Dak

but assuming it's true I think we have to take a serious look at that and decide whether we want the government participating in that sort of reaction to this kind of event.

wouldn't "tak[ing] a serious look at [what the gov' is doing]" require that the gov' don't have the ability to arbitrarily suppress information about what they're doing?

Given that the entire point of censorship is that you can't see what's being censored, isn't it the case that you can't differentiate between arbitrary and non-arbitrary censorship, thus limiting your choices to some, unknown amount of censorship or none?

How much of what's blocked as child porn is child porn? how much is political criticizm? is the fact that you've never heard allegations of political suppression by the Department of Stopping Child Porn actually meaningful, as this allegation would be political criticizm and thus logically just be censored if that's what they do? Hell, how do you know anything about child porn given that your perception of it is literally blocked? Where do your perceptions of child porn come from? Is it from the only people allowed to admit to having Knowledge of Child Porn? how much crap could they make you swallow about child porn because it doesn't conflict with anything you know about child porn, given that knowledge of child porn is forbidden so you don't actually know anything about it, except what the government tells you? Could you be persuaded there's an Aweful Lot of It, certainly Enough to Justify Suspension of the First Amendment? as opposed to Hardly Any?

Can you apply these concepts to Necessary Censorship of Certain Legitimate Government Actions For Your Own Good?

This is why free speech is part of your constitution, and why you're constitutionally allowed to shoot a government that breaks the constitution (e.g., who censor you), and why I'm suprized to see Patriotic Americuns tolerate any censorship let alone demand it.

Ah, but a lack of censorship would allow Child Porn, which -- as we all 'know' -- there is an Aweful Lot Of. certainly Enough to Justify Suspension of the First Amendment. We know this because the government tell us so. Plus some crap about Terrorism, which we Also Know Justifies Suspension of the First Amendment. We know this because the government have checked on our behalves, and they say it's both prolific and horrific enough that they need to censor the internets. they've also checked and confirm that's all they're censoring, so don't worry. Or check, or you'll go to jail. But double-don't-worry, other people are allowed to check, and if they find out we're censoring the media in any other way, they can tell you via our uncensored media. Apart from wikileaks. Who will become terrorists just as soon as it's the case that you can't check what they're actually doing.

I think it's the case that if 'wikileaks' win, the gov's response to this situation will be perceived as either a bad or a justified thing; if the gov' win, the gov's response will mostly just not be perceived.

Which leaves you in the position whereby if you actually want to be able to "take a serious look at that and decide whether we want the government participating in that sort of reaction to this kind of event", you need the government to not take that sort of reaction to this kind of event.

AFAIK there's no way to listen and break the anonymity totally.

IIRC:

1/ end-to-end correlation, even of part of the network, can confirm that you're using tor to access site X, but only if site X is monitorable; due to UK's logging laws, i think this can be done after-the-fact from the logs

2/ interrupt a website, and see who's connection to Tor suddenly gets interupted (requires you can arbitrarily affect the site's bandwidth)

3/ fingerprint: the connection to a site will first download the HTML, then make some more requests for the images; the size and number of these requests form a 'fingerprint' for a site, even tho the data's encrypted. (site can be set up to avoid this?)

IANAH, but as i understand it these three break tor pretty easily; note that setting up your own, e.g., wikileaks mirror/hidden service would satisfy all 3 conditions, and allow you to identify some of the people who're accessing wikileaks. Fine them or something, and you've got some 'censorship by fear' going on...

As for Freenet, careful use of darknets can mitigate the problem, I think

I think that's the case...

not disagreeing with you tho: for all the above, i had a good read of teh gub'ments sekritz over HTML/web and am currently d/l'ing the archive via torrent, and have yet to be arrested or disconnected.

This quite obviously shows the lack of infrastructure and security on the web. sure anyone can connect to it, but there needs to be some better controls and infrastructure within the Internets Architecture. Also it shows a need for a government agency to do some net patrolling/policing. sure you will still have hackers, but just like society and the physical world we live in, without police you have anarchy. i see the same should be applied to the incorporeal internet.

No, see, the current issue is a demonstration of why the government shouldn't be trusted with censorship, because this is the kind of thing they will try to censor so that we can't judge them properly.

I'd prefer an anarchy: i'd sooner TRUST everyone in general not to shaft me too much, than TRUST a government that won't even allow me enough information to make an informed decision about their trustworthiness.

Electronic chains are cryptographically guaranteed to remain anonymous, and each operator in the chain cannot tell who the user is or where they're going.

You know that Tor is known to be insecure, and Freenet is suspected to be insecure as-currently-is? (iirc, Freenet's model is believed to be secure, but it isn't fully implimented yet).

Dak, so you are not being mislead on US Law; Our 50 States have near the same sovereignty under the Constitution as do you EU has. Most every issue we talk about on this forum, is IN FACT falls under State jurisdiction, including "what constitutes rape". I know of NO US State, that would prosecute any person on what's been said and it's questionable if any State would extradite a person to ANOTHER STATE, based on these facts, yes extradition it's up to the State Courts whether to or not extradite, even to a foreign country. Both States and the Federal can request extradition from other Nations.

Ah, thanks. Didn't know it was like that for the biggies like rape, tho it makes sense now you say it.

If someone commits a crime and flees the state, can't you issue a nation-wide warrant, valid in each state, and also allowing the FBI to get involved?

Yes, it's up to whatever authorities there are, who will presumably take a look at the evidence, as opposed to reading an article online, fawning over the importance of "transparency", and deciding that he simply MUST be innocent.

No-one here is doing that.

And, to be clear, on paper "whatever authroities there are" is the UNITED KINGDOM authorities, as that's where he is and Sweden have ABSOLUTELY NO JURISDICTION here.

BTW, it's fascinating to me that "extradition" is still required within the so-called "European Union". Europe can't even agree on a single definition of rape, but has no problem giving the US a hard time for not submitting to the war crimes tribunal in The Hague.

Aside: the European union is (by design) not the United States of Europe. Each country has sovereignty. So, yeah, they have to ask for extradition, and yeah we can have different laws on rape.

I don't see how this is comparable to the US's approach to the international criminal court?

/Aside

Non-redacted names of Iraqi informants may result in their death.

At the very least, 'threatening bodily harm' is an over-exaggeration.

I'd be interested: is the threat of imprisoning JA for years -- using reasonable force to achieve this if necessary -- a threat of bodily harm?

What that particular point is about is that hypocrisy is either a valid issue in political discussion, or it is not.

 

[...]

 

Well that's your opinion and more power to you. If you work it a little more you might find an even narrower definition that lets you avoid any comparisons at all.

 

[...]

 

 

Nope. But it sure is unethical.

This is pretty much what the argument comes down to.

Yes, hypocrisy is relevant. Not to the point where being a hypocrite necessarily means what you say is wrong, but it's certainly not a good sign.

But, i'm sorry, trying to label what he's doing as 'ethical' and then say that he has to act ethically in every single way or he's somehow 'wrong' is far too broad. I mean, by that stance rapists can't object to child molestation, paedophiles can't object to genocide, adulterors can't object to gay marriage for any reason, and (assuming he's guilty) rapists can't object to government corruption.

I have thought of something tho: if JA has a threat of unredacted releases -- something presumably designed to allow him to be a spokesman for wikileaks without fear of reprisal -- and he actually committed rape and is now trying to get away with it by hiding behind that threat, then that'd surely be a misuse of position, no? So, in a round-about kinda way, it would be slightly hypocritical to get immunity from the law to do a job and misuse that immunity to 'rape' people, when that job is to fight organized corruption.

Even that point's slightly less valid as he's turned himself in, tho.

It's similar to paedophillia: having sex with a 5-year-old and a 15-year-old are both paedophillia, tho for various reasons it might be a good idea to have separate names for the two crimes.

Refusal to stop is rape, for similar reasons that refusing to return something that was voluntarily lent is theft -- once permission's withdrawn, you no longer have permission -- but it's miles away from pinning a struggling woman down and forcing it in her

similarly, agreeing to use the quick withdraw method and then cumming inside her would be 'rape', 'cos you don't have her permission to do that; tho i think a new term with slightly less impact than 'rape' would be useful.

hmm... would a woman claiming to be on the pill when really she's not be rape? or the sexual equivalent of fraud, I suppose?

That's not up to you, it's up to Swedish prosecutors. If the two ladies are in collusion, fine, but we can't make that determination via news reporting and public opinion. It has to be made via a legal process.

No, it's up to a British Extradition Panel. And they've no business extraditing someone if there's insufficient evidence, by the requesting country's own standards, to expect a conviction.

I mean, if nothing else what would be the point?

In threatening to release unredacted documents if "something happens" to him.

How does that count as threatening bodily harm?

Sorry, no dice. Conservative politicians who cheat on their wives get hammered as hypocrits over gay marriage, for example. It's a broad brush, not a fine-toothed comb.

If they've been campaigning on 'the sanctity of marriage' and are anti-gay-marriage because it 'ruins the sanctity of marriage' and then they get caught with their nob up some hookers arse, then that's kinda hypocritical (if they're married). If they're anti-gay-marraige because they just don't like poofs, then it's not hypocritical to cheat on their wifes (unless it's with a man, obviously).

If, in america, you'd get hammered for your anti-gay-marriage stance for cheating on your wife even if you've never justified your anti-gay-marriage stance in terms of sanctity of marriage, then i'd agree with you that that's wrong; but this isn't about being equally unfair to JA just to 'make it even', is it?

Assange's entire motivation and purpose is ethical behavior, and he's all over the map about what constitutes unethical behavior, ranging from governments to corporations and I believe even individuals.

His stance is anti-government/corporation-corruption, and openness as a means towards forcing that end, whether said governments/corporations agree or not. Rape isn't corruption.

Hey, if he embezzled WL's funds, i'd totally be agreeing with you.

There is reasonable grounds for a case here. Whether there's sufficient evidence for a conviction is another question

no it isn't. If there's zero likelyhood of a conviction, then there's not reasonable grounds for a case.

Let's say he's in the UK. If he couldn't be convicted in the UK, then he's a right, under UK law, to expect to not be extradited to another country; especially so to another country where he might expect 'cruel or unusual punishment', which, in the UK, would include death.

And I also wouldn't threaten bodily harm to other human beings if I get extradited, either.

where did JA do this please?

The reason I ask is that in the example I gave above, people frequently call for the general condemnation of any conservative politician who (for example) commits adultery. But just because they're an adulterer doesn't mean they're wrong about the importance of family life and, for example, male role models in the African-American community.

if you say you're pro-family-values, it's taken that you're anti-adultery, unless you specifically point out otherwize. A politician who allows people to believe he's anti-adultery, and who then commits adultery, is hypocritical and (if 'anti-adultary' was a campaigning platform) cynical; not what you want in a politician.

JA hasn't adopted an anti-rape stance. So, even if he's guilty, it'd be a different situation. it'd make him a cock, but not really do anything to his anti-gov-secrecy work; unwarranted secrecy on his/WL's part would, for example.

The latest now sounds like "whistle blowing" gone seriously wrong. Sound like anarchy and terrorism.

hence i feel that 'terrorism' is a slightly apt label for wikileaks.

It's only fair tho:

gov: if you leak our stuff, you'll go to jail

WL: if you send our head guy to jail, we'll release even more.

threat, counter-threat. I don't subscribe to the idea that only the gov are allowed to use threats.

And rape is rape

Apart from when it's not. didn't we talk about this before, and come to the conclusion that it's more statutory (i.e., not) rape that he's been charged with?

Anyhoo, he could be a kiddy-fiddler for all that I care: it'd make him a Bad Person, but wouldn't be of any relevance to whether what WL is doing is right or wrong.

---

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11911162

He said his client was in a "bizarre situation" where he had tried to seek a meeting with the Swedish prosecutor to discuss the charges against him, but had been rebuffed.

Er, you believe that Wikileaks should wield its information as a weapon to fight a rape accusation? Did I understand that right?

dunno should vs. shouldn't, but I know he did.

but: maybe Assange 'raped' someone. Maybe the CIA falsely accused him to sully WLs reputation. Maybe Assange falsely accused himself, to make it look like the CIA is playing underhandedly. Either way, it's irrelevent, doncha think?

Good example. The US is helping an ally, but we would also like to move toward peace with a country like Iran. By letting this information out do we move the world closer to peace or war? Negotiating positions and strategies are discussed. Does releasing that information help or hinder the negotiation process with Iran?

Apparently, tho, your country's fine with the concept of Israel bombing Iran, as long as the US doesn't appear to have anything to do with it... so you're not necessarily moving towards peace in a country like Iran. (I acknowledge the phrase could mean something else, dependant on context; but I don't trust that the US gov' isn't doing that: it requires checking imo).

I guess your question would ideally be answered by the US government, in the form of only censoring the bear minimum. Were that the case, I'd be happy trusting their judgment as to wether things should be public or private, and, if something's withheld, I'd think leaking it would be wrong/counter-productive. However, the US (et. al.) gov's aren't like that, so I guess that brings me back to thinking we should take away their privacy until they can be trusted with it.

And: probably hinder; but by doing that -- by forcing as much transparency onto our own governments, even at the cost of some short-term problems, so that we deny them the ability to (e.g.) encourage wars in the Middle East -- do we move the world in a better or a worse direction?

====

To clarify, I agree with you: I think that the gov' should have the ability to withhold certain things. I just think they need their privacy taken away right now to force them to use that power responsibly. (tho i'm still not sure that the idea of any censorship is actually feasible any more).

I mean, this'd all be a lot easier if we had governments that we could trust, but I guess that would require that we could choose them; so I suppose unless we're willing to over-throw them and implement some form of democracy we're stuck doing utterly retarded things like spying on 'our own' governments to make sure they're not shafting us...

The government refuses because classified documents are classified. Their position is that as classified documents, none of them can be released.

That attitude doesn't make the blindest bit of sense when they're about to be released by WL. At that point, the gov' has the choice between minimizing the leak, or not minimizing the leak.

The wikileaks statement of their mission they cite the US Pentagon Papers Supreme Court ruling: "only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government." How does a cable saying the French Prime Minister is thin-skinned fall under government deception? My problem is that they are not just exposing government coverups and lies to the people. They have stepped over that line.

Along with that, the leaks contain stuff like discussing how the US can deliver GBU-28 bunker busting bombs to Israel while avoiding "any allegations that the US government is helping Israel prepare for a strike against Iran.". Unless that's out-of-context, that sounds like the US is helping Israel prepare for a strike against Iran...

There's a quarter-million documents. I guess they just chucked them to the media, who are now printing whatever they think is interesting, be it public interest (spying on UN) or public tittilation/trolling (French PM is thin-skinned).

I still think this counts as trying to bully the gov' into being more open about, e.g., arms deals, or loosing all secrecy.

That last bit is my objection. Secrecy is required sometimes in order to provide safety and to facilitate work. Why is that true for wikileaks but not governments?

 

I don't have a problem with whistleblowing and I have no doubt that governments tend to classify documents for the sole purpose of preventing embarrassment rather than protecting legitimate national security secrets. But legitimate national security secrets do exist.

Whenever WL approaches the gov' for help in redacting the leaks, the gov' refuse. This seems to put WL in a position whereby they could redact it themselves and possibly miss stuff that should be withheld, or just not leak at all.

iow, WL isn't necessarily saying that nothing can be secret -- rather, given a choice between possibly declassifying too much or possibly leaving too much classified, they will risk over-declassifying.

The gov' could always classify just the bear minimum, in which case i suspect WL would leave them alone; or if certain redactions are so necessary and justified, they could work with WL just prior to leakage, as it's clear now that WL will go ahead anyway (which is where the slight comparison with terrorism comes in imo).

however: could the gov' actually keep the bear minimum classified? or does WL prove that any censorship, no matter how justified, is unviable nowadays? Anyone know how China deal with WL?

Pretty much everything has side effects and will kill you in large enough doses. Including water.

Also, some people are allergic to pretty much anything, including water. So, for some people, water effectively has a 'side effect'.

Isn't that more like extortion or blackmail?

meh, i said it was a stretch, and 'terrorism' is a wishy-washy term.

I was thinking 'do what we want or we'll blow shit up' is sort of comparable.

Also, apparently I'm allregic to penicillin, so forgive me if i sound drunk and it made no sence.

However, embarrassment isn't my objection to what wikileaks is doing. The notion that governments should have no secrets is naive to an absurd degree, and from what I can tell little distinction is being made between publishing documents covering up embarrassing activities and other classified material.

Not saying that I disagree, but I think that's kinda the point: draw your own realistic line, or there'll be no line at all? sort of like "censorship: abuse it and you'll lose it"?

'Terrorism' is so vaguely-defined as to be useless as a term. Try defining it in a way that includes the IRA, al-quaida, and other 'terrorist' organizations, whilst excluding the US/UK police and armed forces (without cheating and including 'except gov-approved forces' in the definition). The UN still hasn't figured out how to do it.

Also, terrorism implies the actions are designed to create fear and panic among the populace.

like the police?

You could just about stretch that he's threatening to keep on leaking dox in order to force the governments of the world to release them themselves. That kind of 'do x or i'll do y' seems to sort-of fit one possible definition of terrorism ('do x out of fear of me doing y').

dunno if this counts as necroposting -- this forum seems to move slowly.

the bit the antibody would recognize would be narrowed down to part of the gp120 or gp41 molecule, which significantly narrows down the number of mutations (env, which codes for both gp160 and gp41, is only 1,500 bp long).

However, for reasons which are a bit hard to explain without pictures, the antibodies to gp120 have a bit of a tendancy to stick to other, native molecules. Possibly because of this, the immune system has a tendancy to make antibodies that stick to anti-HIV-antibodies, and they have a tendancy to stick to CD4, at which point the immune system attacks it's CD4+ cells, causing AIDS. So i'm not sure your idea is safe.

there are some less-variable regions of the gp120 molecule that are being targeted by research.

How bad do the risks need to be before you realise that a potentially life threatening risk isn't worth it?

Depends how fun it is. I dunno, 1/1000 maybe? I mean, 'risk of death' is only the same as drinking, taking drugs, or crossing the road: you can't shouldn't just ignore risk, but you can't just avoid it either.

Note that even with a condom, nasty STD's are a possibility -- even if it doesn't break (scrotal herpies, for example).

Since our Puritanical society still hates sex, it naturally exaggerates the physical risks associated with sex, since it constantly seeks for some objective reason to discourage sex which can reinforce the constantly weakening force of the moral reasons against it.

Not saying you haven't got a point about society being prudish, but read into the friendship paradox. Not only have your facebook friends got more friends on average than you, but your sexual partners will have had sex on average a lot more than you have, which exaggerates the risk.

Effectively: if you shag someone w/out a condom, it's probably because they shag a lot of people without a condom, not because you're special and they made an exception for you. Hence, it's not neccesarily the case that doing it a few times is a dead-certain way to get the clap, but it's riskier than you're thinking. Hence why I want some kind of knowledge as to the actual risk.

Most STDs are either completely curable or of minor significance (syphillis, gonorrhea, yaws, herpes) so it is not necessary to worry much about them.

Herpies is not curable. I'd be interested to hear an argument as to it's 'minor significance'.

Syph is only of minor significance if you either identify it early on, or don't mind your bones and brain being gnawed on. If it goes undiagnosed, then it can still be cured, but the symptoms (blindness, insanity, etc) cannot be reversed.

The serious STD, AIDS, is minimally transmissible to males by ordinary sexual intercourse. I have seen the figure quoted that there are NO cases of males who have developed AIDS from conventional sexual intercourse with a female in North America (where parasitic infections don't generally serve to make AIDS more communicable).

Do you have a citation. 'cos i'm pretty sure you're wrong.

Seriously, from someone who I hope it's obvious isn't 'prudish', your attitude towards not getting teh clap sucks. Go to a clinic and get checked out if you haven't already...

Given that about one in five people* have an STD, your chances of contracting a nasty disease must go up exponentially with every non-protected encounter you have.

 

not exponentially. assuming 1/5 STD instance, the chance of two randomly picked women not having an STD is nearer 1/3 than 2/5

Also, as I have regularish checkups, i'm not so conserned about bacterial infections like chlamydia and syph, more the incurable viral ones

btw, i'm a bit suspicious about your link:

1/5 people have an STD in the US;

1/5 people have herpies in the US;

HPV and chlamydia are the most common STDs in the US;

therefore, more people have HPV than herpies

therefore, more than 1/5 people have HPV

therefore, more people have HPV than have an STD???

After a scare that turned out to just be a cyst (which still isn't a fun thing to have on your penis btw), I got wondering: on average, how many one-night stands do you have to have before you get a viral STD?

I was expecting it to not be a strait-forward answer, but I can't find any answer anywhere... anyone got any ideas?

I'm asking because I usually use a condom (long-term girlfriends excluded), but occasionally don't. I figure that if the answers, e.g., 10, then i'll have to aim to have sex w/out a condom so rarely that I only do it, say, 5 times in my life so as to minimize the risk of an incurable disease. If the answer's 20, I can do it twice as often whilst still probably not getting a viral STD.

(not looking for 'always wear a condom' btw, had enough of that from the nurse that'd just violated me with a coctail stick, especially since i've never had the clap)

well the citizens of the uk could try to get gun laws there changed.

That'd involve begging the government to allow us to have the capacity to resist them, and not even need them. So no, they won't do that.

If a large majority of the citizenry was in opposition, things would just stop working, and passive resistance would likely be effective.

We use an interesting trick in the UK:

The police 'keep a lid' on the bad guys, rather than killing or imprisoning (enough) of them to neutralize their threat, and they keep us disarmed. et voila, 'things would just stop working' all of a sudden sounds much less appealing, 'cos without the police we'd be all soft and squishy targets for the bad guys, who i'm sure love the police for keeping us all disarmed and would be more than happy to run riot to force us back into the governments warm embrace.

We can't defend against the bad guys without organization/guns/etc, we can't get those without getting rid of the police first, and we can't get rid of the police without first being able to defend against the baddies...

Or am i just being a loony conspiracy theorist?

Sure, I agree with that, but I don't think that's really where the "abuse" comes into it

I was under the impression that they keep changing their format for no good reason, thus forcing the (probably incapable of keeping up) competitors to redo all their compatability work.

Also, there's the whole OOXML vs. MS-OXML thingy...

This very forum depends on proprietary formats. That doesn't stop web crawlers from crawling in. At this very moment, this site is infested with spiders from Google, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves , ...

Plus, it used to be vBulletin, another prorietary system: yet we could still migrate to IPB, and can still migrate to, idunno, phpBB or something. can even copy/paste from one forum to another with relatively few problems, and can certainally hyperlink from a vB forum to an IPB forum.

That's not really analogous to facebook et al, and I think that's Berners' point...

So:

Well okay "proprietary formats", then. It's not really standards I'm trying to get at here, so much as economic ideologies.

tbh, I don't think you can seperate this from standards. without considering standards, I think OS and proprietary go well hand-in-hand. I mean, i can code just about well enough that'd i've modified a few programs before so i suppose technically I'd prefer it to be OS in case i need to fix a simple bug, but tbh as long as it's free and cool i don't really care what economic forces drove it's development.

Problem with proprietary is when it'd be better for US if the companies shared and inter-operated, but more profitable for THEM if they didn't, so they don't; which not only sucks but also removes the burden of innovation in order to profit and causes vendor lockin.

see, e.g., openoffice vs. ms word for example. Both have innovated in the field of word processorage, and it'd be perfectly OK that they both exist: except that, due to the fact that MSW is proprietary and how MS have (ab)used this fact it's genuinally hard to chose OO over MSW.

Is it possible that the existence of BOTH open standards AND proprietary standards enables more ingenuity and development than would be possible with either of those ideological methods alone?

Facebook doesn't use any standards. to my knowledge, there's no 'export data' function which could aid migration to another Social Network, nor an 'add a friend on myspace' feature that results in facebook and myspace communicating with each other in order to defragment the SNs, nor a 'sync with another SN' feature, all of which would be enabled by a universal [open|proprietary] standard.

as for open vs. proprietary standards, what's that actually mean? it can't be open as opposed to closed, as that'd imply that proprietary standards == closed standards which makes no sense at all (secret standards just wouldn't work)... whilst open as in 'anyone can change them' also somewhat conflicts with the concept of a standard... unless some group has the power of Having The Last Word, in which case i suppose the difference between open and proprietary standards would actually be quite slim...