The obvious solution is to stop pretending that the abstract corporate entity "engaged in price fixing" and remember that some number of specific individuals(who happen to have offices within that corporate entity) were the ones who actually decided upon and executed that price fixing.
Fining corporations is a dubiously useful exercise because, if small, the fines are simply a cost of doing business(and, since the rational decision maker will discount the possible fines according to the probability of getting caught, they are an even smaller deterrent than their size would suggest). If ruinous, they are economically disruptive and hit hundreds or thousands of mid and low-level worker drones who had nothing to do with it. Ironically, fines for cartel behavior are probably least effective of all: If X companies are a cartel, and are powerful enough to fix prices, and you fine all of them, they can all pass the fines on in the form of higher prices because(as previously established) those X companies have that level of market power. Since they all have independent reasons to raise prices, it won't even be cartel behavior.
By contrast, if you punish cartel behavior, and other forms of corporate misbehavior, with fines against the personal assets or prison terms/capital punishments against the persons of the specific corporate officers responsible(and, barring the development of strong-AI ERP systems, anything a corporation 'does' was actually decided upon and executed by one or more humans), you should get greater deterrent effect, less impact on innocent bystanders, and less passing-on of costs to customers(there isn't even a way of passing on "our former CEO is doing 20-to-life" to your customers.
This is why I like the strategy, occasionally employed, of, instead of relying on the (usually pitifully weak) employee protection/workplace health and safety laws, using the (typically much stiffer) charges of negligent homicide, reckless negligence, and the like, against the particular people responsible for conditions resulting in worker injuries or deaths. The same strategy could be applied to financial crimes.
No, my argument is that machines can only be operated over time if they exist within range of the supply structure that their technology requires. Poor people are, of necessity, typically quite good generalists. However, they aren't magically good and the downside of poverty and generalism is the unavailability of specialized hardware.
High tech machines generally, and medical apparatus is particularly bad, tend to rely on a huge web of interlocking suppliers, substantial amounts of human and physical capital, and accumulated expertise. If you have those, keeping things running is generally pretty easy(with the exception of specific jobs requiring substantial human capital). If you don't, all the smarts and ingenuity you can muster won't help you very much.
In this case, my argument is that the survival advantages of an incubator over just being held directly against a parent, while nontrivial, rely almost entirely on some quite specialized supplies and spare parts. If you don't have those, you have a problem. If anything, poor people probably have more experience with lousy supply lines and improvising, so they'd probably keep it working longer; but, ultimately, the only way to keep such a device working is to be connected to its supply chain, or to recreate that supply chain from scratch.
There was an analogous case that I'm thinking of, can't find the link offhand. Some charitable NGO was providing wheelchairs to the impoverished and disabled in, I believe, Kenya. They quickly found that the western donor units they could easily get were nearly useless, mostly designed for light-duty use indoors and on paved surfaces, and made largely of plastics and aluminum. They broke quickly, and once they did, they were hard to repair(the recipients couldn't exactly go back to the manufacturer for replacement plastics, and aluminum welding requires inert shield gasses and is somewhat touchy). However, the areas they were interested in had a considerable store of general mechanical know-how, and plenty of locally available blacksmithing and iron/steel welding ability. So, they switched to a more bicycle-derived design, with more robust parts made of metals that could easily be worked with local equipment and expertise, and the problem went away.
That isn't a story about stupidity. Per capita, the locals were probably less helpless than the donors; but a story about how aluminum frames are superior when you can order shield gasses at any welding supply place, and how they aren't where you can't.
If you want to be effective on the internet (which, contra a lot of optimistic mid 90's blather about the impossibility of censorship, can actually be censored with some degree of efficacy) you want to put the would-be censor in the position of upsetting as many "good, honest, law-abiding citizens" as possible if he choses to go after you. If they can just quietly squelch you, those people will cheer. If they have to cut off those people's lolcat supply to squelch you, there will be grumbling.
With this in mind, things like Facebook are excellent targets. If you just set up mohammedporcinebestiality.com, or something, you might attract a certain amount of outrage; but you could be blocked with basically zero collateral damage. If, on the other hand, you make heavy use of sites with "legitimate" uses, you can effectively force the fundies into the position of either enduring you or inflicting a DOS attack on themselves.
Your contemporary incubator, as found inhabiting the NICU, is a pricey and sophisticated beast. Now, I'm sure that the "pricey" part could probably be cut substantially if you said "fuck it, 'medical grade' is worthless if you can't afford it. We'll do this one 'commercial grade' and the vast increase in access will more than compensate for a few deaths due to system faults". However, that still leaves you with the "sophisticated" bit. We are talking supplemental oxygen, temp/humidity control, sterile barriers for infection control, a variety of intravenous delivery tubes(nutrition and various medications), sometimes various sorts of respiratory assistance stuff, and vital signs monitoring.
The trouble is, a lot of those functions aren't simply mechanical, or operable without sophisticated maintenance and expert control. Intravenous anything is infection central without serious attention to sterile technique(and, ideally, lots of 1-time-use components). Supplemental oxygen is fine, if your impoverished hellhole happens to have a source of clean, pure, gasses around. Barring the development of extremely sophisticated diagnostics expert systems, the ability to administer drugs(even if you have the drugs) is largely useless without a doctor to tell you which ones to use. Even basic climate control will, in any humid and unpleasantly tropical environment, probably spend its time spewing spores into kiddo's lungs unless somebody who knows their shit maintains it.
I have to wonder if within, say a year or two of deployment, such a system wouldn't be actively worse(as well as more expensive and less available) than having mom, to whose germs kiddo has already been exposed, scoop kiddo up and start walking. Babies are small, an adult should be able to keep their temperature roughly stable through contact, as well as administering oral nutrition and hydration. Pretty much anything that a parent can't do, neither can technology, without a formidable infrastructure behind it.
It is, undeniably, the case that modern medicine can deliver results far superior to its predecessors for a wide variety of conditions. However, it is hard to just slice off a neat little bit of modern medicine and expect it to work in the field without further input from a vast and interlocking set of systems. And, to the degree that you can do that, one of the parts of the system you slice off is usually a doctor(and most people didn't just slog through Med school to man the village clinic of upper nowhereistan). Medicines are complex chemicals. Most of them lose efficacy unpleasantly quickly outside of environmentally controlled conditions(and good luck if any cutting/recompounding/repackaging/adulteration occurs along the way). Pretty much anything that should be sterile won't be if it has ever left its package, unless it has since been subjected to(often nontrivial) disinfection procedures. Even drugs that still have some punch to them can kill you good and hard if administered incorrectly. Filters go from cleaning fluids to harboring fungi and crap fairly quickly.
If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
There are really two sides to this, one somewhat hopeless, one somewhat cynical. The cynical one is that defense procurement is subject to substantial regulatory capture, and is thus driven more than one would like by what defense contractors can produce, rather than what is needed.
The somewhat hopeless one is ultimately more problematic. Because we are a high-tech, highly integrated society, with a fairly high cost-of-living, we have a comparative advantage in high-tech wizbangs, and a comparative disadvantage in, say, nihilistic but plucky 18 year olds with primitive explosives. If we cannot find viable ways to make our high-tech wizbangs into sufficiently potent force multipliers, we will have serious issues. The supply of disaffected third-worlders is basically inexhaustible. If there isn't a high-tech solution to that, we have a problem. Therefor, we operate under the assumption that there must be one.
You might want to verify that you don't have a hardware problem there. Graphical corruption caused by software bugs is certainly far from unknown; but "screen wigs out, system dirt-naps" is classic dying GPU behavior. I saw it all the time when dealing with a batch of laptops with the NVIDIA GPU package fault issue.
From a security perspective, making the user affirm that they are, in fact, super-double sure that they want to save something makes perfect sense.
From a UI/human interaction perspective, it is kind of a walking disaster. Humans are lazy, clueless, and easily distracted(even the smart ones, if you catch them at a bad moment, which everybody has).
Unless you make copiers for Spook HQ(and possibly even then), you'll get far more flack for "the copier lost my document" than you will praise for "the copier protected my document from disclosure". Having something you wanted to access vanish is highly visible, and highly annoying. Having something you wanted to vanish silently lurk in the background is bad; but largely invisible.
Arguably, the real factor in a cyberwar has less to do with exactly how many bots you own, and more to do with how good your "passive defense" is. "Passive defense" being the defensive value of those activities that make up your way of life, the stuff you do by default.
A nation of illiterate mud farmers wouldn't even know that a cyberwar had been declared. A nation that has been chasing automation, efficiency, and optimization for some decades would(barring truly incredible security) be completely fucked.
Just write "Contains neither canned goods nor ammunition" on the door in a variety of common world languages, as well as the pictograms used in McDonald's procedural documentation(mankind's last written language during the apocalypse, dontcha know), and the rabble should ignore it.
Since TFA was a bit light on the details, who wants to do some speculating on how they would preserve digital data for the long term?
With modern CNC/rapid prototyping tech, stone or fired clay tablets could actually be surprisingly painless, if still rather bulky. Printing with good toner on high quality paper(or something paper-esque but more durable, like Tyvek) would last pretty well, and be a lot smaller.
The more important decision would probably be how to express yourself: You'd probably want to use common world languages and math as much as possible. If you have to include binaries, you might even describe your own simple VM. If you needed better storage density, you could plaintext a description of, say, a barcode format, assuming that the future will have optical sensors good enough for the purpose, and then store the rest as barcodes printed/etched onto tablets...
I suspect that the logic(aside from the fact that it simply isn't economic to store everything in blast vaults), is that today's cheap, common, ubiquitous digital formats are widespread enough to more or less protect themselves through sheer numbers(can you imagine how much of the earth's surface you'd have to nuke to get rid of all the XP install CDs?); but that the incentives and technology required for them to be readable and useful in a few decades, or after a modest nuclear exchange or something, are actually quite rare. Thus, you put the work and money into building the reading/decoding tech, and just bury that.
Would it have killed you to include the slightest mention of what "the key to unpick defunct digital formats" is in an article discussing how the Europeans have stashed one away?
I'd be inclined to doubt it, I'm sure the sex of the offender plays an overwhelmingly greater role. It wouldn't at all surprise me if the hot ones get lighter sentences, though.
Well, unless you are one of the (fairly rare) people who have multiple internet-facing IPs in the location that they do their personal surfing from, rather than just a NAT box, your multiple computers won't do all that much. Even if you don't shell out for a static IP, most home broadband IPs are, de facto, stable for a few days at a time, if not rather longer. Multiple distinct signatures aren't a huge mystery if they come from the same IP.
Unless you are quite careful, multiple browsers is trivially defeated by Flash cookies, which are persistent per flash instance, not per browser(maybe Chrome's upcoming integration will change this, I don't know). The other plugin and font fingerprinting stuff should be reasonably robust cross-browser as well.
Then there are the time-of-day based inferences. IP geolocation should, barring specific attempts at obfuscation, or the occasional fuckup, at least get you within the right time zone. You can then start testing inferences based on the fact that, for instance, schoolchildren tend to browse at home earlier than office workers do, night-shift workers have a different schedule altogether, stay-at-home-moms keep roughly the same hours as work-from-home consultant types; but have different browsing habits, and so forth.
I'm not saying that privacy is completely impossible, just that it is harder than it looks.
Umm... Because it suggests that the phones (though not the networks) aren't backdoored?
The fact that the Secret Service, who ought to be a bit sharper than Joe Beat Cop, haven't mastered the art of "turning the phone off before it gets wiped" doesn't strike me as a good thing. However, the fact that "wipe" means "wipe" not "Wipe, unless the state says otherwise" does.
My understanding is that this very feature is either available or available-real-soon-now in certain corporate models with integrated cellular broadband cards(since, effectively, if the PC has a cell card with BIOS integration, doing just about anything a smartphone could do under the circumstances is just a matter of implementation).
Slashdot Mirror
The obvious solution is to stop pretending that the abstract corporate entity "engaged in price fixing" and remember that some number of specific individuals(who happen to have offices within that corporate entity) were the ones who actually decided upon and executed that price fixing.
Fining corporations is a dubiously useful exercise because, if small, the fines are simply a cost of doing business(and, since the rational decision maker will discount the possible fines according to the probability of getting caught, they are an even smaller deterrent than their size would suggest). If ruinous, they are economically disruptive and hit hundreds or thousands of mid and low-level worker drones who had nothing to do with it. Ironically, fines for cartel behavior are probably least effective of all: If X companies are a cartel, and are powerful enough to fix prices, and you fine all of them, they can all pass the fines on in the form of higher prices because(as previously established) those X companies have that level of market power. Since they all have independent reasons to raise prices, it won't even be cartel behavior.
By contrast, if you punish cartel behavior, and other forms of corporate misbehavior, with fines against the personal assets or prison terms/capital punishments against the persons of the specific corporate officers responsible(and, barring the development of strong-AI ERP systems, anything a corporation 'does' was actually decided upon and executed by one or more humans), you should get greater deterrent effect, less impact on innocent bystanders, and less passing-on of costs to customers(there isn't even a way of passing on "our former CEO is doing 20-to-life" to your customers.
This is why I like the strategy, occasionally employed, of, instead of relying on the (usually pitifully weak) employee protection/workplace health and safety laws, using the (typically much stiffer) charges of negligent homicide, reckless negligence, and the like, against the particular people responsible for conditions resulting in worker injuries or deaths. The same strategy could be applied to financial crimes.
No, my argument is that machines can only be operated over time if they exist within range of the supply structure that their technology requires. Poor people are, of necessity, typically quite good generalists. However, they aren't magically good and the downside of poverty and generalism is the unavailability of specialized hardware.
High tech machines generally, and medical apparatus is particularly bad, tend to rely on a huge web of interlocking suppliers, substantial amounts of human and physical capital, and accumulated expertise. If you have those, keeping things running is generally pretty easy(with the exception of specific jobs requiring substantial human capital). If you don't, all the smarts and ingenuity you can muster won't help you very much.
In this case, my argument is that the survival advantages of an incubator over just being held directly against a parent, while nontrivial, rely almost entirely on some quite specialized supplies and spare parts. If you don't have those, you have a problem. If anything, poor people probably have more experience with lousy supply lines and improvising, so they'd probably keep it working longer; but, ultimately, the only way to keep such a device working is to be connected to its supply chain, or to recreate that supply chain from scratch.
There was an analogous case that I'm thinking of, can't find the link offhand. Some charitable NGO was providing wheelchairs to the impoverished and disabled in, I believe, Kenya. They quickly found that the western donor units they could easily get were nearly useless, mostly designed for light-duty use indoors and on paved surfaces, and made largely of plastics and aluminum. They broke quickly, and once they did, they were hard to repair(the recipients couldn't exactly go back to the manufacturer for replacement plastics, and aluminum welding requires inert shield gasses and is somewhat touchy). However, the areas they were interested in had a considerable store of general mechanical know-how, and plenty of locally available blacksmithing and iron/steel welding ability. So, they switched to a more bicycle-derived design, with more robust parts made of metals that could easily be worked with local equipment and expertise, and the problem went away.
That isn't a story about stupidity. Per capita, the locals were probably less helpless than the donors; but a story about how aluminum frames are superior when you can order shield gasses at any welding supply place, and how they aren't where you can't.
If you want to be effective on the internet (which, contra a lot of optimistic mid 90's blather about the impossibility of censorship, can actually be censored with some degree of efficacy) you want to put the would-be censor in the position of upsetting as many "good, honest, law-abiding citizens" as possible if he choses to go after you. If they can just quietly squelch you, those people will cheer. If they have to cut off those people's lolcat supply to squelch you, there will be grumbling.
With this in mind, things like Facebook are excellent targets. If you just set up mohammedporcinebestiality.com, or something, you might attract a certain amount of outrage; but you could be blocked with basically zero collateral damage. If, on the other hand, you make heavy use of sites with "legitimate" uses, you can effectively force the fundies into the position of either enduring you or inflicting a DOS attack on themselves.
Your contemporary incubator, as found inhabiting the NICU, is a pricey and sophisticated beast. Now, I'm sure that the "pricey" part could probably be cut substantially if you said "fuck it, 'medical grade' is worthless if you can't afford it. We'll do this one 'commercial grade' and the vast increase in access will more than compensate for a few deaths due to system faults". However, that still leaves you with the "sophisticated" bit. We are talking supplemental oxygen, temp/humidity control, sterile barriers for infection control, a variety of intravenous delivery tubes(nutrition and various medications), sometimes various sorts of respiratory assistance stuff, and vital signs monitoring.
The trouble is, a lot of those functions aren't simply mechanical, or operable without sophisticated maintenance and expert control. Intravenous anything is infection central without serious attention to sterile technique(and, ideally, lots of 1-time-use components). Supplemental oxygen is fine, if your impoverished hellhole happens to have a source of clean, pure, gasses around. Barring the development of extremely sophisticated diagnostics expert systems, the ability to administer drugs(even if you have the drugs) is largely useless without a doctor to tell you which ones to use. Even basic climate control will, in any humid and unpleasantly tropical environment, probably spend its time spewing spores into kiddo's lungs unless somebody who knows their shit maintains it.
I have to wonder if within, say a year or two of deployment, such a system wouldn't be actively worse(as well as more expensive and less available) than having mom, to whose germs kiddo has already been exposed, scoop kiddo up and start walking. Babies are small, an adult should be able to keep their temperature roughly stable through contact, as well as administering oral nutrition and hydration. Pretty much anything that a parent can't do, neither can technology, without a formidable infrastructure behind it.
It is, undeniably, the case that modern medicine can deliver results far superior to its predecessors for a wide variety of conditions. However, it is hard to just slice off a neat little bit of modern medicine and expect it to work in the field without further input from a vast and interlocking set of systems. And, to the degree that you can do that, one of the parts of the system you slice off is usually a doctor(and most people didn't just slog through Med school to man the village clinic of upper nowhereistan). Medicines are complex chemicals. Most of them lose efficacy unpleasantly quickly outside of environmentally controlled conditions(and good luck if any cutting/recompounding/repackaging/adulteration occurs along the way). Pretty much anything that should be sterile won't be if it has ever left its package, unless it has since been subjected to(often nontrivial) disinfection procedures. Even drugs that still have some punch to them can kill you good and hard if administered incorrectly. Filters go from cleaning fluids to harboring fungi and crap fairly quickly.
Zeus turns both into stone.
I wonder if Adobe's P2P features are going to have a TOS as sinister as the one Octoshape, a prior 3rd party implementation of the same idea, had?
If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
There are really two sides to this, one somewhat hopeless, one somewhat cynical. The cynical one is that defense procurement is subject to substantial regulatory capture, and is thus driven more than one would like by what defense contractors can produce, rather than what is needed.
The somewhat hopeless one is ultimately more problematic. Because we are a high-tech, highly integrated society, with a fairly high cost-of-living, we have a comparative advantage in high-tech wizbangs, and a comparative disadvantage in, say, nihilistic but plucky 18 year olds with primitive explosives. If we cannot find viable ways to make our high-tech wizbangs into sufficiently potent force multipliers, we will have serious issues. The supply of disaffected third-worlders is basically inexhaustible. If there isn't a high-tech solution to that, we have a problem. Therefor, we operate under the assumption that there must be one.
You might want to verify that you don't have a hardware problem there. Graphical corruption caused by software bugs is certainly far from unknown; but "screen wigs out, system dirt-naps" is classic dying GPU behavior. I saw it all the time when dealing with a batch of laptops with the NVIDIA GPU package fault issue.
From a security perspective, making the user affirm that they are, in fact, super-double sure that they want to save something makes perfect sense.
From a UI/human interaction perspective, it is kind of a walking disaster. Humans are lazy, clueless, and easily distracted(even the smart ones, if you catch them at a bad moment, which everybody has).
Unless you make copiers for Spook HQ(and possibly even then), you'll get far more flack for "the copier lost my document" than you will praise for "the copier protected my document from disclosure". Having something you wanted to access vanish is highly visible, and highly annoying. Having something you wanted to vanish silently lurk in the background is bad; but largely invisible.
I'm fairly sure that if a Model M experiences excessive force, it simply breaks the user and continues on its implacable course...
Hence "magic" and "stolen from the Greys". A florid way of saying "not happening".
Arguably, the real factor in a cyberwar has less to do with exactly how many bots you own, and more to do with how good your "passive defense" is. "Passive defense" being the defensive value of those activities that make up your way of life, the stuff you do by default.
A nation of illiterate mud farmers wouldn't even know that a cyberwar had been declared. A nation that has been chasing automation, efficiency, and optimization for some decades would(barring truly incredible security) be completely fucked.
That this is the plot to "Colossus: The Forbin Project"; but with lawyers instead of ICBMs...
Let's just say that you wouldn't want Monsanto's license server to go offline...
Just write "Contains neither canned goods nor ammunition" on the door in a variety of common world languages, as well as the pictograms used in McDonald's procedural documentation(mankind's last written language during the apocalypse, dontcha know), and the rabble should ignore it.
Its the only way to be sure.
Since TFA was a bit light on the details, who wants to do some speculating on how they would preserve digital data for the long term?
With modern CNC/rapid prototyping tech, stone or fired clay tablets could actually be surprisingly painless, if still rather bulky. Printing with good toner on high quality paper(or something paper-esque but more durable, like Tyvek) would last pretty well, and be a lot smaller.
The more important decision would probably be how to express yourself: You'd probably want to use common world languages and math as much as possible. If you have to include binaries, you might even describe your own simple VM. If you needed better storage density, you could plaintext a description of, say, a barcode format, assuming that the future will have optical sensors good enough for the purpose, and then store the rest as barcodes printed/etched onto tablets...
I suspect that the logic(aside from the fact that it simply isn't economic to store everything in blast vaults), is that today's cheap, common, ubiquitous digital formats are widespread enough to more or less protect themselves through sheer numbers(can you imagine how much of the earth's surface you'd have to nuke to get rid of all the XP install CDs?); but that the incentives and technology required for them to be readable and useful in a few decades, or after a modest nuclear exchange or something, are actually quite rare. Thus, you put the work and money into building the reading/decoding tech, and just bury that.
Lots and lots of little boys?
Would it have killed you to include the slightest mention of what "the key to unpick defunct digital formats" is in an article discussing how the Europeans have stashed one away?
I'd be inclined to doubt it, I'm sure the sex of the offender plays an overwhelmingly greater role. It wouldn't at all surprise me if the hot ones get lighter sentences, though.
The statues of justice are always blindfolded, not blind...
On the plus side, we could spend some time discussing phrenological theories of the "physiognomy of the criminal type" which are always amusing.
Well, unless you are one of the (fairly rare) people who have multiple internet-facing IPs in the location that they do their personal surfing from, rather than just a NAT box, your multiple computers won't do all that much. Even if you don't shell out for a static IP, most home broadband IPs are, de facto, stable for a few days at a time, if not rather longer. Multiple distinct signatures aren't a huge mystery if they come from the same IP.
Unless you are quite careful, multiple browsers is trivially defeated by Flash cookies, which are persistent per flash instance, not per browser(maybe Chrome's upcoming integration will change this, I don't know). The other plugin and font fingerprinting stuff should be reasonably robust cross-browser as well.
Then there are the time-of-day based inferences. IP geolocation should, barring specific attempts at obfuscation, or the occasional fuckup, at least get you within the right time zone. You can then start testing inferences based on the fact that, for instance, schoolchildren tend to browse at home earlier than office workers do, night-shift workers have a different schedule altogether, stay-at-home-moms keep roughly the same hours as work-from-home consultant types; but have different browsing habits, and so forth.
I'm not saying that privacy is completely impossible, just that it is harder than it looks.
Umm... Because it suggests that the phones (though not the networks) aren't backdoored?
The fact that the Secret Service, who ought to be a bit sharper than Joe Beat Cop, haven't mastered the art of "turning the phone off before it gets wiped" doesn't strike me as a good thing. However, the fact that "wipe" means "wipe" not "Wipe, unless the state says otherwise" does.
My understanding is that this very feature is either available or available-real-soon-now in certain corporate models with integrated cellular broadband cards(since, effectively, if the PC has a cell card with BIOS integration, doing just about anything a smartphone could do under the circumstances is just a matter of implementation).