Or we can assume, because they took that job, that a large number of the people who make the decisions are Islamophobic bigots running hot from Fox News. A million people on that no-fly list.
In the 1940s and 1950s, marxophobia gripped the popular imagination, fed by a national security apparatus that really had nothing else to do. The entire country danced the bigot's tango, investigating "commies" and "fellow travellers", ruining tens of thousands of lives.
If you have a secret security apparatus, bigots consumed with confirmation bias will do what they always do; imply, smear, ruin people. Now we've given them the golden ticket, the end game of all control freaks: a perfect surveillance system.
As Terry Pratchett says: "Don't give a monkey the key to the banana plantation."
The point, the very essence, of the electronic surveillance state is that YOU have no privacy or hope of leniency. Your watchers, however, are secret, immune, and implacable. Whenever someone says, "Just don't do anything wrong!", or, "What have you got to hide?" or, best, "Get the fuck over it, privacy is dead.", remember this story. The people who run the panoptikon, who can call in Copyright Commando raids against a home *in another country*, can accuse and prosecute and steal; however, they themselves can lie, hide, destroy evidence, and operate in total secrecy. Power without consequences for the corporations and governments, while *you* will be held responsible for every bad thing you've ever said or did. Anywhere in the world that has power that can get access to the panoptikon can drag your ass back to their jurisdiction (well, America, Canada, New Zealand and Australia can, anyway).
and then click on the upper left hand slashdot banner. You're back to old school. I don't have time to find the "not-the-beta" button, which doesn't seem to exist, or isn't easily identifiable.
In Corporateworld, every cheese is Velveeta, sooner or later. The money people want all sites to be easy-to-use money-makin' clickyclickers. Slashdot is next.
The aging population should live in towns in which you can walk to where you need to go (or ride a cart); if they can't, we've made a mistake in how we design towns.
As for demanding the ability to travel anywhere, in robot cars - that's a new high in self-entitlement.
We're in a world rapidly hyperheating from fossil fuel burning a construction (25% of carbon dioxide emissions come from laying concrete, for roads I assume, mostly). We've a rapidly expanding population worldwide; wildlife is disappearing as humans build suburbs in their spaces (literally in east Africa - elephants live in a tiny swath of land surrounded by new suburbanites who are pissed the elephants are messing up their new gardens, all made possible by car access). Not a world which needs more humans demanding more access at any time. I would call that a civilization of spoiled-rotten children in adult bodies. Our selfishness is killing everything else. Perhaps a health dose of NO is needed.
Cell phones and associated toys make about 60 million tons of tech garbage every year. Your *use* may be a success story, but the off-loaded exterior costs are not passed on to you, so you don't consider what a disaster they've been. Extend this to other technologies. We need to simplify, not constantly add more circuits onto an already-overdesigned and unstable mess.
Put ten millions of them on roads with bicycles and small children. And kids with HERF guns.
This is a solution in search of a problem. Humans + cars are the most deadly killing even in man's history, slaughter worse than all the death tolls of all our wars combined; the appropriate solution is trains.
Cars + computers is a solution to a *suburban* problem, a problem created by the existence of cars driven by people and the road topology that results from their capabilities, a problem of needing to travel long distances at any time for all reasons to random destination. That problem can't be solved by rail because the houses aren't laid out for rail.
More efficient, more sane, to lay out towns for rail access than to build billions of robot tanks to emulate trains.
Automated voting machines, self-driving cars. Same bad ideas, same misplaced abundance of faith in programming. The world isn't a video game; it's full of chaos and malice, and you can't anticipate the outcomes.
Planes, yes, cars, no. Planes have buffer space and trained commercial pilots. Cars will have people reading books, and no in practice no space or time buffers. You can dodge a random garden hose of water, but you can't dodge rain.
You may joke, but that sort of thing is why Target let 60+ million customer records get into the hands of bad guys. You will always be adding more to the programming, and it will always be failing. You can't program for chaos, and especially can't anticipate malevolent intent.
"Proof"? He's speculating on outcome of capability, which should be second nature for you. No wonder they keep sneaking up on techies with surveillance tech - no imagination allowed?
Curious: CAN self driving cars see bicycles? If they can, do they know how to anticipate a bicycle's movements? How about recumbent trikes? Pedal powered vehicles of any time? Anything that isn't a car - how do they fit into the world of computing machines driving speeding tanks?
We are nowhere near ready for robot cars. Humans are general purpose computing machines that can perform pattern recognition tasks that no software can. If we are really concerned about human error to the extent we want to eliminate humans, then we should go back to formula and start building rail lines again. Making cars into trains is inefficient, not to mention impossible. A waste of time and resources in a world rapidly running out of both.
The Bill of Rights never were stone: hence the Amendments.
But the 9th Amendment WAS designed for such things as privacy - "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." I am aware the nuance of the amendment can be argued, but the thrust of the law is obvious. Enumerated rights (the BofR and the Constitution itself) don't mean others don't exist. Such rights, as, say, the right to not have a citizen's horse and carriage tracked forever using ethereal invisible rays broadcast by tiny wizards in a horses's brain. Every conceivable SF possibility didn't have to be painstakingly imagined by the Constitutional Congress in the late 18th century. Nor do we need to create a new amendment every time someone invents something novel that tap dances around the law, or common sense. Or uncommon sense, as most people don't care or don't recognize the possibilities in things such as universal surveillance.
Well, I like that interpretation, and I know the actual law will never be used in that fashion. But it should be.
The GPS functionality will be woven into the brain of the engine, so that blocking or disabling will cause the engine to cease functioning. Ever try to cut out the GPS of your phone? I mean, REALLY kill the circuit? You can't. The phone ceases to function. Cars are rolling networks now, and pretty easy to control.
Disabling GPS could cause the car to yell to the cops, the insurance company, Ford, whatever. Once the pieces are in place, any scenario can be deployed.
Cutting out the GPS will be declared a crime. Eventually. Because terrorism, crime, whatever. Doesn't matter. This is stepwise world engineering here - boil the frog slowly, and no one will care much.
Regardless, GPS modules will be incorporated, permanently, into the engine block or essential structure of every new car. Shortly, modules will be required in all cars by law. So, used or new, you will be tracked. Why? Parking tickets, speeding tickets, movement tracking for any purpose. And of course all cars will be required to be wirelessly networked, so such data will be easily provided. What Have You Got To Hide? It was done to our cell phones nine years ago, by law. Few people noticed (I did - if you can drill back that far, check my increasingly rabid Slashdot posts). Or cared.
Thanks to Snowden, my nation is finally noticing the noose drawing tight around their lives.
I keep my very old car running, and probably will spend ten grand rebuilding the body. It's pre-black box, not to mention non-GPSed. It's a statement, not a dodge, as cameras are tracking our cars and opting-out isn't possible.
I've read many of the comments, and not one mentioned software failure, sensor failure, GPS failure, power failure, design failure, or hardware failure of any sort I can't envision. Or being hit by a non-automated car - which could make the system fail and drive the car into further danger. Is it possible techies cannot conceive of a computer system that does not work 100% of the time? (Makes me reflect back on all those posts I used to make contending that voting systems were inherently designed for cheating. No imagination. Machines *always work* in techies' view, it seems) A little too much programming - no experience in actual machines operating in the real world.
Computers *fail* in the real world. The more complex the system, the more certain the failure. An airplane can get away with automated flight, as there is room to maneuver and pilots are always standing close by. Cars have no safety margins for failure in traffic. None. This will not work, not unless people are willfully blind when the failures accumulate - possible.
What happens if someone spoofs a GPS signal? It's been done to drones, making them dive and kill themselves. What if a HERF gun blows out the brains of the car with EMP - or someone simply makes an EMP "bomb" and detonates it on an overpass?
Question again: who's responsible when the perfect machine fails and causes an accident?
We need a VCR equivalent. Been looking for one for a while. For all you young people, a VCR - Video Cassette Recorder - let us record live TV - unencrypted - onto tapes. I'm only half kidding about the education here. We need a simple box that records OTA in 1080P onto a hard drive or USB stick. There are several out there, of various flavors. The key for searching for such is "converter box" with recording capabilities. A PC with media software is not sufficient. We need a simple solution.
Remember to contract private companies to build machines and systems to count votes as well. Nothing could possibly go wrong, and those companies will be as assiduous in detecting flaws in voting systems and their front ends as they are in counting vast quantities of cash. Because, you know, they will. 'Cause. Perfect.
Spooks don't need keys. They either have masters or have a little toy or two that opens the locks. Our doors and windows are paradoxically designed so that they can be opened, not to keep people out. If we had real door locking tech - steel frames/door plates and amazing locks - firemen couldn't get in, and police would be REALLY pissed off and have them outlawed... hmm. Probably are outlawed.
Scientology operatives of various levels of competence love to let you know they've been there. Basic tactics: make the person insecure and neurotic about their home and theirr privacy, especially as law enforcement will not believe you, or care. The target lives a miserable life, and the thugs don't even have to make a return visit. Once does it.
Three of the four systems he had installed (good man!) were deactivated. The agency who broke in just weren't expecting that many layers (they will now be aware of super-tinfoilhatting). Whipping out the Occam's Razor, they are doing this to every effective anti-spying activists they can - but those hundreds or thousands of targets didn't have four layers of armor.
Now the challenge: let's get some pictures! Let's see these little sneaks.
So few of even those who understand what the government is doing were interested, much less concerned, or more properly, panicked and furious beyond belief. Maybe this will ring a bell that means something to them?
Slashdot Mirror
Or we can assume, because they took that job, that a large number of the people who make the decisions are Islamophobic bigots running hot from Fox News. A million people on that no-fly list.
In the 1940s and 1950s, marxophobia gripped the popular imagination, fed by a national security apparatus that really had nothing else to do. The entire country danced the bigot's tango, investigating "commies" and "fellow travellers", ruining tens of thousands of lives.
If you have a secret security apparatus, bigots consumed with confirmation bias will do what they always do; imply, smear, ruin people. Now we've given them the golden ticket, the end game of all control freaks: a perfect surveillance system.
As Terry Pratchett says: "Don't give a monkey the key to the banana plantation."
Will the judge order the arrest of the GCSB? Then his opinion doesn't matter. They are immune.
The point, the very essence, of the electronic surveillance state is that YOU have no privacy or hope of leniency. Your watchers, however, are secret, immune, and implacable. Whenever someone says, "Just don't do anything wrong!", or, "What have you got to hide?" or, best, "Get the fuck over it, privacy is dead.", remember this story. The people who run the panoptikon, who can call in Copyright Commando raids against a home *in another country*, can accuse and prosecute and steal; however, they themselves can lie, hide, destroy evidence, and operate in total secrecy. Power without consequences for the corporations and governments, while *you* will be held responsible for every bad thing you've ever said or did. Anywhere in the world that has power that can get access to the panoptikon can drag your ass back to their jurisdiction (well, America, Canada, New Zealand and Australia can, anyway).
go to this link:
http://meta.slashdot.org/story...
and then click on the upper left hand slashdot banner. You're back to old school. I don't have time to find the "not-the-beta" button, which doesn't seem to exist, or isn't easily identifiable.
In Corporateworld, every cheese is Velveeta, sooner or later. The money people want all sites to be easy-to-use money-makin' clickyclickers. Slashdot is next.
The aging population should live in towns in which you can walk to where you need to go (or ride a cart); if they can't, we've made a mistake in how we design towns.
As for demanding the ability to travel anywhere, in robot cars - that's a new high in self-entitlement.
We're in a world rapidly hyperheating from fossil fuel burning a construction (25% of carbon dioxide emissions come from laying concrete, for roads I assume, mostly). We've a rapidly expanding population worldwide; wildlife is disappearing as humans build suburbs in their spaces (literally in east Africa - elephants live in a tiny swath of land surrounded by new suburbanites who are pissed the elephants are messing up their new gardens, all made possible by car access). Not a world which needs more humans demanding more access at any time. I would call that a civilization of spoiled-rotten children in adult bodies. Our selfishness is killing everything else. Perhaps a health dose of NO is needed.
Cell phones and associated toys make about 60 million tons of tech garbage every year. Your *use* may be a success story, but the off-loaded exterior costs are not passed on to you, so you don't consider what a disaster they've been. Extend this to other technologies. We need to simplify, not constantly add more circuits onto an already-overdesigned and unstable mess.
Software developers are not held liable.
Damn. The hubris.
Put ten millions of them on roads with bicycles and small children. And kids with HERF guns.
This is a solution in search of a problem. Humans + cars are the most deadly killing even in man's history, slaughter worse than all the death tolls of all our wars combined; the appropriate solution is trains.
Cars + computers is a solution to a *suburban* problem, a problem created by the existence of cars driven by people and the road topology that results from their capabilities, a problem of needing to travel long distances at any time for all reasons to random destination. That problem can't be solved by rail because the houses aren't laid out for rail.
More efficient, more sane, to lay out towns for rail access than to build billions of robot tanks to emulate trains.
Automated voting machines, self-driving cars. Same bad ideas, same misplaced abundance of faith in programming. The world isn't a video game; it's full of chaos and malice, and you can't anticipate the outcomes.
Planes, yes, cars, no. Planes have buffer space and trained commercial pilots. Cars will have people reading books, and no in practice no space or time buffers. You can dodge a random garden hose of water, but you can't dodge rain.
You may joke, but that sort of thing is why Target let 60+ million customer records get into the hands of bad guys. You will always be adding more to the programming, and it will always be failing. You can't program for chaos, and especially can't anticipate malevolent intent.
Far better stated than I did. Let me add: bicycles.
"Proof"? He's speculating on outcome of capability, which should be second nature for you. No wonder they keep sneaking up on techies with surveillance tech - no imagination allowed?
Or you could build a train.
Curious: CAN self driving cars see bicycles? If they can, do they know how to anticipate a bicycle's movements? How about recumbent trikes? Pedal powered vehicles of any time? Anything that isn't a car - how do they fit into the world of computing machines driving speeding tanks?
We are nowhere near ready for robot cars. Humans are general purpose computing machines that can perform pattern recognition tasks that no software can. If we are really concerned about human error to the extent we want to eliminate humans, then we should go back to formula and start building rail lines again. Making cars into trains is inefficient, not to mention impossible. A waste of time and resources in a world rapidly running out of both.
The Bill of Rights never were stone: hence the Amendments.
But the 9th Amendment WAS designed for such things as privacy - "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." I am aware the nuance of the amendment can be argued, but the thrust of the law is obvious. Enumerated rights (the BofR and the Constitution itself) don't mean others don't exist. Such rights, as, say, the right to not have a citizen's horse and carriage tracked forever using ethereal invisible rays broadcast by tiny wizards in a horses's brain. Every conceivable SF possibility didn't have to be painstakingly imagined by the Constitutional Congress in the late 18th century. Nor do we need to create a new amendment every time someone invents something novel that tap dances around the law, or common sense. Or uncommon sense, as most people don't care or don't recognize the possibilities in things such as universal surveillance.
Well, I like that interpretation, and I know the actual law will never be used in that fashion. But it should be.
The GPS functionality will be woven into the brain of the engine, so that blocking or disabling will cause the engine to cease functioning. Ever try to cut out the GPS of your phone? I mean, REALLY kill the circuit? You can't. The phone ceases to function. Cars are rolling networks now, and pretty easy to control.
Disabling GPS could cause the car to yell to the cops, the insurance company, Ford, whatever. Once the pieces are in place, any scenario can be deployed.
Cutting out the GPS will be declared a crime. Eventually. Because terrorism, crime, whatever. Doesn't matter. This is stepwise world engineering here - boil the frog slowly, and no one will care much.
Regardless, GPS modules will be incorporated, permanently, into the engine block or essential structure of every new car. Shortly, modules will be required in all cars by law. So, used or new, you will be tracked. Why? Parking tickets, speeding tickets, movement tracking for any purpose. And of course all cars will be required to be wirelessly networked, so such data will be easily provided. What Have You Got To Hide? It was done to our cell phones nine years ago, by law. Few people noticed (I did - if you can drill back that far, check my increasingly rabid Slashdot posts). Or cared.
Thanks to Snowden, my nation is finally noticing the noose drawing tight around their lives.
I keep my very old car running, and probably will spend ten grand rebuilding the body. It's pre-black box, not to mention non-GPSed. It's a statement, not a dodge, as cameras are tracking our cars and opting-out isn't possible.
I've read many of the comments, and not one mentioned software failure, sensor failure, GPS failure, power failure, design failure, or hardware failure of any sort I can't envision. Or being hit by a non-automated car - which could make the system fail and drive the car into further danger. Is it possible techies cannot conceive of a computer system that does not work 100% of the time? (Makes me reflect back on all those posts I used to make contending that voting systems were inherently designed for cheating. No imagination. Machines *always work* in techies' view, it seems) A little too much programming - no experience in actual machines operating in the real world.
Computers *fail* in the real world. The more complex the system, the more certain the failure. An airplane can get away with automated flight, as there is room to maneuver and pilots are always standing close by. Cars have no safety margins for failure in traffic. None. This will not work, not unless people are willfully blind when the failures accumulate - possible.
What happens if someone spoofs a GPS signal? It's been done to drones, making them dive and kill themselves. What if a HERF gun blows out the brains of the car with EMP - or someone simply makes an EMP "bomb" and detonates it on an overpass?
Question again: who's responsible when the perfect machine fails and causes an accident?
We need a VCR equivalent. Been looking for one for a while.
For all you young people, a VCR - Video Cassette Recorder - let us record live TV - unencrypted - onto tapes. I'm only half kidding about the education here.
We need a simple box that records OTA in 1080P onto a hard drive or USB stick. There are several out there, of various flavors. The key for searching for such is "converter box" with recording capabilities.
A PC with media software is not sufficient. We need a simple solution.
This might be a contender very soon:
http://www.avsforum.com/t/1500872/channel-master-cm-7500-2-tuner-ota-dvr-with-guide
Remember to contract private companies to build machines and systems to count votes as well. Nothing could possibly go wrong, and those companies will be as assiduous in detecting flaws in voting systems and their front ends as they are in counting vast quantities of cash. Because, you know, they will. 'Cause. Perfect.
Spooks don't need keys. They either have masters or have a little toy or two that opens the locks. Our doors and windows are paradoxically designed so that they can be opened, not to keep people out. If we had real door locking tech - steel frames/door plates and amazing locks - firemen couldn't get in, and police would be REALLY pissed off and have them outlawed... hmm. Probably are outlawed.
Scientology operatives of various levels of competence love to let you know they've been there. Basic tactics: make the person insecure and neurotic about their home and theirr privacy, especially as law enforcement will not believe you, or care. The target lives a miserable life, and the thugs don't even have to make a return visit. Once does it.
Three of the four systems he had installed (good man!) were deactivated. The agency who broke in just weren't expecting that many layers (they will now be aware of super-tinfoilhatting). Whipping out the Occam's Razor, they are doing this to every effective anti-spying activists they can - but those hundreds or thousands of targets didn't have four layers of armor.
Now the challenge: let's get some pictures! Let's see these little sneaks.
So few of even those who understand what the government is doing were interested, much less concerned, or more properly, panicked and furious beyond belief. Maybe this will ring a bell that means something to them?