6 ms·

Just the fact that we have to start websites like these, and march Capitol Hill to make the government realize its mistake is depressing, infuriating, and is ge

by kunai 13y ago

Just the fact that we have to start websites like these, and march Capitol Hill to make the government realize its mistake is depressing, infuriating, and is gently, gradually tapping at a hot, steaming teapot of rage within every rational individual's psyche. What is the root cause? How did this get so incredibly bad? Is it the fault of the public? Is it the public's fault we are in an Orwellian state of Soviet-era Germany? Or does Hanlon's Razor apply here? In any case, there needs to be more action than just bandage measures like petitions and phoning your Congressman. This level of government negligence deserves an uproar, and sadly we're not getting it because many trust government, and are not skeptical in the slightest about it. We have those animals called "politicians" to blame for that. So, if people really want to change, lead a march on Capitol Hill. Be attention-seekers, make a change for the better, not for the worse. Let your life have value, and use that value against the worthless individuals sitting at their desks in Washington. Just do something worthwhile, not sitting behind that sRGB display of yours. Painless encryption, countermeasures, protests, whatever -- we need to do something.

barret907k 13y ago
Make sure you're marching is very peaceful. Don't want the government to label you a 'terrorist'. You may never seen sunlight again.
- kunai 13y ago
  I'm young, foolish, and I honestly don't care if I'm labeled a terrorist. Although, my ethnicity doesn't particularly help my cause...
  - lepht 13y ago
    Interesting sentiment, and I can't help but think this is why the government seems to fear the youth the most/ships them off to wars in other countries.
    - pyre 13y ago
      Was there a time when wars were only fought by old men?
      - a3n 13y ago
        The ones that lasted a long time.
      - lepht 13y ago
        The question is not the age of the people fighting wars, but what a government chooses to "use" its youth population for.
nano111 13y ago
Creating a mesh network using the unused analog TV frequencies probably would be nice and useful
- bdamm 13y ago
  Or a mesh network consisting of wifi nodes might be good too. The trick is in the routing.
  - notdrunkatall 13y ago
    There's something like that already in the works: http://www.reddit.com/r/darknetplan http://www.reddit.com/r/darknetplan
    - admax88q 13y ago
      A mesh network can't scale. "We show that for WMNs the throughput of each node decreases as O(1/n), where n is the total number of nodes in the network." http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=1241089&tag=1 http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=1241089...
detcader 13y ago
The root cause? It's always money. Lawrence Lessig makes this clear, in a TED talk no less ( http://www.ted.com/talks/lawrence_lessig_we_the_people_and_the_republic_we_must_reclaim.html http://www.ted.com/talks/lawrence_lessig_we_the_people_and_t... )
- adrianbg 13y ago
  The root cause is power, of which money is a conveniently quantifiable manifestation. Power-seeking has occurred continually over time since human populations became dense enough to extrude persistent hierarchies.
  - arethuza 13y ago
    Dominance hierarchies are pretty common amongst animals - so we have probably inherited this bheaviour from our non-human ancestors: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominance_hierarchy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominance_hierarchy
    - RyanMcGreal 13y ago
      Constitutional politics to evolutionary psychology in four comments: this is why I keep coming back to HN.
cinquemb 13y ago
As I follow what has been going on in greece and turkey, I wonder when/under which circumstances we will reach our tipping point? Maybe when MQ9's start patrolling the skys regularly state side, someone will intercept and take control the line of sight feed and send a message to the individuals sitting in their desks in Washington that the chickens have come home to roost…
zer0gravity 13y ago
Concrete steps that I have made to gain control over my data: - hosting my DNS server ( bind ) along with my domain - Made my own RSS reader and blog with openid authentication (server/client) - Installed ftp server ( vsftpd ) - Installed my own mailserver (nice tutorial here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MailServer https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MailServer) Planning to: - install my own xmpp server I want to create an integrated, user centered platform, that will provide ( mail, blogging, storage, ftp, feed reader, an openid identity & social networking ) and make it really easy for somebody to install it on a raspberry pi + some external storage and have its own personal micro data center. Someone could also consider Citadel (http://www.citadel.org/ http://www.citadel.org/) If you ask me, I'd say that the personal data center is the future ( the free future )
- sahirh 13y ago
  For XMPP, I recommend checking out Prosody (http://prosody.im http://prosody.im). You can get a working system up with Off-the-record instant messaging and internal file transfers in an afternoon, if you're familiar with UNIX system administration. If you use a client like Jitsi, you can do ZRTP encrypted calls through the server as well. Use your own SSL certificates for SSL. Ejabberd is also good, however the debug information was pretty inadequate. Also helps to be familiar with erlang.
- tn13 13y ago
  Well, I wonder why cant we create too many false positives for them to make the whole data meaningless ? Instead of hiding all our private communication we can generate fake communication across the whole internet which might raise flags in NSA's system. (I would have given more concrete examples but I am scared that tomorrow some NSA freak might knock on my door.)
  - zer0gravity 13y ago
    What you're proposing is like this: I want to say a sentence to someone, but in order for an unintended listener not to understand what I'm saying I will say 10 sentences. Five of which will be "I will kill you and everyone you know" and "I will bomb America". Isn't that just a meaningless waste of energy? -- The government spies on you because you make it easy for it to do it. Instead, keep your personal data personal, use encryption and there's not much more that it can do, without becoming physical... ( it has no problem doing that either, but at least its intentions will be more obvious that way, and hopefully will wake up all the ignorants that think that some old guys peeking into everyone's lives is justified).
mseebach 13y ago
The reason freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom to petition and host of other freedoms are important is that, from time to time, you need to use them. Democracy isn't a guarantee that everything will be perfect, quite the opposite, but that we have a reasonable chance of rightening a wrong without erecting guillotines on the national mall. The challenge IMO isn't petitioning Congress, it's petitioning the public to make sure this issue remains on the radar for the upcoming election (Part of that, though, could well be a noisy march on Washington).
- jared314 13y ago
  That is one reason I wish this leak had happened two years ago, or two years from now, when it could affect the Patriot Act extension vote. The only thing members of congress can do now is try to defund it, because voting to repeal it might be political suicide.
  - mseebach 13y ago
    > because voting to repeal it might be political suicide. Then provide political cover.
- zer0gravity 13y ago
  > remains on the radar for the upcoming election Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Democracy is not about elections, it's about representing yourself.
  - mseebach 13y ago
    Democracies have emerged from scandal and abuses of power before, so it not actually insane to believe that it can happen again. Believing that the outcome will be a perfect fairy-tale land of milk and honey, on the other hand, not so much. It's important to keep in mind that victory in this case probably looks a lot like better constitutional oversight of the FISA courts.
Nursie 13y ago
Wait, you think a little march and a couple of websites will change anything? Someone still has a some unwarranted faith in humanity! What will happen is some politicians will make some noises from their face holes, they might promise a few reviews, or to look into a few things. These will be accompanied by rationalisations that seek to marginalise concerns and make it look like these measures are to protect the children and tall buildings. In a few weeks most of the public will stop caring, partly because of the noise from politicians flapping their gums, partly because of a low attention span. If a review actually takes place, it will report that there was nothing wrong with what's been going on, it's all within the law. A few people will mutter about changing the laws, but most people won't care by this point and the political classes will have a new hot button talking point by then.
- PavlovsCat 13y ago
  Wait, you think a little march and a couple of websites will change anything? Someone still has a some unwarranted faith in humanity! Organizing and demonstrations can make a big difference.. for those involved in them :P That is to say, it sometimes just plain feels good to see you're not alone with being fed up -- or even better, that you're not alone with the things you're for, either.
rickhanlonii 13y ago
Hanlon's razor is my favorite of all razors, and is the principle that keeps me calm in moments like this: >Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. I don't think that the (mostly lawyers) who represent us and run this country are malicious. They're just incompetent. They're simply not qualified to understand and make decions in the fields that they affect. So they call in 'experts' to help , who end up working for or being otherwise paid by a particular group or corporation. Of course these people are paid to bias their groups preference, so the 'expert' advise they give them is tainted, and the representative has no basis to detect the bullshit.

by kunai 13y ago

barret907k 13y ago

Make sure you're marching is very peaceful. Don't want the government to label you a 'terrorist'. You may never seen sunlight again.

kunai 13y ago
I'm young, foolish, and I honestly don't care if I'm labeled a terrorist. Although, my ethnicity doesn't particularly help my cause...
- lepht 13y ago
  Interesting sentiment, and I can't help but think this is why the government seems to fear the youth the most/ships them off to wars in other countries.
  - pyre 13y ago
    Was there a time when wars were only fought by old men?
    - a3n 13y ago
      The ones that lasted a long time.
    - lepht 13y ago
      The question is not the age of the people fighting wars, but what a government chooses to "use" its youth population for.

nano111 13y ago

Creating a mesh network using the unused analog TV frequencies probably would be nice and useful

bdamm 13y ago
Or a mesh network consisting of wifi nodes might be good too. The trick is in the routing.
- notdrunkatall 13y ago
  There's something like that already in the works: http://www.reddit.com/r/darknetplan http://www.reddit.com/r/darknetplan
  - admax88q 13y ago
    A mesh network can't scale. "We show that for WMNs the throughput of each node decreases as O(1/n), where n is the total number of nodes in the network." http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=1241089&tag=1 http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=1241089...

detcader 13y ago

The root cause? It's always money. Lawrence Lessig makes this clear, in a TED talk no less ( http://www.ted.com/talks/lawrence_lessig_we_the_people_and_the_republic_we_must_reclaim.html http://www.ted.com/talks/lawrence_lessig_we_the_people_and_t... )

adrianbg 13y ago
The root cause is power, of which money is a conveniently quantifiable manifestation. Power-seeking has occurred continually over time since human populations became dense enough to extrude persistent hierarchies.
- arethuza 13y ago
  Dominance hierarchies are pretty common amongst animals - so we have probably inherited this bheaviour from our non-human ancestors: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominance_hierarchy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominance_hierarchy
  - RyanMcGreal 13y ago
    Constitutional politics to evolutionary psychology in four comments: this is why I keep coming back to HN.

cinquemb 13y ago

As I follow what has been going on in greece and turkey, I wonder when/under which circumstances we will reach our tipping point? Maybe when MQ9's start patrolling the skys regularly state side, someone will intercept and take control the line of sight feed and send a message to the individuals sitting in their desks in Washington that the chickens have come home to roost…

zer0gravity 13y ago

Concrete steps that I have made to gain control over my data: - hosting my DNS server ( bind ) along with my domain - Made my own RSS reader and blog with openid authentication (server/client) - Installed ftp server ( vsftpd ) - Installed my own mailserver (nice tutorial here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MailServer https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MailServer) Planning to: - install my own xmpp server I want to create an integrated, user centered platform, that will provide ( mail, blogging, storage, ftp, feed reader, an openid identity & social networking ) and make it really easy for somebody to install it on a raspberry pi + some external storage and have its own personal micro data center. Someone could also consider Citadel (http://www.citadel.org/ http://www.citadel.org/) If you ask me, I'd say that the personal data center is the future ( the free future )

sahirh 13y ago
For XMPP, I recommend checking out Prosody (http://prosody.im http://prosody.im). You can get a working system up with Off-the-record instant messaging and internal file transfers in an afternoon, if you're familiar with UNIX system administration. If you use a client like Jitsi, you can do ZRTP encrypted calls through the server as well. Use your own SSL certificates for SSL. Ejabberd is also good, however the debug information was pretty inadequate. Also helps to be familiar with erlang.
tn13 13y ago
Well, I wonder why cant we create too many false positives for them to make the whole data meaningless ? Instead of hiding all our private communication we can generate fake communication across the whole internet which might raise flags in NSA's system. (I would have given more concrete examples but I am scared that tomorrow some NSA freak might knock on my door.)
- zer0gravity 13y ago
  What you're proposing is like this: I want to say a sentence to someone, but in order for an unintended listener not to understand what I'm saying I will say 10 sentences. Five of which will be "I will kill you and everyone you know" and "I will bomb America". Isn't that just a meaningless waste of energy? -- The government spies on you because you make it easy for it to do it. Instead, keep your personal data personal, use encryption and there's not much more that it can do, without becoming physical... ( it has no problem doing that either, but at least its intentions will be more obvious that way, and hopefully will wake up all the ignorants that think that some old guys peeking into everyone's lives is justified).

mseebach 13y ago

The reason freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom to petition and host of other freedoms are important is that, from time to time, you need to use them. Democracy isn't a guarantee that everything will be perfect, quite the opposite, but that we have a reasonable chance of rightening a wrong without erecting guillotines on the national mall. The challenge IMO isn't petitioning Congress, it's petitioning the public to make sure this issue remains on the radar for the upcoming election (Part of that, though, could well be a noisy march on Washington).

jared314 13y ago
That is one reason I wish this leak had happened two years ago, or two years from now, when it could affect the Patriot Act extension vote. The only thing members of congress can do now is try to defund it, because voting to repeal it might be political suicide.
- mseebach 13y ago
  > because voting to repeal it might be political suicide. Then provide political cover.
zer0gravity 13y ago
> remains on the radar for the upcoming election Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Democracy is not about elections, it's about representing yourself.
- mseebach 13y ago
  Democracies have emerged from scandal and abuses of power before, so it not actually insane to believe that it can happen again. Believing that the outcome will be a perfect fairy-tale land of milk and honey, on the other hand, not so much. It's important to keep in mind that victory in this case probably looks a lot like better constitutional oversight of the FISA courts.

Nursie 13y ago

Wait, you think a little march and a couple of websites will change anything? Someone still has a some unwarranted faith in humanity! What will happen is some politicians will make some noises from their face holes, they might promise a few reviews, or to look into a few things. These will be accompanied by rationalisations that seek to marginalise concerns and make it look like these measures are to protect the children and tall buildings. In a few weeks most of the public will stop caring, partly because of the noise from politicians flapping their gums, partly because of a low attention span. If a review actually takes place, it will report that there was nothing wrong with what's been going on, it's all within the law. A few people will mutter about changing the laws, but most people won't care by this point and the political classes will have a new hot button talking point by then.

PavlovsCat 13y ago
Wait, you think a little march and a couple of websites will change anything? Someone still has a some unwarranted faith in humanity! Organizing and demonstrations can make a big difference.. for those involved in them :P That is to say, it sometimes just plain feels good to see you're not alone with being fed up -- or even better, that you're not alone with the things you're for, either.

rickhanlonii 13y ago

Hanlon's razor is my favorite of all razors, and is the principle that keeps me calm in moments like this: >Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. I don't think that the (mostly lawyers) who represent us and run this country are malicious. They're just incompetent. They're simply not qualified to understand and make decions in the fields that they affect. So they call in 'experts' to help , who end up working for or being otherwise paid by a particular group or corporation. Of course these people are paid to bias their groups preference, so the 'expert' advise they give them is tainted, and the representative has no basis to detect the bullshit.