Not really. Torrent will back up "some version" of a lot of media but the nature of who's doing it and why means we don't get to keep master-cuts of stuff around so easily. But this is a problem that's rife on the internet right now - it's utterly maddening that there's no way to digitally purchase music in lossless CD-quality format, nevermind 24-bit HD or better. It just straight up doesn't exist.
Most of those things you mentioned fail for the watch use case though.
Contact-less payments are a nightmare - the possibility of an unintentional scan is pretty damn high. Ah you say, but you'll require you to authenticate - well ok, but now you've turned a one-handed action (remove phone from pocket, press "allow" and swipe) into a two-handed action (hold hand against scanner, use other hand to press "allow" on the watch face").
The Watch is a really terrible form factor for pretty much anything that's not passive, because there is no possible way to control it with the hand of the arm it's worn on - it takes things which only need one hand on your smart phone to implicitly involving two.
On my LAN it is a lot faster - it's part of HPN-SSH which speeds up SSH over a gigabit network enormously for me (2 mb/s -> 30 mb/s with parallel AES ciphers). If I then use the none cipher I get 80-90 mb/s, which is closing in on the practical line speed for the network.
NULL algorithms are also handy when you just want to do secure authentication but nothing else. I have an SSH implementation with the none cipher enabled because it means I get packet verification and secure authentication without the overhead of AES when I'm just moving a bunch of non-secure log files (or don't want to install a totally different daemon on a machine on a local network).
In all seriousness this guy has written an incredibly vague article, dropped Snowden's name and let the geek community's intellectual blindspot for the emotions they convince themselves they don't have do the rest of the work for them.
Within a few weeks this article, like all the others, will be walked back once it turns out the guy had little if any clue of what he was talking about or reading, and it will turn out he was simply making huge leaps of logic not unlike the previous Guardian articles like Greenwald.
When your problem is having a lot of people who by definition can't be limited in any real fashion of their access in order to their job, a good answer is, depending on what you think the cost of a breach is, to centralize and reduce the numbers to a level which is manageable for near constant surveillance.
Maybe you can't keep a close eye on 1000 sysadmins (reasonable, its a number well above the monkey-sphere size of a human brain, so there's a espirit de corps issue there) but if you could get that number down to 100, then that's low enough that you could run them all in the same department, where everyone would "know" everyone as a real person with some room to spare for management and oversight.
It might not be an ideal or cheap solution, but it would work. Maybe they're weighting off the increased scope of a potential breach against the reductions in likelihood or speed with which it could be caught? Maybe, just maybe, you, Slashdot poster, aren't actually smarter then everyone else in the world.
The $52 billion is the funding for every intelligence agency in the US, including operations costs for drones, satellites and numerous other things. That's not all CIA.
The fact we usually know what Mossad has done doesn't speak well of their effectivness. You want your secret intelligence services to do things that remain secret.
The other thing to remember is that by and large the CIA are spies. Mossad is notable because they kill a lot of people, but that's hardly what an intelligence agency is actually all about.
Elon is _not_ the kind of guy to bow to conventional wisdom. SpaceX is one giant experiment to reevaluate 'conventional wisdom' about access to space, from the ground up. They're learning that while certain corners cannot be cut, there _are_ ways to economise.
Tom Markusic has come right out and said that they can develop Merlin 2 (engine for their super-heavy lift vehicle) in three years for $1b. I don't know the odds of a company the size of SpaceX getting their hands on that kind of money any time soon.
The thing about SpaceX is that it would be really great if NASA could get out of the business of getting access to low-earth orbit, and focus instead on the types of platforms that get us from LEO to the moon or other planets. The best way forward I can see for the immediate future of manned exploration is definitely going to be figuring out what can be done with SpaceX platforms - and Elon Musk at least seems super onboard with anything involving sending people to Mars.
Properly implemented encryption isn't easily breakable and there's only a few types of usable ciphers out there. Of course this sounds custom and probably proprietary, so in fact there's no reason to trust that at all.
But the thing is this is all digital: it can be data-mined easily. You're not going around to businesses collecting receipts, or having to even mangle data so it can be correlated from different sources. Everything's in the same format, and easily analyzable by computer.
Part of the difficulty of normal forensic accounting is that the data formats suck. But for pure tracking purposes, BitCoin is a dream - all the data is owned by everyone all the time as a nature of the protocol, so you can build social graphs and run correlation functions as much as you want.
If your plan is to keep an engagement a secret then I think you've misunderstood the purpose of marriage entirely.
And for that matter, who the hell would want to keep buying tampons a secret? This is in the same vein of thought as wanting to make sure no one knows you buy toilet paper.
Also "somehow" is not that nebulous: the DEA simply tells Steve "if you cooperate we'll drop some of the charges". Steve gives up all his keys and thus customers.
It isn't. But it is a crime to knowingly accept money gained through criminal activity, and to launder it for the purpose of obfuscating that fact. So anyone running "BitCoin laundry" is doing exactly that - providing a service where they deliberately blind themselves to possible criminal activities of people asking for the service.
A big part of financial regulations is that once you hit a certain size and scope of operation, you have to demonstrate you take reasonable measures to identify that the money you are handling is legally obtained (at least if you want to operate independently - I imagine you could get away with such an operation by turning all the data over to the government of who sends money in).
It gets secure only when you start approaching numbers the size of those uses in cryptography, which itself is numbers similar in size to those used for the data cryptography of the BitCoin protocol. At which point you're generating another problem: all those transactions are making the block-chain get longer and longer...
This all kind of hinges on the cost to LEO I suspect. Given the prices people pay for space tourism, I have been wondering what sort of improvements might make Lunar orbit tourism a thing instead. It's only a 3-day ride, and I suspect passage around the dark side of the moon would still be an incredible thing given that, what, about 30 people maximum have ever been there?
With enough money and a few years lead time, I suspect the Falcon-9 could probably get us orbiting the moon, and that there's enough talent in private space to also supply a suitable landing vehicle for a spacewalk.
The real trick is to plan to do something which gets us enough buy-in that we actually go there, and do something which keeps us in-space as a permanent - and ideally profitable (or break-even) endeavour.
Voted for, also had oversight authority and access to keep tabs on what they were doing and yet are just flabbergasted (apparently) at what the NSA has been doing.
Seriously? There are already at least 2 published standards that can be used with little concern over being cracked any time soon when used properly. Theres absolutely no indication that SMIME or PGP are broken when using the proper algorithm and key sizes.
I think the point is that encryption is useless against someone that can say, "give us the key or we'll dissappear you."
Yeah that Snowden guy - totally dead now don't you know?
Bradley Manning? Also dead. They killed him last week I think.
Wait, neither of those people, who are guilty of really serious breaches are dead? That's just them trying to lull you into a false sense of security!
Or you know: just share GPG keys and do it that way?
The idea that it was ever remotely possible to talk to people without leaving some trace of it is a bit of absurd fiction perpetrated by the early internet when it was always possible, but no one cared to do it because the only people talking were university students in the US.
Or maybe spend less time worrying about what the elected government will do to you, and more about what all those armies of large companies and advertisers who have always had your data and have kind of a big vested interest in manipulating the legal debate of the nation?
It can also work with planets though. Earth has a magnetic field, so by pumping current (or sinking it) you can increase and decrease orbital height relative to the planet.
More importantly, if you can do this with natural upwellings, its the same sort of infrastructure and engineering requirements as you'd need to tap geothermal vents for power directly (which is destructive, but the vents are temporary - i.e. decadal - things anyway so provided we did keep it low in proportion of vents, it would be sustainable).
Didn't NASA have reaction wheels go on another probe as well? The one we're sending to explore Ceres I think had reaction wheel issues as well and had to be reconfigured to run its mission on thrusters as well.
It certainly seems like this is probably going to be a big engineering challenge into the future since super-steady stargazing probes are hardly going out of fashion. Though I suppose the better issue is "can we make some of this stuff replaceable/repairable cost effectively?"
Well no, I explained why - it dilutes the risk pool. But take a glance over the history of insurance article on wikipedia and notice that the trend at every conceivable juncture was to expand the risk pool (but to try and drop bad risks). Architects of social welfare schemes obviously realized that when you are still responsible for a bad risk, the best answer is to include everyone.
the best possible insurance scheme for a country is single-payer, where everyone is part of the same risk pool
If this were really true, why stop at insurance industry? Why not leverage the awesome economy of scale by getting rid of the petty competition between Coca-Cola and Pepsi? Ford and GM? This was, actually, attempted already — to miserable results.
The numbers speak for themselves: the overhead of Medicare is about 6%. The overhead of a private health insurance company is closer to 20%. The insurance industry - particularly medical insurance - does not work like any other product. It's non-optional for the users, they have no negotiating power at the time they need it, and everyone will need it. Which means you can't simply boot people off of it consequence free since doing so usually kills them.
You are right in that size does matter for insurance companies. But only to a point. A company with 200 mln customers is not appreciably more efficient, than one with 100 mln. Having such companies compete with each other is much better for all the 300 mln, than to force them all into a single 300 mln-customer monopoly — governed charlie rangels and nansy pelosies to boot.
Competition requires innovation, innovation has to operate within the constraints of physical reality. Insurance is not a technological enterprise by and large, there's no new inventions which mean someone can gain a competitive advantage - you can't sink money into R&D and come up with a cheaper, better product. The only things you can do are figure out new ways to drop people from insurance - ideally after they need it. Which is exactly what US health insurance companies have been innovating on.
Slashdot Mirror
Not really. Torrent will back up "some version" of a lot of media but the nature of who's doing it and why means we don't get to keep master-cuts of stuff around so easily. But this is a problem that's rife on the internet right now - it's utterly maddening that there's no way to digitally purchase music in lossless CD-quality format, nevermind 24-bit HD or better. It just straight up doesn't exist.
That's still a problem which someone trying to restore old files can figure out. Cracking suitably large encryption keys? Not so much.
Most of those things you mentioned fail for the watch use case though.
Contact-less payments are a nightmare - the possibility of an unintentional scan is pretty damn high. Ah you say, but you'll require you to authenticate - well ok, but now you've turned a one-handed action (remove phone from pocket, press "allow" and swipe) into a two-handed action (hold hand against scanner, use other hand to press "allow" on the watch face").
The Watch is a really terrible form factor for pretty much anything that's not passive, because there is no possible way to control it with the hand of the arm it's worn on - it takes things which only need one hand on your smart phone to implicitly involving two.
On my LAN it is a lot faster - it's part of HPN-SSH which speeds up SSH over a gigabit network enormously for me (2 mb/s -> 30 mb/s with parallel AES ciphers). If I then use the none cipher I get 80-90 mb/s, which is closing in on the practical line speed for the network.
NULL algorithms are also handy when you just want to do secure authentication but nothing else. I have an SSH implementation with the none cipher enabled because it means I get packet verification and secure authentication without the overhead of AES when I'm just moving a bunch of non-secure log files (or don't want to install a totally different daemon on a machine on a local network).
In all seriousness this guy has written an incredibly vague article, dropped Snowden's name and let the geek community's intellectual blindspot for the emotions they convince themselves they don't have do the rest of the work for them.
Within a few weeks this article, like all the others, will be walked back once it turns out the guy had little if any clue of what he was talking about or reading, and it will turn out he was simply making huge leaps of logic not unlike the previous Guardian articles like Greenwald.
How is that a bad solution?
When your problem is having a lot of people who by definition can't be limited in any real fashion of their access in order to their job, a good answer is, depending on what you think the cost of a breach is, to centralize and reduce the numbers to a level which is manageable for near constant surveillance.
Maybe you can't keep a close eye on 1000 sysadmins (reasonable, its a number well above the monkey-sphere size of a human brain, so there's a espirit de corps issue there) but if you could get that number down to 100, then that's low enough that you could run them all in the same department, where everyone would "know" everyone as a real person with some room to spare for management and oversight.
It might not be an ideal or cheap solution, but it would work. Maybe they're weighting off the increased scope of a potential breach against the reductions in likelihood or speed with which it could be caught? Maybe, just maybe, you, Slashdot poster, aren't actually smarter then everyone else in the world.
The $52 billion is the funding for every intelligence agency in the US, including operations costs for drones, satellites and numerous other things. That's not all CIA.
The fact we usually know what Mossad has done doesn't speak well of their effectivness. You want your secret intelligence services to do things that remain secret.
The other thing to remember is that by and large the CIA are spies. Mossad is notable because they kill a lot of people, but that's hardly what an intelligence agency is actually all about.
Elon is _not_ the kind of guy to bow to conventional wisdom. SpaceX is one giant experiment to reevaluate 'conventional wisdom' about access to space, from the ground up. They're learning that while certain corners cannot be cut, there _are_ ways to economise.
Tom Markusic has come right out and said that they can develop Merlin 2 (engine for their super-heavy lift vehicle) in three years for $1b. I don't know the odds of a company the size of SpaceX getting their hands on that kind of money any time soon.
The thing about SpaceX is that it would be really great if NASA could get out of the business of getting access to low-earth orbit, and focus instead on the types of platforms that get us from LEO to the moon or other planets. The best way forward I can see for the immediate future of manned exploration is definitely going to be figuring out what can be done with SpaceX platforms - and Elon Musk at least seems super onboard with anything involving sending people to Mars.
Properly implemented encryption isn't easily breakable and there's only a few types of usable ciphers out there. Of course this sounds custom and probably proprietary, so in fact there's no reason to trust that at all.
But the thing is this is all digital: it can be data-mined easily. You're not going around to businesses collecting receipts, or having to even mangle data so it can be correlated from different sources. Everything's in the same format, and easily analyzable by computer.
Part of the difficulty of normal forensic accounting is that the data formats suck. But for pure tracking purposes, BitCoin is a dream - all the data is owned by everyone all the time as a nature of the protocol, so you can build social graphs and run correlation functions as much as you want.
If your plan is to keep an engagement a secret then I think you've misunderstood the purpose of marriage entirely.
And for that matter, who the hell would want to keep buying tampons a secret? This is in the same vein of thought as wanting to make sure no one knows you buy toilet paper.
Also "somehow" is not that nebulous: the DEA simply tells Steve "if you cooperate we'll drop some of the charges". Steve gives up all his keys and thus customers.
It isn't. But it is a crime to knowingly accept money gained through criminal activity, and to launder it for the purpose of obfuscating that fact. So anyone running "BitCoin laundry" is doing exactly that - providing a service where they deliberately blind themselves to possible criminal activities of people asking for the service.
A big part of financial regulations is that once you hit a certain size and scope of operation, you have to demonstrate you take reasonable measures to identify that the money you are handling is legally obtained (at least if you want to operate independently - I imagine you could get away with such an operation by turning all the data over to the government of who sends money in).
It gets secure only when you start approaching numbers the size of those uses in cryptography, which itself is numbers similar in size to those used for the data cryptography of the BitCoin protocol. At which point you're generating another problem: all those transactions are making the block-chain get longer and longer...
This all kind of hinges on the cost to LEO I suspect. Given the prices people pay for space tourism, I have been wondering what sort of improvements might make Lunar orbit tourism a thing instead. It's only a 3-day ride, and I suspect passage around the dark side of the moon would still be an incredible thing given that, what, about 30 people maximum have ever been there?
With enough money and a few years lead time, I suspect the Falcon-9 could probably get us orbiting the moon, and that there's enough talent in private space to also supply a suitable landing vehicle for a spacewalk.
The real trick is to plan to do something which gets us enough buy-in that we actually go there, and do something which keeps us in-space as a permanent - and ideally profitable (or break-even) endeavour.
Voted for, also had oversight authority and access to keep tabs on what they were doing and yet are just flabbergasted (apparently) at what the NSA has been doing.
Seriously? There are already at least 2 published standards that can be used with little concern over being cracked any time soon when used properly. Theres absolutely no indication that SMIME or PGP are broken when using the proper algorithm and key sizes.
I think the point is that encryption is useless against someone that can say, "give us the key or we'll dissappear you."
Yeah that Snowden guy - totally dead now don't you know?
Bradley Manning? Also dead. They killed him last week I think.
Wait, neither of those people, who are guilty of really serious breaches are dead? That's just them trying to lull you into a false sense of security!
Or you know: just share GPG keys and do it that way?
The idea that it was ever remotely possible to talk to people without leaving some trace of it is a bit of absurd fiction perpetrated by the early internet when it was always possible, but no one cared to do it because the only people talking were university students in the US.
Or maybe spend less time worrying about what the elected government will do to you, and more about what all those armies of large companies and advertisers who have always had your data and have kind of a big vested interest in manipulating the legal debate of the nation?
It can also work with planets though. Earth has a magnetic field, so by pumping current (or sinking it) you can increase and decrease orbital height relative to the planet.
More importantly, if you can do this with natural upwellings, its the same sort of infrastructure and engineering requirements as you'd need to tap geothermal vents for power directly (which is destructive, but the vents are temporary - i.e. decadal - things anyway so provided we did keep it low in proportion of vents, it would be sustainable).
Didn't NASA have reaction wheels go on another probe as well? The one we're sending to explore Ceres I think had reaction wheel issues as well and had to be reconfigured to run its mission on thrusters as well.
It certainly seems like this is probably going to be a big engineering challenge into the future since super-steady stargazing probes are hardly going out of fashion. Though I suppose the better issue is "can we make some of this stuff replaceable/repairable cost effectively?"
Citation needed.
Well no, I explained why - it dilutes the risk pool. But take a glance over the history of insurance article on wikipedia and notice that the trend at every conceivable juncture was to expand the risk pool (but to try and drop bad risks). Architects of social welfare schemes obviously realized that when you are still responsible for a bad risk, the best answer is to include everyone.
If this were really true, why stop at insurance industry? Why not leverage the awesome economy of scale by getting rid of the petty competition between Coca-Cola and Pepsi? Ford and GM? This was, actually, attempted already — to miserable results.
The numbers speak for themselves: the overhead of Medicare is about 6%. The overhead of a private health insurance company is closer to 20%. The insurance industry - particularly medical insurance - does not work like any other product. It's non-optional for the users, they have no negotiating power at the time they need it, and everyone will need it. Which means you can't simply boot people off of it consequence free since doing so usually kills them.
You are right in that size does matter for insurance companies. But only to a point. A company with 200 mln customers is not appreciably more efficient, than one with 100 mln. Having such companies compete with each other is much better for all the 300 mln, than to force them all into a single 300 mln-customer monopoly — governed charlie rangels and nansy pelosies to boot.
Competition requires innovation, innovation has to operate within the constraints of physical reality. Insurance is not a technological enterprise by and large, there's no new inventions which mean someone can gain a competitive advantage - you can't sink money into R&D and come up with a cheaper, better product. The only things you can do are figure out new ways to drop people from insurance - ideally after they need it. Which is exactly what US health insurance companies have been innovating on.