71–80 of 142 posts
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... really? Has he been communicating with these people? Or was he just observing connections being dropped, which could be automated response?
When a computer says "No," a hacker figures out a way to make the computer say "Yes," perhaps unaware that the computer said "No" because a person told it to.
Well worth a read.
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In some cases just fixing things may look like rule-breaking. Imagine, you need to download a file from a server, but your wireless connection keeps dropping. You don't really know why. Maybe some problem on the network, or improperly configured web server. You don't know. What would you do? Would you go, and start soliciting network administrators, or contact web server administrators? Probably no, right? You'll jus…
Anybody that does any kind of high volume crawling knows about rate limiting and knows that evading those rate limiting blocks is circumvention. Having a door slammed in your face then going around to find another door indicates that you know that door was closed because of you .
Unless you've received a notification from administrator, there is no way of telling for sure, really. Just guesswork.
And there are no physical doors on the network. So they can not be slammed in your face. All that you can observe is dropping connections, negative acknowledgements, server messages, etc.
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Anybody that does any kind of high volume crawling knows about rate limiting and knows that evading those rate limiting blocks is circumvention. Having a door slammed in your face then going around to find another door indicates that you know that door was closed because of you .
Or maybe because of some bug somewhere on the way? Like congested campus wireless breaking down? Unless you've received a notification from administrator, there is no way of telling for sure, really. Just guesswork. And there are no physical doors on the network. So they can not be slammed in your face. All that you can observe is dropping connections, negative acknowledgements, server messages, etc.
Swartz had something else in mind it seems; just taking the law into his own hands I think this is really one of the core reasons so many hackers disagree with this lawyer mindset. A hacker or an entrepreneur is someone who breaks rules to create something. Innovation and consensus are antonyms, not synonyms. Innovation does not happen by committee. If you wait for a "democratic process" that is bought and rigged by…
I think there is a strong grain of truth to what you say. My politics are fairly lawyerly,[1] and I find the anti-democratic sentiment on here disquieting, especially the constant attempts to discredit the democratic process at every turn by unsubstantiated hand waving about how the system is "bought." [1] I think the chicken came before the egg. The profession attracts people who have a strong sense of order and con…
On December 16, 2005, The New York Times reported that the Bush administration was spying on American citizens without a warrant. Most of the major Telecoms were participants in this massive, warrantless eavesdropping system. So the EFF and the ACLU filed lawsuits against these telecoms. Federal courts began ruling against the telecoms (Yay! Democracy in action!).
So the telecoms "bought" some lawmakers. In July, 2008, the senate passed H.R. 6304 which provided retro-active immunity to telephone companies that participated in the Bush administration's warrantless surveillance program.
ie: This is not unsubstantiated. This is not hand-waving. The system was "bought".
Since then, congress doesn't even bother with immunity any more. Both Cheney and Bush have admitted on national television that they authorized torture. (Torture is still illegal in the U.S.: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2340 -- that's a specific law passed by a democratic system.) And yet no one was ever investigated or arrested or anything. Ho hum.
Obama now has a "kill list" that he personally signs. He can declare someone to die, without a court or a trial. That sounds like "monarchy" to me, not "democracy". ("Off with his head!")
Based on these and other events, as far as I can tell, at a federal level, we don't really have a democracy anymore. There's no democracy to uphold or respect. If you're a Washington insider, protecting Washington power, then anything goes -- spying on American citizens, torture, invading countries, killing people.
But if you threaten Washington power, then you will be hounded by prosecutors in the name of "justice". It's too bad Aaaron Swartz couldn't buy himself some retroactive immunity.
Let's say I issue a manifesto where I support free food for all. Would me picking up things in a store mean that I wanted to steal them or give them for free? The association between the man's principles and his assumed purposes is in direct contrast with the other author's argument on fighting lawfully. Even if he downloaded one article he could share it. Should he not be allowed access to information just because he was fighting for freedom of information? Do laws now impose principles and beliefs? Or does a principle render us in self-imposed seclusion until the relevant laws change? Highly problematic and indicative of how prosecutors argue the cases. And this man is considered an expert?
Swartz had something else in mind it seems; just taking the law into his own hands I think this is really one of the core reasons so many hackers disagree with this lawyer mindset. A hacker or an entrepreneur is someone who breaks rules to create something. Innovation and consensus are antonyms, not synonyms. Innovation does not happen by committee. If you wait for a "democratic process" that is bought and rigged by…
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"As for the fetishization of 'democracy' in Kerr's post, sometimes elections produce good outcomes. But often the wisdom of crowds isn't so wise" Well, yes, but that's why we do the whole voting thing again after a period of time, rather than just once. Democracy isn't a means to ensure bad decisions won't get made, it's a means to ensure they can be un-made. "Many times, perhaps most times, the crowd votes after som…
Provoking an arrest to gain publicity and highlight a law's unjustness is one civil-disobedience tactic, but I don't see it as the only one, or a particularly canonical form. Thoreau's original essay on the subject focused on the moral imperative to ignore unjust laws through noncompliance. That might result in an arrest, or it might not; the important part was noncompliance, and provoking an arrest was simply a nece…
Swartz had something else in mind it seems; just taking the law into his own hands I think this is really one of the core reasons so many hackers disagree with this lawyer mindset. A hacker or an entrepreneur is someone who breaks rules to create something. Innovation and consensus are antonyms, not synonyms. Innovation does not happen by committee. If you wait for a "democratic process" that is bought and rigged by…
A hacker or an entrepreneur is someone who breaks rules to create something. That definition really begs the question [1]. A simple counter-example: Google didn't break any rules when it launched a search engine built on pagerank rather than conventional indexing. They broke convention . Talk about 'breaking the rules' sounds great at motivational seminars or in marketing speak, but metaphors don't make for credible…
Talk to anyone there in the days of Early Google. They were all about breaking rules.