There are plenty of people who build their own packet radio networks, you know. The only issue, really, is the latency and bandwidth on such networks -- you are not going to have an easy time watching Youtube videos when you are using a shortwave radio as a modem. Believe it or not, Fidonet still exists, and Fidonet nodes still maintain dialup or shortwave links between each other.
All this will do is to condition these children to accept invasive tracking and surveillance. This is not a question of children's rights, it is a question of what those children will think is normal or acceptable in a decade, when they are adults.
Why? This is exactly what the GPL is supposed to do, and nobody ever claimed otherwise. The GPL is meant to give free software licenses teeth, it is not just about gaining as many users as is possible.
Well, you know, if they did not do that, they would have to wait until the conclusion of a trial before they could demonize people. This makes things a whole lot easier.
Do you even have to ask? Logic and rational thinking go right out the window once people hear that so-and-so was accused of anything related to possession (let alone distribution or production) of child pornography; people do not even bother to wait for the conclusion of a trial before they banish someone from the community.
The followup question is more important: how many people will be willing to believe that it was all a mistake, as opposed to simply assuming that if the government calls someone a pedophile that person should be treated like the devil incarnate? People who are accused of anything related to child pornography can find their reputations tarnished years later, even if they are acquitted or if the charges are dropped. No rational thought it applied once the magic words are spoken.
I was going to make the point that that study fails to mention how many engineers drop out of their programs in general; looks like someone else already did that research, however:
Notice that they found that women persist in engineering at the same rate as men. The fact that most women leave engineering in a particular time frame is largely irrelevant, since most men also leave engineering in that same time frame.
If women are hearing snide remarks, it is apparently having less of an effect on their willingness to remain engineers than you might think. Both studies seem to support what I said from the outset: the problems are mainly before college, when high school students are deciding what programs they wish to apply to. The more recent study also indicates that efforts to encourage students to persist in general (rather than programs that focus on women specifically) tend to reduce the rates of women dropping out by a greater amount than the rate of men dropping out.
Personally, I prefer to use a simpler term: restriction systems. By saying "restriction system," you are getting right to the point, and not confusing anyone about what DRM is. Why bother playing games with what the acronym stands for; why bother with the acronym at all? Just be up front about it: the technologies are systems that restrict how much control people have over the devices and data they purchase.
I imagine that it would be a very strange scenario if you were convicted of that misdemeanor without being convicted of another crime as well. After all, they need to have the evidence in order to show that you encrypted the evidence. It is really just another law that underhandedly increases criminal sentences and adds to the number of charges that accused criminals have to argue against.
Take a look at the police training manual, "Catch him with his encryption down," which is posted somewhere on cryptome. The police have methods of extracting passphrases or tricking people into leaving an encrypted partition mounted; they can then collect the evidence, and charge you with the crime of encrypting it. Actually defending yourself against the police, even if you use encryption, is a substantially difficult thing to do.
They are trying to sell themselves to the people who want to see Wikileaks die. I imagine that companies like Palantir do not really care about Wikileaks, except that Wikileaks is a great marketing point for them. Look at the tone of the second half of the presentation: everything people have tried to do to protect themselves from Wikileaks has not worked, but we are experts with experience in intelligence and counter-intelligence; we can save you (just pay us)!
Those companies went bankrupt in large part because of the government itself. The government put major roads parallel to rail lines, paying for the thoroughfare that carried cars, buses, and trucks; railroads were not given help maintaining their tracks or stations. Counties routinely placed a heavy tax burden on railroads, beyond other businesses, since railroads appeared to be endless sources of money. It was the government that poured money into building airports, delivering another blow to the railroads.
Privatization would fail unless it happened simultaneously with the privatization of highways and airports. I do not personally want to see what America would look like with privatized highways, nor do privatized airports sound particularly appealing. Since I do not want to see passenger rail die either (I actually prefer it for trips along the east coast), the choice is pretty clear for me: do not privatize.
The problem railroads in the US face is that they were undermined by government at just about every level. Counties used railroads as a steady source of tax revenue, states and the federal government built major highways (interstates etc.) parallel to rail lines and paid for the construction of airports (while leaving railroads to pay for their own stations and rails), railroads were subject to much stricter labor regulations than other forms of transit (seriously, I am a big supporter of unions, but this did add to the decline of railroads, especially when coupled with everything else), etc. It is a wonder that railroads survived long enough for Amtrak and Conrail to be created at all, and even more remarkable that Conrail managed to become profitable.
As for TFA and spending $53bn on high speed rail...my first reaction was, "Where is that $53bn going to come from?" This country really cannot afford more large projects until we get our budget back under control. How about cutting spending on programs like the war on drugs and reducing "defense" spending, before talking about ways to spend billions of dollars?
Not necessarily, some time ago I met some OLPC developers who were talking about how email was being sent in some mountainous region they had been visiting; some local man had the job of travelling from village to village with a thumb drive, literally carrying email until an Internet connection was available to send it. I also heard something about setting up long range wifi in such regions.
America has put phone lines (mostly) everywhere, sure; the rest of the world, not so much.
"Developing nation" does not necessarily mean "nation filled with people who are starving and lack clothes." Additionally, it is not necessarily the case that the people targeted by this program would want Internet access in their homes; I have heard that in some very rural areas in developing nations, it is common for a village to possess a few communally owned cell phones (apparently they can get reception) which they use for long distance communications. I think it is likely that in such places, a single communal computer with an Internet connection would be greatly appreciated.
Newsletter, no, but if you are interested in cryptography authentication, this would be worth reading (it is a very simple description that uses ssh as an example):
There is quite a bit of documentation available for setting up public key logins. TLS supports it (Firefox can store personal keys for this purpose), SSH now supports it with a rudimentary PKI, and there are some other methods out there.
I imagine a simple answer would be for people to carry their private keys on a card of some sort -- people seem to be able to carry around drivers licenses and passports without too much difficulty. True, losing the card could complicate matters, but there are solutions to that as well -- storing revocation certificates in a safe place, procedures for issuing new keys (show up at your bank in person with a new key, call up companies, etc.). Key generation could be done with any computer, although people would have to be knowledgeable enough to follow the procedure (which may be asking too much of users). No, this is not a perfect solution, but it would be a big step forward.
Ask Sony what happens if you are not sufficiently careful about how you generate private keys...
If you are referring to the recent PS3 crack, it had nothing to do with how Sony generated their keys; in fact, as far as anyone can tell, Sony did an outstanding job of generating an ECDSA key. What Sony botched was the ECDSA signing procedure; instead of a unique random number for each signature, they used the same number each time, thus allowing the key to be recovered from just two signatures.
It is somewhat ironic that you should bring up Facebook, which is the first website that comes to mind when I think about the problems with passwords. Have you forgotten what one of Zuckerberg's first uses for Facebook was? I have not:
This is one of the biggest problems with passwords: you often wind up sending a password to some unknown system that could be doing a number of things with it (like displaying it to Mark Zuckerberg). Combined with the fact that people routinely use the same password on multiple systems, and may mistakenly enter the password for one system when logging in to another, I would say passwords are almost a security liability.
Here is the alternative, and it is very common to do this with ssh: use public key authentication. I can leave my public key on numerous systems, and not worry about some account being compromised. My computer generated the key; computers are good at generating big random numbers. I can also choose my security level; if I want a search space of a certain minimum size, I can generate an RSA key of a corresponding size (likewise with DSA/EC/etc.). There are some annoyances with public keys, but in my opinion, they are far better than passwords.
Slashdot Mirror
There are plenty of people who build their own packet radio networks, you know. The only issue, really, is the latency and bandwidth on such networks -- you are not going to have an easy time watching Youtube videos when you are using a shortwave radio as a modem. Believe it or not, Fidonet still exists, and Fidonet nodes still maintain dialup or shortwave links between each other.
All this will do is to condition these children to accept invasive tracking and surveillance. This is not a question of children's rights, it is a question of what those children will think is normal or acceptable in a decade, when they are adults.
Why? This is exactly what the GPL is supposed to do, and nobody ever claimed otherwise. The GPL is meant to give free software licenses teeth, it is not just about gaining as many users as is possible.
Well, you know, if they did not do that, they would have to wait until the conclusion of a trial before they could demonize people. This makes things a whole lot easier.
Do you even have to ask? Logic and rational thinking go right out the window once people hear that so-and-so was accused of anything related to possession (let alone distribution or production) of child pornography; people do not even bother to wait for the conclusion of a trial before they banish someone from the community.
The followup question is more important: how many people will be willing to believe that it was all a mistake, as opposed to simply assuming that if the government calls someone a pedophile that person should be treated like the devil incarnate? People who are accused of anything related to child pornography can find their reputations tarnished years later, even if they are acquitted or if the charges are dropped. No rational thought it applied once the magic words are spoken.
I was going to make the point that that study fails to mention how many engineers drop out of their programs in general; looks like someone else already did that research, however:
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/08/05/engineer
http://www.asee.org/papers-and-publications/publications/jee/award-winning-jee-papers/2008-wickenden-award-winner.pdf
Notice that they found that women persist in engineering at the same rate as men. The fact that most women leave engineering in a particular time frame is largely irrelevant, since most men also leave engineering in that same time frame.
If women are hearing snide remarks, it is apparently having less of an effect on their willingness to remain engineers than you might think. Both studies seem to support what I said from the outset: the problems are mainly before college, when high school students are deciding what programs they wish to apply to. The more recent study also indicates that efforts to encourage students to persist in general (rather than programs that focus on women specifically) tend to reduce the rates of women dropping out by a greater amount than the rate of men dropping out.
Are you sure any of these things actually happened? Let's remember which company is making these claims...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitarianism
Personally, I prefer to use a simpler term: restriction systems. By saying "restriction system," you are getting right to the point, and not confusing anyone about what DRM is. Why bother playing games with what the acronym stands for; why bother with the acronym at all? Just be up front about it: the technologies are systems that restrict how much control people have over the devices and data they purchase.
I imagine that it would be a very strange scenario if you were convicted of that misdemeanor without being convicted of another crime as well. After all, they need to have the evidence in order to show that you encrypted the evidence. It is really just another law that underhandedly increases criminal sentences and adds to the number of charges that accused criminals have to argue against.
Take a look at the police training manual, "Catch him with his encryption down," which is posted somewhere on cryptome. The police have methods of extracting passphrases or tricking people into leaving an encrypted partition mounted; they can then collect the evidence, and charge you with the crime of encrypting it. Actually defending yourself against the police, even if you use encryption, is a substantially difficult thing to do.
Keep in mind that in some places, using encryption to hide evidence of a crime is itself a crime:
http://leg1.state.va.us/cgi-bin/legp504.exe?000+cod+18.2-152.15
I have heard of people getting hit with destruction of evidence charges for engaging in this sort of behavior...
that PDF is nothing more than a sales pitch written for someone who probably believes the hype of "cyber-warfare" as portrayed in movies
FTFY
They are trying to sell themselves to the people who want to see Wikileaks die. I imagine that companies like Palantir do not really care about Wikileaks, except that Wikileaks is a great marketing point for them. Look at the tone of the second half of the presentation: everything people have tried to do to protect themselves from Wikileaks has not worked, but we are experts with experience in intelligence and counter-intelligence; we can save you (just pay us)!
Those companies went bankrupt in large part because of the government itself. The government put major roads parallel to rail lines, paying for the thoroughfare that carried cars, buses, and trucks; railroads were not given help maintaining their tracks or stations. Counties routinely placed a heavy tax burden on railroads, beyond other businesses, since railroads appeared to be endless sources of money. It was the government that poured money into building airports, delivering another blow to the railroads.
Privatization would fail unless it happened simultaneously with the privatization of highways and airports. I do not personally want to see what America would look like with privatized highways, nor do privatized airports sound particularly appealing. Since I do not want to see passenger rail die either (I actually prefer it for trips along the east coast), the choice is pretty clear for me: do not privatize.
The problem railroads in the US face is that they were undermined by government at just about every level. Counties used railroads as a steady source of tax revenue, states and the federal government built major highways (interstates etc.) parallel to rail lines and paid for the construction of airports (while leaving railroads to pay for their own stations and rails), railroads were subject to much stricter labor regulations than other forms of transit (seriously, I am a big supporter of unions, but this did add to the decline of railroads, especially when coupled with everything else), etc. It is a wonder that railroads survived long enough for Amtrak and Conrail to be created at all, and even more remarkable that Conrail managed to become profitable.
As for TFA and spending $53bn on high speed rail...my first reaction was, "Where is that $53bn going to come from?" This country really cannot afford more large projects until we get our budget back under control. How about cutting spending on programs like the war on drugs and reducing "defense" spending, before talking about ways to spend billions of dollars?
Not necessarily, some time ago I met some OLPC developers who were talking about how email was being sent in some mountainous region they had been visiting; some local man had the job of travelling from village to village with a thumb drive, literally carrying email until an Internet connection was available to send it. I also heard something about setting up long range wifi in such regions.
America has put phone lines (mostly) everywhere, sure; the rest of the world, not so much.
"Developing nation" does not necessarily mean "nation filled with people who are starving and lack clothes." Additionally, it is not necessarily the case that the people targeted by this program would want Internet access in their homes; I have heard that in some very rural areas in developing nations, it is common for a village to possess a few communally owned cell phones (apparently they can get reception) which they use for long distance communications. I think it is likely that in such places, a single communal computer with an Internet connection would be greatly appreciated.
This sounds an awful lot like security by obscurity to me...
Newsletter, no, but if you are interested in cryptography authentication, this would be worth reading (it is a very simple description that uses ssh as an example):
http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/530
There is quite a bit of documentation available for setting up public key logins. TLS supports it (Firefox can store personal keys for this purpose), SSH now supports it with a rudimentary PKI, and there are some other methods out there.
Ask Sony what happens if you are not sufficiently careful about how you generate private keys...
If you are referring to the recent PS3 crack, it had nothing to do with how Sony generated their keys; in fact, as far as anyone can tell, Sony did an outstanding job of generating an ECDSA key. What Sony botched was the ECDSA signing procedure; instead of a unique random number for each signature, they used the same number each time, thus allowing the key to be recovered from just two signatures.
It is somewhat ironic that you should bring up Facebook, which is the first website that comes to mind when I think about the problems with passwords. Have you forgotten what one of Zuckerberg's first uses for Facebook was? I have not:
http://www.businessinsider.com/how-mark-zuckerberg-hacked-into-the-harvard-crimson-2010-3
This is one of the biggest problems with passwords: you often wind up sending a password to some unknown system that could be doing a number of things with it (like displaying it to Mark Zuckerberg). Combined with the fact that people routinely use the same password on multiple systems, and may mistakenly enter the password for one system when logging in to another, I would say passwords are almost a security liability.
Here is the alternative, and it is very common to do this with ssh: use public key authentication. I can leave my public key on numerous systems, and not worry about some account being compromised. My computer generated the key; computers are good at generating big random numbers. I can also choose my security level; if I want a search space of a certain minimum size, I can generate an RSA key of a corresponding size (likewise with DSA/EC/etc.). There are some annoyances with public keys, but in my opinion, they are far better than passwords.