University Professor Chastised For Using Tor 623
Irongeek_ADC writes with a first-person account from the The Chronicle of Higher Education by a university professor who was asked to stop using Tor. University IT and campus security staffers came knocking on Paul Cesarini's door asking why he was using the anonymizing network. They requested that he stop and also that he not teach his students about it. The visitors said it was likely against university policy (a policy they probably were not aware that Cesarini had helped to draft). The professor seems genuinely to appreciate the problems that a campus IT department faces; but in the end he took a stand for academic freedom.
Bravo (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Bravo (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Bravo (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Bravo (Score:5, Insightful)
I applaud his efforts. And I chose not to work in academia so it's my responsibility that he has privileges that I do not.
Re:Bravo (Score:4, Insightful)
That's why the Government should be providing health insurance, and limiting the price of medication, like in every other first-world country.
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Re:Bravo (Score:5, Insightful)
These are fairly well established facts (I'm not going to dig up references now, but for example, there was a Nature article last year on how Brits live longer than Americans -- even if you account for any conceivable cultural/economical/whatever difference, and Brits have a lower life expectancy than other European countries. That should get you started). You can also easily look up medical expenditure per capita.
Whether you want universal healthcare should mainly be a political question: it does, undeniably, take away freedom (you're going to be taxed and you don't have a very direct say on how that money gets spent --- you're still free to go to any doctor you want if you're willing to pay more for it).
In many countries, people think it's worth the trade-off.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The other problem is that the US market is currently subsidizing drug and equipment development (even in other countries). If you make the US
Re:Bravo (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't want to talk past each other with statistics, because that's been done to death, and frankly neither side ever seems to trounce the other. All I know is that I keep seeing wealthy Canadians and even Europeans coming to the States for their elective procedures. You can live a long time and still be miserable because you can't get the knee surgery that you need.
You're right, that's indeed one of the trade-offs. Although on average people do get more and easier access to decent healthcare, that doesn't mean that specific cases are better off -- quite the opposite for some people. If you have a rare disease, you might be out of luck.
The other problem is that the US market is currently subsidizing drug and equipment development (even in other countries). If you make the US market like France or Germany, either everyone's costs will rise or the rate of drug/device/procedure development will slow. It's not rocket science - if money flow goes down, the research dollars will flow elsewhere.
I don't see how this is an argument against universal healthare in the US. If anything, it would force more equitable prices. There's still a lot of money to be made on sick and unhealthy people, no matter who pays.
There is the other issue, too. The model countries for socialized health care are Germany and France. These countries have horrible economic problems as a result of their social spending. I don't like the thought of 50% unemployment for those under 25. The last thing we need is more government spending.
That argument keeps coming up, but people fail to realize that Germany had jumped in population but not in GDP when it unified; East Germany (1/3 of current Germany) really was bankrupt. Other countries are doing just fine with their socialized care (the Netherlands, Sweden, etc.). The UK (with its uber-socialized NHS) is doing fine, but it's true that France has been a basket-case for quite a while.
I do support reform, however. The current system is not great. Specifically, our "universal health care" is the emergency room. We need to offer free or cheap clinics that will keep people out of the very expensive emergency rooms. I have no problem with government spending or social programs, but I believe that they should have as small a scope as is possible while still attacking the problem. Government is inefficient (by design) and usually inept (not by design, but in practice).
I was in for quite a shock when I had an accident and ended up in an emergency room for the first time in the US. Those places really epitomize the failure of a system where free markets collide with basic ethics (like not turning away people without insurance).
Another shock upon coming here was the inefficiency of government: bureaucracy and slowness are more like what I'd seen in communist countries than like what I've experienced in Northwestern Europe. I think it has to do with the fact that working for government in the US has such low status and that many government agencies are chronically underfunded.
You get what you pay for, also in government :-)
Re:Bravo (Score:4, Insightful)
Or the drug companies will simply make less money.
Except that there's nowhere else for the drug companies to spend their money. Big Pharma is probably the most lucrative commercial R&D area since forever. Even with significantly lower prices, the companies would still be very profitable. They're not stupid, and not likely to back out of a good deal just because an obscenely good deal is no longer an option.
Re:Bravo (Score:4, Insightful)
1. The US is both population wise and land wise considerably larger- at last estimate over 300 million people. This means the logistical and administrative demands of any such system would be orders of magnitude larger than anything Germany (82m ppl), England (60m ppl), or Sweden (9m ppl) have thus making the program harder to manage and much more expensive.
2. Germany, England and Sweden are central government countries. They have a strong national government with mutiple parties working in coalitions and the Prime Minister is selected from this. This allows for things to work "all in one direction". However, the US is fragmented with a weakened federal government (though stronger over the last 50 years) and many fragmented states with no single direction or goal- and often opposit goals. This would make it both politically and socially difficult to implement a single Universal Heathcare without it being very regonal, complex, and beholden to local politics thus negating many of the advantages of "national heathcare".
3. The US has no National will. It is far easier to geta majority of 80, 60 or especially 9 million people to have a single set of goals or objectives. Especially when that social structure has been in existance for over a thousand years, they all speak the same language and they share common cultural and social norms. The US is to use a cliche a melting pot only 200 years old- getting five random people in a room that have anything in common is nearly impossible in a big city. Trying to find commonality beyond Nation & Citizenship for 300 million in this country is pipe dream.
Antoher issue is Univeral Healthcare does not solve the litigation issue in this country, but that is a whole nother topic.
So, that said what do I think the solution is? Univeral Healthcare laws. Too many of our basic healthcare laws are done state by state thus making it an administrative and paperwork nightmare. Meeting the laws in each state, region and area drive the cost of Healthcare and Insurance up. We need to allow people to pool their insurance- without requiring the involvment of their employer, and we need to standardize the laws across the nation thus lowering the adminstrative and legal cost for both insurers and providers. Once this is done the free market competition in insurance will help drive down cost as each insurer demands lower prices for drugs, medical equipment, and even procedures.
My 2 cents
Re:Bravo (Score:5, Insightful)
Nice Straw Man (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You know, health care is pretty goddamn essential.
In good faith or otherwise, it is in the public interest for people to have basic health care. The fewer sick people there are, the less likely you are to contract something. Furthermore, his point of view is predicated on the false assumption that if he doesn't contribute to public health care through taxes, that he won't end up paying anyway through insure
Re:Nice Straw Man (Score:4, Insightful)
Welfare and unemployment is a wonderful thing to give to people in need. It is a horrible and corrosive thing to give to people too tho and can absolutely destroy them. Any drive they may have had to create, to learn, to thrive is instead destroyed and they just get by.
It finally got bad enough here that a democratic president ended it for the most part.
The fact that large numbers of people were on welfare and had no intention of getting off it is just embedded in any discussion about the subject now.
It can be really heartless to not help someone who is permanently disabled. When you do tho, you get 4 other people pretending to be permanently disabled (hell they may even believe it themselves). You'd have people "too sick to work" out doing yardwork, gardening, mowing, etc. Bit of a travesty.
In the end- if you want to help people without money- give them yours. That's what I do-- habitat humanity, the food bank, and red cross of the tsunami. But it's MY money to do that with.
Re:Nice Straw Man (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Nice Straw Man (Score:5, Insightful)
peeve: "vast" majority (Score:5, Insightful)
This may sound like mere linguistic pedantry, but it really isn't -- this usage both feeds, and is part of, the trend toward polarization and "extremification" (yes, afaik, I just made up that word) of political discourse. When you claim not just a majority but a vast majority, you're doing more than just adding emphasis: you're actively marginalizing the other side (by implying that they're not just a minority but a tiny, insignificant minority).
And it's self-escalating: it creates a sort of "linguistic arms race", where "everyone else does it", so people feel compelled to tack on the "vast", lest it sound like their side is only a mere "majority". But that just leads to linguistic inflation: when (almost) everyone says "vast", it loses its meaning, sending everyone scrambling to find ever-more-emphatic (and more insulting) modifiers, like "overwhelming".
It may seem to make your argument sound a bit stronger, but the constant minor insults don't help us get anywhere closer to building true consenus. After all, wouldn't the overwhelming majority prefer to see a political arena with more true communication and less poo-flinging?
Re:Nice Straw Man (Score:5, Insightful)
Most illnesses of this sort, including the black plague; could have been stopped if appropriate care were provided BEFORE the pandemic was a pandemic. Bum A slips off a ship carrying the new plague. He feels sick but can't afford healthcare and doubts he'll receive the treatment he needs if he shows up at the ER claiming a heart attack again. So he hangs out with other bums on the street. They in turn ask you for change outside the subway. 48hrs later thousands of people are infected and starting to feel sick. But they don't go to the doctor either. After all, you only go to the doctor if you are really sick in this country because it is expensive. So they wait and thousands more contract the illness. Some of the first were on their way to the airport so they spread it from city to city. And so on and so forth it goes from there. With free healthcare you go to the doctor when you feel sick and everytime you feel sick. The doctor doesn't prescribe anti-biotics if you have a cold because he no longer feels like he has to do something to justify your $75. Anti-biotics remain effective and plagues have a much higher probability of being caught in the first place.
Oh yeah. Plus nobody dies sick, alone, and unable to chew their food because you are rich, cheap, and have principles. Healthcare (including the sub-aspects like Dental, Vision, etc) is a basic fundemental human need. This is the wealthiest nation in the world; this nation is so wealthy that our definition of lower income bracket has a lifestyle that exceeds the wealthy of other nations in many respects. It is just fucking pathetic that a wealthy nation like this can't afford to provide the essentials to its citizens.
It might hurt your work ethic but the secret is that working hard does NOT bring success or a guarantee of making your way in life. The only ones who claim that are the ones that worked hard and succeeded.
Re:Bravo (Score:4, Insightful)
It is however quite possible to make each person responsible for paying the cost his own health insurance, whether or not one thinks this is a good idea. This type of condescending and simplistic rhetoric merely cheapens legitimate arguments for government-sponsored health insurance.
Re:Bravo (Score:5, Insightful)
What I was saying is that I face large bills if I lose my insurance so I do not feel free to "fight the man".
Answering your question however:
1) Every american should be able to pay the negotiated rate for items. If all blue cross pays the hospital is $1,375 for a gall bladder operation- why should an uninsured person have to pay $18,325 for the same exact operation? If you can show that the hospital is charging anyone a certain price, you should be able to pay that same price for the same service.
2) Every american should have basic (and I do mean *BASIC*) health care covered socially. This includes random things like broken legs and car wreck injuries and not things like chemo therapy (and I say that as a cancer survivor). The larger the pool, the lower the costs. Right now, cherry picking is getting so extreme that you can't get insurance unless you are well. If I were grand high poohbah, I would set this at $1,000 * the minimum wage with a 20% co-pay but 0% on annual physicals. Everything over $1,000 would be your cost. If you used no benefits except the free physicals, I'd give you back 5% ($350) as a tax credit.
Why I say this is that we are competing against countries where this is true and it puts our companies at a competative disadvantage.
Re:Bravo (Score:4, Informative)
-nB
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Re:Bravo (Score:5, Interesting)
However, the original poster lives (I assume) in a place where capitalism is revered, including in health care. It's not how I'd want to live, and what you said in your post is an excellent summary of why.
Re:Bravo (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Bravo (Score:5, Interesting)
Here's the deal-- you cannot have unlimited medical coverage.
Period.
1) there are too many diseases that can be cured IF you have unlimited resources... well really about $2,000,000 to $10,000,000 or so. The point is- we can't afford to cure everyone's $350,000 bypass surgery so we let people pay for it themselves or die. You do it in canada too- you just do it via rationing and delays instead of via money. "Sure you can get your surgery-- in 17 months" vs "Sure you can get your surgery- for $350,000".
2) If we could get the legal $ystem out of it, the costs would be much lower but there would be more malpractice. We currently say "no mistakes and no malpractice" but that decision probably doubles or triples every thing we do medically. Which in some cases means that the procedure that could be done cheaply- is now too expensive.
3) Even in socialist countries- you are paying. Sure- you may rip off the doctors (with a resulting shortage of doctors and hence long wait periods) but the drug company executives are still flying around in jets and vacationing in maui.
So the point is not curing every illness known regardless of price- but setting a reasonable amount of tax dollars aside to cover a reasonable amount of medical expenses for the most people possible. No open heart surgery for 98 year olds on the tax dollar but if they want to pay for it themselves- okay. Yes to vaccinations for everyone and broken limbs (tho perhaps a limit on the number of times to reign in the reckless types).
Re:Bravo (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, there is no absolute reason carved on a stone somewhere. Likewise, why should life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness be rights? Why should you have a right to physical property? Why should you have a right to move as you please, go where you want, under your own free will? In many times and places, people didn't have these rights. Hell, some people don't have them now. Therefore, they are not universal, but only what we agree upon. These "rights" are part of a social contract. I enumerate health care among them.
Re:Bravo (Score:4, Insightful)
And your point is??? Police officers, judges, soldiers also require training and financing. Why don't we leave their services to the free market?
Face it --- You have no good argument. As a society, what we choose to finance through taxes and what we choose to finance directly from our own pocketbook is COMPLETELY arbitrary. However, some people, such as yourself apparently, value money above human life. That speaks volumes about your character.
Re:Bravo (Score:4, Informative)
Agreed!
" If you need a bypass operation you're not going to die on the waiting list because it's too expensive to do it."
To be fair, people do sometimes die on the waiting lists. Its tragic when it occurs, and often makes the national news. Its certainly something that a lot of effort is spent on preventing, and that effort is largely successful. In the vast majority of cases people on long waiting lists are generally in pretty stable condition. And that is part of the "problem", deteriorating cases are prioritized over stable cases -- so if you are stable it can take a long time to reach the front of line, leading to the unbelievable long waiting lists you read about.
For a good analagy consider a combat medic performing triage - patients that are deemed stable may have to wait hours or days to get patched up while people in critical/deteriorating condition are processed immediately. If people are continually coming in off the field, the stable patients just get pushed back further, and are only finally tended to during lulls, or if their condition deteriorates. Its a terrible thing to have to go through, but it is the fairest and most just approach in the situation.
Thus the main problem with the waiting lists in Canada isn't that you are likely to die while you wait, but rather that you have to deal with the condition (and associated pain and inconvenience) WHILE you wait, and that is admittedly terribly terribly frustrating, especially if its disabling in any manner.
But despite the waiting lists and issues associated with them, I suspect that Canada's health care is more effective than the US's is, when measured in terms of how many people live vs die due to availability of care. (Whether its waiting "too long" in Canada, or not being able to afford care in the States.) For the simple reason that a national-scale system of triage seems far more effective at saving the largest number of people vs hoping that only people who can afford care will need it. (the only way the US system could reliably care for more patients.)
Naturally there is pressure from the well-to-do to desire to 'queue-jump' by spending some of that money to avoid time spent in pain. Currently that is disallowed, and that is controversial. I don't have a problem with the rich spending money to get out pain faster; I have a problem with the fact that the more they are allowed to queue jump, the longer the poor have to wait.
The argument that if they queue jump to a 2nd tier in a two-tier system so the poor actually get served faster if the rich can 'pay to get out of the way' doesn't hold water for the simple reason that supply is relatively inelastic. I.e. the doctors and nurses that will staff that 2nd tier are going to come from the first tier. So the poor will have to wait longer. Worse, the more profitable tier will be more attractive, and will be where you find the 'best and brightest', further disadvantaging the poor.
Because of our proximity to the US we essentially have the two-tier system NOW, and the problems with it are apparent.
Wealthy Canadians willing to pay go to the states to "queue jump", and Canada loses doctors and nurses to the states due to the greater earnings potential. I think Canada's socialized medical system suffers overall as a result.
Re:Bravo (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, the huge money sink isn't the $350,000 one-time bypass surgery, at least not for people who can get back to work. The biggest money sink is treatments of chronic conditions, things like MS or mental disorders where the patient isn't going to recover but is going to live on and needs medical care for decades on end. I recently read about a girl in my country, 15yo who killed her mother and also got her own child, they have 8 nurses on her 24x7. If we wanted to save money, we'd put her in a padded room and the kid in foster care.
However, there are priority queues to get otherwise healthy, working (read: tax-paying) citizens back to work. A rather young relative of mine needed a hip surgery - rushed to the head of the line, then retraining. Same with a neighbor in his 50s, if not quite as expendient. That 80yo that's probably going to have a hard time recovering from major surgery? Well, if we get around to it. And in the final stages of life, there are limits to what they'll do. The difference is that we're trying to give everyone a good run - that 30yo isn't going to die while the 90yo millionaire lives on for another year if we can help it. We do have private clinics here too, if you can afford it though.
2) If we could get the legal $ystem out of it, the costs would be much lower but there would be more malpractice. We currently say "no mistakes and no malpractice" but that decision probably doubles or triples every thing we do medically. Which in some cases means that the procedure that could be done cheaply- is now too expensive.
I'm not sure I follow you because there's accepted medical protocol and there's not accepted protocol, aka malpractise. While we don't have your multi-million dollar lawsuits (though we of course pay damages to people that have been mistreated) we do have medical review boards which can do everything from give you a mild criticism to having your license revoked, which is basicly the end of your medical career. You certainly see far less unserious fly by night clinics here than you do in the US.
3) Even in socialist countries- you are paying. Sure- you may rip off the doctors (with a resulting shortage of doctors and hence long wait periods) but the drug company executives are still flying around in jets and vacationing in maui.
They pretty much hate us. One you don't get to bribe the doctors to prescribe their brand of medicine, second as a matter of public policy doctors must prescribe cheaper knock-off drugs if they work on the patient without any ill effects. If they're flying around in jets and vacationing in Maui, it's not because of us. As for shortage of doctors - not really. The biggest issue with doctors is that they're educated in big cities, while they're needed way out in the countryside where well - most of these urban doctors don't want to live. We're not above laws of supply and demand when it comes to getting people to educate themselves to doctors.
Yes to vaccinations for everyone and broken limbs (tho perhaps a limit on the number of times to reign in the reckless types).
And then you'll bring back the courts who'll decide on reckless etc., we cover everyone even if you're a mountain climber, basejumper or whatever else stupid thing you were doing. Turns out that those kind of people go absolutely crazy from limping around on crutches a few weeks, not to mention the pain and aches so there's actually no problem at all. People don't just set off down a double black diamond slope thinking "who cares if I beat myself half to death, the healthcare will cover it".
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Every operation is different, and often performed by specialist surgeons. Each one involves exactly the same amount of paperwor
Re:Bravo (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm truly sorry if my comment offended anybody. But when I hear some bright boy who's probably still dodging his college loans say that he hates having to "pay for all the uninsured waifs" it makes me so angry that my usually calm demeanor abandons me. Knowing that smug pricks like that actually think that because their uncle got them a job doing tech support at an insurance company that they're suddenly better than some laid-off factory worker with three kids really puts a snag in my merkin. This country is so frigging wealthy that a one-bedroom condo on Manhattan now averages about a million bucks, and it's still a seller's market. You'd think the least we could do is work out something so that everybody here can have their kids' tonsils taken out (do they still do that?) or get decent care for their elderly parents without having it destroy them economically.
I let it get to me sometimes, and it makes me lose my cool. I start making typos and going through keyboards every other week. Then when I lay my head down at night I get headaches from grinding my teeth. It's why my wife doesn't let me listen to talk radio any more. And hearing about a half-dozen helicopters in two weeks, full of 20 year-olds who should be listening to bad rock music and getting laid, going down half a world away in a war that every single military expert now says was a loser from the beginning (see today's National Intelligence Estimate), can make me downright unpleasant.
So I'm sorry. Next time some arrogant c-sucker wants to complain about all those icky poor people who are getting in the way of his new 3-series, I'll go walk the dog instead of telling him what I think. There are other people around here who do it better anyway.
Re:Bravo (Score:5, Interesting)
I mean, most people are not usually sick. And I'm sick of people pointing to Canada or Britain and saying: "see, universal coverage doesn't work". We're the USA, goddammit, and we can spit farther, screw longer and piss farther than any other country on the planet, so you'd think we could figure this thing out so we don't have to have kids going without being able to see a doctor when they get sick. The fact that we have such a high infant mortality rate should cause every one of us to be ashamed. Once and for all, can we just build a good health-care system for every American and maybe put gay marriage, protecting the children from video games, and flag-burning amendments on the back burner for just a little while?
Re:Bravo (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Bravo (Score:5, Insightful)
This is not necessarily true. I've actually put myself into a position where I was SURE I'd be fired for refusing to go along with a company policy that I felt to be morally (and ethically) wrong. When you have righteousness on your side you'd be amazed at what can actually happen. (I wasn't fired, and I didn't follow policy).
I'm not saying you're lying or anything, because I don't know your situation. But I do know how scary it is to put yourself out there like that, and I know that it's a lot easier to say "Ohh pfft, he's in academia so he can get away with that... I could never do that." But really that's nothing more than an excuse.
There's plenty of situations where someone in the private sector could get away with a lot more than someone in academia, and vice versa. Making an insinuation that somehow life is easier in academia is not only wrong, but it's also a little insulting to what he decided to put himself through.
I'm not suggesting that you start using Tor even if it's against company policy (that would be something entirely different than what he did), but executing your basic rights as an individual will not result in instant unemployment.
Stand up for what you believe in! If it gets your fired, you're working in the wrong place. If you worked somewhere that wasn't going to immediately fire you for doing something you feel to be just, then maybe your blood pressure wouldn't be so high!
And yet... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Bravo (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Bravo (Score:4, Insightful)
This incident illustrates the precise reason tenure exists.
Re:Bravo (Score:5, Informative)
Just to expand on that (Score:4, Insightful)
"Those countries"? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Bravo (Score:5, Insightful)
Government funding (Score:5, Insightful)
Oil, farming, auto (roads), space (NASA), rail (AMTRAK), the defense industry, telecom, utilities,
Re:Bravo (Score:5, Interesting)
Its about academic freedom, and freedom of inquery.
Realise I worked in IT at a major university. I was there when we decided to impliment virus scanning, not even spam filtering (I was there for that too) but just virus scanning.
It was debated because well... what if someone had a legitimate acedemic need to recieve viruses in email?
Seriously! We gave unfettered internet access. Porn? Well... guess what... someone may be doing acedemic research into porn and needs to access porn sites. These are legitimate debates that come up in that environment because... they take the persuit of intellectual inquery as serious buisness... because it IS their buisness.
No firewalls, no filtering... unfettered access, because if someone needs it, they need it.
-Steve
Re:Bravo (Score:4, Insightful)
> research. He got a stern warning from the IT department, and, in return, the IT department got a
> stern warning from the Provost's office about disturbing researchers.
And well they should!
As someone who worked in University IT, we were often reminded of where we worked and what our purposes was. I think it was a good thing. IT exists to provide infrastructure for things to be done, not for its own ends.
Restricting porn in your house or in your buisness is one thing, but a university exists to promote knowledge and discover new knowledge. These sorts of restrictions and policing run directly against the very mission of the institution.
I think people tend to forget that there are reasons to block porn. Parents block porn in a misguided attempt to protect their children from some imagined harm (which is a very common thing for parents to do). Or to protect a company from potential legal liability from overly sensative workers. (I mean really... it has nothing to do with productivity. There are plenty of ways to be unproductive, thats like rotating the tires to see if it fixes that loud exhaust sound) .
A university has a completly different mission. Its good to see that the school has an intelligent provost.
-Steve
Re:Bravo (Score:5, Insightful)
Fuck you.
I have had tor installed for many moons now, and have a severe reaction to child porn (or any type of sexual abuse, especially of children) due to the fact that an overwhelming majority of women I've gotten close enough to to talk about such things have been molested at some point in their life.
How about people who use it just because the country they are in has an abusive civil rights regime, or because they don't trust their ISP to keep their browsing habits secret? (Maybe they REALLY like the old cartoon Gem and are embarrassed about it) Maybe, just maybe, the person thinks that they are under surveillance for legal activities (like planning anti-war demonstrations).
Forget all that, the only thing you need know about it is that it's none of your fucking business what these people are doing. The old "they wouldn't care if they aren't doing anything wrong" bit is so played out, so proven stupid, and so indicative of 'fucktardation' that if you hadn't sent a damn shiver down my spine by calling me a supporter of child porn I'd have completely ignored you.
I couldn't though. Idiots are only dangerous when allowed to say such misinformed and ignorant things and are not called on it.
P.S.
Fuck you once more for implying that I'm some type of child molester (even a passive one) you freedom hating punk.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
It's Jem. And she is outrageous.
(Oh no -- maybe I should have used Tor to submit this comment?!)
Re:Bravo (Score:4, Insightful)
Furthermore, while sexual exploitation (especially involving children) is terrible, awful, and shouldn't be condoned by any civilised society it is not the Greatest Evil In The World.
Imagine if a law was passed that said all houses must have glass walls and no curtains, because we want to find child molestors. You shouldn't mind if you've nothing to hide, right?
If we start unravelling our society to catch the tiny minority of assholes - throwing away all the great things that our ancestors have faught for over the centuries - then we've wasted all that effort, and we _still_ wouldn't stop child porn.
I wish those dickheads would get a sense of perspective!
Re:Bravo (Score:5, Insightful)
Or even better, everyone in the U.S. who has in any way paid for any road construction, well they've supported every criminal who tried to get away by car.
C'mon now, who's next in line for trying to tell me that the desire of privacy is indicative of criminal behavior.
Re:Bravo (Score:5, Interesting)
First: please stop using Tor on our network. Not very objectionable, they do own it and can request that sort of thing. Kind of like saying "please don't seed torrents of 20 Linux CD images on our network."
Second: please do not tell your class about Tor even though you believe it is relevant to what they are learning about. This is highly objectionable, and undermines the purpose of the university as a place for free exchange of ideas. Even assuming the university is private and can tell him to do this, they shouldn't tell him to do this. It makes them a worse university. Can do and should do are different questions.
ill prepared? (Score:5, Insightful)
Could they not be bothered with actually checking the policy since they were there to enforce it?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:ill prepared? (Score:5, Insightful)
In fact, they brought a printout of the policy to the meeting with the professor. The reason they weren't sure is that when the policy was written, Tor didn't exist yet. It might violate the policy, but they hadn't faced this kind of thing before, so they weren't certain.
Re:ill prepared? (Score:5, Insightful)
1) The policy may be so vague, as written, so as to make it unclear whether Tor is legitimate or not. For instance, it could simply have a blanket prohibition of doing things that are detrimental to the network, but not specify exactly what's prohibited and allowed. This is fairly common in most AUPs that I've read, particularly academic ones; rather than attempting to specifically outline what you can't do, they basically say "anything that's bad, don't do it." (Usually in a more verbose fashion, but that's the general idea.) Sometimes they're clear about who decides what is 'bad,' other times less so. It all depends on how bright a person wrote the policy.
2) The policy, as written, may actually prohibit Tor, but the faculty member, who said he was part of the committee that wrote the policy, believes that owing to the age of the policy and his knowledge of the writers intentions, that it was never intended to prohibit something like Tor. Thus, his usage, while technically in violation, he believes is OK because -- to put it bluntly -- he knows what behaviors the policy was supposed to prohibit better than the sysadmin does. (This seems like it could be a dangerous position for him to take, but I guess if you've got tenure, you might as well use it.)
Campus Intelligence Agency... (Score:3, Interesting)
_Detectives_ of the campus police force. What's next? Agents of the Campus Intelligence Agency?
the Department of Campus Security?
This is really ridiculous.
Re:Campus Intelligence Agency... (Score:4, Insightful)
Many campuses have their own PD and FD. Why?
10,000 staff.
25,000 students.
A couple square miles
It's basically a small, densely populated town...only with higher rates of rape, assault, drug use, theft, and copyright infringement.
You know, the big 5
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Why not? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, detectives. Note that he's talking about "police," not "security guards." Large enough campuses can benefit from having a focused police force. These aren't thugs in the employ of the university, these are just a real police just like the city-wide force, they just have a more specialized focus. They have the same powers and restrictions. As such it's only logical that they would have detectives, just like the city-wide force. By being specialized they c
question (Score:5, Interesting)
How does Tor enable those things, and how would more people using Tor make those things worse than they already are?
Re:question (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Bowling Green State University (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Bowling Green State University (Score:5, Insightful)
Since these are stored in university archives, and not checked, new graduate studies are (more or less) required by the state to sign loyalty oaths.
But... (Score:3, Funny)
Overblown.
Re:But... (Score:5, Insightful)
Common sense would dictate that the detectives, doing their jobs and trying to investigate an online scam, ask the professor some questions to determine if he was involved. But instead they asked him to stop doing something legal, tried to get him to NOT share something with his students, and used some vague provisions of an IT policy to back it up. This is a direct attack on academic freedom - 'Thou shalt not tell your students about this' and even worse, telling him not to use Tor himself - obviously because they couldn't track what he was doing.
Overblown? Hardly - we are losing our rights bit by bit by bit and people who think something like this is 'overblown' are part of the reason. By the time you all realize you've lost most of your rights it'll be too late.
half reasonable request (Score:5, Insightful)
Attempting to censure what he can say to his students is clearly not reasonable.
It can't be _THAT_ effective... (Score:3, Funny)
He's lucky... (Score:3, Funny)
University IT (Score:4, Insightful)
What is it about university IT departments that attracts such incompetent people?
Hint: If you're pouncing on people as often as a small frisky dog does, you're the problem.
University ID depts pay peanuts (Score:5, Informative)
Then when I wanted to hire anyone, however, they dictated to me what I could offer, and refused to accept any input regarding what industry norms were. So, when I needed a DBA (and frankly needed a really good one), they told me I should get someone Oracle certified, and that I should pay no more than $50k. Skilled, experienced, product certified DBAs, as you may know, tended to go for over twice that (usually more like three times that) a few years back in Boston, and our database wasn't Oracle anyway. I ended up hiring a junior-level person (when I really needed a senior level person) because that was the best I could get for the money they were offering (in fact the only applicant we had received who had any experience with the database products we actually used), and told HR they could forget about certification. Their response was to complain a lot that I hadn't hired a good enough person, despite that they hadn't actually asked me (his manager) about his performance, and he was actually doing unusually well for someone of his level. They also nagged me extensively to replace him with a woman who had applied who was oracle certified (which was still useless because we still didn't have oracle), but didn't actually speak English. (Presumably that's why she was willing to take the lousy pay rate.)
10 months after I was hired the university outsourced my job, proving that their claim of long term job security was a lie in the first place. (I hear they had to hire three consultants to replace me, each one at a cost of two to three times my salary.)
I've seen this pattern repeatedly in university IT groups; they won't pay what it really costs to get someone who can really do the job, but they insist on unreasonable qualifications given the pay level they're offering, so instead of either shelling out what it costs to get what they want or accepting the best qualified person who would normally be in the pay range they're offering, they instead hire the loser who is willing to both take the low pay rate AND inflate their qualifications (either by exaggeration or outright lies) to meet the university's unreasonable demands. So, when they most need a skilled, experienced person, they're most likely to get a lying fraud who can't get the job done and will give everyone else a hard time to try to make it look like nothing is their fault.
From Someone Who Has Been There (Score:5, Interesting)
I could say a lot of BAD things about *university* ITS, but I'd probably get me in far more trouble than it is worth to say them out loud. I am not there anymore, they don't effect me. I will just be happy that Paul is still the fine individual I have always looked up to.
This could have been prevented (Score:3, Funny)
Double entendre (Score:3, Funny)
So, sharing a computer with roommates might give you an STD and Tor will protect you from it? Hmmm...
How did they find out? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:How did they find out? (Score:4, Interesting)
Its possible that I'm simply missing the point, but if Tor is so effective then how exactly did a university IT guy and two campus cops find out it was in use and trace it so easily to the professor in question? Isn't anonymity the whole point?
Every technology has its limits, and the anonymity is actually pretty good. When you browse with TOR, you do these things:
The university can see that something went between TOR and one of their computers, but they have no idea what that something is or where it's going. Since anyone who can get access to a computer can use it, the university actually doesn't know who was using the computer. They can only guess because it belongs to that professor and is in his office.
If the professor had taken an extra precaution and used a computer that was not linked to his identity, there really would have been no way to catch him unless they ran over to the machine while he was on it. If were truly a sneaky bastard, he would have installed TOR along with a program to activate it and do some communications and left before it went on. At some later time he could come back to that machine briefly just to retrieve the data.
If you are in a repressive country, you could start by using TOR discretely at an internet cafe. As long as the managers of the cafe are not actively policing their clients, you won't get caught. Better still, your government has no clue and will mistake TOR for traffic they're not interested in.
Poor excuse (Score:3, Insightful)
The other side of Tor. (Score:3, Interesting)
So my question is, what problems does Tor create for us all? I'm all for people being able to escape governments that want to control what they do.. but I can't imagine that this doesn't create other problems, so of which might not be immediately apparent.
VPN, Proxies, etc... (Score:3, Interesting)
I know everyone worth their weight in IT realizes that a secure border isn't enough. We had virus protection available for free for every seat on campus, however, in a huge distributed environment (where departments and colleges were "islands" in a network ocean, with their own IT staff) we couldn't gaurantee the integrity of these machines. But we were sure going to be the ones to take the hit when their "nice kid that they liked to much to see them move on after graduation system admin" didn't bother to CHECK to see if the definitions his AD-out-the-box for dummies was pushing those defs.
We also disallowed some of these services because it became harder to effectively monitor our network. When some s5r1pt k1dd13 in CIS 201 decides that he is now a UNIX god is and is going to put "Bush Sucks - $college_name is #1, fark $rival" on whitehouse.gov to impress his pink haired, pot smoking, PETA member across the hall in the dorms who only talks to him when he removes the spyware she got trying to download off KaZaa, we look like complete dickheads when the Feds show up (or the **AA) and the best we can do is say "I don't know... what goes on in them there tubes" the suits tend to get pretty agrivated.
On the other hand, even if they are SSHing into an intermediary (which we strongly encouraged over telnet), we can at least say "Well, we had an outgoing SSH connection from 4 machines on campus at that time going to these 4 addresses, do any of those ring a bell? We happened to have authenticated WPA, so we can tell you who these folks are even if the machine name is PoPPySeeD420 and done from the student union.
Privacy is wonderful, but when the shit hits the proverbal fan, IT would like to know who is pulling shenanagins on the network. The rest of the time, 99.9999% of the time, we'd rather NOT know what you're up to, and every one of us in the office (except for that one windows fanboi MS office specialist who we used to throw beanbags at) had our open source/linux/free as in beer and freedom/crypto-privacy street cred.
Bigger breach (Score:4, Interesting)
Bat#*($# Insane (Score:4, Interesting)
Here's a legit situation I can see coming up - if a faculty person was somehow using 90% of our internet bandwidth, we'd have to have a chat. Sure, it might be for their research, but that doesn't matter in that case. It's a shared resource, there's a limited (by the University) budget, and it's not an academic freedom issue. It might be convenient for one of the physics faculty to have a supercollider as well, but it's not in the University's budget. You have to partner with someone outside, or get grants, etc. Every instituation has limits and priorities.
But this? This is bizarre. The only awkward situation I can think of in some states is that state schools can fall under open records laws that require that the public can check on certain information (in some states, browser histories have come up in the past). In that case, as a state employee, they might be violating the open records law by going out of their way to hide their activity. Hell, even under a Patriot Act search, we'd have to give them whatever information we had about a user, but we're not obligated to keep information to track back every outbound internet connection - even under CALEA. We probably can't link a PAT assignment on the outside of our firewall to an inside machine for more than a couple of days, at best We just don't have the space to keep the logs.
BGSU's IT usage policies (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.bgsu.edu/downloads/cio/file9602.pdf [bgsu.edu]
and
Now, the first one seems like it is worded vaguely and may or may not apply in this situation, but the second one is pretty clear: as long as you are using anonymity services "to escape responsibility". Clearly, the professor was not trying to skirt the law or detection for any shady behaviour. of course, in the eyes of admins, allowing any use of such anonymizers could be dangerous to their network, and make their jobs harder.
I take most issue to the detectives' request that the professor refrain from discussing Tor in his classes. It would be academically unethical for the prof to bend to this pressure because a little pressure was put on him by the rent-a-cops. The detectives can ask the professor to do whatever they want, but dictating what he can and cannot teach in his classroom is inappropriate.
Re:the ivory tower (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Somehow I suspect that this university's professors do not report to the IT or security staff. They certainly don't at any of the universities I attended or worked at
Having an IT guy show up with campus police and telling you what you are not allowed to teach in class is the
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
"The school" has that right to some degree, but a network manager is not "the school" and does not have the right to set school policy. At best, the network manager can make a temporary decision (arguing that this was necessary to protect the university), which the faculty and university administration can overturn. And if faculty and the unive
Re:the ivory tower (Score:4, Informative)
Re:the ivory tower (Score:5, Informative)
What are you talking about?
The use of tor on "someone else's network" is implicit, because you are connecting to someone on the other side of the network as a whole.
You say you use tor at home, but that's not "your" network either. I think your ISP would say that you are connecting to *their* network. I think the Hosting Provider of the web server you're connecting to would say it is *their* network. I think AT&T, (or whoever owns the backbone your data is traveling across) would say it is *their* network too.
If any of these network owners told you to stop using tor at home, what would you say to that? I'm guessing it would be pretty close to what this professor said to the IT goons trying to intimidate him into stopping.
The only time it's "your" network is when you have two of your own computers on your own LAN, and a tor router between them.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:the ivory tower (Score:5, Insightful)
Furthermore, just because something "could be a huge headache" for IT doesn't, necessarily, mean it isn't, still, part of their job responsibilities. Giving students/faculty at a university access to the Internet in the first place will, inevitably, produce headaches for IT. That said, it's also the only reason they have a job. It would be just as absurd for the IT department to attempt to strong-arm all the students/faculty into not using the Internet at all as a method of decreasing the IT workload.
The fact is, there are ways to deal with it in the event it ever, actually, became a problem such as announcing a ban on the software for student PCs and banning systems from the network as soon as Tor use is detected. It's not difficult to do and means that Tor would only cause the network to dissolve into "technological anarchy" if the IT people sat around and did nothing. If they were even more reasonable and even handed about it, they could ban or traffic shape Tor users that were found to be using an obscene amount of bandwidth (most likely to have had their system injected). This, probably, wouldn't even require a re-write of their network use policies.
"He has the RIGHT to use it, of course, nobody else should. It's a tool only for the gifted."
While I'm assuming you meant this to be sarcastic, YES HE DOES HAVE THAT RIGHT! Its called academic freedom and was, clearly, mentioned in the article. It allows him and other professors to do their job. There are plenty of times that professors research/teach about controversial topics or topics that could cause problems if they were abused. He was teaching a class directly related to Tor and was using it as a way to become more familiar with the software. He never suggests that the general student body, or even the rest of the university employees should, necessarily, be allowed to use the software. You and I may not have the right to use Tor on out employer's networks but, then again, we aren't college professors (unless you happen to be). They represent a, very specific, special case when it comes to thing like this.
As an example, I went to school for computer science. In one of my classes, on how operating systems work, our professor explained how a programmer could, very easily, take down almost any flavor of Unix system no matter how well secured the system was (thus causing headaches for anyone else using that system at the same time as was common in our CS computer labs). This was a fundamental flaw in the design of operating systems that, for Unix systems at least, was pretty universal. He also informed us, very clearly, that we were, in no uncertain terms, banned from using this technique on any of the lab systems (which ran Sun Unix). Furthermore, he informed us that, should we decide to try, they would, very easily, find out who did it and deal with them accordingly. This was an issue directly related to the subject of the class. Knowing it meant that we, as students, could avoid it in our own future software. There is a good chance that, at least one time, my professor had to write a program like this himself (or one of his colleagues did) and test it on one of the lab systems just to prove that it did, in fact, work that way.
The story is that an IT guy and two Campus Security goons came to his door and tried to strong-arm him into not using the software or teaching about it. It's like a bad scene from a melodramatic police drama. They tried to feed him some nebulous garbage about it being against "policy" (a policy he actually helped edit and probably knows better than they do) and use it to threaten his job. The story is about a professor having his job threatened for researching a topic they don't like which flys against the very essence of acade
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Good for him, he had a reasonable chat with the detectives and they dropped it. I just cant stand the rhetoric about "rights" and "academic freedoms".
If the police visited him at home, because of his use of tor on his own connection that he paid for - then you got a story. But this guys a gues
Re:the ivory tower (Score:4, Interesting)
Do you think they have the right to say "Whites Only" or "No visiting Republican Websites"?
Now, that is not to say that the University is not allowed to draft up a reasonable set of rules. Perhaps it could even be argued that the right to anonymous communications and encryption fall under the 1st amendment, but thats not really my point here.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That's not quite true. As a university, their mission is furthering educational development. They can argue over how such and such use does or doesn't advance educational goals, but there should be no dispute that education is the goal. The campus IT department then, as an administrative branch, is in a unique position of trying to accommodate all party's intere
you don't understand organizations (Score:3, Insightful)
The university does, but the IT department and the campus police don't. Their function is merely to implement university policies, they ultimately don't have a right to make them.
Re:When you know so little about TOR... (Score:5, Insightful)
Bit torrent gets throttled because it is a bandwidth hog, not because its often used for copyright infringement. If that was the issue, it would be blocked totally in the places where it is throttled instead.
What exactly is your point? Shit gets abused all the time.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:question... (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
It's where the virus Megabyte lived with his army of viral binomes and henchmen Hack and Slash while plotting to take over Mainframe and the Supercomputer.