Quote: For those few of you who may have watched a documentary on the history channel, you might recall that the Fascist governments in much of Europe were democratically elected.

I wouldn't say they were Democratically elected, I would say they were "Democratically" elected. i.e. They were forced on the majority by a vocal minority: the ignorant, small minded, violent dregs who assumed moral ownership of the country. Even at the height of their popularity before Hitler officially became the dictator of Germany, the Nazi supporters didn't amount to a lot of people. The lack of organized defence, public apathy, public spectacles, and constant campaigns of violence made them appear that way.

What the Nazi regime really teaches us, is that when a bunch of violent paranoid thugs are running around the country causing havoc, putting your head between your legs and hoping it will go away is counter-productive.

Democratically? Hardly so...

Hilter rose to power after Hindenburg's death in 1934 (he did organize a coup to seize power in 1923, after all). Lenin seized power through the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. Castro came to power as the result of the Cuban revolution in 1953, overthrowing the previous US-backed Batista government (which, granted, was no where near being a democracy; eg it was another dictatorship). Precisely how Hussein rose to power in 1979 is a tad unclear because he killed his evidence. Mao rose to power through a Communist military campaign in 1949. Kim Il-Sung was made the head of the provisional governement in 1945 by Soviet occupation forces. There's nothing democratic - and never has been - about power shifts in any of the African states.

I always found North Korea a kinda fascinating exception because it's the closes thing to Oceania there has ever been. I wouldn't be surprised if a form of Newspeak - something that goes beyond semantic control - was being imposed there.

There's no doubt in my mind whatsoever that the corporate world is at least as big a threat to individuals as the government is. They get away with it because the vast majority of people don't actually care about privacy and/or have no problem giving away enough personal information to enable identity theft so that they can have a one-time savings of 20c on laundry soap. Also it's still possible to live completely off the matrix in a hut in Montana or something so techically any info you give out falls under the category of optional.

I don't use grocery store loyalty cards largely because of privacy concerns. There's still one major chain in my area that doesn't use them. This is despite the fact that I usually pay using a debit card (since carrying around that much cash is impractical) and it's trivial to identify me through that. Once that last chain turns to the dark side (and it's clear that they will soon) then I might as well give in.

You might want to give David Brin's The Transparent Society a read if you haven't yet. Basically he argues that it will only get worse as techonology improves so we might as well stop trying to maintain an illusion of privacy and instead focus on reciprical transparency.

This ultimately boils down to the concept of ownership of information, i.e. Intellectual Property. Do you, as a person, own the information of your habits and activities, and therefore have rights to determine its use and distribution? It's a fair bet that at least a few of you are very supportive of the idea that information is un-ownable, in regards to free software and copyright. So, either information is free and un-ownable (software is free, books are free, music is free, information about your personal habits which you freely provided through the simple matter of using their service), or you have the right to control how people use your personal use habit information, your musical arrangements, your software, etc.

Quote: Original post by Anon Mike
You might want to give David Brin's The Transparent Society a read if you haven't yet. Basically he argues that it will only get worse as techonology improves so we might as well stop trying to maintain an illusion of privacy and instead focus on reciprical transparency.

Great link!

I've been worried about the role of technology for some time now. And, it does seem to be getting worse every day. Google Satellite or whatever that thing is that can see ground level is frightening.

Like others have said, it's too bad nobody seems to really care :(

Quote: This ultimately boils down to the concept of ownership of information, i.e. Intellectual Property. Do you, as a person, own the information of your habits and activities, and therefore have rights to determine its use and distribution? It's a fair bet that at least a few of you are very supportive of the idea that information is un-ownable, in regards to free software and copyright. So, either information is free and un-ownable (software is free, books are free, music is free, information about your personal habits which you freely provided through the simple matter of using their service), or you have the right to control how people use your personal use habit information, your musical arrangements, your software, etc.

In some ways, they are treated the same way. A company has every right to do what they will with my information provided that I agree that they can use it. In the same way I have every right to use Ubuntu whichever way I please because the licence of that software permits me to do so. The status quo is because people who write software are more willing to release software, than people in general are willing to share sensitive information about their personal habits.

The reason being of course, that if you release sensitive information you are more likely to be attacked personally. The reason, for example, that I don't put my phone number on this post is because I don't want to be called in the middle of the night by an Algerian asking me for my credit card number. And the reason that I don't put my credit card number in this post is because I want all my money to stay in my account.

If I write the next Unreal and release it's source code, what I've lost is my R&D capital, which is substantial, but it in no way directly endangers my personal belongings or my life.

And if that was a dig at me, I think I said it a thousand times in that thread that I don't want people being beaten bloody so that their intellectual property gets released to the public. And I don't want people "losing ownership" of their intellectual property. And I apologized for my comments about how companies should sell the source code with the product. And I take them back. I have no right to tell people what they should and should not do. Even then, the basic premise had nothing to do with selling ownership, but a more open licence, which is were the software industry as a whole is moving. There is a BIG difference.

As far as I know the only things which are unownable are open standards like C, C++, Ogg, Unicode, and a few other formats. Most free software is owned, as it should be.

[Edited by - WazzatMan on December 9, 2009 3:01:48 PM]

I don't think it's smart to equate ownership of information with intellectual property. That's like mistaking data for code. Information about what you do in public isn't yours to horde. One visceral horror of "1984" was the invasion of private spaces. Everyone was surveiled in their homes to such an extent that even sex was criminalized. We've got a long way to go to get there.



Sometimes imagination exceeds reality, sometimes reality exceeds imagination.

The dark side of the internet

Quote:
Fourteen years ago, a pasty Irish teenager with a flair for inventions arrived at Edinburgh University to study artificial intelligence and computer science. For his thesis project, Ian Clarke created "a Distributed, Decentralised Information Storage and Retrieval System", or, as a less precise person might put it, a revolutionary new way for people to use the internet without detection. By downloading Clarke's software, which he intended to distribute for free, anyone could chat online, or read or set up a website, or share files, with almost complete anonymity.

"It seemed so obvious that that was what the net was supposed to be about – freedom to communicate," Clarke says now. "But [back then] in the late 90s that simply wasn't the case. The internet could be monitored more quickly, more comprehensively, more cheaply than more old-fashioned communications systems like the mail." His pioneering software was intended to change that.
...
"The darkweb"; "the deep web"; beneath "the surface web" – the metaphors alone make the internet feel suddenly more unfathomable and mysterious. Other terms circulate among those in the know: "darknet", "invisible web", "dark address space", "murky address space", "dirty address space". Not all these phrases mean the same thing. While a "darknet" is an online network such as Freenet that is concealed from non-users, with all the potential for transgressive behaviour that implies, much of "the deep web", spooky as it sounds, consists of unremarkable consumer and research data that is beyond the reach of search engines. "Dark address space" often refers to internet addresses that, for purely technical reasons, have simply stopped working.
...
In 2001 he published a paper on the deep web that is still regularly cited today. "The deep web is currently 400 to 550 times larger than the commonly defined world wide web," he wrote. "The deep web is the fastest growing category of new information on the internet … The value of deep web content is immeasurable … internet searches are searching only 0.03% … of the [total web] pages available."
...
But sheer scale is not the only problem. "When we've crawled [searched] several sites, we've gotten blocked," says Freire. "You can actually come up with ways that make it impossible for anyone [searching] to grab all your data." Sometimes the motivation is commercial – "people have spent a lot of time and money building, say, a database of used cars for sale, and don't want you to be able to copy their site"; and sometimes privacy is sought for other reasons. "There's a well-known crime syndicate called the Russian Business Network (RBN)," says Craig Labovitz, chief scientist at Arbor Networks, a leading online security firm, "and they're always jumping around the internet, grabbing bits of [disused] address space, sending out millions of spam emails from there, and then quickly disconnecting."
...
In fact, the internet has always been driven as much by a desire for secrecy as a desire for transparency. The network was the joint creation of the US defence department and the American counterculture – the WELL, one of the first and most influential online communities, was a spinoff from hippy bible the Whole Earth Catalog – and both groups had reasons to build hidden or semi-hidden online environments as well as open ones. "Strong encryption [code-writing] developed in parallel with the internet," says Danny O'Brien, an activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a long-established pressure group for online privacy.
...
The internet, for all its anarchy, is becoming steadily more commercialised; as internet service providers, for example, become larger and more profit-driven, the spokesman suggests, it is increasingly in their interests to accept a degree of policing. "There has been an increasing centralisation," Ian Clarke acknowledges regretfully.

Meanwhile the search engine companies are restlessly looking for paths into the deep web and the other sections of the internet currently denied to them. "There's a deep implication for privacy," says Anand Rajaraman of Kosmix. "Tonnes and tonnes of stuff out there on the deep web has what I call security through obscurity. But security through obscurity is actually a false security. You [the average internet user] can't find something, but the bad guys can find it if they try hard enough."
...

Google says... if comrades are concerned with their privacy, then they're probably up to no good!



/and thus begins my exit of using any google services whatsoever.
//Starting with blocking all google adservers at the host level.

Quote: Original post by LessBread
I don't think it's smart to equate ownership of information with intellectual property. That's like mistaking data for code.

Lisp programmers see no difference between data and code.

Quote: Information about what you do in public isn't yours to horde. One visceral horror of "1984" was the invasion of private spaces. Everyone was surveiled in their homes to such an extent that even sex was criminalized. We've got a long way to go to get there.

When you use Google's services, you are essentially offering you data to them for free, snippits of information about your habits that they are expressly using to infer information about you. Visit a lot of sites that sell expensive items? They'll serve you ads for Rolex watches and Mercedes-Benz cars. The data is pointless, it's what they can infer about it that is important.

The problem is when inference goes wrong. Do academic researchers in aspects of child labor and child prostitution need to worry that their search records might be misconstrued to make them appear to have a personal interest in child pornography? People have gone to jail for less believable lies.

What I do in public didn't mean anything when there was no vast inference machine dutifully collecting and correlating my data. The point is not to control what people know about what I've done in public; people have always known what you do in public, that's the nature of doing things in public. The point is to control what they may do by inferring new information from that. Try buying fertilizer for your garden, diesel for your truck, and barrels to collect rain water on your property, on the same credit card, in the same day, and see how far you get without the FBI scrutinizing your every move.

Automatically serving me the wrong ads harms no one. Automatically flagging me as a potential terrorist has serious implications.

Quote: Original post by capn_midnight

Quote: Original post by LessBread
I don't think it's smart to equate ownership of information with intellectual property. That's like mistaking data for code.

Lisp programmers see no difference between data and code.

I was pointing out a similarity not an equivalence.

Quote: Original post by capn_midnight

Quote: Information about what you do in public isn't yours to horde. One visceral horror of "1984" was the invasion of private spaces. Everyone was surveiled in their homes to such an extent that even sex was criminalized. We've got a long way to go to get there.

When you use Google's services, you are essentially offering you data to them for free, snippits of information about your habits that they are expressly using to infer information about you. Visit a lot of sites that sell expensive items? They'll serve you ads for Rolex watches and Mercedes-Benz cars. The data is pointless, it's what they can infer about it that is important.

The problem is when inference goes wrong. Do academic researchers in aspects of child labor and child prostitution need to worry that their search records might be misconstrued to make them appear to have a personal interest in child pornography? People have gone to jail for less believable lies.

What I do in public didn't mean anything when there was no vast inference machine dutifully collecting and correlating my data. The point is not to control what people know about what I've done in public; people have always known what you do in public, that's the nature of doing things in public. The point is to control what they may do by inferring new information from that. Try buying fertilizer for your garden, diesel for your truck, and barrels to collect rain water on your property, on the same credit card, in the same day, and see how far you get without the FBI scrutinizing your every move.

Automatically serving me the wrong ads harms no one. Automatically flagging me as a potential terrorist has serious implications.

And if you are a terrorist, then not flagging you has serious implications. Automatically serving you the wrong ads, as an inefficiency, harms investors directly and to the extent that it wastes electricity harms everyone by generating additional pollution. In public a person has a limited expectation of privacy (along the lines of not being subjected to a strip search on the street). It seems to me that controlling inferences is more insidious than controlling data collection.