OK, this statement really points that you aren't involved in information security (at least in a serious capacity anyway).
And we're off to a brilliant start here with a classic ad hominid abuse fallacy. Or as it's known in IT circles... The Handwave. Not that it matters, but I worked for a fortune 50 company in systems administration; My job role included maintenance of workstations and ATMs at over 3,700 retail locations throughout North America. But again; you're attacking the messenger, not the message. Not cool.
Do you really guarantee you can hide from Anonymous or even script kiddies 100% of the time if they really want you?
Number two burning up the charts is a Nirvana fallacy. Brilliant. No, nobody can guarantee 100%. But I can be pretty confident of 99.997%, yes. And you do recall that the "script kiddies" and "Anonymous" (an aggregate group of script kiddies) have about.01% of the funding of the NSA, right? Yes, they regularly make headlines breaking into computers, but the odds of them breaking into any specific computer is quite low. Unlike the NSA, which has cultivated the ability to point at something and say "I want it. Make it mine." You're comparing the mongolian hordes to the Knights Templar here, buddy.
If you answer yes, then again we know you aren't involved in information security. So since the answer is no, what is your solution? Do you simply throw your hands in the air and say screw it? I cannot guarantee to stop them anyway, so lets just toss our firewall and anti-virus in the trash?
Up next, we've got ourselves a false dilemma, with a bonus -- another ad hominim. This harkens back to high school where you'd say "If you don't answer, you're gay!"
Heck even your sarcastic comment about a physically secured facility, in a faraday cage, with no internet access cannot promise the information will be secure.
That wasn't sarcasm. That's how the professionals protect highly classified, compartmentalized information. Perhaps you misunderstand what "physically secured facility" means. These are places like military bases; They have men with shotguns, lots of cameras, a perimeter, barbed wire, high explosives, and thick concrete walls.
A simple warrant, guys with guns, breaking down your door and taking the server easily gets around that.
This time, a less obvious one: the single cause fallacy, otherwise known as oversimplification.
Please show me the "easy" plan you have for bypassing all of the layers of security at a typical military base, in order to access the server in the middle of it that contains the secure data, and to either do it so quickly that nobody has time to push the self-destruct button, or so quietly nobody thinks to.
I'm sorry for you (really more for your clients) if you don't want to hear about this, but it isn't going anywhere.
I feel sorry for you too, because you spent a couple kilowords demolishing an argument that wasn't made to begin with. Your entire post is a giant strawman, and a poorly executed one at that. I didn't say to give up on information security; I said that a guy on a shoestring budget is no match for them. Somewhere in your brain, a process caught a signal 11, trapped it incorrectly, and you vomited out a four page error message onto Slashdot.
You're trying to convince a lot of IT professionals, who know damn well that its technically possible to secure communications end to end, that they are powerless to do what they know they can do.
No, I'm merely suggesting that locking those IT professionals in a room and beating them with a metal pipe, is an effective method of "unsecuring" those communications. It's only in the imagination of Anonymous Cowards and hollywood screen-writers that the police kick in the door, seize the computer, and then say "Oh shit! He's using a 8192 bit encryption key. We'll never recover the data! I guess we better just leave then, defeated."
It's just short notice, we thought we lived in a system of rules that protected our privacy, we thought TLS worked and so on, stupidly thinking there were warrants and judicial courts and so on. Silly us! No matter, it's a bug. We need to switch to end to end encryption to fix it.
The people who designed these systems, those venerated IT professionals you mentioned earlier? Yeah, they knew from day one that TLS, SSL, certificate authorities, etc., were not truly secure. They were a compromise that provided "reasonable" security -- and it still does do that. Millions of internet-based financial transactions are secured using SSL, TLS, etc., every day and are not compromised. Is it a perfect solution? Of course not. Is it a decent one? Sortof.
But fundamentally, you're asking for the impossible with your "end to end" encryption non-sense. The very first in a long list of problems is: How do you securely exchange keys with an entity you have no prior relationship with? How does Alice know she's talking to Bob, if she has never met Bob before? The solution that TLS/SSL used was certificate authorities; A trusted third party that both Bob and Alice trust. Unfortunately, like any trust model, it is only as strong as the weakest link, and as certificate authorities proliferated... rogue CAs and stolen keys became a very real threat.
But simply switching the protocols around won't solve the very first problem: How do you securely exchange keys over what is, inherently, an insecure medium? You can't.
Well I bow to your superior knowledge and will immediately stop writing this Thunderbird OTR add on and step away from my keyboard.
First, yes, I do have superior knowledge (obviously). And I'm willing to put my reputation on the line by not posting anonymously. This frequently comes back to bite me in the ass, especially when dealing with Anonymous Cowards, but karma is not as important to me as getting as accurate of information as possible in front of as many eyeballs as possible. If a few -1, Troll mods is the price I pay, I do so gladly. Second, Thunderbird has an OpenPGP addon... developing another addon is silly, and frankly, you and I both know you lack the chops to actually program.
But regardless, if I'm going to get serious about personal privacy, I'm not going to do it by sitting down to write my own crypto addon. For one, it would almost certainly be more buggy than the ones that have been reviewed and certified as correctly implimented by crytologists... and crypto is amazingly easy to get wrong, and devilishly difficult for someone without loads of experience to detect the failure. For two... why would I spend hundreds of hours doing that, when I can spend dozens of hours making phone calls and writing letters to the people who have far, far more power than I do, and convince others to do the same?
I'm sorry, but looking at my large list of tools available to me, the one labelled "Democracy" seems far more likely to get me what I want than one labelled "Amateur Crypto".
Because it's easier to store all the data now, and only access and analyze it when traditional investigative techniques identify a potential threat. It also eliminates the time wasted once a potential threat is identified going back and trying to reconstruct/recover/access data from many different sources. In other words, it saves time and resources; A counter-intuitive conclusion, given that most people look only at the costs and implications of gathering and storing all that data, but not very much on what happens after.
Nah, just arrest every hacker you find and don't give hackers 0 day exploits and you'll fix a lot of problems.
I'd prefer a world where people were only arrested when they've actually committed a crime, or there's strong evidence that they intend to. Mere capability is not sufficient to justify an arrest. At best, a knock on the door and "Can we come in and ask a few questions?" At best.
Don't you think we shouldn't *have* to ask? It's written into the constitution and the EU privacy right.
Actually, it isn't. There is no right to privacy in the US Constitution. And as far as the EU; They are a sovereign foreign power. The NSA has not just the mandate, but an obligation, to monitor foreign threats; Allies can become enemies, and when surveillance is pervasive and shared, it keeps everyone a bit more honest. And when it comes to international politics... dishonesty and rhetoric are pretty much the order of the day for everyone, allies or enemies.
What do we need to do to get the NSA to read the constitution, send it in an encrypted email to our kids?
There was an article not very long ago about a book published by someone who spent a considerable period of time investigating the culture of the NSA. His takeaway was that they do respect the Constitution. They also want to ensure as few Americans as possible become a part of some terrorist's political statement. Balancing these two goals is not so easy or cut and dry as internet pundits say.
"There are no high tech solutions to this that are within your budget, ok? Just... deal with it already guys."
Hah! you wish.
Actually, I do. I am not overly concerned with the NSA reading my e-mail or even keeping a file on me. It will not adversely impact my life in any meaningful way. As long as it continues to not affect me, surveil away. I am far, far more concerned with commercial interests accessing and misusing my data; There is little legal recourse to such activities, and it is readily apparent to me that no matter how unethical people claim the NSA to be, corporations are several orders of magnitude worse in almost every measure.
But unlike the NSA, I believe we can, with the budget and resources available to the average person, mount effective defenses against those corporations. And I would rather people start taking the threat corporations pose seriously, instead of pointing to the NSA like (a) they're the biggest problem and/or (b) we can honestly hope to accomplish anything against them.
Ultimately, it's a question of practicality. I simply don't believe that I can defend against an organization with half a trillion dollars in assets and an operating budget bigger than that of the majority of the countries on the planet. But by happy coincidence, I do not feel they are a threat to me in any meaningful way.
During the sneakernet era you had computing ability, but if they wanted your data they'd have to get a warrant or ransack your office illegally.
Neither of which you'd necessarily be informed of. There's two ways to approach security; tamper-evident, and tamper-resistant. Everyone is focusing on tamper-resistant right now to deal with the NSA; "How do we stop them?"... Have you noticed nobody is asking the question; How do we detect them? Sneakernet also had the benefit of being tamper-evident... if they broke down your door, you'd come home to a broken door. It'd be pretty obvious that something was up. Legal or illegal, when you physically search a property, you leave evidence behind that you did so. However, much of the technology the NSA is using doesn't leave any proverbial fingerprints behind.
The problem is the echo chaimber it creates. If you only get news your friends share, where do you get alternative viewpoints?
This begs the question of why someone would want to get alternative viewpoints. Most people don't want to be regularly exposed to ideas, beliefs, culture, etc., that conflicts with their own. It creates anxiety, anger, and/or dissociation. The begged question, by the way, is also a rhetorical question. But it doesn't change human nature, and we are talking about Facebook here.
The "social network" is not simply a conduit for human virtues -- it is equally a conduit for human failures. And let's be honest with ourselves -- critical thinking is hard work. Even (perhaps especially) amongst the highly literate and/or intelligent, who are practiced at overcoming their own biases to keep an open mind, must still be deliberate and cautious.
On that note, for those who so desire to find alternative viewpoints social networks provide plenty of opportunity. Many of my friends and I debate on Facebook, each playing devil's advocate to the other in a semi-public venue. I have also found, painfully, that if one wishes to test how tolerant their friends truly are... post something unpopular and defend it. The results are both illuminating, and occasionally warrant making popcorn to witness the explosively violent ways in which people react to opposing views.
In other words.... Where can I purchase a car with all the amenities of the high end Rolls-Royce, for the price of a Civic?
You steal the Rolls-Royce. Hundreds of millions of computers right now are part of one kind of botnet or another because botnets offer everything the poster is looking for. There are websites out there where you can purchase the resources of the botnet for cheap; Just gotta know where to look. As a bonus, they also offer a degree of anonymity and resistance to the kind of tracking the author is apparently worried about. If you want to be resistant to a search and seizure by a government, I can think of few things better than a massively decentralized, worldwide network with millions of potential servers to shift your data around within.
So no.. I will not just 'deal with it', that is completely the wrong attitude. We DO NOT have to deal with it, we will not deal with it. It will be stopped, eventually.
Excuse me... I didn't say just roll over and take it. But trying to solve a social problem like this with technology is the very height of stupidity. It's like saying if we take away everyone's guns, we'll solve that pesky violence problem. The gun is just the tool. Just like the internet. Just like a cell phone, a camera, a packet sniffer, a data center... all of these things that the NSA uses are not the problem! It's the people that are the problem, and the people alone.
People problems can only be solved by people. I know that seems like a stupidly obvious thing to say, but it's clear to me that when article after article posted is variations of the question "What technology can I use to stop the NSA from spying on me?" There isn't any! You stop the NSA by getting off your ass and participating in the democratic process. You cannot fix this by keyboard warrioring.
The Japanese government is more honourable than the US one, for one simple reason: It still cares about principal and the rule of law.
Really? The Japanese government has elevated revisionist history to an art form. Many school children have no idea why China has a problem with them, for example, because their textbooks don't include anything that Japan has done wrong. Like, for example, the Nanking Massacre. Which goes back to my original point about their culture: They are really hard up about admitting failure. Remember, it took not one, but two nuclear attacks before the Emperor surrendered.
I could continue with more examples, but I think just one is sufficient to drive home my point; This abstract concept of "honor" you're on about the Japanese having more of is something we could argue back and forth about until the cows come home; It's the perfect shifting goal-post argument.
The US government views the constitution as an obstruction, not an ideal.
Really? The entire government? You can speak authoritatively on the 96 or so million people that work for it and can confirm beyond any doubt that all of them view "the constitution as an obstruction, not an ideal"?
Look at how it has dealt with the threats to it from foreign powers over the decades though. At times antagonistic and prone to posturing, but ultimately true to the principal of self defence and peace.
Really? Fun fact: The Germans killed about 6 million jews, and 20 million Russians. The Japanese have them beat though: They killed at least 23 million chinese during the war, and another seven million from nearby Malasia, Vietnam, Cambodia, etc. Go ahead and explain how that was "true to the principle of self defence and peace". I'll get the popcorn!
Japan could have a world class and extremely powerful military, but refrains from developing one.
No, they're prevented by a treaty they signed as part of the terms of their surrender after we nuked their asses. Twice. That treaty is still in force, but it has expanded to a mutual defense treaty. In exchange for the protection of the United States military, the Japanese have given up the right to have their own army.
It's commendable that they actually care about that bit of paper enough to bother changing it, unlike the US government that just looks for some work-around or tries to keep the violations secret.
The US Constitution has been amended 27 times so far. It was intended to be a living document; and the precise meaning and application of a document which is over two hundred years old is one of the major functions of the Supreme Court. And don't think for a New York second that other countries don't have their own secret courts. Secret courts are a part of every major government's history.
The other major difference is that the Japanese government does not use the very real threat from its neighbours to terrorize its population.
Really? Because just today the Japanese PM stepped up the rhetoric, telling citizens that China is a major threat and they should be vigilant against it. They have also recently approved a treaty of shooting down any drones that enter its airspace... and recently civil defense forces were called to clear out citizens threatening to turn violent amidst rising chinese-japanese tensions regarding ownership of some of the Senkaku Islands.
I have gotten incredibly sick of the tin foil hat brigade putting the NSA into every one of their conspiracy theories, and equally tired of the idiot replacement editors from Dice rubber-stamping submissions like this that even most bloggers wouldn't post. You wanna talk about hosting providers? Okay, let's talk. Obviously you are concerned about your data being intercepted and stolen.
Do you guys honestly think, for one second, that you can hide from these guys if they really want you? Any of you? This is the largest, most powerful government on the planet, with resources you could only dream of. Even businesses the size of Google can't keep them out; And if you believe any press releases to the contrary, you're an idiot.
The only way you're keeping your data safe is in a physically secured facility, with the computer locked in a faraday cage and with no access to the internet. Just about anything else and the data will be vulnerable at some point to a legal intercept of it. You can manage those risks, limit them, but ultimately, if they want it they're gonna get it.
So please guys, stop asking for NSA-proof [insert thing here]. There are only two defenses when your opponent has a half trillion dollar budget and you got twenty bucks and a cracker; Anonymity (ie, don't get on the radar), or don't do anything that would be interesting to them... or if you must, for the love of fuck, minimize your electronic footprint. Forget the credit card, the cell phone, the wifi-enabled anything. Go off grid, stand in the woods in the middle of nowhere, and then do whatever it is you're keen on doing without the government being aware of it.
There are no high tech solutions to this that are within your budget, ok? Just... deal with it already guys.
no, this is not the photoelectric effect. the "bandgap" is range of energy levels where no electron exists. Thisproperty separates insulators, semiconductors and conductors. They are altering the bandgap with polarization of light
Sounds like it's the same phenomenon to me. You're confusing a property with an effect.
That's not "premature optimization", that's unsafe, bug-producing optimization, which is definitely wrong, but, again, is just not what Knuth was talking about in that statement. "Premature" in this context means "before you've profiled your code", not "before you're sure it's safe to add to your compiler".
I know I'm going to just continue burning mod points from the sole asshole moderator reading these comments and downmodding me because he's too much of a coward to participate in the discussion... but whatever.
For any non-trivial optimization you're changing the behavior of the code. This is what I believe Knuth was trying to get at; Don't optimize your code until you have a case where the code is performing poorly -- in this case, the compiled product. What you're suggesting is blind optimization and it's dangerous. The GCC people do it right: They don't optimize until you can provide a test case showing how the compiler generates suboptimal code, and then they rigorously test the new optimization to confirm it still results in behavior that matches expectation. This is the Right Way to do it, and what I think Knuth was referring to -- don't optimize until you have a case where it's shown it's needed, ie. don't anticipate.
I am a bit confused by what you said. An incident photon at wavelength (Lamda) or smaller will eject an electron ( photo electric) and thermal excitation of a material like the cathode of a tube will also eject electrons. I am not getting where the charged particle comes in. From TFA:
Uhh, this isn't about what was said in the TFA. My statement applies to the photoelectric effect. The underlying math behind the statement is available. Wavelength is directly coupled with the specific energy of a photon -- shorter wavelengths mean higher specific energy. Once enough specific energy is present, an electron will strike the material, and a photon will be emitted, or vice versa. Below the threshold, and no particle will be emitted.
What the article is dicussing is about what happens below that threshold. This behavior is a consequence of the photoelectric effect -- it deals with how a given material deals with the absorption of energy, instead of the conversion of it.
And that Knuth quote applies to users prematurely optimizing their specific source code before seeing where the time actually is; compiler people have to figure out how to optimize all code in the world with the same compiler. It just doesn't apply to that situation.
It applies more strongly in that situation than in any other situation. Go back and read the patch notes in GCC and you will find plenty of examples where over-zealous optimization led to unexpected behavior and failure. There are even a few notes for options regarding optimization in the man pages that say "You probably don't want to do this. It'll break your program if it does x or y, and the compiler can't tell if you're doing x, or y. Only enable if you are sure it doesn't do these things."
I'm glad Japan still seems to have some honour left.
It never ceases to amaze me how often people ascribe general characteristics like honor, integrity, etc., to governments, on the basis of singular examples. The Japanese government, in this very specific case, did what you consider to be the right thing. But to ascribe their entire government, as a complete entity, as having honor on this basis, is premature and unwarranted.
Look at how the Japanese government handled the Fukoshima disaster; or rather, didn't. A great many would not consider it honorable to keep citizens in a hot zone for well after it was apparent there were serious safety concerns, simply and largely out of a desire to save face. This is a glitch of Japanese culture; They are downright Russian in their inability to acknowledge a mistake when it happens. It's hardly the only time this less than endearing quality of Japanese culture has reared its ugly head either -- the internet is littered with examples of how situations were made needlessly worse because of it.
Every government. Every. Government. will at times act in act in accordance with your individual beliefs regarding fundamental human virtues... and at other times will not. This is because governments are collections of people and organizations that are often in opposition to one another, and in a dance with so many steps and so many partners, you simply cannot judge the whole as you would an individual. Governments cannot be judged on their individual actions -- at the micro scale, it is simply too chaotic and random. We can only begin to understand whether a government adheres to a given virtue by looking at the aggregate sum of their actions and the actual (not intended or stated) result.
Because of this, I would not say the Japanese government is either less, or more, honorable because of its refusal to allow the NSA to tap Asia's internet. As an aggregate entity, I would say that the Japanese government would like greater cooperation with the United States in the areas of defense and economics, but places a great deal of value on its cultural identity and independence from all sovereign powers, the US included. Cooperation in this particular case would have enabled a high level of industrial espionage and the Japanese culture views business as being nearly a literal equivalent to war; They take industrial espionage very, very seriously. To cooperate with the NSA in this regard would have serious reprecussions with the business leaders within Japan.
To say that this behavior though is 'honorable' is a stretch. They are protecting their own interests. It has nothing to do with the Japanese constitution, but rather how they do business. In a very real sense, the NSA is a business competitor.
We've known about this since the turn of the last century. It's the photoelectric effect. Every material has a wavelength where if it is struck by a charged particle at or above that, it will absorb it and then emit an electron. This isn't news.
What's news is that we've now reached a sufficient level of understanding regarding the engineering of electro-optical systems that we are starting to build devices where the primary logic is based on optics, not electronics. This is an advancement of technology, not of understanding.
A lot of generalized software are simple in theory. Until you factor in real world designs, like optimization, handling multiple platforms and architectures, maintainability, stability . . . .
"We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil." -- Knuth
Now, I'll say it again: Making something like GCC is simple. It's just time consuming. It's like a jigsaw puzzle... they're easy regardless of the number of pieces in them, because the overall process doesn't vary regardless of size.
Compilers are jigsaw puzzles. All that extra complexity you ascribe to them is based solely on looking at the size of it and going "zomfg! Where do I start?"... which is probably why I got downmodded. Nobody understands that just because something is _big_ does not mean it is _complex_.
Perhaps it should be banged on a bit before worrying about 4.9.x as it takes a while before everyone starts using the bleeding edge gcc.
Why? Compilers are pretty simple; Difficult for a lot of people to conceptualize, yes, but for those who can make that leap of understanding, not terribly difficult to design. What reason do you have to suspect instability in the 4.9 branch?
His point is that the NSA has justified all of the institutionalized violations of privacy because it somehow prevents terrorism (and for while, they were claiming they've stopped over 50 acts of terrorism when it turns out it was actually only two . . . and maybe not even that), yet with all of this surveillance and violation of people's rights, they weren't even able to stop an angry teenage boy with a pressure cooker.
Yes, and he's wrong; a simple application of common sense would reveal the flaw in his argument: Police can't prevent crime, and yet nobody would imagine a society without them. The police, like the NSA act as a deterrent against would-be terrorists.
You keep saying they weren't "tasked with this case", which has fuck all to do with anything. The FBI was tasked with hunting the kid down (and it took the shutdown of an entire city and yanking people out of their homes at rifle-point for several days to hunt down the teenager). The NSA and all of its nefarious sister organizations were tasked with preventing attacks. You know, the thing they keep using to justify their disregard for the Constitution. And, yet, they were not aware of this pending "act of terrorism".
The NSA doesn't handle domestic terrorism, the FBI does. The NSA simply fulfills requests made by the various agencies it reports to, including the FBI. The FBI never asked the NSA for information on this person or engaged any NSA resources. This has been documented repeatedly; The entire investigation from start to finish was handled by a joint task force with DHS and the FBI.
But go ahead and reply with "but the NSA wasn't tasked with this case" for the sixth time.
It's not my fault that the two of you are so dense you create your own event horizon from which a clue cannot escape. I will continue to repeat the same point until the two of you either drop off and die of old age or get the very simple logic if the situation; No amount of surveillance, etc., can entirely prevent terrorism. It can deter it, and it does deter it. For every guy that makes a pressure cooker bomb, there's fifty more that picked up a newspaper and believe the NSA is watching them masturbate... and so they thought better of it.
But dense fucktards like you only ever want to look at the part of the equation that supports your own tin foil hat worldview, which is the NSA is evil blah blah, watching you masturbate, blah blah, and they represent the end of life as we know it. Cue stock footage of clouds, a patriotic one liner, and a phone number across the bottom to call for more information.
You're the same kind of person that screams at sports teams that they're doing it wrong and think that if they'd just follow YOUR advice, everything would be fine. Except they're professionals who do 40-60 hours of training every week, year round, and you've got your hand in a bag of potato chips. I'm gonna go out on a limb and say the pros are probably better qualified... and likewise... you have no fucking idea what you're talking about. You don't know what would be considered good performance by the NSA. You don't know how the intelligence cycle works, how assets are developed, how the people who use this technology actually use it.
You're just another armchair quarterback who thinks he's got it all figured out, and it just burns you up when someone like me comes along and says everything you're blithering on about is fractally wrong, and dares to suggest that professionals might know something more than the drunk guy posting on the internet.
Taxpayer-funded research should be accessible by taxpayers.
It is, technically. By technically I mean, it was published once, in a 'free' publication, sent to a few libraries, and thus the public access requirement was met. But since you'll never find it there because it isn't indexed, searchable, or in any way known... it's effectively useless. See, once again our shitty co(r)p-y(a)-right system fucks us; They make it so if you assemble a collection of works together into a database, that now counts as a unique and copyrightable work unto itself. So... although the study is 'free' to the public... the "doesn't have to drive 500 miles to a library in the boon docks and find it on a shelf" convenience is what they charge for access.
What we need is a 'google' of science/medical studies. Unfortunately our government's archaic and purposefully not updated methods of publication mean that if you want to get a digital copy... you have to contribute the labor to re-digitalization. Of course, you can get a digital copy... for a small additional processing fee. -_-
That's a strawman. Neither I, not the GGGP said that the NSA was tasked with catching the Boston bombers. There is no point arguing this further with you since you clearly have a problem with your reading or comprehension skills.
The NSA was never assigned to the boston bomber case. They were never asked to help on it. Therefore, mentioning the Boston Bomber case in reference to the competence or abilities of the NSA is stupid... and you clearly have a problem with your brain being missing.
This is a stupid argument and you're a stupid person for making it.
Small correction; it's not just stupid. It's entirely an ad hominid argument. It's basically "Dave flunked math five times... and now, let's hear what Dave has to say about math!"... it's classic ad hominid.
here's a recent news story where, for the first time, the DOJ is informing a defendant that they used NSA/warrant-less surveillance to gather evidence. They used mass surveillance to get enough probable cause to apply for a real warrant which resulted in evidence of a crime.
This is a far from settled issue, with even the Supreme Court waffling on it, allowing it in some cases and denying it in others. And no, it's not the first time. They were doing warrantless surveillance in the 1960s to deal with vietnam war protesters. Why is it that every generation somehow thinks when it happens to them, it's the first time, and it's never happened before?
The important bit of the previous is that the DOJ was conflicted about revealing this information.
Wait, you mean a bunch of lawyers got together in a room and they disagreed with each other? STOP THE PRESSES! Of course they were conflicted... they're paid to play devil's advocate sometimes!
Back up the strawman train there. The GP was pointing out that the information gathered by the NSA failed to prevent the Boston bomber
Strawman? That word... I do not think it means what you think it means. A government agency that wasn't tasked to assist with the case didn't come up with anything. In other news, the Army Corp of Engineers failed to find him too. Shame on them.
Show me where the NSA was assigned the job of catching them, and then maybe you got something. How ever you got a +5 with such a glaring inconsistency is beyond me.
In reality, what it does is undermine democracy.
So let me get this straight... the NSA is secretly changing your votes to put a puppet president in place? Or... they're arresting people in secret and deporting them to foreign countries? Nope. Umm... infringing your right to bear arms? No. Fifth amendment? Nope.
Dude, democracy isn't being undermined because the NSA turned on a packet sniffer somewhere. This is like saying Obamacare is the "worst legislation ever", and forgetting that bit about Japanese internment camps during WWII, Jim Crow laws, and... well the list goes on. Take off the tin foil hat and go forth into the sunlight, my basement-dwelling armchair revolutionary. Is the NSA there to stop you from protesting? Nope. The NSA gathers information. That's it. That's all. Maybe they gather too much... but all you can say about them is they invade people's privacy... a right nowhere guaranteed by the Constitution. That's a terribly inconvenient fact, and I urge you to use the as-yet uninfringed by the NSA rights to go out and change that, if you feel so strongly about it.
This kind of logic is like blaming the dash cam in the police car for beating someone up. "Yes, your honor... that camera beat the everloving shit out of me."... Guh. Fail.
What would Herbert Hoover would have given to have the information that the NSA has?
*facepalm* The NSA was around during the Hoover days. The government just denied its existance until relatively recently.
Something big and mysterious is rising from a floating barge at the end of Treasure Island, a former Navy base in the middle of San Francisco Bay. And Google's fingerprints are all over it,'
It's hardly a secret guys. They were granted a patent on sea-based data centers... in 2009. They want to build a sea-water based data center, and given the mild seasons of California and abundance of internet peering points, this is the logical place to start.
The thing is, sea water isn't exactly computer-friendly... so they probably aren't going to get it on the first go. But the water a hundred feet down in the ocean is actually pretty cool. This makes sense... it all comes down to materials selection. Salt water is highly corrosive and they'll need something that can handle hoovering up large jelly fish and such without dying.
All in all, an interesting, and definately not very secret, project.
Considering the number of things the NSA has completely missed (e.g. Boston bomber, Snowden, Bengazi, etc.) I'm beginning to wonder if
Back up the fail train there. The NSA wasn't tasked to find the Boston bomber, the FBI was. And they did. Bengazi is a figment of the tea party's over-active imagination -- there's no evidence that anything other than poor judgement and incompetence at a local level occurred. And Snowden... well, that's the only thing you mentioned that has any weight. The NSA management was warned about him long before "the incident" by Homeland Security. They ignored that warning. The case can be made this was a mistake -- but it seems from the after action reports online they're addressing their structural/organizational deficits that allowed it to happen post-incident. The fact is, there's always a risk of a defector, no matter how good your agency is. Every major intelligence agency from every major government in the world has had it happen. This is not a statement on the overall competence of the NSA as an intelligence organization.
What if this is much like a Banana Republic, were the government puffs up it's chest and parades around a bunch of military men and equipment to try to scare it's citizens into line. But actually they are totally outnumbered by the citizenry, have very little real power, and they know it.
That's pretty much the working definition of law enforcement everywhere, man. There's only 1 police officer for every, what, 10,000 citizens? It's a practical impossibility for the NSA to do all the things the tin foil hat brigade claims they're doing -- monitoring everyone's cell phones, everyone's e-mail, the entire internet... and just to keep things interesting, doing all that while cracking foreign powers' high level cryptography and military communications systems. To do everything they claim they're doing, even assuming their technology is twenty years more advanced than the civilian sector equivalents, would imply multi-trillion dollar budgets per year to sustain and a workforce vastly higher than the numbers available suggest.
Sure, they might be collecting a lot of data, but storage and analysis may be such a monumental task that they can really only figure out things in retrospect, which really doesn't give them much advantage over classic investigation techniques. But hey, some tech companies are probably getting rich over this.
The data collection is a massive operation because the data being sent only has data retrospectively; When they identify a potential suspect for development, based on those "classic investigation techniques", without that infrastructure they're starting at day zero. But if everything is logged, they can proceed immediately with looking into his/her background and recent communications. In the intelligence world, there are three things that give an asset value; Timeliness, accuracy, and analytical support. It does you no good to find the terrorist after the bomb has gone off, it does you no good to identify the wrong person, and it does you no good to have all the information that could have met the first two criterion if nobody analyzes it and suggests a course of action (arrest, drone strike, whatever).
Once you understand that the analytical side of the intelligence cycle is the real bottleneck here, you quickly realize that the NSA can't possibly care about your marijuana stash, or even the warrant for your arrest. To develop leads and maintain a solid intelligence cycle, they can only focus on a tiny fraction of the data they're pulling in... so unless you're a.01%'er in the world of terrorism, counter-intelligence, spying, or foreign military... forget it. They don't care.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, this statement really points that you aren't involved in information security (at least in a serious capacity anyway).
And we're off to a brilliant start here with a classic ad hominid abuse fallacy. Or as it's known in IT circles... The Handwave. Not that it matters, but I worked for a fortune 50 company in systems administration; My job role included maintenance of workstations and ATMs at over 3,700 retail locations throughout North America. But again; you're attacking the messenger, not the message. Not cool.
Do you really guarantee you can hide from Anonymous or even script kiddies 100% of the time if they really want you?
Number two burning up the charts is a Nirvana fallacy. Brilliant. No, nobody can guarantee 100%. But I can be pretty confident of 99.997%, yes. And you do recall that the "script kiddies" and "Anonymous" (an aggregate group of script kiddies) have about .01% of the funding of the NSA, right? Yes, they regularly make headlines breaking into computers, but the odds of them breaking into any specific computer is quite low. Unlike the NSA, which has cultivated the ability to point at something and say "I want it. Make it mine." You're comparing the mongolian hordes to the Knights Templar here, buddy.
If you answer yes, then again we know you aren't involved in information security. So since the answer is no, what is your solution? Do you simply throw your hands in the air and say screw it? I cannot guarantee to stop them anyway, so lets just toss our firewall and anti-virus in the trash?
Up next, we've got ourselves a false dilemma, with a bonus -- another ad hominim. This harkens back to high school where you'd say "If you don't answer, you're gay!"
Heck even your sarcastic comment about a physically secured facility, in a faraday cage, with no internet access cannot promise the information will be secure.
That wasn't sarcasm. That's how the professionals protect highly classified, compartmentalized information. Perhaps you misunderstand what "physically secured facility" means. These are places like military bases; They have men with shotguns, lots of cameras, a perimeter, barbed wire, high explosives, and thick concrete walls.
A simple warrant, guys with guns, breaking down your door and taking the server easily gets around that.
This time, a less obvious one: the single cause fallacy, otherwise known as oversimplification.
Please show me the "easy" plan you have for bypassing all of the layers of security at a typical military base, in order to access the server in the middle of it that contains the secure data, and to either do it so quickly that nobody has time to push the self-destruct button, or so quietly nobody thinks to.
I'm sorry for you (really more for your clients) if you don't want to hear about this, but it isn't going anywhere.
I feel sorry for you too, because you spent a couple kilowords demolishing an argument that wasn't made to begin with. Your entire post is a giant strawman, and a poorly executed one at that. I didn't say to give up on information security; I said that a guy on a shoestring budget is no match for them. Somewhere in your brain, a process caught a signal 11, trapped it incorrectly, and you vomited out a four page error message onto Slashdot.
You're trying to convince a lot of IT professionals, who know damn well that its technically possible to secure communications end to end, that they are powerless to do what they know they can do.
No, I'm merely suggesting that locking those IT professionals in a room and beating them with a metal pipe, is an effective method of "unsecuring" those communications. It's only in the imagination of Anonymous Cowards and hollywood screen-writers that the police kick in the door, seize the computer, and then say "Oh shit! He's using a 8192 bit encryption key. We'll never recover the data! I guess we better just leave then, defeated."
It's just short notice, we thought we lived in a system of rules that protected our privacy, we thought TLS worked and so on, stupidly thinking there were warrants and judicial courts and so on. Silly us! No matter, it's a bug. We need to switch to end to end encryption to fix it.
The people who designed these systems, those venerated IT professionals you mentioned earlier? Yeah, they knew from day one that TLS, SSL, certificate authorities, etc., were not truly secure. They were a compromise that provided "reasonable" security -- and it still does do that. Millions of internet-based financial transactions are secured using SSL, TLS, etc., every day and are not compromised. Is it a perfect solution? Of course not. Is it a decent one? Sortof.
But fundamentally, you're asking for the impossible with your "end to end" encryption non-sense. The very first in a long list of problems is: How do you securely exchange keys with an entity you have no prior relationship with? How does Alice know she's talking to Bob, if she has never met Bob before? The solution that TLS/SSL used was certificate authorities; A trusted third party that both Bob and Alice trust. Unfortunately, like any trust model, it is only as strong as the weakest link, and as certificate authorities proliferated... rogue CAs and stolen keys became a very real threat.
But simply switching the protocols around won't solve the very first problem: How do you securely exchange keys over what is, inherently, an insecure medium? You can't.
Well I bow to your superior knowledge and will immediately stop writing this Thunderbird OTR add on and step away from my keyboard.
First, yes, I do have superior knowledge (obviously). And I'm willing to put my reputation on the line by not posting anonymously. This frequently comes back to bite me in the ass, especially when dealing with Anonymous Cowards, but karma is not as important to me as getting as accurate of information as possible in front of as many eyeballs as possible. If a few -1, Troll mods is the price I pay, I do so gladly. Second, Thunderbird has an OpenPGP addon... developing another addon is silly, and frankly, you and I both know you lack the chops to actually program.
But regardless, if I'm going to get serious about personal privacy, I'm not going to do it by sitting down to write my own crypto addon. For one, it would almost certainly be more buggy than the ones that have been reviewed and certified as correctly implimented by crytologists... and crypto is amazingly easy to get wrong, and devilishly difficult for someone without loads of experience to detect the failure. For two... why would I spend hundreds of hours doing that, when I can spend dozens of hours making phone calls and writing letters to the people who have far, far more power than I do, and convince others to do the same?
I'm sorry, but looking at my large list of tools available to me, the one labelled "Democracy" seems far more likely to get me what I want than one labelled "Amateur Crypto".
So why *does* the NSA do that?
Because it's easier to store all the data now, and only access and analyze it when traditional investigative techniques identify a potential threat. It also eliminates the time wasted once a potential threat is identified going back and trying to reconstruct/recover/access data from many different sources. In other words, it saves time and resources; A counter-intuitive conclusion, given that most people look only at the costs and implications of gathering and storing all that data, but not very much on what happens after.
Nah, just arrest every hacker you find and don't give hackers 0 day exploits and you'll fix a lot of problems.
I'd prefer a world where people were only arrested when they've actually committed a crime, or there's strong evidence that they intend to. Mere capability is not sufficient to justify an arrest. At best, a knock on the door and "Can we come in and ask a few questions?" At best.
Don't you think we shouldn't *have* to ask? It's written into the constitution and the EU privacy right.
Actually, it isn't. There is no right to privacy in the US Constitution. And as far as the EU; They are a sovereign foreign power. The NSA has not just the mandate, but an obligation, to monitor foreign threats; Allies can become enemies, and when surveillance is pervasive and shared, it keeps everyone a bit more honest. And when it comes to international politics... dishonesty and rhetoric are pretty much the order of the day for everyone, allies or enemies.
What do we need to do to get the NSA to read the constitution, send it in an encrypted email to our kids?
There was an article not very long ago about a book published by someone who spent a considerable period of time investigating the culture of the NSA. His takeaway was that they do respect the Constitution. They also want to ensure as few Americans as possible become a part of some terrorist's political statement. Balancing these two goals is not so easy or cut and dry as internet pundits say.
"There are no high tech solutions to this that are within your budget, ok? Just... deal with it already guys."
Hah! you wish.
Actually, I do. I am not overly concerned with the NSA reading my e-mail or even keeping a file on me. It will not adversely impact my life in any meaningful way. As long as it continues to not affect me, surveil away. I am far, far more concerned with commercial interests accessing and misusing my data; There is little legal recourse to such activities, and it is readily apparent to me that no matter how unethical people claim the NSA to be, corporations are several orders of magnitude worse in almost every measure.
But unlike the NSA, I believe we can, with the budget and resources available to the average person, mount effective defenses against those corporations. And I would rather people start taking the threat corporations pose seriously, instead of pointing to the NSA like (a) they're the biggest problem and/or (b) we can honestly hope to accomplish anything against them.
Ultimately, it's a question of practicality. I simply don't believe that I can defend against an organization with half a trillion dollars in assets and an operating budget bigger than that of the majority of the countries on the planet. But by happy coincidence, I do not feel they are a threat to me in any meaningful way.
During the sneakernet era you had computing ability, but if they wanted your data they'd have to get a warrant or ransack your office illegally.
Neither of which you'd necessarily be informed of. There's two ways to approach security; tamper-evident, and tamper-resistant. Everyone is focusing on tamper-resistant right now to deal with the NSA; "How do we stop them?" ... Have you noticed nobody is asking the question; How do we detect them? Sneakernet also had the benefit of being tamper-evident... if they broke down your door, you'd come home to a broken door. It'd be pretty obvious that something was up. Legal or illegal, when you physically search a property, you leave evidence behind that you did so. However, much of the technology the NSA is using doesn't leave any proverbial fingerprints behind.
The problem is the echo chaimber it creates. If you only get news your friends share, where do you get alternative viewpoints?
This begs the question of why someone would want to get alternative viewpoints. Most people don't want to be regularly exposed to ideas, beliefs, culture, etc., that conflicts with their own. It creates anxiety, anger, and/or dissociation. The begged question, by the way, is also a rhetorical question. But it doesn't change human nature, and we are talking about Facebook here.
The "social network" is not simply a conduit for human virtues -- it is equally a conduit for human failures. And let's be honest with ourselves -- critical thinking is hard work. Even (perhaps especially) amongst the highly literate and/or intelligent, who are practiced at overcoming their own biases to keep an open mind, must still be deliberate and cautious.
On that note, for those who so desire to find alternative viewpoints social networks provide plenty of opportunity. Many of my friends and I debate on Facebook, each playing devil's advocate to the other in a semi-public venue. I have also found, painfully, that if one wishes to test how tolerant their friends truly are... post something unpopular and defend it. The results are both illuminating, and occasionally warrant making popcorn to witness the explosively violent ways in which people react to opposing views.
In other words.... Where can I purchase a car with all the amenities of the high end Rolls-Royce, for the price of a Civic?
You steal the Rolls-Royce. Hundreds of millions of computers right now are part of one kind of botnet or another because botnets offer everything the poster is looking for. There are websites out there where you can purchase the resources of the botnet for cheap; Just gotta know where to look. As a bonus, they also offer a degree of anonymity and resistance to the kind of tracking the author is apparently worried about. If you want to be resistant to a search and seizure by a government, I can think of few things better than a massively decentralized, worldwide network with millions of potential servers to shift your data around within.
So no.. I will not just 'deal with it', that is completely the wrong attitude. We DO NOT have to deal with it, we will not deal with it. It will be stopped, eventually.
Excuse me... I didn't say just roll over and take it. But trying to solve a social problem like this with technology is the very height of stupidity. It's like saying if we take away everyone's guns, we'll solve that pesky violence problem. The gun is just the tool. Just like the internet. Just like a cell phone, a camera, a packet sniffer, a data center... all of these things that the NSA uses are not the problem! It's the people that are the problem, and the people alone.
People problems can only be solved by people. I know that seems like a stupidly obvious thing to say, but it's clear to me that when article after article posted is variations of the question "What technology can I use to stop the NSA from spying on me?" There isn't any! You stop the NSA by getting off your ass and participating in the democratic process. You cannot fix this by keyboard warrioring.
The Japanese government is more honourable than the US one, for one simple reason: It still cares about principal and the rule of law.
Really? The Japanese government has elevated revisionist history to an art form. Many school children have no idea why China has a problem with them, for example, because their textbooks don't include anything that Japan has done wrong. Like, for example, the Nanking Massacre. Which goes back to my original point about their culture: They are really hard up about admitting failure. Remember, it took not one, but two nuclear attacks before the Emperor surrendered.
I could continue with more examples, but I think just one is sufficient to drive home my point; This abstract concept of "honor" you're on about the Japanese having more of is something we could argue back and forth about until the cows come home; It's the perfect shifting goal-post argument.
The US government views the constitution as an obstruction, not an ideal.
Really? The entire government? You can speak authoritatively on the 96 or so million people that work for it and can confirm beyond any doubt that all of them view "the constitution as an obstruction, not an ideal"?
Look at how it has dealt with the threats to it from foreign powers over the decades though. At times antagonistic and prone to posturing, but ultimately true to the principal of self defence and peace.
Really? Fun fact: The Germans killed about 6 million jews, and 20 million Russians. The Japanese have them beat though: They killed at least 23 million chinese during the war, and another seven million from nearby Malasia, Vietnam, Cambodia, etc. Go ahead and explain how that was "true to the principle of self defence and peace". I'll get the popcorn!
Japan could have a world class and extremely powerful military, but refrains from developing one.
No, they're prevented by a treaty they signed as part of the terms of their surrender after we nuked their asses. Twice. That treaty is still in force, but it has expanded to a mutual defense treaty. In exchange for the protection of the United States military, the Japanese have given up the right to have their own army.
It's commendable that they actually care about that bit of paper enough to bother changing it, unlike the US government that just looks for some work-around or tries to keep the violations secret.
The US Constitution has been amended 27 times so far. It was intended to be a living document; and the precise meaning and application of a document which is over two hundred years old is one of the major functions of the Supreme Court. And don't think for a New York second that other countries don't have their own secret courts. Secret courts are a part of every major government's history.
The other major difference is that the Japanese government does not use the very real threat from its neighbours to terrorize its population.
Really? Because just today the Japanese PM stepped up the rhetoric, telling citizens that China is a major threat and they should be vigilant against it. They have also recently approved a treaty of shooting down any drones that enter its airspace... and recently civil defense forces were called to clear out citizens threatening to turn violent amidst rising chinese-japanese tensions regarding ownership of some of the Senkaku Islands.
...making data siphoning easy for the NSA.
I have gotten incredibly sick of the tin foil hat brigade putting the NSA into every one of their conspiracy theories, and equally tired of the idiot replacement editors from Dice rubber-stamping submissions like this that even most bloggers wouldn't post. You wanna talk about hosting providers? Okay, let's talk. Obviously you are concerned about your data being intercepted and stolen.
Do you guys honestly think, for one second, that you can hide from these guys if they really want you? Any of you? This is the largest, most powerful government on the planet, with resources you could only dream of. Even businesses the size of Google can't keep them out; And if you believe any press releases to the contrary, you're an idiot.
The only way you're keeping your data safe is in a physically secured facility, with the computer locked in a faraday cage and with no access to the internet. Just about anything else and the data will be vulnerable at some point to a legal intercept of it. You can manage those risks, limit them, but ultimately, if they want it they're gonna get it.
So please guys, stop asking for NSA-proof [insert thing here]. There are only two defenses when your opponent has a half trillion dollar budget and you got twenty bucks and a cracker; Anonymity (ie, don't get on the radar), or don't do anything that would be interesting to them... or if you must, for the love of fuck, minimize your electronic footprint. Forget the credit card, the cell phone, the wifi-enabled anything. Go off grid, stand in the woods in the middle of nowhere, and then do whatever it is you're keen on doing without the government being aware of it.
There are no high tech solutions to this that are within your budget, ok? Just... deal with it already guys.
no, this is not the photoelectric effect. the "bandgap" is range of energy levels where no electron exists. Thisproperty separates insulators, semiconductors and conductors. They are altering the bandgap with polarization of light
Sounds like it's the same phenomenon to me. You're confusing a property with an effect.
That's not "premature optimization", that's unsafe, bug-producing optimization, which is definitely wrong, but, again, is just not what Knuth was talking about in that statement. "Premature" in this context means "before you've profiled your code", not "before you're sure it's safe to add to your compiler".
I know I'm going to just continue burning mod points from the sole asshole moderator reading these comments and downmodding me because he's too much of a coward to participate in the discussion... but whatever.
For any non-trivial optimization you're changing the behavior of the code. This is what I believe Knuth was trying to get at; Don't optimize your code until you have a case where the code is performing poorly -- in this case, the compiled product. What you're suggesting is blind optimization and it's dangerous. The GCC people do it right: They don't optimize until you can provide a test case showing how the compiler generates suboptimal code, and then they rigorously test the new optimization to confirm it still results in behavior that matches expectation. This is the Right Way to do it, and what I think Knuth was referring to -- don't optimize until you have a case where it's shown it's needed, ie. don't anticipate.
I am a bit confused by what you said. An incident photon at wavelength (Lamda) or smaller will eject an electron ( photo electric) and thermal excitation of a material like the cathode of a tube will also eject electrons. I am not getting where the charged particle comes in. From TFA:
Uhh, this isn't about what was said in the TFA. My statement applies to the photoelectric effect. The underlying math behind the statement is available. Wavelength is directly coupled with the specific energy of a photon -- shorter wavelengths mean higher specific energy. Once enough specific energy is present, an electron will strike the material, and a photon will be emitted, or vice versa. Below the threshold, and no particle will be emitted.
What the article is dicussing is about what happens below that threshold. This behavior is a consequence of the photoelectric effect -- it deals with how a given material deals with the absorption of energy, instead of the conversion of it.
And that Knuth quote applies to users prematurely optimizing their specific source code before seeing where the time actually is; compiler people have to figure out how to optimize all code in the world with the same compiler. It just doesn't apply to that situation.
It applies more strongly in that situation than in any other situation. Go back and read the patch notes in GCC and you will find plenty of examples where over-zealous optimization led to unexpected behavior and failure. There are even a few notes for options regarding optimization in the man pages that say "You probably don't want to do this. It'll break your program if it does x or y, and the compiler can't tell if you're doing x, or y. Only enable if you are sure it doesn't do these things."
I'm glad Japan still seems to have some honour left.
It never ceases to amaze me how often people ascribe general characteristics like honor, integrity, etc., to governments, on the basis of singular examples. The Japanese government, in this very specific case, did what you consider to be the right thing. But to ascribe their entire government, as a complete entity, as having honor on this basis, is premature and unwarranted.
Look at how the Japanese government handled the Fukoshima disaster; or rather, didn't. A great many would not consider it honorable to keep citizens in a hot zone for well after it was apparent there were serious safety concerns, simply and largely out of a desire to save face. This is a glitch of Japanese culture; They are downright Russian in their inability to acknowledge a mistake when it happens. It's hardly the only time this less than endearing quality of Japanese culture has reared its ugly head either -- the internet is littered with examples of how situations were made needlessly worse because of it.
Every government. Every. Government. will at times act in act in accordance with your individual beliefs regarding fundamental human virtues... and at other times will not. This is because governments are collections of people and organizations that are often in opposition to one another, and in a dance with so many steps and so many partners, you simply cannot judge the whole as you would an individual. Governments cannot be judged on their individual actions -- at the micro scale, it is simply too chaotic and random. We can only begin to understand whether a government adheres to a given virtue by looking at the aggregate sum of their actions and the actual (not intended or stated) result.
Because of this, I would not say the Japanese government is either less, or more, honorable because of its refusal to allow the NSA to tap Asia's internet. As an aggregate entity, I would say that the Japanese government would like greater cooperation with the United States in the areas of defense and economics, but places a great deal of value on its cultural identity and independence from all sovereign powers, the US included. Cooperation in this particular case would have enabled a high level of industrial espionage and the Japanese culture views business as being nearly a literal equivalent to war; They take industrial espionage very, very seriously. To cooperate with the NSA in this regard would have serious reprecussions with the business leaders within Japan.
To say that this behavior though is 'honorable' is a stretch. They are protecting their own interests. It has nothing to do with the Japanese constitution, but rather how they do business. In a very real sense, the NSA is a business competitor.
We've known about this since the turn of the last century. It's the photoelectric effect. Every material has a wavelength where if it is struck by a charged particle at or above that, it will absorb it and then emit an electron. This isn't news.
What's news is that we've now reached a sufficient level of understanding regarding the engineering of electro-optical systems that we are starting to build devices where the primary logic is based on optics, not electronics. This is an advancement of technology, not of understanding.
A lot of generalized software are simple in theory. Until you factor in real world designs, like optimization, handling multiple platforms and architectures, maintainability, stability . . . .
"We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil." -- Knuth
Now, I'll say it again: Making something like GCC is simple. It's just time consuming. It's like a jigsaw puzzle... they're easy regardless of the number of pieces in them, because the overall process doesn't vary regardless of size.
Compilers are jigsaw puzzles. All that extra complexity you ascribe to them is based solely on looking at the size of it and going "zomfg! Where do I start?" ... which is probably why I got downmodded. Nobody understands that just because something is _big_ does not mean it is _complex_.
Perhaps it should be banged on a bit before worrying about 4.9.x as it takes a while before everyone starts using the bleeding edge gcc.
Why? Compilers are pretty simple; Difficult for a lot of people to conceptualize, yes, but for those who can make that leap of understanding, not terribly difficult to design. What reason do you have to suspect instability in the 4.9 branch?
His point is that the NSA has justified all of the institutionalized violations of privacy because it somehow prevents terrorism (and for while, they were claiming they've stopped over 50 acts of terrorism when it turns out it was actually only two . . . and maybe not even that), yet with all of this surveillance and violation of people's rights, they weren't even able to stop an angry teenage boy with a pressure cooker.
Yes, and he's wrong; a simple application of common sense would reveal the flaw in his argument: Police can't prevent crime, and yet nobody would imagine a society without them. The police, like the NSA act as a deterrent against would-be terrorists.
You keep saying they weren't "tasked with this case", which has fuck all to do with anything. The FBI was tasked with hunting the kid down (and it took the shutdown of an entire city and yanking people out of their homes at rifle-point for several days to hunt down the teenager). The NSA and all of its nefarious sister organizations were tasked with preventing attacks. You know, the thing they keep using to justify their disregard for the Constitution. And, yet, they were not aware of this pending "act of terrorism".
The NSA doesn't handle domestic terrorism, the FBI does. The NSA simply fulfills requests made by the various agencies it reports to, including the FBI. The FBI never asked the NSA for information on this person or engaged any NSA resources. This has been documented repeatedly; The entire investigation from start to finish was handled by a joint task force with DHS and the FBI.
But go ahead and reply with "but the NSA wasn't tasked with this case" for the sixth time.
It's not my fault that the two of you are so dense you create your own event horizon from which a clue cannot escape. I will continue to repeat the same point until the two of you either drop off and die of old age or get the very simple logic if the situation; No amount of surveillance, etc., can entirely prevent terrorism. It can deter it, and it does deter it. For every guy that makes a pressure cooker bomb, there's fifty more that picked up a newspaper and believe the NSA is watching them masturbate... and so they thought better of it.
But dense fucktards like you only ever want to look at the part of the equation that supports your own tin foil hat worldview, which is the NSA is evil blah blah, watching you masturbate, blah blah, and they represent the end of life as we know it. Cue stock footage of clouds, a patriotic one liner, and a phone number across the bottom to call for more information.
You're the same kind of person that screams at sports teams that they're doing it wrong and think that if they'd just follow YOUR advice, everything would be fine. Except they're professionals who do 40-60 hours of training every week, year round, and you've got your hand in a bag of potato chips. I'm gonna go out on a limb and say the pros are probably better qualified... and likewise... you have no fucking idea what you're talking about. You don't know what would be considered good performance by the NSA. You don't know how the intelligence cycle works, how assets are developed, how the people who use this technology actually use it.
You're just another armchair quarterback who thinks he's got it all figured out, and it just burns you up when someone like me comes along and says everything you're blithering on about is fractally wrong, and dares to suggest that professionals might know something more than the drunk guy posting on the internet.
Taxpayer-funded research should be accessible by taxpayers.
It is, technically. By technically I mean, it was published once, in a 'free' publication, sent to a few libraries, and thus the public access requirement was met. But since you'll never find it there because it isn't indexed, searchable, or in any way known... it's effectively useless. See, once again our shitty co(r)p-y(a)-right system fucks us; They make it so if you assemble a collection of works together into a database, that now counts as a unique and copyrightable work unto itself. So... although the study is 'free' to the public... the "doesn't have to drive 500 miles to a library in the boon docks and find it on a shelf" convenience is what they charge for access.
What we need is a 'google' of science/medical studies. Unfortunately our government's archaic and purposefully not updated methods of publication mean that if you want to get a digital copy... you have to contribute the labor to re-digitalization. Of course, you can get a digital copy... for a small additional processing fee. -_-
That's a strawman. Neither I, not the GGGP said that the NSA was tasked with catching the Boston bombers. There is no point arguing this further with you since you clearly have a problem with your reading or comprehension skills.
The NSA was never assigned to the boston bomber case. They were never asked to help on it. Therefore, mentioning the Boston Bomber case in reference to the competence or abilities of the NSA is stupid... and you clearly have a problem with your brain being missing.
This is a stupid argument and you're a stupid person for making it.
Small correction; it's not just stupid. It's entirely an ad hominid argument. It's basically "Dave flunked math five times... and now, let's hear what Dave has to say about math!" ... it's classic ad hominid.
here's a recent news story where, for the first time, the DOJ is informing a defendant that they used NSA/warrant-less surveillance to gather evidence. They used mass surveillance to get enough probable cause to apply for a real warrant which resulted in evidence of a crime.
This is a far from settled issue, with even the Supreme Court waffling on it, allowing it in some cases and denying it in others. And no, it's not the first time. They were doing warrantless surveillance in the 1960s to deal with vietnam war protesters. Why is it that every generation somehow thinks when it happens to them, it's the first time, and it's never happened before?
The important bit of the previous is that the DOJ was conflicted about revealing this information.
Wait, you mean a bunch of lawyers got together in a room and they disagreed with each other? STOP THE PRESSES! Of course they were conflicted... they're paid to play devil's advocate sometimes!
Sock puppet, begone!
Tin foil hat, remove!
Back up the strawman train there. The GP was pointing out that the information gathered by the NSA failed to prevent the Boston bomber
Strawman? That word... I do not think it means what you think it means. A government agency that wasn't tasked to assist with the case didn't come up with anything. In other news, the Army Corp of Engineers failed to find him too. Shame on them.
Show me where the NSA was assigned the job of catching them, and then maybe you got something. How ever you got a +5 with such a glaring inconsistency is beyond me.
In reality, what it does is undermine democracy.
So let me get this straight... the NSA is secretly changing your votes to put a puppet president in place? Or... they're arresting people in secret and deporting them to foreign countries? Nope. Umm... infringing your right to bear arms? No. Fifth amendment? Nope.
Dude, democracy isn't being undermined because the NSA turned on a packet sniffer somewhere. This is like saying Obamacare is the "worst legislation ever", and forgetting that bit about Japanese internment camps during WWII, Jim Crow laws, and ... well the list goes on. Take off the tin foil hat and go forth into the sunlight, my basement-dwelling armchair revolutionary. Is the NSA there to stop you from protesting? Nope. The NSA gathers information. That's it. That's all. Maybe they gather too much... but all you can say about them is they invade people's privacy... a right nowhere guaranteed by the Constitution. That's a terribly inconvenient fact, and I urge you to use the as-yet uninfringed by the NSA rights to go out and change that, if you feel so strongly about it.
This kind of logic is like blaming the dash cam in the police car for beating someone up. "Yes, your honor... that camera beat the everloving shit out of me." ... Guh. Fail.
What would Herbert Hoover would have given to have the information that the NSA has?
*facepalm* The NSA was around during the Hoover days. The government just denied its existance until relatively recently.
Something big and mysterious is rising from a floating barge at the end of Treasure Island, a former Navy base in the middle of San Francisco Bay. And Google's fingerprints are all over it,'
It's hardly a secret guys. They were granted a patent on sea-based data centers... in 2009. They want to build a sea-water based data center, and given the mild seasons of California and abundance of internet peering points, this is the logical place to start.
The thing is, sea water isn't exactly computer-friendly... so they probably aren't going to get it on the first go. But the water a hundred feet down in the ocean is actually pretty cool. This makes sense... it all comes down to materials selection. Salt water is highly corrosive and they'll need something that can handle hoovering up large jelly fish and such without dying.
All in all, an interesting, and definately not very secret, project.
Considering the number of things the NSA has completely missed (e.g. Boston bomber, Snowden, Bengazi, etc.) I'm beginning to wonder if
Back up the fail train there. The NSA wasn't tasked to find the Boston bomber, the FBI was. And they did. Bengazi is a figment of the tea party's over-active imagination -- there's no evidence that anything other than poor judgement and incompetence at a local level occurred. And Snowden... well, that's the only thing you mentioned that has any weight. The NSA management was warned about him long before "the incident" by Homeland Security. They ignored that warning. The case can be made this was a mistake -- but it seems from the after action reports online they're addressing their structural/organizational deficits that allowed it to happen post-incident. The fact is, there's always a risk of a defector, no matter how good your agency is. Every major intelligence agency from every major government in the world has had it happen. This is not a statement on the overall competence of the NSA as an intelligence organization.
What if this is much like a Banana Republic, were the government puffs up it's chest and parades around a bunch of military men and equipment to try to scare it's citizens into line. But actually they are totally outnumbered by the citizenry, have very little real power, and they know it.
That's pretty much the working definition of law enforcement everywhere, man. There's only 1 police officer for every, what, 10,000 citizens? It's a practical impossibility for the NSA to do all the things the tin foil hat brigade claims they're doing -- monitoring everyone's cell phones, everyone's e-mail, the entire internet... and just to keep things interesting, doing all that while cracking foreign powers' high level cryptography and military communications systems. To do everything they claim they're doing, even assuming their technology is twenty years more advanced than the civilian sector equivalents, would imply multi-trillion dollar budgets per year to sustain and a workforce vastly higher than the numbers available suggest.
Sure, they might be collecting a lot of data, but storage and analysis may be such a monumental task that they can really only figure out things in retrospect, which really doesn't give them much advantage over classic investigation techniques. But hey, some tech companies are probably getting rich over this.
The data collection is a massive operation because the data being sent only has data retrospectively; When they identify a potential suspect for development, based on those "classic investigation techniques", without that infrastructure they're starting at day zero. But if everything is logged, they can proceed immediately with looking into his/her background and recent communications. In the intelligence world, there are three things that give an asset value; Timeliness, accuracy, and analytical support. It does you no good to find the terrorist after the bomb has gone off, it does you no good to identify the wrong person, and it does you no good to have all the information that could have met the first two criterion if nobody analyzes it and suggests a course of action (arrest, drone strike, whatever).
Once you understand that the analytical side of the intelligence cycle is the real bottleneck here, you quickly realize that the NSA can't possibly care about your marijuana stash, or even the warrant for your arrest. To develop leads and maintain a solid intelligence cycle, they can only focus on a tiny fraction of the data they're pulling in... so unless you're a .01%'er in the world of terrorism, counter-intelligence, spying, or foreign military... forget it. They don't care.