State Surveillance on the Internet

[Ataraxia]

Censorship is not only for teevee in Australia.

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/ ... 61,00.html

Yes an appalling turn of events for Australia and I suspect it is only just the beginning.

Surely if they really must bring in this sort of bulltwang the option for the individual would be to 'opt in' into the censorship,rather than an accrross the board ban we then have to opt out of.

One wonders what next abstact noun the government will need to protect us viewing via the internet. 'Holocaust denial', 'Atheism','anti-feminsm'....

[Laird]

I've tried it, it is nice, but since I have other drives with other operating systems, I prefer Xandros.

I haven't used Xandros before but it seems to conform to my suspicion that the most user-friendly Linux distros will be commercial, based on proprietary extensions (although on the other hand, Ubuntu, being free, seems to break this suspicion) - I just looked at the downloads section of the Xandros website and I would have to pay for anything other than an evaluation copy.

When it boots, it finds all the other drives and partitions on the PC and makes all the files on them, whether Linux, Windows, or DOS, available with the file manager.

Nice. You can of course do that, or something very similar, manually with a little effort but a casual user probably doesn't want to have to learn how to do that, and even experienced users appreciate a little automation.

Xandros also has a thing called CROSSOVER which runs all the windows software I tried on it. I dont much care to do that cause it takes a few minutes to load the windows emulator. But that mite not be a problem with the newer faster systems.

Yeah, I've used Wine (which I believe stands for "Wine is not an emulator"), upon which Crossover is based (Wine is free). I originally had Wine configured so that it ran Internet Explorer so that I could check in the dominant browser the html that I write - my default browser is Firefox. I was also able to run Windows Media Player through Wine. Unfortunately my computer's motherboard died and I had to reinstall everything on a new one (well, a secondhand one - thanks Kev!) and I haven't managed to set up Wine as sturdily as I originally had it - now IE pops up as an empty window. Wine seems to be kind of hit-and-miss software and I imagine that Crossover is a lot more stable.

Xandros is based on Corel's debian distro; some of us remember Corel as producing very nice apps and interfaces, and Xandros inherited that code and tradition.

Good to hear.

[brokenhead]

daybrown:

Xandros is based on Corel's debian distro; some of us remember Corel as producing very nice apps and interfaces, and Xandros inherited that code and tradition.

I tried Xandros a ways back but it didn't see my wireless network card. I think that kernel 2.6 and later was compiled with a generic driver for wireless LANS. Ubuntu has it. Mandiriva has it, too, but it couldn't see my printer no matter what I tried. So it's easier and cheaper to keep trying out distros than it is to buy new peripherals, especially since most distros offer live CDs so you can test drive first. Ubuntu is also based on debian.

Hey, d.b., have you ever tried Reatogo? It is a live Windows XP CD that you make yourself using your own XP install. MS doesn't like it, needless to say. But you are legally allowed to make one copy of every Windows system file you purchased with your Windows OS. By the time you are done setting up your copy of Reatogo, you have a CD that any PC can boot to, and up comes a fully functional, if a bit stripped-down, copy of XP with any apps you choose to include and that you can get to fit on the CD. You can use it like you would any XP PC, and the hard-drive of the host PC is never touched. Unless, of course, you want to: your live CD can access any file at all on the host PC. Reatogo is very useful for running diagnostics with graphical interfaces. You can, say, clean the host PC of any virus or spyware if you have included an AV program and anti-spyware program on your live CD. It gives you a sense of power over Microsoft.

The bad news is Vista - I don't think there will be a Reatogo made from a Vista setup. The good news is that Vista is such bad news, people seem to be avoiding it and waiting for Micosoft's next effort.

[daybrown]

No, I've never had windows on my own desktop. Only used dos, OS/2, and Linux distros. Since I have a lotta old drives around- I get dead PCs brought in from time to time, the ability of Xandros to see what is on the drive no matter what it is, is an important perk. I dunno why, its the only distro I've seen which can do this. Yes, if you know how, you can "mount" any drive, but then you have to do that every time the drive has a different file system.

Right now, I'm running Xandros on a new 2.7ghz motherboard. I frankly dont see that its that's much faster. But the MEPIS Linux drive I was using wont boot on it, even tho it runs just fine on another mthbd that cranks at 997 mhz.

As noted, Xandros mite not find some of your hardware; I have a nice scsi card it cant deal with. But distros are so cheap you'll always find some that'll work with whatever you have. I have a couple motherboards waiting new cpus, that wont run Linux, but as they are, will still run dos.

Part of the problem the state plan for surveillance is that the standards are just not that standard. There will always be combinations of old and new hardware and old and new software to communicate with that they didnt think of. Bureaucrats are not, after all, that creative.

[brokenhead]

Bureaucrats are not, after all, that creative.

If you had said this just a few days ago, I'd've nominated it for Quote of the Year!

[hsandman]

Daybrown,

The only alternative is to get out your old 56k dialup modem and use the BBS software to use the plain old telephone system to communicate with whoever you find agreeable and useful. Even if Big Brother put a tap on your line, all he'd hear is meaningless white noise.

I have seen you write this before, I think you are confused on this issue.
The clicks and whistles that you hear coming out of the 56k modem is information (text, image etc) converted in to a analog signal (kind of like English translated in to a Japanese). Incomprehensible to person, but very comprehensible to another modem (another Japanese). You can record those whistles and clicks on a tape recorder and then play it back to a modem latter and you will have original message/information.

I am sure the big bro can afford a $10 modem. Echelon has been translating all the fax messages in the world since way back when = same deal ;-)

[daybrown]

There is an inversion transformer in every telephone and 56k modem Hsandman. What it does, is cancels out the sound coming from your mic so that you only hear what's coming from the other end.

But a phone signal has only two wires, operating at 'full duplex', and only your end knows what you said, and only the other end knows what it put on the line. The tap hears both sides at once. If normal voice, no biggie, anyone can tell by the timbre of the voice who says what.

But all 56k dialup modems sound egzactly alike. The tap cant tell which sound is coming from which end. What it hears is both sets of very white noise at once with no way to sort that out.

To try to be more clear, spoze you and the remote each had a 440hz tuning fork. When played to the mic, a tap could not tell which fork was making the tone. But if you damp your end you know that, and you'll still hear the other end, and vice versus. So long as one end or the other is making the 440, that's all the tap hears- a continuous tone. but if you damped and then played your in an on/off morse code fashion, the other end would hear that, and you'd hear a morse code from that end because your phone's speaker does not play the sound of your voice, or anything else from your end.

[hsandman]

Daybrown, I see what you are saying, and maybe it would be true, if the signals were random and did not follow strict protocols established by modem handshake, and big bro had no access to your local phone company exchange (mamma bell for you I guess :P )


"SMPA is a real-time, passive and listening-only modem call monitoring tool. SMPA works bysimultaneously monitoring and analyzing the signals from both modems, and displaying the relevanttime-stamped information all in real-time. Test access is through DS1-level (T1 or E1) monitoringmode. Depending on platforms, a single SMPA can analyze one to many modem calls at the sametime" (Link)


A interceptor can distinguish between the two modems as you can see from the article from the link, even if you have shortwave radio hooked up to the modems. If it was so easy, no one would bother with encryption? Hmm, but I guess i don't have the expertise to say for sure. :-/ Looking in to this.

Edit: ok, with the 440 hz forks.. let's simplify: 2 people = identical japanese twins (A and B)
started to sing at same time on a phone line, how would you know who is singing what?

You are saying that this is the case bellow?

( signal coming from A ->
------------------------------->2 mixed signals (aka cacophany)-> |me intercepting| )
( signal coming from B ->


In reality I think that one signal is coming in from one end, and the other is coming from the other. You don't realy need to have inversion transformer to identify and separate the messages if you understand the language, it's all about the location in time/space.

( signal coming from A ->|me intercepting both at a phone company|<- signal coming from B )



Same with radio interception. That is the reason you need encryption. (aka jibberish)

cacophany is not a security solution :-S

Edit2: Addendum-

The 2 identical Japanese twins (modems) are actually not even singing at the same time random songs they are engaged in polite conversations with each other albeit in a incomprehensible language and at speeds that are to human ear like one continuous white noise, but to another 3d Japanese (modem) it is a conversation where both speakers have exactly(?) the same voice.

[daybrown]

Another problem- during the handshake, each modem evaluates the noise level, which the tap cannot do; it cannot know what is on each end of each local loop. The character of the noise determines the form of the signal.

Even if they had the full cooperation of the telephone company, once the signal gets beyond the local loop it is multiplexed, and parts of the signal are farmed off to different channels at different times depending on the available bandwidth. It aint like trying to tap into a single line any more. I've seen a zen master splicing cable; all 128 pairs or maybe it was 512, each pair twisted, each with a unique color pattern on the casing. It aint a Gordian knot you can just cut.

Carnivore works on the Internet because each data packet has a fixed length with a destination and source ID. But they dont have that with the POTS system. The switching of channels is ongoing, automatic, and no matter which point you tap into it wont be used for long. Each local loop has certain resonances, just as you'd expect talking to someone with tin cans and string. You know it sounds different, and will depending on how tight the string is, and how long it is. This affects the shape of a sin wave, making the leading or trailing edge steeper or flatter. The modems pay attention to this phase angle and adjust for it. The tap cant know what the phase angles are.

And these distorted signals on the local loop are then multiplexed at the area terminals for the feed onto the backbone. Nobody at any point trying to monitor the multiplexed signals could tell what the phase angle should be either.

Not that the "intelligence agencies" could not be sold some bullshit to make them think they can get a handle on it. As it is, all the work is going on on the internet, and everyone is ignoring POTS now that so many perps have cell phones. With cell phones there are different receive and transmit frequencies so that a 'tap' can always tell who is saying what to who.

Another option of course, is to go wireless yourself. hook up a pc modem to a phone patch which is hooked up to a radio transmitter/receiver. Use the PCs on each end to agree on a set of frequencies to use, and use this spread spectrum to change frequencies rapidly. By the time a CIA scanner could lock onto a signal, the PC has changed the frequency, and all it has is dead air.

[Tomas]

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Seven Steps to a Homeland Security College Campus

College campuses join the Homeland Security state

The Department of Homeland Security has launched its own curriculum under its Office of University Programs (OUP), intended, it says, to "foster a homeland security culture within the academic community."

http://alternet.org/story/73504


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[hsandman]

College campuses join the Homeland Security state

The Department of Homeland Security has launched its own curriculum under its Office of University Programs (OUP), intended, it says, to "foster a homeland security culture within the academic community."

http://alternet.org/story/73504

Interesting...

In November 2006, the Taser infamously broke into the news on campus when a student at the University of Florida, questioning Senator John Kerry,harshly was dragged off, Tased, and subdued by campus police.


At more than a dozen universities and colleges, police officers now double as full-time FBI agents and, according to the Campus Law Enforcement Journal, serve on many of the nation's 100 Joint Terrorism Task Forces. These dual-purpose officer-agents have knocked on student activists' doors from North Carolina State to the University of Colorado

Administrators often do it for them, setting up "free speech zones,"



Many campus police departments are morphing into heavily armed garrisons.
75% of universities now arm their police, according to the Justice Department.

Equipped with a wide array of weaponry from Taser stun guns and pepper guns to shotguns and semiautomatic rifles. Many of the guns being purchased were previously in the province of military units and SWAT teams.

Last year, protests were typically forced into "free assembly areas" at the University of Central Florida and Clemson University; while students at Hampton and Pace Universities faced expulsion for handing out antiwar flyers, aka "unauthorized materials."

Lock-and-load policies that began in the 1990s under the rubric of "the war on crime" only escalated with the President's Global War on Terror. Each school shooting -- most recently the massacre at Virginia Tech -- just adds fuel to the armament flames.

<Cocaine Import Agency sponsor mind control programs. ;-)> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKULTRA