No. It is stored, encrypted, on the phone, or the computer, or the tablet, or the USB stick, by the user, who is responsible for its security. what "browser storage" means, I do not know. If the master key is encrypted in the usual fashion, only the user has the password necessary to unlock it, just as in Truecrypt's case. It's gotta be somewhere. This way, it doesn't exist anywhere else in the universe but that device (and anything else you can store it, encrypted, as well), so no certificate hijacker, no MITM, no ISP, no website ever has that key but you.
Not a certificate, but a means of generating session keys that are unique, and theoretically anonymous, by use of that master key. No one in the world can be you. The only drawbacks are MITM, where someone pretends to be a valid site and presents a fake challenge and then lets you in. That's up to you to police. No one else can stop you from entering a phishing site but you. The other is losing your key (!!) by losing your phone or whatever. They've come up with a revolving two-master key system, where you can revoke your master and then switch to a pre-entered (by you) new master. Further developments are open to view,and anyone can challenge or join in. But, do read first.
The fallacy of the golden mean. The truth doesn't always lie between two extremes. He can be, and has proven to be, careful in his self-education and execution over decades. He nailed Microsoft on open sockets - *yes - he -did* - and figured out Prism as a pipe-tap rather than as a cooperative venture while everyone else was screaming and running in circles, accusing everyone of collaboration (not that there isn't, of course). I've listened to him for years. I've never known anyone so careful of his reasoning, so open to arguments, and ready to admit he is wrong and adapt to new facts. He has a podcast that provides him with excellent feedback, so facts are checked and errors corrected on the next podcast. He's polite, accomplished, and well-liked by people who listen to his show. He's a successful IT professional with good products. He's been a tireless advocate of privacy and freedom and has worked to try to find solutions to now proven security canyons. And his SQRL is no longer his baby - he gave it away for free, as in beer and speech, all open-sourced, and all the problems people have thought of are now being hammered on by people in the GRC discussion group as well as anywhere else that cares to try. If there's a hole, they'll address it. He's not the sole programmer or developer of SQRL. It's out there for anyone to work on, and soon will be a web standard. It helps to read his posts, or listen to his podcast, and not listen to "people" yakking on the internet about him. I can understand character assassination and how it is forever on the internet, but it doesn't mean that intelligent people have to bow to it. Look at what's really there, not at what people say.
Those that do adapt, by say ignoring it, will mostly do fine. A small minority will find that they can't be troublemakers anymore when the hammer falls - the Occupy protesters a couple years back in Chicago who were disappeared for three days by Chicago cops are a good example. They were disappeared - not arrested - in the middle of the night from an apartment even before they got to a protest. The FBI/NSA/cops/whatever were cooperating in unprecedented fashion to track protesters. Remember that protest isn't illegal - and remember that no one cared that it happened when they went poof. Privacy is necessary if you ever want to challenge power. Without it, you're helpless.
Think of the personal profile tracking they could do from birth, esp if students are made to use ebooks instead of paper. In time, every ebook that passes a person's eyes since birth could be tracked, every page turn, hell, every eye movement, probably, if they wanted. Every email, every convo, every web page view, every association. They could know who you are better than you do. And it could be done without human oversight - automated analyses. I thought this nonsense for the time being, until last week it turned up that the NSA does indeed run automated analyses on people, with purdy graphs. How the hell do you rebel or even plan opposition when total life surveillance is a reality?
A story came out last week that made it clear the NSA was looking for private commercial partners to help analyze all that shiny data they will be collecting - Because Terrorism, and because they can't do it themselves. Hence my "they will use companies" screed about third parties.
When this thing becomes real, nothing will stop people from getting access to that giant black box. It's worth a fortune, commercially, politically. It's Power with a giant gothic capital P.
Even if it doesn't happen immediately - how will we ever know when future administrations won't quietly change the rules regarding access? Or the spooks that really run the show decide it themselves, as they always have done. They're f-ing secret - Congress doesn't know what they really do, and neither does the President.
They are a representative nutjob set. They will, if this thing flies, make it job one for their organization to get access to that data. I know those suckers from way back. It's their dream, the ability to run a timeline on their enemies.
They'll beg, bribe, steal, get people on the inside, buy a company that *does* have access to the thing. They won't stop until they get it, and then game over for any schmuck who screws with them. You think they were bad when they just had PIs, loony members and lawyers? Wait for when they get total power over personal information. That little rebellion we had against them in the 90s - that ended with South Park and Seth McFarlane getting info they then made accessible to all in a way people would remember - that sort of thing would not have happened had the CoS had the NSA dbases to find out dirt on people who faced them down. Hell, they broke Minton and put another poor bastard into prison for making a Tom Cruise missile joke, without total surveillance. It'll be like what happened to Occupy - they'll nail you as soon as you speak up.
And they are just the fringe of would-be spies. This is god-like power, the ability to timeline any human. There are far more serious bastards in the world.
That, and we spent (tens at least) of trillions in adjusted dollars waging war against any communistic, or hell, socialistic country until they failed from sheer economic exhaustion. We're still embargoing Cuba. The Soviet Union fell, not because it wasn't feeding people (Russia today has far worse economic conditions for its people), but because the oil market collapsed for OPEC around 1980-1982. Russia makes most of its overseas cash selling oil. They didn't have enough to buy foreign goods, and they were spending ridiculous amounts on their military in our war on them. Was easier to sell everything and make commissars into billionaires with golden toilets. The people went to hell, though.
Here's another bit for the pile. If everyone in the world had talent, drive and opportunity to become a doctor, developer or financier, and became such, would everyone be well off at a 60K+ salary in the free market of labor?
Another way of stating it is: if everyone had a ton of gold, would everyone be rich?
Wouldn't work, would it? If everyone is Tony Stark, doesn't mean everyone gets a skyscraper. Developers or doctors would be as cheap to hire, and as desperate, as any burger flipper. Scarcity drives value, not abundance.
We call it "Congress", where we used to pass "laws" that made people middle class instead of insurance-free serfs. Left to the "free market's" mercy, most people would live in animal-skin tents and drink acidic rainwater. There ain't no such thing as a free market. Rich people shut down free markets for labor as fast as they can manage it.
The commies-are-coming crap should have died with the Birchers. Sadly, we consider Birchers liberal nowadays.
Why would prices need to rise - they make tens of billions of dollars in profits each year, split between a few family members. Take the pay raises out of those pockets. A tiny amount of their personal dad-given profits would fuel the rebirth of the middle class. The Walton clan would be able to buy only one personal luxury liner a year per descendant, rather than two each; the country would survive that horror, I think.
The US doesn't have a productivity problem. It has a greed problem. We've tens of millions of newly impoverished citizens because clever boy and girls have figured out how to absorb nearly all the profits that used to be paid to the middle class. The only trickle-down we see is the stream being directed onto people's heads by a few thousand Ayn Rand worshipers.
This isn't the result of incompetence - rather the result of trying to racing to finish the thing before any more opposition builds up that may stop the project. Wile E. Coyote trying to run on air, knowing it's impossible, but trying to get to the cliff before gravity notices the flagrant violation.
When that monster is done - and it seems that they are turning it on *right now*, this week - human history is done as we understand it. We will all behave as though someone is watching and recording us, because they will be.
Scientology is going to *love* this - one stop shopping for all its spying needs. The NSA just last week asked permission for private corporations to access their new trove of data, Because Terrorism. The Unification Church and Scientology will be first in line with front corporations to drink deep of this wonderful new integrated terrorism enabling center - terrorism because bad guys like Scientology will be able to terrorize people with fresh, holistic super-knowledge not only of who they are, what they say, what they read and where they've been, but also of everyone their enemies ever talk to, email, walk next to, text or write to. That center isn't about just metadata, it's the *actual phone conversations* that will be recorded. Don't ever piss off the powerful, 'cause they can nail you and anyone who ever contacts you until you give up. Blackmail, extortion, we-know-where-you-kids-are... anything. And the coolest part is that it will all be secret! Persecutors with behind stage access to the NSA superboxes and analytic tools won't even be logged in any real sense. Political opposition, nullified, instantly. The possibilities for our brave new world owners are limitless.
Such a net I've dreamed of for years - say TV channels new made available to the public as wifi is permitted now, with mesh networks run by individuals, interference mitigated by new methodologies and software, encrypted and onion-routed to hell and back, and no choke points taken over by the DEA, NSA, CIA and FBI. Dream on, because none of those things will be permitted, authorities citing the four legs of the security state's foundations: child porn, terrorism, copyright violation, and national security.
As the pieces fall in place for a new internet, they will be forbidden by law, outright sale to owners, or failing that, kicking in the door and shooting your dogs and dragging your stuff away. This is about power, in one form or another. The internet is a fulcrum of power, and people who love power have moved in to stay. It's a certain personality type that wants to control what other people do (never themselves, of course - they are never the ones under surveillance).
Some healthcare electronic records systems still distribute CDs to patient that require.net to use. When patients complain, they are told to find a MS Windows PC. True.
DRMed music on ipods is easily transported to any other player or hard drive, isn't it? If you view the track in question on iTunes using the option to view the file in the Finder, it is displayed as an mp3 file, isn't it? You can copy that anywhere, no? Apple gave us a backdoor to DRM since day one of iTunes. I've used that method to copy podcasts around various platforms. The DRM doesn't travel with the mp3 file.
Freedom is so silly, when money is on the line. I commend you for your honestly. I'd have spent twelve paragraphs arguing that people believe as you do, so you've saved me a lot of time.
Pity copyright, as it was meant to be, is dead. Now we have eternal ownership. And a security state that seems to have as a major purpose the enforcement of that eternal ownership of anything published past 1929 or so. And so now: absolute surveillance and prison terms - for the crimes of watching TV, reading books and listening to sounds.
Major problem, semantics is. We keep using the word "copyright" when the meaning of the word has been changed, still imbuing it with the respect we had for the older concept (limited rights for a set duration to benefit the creator, and then released to the public forever), instead of treating the new meaning (eternal ownership enforced by a surveillance state, violations punished with harsh financial confiscation combined with federal prison terms) with the derision and opposition it now deserves. We are trying to point at the newly red-colored tree while still crying, "Look at the green tree!" Impossible to have a sane argument about the situation, sadly, when the words to describe what we argue about have been so expertly, intentionally, ruined.
"If you believe that Copyright should be able to exist on media and that authors and/or distributors should be able to charge for the video/audio, and you believe that technological protection measures may have some impact to reduce non-paid use of such media, and you believe that it is in the interest of consumers to have standards for these sort of things, then you may view EME as a good thing."
The internet isn't "media" - it's an open-source communications protocol. DRM is closed source. If you make a part of the protocol secret, it is no longer the internet - it is cable TV.
Open source is an absolute. Like being pregnant, you are either one of two states. You can't be a little bit pregnant. If you let commercial "cable TV" in the door to control the internet - and that is all this is, metaphotically - the internet no longer belongs to you. It belongs to businessmen who want to charge for access.
The entertainment companies should never have been able to hijack copyright and destroy the concept - eternal copyright isn't copyright, it's a takeover of man's history on earth. Cable TV companies should never have been permitted to hijack the internet. The owners of the pipes should never have been permitted to sell the water in the pipes, the basic, horrible error of our age.
To implement DRM means to destroy our privacy, our freedom, because to implement copyright protection as they require it to be mandates surveillance on a scale undreamed of by any tyrant, and worse, the surveillance will be conducted by private individuals who barely recognize government oversight, much less see themselves under it.
The internet must be free, private, and under no industry or government control. Else, tyranny, no matter how mercantile the motives.
Note also that the record companies now pay artists even *less* under their new internet regime. "Pay the artist" is not their mantra. The want money and power over other people.
The Republicans shut down the government; the government did not shut itself down. Only one Republican voted "no".
They want the President neutralized. His only "victory", passing Bob Dole's idea of national health care (insurance by private companies in fenced markets), is baneful and hurts their very souls to behold. They will kill people to negate that minor win.
This isn't a government malfunctioning. This is a coup. The second one in six years. This, ladies and germs, is a test of national memory. Can we remember what happened only a couple of years back, at least, if we can't remember Gingrich doing this in the 90s?
As for Jon Stewart and all the other False Equivalency pundits: NO, this is not a failure of "Congress". Congress is furious, except for the representatives of the Confederacy still trying to win the Civil War.
You walk down the street with iPhone in hand. Man walks casually up to you. Points gun at you. "Take out your phone," he says. "Now, unlock it." You try to fake it. He repeats, "Finger on button - UNLOCK IT NOW." You unlock it. He takes the phone, shuts off all verification procedures, now that he is "you". Smacks you in the face until you hit the ground and walks away.
Fingerprint verification defeated. He sells the phone.
Too much knowledge sometimes prevents people from seeing the obvious flaws because they keep doubling down on their own cleverness. See: computerized election systems and the flaws no one sees, for sad examples
Slashdot Mirror
Read.
No. It is stored, encrypted, on the phone, or the computer, or the tablet, or the USB stick, by the user, who is responsible for its security. what "browser storage" means, I do not know. If the master key is encrypted in the usual fashion, only the user has the password necessary to unlock it, just as in Truecrypt's case. It's gotta be somewhere. This way, it doesn't exist anywhere else in the universe but that device (and anything else you can store it, encrypted, as well), so no certificate hijacker, no MITM, no ISP, no website ever has that key but you.
Not a certificate, but a means of generating session keys that are unique, and theoretically anonymous, by use of that master key. No one in the world can be you. The only drawbacks are MITM, where someone pretends to be a valid site and presents a fake challenge and then lets you in. That's up to you to police. No one else can stop you from entering a phishing site but you. The other is losing your key (!!) by losing your phone or whatever. They've come up with a revolving two-master key system, where you can revoke your master and then switch to a pre-entered (by you) new master. Further developments are open to view,and anyone can challenge or join in. But, do read first.
Idiocy indeed. Learn to read.
Indeed no. It doesn't.
no. as it has been written and said, many, many, many times, you do not need a smartphone.
The fallacy of the golden mean. The truth doesn't always lie between two extremes. He can be, and has proven to be, careful in his self-education and execution over decades. He nailed Microsoft on open sockets - *yes - he -did* - and figured out Prism as a pipe-tap rather than as a cooperative venture while everyone else was screaming and running in circles, accusing everyone of collaboration (not that there isn't, of course). I've listened to him for years. I've never known anyone so careful of his reasoning, so open to arguments, and ready to admit he is wrong and adapt to new facts. He has a podcast that provides him with excellent feedback, so facts are checked and errors corrected on the next podcast. He's polite, accomplished, and well-liked by people who listen to his show. He's a successful IT professional with good products. He's been a tireless advocate of privacy and freedom and has worked to try to find solutions to now proven security canyons. And his SQRL is no longer his baby - he gave it away for free, as in beer and speech, all open-sourced, and all the problems people have thought of are now being hammered on by people in the GRC discussion group as well as anywhere else that cares to try. If there's a hole, they'll address it. He's not the sole programmer or developer of SQRL. It's out there for anyone to work on, and soon will be a web standard. It helps to read his posts, or listen to his podcast, and not listen to "people" yakking on the internet about him. I can understand character assassination and how it is forever on the internet, but it doesn't mean that intelligent people have to bow to it. Look at what's really there, not at what people say.
Arresting? Putting a 12 year old in FUCKING PRISON? Have you all lost your goddamned minds??? You have, haven't you?
Those that do adapt, by say ignoring it, will mostly do fine. A small minority will find that they can't be troublemakers anymore when the hammer falls - the Occupy protesters a couple years back in Chicago who were disappeared for three days by Chicago cops are a good example. They were disappeared - not arrested - in the middle of the night from an apartment even before they got to a protest. The FBI/NSA/cops/whatever were cooperating in unprecedented fashion to track protesters. Remember that protest isn't illegal - and remember that no one cared that it happened when they went poof. Privacy is necessary if you ever want to challenge power. Without it, you're helpless.
Think of the personal profile tracking they could do from birth, esp if students are made to use ebooks instead of paper. In time, every ebook that passes a person's eyes since birth could be tracked, every page turn, hell, every eye movement, probably, if they wanted. Every email, every convo, every web page view, every association. They could know who you are better than you do. And it could be done without human oversight - automated analyses. I thought this nonsense for the time being, until last week it turned up that the NSA does indeed run automated analyses on people, with purdy graphs. How the hell do you rebel or even plan opposition when total life surveillance is a reality?
A story came out last week that made it clear the NSA was looking for private commercial partners to help analyze all that shiny data they will be collecting - Because Terrorism, and because they can't do it themselves. Hence my "they will use companies" screed about third parties.
When this thing becomes real, nothing will stop people from getting access to that giant black box. It's worth a fortune, commercially, politically. It's Power with a giant gothic capital P.
Even if it doesn't happen immediately - how will we ever know when future administrations won't quietly change the rules regarding access? Or the spooks that really run the show decide it themselves, as they always have done. They're f-ing secret - Congress doesn't know what they really do, and neither does the President.
They are a representative nutjob set. They will, if this thing flies, make it job one for their organization to get access to that data. I know those suckers from way back. It's their dream, the ability to run a timeline on their enemies.
They'll beg, bribe, steal, get people on the inside, buy a company that *does* have access to the thing. They won't stop until they get it, and then game over for any schmuck who screws with them. You think they were bad when they just had PIs, loony members and lawyers? Wait for when they get total power over personal information. That little rebellion we had against them in the 90s - that ended with South Park and Seth McFarlane getting info they then made accessible to all in a way people would remember - that sort of thing would not have happened had the CoS had the NSA dbases to find out dirt on people who faced them down. Hell, they broke Minton and put another poor bastard into prison for making a Tom Cruise missile joke, without total surveillance. It'll be like what happened to Occupy - they'll nail you as soon as you speak up.
And they are just the fringe of would-be spies. This is god-like power, the ability to timeline any human. There are far more serious bastards in the world.
Inflation doesn't exist, other than oil prices rising in 2006 and then staying risen. The rest is greed.
That, and we spent (tens at least) of trillions in adjusted dollars waging war against any communistic, or hell, socialistic country until they failed from sheer economic exhaustion. We're still embargoing Cuba. The Soviet Union fell, not because it wasn't feeding people (Russia today has far worse economic conditions for its people), but because the oil market collapsed for OPEC around 1980-1982. Russia makes most of its overseas cash selling oil. They didn't have enough to buy foreign goods, and they were spending ridiculous amounts on their military in our war on them. Was easier to sell everything and make commissars into billionaires with golden toilets. The people went to hell, though.
Great post.
Here's another bit for the pile. If everyone in the world had talent, drive and opportunity to become a doctor, developer or financier, and became such, would everyone be well off at a 60K+ salary in the free market of labor?
Another way of stating it is: if everyone had a ton of gold, would everyone be rich?
Wouldn't work, would it? If everyone is Tony Stark, doesn't mean everyone gets a skyscraper. Developers or doctors would be as cheap to hire, and as desperate, as any burger flipper. Scarcity drives value, not abundance.
We call it "Congress", where we used to pass "laws" that made people middle class instead of insurance-free serfs. Left to the "free market's" mercy, most people would live in animal-skin tents and drink acidic rainwater. There ain't no such thing as a free market. Rich people shut down free markets for labor as fast as they can manage it.
The commies-are-coming crap should have died with the Birchers. Sadly, we consider Birchers liberal nowadays.
Why would prices need to rise - they make tens of billions of dollars in profits each year, split between a few family members. Take the pay raises out of those pockets. A tiny amount of their personal dad-given profits would fuel the rebirth of the middle class. The Walton clan would be able to buy only one personal luxury liner a year per descendant, rather than two each; the country would survive that horror, I think.
The US doesn't have a productivity problem. It has a greed problem. We've tens of millions of newly impoverished citizens because clever boy and girls have figured out how to absorb nearly all the profits that used to be paid to the middle class. The only trickle-down we see is the stream being directed onto people's heads by a few thousand Ayn Rand worshipers.
This isn't the result of incompetence - rather the result of trying to racing to finish the thing before any more opposition builds up that may stop the project. Wile E. Coyote trying to run on air, knowing it's impossible, but trying to get to the cliff before gravity notices the flagrant violation.
When that monster is done - and it seems that they are turning it on *right now*, this week - human history is done as we understand it. We will all behave as though someone is watching and recording us, because they will be.
Scientology is going to *love* this - one stop shopping for all its spying needs. The NSA just last week asked permission for private corporations to access their new trove of data, Because Terrorism. The Unification Church and Scientology will be first in line with front corporations to drink deep of this wonderful new integrated terrorism enabling center - terrorism because bad guys like Scientology will be able to terrorize people with fresh, holistic super-knowledge not only of who they are, what they say, what they read and where they've been, but also of everyone their enemies ever talk to, email, walk next to, text or write to. That center isn't about just metadata, it's the *actual phone conversations* that will be recorded. Don't ever piss off the powerful, 'cause they can nail you and anyone who ever contacts you until you give up. Blackmail, extortion, we-know-where-you-kids-are... anything. And the coolest part is that it will all be secret! Persecutors with behind stage access to the NSA superboxes and analytic tools won't even be logged in any real sense. Political opposition, nullified, instantly. The possibilities for our brave new world owners are limitless.
Such a net I've dreamed of for years - say TV channels new made available to the public as wifi is permitted now, with mesh networks run by individuals, interference mitigated by new methodologies and software, encrypted and onion-routed to hell and back, and no choke points taken over by the DEA, NSA, CIA and FBI. Dream on, because none of those things will be permitted, authorities citing the four legs of the security state's foundations: child porn, terrorism, copyright violation, and national security.
As the pieces fall in place for a new internet, they will be forbidden by law, outright sale to owners, or failing that, kicking in the door and shooting your dogs and dragging your stuff away. This is about power, in one form or another. The internet is a fulcrum of power, and people who love power have moved in to stay. It's a certain personality type that wants to control what other people do (never themselves, of course - they are never the ones under surveillance).
Face it -- we're all in jail now.
Some healthcare electronic records systems still distribute CDs to patient that require .net to use. When patients complain, they are told to find a MS Windows PC. True.
DRMed music on ipods is easily transported to any other player or hard drive, isn't it? If you view the track in question on iTunes using the option to view the file in the Finder, it is displayed as an mp3 file, isn't it? You can copy that anywhere, no? Apple gave us a backdoor to DRM since day one of iTunes. I've used that method to copy podcasts around various platforms. The DRM doesn't travel with the mp3 file.
Freedom is so silly, when money is on the line. I commend you for your honestly. I'd have spent twelve paragraphs arguing that people believe as you do, so you've saved me a lot of time.
Pity copyright, as it was meant to be, is dead. Now we have eternal ownership. And a security state that seems to have as a major purpose the enforcement of that eternal ownership of anything published past 1929 or so. And so now: absolute surveillance and prison terms - for the crimes of watching TV, reading books and listening to sounds.
Major problem, semantics is. We keep using the word "copyright" when the meaning of the word has been changed, still imbuing it with the respect we had for the older concept (limited rights for a set duration to benefit the creator, and then released to the public forever), instead of treating the new meaning (eternal ownership enforced by a surveillance state, violations punished with harsh financial confiscation combined with federal prison terms) with the derision and opposition it now deserves. We are trying to point at the newly red-colored tree while still crying, "Look at the green tree!" Impossible to have a sane argument about the situation, sadly, when the words to describe what we argue about have been so expertly, intentionally, ruined.
"If you believe that Copyright should be able to exist on media and that authors and/or distributors should be able to charge for the video/audio, and you believe that technological protection measures may have some impact to reduce non-paid use of such media, and you believe that it is in the interest of consumers to have standards for these sort of things, then you may view EME as a good thing."
The internet isn't "media" - it's an open-source communications protocol. DRM is closed source. If you make a part of the protocol secret, it is no longer the internet - it is cable TV.
Open source is an absolute. Like being pregnant, you are either one of two states. You can't be a little bit pregnant. If you let commercial "cable TV" in the door to control the internet - and that is all this is, metaphotically - the internet no longer belongs to you. It belongs to businessmen who want to charge for access.
The entertainment companies should never have been able to hijack copyright and destroy the concept - eternal copyright isn't copyright, it's a takeover of man's history on earth. Cable TV companies should never have been permitted to hijack the internet. The owners of the pipes should never have been permitted to sell the water in the pipes, the basic, horrible error of our age.
To implement DRM means to destroy our privacy, our freedom, because to implement copyright protection as they require it to be mandates surveillance on a scale undreamed of by any tyrant, and worse, the surveillance will be conducted by private individuals who barely recognize government oversight, much less see themselves under it.
The internet must be free, private, and under no industry or government control. Else, tyranny, no matter how mercantile the motives.
Note also that the record companies now pay artists even *less* under their new internet regime. "Pay the artist" is not their mantra. The want money and power over other people.
The Republicans shut down the government; the government did not shut itself down. Only one Republican voted "no".
They want the President neutralized. His only "victory", passing Bob Dole's idea of national health care (insurance by private companies in fenced markets), is baneful and hurts their very souls to behold. They will kill people to negate that minor win.
This isn't a government malfunctioning. This is a coup. The second one in six years. This, ladies and germs, is a test of national memory. Can we remember what happened only a couple of years back, at least, if we can't remember Gingrich doing this in the 90s?
As for Jon Stewart and all the other False Equivalency pundits: NO, this is not a failure of "Congress". Congress is furious, except for the representatives of the Confederacy still trying to win the Civil War.
He shoots you fifteen times. You die.
Would you like to play again? Y/N
Scenario:
You walk down the street with iPhone in hand.
Man walks casually up to you. Points gun at you. "Take out your phone," he says. "Now, unlock it."
You try to fake it. He repeats, "Finger on button - UNLOCK IT NOW."
You unlock it. He takes the phone, shuts off all verification procedures, now that he is "you".
Smacks you in the face until you hit the ground and walks away.
Fingerprint verification defeated. He sells the phone.
Too much knowledge sometimes prevents people from seeing the obvious flaws because they keep doubling down on their own cleverness. See: computerized election systems and the flaws no one sees, for sad examples