21 replies to this topic

[DaRatmastah]

So with Aaron Swartz's recent tragic suicide, the idea of freedom of information again comes to the forefront.

For those not in the know, it's thought that part of the reason Aaron ended his life was stress at the idea of facing a prison sentence of up to forty years for downloading and planning to freely distribute a HUGE amount of academic papers, studies, information from MIT and other collegiate sources.

So how does Nerd Forum feel about this? Should all information be free? Only some? How do we decide what is freely available, and is not?

[Diabolical_Jazz]

I'm a huge supporter of the whole concept of freedom of information. Especially in situations where no one is trying to friend make money off of another person's idea.
A forty year prison sentence is absolutely absurd. Murderers and rapists get less than that.

I also think that anyone who discusses this topic without reading at least a little bit of Cory Doctorow's work on the subject is probably woefully underinformed.

[Coconut Man]

I definitely believe in freedom of information.

I also support hacktivist groups like Anonymous, who uncovered the video of those kids laughing about the girl they raped.
+1 for them.

[DaRatmastah]

If I spend a million dollars conducting a study the results should be mine to do what I please with. Would the right/ethical thing to do be to openly distribute this? Of course. Should anyone be forced to disclose this kind of thing? Nah, I don't think so.

And herein lies the conflict. Yes, from an ethical and moral standpoint, it is difficult to argue against absolute freedom of information. However, information more often than not comes at a cost, and if someone exacts that cost upon themselves, and gains no real benefit from spending the money because the information the obtained is not exclusive to them upon its obtaining, then why accept the cost in the first place?

[Coconut Man]

Let's pretend I'm doing research on uranium enrichment/refinement (or whatever you do with uranium) - my goal has nothing to do with nuclear weapon development but the process could be used for such. Would you like that information being freely available to everyone?

Exactly. The problem, though, is no matter how good-intentioned information may be, there is almost always a way to use it for sinister purposes.

[DaRatmastah]

Let's pretend I'm doing research on uranium enrichment/refinement (or whatever you do with uranium) - my goal has nothing to do with nuclear weapon development but the process could be used for such. Would you like that information being freely available to everyone?

Personally? Yes. Anyone who has the means to actually obtain the hardware and supplies necessary to complete this process would most likely be able to come by the information anyway. It's not that hard to find. And sharing this sort of information could allow others to piggy-back on the process in an academic sense and open up whole new worlds because of their insight.

[DaRatmastah]

Have to disagree with anyone having the means being able to do it. North Korea is a great example - a nation with questionable intent and a (somewhat) failing rocket program.

Shhhh, everyone knows North Koreans don't really exist. Seriously though, is north Korea's failing due to a lack of knowledge, or a lack of qualified personnel, equipment procurement, and technical capabilities? In addition to this, how much of their failing is due to actively being denied knowledge, and how much of it is due to merely denying themselves? Sending two qualified sleeper agents to a foreign country for a decade to attain degrees and/or work experience in the required fields to procure and produce the knowledge to develop such weaponry doesn't seem that difficult a goal for a country. Either they've done this successfully and it's failed(so they got the knowledge, but still couldn't produce), they've done this unsuccessfully(the spies/expatriots wouldn't repatriate), or they refuse to do this(north korea's better than you silly english kaaaaa-niggits).

Secondly, how can you enforce divulging information? What kind of channels does it go through? What is deemed to be forcibly given up and what you're allowed to keep to yourself? If the enforcer on this is the government, who is to keep the government in check and force them to publish their information? IMO, the real freedom here is the decision on whether to make the information public or not - forcing to divulge information is far, far from freedom.

Again, this is the issue with debating morals and ethics. Forcing your own moral and ethics upon another person is tyrannical, and, by most people's definitions, therefore immoral. There is no way to ethically regulate and enforce the dissemination of information. My personal source of woe is that other people don't naturally feel my own ethics about informational freedom, not my lack of ability to force them to.

[Diabolical_Jazz]

Y'know, as I get older I get less and less opposed to the idea of forcing people to do ethical things.
I just feel like, in many situations, it is more important to prevent a huge injustice than to deny one person the freedom to be unethical.
Certainly there's a balance to be reached, anyway. Suffice to say that I do not consider the freedom to be unethical to be a sacrosanct right.

This is perhaps the only way in which aging is not making me more moderate.

[Calvary]

Have to disagree with anyone having the means being able to do it. North Korea is a great example - a nation with questionable intent and a (somewhat) failing rocket program.

Any country with nuclear weapons has questionable intent. There's only ever been one country to actually use a WMD on another, remember.

That wasn't a shot by the way, just making a point that all weapons of any shape and size are bad and even the most unlikely person or country might end up becoming a perpetrator of holocaust.

I am with you that some information should not be public. Certainly what the government organisations do, the CIA, FBI, MI6, KGB (I'm pretty sure they're the KGB in all but name), that's none of our business.

[Calvary]

Potentially true, but as I said, I really wasn't trying to make a point of moaning about America, what's done is done and as you say, it brought the war to a close earlier than it would have with a ground invasion with less loss of life to boot. I was just saying simply that anyone with a nuclear weapon is a danger to the free world. That includes the UK, might I add.

[No-Danico]

Not that I don't agree with the use of the bombs on Japan (I reluctantly do) but that line of justifying thinking is a slippery slope. What if the use of the bomb could have ended the Vietnam conflict a year earlier with half as many deaths and countless less injuries and rapes. Gulf war, (probably harder to argue) Kosovo, Iraq war v.2.0, inevitable war on Canada, ect.

It shouldn’t be justified with Post hoc reasoning, even if it’s sound. Morals rarely have a place in logic, but it does in this instance. Those weapons are far too dangerous to ever be justified. And the nuclear deterrence system just barely works, see Metal Gear Peacewalkers for a pretty sound argument there. Any country could launch if they felt strongly enough, potentially without fear of retaliation or fear of death.

[Krankykoala]

I actually disagree on the use of nuclear weaponry against japan in WW2. We should not have done it.

That said my reasoning behind disagreeing is that to a very small extent everyone and everything in the world is slightly radioactive since the detonation of nuclear weaponry occurred. Now we are told "slightly radioactive" really does not mean much since it is so little it will not have any adverse effects. While that may be true, what happens when it happens again? Each use gives everyone just a little bit of radioactive material to live with, including those not yet born for the foreseeable future.

To be entirely honest I believe I myself would have been in favor of using the nuke to end the war had I been alive at the time. But looking back on it it was arguably the worst possible move. We as Americans may not have known about the lasting effects, but we knew it had the potential to do something terrible like this. The use of the nuke was essentially us(the U.S.) sending the message that we value American lives over the entirety of humanity. By using such a weapon we struck a blow against humanity as a whole in exchange for the survival of a quantifiable number of lives.

That is not an acceptable solution, but it is one that America as a whole makes in smaller ways every day. We are not the only country to live this way, but we arguably have had and likely will continue to have the greatest negative impact in this way.

[Krankykoala]

Oh, right. Forgot what the actual subject of this topic was.

I believe most information should be readily available for any who wish to obtain it. That said I can certainly see where the danger lies in this. Until a single world government can be effectively established(not likely to happen within the foreseeable future) the open allowance of certain pieces of information should be kept out of the reach of the public. Most things should be openly shared however, as it encourages free thinking which allows humanity as a whole to advance.

[No-Danico]

I agree. In reality, MAD is just an extension of the ideas that civilization was based on, two cavemen agreeing not to bonk each other on the head and try to live in peace, so they could bonk the heads of those guys living across the river.

It’ll work, up to a point...

... crazies who have no problems destroying themselves in the process of destroying someone else. (ie, someone of questionable intent)

I mean, no countries are crazyballs enough to do that, are they?

But, digression aside, I don’t think North Korea will get the crafting recipe for a fatman from 4chan or something. There is a high likelihood that the quiet guy who gets picked on in gym might find something dangerous on the line.

I mean, it’s not like Che Guevara’s book Guerrilla Warfare shows you how to convert a common shotgun into a jury-rigged bazooka. And that book wouldn’t be easily accessible to a teenager. Wait a second, I was a teen when I bought my copy of Guerilla Warfare.

So yeah, that sort of stuff is easily accessible.