If they exercise some diligence in verifying the information, it's not fraud. They don't have to be good at it.
If they were actually doing due diligence and making an attempt to contact every person who asks for credit prior to saying, "Yes, you should issue credit", that would be different, but they aren't actually doing that. They're blindly repeating whatever information they are fed, treating a public identifier as a secret, and making no attempt to directly contact the supposed borrower to determine if a request for credit is legit despite having access to their current contact info. You can't get much farther from due diligence than that.
If they have good reason to believe what they're telling people about you, it's not libel. (Not in the US, anyway, which has a very strong commitment to free speech and hence has a high bar for libel suits.)
No, the bar for libel against public figures is high because you have to prove actual malice or reckless disregard for the truth. The legal bar for libel against private individuals is much lower. It must be false (check), it must be injurious (check), it must be sent to at least one other person (check), and it must involve negligence (check). That's it. And frankly, even for public figures, I would argue that they show a reckless disregard for the truth by authorizing people to take out credit in your name without even bothering to contact you (unless you pay them protection money).
If they make a mistake and offer a paid service to help clean up the mess, I really doubt that's legally racketerring.
You're focusing on the wrong thing. The root problem is not the leak (which is a mistake). The root problem is a well-established pattern of gross neglect that has been repeatedly pointed out for at least a decade, such that all you have to do to obtain credit in someone else's name is provide a token amount of information about that person, most of which is publicly available, in a fashion that is otherwise largely anonymous (e.g. by mail). The entire concept upon which the entire industry was built is fundamentally flawed.
Worse, the only reason you are harmed significantly by people taking out false credit in your name is because these credit agencies agglomerate that data and make it available to anyone who wants it. So they're literally collecting money to prevent them from spreading libelous information about you. How is that not racketeering? It is collecting protection money in exchange for them not committing a tort (and possibly a crime) against you. I'm pretty sure that's the strict legal definition of the term.
If they actually sold stock after the breach before it was public information, they will be guilty of insider trading, and the SEC will have a field day with them.
Not necessarily. The trades could be the result of automatic sell orders that have been in place for years.
No, insider trading isn't what makes them criminal. What makes them criminal is that they:
Created a system that gathers information about your credit habits without exercising due diligence to verify it (providing material support for identity fraudsters)
Sell that information with claims that it is true (libel)
Sell consumers a service to protect them from that false information (racketeering)
If they happen to be guilty of yet another crime against the United States, fine, but if we're going to call them criminals, we should do so for crimes that they're definitely guilty of, rather than just for crimes that they're probably guilty of.
No disagreement there. If people want to, they should be able to obtain a dump from every voting machine and see all the votes that were cast, but with the time stamps scrubbed. (The time stamps would presumably be from a timestamping server anyway, so it would be a separate wrapper signature that could be stripped without affecting the ability to do crypto verification of the voting logs.) Not that anyone sane would ever take the time to verify the paper trail, but it should be possible to do so.:-D
Victims are normally just expected to be diligent about disputing any accounts opened in their name they didn't authorize. No way half the population will get a new SSN.
You see, I think that victims being diligent is just as much the wrong answer as getting a new SSN. It isn't our responsibility to catch bad guys in the act when they use our name and SSNs to obtain credit. It is the credit reporting agencies' responsibility to exercise due diligence in determining whether or not someone should extend credit in my name, and in determining whether claims of failure to pay back said credit are legitimate or the result of fraud. That's literally what companies are paying them to do!
More to the point, calling anything "identity theft" is, in fact, a lie. It isn't identity theft, because you can't steal someone's identity. We should just cut all the politically correct crap and call it what it is: libel arising out of gross negligence.
When a company makes false claims about an individual, that's libel. It is illegal. So when a credit bureau claims in writing that you obtained credit that you did not, they are violating the law, and you can sue them. If every victim of so-called identity theft—every victim of gross negligence by credit bureaus to exercise due diligence—were to sue the credit reporting agencies for libel, they would have two choices: go out of business or start doing their [expletive deleted] jobs.
More to the point, because it occurs en masse, one could argue that it rises to the level of criminal libel, at least in states where such laws still exist (including California, as of last year).
Of course, libel is just the beginning of the laws that the credit bureaus are breaking. If I were an attorney general, I would have long ago prosecuted the heads of the major credit reporting bureaus under RICO statutes, because they're quite literally profiting from every side of identity theft:
They profit from not having to incur the cost of due diligence to ensure that requests for credit are legitimate.
They profit from selling the potentially libelous credit reports to companies.
They profit from selling "credit watch" services to protect people's credit from future fraudulent credit requests and the libel arising out of those requests. (That's a nice credit score you have there. It would be a shame if something... happened to it.)
Literally, these credit watch services do nothing but protect the consumers from libel by the credit bureaus that sell the credit watch services. That's the textbook definition of racketeering! How are these people not in jail yet? Because they have money? Because they're hiding behind the corporate veil? These companies should simply be RICOed out of existence.
I've said for years that the only thing that would ever force these clowns to clean up their act would be if every SSN in the U.S. got compromised, and that it was only a matter of time before the entire credit bureau industry came crashing down like a house of cards. With this one incident, our country got most of the way there. That 143 million people is almost everyone who has applied for credit or bought cable TV service or phone service or really just about anything else in the past ten years. It includes nearly the entire working population of the U.S. Clearly, SSNs are not even slightly useful as a "secret" anymore, and any credit bureau claiming otherwise is peddling libel and fraud.
So what remains is for the credit bureaus to pull their heads out of their collective a**es and implement a proper callback-based verification scheme in which a reasonable attempt is made to verify every request for
What is this actually adding to the equation, other than maybe some level of plausible deniability?
And only in one direction. If it asks you, you can't assume that the other person has said yes. But if you say yes and it doesn't "connect" you, or whatever, you can assume that the other person said no. So the person who got dissed knows it, but the person who isn't interested can't tell that the other person is.
It might be better if there were a degree of randomness, where you couldn't be certain whether the other person was even asked, or where maybe the person is a friend of a friend instead of someone you actually know....
That said, this is arguably worse than having no plausible deniability; in fact, it's exactly backwards from an ideal outcome. An ideal design would be to minimize the chances of someone getting hurt, such that the person who get rejected wouldn't know that he/she got rejected, but so that the person would know for sure if he/she got asked because the other person was interested or just randomly. An algorithm for achieving such an outcome is left as an exercise for the reader.
I think I already covered that. Each device signs the data at each point in the audit trail and maintains copies at each step. There is no "who" here. It's a "what" doing the signing.
How do you ensure that the cryptography isn't fake/intentionally weak?
Because the verification systems are open source, and thus can be audited (including the choice of crypto).
How do you expect the general public to understand this system enough to believe that the result hasn't been manipulated?
All that the average person needs to know is that there are three independent totals stored on systems produced by at least two (and possibly three) different manufacturers that can be independently verified.
How do you prevent the poll worker from learning your vote in step 3?
The "step 3" sanity check device is a black box with a red light and a green light that verifies that the vote on the device was reported to the server before wiping the flash card. How would the poll worker learn your vote from a single, colored light that merely tells whether the vote stored on the flash card was properly completed/reported?
Pedantically, the step 3 sanity check box could do its job without even connecting to the server by confirming that the verifier station marked the vote as complete before wiping the flash card for the next user. However, if it does the verification offline, it should additionally keep a count of the number of votes reported as complete, to ensure that the verification station can't (for example) cancel every 10th vote for a Democrat and mark it as having been submitted. And really, that device probably needs to not be made by the same company as the verifier. Though realistically, a non-zero vote loss between the voting and verifying stage should set off red flags anyway.
An attacker in control of the software/hardware of the voting system can manipulate without any discrepancies turning up, unless every voter can prove the vote after the election, which must not be possible.
No, they can't. By law, voting hardware (at least in the U.S.) has to be a locked box, and nobody can modify its software once certified (I'm ignoring the possibility of hacks here). And the existence of multiple verifications of the data by hardware and software created by multiple independent companies makes it nearly impossible for any single person or group to tamper with the data without causing very obvious discrepancies.
BTW, it goes without saying that each signing event in the log must have both a time stamp and an event number that increments by one per signing event so that even if someone somehow managed to simultaneously take control of the central server and the independent computers that process the accumulated data in a dump from each of the voting machines and verifier machines, it would still not be practical to purge votes except en masse from the end of the day, which again would set off obvious red flags when nobody voted in the last three hours of polling.
It is impossible to build an e-voting system that satisfies all requirements of a democratic election, particularly the secret ballot.
Not remotely. You just have to design the system in a way that makes it infeasible to falsify results without detection.
Step 1: The voting booth. Vote for a candidate. The vote is recorded on a flash card and cryptographically signed by the voting machine and simultaneously sent to a central server and stored locally on the machine.
Step 2: The verifying booth. Verify your votes. The signed vote is read from the flash card, then either invalidated or verified on the central server, and in either case, the decision and the vote are stored locally on the machine. If canceled, the user goes back to the voting booth, inserts the card, and steps through the people, correcting votes as necessary, before coming back to the verifying booth.
Step 3: Collecting the flash card. The poll workers stick the card into a machine that lights up a light to confirm whether the vote was verified on the central server, and if not, the poll workers send the voter to the verifying booth, which the voter obviously missed.
Step 4: The tally.:
The voting data from each voting machine is collected independently and compared against the central server data. Short of somebody walking out with a flash card in hand (without verifying the vote on it), it should be possible to reconstruct the central server data using only the audit trail from the voting booths.
The voting data from each verifying machine is collected independently and compared against the central server data. Again, it should be possible to reconstruct the central server data using only the audit trail from the verifying machines.
There are a couple of additional requirements:
The verifying boxes in a given polling place cannot be built by the same company as the voting machines in that polling place
The source code for the verifying machines must be open source (and thus readily audited.
Each voting or verifying machine must have its own private key that must be generated when the device first boots up with a UI to show the newly generated key fingerprint that appears *only* when the device boots the *first* time.
Poll workers must verify that the UI appears on first power-on (or else the machine must be discarded because someone could have pre-cast a bunch of votes on flash cards), and must manually write down that key fingerprint as a sanity check, and each key fingerprint in the log book must be verified by the signatures of at least 2 poll workers (maybe more).
Each device must register its key fingerprint with the central server, too.
Votes cast by devices that are not on the list stored in the central server must be validated by hand against the log book and rejected if there is no entry for that device.
When a device is taken out of service, it must be immediately reset to a factory-clean state by holding down a button that disconnects power to the battery-backed RAM where the key is stored.
Under 18: 74 million
In college: 20.4 million
On disability: 40 million
Over 65: 46 million
Illegal immigrants (not eligible): 11.1 million
Total:191.5 million
The population of the U.S. is 323.1 million, so there's another 1 million error (196 million, not 197 million).
If we assume people retire at 65 and start work after college, that leaves ~4.5 million people without jobs, give or take, or 1.4% unemployment over the entire population, 3.5% of potential workers. That's a rough estimate. The official number is 4.3%, so some people under 18, over 65, in college, or here illegally actually have on-the-books jobs.
It's also why the mass is still held in Latin in many denominations...
Mass is not held in Latin except in rare situations. A few churches have a single Latin Mass celebration out of many. And the word "denominations" inherently means "Protestant", which by definition: A. do not call it a "Mass", with the possible exception of the Anglicans and Episcopals, and B. do not use Latin at all. In fact, one of the major driving factors behind the Protestant Reformation was the desire to use the vernacular in worship.
Book burnings, although they did happen, didn't happen early on.
Sure they did. Ever look for the writings of Arius? Priscillian of Ávila? Nestorius? Non-Christian literature from the library of Antioch? Eutychius? Arnold of Brescia? That's just the list of Catholic writings destroyed by Catholics up through the 1100s. The burning of books believed to be heretical is a longstanding tradition in Christianity, and is more a dubious and archaic method than a modern one.
Meh. The unemployment rates also provide actual facts, and facts that paint a much more accurate and complete picture than the labor participation rate.
U-1 tells the long-term unemployed (out of work for over 15 weeks) who are still actively looking for jobs as a percentage of the LPR.
U-2 gives the number of just-now unemployed (who lost jobs during the most recent reporting period) as a percentage of the LPR.
U-3 gives the total number of people currently collecting unemployment benefits who have no job at all (not including underemployed) as a percentage of the LPR.
U-4 gives U-3 plus the number of people who have stopped looking for work and who gave a job-market-related reason for doing so, as a percentage of [LPR + people who stopped looking for market reasons].
U-5 gives U-4 plus people who have looked for work at some point within the last year, but are no longer actively looking for work, regardless of the reasons for doing so, as a percentage of [LPR + all people who stopped looking]
U-6 gives U-5 plus involuntary part-time workers, as a percentage of [LPR + all people who stopped looking + involuntary part-time employees].
The declining labor participation rate is largely because of:
Baby boomers retiring
More people deferring work for college
both of which significantly reduce the number of people who are out looking for jobs, and neither of which is a sign of actual unemployment. That's why U-3 uses the LPR as a baseline. It removes the bias that would otherwise be caused by non-job-market-related trends in employment numbers.
Out of your "36% unemployed" number, how many aren't of legal age to work? How many are retired?
Statistically? About 103% of them are either too young to work or are over 65. So if you go by 65 as a retirement age, about 1% of the population are working past 65. Of course, in reality, people don't all retire at 65, and you could argue that the reason we have unemployment is because people continue to work past retirement age. Otherwise, there would be enough jobs for full employment of all adults under 65 and then some.
The labor participation rate is basically a useless number. It is too coarse-grained to be even slightly relevant as a metric. The right question to ask is not what percentage of people aren't bothering to work or look for jobs, but rather to ask why they are not doing so. Are they retiring early because of prosperity, or have they given up because there are no jobs? And of the 64% who are working, what percentage of them are underemployed, working part-time because they can't get more hours?
Oh, yeah. I vaguely remember reading about that. If there's an antibody that can actually deliver the iron to the tumor, that's certainly a good approach. Then again, I always assumed that the main challenge was the lack of a reliable delivery mechanism that didn't affect healthy cells. If there's an antibody that can deliver the iron to the tumor, couldn't you just deliver a dose of a cyanide salt, an ATP inhibitor like DNP, a DNA-binding protein, or some similar poison and skip the EM entirely? Or, for that matter, a viral load that splices out the bad gene?
What on earth makes you think that computer modeling makes the radiation only arrive exactly where needed? That's just not how it works.
Very true. Sometimes people have serious side effects resulting from radiation burns. I'm not sure how much that has improved over the years, but it definitely was a problem with beam radiation at one time.
That said, in theory, there's no reason it couldn't be exact if you used directed high-power EM instead of ionizing radiation. You could use constructive interference in the same way that they do when breaking up kidneystones, only instead of shattering something solid, you heat up the tumor to the point that the cells die. It would basically be like creating a microwave oven hot spot right where the tumor is, and the rest of you would just get a little warmer.
The levy plant was located further inland in acknowledgement of the bad location of the Crystal River plant.
The problem with that plan, IMO, is that the state of Florida is very nearly flat. The highest elevation in Florida is less than 350 feet above sea level. The record run-up height for a tsunami was 1,720 feet. Even the relatively modest Fukushima run-up (128 feet) would theoretically have covered the entire state of Florida, with the exception of the most inland parts of the panhandle and a small high spot near Orlando.
So nuclear is no longer the best bag for your buck in the energy industry and it comes with the NIMBY stigma associated with radiation.
It always did. The difference is that post-Fukushima, building a nuclear power plant near a coast also comes with a boatload of new regulations and extra scrutiny. Plus, with Westinghouse's bankruptcy putting the entire future of the AP1000 in jeopardy, there was a good chance that they would get halfway through and have to scrap it anyway. Better to cut their losses relatively early.
Nobody in their right minds would try to shoot the sun at f/4, though. They'd crank it all the way down to f/44. Which is fine until the camera stupidly opens the lens up all the way to focus...
I agree -- your wording is clearer and not sloppy as is the actual title. It's not that I couldn't figure out the implied intent of the title, it's that I find it annoying that reporting and writing has gotten really sloppy.
I figured as much. My newswriting teacher would have knocked off ten points for that headline.:-)
I'm more irritated by the use of allegedly in situations where nothing is alleged. If there's airtight evidence of the "alleged" event playing in the background, that's no longer alleged—the reasons for the events, perhaps, but not the events themselves.
If the government has data I feel as if i should have access to that data.
Perfect. Let's just make salary data available so that everyone can know what everyone else makes, and watch as jealousy consumes the nation. And now that we can get those fingerprints from the DMV database, we can crack everybody's cell phone trivially. Awesome! Oh, and the government knows what church you donate money to, so that makes religious discrimination much easier and much harder to detect.
Need I continue to list data that the government has but shouldn't be public? How about the schematics to nuclear power plants? Launch codes for nuclear missile silos? Encryption keys for military communications? Coordinates of safe houses? Current addresses of people in the witness protection program?
As you can see, good counterexamples are numerous, important, and obvious.
In today's America I am willing to bet that the underground and black market economies are as large as the official economies.
Only because the risk is so high, and thus, the cost of transactions. Were those same black-market transactions legal, they would be lost in the noise.
Wouldn't it be nice to see where she parked he car three years ago? And in turn she could check you out as well.
Yes, if she was driving a car formerly owned by He-Man, I definitely would want to know about it.:-D
But if you mean her car, then no, it would not be nice. It would strike me as creepy, psycho, stalker behavior. The sorts of people who want that level of access to everyone's history are often precisely the people who should not be allowed to have it. As soon as you allow someone that level of access, they will find ways to use it to manipulate and control people.
For example, it is relatively trivial to cherry-pick data to paint unflattering pictures that will embarrass you, even if you have done nothing wrong. Between property crimes and violent crimes, a crime is reported about every ten minutes somewhere in San Francisco. If you have a car, the probability of your car being near a significant number of them approaches one by the time you have lived there for a year. So you could use this, potentially, to implicate anyone for anything.
And that doesn't even consider whether people should have a right to privacy in their personal lives, in their medical history, etc. We have explicit laws to prevent disclosure of a person's medical history precisely because there is a good reason for a right to privacy in those areas. Yet if you have full access to plate data, you can show a pattern of someone going to an oncology center for a chemo appointment every n weeks, and suddenly you know something that you really should not have a right to know.
And what of that bride to be? What right do you have to know who every one of her ex-boyfriends was? You could get that from plate data. Correlate which plates appeared in the same places at the same times week after week, and you now know intimate details. Oh, and that one time when she spent a couple of extended stops at an abortion clinic followed by suddenly no longer seeing that guy... well, now you know that, too.
You definitely don't have a right to know everything about everyone—even the people closest to you. What your bride-to-be chooses to disclose to you is her decision, and hers alone. That is as it should be. The past is the past, and unless your bride-to-be poses a real risk of causing you harm in the present, you should leave it in the past. And if she does, you shouldn't be marrying her in the first place. More to the point, if you don't trust her, you shouldn't be marrying her in the first place, because either she is untrustworthy or you are untrusting, and either one will eventually lead to the marriage self destructing. Distrust leads to more distrust as you discover things about the ot
LOL, you can get all that information just from scanning a license plate?
By scanning it in the right places, you can establish patterns that strongly imply those things, assuming the psychologist or cancer specialist is in a clinic dedicated to that specialty and not in a general hospital. You can also determine that your husband or wife is in a particular neighborhood on Friday nights and not at work as he or she has claimed, thus leading you to discover that your husband or wife is having an affair. You can determine whether clusters of adjacent houses won't have anyone nearby to report someone breaking in and stealing everything. (Just be sure to cover your plates a few blocks away.) And so on.
The general public gaining access to such a database would be a privacy nightmare. And as a rule, if disclosure of information would be a big enough disaster, the right solution is to not retain the data, or where possible, to not create the data in the first place.
If the data can be anonymized until such time as it is needed in an investigation, then I don't see a problem with the longer data retention.
But it can't be anonymized in any way that would still make it useful for investigative purposes. A plate number is an identifier. It is impossible to anonymize an identifier in such a way that it can be consistently rehashed from the original value to the same "anonymized" value every time, but in such a way that someone with access to the original value cannot effectively de-anonymize the data at will. If there's a way for the license plate readers to convert the plate number into a consistent identifier, then the police can perform the same conversion just as easily, so it isn't really anonymized from the police. If there isn't a way to do so, then it isn't useful for the police to have the anonymized data, because there's no longer any way to determine whether two "anonymized" values refer to the same car.
And if the intent is to hash it in such a way that you can look up a specific car but can't easily see who was near a particular location, that won't prevent abuse, either, unless you don't have traffic cameras or other storage that would contain the unencrypted plate information (even for a short time). After all, to unmask a hashed plate number, all you would have to do is watch for a particular hashed plate to pop up somewhere, then look at the unhashed plates in that spot, checking each plate until you find the one that hashes to that value. Although that would be harder, it still would not require a judge to issue an order or otherwise force external oversight into the investigative process in any meaningful way, at least from a technical standpoint.
The best you could realistically do would be to discard the complete data and store only a colliding hash in you throw away everything but the last two digits, thus allowing you to say yes or no to the question of whether a car with those last two digits was in a given area at a given time, but not which of the millions of cars with those last two digits were there. This would make it harder to use for tracking, but would also make it less useful for investigative purposes, providing only sufficient grounds for getting a judicial order to compel access to the complete (unhashed) records.
Realistically, the options are either A. don't keep the records, or B. keep the records offline, in a vault, with a judge's order required to remove one of the tapes from the vault, and the key used to encrypt it kept in the independent custody of an antagonistic organization, e.g. the police have the tapes, but major news media outlets have control over the private key required to decrypt them, split in such a way that a certain number of outlets have to agree before you can reconstruct the entire private key.
How is the location of the hire even remotely relevant? Nearly all the people with any sufficiently rare skill set in Shanghai are already employed, too. So your options are still exactly the same. The only difference is which market's rates you have to exceed.
It is true that you have the option of hiring a contractor, assuming you need that skill for only a short time. However, one typically assumes that if a contractor is a realistic option, the company would hire a contractor to begin with rather than advertising a job for a full-time employee. By the time you get to the point of trying to hire an FTE, it is because the company needs someone full-time with those skills, and a contractor with highly valued skills isn't going to be interested in being effectively full-time.
Also, a contractor typically charges way above the market wages that you'd pay for a full-time employee. If the contractor doesn't, he/she won't be able to pay the rent during the period between gigs. So you're still back to the original options, just for a shorter period of time.
The scenario you propose would imply that the New York Times, a corporate entity, should not enjoy the protections offered by the first amendment. Corporations are not people, but people acting in concert should have the same rights as people acting separately.
Well, yes and no. Although the New York Times does enjoy the protection of the first amendment, it definitely does not and should not enjoy the same first amendment protection as an individual would. Commercial speech is given much less protection than other forms of speech. It is the least protected form of speech. One reason for this is that the power of a group of individuals is much greater than the power of a single individual. Because the harm that can be done by using that power irresponsibly is much greater, the presumption of responsibility for the consequences of doing so is also much greater, and the governmental limits on such speech are thus significantly more strict.
Sure. My mains voltage is 230 kV from midnight to 10 A.M., though, via what looks like a normal outlet, so I don't recommend plugging anything in... or, really, getting anything metal within about a foot of the front of the outlet. Feel free to protest, but do so at your own risk.
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If they were actually doing due diligence and making an attempt to contact every person who asks for credit prior to saying, "Yes, you should issue credit", that would be different, but they aren't actually doing that. They're blindly repeating whatever information they are fed, treating a public identifier as a secret, and making no attempt to directly contact the supposed borrower to determine if a request for credit is legit despite having access to their current contact info. You can't get much farther from due diligence than that.
No, the bar for libel against public figures is high because you have to prove actual malice or reckless disregard for the truth. The legal bar for libel against private individuals is much lower. It must be false (check), it must be injurious (check), it must be sent to at least one other person (check), and it must involve negligence (check). That's it. And frankly, even for public figures, I would argue that they show a reckless disregard for the truth by authorizing people to take out credit in your name without even bothering to contact you (unless you pay them protection money).
You're focusing on the wrong thing. The root problem is not the leak (which is a mistake). The root problem is a well-established pattern of gross neglect that has been repeatedly pointed out for at least a decade, such that all you have to do to obtain credit in someone else's name is provide a token amount of information about that person, most of which is publicly available, in a fashion that is otherwise largely anonymous (e.g. by mail). The entire concept upon which the entire industry was built is fundamentally flawed.
Worse, the only reason you are harmed significantly by people taking out false credit in your name is because these credit agencies agglomerate that data and make it available to anyone who wants it. So they're literally collecting money to prevent them from spreading libelous information about you. How is that not racketeering? It is collecting protection money in exchange for them not committing a tort (and possibly a crime) against you. I'm pretty sure that's the strict legal definition of the term.
Not necessarily. The trades could be the result of automatic sell orders that have been in place for years.
No, insider trading isn't what makes them criminal. What makes them criminal is that they:
If they happen to be guilty of yet another crime against the United States, fine, but if we're going to call them criminals, we should do so for crimes that they're definitely guilty of, rather than just for crimes that they're probably guilty of.
No disagreement there. If people want to, they should be able to obtain a dump from every voting machine and see all the votes that were cast, but with the time stamps scrubbed. (The time stamps would presumably be from a timestamping server anyway, so it would be a separate wrapper signature that could be stripped without affecting the ability to do crypto verification of the voting logs.) Not that anyone sane would ever take the time to verify the paper trail, but it should be possible to do so. :-D
You see, I think that victims being diligent is just as much the wrong answer as getting a new SSN. It isn't our responsibility to catch bad guys in the act when they use our name and SSNs to obtain credit. It is the credit reporting agencies' responsibility to exercise due diligence in determining whether or not someone should extend credit in my name, and in determining whether claims of failure to pay back said credit are legitimate or the result of fraud. That's literally what companies are paying them to do!
More to the point, calling anything "identity theft" is, in fact, a lie. It isn't identity theft, because you can't steal someone's identity. We should just cut all the politically correct crap and call it what it is: libel arising out of gross negligence.
When a company makes false claims about an individual, that's libel. It is illegal. So when a credit bureau claims in writing that you obtained credit that you did not, they are violating the law, and you can sue them. If every victim of so-called identity theft—every victim of gross negligence by credit bureaus to exercise due diligence—were to sue the credit reporting agencies for libel, they would have two choices: go out of business or start doing their [expletive deleted] jobs.
More to the point, because it occurs en masse, one could argue that it rises to the level of criminal libel, at least in states where such laws still exist (including California, as of last year).
Of course, libel is just the beginning of the laws that the credit bureaus are breaking. If I were an attorney general, I would have long ago prosecuted the heads of the major credit reporting bureaus under RICO statutes, because they're quite literally profiting from every side of identity theft:
Literally, these credit watch services do nothing but protect the consumers from libel by the credit bureaus that sell the credit watch services. That's the textbook definition of racketeering! How are these people not in jail yet? Because they have money? Because they're hiding behind the corporate veil? These companies should simply be RICOed out of existence.
I've said for years that the only thing that would ever force these clowns to clean up their act would be if every SSN in the U.S. got compromised, and that it was only a matter of time before the entire credit bureau industry came crashing down like a house of cards. With this one incident, our country got most of the way there. That 143 million people is almost everyone who has applied for credit or bought cable TV service or phone service or really just about anything else in the past ten years. It includes nearly the entire working population of the U.S. Clearly, SSNs are not even slightly useful as a "secret" anymore, and any credit bureau claiming otherwise is peddling libel and fraud.
So what remains is for the credit bureaus to pull their heads out of their collective a**es and implement a proper callback-based verification scheme in which a reasonable attempt is made to verify every request for
And only in one direction. If it asks you, you can't assume that the other person has said yes. But if you say yes and it doesn't "connect" you, or whatever, you can assume that the other person said no. So the person who got dissed knows it, but the person who isn't interested can't tell that the other person is.
It might be better if there were a degree of randomness, where you couldn't be certain whether the other person was even asked, or where maybe the person is a friend of a friend instead of someone you actually know....
That said, this is arguably worse than having no plausible deniability; in fact, it's exactly backwards from an ideal outcome. An ideal design would be to minimize the chances of someone getting hurt, such that the person who get rejected wouldn't know that he/she got rejected, but so that the person would know for sure if he/she got asked because the other person was interested or just randomly. An algorithm for achieving such an outcome is left as an exercise for the reader.
I think I already covered that. Each device signs the data at each point in the audit trail and maintains copies at each step. There is no "who" here. It's a "what" doing the signing.
Because the verification systems are open source, and thus can be audited (including the choice of crypto).
All that the average person needs to know is that there are three independent totals stored on systems produced by at least two (and possibly three) different manufacturers that can be independently verified.
The "step 3" sanity check device is a black box with a red light and a green light that verifies that the vote on the device was reported to the server before wiping the flash card. How would the poll worker learn your vote from a single, colored light that merely tells whether the vote stored on the flash card was properly completed/reported?
Pedantically, the step 3 sanity check box could do its job without even connecting to the server by confirming that the verifier station marked the vote as complete before wiping the flash card for the next user. However, if it does the verification offline, it should additionally keep a count of the number of votes reported as complete, to ensure that the verification station can't (for example) cancel every 10th vote for a Democrat and mark it as having been submitted. And really, that device probably needs to not be made by the same company as the verifier. Though realistically, a non-zero vote loss between the voting and verifying stage should set off red flags anyway.
No, they can't. By law, voting hardware (at least in the U.S.) has to be a locked box, and nobody can modify its software once certified (I'm ignoring the possibility of hacks here). And the existence of multiple verifications of the data by hardware and software created by multiple independent companies makes it nearly impossible for any single person or group to tamper with the data without causing very obvious discrepancies.
BTW, it goes without saying that each signing event in the log must have both a time stamp and an event number that increments by one per signing event so that even if someone somehow managed to simultaneously take control of the central server and the independent computers that process the accumulated data in a dump from each of the voting machines and verifier machines, it would still not be practical to purge votes except en masse from the end of the day, which again would set off obvious red flags when nobody voted in the last three hours of polling.
Not remotely. You just have to design the system in a way that makes it infeasible to falsify results without detection.
Step 1: The voting booth. Vote for a candidate. The vote is recorded on a flash card and cryptographically signed by the voting machine and simultaneously sent to a central server and stored locally on the machine.
Step 2: The verifying booth. Verify your votes. The signed vote is read from the flash card, then either invalidated or verified on the central server, and in either case, the decision and the vote are stored locally on the machine. If canceled, the user goes back to the voting booth, inserts the card, and steps through the people, correcting votes as necessary, before coming back to the verifying booth.
Step 3: Collecting the flash card. The poll workers stick the card into a machine that lights up a light to confirm whether the vote was verified on the central server, and if not, the poll workers send the voter to the verifying booth, which the voter obviously missed.
Step 4: The tally.:
There are a couple of additional requirements:
And you're done.
Sounds like somebody hasn't been on public buses in the right cities.
Almost, yes.
Under 18: 74 million
In college: 20.4 million
On disability: 40 million
Over 65: 46 million
Illegal immigrants (not eligible): 11.1 million
Total:191.5 million
The population of the U.S. is 323.1 million, so there's another 1 million error (196 million, not 197 million).
If we assume people retire at 65 and start work after college, that leaves ~4.5 million people without jobs, give or take, or 1.4% unemployment over the entire population, 3.5% of potential workers. That's a rough estimate. The official number is 4.3%, so some people under 18, over 65, in college, or here illegally actually have on-the-books jobs.
Mass is not held in Latin except in rare situations. A few churches have a single Latin Mass celebration out of many. And the word "denominations" inherently means "Protestant", which by definition: A. do not call it a "Mass", with the possible exception of the Anglicans and Episcopals, and B. do not use Latin at all. In fact, one of the major driving factors behind the Protestant Reformation was the desire to use the vernacular in worship.
Sure they did. Ever look for the writings of Arius? Priscillian of Ávila? Nestorius? Non-Christian literature from the library of Antioch? Eutychius? Arnold of Brescia? That's just the list of Catholic writings destroyed by Catholics up through the 1100s. The burning of books believed to be heretical is a longstanding tradition in Christianity, and is more a dubious and archaic method than a modern one.
Meh. The unemployment rates also provide actual facts, and facts that paint a much more accurate and complete picture than the labor participation rate.
The declining labor participation rate is largely because of:
both of which significantly reduce the number of people who are out looking for jobs, and neither of which is a sign of actual unemployment. That's why U-3 uses the LPR as a baseline. It removes the bias that would otherwise be caused by non-job-market-related trends in employment numbers.
Statistically? About 103% of them are either too young to work or are over 65. So if you go by 65 as a retirement age, about 1% of the population are working past 65. Of course, in reality, people don't all retire at 65, and you could argue that the reason we have unemployment is because people continue to work past retirement age. Otherwise, there would be enough jobs for full employment of all adults under 65 and then some.
The labor participation rate is basically a useless number. It is too coarse-grained to be even slightly relevant as a metric. The right question to ask is not what percentage of people aren't bothering to work or look for jobs, but rather to ask why they are not doing so. Are they retiring early because of prosperity, or have they given up because there are no jobs? And of the 64% who are working, what percentage of them are underemployed, working part-time because they can't get more hours?
Oh, yeah. I vaguely remember reading about that. If there's an antibody that can actually deliver the iron to the tumor, that's certainly a good approach. Then again, I always assumed that the main challenge was the lack of a reliable delivery mechanism that didn't affect healthy cells. If there's an antibody that can deliver the iron to the tumor, couldn't you just deliver a dose of a cyanide salt, an ATP inhibitor like DNP, a DNA-binding protein, or some similar poison and skip the EM entirely? Or, for that matter, a viral load that splices out the bad gene?
Very true. Sometimes people have serious side effects resulting from radiation burns. I'm not sure how much that has improved over the years, but it definitely was a problem with beam radiation at one time.
That said, in theory, there's no reason it couldn't be exact if you used directed high-power EM instead of ionizing radiation. You could use constructive interference in the same way that they do when breaking up kidneystones, only instead of shattering something solid, you heat up the tumor to the point that the cells die. It would basically be like creating a microwave oven hot spot right where the tumor is, and the rest of you would just get a little warmer.
The problem with that plan, IMO, is that the state of Florida is very nearly flat. The highest elevation in Florida is less than 350 feet above sea level. The record run-up height for a tsunami was 1,720 feet. Even the relatively modest Fukushima run-up (128 feet) would theoretically have covered the entire state of Florida, with the exception of the most inland parts of the panhandle and a small high spot near Orlando.
So nuclear is no longer the best bag for your buck in the energy industry and it comes with the NIMBY stigma associated with radiation.
It always did. The difference is that post-Fukushima, building a nuclear power plant near a coast also comes with a boatload of new regulations and extra scrutiny. Plus, with Westinghouse's bankruptcy putting the entire future of the AP1000 in jeopardy, there was a good chance that they would get halfway through and have to scrap it anyway. Better to cut their losses relatively early.
Nobody in their right minds would try to shoot the sun at f/4, though. They'd crank it all the way down to f/44. Which is fine until the camera stupidly opens the lens up all the way to focus...
... and that's when it catches fire. :-)
I figured as much. My newswriting teacher would have knocked off ten points for that headline. :-)
I'm more irritated by the use of allegedly in situations where nothing is alleged. If there's airtight evidence of the "alleged" event playing in the background, that's no longer alleged—the reasons for the events, perhaps, but not the events themselves.
Perfect. Let's just make salary data available so that everyone can know what everyone else makes, and watch as jealousy consumes the nation. And now that we can get those fingerprints from the DMV database, we can crack everybody's cell phone trivially. Awesome! Oh, and the government knows what church you donate money to, so that makes religious discrimination much easier and much harder to detect.
Need I continue to list data that the government has but shouldn't be public? How about the schematics to nuclear power plants? Launch codes for nuclear missile silos? Encryption keys for military communications? Coordinates of safe houses? Current addresses of people in the witness protection program?
As you can see, good counterexamples are numerous, important, and obvious.
Only because the risk is so high, and thus, the cost of transactions. Were those same black-market transactions legal, they would be lost in the noise.
Yes, if she was driving a car formerly owned by He-Man, I definitely would want to know about it. :-D
But if you mean her car, then no, it would not be nice. It would strike me as creepy, psycho, stalker behavior. The sorts of people who want that level of access to everyone's history are often precisely the people who should not be allowed to have it. As soon as you allow someone that level of access, they will find ways to use it to manipulate and control people.
For example, it is relatively trivial to cherry-pick data to paint unflattering pictures that will embarrass you, even if you have done nothing wrong. Between property crimes and violent crimes, a crime is reported about every ten minutes somewhere in San Francisco. If you have a car, the probability of your car being near a significant number of them approaches one by the time you have lived there for a year. So you could use this, potentially, to implicate anyone for anything.
And that doesn't even consider whether people should have a right to privacy in their personal lives, in their medical history, etc. We have explicit laws to prevent disclosure of a person's medical history precisely because there is a good reason for a right to privacy in those areas. Yet if you have full access to plate data, you can show a pattern of someone going to an oncology center for a chemo appointment every n weeks, and suddenly you know something that you really should not have a right to know.
And what of that bride to be? What right do you have to know who every one of her ex-boyfriends was? You could get that from plate data. Correlate which plates appeared in the same places at the same times week after week, and you now know intimate details. Oh, and that one time when she spent a couple of extended stops at an abortion clinic followed by suddenly no longer seeing that guy... well, now you know that, too.
You definitely don't have a right to know everything about everyone—even the people closest to you. What your bride-to-be chooses to disclose to you is her decision, and hers alone. That is as it should be. The past is the past, and unless your bride-to-be poses a real risk of causing you harm in the present, you should leave it in the past. And if she does, you shouldn't be marrying her in the first place. More to the point, if you don't trust her, you shouldn't be marrying her in the first place, because either she is untrustworthy or you are untrusting, and either one will eventually lead to the marriage self destructing. Distrust leads to more distrust as you discover things about the ot
By scanning it in the right places, you can establish patterns that strongly imply those things, assuming the psychologist or cancer specialist is in a clinic dedicated to that specialty and not in a general hospital. You can also determine that your husband or wife is in a particular neighborhood on Friday nights and not at work as he or she has claimed, thus leading you to discover that your husband or wife is having an affair. You can determine whether clusters of adjacent houses won't have anyone nearby to report someone breaking in and stealing everything. (Just be sure to cover your plates a few blocks away.) And so on.
The general public gaining access to such a database would be a privacy nightmare. And as a rule, if disclosure of information would be a big enough disaster, the right solution is to not retain the data, or where possible, to not create the data in the first place.
But it can't be anonymized in any way that would still make it useful for investigative purposes. A plate number is an identifier. It is impossible to anonymize an identifier in such a way that it can be consistently rehashed from the original value to the same "anonymized" value every time, but in such a way that someone with access to the original value cannot effectively de-anonymize the data at will. If there's a way for the license plate readers to convert the plate number into a consistent identifier, then the police can perform the same conversion just as easily, so it isn't really anonymized from the police. If there isn't a way to do so, then it isn't useful for the police to have the anonymized data, because there's no longer any way to determine whether two "anonymized" values refer to the same car.
And if the intent is to hash it in such a way that you can look up a specific car but can't easily see who was near a particular location, that won't prevent abuse, either, unless you don't have traffic cameras or other storage that would contain the unencrypted plate information (even for a short time). After all, to unmask a hashed plate number, all you would have to do is watch for a particular hashed plate to pop up somewhere, then look at the unhashed plates in that spot, checking each plate until you find the one that hashes to that value. Although that would be harder, it still would not require a judge to issue an order or otherwise force external oversight into the investigative process in any meaningful way, at least from a technical standpoint.
The best you could realistically do would be to discard the complete data and store only a colliding hash in you throw away everything but the last two digits, thus allowing you to say yes or no to the question of whether a car with those last two digits was in a given area at a given time, but not which of the millions of cars with those last two digits were there. This would make it harder to use for tracking, but would also make it less useful for investigative purposes, providing only sufficient grounds for getting a judicial order to compel access to the complete (unhashed) records.
Realistically, the options are either A. don't keep the records, or B. keep the records offline, in a vault, with a judge's order required to remove one of the tapes from the vault, and the key used to encrypt it kept in the independent custody of an antagonistic organization, e.g. the police have the tapes, but major news media outlets have control over the private key required to decrypt them, split in such a way that a certain number of outlets have to agree before you can reconstruct the entire private key.
How is the location of the hire even remotely relevant? Nearly all the people with any sufficiently rare skill set in Shanghai are already employed, too. So your options are still exactly the same. The only difference is which market's rates you have to exceed.
It is true that you have the option of hiring a contractor, assuming you need that skill for only a short time. However, one typically assumes that if a contractor is a realistic option, the company would hire a contractor to begin with rather than advertising a job for a full-time employee. By the time you get to the point of trying to hire an FTE, it is because the company needs someone full-time with those skills, and a contractor with highly valued skills isn't going to be interested in being effectively full-time.
Also, a contractor typically charges way above the market wages that you'd pay for a full-time employee. If the contractor doesn't, he/she won't be able to pay the rent during the period between gigs. So you're still back to the original options, just for a shorter period of time.
A slight word order change will make it more obvious:
Police Arrest UK News Photographer—Allegedly For Standing In A Field
Clearer?
Well, yes and no. Although the New York Times does enjoy the protection of the first amendment, it definitely does not and should not enjoy the same first amendment protection as an individual would. Commercial speech is given much less protection than other forms of speech. It is the least protected form of speech. One reason for this is that the power of a group of individuals is much greater than the power of a single individual. Because the harm that can be done by using that power irresponsibly is much greater, the presumption of responsibility for the consequences of doing so is also much greater, and the governmental limits on such speech are thus significantly more strict.
Sure. My mains voltage is 230 kV from midnight to 10 A.M., though, via what looks like a normal outlet, so I don't recommend plugging anything in... or, really, getting anything metal within about a foot of the front of the outlet. Feel free to protest, but do so at your own risk.