The Internet ought not evolve, because some network admins at companies don't know how to use it properly? Is that the argument? I'd say that's a rather bad argument.
SpiderOak's privacy policy is very different. It is essentially "Sorry NSA. We do not have the ability to decrypt; end of story."
Only it doesn't work that way. They have the ability to decrypt because they have full control of the endpoint software either via software updates. If they get a letter saying "Hey assholes, we need to get access to this system (IP number) and you are not allowed to tell anyone ever" they have to comply thanks to the Patriot act, and the encryption is invalidated in a jiffy. Most of these companies already use key escrow anyway.
The USA is provably the most injust industrialized country of the world, and its getting worse all the time. On average, an employer used to get a 30 times higher salary than an employee in the 50s, nowadays he gets a 300 times higher salary. The USA is the only modern industrialized country in the world without legally guaranteed vacation - 25% of all Americans have not a single day of paid vacation per year. The top 1% of US households in terms of income own 35.4% of all privately owned wealth (in 2010). You have - before / without Obamacare - one of the most expensive health systems in the world, yet it doesn't even cover the whole population. Your Gini index is 0.49 - only select countries in Africa, parts of South America , and China have a worse Gini index. The list could go on and on. At the same time the US is the 15th richest country in the world in terms of GDP per capita (according to the CIA world fact book), so the country is not poor at all.
Sorry if these facts annoy you, that's not my intention. I'm just mentioning them in orer to illustrate that there might be a social problem in your country. Of course, you could also just ignore it and explain it away as your politicians apparently prefer. But there is a good chance that one day in the more distant future the social justice problem will bite you in the ass.
Putting closing parentheses on one line like in the original code is standard convention in most LISP and Scheme languages. The editor takes care of the closing parentheses for you and will give you constant visual feedback on the level you're at and where the opening paren is (e.g. by color coding). Indentation and pretty-printing will also be automatic in any reasonable, modern editor (such as e.g. vim or Emacs).
What you say sounds quite nice and appealing to many of your fellow compatriots, but is really based on a lack of historical knowledge. Not only is it hard to detect any decline of morality in the US - in fact, the opposite is true if you look at civil rights of e.g. ethnic minorities or women -, the sometimes extreme immorality of intelligence agencies and other federal institutions during Cold War is well-documented by now. These were crazy times, some high-ranking officials really thought communists put something in the tap water to make Americans gay and sick. They weren't joking about it, they really thought so. And the CIA contemplated how they could kill Castro with a poisoned cigar. Poisoning political enemies is considered immoral throughout history. Or, to give another example, the CIA experimented with drugs, sexual abuse and psychological torture on (often unsuspecting) US citizens. Want more? How about intentionally not treating the syphilis of hundreds of black patients for 'scientific reasons' (1932-1972)?
I'm not saying that the US is inherently more immoral than other countries, atrocities can be found everywhere. However, it is ludicrous to claim that moral standards were higher in the US intelligence and military community formerly than now. If at all, the opposite is true, thanks to the fact that the Cold War is over.
Absolutely. Both Apple and Microsoft have long recognized that free operating systems are the biggest threat to their business models. Operating systems do not offer enough ways to stay ahead of competition by innovation, once the basic needs are fulfilled new features become mere gimmicks that might be nice to have but are not essential (see history of OS X).
Both Apple and Microsoft have a well-recorded history of anti-competitive business behavior and have in the past tried by all means to keep the application barrier up. In the 90s Java and Web-browsers were the biggest threats and they successfully averted these by tricky anti-competitive behavior. SCO tried to sue free operating systems out of existence and failed (so far, bogus patent law can change that and new law suits are in the drawer), now GNU/Linux has matured so well that it has become intolerable to Microsoft and Apple. Bear in mind that you can run many Windows programs in Wine already and that GNU/Linux has reached a certain usability threshold putting it roughly on a par with Windows XP in terms of software that end-consumers actually need (and GNU/Linux is much more stable).
The sole and only purpose of the current secure boot specification is to be the entry ticket to completely locked-down machines with completely locked-down whitelisted software that is only runnable and distributable by obtaining a key from Microsoft or Apple respectively and only with their blessings. That's the long-term goal.
The current, more modest goal is to make it hard for end-users to install another OS and hard to set up dual boot systems. Microsoft will then urge (=blackmail) hardware makers to produce more consumer boards that can run only Windows, and Apple will start to make their manufacturers produce OSX-only boards, while at the meantime urging manufacturers to sell more expensive motherboards that are not locked down so they can still claim they allow competition. For Microsoft, this is particularly important, because they need to make money with Windows and the "windows tax" is annoying more and more people. So they want to make sure that a board that runs GNU/Linux or BSD systems is more expensive (a 'pro feature', so to say) than a consumer board that only runs Windows plus the OEM fee for Windows. Microsoft is very desperate to keep their huge share of the dwindling desktop market, because they have already lost the mobile market.
This might all sound exaggerated to you now, but the fact is that these companies plan far more ahead than some people might think.
Conceptually would be for secure locations that normal PC access is restricted, and do not want uncontrolled software booted to bypass their existing OS security, gaining access to the network and so fourth.
Well, good luck with your rescue CD if it doesn't boot!
Conceptually, the purpose of secure boot is to keep unwanted operating system software secure from the user (rather than keeping the user safe from malicious software) and preserve a quasi-monopoly for Microsoft. Hopfeully, there will be EU rulings that prohibit current practise.
So you think that countries like Germany, Denmark, or, say, Luxembourg are all massively tapping into US telecomunications infrastructure in order to extract information about US companies, read private mails of US politicians, and build a large-scale database of all communications of US citizens? Or that they tap into the networks of the United States Congress?
Nobody knows for sure, but none of this sounds very credible.
Bullshit. GNU/Linux is an international effort with contributors from many different countries. It is constantly peer reviewed by all kind of people, e.g. security researchers all over the world, and the source is open so you can check it yourself.
I find it funny that we have police CCTV everywhere--there's two on my street watching my house wtf?--but people bitch about Google Glass. Yet people don't whine about dash cams or cameras in cell phones?
Typical non-sequitur (and looks like a flaimebait to me, not insightful). You can consistently
1. be against CCTV everywhere (and where I live, they are not everywhere)
2. be against Google glasses (unless they'd have a HUGE flashing light plus aconstant BEEP BEEP BEEP sound when they are recording)
3. have no problem with cameras in phones as long as they are clearly indicating when they are recording (and otherwise be against their use)
Moreover, in the country I come from filming people in public without their consent is prohibited, and I greatly appreciate that.
What is it you don't get? Yes, the guy should be beaten and the state should be beaten. The guy apears to be weaker than the state, so let's start with him...
We're talking about a new language; the claim that fast easy development cannot be combined with strong typing and and compile-time checking is totally unjustified. There is absolutely no reason why a language with "dynamic types" is, could, or should lead to easier development or faster development cycles, particularly not if automatic type inference is available. In fact, the opposite is true due to improved error checking at compile time in a strongly and statically typed language.
Even less understandable is your claim that that strong static typing, which allows for compile time optimizations and many error checks at compile time, is somehow an instance of premature optimization. On the contrary, strong typing allows the compiler to optimize, leaving the programmer free to do something more important than optimizing.
Now the ironic thing about your post is that the gaming industry has had and still has a tendency to use not-so-great dynamically-typed scripting languages even in the presence of better alternatives, a misfeature that every modder can confirm. To be fair the originally not so great languages (like e.g. Lua) have caught up and are quite fine by now.
Hm, count me among the skeptics, too. The problem is that "dynamic typing" creates principal performance bottlenecks - not good for games. The golden rule is to compute as much as possible at compile time using a strong type system, including type checking, type inference, bounds checking, overflow checks. Heck, with a strong enough type system you might even be able to avoid most of runtime exception handling (see e.g. the design goals of Parasail). What you want is to encourage the programmer to use very limited subtypes to e.g. be able to optimize loops and procedure calls based on known compile-time constraints.
Just about the only place where you really need dynamic types is dynamic dispatch in OOP, which might not be the best programming paradigm when performance matters anyway.
Why keep it a secret from us if it's to protect us?
The problem is that when you use "us" you appear to mean "US Americans", who only constitute a fraction of worldwide Internet users. Even if US voters agreed, the majority of the world does not agree to being spied on. The NSA has an (unproven, but well-known) track record of conducting industrial espionage against befriended countries, and spying on any foreigners is apparently considered perfectly legal and constitutional in the US.
The fact that other countries might attempt to do the same is no excuse. The real problem is that all the data that is collected is already used to undermine constitutional rights. There are quite persistent and credible rumors that when e.g. the BND wants some data on a German they may not obtain legally (according to German law), they'll just ask a US agency. I'm pretty sure this also works the other way around.
Things might look different if the people in power would really endorse democratic principles and human rights, which they don't.
say the NSA is tracking 500 million people worldwide do you really think that there is a guy sitting in the NSA tracking you for no reason? out of all the tens of millions of people? what makes you so important?
If you look at the history of intelligence agencies all over the world, it is absolutely amazing what kind of people they considered "interesting" in the past (e.g. during the McCarthy era): poets, writers, movie-makers, businessmen, small criminals, politicians and political activists of all flavors, scientists, programmers, muslims, christians, outspoken government critiques, intellectuals,... The list goes on and on. History has proved that these agencies have a pretty broad concept of what's "interesting" - all in the name of wasting tax payer money.
Q: Is there any way to keep your communications truly private?
A: No.
The NSA has worked on infiltrating highly secure military networks in the past, it would be foolish to think you can keep data away from them and use the Internet at the same time.
Perhaps things like inventing your own symmetric key end-to-end encryption software on the basis of combining existing technology and algorithms (+ hand to hand key distribution) or hooking up random number generators to your computer and producing and distributing OTPs may callenge and potentially annoy them for some time. That's about it.
The way I see it, there are people who do some real work with their device and then there are people who primarily use their device for wasting time. The former need a PC, the latter will to some extent be happy with a tablet and a phone (and an additional console for gaming).
I have yet to meet anyone who can sincerely say that he gets some real work(TM) done with a tablet or phone. What kind of job would that be? Warehouse management assistant?
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The Internet ought not evolve, because some network admins at companies don't know how to use it properly? Is that the argument? I'd say that's a rather bad argument.
SpiderOak's privacy policy is very different. It is essentially "Sorry NSA. We do not have the ability to decrypt; end of story."
Only it doesn't work that way. They have the ability to decrypt because they have full control of the endpoint software either via software updates. If they get a letter saying "Hey assholes, we need to get access to this system (IP number) and you are not allowed to tell anyone ever" they have to comply thanks to the Patriot act, and the encryption is invalidated in a jiffy. Most of these companies already use key escrow anyway.
The USA is provably the most injust industrialized country of the world, and its getting worse all the time. On average, an employer used to get a 30 times higher salary than an employee in the 50s, nowadays he gets a 300 times higher salary. The USA is the only modern industrialized country in the world without legally guaranteed vacation - 25% of all Americans have not a single day of paid vacation per year. The top 1% of US households in terms of income own 35.4% of all privately owned wealth (in 2010). You have - before / without Obamacare - one of the most expensive health systems in the world, yet it doesn't even cover the whole population. Your Gini index is 0.49 - only select countries in Africa, parts of South America , and China have a worse Gini index. The list could go on and on. At the same time the US is the 15th richest country in the world in terms of GDP per capita (according to the CIA world fact book), so the country is not poor at all.
Sorry if these facts annoy you, that's not my intention. I'm just mentioning them in orer to illustrate that there might be a social problem in your country. Of course, you could also just ignore it and explain it away as your politicians apparently prefer. But there is a good chance that one day in the more distant future the social justice problem will bite you in the ass.
Putting closing parentheses on one line like in the original code is standard convention in most LISP and Scheme languages. The editor takes care of the closing parentheses for you and will give you constant visual feedback on the level you're at and where the opening paren is (e.g. by color coding). Indentation and pretty-printing will also be automatic in any reasonable, modern editor (such as e.g. vim or Emacs).
Yes, it does.
What you say sounds quite nice and appealing to many of your fellow compatriots, but is really based on a lack of historical knowledge. Not only is it hard to detect any decline of morality in the US - in fact, the opposite is true if you look at civil rights of e.g. ethnic minorities or women -, the sometimes extreme immorality of intelligence agencies and other federal institutions during Cold War is well-documented by now. These were crazy times, some high-ranking officials really thought communists put something in the tap water to make Americans gay and sick. They weren't joking about it, they really thought so. And the CIA contemplated how they could kill Castro with a poisoned cigar. Poisoning political enemies is considered immoral throughout history. Or, to give another example, the CIA experimented with drugs, sexual abuse and psychological torture on (often unsuspecting) US citizens. Want more? How about intentionally not treating the syphilis of hundreds of black patients for 'scientific reasons' (1932-1972)?
I'm not saying that the US is inherently more immoral than other countries, atrocities can be found everywhere. However, it is ludicrous to claim that moral standards were higher in the US intelligence and military community formerly than now. If at all, the opposite is true, thanks to the fact that the Cold War is over.
Absolutely. Both Apple and Microsoft have long recognized that free operating systems are the biggest threat to their business models. Operating systems do not offer enough ways to stay ahead of competition by innovation, once the basic needs are fulfilled new features become mere gimmicks that might be nice to have but are not essential (see history of OS X).
Both Apple and Microsoft have a well-recorded history of anti-competitive business behavior and have in the past tried by all means to keep the application barrier up. In the 90s Java and Web-browsers were the biggest threats and they successfully averted these by tricky anti-competitive behavior. SCO tried to sue free operating systems out of existence and failed (so far, bogus patent law can change that and new law suits are in the drawer), now GNU/Linux has matured so well that it has become intolerable to Microsoft and Apple. Bear in mind that you can run many Windows programs in Wine already and that GNU/Linux has reached a certain usability threshold putting it roughly on a par with Windows XP in terms of software that end-consumers actually need (and GNU/Linux is much more stable).
The sole and only purpose of the current secure boot specification is to be the entry ticket to completely locked-down machines with completely locked-down whitelisted software that is only runnable and distributable by obtaining a key from Microsoft or Apple respectively and only with their blessings. That's the long-term goal.
The current, more modest goal is to make it hard for end-users to install another OS and hard to set up dual boot systems. Microsoft will then urge (=blackmail) hardware makers to produce more consumer boards that can run only Windows, and Apple will start to make their manufacturers produce OSX-only boards, while at the meantime urging manufacturers to sell more expensive motherboards that are not locked down so they can still claim they allow competition. For Microsoft, this is particularly important, because they need to make money with Windows and the "windows tax" is annoying more and more people. So they want to make sure that a board that runs GNU/Linux or BSD systems is more expensive (a 'pro feature', so to say) than a consumer board that only runs Windows plus the OEM fee for Windows. Microsoft is very desperate to keep their huge share of the dwindling desktop market, because they have already lost the mobile market.
This might all sound exaggerated to you now, but the fact is that these companies plan far more ahead than some people might think.
Conceptually would be for secure locations that normal PC access is restricted, and do not want uncontrolled software booted to bypass their existing OS security, gaining access to the network and so fourth.
Well, good luck with your rescue CD if it doesn't boot!
Conceptually, the purpose of secure boot is to keep unwanted operating system software secure from the user (rather than keeping the user safe from malicious software) and preserve a quasi-monopoly for Microsoft. Hopfeully, there will be EU rulings that prohibit current practise.
Properly implemented secure boot increases your security by letting you decide what the machine should boot
Exactly. Secure boot is not properly implemented. A proper implementation would allow you to install anything you like after flipping a manual switch.
Languages like Ada/Spark and Haskell: Yes. The languages you mention: not really.
So you think that countries like Germany, Denmark, or, say, Luxembourg are all massively tapping into US telecomunications infrastructure in order to extract information about US companies, read private mails of US politicians, and build a large-scale database of all communications of US citizens? Or that they tap into the networks of the United States Congress?
Nobody knows for sure, but none of this sounds very credible.
Bullshit. GNU/Linux is an international effort with contributors from many different countries. It is constantly peer reviewed by all kind of people, e.g. security researchers all over the world, and the source is open so you can check it yourself.
I find it funny that we have police CCTV everywhere--there's two on my street watching my house wtf?--but people bitch about Google Glass. Yet people don't whine about dash cams or cameras in cell phones?
Typical non-sequitur (and looks like a flaimebait to me, not insightful). You can consistently
1. be against CCTV everywhere (and where I live, they are not everywhere)
2. be against Google glasses (unless they'd have a HUGE flashing light plus aconstant BEEP BEEP BEEP sound when they are recording)
3. have no problem with cameras in phones as long as they are clearly indicating when they are recording (and otherwise be against their use)
Moreover, in the country I come from filming people in public without their consent is prohibited, and I greatly appreciate that.
What is it you don't get? Yes, the guy should be beaten and the state should be beaten. The guy apears to be weaker than the state, so let's start with him...
You've never bought anything from IKEA, have you?
We're talking about a new language; the claim that fast easy development cannot be combined with strong typing and and compile-time checking is totally unjustified. There is absolutely no reason why a language with "dynamic types" is, could, or should lead to easier development or faster development cycles, particularly not if automatic type inference is available. In fact, the opposite is true due to improved error checking at compile time in a strongly and statically typed language.
Even less understandable is your claim that that strong static typing, which allows for compile time optimizations and many error checks at compile time, is somehow an instance of premature optimization. On the contrary, strong typing allows the compiler to optimize, leaving the programmer free to do something more important than optimizing.
Now the ironic thing about your post is that the gaming industry has had and still has a tendency to use not-so-great dynamically-typed scripting languages even in the presence of better alternatives, a misfeature that every modder can confirm. To be fair the originally not so great languages (like e.g. Lua) have caught up and are quite fine by now.
Hm, count me among the skeptics, too. The problem is that "dynamic typing" creates principal performance bottlenecks - not good for games. The golden rule is to compute as much as possible at compile time using a strong type system, including type checking, type inference, bounds checking, overflow checks. Heck, with a strong enough type system you might even be able to avoid most of runtime exception handling (see e.g. the design goals of Parasail). What you want is to encourage the programmer to use very limited subtypes to e.g. be able to optimize loops and procedure calls based on known compile-time constraints.
Just about the only place where you really need dynamic types is dynamic dispatch in OOP, which might not be the best programming paradigm when performance matters anyway.
More people are killed by clubs and bats than rifles, yet we are more scared of rifles
[citation needed]
the president had the constitutional authority, no matter what the law actually says, to order domestic spying without [constitutional] warrants
"no matter what the law actually says" - is that seriously what the people in charge think nowadays?
If his claims were outlandish, nobody would care, especially not the US government.
So he has only re-asserted what everyone knows already? Well, if that is so, what's the big problem?
You can have it either ways but not both.
Why keep it a secret from us if it's to protect us?
The problem is that when you use "us" you appear to mean "US Americans", who only constitute a fraction of worldwide Internet users. Even if US voters agreed, the majority of the world does not agree to being spied on. The NSA has an (unproven, but well-known) track record of conducting industrial espionage against befriended countries, and spying on any foreigners is apparently considered perfectly legal and constitutional in the US.
The fact that other countries might attempt to do the same is no excuse. The real problem is that all the data that is collected is already used to undermine constitutional rights. There are quite persistent and credible rumors that when e.g. the BND wants some data on a German they may not obtain legally (according to German law), they'll just ask a US agency. I'm pretty sure this also works the other way around.
Things might look different if the people in power would really endorse democratic principles and human rights, which they don't.
say the NSA is tracking 500 million people worldwide
do you really think that there is a guy sitting in the NSA tracking you for no reason? out of all the tens of millions of people? what makes you so important?
If you look at the history of intelligence agencies all over the world, it is absolutely amazing what kind of people they considered "interesting" in the past (e.g. during the McCarthy era): poets, writers, movie-makers, businessmen, small criminals, politicians and political activists of all flavors, scientists, programmers, muslims, christians, outspoken government critiques, intellectuals, ... The list goes on and on. History has proved that these agencies have a pretty broad concept of what's "interesting" - all in the name of wasting tax payer money.
Q: Is there any way to keep your communications truly private?
A: No.
The NSA has worked on infiltrating highly secure military networks in the past, it would be foolish to think you can keep data away from them and use the Internet at the same time.
Perhaps things like inventing your own symmetric key end-to-end encryption software on the basis of combining existing technology and algorithms (+ hand to hand key distribution) or hooking up random number generators to your computer and producing and distributing OTPs may callenge and potentially annoy them for some time. That's about it.
The way I see it, there are people who do some real work with their device and then there are people who primarily use their device for wasting time. The former need a PC, the latter will to some extent be happy with a tablet and a phone (and an additional console for gaming).
I have yet to meet anyone who can sincerely say that he gets some real work(TM) done with a tablet or phone. What kind of job would that be? Warehouse management assistant?