I hope you know more about architecture than you do about security.
Hiding communications in plain sight works surprisingly well. This might shock you, but back before the Internet, military plans were often written in plain text and carried by third-parties! Yes, sometimes, the messages were intercepted, and sometimes they were even understood, but more often the secret communications actually work for a while, because the hidden messages are indistinguishable from their carrier medium.
Being indistinguishable, by definition there is no way to identify your planning messages from anyone else's messages about actual raids. Law enforcement won't be reading (or flagging) your messages, because they won't even know you're interesting. On the other hand, if you ever actually need the plausible deniability that encryption provides, then you've already partially failed. Your every move will be scrutinized, and the computer you use to send those secure messages will probably be compromised anyway.
As for entrapment, I also hope you're a better system engineer than you are a lawyer.
Entrapment is defined as when an officer of the law induces someone to commit a crime they otherwise wouldn't. Giving someone access to supplies they could get elsewhere isn't entrapment, nor is encouragement, in most jurisdictions I've studied. The suspect can always just say "no", and walk away. In fact, that is the point of such sting operations - to find the people who, given the chance to commit a crime, wouldn't say "no".
No, it's not. Entrapment is when the law enforcement officer actually convinces an otherwise law-abiding person to commit a crime. If the agents threatened to harm their suspect's family unless the plan was completed, that'd be entrapment. Providing supplies and assistance is actually allowed, just enabling the suspect to do what they already intend to do.
If I had ill intent, I would use whatever communication channels raise the least suspicion. If I'm worried about an investigation, a fully-encrypted chat client on my computer or an account at a secure email provider are hard to explain away, but an XBox just implies that I like playing games. My chats with my friends might not be terribly interesting on their own, and anybody reading the logs wouldn't really care if we set up raids that had to be canceled later, but those canceled plans could really be setting up events outside the game, that the operators would know nothing about.
Numerous 3 letter agencies have made it a habit of trolling forums and Facebook looking for patsies. They even found a few of them and gave them everything they needed including targets
Yes. The point is to find people who are willing to commit such acts, and who would indeed do so if they meet someone who will give them the resources. The agents offer such resources (and yes, even targets) just like an enemy recruiter would. Then, if and only if the "patsy" follows through with the plan are they arrested. The United States has no law against hating the government. There are laws against doing something with that hatred.
The actualized concept of a next-generation cloud-based synergistic teambuilding-as-a-service ad-hoc exercise correlates with the data previously acquired through empirical research regarding organizational executive judgement calls in relation to morale and outreach endeavors on an accelerated timeline.
I've been working directly under C-level execs on and off for the past decade. It's not too obvious, is it?
Of course, there is also the perspective that the presence of the program is advertised, but not its capabilities. Most of TFA is speculation based on what Northrop Grumman could do, based on its various acquisitions and industry strengths.
Stop right there. In a modern war, anything can be stuck on an ICBM and made into however long a range we want. The key is getting it to land accurately.
...more difficult for a civilian to know they're in a combat zone...
There are effectively no non-combat zones. Despite the romantic picture of armies meeting at dawn on an empty battlefield, there never really has been anywhere safe, so we can dismiss this notion out of hand. All territory controlled by an enemy is (and has always been) the "combat zone", for every country at war. To an extent, that's intentional... the actual target for a strike can't just run into the nearest town for safety, and the civilians, knowing that their proximity to the target puts them at risk, are less likely to offer aid.
Civilian casualties are terrible. The engineers building weapons know this, and it is haunting, but it's also what drives us to improve past designs.
I've worked on military systems before that were designed to enable killing.
Mine were more accurate than any predecessors, used better sensors than any predecessors, and had better controls than any predecessors. Sure, it's possible to send it off to kill civilians, but if you're aiming for the bad guy, it will kill only the bad guy, and not the schoolchildren next door.
To me, that's ethical. It'd be great if we could stop killing each other, but until that happens I'm going to do my best to keep everybody outside the conflict safe.
Joking about such a tragedy is not a nice and cheerful thing to do. I've never claimed to be a nice and cheerful person, though.
Japan is the only country to have a nuclear bomb detonated on civilians. A significant percentage of the population was directly affected by those blasts and the fallout, and in the decades that followed those same victims got to see the terror of radioactivity go from being a horror to a power source... but the trauma isn't forgotten. Godzilla was a horror movie, exhibiting the terror Japan saw (and still sees) in all things nuclear.
Now those fears are real yet again. No, Fukushima's leaks haven't been terribly dangerous, and radiation levels are still in the typical range of most vegetables, but the fear is back in full force. If life were a horror movie franchise, this is the point in the sequel where the new characters start doing the same things we saw in the first movie. Nothing too bad has happened yet, but we know it's coming...
Life isn't a movie, though. Religion aside, we aren't here to entertain some external audience. After the horror is over, we still have to live on this spinning rock, and there's still a wide spectrum of things that can go wrong. Ultimately, we won't make it out alive, and we all know that.
Why, then, must we be miserable, just because of misery? Why must we suffer our misfortunes alone? As humans, we have evolved to share our fortunes (good or bad) as a society. Talking is therapeutic, but what more is there to say? "Thousands died, and now I'm sad" is a good way to start depression, but not really a conversation.
That is the job of dark humor. For a few fleeting moments, a simple joke provides human contact outside the bleak devastation of a disaster. Perhaps you chuckle at the juxtaposition, or perhaps you get angry at the insensitivity, or maybe, just maybe, you start a dialog on a tangential topic.
The horror is still there. The fear is still lurking in the background. The risk hasn't changed... but now you're not facing them alone. We are all still living on this spinning rock, together, and the curse of fate just happened to land on you this time. We'll pick up the pieces together and move on. Next week, it might be my turn. Please, come talk to me too, even if all you can say is adding insult to my injury. It's your injury, too, and this spinning rock has lost a bit more of its brilliance. In my moment of darkness, remind me that the rock keeps spinning, and its brilliance keeps coming back. Remind me that my species will live on.
I'm an asshole. I will make jokes about anyone or anything at any time... because I care.
He's not charging. He's arresting, with reasonable evidence that a crime has been committed. The prosecutor would be the one pressing charges, or not if they don't think the case is worthwhile.
Second, name one effective protest in the last 10 years. Should be easy if you think there's daily evidence of such in the news.
Marriage equality in several states.
Marijuana legalization in several states.
Stopping anti-union legislation in a few states.
And of course all the mundane ones usually reported in the form of "$COMPANY responds to pressure, does $WANTED_ACTION", along with many more that didn't even succeed in changing anything.
Protesting doesn't mean you get what you want. It means you voice your opposition and concerns to the people who have the power to respond. An effective protest is one where your opinions are heard and considered fairly, along with the other opinions in play.
This is why you just don't want to mix your moral and economic philosophies. Is authoritarian socialism any worse than theocratic capitalism? or monarchic feudalism?
If you have a socialist system, the needs of society are held in higher regard than the needs of individuals. If you have an authoritarian system, the government decides what those needs are. There is an inherent conflict of interest there, where the people in government can simply declare that society needs whatever they want.
In a feudal society, where the needs of the lord are held highest, authoritarianism is good. The lord says what the lord wants. Similarly, in a democratic socialist society, the people define what the people want.
The key for a freedom-loving people like the majority of the Western world is to limit authoritarianism without undermining authority. We don't seem to have that figured out yet.
The mainframe bows to the minicomputer. The minicomputer bows to the personal computer. The personal computer bows to the tablet and smart phone. It seems as if these will soon bow to the smart watch or smart glasses
Each of those form factors has a different balance of convenience and functionality, with the smaller device being more convenient but also more limited. As the first post pointed out, you're not going to be running CAD software on Google Glass anytime soon. You might run a client interface to a server, but not the CAD software itself.
People like convenience most of the time, so we're quick to get smartphones and tablets, because they offer convenience doing the tasks we do most often. For bigger jobs than that limited hardware can handle, we'll move up to a bigger machine, sacrificing convenience for the necessary power. As technology improves and tasks can be moved down to smaller devices, we're also discovering new problems (and solutions to old ones) that fill in the gaps at the top of the chain.
The death of the desktop is not approaching any time soon. The death of computing's status quo is upon us, and has been for decades.
That's because mass copying is a recent phenomenon. Before easy copying techniques, art was promoted by patronage, as the GP suggests. It's still the effective system in small theaters and galleries around the world, and of course all manner of "arts" online. Get rid of copyright, and the patronage would still exist... it'd just be much more difficult for an artist to rely on an income, because there'd be no middlemen absorbing the financial risk.
How "parallel" do you think these schools will actually be? Of course, the best extracurricular programs and the best teachers will want to work with the well-behaved kids more, so they'll try to get into that one more heavily, giving those good students a better chance at a good education. The "bad" kids will be stuck with the worse programs and teachers, reinforcing that there is no escape from a life of crime and violence. Sure, we could legislate that programs and teachers are assigned randomly... but that doesn't change the fact that every day, the kid walks into school knowing he's "bad".
Separate is never equal, regardless of what criterion is used.
1. Lawsuits will be handled by the lawyers, but they'll be pretty bored, because the EMTs will handle the people having heart attacks at a traffic stop.
2. Or the rider could just slow down to a stop like any other vehicle.
3. [citation needed]. The first drive-by-wire cars are just coming out now, and they still have mechanical fallbacks.
4. Lawyers again, but since this is a device with push-button control (rather than a slow manual deployment like spike strips), the officer in charge can abort the operation if a situation looks dangerous.
5. Just like they do now with tacks, spikes, and opportunities every time someone runs out of gas.
Slashdot Mirror
I hope you know more about architecture than you do about security.
Hiding communications in plain sight works surprisingly well. This might shock you, but back before the Internet, military plans were often written in plain text and carried by third-parties! Yes, sometimes, the messages were intercepted, and sometimes they were even understood, but more often the secret communications actually work for a while, because the hidden messages are indistinguishable from their carrier medium.
Being indistinguishable, by definition there is no way to identify your planning messages from anyone else's messages about actual raids. Law enforcement won't be reading (or flagging) your messages, because they won't even know you're interesting. On the other hand, if you ever actually need the plausible deniability that encryption provides, then you've already partially failed. Your every move will be scrutinized, and the computer you use to send those secure messages will probably be compromised anyway.
As for entrapment, I also hope you're a better system engineer than you are a lawyer.
Entrapment is defined as when an officer of the law induces someone to commit a crime they otherwise wouldn't. Giving someone access to supplies they could get elsewhere isn't entrapment, nor is encouragement, in most jurisdictions I've studied. The suspect can always just say "no", and walk away. In fact, that is the point of such sting operations - to find the people who, given the chance to commit a crime, wouldn't say "no".
No, it's not. Entrapment is when the law enforcement officer actually convinces an otherwise law-abiding person to commit a crime. If the agents threatened to harm their suspect's family unless the plan was completed, that'd be entrapment. Providing supplies and assistance is actually allowed, just enabling the suspect to do what they already intend to do.
It's cute that you think the world adheres to your silly "logic".
No you would not.
Yes I would.
If I had ill intent, I would use whatever communication channels raise the least suspicion. If I'm worried about an investigation, a fully-encrypted chat client on my computer or an account at a secure email provider are hard to explain away, but an XBox just implies that I like playing games. My chats with my friends might not be terribly interesting on their own, and anybody reading the logs wouldn't really care if we set up raids that had to be canceled later, but those canceled plans could really be setting up events outside the game, that the operators would know nothing about.
Numerous 3 letter agencies have made it a habit of trolling forums and Facebook looking for patsies. They even found a few of them and gave them everything they needed including targets
Yes. The point is to find people who are willing to commit such acts, and who would indeed do so if they meet someone who will give them the resources. The agents offer such resources (and yes, even targets) just like an enemy recruiter would. Then, if and only if the "patsy" follows through with the plan are they arrested. The United States has no law against hating the government. There are laws against doing something with that hatred.
I think you mean:
The actualized concept of a next-generation cloud-based synergistic teambuilding-as-a-service ad-hoc exercise correlates with the data previously acquired through empirical research regarding organizational executive judgement calls in relation to morale and outreach endeavors on an accelerated timeline.
I've been working directly under C-level execs on and off for the past decade. It's not too obvious, is it?
Of course, there is also the perspective that the presence of the program is advertised, but not its capabilities. Most of TFA is speculation based on what Northrop Grumman could do, based on its various acquisitions and industry strengths.
If your weapon was fast and long-ranged...
Stop right there. In a modern war, anything can be stuck on an ICBM and made into however long a range we want. The key is getting it to land accurately.
...more difficult for a civilian to know they're in a combat zone...
There are effectively no non-combat zones. Despite the romantic picture of armies meeting at dawn on an empty battlefield, there never really has been anywhere safe, so we can dismiss this notion out of hand. All territory controlled by an enemy is (and has always been) the "combat zone", for every country at war. To an extent, that's intentional... the actual target for a strike can't just run into the nearest town for safety, and the civilians, knowing that their proximity to the target puts them at risk, are less likely to offer aid.
Civilian casualties are terrible. The engineers building weapons know this, and it is haunting, but it's also what drives us to improve past designs.
But where do those numbers come from?
I've worked on military systems before that were designed to enable killing.
Mine were more accurate than any predecessors, used better sensors than any predecessors, and had better controls than any predecessors. Sure, it's possible to send it off to kill civilians, but if you're aiming for the bad guy, it will kill only the bad guy, and not the schoolchildren next door.
To me, that's ethical. It'd be great if we could stop killing each other, but until that happens I'm going to do my best to keep everybody outside the conflict safe.
Joking about such a tragedy is not a nice and cheerful thing to do. I've never claimed to be a nice and cheerful person, though.
Japan is the only country to have a nuclear bomb detonated on civilians. A significant percentage of the population was directly affected by those blasts and the fallout, and in the decades that followed those same victims got to see the terror of radioactivity go from being a horror to a power source... but the trauma isn't forgotten. Godzilla was a horror movie, exhibiting the terror Japan saw (and still sees) in all things nuclear.
Now those fears are real yet again. No, Fukushima's leaks haven't been terribly dangerous, and radiation levels are still in the typical range of most vegetables, but the fear is back in full force. If life were a horror movie franchise, this is the point in the sequel where the new characters start doing the same things we saw in the first movie. Nothing too bad has happened yet, but we know it's coming...
Life isn't a movie, though. Religion aside, we aren't here to entertain some external audience. After the horror is over, we still have to live on this spinning rock, and there's still a wide spectrum of things that can go wrong. Ultimately, we won't make it out alive, and we all know that.
Why, then, must we be miserable, just because of misery? Why must we suffer our misfortunes alone? As humans, we have evolved to share our fortunes (good or bad) as a society. Talking is therapeutic, but what more is there to say? "Thousands died, and now I'm sad" is a good way to start depression, but not really a conversation.
That is the job of dark humor. For a few fleeting moments, a simple joke provides human contact outside the bleak devastation of a disaster. Perhaps you chuckle at the juxtaposition, or perhaps you get angry at the insensitivity, or maybe, just maybe, you start a dialog on a tangential topic.
The horror is still there. The fear is still lurking in the background. The risk hasn't changed... but now you're not facing them alone. We are all still living on this spinning rock, together, and the curse of fate just happened to land on you this time. We'll pick up the pieces together and move on. Next week, it might be my turn. Please, come talk to me too, even if all you can say is adding insult to my injury. It's your injury, too, and this spinning rock has lost a bit more of its brilliance. In my moment of darkness, remind me that the rock keeps spinning, and its brilliance keeps coming back. Remind me that my species will live on.
I'm an asshole. I will make jokes about anyone or anything at any time... because I care.
APK has taken up journalism.
He's not charging. He's arresting, with reasonable evidence that a crime has been committed. The prosecutor would be the one pressing charges, or not if they don't think the case is worthwhile.
Second, name one effective protest in the last 10 years. Should be easy if you think there's daily evidence of such in the news.
Marriage equality in several states.
Marijuana legalization in several states.
Stopping anti-union legislation in a few states.
And of course all the mundane ones usually reported in the form of "$COMPANY responds to pressure, does $WANTED_ACTION", along with many more that didn't even succeed in changing anything.
Protesting doesn't mean you get what you want. It means you voice your opposition and concerns to the people who have the power to respond. An effective protest is one where your opinions are heard and considered fairly, along with the other opinions in play.
My goals are Ig Nobel.
No, I'm making a hyperbolic point about retaliation being a slippery slope to vigilantism, which itself is a weak justification for abuse.
Yes, yes it was.
That's what made it civil disobedience, and that's why people were arrested and fined for it, until the Supreme Court overturned the law.
Damned right!
Let's get together a nice posse, and have ourselves a good ol' lynching! Vigilante justice is the best justice, right?
This is why you just don't want to mix your moral and economic philosophies. Is authoritarian socialism any worse than theocratic capitalism? or monarchic feudalism?
If you have a socialist system, the needs of society are held in higher regard than the needs of individuals. If you have an authoritarian system, the government decides what those needs are. There is an inherent conflict of interest there, where the people in government can simply declare that society needs whatever they want.
In a feudal society, where the needs of the lord are held highest, authoritarianism is good. The lord says what the lord wants. Similarly, in a democratic socialist society, the people define what the people want.
The key for a freedom-loving people like the majority of the Western world is to limit authoritarianism without undermining authority. We don't seem to have that figured out yet.
The mainframe bows to the minicomputer. The minicomputer bows to the personal computer. The personal computer bows to the tablet and smart phone. It seems as if these will soon bow to the smart watch or smart glasses
Each of those form factors has a different balance of convenience and functionality, with the smaller device being more convenient but also more limited. As the first post pointed out, you're not going to be running CAD software on Google Glass anytime soon. You might run a client interface to a server, but not the CAD software itself.
People like convenience most of the time, so we're quick to get smartphones and tablets, because they offer convenience doing the tasks we do most often. For bigger jobs than that limited hardware can handle, we'll move up to a bigger machine, sacrificing convenience for the necessary power. As technology improves and tasks can be moved down to smaller devices, we're also discovering new problems (and solutions to old ones) that fill in the gaps at the top of the chain.
The death of the desktop is not approaching any time soon. The death of computing's status quo is upon us, and has been for decades.
Copyright is only a recent phenomena.
That's because mass copying is a recent phenomenon. Before easy copying techniques, art was promoted by patronage, as the GP suggests. It's still the effective system in small theaters and galleries around the world, and of course all manner of "arts" online. Get rid of copyright, and the patronage would still exist... it'd just be much more difficult for an artist to rely on an income, because there'd be no middlemen absorbing the financial risk.
Well done. You've completely missed my point.
How "parallel" do you think these schools will actually be? Of course, the best extracurricular programs and the best teachers will want to work with the well-behaved kids more, so they'll try to get into that one more heavily, giving those good students a better chance at a good education. The "bad" kids will be stuck with the worse programs and teachers, reinforcing that there is no escape from a life of crime and violence. Sure, we could legislate that programs and teachers are assigned randomly... but that doesn't change the fact that every day, the kid walks into school knowing he's "bad".
Separate is never equal, regardless of what criterion is used.
Welders can handle a lot more than just a tiny little pacemaker.
That's what you meant, right?
What do you mean we can't build deadly radio laser satellites? I saw it in a movie once!
1. Lawsuits will be handled by the lawyers, but they'll be pretty bored, because the EMTs will handle the people having heart attacks at a traffic stop.
2. Or the rider could just slow down to a stop like any other vehicle.
3. [citation needed]. The first drive-by-wire cars are just coming out now, and they still have mechanical fallbacks.
4. Lawyers again, but since this is a device with push-button control (rather than a slow manual deployment like spike strips), the officer in charge can abort the operation if a situation looks dangerous.
5. Just like they do now with tacks, spikes, and opportunities every time someone runs out of gas.
It didn't last time.