Internet

[Another Victim]

Yeah, Apple, terrible. It's all so closed and proprietary.

I'm not sure what this picture is meant to be of. Have you changed the background to demonstrate your consoles flexibilty?

I'm also guessing you are part of the Apple cult and I have offended you?

What I was trying to say I am aware that people fall for ******** branding all the time and to quote Aldous Huxley 'you can imagine a euphoric which would make people thoroughly happy even in the most abominable circumstances.'

It's not at that point right now but thats how I see apple being in the future. The smiling bouncing "isn't it modern!" face of internet censorship in the West.

[D.C.]

The screenie is a mac user with 3 diffrent linux distros running in virtual machines.

And xp but I think I must have blocked that one from my mind...

Edited October 7, 2008 by D.C.

[Redcellar]

Despite the serious efforts of the Chinese government, it is trivial to bypass the great firewall.

We are way off anything approaching that sort of effort in this country and it will be far less effective over here.

Most people in China connect to the internet via government internet cafe's which have real live policemen patrolling them and cctv everywhere.

I think you may be right that it is technically trivial, but its a fact that they police it very strongly. Our firm witnessed staff and PC being removed by the police because they were surfing the internet. So unless we employ millions of police then we are nowhere near securing it as well as they do. Lets face it, our police can't be bothered arresting dangerous drivers let alone someone browsing the scandelous HPC site.

[Flatdog]

The screenie is a mac user with 3 diffrent linux distros running in virtual machines.

And xp but I think I must have blocked that one from my mind...

Out of interest could you translate that into something more readily understandable...please!

[Guest DissipatedYouthIsValuable]

I'm not sure what this picture is meant to be of. Have you changed the background to demonstrate your consoles flexibilty?

I'm also guessing you are part of the Apple cult and I have offended you?

What I was trying to say I am aware that people fall for ******** branding all the time and to quote Aldous Huxley 'you can imagine a euphoric which would make people thoroughly happy even in the most abominable circumstances.'

It's not at that point right now but thats how I see apple being in the future. The smiling bouncing "isn't it modern!" face of internet censorship in the West.

Just a demonstration of running 5 operating systems simultaneously on a laptop.

The feature isn't so bleak.

[dredwerker]

I think you may be right that it is technically trivial, but its a fact that they police it very strongly. Our firm witnessed staff and PC being removed by the police because they were surfing the internet. So unless we employ millions of police then we are nowhere near securing it as well as they do. Lets face it, our police can't be bothered arresting dangerous drivers let alone someone browsing the scandelous HPC site.

It would be relatively trivial to stop it. As soon as someone is sued they tend to give up. The piratebay and so on are pretty good at moving countries but every site has someone who is responsible and can be leaned on.

Mostly everyone would just move around and spontaneously meet up again but you wouldnt be able to keep nicks under a proper police state.

Everyone could use onion ring technology - I wouldnt want to be a provider as someone could be doing something dodgy on my connection.

I think you would end up with BBS type tech and municipal underground wifi (well overground actually) although I believe unregistered routers are illegal in Russia.

Also encryption is not always that useful as it flags you as interesting. My main hope in all this is that most police are too technically incompetent to turn on some pcs (I know of this happening in a silly counterfeiting case - PC had dual power supplies) let alone encrypted drives etc..

Those interested should check out echelon or numbers stations for fun.

Echelon:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON

ECHELON is a name used in global media and in popular culture to describe a signals intelligence (SIGINT) collection and analysis network operated on behalf of the five signatory states to the UK-USA Security Agreement (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States, known as AUSCANZUKUS).[1]

The system has been reported in a number of public sources.[2] Its capabilities and political implications were investigated by a committee of the European Parliament during 2000 and 2001 with a report published in 2001.[3]

In its report, the European Parliament states that the term ECHELON is used in a number of contexts, but that the evidence presented indicates that it was the name for a signals intelligence collection system. The report concludes that, on the basis of information presented, ECHELON was capable of interception and content inspection of telephone calls, fax, e-mail and other data traffic globally through the interception of communication bearers including satellite transmission, public switched telephone networks and microwave links. The committee further concluded that "the technical capabilities of the system are probably not nearly as extensive as some sections of the media had assumed".[3

Numbers stations:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_station

Numbers station

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search

Numbers stations are shortwave radio stations of uncertain origin. They generally broadcast artificially generated voices reading streams of numbers, words, letters (sometimes using a spelling alphabet), tunes or Morse code. They are in a wide variety of languages and the voices are usually women's, though sometimes men's or children's voices are used.

Evidence supports popular assumptions that the broadcasts are used to send messages to spies. This usage has not been publicly acknowledged by any government that may operate a numbers station, but in one case, Cuban numbers station espionage has been publicly prosecuted in a United States federal court.[1]

Numbers stations appear and disappear over time (although some follow regular schedules), and their overall activity has increased slightly since the early 1990s. This increase suggests that, as spy-related phenomena, they were not unique to the Cold War.

[Another Victim]

Just a demonstration of running 5 operating systems simultaneously on a laptop.

The feature isn't so bleak.

I'm not knocking how technically good they are! That's the problem they're way tooo good!

People will wilfully except the restriction / censorship of information because they will be able to download a movie in a minute. If I told you about the amount of speed cameras / CCTV 15 years ago you'd have laughed. Not because I was only 10, but because it wouldn't seem possible or because "people won't accept that, they'd be riots"

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&saf...=incrementalism

[Guest DissipatedYouthIsValuable]

I'm not knocking how technically good they are! That's the problem they're way tooo good!

People will wilfully except the restriction / censorship of information because they will be able to download a movie in a minute. If I told you about the amount of speed cameras / CCTV 15 years ago you'd have laughed. Not because I was only 10, but because it wouldn't seem possible or because "people won't accept that, they'd be riots"

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&saf...=incrementalism

Signal to noise ratio.

As for music or video, if you can listen/watch it, you can copy it, if that's your concern.

Under the pretty interfaces of OS X, Linux and Windows are some incredible universal tools, and thankfully the hacker community is mainly chaotic libertarian.

Whatever gets put in place to convert the internet into an equivalent of daytime pay TV for the masses, there will be ways around it.

[YoungFTB]

Sure thing.

But in essence is the whole of the internet as we understand it not on an serial network?

And like I say, if censorship is possible in China with 1 billion people - and thats a fact we all openly accept - then surely it's a possiblity anywhere under the right circumstances?

As I just saw someone had written, power does what it wants. Freedoms are only granted if they are advantageous to power and the internet is not in it's current form. Too much info, too readily available. AND thats not me being a tin-foiler - it's me being an amateur historian.

I suspect we'll see it happen incrementally.

I agree 100%

Same goes for making money online, enjoy it while it lasts because I feel eventually the only people profiting from the internet will be big business

[Another Victim]

Signal to noise ratio.

As for music or video, if you can listen/watch it, you can copy it, if that's your concern.

Under the pretty interfaces of OS X, Linux and Windows are some incredible universal tools, and thankfully the hacker community is mainly chaotic libertarian.

Whatever gets put in place to convert the internet into an equivalent of daytime pay TV for the masses, there will be ways around it.

Sure, all good comment. But I'm sure we both agree on three things.

1. all TV is mindless censored dross

2. the internet is an incredible source of information, like nothing unleashed on any population in the history of time ever

3. turning the internet into what we could loosly term as "interactive-TV" would be an acheivement if you didnt want the population to have access to certain things

And i'm defintly not worried about copying anything, what my point is the people don't notice these freedoms taken away when they're done incrementally. And if they do they sell out for cheeseburgers and popcorn. I think apple pc's of the (near) future will be so great that people wont even notice what might have been taken away.

You get me?

[D.C.]

I think we are talking about 2 separate groups of people.

Sheeple and not sheeple

It doesn't matter how invasive or dictatorial the government gets, if I have physical access to a computer, can boot off a live cd and don't have a copper or camera looking over my shoulder there is nothing you can do about me communicating with a trusted other person somewhere else in the world. Nothing.

Ok, to be more accurate, if you kicked down my door with a well equipped, really skilled computer forensic tech who could pull data from ram before the electricity discharged from it (a couple of minutes) then you might get lucky. Barring that scenario, nothing.

As far as sheeple go, unless we get a communist government that tears up copyright law, we will not be getting free unlimited legal movie downloads.

If the government really pushes draconian laws, what will happen is people that write torrent software will issue patches and work arounds, making the legislation impossible to enforce, sheeple click the 'update now' button and carry on.

This is exactly what has happened over hard drive encryption in the UK.

Law changed to allow the police to demand people's encryption keys as they could decrypt the data on people's hard drives.

Software was patched to create 'duress keys'

Law is now unusable.

[Another Victim]

All good points and worthwhile noting that the sheeple will always be sheeple. And I'm sure you can communicate and there are communities of really technical guys etc.

What I'm implying is that access to the kind of limitless information and opinion you and I have at present will become a terrorist act at some point in the future. And this will all be dressed up as a good thing.

Ive been precise in my speculation by naming apple as the PC that everyone will have but that is just what I think is probable becasue that's how I see people tricking people - give them what they superfically think they want, then take away what you don't want them to have and they won't notice.

I've convinced myself that people will sell out interent freedom as we know it for faster download times and prettier hard drive box thingy.

(And the way the free movies & music thing is being worked is like contract phones / sky subscriptions / love film - pay once a month for limitless use - maybe premuims for newer films and less for backlist - bit like Sky Digital but whatever you want to watch)

[OMG]

I've convinced myself that people will sell out interent freedom as we know it for faster download times and prettier hard drive box thingy.

You underestimate geek power. There are a lot of us and we won't allow this to happen, we'll vote with our feet if nothing else.

Hat-tip to @D.C. for a good post.