Ummmm... hate to bring up Pesky Facts but he was guilty.
What's your point? Has someone claimed that he was not guilty of breaking the law of the time? Of course no one can change the fact that it was back then illegal and Turing was obviously guilty. Pardon does not mean pretending a law wasn't broken; it just means that for whatever reason people of high power have concluded, that the person's conviction should be undone. Yet, lack of conviction is not the same as not being illegal — jaywalking clearly is illegal in most jurisdictions, yet very few people are ever convicted of it. Since no one can change the past, a pardon and an apology are pretty much the best the government can do.
The corruption in India is indeed rampant and throughout. One of the most astonishing forms I have seen are the "living dead", where authorities are bribed to declare you dead, so that someone can meanwhile and unbeknownst to you make a claim to your inheritance. For this particular poor fellow, it took mere 19 years of battling against the authorities until a court finally acknowledged him actually being alive.
Anyone else have trouble accessing the article on Firefox? I get presented a certificate error, but without the button to bypass it, and the HTTP site auto-redirects to the HTTPS site. Looks like the exact same as Bugzilla #799836.
So I am basically locked out from viewing Mozilla's own blog when using their very own browser? I don't have Chrome on this machine. I can't believe I am about to install Chrome just to view Mozilla's own blog!
It's obviously not "legal", as per the Ars article you posted (thanks for the interesting read BTW) these Google Play components are proprietary closed-source apps, that are only available under a license to the Open Handset Alliance members, which Jolla is of course not, since it's manufacturing a non-Google approved version of Android. So while you might be able to install Play on your Jolla, I would think its impossible for Jolla to ship their phone with Google Play pre-installed. Though depending on other restrictions on the phone, it might be possible to make an easily downloadable "pirate" package that will install unlicensed Google Play on the phone, so that non-technical users can benefit from the full Android ecosystem.
What comes to Google "blocking" this hack, I am quite skeptical. If they add some software detection that you are running the Play services on a licensed device, we know from PC world that it will be hacked and people will start distributing "cracked" copies of the APK (Android application package). But AFAIK, Android phones support DRM as well, which can make things little tricker if Google one day really wants to shut off this competition.
He is probably referring to the mass-seizures of domain names wihtout due process, mostly used in intellectual property disputes against foreign entities without any defense against the US government.
While I don't agree that camera surveillance or a ticket booth system on motorways in a solution for all parts of Europe, I think the military and economic applications of EU's own GPS system are probably more important than the surveillance applications. While a direct military confrontation with the USA and EU is exceedingly unlikely now, or at any point in the future (thanks to NATO), there could be future proxy wars where EU and US opinions differ, and where the US might conceivably use jamming of the GPS signals to e.g. to render EU wardrones inoperable. Such situation might arise in the Middle East for example, where Europeans seem more open to the Arab/Palestinian causes than the Americans, who are very staunchly allied with Israel. Or any other military situation involving proxies – bottom line is, it's not a bad idea to develop new military technology that's not dependent on tech by others, especially as wardrones are looking more and more like the future of warfare, and sooner or later EU must start producing its own wardrones.
Further down the road, trade disputes between the US and EU are much more common and likely than any forms of military engagement. Should a trade dispute escalate, it's conceivable though unlikely, that there might develop a situation where the Americans would leverage their control over GPS as a weapon in trade negotiations, especially if the tech under dispute is dependent on positioning tech – like is true for more and more of new high tech. Look at what happened to Samsung in Apple v. Samsung – essentially a modern form of protectionism through a flawed trial by court. Hopefully not a sign of things to come.
For EU, it's not a bad to have its own positioning system just in case for situations like those. While it seems currently very unlikely that the US would abuse its control over GPS in any situation, no one knows what future could hold. As deploying a GPS system is a process that takes years or decades to complete, if a need arises at some point, it's probably too late by then. Especially the wardrone tech seems like something that the EU might want its own GPS system for already now (think exporting this tech to countries not allied with US). And on the good side, I can imagine many worse uses for EU tax dollars than developing space technology!
We're having the same debate here in Finland currently. Sadly, most people seem only concerned with the eternal "tax or no tax" debate, shortsightedly arguing this would hurt their interest group and favor some other group tax-wise. Very few in the public sphere seem concerned that this is at its core about establishing a government surveillance database about the precise location of every registered vehicle in the country, 24/7. Of course, the authorities are having the same mantra as always with more surveillance: it would be only used by the police against "the really bad criminals", the system would be "unbreakable" security-wise, etc. etc.
Elop is a likely candidate for the next CEO at Redmond. When you are thinking about Microsoft and Nokia, you must always think in opposites, like in Lewis Carroll's book Through The Looking Glass, to grasp how these companies' management teams operate. So, as in our mere mortals' terms Elop is a miserable executive, who did almost everything in his power to destroy his company's market position, in Redmond-speak it means he is a great manager. Further in their distorted reality field, he is a great choice for the next CEO, because selecting the worst outcome for Microsoft is the management's objective. So, you just might be right about Elop's next job!
This attitude and aggressiveness can actually kill when it is used to intimidate cyclists using a weapon as deadly as any automatic firearm.
So true.
Experienced motorists in most cities have developed an unnecessarily aggressive way of driving. You maybe win on average a few seconds on every trip you make, but at what cost? You run a slightly higher risk of fender-benders. But for any cyclist, motorcyclist or pedestrian, you become a reckless murderer. Someone not in a car stands no chance against a car: likely outcomes include serious injury and death. And all this only, because few consider that they might ever run into an accident with a non-car, and think it's alright to risk having a few fender-bender for minuscule time savings.
Any motorist, who has problems grasping how irresponsible this is, should ask themselves what would happen to their own road safety, if all the big truck drivers had the same kind of road attitude as themselves. Driving a big truck like "aggressive drivers" drive their cars is obviously very dangerous for all car drivers, because cars in turn stand little chance against heavy traffic in an accident. Now, from the viewpoint of a cyclist or motorcyclist, almost everyone is driving a big-ass truck, and many of them drive with very little regard for road safety.
This is of course a complex question. Sure, cyclist are more prone to accidents and air pollution than those who commute by private car or by public transport. Then again, cycling to work is a "free" daily exercise – a benefit too often overlooked. A Danish study published in 2000 found that in a group of 30,000 randomly selected individuals, those who did not cycle to work experienced a 39% higher mortality rate than those who did – even after adjusting for other risk factors. So considering the overall effect, it seems that cycling is actually safer than not cycling, probably due to its positive effect on your physical fitness.
Anyone can run a Tor node. I would think it's much easier for NSA to operate a gigaton of its own Tor nodes via different cloud providers than try to infiltrate existing nodes. And, anyway the whole idea of Tor is that you never get to read other people's messages unless you are operating an exit node or a hidden service. If you are running a simple router node, all your inputs and outputs are encrypted and not readable by you.
Actually, you mostly die of heroin through accidental or deliberate overdose, or through associated problems like contracting HIV through a dirty IV injection needle, that are not actually related to heroin per se. Because what comes to physiological effects, opioids, such as heroin, are actually less harmful than alcohol or tobacco, even in prolonged use. There is an increased chance of infections due to the suppressing effect opioids have on the body's immune system, but that's about it.
Of course, this if you ignore the horrible consequence of extreme dependence and very difficult withdrawal from heroin (the withdrawal can actually be itself fatal), which means it's very hard to stop taking it once you get hooked on heroin. But you will not die of it, if you keep to your body's tolerance levels. Alcohol dependence could be considered much worse, because daily heavy drinking is so extremely detrimental for your health, and if you are unable to stop drinking, it will inevitably lead to a fatal failure of some vital organ, such as the liver.
Smoking, too, is very bad for your health, and safely injecting high-purity heroin a few times per day is probably less harmful in the long run than smoking a pack of cancer sticks per day. It has to be noted though, that if you decide to become a heroin addict, your life will be absolutely dominated by the graving for this substance, probably for the rest of your life. This can have devastating effects on thing many people find very important in life, such as career and family relations. Smoking addiction, on the other hand, while physically probably more unhealthy, still lets you lead a relatively normal life.
Yes, but this could show up with tools like SSL Observatory, which has recorded millions of certificates from different web sites as seen by hundreds of thousands of Chrome and Firefox users globally. They would risk eventually exposing themselves, and the CAs who signed those bogus certificates for NSA would get nuked from all browsers, which is the absolute worst thing that can happen to a CA. If they use fake certs and MITM, it would have to be very elusive, and carry a calculated risk of exposure.
All articles are missing the crucial details; namely which cryptographic algorithms have been successfully cracked and under which parameters. Guardian writes:
The three organisations removed some specific facts but decided to publish the story because of the value of a public debate about government actions [...].
Yet, the article does claim this:
"Project Bullrun deals with NSA's abilities to defeat the encryption used in specific network communication technologies. Bullrun involves multiple sources, all of which are extremely sensitive." The document reveals that the agency has capabilities against widely used online protocols, such as HTTPS, voice-over-IP and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), used to protect online shopping and banking.
But they also quote Snowden that:
"Encryption works. Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on," he said before warning that NSA can frequently find ways around it as a result of weak security on the computers at either end of the communication.
During the last ice age up to only 15,000 years ago, the whole of Scandinavia was covered under a very heavy glacial mass, causing the earth's crust to deform. In these areas, the earth is currently raising or rebounding at a rate of about 3-5 millimeters per year, or up to 10 inch (25 cm) in half a century (50 years). Such changes are indeed quite visible during a human life. An elderly person might recognize that a shore where he or she used to spend time as a child has visibly changed as if by a permanent low tide during their lifetime.
German companies now rate U.S. as the second worst risk to industrial espionage, only second to China. Even Russia is considered a more trustworthy IT partner than the Americans. It's not only the private citizens who care for some privacy.
I was also baffled by the headline. Though speaking as a non-American, I have still never seen "WA Post" being used for "Washington Post", and deciphering the meaning took a while. This usage seems very original, and is probably erroneous, as "Washington" in "Washington Post" does not refer to Washington state.
FLAC is not a lossy audio compression tool. It maintains its input bitstream 1:1 like GZip or BZip2; it's algorithm just happens to be especially efficient on PCM audio bitstreams. It is pretty trivial to test that such algorithm is behaving correctly: feed it random bits and check that input and de-coded output match.
Slashdot Mirror
Ummmm ... hate to bring up Pesky Facts but he was guilty.
What's your point? Has someone claimed that he was not guilty of breaking the law of the time? Of course no one can change the fact that it was back then illegal and Turing was obviously guilty. Pardon does not mean pretending a law wasn't broken; it just means that for whatever reason people of high power have concluded, that the person's conviction should be undone. Yet, lack of conviction is not the same as not being illegal — jaywalking clearly is illegal in most jurisdictions, yet very few people are ever convicted of it. Since no one can change the past, a pardon and an apology are pretty much the best the government can do.
In 2009, Prime Minister Gordon Brown already apologised for the "inhumane" treatment of Alan Turing on the behalf of his government.
The corruption in India is indeed rampant and throughout. One of the most astonishing forms I have seen are the "living dead", where authorities are bribed to declare you dead, so that someone can meanwhile and unbeknownst to you make a claim to your inheritance. For this particular poor fellow, it took mere 19 years of battling against the authorities until a court finally acknowledged him actually being alive.
Indeed. Even Google, Apple and Amazon full-heartedly agree that paying taxes is not a duty of the tech companies.
Anyone else have trouble accessing the article on Firefox? I get presented a certificate error, but without the button to bypass it, and the HTTP site auto-redirects to the HTTPS site. Looks like the exact same as Bugzilla #799836.
So I am basically locked out from viewing Mozilla's own blog when using their very own browser? I don't have Chrome on this machine. I can't believe I am about to install Chrome just to view Mozilla's own blog!
It's obviously not "legal", as per the Ars article you posted (thanks for the interesting read BTW) these Google Play components are proprietary closed-source apps, that are only available under a license to the Open Handset Alliance members, which Jolla is of course not, since it's manufacturing a non-Google approved version of Android. So while you might be able to install Play on your Jolla, I would think its impossible for Jolla to ship their phone with Google Play pre-installed. Though depending on other restrictions on the phone, it might be possible to make an easily downloadable "pirate" package that will install unlicensed Google Play on the phone, so that non-technical users can benefit from the full Android ecosystem.
What comes to Google "blocking" this hack, I am quite skeptical. If they add some software detection that you are running the Play services on a licensed device, we know from PC world that it will be hacked and people will start distributing "cracked" copies of the APK (Android application package). But AFAIK, Android phones support DRM as well, which can make things little tricker if Google one day really wants to shut off this competition.
Interesting. It's slightly better hardware than Jolla for €100 less. But at least for now without Sailfish OS, of course.
So the next logical step is that someone starts selling Android hardware where you can replace the OS component without voiding the warranty.
He is probably referring to the mass-seizures of domain names wihtout due process, mostly used in intellectual property disputes against foreign entities without any defense against the US government.
While I don't agree that camera surveillance or a ticket booth system on motorways in a solution for all parts of Europe, I think the military and economic applications of EU's own GPS system are probably more important than the surveillance applications. While a direct military confrontation with the USA and EU is exceedingly unlikely now, or at any point in the future (thanks to NATO), there could be future proxy wars where EU and US opinions differ, and where the US might conceivably use jamming of the GPS signals to e.g. to render EU wardrones inoperable. Such situation might arise in the Middle East for example, where Europeans seem more open to the Arab/Palestinian causes than the Americans, who are very staunchly allied with Israel. Or any other military situation involving proxies – bottom line is, it's not a bad idea to develop new military technology that's not dependent on tech by others, especially as wardrones are looking more and more like the future of warfare, and sooner or later EU must start producing its own wardrones.
Further down the road, trade disputes between the US and EU are much more common and likely than any forms of military engagement. Should a trade dispute escalate, it's conceivable though unlikely, that there might develop a situation where the Americans would leverage their control over GPS as a weapon in trade negotiations, especially if the tech under dispute is dependent on positioning tech – like is true for more and more of new high tech. Look at what happened to Samsung in Apple v. Samsung – essentially a modern form of protectionism through a flawed trial by court. Hopefully not a sign of things to come.
For EU, it's not a bad to have its own positioning system just in case for situations like those. While it seems currently very unlikely that the US would abuse its control over GPS in any situation, no one knows what future could hold. As deploying a GPS system is a process that takes years or decades to complete, if a need arises at some point, it's probably too late by then. Especially the wardrone tech seems like something that the EU might want its own GPS system for already now (think exporting this tech to countries not allied with US). And on the good side, I can imagine many worse uses for EU tax dollars than developing space technology!
We're having the same debate here in Finland currently. Sadly, most people seem only concerned with the eternal "tax or no tax" debate, shortsightedly arguing this would hurt their interest group and favor some other group tax-wise. Very few in the public sphere seem concerned that this is at its core about establishing a government surveillance database about the precise location of every registered vehicle in the country, 24/7. Of course, the authorities are having the same mantra as always with more surveillance: it would be only used by the police against "the really bad criminals", the system would be "unbreakable" security-wise, etc. etc.
Elop is a likely candidate for the next CEO at Redmond. When you are thinking about Microsoft and Nokia, you must always think in opposites, like in Lewis Carroll's book Through The Looking Glass, to grasp how these companies' management teams operate. So, as in our mere mortals' terms Elop is a miserable executive, who did almost everything in his power to destroy his company's market position, in Redmond-speak it means he is a great manager. Further in their distorted reality field, he is a great choice for the next CEO, because selecting the worst outcome for Microsoft is the management's objective. So, you just might be right about Elop's next job!
You do understand that the design is based on the original N900 design?
This attitude and aggressiveness can actually kill when it is used to intimidate cyclists using a weapon as deadly as any automatic firearm.
So true.
Experienced motorists in most cities have developed an unnecessarily aggressive way of driving. You maybe win on average a few seconds on every trip you make, but at what cost? You run a slightly higher risk of fender-benders. But for any cyclist, motorcyclist or pedestrian, you become a reckless murderer. Someone not in a car stands no chance against a car: likely outcomes include serious injury and death. And all this only, because few consider that they might ever run into an accident with a non-car, and think it's alright to risk having a few fender-bender for minuscule time savings.
Any motorist, who has problems grasping how irresponsible this is, should ask themselves what would happen to their own road safety, if all the big truck drivers had the same kind of road attitude as themselves. Driving a big truck like "aggressive drivers" drive their cars is obviously very dangerous for all car drivers, because cars in turn stand little chance against heavy traffic in an accident. Now, from the viewpoint of a cyclist or motorcyclist, almost everyone is driving a big-ass truck, and many of them drive with very little regard for road safety.
This is of course a complex question. Sure, cyclist are more prone to accidents and air pollution than those who commute by private car or by public transport. Then again, cycling to work is a "free" daily exercise – a benefit too often overlooked. A Danish study published in 2000 found that in a group of 30,000 randomly selected individuals, those who did not cycle to work experienced a 39% higher mortality rate than those who did – even after adjusting for other risk factors. So considering the overall effect, it seems that cycling is actually safer than not cycling, probably due to its positive effect on your physical fitness.
My page on Fully Countering Trusting Trust through Diverse Double-Compiling (DDC) has more details, including detailed material so you can duplicate the experiments and re-verify the proofs. Note that you do not have to take my word for it.
Sounds very interesting. And I am apparently not even the only one to think so, since you seem to have been Slashdotted. :)
Anyone can run a Tor node. I would think it's much easier for NSA to operate a gigaton of its own Tor nodes via different cloud providers than try to infiltrate existing nodes. And, anyway the whole idea of Tor is that you never get to read other people's messages unless you are operating an exit node or a hidden service. If you are running a simple router node, all your inputs and outputs are encrypted and not readable by you.
Like nobody dies from alchohol abuse?
Actually, you mostly die of heroin through accidental or deliberate overdose, or through associated problems like contracting HIV through a dirty IV injection needle, that are not actually related to heroin per se. Because what comes to physiological effects, opioids, such as heroin, are actually less harmful than alcohol or tobacco, even in prolonged use. There is an increased chance of infections due to the suppressing effect opioids have on the body's immune system, but that's about it.
Of course, this if you ignore the horrible consequence of extreme dependence and very difficult withdrawal from heroin (the withdrawal can actually be itself fatal), which means it's very hard to stop taking it once you get hooked on heroin. But you will not die of it, if you keep to your body's tolerance levels. Alcohol dependence could be considered much worse, because daily heavy drinking is so extremely detrimental for your health, and if you are unable to stop drinking, it will inevitably lead to a fatal failure of some vital organ, such as the liver.
Smoking, too, is very bad for your health, and safely injecting high-purity heroin a few times per day is probably less harmful in the long run than smoking a pack of cancer sticks per day. It has to be noted though, that if you decide to become a heroin addict, your life will be absolutely dominated by the graving for this substance, probably for the rest of your life. This can have devastating effects on thing many people find very important in life, such as career and family relations. Smoking addiction, on the other hand, while physically probably more unhealthy, still lets you lead a relatively normal life.
Yes, but this could show up with tools like SSL Observatory, which has recorded millions of certificates from different web sites as seen by hundreds of thousands of Chrome and Firefox users globally. They would risk eventually exposing themselves, and the CAs who signed those bogus certificates for NSA would get nuked from all browsers, which is the absolute worst thing that can happen to a CA. If they use fake certs and MITM, it would have to be very elusive, and carry a calculated risk of exposure.
The three organisations removed some specific facts but decided to publish the story because of the value of a public debate about government actions [...] .
Yet, the article does claim this:
"Project Bullrun deals with NSA's abilities to defeat the encryption used in specific network communication technologies. Bullrun involves multiple sources, all of which are extremely sensitive." The document reveals that the agency has capabilities against widely used online protocols, such as HTTPS, voice-over-IP and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), used to protect online shopping and banking.
But they also quote Snowden that:
"Encryption works. Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on," he said before warning that NSA can frequently find ways around it as a result of weak security on the computers at either end of the communication.
Maybe we still have some hope?
During the last ice age up to only 15,000 years ago, the whole of Scandinavia was covered under a very heavy glacial mass, causing the earth's crust to deform. In these areas, the earth is currently raising or rebounding at a rate of about 3-5 millimeters per year, or up to 10 inch (25 cm) in half a century (50 years). Such changes are indeed quite visible during a human life. An elderly person might recognize that a shore where he or she used to spend time as a child has visibly changed as if by a permanent low tide during their lifetime.
German companies now rate U.S. as the second worst risk to industrial espionage, only second to China. Even Russia is considered a more trustworthy IT partner than the Americans. It's not only the private citizens who care for some privacy.
ActiveX was actually smart in the way that it executed fast native code instead of slow interpreted Javascript.
And just for the record, nowadays all browsers compile (JIT) rather than interpret JavaScript, making it much, much faster than it used to be.
I was also baffled by the headline. Though speaking as a non-American, I have still never seen "WA Post" being used for "Washington Post", and deciphering the meaning took a while. This usage seems very original, and is probably erroneous, as "Washington" in "Washington Post" does not refer to Washington state.
FLAC is not a lossy audio compression tool. It maintains its input bitstream 1:1 like GZip or BZip2; it's algorithm just happens to be especially efficient on PCM audio bitstreams. It is pretty trivial to test that such algorithm is behaving correctly: feed it random bits and check that input and de-coded output match.