Most Likely to be Shutdown By Government Agency
Displaying poll results.7113 total votes.
Most Votes
- By the end of 2026, how useful do you think agentic/multi-agent AI systems will actually be in your daily work or personal projects? Posted on March 11th, 2026 | 16527 votes
Most Comments
- By the end of 2026, how useful do you think agentic/multi-agent AI systems will actually be in your daily work or personal projects? Posted on March 11th, 2026 | 40 comments
Most likely to be shut down by the government? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
It's not hard to shut down the government - all it takes is a decent slashdotting!
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Would it be "course of Slashdot!" or "!esruoc fo todhsalS"
Re:Most likely to be shut down by the government? (Score:4, Funny)
Quick, to the polls before the MIBs arrive!
So I'm guessing (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Government Agency? (Score:4, Insightful)
The Most Likely Choice... (Score:5, Interesting)
Among the nominees, it's the biggest threat to the governments themselves. And make no mistake, the governments will deal with threats to itself before others.
Re:The Most Likely Choice... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:The Most Likely Choice... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The Most Likely Choice... (Score:5, Funny)
WikiLeaks domain sold to the Urinary Tract Infection Society Of America.
Re:The Most Likely Choice... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The Most Likely Choice... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The Most Likely Choice... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:The Most Likely Choice... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The Most Likely Choice... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Stuff that the *Swedish* government doesn't want leaked.
Re:The Most Likely Choice... (Score:4, Interesting)
While Wikileaks can't be held liable for breaking a NDA that never signed onto, they could be sued for Tortious interference by helping a third party to break that NDA.
Yes, I saw it on 'The Insider'
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes. It also refused to comply with any takedown notice according to any law. The way they dont get shut down is because they are hosted in many different jurisdictions. If they are breaking a law in an area they simply leave that area. They do often however break the law before they leave. This means they are blatantly illegal in many situations.
There is not a distinction to be made between who uploads and who hosts the data in this situation. This i
Re:The Most Likely Choice... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Missing option (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Dont worry, CowboyNeal, we will bring you lime cakes to prison.
Any Serious Chance It'll Happen???!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
I challenge anyone to even find one credible attempt by anyone in government to shut down one of the nominees.
This story is just hysterical scaremongering.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Any Serious Chance It'll Happen???!!! (Score:5, Interesting)
There is something about geeks that leads them to be more suspicious of authority. Perhaps it is being ostracized at a young age or the fact that there are simply a lot of really dumb people out there who have somehow manage to get a little power.
Re:Any Serious Chance It'll Happen???!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
There is something about geeks that leads them to be more suspicious of authority. Perhaps it is being ostracized at a young age or the fact that there are simply a lot of really dumb people out there who have somehow manage to get a little power.
Re:Any Serious Chance It'll Happen???!!! (Score:4, Informative)
Wikileaks. QED.
One Example [boingboing.net]
Re:Any Serious Chance It'll Happen???!!! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Any Serious Chance It'll Happen???!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
The indication they look for that you're trying to spoof them is that the last modified file dates are all months old in your "cover" partition. So don't leave that kind of a signature. Think of one as the "low security" partition and the other as the "high security" partition. I put work stuff on the low security partition and my own stuff on the high security partition and I use them both all the time. In fact, the stuff in the work partition probably has newer timestamps than the stuff in my personal partition right now.
There really is no way to tell that I've got another partition, and a dozen files (or more) in the partition I'll reveal have last modified timestamps as of today or yesterday. Also, I'll put up a serious squawk about needing to protect confidential information for my clients, then give them the key. Then when they actually see the confidential information of my clients...
The best lie is not to lie at all.
Tuecrypt (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Tuecrypt (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Only because its Monday. It'll make more sense tomorrow.
**AA (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Therefore, the Government is an **AA agency.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Summary Error (Score:3, Funny)
Can we vote for... (Score:2, Redundant)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
YouTube? (Score:5, Informative)
I read the earlier story, but it only now just occurred to me that another prime candidate for this is YouTube. The freedom to "Broadcast Yourself" is scary in a lot of general contexts that have already led to a number of government agency censorships around the world.
Also, giving Google the ability to self-censor the content posted (currently, I believe objectionable violence and pornography is banned by the TOS) provides for a bias on the site.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:YouTube? (Score:4, Funny)
People are too busy watching their favorite new hip-hop dance or replays of clips from American Idol or whatever the kids are into these days to find the interesting, insightful, and thought-provoking pieces.
When YouTube hit, I thought it was the perfect place for documentaries and culture works, but apparently it's a place for pop culture trash and soft-core pornography. Never underestimate the reptilian brain of your average Joe Sixpack.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Likely? (Score:5, Insightful)
It matters if something is actually shut down. The answers on this "likely" poll are just a measure of the prejudice (in the dictionary sense of the word prejudice [reference.com]) of the people answering the question.
Where's the answer for "none of them should be shut down, but I prefer to keep an open mind and deal with reality rather than wallow in my own preconceptions about things that haven't happened yet"?
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Tor? (Score:3, Funny)
Unless... I knew it! That whole wheel of time thing really WAS a government conspiracy designed to cause me to fail out of junior high/high school/college! I thought it was a little fishy when RJ supposedly passed away just before finishing the final installment.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Vote for CowboyNeal, that way we can ..... (Score:3, Funny)
Plugging the 'Leaks (Score:3, Informative)
Wikileaks has a legal team and the balls to use them to keep running, but that likely won't stop the insensitive clods in the government.
Re: (Score:2)
If your wiki is leaking, you probably need to see a doctor.
Badda-bump!
Vote None! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Vote None! (Score:5, Insightful)
Someone posts to wikileaks about how the govt made up the charges about freenet, and then freenet gets taken down over "state secrets" or something.
Notions of law and justice are really somewhat quaint these days.
Re:Vote None! (Score:5, Insightful)
Just because some of our 535 crazies committed to Congress this session want to shut it down, doesn't mean it'll happen.
A bill was introduced in 1955 to ban Rock and Roll music, for the same "protect the children" reasons used as excuses to ban anything. Of course, that didn't happen - what would've happened to "Guitar Hero?"
Congress wants to look like it's doing something - actually doing it is hard. Watch them ban Wikileaks, make a press release, and then do nothing within their (limited) power to actually shut the site down. They get their press time, everyone's happy.
But, in some ways, that's a good thing. An ineffectual government is better than one with "quaint" notions of law and justice.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Whew! (Score:4, Insightful)
I guess we're all safe, just as long as there aren't any laws [cornell.edu] or regulations [gpo.gov] that these websites might be violating. I'm sure the authors of Freenet double-check their regulatory compliance every week. After all, the index volume for the Code of Federal Regulations is only 1100 pages, and the other 50 volumes can't be too much bigger. And why even bother reading the US Code? You barely have to skim the thing to determine that there could never be anything illegal about providing assistance to third parties who want to covertly transmit large amounts of unspecified data.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
They can't, legally, unless there's something criminal going on.
You mean, like telling you how to decrypt DVDs [2600.com]?
(Which, incidentally, is why I voted for the GNU Software Radio project. If "Think of the children!" is the constitution's rootkit, "Think of the IP!" is its moneyed, bastard son.)
Re: (Score:2)
Not even one word needed to rebut your claim (Score:3, Informative)
For those of you to whom the number "2600" has no meaning, the courts stopped 2600.org from posting and even linking to DeCSS or the source code (which the last I saw was seven lines of code and still shrinking). It is the website of 2600: The Hacker Quarterly [wikipedia.org]. Amazing that anyone at slashdot hasn't heard of it.
The courts held that source code isn't speech, pissing off a LOT of programmers who only know a few languages, all of which are computer languages.
</script>
Re: (Score:2)
Whether you agree with that definition is another thing. And as a citizen of the US, you can work (perhaps futilly) to get the law changed.
Re: (Score:2)
Not a suggestion (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
There, fixed that for you.
GNU Radio (Score:2, Insightful)
Some people say 'wikileaks' because the man doesn't want you knowing, but imo worse than that is the man not knowing. The man being any of the govt, riaa, mpaa, ca
Re: (Score:2)
The goernment won't shut down anything (Score:2)
As a last resort, I guess the corporations will need to "ask" the government to "step in" to protect some trade secret or stop some piracy, but the government won't just march in and take the servers.
That's what the RIAA is for.
Truecrypt can live underground. Wikileaks can't. (Score:5, Insightful)
As much as I think TPTB would like to kill off truecrypt (assuming it's on their radar), it can live on with underground distribution since it's a software project. Development might grind to a halt, since no one could easily validate the source for various underground successor projects. But checksums for the last known, good version would be as easy to find elsewhere as a bootleged disc of code.
The whole point of Wikileaks is to make things public, so driving leaked documents repositories underground would make them indistinguishable from conspiracy theorists and the lunatic fringe.
Re: (Score:2)
And if that's a problem just use P2P and/or an anonymous overlay network.
Community Choice Award (Score:2)
EFF Patent Busting?? (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, even the patent office is complaining about the backlog of patents. I think they want a solution as much as the rest of us.
Thank you (Score:2, Funny)
Sincerely,
U.S. Govt.
Clearly Neal (Score:2, Insightful)
Naw ... None of those ... (Score:3, Funny)
I must have been busy with something really really important or I would have nominated
. . . . . the Sirius and XM satellite radio merger
. . . . . the United States Patent Office
. . . . . the border between the United States and Mexico
. . . . . Amtrak
I'd say (Score:3, Insightful)
TrueCrypt (Score:3, Interesting)
Even though it would be delicious irony for them to shutdown TOR - after all, the US Navy created it - I would say TrueCrypt.
TOR (and Freenet) is too easy to co-opt. Anyone can locally modify their copy of the software and deploy "spyware enhanced" entry and exit nodes. Traffic between the exit node and final destination is not (TOR) encrypted. Also, even if otherwise encrypted, traffic analysis is useful due to the fact that entry and exit traffic can be correlated.
TrueCrypt, however, represents a real problem. While it would be easy enough to foist a back-doored version on to most potential TrueCrypt users, the people who are really serious about keeping their private information private, would build from source and be extremely careful about where they got the source from.
On the other hand, truly shutting down an open source project is likely impossible. Also, it is virtually certain that the software has been extensively analyzed for implementation weaknesses, so it might be decided to allow users to think they are secure.
DMCA -> software radio (Score:2)
Here's the pattern:
powerful people don't like X
X is inconvenient
software makes X convenient
government outlaws software that does X
Case 1
content producers don't want DRM to be broken
breaking DRM needs specialized hardware and expertise
software makes it easy for anyone to break DRM
DMCA outlaws software that breaks DRM
Case 2
<interests> don't want people to have free access to the airwaves
access to the airwaves needs specialized hardware
softwa
TrueCrypt is not an underground tool (Score:3, Informative)
Excellent question! (Score:5, Funny)
Listening attentively,
-US Gov't
I'm voting WikiLeaks (Score:3, Insightful)
But leaks they definitely understand and posting leaked info online is simply poking the Happy Fun Ball repeatedly with a sharp stick.
GNU Radio (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Links please? (Score:5, Informative)
http://w2.eff.org/patent/ [eff.org]
http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuradio/ [gnu.org]
http://www.wikileaks.org/ [wikileaks.org]
http://www.cryptome.org/ [cryptome.org]
http://www.torproject.org/ [torproject.org]
http://freenetproject.org/ [freenetproject.org]
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Links please? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Links please? (Score:4, Funny)
Oh the irony of this post in light of how wrong I am.
I apologize and retract my statement
Re:what? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:what? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:what? (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Re:what? (Score:4, Funny)
So there you have it. Slashdot Subculture, already targeted and dealt with by the Government!
Re: (Score:2, Funny)