What a ridiculous clickbait headline from the EFF. The truth is buried 7 paragraphs down:
The amendments announced on Thursday will be formally included into the bill on Monday, in a committee meeting that was not planned to include a vote. The Lords will then have two more minor opportunities to debate the content of the bill before it is passed onto the elected House of Commons in its entirety for what is expected to be a simple up/down vote. Britain's members of parliament are currently distracted as they prepare for nationwide elections in May, which means it is highly likely that a major anti-terrorism bill like this will collect enough votes to pass.
If it's anything like the US system, the time to stop an amendment is before it becomes part of a Christmas-tree bill, rather than after. So I don't think this is burying the truth at all.
Why's that more alarming? "72 hours to stop the bill" is pretty alarming, but with the bill still in committee, there's still a a little longer for it to go yet. The third reading is scheduled in a fortnight.
Hi, Danny O'Brien from EFF, and the person who wrote the headline and the paragraph.
I'd say the headline is actually in this case more accurate, but I didn't really want to add another six paragraphs of insider politics to the blog post to explain why. Long-form HN comment readers are a different matter, of course, so here goes:
It's true there are three more readings in the Lords, but my understanding (and recollection from when I worked more on HoP issues) is that the majority of these are pretty perfunctory, especially with a bill like this which has a high government priority to get through before the end of the current Parliament. Essentially, once these amendments hitch a ride on the process, it will get steadily more difficult to unmoor them. They will cease to become amendments, and more a small part of a very important bill.
Rejecting amendments like this at any step is an unusual act, especially when they are promoted by peers with apparent strong domain knowledge. It's absolutely impossible if you don't actually have time to debate the details.
So what you have to do is to alert politicians to a procedural violation instead. Few politicians are experts on Internet surveillance, so wil not feel confident to go up against domain experts; all of them are experts, however, on the exact moments they might be being bypassed or steamrollered over. That's because they're politicians and human beings, and being sensitive to possible cheating among your peers (pun not intended) is built into their psychology.
That moment of steamrollering is on Monday. If the amendments go through on the nod on Monday without a fuss, then the moment will be lost where we can argue about a violation of procedure. After that, we will have to argue about the substance of the bill. And there is no parliamentary time allotted for arguments of substance, because the whole point of inserting these 18 pages of amendments so quickly is to bypass that debate.
TLDR; yes, there are other opportunities. No, we're really not confident at all that we could stop the bill at those points. The best and possibly only probable chance to stop the Snooper's Charter is on Monday.
(For those wondering how you even begin to make these calculations: EFF works with the Open Rights Group, Britain's own awesome digital rights group. ORG's advisory bench includes MPs and peers, so they walk us both through the probabilities. https://www.openrightsgroup.org/people/advisory )
Just to add, fellow HNers in the UK might want to support the Open Rights Group; Jim Killock gave a useful overview of their activities on a recent Linux Outlaws podcast [1] - motivated me to support the Open Rights Group [2].
I don't agree with the narrow definition of clickbait. I think any sensationalism in headline, for sake of gaining clicks and attention, can be considered clickbait. I saw Wikipedia also proclaims the same relation to ad revenue; I just disagree that it's the only interpretation as people have been using the term more broadly for a while now even if it's origins are of the online advertising world.
In this case, I wouldn't categorize the headline as sensationalist though, considering that it's accurate and the next 72 hours are actually important.
What would give "TorCoins" value? It is obvious relays would sell their coins on some altcoin exchange, but who would be purchasing these coins? It seems that the only people purchasing TorCoins would be people looking to donate to Tor relays (this is a totally valid use case, but I was wondering if you have something else in mind.)
Yes -- This is one of the open questions for discussion, and one of the most important. (HotPETS is a "workshop", which in Academia is the precursor to a conference... papers are meant to be early stage drafts ready for discussion. So we are curious how people would be interested in the currency.)
You're right, one of the early reasons for purchasing TorCoins would likely be donating to Tor. But they are a totally usable altcoin, just like Dogecoin for example. What reason do people have to buy Dogecoin? Not much, beyond using it as a currency or speculating with it as an investment. I could see TorCoin working the same way.
Another use you should consider is to follow the FON model - you can spend TorCoins to buy bandwidth from people operating networks.
The more bandwidth you share for TOR, the more free wifi you get.
If you only "sell" wifi to torcoin owners, you simply trade internet access time, but running a tor relay would be like "mining" in the traditional bitcoin world.
EDIT: The point I'm trying to make is that instead of "just" the way to create torcoins, this would also create a way to spend it (and provide value to people by spending it).
Dogecoin is an example of excellent and deliberate marketing.
From branding decisions ("Let's stop people talking about us as the joke coin, and start people talking about us as the community coin") to PR (Constantly reaching out to big news outlets, carrying out small-to-medium PR campaigns) to content marketing (the tools available for Dogecoin have quickly grown in number and sophistication - check out moolah.io for instance, which began on /r/dogecoin) to incentive marketing (they're constantly giving people small stakes in Dogecoin's success).
Quite frankly, it's weird. I think of Dogecoin as the marketing coin now, which is most of the reason I've withdrawn from the community somewhat. I really don't want my day job getting mixed up with my free time.
> What reason do people have to buy Dogecoin?
No technical, practical reason. But you may find that without that consistent, sustained marketing that people won't use your coin so much.
I thought miners get coins for transmitting bandwidth which they can sell at exchanges, and people who do not participate in transmitting but want to trasmit buy these coins to consume bandwidth in the network. It would make sense.
Essentially miners would be bandwidth providers and consumers buy torcoin to pay miners. The monetary value of torcoin will be decided by free market.
Further thought: it would make sense in a new tor network, not an established one.
But the context you've given is similar to the argument that *coins have value because of the electricity costs required for their creation. Unless I can trade those coins for units of energy, those coins are not a store of the value of their energy cost.
Similarly, unless I can trade these coins for access to higher bandwidth on tor (and/or if the lack of them denies me access to tor ), they hold no value to anyone except as a speculation vehicle (as any other coin of the day).
^ This. Google Wallet uses the same underlying technology as EMV. The only difference is the commands are being sent wirelessly (by NFC) rather than a direct physical connection between EMV chip and terminal.
I tried to boot with my Intel HD 3000 enabled (secondary GPU in my Thinkpad) and while it was very slow, demo did work.
I'm on Windows 7. Weird it doesn't work on newer GPUs and newer OS, regresses do happen sometimes.
It does work for me elsewhere, on my Nvidia Quadro 2000M and oldie ATI Radeon HD3650, Chrome and Firefox, with DX9 ANGLE, DX11 ANGLE and OpenGL rendering backends.
