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Comment Ellsberg actually redacted diplomatic cables (Score 2, Insightful) 669

While Ellsberg supports Assange and what they are trying to do, in actuality he redacted many names and even entire sections of diplomatic reports that assessed the allies of the US who were secretly supporting the Vietnam war, like Poland.

He felt he wasn't doing the world any favors by exposing the murky dealings and backroom pacts that make the globe spin, and may delay his goal of a swift end to the Vietnam war.

Assange has no goal, and that is part of his problem. His treatise is to make the world more open, as if the very nature of classified conversations and secret deals between nations offends him, so he is to bring a giant flashlight to things regardless of what happens.

He has some very large bombshells to drop, such as I believe he has documents which tie Bank Of America to the Feds knowing that CDOs had no accountability, and that most mortage notes didn't have legal basis, and then of course TARP money - much of which is unaccounted for despite being taxpayer money. But like his bombshells that showed US helecopters attacking what may or may not have been journalists in the street, it did nothing. Nothing has changed despite Manning smuggling that video from the Apache gunning those guys down, including wasting their van that had children in it. I don't think it altered the US Army's engagement policy one iota.

Despite all these findings he has, nothing will change and his duress which may cause him to continue to reveal all kinds of things without edit, he simply WILL cause collateral damage. The question is, is it worth it? To see how the bankers and the financiers and the heads of state control the world and the wealth in the world? Will it REALLY help democracy and display capitalism's flaws? Haven't we known that since Marx?

I hope Assange or his followers continues, but does do more selective editing. the truth is not always its' own reward, as we are now seeing.

Comment Deterrence theory vs retribution theory (Score 1) 437

Played out about as purely as it could be. Here again, as in criminal law, we see that deterrence is always a better choice than retribution. It's why the death penalty doesn't persuade anybody not to commit a capital crime. It's retributive. It says nothing about the probability of being caught to begin with, so it does not change the murder rate.

Comment Regulation is needed (Score 2) 705

Q: Regardless of your political point of view shouldn't the Internet remain free from regulation?


As somebody who has already been modded to 5 said, Internet yes - ISPs no. And what is the internet other than a collection of Tier 1,2 and 3 providers. And the Tier 1s, the AT&Ts and Level 3 and such, they have a oligopoly partially caused by de-regulation. Regional competition in the DSL space, like Rhythms and Covad, was shoved aside because of fair use considerations to the central offices for equipment. They were shut out. Cable - same thing. The Comcasts were never mandated to allow their cable infrastructures to be shared. So they didn't. Which is why only now the Telecom's, using the old phone infrastructure, can complete against cable. Celestial like DirectPC never had a chance in hell to be anything other than a last resort technology.

So de-regulation caused this oligopoly. There was already a /. article earlier this week about how Comcast lets it's ISP peering points slam to 100% and congest, because it is in their interest to create poor response for streaming competition and force those companies to pay to locate services within their networks for fees.

If the FCC doesn't stop this via regulation, the Tier 1 providers will simply force the upstream peering points to differentiate classes of service. Tier 2 providers can only send so much Skype into AT&T's network and any more than 10% of the pipe will get congested using QoS. Because it's not in AT&T's interest to support the flow of voice when they themselves are in the business of carrying long distance and supporting the PSTN. Why should they? Who will stop them if they band with Global Crossing and Level 3 and Qwest and say "why the fuck should we cut our own revenue carrying Skype when we don't want to?" And if the Tier 2 provider buys a bigger pipe to the Tier 1 carrier, the Tier 1 carrier can say "I don't give a shit if you have a 10Meg or 10Gig pipe, you can only send us 1Mb/s of Skype traffic and that's all."

Who can insure that their isn't collusion? Only the Federal government can.

As others have pointed out, it is in the Tier 1 providers INTERESTS to create artificial scarcity of bandwidth. A Tier 3 provider buying upstream pipe from a Tier 2 should be federally mandated to buy at least 50% of the bandwidth he is selling in aggregate to end customers. There is PLENTY of dark fiber and equipment to handle that, even if we are talking about a company like Comcast that sells an entire medium size city all 100Mb pipes using new DOCSIS specs. Add up all the bandwidth sold, and federally MANDATE that they purchase upstream capacity to support all that.

Comment Greenlight theater in Chicago (Score 1) 170

I was at the Greenlight theater last Saturday (2200 N. Block of Lincoln) to see their Frosty kids show with my kids. Last Saturday was the final performance of Klingon Christmas Carol. Greenlight gives kids of elementary age a chance to learn theater and participate. Anyone who calls the show lame and nerdy is a fucktard and probably insults it from their World of Warcraft system. It's great, and few theaters have the money and ability to do something so funny and experimental.

Comment This line from the article.... (Score 5, Insightful) 424

"The entire phenomenon of viruses and malware is a result of the proliferation of Windows, the people behind malware take advantage of that same standard development platform."

This sentence is so stupid that it invalidates the arguments contained within the entire article. Who thinks that if Apple and their marriage of hardware and software were to have only existed in some anti-Capra Steve Jobs as Mister Potter world of computing, that viruses and malware would have not existed? Because there are no viruses for MAC OS? By that logic, wouldn't NeXT Step have been the most secure UNIX ever? To lay the existence of malware at Redmond's feet is to be so ignorant of computing and O/S design as to make anything said about Android totally and completely moot.

Comment Jalopnik sucked anyhow... (Score 4, Insightful) 236

I left Jalopnik over two years ago. It had very poor editorial control, and displayed the vast chasm between reputable automotive journalism in mags like Car & Driver and Road & Track and the interwebz. It had become Ray Wert's bully pulpit, and the commentariat IQ over there dropped down to double digits pretty quickly.


IO9 and others really were not much better. And the problem really came down to not being able to drown out the idiots. I attribute Slashdot's long term success to the mod system and the whole way it handles contributions. It works. And the Gawker crap blog engine was badly coded, anybody who used it could see that. So it isn't a shock that it got 0wn3d. Amateur blog engine should be a sign of overall poor design and security.

Comment Lyrics for a Tuesday (Score 1) 434

Wha, yeah!
C'mon, yeah
Yeah, c'mon, yeah
Yeah, c'mon
Oh, yeah, ma
Yeah, I'm a back door Santa
I'm a back door Santa
The public don't know
But Comcast understands
Hey, all you people that tryin' to sleep
I'm out to make it with my midnight leak, yeah
'Cause I'm a back door Santa
The public don't know
But Comcast understands
All right, yeah
You routers eat your dinner
Eat your pork and beans
I eat more bandwidth
Than any man ever seen, yeah, yeah
I'm a back door Santa, wha
The public don't know
But Comcast understands
Well, I'm a back door Santa!
I'm a back door Santa
Whoa, baby, I'm a back door Santa
The public don't know
But Comcast understands
Image

IT Worker's Revenge Lands Her In Jail 347

aesoteric writes "A 30-year-old IT worker at a Florida-based health centre was this week sentenced to 19 months in a US federal prison for hacking, and then locking, her former employer's IT systems. Four days after being fired from the Suncoast Community Health Centers' for insubordination, Patricia Marie Fowler exacter her revenge by hacking the centre's systems, deleting files, changing passwords, removing access to infrastructure systems, and tampering with pay and accrued leave rates of staff."
Social Networks

The New Reality of Gaming 122

Hugh Pickens writes "Video games used to be about fighting aliens and rescuing princesses, writes Rohin Dharmakumar in Forbes, but the most popular games today have you tilling your farm, hiring waiting staff and devising menus for your restaurant or taking your pets out for walks while maintaining cordial relations with the neighbors. 'Reality, it would seem, is the new escapism.' Video games of the pre-social network era were mostly played by boys or young men but 'now the core audience of social network games are girls and young women,' says Alok Kejriwal, founder and CEO of games2win, an online gaming company. The tipping point in the US came in 2008 when women outnumbered men on the Internet. Combined with millions of parents and grandparents who're new to the Internet, the traditional face of the gamer is changing from that of a 25-year-old male to a band stretching from 16 to 40 years comprising men and women in almost equal numbers, says Sebastien de Halleux, one of the co-founders of Playfish, who predicts that someone is going to create a social game very shortly that pulls in a billion dollars a year. Gaming for this new set of players is less about breathtaking graphics, pulsating sound or edge-of-the-seat action and more about strengthening existing real world relations through frequent casual gaming. 'Think of these games as a sandbox where everybody has the same tools, yet everyone achieves different results,' says de Halleux."

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