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Watching the IPRED Watchers In Sweden 88

digithed writes "In response to Sweden's recent introduction of new laws (discussed here recently) implementing the European IPRED directive, a new Swedish Web site has been launched allowing users to check if their IP address is currently under investigation. The site also allows users to subscribe for email updates alerting them if their IP address comes under investigation in the future, or to report IP addresses known to be under investigation. This interesting use of people power 'watching the watchers' is possible because the new Swedish laws implementing the IPRED directive require a public request to the courts in order to get ISPs to forcibly disclose potentially sensitive private information. Since all court records are public in Sweden, it will be easy to compile a list of addresses currently being investigated."
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Watching the IPRED Watchers In Sweden

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  • by MichaelSmith ( 789609 ) on Wednesday April 08, 2009 @12:03AM (#27499495) Homepage Journal
    Thats a terrible analogy. I am a native English speaker and I did not hear of habeas corpus until recently.

    OTH my wife is a native Cantonese speaker and I have noticed the trouble she has in English with the concepts of lights vs mirrors, ground vs floor and gate vs door.
  • by BlueParrot ( 965239 ) on Wednesday April 08, 2009 @12:06AM (#27499525)

    If you're writing this from the US I'm going to laugh at you.

  • by emilv ( 847905 ) on Wednesday April 08, 2009 @12:37AM (#27499713)

    No, but this is Sweden. The motto of our police force are something along the lines of "Raidin' The Pirate Bay and keepin' their servers forever". Thus, your comment are not at all inappropriate to describe Sweden.

  • by proton ( 56759 ) on Wednesday April 08, 2009 @01:14AM (#27499865) Homepage

    As a swede, I can say that our laws seems to function quite alot better than the american laws do.

    We actually have the freedom to watch our watchers (in most cases). The government is quite significantly more "for the people by the people" than in the United States.

    And just for you, the european human rights convention explictly states "habeas corpus" rights, although not under the title "habeas corpus". This convention is also considered part of swedish law since 1998.

    And we certainly have the sense not to run camps were our "habeas corpus" doesnt apply...

  • by Zarhan ( 415465 ) on Wednesday April 08, 2009 @01:43AM (#27500023)

    IPv6 has a nice little RFC going for it - Cryptographically generated addresses (CGA) [ietf.org], defined in RFC 3972 [ietf.org]. Consider the possibility where every TCP/UDP session, or even every packet, comes from a different address...

  • by Threni ( 635302 ) on Wednesday April 08, 2009 @02:57AM (#27500315)

    > English is also not derived from Latin (although it does borrow a large amount of words from Latin.)

    It borrows to within less than 1% as many words from Latin as from the biggest influence, so where it's derived from is something of a moot point for the purpose of this argument!

  • Re:127.0.0.1 (Score:3, Informative)

    by HonIsCool ( 720634 ) on Wednesday April 08, 2009 @04:36AM (#27500703)
    Not exactly. I think that in the USA, the police can also get the information from the ISPs, no?
  • by Kjellander ( 163404 ) on Wednesday April 08, 2009 @04:44AM (#27500737)

    English is also not derived from Latin (although it does borrow a large amount of words from Latin.) Swedish and English actually come from the same language family (Germanic) and share a large number of words.

    Not only that. A lot more English words than you think are borrowed from old Norse, the root of Swedish, Danish , Icelandic and Norwegian, and this because we Vikings invaded a thousand years ago.

    Don't believe me, check out the etymology on the word window [wiktionary.org], which means eye to the wind. (Swedish has since borrowed the German word Fenster into the word fönster, but that is beside the point. Norwegian still uses vindue)

    Think about that next time you see for instance Microsoft's trademark on a +1000 year old Norse word, vindauga.

  • by bigmouth_strikes ( 224629 ) on Wednesday April 08, 2009 @07:50AM (#27501461) Journal

    There are no scripts involved in this. As much as it may disturb basement-dwellers, exercising your Swedish freedom of information involves showing up at the specific public office/gov't branch/etc yourself.

    You have to show up at the court in person and ask to see any documents pertaining to specific IP-addresses. The court is not obliged to prepare lists or in any other way format the data; they will just hand out the entire court document itself for you to sift through. The work is also expected to be "reasonable", which is why you just can't show up with 1000 ip-addresses every day.

    The general idea behind the Swedish freedom of information is that you know what you're looking for, not that you're scanning everything in order to find something interesting. This of course makes it hard to apply in cases like IPRED where you may not be informed that you are under investigation until after a whole month.

  • by Petrushka ( 815171 ) on Wednesday April 08, 2009 @08:51AM (#27501865)

    > English is also not derived from Latin (although it does borrow a large amount of words from Latin.)

    It borrows to within less than 1% as many words from Latin as from the biggest influence, so where it's derived from is something of a moot point for the purpose of this argument!

    Latin/Romance-derived words in your post (including the quotation, since including it actually works in favour of your claim):
    derived, Latin, large, amount, Latin, per cent, Latin, influence, derived, point, purpose, argument.
    Total count: 11.

    Germanic words in your post:
    English, is, also, not, from, although, it, does, borrow, a, of, words, from, it, borrows, to, within, less, than, one, as, many, words, from, as, from, the, biggest, so, where, it, is, from, is, something, of, a, moot, for, the, of, this.
    Total count: 42.

    I hope that clarifies the slip in your reasoning.

  • by blackest_k ( 761565 ) on Wednesday April 08, 2009 @10:12AM (#27502971) Homepage Journal

    I am not a linguist however it doesn't seem to be an unreasonable hypothesis, one of the problems in translation is finding reasonably equivalent phrases between languages.

    Within any individual language there are specialized vocabularies that people outside the profession have very little grasp of, the language of stockbrokers or software engineers or marketing for example.

    I believe thats referred to the domain of discourse. Within different languages there are subtle differences between what we would think of as universal concepts. For example the word you in Japanese has maybe 7 roughly equivalent words, the difference is directly related to the relative positions of the two speakers in relation to each other and society. In Polish for example there is a similar difference where there are formal and familiar forms of discourse. If your being respectful then you use the third party form of verbs. As nonnative speakers we are liable to trample all over that difference and may be considered rude or ignorant.

    I believe 0 was late to arrive in mathematics but it made a considerable impact on thinking about numbers. Of course there is a tendency of languages to assimilate words from other languages sometimes with a direct relation such as the word bungalow which comes from india or a different meaning such as 'handy' which I believe the Germans use for 'Cell phone' or 'Mobile'. I've not even touched on English idiom which can really baffle non native speakers yet can be extremely vivid concepts for native speakers.

    The problem with the hypothesis is that if I were fluent enough to recognize a conceptual difference in one language and were able to convey that concept to you in English or another language then that concept is no longer constrained by its original language.

    However the essential idea that language is a framework in which we express our idea's is quite reasonable, the idea that frameworks differ between languages and individuals also seems reasonable, however these frameworks are not fixed and can be expanded on. So given two differing frameworks it is likely that a difference in the concepts as expressed in two different languages may lead to different approaches which may yield different results. Chances are that if it's important enough the language frameworks will be modified to share the concept. Obviously change is ongoing so differences will become more subtle, but it's obvious that if you talked about working with computers for example to someone from the 1900's the concept computer used to be a man who worked with mathematics and windows were glass panels set into walls. I've no doubt you could teach the modern day concepts to someone from the 1900's but then your modifying his frame of reference.

    As a final thought I'm reminded of a scifi story where a stricken spacecraft needed instruction from earth to be able to avoid disaster but the delay in sending a communication and receiving the answer meant there wouldnt be enough time to avoid disaster, the problem was solved by the presidents wife who told them to speak at the same time in her field of expertise gossiping nothing would get done if they waited for one party to relay one story before they related their own.

           

  • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 08, 2009 @02:21PM (#27506835)

    English and Swedish have a lot in common. If you're good at Swedish and have been exposed to some different Swedish dialects, you understand British English pretty well, even if you never learned it (but it's really hard to find an adult Swede with normal brain capacity that haven't learned English in school). I don't know if the opposite is true. If your good at Swedish you also understand many dialects of German (dialects in Uplandia sounds a lot like Low German and Stockholm had more German speaking inhabitants then Swedish ones during periods of the Middle Ages) and of course all of the Scandinavian languages. Swedish have also had a lot of influence from modern French (18th and 19th century) and Latin (both Vulgar and Book Latin: B.C. until late 19th century, we traded with that part of the world even before the Roman empire).

    After the Normands invaded Britain, Swedish vikings where actually able to get by speaking their native tongue on the British Islands (they usually hitched a ride with ships from Norway to that part of the world). As Normands where vikings that had settled in French and spoke a language with strong influence by Old French but with a Old Norse base, English has more loan words from Old Norse (the "grandfather" of Swedish) than it has from Latin, although sometimes it's hard to tell which ones was borrowed from Old Norse and which ones originates in older Germanic dialects (or French ;-). Some of these English loan word from Old Norse (at least from what I learned in Swedish schoolbooks when I was a kid) are: father, mother, stone, house, I, me, you. As you can see they are part of the English base language. In Swedish they are: fader, moder, sten, hus, jag (from ek or ik), mig/mej (alternate spelling), du (from thu).

    Of course, English have abandoned more grammar from it's Old Norse and Germanic roots then Swedish (we replaced and complemented some of our Old Norse grammar with some from Low German, Latin and French, but we didn't dumb down things as much as in English). English use only a small fraction of the Swedish phonemes (we have even more then Old Norse is likely to have had). And most English dialects are very monotonous in comparison with Swedish, even the most lively English/American dialects are just as monotonous as our most dull dialects (and why do most English/American dialects have to sound so aggressive). If you see The Muppet Show, the Swedish Chef singing in early episodes are actually a rather good imitation of how people from Rättvik sound when they talk (not singing), in later shows he's just an imitation of himself. But English/US people usually only have experienced the rather dull dialects around our Swedish capital. Those dialects are also prevalent in Swedish television and radio (even persons that normally speak other dialects usually adapt somewhat when in TV/radio, to be understood by people in that part of Sweden, which are not used to be exposed to other dialects/languages as much as people in other parts of Sweden (they traded mostly with the Swedish colonies in Finland, Lapland and Balticum, all of which they forced to use Swedish, and Germany).

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