I tend not to trust the US government at all, but in this case it seems extremely likely that North Korea is in fact behind this as they say. If that's the case, then we are probably seeing a re-orientation of the US government towards a different enemy. Taking tension out of the relations with Cuba, reassessing the torture stupidity and being more proactive about closing Guantanamo have all been long overdue because all these insanities happen only for reasons of interior policy and hurt the US extremely in terms of international diplomacy.

It would make sense for this event to be connected to the recent confrontation with Russia (who might have provided misleading intelligence to North Korea suggesting the US would not react to such retaliation against Sony for embarrassing North Korea's leader), but in any case the realisation they are en route to two extremely costly wars (with no oil to win) -- both of them close to or in China's sphere of interest -- could have prompted some emergency measures by the US government to try and restore international good will.

If I have analysed the situation correctly, we are just seeing the usual manipulations of international public opinion that are a necessary preparation for war in a (pro-forma or real) democracy. For a war against North Korea, not Russia. To this end, the threat must be exaggerated and connected to an American trauma, rather than treated proportionally.

French television made a more thorough experiment that can be watched as a 3-hour documentary on Youtube. They used all the tricks available to film to turn a black family living in Paris into a convincing white one and vice versa. This is worth watching even if you don't understand French: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... ("Dans la peau d'un noir").

Excellent point. It seems unlikely to me that this decision survives the next round, since that would probably imply a reversal on the current jurisdiction around second-level domain names.

Maybe the decision was *designed* to be reverted by a higher court. At least in Germany, it is an open secret that courts sometimes write their decisions intentionally so that they will be overturned - either because they don't want to take responsibility for the correct decision or because the professional judge must write the rationale for a decision in which he was overruled by lay judges. In the present situation, maybe it's a trick for making sure certain arguments cannot be heard in the higher instance?

That makes sense, and we have *sometimes* done something like it.

Not necessarily. In my cooperations with others we never hid comments to co-authors in LaTeX comments. Otherweise, co-authors who work on a printed copy first would have seen them too late or not at all.

The parts of the internet where I spend most of my online time aren't half as bad as what you describe. But those bad parts definitely exist, and when we are talking real-life consequences such as hiring hitmen this is the only thing that matters. I am not at all surprised by what Poettering is complaining about. It's just the logical next step after doxing, calling employers and swatting.

How far someone will go is determined to a large extent by the attitudes of their peers. Many will always go with the average opinion, some will always be a little more moderate, and some will always make sure to be the most extreme person in the room. Once several people of the latter type meet online, it gets dangerous because this results in a one-upmanship competition not unlike that 'game' where two stolen cars race towards a frontal crash and the first driver to brake or turn aside 'loses'. Come to think of it, the idiots playing this 'game' are also on the internet, which should explain a lot.

So you are now admitting that what you claimed is wrong. *Of course* you can get a ticket for driving in the left lane for no reason at all. It's the same everywhere here in Europe, but people here actually stick to this rule, most of the time. As my ex-wife told me after half a year in Oregon, this is not at all the case there. I guess this is somehow related to everyone with a pulse being able to get a driver's licence. In Germany, like in most European countries, there is always a very real chance of not passing. At the time when most of my classmates turned 18 and took driving lessons, several of them failed on their first attempt. Typical problems were failing the theory exam, not properly starting the car on a rising slope, taking "turn right at the next chance" more seriously than a one-way sign, and following a lorry at a traffic light that turned red - or might have done so - while obscured by the lorry.

In other news: Believe it or not, you can get a life sentence for walking on the side-walk. (If you shoot someone dead while doing so.)

The problem is that that's often not how they think. In some cultures you only ask a yes or no question in order to hear a yes answer, no matter what. You think you are enquiring for information. The poor Elbonian you are talking to may be totally stressed out because he thinks you are telling them that you are very angry about him because you lost face before your superior due to his poor performance. And that, even though nobody knows or can know how to do things better, you now have to report back to that superior, untruthfully (as everybody including the superior knows), that the Elbonian will solve the problem. You just need a yes from the Elbonian, so it can travel up the chain of command. The Elbonian just needs to confirm that he is doing that impossible thing that nobody has ever heard of, and everything will be fine for a while.

If, instead, you wanted him to try to actually do this, then you would - in the mind of the Elbonian - ask very differently.

Now of course you can try to find Elbonians who know how to communicate with Americans. Just don't be surprised if it's hard, and maybe impossible at the price you are willing to pay.

I don't think it's so hard. Extreme example:

"Some of our computers are more important for our business than the others. For example, every hour that kremvax is not running costs us roughly half a million dollars because people worldwide then buy somewhere else.

It often happens that new firmware from the vendor does not work properly. So suppose you make a firmware update on kremvax, reboot it, and it does not start. What will you do in that case?" ...

"That's probably the best thing you can do in this situation, though I would ask you to also ... so that ... . Unfortunately, if this happens, it can take days to resolve the situation. Two days at half a million dollars each, that would make, um, ... How much is that, help me out please..." ...

"Yes, exactly, 24 million. That's why our last system administrator was always very scared. He wouldn't have lost his job if this happened once, but some people would have been very angry. So he was always reading those books about anticipatory system administration [I just made this term up; use a proper, searchable technical term if there is one] to minimize the danger. He always came up with new tricks. For example, there is this server called deepthought that is not doing anything really important most of the time. We call this a development server. Now when he wanted to do a firmwareupdate, what do you think: which of the servers did he do first, kremvax or deepthought?"

Sorry if this is a stupid question - I may just be out of touch with what firewalls can do nowadays. How would the firewall know whether it is dealing with sqlserver.exe on port 40264 or some other program? If it's not running on the same computer? I can imagine that some expensive solutions can do this, but I would be surprised to learn that a stock OpenBSD, say, can do it.

As usual, the abstract draws a general conclusion. Due to the paywall I can't check it, but presumably, as usual, they didn't actually test a wide variety of people from all sorts of international cultures. To judge from their results, I guess they didn't test primarily Tibetan monks.

I am not surprised that the likely demographic of the tests, when you deprive them of their cellphones and don't give them anything else to do, turn to autoaggressive behaviour. Over the past year I have experienced how students at a German school behave nowadays if they have to hand in their cellphones, and how the behaviour improves if they are allowed to keep and use them or if they have a PC with internet connection.

Look at my post "My experience with LinkedIn spam" for a method that worked with LinkedIn for me. I sent those emails to privacy at linkedin.com. Of course your request may be considered less explosive if it's not related to a mentally unstable person with a history of making threats. (Potential for really bad publicity.) Maybe you can make up for this by asking a targeted question that shows you mean business. E.g. with a German company I would ask for the data protection officer's direct contact address and a company address suitable for a summons.

I have read that in some companies directly mailing someone high up in the hierarchy also works wonders. I guess they don't like losing plausible deniability concerning knowledge of what their underlings are up to.

I once got LinkedIn invitations in the name of a American who was totally unknown to me. When it finally occurred to me to search my correspondence for his name, I learned that this was a banned Wikipedia editor who had written one email to my professional email address to advertise his evidently psychosis-induced website. I had never answered.

Here is my complete correspondence with LinkedIn after I found this out.

----- My first email to LinkedIn ----- Mon, 23 May 2011 08:37:04 UTC

It is an impertinence to send "invitations" to people who are not even
using your service, based on email address books of your users. It is
almost criminal to repeat them periodically and not to include the
usual spam opt-out links with these unsolicited messages.

I keep getting such reminders "from" a person who I do not know and
who was banned from Wikipedia for stalking and making threats.

You *will* add the following email addresses to your "do not contact"
list. Your confirmation that you have done so will be the last
communication that I will receive from your servers.

[my 2 email addresses deleted]

----- My second email to LinkedIn ----- Tue, 24 May 2011 10:58:27 UTC

May I ask you to confirm that you have received the message below and
that it will be handled. I am somewhat reluctant to go public with
this incident.

[quotation of my first email deleted]

----- First email from LinkedIn to me ----- Tue, 24 May 2011 11:03:21 UTC

We’ve received your message and we’re working to get you an answer. If you have a Premium account or you’re a LinkedIn Ads customer, we strive to reply within 24 hours. For all other members, we do our best to respond within 48 hoursbut at times we do see delays. We’ll get back to you soon!

[quotation of my *second* email deleted; I never received such a confirmation for my first email, even though this one looks like an auto-response]

----- Second email from LinkedIn to me ----- Wed, 25 May 2011 15:40:33 UTC [55 hours after my first email]

Hi Hans,

Thank you for bringing this issue to my attention.

Per your request, the email addresses provided have been added to our "do not contact" list. You will no longer receive any email from LinkedIn or our members on these email addresses. If you decide at a later date that you want to set up a LinkedIn account, you will need to first contact us to have your email addresses removed from the “do not contact” list.

If you have further questions, please feel free to reply to this message.

[some first name deleted]
LinkedIn Customer Service

Well, I have never been robbed at gunpoint and the only people I know who were, are friends who live on a different continent. (It happened in Columbia.) In fact, the only guns I have ever consciously seen outside the media were *always* held by uniformed police or soldiers. And most of these were not even in the countries where I have lived for longer (Germany, Austria, UK), where you see very few soldiers and to the extent that the police are wearing arms these are generally quite unobtrusive and extremely rarely used. No, most of these were in Columbia and in Israel. (I have never been in the US.)

In most of Europe, when you are dealing with violent crime, the thought of firearms usually does not even arise because they are so rare. Criminals have knives, people who want to be prepared for a criminal attack have pepper spray. This works because neither side has an expectation that the other side has, let alone will use, a firearm.

The total number of people shot dead by the German police since 1978 is less than 500. That's less than 15 per year and would correspond to 60 per year in the US, after adjusting for the higher population. (The number of shots fired by police on people was about five times the number of people shot dead, corresponding to 300 such shots per year in the US.) The situation in most other European countries is quite similar due to the relatively strict gun laws. Not just in the UK, where most police officers are completely unarmed.

The 2nd amendment is very explicit that it's about *collective* self defense, not *individual* self defense. Here is how it must have worked: People had guns on their farms and were well trained with them because they were using them all the time. In cases of armed conflict (with England or France, say, or with those pesky people who had older claims to the continent, or with a bunch of unhappy slaves), these well trained civilians formed militias that were more efficient than they would have been if they had had no guns at home.