DDoS as a violation of the 1st Amendment

I have serious issues with this:

Anonymous Files Petition To Make DDoS Legal Form of Protest: hypnosec writes "Anonymous has filed a petition with the U.S. Government asking the Obama administration to make Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks a legal form of protest. Anonymous has argued that because of advancements in internet technology, there is a need for new ways of protest. The hacking collective doesn't consider DDoS as a form of attack and equates it to hitting the 'refresh' button on a webpage. Comparing these attacks to the 'occupy' protests, Anonymous notes that instead of people occupying an area, it is their computers occupying a website for a particular period of time."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One this is, to my layman's mind, a clear and simple violation of the 1st Amendment freedom of speech rights of the website owner. To DDoS the site and shut out the speech of the owner is more egregious than to "suppress" Anonymous's right to protest.

Here's the greater dilemma, though: while the premise that the Constitution and its Bill or Rights are based on Natural Law, the Constitution is a legal document between the citizens of the United States of America. It is not binding on non-citizens, nor (in my estimation) does it offer protections to them. By being "Anonymous", these individuals should not be afforded Constitutional protections. To be protected under the Constitution, one must be identified as a citizen eligible to those protections.

GPS Hate! Part Deux

In continuance (see this post for the last rant) of my diatribe on the over-reliance on tech, I saw the following article in The Scottsman:

Scots the most misled by satnavs:

Misleading satnavs have caused more than £200 million worth of damage to cars in the past 12 months with Scots the most misled by their devices.

And here is a re-spin of the same story from Ireland's Independent:

Satnav errors 'cause damage £ 200m':Misleading satnavs have caused more than £200 million worth of damage to cars in the past 12 months, it has been revealed.

But being the Luddite that I am, I fear no squawk box sitting on my dash! I laugh in the face (if she only had one...) of my tinny-voiced navigator and her incessant "Recalculating!". I'll take no orders from the waif-er of silicon who would with all her might keep me off The Road Not Taken. I am a man and I shall get lost on my own terms, and my wife and children will heartily attest to that. 


Ah, but I digress... so my advice to the weary traveler led astray by his GPS, satnav, or whatever the local  parlance for the little beast is, is to get a real map, and get a real navigator. The companionship of a fellow human is worth the inconvenience. And get lost along the way on purpose. Pull over at a gas station and meet the locals. You might find a treasure in the countryside that those who never leave the beaten path have opportunity to experience. 

Another reason why paper maps are superior to GPS

Over the past several years I have developed some fairly strong anachronistic views on the overuse of technology, with GPSes being one in particular. Given, I own hiking and auto GPSes, I find them no substitute for actual navigational and geo-positional savvy (i.e. knowing where you are, where you want to go, and how to get there). I prefer paper maps, and given the subject of the post below, they have a very strong characteristic in their favor: THEY CAN'T TELL ON YOU.

TomTom Satnavs To Set Insurance Prices: nk497 writes "TomTom has signed a deal with an insurance firm that will see its satnavs used to monitor drivers. Fair Pay Insurance, part of Motaquote, will use monitoring systems built into the TomTom PRO 3100 to watch for sharp braking and badly managed turns, rewarding 'good' drivers with lower premiums and warning less skilled motorists when they aren't driving as they should. 'We've dispensed with generalization's and said to our customers, if you believe you're a good driver, we'll believe you and we'll even give you the benefit up front,' said Nigel Lombard of Fair Pay Insurance."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.