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Cybersecurity and Piracy on the High Seas
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Fri Apr 18, 2008 01:37 PM
from the not-one-cent-in-tribute dept.
from the not-one-cent-in-tribute dept.
Schneier points out an interesting article comparing modern cybersecurity to piracy on the high seas in the early 1800s. The article extends the comparison into projected action based on historical context. "Similarly, in many ways, current U.S. policy on the security of electronic commerce is similar to Adams' appeasement approach to the Barbary pirates. The U.S. government's inability to dictate a consistent cyber commerce protection policy is creating a financial burden on the U.S. private sector to maintain a status quo, when those resources could be used to mount a more-effective Internet-focused defense. In the case of financial fraud on the Internet, the costs associated with fraudulent transactions are currently borne by private companies, which then have to pass those costs on to their customers. This basically creates a system in which the financial institutions are paying a type of 'tribute' to the cyber criminals, just as Adams did to the Barbary pirates."
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What do you know? (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah. Look at what a great job private companies (Bear Stearns, Countrywide, Citigroup) did making loans. They were so effective at making loans, the government had to bail them out.
It's great to criticize government (I'm usually first in line) but when you're comparing something that large to one company, you can't. It's like comparing an oil tanker to a cigarette boat. Who do you think is more nimble?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
People who Bear Stearns owed money to got bailed out. Bear Stearns no longer exists as a company(most of the operations continue to exist under J.P. Morgan).
Countrywide and Citigroup didn't get anything more than cheap credit from the government.
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Yeah. Look at what a great job private companies (Bear Stearns, Countrywide, Citigroup) did making loans. They were so effective at making loans, the government had to bail them out.
That is the real tragedy of it all the government did not have to bail them out. They chose to at the expense of everyone as well as the future to help at a few people who should have know better. Bear Stearns should have been allowed to fail. The investors should have lost it all. That the game called investing. You can win and sometimes you can lose. Bear Stearns was posting huge profits by investing in risky loans themsevels. This was foolish, lost of people knew it. Lots of people did not get s
Not much. (Score:3, Insightful)
Interesting. Government is less effective than private companies. Who would have guessed?
It seems you (and the authors of the article) are missing a key point. Yes, international trade grew on a foundation of international and maritine law, but only after the Marines went in and kicked some Barbary butt. In that sense, government is more effective than private companies. (At least, private companies that don't have their own army and navy.)
Countries were able to reach peaceful agreements on how they
The modern internet piracy dictionary (Score:5, Funny)
Hijacking - 1. Taking over a post on Slashdot.
Terrorism - 1. DOS attack against all the root DNS servers simultaneously. 2. Slashdotting a website.
"Arrrr..." - 1. Phrase uttered by someone who has just been linked to goatse.cz
One-Eye - 1. Asshole.
Pirate Flag - 1. Used to indicate a box has been pwned. 2. Used by Maddox (maddox.xmission.com) as a TM.
Booty - 1. A woman's butt.
Re: (Score:2)
Instead of Car Analogies... (Score:4, Funny)
Looks like the argument is "the government should be more involved in actually doing something." This is undoubtedly true; it's the government's job to set safety standards and to fight crime.
But really this is just an article that says "Hey, why not have the government fight crime?" with nautical window dressing. The author's better off scuttling the piracy angle.
It's IMHO even worse (Score:3, Insightful)
I mean... Umm, excuse me? They don't look at all similar to me. Just because they share one element, it doesn't automatically make two things similar.
If it automatically did, we'd have a hell of a lot of ridiculous "similarities" all over the place. E.g., (A) the government still can't stop cars from killing innocent people, (B) Stalin
21st century version of a protection racket? (Score:3)
Apparently so from TFA, ... either that, or it's just more FUD to encourage government control (read taxation) of the internet.
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No, really.
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I don't think "Protection Racket" means what you think it means.
DDoS is the "external threat". But let's go ahead and talk about "There ought to be a law" in regards to DDoS.
Who w
Re: (Score:2)
Because, as long as people pay, the extortionists will continue to attack.
It's the same for the Mafia today. It's still around. Companies could turn to law enforcement (which has no legal liability if attacks happen on their watch, and cannot promise they'd catch them), could invest millions more in security which still might not stop them (law of diminishing returns, infiltration and inside jobs, etc), or just pay the lousy couple grand every year or so and not get attacked.
You gotta pick your battles, and I don't know any corporations that have "oh, and, don't deal in protecti
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You can't have it both ways (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm of the opinion that the government should be there to hold private industry liable for any breaches of personal data that leads to fraud. If someone steals my credit information and makes purchases with them, the credit card company should be on the hook for not verifying the identity of the person who made the purchase. The merchant should be on the hook for not verifying the identity of the purchaser. The whole system needs to be changed. Instead of giving out free credit, they need to only give credit to those who ask for it. Turn it from a push to a pull system and validate the hell out of the puller.
On an only semi-related tangant, I'm waiting for the explosion in fraudulant health care claims. The health care cards themselves are simple pieces of paper. It is easy to get a picture idea with your picture and someone else's name on it. With the cost of health care skyrocketting in this country it is only a matter of time before people start getting health services under someone else's name. And I already know what is going to happen... the person whose name got abused is going to be liable for it, not the health providers who okayed the procedure in the first place.
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I'm of the opinion that the government should be there to hold private industry liable for any breaches of personal data that leads to fraud. If someone steals my credit information and makes purchases with them, the credit card company should be on the hook for not verifying the identity of the person who made the purchase. The merchant should be on the hook for not verifying the identity of the purchaser. The whole system needs to be changed. Instead of giving out free credit, they need to only give credit to those who ask for it. Turn it from a push to a pull system and validate the hell out of the puller.
Yes! This at least makes sense. Now if only there was some way in which we could get congress to do their jobs and actually regulate something useful instead of declaring that they want to regulate p2p by filename.
So that that would be like, (Score:2)
WTF is this guy talking about? (Score:5, Insightful)
The rest of this article is full of similar crap ideas and analogies.
I guess it's easier to create an international body to oversee the internet than get Microsoft to put out a secure product.
Dude, WTF are YOU talking about? (Score:3, Interesting)
Did the street price of booze go up or down during Prohibition? I'm betting up.
Re:WTF is this guy talking about? (Score:4, Interesting)
And whoever decided to call tenager who were thinking of copying music pirates, sould realise 2 thing:
1) You cant copy a bar of gold only take it, so the analogy is as fundamentally flawed as all those Wifi analogies!
2) Pirates are cool
Infact who ever made pirates of the carabian really shot themselves in the foot with regards to piracy "Come watch our film, because pirates are cool. NOOO! dont copy it pirates are bad!"
Parent
Credit card fraud? Bah (Score:2, Insightful)
His analogy works far better when talking about Net Neutrality. You could say that ISPs are charging tribute based on packet type. The closest you could get is if a foreign country started blocking traffic to Amazon, or if say
At this point, they are just trying to piss me off (Score:2)
The only reason I can imagine for the US government to discourage or jail our millions of ambitious hackers instead of enlisting them is that they don't want the holes found. Either that or arrogance and stupidity on such a massive scale that I can't actually picture it.
Hmm, but then it is the US government we're talking about. Never mind.
This game sucks.
Shhh! (Score:2, Funny)
As History Shows (Score:3, Informative)
Hell, lets resolve this like they did back then. Give me an unit of marines, a naval squadron, and three times as many mercenaries. I will just shoot the hackers. Sing the song be damed, we'll just shoot them in the head.
Apples and Oranges (Score:2)
The law is part of the problem (Score:2)
The financial institutions need this easy ability to shove credit down people's throats because the cost of doing it right isn't nearly as profitable. However, it is a lot safer and would solve a lot of the problems that banks have wi
Idiotic comparison (Score:2)
Pathetic idiotic idiots soaked in their idiocy.
The concept of intellectual property exists since middle ages, when craftsmen corporations were guarding their technological secrets. That would be better, but still utterly useless train of analogy.
There is nothing comparable in the technological ease with which modern digitized intellectual property is stolen. Absolutely
Cyber (Score:2)
Why don't they learn? (Score:2)
Rudyard Kipling covered this already [newcastle.edu.au]. Why don't they learn?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
So what? Piracy is not This. (Score:3, Interesting)
Software "piracy", entertainment "piracy", phishing ... the author is obviously conflating these things under the banner of IP and suggesting that there's an economic argument similar to one raised when the US was a free republic. The differences are glaring and obvious:
Oddly enough... (Score:2, Informative)
The response the US got back from the Barbary ambassador was that their taking captive sailors and forcing them to either convert or be killed was "founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Quran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners,
Re:Oddly enough... (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Oddly enough... (Score:4, Interesting)
There's just not enough time in most school history classes to teach the kids something meaningful about all of the very major wars (Revolution, Civil War, WWI, WWII, Vietnam) that even some of the medium-sized wars (French and Indian, 1812, Korea) get short shrift. It's not a coincidence that Korea is called the "forgotten war." It'd be great if every high school kid had as much curiosity and interest about history as you clearly do, but it's just not the case. One survey, admittedly not very scientific, found that 57% of high school students didn't know that the Civil War was in the last half of the 19th century [cbsnews.com].
That's pretty bad. I'd much rather fix that than worry about teaching them about Barbary pirates. Maybe the right solution is more edu-tainment programming; it seems that your lesson to be taken from the Barbaray pirates is not dates and places, but more of a zeitgeist about the forces that were acting on the US in the early days. Some of that can be captured in a good period piece--think Pirates of the Caribbean, except not entirely fictionalized.
Similarly, it looks some somebody has already made silly videos about " protecting web booty" [reputation...erblog.com] to riff on the pirate/cybersecurity theme.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
There's just not enough time in most school history classes to teach the kids something meaningful about all of the very major wars (Revolution, Civil War, WWI, WWII, Vietnam) that even some of the medium-sized wars (French and Indian, 1812, Korea) get short shrift.
Why are we concentrating on the wars at all? What about the things that shaped our country's history between the wars?
My wife has been reading a 1930s high school U.S. history textbook, and has been fascinated by the descriptions of interpersonal relationships between various politicians at different stages in the country's history. The period between the War of 1812 and the Civil War in a modern text usually merits a page or two about Andrew Jackson, then the build-up to the war in terms of slavery and
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Well, hard to say. First, whether the Vietnam War was "frivilous" is a matter of opinion. It's cast as such. As I see it, the US did have legitimate concerns about the so-called "domino effect", namely that if communism (as practiced by the USSR and China at the time) could establish itself in Vietnam, then neighboring countries would be destabilized as well. A better approach would have been to enable Vietnam to be sufficiently independent of China, like Yugoslavia was from the USSR. That probably would ha
Re:Oddly enough... (Score:5, Funny)
I didn't even know there was an American civil war until I visited the south, where I found out it's still being fought.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Muslim != terrorist (Score:3, Insightful)
When you look at the historical record over many centuries, it's hard to say whether Muslims or
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd call that terrorism. Fully Koranic-supported terrorism, btw.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
If by "terrorist" you mean someone who forces you to convert to his religion under threat of death or enslavement, then there are plenty of historical examples of "Christian terrorists" as in history well. Forcible conversion is hardly a uniquely Muslim phenomenon.
Mod Parent UP (Score:4, Insightful)
The terrorism label is a red herring, great for propaganda and useless war mongering. No one doubts the existence of many organizations that will murder, some en masse, in the name of their cause.
Parent
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What would they like to do, have a big central server to send everything through? good luck with that.
The best they could do would be to have the seller create a signed pgp receipt of the sale which would be sent to the buyer and would be counter signed with their pgp key, which could be then sent to the bank directly which could then verify their customer pgp key agai
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What would they like to do, have a big central server to send everything through?
How about a giant Linksys router in an underground bunker in New Mexico?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Say no to Piracy! Don't steal ships.
Re:Pah (Score:4, Informative)
Link in parent is malicious. Do not click.
(Honestly, dude...it's getting old...)
Parent
That's just "better cannon" (Score:2)
The three mile limit was created because that was essentially the maximum range of cannon at the time: A shore battery could only hit something within that range, so that's how far the countries could claim their territory extended.
The cannon on pirate craft had an only slightly lesser range. A pirate, raiding a town, could bombard it from a couple miles out.
Modern alalogical "pirates", shouting