I won't say which, but that guy (or at least someone using that handle) would occasionally drop into an IRC channel that I frequent, trying to recruit us. When news of the leak first broke, I wondered if he was going to try to DOS wikileaks (something he had spoken about doing in the past), and then, there was a DDOS. Now he's been arrested for it, and I cannot say that I am surprised.
Now I just have to wonder if he'll receive a pardon of some kind.
...a lot of people recently said that Wikileaks has become an anti-US organization. We should probably wait and see what they actually release, but perhaps this news shows otherwise? Or is the fact that they are going to release data on US based corporations just going to be viewed as more evidence of an anti-US sentiment?
Last I checked, he was accused of having consensual sex with a woman, and failing to stop after the condom he was wearing broke. Calling that rape is a serious stretch.
You have a website that has pictures of you, your current whereabouts, mood, who you like, where you live, work, sleep, and every interaction with anyone else has just as much information pulled out and sorted. And you're bothered by the Like this button?!
You seem to be a Facebook user; I am not. If Facebook is tracking me anyway, then yes, I am bothered.
But we really need to do something about this whole security thing.
Why would banks care about that? Secure digital cash systems have been around for a very long time, but banks do not like the concept very much, probably because it would mean losing certain revenue streams. Credit card processors and banks sell spending data to marketing firms; secure digital cash generally makes that difficult or impossible, since digital cash allows for anonymous payments. Additionally, digital cash would make it hard for banks to do things like profit from debit card overdraft fees (although with the new regulations, perhaps this is less of a valid argument).
It is not that the technology is not there, it is that it solves the wrong problem.
1. The Republicans are against any regulation of companies at all, so they'll never support it.
You must be thinking of those libertarians. Republicans have certainly rallied behind regulations on businesses, just not the ones that make the headlines as "socialist regulations." For example, take a look at how many Republicans support "decency" measures and the regulation of pornography.
2. The Democrats want to censor the Internet in the name of reducing piracy/protecting children from "cyber bullying."
So do Republicans, so what is your point? Neither of the major parties has any interest in protecting free speech or any other individual freedoms.
How about making it, you know, your screen readers job to translate whatever I throw at him nicely, as long as it is standard-compliant HTML?
Perhaps because the technology is not quite there yet? You are talking about a screen reader that would be able to process a nightmarish mess of AJAX the same way that a human being does, then rewriting it in a way that is useful for a blind person. Are you familiar with that kind of technology, and could you perhaps send me some information about it?
What you said would be a little more feasible if there were some kind of standard for web page layouts. The way tabbed websites exchange content between tabs is something that varies from website to website, and the meaning of those sorts of exchanges vary. Screen readers have an easier time when it is at least possible to locate the text that should be rendered; if that keeps shifting around, getting changed by AJAX, and so forth, it is a much harder problem to solve; when the way it gets shifted varies from website to website, it becomes that much harder.
When you get right down to it, blind people do not really benefit much from fancy website layouts. Why is it so damned hard to provide the text in a way that makes sense for the blind? Why is providing a version of the page that has no Javascript, and just includes text, links, and possibly form elements something that people seem to think is unreasonable? Surely a modern web application framework is capable of not being fancy?
The nice thing about supporting, say, a blind person, is that there is almost no incompatibility between browsers to worry about. Blind people are not going to benefit from CSS, Javascript, or Flash. They do not even need a GUI. If your web page would render on a browser from 1993, then blind people should be capable of interacting with it (I would like to think that browser in 2010 can still render pages from 1993, when there was only HTML, but perhaps I am wrong?).
those with such a crippling poverty of distrust that you won't even expect a simple human baseline of behavior in civil society
Look, I do not distrust everyone around me, but I really do not think that trusting the police to not pursue someone who breaks the law is a good idea, even for mild offenses that harm nobody. Where I live, the police suddenly and unexpected started ticketing people en masse for jaywalking, traffic violations by bicyclists, and other offenses that were previously ignored. When I was in college, the police used to go around looking for students who were smoking pot in their dorm rooms -- in private -- and underage drinking, and every week the student paper would publish reports about students who had to show up in court for these violations.
the abuses you imagine above are rare
Politicians demanding a crack down to score some political points is not rare at all, I have seen it happen in several different areas, from large cities to small towns. Harassing critics is not so rare either. Possibly the only scenario that might be considered rare would be police officers doing favors for friends and family members who have a business interest in having a particular law enforced, but it has happened at higher levels of law enforcement in the past.
most people are good and decent
I do not doubt that, but the police have a job to do: enforcing the law, regardless of whether or not the law is moral or decent. The police do arrest people for possession of drugs, all the time. I was ticketed once in New York City for walking from one subway car to another, while the train was stopped, because it was creating "a dangerous situation." Why would you ever trust law enforcement officers to not enforce the law; if they cannot enforce the law in all cases (due to lack of resources), why would you trust them to use any particular selection criteria in making decisions about which laws to enforce?
Why should they go to all that hassle for something that'll have no negative effect on their district and only serve to push up the crime statistics and take officers off the streets?
For the same reason that the police go after people who possess drugs: it keeps them employed.
the student wins: the police will mostly ignore the pirating
Until it turns out to be a student who runs a blog that criticizes the police department, or some politician wants to run on a "tough on crime" platform, or some police officer whose cousin works for the RIAA. Relying on the police to not prosecute people who are reported to them for breaking the law is not something I would do.
What profits would you be referring to? You do realize that, according to the movie studios, the overwhelming majority of movies lose money, and have lost money consistently for the past few decades, right?
Honestly, if downloading were killing movie studios, we would have stopped having new movies years ago. The studios are not hurting, they are just greedy and demand more money than they made previously, using downloading as an excuse for squeezing more money out of consumers.
However, if you have the money, architectural choices make a big difference. There is a reason why you do not see many shared memory machines these days, why Ethernet is usually not the network of course for clusters, etc.
Maybe I'm just shamelessly immodest, but I support these scanners if they can be shown to speed up the process of checking in. People need to get over being seen naked - do they avoid the doctor's office as well?
You are shamelessly immodest. For a lot of people, being naked is an emotional thing, and while they can suck it up when it needs to happen with a doctor, they should not be forced to disrobe for some random TSA employee who really has no job qualifications at all.
We live in a world where airplanes attract way more than their fair share of terrorism - we need to accept that fact
Really? When last I checked, terrorists were also attacking federal buildings, abortion clinics, and meat packing plants, right here in the United States. Worldwide, terrorists seem to be attacking markets, schools, government buildings, and so forth. Airplanes are a bit rare in terms of terrorist attacks, probably because of the large amount of security and the difficulty in pulling off a successful attack.
We can't pretend that people won't try to bomb airplanes, even if there are much easier ways to kill people
You know what would be a really easy target? That giant line right near the security checkpoint at the airport. A terrorist looking to kill a lot of people would probably choose that target over an airplane, we practically handed it over to them. Attacking security checkpoints is not exactly unheard of; it happens in the middle east fairly regularly.
Terrorists don't go after low-hanging fruit... they go after the spectacular.
Completely false, take a look at the reports of attacks in Israel, Pakistan, India, Iraq, Afghanistan, and any of the other of dozens of countries that have problems with terrorists. Take a look at the terrorist activities here in the United States some time, and see how much low hanging fruit is attacked.
What are the patent trolls going to do, exactly? Sue everyone who develops open source software? There is just not enough money to even justify that sort of action, and given the US government's interest in open source software, they would run the risk of getting software patents rendered invalid. If Red Hat is party to some sort of secret licensing deal, that is very unfortunate, but I really do not think that the patent trolls can actually destroy the entire movement.
I am at a university, and my department's IT guys have to deal with Windows, Mac OS X, Fedora, Ubuntu, and even a few old Solaris machines. They maintain a wiki of tips for accomplishing various tasks, and for the most part, users who do not use the default configuration (dual-boot Windows and Ubuntu) are on their own. The biggest issues are probably the file servers (NFS is only allowed for the default Ubuntu install, Samba for everything else) and printing (maintaining both Windows and Unix print queues is apparently difficult). Of course, we do not really have "Enterprise" IT needs; strictly speaking, we do not even need domain logins, except for a few servers, and machines can be registered on a per-owner basis (unregistered MAC addresses do not get IPs); security requirements are not very high, a firewall that blocks everything but SSH is enough, for the most part.
Exactly what incident would you be referring to? The launch of an ICBM 35 miles from LA that almost nobody in LA is an eyewitness to? There is a time to criticize the government for lying to us, but this really is not it...
Mark used his site, TheFacebook.com, to look up members of the site who identified themselves as members of the Crimson. Then he examined a log of failed logins to see if any of the Crimson members had ever entered an incorrect password into TheFacebook.com. If the cases in which they had entered failed logins, Mark tried to use them to access the Crimson members' Harvard email accounts. He successfully accessed two of them.
Security experts will tell you that usability is a part of security. The harder it is to use a system, the more likely it is that people will make a mistake, and in the case of a security system that often means compromising security in some way.
Passwords as a secure authentication method are a really bad idea. Humans are pretty terrible at coming up with random passwords, and only marginally better at remembering a randomly generated string. It is easy to accidentally enter the one system's password when logging into another system (and if you are logging into a system run by someone like Mark Zuckerberg, this could get you in a lot of trouble). Cryptographic logins are a hell of a lot better, all that would be needed is a good way for people to carry crypto keys around with them (which is not asking much given how many different storage devices people usually carry around -- cell phones, thumb drives, cards, etc. -- any one of which could be used to store a key). Web browsers are already capable of supporting cryptographic logins, it should not take a terrible effort to enable web browsers to use crypto keys stored on some portable device.
Yes, I know, someone could steal your thumb drive and get all your credentials. Yet we rely on house keys to protect our homes, and someone could steal your house keys and enter your house (which would give them physical access to your computer). Users can use a passphrase to help protect their crypto keys from theft (this is somewhat better than just a password login since an attacker would need the keys before they could even attempt a brute force attack, and your passphrase would only need to thwart an adversary long enough for you to report the theft and revoke the stolen keys).
Slashdot Mirror
I won't say which, but that guy (or at least someone using that handle) would occasionally drop into an IRC channel that I frequent, trying to recruit us. When news of the leak first broke, I wondered if he was going to try to DOS wikileaks (something he had spoken about doing in the past), and then, there was a DDOS. Now he's been arrested for it, and I cannot say that I am surprised.
Now I just have to wonder if he'll receive a pardon of some kind.
...a lot of people recently said that Wikileaks has become an anti-US organization. We should probably wait and see what they actually release, but perhaps this news shows otherwise? Or is the fact that they are going to release data on US based corporations just going to be viewed as more evidence of an anti-US sentiment?
But isn't he currently a rape suspect?
Last I checked, he was accused of having consensual sex with a woman, and failing to stop after the condom he was wearing broke. Calling that rape is a serious stretch.
You have a website that has pictures of you, your current whereabouts, mood, who you like, where you live, work, sleep, and every interaction with anyone else has just as much information pulled out and sorted. And you're bothered by the Like this button?!
You seem to be a Facebook user; I am not. If Facebook is tracking me anyway, then yes, I am bothered.
But we really need to do something about this whole security thing.
Why would banks care about that? Secure digital cash systems have been around for a very long time, but banks do not like the concept very much, probably because it would mean losing certain revenue streams. Credit card processors and banks sell spending data to marketing firms; secure digital cash generally makes that difficult or impossible, since digital cash allows for anonymous payments. Additionally, digital cash would make it hard for banks to do things like profit from debit card overdraft fees (although with the new regulations, perhaps this is less of a valid argument).
It is not that the technology is not there, it is that it solves the wrong problem.
1. The Republicans are against any regulation of companies at all, so they'll never support it.
You must be thinking of those libertarians. Republicans have certainly rallied behind regulations on businesses, just not the ones that make the headlines as "socialist regulations." For example, take a look at how many Republicans support "decency" measures and the regulation of pornography.
2. The Democrats want to censor the Internet in the name of reducing piracy/protecting children from "cyber bullying."
So do Republicans, so what is your point? Neither of the major parties has any interest in protecting free speech or any other individual freedoms.
http://www.genesi-usa.com/products/smartbook
In fact, unless there is some kind of ARM port of Windows, I doubt that you could get that model with Windows installed.
How about making it, you know, your screen readers job to translate whatever I throw at him nicely, as long as it is standard-compliant HTML?
Perhaps because the technology is not quite there yet? You are talking about a screen reader that would be able to process a nightmarish mess of AJAX the same way that a human being does, then rewriting it in a way that is useful for a blind person. Are you familiar with that kind of technology, and could you perhaps send me some information about it?
What you said would be a little more feasible if there were some kind of standard for web page layouts. The way tabbed websites exchange content between tabs is something that varies from website to website, and the meaning of those sorts of exchanges vary. Screen readers have an easier time when it is at least possible to locate the text that should be rendered; if that keeps shifting around, getting changed by AJAX, and so forth, it is a much harder problem to solve; when the way it gets shifted varies from website to website, it becomes that much harder.
When you get right down to it, blind people do not really benefit much from fancy website layouts. Why is it so damned hard to provide the text in a way that makes sense for the blind? Why is providing a version of the page that has no Javascript, and just includes text, links, and possibly form elements something that people seem to think is unreasonable? Surely a modern web application framework is capable of not being fancy?
Every browser that you add support for adds cost
The nice thing about supporting, say, a blind person, is that there is almost no incompatibility between browsers to worry about. Blind people are not going to benefit from CSS, Javascript, or Flash. They do not even need a GUI. If your web page would render on a browser from 1993, then blind people should be capable of interacting with it (I would like to think that browser in 2010 can still render pages from 1993, when there was only HTML, but perhaps I am wrong?).
those with such a crippling poverty of distrust that you won't even expect a simple human baseline of behavior in civil society
Look, I do not distrust everyone around me, but I really do not think that trusting the police to not pursue someone who breaks the law is a good idea, even for mild offenses that harm nobody. Where I live, the police suddenly and unexpected started ticketing people en masse for jaywalking, traffic violations by bicyclists, and other offenses that were previously ignored. When I was in college, the police used to go around looking for students who were smoking pot in their dorm rooms -- in private -- and underage drinking, and every week the student paper would publish reports about students who had to show up in court for these violations.
the abuses you imagine above are rare
Politicians demanding a crack down to score some political points is not rare at all, I have seen it happen in several different areas, from large cities to small towns. Harassing critics is not so rare either. Possibly the only scenario that might be considered rare would be police officers doing favors for friends and family members who have a business interest in having a particular law enforced, but it has happened at higher levels of law enforcement in the past.
most people are good and decent
I do not doubt that, but the police have a job to do: enforcing the law, regardless of whether or not the law is moral or decent. The police do arrest people for possession of drugs, all the time. I was ticketed once in New York City for walking from one subway car to another, while the train was stopped, because it was creating "a dangerous situation." Why would you ever trust law enforcement officers to not enforce the law; if they cannot enforce the law in all cases (due to lack of resources), why would you trust them to use any particular selection criteria in making decisions about which laws to enforce?
Why should they go to all that hassle for something that'll have no negative effect on their district and only serve to push up the crime statistics and take officers off the streets?
For the same reason that the police go after people who possess drugs: it keeps them employed.
I didn't miss it, I was just adding to the list.
the student wins: the police will mostly ignore the pirating
Until it turns out to be a student who runs a blog that criticizes the police department, or some politician wants to run on a "tough on crime" platform, or some police officer whose cousin works for the RIAA. Relying on the police to not prosecute people who are reported to them for breaking the law is not something I would do.
There are a lot of uses for BitTorrent that have nothing to do with copyright infringement.
Why should that surprise you? I do not have any of those things in my home either...then again, I am not a Netflix customer...
which would lead to severely reduced profits
What profits would you be referring to? You do realize that, according to the movie studios, the overwhelming majority of movies lose money, and have lost money consistently for the past few decades, right?
Honestly, if downloading were killing movie studios, we would have stopped having new movies years ago. The studios are not hurting, they are just greedy and demand more money than they made previously, using downloading as an excuse for squeezing more money out of consumers.
However, if you have the money, architectural choices make a big difference. There is a reason why you do not see many shared memory machines these days, why Ethernet is usually not the network of course for clusters, etc.
Isn't this about hardware, not operating systems (other than the OS being able to support the hardware)?
No, it is about two operating systems on the same hardware, one of which (GNU/Linux) outperforming the other (Windows).
And isn't the hardware simply about how much money you have to throw at it?
No, it is also about the architectural choices.
Maybe I'm just shamelessly immodest, but I support these scanners if they can be shown to speed up the process of checking in. People need to get over being seen naked - do they avoid the doctor's office as well?
You are shamelessly immodest. For a lot of people, being naked is an emotional thing, and while they can suck it up when it needs to happen with a doctor, they should not be forced to disrobe for some random TSA employee who really has no job qualifications at all.
We live in a world where airplanes attract way more than their fair share of terrorism - we need to accept that fact
Really? When last I checked, terrorists were also attacking federal buildings, abortion clinics, and meat packing plants, right here in the United States. Worldwide, terrorists seem to be attacking markets, schools, government buildings, and so forth. Airplanes are a bit rare in terms of terrorist attacks, probably because of the large amount of security and the difficulty in pulling off a successful attack.
We can't pretend that people won't try to bomb airplanes, even if there are much easier ways to kill people
You know what would be a really easy target? That giant line right near the security checkpoint at the airport. A terrorist looking to kill a lot of people would probably choose that target over an airplane, we practically handed it over to them. Attacking security checkpoints is not exactly unheard of; it happens in the middle east fairly regularly.
Terrorists don't go after low-hanging fruit... they go after the spectacular.
Completely false, take a look at the reports of attacks in Israel, Pakistan, India, Iraq, Afghanistan, and any of the other of dozens of countries that have problems with terrorists. Take a look at the terrorist activities here in the United States some time, and see how much low hanging fruit is attacked.
Same as above.
What are the patent trolls going to do, exactly? Sue everyone who develops open source software? There is just not enough money to even justify that sort of action, and given the US government's interest in open source software, they would run the risk of getting software patents rendered invalid. If Red Hat is party to some sort of secret licensing deal, that is very unfortunate, but I really do not think that the patent trolls can actually destroy the entire movement.
I am at a university, and my department's IT guys have to deal with Windows, Mac OS X, Fedora, Ubuntu, and even a few old Solaris machines. They maintain a wiki of tips for accomplishing various tasks, and for the most part, users who do not use the default configuration (dual-boot Windows and Ubuntu) are on their own. The biggest issues are probably the file servers (NFS is only allowed for the default Ubuntu install, Samba for everything else) and printing (maintaining both Windows and Unix print queues is apparently difficult). Of course, we do not really have "Enterprise" IT needs; strictly speaking, we do not even need domain logins, except for a few servers, and machines can be registered on a per-owner basis (unregistered MAC addresses do not get IPs); security requirements are not very high, a firewall that blocks everything but SSH is enough, for the most part.
Exactly what incident would you be referring to? The launch of an ICBM 35 miles from LA that almost nobody in LA is an eyewitness to? There is a time to criticize the government for lying to us, but this really is not it...
if it never exists outside somebody's head
Except that it does exist outside of their head: the password is communicated to the system that the person is logging in to. Case in point:
http://www.businessinsider.com/how-mark-zuckerberg-hacked-into-the-harvard-crimson-2010-3
From the article:
Mark used his site, TheFacebook.com, to look up members of the site who identified themselves as members of the Crimson. Then he examined a log of failed logins to see if any of the Crimson members had ever entered an incorrect password into TheFacebook.com. If the cases in which they had entered failed logins, Mark tried to use them to access the Crimson members' Harvard email accounts. He successfully accessed two of them.
Security experts will tell you that usability is a part of security. The harder it is to use a system, the more likely it is that people will make a mistake, and in the case of a security system that often means compromising security in some way.
Passwords as a secure authentication method are a really bad idea. Humans are pretty terrible at coming up with random passwords, and only marginally better at remembering a randomly generated string. It is easy to accidentally enter the one system's password when logging into another system (and if you are logging into a system run by someone like Mark Zuckerberg, this could get you in a lot of trouble). Cryptographic logins are a hell of a lot better, all that would be needed is a good way for people to carry crypto keys around with them (which is not asking much given how many different storage devices people usually carry around -- cell phones, thumb drives, cards, etc. -- any one of which could be used to store a key). Web browsers are already capable of supporting cryptographic logins, it should not take a terrible effort to enable web browsers to use crypto keys stored on some portable device.
Yes, I know, someone could steal your thumb drive and get all your credentials. Yet we rely on house keys to protect our homes, and someone could steal your house keys and enter your house (which would give them physical access to your computer). Users can use a passphrase to help protect their crypto keys from theft (this is somewhat better than just a password login since an attacker would need the keys before they could even attempt a brute force attack, and your passphrase would only need to thwart an adversary long enough for you to report the theft and revoke the stolen keys).