You can play whack-a-mole targeting sources of misinformation all you want, but it's not going to make a difference until you address the real problem, which is gullibility.
The majority of the population, subjected to the same barrage of misinformation, has not been swept up in it or conned by it, or at the very least affected to a lesser extent. Maybe increased focus on providing skills and tools to help defend against inevitable levels of misinformation will better help those who have limited capacity to resist.
It's tough because those who fall for it don't think they need help, and people who haven't fallen for it aren't motivated to help those that have. Overcoming this will require a surge in collective altruism from the user community, the press, and tech providers.
Art and technology by their very nature take a combinative form, building new by adapting and improving elements of old. Copyright, a legal fiction to assign restrictions to the otherwise natural flow and recombination of ideas, is supposed to be meant to promote advancement by giving time-limited ownership as incentive to creators to increase their motivation to share. Instead it is commonly used to inhibit sharing, to impede improvement and innovation, and with ever-increasing terms, to essentially permanently assign ownership.
Imagine a campaign that calls for doing away with end-to-end encryption for banking, healthcare, business VPNs, and Cloud. That's the same end result, and people need to understand that calling for one is equivalent to calling for the other.
Of course the risk would be that somehow this patently ridiculous straw-man notion gains momentum in this bizarro world political climate.
I'm perplexed that the scope of this encryption debate always seems to be limited to encrypted messages between humans that the govt wants to be able to see, or file and disk encryption used by miscreants on their phones and computers.
That's just the bathwater, and it's full of babies whose loss would have much greater impact. Outlawing (or invalidating the efficacy of) encryption is nothing less than the outlawing of secure communication.
The entire world's business and financial systems rely on the confidential transfer and storage of information. The very same highly-placed people who press for broken encryption would stand to lose everything in very short order. The entire payment card industry (PCI) knows the value of encryption; how is it that these folks can have missed the boat?
You can't talk about encryption and not know that the scope of the conversation encompasses the very foundations of commerce. Corporate and personal information would be free for the taking in a world where secure communication is made ineffective. Passwords transferred and stored without valid encryption are practically worthless and will soon be found and published, as they already are in places where people do not use effective security measures.
Why are people not asking the proponents of these measures how they expect to continue to trust online banking, corporate WANs, DRM and a host of other technologies they rely on to remain stable and powerful, when compromised? Even if they think the master keys are secure in their own govt hands, surely in this polarized political climate they should see the problems inherent in the process of transitioning from one regime to the next. You may not trust the keyholders down the road.
Anyone with an Android phone or a Chromebook is running a Linux-based kernel. Even the poorly-named Windows 10 "Windows Subsystem for Linux" has the GNU toolset, although it's not strictly Linux because it doesn't use the kernel.
Perhaps you mistake my observation of an absurd reality for a call to action. In the current bizarro political climate, I would not suggest attempting such reverse psychology gamesmanship, as you might well get exactly what you are pretending to ask for.
I think the fastest way to get legislators to abandon all attempts to pursue secondary liability would be to lobby wholeheartedly for it, but make sure it also applies to the manufacture and sale of firearms.
When I dropped all my cable and switched to antenna and Netflix, my TV watching habits changed.
It's no longer imperative for me to have immediate access to every thing that I could possibly see. If I don't have access to a sporting event or a TV show, I simply don't see them. Maybe I talk to my family or take the dogs for a walk. Maybe I wait for the movie or show to come out on Netflix in 6 months. It's the behavior change that makes it work, not any attempt to make the experience the same as before.
Changing your viewing habits is like changing your diet. If you are choosing the chocolate-chip-cookie-dough diet bar instead of an apple, your head isn't in the right space to make it work.
Now that it's clear that there is a way to harness and focus the unlimited natural resource of stupidity, we will never need to rely on fossil fuels again.
Then they'll just find/create/manipulate/overextend/ignore a different law. Impunity isn't picky when it comes to post-facto justification or umbrella prosecution, any law that can be stretched to fit will suffice.
This presumes that the goal of the current security developments is actually to reduce the effects of terrorism as stated. If it turned out that the real goal was to increase power and perpetuate revenue, we might find that there is little appetite among those in control for a rational approach to saving more lives. Perhaps the current strategy is serving their goals already.
Of course you can cut the cable entirely, if you are in a sufficiently large metropolitan area and don't need to watch sports. I have over 20 channels via antenna, and none of my streaming is from the Canadian cartels. In Burlington, I have DSL from TekSavvy on a dry loop, so Bell's involvement exists at an infrastructure level but is entirely incidental. If you are not addicted to a) the usual pap that passes for entertainment or b) the notion that you have to watch first-run everything, you can be quite comfortably entertained without indenturing yourself to the BigCos.
I'm a bit confused by your response in that it draws meaning from my statement that wasn't expressed or intended and then takes affront and chides me for that very thing.
Again, I grant that "deserves" is loaded so as a consequence of creating a brief and glib quote I failed in expressing blunt tautology rather than pointed blame. Sorry bout that.
I am not spouting defeatism - my point is that the outcome can and hopefully will be more positive than current prevailing opinion projects
If the outcome is negative, attributing the cause to those who steered the outcome in that direction is not victim blaming. Perhaps the system as become broken enough that no steering will be enough. I hope not.
The reason I haven't made direct suggestions on making the government better is that as I'm not American it is not my place to lecture. I'm not telling you what to do, I'm indirectly suggesting that analyzing cause and effect is part of the solution, since I have observed that "more of the same" does not usually turn things around when current practices have been proven not to work.
I'm still optimistic that America can find a positive path through the political minefield.
Re: Re: less offence, more defence
Alas, I fear you are right. The Neville Chamberlain appeasement approach isn't going to draw these folks back to rationality.
less offence, more defence
You can play whack-a-mole targeting sources of misinformation all you want, but it's not going to make a difference until you address the real problem, which is gullibility.
The majority of the population, subjected to the same barrage of misinformation, has not been swept up in it or conned by it, or at the very least affected to a lesser extent. Maybe increased focus on providing skills and tools to help defend against inevitable levels of misinformation will better help those who have limited capacity to resist.
It's tough because those who fall for it don't think they need help, and people who haven't fallen for it aren't motivated to help those that have. Overcoming this will require a surge in collective altruism from the user community, the press, and tech providers.
AITA?
Yes, Excolo Law, you are TA
Variation on a theme
This reminds me of 9 years ago with my daughter's Art History textbook with no images. (see https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120917/01060120399/university-requires-students-to-pay-180-art-h istory-text-that-has-no-photos-due-to-copyright-problems.shtml)
Art and technology by their very nature take a combinative form, building new by adapting and improving elements of old. Copyright, a legal fiction to assign restrictions to the otherwise natural flow and recombination of ideas, is supposed to be meant to promote advancement by giving time-limited ownership as incentive to creators to increase their motivation to share. Instead it is commonly used to inhibit sharing, to impede improvement and innovation, and with ever-increasing terms, to essentially permanently assign ownership.
Copyright reform is long overdue.
Reframe the issue
Imagine a campaign that calls for doing away with end-to-end encryption for banking, healthcare, business VPNs, and Cloud. That's the same end result, and people need to understand that calling for one is equivalent to calling for the other.
Of course the risk would be that somehow this patently ridiculous straw-man notion gains momentum in this bizarro world political climate.
Scope
Re: Re: When everybody is special, nobody is special
MacOS is not a derivative of Linux. It comes from the BSD side of the Unix family tree.
When everybody is special, nobody is special
Anyone with an Android phone or a Chromebook is running a Linux-based kernel. Even the poorly-named Windows 10 "Windows Subsystem for Linux" has the GNU toolset, although it's not strictly Linux because it doesn't use the kernel.
I guess we're all suspicious hacker types now.
Re: Re: Fulsome support
Fulsome support
Enough rope
It's about changing your diet
It's no longer imperative for me to have immediate access to every thing that I could possibly see. If I don't have access to a sporting event or a TV show, I simply don't see them. Maybe I talk to my family or take the dogs for a walk. Maybe I wait for the movie or show to come out on Netflix in 6 months. It's the behavior change that makes it work, not any attempt to make the experience the same as before.
Changing your viewing habits is like changing your diet. If you are choosing the chocolate-chip-cookie-dough diet bar instead of an apple, your head isn't in the right space to make it work.
(untitled comment)
11: Global Warming Solved
Whack-a-mole
Then they'll just find/create/manipulate/overextend/ignore a different law. Impunity isn't picky when it comes to post-facto justification or umbrella prosecution, any law that can be stretched to fit will suffice.
Picky picky
If that's the goal
Re: Re:
504: Bad Gateway
Re: Re: Re: Re: Just Deserts
Again, I grant that "deserves" is loaded so as a consequence of creating a brief and glib quote I failed in expressing blunt tautology rather than pointed blame. Sorry bout that.
I am not spouting defeatism - my point is that the outcome can and hopefully will be more positive than current prevailing opinion projects
If the outcome is negative, attributing the cause to those who steered the outcome in that direction is not victim blaming. Perhaps the system as become broken enough that no steering will be enough. I hope not.
The reason I haven't made direct suggestions on making the government better is that as I'm not American it is not my place to lecture. I'm not telling you what to do, I'm indirectly suggesting that analyzing cause and effect is part of the solution, since I have observed that "more of the same" does not usually turn things around when current practices have been proven not to work.
I'm still optimistic that America can find a positive path through the political minefield.
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