People are trained from kindergarden onwards to think that if someone tries to do something privately or in secret, they must be doing something that breaks the rules. We are also trained from kindergarden onwards to think that the rules are sacred and must not be broken, so people wind up thinking that anyone who wants privacy must be doing some immoral.
What, you want to have privacy? What are you trying to hide?
I mean, outside of fedora, Ubuntu, Xubuntu (maybe Mint) and Slackware, what's the point?
How about, "I want something like Fedora, but which does not require a yearly upgrade that will inevitably break things?" Now, where might I find such a disto, without having to pay for it...
(In reality, I use ScientificLinux, but both basically follow RHEL)
Distros are not forked just for fun. Sometimes there are real disagreements over how packages should be managed, what new features are important, what patches are worth applying, etc. I do not need the latest eye candy and I do not really have the time for things to mysteriously break, but other people want the latest eye candy and are willing to fix broken things.
Hundreds of distros may seem excessive, but a lot of those are just small communities of people with similar enough aims.
Why is that scary? Intelligence agencies have used broadcast media to communicate with spies in the field for many decades now. Look up "numbers stations" -- you could tune in to many of these broadcasts any time you want.
So you find some pornography files in a strange place (a guy's underwear -- maybe not that strange), and the reason you think there is some hidden message is...? Oh, yeah, you also found the steganography software that was used for encoding and decoding, and then just brute forced the passphrase (RTFA). So the fact that the memory card was in the guy's underwear is actually irrelevant -- the same thing would have happened had the card been in his wallet, backback, tablet, etc.
This is the classic warden problem, applied to terrorists.
Time for a new "Eternal September"
on
Introducing SlashBI
·
· Score: 3, Funny
It is not as simple as, "whoever has the most babies wins." What evolution will do is produce ratios of geniuses to average humans that best fit the selection pressure. Our survival depends on our intelligence, or more precisely, our ability to produce the occasional genius whose intelligence will benefit everyone else.
They think they are punishing TPB by blocking it, and that other torrent sites will be afraid because of the example they make of TPB. It is the sort of thinking that comes from politicians who grew up in a pre-Internet age.
Microsoft expects you to keep shoveling money into their coffers; DRM is a way to ensure that you function as Microsoft expects you to, i.e. in a way that enriches them. The fact that you own your device does not mean that you are free to do what you want with it; you are only free to do things that will help Microsoft compete with other companies, who all have roughly the same attitude about their customers.
What, did you think that because desktops and laptops gave you freedom, the hackers had won? Times have changed, and all those hackers who got rich giving people their freedom from IBM and AT&T have come to realize that freedom is not profitable.
How else are we expected to subjugate other countries? What, did you expect us to have people make our toys domestically, where there are laws forbidding child labor, where there is a minimum wage, where workers cannot be locked in their factories? Now that is just crazy talk. Of course we need copyrights and patents -- we need to be able to trade our ideas for the physical labor of other nations.
No, his lab was raided by the DEA because of the book; they were looking for anything they could use against him. Ward Churchill was not fired for his 9/11 article either, he was fired for academic misconduct -- which the University of Colorado started looking for after the article was brought to their attention. People cannot be punished for what they say, but if you look hard enough you can always find a punishable offense.
How about Alexander Shulgin, whose lab was raided and whose research license was revoked after he published a book on the drugs he had researched? He has continued to work, but is basically barred from performing any analysis on illegal drugs, which at this point includes whole families of drugs that he described in his books.
Considering that the federal government has caused researchers to lose their jobs over entire books their have published, it is hardly surprising that such a minute form of expression would not be considered "protected."
Perhaps you missed the part about technology given only to law enforcement, which allows them to take forensic data from live systems -- technology that criminals will be able to study, but which is deliberately hidden from law abiding citizens. The point is not that Microsoft is actively handing data over, the point is that Microsoft is not going to stand up to law enforcement and say, "No, we are not voluntarily helping you." The opposite is true: Microsoft is giving away technology at no cost to help law enforcement gather data from computers.
Microsoft did show an iota of backbone when it came to the clipper chip, but times have changed. Now Microsoft wants to cultivate a friendly relationship with the government. Perhaps the OP was a little strong with calling this a "first" for Microsoft, but it is not exactly something that we should expect either.
What someone should be doing is introducing legislation that enumerates, codifies, and protects specific rights and expectations of privacy that citizens have
You would have to amend the constitution for that. Here is how I would word such an amendment:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Of course, there is no way anyone would dare to include such language in our constitution, at a time when we are surrounded by enemies who are hell-bent on destroying our nation. We could be attacked at any time; how can we even think of codifying such a right in our constitution?
On the other hand, Microsoft plans to sell their Cloud Services to Europeans too, and if they want to do that they have to make sure that their services follow European Law, and that means that they can't at the same time follow CISPA
They could just operate one data center in the USA and one in Europe, and serve both markets with the same software. In the early 90s, Microsoft was worried about Europeans not buying their products because the NSA was pushing for back doors; this time around, Microsoft only needs to separate their customers by region. They might not even need two data centers; just one, with a region column in each table that dictates which laws and privacy rights need to be respected.
They also have a substantial and growing online services division, and they are still in a precarious position when it comes to antitrust laws. Microsoft does not want to endanger its relationship with the government -- a relationship that basically resulted in the punishment for their previous antitrust case being completely ignored. They also sell technology to law enforcement agencies that helps in the gathering of computer evidence.
A business built on privacy violations? No, nobody can accuse Microsoft of that, at least not without some real evidence to back it up. A friendly and valuable relationship with the government, that has allowed them to continue to dominate various markets? Absolutely, and that is why they supported CISPA -- it basically gave them a free pass to cultivate that relationship.
I blame the fact that most Americans have no idea why their rights are important, or what life would be like without those rights. We are already starting to get our feet wet with this, but people need to be tossed in head first before they really understand the issues. When people are being asked for their papers before being allowed to cross state lines, when their search histories are scrutinized whenever they try to spend money, when it becomes impossible to live without breaking laws and bribing cops, then people will understand -- but by then it will be too late anyway.
Note that this is exclusively for law enforcement -- law abiding citizens would presumably have difficult obtaining technical information or copies of this product (I doubt that criminals will have much trouble). The last line on that page is telling:
If it's vital to government, it's mission critical to Microsoft.
You might as well say that we should throw out the junk science from Harry Potter. Neither collection of stories represents a science textbook, the only difference is that large numbers of people think that the bible is an accurate record of the history of the world, whereas nobody above the age of five thinks that Harry Potter is real.
Some people are mature enough to recognize that beliefs that make them feel good about the world may not be an accurate description of reality. They can compartmentalize their religious and scientific views, not allowing one to interfere with the other. This is fine, as far as I am concerned -- as long as nobody is trying to inject religion into science (or worse, engineering), people can hold whatever beliefs they wish and practice whatever religion they want.
I don't know which USA you are thinking about, but the one I live in has only one party in power, with two faces, and represents only corporations and the ruling elite. Since the media basically portrays the two faces of this one party as the choice people have to make during elections, the party stays in power. Since most people do not give two hoots about their civil rights, bills like CISPA wind up passing with the approval of the population.
...we need anonymity systems. People who are afraid to report unethical behavior are less likely to report it (shocking!), and whistleblower protections are neither universal nor reliable.
Scarcity does not create value. Example: how much would you be willing to pay me for a gram of Ununquadium, an extremely rare element that can only be produced in a lab, and which has a half life of less than one minute? Value is created by supply and demand -- money is no different.
No one's saying small children should be excluded from screening
Technically, you're right, because people like me are saying that nobody should be subjected to the TSA, that the TSA should be disbanded, and that the screening process is a ridiculous joke that fails to detect knives and guns. So yeah, I am not saying that four year olds should be excluded; I am saying that everyone should be excluded.
If this child -- barely older than a toddler -- was traveling with her grandmother, then the proper thing to do is to screen the child with her grandmother. It is absurd to separate such a small child from the adult she is traveling with, regardless of the reason.
The screening process itself is a joke, contributes nothing to out security, and would not have detected a knife or a gun hidden on the grandmother's body -- so why would she have used a four year old as a mule?
Remove "TSA," "airport," and "screening" from the process, and you have a story about an adult groping a four year old -- which is another way of saying a story about a child molester. The idea that a poorly-trained, poorly-paid adult should have the legal authority to grope a little girl is outrageous.
You would think that we need some sort of a constitutional amendment that forbids this sort of behavior. Like, an amendment that explicitly spells out our right to be secure in our persons, so that the government cannot just grope people at will. If only we had such an amendment...
Slashdot Mirror
People are trained from kindergarden onwards to think that if someone tries to do something privately or in secret, they must be doing something that breaks the rules. We are also trained from kindergarden onwards to think that the rules are sacred and must not be broken, so people wind up thinking that anyone who wants privacy must be doing some immoral.
What, you want to have privacy? What are you trying to hide?
I mean, outside of fedora, Ubuntu, Xubuntu (maybe Mint) and Slackware, what's the point?
How about, "I want something like Fedora, but which does not require a yearly upgrade that will inevitably break things?" Now, where might I find such a disto, without having to pay for it...
http://www.centos.org/
(In reality, I use ScientificLinux, but both basically follow RHEL)
Distros are not forked just for fun. Sometimes there are real disagreements over how packages should be managed, what new features are important, what patches are worth applying, etc. I do not need the latest eye candy and I do not really have the time for things to mysteriously break, but other people want the latest eye candy and are willing to fix broken things.
Hundreds of distros may seem excessive, but a lot of those are just small communities of people with similar enough aims.
Why is that scary? Intelligence agencies have used broadcast media to communicate with spies in the field for many decades now. Look up "numbers stations" -- you could tune in to many of these broadcasts any time you want.
So you find some pornography files in a strange place (a guy's underwear -- maybe not that strange), and the reason you think there is some hidden message is...? Oh, yeah, you also found the steganography software that was used for encoding and decoding, and then just brute forced the passphrase (RTFA). So the fact that the memory card was in the guy's underwear is actually irrelevant -- the same thing would have happened had the card been in his wallet, backback, tablet, etc.
This is the classic warden problem, applied to terrorists.
Perhaps, "Eternal right-after-commander-taco-leaves?"
It is not as simple as, "whoever has the most babies wins." What evolution will do is produce ratios of geniuses to average humans that best fit the selection pressure. Our survival depends on our intelligence, or more precisely, our ability to produce the occasional genius whose intelligence will benefit everyone else.
They think they are punishing TPB by blocking it, and that other torrent sites will be afraid because of the example they make of TPB. It is the sort of thinking that comes from politicians who grew up in a pre-Internet age.
Microsoft expects you to keep shoveling money into their coffers; DRM is a way to ensure that you function as Microsoft expects you to, i.e. in a way that enriches them. The fact that you own your device does not mean that you are free to do what you want with it; you are only free to do things that will help Microsoft compete with other companies, who all have roughly the same attitude about their customers.
What, did you think that because desktops and laptops gave you freedom, the hackers had won? Times have changed, and all those hackers who got rich giving people their freedom from IBM and AT&T have come to realize that freedom is not profitable.
How else are we expected to subjugate other countries? What, did you expect us to have people make our toys domestically, where there are laws forbidding child labor, where there is a minimum wage, where workers cannot be locked in their factories? Now that is just crazy talk. Of course we need copyrights and patents -- we need to be able to trade our ideas for the physical labor of other nations.
No, his lab was raided by the DEA because of the book; they were looking for anything they could use against him. Ward Churchill was not fired for his 9/11 article either, he was fired for academic misconduct -- which the University of Colorado started looking for after the article was brought to their attention. People cannot be punished for what they say, but if you look hard enough you can always find a punishable offense.
How about Alexander Shulgin, whose lab was raided and whose research license was revoked after he published a book on the drugs he had researched? He has continued to work, but is basically barred from performing any analysis on illegal drugs, which at this point includes whole families of drugs that he described in his books.
Considering that the federal government has caused researchers to lose their jobs over entire books their have published, it is hardly surprising that such a minute form of expression would not be considered "protected."
Perhaps you missed the part about technology given only to law enforcement, which allows them to take forensic data from live systems -- technology that criminals will be able to study, but which is deliberately hidden from law abiding citizens. The point is not that Microsoft is actively handing data over, the point is that Microsoft is not going to stand up to law enforcement and say, "No, we are not voluntarily helping you." The opposite is true: Microsoft is giving away technology at no cost to help law enforcement gather data from computers.
Microsoft did show an iota of backbone when it came to the clipper chip, but times have changed. Now Microsoft wants to cultivate a friendly relationship with the government. Perhaps the OP was a little strong with calling this a "first" for Microsoft, but it is not exactly something that we should expect either.
What someone should be doing is introducing legislation that enumerates, codifies, and protects specific rights and expectations of privacy that citizens have
You would have to amend the constitution for that. Here is how I would word such an amendment:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Of course, there is no way anyone would dare to include such language in our constitution, at a time when we are surrounded by enemies who are hell-bent on destroying our nation. We could be attacked at any time; how can we even think of codifying such a right in our constitution?
On the other hand, Microsoft plans to sell their Cloud Services to Europeans too, and if they want to do that they have to make sure that their services follow European Law, and that means that they can't at the same time follow CISPA
They could just operate one data center in the USA and one in Europe, and serve both markets with the same software. In the early 90s, Microsoft was worried about Europeans not buying their products because the NSA was pushing for back doors; this time around, Microsoft only needs to separate their customers by region. They might not even need two data centers; just one, with a region column in each table that dictates which laws and privacy rights need to be respected.
Microsofts business is to sell software
They also have a substantial and growing online services division, and they are still in a precarious position when it comes to antitrust laws. Microsoft does not want to endanger its relationship with the government -- a relationship that basically resulted in the punishment for their previous antitrust case being completely ignored. They also sell technology to law enforcement agencies that helps in the gathering of computer evidence.
A business built on privacy violations? No, nobody can accuse Microsoft of that, at least not without some real evidence to back it up. A friendly and valuable relationship with the government, that has allowed them to continue to dominate various markets? Absolutely, and that is why they supported CISPA -- it basically gave them a free pass to cultivate that relationship.
I blame the fact that most Americans have no idea why their rights are important, or what life would be like without those rights. We are already starting to get our feet wet with this, but people need to be tossed in head first before they really understand the issues. When people are being asked for their papers before being allowed to cross state lines, when their search histories are scrutinized whenever they try to spend money, when it becomes impossible to live without breaking laws and bribing cops, then people will understand -- but by then it will be too late anyway.
Note that this is exclusively for law enforcement -- law abiding citizens would presumably have difficult obtaining technical information or copies of this product (I doubt that criminals will have much trouble). The last line on that page is telling:
If it's vital to government, it's mission critical to Microsoft.
You might as well say that we should throw out the junk science from Harry Potter. Neither collection of stories represents a science textbook, the only difference is that large numbers of people think that the bible is an accurate record of the history of the world, whereas nobody above the age of five thinks that Harry Potter is real.
Some people are mature enough to recognize that beliefs that make them feel good about the world may not be an accurate description of reality. They can compartmentalize their religious and scientific views, not allowing one to interfere with the other. This is fine, as far as I am concerned -- as long as nobody is trying to inject religion into science (or worse, engineering), people can hold whatever beliefs they wish and practice whatever religion they want.
I don't know which USA you are thinking about, but the one I live in has only one party in power, with two faces, and represents only corporations and the ruling elite. Since the media basically portrays the two faces of this one party as the choice people have to make during elections, the party stays in power. Since most people do not give two hoots about their civil rights, bills like CISPA wind up passing with the approval of the population.
...we need anonymity systems. People who are afraid to report unethical behavior are less likely to report it (shocking!), and whistleblower protections are neither universal nor reliable.
Scarcity does not create value. Example: how much would you be willing to pay me for a gram of Ununquadium, an extremely rare element that can only be produced in a lab, and which has a half life of less than one minute? Value is created by supply and demand -- money is no different.
No one's saying small children should be excluded from screening
Technically, you're right, because people like me are saying that nobody should be subjected to the TSA, that the TSA should be disbanded, and that the screening process is a ridiculous joke that fails to detect knives and guns. So yeah, I am not saying that four year olds should be excluded; I am saying that everyone should be excluded.
You would think that we need some sort of a constitutional amendment that forbids this sort of behavior. Like, an amendment that explicitly spells out our right to be secure in our persons, so that the government cannot just grope people at will. If only we had such an amendment...