And from where exactly do they propose we get these girlfriends for the crackers? If we accept the supposition that these are all a bunch of young persistently-single men, then clearly these men are either a) not putting in the effort / participating in activities conducive to getting a mate, or b) insufficiently desirable to any potential mate met thus far.
c) they would rather talk about hacking, computers, etc. than celebrity gossip and other shallow stupidity, and the lack of female hackers (i.e. women who would be interested in such a conversation) leaves them without any suitable options.
why all the heteronormativity?
Because the goal of the article is to force hackers into the sort of lifestyles approved by American corporations. Corporations hate it when people deviate from the "get married and focus on reproduction" mode of existence, because it makes it hard for them to turn people into money wells.
Just because it would solve your problem if a woman were to screw this guy
It does not solve my problem. I would rather have friends who can talk about interesting things, argue with me, explain why I am wrong or why they are right about technical topics, etc. I have a girlfriend that can talk to me about interesting things -- and I cannot imagine trading her for a shallow dimwit who would rather talk about celebrities and handbags.
Most men are intimidated by smart women, and so most women who are smart try to conceal it.
Then they meet men who want someone they can talk to, they come out of their shells, and all the men who were intimidated by smart women lose their chance. Believe it or not, plenty of us straight men want to be in relationships with people are not boring.
Or maybe hackers just need to find partners who actually understand what hacking is about and why it draws people, and who can at least sustain a conversation about something more interesting than celebrity gossip. My current girlfriend and I argue about the merits and problems of Javascript being used everywhere, about the shortcomings of Python, about whether or not computer science is just a field of math, and so forth. Do you think that sounds awful for a hacker?
The real problem with this article is that it assumes that hacking is a problem that needs to be "solved" i.e. destroyed. The author's idea is to bog down hackers with mundane, corporate-approved concerns. I bet the author never considered the possibility that two hackers could pair up without stopping their activities -- typical conservative attitude about computers and hackers.
It is also worth noting that there are plenty of women who are content to let their husbands spend hours working on a project in the shed/garage/barn/whatever. What, does the author think that no woman would ever be willing to give her boyfriend or husband some free time to sit in front of a computer and hack? If I did not know better, I would think that the author was clueless or something.
Oh, yeah, and nevermind the number of female hackers or gay hackers.
Corporations view hackers as a threat, because hackers do not just sit down and follow the rules like everyone else (rules which are, of course, designed to extract money from your wallet). Hackers created PCs, because hackers did not want to have to pay for computation utilities. Hackers explored the Internet and the phone system, and ignored restrictions that could be bypassed by pressing the right buttons or sending the right strings. Hackers are jailbreaking gaming consoles and tablets. Hackers are creating filesharing systems.
Corporate leaders cannot stand such people, and so now the threat of hackers has been played up by the mainstream media to the point that society thinks hackers are a major threat to public safety (as opposed to, say, the incompetent decisions made by management, or corporations who refuse to adapt to new technologies and new market realities). Naturally, the solution is to coax hackers into becoming more mainstream by bogging them down with mainstream problems (and if their girlfriends happen to be hackers as well? I guess the corporations never considered that possibility...).
Really? I listened to experienced hackers when I was young; younger hackers listen to me, if I am saying something interesting.
The real issue here is that we are assuming that hacking is a bad activity and that older hackers should be steering wayward youth toward the conservative, endorsed-by-corporations lifestyle.
Sorry about the paywall; I am at a fairly large university, so I am not always aware of these things. This is part of my point, though: what we generally hear are tidbits from the study that omit details (such as the fact that the study's 1-in-4 figure counts both rapes and attempted rapes) from people who have a particular political motivation. If there is no publicly-accessible copy of the study, that is a problem in and of itself.
It seems like you denying the existence of "rape culture". If so, you're quite wrong
Where is the convincing argument for this phenomenon? We live in a culture where rapists are imprisoned, where women are warned to avoid known rapists, where a man's behavior around drunk women is used as the basis for judging if he is a threat, etc. Rape is not widely accepted, even by people who make jokes about rape (e.g. "I totally raped that exam"). People generally view rape as being one of the worst crimes a man can commit, on par with murder.
Now, this is not to say that there are no problems. A pervasive problem at colleges and in large organizations is the active attempt to cover up rape, to shield the organization from embarrassment. Related is the problem of organizations that pressure victims of rape (under the commonly understood definition) to remain silent. I have observed these problems at both my current institution and my alma mater -- the seriousness of a rape accusation leads to this sort of behavior. Individual people are not doing this; this is what we see out of people in positions of leadership, who are more concerned with protecting their organization and perhaps their own position within their organization than with the victims.
So like many things, feminists are only half right and base their assertions on the realities of the world as it was decades or centuries ago (likely because they believe in "the patriarchy"). The modern moral zeitgeist leaves no room for rape; rapists need to hide their activities, because if their crimes were to become known, they would be social outcasts (if not prisoners). There are organizations that enable rapists, but those organizations do not represent the mainstream of our culture -- fraternities (popular at some schools, bet generally derided), certain religious organizations (I am embarrassed to say that some Jewish movements fall into this category), etc. Yet when those organizations' treatment of rapists and victims is made known, it becomes a scandal; people do not just shrug it off.
There's also the frequent sniggering usage of the phrase "Pound-me In The Ass Prison" which has a similar effect
Unfortunately, feminists tend to ignore the very real and widespread problem of male prison rape; it is hard to blame them, since feminism is really a movement for women (let's not even try that "feminism is for everyone" nonsense), but the reality is that prison rape is not only pervasive, but male prisoners face a threat to their lives if they report rape to the authorities. At the beginning of this thread, I said that we should not put so many people in prison, and aside from the cost to society, there is the reality that prisons are dangerous places -- dangerous people are (rightly) in prison, and non-dangerous people should not be placed in such an environment.
Seems I misinterpreted some things the first time around (I was in a rush), which I apologize for, however...
The definition of rape excludes coercion and abuses of power (one yes to question 4, 5, 8, 9, or 10 is required), but includes attempted but not completed acts (which is how a 1 in 4 figure is reported; without lumping attempted rape with successful rape, the figure drops to 1 in 7).
The "alcohol or drugs" questions -- a large fraction of the victims -- does not actually meet the legal definition of rape cited by the study. It does not require that alcohol or drugs have been given for the purpose of impairing a woman's judgment; a man who buys a glass of wine for a woman is not necessarily doing so as part of a plot to rape the woman. The study asks if a woman had sex with a man "because" he gave her alcohol or drugs; that may very well include women who had sex with men in order to obtain drugs, women who had sex with a man following a date where alcohol played a significant role (and where the lack of alcohol would have made the date boring etc.), and so forth.
More importantly, in followup interview, Dr. Koss noted that this question was worded poorly, and had this question been excluded, the figure drops to 1 in 9:
(Hard to read, sorry; Toledo Blade, October 10, 1993)
The premise of the study is that excluding the word "rape" leads to more accurate results; yet this is not actually proved anywhere, nor is any citation given. The assumption is that victims may not use the word "rape" to characterize what happened, but this is not demonstrated by the study. It may be the case that not using the word rape leads to an inflated figure.
The original blog post was criticizing someone who pointed out that, in later statements, Koss admitted that 73% of the victims were not actually sure they had been raped. This is probably because of the serious connotations of the word "rape," which (rightly) conjures images of psychological harm, difficulty trusting men following the incident, years of counseling, etc. -- that is what I have seen in the rape victims that I know. People have doubts about the 1 in 4 figure for this very reason: it is not the case that 1 in 4 women require years of counseling due to a rape. The Koss study points out that rape victims often develop PTSD years later; it has been over 20 years, yet we do not have an epidemic of adult women with PTSD.
Somewhere between the Koss study and the common understanding of rape, even among the victims identified in the study, there is a disconnect -- at some point, the Koss study's findings diverge from what people understand to be rape.
The 1987 study omits a question from the original sexual experiences survey that Koss developed in 1982: "Have you ever been raped?" In that trial version of that study (only at one university), a mere 6% of women answered "yes," even though 8.2% reported having unwanted sexual intercourse while being physically restrained (note that both of these are lower than what the 1987 study found). Why omit this question? The 13th question in the 1982 version illustrates the disconnect mentioned above.
To reiterate, this is no defense of rapists; rapists are predators, who strike opportunistically and who present a real threat. Yet widely cited studies like this one -- it is not as though
People have a problem with the USA when we start applying our laws in other countries, and rightly so. New Zealand has a legitimate, democratic government that creates its laws, so what business do we have trying to extradite NZ citizens for violations of US law that did not occur in the US?
Yeah, blah blah blah, he registered a US domain name. If we start using the Internet as a vehicle for applying our out-of-control legal code in other countries, we are just going to make more enemies.
I'm sorry, but do USA copyrigth laws cover every country on the planet? No, they do not, so people need to learn to deal with the fact that some countries take a different approach to promoting the distribution of science and art.
Oh, what, you were hoping to turn music into a form of property? That's cute.
who were asked using a question that didn't use the word rape but instead asked if they'd ever physically or through the use if drugs forced an unwilling woman to have sex.
They were also asked if they had unwanted sexual contact following verbal coercion or a coercive abuse of power. Had you bothered to read the post you were replying to, you would have seen that I actually read the study, not some feminist's blog post, and that the study itself found that most victims fell into the "verbal coercion" category.
You should read up on it, this isn't feminist nonsense like you've assumed.
Maybe you should read the study, and see what kind of definition of rape is used in that study. The definition is a typical feminist simplification of the crime: any unwanted sexual contact is "rape," regardless of the circumstances.
in the furure, please read any linked material before jumping to conclusions like that. Who knows how many people have gotten the wrong idea from reading your uninformed comment.
The linked material was a feminist blog post, not a scientific study. I took the time to find the study, which was not easy (searching for the study leads to more blog posts than scientific papers), and I took the time to read the study and its results. Yes, the study did find that a significant fraction of women have been raped (by the commonly understand definition), and the study was based on the premise that saying "rape" would conjure images of the commonly understood definition of the crime, not the spectrum of behavior that the study classifies as rape.
You know what gives people the wrong idea? Feminist writings that take the Koss study, refer to "rape" without bothering to mention that the study uses "rape" to refer to so many behaviors, and then declare that 25% of women have been raped. So how about the next time you say, "1 in 4 women have been raped!" you be honest and say, "By defining rape to include the use of force, drugs, verbal coercion, abuse of power, and anything else that might lead a women to an unwanted sexual encounter, we would have to say that 1 in 4 women have been raped!"
Oh, and, by the way, turning everyone into a criminal, overly harsh sentences, overly broad and vague laws, and the massive increase in law enforcement power are what the right wing is going.
However, for deterrence (and that's what we're talking about here)
Deterrence? Prisons should not be about deterrence, they are supposed to keep dangerous people separated from the rest of society, so that the rest of society remains safe, and people are released from prison when we believe that society will be safe with those people walking free. Putting people in prison for any other reason is wasteful; it wastes a person's life and it wastes the resources needed to house them in prison.
Non-violent crimes -- at least those that make sense to remain in effect (which excludes the entirety of the war on drugs, for starters) -- should be punished with community service, so that people can work for the benefit of the society they wronged. Bankers who defrauded people out of their money should be out picking up trash and helping to lay roads, as a form of restitution. Keep the punishment short, and make sure it does not prevent a person from working their day job; this should not turn into a system of slavery, just like it should not waste a non-violent person's life by locking them in a cell.
Punishment is not effective
Not as a deterrent; some people are capable of murder, and we need to keep them separated from everyone else. Stop thinking of things in terms of deterrence, and start thinking of how to maximize the benefit to society. It is detrimental to society to spend money and man-power keeping people in cages if those people pose no threat to anyone else. It is beneficial to society if people have a chance to contribute their labor as a way of righting their wrongs.
Which means that we should rather work on crime prevention measures
Not putting people in prison is a crime prevention method. There are communities that have been decimated by "lock 'em up" approaches to "justice," places where 1/4 of men are incarcerated. That breeds crime -- crimes on the part of children who were raised in unstable, impoverished homes, crimes on the part of former inmates who return home and discover that they cannot find a job (who wants to hire a convicted felon?), crimes on the part of families who are trying to help their incarcerated relatives.
People make connections with criminal gangs while in prison; what do you think happens when they get out and face diminished employment prospects? They turn to those same gang connections for help, and they start committing crimes for money -- driving contraband-laden trucks, driving getaway cars, etc. The disproportionately high rate of recidivism among former prison inmates is well known.
Which means, when it comes to adults, find them some work.
Spot on, and like I said, former prison inmates face problems finding employment -- so we need to stop sending people to jail, and stop classifying non-violent, non-serious crimes as felonies. We also need to stop arresting people over drugs, which is the leading cause of incarceration in this country, and we need to reorganize our legal code to restore faith in the justice system. We need to stop having knee-jerk reactions to infamous crimes -- laws that do not expire, which are meant to prevent rare crimes from happening and which wind up being applied in novel, unanticipated ways.
That is not a universally agreed upon number, since it is based on some feminists' expansive definition of the word "rape." The majority of the victims were "verbally coerced," not physically restrained or drugged -- which may be mean, it may be immoral, but to call it "rape" is stretching the definition of a very serious crime. Verbally manipulating someone into having sex, even by abusing a position of power, falls short of the proper and appropriate definition of rape as a crime. Being creepy does not make a man a rapist.
Feminists have an unfortunate habit of using the word rape to shock people into action. At the time that the Koss study was first published, feminists had been so successful at shocking people into action that we were in the middle of a moral panic, imprisoning thousands of innocent men for child abuse that never happened (and going as far as to accuse some of subjecting children to satanic rituals and other witchcraft). We should be doing everything we can to avoid making that mistake again, not talking about the need to triple our already tyrannically large prison population.
I'll be the first to say that there are problems with the way many police forces and colleges deal with rape. I have heard stories of women who were never told about a "rape kit," who were advised by people in positions of power to not press charges, who were turned away when they went to the police, who were told to just get on with their lives, etc. That is a problem, and that is a problem that should be addressed. However, we must also be careful in our solutions to that problem: we must ensure that innocent men are not imprisoned as part of the hunt for rapists, we must ensure that there is no confusion about what a man is being accused of when he is accused of rape, and we must ensure that the word rape does not become associated with normal sexual activity.
I know two women who were raped (one by physical force, one by drugs), and the last thing I want is for people to doubt that they are victims of a serious crime.
Not entirely true, algorithms like AES do not have a high enough security margin. Also, you cannot just change the key length, even if the algorithm specification would allow that (like e.g. Blowfish does), because whatever change you make needs to be cryptanalyzed first. The same for other changes like multiple encryption, etc.
Sure, but a 256 bit keys is high enough margin for many decades even if scalable quantum computers became feasible. AES256 has problems, but we have alternatives; as far as I know, 256 bit Serpent does not have the same problems as AES256. In any case, this is a minor problem to solve: use Serpent or Twofish or some other algorithm before uploading your data. It is not as though we need to fundamentally alter how we approach cryptography.
So how many "cloud" service providers use them? Answer: Zero.
It's worse than that: we are not even taking steps toward deploying these algorithms. One issue is that Regev's system (and related) require much larger keys, which would increase the load on many systems, and we are currently trying to decrease the expense of crypto deployment. I remember seeing a presentation at CRYPTO last year that showed that McEliece could be as efficient as some EC algorithms, but I do not recall the specifics.
More troubling is that the OpenPGP standard is not being amended to include McEliece or Regev, despite having recently been amended to include EC algorithms. There is no need to panic here, though, as quantum computing is still an extremely remote and highly speculative threat.
Only insofar as the the public sector is concerned. It not unreasonable to assume that intelligence agencies of larger countries are 10-20 years ahead.
I do not think QC is 10-20 years away; I would place it at 100 years away, barring some unprecedented sequence of breakthroughs in science and engineering. Even if intelligence agencies have scalable quantum computers, the likelihood that such expensive resources would be used for a mass wiretapping program or for anything less than spying on other intelligence agencies is pretty low. There are plenty of other attack vectors that can be used: bad RNGs, bad opsec (e.g. someone forgetting to encrypt a message that quotes an encrypted message), side channels, traffic analysis, undercover agents, etc.
Sorry, I don't want to be fear-mongering, but there is a point to the claim that if you put your data into the cloud now, it might be decryptable in ten years from now.
Ten years is pretty short for something like AES128. Thirty years is reasonable, or if you are optimistic, fifty years. Even in thirty years, the resources that will be required to perform a ciphertext-only attack on AES128 will be immense, so I doubt most people will face such an attack. Even the most tyrannical, authoritarian government would be hard-pressed to use an AES-breaking system for anything other than a targeted attack thirty years from now -- there are too many messages to attack them all in any useful timeframe.
It's not that I mean to say that some healthy paranoia is a bad thing -- this is crypto, we should assume our adversary is powerful. We do need to assign at least some bounds to the adversary's power, though, or else we are never going to get anything better than a one time pad. You can argue that there is a possibility that any key size will be insecure in 30 years, but then what will you do if you need to send a message that needs to be secret 30 years from now? One time pads have limited real-world utility, especially for personal communications (it is also unclear if 30 year security is even needed there, or what sort of threat model personal communications should have).
If encryption and the necessary trust mangement was easy, people would be doing it already.
The problem is that traditional threat models are not appropriate for personal communications. Most people are not dealing with a determined, organized, and well-funded adversary. For personal communication, we need security against mass wiretapping systems, not security against targeted attacks (which is what banks need), and that threat is nothing close to the kind of threat that would lead most people to verify key fingerprints or use an email client with PGP support.
Cryptosystems need to be designed with these things in mind: people are going to do silly things with their secret keys (both in trying to synchronize keys between devices and in having lots of secret keys across their devices), people are not going to take the time to verify keys, and people are not going to refuse to communicate because a key was not verified. The cryptosystems of the future need to give people reliable security under those constraints. It needs to be better than Hushmail (one compromised server should not lead to a complete system compromise), even if it cannot protect against a targeted attack.
We also face a secondary problem: it is hard to get people to move to a new protocol. People are not going to stop using Facebook, Gchat, etc.; if we want to give people cryptography, we need to find a way to get it to piggyback on those systems without the cooperation of companies like Google and Facebook (because they have every reason not to cooperate).
Nobody says this is easy. These are big problems that need to be researched and solved.
Remember, with technologies such as practical quantum cryptography on the horizon, any data you store encrypted in "the cloud" won't stay that way encrypted forever.
Quantum computing is the problem for crypto
Quantum computers are a thread to certain assymetric algorithms like RSA and ElGamal, not symmetric algorithms (aside from halving the key length, but that is solved by doubling the key length).
We have assymetric algorithms that resist quantum computer attacks; McEliece, Regev, etc.
Quantum computers are about as "on the horizon" as cold fusion. People keep talking about incremental breakthroughs, but there are big problems standing in the way.
I see OTR from plenty of Adium users (most of whom has no idea what it is or that they are even using it), and it is installed by default in some GNU/Linux distributions. The biggest issue with OTR is that it still lacks group chat, and SILC is far more annoying to use (distributing a shared key to everyone, or else getting your key from the server?). It would also be nice if OTR displayed a warning if a person's key fingerprint changed; not everyone is willing to take the time to verify keys (this has the downside of annoying people who use multiple devices, but we do not have any good / easy way to synchronize keys).
Encryption via web apps is always a problem. It makes Hushmail insecure, and it makes cryptocat insecure.
This isn't Soviet Russia where a kangaroo court declares you guilty and they pop you in the head as soon as you walk out of the courtroom
No, this is America, where the majority of inmates never had a trial and just pleaded out on the advice of their lawyers. No, we are not the USSR yet -- the USSR was one of only two countries in the history of the Earth to have a larger prison population than the United States.
We have due process
Coupled with a legal system that makes so many activities crimes that most people cannot live their lives without breaking the law. The US government has actually lost track of how many laws are on the books -- we don't even know the number of laws, let alone what the laws actually say. Our criminal code only expands, it never contracts -- and unsurprisingly, our prison population keeps expanding.
However, perhaps there needs to be a line drawn here, since this type of investigation (or re-investigation) comes with a significant price tag (likely to the taxpayer).
As opposed to the price tag associated with keeping someone in prison?
I question benefit vs. cost in those cases.
Anything that reduces our prison population is worth the cost -- we have the largest prison population on Earth, and it is continuing to grow. We will soon have the largest prison population in human history (currently, only Nazi Germany and the USSR had larger populations). That has massive direct and indirect costs to our society, both in terms of money and in terms of the destructive effect that overly broad legal codes and overly powerful police forces have had on our rights and freedoms. Communities have been decimated by having 1/4 of their male population imprisoned. Once out of prison, people often have difficulty finding employment, which can and does lead to recidivism -- prison can turn an innocent, wrongly convicted person into a criminal.
"Law and order" attitudes are fine when the only people we imprison are murderers, rapists, etc. -- dangerous people who need to be separated from society to keep everyone else safe. These days, there are so many vague laws on the books that everyone is guilty of at least some felony, and by some estimates people are committing felonies every day just by living their lives.
Until we see major, sweeping reforms to our criminal laws, "law and order" approaches to crime are dangerous.
Slashdot Mirror
And from where exactly do they propose we get these girlfriends for the crackers? If we accept the supposition that these are all a bunch of young persistently-single men, then clearly these men are either a) not putting in the effort / participating in activities conducive to getting a mate, or b) insufficiently desirable to any potential mate met thus far.
c) they would rather talk about hacking, computers, etc. than celebrity gossip and other shallow stupidity, and the lack of female hackers (i.e. women who would be interested in such a conversation) leaves them without any suitable options.
why all the heteronormativity?
Because the goal of the article is to force hackers into the sort of lifestyles approved by American corporations. Corporations hate it when people deviate from the "get married and focus on reproduction" mode of existence, because it makes it hard for them to turn people into money wells.
Just because it would solve your problem if a woman were to screw this guy
It does not solve my problem. I would rather have friends who can talk about interesting things, argue with me, explain why I am wrong or why they are right about technical topics, etc. I have a girlfriend that can talk to me about interesting things -- and I cannot imagine trading her for a shallow dimwit who would rather talk about celebrities and handbags.
Most men are intimidated by smart women, and so most women who are smart try to conceal it.
Then they meet men who want someone they can talk to, they come out of their shells, and all the men who were intimidated by smart women lose their chance. Believe it or not, plenty of us straight men want to be in relationships with people are not boring.
The point is that having a wife and children is supposed to take up all your free time, so you will not have a chance to hack.
(Let's just pretend that there are no women out there who are OK with their husbands spending hours in the garage working on a project)
Or maybe hackers just need to find partners who actually understand what hacking is about and why it draws people, and who can at least sustain a conversation about something more interesting than celebrity gossip. My current girlfriend and I argue about the merits and problems of Javascript being used everywhere, about the shortcomings of Python, about whether or not computer science is just a field of math, and so forth. Do you think that sounds awful for a hacker?
The real problem with this article is that it assumes that hacking is a problem that needs to be "solved" i.e. destroyed. The author's idea is to bog down hackers with mundane, corporate-approved concerns. I bet the author never considered the possibility that two hackers could pair up without stopping their activities -- typical conservative attitude about computers and hackers.
It is also worth noting that there are plenty of women who are content to let their husbands spend hours working on a project in the shed/garage/barn/whatever. What, does the author think that no woman would ever be willing to give her boyfriend or husband some free time to sit in front of a computer and hack? If I did not know better, I would think that the author was clueless or something.
Oh, yeah, and nevermind the number of female hackers or gay hackers.
Corporations view hackers as a threat, because hackers do not just sit down and follow the rules like everyone else (rules which are, of course, designed to extract money from your wallet). Hackers created PCs, because hackers did not want to have to pay for computation utilities. Hackers explored the Internet and the phone system, and ignored restrictions that could be bypassed by pressing the right buttons or sending the right strings. Hackers are jailbreaking gaming consoles and tablets. Hackers are creating filesharing systems.
Corporate leaders cannot stand such people, and so now the threat of hackers has been played up by the mainstream media to the point that society thinks hackers are a major threat to public safety (as opposed to, say, the incompetent decisions made by management, or corporations who refuse to adapt to new technologies and new market realities). Naturally, the solution is to coax hackers into becoming more mainstream by bogging them down with mainstream problems (and if their girlfriends happen to be hackers as well? I guess the corporations never considered that possibility...).
Really? I listened to experienced hackers when I was young; younger hackers listen to me, if I am saying something interesting.
The real issue here is that we are assuming that hacking is a bad activity and that older hackers should be steering wayward youth toward the conservative, endorsed-by-corporations lifestyle.
It seems like you denying the existence of "rape culture". If so, you're quite wrong
Where is the convincing argument for this phenomenon? We live in a culture where rapists are imprisoned, where women are warned to avoid known rapists, where a man's behavior around drunk women is used as the basis for judging if he is a threat, etc. Rape is not widely accepted, even by people who make jokes about rape (e.g. "I totally raped that exam"). People generally view rape as being one of the worst crimes a man can commit, on par with murder.
Now, this is not to say that there are no problems. A pervasive problem at colleges and in large organizations is the active attempt to cover up rape, to shield the organization from embarrassment. Related is the problem of organizations that pressure victims of rape (under the commonly understood definition) to remain silent. I have observed these problems at both my current institution and my alma mater -- the seriousness of a rape accusation leads to this sort of behavior. Individual people are not doing this; this is what we see out of people in positions of leadership, who are more concerned with protecting their organization and perhaps their own position within their organization than with the victims.
So like many things, feminists are only half right and base their assertions on the realities of the world as it was decades or centuries ago (likely because they believe in "the patriarchy"). The modern moral zeitgeist leaves no room for rape; rapists need to hide their activities, because if their crimes were to become known, they would be social outcasts (if not prisoners). There are organizations that enable rapists, but those organizations do not represent the mainstream of our culture -- fraternities (popular at some schools, bet generally derided), certain religious organizations (I am embarrassed to say that some Jewish movements fall into this category), etc. Yet when those organizations' treatment of rapists and victims is made known, it becomes a scandal; people do not just shrug it off.
There's also the frequent sniggering usage of the phrase "Pound-me In The Ass Prison" which has a similar effect
Unfortunately, feminists tend to ignore the very real and widespread problem of male prison rape; it is hard to blame them, since feminism is really a movement for women (let's not even try that "feminism is for everyone" nonsense), but the reality is that prison rape is not only pervasive, but male prisoners face a threat to their lives if they report rape to the authorities. At the beginning of this thread, I said that we should not put so many people in prison, and aside from the cost to society, there is the reality that prisons are dangerous places -- dangerous people are (rightly) in prison, and non-dangerous people should not be placed in such an environment.
Seems I misinterpreted some things the first time around (I was in a rush), which I apologize for, however...
More importantly, in followup interview, Dr. Koss noted that this question was worded poorly, and had this question been excluded, the figure drops to 1 in 9:
http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=w2NPAAAAIBAJ&jtp=5
(Hard to read, sorry; Toledo Blade, October 10, 1993)
The original blog post was criticizing someone who pointed out that, in later statements, Koss admitted that 73% of the victims were not actually sure they had been raped. This is probably because of the serious connotations of the word "rape," which (rightly) conjures images of psychological harm, difficulty trusting men following the incident, years of counseling, etc. -- that is what I have seen in the rape victims that I know. People have doubts about the 1 in 4 figure for this very reason: it is not the case that 1 in 4 women require years of counseling due to a rape. The Koss study points out that rape victims often develop PTSD years later; it has been over 20 years, yet we do not have an epidemic of adult women with PTSD.
Somewhere between the Koss study and the common understanding of rape, even among the victims identified in the study, there is a disconnect -- at some point, the Koss study's findings diverge from what people understand to be rape.
https://encrypted.google.com/url?q=http://doi.apa.org/journals/ccp/50/3/455.pdf&sa=U&ei=_n8EUICPM4eW0QHlzrnoBw&ved=0CBEQFjAA&usg=AFQjCNG4492vfopHDTbiHXc3c69HIvUCJQ
To reiterate, this is no defense of rapists; rapists are predators, who strike opportunistically and who present a real threat. Yet widely cited studies like this one -- it is not as though
People have a problem with the USA when we start applying our laws in other countries, and rightly so. New Zealand has a legitimate, democratic government that creates its laws, so what business do we have trying to extradite NZ citizens for violations of US law that did not occur in the US?
Yeah, blah blah blah, he registered a US domain name. If we start using the Internet as a vehicle for applying our out-of-control legal code in other countries, we are just going to make more enemies.
I'm sorry, but do USA copyrigth laws cover every country on the planet? No, they do not, so people need to learn to deal with the fact that some countries take a different approach to promoting the distribution of science and art.
Oh, what, you were hoping to turn music into a form of property? That's cute.
A pedicab driver makes money from a service that gets you from point A to point B without paying for gasoline! THE HORROR!
who were asked using a question that didn't use the word rape but instead asked if they'd ever physically or through the use if drugs forced an unwilling woman to have sex.
They were also asked if they had unwanted sexual contact following verbal coercion or a coercive abuse of power. Had you bothered to read the post you were replying to, you would have seen that I actually read the study, not some feminist's blog post, and that the study itself found that most victims fell into the "verbal coercion" category.
You should read up on it, this isn't feminist nonsense like you've assumed.
Maybe you should read the study, and see what kind of definition of rape is used in that study. The definition is a typical feminist simplification of the crime: any unwanted sexual contact is "rape," regardless of the circumstances.
in the furure, please read any linked material before jumping to conclusions like that. Who knows how many people have gotten the wrong idea from reading your uninformed comment.
The linked material was a feminist blog post, not a scientific study. I took the time to find the study, which was not easy (searching for the study leads to more blog posts than scientific papers), and I took the time to read the study and its results. Yes, the study did find that a significant fraction of women have been raped (by the commonly understand definition), and the study was based on the premise that saying "rape" would conjure images of the commonly understood definition of the crime, not the spectrum of behavior that the study classifies as rape.
You know what gives people the wrong idea? Feminist writings that take the Koss study, refer to "rape" without bothering to mention that the study uses "rape" to refer to so many behaviors, and then declare that 25% of women have been raped. So how about the next time you say, "1 in 4 women have been raped!" you be honest and say, "By defining rape to include the use of force, drugs, verbal coercion, abuse of power, and anything else that might lead a women to an unwanted sexual encounter, we would have to say that 1 in 4 women have been raped!"
It's not just that one example:
http://threefelonies.com/Youtoo/tabid/86/Default.aspx
Oh, and, by the way, turning everyone into a criminal, overly harsh sentences, overly broad and vague laws, and the massive increase in law enforcement power are what the right wing is going.
However, for deterrence (and that's what we're talking about here)
Deterrence? Prisons should not be about deterrence, they are supposed to keep dangerous people separated from the rest of society, so that the rest of society remains safe, and people are released from prison when we believe that society will be safe with those people walking free. Putting people in prison for any other reason is wasteful; it wastes a person's life and it wastes the resources needed to house them in prison.
Non-violent crimes -- at least those that make sense to remain in effect (which excludes the entirety of the war on drugs, for starters) -- should be punished with community service, so that people can work for the benefit of the society they wronged. Bankers who defrauded people out of their money should be out picking up trash and helping to lay roads, as a form of restitution. Keep the punishment short, and make sure it does not prevent a person from working their day job; this should not turn into a system of slavery, just like it should not waste a non-violent person's life by locking them in a cell.
Punishment is not effective
Not as a deterrent; some people are capable of murder, and we need to keep them separated from everyone else. Stop thinking of things in terms of deterrence, and start thinking of how to maximize the benefit to society. It is detrimental to society to spend money and man-power keeping people in cages if those people pose no threat to anyone else. It is beneficial to society if people have a chance to contribute their labor as a way of righting their wrongs.
Which means that we should rather work on crime prevention measures
Not putting people in prison is a crime prevention method. There are communities that have been decimated by "lock 'em up" approaches to "justice," places where 1/4 of men are incarcerated. That breeds crime -- crimes on the part of children who were raised in unstable, impoverished homes, crimes on the part of former inmates who return home and discover that they cannot find a job (who wants to hire a convicted felon?), crimes on the part of families who are trying to help their incarcerated relatives.
People make connections with criminal gangs while in prison; what do you think happens when they get out and face diminished employment prospects? They turn to those same gang connections for help, and they start committing crimes for money -- driving contraband-laden trucks, driving getaway cars, etc. The disproportionately high rate of recidivism among former prison inmates is well known.
Which means, when it comes to adults, find them some work.
Spot on, and like I said, former prison inmates face problems finding employment -- so we need to stop sending people to jail, and stop classifying non-violent, non-serious crimes as felonies. We also need to stop arresting people over drugs, which is the leading cause of incarceration in this country, and we need to reorganize our legal code to restore faith in the justice system. We need to stop having knee-jerk reactions to infamous crimes -- laws that do not expire, which are meant to prevent rare crimes from happening and which wind up being applied in novel, unanticipated ways.
That is not a universally agreed upon number, since it is based on some feminists' expansive definition of the word "rape." The majority of the victims were "verbally coerced," not physically restrained or drugged -- which may be mean, it may be immoral, but to call it "rape" is stretching the definition of a very serious crime. Verbally manipulating someone into having sex, even by abusing a position of power, falls short of the proper and appropriate definition of rape as a crime. Being creepy does not make a man a rapist.
Feminists have an unfortunate habit of using the word rape to shock people into action. At the time that the Koss study was first published, feminists had been so successful at shocking people into action that we were in the middle of a moral panic, imprisoning thousands of innocent men for child abuse that never happened (and going as far as to accuse some of subjecting children to satanic rituals and other witchcraft). We should be doing everything we can to avoid making that mistake again, not talking about the need to triple our already tyrannically large prison population.
I'll be the first to say that there are problems with the way many police forces and colleges deal with rape. I have heard stories of women who were never told about a "rape kit," who were advised by people in positions of power to not press charges, who were turned away when they went to the police, who were told to just get on with their lives, etc. That is a problem, and that is a problem that should be addressed. However, we must also be careful in our solutions to that problem: we must ensure that innocent men are not imprisoned as part of the hunt for rapists, we must ensure that there is no confusion about what a man is being accused of when he is accused of rape, and we must ensure that the word rape does not become associated with normal sexual activity.
I know two women who were raped (one by physical force, one by drugs), and the last thing I want is for people to doubt that they are victims of a serious crime.
Not entirely true, algorithms like AES do not have a high enough security margin. Also, you cannot just change the key length, even if the algorithm specification would allow that (like e.g. Blowfish does), because whatever change you make needs to be cryptanalyzed first. The same for other changes like multiple encryption, etc.
Sure, but a 256 bit keys is high enough margin for many decades even if scalable quantum computers became feasible. AES256 has problems, but we have alternatives; as far as I know, 256 bit Serpent does not have the same problems as AES256. In any case, this is a minor problem to solve: use Serpent or Twofish or some other algorithm before uploading your data. It is not as though we need to fundamentally alter how we approach cryptography.
So how many "cloud" service providers use them? Answer: Zero.
It's worse than that: we are not even taking steps toward deploying these algorithms. One issue is that Regev's system (and related) require much larger keys, which would increase the load on many systems, and we are currently trying to decrease the expense of crypto deployment. I remember seeing a presentation at CRYPTO last year that showed that McEliece could be as efficient as some EC algorithms, but I do not recall the specifics.
More troubling is that the OpenPGP standard is not being amended to include McEliece or Regev, despite having recently been amended to include EC algorithms. There is no need to panic here, though, as quantum computing is still an extremely remote and highly speculative threat.
Only insofar as the the public sector is concerned. It not unreasonable to assume that intelligence agencies of larger countries are 10-20 years ahead.
I do not think QC is 10-20 years away; I would place it at 100 years away, barring some unprecedented sequence of breakthroughs in science and engineering. Even if intelligence agencies have scalable quantum computers, the likelihood that such expensive resources would be used for a mass wiretapping program or for anything less than spying on other intelligence agencies is pretty low. There are plenty of other attack vectors that can be used: bad RNGs, bad opsec (e.g. someone forgetting to encrypt a message that quotes an encrypted message), side channels, traffic analysis, undercover agents, etc.
Sorry, I don't want to be fear-mongering, but there is a point to the claim that if you put your data into the cloud now, it might be decryptable in ten years from now.
Ten years is pretty short for something like AES128. Thirty years is reasonable, or if you are optimistic, fifty years. Even in thirty years, the resources that will be required to perform a ciphertext-only attack on AES128 will be immense, so I doubt most people will face such an attack. Even the most tyrannical, authoritarian government would be hard-pressed to use an AES-breaking system for anything other than a targeted attack thirty years from now -- there are too many messages to attack them all in any useful timeframe.
It's not that I mean to say that some healthy paranoia is a bad thing -- this is crypto, we should assume our adversary is powerful. We do need to assign at least some bounds to the adversary's power, though, or else we are never going to get anything better than a one time pad. You can argue that there is a possibility that any key size will be insecure in 30 years, but then what will you do if you need to send a message that needs to be secret 30 years from now? One time pads have limited real-world utility, especially for personal communications (it is also unclear if 30 year security is even needed there, or what sort of threat model personal communications should have).
If encryption and the necessary trust mangement was easy, people would be doing it already.
The problem is that traditional threat models are not appropriate for personal communications. Most people are not dealing with a determined, organized, and well-funded adversary. For personal communication, we need security against mass wiretapping systems, not security against targeted attacks (which is what banks need), and that threat is nothing close to the kind of threat that would lead most people to verify key fingerprints or use an email client with PGP support.
Cryptosystems need to be designed with these things in mind: people are going to do silly things with their secret keys (both in trying to synchronize keys between devices and in having lots of secret keys across their devices), people are not going to take the time to verify keys, and people are not going to refuse to communicate because a key was not verified. The cryptosystems of the future need to give people reliable security under those constraints. It needs to be better than Hushmail (one compromised server should not lead to a complete system compromise), even if it cannot protect against a targeted attack.
We also face a secondary problem: it is hard to get people to move to a new protocol. People are not going to stop using Facebook, Gchat, etc.; if we want to give people cryptography, we need to find a way to get it to piggyback on those systems without the cooperation of companies like Google and Facebook (because they have every reason not to cooperate).
Nobody says this is easy. These are big problems that need to be researched and solved.
Remember, with technologies such as practical quantum cryptography on the horizon, any data you store encrypted in "the cloud" won't stay that way encrypted forever.
I see OTR from plenty of Adium users (most of whom has no idea what it is or that they are even using it), and it is installed by default in some GNU/Linux distributions. The biggest issue with OTR is that it still lacks group chat, and SILC is far more annoying to use (distributing a shared key to everyone, or else getting your key from the server?). It would also be nice if OTR displayed a warning if a person's key fingerprint changed; not everyone is willing to take the time to verify keys (this has the downside of annoying people who use multiple devices, but we do not have any good / easy way to synchronize keys).
Encryption via web apps is always a problem. It makes Hushmail insecure, and it makes cryptocat insecure.
http://threefelonies.com/Youtoo/tabid/86/Default.aspx
This isn't Soviet Russia where a kangaroo court declares you guilty and they pop you in the head as soon as you walk out of the courtroom
No, this is America, where the majority of inmates never had a trial and just pleaded out on the advice of their lawyers. No, we are not the USSR yet -- the USSR was one of only two countries in the history of the Earth to have a larger prison population than the United States.
We have due process
Coupled with a legal system that makes so many activities crimes that most people cannot live their lives without breaking the law. The US government has actually lost track of how many laws are on the books -- we don't even know the number of laws, let alone what the laws actually say. Our criminal code only expands, it never contracts -- and unsurprisingly, our prison population keeps expanding.
how many cases were settled outside court?
So many criminal cases are pleaded out that if everyone exercised their right to a trial, the entire system would come grinding to a halt:
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/opinion/sunday/go-to-trial-crash-the-justice-system.html
However, perhaps there needs to be a line drawn here, since this type of investigation (or re-investigation) comes with a significant price tag (likely to the taxpayer).
As opposed to the price tag associated with keeping someone in prison?
I question benefit vs. cost in those cases.
Anything that reduces our prison population is worth the cost -- we have the largest prison population on Earth, and it is continuing to grow. We will soon have the largest prison population in human history (currently, only Nazi Germany and the USSR had larger populations). That has massive direct and indirect costs to our society, both in terms of money and in terms of the destructive effect that overly broad legal codes and overly powerful police forces have had on our rights and freedoms. Communities have been decimated by having 1/4 of their male population imprisoned. Once out of prison, people often have difficulty finding employment, which can and does lead to recidivism -- prison can turn an innocent, wrongly convicted person into a criminal.
I'm a good law-and-order conservative
I bet you would change your tune if you were arrested for something like this:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/oct/05/criminalizing-everyone/
"Law and order" attitudes are fine when the only people we imprison are murderers, rapists, etc. -- dangerous people who need to be separated from society to keep everyone else safe. These days, there are so many vague laws on the books that everyone is guilty of at least some felony, and by some estimates people are committing felonies every day just by living their lives.
Until we see major, sweeping reforms to our criminal laws, "law and order" approaches to crime are dangerous.