all I saw in that reply was "block extreme porn". My heart just sank at the loss of such wonderful advances we have made!!! lol
News
I've just spent 20 mins reading this whole thread and one or two things occur to me:
1) that there's a LOT of money to be made for a country that offered server hosting as an alternative to the US......
2) it is a supreme irony that the US, which is obssessed with protecting its borders from "illegal aliens", would have the potential to extradite every human on earth there if they chose to.
3) what would happen if (and this is where most of my ideas and thoughts come from and get me into the most trouble) the US extradited every "cyber terrorist" it could? There's 23 million people in Chicago alone (thats the entire population of Australia). They can't keep track of the 23 million in one of city. If they extradited every single "cyber terrorist", how would they house/feed/process them all? What if people decide to stop trying to enter the US via Mexico or Canada and simply start posting "cyber threats" on FB - one visit from the Men In Black and voila!! you're off to the US!I
It seems to me that if the US enforced this law every opportunity it gets, it would end up with most of the rest of the planet living within its borders - in prisons. If it didn't enforce this law every time, it means a lot of people "get away with" a lot of stuff most of the time.
(ok, that's three things but I think as I type and new stuff pops in my head all the time)
While I don't for one moment agree with CISPA or any other method any govt uses to pry into my life, I am wondering about the actual logistics of it all. I don't have anything to hide, I am who I am and I dont have to pretend to be anyone other than me. But it annoys me to think that someone could go through every email or text I've sent or recieved. Not out of a need for secrecy but because, dammit, my mind is my last bastion - I don't want some grubby little govt drone poking about what are, essentially,expressions of my thoughts and feelings. I share those with people I choose.
I know someone who was a military "spook" (and he/she is the most paranoid individual I have met!!) so I am aware of "flagging" systems - certain words are noted in emails and texts so that when they come up in the system, the individual using the flagged word/s can be monitored. (if you've ever wondered why certain books are available in libraries, its not because we are free but because they are flagged - anyone who borrows them becomes a person of interest) But if every person with a mobile texted the words "guns terrorist bombmaking" every day, if every person in the state borrowed the flagged books, they wouldnt know who to watch. Seems to me it would be the same with the internet. Surely sheer numbers would outweigh their ability to enforce their new powers?
Or am I being over-simplistic again?
:confused:
1) that there's a LOT of money to be made for a country that offered server hosting as an alternative to the US......
2) it is a supreme irony that the US, which is obssessed with protecting its borders from "illegal aliens", would have the potential to extradite every human on earth there if they chose to.
3) what would happen if (and this is where most of my ideas and thoughts come from and get me into the most trouble) the US extradited every "cyber terrorist" it could? There's 23 million people in Chicago alone (thats the entire population of Australia). They can't keep track of the 23 million in one of city. If they extradited every single "cyber terrorist", how would they house/feed/process them all? What if people decide to stop trying to enter the US via Mexico or Canada and simply start posting "cyber threats" on FB - one visit from the Men In Black and voila!! you're off to the US!I
It seems to me that if the US enforced this law every opportunity it gets, it would end up with most of the rest of the planet living within its borders - in prisons. If it didn't enforce this law every time, it means a lot of people "get away with" a lot of stuff most of the time.
(ok, that's three things but I think as I type and new stuff pops in my head all the time)
While I don't for one moment agree with CISPA or any other method any govt uses to pry into my life, I am wondering about the actual logistics of it all. I don't have anything to hide, I am who I am and I dont have to pretend to be anyone other than me. But it annoys me to think that someone could go through every email or text I've sent or recieved. Not out of a need for secrecy but because, dammit, my mind is my last bastion - I don't want some grubby little govt drone poking about what are, essentially,expressions of my thoughts and feelings. I share those with people I choose.
I know someone who was a military "spook" (and he/she is the most paranoid individual I have met!!) so I am aware of "flagging" systems - certain words are noted in emails and texts so that when they come up in the system, the individual using the flagged word/s can be monitored. (if you've ever wondered why certain books are available in libraries, its not because we are free but because they are flagged - anyone who borrows them becomes a person of interest) But if every person with a mobile texted the words "guns terrorist bombmaking" every day, if every person in the state borrowed the flagged books, they wouldnt know who to watch. Seems to me it would be the same with the internet. Surely sheer numbers would outweigh their ability to enforce their new powers?
Or am I being over-simplistic again?
:confused:
1) I was thinking that myself. Wondering who was going to give me $50k so I can bugger off to the Netherlands to buy some space in a datacentre.
The rest - logistically, they don't need to get every body. They just need to get a few - because that's what creates the fear of them. That's the point. They want people to be scared of them. It means that they'll tow the line. That will mean less people will be brave enough to stand against them. That means those brave enough to try run a higher risk of getting caught. All of a sudden, we all might as well be living in North Korea.
The rest - logistically, they don't need to get every body. They just need to get a few - because that's what creates the fear of them. That's the point. They want people to be scared of them. It means that they'll tow the line. That will mean less people will be brave enough to stand against them. That means those brave enough to try run a higher risk of getting caught. All of a sudden, we all might as well be living in North Korea.
Absolutely agree with you Michelle. I think more could be done to bring "them" to their knees by flooding text messages with "guns terrorist bombmaking" than any bans or blackouts people can do, they just become an inconvenience to ourselves. Make the bastards try and work out how they're going to handle this wonderful new law they have imposed on the world.
Floods are notoriously simple to detect. It's not particularly difficult for a computer to go through ten million messages of similar random rubbish, and find the dozen messages in there that are different enough to look at. It's only an issue that needs hardware thrown at it. It'll only the unusual looking stuff that a human will be looking at. And chances are, those systems will have found a whole pile of relationships to draw a bigger picture about that hit.
An assumption maybe??, that maybe this is a fleetingly fast decision and that they will stand around latter scratching their heads on how to tackle the results.
Hate to break it to you campers, their citizens are likely docile for the better part, to paint with the same brush those with a brain within the trust would be a mistake. Never underestimate human calculating machines, the only difference between them and say Asia, is they are cockier and sloppy. If they focused more on rectifying these two area's, then I really would be worried about America.
Hate to break it to you campers, their citizens are likely docile for the better part, to paint with the same brush those with a brain within the trust would be a mistake. Never underestimate human calculating machines, the only difference between them and say Asia, is they are cockier and sloppy. If they focused more on rectifying these two area's, then I really would be worried about America.
Shit, this is one of those rare times where you've totally lost me 'vspec' :p
The US government are smart enough to have reasoning behind "fleetingly fast decisions". Do not doubt for a second that the truly dangerous parts of them - the CIA, NSA and that damned Department of homeland security have something to do with this. There are a lot of things that government is, but it's not stupid. It's not always right. It's not even always logical, but its not stupid. The whole thing probably doesn't even need to last long. It's pretty safe to say that their more subversive departments already have a whole pile of targets queued up that they want to extract information about the minute the get the go ahead.
And that's just the ones they need this to get the information on, and not the ones that they've already got the information - just that they need a legal avenue to open up so they can act on it.
I have a loathing of red tape & pointless laws and having found myself entangled in the finer meshes of both several times, I have learned that the best way to deal with both is to use them against their enforcers. For example: I know who I am. The people who matter know who I am. Therefore when a bank rings me and wants me to ID myself, I refuse. They rang me! They say "well we can't talk to you then" and I say "oh dear" and hang up. I refuse to keep paperwork from govt. departments - they already have copies so what do I want them for? If they want to know something, they can refer to their own records. I refuse to clutter my life up with numbers and documents and files (any more than necessary, I mean) when there is a perfectly good govt drawer or computer file doing the same job. If they want to keep notes and records and pointless stuff, then go right ahead. I will add to the pile every day. I'd like to see someone trawl through it.
Because someone, somewhere, has to do that - go through every file and document. And this is where I think CISPA will fail - we are overloaded with information these days. I stopped watching the news several years ago simply because it was too much. I can only process and care about so much. After that it becomes background noise and life goes on as usual. If the US wants to check through literally billions of files, then I'll add to the pile. The pile will get bigger and bigger every day until the people doing the checking tune it out and it becomes background noise for them. How do you think the 9/11 terrorists got away with their training? Only one human noted the fact that these men didn't want to learn to land and wondered why. She tried to raise the alarm and no one took any notice - background noise, you see. They had serial killers to catch and white collar criminals to watch. It seems to me that if enough people create enough background noise, CISPA will fail. Or at least become so bogged in a quagmire of its own making that it will grind to a (blessed) halt.
Because someone, somewhere, has to do that - go through every file and document. And this is where I think CISPA will fail - we are overloaded with information these days. I stopped watching the news several years ago simply because it was too much. I can only process and care about so much. After that it becomes background noise and life goes on as usual. If the US wants to check through literally billions of files, then I'll add to the pile. The pile will get bigger and bigger every day until the people doing the checking tune it out and it becomes background noise for them. How do you think the 9/11 terrorists got away with their training? Only one human noted the fact that these men didn't want to learn to land and wondered why. She tried to raise the alarm and no one took any notice - background noise, you see. They had serial killers to catch and white collar criminals to watch. It seems to me that if enough people create enough background noise, CISPA will fail. Or at least become so bogged in a quagmire of its own making that it will grind to a (blessed) halt.
The problem with background noise is, as per my last post, a lot of technology exists now to ignore it. Your thinking is based on humans, not on machines. 9/11 has caused a lot of technology to be created/refined/whatever that analyses information, disposes of the chatter and focuses on information that stands out. A mistake they know they made back then was that they didn't take notice of the little details because it was lost in the middle of garbage.
It's not particularly easy to describe the way a machine can analyse data as there are a lot of variables (think context) that need to be considered but for the most part, technology exists to strip out most of the rubbish so actual effort can be spent on dealing with the interesting stuff, and dealing with emerging changes in the data types.
They're a government that knows their mistakes in missing things lost within the background noise. They have all of the tech they need to not make that mistake too many more times.
If CISPA fails after implementation, it will be from backlash and not from being not workable. You can throw all the rubbish in the world at them, but if for whatever reason they have reason to come after you, you they still have the legal ability to do so. CISPA doesn't have to be reason they go after you. They just need it for when they decide to go after you...
It's not particularly easy to describe the way a machine can analyse data as there are a lot of variables (think context) that need to be considered but for the most part, technology exists to strip out most of the rubbish so actual effort can be spent on dealing with the interesting stuff, and dealing with emerging changes in the data types.
They're a government that knows their mistakes in missing things lost within the background noise. They have all of the tech they need to not make that mistake too many more times.
If CISPA fails after implementation, it will be from backlash and not from being not workable. You can throw all the rubbish in the world at them, but if for whatever reason they have reason to come after you, you they still have the legal ability to do so. CISPA doesn't have to be reason they go after you. They just need it for when they decide to go after you...
not "illegal" but people who use certain words and phrases in their communications will be looked at closely. our own govt uses this method to monitor say, illegal or drug dealers. our govt views anyone with an interest in (for example) guns as suspicious. and I am speaking as someone who was the curator of a military museum:(
Something of interest that a lot of people don't realise is actually how much of this information that certain government departments already have, but just can't use to prosecute you. I know of knowledge sharing between our police and the FBI of information on people of interest that cannot necessarily be used in court because its acquisition is um.. questionable.
To add insult to injury - the encryption mechanisms used online are typically restricted to 128bit. The reason for this is that the US government has the ability to break it. The NSA developed certain parts of the encryption systems used in most online systems. OpenBSD, which most of you have never heard of despite being regarded as the most secure server operating system platform around, is well known to have had NSA built backdoors built it until someone actually read the source code. Given who created the encryption mechanisms, do not doubt for a second that they can't walk through it if they want to.
To add insult to injury - the encryption mechanisms used online are typically restricted to 128bit. The reason for this is that the US government has the ability to break it. The NSA developed certain parts of the encryption systems used in most online systems. OpenBSD, which most of you have never heard of despite being regarded as the most secure server operating system platform around, is well known to have had NSA built backdoors built it until someone actually read the source code. Given who created the encryption mechanisms, do not doubt for a second that they can't walk through it if they want to.
Hacking only does so much. It's a start, but I'm not inclined to discuss that particular subject with too much depth.
What I will point out is that what a lot of people think is meaningful hacking is actually public relations fluff. Taking down a website is a PR stunt. Getting into an organisations local network, and quietly relieving them of their sensitive information is real hacking. That's where pay dirt is. Taking down a website is easy. Anonymous is full of kids that can do that. If you're lucky, you might manage to have worked out a password for an account that can authenticate against an internal network that you can leverage . Pretty unlikely as no intelligent govt department with sensitive info is going to have ldap auth tied to their external facing web sites... but possible.
Getting to the internal network, that's a whole new world of hurt. Security procedures and processes, firewalls, intrusion detection systems and the ultimate in kicks in the nuts - logging, all stand in your way.. Social engineering is a good way in, but you need some balls, and this takes a lot of time. That usually gets you in the door. After that, you still need to get to the data and be invisible doing so. Most hackers would have given up long before this. Plenty will have been caught, and very few would actually be capable of pulling off the whole shebang and getting away with it.
So.. most of what you're seeing is really a PR stunt - it's all about activism. If you don't sell stuff on a website, or make money out of it, taking it down only does so much damage. Stealing their intel is where it's at, and the important stuff isn't on their website.
"Floods are notoriously simple to detect. It's not particularly difficult for a computer to go through ten million messages of similar random rubbish, and find the dozen messages in there that are different enough to look at. It's only an issue that needs hardware thrown at it. It'll only the unusual looking stuff that a human will be looking at"
- ok but I wasnt thinking of a small group of people sending out millions of "flooding" data messages. I was thinking of millions of people sending out millions of messages. Instead of gathering people to protest in a physical place, they could protest in cyber space by sending millions or even billions of messages that fit the profile set up by the filtering system. A human would have to spend years looking at every single flagged message.
As for hacking, I wasn't endorsing it either way - I failed high school program writing (apparently, I'm far too illogical) so I dont know the first thing about it - in a practial or political sense. All I meant was: as soon as someone invents a new program or system, there will be someone who will do their best to find their way around it. Like police radars. The police began using radars so someone invented a radar detector. So the police had someone invent a radar-detector detector.....and it goes on. At heart, I am an optimist so I have to believe that somehow, a way through or around will be found. Computers, and their programs, are only as good as the humans who write and use them. And humans are fallible. I take heart in that - it may be our saving grace this time.....
- ok but I wasnt thinking of a small group of people sending out millions of "flooding" data messages. I was thinking of millions of people sending out millions of messages. Instead of gathering people to protest in a physical place, they could protest in cyber space by sending millions or even billions of messages that fit the profile set up by the filtering system. A human would have to spend years looking at every single flagged message.
As for hacking, I wasn't endorsing it either way - I failed high school program writing (apparently, I'm far too illogical) so I dont know the first thing about it - in a practial or political sense. All I meant was: as soon as someone invents a new program or system, there will be someone who will do their best to find their way around it. Like police radars. The police began using radars so someone invented a radar detector. So the police had someone invent a radar-detector detector.....and it goes on. At heart, I am an optimist so I have to believe that somehow, a way through or around will be found. Computers, and their programs, are only as good as the humans who write and use them. And humans are fallible. I take heart in that - it may be our saving grace this time.....
Wow this has to be the most interest I've ever had in a thread, ever!
I like the ideas being thrown around, however here is my take on whats been said above.
What I am suspecting the US govt. is going to do with CISPA is firstly monitor target areas, for instance the middle east, china, north korea etc. The more I read the term cyberterrorism, the more the cyber part falls away from terrorism. The cyber part to me, is their way of monitioring terrorist activities (which is obvious they already do, and this is where CISPA comes into it) and now with CISPA they are able to do something about any suspicious activities. Before they could suspect an act of terrorism before the attack happened, but they had to wait for that attack, or at least have gathered enough substatial information, to take any action on it. Writing in an extradition clause into the law gives them the power to take action before any actual violence happens. I'm pretty sure there not going to worry about some kid illegally downloading a few movies, unless it becomes a major issue for them, or a complaint made to someone important. I see this as a major anti-terrorism law and not just something they will throw at every man and his dog. I also suspect, like our carbon tax, it has been thought out a bit better than we have knowledge of, I know it sounds like I am defending this law, but I'm just throwing a few ideas together and seeing if it makes sense.
However, and this is the biggest issue I see with CISPA, the clauses in the law are relatively greyed out. In other words it doesn't specifically state it will be targetting terrorist activities, and I'm sure if your a govt. dept. you wouldn't do that either as you know the terrorism groups are reading your laws. Which I believe means it has the great potential to be used out-of-context, and against any person/s, even the kid downloading the movies. I think this is the biggest issues about CISPA, is it is indirect, and has the real potential to harm anyone and everyone if the govt. see's fit. That's my take on it and I still believe it is a ridiculous law to pass. There are so many other ways around cyberterrosim issues
I like the ideas being thrown around, however here is my take on whats been said above.
What I am suspecting the US govt. is going to do with CISPA is firstly monitor target areas, for instance the middle east, china, north korea etc. The more I read the term cyberterrorism, the more the cyber part falls away from terrorism. The cyber part to me, is their way of monitioring terrorist activities (which is obvious they already do, and this is where CISPA comes into it) and now with CISPA they are able to do something about any suspicious activities. Before they could suspect an act of terrorism before the attack happened, but they had to wait for that attack, or at least have gathered enough substatial information, to take any action on it. Writing in an extradition clause into the law gives them the power to take action before any actual violence happens. I'm pretty sure there not going to worry about some kid illegally downloading a few movies, unless it becomes a major issue for them, or a complaint made to someone important. I see this as a major anti-terrorism law and not just something they will throw at every man and his dog. I also suspect, like our carbon tax, it has been thought out a bit better than we have knowledge of, I know it sounds like I am defending this law, but I'm just throwing a few ideas together and seeing if it makes sense.
However, and this is the biggest issue I see with CISPA, the clauses in the law are relatively greyed out. In other words it doesn't specifically state it will be targetting terrorist activities, and I'm sure if your a govt. dept. you wouldn't do that either as you know the terrorism groups are reading your laws. Which I believe means it has the great potential to be used out-of-context, and against any person/s, even the kid downloading the movies. I think this is the biggest issues about CISPA, is it is indirect, and has the real potential to harm anyone and everyone if the govt. see's fit. That's my take on it and I still believe it is a ridiculous law to pass. There are so many other ways around cyberterrosim issues
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