What's the authority for Snidely to have me audited? What's his justification to have my computer confiscated? With video evidence of jaywalking... Well, jaywalking's a crime, and it should be pursued like any other crime, at the discretion of the appropriate prosecutor.
The key to minimizing abuse is that the system should be built such that actually causing an abuse requires a large number of conspirators and enough documentation to raise a big red flag to oversight offices.
The exploit is that regsvr32 can download a script from the Internet and execute it. If that script launches an executable that AppLocker should block, teh executable will launch anyway.
In short, not only is a single command all that's necessary to download a malware kit from the Internet and run it, the kit can be a simple (and locally untraceable) way to get around AppLocker restrictions.
If a terrorist wants to use a drone to attack a plane, what regulation is going to stop them?
The regulation that says that no drones may be flying within a few miles of an airstrip, regardless of intent. Then when they pull out the drone and start prepping it to fly, they get arrested then, rather than after their drone ran into an engine intake.
They already are looking at breaking murder laws, so why would they care about drone laws?
They won't care about the punishment for breaking drone laws, but violating the drone laws allows law enforcement to see what exactly they're up to, which may interrupt their other plans.
People can become a security interest in other ways than simply grepping bulk data. It may be justified to track convicted criminals, suspected criminals, those with links to criminals or suspects because the likelihood of them being involved is higher than a random member of the public.
So how does an investigator know if I have a link to a known criminal?
Every day, I go to a particular cafe and order fish and chips, served in the traditional paper wrapping. Is that suspicious? A mobster, currently in prison, is visited weekly by his apparently-law-abiding longtime friend. Is that suspicious? The childhood friend owns a cafe that sells fish and chips to loyal customers. Is that suspicious?
What's suspicious is when the officer assigned to surveil the cafe sees that my paper has a name written on it, and that named person ends up dead the next day.
Taking that anology to a modern world, I might now visit a particular news site daily. The friend may post stories or comments to the site, carefully arranging his sentences to pass the target message. An officer watching the site would have so many comments and stories to read that his chances of spotting the hidden message are virtually nonexistent. He'd also have no way to tell which messages I'm looking at, because even if I look only at the friend's comment listing, the officer can't see that.
Likewise if in the course of an investigation you confirm that someone you have collected data on really isn't linked, then you can delete the data.
That's always a risk, because the data might not indicate a connection now, but next week, or next month, or next year it might. A decade after the fact, when a mobster confesses that he ordered hits on several targets, my credit card history might show that I ordered fish and chips every day, confirming the mobster's story.
such a data set can be misused, either if it is leaked, or by corrupt elements within the state itself.
That's actually what I'd rather see argued. I'd prefer to see "keeping data" be to the government what "processing credit cards" is (or was until recently) to small businesses. It should be a hairy mess of regulation and oversight, such that it becomes an option of last resort.
What most people seem to accept is that surveillance be used when either the confidence of the suspicion is high, or the severity is high - i.e. for active investigation of known crimes, for investigation of suspects where there is some known reason for suspicion, and (potentially) for trying to detect and pre-empt terrorism and similar.
What people don't seem to accept is the difficulty in reaching that point. As I understand, terrorist groups are actively trying to recruit previously-unknown individuals to their cause, specifically because they're not high-suspicion.
The world is full of cost/benefit trade offs and arguments about them which assume either the cost or the benefit is infinite - people struggle to actually balance them because they are difficult to quantify.
Even worse, the cost is dynamic and dependent on quantities that are intentionally difficult to observe.
As more of a society follows the rules, it becomes more costly to find the remaining individuals who are not following the rules. In short, with every crime that is prevented, preventing the next one becomes more difficult, because new methods of detection and enforcement must be applied, while the old methods must continue to be used. Of course, it is impossible to know how many crimes are actually being prevented by a given method, and it's very unlikely that a criminal will come forth and say "I didn't do the crime because of this method".
On the other hand, with every crime that succeeds, the cost to commit further crime is reduced, because it is known that tho
If an insurance company raises your rates, there should be a documented reason, and if that reason is that your history shows a higher risk, then I see no reason why it's unjustified. After all, the point of insurance is to pool risk and costs, so the actual cost of a claim is amortized to affordable levels, regardless of when the claim actually occurs.
If you're being denied a loan due to a benign tumor, it is again a function of risk. Does that tumor carry a known risk of other conditions that would prevent you from repaying the loan? If so, then again it is justified that the bank would not want to increase their own risk. If not, then it's the bank's loss, as they're losing the potential income from your loan fees and interest, due to an unjustified risk. Find another bank, and see if they want to make more profit.
Personally, I don't trust the government to keep such data secure. Mostly I split the blame between legislators who don't understand technology, and technology companies who care more about selling their latest expensive data package than about doing a job right. That's a different matter, though, and I won't get into it today without request.
The surveillance did not make the "nightmare states". The nightmare states used surveillance as a tool to further oppress their citizens. If surveillance isn't possible, more violence is used to remove dissidents. If violence isn't an option, misinformation will convince everyone that the state's problems are all someone else's fault. If misinformation isn't fully effective, surveillance will be used to find dissidents.
Surveillance is just a tool. Worry less about it, and worry more about the intent of those employing it.
Just to play Devil's advocate a bit here, but isn't this exactly the way the system is supposed to work?
Having information on someone is what puts them in the "no security interest" category, rather than the "unknown" category. In reviewing that information, crimes like copyright infringement may be discovered, and that puts the person in a different category entirely.
Now, if understand the typical Slashdotter's perspective, the government shouldn't be allowed to gather information on people of "no security interest", but they can't know who that is without gathering information. Naturally, then, we will lobby to prohibit all gathering of information, and when successful, we will mock the government's eventual failure to find people who are of "security interest" with their then-nonexistent capabilities.
Your reasonable position and comprehension is not welcome here. We are all armchair commanders whose personal military experience tops out with a few battles in one war, and our understanding of tactics is based on a few thousand hours in Modern Warfare. In our opinion, all wars are like the last one, which we're pretty sure we won... or would have, if not for that one big mistake by that one guy.
Obviously, this new plane is expensive and complicated, and we never saw that with our previous beloved planes. What we did see were planes coming back with damage, but still flying, and we haven't seen such feats from these new planes that haven't flown yet. That means it's wholly unsuitable for use, and its money would be better spent cutting our taxes, rather than making "accurate" or "effective" weapons. After all, surely if we stop building new military technology, every other country would be content with their state-of-last-decade's-art weaponry, right?
No, they've said that such collisions could result in a loss of life.
This drone apparently hit the plane's nose. If it were an engine intake at a critical moment, the story could be quite different. It happens occasionally with bird strikes, and it can happen with drones, that an incident will cause significant damage.
One key difference between birds and drones, though, is that birds tend to avoid aircraft. Stupid humans, on the other hand, tend to do ever-dumber things without realizing the risks they're causing. Current drones are usually small, lightweight, plastic little things... but there are plenty of larger kits out there, and improving battery technology is making it cheaper and easier to pose a real threat. The age of rare aviation is over, and now everyone can put an obstacle into the flight path if they want to, without even realizing that there's a danger to others.
It's a careful balance to be struck... Little Bobby's 6-ounce toy isn't a risk, but if Bobby starts flying a drone at age 10 without any limits, he won't be expecting limits when he flies a 20-pound drone at age 20. Trying to record the neighbor girl sunbathing might be rude, but trying to record the takeoff of an approaching single-engine airplane might be deadly.
That's the concern for lawmakers and airlines. Current technology and incidents present only annoyances for pilots, but now is the time to start thinking about regulation, and hopefully lay out reasonable limits. Don't wait until after the first deadly drone strike, when all the politicians bring their knee-jerk reactions.
Being a for-profit company does not preclude having ethics.
If you want good journalism, write the company bylaws and policies in such a way that rewarding deep, detailed, and objective reporting is mandatory, and journalists who routinely write sensationalist crap lose seniority. It's not a popular way to run a business, but it is orthogonal to the profitability of the business.
Let's figure out how to build structures like space stations on a larger scale
A cheap way to do that would be inflatable rooms, so a large work environment can be launched with fewer (and smaller) rockets.Of course, once built, such a thing would need to be tested, but I suppose that's a "complete waste of resources"...
This is a standard (for Slashdot) hit piece against a legitimate police action. Consider a few key details from TFS:
The Seattle Police Department acknowledged that no child porn was found, no assets were seized, and no arrests were made.
In other words, an officer had a reasonable suspicion that something illegal happened that required a search, and convinced a judge of such, which is the entirety of Fourth Amendment protection. The police don't have to convince the public that a search is reasonable. They only have to convince a judge. The judge (and his views on privacy and other issues) is elected in a general election.
In this case, the search ensued, and it's determined that there's no justification for further action (at this time). That's the entirety of the legal process so far. The server operators then chose to buy new hardware and build a new server, but that's their own paranoia, and the police aren't responsible for that.
"You knew about the Tor node, but didn't mention it in warrant application. Y'all pulled a fast one on the judge... you knew the uploader could have been literally anyone in the world."
According to the second (heavily biased) TFA, the detectives learned about the exit node between requesting the warrant and executing the search. Even if known, it doesn't necessarily have to be mentioned in the search warrant. It could be exculpatory, but just as there's no evidence the server operators were responsible for the crime, there's no evidence they weren't.. Are we now assuming that people running Tor exit nodes are now above suspicion? Are they the next group to be unaccountable to the law?
Despite the outrage by the privacy community, and the anti-police bias in TFAs, it looks like everything here happened exactly as it's supposed to, given the current state of the law.
I strongly suspect that "the last time the military brought in a project with even reasonable success at a reasonable price" was slightly before the politicians realized that government contractors were wasting a small percentage of the contract money as "overhead".
Now, thanks to anti-fraud laws, we pay for materials, people to do the work, accountants to keep track of the people doing work, and accountants to keep track of the accountants. In order to make sure every minute of time is properly billed and every scrap of material is properly tracked, the cost of every trivial task is doubled and redoubled.
They assume that if the phone comes with 16Gb and has no expandability, that 16Gb is probably "good enough" because what manufacturer would come out with an explicitly crippled device that cannot be upgraded, not even for cold hard cash?
Bullshit. They buy a 16GB device because that's what they want to buy. Don't blame the manufacturer because you can't imagine a use case for their product. Sure, other use cases fit other products better, but one size certainly does not fit all.
I know someone who bought the smallest iPhone available at the time, because he doesn't have any need for large storage. He uses the phone for phone calls, email, a few apps, and the ability to have access to online references wherever he is. It was also a convenient tool for his job installing video systems. Last I heard, his phone was still half empty after a few years of use.
I bought my latest device in the middle of the range. The smallest was a bit of a tight fit to also serve as a camera, but the largest was more expensive than I cared to spend, and I didn't need that much storage.
If you think you'd need more than some particular fixed limit, then go pay for it and have what you want, but please don't assume that my requirements match yours.
From TFS (which is all I bothered reading), there is no indication of the mother's reaction at all.
When you carry a weapon, you are on a mission to do whatever it is you would be doing without a weapon, only doing it while armed. If you would be improving the world, then improve the world. If you would be educating a child, then educate a child.
If you would be encouraging partisan confrontation and argument, keep posting anonymous troll posts to Slashdot.
"Yes, kid, I have a gun, and that's okay. Before I could get this gun, I had to go to the police and show them that I'm one of the good guys. They made me promise that no matter what, I would use this gun only if there are bad guys who want to hurt me or the people around me, and there is no other way to escape. See, you've probably seen some movies or TV shows where the good guys arrive right in time. In the real world, that doesn't always happen. Sometimes, a good guy has to be there already. Right now, if a bad guy comes in this restaurant, I might be able to stop him, and that's why I have a gun."
...and that's how you change "awkward" into "awesome", and you don't even need to make even more identification problems!
If you're the FBI and you can see an approaching issue where you won't be able to get into communication devices due to the security measures that manufacturers are putting in place, then it is entirely rational to want to establish a precedent where you can compel the firms to assist you in defeating that security in future. This isn't some crazy multi-step conspiracy theory, the benefit of doing this is clear and direct.
Rational, perhaps, but certainly not direct. Your assumption is that the person making this realization has the authority to initiate a court order before anybody else involved says "Wait, that's not our job."
If I personally was the FBI, it's be easy. If the FBI were a single coherent unit, it'd be easy. However, the FBI is a large organization of many people, each one with their own priorities and oversight. Any one of them could have raised an alarm about perverting the goal of the investigation, if that were really the case.
Even if it was a more convoluted plot you only have to look at some of the batshit crazy things things government agencies have done, and have gotten away with, to see just how weak your claim that this isn't credible because the US government doesn't do X-files" type stuff: The CIA did run brothels and inject people with LSD in San Francisco against their will for example.
That makes sense, though. It was directly related to the goals of project MKULTRA, and apart from the issue of ethics, MKULTRA fit within the CIA's mission. A similar statement for the FBI is that they investigate prominent activists. That's within their mission, and at every step of the chain of command, there's a reasonable justification.
Odds are they never cared about that anyway, but only about setting the precedent by requiring Apple to help them,
I know it's never been a popular view on Slashdot, but perhaps if we all just loosen our tinfoil hats a bit, we can see Ockham's favored solution.
I see an investigative team who did their research, and realized that the only thing standing between them and potential evidence was a stupid passcode on the phone. They knew there was an attack vector there, because later models added hardware security. All they needed was for Apple to sign a tool to work around the lock. That meant asking for a court order, because there is no alternative. Now someone else has come forward with an alternative, and the team is still open to it. It seems to work, so the request for Apple's help can be dropped.
That scenario requires me to believe that the FBI has assigned their qualified personnel to a high-profile case. It also requires me to believe that the FBI's personnel are doing their sworn duty to seek legal justice. In short, it requires me to only believe that people are individually doing exactly what they're supposed to be doing.
The conspiracy theory means there is a team at the FBI seeking to undermine American freedoms, and that they operate with high enough authority and wide enough acceptance that they can interfere with any convenient case and effectively obstruct justice for a few months while they submit a bogus court motion that may or may not be granted, and if so, may or may not set a useful precedent.
For that scenario, I am expected to believe in a cabal of high-ranking FBI officials who are all individually working utterly contrary to their sworn duty, with no oversight, and that none of them (or any subordinates who know of them) have ever had the moral fortitude to say "this is wrong".
Sorry, folks, but this is reality, not the X-files. There are no like-minded high-ranking alien conspiracies in the government. There are only people, doing their best to do what is right.
As long as your last name isn't a single letter. That catches my psuedonym fairly regularly.
Back when I worked in medical data, I encountered real people with single-character names. It happens for real names, too. For programmers, the rule is simple: Don't use names for anything except your application's convenience, and don't have any restrictions on them. Don't even require their existence.
Lockheed Martin once built an airship to go over 18km. Due to budget cuts and the required removal of equipment, a critical valve froze at about half that height, cutting the test flight short with an "unplanned controlled descent". The airship landed in a forest, and when the sun came out the next day, the solar panels started a fire.
not all of us live in areas where the maps are accurate - or even remotely accurate.
Maps are just one sensor. The algorithms work well enough without them, though you may need to tell the car exactly what route to follow.
I'm a driving enthusiast... I'd like to think I've got a qualified opinion.
Your opinion may indeed be qualified, or it may not be. Experience and understanding are related, but distinct.
What's awesome is when they say how many miles the cars have driven without accidents. Sure, how many times have humans intervened and how much of that was on roads that were unfamiliar? How much of that was in less than optimal situations?
Actually, a lot of it is in less-than-optimal situations, with very little human intervention. There are controlled and uncontrolled tests. Google and the media make a big deal about the uncontrolled tests, where a vehicle is out on the roads in public areas, but those aren't really the most useful for refining the software. In controlled tests, engineers throw everything at the vehicle, and any time the human has to assist, the software goes back for redesign.
However, my big concern is privacy but nobody gets that part.
Actually, there is research being done into privacy aspects of automated cars, but it is still a minority. Sadly, concern about privacy is a minority concern pretty much everywhere outside of echo-chambers like Slashdot.
One of the promising areas for vehicular privacy is not really privacy, but anonymity. It's not the idea of hiding what you're doing, but rather hiding who's doing it. Your car may announce its presence with a unique identifier, but that identifier can (in research tests, though I don't know of any real-world implementation) change at every turn. Someone intending to follow your travels might know that your car left your house and entered a particular road, but then a completely different vehicle announced it was on that road a few seconds later. For a few seconds (where nothing of interest happened, as far as your vehicle's concerned), there is uncertainty about your car's identifier, and that makes tracking your movement far more difficult.
Movement can be extrapolated, but there's no requirement (yet) that a vehicle announce every move. Such announcements are a courtesy to other vehicles, but those vehicles have their own sensors, and don't really need the announcement.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a leap of faith you're making there.
What's the authority for Snidely to have me audited? What's his justification to have my computer confiscated? With video evidence of jaywalking... Well, jaywalking's a crime, and it should be pursued like any other crime, at the discretion of the appropriate prosecutor.
The key to minimizing abuse is that the system should be built such that actually causing an abuse requires a large number of conspirators and enough documentation to raise a big red flag to oversight offices.
You mean like the cell phone on my nightstand every night?
Or the always-on audio monitoring so popular with voice agents today?
Looks like you didn't read TFA.
The exploit is that regsvr32 can download a script from the Internet and execute it. If that script launches an executable that AppLocker should block, teh executable will launch anyway.
In short, not only is a single command all that's necessary to download a malware kit from the Internet and run it, the kit can be a simple (and locally untraceable) way to get around AppLocker restrictions.
If a terrorist wants to use a drone to attack a plane, what regulation is going to stop them?
The regulation that says that no drones may be flying within a few miles of an airstrip, regardless of intent. Then when they pull out the drone and start prepping it to fly, they get arrested then, rather than after their drone ran into an engine intake.
They already are looking at breaking murder laws, so why would they care about drone laws?
They won't care about the punishment for breaking drone laws, but violating the drone laws allows law enforcement to see what exactly they're up to, which may interrupt their other plans.
People can become a security interest in other ways than simply grepping bulk data. It may be justified to track convicted criminals, suspected criminals, those with links to criminals or suspects because the likelihood of them being involved is higher than a random member of the public.
So how does an investigator know if I have a link to a known criminal?
Every day, I go to a particular cafe and order fish and chips, served in the traditional paper wrapping. Is that suspicious? A mobster, currently in prison, is visited weekly by his apparently-law-abiding longtime friend. Is that suspicious? The childhood friend owns a cafe that sells fish and chips to loyal customers. Is that suspicious?
What's suspicious is when the officer assigned to surveil the cafe sees that my paper has a name written on it, and that named person ends up dead the next day.
Taking that anology to a modern world, I might now visit a particular news site daily. The friend may post stories or comments to the site, carefully arranging his sentences to pass the target message. An officer watching the site would have so many comments and stories to read that his chances of spotting the hidden message are virtually nonexistent. He'd also have no way to tell which messages I'm looking at, because even if I look only at the friend's comment listing, the officer can't see that.
Likewise if in the course of an investigation you confirm that someone you have collected data on really isn't linked, then you can delete the data.
That's always a risk, because the data might not indicate a connection now, but next week, or next month, or next year it might. A decade after the fact, when a mobster confesses that he ordered hits on several targets, my credit card history might show that I ordered fish and chips every day, confirming the mobster's story.
such a data set can be misused, either if it is leaked, or by corrupt elements within the state itself.
That's actually what I'd rather see argued. I'd prefer to see "keeping data" be to the government what "processing credit cards" is (or was until recently) to small businesses. It should be a hairy mess of regulation and oversight, such that it becomes an option of last resort.
What most people seem to accept is that surveillance be used when either the confidence of the suspicion is high, or the severity is high - i.e. for active investigation of known crimes, for investigation of suspects where there is some known reason for suspicion, and (potentially) for trying to detect and pre-empt terrorism and similar.
What people don't seem to accept is the difficulty in reaching that point. As I understand, terrorist groups are actively trying to recruit previously-unknown individuals to their cause, specifically because they're not high-suspicion.
The world is full of cost/benefit trade offs and arguments about them which assume either the cost or the benefit is infinite - people struggle to actually balance them because they are difficult to quantify.
Even worse, the cost is dynamic and dependent on quantities that are intentionally difficult to observe.
As more of a society follows the rules, it becomes more costly to find the remaining individuals who are not following the rules. In short, with every crime that is prevented, preventing the next one becomes more difficult, because new methods of detection and enforcement must be applied, while the old methods must continue to be used. Of course, it is impossible to know how many crimes are actually being prevented by a given method, and it's very unlikely that a criminal will come forth and say "I didn't do the crime because of this method".
On the other hand, with every crime that succeeds, the cost to commit further crime is reduced, because it is known that tho
...and is that wrong?
If an insurance company raises your rates, there should be a documented reason, and if that reason is that your history shows a higher risk, then I see no reason why it's unjustified. After all, the point of insurance is to pool risk and costs, so the actual cost of a claim is amortized to affordable levels, regardless of when the claim actually occurs.
If you're being denied a loan due to a benign tumor, it is again a function of risk. Does that tumor carry a known risk of other conditions that would prevent you from repaying the loan? If so, then again it is justified that the bank would not want to increase their own risk. If not, then it's the bank's loss, as they're losing the potential income from your loan fees and interest, due to an unjustified risk. Find another bank, and see if they want to make more profit.
Personally, I don't trust the government to keep such data secure. Mostly I split the blame between legislators who don't understand technology, and technology companies who care more about selling their latest expensive data package than about doing a job right. That's a different matter, though, and I won't get into it today without request.
Please actually read some Orwell.
The surveillance did not make the "nightmare states". The nightmare states used surveillance as a tool to further oppress their citizens. If surveillance isn't possible, more violence is used to remove dissidents. If violence isn't an option, misinformation will convince everyone that the state's problems are all someone else's fault. If misinformation isn't fully effective, surveillance will be used to find dissidents.
Surveillance is just a tool. Worry less about it, and worry more about the intent of those employing it.
Just to play Devil's advocate a bit here, but isn't this exactly the way the system is supposed to work?
Having information on someone is what puts them in the "no security interest" category, rather than the "unknown" category. In reviewing that information, crimes like copyright infringement may be discovered, and that puts the person in a different category entirely.
Now, if understand the typical Slashdotter's perspective, the government shouldn't be allowed to gather information on people of "no security interest", but they can't know who that is without gathering information. Naturally, then, we will lobby to prohibit all gathering of information, and when successful, we will mock the government's eventual failure to find people who are of "security interest" with their then-nonexistent capabilities.
I'm sorry, but this is the Internet.
Your reasonable position and comprehension is not welcome here. We are all armchair commanders whose personal military experience tops out with a few battles in one war, and our understanding of tactics is based on a few thousand hours in Modern Warfare. In our opinion, all wars are like the last one, which we're pretty sure we won... or would have, if not for that one big mistake by that one guy.
Obviously, this new plane is expensive and complicated, and we never saw that with our previous beloved planes. What we did see were planes coming back with damage, but still flying, and we haven't seen such feats from these new planes that haven't flown yet. That means it's wholly unsuitable for use, and its money would be better spent cutting our taxes, rather than making "accurate" or "effective" weapons. After all, surely if we stop building new military technology, every other country would be content with their state-of-last-decade's-art weaponry, right?
No, they've said that such collisions could result in a loss of life.
This drone apparently hit the plane's nose. If it were an engine intake at a critical moment, the story could be quite different. It happens occasionally with bird strikes, and it can happen with drones, that an incident will cause significant damage.
One key difference between birds and drones, though, is that birds tend to avoid aircraft. Stupid humans, on the other hand, tend to do ever-dumber things without realizing the risks they're causing. Current drones are usually small, lightweight, plastic little things... but there are plenty of larger kits out there, and improving battery technology is making it cheaper and easier to pose a real threat. The age of rare aviation is over, and now everyone can put an obstacle into the flight path if they want to, without even realizing that there's a danger to others.
It's a careful balance to be struck... Little Bobby's 6-ounce toy isn't a risk, but if Bobby starts flying a drone at age 10 without any limits, he won't be expecting limits when he flies a 20-pound drone at age 20. Trying to record the neighbor girl sunbathing might be rude, but trying to record the takeoff of an approaching single-engine airplane might be deadly.
That's the concern for lawmakers and airlines. Current technology and incidents present only annoyances for pilots, but now is the time to start thinking about regulation, and hopefully lay out reasonable limits. Don't wait until after the first deadly drone strike, when all the politicians bring their knee-jerk reactions.
No, because the photons would be aimed at the probe, not at us.
Being a for-profit company does not preclude having ethics.
If you want good journalism, write the company bylaws and policies in such a way that rewarding deep, detailed, and objective reporting is mandatory, and journalists who routinely write sensationalist crap lose seniority. It's not a popular way to run a business, but it is orthogonal to the profitability of the business.
Let's figure out how to build structures like space stations on a larger scale
A cheap way to do that would be inflatable rooms, so a large work environment can be launched with fewer (and smaller) rockets.Of course, once built, such a thing would need to be tested, but I suppose that's a "complete waste of resources"...
This is a standard (for Slashdot) hit piece against a legitimate police action. Consider a few key details from TFS:
The Seattle Police Department acknowledged that no child porn was found, no assets were seized, and no arrests were made.
In other words, an officer had a reasonable suspicion that something illegal happened that required a search, and convinced a judge of such, which is the entirety of Fourth Amendment protection. The police don't have to convince the public that a search is reasonable. They only have to convince a judge. The judge (and his views on privacy and other issues) is elected in a general election.
In this case, the search ensued, and it's determined that there's no justification for further action (at this time). That's the entirety of the legal process so far. The server operators then chose to buy new hardware and build a new server, but that's their own paranoia, and the police aren't responsible for that.
"You knew about the Tor node, but didn't mention it in warrant application. Y'all pulled a fast one on the judge... you knew the uploader could have been literally anyone in the world."
According to the second (heavily biased) TFA, the detectives learned about the exit node between requesting the warrant and executing the search. Even if known, it doesn't necessarily have to be mentioned in the search warrant. It could be exculpatory, but just as there's no evidence the server operators were responsible for the crime, there's no evidence they weren't.. Are we now assuming that people running Tor exit nodes are now above suspicion? Are they the next group to be unaccountable to the law?
Despite the outrage by the privacy community, and the anti-police bias in TFAs, it looks like everything here happened exactly as it's supposed to, given the current state of the law.
I strongly suspect that "the last time the military brought in a project with even reasonable success at a reasonable price" was slightly before the politicians realized that government contractors were wasting a small percentage of the contract money as "overhead".
Now, thanks to anti-fraud laws, we pay for materials, people to do the work, accountants to keep track of the people doing work, and accountants to keep track of the accountants. In order to make sure every minute of time is properly billed and every scrap of material is properly tracked, the cost of every trivial task is doubled and redoubled.
At least it makes jobs, right?
They assume that if the phone comes with 16Gb and has no expandability, that 16Gb is probably "good enough" because what manufacturer would come out with an explicitly crippled device that cannot be upgraded, not even for cold hard cash?
Bullshit. They buy a 16GB device because that's what they want to buy. Don't blame the manufacturer because you can't imagine a use case for their product. Sure, other use cases fit other products better, but one size certainly does not fit all.
I know someone who bought the smallest iPhone available at the time, because he doesn't have any need for large storage. He uses the phone for phone calls, email, a few apps, and the ability to have access to online references wherever he is. It was also a convenient tool for his job installing video systems. Last I heard, his phone was still half empty after a few years of use.
I bought my latest device in the middle of the range. The smallest was a bit of a tight fit to also serve as a camera, but the largest was more expensive than I cared to spend, and I didn't need that much storage.
If you think you'd need more than some particular fixed limit, then go pay for it and have what you want, but please don't assume that my requirements match yours.
From TFS (which is all I bothered reading), there is no indication of the mother's reaction at all.
When you carry a weapon, you are on a mission to do whatever it is you would be doing without a weapon, only doing it while armed. If you would be improving the world, then improve the world. If you would be educating a child, then educate a child.
If you would be encouraging partisan confrontation and argument, keep posting anonymous troll posts to Slashdot.
"Yes, kid, I have a gun, and that's okay. Before I could get this gun, I had to go to the police and show them that I'm one of the good guys. They made me promise that no matter what, I would use this gun only if there are bad guys who want to hurt me or the people around me, and there is no other way to escape. See, you've probably seen some movies or TV shows where the good guys arrive right in time. In the real world, that doesn't always happen. Sometimes, a good guy has to be there already. Right now, if a bad guy comes in this restaurant, I might be able to stop him, and that's why I have a gun."
...and that's how you change "awkward" into "awesome", and you don't even need to make even more identification problems!
If you're the FBI and you can see an approaching issue where you won't be able to get into communication devices due to the security measures that manufacturers are putting in place, then it is entirely rational to want to establish a precedent where you can compel the firms to assist you in defeating that security in future. This isn't some crazy multi-step conspiracy theory, the benefit of doing this is clear and direct.
Rational, perhaps, but certainly not direct. Your assumption is that the person making this realization has the authority to initiate a court order before anybody else involved says "Wait, that's not our job."
If I personally was the FBI, it's be easy. If the FBI were a single coherent unit, it'd be easy. However, the FBI is a large organization of many people, each one with their own priorities and oversight. Any one of them could have raised an alarm about perverting the goal of the investigation, if that were really the case.
Even if it was a more convoluted plot you only have to look at some of the batshit crazy things things government agencies have done, and have gotten away with, to see just how weak your claim that this isn't credible because the US government doesn't do X-files" type stuff: The CIA did run brothels and inject people with LSD in San Francisco against their will for example.
That makes sense, though. It was directly related to the goals of project MKULTRA, and apart from the issue of ethics, MKULTRA fit within the CIA's mission. A similar statement for the FBI is that they investigate prominent activists. That's within their mission, and at every step of the chain of command, there's a reasonable justification.
Odds are they never cared about that anyway, but only about setting the precedent by requiring Apple to help them,
I know it's never been a popular view on Slashdot, but perhaps if we all just loosen our tinfoil hats a bit, we can see Ockham's favored solution.
I see an investigative team who did their research, and realized that the only thing standing between them and potential evidence was a stupid passcode on the phone. They knew there was an attack vector there, because later models added hardware security. All they needed was for Apple to sign a tool to work around the lock. That meant asking for a court order, because there is no alternative. Now someone else has come forward with an alternative, and the team is still open to it. It seems to work, so the request for Apple's help can be dropped.
That scenario requires me to believe that the FBI has assigned their qualified personnel to a high-profile case. It also requires me to believe that the FBI's personnel are doing their sworn duty to seek legal justice. In short, it requires me to only believe that people are individually doing exactly what they're supposed to be doing.
The conspiracy theory means there is a team at the FBI seeking to undermine American freedoms, and that they operate with high enough authority and wide enough acceptance that they can interfere with any convenient case and effectively obstruct justice for a few months while they submit a bogus court motion that may or may not be granted, and if so, may or may not set a useful precedent.
For that scenario, I am expected to believe in a cabal of high-ranking FBI officials who are all individually working utterly contrary to their sworn duty, with no oversight, and that none of them (or any subordinates who know of them) have ever had the moral fortitude to say "this is wrong".
Sorry, folks, but this is reality, not the X-files. There are no like-minded high-ranking alien conspiracies in the government. There are only people, doing their best to do what is right.
As long as your last name isn't a single letter. That catches my psuedonym fairly regularly.
Back when I worked in medical data, I encountered real people with single-character names. It happens for real names, too. For programmers, the rule is simple: Don't use names for anything except your application's convenience, and don't have any restrictions on them. Don't even require their existence.
Lockheed Martin once built an airship to go over 18km. Due to budget cuts and the required removal of equipment, a critical valve froze at about half that height, cutting the test flight short with an "unplanned controlled descent". The airship landed in a forest, and when the sun came out the next day, the solar panels started a fire.
I'm sure they're watching this intently.
So evidence that runs contrary to your prejudice must clearly have been fabricated.
I'm not sure whether that falls under a conspiracy theory, or just plain ignorance.
Space requirements. A high-traffic roundabout requires more land area than a cross intersection.
not all of us live in areas where the maps are accurate - or even remotely accurate.
Maps are just one sensor. The algorithms work well enough without them, though you may need to tell the car exactly what route to follow.
I'm a driving enthusiast... I'd like to think I've got a qualified opinion.
Your opinion may indeed be qualified, or it may not be. Experience and understanding are related, but distinct.
What's awesome is when they say how many miles the cars have driven without accidents. Sure, how many times have humans intervened and how much of that was on roads that were unfamiliar? How much of that was in less than optimal situations?
Actually, a lot of it is in less-than-optimal situations, with very little human intervention. There are controlled and uncontrolled tests. Google and the media make a big deal about the uncontrolled tests, where a vehicle is out on the roads in public areas, but those aren't really the most useful for refining the software. In controlled tests, engineers throw everything at the vehicle, and any time the human has to assist, the software goes back for redesign.
However, my big concern is privacy but nobody gets that part.
Actually, there is research being done into privacy aspects of automated cars, but it is still a minority. Sadly, concern about privacy is a minority concern pretty much everywhere outside of echo-chambers like Slashdot.
One of the promising areas for vehicular privacy is not really privacy, but anonymity. It's not the idea of hiding what you're doing, but rather hiding who's doing it. Your car may announce its presence with a unique identifier, but that identifier can (in research tests, though I don't know of any real-world implementation) change at every turn. Someone intending to follow your travels might know that your car left your house and entered a particular road, but then a completely different vehicle announced it was on that road a few seconds later. For a few seconds (where nothing of interest happened, as far as your vehicle's concerned), there is uncertainty about your car's identifier, and that makes tracking your movement far more difficult.
Movement can be extrapolated, but there's no requirement (yet) that a vehicle announce every move. Such announcements are a courtesy to other vehicles, but those vehicles have their own sensors, and don't really need the announcement.