they don't care about privacy but even they would not do that
You say it as if Facebook has some moral obligation to keep the database secret. They simply do not want to allow their competition to access valuable product data (the product being Facebook users).
The problem is that web app APIs can change at a moment's notice, without any announcement, and all the developers who depended on the API will be left out in the cold. If Facebook wanted to, they could kill, hinder, or otherwise put any particular third party app at a disadvantage by simply changing the API a little. The running story with web 2.0 is that everyone is at the mercy of the people who run websites; this should not be news (in fact, the problem was discussed years ago).
That does not sound very united to me. Suppose the democrats had a simple majority in congress; if they are 3-2 against the war, what makes you think the measure would not pass? They would need a pretty significant majority in congress for 3/5 of the democrats to prevent us from going to war in Iraq, although maybe my ability to multiply and add fractions is on the fritz.
They fought against torture
So the fact that the Chinese do not even come close to imprisoning as many of their citizens as we do means nothing, because we are nice about imprisoning people. Additionally, the Democrats have only expressed opposition to waterboarding, but not to other forms of torture used in our prison system:
When a large segment of the population is used as a political punching bag and denied basic rights and control over their lives, that IS a big deal
Gays are not denied their rights anymore, and neither are women (??). The last, very minor right that gays were denied was the right to express who they are attracted to while they are serving in the military -- hardly a big deal issue, and hardly one that justifies voting for democrats. What rights are women currently being denied by the government, and what are your beloved democrats doing about it?
We can help millions of people right now, but it seems you'd rather let them suffer because you can't get some other things you want first.
Gay marriage is a nice concept if you are a romantic, but I am not going to vote for people who support gay marriage while simultaneously supporting the war on drugs, the militarization of the police, the military industrial complex, and the prison industrial complex, when I could vote for someone else. Some issues are minor, and some are not minor, and gay marriage falls squarely in the "minor" category. It is not that it is not something worth addressing, but given the choice between living in a country where gays can marry each other an the police drive around in tanks (see link) and a country where people can only marry members of the opposite sex but the police are not a paramilitary force, I choose the country without gay marriage.
I am not the one claiming that gay marriage is important enough to outweigh the support among democrats for the various fascist domestic policies that they have been pushing.
Cocaine and opiates were first made illegal in 1914 in America, although some of the states had already passed prohibition laws prior to that. Just because we did not call it "the war on drugs" does not mean that it was not the same story: racism, increased police power, and widespread curtailments of American rights. Sure, we added more and more drugs to the list, and eventually we stopped even trying to be constitutional about it (early on we used tricks with tax law to effectively make drugs illegal), but it all started in 1914.
Really? The democrats fought against the Iraq war? That explains the bipartisan support for the war in 2003. Healthcare would have been a good move...except that we do not have it, and a democratic majority failed to delivery it. Corporations wield just as much power over congress today as they did during the Bush and Clinton presidencies.
They fought against torture
While failing to fight against the prison-industrial complex, and while fighting for NDAA.
despite your hand-waving dismissal, they fought for the rights of gays and women, who probably don't view themselves as minor issues
Sorry, but gay marriage is a pretty minor issue by comparison with the other problems facing this country. What do you consider to be more important, allowing people to marry members of the same sex, or not being the world leader in imprisoning people? When we stop having law enforcement officers that carry M-16s on a day-to-day basis, maybe gay marriage will move up a notch.
While you were busy cheering for the democrats pulling our troops out of Iraq (after nearly a decade spent in Iraq, and the approval of the democrats for the invasion in the first place), they were busy establishing more surveillance, more law enforcement power, more curtailments of your rights, more hand-outs for large corporations, more union busting policies, more censorship, and more imprisonment -- just like the republicans. It was not a republican president whose drug czar interfered in popular TV show scripts for the purpose of spreading propaganda.
Yeah, I see what you mean about them being different from the republicans. After all, the republicans try appealing to the religious sentiments of middle America, while the democrats only use racial prejudice and fear. Republicans overtly support big business, while the democrats quietly support big business. As someone with liberal leanings, I guess it is clear that I should stop voting third party and start voting for the democrats, right?
When did the difference between Democrats and Republicans amount to anything more than a distraction? We have a one-party system, except that the one party happens to be somewhat divide on minor issues like gay marriage and abortion rights. People are easily distracted, which is how these crooks get away with so many abuses of power.
That is assuming that you could locate their repeater stations, which may not be as simple as you think. They could be using directional antennas, or at least antennas with a small vertical beamwidth that would make locating the stations from the air difficult. I am sure that US signals intelligence agencies could find the stations regardless of their configuration, but surely those intelligence resources can be put to better use than tracking down drug cartels (regardless of how violent they may be). There is also the matter of how the cartels could address such strikes -- they might keep several stations on standby, transmitting nothing (and therefore being hard to locate) until some other station goes offline.
Makes me wonder if the "war on drugs" is actually an excuse just to jail random poor people if the cops dont like them.
I would have thought that was obvious regardless of the cartels.
they simply would have to do a bit of flying in those areas with a SIGINT plane and map out all the transceivers
This may not be as simple as you think. If I were a cartel, I would use directional antennas wherever possible and try to minimize propagation in unwanted directions (like upward where a helicopter might receive it). Something like this, perhaps:
Take a look at the vertical beamwidth; that is going to be a pretty weak signal from the air, unless you are lucky enough to find a side lobe of some kind (and even then, your helicopter would have to be moving pretty slowly). Now, I do not know what sort of frequencies the cartels were using or what their specific needs were (maybe they needed something with less of an LOS requirement than 900MHz), so I could be wrong about using directional antennas. It may also be the case that the repeaters do not continuously transmit and that the cartels keep their communications to an absolute minimum, and so hunting for the repeaters from the air may be a difficult thing to do.
WE (the technically oriented community) should be doing this as well with 802.11 networks
THEY (the FCC) have rules that make such a thing difficult outside of densely populated areas. Point-to-point wifi links across long distances are doable under the FCC's rules, but low-gain antennas (read: not-highly-directional) can only legally be used to transmit at low power. Even point-to-point links can be difficult if the conditions are bad: vegetation, rain, etc.
If you have an amateur radio license, you can transmit at higher power levels...but then you are subject to Part 97 rules, which forbid conducting (most) business over amateur radio systems. This effectively means that you could not log on to Amazon; even if that were allowed, you would not want to do it, because the rules also forbid encrypting most communications. Part 97 also prevents you from communicating with people who are not licensed, which would make any such network useless to most people. If it were not for such rules, amateur radio operators would have enabled national wireless Internet service long ago.
I have seen various elements of this system assembled by amateur radio operators; the equipment is not terribly hard to find. Getting all the components together does take a level of organization...which the cartels would have to have, considering the business they are in.
What is really impressive is how long they were able to keep a system of that size secret for so long.
I suppose that if you were familiar with the history of the Edison and Westinghouse companies, you would know that Thomas Edison was no stranger to dirty tricks (to be fair, neither was Westinghouse). Edison's company was hired to produce the first electric chair, and they chose to use Westinghouse AC generators for this purpose. Edison went around demonstrating the lethality of AC power by putting on public displays of animal electrocution using AC generators, always sure to mention that Westinghouse was using AC power and he was using DC power. Edison himself was opposed to execution, but accepted to contract to produce the electric chair for the specific purpose of demonstrating that AC power could kill human beings.
Perhaps you want to pick a rich industrialist who was a decent, friendly individual that did not pull underhanded tricks to claw his way to the top? I just cannot seem to think of any...
Some GPG users do have something on the line -- they might be trying to protect themselves from a hostile government.
That being said, a collision on a short key ID is not quite as critical as one might think. It happens fairly frequently just on its own, and this is just a technique of forcing it to happen. There is a bug in GPG that causes it to import the collided key under some circumstances, but one would still need to someone trick a person into signing the key (or trick several people) for that to be of any use.
What difference does IT's feelings on this make? Students are in school to learn, and IT staff are there to facilitate that. If school officials instruct the IT staff to impose draconian controls over student computers, then the students will grow up thinking that computers are machines controlled by some higher authority. Once those students are all grown up, would you expect them to be opposed to SOPA/PIPA (or more subtly, would you expect a lack of opposition to stem from a logical, reasoned-out argument, or from years spent being taught that computers are controlled by "higher up" authority figures)?
There is also the matter of what to do with those students who find ways to defeat the school's security system. If we accept the premise that the school should be controlling each student's computer, should we also accept the premise that students who take control of their computers should be punished for doing so? Right now, most American schools would do just that: punish students who are smart enough to figure out how to defeat computer security systems. Such students may be a minority, but we do them a disservice by punishing them for exercising their own intelligence.
Much in the same way that "their" books, "their" desks, and "their" lockers are likely school property. Students generally feel some sense of ownership over school property that has been assigned to them.
Lock them down, you need to assert control over school electronic property
So we are going to condition our students to think that they cannot have control over their computers, and that some higher authority is supposed to be the ultimate arbiter of what is or is not allowed?
Make the kids financially responsible for any physical damage to the computer, and give them detention if their software winds up in such a corrupted state that the IT staff needs to reimage their system. With those simple measures, the kids can be trusted to manage their own systems, because screwing up will result in unpleasantness. The best part is that kids will learn how to repair their computers and not be helpless: when the choice is between detention and learning how to reimage your own hard drive, I think a typical middle or high school student will learn how to reimage their hard drive.
Furthermore, the solution to the kids playing games is to give them a computer that cannot play games -- make it a computer with the wrong software or hardware configuration (e.g. Minix OS/ARM processor). Yes, some kids will figure out how to get popular games to run on such a system...and they should receive high praise for having such aptitude and inventiveness, and should be given the special honor of presentation their technique to their classmates.
Why go for a fascist approach, when you can be constructive and turn computers into a tool that promotes thinking and education?
e-learning needs the proper method and programming
I would say that e-learning needs to be about programming. We give kids computers that require no real thought on the part of the users, and then wonder why the kids are spending more time playing games written by other people than they are learning using the computers.
Instead of starting with the premise that millions of lines of code need to be written before kids can benefit from computers in schools, why not start with the premise that kids should be challenged to think? Give them computers that include just enough software for them to start writing their own programs, make computer programming part of the curriculum, and give special extra credit to kids who have an aptitude for computer use. When you see a kid who managed to get a popular Windows or iPad game to run on a Minix system, the kid should give a presentation to the rest of the class about what they did, rather than have their computer taken away.
Or we can continue to make thinking a secondary goal in our education system.
I do not know, but the Chinese have plenty of other things that they need to be doing, so something is compelling them to produce consumer electronics and computers. Maybe they are installing special hardware that would allow them to selectively disable systems? Maybe some sort of surveillance equipment? Maybe they just like the idea of wielding that much power over the American economy, and want to get us hooked on Chinese manufacturing so that they can raise prices and profit later?
Slashdot Mirror
they don't care about privacy but even they would not do that
You say it as if Facebook has some moral obligation to keep the database secret. They simply do not want to allow their competition to access valuable product data (the product being Facebook users).
Programmers seem to routinely toss away their entire codebase from time to time anyway.
With disastrous consequences: Netscape, KDE4, etc. Throwing away a large codebase is stupid.
The problem is that web app APIs can change at a moment's notice, without any announcement, and all the developers who depended on the API will be left out in the cold. If Facebook wanted to, they could kill, hinder, or otherwise put any particular third party app at a disadvantage by simply changing the API a little. The running story with web 2.0 is that everyone is at the mercy of the people who run websites; this should not be news (in fact, the problem was discussed years ago).
On the Iraq war: Democrats were opposed 126-82
That does not sound very united to me. Suppose the democrats had a simple majority in congress; if they are 3-2 against the war, what makes you think the measure would not pass? They would need a pretty significant majority in congress for 3/5 of the democrats to prevent us from going to war in Iraq, although maybe my ability to multiply and add fractions is on the fritz.
They fought against torture
So the fact that the Chinese do not even come close to imprisoning as many of their citizens as we do means nothing, because we are nice about imprisoning people. Additionally, the Democrats have only expressed opposition to waterboarding, but not to other forms of torture used in our prison system:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solitary_confinement
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_therapy
When a large segment of the population is used as a political punching bag and denied basic rights and control over their lives, that IS a big deal
Gays are not denied their rights anymore, and neither are women (??). The last, very minor right that gays were denied was the right to express who they are attracted to while they are serving in the military -- hardly a big deal issue, and hardly one that justifies voting for democrats. What rights are women currently being denied by the government, and what are your beloved democrats doing about it?
We can help millions of people right now, but it seems you'd rather let them suffer because you can't get some other things you want first.
Gay marriage is a nice concept if you are a romantic, but I am not going to vote for people who support gay marriage while simultaneously supporting the war on drugs, the militarization of the police, the military industrial complex, and the prison industrial complex, when I could vote for someone else. Some issues are minor, and some are not minor, and gay marriage falls squarely in the "minor" category. It is not that it is not something worth addressing, but given the choice between living in a country where gays can marry each other an the police drive around in tanks (see link) and a country where people can only marry members of the opposite sex but the police are not a paramilitary force, I choose the country without gay marriage.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41912754/ns/technology_and_science-tech_and_gadgets/t/why-do-americas-police-need-armored-tank/
Also I seem to recall some Democrats fighting like hell in Wisconsin to protect the unions
Meanwhile, in New York State, Andrew Cuomo pushes hard to break the unions:
...just like his democrat predecessor:
http://nyceducator.com/2011/11/governor-one-percent-discreetly-pulls.html
http://nyceducator.com/2005/12/dear-attorney-general-spitzer.html
Stop falling for it.
I am not the one claiming that gay marriage is important enough to outweigh the support among democrats for the various fascist domestic policies that they have been pushing.
s/40/98/
Cocaine and opiates were first made illegal in 1914 in America, although some of the states had already passed prohibition laws prior to that. Just because we did not call it "the war on drugs" does not mean that it was not the same story: racism, increased police power, and widespread curtailments of American rights. Sure, we added more and more drugs to the list, and eventually we stopped even trying to be constitutional about it (early on we used tricks with tax law to effectively make drugs illegal), but it all started in 1914.
They fought against torture
While failing to fight against the prison-industrial complex, and while fighting for NDAA.
despite your hand-waving dismissal, they fought for the rights of gays and women, who probably don't view themselves as minor issues
Sorry, but gay marriage is a pretty minor issue by comparison with the other problems facing this country. What do you consider to be more important, allowing people to marry members of the same sex, or not being the world leader in imprisoning people? When we stop having law enforcement officers that carry M-16s on a day-to-day basis, maybe gay marriage will move up a notch.
While you were busy cheering for the democrats pulling our troops out of Iraq (after nearly a decade spent in Iraq, and the approval of the democrats for the invasion in the first place), they were busy establishing more surveillance, more law enforcement power, more curtailments of your rights, more hand-outs for large corporations, more union busting policies, more censorship, and more imprisonment -- just like the republicans. It was not a republican president whose drug czar interfered in popular TV show scripts for the purpose of spreading propaganda.
Yeah, I see what you mean about them being different from the republicans. After all, the republicans try appealing to the religious sentiments of middle America, while the democrats only use racial prejudice and fear. Republicans overtly support big business, while the democrats quietly support big business. As someone with liberal leanings, I guess it is clear that I should stop voting third party and start voting for the democrats, right?
As opposed to some other month?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_industrial_complex
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_On_Drugs
I thought Barack Obama was a fascist like his predecessor.
Yeah, I got that feeling too...
When did the difference between Democrats and Republicans amount to anything more than a distraction? We have a one-party system, except that the one party happens to be somewhat divide on minor issues like gay marriage and abortion rights. People are easily distracted, which is how these crooks get away with so many abuses of power.
Tesla was not a rich industrialist; he died broke and alone, and Westinghouse became rich using Tesla's inventions.
Makes me wonder if the "war on drugs" is actually an excuse just to jail random poor people if the cops dont like them.
I would have thought that was obvious regardless of the cartels.
they simply would have to do a bit of flying in those areas with a SIGINT plane and map out all the transceivers
This may not be as simple as you think. If I were a cartel, I would use directional antennas wherever possible and try to minimize propagation in unwanted directions (like upward where a helicopter might receive it). Something like this, perhaps:
http://www.wlanparts.com/product/MT263004NH/900MHZ-SECTOR-ANTENNA-H-POL-125DBI-120-DEG.html
Take a look at the vertical beamwidth; that is going to be a pretty weak signal from the air, unless you are lucky enough to find a side lobe of some kind (and even then, your helicopter would have to be moving pretty slowly). Now, I do not know what sort of frequencies the cartels were using or what their specific needs were (maybe they needed something with less of an LOS requirement than 900MHz), so I could be wrong about using directional antennas. It may also be the case that the repeaters do not continuously transmit and that the cartels keep their communications to an absolute minimum, and so hunting for the repeaters from the air may be a difficult thing to do.
What is really impressive is how long they were able to keep a system of that size secret for so long.
This is why we finish drinking our coffee before we start posting to /..
WE (the technically oriented community) should be doing this as well with 802.11 networks
THEY (the FCC) have rules that make such a thing difficult outside of densely populated areas. Point-to-point wifi links across long distances are doable under the FCC's rules, but low-gain antennas (read: not-highly-directional) can only legally be used to transmit at low power. Even point-to-point links can be difficult if the conditions are bad: vegetation, rain, etc.
If you have an amateur radio license, you can transmit at higher power levels...but then you are subject to Part 97 rules, which forbid conducting (most) business over amateur radio systems. This effectively means that you could not log on to Amazon; even if that were allowed, you would not want to do it, because the rules also forbid encrypting most communications. Part 97 also prevents you from communicating with people who are not licensed, which would make any such network useless to most people. If it were not for such rules, amateur radio operators would have enabled national wireless Internet service long ago.
I have seen various elements of this system assembled by amateur radio operators; the equipment is not terribly hard to find. Getting all the components together does take a level of organization...which the cartels would have to have, considering the business they are in.
What is really impressive is how long they were able to keep a system of that size secret for so long.
Worth mentioning that 2600 magazine can be found at Barnes and Noble (so instant gratification is still possible with printed magazines).
I suppose that if you were familiar with the history of the Edison and Westinghouse companies, you would know that Thomas Edison was no stranger to dirty tricks (to be fair, neither was Westinghouse). Edison's company was hired to produce the first electric chair, and they chose to use Westinghouse AC generators for this purpose. Edison went around demonstrating the lethality of AC power by putting on public displays of animal electrocution using AC generators, always sure to mention that Westinghouse was using AC power and he was using DC power. Edison himself was opposed to execution, but accepted to contract to produce the electric chair for the specific purpose of demonstrating that AC power could kill human beings.
Perhaps you want to pick a rich industrialist who was a decent, friendly individual that did not pull underhanded tricks to claw his way to the top? I just cannot seem to think of any...
Some GPG users do have something on the line -- they might be trying to protect themselves from a hostile government.
That being said, a collision on a short key ID is not quite as critical as one might think. It happens fairly frequently just on its own, and this is just a technique of forcing it to happen. There is a bug in GPG that causes it to import the collided key under some circumstances, but one would still need to someone trick a person into signing the key (or trick several people) for that to be of any use.
Mom, I could have sworn that I had 1984 on my Kindle! How am I supposed to do my homework now?
Back when I was in school, if you had a book in your house when you went to sleep, it was still there when you woke up.
What difference does IT's feelings on this make? Students are in school to learn, and IT staff are there to facilitate that. If school officials instruct the IT staff to impose draconian controls over student computers, then the students will grow up thinking that computers are machines controlled by some higher authority. Once those students are all grown up, would you expect them to be opposed to SOPA/PIPA (or more subtly, would you expect a lack of opposition to stem from a logical, reasoned-out argument, or from years spent being taught that computers are controlled by "higher up" authority figures)?
There is also the matter of what to do with those students who find ways to defeat the school's security system. If we accept the premise that the school should be controlling each student's computer, should we also accept the premise that students who take control of their computers should be punished for doing so? Right now, most American schools would do just that: punish students who are smart enough to figure out how to defeat computer security systems. Such students may be a minority, but we do them a disservice by punishing them for exercising their own intelligence.
Much in the same way that "their" books, "their" desks, and "their" lockers are likely school property. Students generally feel some sense of ownership over school property that has been assigned to them.
Lock them down, you need to assert control over school electronic property
So we are going to condition our students to think that they cannot have control over their computers, and that some higher authority is supposed to be the ultimate arbiter of what is or is not allowed?
Make the kids financially responsible for any physical damage to the computer, and give them detention if their software winds up in such a corrupted state that the IT staff needs to reimage their system. With those simple measures, the kids can be trusted to manage their own systems, because screwing up will result in unpleasantness. The best part is that kids will learn how to repair their computers and not be helpless: when the choice is between detention and learning how to reimage your own hard drive, I think a typical middle or high school student will learn how to reimage their hard drive.
Furthermore, the solution to the kids playing games is to give them a computer that cannot play games -- make it a computer with the wrong software or hardware configuration (e.g. Minix OS/ARM processor). Yes, some kids will figure out how to get popular games to run on such a system...and they should receive high praise for having such aptitude and inventiveness, and should be given the special honor of presentation their technique to their classmates.
Why go for a fascist approach, when you can be constructive and turn computers into a tool that promotes thinking and education?
e-learning needs the proper method and programming
I would say that e-learning needs to be about programming. We give kids computers that require no real thought on the part of the users, and then wonder why the kids are spending more time playing games written by other people than they are learning using the computers.
Instead of starting with the premise that millions of lines of code need to be written before kids can benefit from computers in schools, why not start with the premise that kids should be challenged to think? Give them computers that include just enough software for them to start writing their own programs, make computer programming part of the curriculum, and give special extra credit to kids who have an aptitude for computer use. When you see a kid who managed to get a popular Windows or iPad game to run on a Minix system, the kid should give a presentation to the rest of the class about what they did, rather than have their computer taken away.
Or we can continue to make thinking a secondary goal in our education system.
I do not know, but the Chinese have plenty of other things that they need to be doing, so something is compelling them to produce consumer electronics and computers. Maybe they are installing special hardware that would allow them to selectively disable systems? Maybe some sort of surveillance equipment? Maybe they just like the idea of wielding that much power over the American economy, and want to get us hooked on Chinese manufacturing so that they can raise prices and profit later?
They are not making these things out of the goodness of their hearts.