] I'm afraid of Americans
] I'm afraid of the world
] I'm afraid I can't help it
] I'm afraid I can't
] I'm afraid of Americans
] God is an American

David Bowie - I'm Afraid Of Americans

As I watch the "real world" outside of college, I get more and more concerned. In the 70s and 80s, it was factory and other blue collar jobs that were being outsourced, crippling towns like Flint MI. Today its High Tech jobs going over seas to India. So what do we have left? What is one thing America really does well? Innovate. We have our intellectual capital left: our inventors and engineers. The only problem is we are destroying that industry as well. The DMCA, the Economic Espionage Act, and other laws are forcing a current generation to stop being curious. Take any examples you want: playfair, decss, Diebold voting. SDMI showed us universities are not completely safe either. We are selling our next generation of inventors and engineers short. How do we create the new inventions of tomorrow without understanding the inventions of today? We are bankrupting our long term future to protect the short term profits of bloated companies. This will cost us jobs. Not because the Japanese make it smaller or better, not because the Indians or Chinese can do it cheaper or faster, but because we are passing laws to feed greed.

] New Hampshire is "two-party consent state" -- one of
] those jurisdictions that requires all parties to a
] conversation to consent before the conversation can be
] intercepted or recorded. The decision is the first of its
] kind to apply that standard to online chats, and the
] ruling is clearly supported by the text of the law. But
] it marks a blow to an investigative technique that has
] been routinely used by law enforcement, employers, ISPs
] and others.

Ok, I see what they are doing: IMs are 2 party point to point conversations, like phones. This raises more questions than it answers.

-What about conference calls? Do you still only need 2 of the parties to consent? (in 2 person states, GA is 1 person).

-How does consent factor into a chatroom, arguably the digital equivlent of a conference call?

-Personally I dismiss an IM conversation is like a telephone call. Its more like sending telegrams to each other. I wonder how consent applies to telegrams: Is it illegal to keep a copy of a telegram without 2 part consent? Or is the very natural of sending someone a message as a block a consent to store a copy?

-I argue the very nature of Chatrooms and IMs are so different than telephone calls, you can't *not* violate 2 party consent. From the end user prospective, voice communication is stream based. You either hear it or you don't, and would have to ask for the data to be repeated. The consent laws basically say you can't "cache" this data for later, by recording the stream, without permission from 1 or both parties.

However IMs and Chatrooms are not stream based, they are block based (Hence the telegram analogy). They work by giving you a copy of a block of data, and you can examine the block now, or X seconds in the future. I violate the consent laws by simply not being at my computer to get an IM, since it is "saved" until I read it. Blocks, unlike streams, can't be parsed/understood/read in realtime. They take an amount of time to read the entire block. There is no way to have block communication without storing a copy for some length of time. Yes, a digital TDM phone switch copies the voice bits in the frames, but this is such a fine granularity, at the single bit level for T1 lines.

-Furthermore, the infrastructure itself causes me to violate the laws without even knowing it. My computer could swap the IM in RAM to disk. I could have store and forward proxies setup, that will make a copy. Hell the TCP IP stack is making lots of little copies in case packets are lost in route. This is different than the copies made of a voice stream by the telephone network. IMs/Chatrooms are having parts or all of the messages copied.

Can the consent laws as written even apply to IMs and chatrooms?

Chat, Copy, Paste, Prison

] Cross country travel by airplane takes a day, whereas driving
] takes a week. One must presume that the court has no concern
] for convenience/practicality here. Therefore it follows that
] the government could require an ID check with warrant/database
] cross reference for every form of transportation/lodging based
] on the theory that you can still WALK between destinations and
] sleep outside.

Welcome to Europe! You must produce your passport to stay in any hotel. Interpol can track you from when you enter to every place you stop and visit. All of this is in a database, and in a matter of seconds Interpol can find out exactly where you are.

RE: [Politech] Judge dismisses John Gilmore's ID-required lawsuit [priv]

] "If my child was in elementary school, I would welcome this with
] open arms and say, "please, please, tell me my kid got on the bus
] and got off the bus,"' said School Board chairwoman Jane Gallucci.

She latered added, "I mean come on, I the fucking School Board Chairwoman; my career is far more important than something so Donny-Reed-like as taking care of my child. I'd have to take some sort of an interest in his upbringing if I was to know if he got on the bus or not. I'd rather not even think twice about having my child figureprinted so then I know he is going to school. That saves me time of explaining things like how skipping school is wrong, or why he shouldn't talk with or ever go anywhere with strangers. God forbid having a kid would tak time out of my day to personally see him off in the morning, or getting a fellow students parent to see them off. All of these are stupid life lessions anyway. It damn time society finally takes some responsiblity in raising my child."

Parents these days suck ass. That's not teenage angst, thats from watching the knee-jerk that was Columbine.

Tampabay: Have your thumb ready to ride the bus

Decius wrote:
] ] Today my candidacy may come to an end--but our campaign
] ] for change is not over.

why. won't. this. rock. bleed!

Dean has been like a zombie from a bad horror movie these last 2 weeks. He's been dead, but keeps walking, and his dialog was pathetic. Sadly his death wails weren't quieter

Dean throws in the towel

] He went up before a review board today, and read them a
] statement (linked below). After hearing the statement, the
] board then voted unanimously to make the expulsion permanent.

I can feel for this kid, but come on, this statement did him more harm then good. When you scare Joe Sixpack, you get nailed. Is it wrong/stupid/crazy how hard they nail you? Most certainly. However scared people don't act in rational ways, as I learned first hand this last year from my own run ins.

The1 needs to take 2 lessons from this:

1- Talk, draw, teach, but never do anything on a school computer, especially when they are already on to you.

2- Don't let this stop you from being what you are: a smart creative kid. Just be smarter about how you do it. Using Proxy Server means you most likely changed some Admin settings, and that will get you screwed, even if it was just a proxy server.

RE: Statement from Student Expelled for Recommending Web Proxy at School

An equivalent panel in this case might have included experts in a variety of espionage specialties, in the difficulties of piercing secretive governments and terror groups, and in the way other nations have organized their intelligence agencies.

A few days ago, David Brooks highlighted the crucial link between selecting the commissioners and achieving the desired results.

I cannot help but feel disappointed.

Deconstructing the Commission on Iraq Intelligence

] So
] if you're between the ages of 20 and 40, prepare to get
] fucked, because you are the smallest generational demographic,
] and thus you have the smallest amount of democratic political
] power. You will witness the very definition of tyranny of the
] majority in your lifetime.

"A Democracy is a chicken and 2 wolves voting on what's for dinner."

RE: Good news -- and bad -- for baby boomers, says AARP

Decius wrote:
] ] "The Government must play a greater role in punishing
] ] those who conceal their identities online, particularly
] ] when they do so in furtherance of a serious federal
] ] criminal offense or in violation of a federally protected
] ] intellectual property right," (Lamar) Smith said at a
] hearing on
] ] the topic today.
]
] Congress wants to make it a federal crime to lie on your
] domain name registration.

The actual bill is even scarier. It's a felony for you to "knowingly [provide] material and misleading false contact information to a domain name registrar, domain name registry, or other domain name registration authority in registering a domain name used in connection with the online location, or in maintaining or renewing such registration.".

Check out the details of the bill at:

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/D?d108:17:./temp/~bdhFqm::

under "Text of Legislation" (which, BTW, it took me _forever_ to find; it's like they're trying to hide these damn things...). If you're really a glutton for high blood pressure, check out the rest of Lamar Smith's civil "services" at

http://lamarsmith.house.gov/

Before starting your own gov't on a small South Pacific island, you can try mailing letters to your congressmen/-women and reps in the House. And, instead of posting angry rebuttals to the not-not sheep here on Memestreams, you might start a petition (http://www.petitiononline.com/create_petition.html) and spread the word about that. Is there anyone with legal experience (Acidus excluded :-) who'd like to tackle it?

RE: Congress Eyes Idiotic Whois Crackdown