As pointed out above, and what I suspected already, most likely there is no encryption broken: they asked the recipient (one of the suspect's contacts) nicely, and recipient simply gave them the message. A much more likely scenario than breaking the encryption of a single message that happens to be of utmost importance.
I for one mostly trust WhatsApp to put effort in working encryption. Why? It's their selling point, and the moment it's shown they're giving their messages to the NSA or whatnot it's on to the Next Great Thing, whatever that may be, and WhatsApp lost all its billions in one big swoop. WhatsApp has economical reason to make sure their encryption is pretty decent at the very least.
Then another thing: apparently a single message has been recovered, and that one message happens to clearly show the motives of the suspect. What a coincidence! Just one message, and that's the one that matters. Looking at my WhatsApp most single messages have little to no meaning. Heck, most conversations don't have much meaning. So the coincidence to pick out and decrypt just the right message is about as great as picking the right decryption key randomly. It even starts to sound like "one of the suspect's contacts came to the police and volunteered the clue".
And finally, why could they only decrypt that one message, and not the rest of the conversation? I forgot how WhatsApp's encryption is supposed to work but I don't remember separate keys for each and every message. At least a unique key per contact it was. Anyway it's not likely that they are limited to just one message. If they can decrypt that one, they can (and presumably would - part of the investigation after all) decrypt the rest.
So who regulates common carrier's privacy? Now, it's no one.
While I think it should be part of being a common carrier.
Common carriers are not responsible for what they carry - the mailman is not responsible for the bomb in your package or the damage it does, nor is the ISP responsible for your copyright infringement. Likewise, they should not be allowed to keep records of what's going through their channels. It's one or the other. Inspect and be responsible, or be not responsible and don't inspect/record.
Just looked at the photos and found there are three cars involved, one with serious denting.
Most notable is a skid mark leading to the less dented car, as if it's been pushed aside, and the skid mark leading to the front wheel of the Uber car, which makes it look like it slid backwards over the road surface while already on it's side. Looks odd to me.
Aren't SUVs with their high centre of mass a known rollover hazard? I very much remember the "reindeer test" videos of about a decade ago: basically making a very sudden, sharp turn at fairly high speeds to avoid a reindeer, causing most SUVs to roll over.
The problem here is that of course you only hear about that one incident where a human driver could have prevented an accident where the robot failed. You do not hear about the 100 incidents where the robot avoided an accident where the human may have not - which makes sense as nothing happened in the other 100 cases. In the same line, you don't hear about the thousands of flights that perform without a hitch every day, but whenever there is an accident with an airplane you hear about it.You probably hear more about air traffic deaths than road traffic deaths in the news over a year. Yet air traffic is much safer than road traffic per distance traveled, in part due to very well trained human operators and a high degree of automation to assist them with it, almost to the degree where all the human has left to do is telling the plane where to go.
It's not about breaking a few eggs to make an omelette. It's about breaking far less eggs to make the same omelette than we used to do.
The few online ads that make it through to me are usually totally irrelevant - except those that come with Google's search results as those are based on my location and current interest, i.e. what I happen to search for. The rest is mostly adblocked to begin with.
Also I have seen relevant ads on other sites - where the site itself sold the ads, to advertisers directly related to the topic at hand (a recycling site posting banner ads of recycling companies).Those were not adblocked, in part for not being part of an ad network so they fell off the radar. Not intrusive and relevant ads, that's totally fine with me.
So it sounds like Internet advertising has to go back to basics. Sites themselves selling ads to advertisers instead of pulling in random ads. Advertisers themselves looking for relevant places to show their ads, instead of having their ads plastered over random sites. At the same time those failing ad networks can stop their invasive tracking and profiling, as it's quite obvious that doesn't work either.
So let's take MS's claims of a more secure Windows at face value.
This means two things. First of all, the Windows they released to the market is unnecessarily insecure, and MS knows that.
Secondly, why would they only offer this enhanced security to the Chinese, and not to the rest of the world?
All software ought to be as secure as possible. If there are security enhancements available, a vendor ought to roll them out to all their users. Here MS is failing in both: Windows can be (much) more secure than it is, and they're not releasing this improvement to the rest of their users.
That, or MS is lying through their teeth to get into China. That may be possible, but while you can say a lot of bad things about the Chinese government, their people by and large are definitely not stupid so there has to be at least some weight to the claims of MS.
That when YouTube nowadays even provides foreign-language subtitles... As in, a robot listens to the audio, translates it into another language, and provides you with subtitles in that language. So a Chinese video can have English subtitles - for free!
Sure the result in my example isn't always the easiest to understand, it's better than nothing, but I've watched English videos with English subtitles where the subs were an almost exact transcription of what I heard them saying. Could be a solution. Add to that a pool of volunteers to check and correct the subs and it's not that big a job any more.
According to YouTube they have about 1 billion unique users a month. So if all were using YouTube every day, that would mean on average one hour of YouTube watching every single day. Still quite possible, but only if those users all visit YouTube every day, and it's an average, so many people watch much more than that. For me, few days pass without YouTube but normally not more than 5-10 minutes or so, mostly linked from my Facebook news feed, and sometimes tutorials and so. More than an hour in a day is rare.
However, according to this web site, some 30 million users use YouTube every day, and 6 billion hours a month. I don't know where they get their statistics, but the daily total is only 1/5 of the YouTube statistic given above. 30 million a day is indeed nearly 1 billion a month, so that's a sensible number, based on how you count "unique users", of course. Many of those will be repeat users. Anyway, at 30 million visitors a day, each visitor has to watch 33.3 hours of video a day. That's impossible - at least in my world, where a day contains just 24 hours. If that number is also off by a factor of 5, it'd be nearly 7 hours a day, on average. Even with a full zero missing for the daily visitors number, it'd be on average over 3 hours of video per user.
No matter how I try to look at this number, it just doesn't make sense.
From what I hear from other people it's quite similar in other big cities such as New York, and by now >50% of the world's population lives in cities.
Besides, self-driving taxis should be cheaper than private cars as you share the high cost of the vehicle itself (the driving it part tends to be the cheapest, so the more distance the vehicle does, the cheaper it gets).
Self driving cars are the future. Once there is self driving cars, the taxis will be as cheap as private cars on per mile basis when averaged over entire year.
Funny you say that. I live in Hong Kong, a place where taxis are cheaper than cars - much cheaper, unless you manage to drive really a lot (like from one end of the territory to the other and back, twice a day), which no normal commuter does. Added bonuses: taxis get you to your destination a lot faster as you don't have to park the darn thing, and you don't have to go back to pick you your car, as you can just take another taxi.
I don't think Amazon has ever been so pro-active in breaking laws. That alone is a big difference between Amazon (be a huge mail order company) and Uber (illegal taxi service).
the owners will cash in/sell out and walk away from Uber with pocket full of cash and a flaming wreck of a company behind them.
In that case these owners will have to be quick, as the moment it becomes apparent that the company is headed for bankruptcy there won't be anyone to sell those shares to - not even gullible "investors" on the stock market as there's just no chance for Uber to go public if it's in that bad a shape.
without copyright we would not be able to have professional actors or musicians or authors among others.
So, do you believe that without copyright Shakespeare wouldn't have written his plays, and there wouldn't have been professional actors to play them for him? Or that Mozart wouldn't have written his music, and there wouldn't have been professional musicians to play it for him?
Set your lockout zone to 1 km around the airport (or may be even a 5 km radius around airports or other ports of entry) and GPS is more than accurate enough. Typical error of GPS on a phone is a few meters. However GPS only works outdoors (most of the time not inside buildings) so you'd have to add something like "lock based on last known location" or a "lockout button" where the device locks until it has a clear GPS signal confirming it's a safe place to unlock.
Not allowing the content of your phone (and/or other digital devices) to be searched will be defined as cause for refusing entry, if it hasn't been done so already.
this may be a case of keeping the active user count artificially high in order to keep the merger on track.
I should also still have a Yahoo account. It's been a few years since I logged in; way longer since I checked my e-mail there. Created 15+ years ago, never actively used. If this "delayed delete" is a way of keeping the "active" user count up (i.e. number of registered and not-deleted accounts), it's a total fraud from Yahoo's side, as it'll for sure also add inactive accounts like mine, in that case.
People ride "driverless" elevators everyday without shitting or pissing in them. Why would horizontal movement be so different from vertical movement?
Elevators: usually the rider is not alone but there are strangers present; even if alone at any one time the door may open with other people wanting to get on. That's even before considering the CCTV cameras and the fact that rides are normally really short (less than a minute).
In short: there is no (expectation of) privacy in lifts. When it comes to cars, even when on the road, that's a whole different story.
Not that everyone will want a life like that. People will always want more than just the basics.
Not stopping people from trying to get more than "just the basics". That's also the philosophy behind things like a basic income for all. The basics are covered - food, shelter, clothing, a little extra for entertainment - but for more you have to put some effort in it. That more, however, can be different for many people. Some want to go for more hikes which is basically free, others may want to collect vintage cars and will need to find a way to get the money for that, yet others like to start writing books or engage in painting. That can also very well be that "more than just the basics", it is something we can not do now, but when robots take over our jobs, maybe we can. But only if we're not going to look for other forms of employment to occupy our lives with, just to fulfil those basics, which is what Bill Gates is suggesting we do.
Doesn't the same thing happen to YouTube videos already?
I've never posted anything there I don't want the world to see, so if they use one of my videos I'd be flattered instead.
However what does bother me is that I often see videos linked on other web sites, and then it's (C) YouTube. Or photos from Facebook, and it says (C) Facebook. Now I understand the part where YouTube and Facebook will have the right to re-use your videos/photos in any way they see fit, but how come they even can claim copyright on it? Or is that simply the news media not understanding copyright (which would be about as worrying but then for other reasons)?
You got one thing terribly wrong in your argumentation. Ad blockers are NOT the fault of YouTube per se.
I don't see ads on YouTube because of my ABP, but I didn't install it to block ads on YouTube, that was just a nice side effect or collateral damage or however you want to call it. I installed it to block ads on other sites that were irritating me, the risk of drive-by malware infections, and the general lack of interest in whatever they were trying to sell. It is the whole of the Internet that made me install an ad blocker.
Maybe a few people installed ABP or equivalent specifically because of YouTube, for most I think it's not like that. By now I install ABP on a new system as a matter of course. Even if the Internet at large would do away with ads suddenly, I wouldn't notice the difference, and I would still keep ABP running. Same for the pop-up blocker of Firefox. For years I haven't seen pop-ups or pop-unders (except that really persistent one from TripAdvisor), I don't know if they're still being used, and I'm not about to try it out either as the blocker doesn't seem to be getting in the way of anything.
Now only if there were a proper ad blocker for Android phones (haven't found one)... I rarely use my phone for browsing but there are some really really annoying ads going around apps (black/white flashing and so). It's those that drive me into spending the time and effort of installing blockers.
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As pointed out above, and what I suspected already, most likely there is no encryption broken: they asked the recipient (one of the suspect's contacts) nicely, and recipient simply gave them the message. A much more likely scenario than breaking the encryption of a single message that happens to be of utmost importance.
I for one mostly trust WhatsApp to put effort in working encryption. Why? It's their selling point, and the moment it's shown they're giving their messages to the NSA or whatnot it's on to the Next Great Thing, whatever that may be, and WhatsApp lost all its billions in one big swoop. WhatsApp has economical reason to make sure their encryption is pretty decent at the very least.
Then another thing: apparently a single message has been recovered, and that one message happens to clearly show the motives of the suspect. What a coincidence! Just one message, and that's the one that matters. Looking at my WhatsApp most single messages have little to no meaning. Heck, most conversations don't have much meaning. So the coincidence to pick out and decrypt just the right message is about as great as picking the right decryption key randomly. It even starts to sound like "one of the suspect's contacts came to the police and volunteered the clue".
And finally, why could they only decrypt that one message, and not the rest of the conversation? I forgot how WhatsApp's encryption is supposed to work but I don't remember separate keys for each and every message. At least a unique key per contact it was. Anyway it's not likely that they are limited to just one message. If they can decrypt that one, they can (and presumably would - part of the investigation after all) decrypt the rest.
So who regulates common carrier's privacy? Now, it's no one.
While I think it should be part of being a common carrier.
Common carriers are not responsible for what they carry - the mailman is not responsible for the bomb in your package or the damage it does, nor is the ISP responsible for your copyright infringement. Likewise, they should not be allowed to keep records of what's going through their channels. It's one or the other. Inspect and be responsible, or be not responsible and don't inspect/record.
Just looked at the photos and found there are three cars involved, one with serious denting.
Most notable is a skid mark leading to the less dented car, as if it's been pushed aside, and the skid mark leading to the front wheel of the Uber car, which makes it look like it slid backwards over the road surface while already on it's side. Looks odd to me.
Aren't SUVs with their high centre of mass a known rollover hazard? I very much remember the "reindeer test" videos of about a decade ago: basically making a very sudden, sharp turn at fairly high speeds to avoid a reindeer, causing most SUVs to roll over.
The problem here is that of course you only hear about that one incident where a human driver could have prevented an accident where the robot failed. You do not hear about the 100 incidents where the robot avoided an accident where the human may have not - which makes sense as nothing happened in the other 100 cases. In the same line, you don't hear about the thousands of flights that perform without a hitch every day, but whenever there is an accident with an airplane you hear about it.You probably hear more about air traffic deaths than road traffic deaths in the news over a year. Yet air traffic is much safer than road traffic per distance traveled, in part due to very well trained human operators and a high degree of automation to assist them with it, almost to the degree where all the human has left to do is telling the plane where to go.
It's not about breaking a few eggs to make an omelette. It's about breaking far less eggs to make the same omelette than we used to do.
Or an excuse to pull out of a failing venture?
The few online ads that make it through to me are usually totally irrelevant - except those that come with Google's search results as those are based on my location and current interest, i.e. what I happen to search for. The rest is mostly adblocked to begin with.
Also I have seen relevant ads on other sites - where the site itself sold the ads, to advertisers directly related to the topic at hand (a recycling site posting banner ads of recycling companies).Those were not adblocked, in part for not being part of an ad network so they fell off the radar. Not intrusive and relevant ads, that's totally fine with me.
So it sounds like Internet advertising has to go back to basics. Sites themselves selling ads to advertisers instead of pulling in random ads. Advertisers themselves looking for relevant places to show their ads, instead of having their ads plastered over random sites. At the same time those failing ad networks can stop their invasive tracking and profiling, as it's quite obvious that doesn't work either.
So let's take MS's claims of a more secure Windows at face value.
This means two things. First of all, the Windows they released to the market is unnecessarily insecure, and MS knows that.
Secondly, why would they only offer this enhanced security to the Chinese, and not to the rest of the world?
All software ought to be as secure as possible. If there are security enhancements available, a vendor ought to roll them out to all their users. Here MS is failing in both: Windows can be (much) more secure than it is, and they're not releasing this improvement to the rest of their users.
That, or MS is lying through their teeth to get into China. That may be possible, but while you can say a lot of bad things about the Chinese government, their people by and large are definitely not stupid so there has to be at least some weight to the claims of MS.
That when YouTube nowadays even provides foreign-language subtitles... As in, a robot listens to the audio, translates it into another language, and provides you with subtitles in that language. So a Chinese video can have English subtitles - for free!
Sure the result in my example isn't always the easiest to understand, it's better than nothing, but I've watched English videos with English subtitles where the subs were an almost exact transcription of what I heard them saying. Could be a solution. Add to that a pool of volunteers to check and correct the subs and it's not that big a job any more.
According to YouTube they have about 1 billion unique users a month. So if all were using YouTube every day, that would mean on average one hour of YouTube watching every single day. Still quite possible, but only if those users all visit YouTube every day, and it's an average, so many people watch much more than that. For me, few days pass without YouTube but normally not more than 5-10 minutes or so, mostly linked from my Facebook news feed, and sometimes tutorials and so. More than an hour in a day is rare.
However, according to this web site, some 30 million users use YouTube every day, and 6 billion hours a month. I don't know where they get their statistics, but the daily total is only 1/5 of the YouTube statistic given above. 30 million a day is indeed nearly 1 billion a month, so that's a sensible number, based on how you count "unique users", of course. Many of those will be repeat users. Anyway, at 30 million visitors a day, each visitor has to watch 33.3 hours of video a day. That's impossible - at least in my world, where a day contains just 24 hours. If that number is also off by a factor of 5, it'd be nearly 7 hours a day, on average. Even with a full zero missing for the daily visitors number, it'd be on average over 3 hours of video per user.
No matter how I try to look at this number, it just doesn't make sense.
From what I hear from other people it's quite similar in other big cities such as New York, and by now >50% of the world's population lives in cities.
Besides, self-driving taxis should be cheaper than private cars as you share the high cost of the vehicle itself (the driving it part tends to be the cheapest, so the more distance the vehicle does, the cheaper it gets).
Self driving cars are the future. Once there is self driving cars, the taxis will be as cheap as private cars on per mile basis when averaged over entire year.
Funny you say that. I live in Hong Kong, a place where taxis are cheaper than cars - much cheaper, unless you manage to drive really a lot (like from one end of the territory to the other and back, twice a day), which no normal commuter does. Added bonuses: taxis get you to your destination a lot faster as you don't have to park the darn thing, and you don't have to go back to pick you your car, as you can just take another taxi.
I don't think Amazon has ever been so pro-active in breaking laws. That alone is a big difference between Amazon (be a huge mail order company) and Uber (illegal taxi service).
the owners will cash in/sell out and walk away from Uber with pocket full of cash and a flaming wreck of a company behind them.
In that case these owners will have to be quick, as the moment it becomes apparent that the company is headed for bankruptcy there won't be anyone to sell those shares to - not even gullible "investors" on the stock market as there's just no chance for Uber to go public if it's in that bad a shape.
There are enough "old" movies out there for you to watch day in day out without watching the same twice, ever.
One of these issues is hurting established business interests. The other not. That's the key difference.
without copyright we would not be able to have professional actors or musicians or authors among others.
So, do you believe that without copyright Shakespeare wouldn't have written his plays, and there wouldn't have been professional actors to play them for him? Or that Mozart wouldn't have written his music, and there wouldn't have been professional musicians to play it for him?
You're mixing up security and privacy. This is more about the latter.
Set your lockout zone to 1 km around the airport (or may be even a 5 km radius around airports or other ports of entry) and GPS is more than accurate enough. Typical error of GPS on a phone is a few meters. However GPS only works outdoors (most of the time not inside buildings) so you'd have to add something like "lock based on last known location" or a "lockout button" where the device locks until it has a clear GPS signal confirming it's a safe place to unlock.
They cannot deny a citizen entry without cause
Not allowing the content of your phone (and/or other digital devices) to be searched will be defined as cause for refusing entry, if it hasn't been done so already.
At least now if he tweets something really embarrassing he can always claim it's FAKE and his account has been hacked.
this may be a case of keeping the active user count artificially high in order to keep the merger on track.
I should also still have a Yahoo account. It's been a few years since I logged in; way longer since I checked my e-mail there. Created 15+ years ago, never actively used. If this "delayed delete" is a way of keeping the "active" user count up (i.e. number of registered and not-deleted accounts), it's a total fraud from Yahoo's side, as it'll for sure also add inactive accounts like mine, in that case.
People ride "driverless" elevators everyday without shitting or pissing in them. Why would horizontal movement be so different from vertical movement?
Elevators: usually the rider is not alone but there are strangers present; even if alone at any one time the door may open with other people wanting to get on. That's even before considering the CCTV cameras and the fact that rides are normally really short (less than a minute).
In short: there is no (expectation of) privacy in lifts. When it comes to cars, even when on the road, that's a whole different story.
Not that everyone will want a life like that. People will always want more than just the basics.
Not stopping people from trying to get more than "just the basics". That's also the philosophy behind things like a basic income for all. The basics are covered - food, shelter, clothing, a little extra for entertainment - but for more you have to put some effort in it. That more, however, can be different for many people. Some want to go for more hikes which is basically free, others may want to collect vintage cars and will need to find a way to get the money for that, yet others like to start writing books or engage in painting. That can also very well be that "more than just the basics", it is something we can not do now, but when robots take over our jobs, maybe we can. But only if we're not going to look for other forms of employment to occupy our lives with, just to fulfil those basics, which is what Bill Gates is suggesting we do.
Doesn't the same thing happen to YouTube videos already?
I've never posted anything there I don't want the world to see, so if they use one of my videos I'd be flattered instead.
However what does bother me is that I often see videos linked on other web sites, and then it's (C) YouTube. Or photos from Facebook, and it says (C) Facebook. Now I understand the part where YouTube and Facebook will have the right to re-use your videos/photos in any way they see fit, but how come they even can claim copyright on it? Or is that simply the news media not understanding copyright (which would be about as worrying but then for other reasons)?
You got one thing terribly wrong in your argumentation. Ad blockers are NOT the fault of YouTube per se.
I don't see ads on YouTube because of my ABP, but I didn't install it to block ads on YouTube, that was just a nice side effect or collateral damage or however you want to call it. I installed it to block ads on other sites that were irritating me, the risk of drive-by malware infections, and the general lack of interest in whatever they were trying to sell. It is the whole of the Internet that made me install an ad blocker.
Maybe a few people installed ABP or equivalent specifically because of YouTube, for most I think it's not like that. By now I install ABP on a new system as a matter of course. Even if the Internet at large would do away with ads suddenly, I wouldn't notice the difference, and I would still keep ABP running. Same for the pop-up blocker of Firefox. For years I haven't seen pop-ups or pop-unders (except that really persistent one from TripAdvisor), I don't know if they're still being used, and I'm not about to try it out either as the blocker doesn't seem to be getting in the way of anything.
Now only if there were a proper ad blocker for Android phones (haven't found one)... I rarely use my phone for browsing but there are some really really annoying ads going around apps (black/white flashing and so). It's those that drive me into spending the time and effort of installing blockers.