Stockpiling zero-day vulnerabilities

Posted Aug 16, 2012 11:32 UTC (Thu) by robert_s (subscriber, #42402)
In reply to: Stockpiling zero-day vulnerabilities by drag
Parent article: Stockpiling zero-day vulnerabilities

Right.

And who are you going to trust over governments? Without government I can guarantee you every freedom you gained would be very quickly clawed back by some corporate monstrosity accountable to nobody but their shareholders (which increasingly nowadays is private equity).

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Stockpiling zero-day vulnerabilities

Posted Aug 16, 2012 15:03 UTC (Thu) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (3 responses)

The government and 'corporate monstrosity' are the same people. They go hand in hand. This has been going all the way back since the merchant class backed parliament won the civil war in England. In the USA the government established by the constitution is fundamentally a mercantilist establishment following along the same lines.

To think that the government acts as a counter to the monolithic corporate power structure just means that you drank too much cool-aid. Without the government there wouldn't be a monolithic corporate power structure.

Stockpiling zero-day vulnerabilities

Posted Aug 21, 2012 13:56 UTC (Tue) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link] (2 responses)

While governments are not especially lovable no-governement is and has been tried regularly all over the world. It's called civil war (different groups competing without any legitimate central power) and by and large, the result is not appealing at all, especially for bystanders.

And I doubt a social animal like man can avoid forming groups once population density gets non-minimal.

Stockpiling zero-day vulnerabilities

Posted Aug 21, 2012 15:48 UTC (Tue) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link] (1 responses)

> It's called civil war (different groups competing without any legitimate central power)

Civil war is involves _two_ governments, not "no government". In civil war, two groups are claiming and competing for "legitimate" central power in a given territory. "No government" means just the opposite, that no one has an effective, "legitimate" claim.

> And I doubt a social animal like man can avoid forming groups once population density gets non-minimal.

There's nothing wrong with forming groups. The problem lies in aggressive actions toward people who do not choose to join or remain in your group.

Stockpiling zero-day vulnerabilities

Posted Aug 21, 2012 16:14 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

That depends on a civil war. It's certainly not uncommon to have multiple competing pseudo-govenment entities (just look at Russian post-revolutionary civil war as an example).

Stockpiling zero-day vulnerabilities

Posted Aug 17, 2012 3:37 UTC (Fri) by felixfix (subscriber, #242) [Link]

Drag has it perfectly right. Corporate and government leaders are the same people and cycle back and forth. My biggest disappointment with the Occupy protests is their naivete in thinking the government would have any interest in fixing the problems caused by Wall Street.

The solution, or at least a part of a solution, is to stop assuming that governments are the only answer. Especially stop giving them a monopoly on criminal prosecution. When a corporation or government violates the law, or when one of their crony bosses screw up, they usually get off with a pat on the back in the form of a golden parachute because they have buddies in charge of the FBI, SEC, and other enforcement agencies and prosecuting offices who pick and choose who to prosecute and for what.

Instead of letting governments be the sole judge of who to prosecute, let victims also prosecute the case.

To go along with this, you have to prevent malicious prosecution, which is also the second half of the problem as regards government prosecutors. You need to remove all immunity from government prosecutors, agents, chiefs, and all the rest of them, to match private prosecutors. There is no good reason to let them off the hook for ignorance of the law or mistakes which would land ordinary people in prison.

Certainly you'd need some fine tuning, but the basic problem is that governments first choose who to prosecute and not prosecute, and then suffer no consequences for either malicious prosecution or letting their buddies off scot-free. Whatever the problems would be from private prosecution, they'd be minor compared to the problems of government monopoly on prosecution.

Evil governments and corporations

Posted Aug 18, 2012 21:48 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link]

Without government I can guarantee you every freedom you gained would be very quickly clawed back by some corporate monstrosity accountable to nobody but their shareholders

I'm not sure what armageddon you're imagining here, because without government, there are no corporations. A corporation is a legal device that allows a government to apply laws to a large group of people (shareholders of a corporation) as simply as to one person, in certain areas (such as enforcing contracts).

Without government, there isn't any entity to be accountable to shareholders. Imagine a thousand people giving someone like Bill Gates money to develop software, with his promise that he'll give them the profits from it. Gates is no more obligated, absent government, to give those shareholders the profits than he is to give a thousand users what they expect.

The freedom-grabbing monstrosities that would exist are strong, selfish individuals. Only people can can be evil.