today's wikileaks cabledump

[Lyion]

The concept of a Deity holds no water since you only want there to be a reason, but if the existence of a greater power gives your life meaning, then what gives his life meaning, an even greater Deity then him? If simply the absence of truth about the meaning of life is all the proof you need that there could be a Deity, then this Deity would also have the same moral quandary. This logic carries infinitely, with each being infinitely more powerful then the next. It’s just silly.
But we do know why we'd create such a thing. Why each civilization has created a deity. Fear. Nothing has changed

Let's ignore the ontological arguments and posteriori discussions which refute the things you've stated, and which you are welcome to research on your own and let's move to simple assertions based on your previous arguments, shall we?

The concept of atheism holds no water since it is arrived at through lack of reason and philosophy.

Atheists feel morals are arbitrary and anything they want to do is fine. Nothing matters since we are all going to be null,six feet under, and worm food. Atheists support all that is wrong with the world: Nihilism, hate, anger, and curling.

Atheist children will end up with equally shady morals since nothing in their parents lives matter. Atheists feel all men are worthless. Atheists feel their kids should be allowed to do anything to succeed and live carpe diem. Atheists are self serving, hedonistic, petty, and mean creatures as evidenced by the recent examples of Stalin, Pol Pot, Hitler, and Alanis Morissette .

Atheists hate anything they cannot understand. All atheists believe Christianity and those trying to help others are inherently evil. They feel the world would be a better place if there was no good or evil, since those really do not exist and are just man made creations.

[Spazz]

Your painting with a really broad brush there friend. Lemme correct you on 2 things.

One as an atheist I have a very high moral code of conduct. I sometimes fail as we all do but i try as hard as I can to do the right thing , help others and just in general try to treat others as I want to be treated. Not cuz any god says I have to but because its the right thing to do.

I dont think you or I or anyone should just be allowed to do whatever the fuck they please. WIthin reason I guess but I think its pretty reasonable to say no killing peple raping one another or stealing other peoples shit.I dont think things like drugs and hookers should be against the law but from there to anarchy is a pretty big gap.

LAst I dont hate what I dont understand. I believe good and evil exist but t me it doesnt have anything to do with gos and everything to do with how bipolar humans can be. I do think religion does some good in the world but it also does a lot of harm.

Overall I dont give a fuck what anyone believes in as long as they leave me alone and dont try to use they religion to dictate how I should live my life.

[Zanchief]

You waited all this time and that's what you bring to the discussion. I'm going to assume your being sarcastic and this isn't worth refuting, but you've proven yourself to be a pretty irrational person so it's possible you actually believe this nonsense.

Obviously nothing of what was previously discussed has been refuted because you're a coward who refuses to have a discussion on the subject of your faith. Likely because it's pretty shaky and you're afraid it might be crushed. If I believe in magic I would too. But I'm not that gullible.

[Lyion]

Your painting with a really broad brush there friend. Lemme correct you on 2 things.

One as an atheist I have a very high moral code of conduct. I sometimes fail as we all do but i try as hard as I can to do the right thing , help others and just in general try to treat others as I want to be treated. Not cuz any god says I have to but because its the right thing to do..

Admit your moral inferiority to the Knight's Templar, cretin, and kneel before Zod, er God.

p.s. Spaz

Spoiler for :

Psst, humor. Don't take seriously. Zan doesn't want to have an actual discussion, nor respect other's beliefs. Plz don't tell him. Thanks~

[Spazz]

Spoiler for :

Sorry I just got up a bit ago and I didnt realize you were joking. Im an atheist and I consider myself a pretty upstanding person and just like religious folks dont like being compared to zealots I dont like being compared to a heathen. Im all for people being free to live and die as they choose .

[Zanchief]

Funny, I've been doing alright with everyone else. You're the only one who has an issue with my point of view.

[Lyion]

Yeah, that first polite, respectful post of yours set the tone, man. How could I not take everything said afterwards seriously and with the utmost dignity?

The thread and discussions were so uncivil and terrible before you arrived.

[Tossica]

Silly Christians, gods are for kids!

[Zanchief]

The thread and discussions were so uncivil and terrible before you arrived.

Most people have several transitions in life, unless they keep things fairly two dimensional.

You were baiting with this one. I'm happy to oblige. No need to chicken out later.

[Lyion]

You were baiting with this one.

Really? No, Really?

That was more about people who go cradle to grave with the same belief structure and environment without ever questioning it. Hey, if that's you, then I'm guilty but it wasn't intentional. You weren't even visible on the board when I posted that and this thread was interesting before you went Mindia on it and took everything personally.

[Zanchief]

I couldn't have taken it personal, I'm not personally involved in the debate. Religion doesn't factor into my day to day life at all.

To each his own, you're the only one whose moved on, and many others have joined in.

[brinstar]

i'ma post goatse if we don't get back on topic here

[Spazz]

DO IT DO IT DO IT


Seriously nothing is more inappropriate than goatse.

[Arlos]

I don't know about that. Tubgirl is at least as bad as goatse.

So is 2 girls 1 cup.

And worse is 1 guy 1 cup. Ow. I couldn't even finish watching that one.

BTW, so I don't have to put on the ModHat (TM), please post them in EE, and not here, if you're actually going to. Thanks. rofl.

-Arlos

[leah]

i think 2 girls 1 cup is waaaaaaay grosser than tubgirl or goatse or wtftit. mostly because i can tell myself that the jpegs are just 'shopped and totally not real. but 2G1C is happening! on video! that's vile.

actually i've never even watched 2G1C. (no i do not plan to.)

[Zanchief]

meh

[leah]

LOL wrong thread, turd.

also, i am sad for your parents' corgi. we had a biter and it sucked. also also, i still get emails from petfinder alerting me to dogs that match my search for a girl corgi (which i saved before i found april, who came from a corgi rescue in MN), and yesterday there was a little red girl named Hambone (lol!) who apparently had some kind of head or neck injury which left her balance completely off-kilter. they described her as "wobbly," ha. poor girl! she's really cute.

[Snero]

Atheists feel morals are arbitrary and anything they want to do is fine. Nothing matters since we are all going to be null,six feet under, and worm food. Atheists support all that is wrong with the world: Nihilism, hate, anger, and curling.

Say whatever you like, but leave curling alone!

[Arlos]

Atheists feel morals are arbitrary and anything they want to do is fine. Nothing matters since we are all going to be null,six feet under, and worm food. Atheists support all that is wrong with the world: Nihilism, hate, anger, and curling.

Say whatever you like, but leave curling alone!

Did anyone else just imagine Snerp saying the last bit in the same over-dramatic histrionic fashion as the "Leave Britney alone!" guy? Are they the same person, then? Inquiring minds want to know!

-Arlos

[Lyion]

Snerp sighting! Hey Snero!

Tubgirl is way more vile than goatse IMHO. Not even sure about the other things, and I get the feeling I really don't want to know.

Great article on Wikileaks:

Leak at WikiLeaks
A Dispatch Disaster in Six Acts

By Christian Stöcker

Some 250,000 diplomatic dispatches from the US State Department have accidentally been made completely public. The files include the names of informants who now must fear for their lives. It is the result of a series of blunders by WikiLeaks and its supporters.

In the end, all the efforts at confidentiality came to naught. Everyone who knows a bit about computers can now have a look into the 250,000 US diplomatic dispatches that WikiLeaks made available to select news outlets late last year. All of them. What's more, they are the unedited, unredacted versions complete with the names of US diplomats' informants -- sensitive names from Iran, China, Afghanistan, the Arab world and elsewhere.

SPIEGEL reported on the secrecy slip-up last weekend, but declined to go into detail. Now, however, the story has blown up. And is one that comes as a result of a series of mistakes made by several different people. Together, they add up to a catastrophe. And the series of events reads like the script for a B movie.

Act One: The Whistleblower and the Journalist

The story began with a secret deal. When David Leigh of the Guardian finally found himself sitting across from WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, as the British journalist recounts in his book "Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy", the two agreed that Assange would provide Leigh with a file including all of the diplomatic dispatches received by WikiLeaks.

Assange placed the file on a server and wrote down the password on a slip of paper -- but not the entire password. To make it work, one had to complete the list of characters with a certain word. Can you remember it? Assange asked. Of course, responded Leigh.

It was the first step in a disclosure that became a worldwide sensation. As a result of Leigh's meeting with Assange, not only the Guardian, but also the New York Times, SPIEGEL and other media outlets published carefully chosen -- and redacted -- dispatches. Editors were at pains to black out the names of informants who could be endangered by the publication of the documents.

Act Two: The German Spokesman Takes the Dispatch File when Leaving WikiLeaks

At the time, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, who later founded the site OpenLeaks, was the German spokesman for WikiLeaks. When he and others undertook repairs on the WikiLeaks server, he took a dataset off the server which contained all manner of files and information that had been provided to WikiLeaks. What he apparently didn't know at the time, however, was that the dataset included the complete collection of diplomatic dispatches hidden in a difficult-to-find sub-folder.

After making the data in this hidden sub-folder available to Leigh, Assange apparently simply left it there. After all, it seemed unlikely that anyone would ever find it.

But now, the dataset was in the hands of Domscheit-Berg. And the password was easy to find if one knew where to look. In his book Leigh didn't just describe his meeting with Assange, but he also printed the password Assange wrote down on the slip of paper complete with the portion he had to remember.

Act Three: Well-Meaning Helpers Accidentally Put the Cables into Circulation

Immediately after the first diplomatic dispatches were made public, WikiLeaks became the target of several denial-of-service attacks and several US companies, including Mastercard, PayPal and Amazon, withdrew their support. Quickly, several mirror servers were set up to prevent WikiLeaks from disappearing completely from the Internet. Well-meaning WikiLeaks supporters also put online a compressed version of all data that had been published by WikiLeaks until that time via the filesharing protocol BitTorrent.

BitTorrent is decentralized. Data which ends up on several other computers via the site can essentially no longer be recalled. As a result, WikiLeaks supporters had in their possession the entire dataset that Domscheit-Berg took off the WikiLeaks server, including the hidden data file. Presumably thousands of WikiLeaks sympathizers -- and, one supposes, numerous secret service agents -- now had copies of all previous WikiLeaks publications on their hard drives.

And, what they didn't know, a password-protected copy of all the diplomatic dispatches from the US State Department.

Act Four: Mudslinging between Assange and Domscheit-Berg

To make matters worse, Julian Assange and Daniel Domscheit-Berg then had a falling out. The German spokesman wrote a vengeful book after being thrown out of WikiLeaks in which he portrayed the WikiLeaks founder as an unreliable egomaniac who tended toward latent megalomania.

Predictably, Assange was furious and made several statements that were intended to besmirch Domscheit-Berg. But when he repaired the WikiLeaks server, Domscheit-Berg apparently didn't just take all of the collected WikiLeaks documents, but he also took the secure submission system designed to allow whistleblowers to anonymously submit data. As a result, WikiLeaks was temporarily out of action.

Domscheit-Berg also repeatedly accused Assange of not being sufficiently vigilant about protecting his sources. And he launched a competing platform called OpenLeaks which he is now developing with other former WikiLeaks employees and other supporters.

Act Five : Exposed Disclosures

The conflict between Domscheit-Berg and Assange has become increasingly aggressive. Germany's Chaos Computer Club recently made the surprising decision to revoke Domscheit-Berg's membership because he allegedly misused their name to hype his OpenLeaks project. While that was their official reason, unofficially the tension stems from the data that Domscheit-Berg took with him from Wikileaks.

In an effort to prove that Assange couldn't be trusted, people associated with the OpenLeaks project recently began talking about the hidden diplomatic cables -- and the dataset which has been coursing through the Internet for months, though no one knew about it.

Then someone betrayed the location of the password -- Leigh's book -- to a journalist for German weekly Der Freitag, which is also an OpenLeaks partner. The weekly published a cautiously formulated version of the story, that without naming the exact location of the password, still revealed it was "out in the open and identifiable to those familiar with the material." Speculation on Twitter and elsewhere ran wild, and hobby investigators began to edge closer to which password it could be.

Meanwhile the mudslinging continued unabated between Assange and Domscheit-Berg.

Act Six: Cablegate-Gate

An account of the story of Leigh, the hidden data and the password then cropped up on a platform normally used by open-source developers to exchange programming codes. A link to the entry spread quickly through Twitter. Suddenly, anyone could access the entire "Cablegate" file with a bit of effort.

On Wednesday afternoon the Wikileaks Twitter account announced "important news," and a few hours later character sequences and links were distributed to download an encoded, 550-megabyte file via a BitTorrent client. The password was to be delivered later.

The distribution apparently didn't work at first, and complaints appeared on Twitter. But later the problem was fixed, and the data began to circulate.

It remains unclear whether this was the Cablegate data set. Meanwhile Wikileaks' Twitter account has called on users to vote on whether they agree with the publication of the unredacted cables. They can register their vote with the hashtag "WLVoteYes" or "WLVoteNo" on Twitter.

A Wikileaks statement on Twitter blames the Guardian and Leigh for the fact that the cables are now freely available online. "We have already spoken to the (US) State Department and commenced pre-litigation action," it said, adding that their targets were the Guardian and a person in Germany who gave out the paper's password. Leigh breached a confidentiality agreement between Wikileaks and the Guardian, it added. The US Embassy in London and the US State Department had been notified of the possible publication already on August 25 so that officials could warn informants.

In a statement the Guardian rejected the accusations from Wikileaks, explaining that the paper had been told the password was temporary and would be deleted within hours. "No concerns were expressed when the book was published and if anyone at WikiLeaks had thought this compromised security they have had seven months to remove the files," the statement said. "That they didn't do so clearly shows the problem was not caused by the Guardian's book."

Finale: In the Open

It is possible that intelligence agencies in a number of countries have already gained access to the data. "Any autocratic security service worth its salt" would have already done so, former US Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs P.J. Crowley told news agency AP on Wednesday. Intelligence agencies that haven't already gotten their hands on the data "will have it in short order," he added.

By Wednesday evening Crowley's prediction was confirmed. The "Cablegate" cables are now completely public. For many people in totalitarian states this could prove life-threatening. For Wikileaks, OpenLeaks, Julian Assange, Daniel Domscheit-Berg and many others, it is nothing short of a catastrophe.

A chain of careless mistakes, coincidences, indiscretions and confusion now means that no potential whistleblower would feel comfortable turning to a leaking platform right now. They appear to be out of control.

URL: http://www.spiegel.de/international/wor ... 78,00.html

[Harrison]

I heard Assange is looking for legal action against someone who leaked information of his.

I fucking rofl'd.

[Drem]

imo if you're doing a bunch of shady shit, you should probly worry about your life. glad all this got leaked. fuck politics. they used to be able to hide behind their veils of secrecy, but it's becoming so open now that people *gasp* might actually be regretting all the sheisty maneuvers they pulled

i used to catch hell if i said i was going somewhere to my girlfriend and went somewhere else by the end of the night without letting her know. stuff like this is a lot worse imo, and i'm glad it's being put out in the open

[brinstar]

yep i hope they get the shit figured out real fast, i love WL

just goes to show how someone's fuckin ego can ruin an otherwise brilliant concept

[Lyion]

Some secrets are good things. As was noted, wikileaks outed a lot of people who live in totalitarian regimes and are trying to work towards freedom, but now many of these people will be killed. Good job in helping those non-free and closed countries. Next time they need to steal some Chinese or Iranian cables and let's see what happens.

I'm against the death penalty, but I'd still like to see Bradley Manning be executed for the damage he's done and the people he's caused to be killed. Likewise, I'd throw in jail the moron who linked the State Department systems to DOD and allowed some idiot private the capability to see them.

[Jay]

Did someone say goatse?