuse to give law enforcement agencies greater surveillance powers, to the point where some police forces have begun to deploy vans loaded with signals intelligence equipment. Responsible citizens should be questioning these things, and questioning whether it is really worth it for law enforcement agencies at every level of government to have their power and authority so vastly increased.
If there exists a demand for a good, eventually someone will fill that demand.
Not at no cost; were you not paying attention in your economics course? Most of the "consumers" of child pornography are paying nothing for it -- they are not paying for it with money, they are not paying for it with new images of child abuse, they are just leeching off the small minority who are fueling the production.
My understanding of the economics of child pornography is this: at the highest levels of production and distribution, pedophiles are trading new and unseen images and videos with each other. The market is based on barter, not money, to thwart efforts at tracing the participants.
Eventually this material is somehow leaked to lower level forums which are more easily accessible, and from there the images are reposted again and again. Below a certain level in the distribution chain, the incentive for the producers to keep producing is entirely lost; the material is reposted on various forums at no cost. The overwhelming majority of people who view child pornography are viewing it at a level that is far below this point, and are contributing nothing to its production.
In simpler terms, arrested the "low hanging fruit" is nothing more than showmanship; it has little affect on the people who are actually abusing children. Every few years we hear about some big deal arrest, where law enforcement agencies manage to gain access to a high level production network, and those are good things in terms of thwarting child abuse. Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of child pornography arrests are not in that category.
I think the point there is that they can't be sure who is producing and who is trading until they investigate
Somehow, I doubt this -- the FBI has agents who search for and patrol pedophile forums, and has a large database of known child pornography images. Someone who is producing or is higher in the distribution chain would stand out like a sore thumb when they start posting new material. What is the point in going after someone who is just collecting the images?
The real problem the FBI faces, as far as I understand it, is that people involved in the production of child pornography are paranoid and technically sophisticated. Unlike the drug trade, which people generally become involved with out of desperation, being a pedophile is a psychological problem that can affect people at various levels of society. Pedophiles actively exchange information on remaining anonymous and avoiding police attention, encrypting evidence, etc. At the higher levels of production and distribution, the paranoia and the operational security measures increase drastically, and it can take many years of work for law enforcement agents to gain access to groups that operate at the highest levels.
In the end, though, someone still has to post new material on pedophile boards. The FBI should not waste time with people who are reposting the same old images, they should go after the new material. The person who has new material is the person who is connected to sources higher in the distribution chain. I doubt that it would take 41% of the FBI's Internet crime resources to track those people down.
Moreover, people who view or collect child pornography may do no harm whatsoever. The overwhelming majority of people who watch child pornography are not paying for it, and most of what gets "traded" are old pictures and videos. Some guy who is sitting in his home masturbating to images of child abuse may have some psychological problems, but that in and of itself does not cause harm and it is a waste of law enforcement time and resources to arrest such a person.
Of course, the FBI has released official statements in the past that promote the idea that, in fact, just by looking at images of child abuse, a person is harming children, even if the children have been rescued and their abusers have been put in prison (unless, one is looking at those images as part of their job as an FBI agent, in which case it is not harmful).
Hopefully this kind of censorship will die, like it died in Australia.
No, censorship will not die. Too many politicians are kept in power by it, too many businesses make their money because of it. The Internet as we know it, the network of unrestricted international communication will die, replaced with a computer network that has succumb to all the greed and problems of "old media."
Most people never took the time to learn about the Internet or their computers, and they will never do anything proactive to evade these firewalls and restore their freedom to communicate. Worse, most people will applaud these moves as fair compromises, necessary, or even a gain for society -- after all, now all that "illicit content" is being blocked.
Well, if you can name a company with the $200bn+ that it would take to acquire IBM...
Not to mention that the ISP has to get those certs onto Windows, Macs, iOS devices and Android too.
Well, without specification regulations (ahem net neutrality) prohibiting this, couldn't an ISP just dictate that only certain operating systems are allowed to be used? That would make the task a whole lot easier. Windows and Mac OS X only? No problem for the ISPs.
On the other hand, they could be a little less aggressive, and only perform the attack on customers who actually make use of the disk that they are given. You would be surprised as to just how many customers actually insert those disks into their computers.
Also what would the legal implication be of an ISP commiting a MITM attach on a customers HTTPS session.
I would like to think that it would be the same as the legal implications of hijacking search queries, since some random hacker would not receive a less harsh sentence for performing such hijacking without an MITM attack than with one.
....and yet, Mediacom is hijacking search queries. Why is adding an MITM attack any more illegal than hijacking the queries in the first place?
You could make your own ISP. It is not terribly expensive to deploy an 802.11y service, I actually know someone who is doing so in the mountains near where I live. All it would take are a couple dozen people in a small town who are sick of Mediacom's crap to get a few thousand dollars together for equipment and a T1 line (not saying that this is a particularly fast connection for a couple dozen people to share, but it's a start).
Now, depending on Mediacom's situation and just how comfortable it is, these people may face some sort of non-technical issue in executing such a plan, but that is another story entirely.
$10 says that ISPs will encourage their customers to use special "installation disks," which add an ISP's signing certificate to the list of trusted CAs and then start using MITM attacks. It takes more than HTTPS, it takes users who both care and understand what they are doing.
On the other hand, there are a lot of people out there who could be contributing to scientific progress, but who lack access to the journals and conference proceedings they need in order to do a basic literature search. Try giving a journal citation in an online discussion with people who may not be affiliated with a university, and you will see what I mean (this is more true of some fields than others).
Yes, but the problem is today you have the guy dealing in kiddy porn who also has a PCP habit
[citation needed]
Nobody died because the police aren't there to shoot people but they are going to control the situation completely
http://bnice2me.tripod.com/id14.html
If you haven't noticed, it is a war out there
Yeah, OK -- you have been watching far too many cop movies. It is not a war out there, it is just another step toward tyranny in America. If law enforcement requires a paramilitary force, then there is something wrong with the laws and the way the country is being run. Perhaps we could start by asking, "Why is it necessary to arrest people for possession of a particular plant? Why is it necessary to arrest people for possession of a particular digital image?"
This country was founded as a rebellion against tyranny, which people seem to have forgotten.
The police never know how a suspect will react. That is not an excuse for turning our police forces into paramilitary organizations.
For all anyone knows, you could have several kids tied up waiting for the next production to go ahead. The guy was not accused of producing child pornography, and it is ludicrous to think that a person who downloads child pornography is likely to be a producer of it (perhaps if he were uploading new material, this would be a justified assumption). There was never any evidence that the guy had ever actually abused a child.
If we were to legalise the possession of it, then how could we attack the producers?
In precisely the same manner we go after them now. Most collectors of child pornography are so far down the supply chain that they can provide little useful information about the origin of the images; many times, the producers of the images have already been caught anyway. The police can always use legal means to obtain information about the origin of child pornography, perhaps by subpoenaing people who possess it for information on its origin.
Furthermore, if you wish to prevent people from profiting by producing child pornography -- an admirable goal -- then the answer is simple: make it illegal to pay for child pornography. Not just to possess it, but to pay for it. Don't arrest people for some hypothetical situation in which they might have possibly paid for it, but arrest people who are actually supplying money or material support to child pornographers in exchange for child pornography.
The problem with criminalizing the possession of particular information -- in this case, images of child abuse -- is that it amounts to...criminalizing the possession of particular information. The question is not, "when does it stop," but rather, "how far down that road are we willing to go?" Already, as a result of criminalizing the possession of certain information, the police are pushing for backdoors to be inserted into cryptography products, for broader surveillance rights, and for more power to invade homes and perform searches. Think of the children indeed, as they may grow up in a society where bill of rights is meaningless and where men must live in constant fear of being attacked by paramilitary police units.
Was it enough to justify sending a paramilitary unit into his home in the early morning? This guy was suspected of trafficking in child pornography, not smuggling machine guns. I doubt that the police would have even needed to use a handgun to arrest this guy if he had been guilty.
The problem here is not that he received a visit from the police, but rather the manner in which that visit had been carried out.
Why the intimidation?
For the same reason that the SS would shout "Jew" when they were arrested German Jews during the 1930s and 40s. The police are not just convinced that this guy is guilty; they are convinced that he is guilty of being a sick pedophile, which of course is worse than being a murderer. What was the point of bringing in a paramilitary force to arrest him, when he is suspected of a nonviolent crime, if not to send a message about how we should view people who like child pornography?
If I remember correctly, CA Cert had a web-of-trust method of verifying X509 certificates, which can theoretically be used for TLS. Additionally, you can probably write a simple program that uses GPG to verify a certificate and then import that certificate into your browser's certificate DB (GPG can export X509 certificates, I think).
s/game console/computer with TV outputs/
FTFY
Does it allow hacking the console?
Yes, and this is the excuse Sony apologists have been using for its removal.
Does it cost too much to maintain?
In a sense, yes: people who use OtherOS are far less likely to buy games for the PS3, and so Sony does not get as much money from game publishers. This is probably the real reason Sony wanted to remove OtherOS, and the hacking incident was just a convenient excuse for doing so.