G8 agenda calls for "civilized Internet": monitored, governed, controlled, taxed

The average American votes against his best interest. The official response to any opposition to totalitarian tactics is .. FUD. Something only less blatant than what I have written above.

I'm not sure if it was constructive. However, the parent poster was asking for sources.

But his larger point remains intact: Freedom of the press/Internet is only an axiomatic good in educated America and Europe. It's on shaky ground in the rest of the world, which in a democratic referendum would make the educated population of America and Europe a rounding error.

Well, people are very protective of their email, that's why. Email is the key to a person's online identity and should be guarded like one's wallet or house keys. But wait until the children are brought into the debate. "Of course, everyone knows _you_ are legit, but there are predators creeping around in the seedy underbelly of the internet. These sexual predators will prey on your children through email and social networking sites. We need safeguards in place to ensure that predators are not able to operate freely on the internet and thus ensure your and your family's freedom and security."

Those predator shows on MSNBC where they basically entice some disturbed person with a made up fantasy, parade him in front of the cameras, talk about all the what-ifs and then arrest him only to have him show up on the next episode reinforces this. Aside: It drives me bonkers when the host says, "You came here to meet a 14 year old boy. What would have happened if we were not here?" I'll tell you. Absolutely nothing. Because there was no 14 year old boy in a chat room looking to meet 45 year old child molesters and there was no 14 year old boy waiting for him in the house.

There are smart people- good parents- who will eat that kind of crap up. They are the kind of parents that are involved in their children's lives. They help them with homework and know their friends and their friend's parents. They talk to their children about risks and staying safe. These are the kind of parents who have the least to worry about, but also the ones who will argue most passionately in favor of policies like this.

http://www.apdaweb.org/guide/rules

True, but I don't think that's central to what most governments are seeking to do, if it is as all. Even the US "kill switch bill" was almost entirely about things other than the so-called "kill switch".

Could you explain what does that `anthropomorphic Stuxnet' stand for?

The "anthropomorphic" bit was just me being excessively silly and forgetting that it's not a very common word even among native English speakers. My apologies. Stuxnet does not, in fact, giggle.

As for Stuxnet: As jrockway correctly pointed out you can secure a network against attacks from the Internet by not connecting it to the Internet. But, on the other hand, one of the most notable attacks in recent history, and one that I think that governments have in mind when thinking about cybersecurity, is an attack that targeted (and reached) systems which weren't connected to the Internet.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropomorphism Anthropomorphism is a term coined in the mid 1700s to refer to any attribution of human characteristics (or characteristics assumed to belong only to humans) to non-human animals or non-living things, phenomena, material states and objects or abstract concepts, such as god(s).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet Stuxnet attacked Windows systems using an unprecedented four zero-day attacks (plus the CPLINK vulnerability and a vulnerability used by the Conficker worm) It is initially spread using infected removable drives such as USB flash drives, and then uses other exploits and techniques such as peer-to-peer RPC to infect and update other computers inside private networks that are not directly connected to the Internet.

32% vote for candidate/party A, 33% vote for B, 35% vote for C.

65% are not represented. First past the post needs to go. :(

Don't pretend we have society of laws rather than of men, or that such a thing is even possible.

Who Influences U.S. Foreign Policy? LAWRENCE R. JACOBS and BENJAMIN I. http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPag...

...and for some reason, property rights and freedom of contract are always forgotten. But for a prosperous society, these are every bit as important.

Look at the US, just before the Civil War. Or even pre Civl Rights act. Were all natural born Americans given the right to pursue happiness?

There's a lot of things that make a country work well. Not all of them are in the constitution. New rules need enforcement. There's a lot of levels of government, and a lot of public institutions (such as the police, judiciary, and education systems), and they virtually never work together.

Sometimes, there's no abstraction layers that make sense, and you just have to talk about fixing stuff that's broken.

Democracy is used liberally as you say and it has come to mean something else other than what it was supposed to, this is the thing we should be fighting.

And SSH is used not only for tunneling the HTTP traffic, try managing a remote server without it.