For a long time in my mind there's been no doubt that Tor is broken, at least with respect to the powers available to the United States and its allies. Think about it. There are no where near a million Tor nodes and even fewer exit nodes, and a million servers is a rounding error in the DoD black budget for a year.
Sure, non DoD Tor nodes exist, but what % of them are p0wned? I'll hazard a guess; just that % required to make it statistically implausible that, combined with traffic analysis, context gleaned from exit nodes a handful of zero-days etc. etc. no one can use Tor and expect sustained anonymity from the government.
I actually think that's a good thing. Hear me out. For the general Tor user who just wants their ISP , nosy Shark Wire aware neighbor, political opponents, large corporations, website owners land various databrokers to fuck off, they have what they want For dissidents in oppressive nations, those nations probably can't muster the resources to de-anonymize Tor users. For very bad people who want to do very bad things, we can get them, with some effort.
I know this is a minority opinion, but I think that the opposing opinion is regressive. Once, it wasn't possible for a small group of non-nation-state individuals to wreak mayhem on millions of people at once.
Once, the amount badness that could be achieved by Bad Guys was a trade-off between the number of people the Bad Guys wanted to effect, the number of people the Bad Guys could enlist to help them and the degree of severity of the Badness itself. Not any more. This changes everything.
We are living more and more in a world in which a few or even one really fucked up person can reach out and kill. This is nothing but the advancement of technology, and it's not going to stop. That means the power of small groups gets larger and broader even as the size of that group spiral down to one.
How are we going to counter this general phenomena? I agree, that giving any government unchecked, unobservable, unlimited powers is always a bad idea. (Ironcially, I believe this because of the actions members of administrations who profess to want to "get government off our backs" and told us "government isn't the solution, it's the problem"- Oliver North, James Secord, Dick Cheney, Alberto Gonzales etc etc. )
But in the face of this hypothetical and not-always hypothetical threat we still have the facts on the ground with respect to advancing technologies and the leverage it gives just anyone.
I don't think the answer is to limit the power of government. We need that power to exist. I think the answer lies in the people being able to hold the government accountable and their actions rendered transparent to a degree that would shock most people today, both in and out of government. We need to radically re-think the national security 3rd-rail issues like national security classifications, clearances, Presidential directives, etc. etc.
It will tear this country apart if the government continues to do what it knows it needs to do in order to avert terrorism and societal chaos and the people continue to feel like they have no faith in the integrity of the processes and powers of the government- that it could at any moment turn the death ray on them, and probably will. That whole dynamic, the whole world view needs to be addressed and not just addressed but actually resolved by some radical out of the box thinking no one had done yet.
We can have both security and freedom, but it's not going to just arise naturally by continuing on with the status quo conceptual categories we are using now.
We need a better way to detect lying if polygraphs can be beaten.
Actually, on a personal note, I had an interest in this at school; it was one of the things I was zeroing in on as a career path. Unfortunately, universities being the places they are now, a liar made it difficult for me to pursue this research interest. It's not as ironic as it seems, since people who are willing to lie about another person's actions and easy to come by. Our university was rife with people undermining each other through whatever means they could think of. Lying was the least of it. But that's another story, and besides, you probably have your own.
The reason I had that interest at all was because my life has been strongly effected again and again by people who think it's OK to just fabricate things to hurt people they don't like for one reason or another. It's basically a pandemic attitude, at least here in the states. I think I missed out on the part of growing up that said absolutely anything goes if you don't like person X. Certainly everyone around me got that message. I mean, WTF?
People in positions of security who try to beat lie detectors are Bad People. The ability to detect when someone is lying is essential to stopping Very Bad People from doing Very Bad Things to us.
I still think there's got to be a way to detect lying using information coming from the brain. A lie is volitional by definition; that's gotta lead to something usable in this context. Perhaps with DIY EEGs and such like coming onto the marketplace, amateurs tinkerers will make a breakthrough. I would love to have the time to pursue this myself.
Dead wrong. Prosecuting deniers will proceed under the same legal theory that makes shouting "FIRE!" in a crowded theater illegal. You can't shout "FIRE" in a theater and you can't shout "NO FIRE" in a burning theater. Both are speech acts which cost people their lives
Deniers are shouting "NO FIRE" when they :
1) know it's a lie or could reasonably be expected to know it was a lie 2) are shown to be unable to defend their junk science theories to duly qualified scientists, either through sheer incompetence (they are not duly qualified in any meaningful sense) or their theories are shown to be made-to-order junk science as determined by a combination of facts on the ground and the larger judgement of actually duly qualified scientists.
And yes, I am saying we're going to put junk science of trial. As we should have done for tobacco and the tobacco executives and scientists and PR firms that advised them.
And yes, I am saying that every citizen does bear and has always borne an inalienable and unshirkable duty to use rational good judgement in matters where human life is at stake.
And yes I am saying that that is at the foundation of civilization, the foundation of the Enlightenment specifically and the foundation of Constitution implicitly and shirking that duty negates all defenses including the ones based on enumerated Rights found in the Constitution.
We don't need to spell out that your rights are voided if you behave in such a depraved way that you put the continuation of human civilization at risk through your actions. No one needs to express that idea explicitly to anyone, and anyways there never was a reason to since it wasn't formerly possible for humans to realize such depravity It's is now and always have been "self evident", as the Founding Fathers were fond of saying.
It's amazing to me how people so preoccupied with 1st. Amendment rights are unable to parse even the most basic application of same to the real world.
Some of us have been calling for the RICO prosecution of deniers for over a decade now.
People who like to pretend that they're arm chair theories about how climate works are somehow a match for the decades of research by scientists may be shocked at this notion, but RICO is the appropriate law to bring to bear.
The deliberate, bad faith denial of human caused climate change will be the worst crime in terms of numbers of deaths, political upheaval, cost and irreversibility of damages ever perpetrated by any group of criminals ever, including the internet's own favorite, The Third Reich.
Denier are terrorists. In the case of the Koch brothers, I believe they are systematically promoting and funding denialism as a way of creating a disaster so large, centralized governments won't be able to deal with it and will therefore collapse.
They KNOW it's true, their own studies which they commissioned to investigate human caused climate change TOLD them it was true. But these are people who tried in the 80s to run for President on a platform of abolishing the FBI, the CIA and all the rest of government. They are sworn enemies of the United States government, our government, my government, and they seek to destroy it *through any means necessary, including genocide via climate change*.
That's terrorism and they're terrorists as are the rest of the denial machinery.
What they think is we're going to stand around with our collective dick in our hands while they inch us closer to a disaster so big, it destroys the United States. What the reality is is the government has a duty to protect its citizens against all enemies foreign AND domestic and that's all the "go" justification they need. We don't need to vote on whether they're terrorists, we need to decide that they are and act. That's how this works.
The architects of climate denial need to be dealt with by any means necessary to stop them, no matter what. The question is not IF it should be done, the question is how can it best be done with the least disruption to the fabric of civil society.
Towards that goal absolutely everything is on the table without exception; techniques and exploits usually reserved for foreign nationals are completely within bounds given the nature of the threat and the proven intractibility of the enemy terrorists, who reside within this country and worse, are citizens and worse are well known, well funded, well organized and worse have assumed the camoflage of civil liberties organizations.
Get this, deniers. The United States government is not going to sit idly by while you destroy human civilization as we know it because you think you've found some Constitutional loophole - "you're citizens and you have the right to your free speech rights!" - big enough to drive the explosive laden truck called "climate change" through.
No, they're going to treat you like they treat all terrorists who seek to destroy our way of life. In this case it may mean "no fingerprints" but that's a purely technical matter.
Not only do RICO laws apply, but they extend to all the "civic organizations" and individuals without exception. The government has a right and a duty to neutralize and defund all terrorists. In this case I propose in addition to RICO "financial decimation" whereby all assets owned by these terrorists including those transferred at any point in time, past, present or future to any co-conspirator, associate, cohort, group, organization, family member or individual be confiscated along with those normally accessible by RICO. Seizing funds and assets this broadly them sends a clear signal: there is no way to benefit from attacking the United States and by doing so, everything you've ever done is voided without exception. That's the signal we need to send. Your business associates, your buddies, your familiy- none of them can safely accept your money. Terrorist money is not fungible- it is forever tainted. The cost to offset climate change is astronomical and the individuals, organizations
You don't know what really happened because you weren't privy to whatever negotiations went on behind closed doors. Maybe story we are reading this is what happened. And it may not be. Maybe the feds swung a deal with the Dr. and he is going to or did do something for them and this is a cover story. "gosh we didn't even test the white powder to see if it was drugs your Honor". a form of that is what is being claimed. Sure the run of the mill citizen , fed or otherwise employed, can't sort the technicalities out but I am pretty sure the feds have specialists who can. Were they really not engaged in this take down?
It may all be as reported. All I am suggesting is you have to keep in the back of your mind that the real story may not be what the headlines are telling you.
Look, copyright means nothing unless it means that authors or copyright holders generally get to control what happens with their work product. Most of them want to get paid, just like you.
Sure patents in software are a national shrine to special interest, deep pockets lobbying against the public good. But copyright? Really? Libraries are the way we've worked this very issue out. Libraries work. Get a card.
Google thought it could just strong arm aside all those vibrant, diverse geniuses who wrote all those interesting books because why, they're Google? They're bigger, hipper and more important that the little people whose ideas and writing this project would be nothing without?
But then we're talking about a company that has nothing but contempt, finally, for workers which is why they and their CEO Eric Schmidt knowingly and deliberately engaged in an illegal conspiracy with Apple and Adobe and oh a few hundred other companies to create a do-not-hire blacklist and limit people's wages, costing those people hundreds of millions of dollars . Where i come from that's called stealing but since no one is going to go to jail for stealing a few hundred million, I guess it's not stealing after all because if it were stealing, people would be going to jail instead of being appointed ambassador by Obama.
Anyway, that's what Google thinks of people who work for a living, and that contempt extends from Nobel prize winning authors to cookbook authors and everyone in between and is, in fact, is so vast it essentially expands to fill all space in the known universe.
Very poor people bootlegging copies of copyrighted works is a look the other way affair for society. It's just better than the alternative which is poor people don't even get access to the significant parts of the larger cultural context they're embedded in. But making a defacto copy machine then turning that loose on absolutely everyone's work ? What were they thinking?
Jobs was a dirt bag backstabbing sociopathic manipulator and if you think that sounds extreme then read the recent biographies of him. Same thing with guys like Eric Schmidt; relative to their companies and products, they're non-technical power seekers who are, uh, unburdened by the chains of conventional morality.
Ditto Larry Ellison. In the beginning Ellison himself characterized Oracle database as the cockroach motel of databases because "data goes in, but doesn't come out". Other people fixed it.
Jobs used to repeat other's people's ideas which were presented to him in meetings 10 minutes after they were presented to him at that meeting as if they were novel ideas he was just having in real time in front of the incredulous meeting atendees. They had a name for this- it was called the "Steve Jobs Warp Field".
In a startup convention a few years ago, the attendees were urged by the presenters to "don't waste your time learning about business". Who does that advice benefit? Not the attendees. All startup paticipants should learn about business and share what they learn most boradly.
The fact is, the world would be a very different place if normal people would take it upon themselves to undermine the careers of obvious sociopaths instead of letting them "lead".
They'll make it up on the back end by recording every micro-interaction you have on every site and document you browse, compiling them and developing a probably mostly derogatory profile of you then selling that profile to your potential employers, insurance providers, political enemies, buisness competitors... you know anyone with a wallet . In the TOS you signed, these entities are referred to as "partners".
Either you're a liar, a paid liar, a sociopathic predator who identifies with the sociopathci predators who have systematcially lied about global warmming or you're an idiot.
From Wikipedia:
Germany's renewable energy sector is among the most innovative and successful worldwide. Net-generation from renewable energy sources in the German electricity sector has increased from 6.3% in 2000 to about 30% in 2014.[1][2] For the first time ever, wind, biogas, and solar combined accounted for a larger portion of net electricity production than brown coal.[3] While peak-generation from combined wind and solar reached a new all-time high of 74% in April 2014,[4] wind power saw its best day ever on December 12, 2014, generating 562 GWh.[5] Germany has been called "the world's first major renewable energy economy".[6][7]E
Don't look to Tesla to change the OTA acccess their building into their cars any time soon. I'll tell you why.
There's a frightening amount of electricity generated by their cars and mechanics who don't know what they're doing are quite likely to eletrocute themselves.
Then the headline will be:
Another Mechanic Killed By Tesla Car.
To prevent that headline from ever materializing and destroying their market share, they reserve the right and aiblity to remotely brick the car.
If the car is in an accident, it gets bricked and the only result of trying to start the car is a message on the instrument panel which reads (approx) : "Take car to Tesla service station for service".
Mechanics CAN'T work on Tesla cars.
Unfortunately, when you connect a car to the internet or otherwise make it accessible OTA you dramatically increase the attack surface area.
Here's a few characterisitics of the new attack vectors:
*A criminal can effect many cars at once. Previously, a 1:1:1 ratio existed between criminals, cars and some discrete unit of time.
*A criminal can make a criminal event imitate an accident. Previously, if the car blew up Mafiosa-style or was stolen, the criminal event was clearly recognizable as a criminal event. Even cutting the brake lines left tell-tale signs. Obviously, a surreptitious way to access the car's electronics is, well, surreptitious .
*The attack vectors have mutiplied to as many zero-day exploits in as many electronic parts as could be effected by zero day exploits. Previously, even if there was a theoretical way to access the computer that controlled critical systems, it was still a head-under-hood affair involving that system.
*Zero day exploits aren't going away. There is no "recall" that is going to "fix" the problem because the problem is now a changing target. Previously, just as criminals and car thefts (or other crime) were 1:1, so also were defects and defective components. Recalls could fix the componnt and return the car to service. Now the subsystem is known to be fundamentally unfixable.
If we could stop people from exploiting critical computer systems, we would have done it. A car is not going to be special in this regard.
Media which makes its living by communicting to masses of people using short time, low attention narratives has to hook into themes it knows all viewers already understand and respond to. These are themes everyone is just genetically pre-wired to understand.
Young, high status male searches for and mates with most beautiful woman.
Evil tribe attempts to destroy us but instead is itself destroyed, thanks to acts of courage and selflessness.
Singularly great man brings knowledge, light and power to the masses.
I cna't remember the article which sort of spoils this post but there's a technical fix for DDoS which ISPs are simply and webiste owners are simply not implementing. Maybe someone knows the article or set of facts I am forgetting and enlighten the rest of us.
I quote from the above post. I am sure (that is, I know for a fact) that this is staple fare amongst a *certain kind* or radically politically correct, social constructivist, radical feminist which I mean to distinguish from feminists generally, a group I and others include myself in.
BEGIN QUOTE: Mr. Sexually Inadequate wonders why the women he encounters don't react like those he sees on porn sites panting and groaning in response to the guy's every demand and whim. He concludes, not entirely surprisingly, that women are untrustworthy, phoney bitch whores who deliberately tease guys like him then withhold what they've given to every other guy and so need to be taught a lesson. END QUOTE
This is an approach to social theorizing and sadly, and ultimately lawmaking, which is based on *nothing more than a narrative which sounds plausible to the narrative's creator.*
That's it. That's the sum total of the evidence used to support that narrative. Remember, this narrative is not just any tale, it's meant to be taken seriously as an accurate description of the casual relationship between two things- porn and rape.
There are no epidemiological studies or population based studies which show, for instance, that porn viewers:
"wonder(s) why the women he encounters don't react like those he sees on porn sites panting and groaning in response to the guy's every demand and whim."
Nor is there any evidence that, for a given porn viewer, he reasons as presented:
" He concludes, not entirely surprisingly, that women are untrustworthy, phoney bitch whores who deliberately tease guys like him then withhold what they've given to every other guy "
Nor any is this a product of evidentiary based reasoning :
"and so (women) need to be taught a lesson."
It's amazing AMAZING to me that entire legislatures can be pressured into action and effectively captured by this level of "evidence" and pass laws and allocate funds and based on a mere narrative.
Rape is not ONLY about sex it's about the fact that the rapist is a criminal, that is, is criminally inclined.
Historical Fact: people of both genders have always and will always engage in sex play which resembles, on the face of it, the worst kind of rape. Thus the books 50 Shades of Gray, The Story of O and Justine to name but the most well known. But these people who view this pornography- and these books ARE pornography, are not rapists and are not potential rapists. The reason is, they are not criminally inclined.
Think of what it means to be a criminal. You are anti-social, at least. You simply do not care about what happens to other people. Their feelings mean basically nothing to you and their suffering is a matter of indifference to you. When they genuinely scream and cry in pain, you're unmoved. You have no empathy.
This pretty much describes a lot of people in society who do a lot of other things than rape, although they may do that too if they get the chance.
As I see it, we have a criminal problem. In the executive suites, in the state legislatures, in Washington, in industry, everywhere we have a disturbingly largish segment of the population which starts off, say, beating up their fellow playmates or learning to be manipulative, and then progresses on to more and perhaps more subtle orviolent crimes depending on the circumstances.
Go after the people who express anti-social behavior patterns early, because they're nt just raping, they're assualting other men, they're ripping people off, they're writing bills for Congress which destroy the earth so they can profit, they're hiding how dangerous the products and drugs theor corporations create are. They're lawyers and think tank employees and broadcasters and CEOs.
Violence against a target is violence against a target. Sure, some fo them rape. But it's not because of pornpornporn. It's because up until they rape, everyone, including feminists looked the other way at their anti-social behavior, some even admired their aggression, some even preferred it and found it exciting.
BTW Hudson Institute - right wing reactionary extemism in think-tank form brought to you by Olin, Koch, Scaife, Walton (Walmart) and featuring on its board Scooter (Plamegate) Libby, Dick Cheney and Richard Pearle.
Uh Germany is run by solar and has the same cloud coverage as the US. What's more the consquences of continuing to use coal and oil is the extinction of the human race. I think perhaps you didn't build that last "cost" into your equation.
You can do it now, or we can do it later, at the point of gun, but either way, Americans and indeed the people's of the world are not going to let a few oil and coal magnates destroy humankind's future in front of their eyes.
Denying the absolute necssity of deploying renewable NOW regardless of the faux cost calculations which ignore the cost of climate change - including societal upheaval and military conflicts which the Pentagon itself have said are not just a threat to the US but are happening NOW and costing us real money- denying reality is a dead end. You know you lost the war when the US Army and the CIA are weighing in against you in the opposite corner.
It's all over but the shouting pal. That's one thing about reality- it doesn't go away and you can only spin it for so long.
Your points are orthogonal to each other. The exposure of hypertext links has nothing to do with curation or no-curation. The rise of web pages as apps and opaque services which present ephemral content instead of durable content has nothing to do HTML and links to durable URLs.
What we want is durable findable content . Google actually did a good job at rating that content for the average surfer. Pages linking to pages takes care of the case where specialized cmmunities judgement is superior to Google's.
What does this have to do with Twitter and Facebook type apporaches? Nothing. The analogy of web 1.0 to the craftsman movement is interesting but ultimately non-informative. It's just an analogy and the consequences of their respective specific internal details for the two subject areas do not somehow parallel each other.
This is really a discussion about the difference between
Wow we're the two guys in the world who feel this way,. I knew there was someone else out there somewhere.
Most of javascript and the massive javascript libraries out there are trash which have the net effect of\ making the ability to write and maintain web pages less democratic. The whole idea that the web has to be some form of advanced TV, with infotainment graphics and video in little squares all over your page is completley mistaken.
You acquire knowledge through reading; through either written words or equations on the page. Knowledge acquistion for humans is inherently and forever a process of abstract symbol processing- we process speech and scratches on a page and transform it into understanding. That's as natural as breathing. Plain text is the once and a future king of the internet.
Sure, interactive infographics is a real step forward in faciliating the comprehension of complex data sets and interrelationships but those are few and far inbetween and most of the web is a designed for something else.
Suer somethings are better demonstrated than explained verbally. No one is arguing with that.
But the vision of the web as a general purpose computing platform hosted in the cloud which distributes it's "resuts" to limited capacity machines (that would be yours) which more or less passively consume the output is the TVization of the web.
It's what the media companies crave because it puts them back into the seat of power they've always held- power to decide what you see, what you're told, what you know; the power to turn you on and and turn you off using draconic and insane theories of "intellectual property" like software patents and copyright-forever and take-down notices - the whole SOPA and PIPA machinery of innovation control and democracy annihilation which is being about to be passed into law through the TPP passage.
Pages like Huffpo and Facebook it's ilk are unendurable, with video splattered everywhere, their incessant loading , reloading, sputtering and changing. But worse, on a deeper level, they're deliberately designed not to inform readers but to *develop detailed profiles of reader's specific interests which are then sold to marketers and employers*.
They do this by making the headline, the actual content and the link-paths to their stories micro-interest sieves. With each follow-me link, with each carefully worded headline, every news story is broken out along predefined personality/interest micro topics. By the time you've clicked down to the actual story you wanted to read, you've told huffpo and their "partners" an enormous amount yourself personally, your personal circumstances, your private interests, private concerns and life circumstances.
When read Huffpo you repeatedly engage in the above cycle and they in turn tweak and retweak their sieves to be finer and finer over time - this is an iterative game for them- so it reads you back, like a book.
It knows you're a 23 y/o white woman living in THAT house with 3 roomates who's had an abortion, makes 23k a year working as a temp and is currently looking for a partner with which she can surprise one day by intimating she's willing to explore 50 Shades of Gray type S&M and that you have 34k in student loan debt you worry a lot about.
It knows that and it shares that information to "its partners" which is to say anyone with enough money who wants it, who in turn sell that to your potential employers, that grant issuing institution you applied to, that political organization you're thining about joining, perhaps to see how far you can go.
It sells it to the gatekeepers of your life so that when you show up in your new business causual outift to interview, you might as well be butt fucking naked with what you thought was your most private and personal information neatly typed out in Courier 12 on bond paper instead of you education and qualifications.
And that's if your just Joesephine Average. If you're Josephine Someone, then you've effectively given your
Ex-machina (so so movie) and all that are not what we have to worry about. Neither is the Terminator. What we have to worry about is crap like tiny drones made of synthetic biological parts which have been programmed to autonomously seek and destroy things based on their target's DNA.
Sure, its a robot but that's not a very rich description of the problem, is it? The level of AI portrayed in movies is a still a hundred years away or more. Long before we have Terminator or Matrix or ex-Machina type AI, we will have something like what I described.
The fact is non-human single purpose "intelligence" in an autonomous "creature" of some kind will happen first, and be more than deadly enough to destroy us. That's what we need to worry about that's what we need to start thinking about.
Yeah sure . Turing is famous for his Turing machine model of computing. He had a full and robust life outside of the ENIGMA part of his life. The idea he never existed is ludicrious.
You need to critically review your evidentiary threshold for believing unlikely things and you need to be more critical about sources.
If you read the TOS they explicitly say that *some parts* (undefined) of what you're calling "privacy invading" (and that's being nice) features cannot be turned off.
You can assume that MS will know and record more or less everything you do on your machine and on the internet.
My adivice: stock up on 7 before you can't get it anymore or see if Linux will serve your needs.
The point is, codes need to be cracked or otherwise secret communication compromised and we can now, unlike during WWII, create encryption which can't be cracked. That was the onluy point I was making. I am not supporting, as I said, backdooring encryption. So I am not sure what your point is.
Is it, among other things, a public relations gambit, in the wake of the PRISM scandal, intended to cast Silicon Valley companies as defenders of privacy?
this. Yes absolutely. Googe knew everything about PRISM except possibly it's classified name, thus their straightfaced "we had not heard nor did you know about PRISM". Ditto every other Silicon Valley company. Do you thik Intel got to where it is while defying the US Government's request for backdoors into their products? Or do you think the government did not request a backdoor?
There are legitimate threats out there people. Unreadable communications can be a real threat to national security- think ENIGMA and Turing. It's just a fact. But bad people has 1000 other ways to disguise their communications including all the variations on one time pads. At least with crypto you have a chance of getting the key or finding a flaw in the crypto or getting access to the pre-encrypted message creating event or the post encryption message reading event.
With other secret sharing schemes what is information is buried in the open in a way known only to the sharers. Is that really a more tractable problem to solve? I can think of a lot of ways to nominate portions of infomation junk as being significant. Woodward communicated with Deep Throat by putting a flowerpot with a red flag onto his balcony. Think of all the bits of information flying around,both public (Twitter) and private. Think of how the problem compounds when IoT comes online. There are enough ip6 addresses to give every grain of sand on earth 1000 unique IP addresses. Do the math. Each of these communicating to any other at will sending messages. Yeah.
Want to know where the real threat is coming from? It's coming from Silicon Valley VCs and companies they are funding. Just as none of these types, from the engineers to the investors ever really thought through what would happen if they made protocols and machines which were inherently (unfixably) insecure and then continued to not think about it, even as it became clear society was going to be critically depending on these protocols and machines, so 100,000 fold with IoT.
It's a headlng rush into chaos and oblivion driven by the most greedy, shortsighted and willfully ignorant members of our community. If you say "hey, maybe we shouldn't "democratizing" synthetic biology without thinking through the implications and how it could be used to deconstruct society and civilization, then you're a Big Government commie. Under the cover of spittingly stupid quips like of "well, any technology can be used for good or evil, I can kill you with a hatpin!" we are creating technology that will give one person th e power to take down whole cities, whole geographically or genetically defined populations, civilization itself.
And if you think no one would do that because of some variant of nuclear MAD then you really are a fucking idiot with no knowledge of history, people or the real world.
Slashdot Mirror
For a long time in my mind there's been no doubt that Tor is broken, at least with respect to the powers available to the United States and its allies. Think about it. There are no where near a million Tor nodes and even fewer exit nodes, and a million servers is a rounding error in the DoD black budget for a year.
Sure, non DoD Tor nodes exist, but what % of them are p0wned? I'll hazard a guess; just that % required to make it statistically implausible that, combined with traffic analysis, context gleaned from exit nodes a handful of zero-days etc. etc. no one can use Tor and expect sustained anonymity from the government.
I actually think that's a good thing. Hear me out. For the general Tor user who just wants their ISP , nosy Shark Wire aware neighbor, political opponents, large corporations, website owners land various databrokers to fuck off, they have what they want For dissidents in oppressive nations, those nations probably can't muster the resources to de-anonymize Tor users. For very bad people who want to do very bad things, we can get them, with some effort.
I know this is a minority opinion, but I think that the opposing opinion is regressive. Once, it wasn't possible for a small group of non-nation-state individuals to wreak mayhem on millions of people at once.
Once, the amount badness that could be achieved by Bad Guys was a trade-off between the number of people the Bad Guys wanted to effect, the number of people the Bad Guys could enlist to help them and the degree of severity of the Badness itself. Not any more. This changes everything.
We are living more and more in a world in which a few or even one really fucked up person can reach out and kill. This is nothing but the advancement of technology, and it's not going to stop. That means the power of small groups gets larger and broader even as the size of that group spiral down to one.
How are we going to counter this general phenomena? I agree, that giving any government unchecked, unobservable, unlimited powers is always a bad idea. (Ironcially, I believe this because of the actions members of administrations who profess to want to "get government off our backs" and told us "government isn't the solution, it's the problem"- Oliver North, James Secord, Dick Cheney, Alberto Gonzales etc etc. )
But in the face of this hypothetical and not-always hypothetical threat we still have the facts on the ground with respect to advancing technologies and the leverage it gives just anyone.
I don't think the answer is to limit the power of government. We need that power to exist. I think the answer lies in the people being able to hold the government accountable and their actions rendered transparent to a degree that would shock most people today, both in and out of government. We need to radically re-think the national security 3rd-rail issues like national security classifications, clearances, Presidential directives, etc. etc.
It will tear this country apart if the government continues to do what it knows it needs to do in order to avert terrorism and societal chaos and the people continue to feel like they have no faith in the integrity of the processes and powers of the government- that it could at any moment turn the death ray on them, and probably will. That whole dynamic, the whole world view needs to be addressed and not just addressed but actually resolved by some radical out of the box thinking no one had done yet.
We can have both security and freedom, but it's not going to just arise naturally by continuing on with the status quo conceptual categories we are using now.
We need a better way to detect lying if polygraphs can be beaten.
Actually, on a personal note, I had an interest in this at school; it was one of the things I was zeroing in on as a career path. Unfortunately, universities being the places they are now, a liar made it difficult for me to pursue this research interest. It's not as ironic as it seems, since people who are willing to lie about another person's actions and easy to come by. Our university was rife with people undermining each other through whatever means they could think of. Lying was the least of it. But that's another story, and besides, you probably have your own.
The reason I had that interest at all was because my life has been strongly effected again and again by people who think it's OK to just fabricate things to hurt people they don't like for one reason or another. It's basically a pandemic attitude, at least here in the states. I think I missed out on the part of growing up that said absolutely anything goes if you don't like person X. Certainly everyone around me got that message. I mean, WTF?
People in positions of security who try to beat lie detectors are Bad People. The ability to detect when someone is lying is essential to stopping Very Bad People from doing Very Bad Things to us.
I still think there's got to be a way to detect lying using information coming from the brain. A lie is volitional by definition; that's gotta lead to something usable in this context. Perhaps with DIY EEGs and such like coming onto the marketplace, amateurs tinkerers will make a breakthrough. I would love to have the time to pursue this myself.
>>"If the science was as good as Mann and his bunch of lynch-mob fans have claimed, it would be indisputable"
Translation: if Mann can not convince unreasonable people, then this means he is factually in error.
Dead wrong. Prosecuting deniers will proceed under the same legal theory that makes shouting "FIRE!" in a crowded theater illegal. You can't shout "FIRE" in a theater and you can't shout "NO FIRE" in a burning theater. Both are speech acts which cost people their lives
Deniers are shouting "NO FIRE" when they :
1) know it's a lie or could reasonably be expected to know it was a lie
2) are shown to be unable to defend their junk science theories to duly qualified scientists, either through sheer incompetence (they are not duly qualified in any meaningful sense) or their theories are shown to be made-to-order junk science as determined by a combination of facts on the ground and the larger judgement of actually duly qualified scientists.
And yes, I am saying we're going to put junk science of trial. As we should have done for tobacco and the tobacco executives and scientists and PR firms that advised them.
And yes, I am saying that every citizen does bear and has always borne an inalienable and unshirkable duty to use rational good judgement in matters where human life is at stake.
And yes I am saying that that is at the foundation of civilization, the foundation of the Enlightenment specifically and the foundation of Constitution implicitly and shirking that duty negates all defenses including the ones based on enumerated Rights found in the Constitution.
We don't need to spell out that your rights are voided if you behave in such a depraved way that you put the continuation of human civilization at risk through your actions. No one needs to express that idea explicitly to anyone, and anyways there never was a reason to since it wasn't formerly possible for humans to realize such depravity It's is now and always have been "self evident", as the Founding Fathers were fond of saying.
It's amazing to me how people so preoccupied with 1st. Amendment rights are unable to parse even the most basic application of same to the real world.
Some of us have been calling for the RICO prosecution of deniers for over a decade now.
People who like to pretend that they're arm chair theories about how climate works are somehow a match for the decades of research by scientists may be shocked at this notion, but RICO is the appropriate law to bring to bear.
The deliberate, bad faith denial of human caused climate change will be the worst crime in terms of numbers of deaths, political upheaval, cost and irreversibility of damages ever perpetrated by any group of criminals ever, including the internet's own favorite, The Third Reich.
Denier are terrorists. In the case of the Koch brothers, I believe they are systematically promoting and funding denialism as a way of creating a disaster so large, centralized governments won't be able to deal with it and will therefore collapse.
They KNOW it's true, their own studies which they commissioned to investigate human caused climate change TOLD them it was true. But these are people who tried in the 80s to run for President on a platform of abolishing the FBI, the CIA and all the rest of government. They are sworn enemies of the United States government, our government, my government, and they seek to destroy it *through any means necessary, including genocide via climate change*.
That's terrorism and they're terrorists as are the rest of the denial machinery.
What they think is we're going to stand around with our collective dick in our hands while they inch us closer to a disaster so big, it destroys the United States. What the reality is is the government has a duty to protect its citizens against all enemies foreign AND domestic and that's all the "go" justification they need. We don't need to vote on whether they're terrorists, we need to decide that they are and act. That's how this works.
The architects of climate denial need to be dealt with by any means necessary to stop them, no matter what. The question is not IF it should be done, the question is how can it best be done with the least disruption to the fabric of civil society.
Towards that goal absolutely everything is on the table without exception; techniques and exploits usually reserved for foreign nationals are completely within bounds given the nature of the threat and the proven intractibility of the enemy terrorists, who reside within this country and worse, are citizens and worse are well known, well funded, well organized and worse have assumed the camoflage of civil liberties organizations.
Get this, deniers. The United States government is not going to sit idly by while you destroy human civilization as we know it because you think you've found some Constitutional loophole - "you're citizens and you have the right to your free speech rights!" - big enough to drive the explosive laden truck called "climate change" through.
No, they're going to treat you like they treat all terrorists who seek to destroy our way of life. In this case it may mean "no fingerprints" but that's a purely technical matter.
Not only do RICO laws apply, but they extend to all the "civic organizations" and individuals without exception. The government has a right and a duty to neutralize and defund all terrorists. In this case I propose in addition to RICO "financial decimation" whereby all assets owned by these terrorists including those transferred at any point in time, past, present or future to any co-conspirator, associate, cohort, group, organization, family member or individual be confiscated along with those normally accessible by RICO. Seizing funds and assets this broadly them sends a clear signal: there is no way to benefit from attacking the United States and by doing so, everything you've ever done is voided without exception. That's the signal we need to send. Your business associates, your buddies, your familiy- none of them can safely accept your money. Terrorist money is not fungible- it is forever tainted. The cost to offset climate change is astronomical and the individuals, organizations
Sell.
You don't know what really happened because you weren't privy to whatever negotiations went on behind closed doors. Maybe story we are reading this is what happened. And it may not be. Maybe the feds swung a deal with the Dr. and he is going to or did do something for them and this is a cover story. "gosh we didn't even test the white powder to see if it was drugs your Honor". a form of that is what is being claimed. Sure the run of the mill citizen , fed or otherwise employed, can't sort the technicalities out but I am pretty sure the feds have specialists who can. Were they really not engaged in this take down?
It may all be as reported. All I am suggesting is you have to keep in the back of your mind that the real story may not be what the headlines are telling you.
Look, copyright means nothing unless it means that authors or copyright holders generally get to control what happens with their work product. Most of them want to get paid, just like you.
Sure patents in software are a national shrine to special interest, deep pockets lobbying against the public good. But copyright? Really? Libraries are the way we've worked this very issue out. Libraries work. Get a card.
Google thought it could just strong arm aside all those vibrant, diverse geniuses who wrote all those interesting books because why, they're Google? They're bigger, hipper and more important that the little people whose ideas and writing this project would be nothing without?
But then we're talking about a company that has nothing but contempt, finally, for workers which is why they and their CEO Eric Schmidt knowingly and deliberately engaged in an illegal conspiracy with Apple and Adobe and oh a few hundred other companies to create a do-not-hire blacklist and limit people's wages, costing those people hundreds of millions of dollars . Where i come from that's called stealing but since no one is going to go to jail for stealing a few hundred million, I guess it's not stealing after all because if it were stealing, people would be going to jail instead of being appointed ambassador by Obama.
Anyway, that's what Google thinks of people who work for a living, and that contempt extends from Nobel prize winning authors to cookbook authors and everyone in between and is, in fact, is so vast it essentially expands to fill all space in the known universe.
Very poor people bootlegging copies of copyrighted works is a look the other way affair for society. It's just better than the alternative which is poor people don't even get access to the significant parts of the larger cultural context they're embedded in. But making a defacto copy machine then turning that loose on absolutely everyone's work ? What were they thinking?
They were thinking "We're Google".
Jobs was a dirt bag backstabbing sociopathic manipulator and if you think that sounds extreme then read the recent biographies of him. Same thing with guys like Eric Schmidt; relative to their companies and products, they're non-technical power seekers who are, uh, unburdened by the chains of conventional morality.
Ditto Larry Ellison. In the beginning Ellison himself characterized Oracle database as the cockroach motel of databases because "data goes in, but doesn't come out". Other people fixed it.
Jobs used to repeat other's people's ideas which were presented to him in meetings 10 minutes after they were presented to him at that meeting as if they were novel ideas he was just having in real time in front of the incredulous meeting atendees. They had a name for this- it was called the "Steve Jobs Warp Field".
In a startup convention a few years ago, the attendees were urged by the presenters to "don't waste your time learning about business". Who does that advice benefit? Not the attendees. All startup paticipants should learn about business and share what they learn most boradly.
The fact is, the world would be a very different place if normal people would take it upon themselves to undermine the careers of obvious sociopaths instead of letting them "lead".
They'll make it up on the back end by recording every micro-interaction you have on every site and document you browse, compiling them and developing a probably mostly derogatory profile of you then selling that profile to your potential employers, insurance providers, political enemies, buisness competitors... you know anyone with a wallet . In the TOS you signed, these entities are referred to as "partners".
Either you're a liar, a paid liar, a sociopathic predator who identifies with the sociopathci predators who have systematcially lied about global warmming or you're an idiot.
From Wikipedia:
Germany's renewable energy sector is among the most innovative and successful worldwide. Net-generation from renewable energy sources in the German electricity sector has increased from 6.3% in 2000 to about 30% in 2014.[1][2] For the first time ever, wind, biogas, and solar combined accounted for a larger portion of net electricity production than brown coal.[3] While peak-generation from combined wind and solar reached a new all-time high of 74% in April 2014,[4] wind power saw its best day ever on December 12, 2014, generating 562 GWh.[5] Germany has been called "the world's first major renewable energy economy".[6][7]E
Don't look to Tesla to change the OTA acccess their building into their cars any time soon. I'll tell you why.
There's a frightening amount of electricity generated by their cars and mechanics who don't know what they're doing are quite likely to eletrocute themselves.
Then the headline will be:
Another Mechanic Killed By Tesla Car.
To prevent that headline from ever materializing and destroying their market share, they reserve the right and aiblity to remotely brick the car.
If the car is in an accident, it gets bricked and the only result of trying to start the car is a message on the instrument panel which reads (approx) : "Take car to Tesla service station for service".
Mechanics CAN'T work on Tesla cars.
Unfortunately, when you connect a car to the internet or otherwise make it accessible OTA you dramatically increase the attack surface area.
Here's a few characterisitics of the new attack vectors:
*A criminal can effect many cars at once. Previously, a 1:1:1 ratio existed between criminals, cars and some discrete unit of time.
*A criminal can make a criminal event imitate an accident. Previously, if the car blew up Mafiosa-style or was stolen, the criminal event was clearly recognizable as a criminal event. Even cutting the brake lines left tell-tale signs. Obviously, a surreptitious way to access the car's electronics is, well, surreptitious .
*The attack vectors have mutiplied to as many zero-day exploits in as many electronic parts as could be effected by zero day exploits. Previously, even if there was a theoretical way to access the computer that controlled critical systems, it was still a head-under-hood affair involving that system.
*Zero day exploits aren't going away. There is no "recall" that is going to "fix" the problem because the problem is now a changing target. Previously, just as criminals and car thefts (or other crime) were 1:1, so also were defects and defective components. Recalls could fix the componnt and return the car to service. Now the subsystem is known to be fundamentally unfixable.
If we could stop people from exploiting critical computer systems, we would have done it. A car is not going to be special in this regard.
Media which makes its living by communicting to masses of people using short time, low attention narratives has to hook into themes it knows all viewers already understand and respond to. These are themes everyone is just genetically pre-wired to understand.
Young, high status male searches for and mates with most beautiful woman.
Evil tribe attempts to destroy us but instead is itself destroyed, thanks to acts of courage and selflessness.
Singularly great man brings knowledge, light and power to the masses.
That why MSM sucks.
I cna't remember the article which sort of spoils this post but there's a technical fix for DDoS which ISPs are simply and webiste owners are simply not implementing. Maybe someone knows the article or set of facts I am forgetting and enlighten the rest of us.
I quote from the above post. I am sure (that is, I know for a fact) that this is staple fare amongst a *certain kind* or radically politically correct, social constructivist, radical feminist which I mean to distinguish from feminists generally, a group I and others include myself in.
BEGIN QUOTE:
Mr. Sexually Inadequate wonders why the women he encounters don't react like those he sees on porn sites panting and groaning in response to the guy's every demand and whim. He concludes, not entirely surprisingly, that women are untrustworthy, phoney bitch whores who deliberately tease guys like him then withhold what they've given to every other guy and so need to be taught a lesson.
END QUOTE
This is an approach to social theorizing and sadly, and ultimately lawmaking, which is based on *nothing more than a narrative which sounds plausible to the narrative's creator.*
That's it. That's the sum total of the evidence used to support that narrative. Remember, this narrative is not just any tale, it's meant to be taken seriously as an accurate description of the casual relationship between two things- porn and rape.
There are no epidemiological studies or population based studies which show, for instance, that porn viewers:
"wonder(s) why the women he encounters don't react like those he sees on porn sites panting and groaning in response to the guy's every demand and whim."
Nor is there any evidence that, for a given porn viewer, he reasons as presented:
" He concludes, not entirely surprisingly, that women are untrustworthy, phoney bitch whores who deliberately tease guys like him then withhold what they've given to every other guy "
Nor any is this a product of evidentiary based reasoning :
"and so (women) need to be taught a lesson."
It's amazing AMAZING to me that entire legislatures can be pressured into action and effectively captured by this level of "evidence" and pass laws and allocate funds and based on a mere narrative.
Rape is not ONLY about sex it's about the fact that the rapist is a criminal, that is, is criminally inclined.
Historical Fact: people of both genders have always and will always engage in sex play which resembles, on the face of it, the worst kind of rape. Thus the books 50 Shades of Gray, The Story of O and Justine to name but the most well known. But these people who view this pornography- and these books ARE pornography, are not rapists and are not potential rapists. The reason is, they are not criminally inclined.
Think of what it means to be a criminal. You are anti-social, at least. You simply do not care about what happens to other people. Their feelings mean basically nothing to you and their suffering is a matter of indifference to you. When they genuinely scream and cry in pain, you're unmoved. You have no empathy.
This pretty much describes a lot of people in society who do a lot of other things than rape, although they may do that too if they get the chance.
As I see it, we have a criminal problem. In the executive suites, in the state legislatures, in Washington, in industry, everywhere we have a disturbingly largish segment of the population which starts off, say, beating up their fellow playmates or learning to be manipulative, and then progresses on to more and perhaps more subtle orviolent crimes depending on the circumstances.
Go after the people who express anti-social behavior patterns early, because they're nt just raping, they're assualting other men, they're ripping people off, they're writing bills for Congress which destroy the earth so they can profit, they're hiding how dangerous the products and drugs theor corporations create are. They're lawyers and think tank employees and broadcasters and CEOs.
Violence against a target is violence against a target. Sure, some fo them rape. But it's not because of pornpornporn. It's because up until they rape, everyone, including feminists looked the other way at their anti-social behavior, some even admired their aggression, some even preferred it and found it exciting.
I wanna be a company.. I wanna be a company...
BTW Hudson Institute - right wing reactionary extemism in think-tank form brought to you by Olin, Koch, Scaife, Walton (Walmart) and featuring on its board Scooter (Plamegate) Libby, Dick Cheney and Richard Pearle.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/ind...
Uh Germany is run by solar and has the same cloud coverage as the US. What's more the consquences of continuing to use coal and oil is the extinction of the human race. I think perhaps you didn't build that last "cost" into your equation. You can do it now, or we can do it later, at the point of gun, but either way, Americans and indeed the people's of the world are not going to let a few oil and coal magnates destroy humankind's future in front of their eyes. Denying the absolute necssity of deploying renewable NOW regardless of the faux cost calculations which ignore the cost of climate change - including societal upheaval and military conflicts which the Pentagon itself have said are not just a threat to the US but are happening NOW and costing us real money- denying reality is a dead end. You know you lost the war when the US Army and the CIA are weighing in against you in the opposite corner. It's all over but the shouting pal. That's one thing about reality- it doesn't go away and you can only spin it for so long.
Your points are orthogonal to each other. The exposure of hypertext links has nothing to do with curation or no-curation. The rise of web pages as apps and opaque services which present ephemral content instead of durable content has nothing to do HTML and links to durable URLs.
What we want is durable findable content . Google actually did a good job at rating that content for the average surfer. Pages linking to pages takes care of the case where specialized cmmunities judgement is superior to Google's.
What does this have to do with Twitter and Facebook type apporaches? Nothing. The analogy of web 1.0 to the craftsman movement is interesting but ultimately non-informative. It's just an analogy and the consequences of their respective specific internal details for the two subject areas do not somehow parallel each other.
This is really a discussion about the difference between
findable, referenceable, durable, cohesive and relevant [text + image + graphics + video}
vs
ephemeral [advertising copy + vacant images + video junk +infotainment]
Mod parent up. This is "innovation" in a nutshell
Wow we're the two guys in the world who feel this way,. I knew there was someone else out there somewhere.
Most of javascript and the massive javascript libraries out there are trash which have the net effect of\ making the ability to write and maintain web pages less democratic. The whole idea that the web has to be some form of advanced TV, with infotainment graphics and video in little squares all over your page is completley mistaken.
You acquire knowledge through reading; through either written words or equations on the page. Knowledge acquistion for humans is inherently and forever a process of abstract symbol processing- we process speech and scratches on a page and transform it into understanding. That's as natural as breathing. Plain text is the once and a future king of the internet.
Sure, interactive infographics is a real step forward in faciliating the comprehension of complex data sets and interrelationships but those are few and far inbetween and most of the web is a designed for something else.
Suer somethings are better demonstrated than explained verbally. No one is arguing with that.
But the vision of the web as a general purpose computing platform hosted in the cloud which distributes it's "resuts" to limited capacity machines (that would be yours) which more or less passively consume the output is the TVization of the web.
It's what the media companies crave because it puts them back into the seat of power they've always held- power to decide what you see, what you're told, what you know; the power to turn you on and and turn you off using draconic and insane theories of "intellectual property" like software patents and copyright-forever and take-down notices - the whole SOPA and PIPA machinery of innovation control and democracy annihilation which is being about to be passed into law through the TPP passage.
Pages like Huffpo and Facebook it's ilk are unendurable, with video splattered everywhere, their incessant loading , reloading, sputtering and changing. But worse, on a deeper level, they're deliberately designed not to inform readers but to *develop detailed profiles of reader's specific interests which are then sold to marketers and employers*.
They do this by making the headline, the actual content and the link-paths to their stories micro-interest sieves. With each follow-me link, with each carefully worded headline, every news story is broken out along predefined personality/interest micro topics. By the time you've clicked down to the actual story you wanted to read, you've told huffpo and their "partners" an enormous amount yourself personally, your personal circumstances, your private interests, private concerns and life circumstances.
When read Huffpo you repeatedly engage in the above cycle and they in turn tweak and retweak their sieves to be finer and finer over time - this is an iterative game for them- so it reads you back, like a book.
It knows you're a 23 y/o white woman living in THAT house with 3 roomates who's had an abortion, makes 23k a year working as a temp and is currently looking for a partner with which she can surprise one day by intimating she's willing to explore 50 Shades of Gray type S&M and that you have 34k in student loan debt you worry a lot about.
It knows that and it shares that information to "its partners" which is to say anyone with enough money who wants it, who in turn sell that to your potential employers, that grant issuing institution you applied to, that political organization you're thining about joining, perhaps to see how far you can go.
It sells it to the gatekeepers of your life so that when you show up in your new business causual outift to interview, you might as well be butt fucking naked with what you thought was your most private and personal information neatly typed out in Courier 12 on bond paper instead of you education and qualifications.
And that's if your just Joesephine Average. If you're Josephine Someone, then you've effectively given your
Ex-machina (so so movie) and all that are not what we have to worry about. Neither is the Terminator. What we have to worry about is crap like tiny drones made of synthetic biological parts which have been programmed to autonomously seek and destroy things based on their target's DNA.
Sure, its a robot but that's not a very rich description of the problem, is it? The level of AI portrayed in movies is a still a hundred years away or more. Long before we have Terminator or Matrix or ex-Machina type AI, we will have something like what I described.
The fact is non-human single purpose "intelligence" in an autonomous "creature" of some kind will happen first, and be more than deadly enough to destroy us. That's what we need to worry about that's what we need to start thinking about.
Yeah sure . Turing is famous for his Turing machine model of computing. He had a full and robust life outside of the ENIGMA part of his life. The idea he never existed is ludicrious.
You need to critically review your evidentiary threshold for believing unlikely things and you need to be more critical about sources.
HTH
If you read the TOS they explicitly say that *some parts* (undefined) of what you're calling "privacy invading" (and that's being nice) features cannot be turned off.
You can assume that MS will know and record more or less everything you do on your machine and on the internet.
My adivice: stock up on 7 before you can't get it anymore or see if Linux will serve your needs.
The point is, codes need to be cracked or otherwise secret communication compromised and we can now, unlike during WWII, create encryption which can't be cracked. That was the onluy point I was making. I am not supporting, as I said, backdooring encryption. So I am not sure what your point is.
Also Turing didn't crack enigma Poland did. That's potentially interesting. References please.
Is it, among other things, a public relations gambit, in the wake of the PRISM scandal, intended to cast Silicon Valley companies as defenders of privacy?
this. Yes absolutely. Googe knew everything about PRISM except possibly it's classified name, thus their straightfaced "we had not heard nor did you know about PRISM". Ditto every other Silicon Valley company. Do you thik Intel got to where it is while defying the US Government's request for backdoors into their products? Or do you think the government did not request a backdoor?
There are legitimate threats out there people. Unreadable communications can be a real threat to national security- think ENIGMA and Turing. It's just a fact. But bad people has 1000 other ways to disguise their communications including all the variations on one time pads. At least with crypto you have a chance of getting the key or finding a flaw in the crypto or getting access to the pre-encrypted message creating event or the post encryption message reading event.
With other secret sharing schemes what is information is buried in the open in a way known only to the sharers. Is that really a more tractable problem to solve? I can think of a lot of ways to nominate portions of infomation junk as being significant. Woodward communicated with Deep Throat by putting a flowerpot with a red flag onto his balcony. Think of all the bits of information flying around,both public (Twitter) and private. Think of how the problem compounds when IoT comes online. There are enough ip6 addresses to give every grain of sand on earth 1000 unique IP addresses. Do the math. Each of these communicating to any other at will sending messages. Yeah.
Want to know where the real threat is coming from? It's coming from Silicon Valley VCs and companies they are funding. Just as none of these types, from the engineers to the investors ever really thought through what would happen if they made protocols and machines which were inherently (unfixably) insecure and then continued to not think about it, even as it became clear society was going to be critically depending on these protocols and machines, so 100,000 fold with IoT.
It's a headlng rush into chaos and oblivion driven by the most greedy, shortsighted and willfully ignorant members of our community. If you say "hey, maybe we shouldn't "democratizing" synthetic biology without thinking through the implications and how it could be used to deconstruct society and civilization, then you're a Big Government commie. Under the cover of spittingly stupid quips like of "well, any technology can be used for good or evil, I can kill you with a hatpin!" we are creating technology that will give one person th e power to take down whole cities, whole geographically or genetically defined populations, civilization itself.
And if you think no one would do that because of some variant of nuclear MAD then you really are a fucking idiot with no knowledge of history, people or the real world.