Probably just that this is a friggen PROTOTYPE (FTS), indicating that they WILL build a deadly version of this. Shit, who the fuck doesn't understand how "progress" works?
I'm pretty sure our first ICBM prototype wasn't a water-pump model with a warhead on the top of it. The mature versions of this technology are typically ship- or airplane-mounted, and require huge amounts of energy. Simply put, there won't be a personal-use version of this technology until a revolution in battery technology happens. The energy densities are several orders of magnitude too low right now.
Bottom line here is it's a nice science project for bored electrical engineers. But that's it. It's the EE's version of your 3rd grade "volcano"... pour in some baking soda, vinegar, and food coloring, and hope you get a passing grade.
Saying that this contributes to the "3-D printed gun/rifle controversy" is a falacy.
*Fallacy. Anyway... it does contribute, just not in the way the author thinks: So far, attempts to produce a reliable 3-D printed gun have resulted in spectacular failure. This one manages to unleash a metal slug at a speed you can literally out run if you're in shape. I can throw a baseball faster than this thing, and it'll cause more damage too. If this is the best 3-D printed "gun/rifles" can do, then I think we can rest easy for awhile. There is no controversy when the best you can produce is a gun that might tickle you...
okay, a.22 averages around 1,120 f/s. 3% of that is 33.6 feet per second. That translates to around 23 MPH. Yes, I can see how this highly dangerous weapon might add to the controversy of 3D printed guns. It is only slightly slower than an olympic sprinter running at full tilt.
...we'd be in so much trouble. It seems like there's a never ending list of surprises from these creatures.
You think you're so special because you have thumbs and built cities and cars and rockets and all that. The dolphins, meanwhile, think they're special... because they didn't have to do any of that.
In other news, US citizens will be punished either by the government for the actions of other citizens, or by other countries' citizens for the actions of the government. However, in no way and at no time, should this reflect that the government is in any way wrong. Meanwhile, police everywhere would like to remind women that if they were raped, it must be because of how they were dressed. "Lady Liberty was asking for it! She was showing leg."
-_- My point is that if the government is concerned that its actions may be inviting wide-spread reprisals, they ought to be asking whether or not those actions have public support. Afterall, isn't this supposed to be a democracy? When most of your citizens are saying "Dude, you fucked up," it might be time to, I don't know... hold a meeting at least?
TL;DR - their lawyer must be having a seizure over the potential liability exposure they seem to be asking for
It's peanuts compared to the marketing potential. Scareware is a booming industry -- look at how much malware we have to scrub off our computers now. The average computer is more likely than not to be infected with some kind of rogue application at this point, and the problem is accelerating.
Now we have ISPs injecting HTML into web pages to scare them into purchasing digital media "legally" and threatening to report them to the police if they do not... we've legitimized this whole ecosystem. The internet has become a place where you are either predator or prey.
Fits in rather nicely with our imperialist views that we can engage in cyberwarfare whenever we want, and then loading aircraft carriers full of automated drones. The corporate-military supraorganization is marrying the idea of greed and profit to abstract murder on the basis of algorithmic determinism. Soon it won't be people killing people, it'll be algorithms killing people. In a world like that, what's a little advertising? What's a little dystopia when there's profit to be had?
History may well remember that the information age was just the prelude to a whole new dark age. And it'll be recorded that we doomed ourselves trying to protect ourselves from pedophiles, murderers, terrorists, and every other boogieman. But... it's not exactly the first time in human history that a sudden leap forward in technology or industry created a power vaccum that led to social collapse. Actually... this would be the first time it hasn't happened, in case it doesn't.:/
Buying more bandwidth is out of the question is too expensive, but dropping a fortune on the hardware to do deep packet inspection is no problem.
That's because the hardware to do that you can stuff in a closet somewhere. The hardware to create more bandwidth on a coaxial network that is continuously being pushed and prodded into doing something it wasn't designed to do -- two-way communication, is considerably more complex to deploy and maintain. To add a server, you just need a port on a wall and some space in a rack. To add another 100 mhz of bandwidth to a coaxial network, you need to rip out every repeater, run down every possible source of signal leakage, and then yank out all the equipment at the head-end... and nevermind that many customers are using their own equipment that may or may not be compatible with the new protocols, equipment, etc.
Now, all that said... Comcast should have been incrementally upgrading this whole time, like any other utility provider. Unfortunately, like every other utility provider, they don't upgrade their infrastructure until there's no other choice. Our power grids are maxed out, our sewers are rotting, our bridges are falling into rivers, our cell phone service is the laughing stock of the first world... and we are paying more and more every year for them. All because short term profit isn't just a mentality... for a publicly-traded company, it's a legal requirement. The problem here is that our method of economic incentives and government regulations about infrastructure/utility services is, achem... broken. Badly.
So it's not technically Comcast's fault... they're just doing what everyone else is doing: Doing anything possible to avoid biting the bullet and investing in infrastructure. So long as the government isn't willing to simply revoke their licenses and tell them to get the fuck out, and start inking non-exclusive contracts for services, and making regulatory demands for regular and timely upgrades... businesses will continue to profit at your expense. But of course, that is how they want it, though we did, by remaining politically inert, allow it to be this way.
What exactly, does proving P = NP have to do with the price of tea in China? We knew when RSA was created that advances in computation power would eventually make it feasible for us to decrypt its contents. We even know what that boundary is.. and we're coming up on it now.
No encryption algorithm is immune to the fact that the faster you can run an algorithm, the sooner you'll get a result. That's all encryption is. I don't need to be a math major to figure out that if I have a car that can go 200 MPH it'll get there twice as fast as a car that can only do 100 MPH.
Your first sentence sounds weird to me, and it isn't supported by your second. AES can't be a suitable replacement for RSA because AES is a secret-key system and RSA is a public-key one.
Sigh. We're discussing an encryption algorithm that is aging and was designed to run under limited computational resources... and now that resources have increased many-fold since the original, it is no longer secure. I then compared it to other encryption schemes that are less resource-constrained which have been coming into wider use. I said nothing about key exchange systems or anything else... I was making a general comment about encryption schemes; Your confusion is because you are drawing your own conclusions, rather than staying on point: Which is that every encryption algorithm, regardless of type or usage-scenario, has a shelf life.
The RSA encryption has been depreciated for years now. Hell, back in 2000 we were saying that DES was insecure, and triple-DES was just a stop-gap. Everyone's been switching to AES for awhile now. This isn't news.
Every encryption scheme has to balance performance and security; And we balance it so that in the next 5, 10, 50, or however many years, advances in technology won't render the data vulnerable in the interim. It's basic engineering. It's like building a safe -- you can't stop it from being broken, but you can make it so that it takes time. Hopefully enough time to get additional resources to the site to stop the thieves. There is no such thing as an uncrackable safe... or an encryption scheme.
The goal is to make sure it takes long enough that by the time they get in, either the men with shotguns have arrived, or whatever it was protecting is now useless to them. If you don't understand this fundamental rule of security, then perhaps this article is newsworthy... but to anyone who works with information security... it's just confirmation of existing methodology.
I think the key phrase there is "superconducting computing", not "super-cooled". If your mom's garage has a custom semiconductor fab working on a non silicon process, you won't have space for the car.
No. It just had some old pentium chips from the days when overclocking was possible because all chips were unlocked... and a big dewer of liquid nitrogen. Of course, you couldn't just pour it on the computer... you had to cool it using isopropyl alcohol and dry ice first... cool it in stages to prevent thermal fracturing. But once you got the whole unit submerged and powered it on, it was effectively supercooled... just like they were doing in the 80s with Cray supercomputers.
You don't need a fab lab to supercool something... you just need a friend at the college science lab to bring you a dewer of liquid nitrogen, and half a brain not to spill it on yourself.
Now, if instead of engaging in this selfdefeating every-man-to-himself canned-goods-and-ammo mentality users would actually stand up for their rights actively, which means, engaging in politics - that could work.
I already contacted my legislator to point out that attacks like this risk having other governments, like those of Iran or China, expose people who are using Tor to be politically active against an oppressive regime. In other words, we're denying those people democracy because we're worried about, ah, what was the justification this week? Pedophiles, I think it was... yes. That seems enough reason to throw tens of thousands who just want freedom under the bus.
'significant technical obstacles prevented exploration of superconducting computing,
Those "significant technical obstacles" haven't prevented people from creating super-cooled computers in their mom's garages. I have to wonder how the NSA missed that one. Especially since two minutes with Google will show you plenty and it's my understanding they've already built several "super computers" to download, store, and analyze the whole internet, all of our phone calls, and blah blah, yeah.
More likely, the obstacles were solved years ago, and now that everyone else has too, they don't have to keep the fact that they're building one classified, so they claim "significant technical obstacles" prevented them before now. -_-
What an amazingly arrogant thing to say. So you read Toynbee, and that makes your opinion better than everyone else's? (More "humbled and enlightened", as you say?) Interesting.
It's amazingly arrogant to suggest that simply because nobody has yet achieved immortality, you will? Interesting.
Further, your assertion that some things are inevitable over time is not a support of your earlier argument, which clearly implied that the United States is in its "inevitable decline". To say that something is inevitable is no proof that it is happening NOW. That is merely your opinion.
You're the kind of person who won't take any amount of evidence as fact. You'll continue to handwave and hem and haw no matter how stacked the facts are against you, because you're one of those hopelessly optimistic types that actually thinks the universe gives a fuck what happens to you.
Correct. I am not wrong, and screaming won't change that.
The Pee Wee Herman defense. Interesting. You're not just arrogant, stupid, and incapable of critical thinking, you're actively hostile to anyone who isn't.
What judge? I read all three links given by OP and I saw no suggestion anywhere that a judge approved the javascript exploit.
That would be the administrative person who signed off on this scheme, typically referred to as a judge. Not that it matters, since I'm sure like most secret courts and administrative oversight bodies, it was rubber stamped. But trust me, somewhere in the chain, there was a judge.
Wow. You believe in absolute determinism too? How really, really depressing. How do you stand it?
In the words of Tyler Durden, "over a long enough time frame, everyone's life expectancy drops to zero." Of course, being the cheerful and optimistic sort, I'm sure you feel you'll live forever. The rest of us, however, read books, and are appropriately humbled and enlightened.
I think if anything is clear, is that we disagree over whether what you are saying represents a "clear view of what is happening".
Yeah; A lack of validation of your cheerful and ignorant worldview probably does seem a bit... unclear.
I'm not confused in the slightest. I simply disagree with you. And I repeat: you have repeatedly demonstrated a gloomy, fatalistic attitude.
Well, you can scream it at the sky if you want, but it won't change how wrong you are. I mean, really... how are you more of an expert on how I feel than me? You aren't just preaching blind optimism, you're arrogant to boot.
Well, I could use them for a faux-brick facade or something. How cheap are those bricks again?
$100 less than my previous offer. But I should warn you these bricks are irregularly sized and incompatible with most types of houses. Attempting to install them could destroy your house, or at the very least make your neighbors laugh at you.
In THIS CASE, if the situation has been described accurately, no, they aren't.
The judge, obviously, disagreed.
The logical extension of this is that there is no law at all, and therefore we are in a state of anarchy. I don't think it has gotten quite that bad. I sympathize with the feeling, though.
Not quite. Civilizations all go through phases; Romans chiseled out stone tablets lamenting that there were so many laws nobody could keep track of them all. Fifty years later, the Visigoths came over the 7th hill and ended that empire. And then the process started over. An overly-complex legal system is an indication that an empire has passed its peak and is in decline, nothing more, nothing less.
Man... I know I've said this before but you sure have a depressing, fatalistic attitude. I do not believe the facts support such a gloomy outlook, and so I cannot honestly agree.
A clear view of what is happening is not in itself a cause for optimism or pessimism. Every mistake made is still progress, provided you don't make the same mistake. The fact that our legal system is broken is simply an opportunity to analyze what went wrong, sift through the wreckage for the useful pieces still left, and then to begin the healing process.
I know that my attitude can be confusing to people so used to political and belief bias. To them, alternating between praise and condemnation of allies and enemies alike must seem, at the very least, disengenuous. But when you understand my values, it makes a lot more sense. I value logical self-consistency, efficiency, and a clear connection between motive and action. I do not often judge the "rightness" of an action, but rather how well it is executed. I don't care so much that law enforcement wants pervasive surveillance of the entire internet... so long as they do it in a way that is consistent with stated values and goals. Invariably, my criticism is because a course of action is rationalized by one thing, but achieves another. And my praise is most always because of the reverse. What I despise and try to avoid most in my life is hypocricy, rationalization, and inefficiency.
When you understand these things, then you will understand that my attitude is neither optimistic nor pessimistic, neither liberal nor conservative. It is, quite simply, a demand that we be true to ourselves. As to which truths are more valued than others, ah, well... it's refreshingly rare to get dessert with people because they don't like eating their vegetables.
The NSA reports it just upgraded the terror alert level to brown after receiving numerous reports that people are using single-ply and not washing their hands after. Remain calm, citizen. The NSA is not in your toilet. Only metadata on your toilet habits are being collected. Remember, a courtesy flush isn't just patriotic, It's The Law(tm).
I have a pile of bricks for sale. You're building a wood house. If I cut the price of the pile of bricks, does that make you more interested in buying them?
Of course not; You still have no use for a pile of bricks.
Ok, I'll pull a "Citation required" card. Please show an OSS license that requires releasing code modifications if you have only just modified a private copy of the code and have not redistributed it.
Er, this programmer took a copy, made some modification to it, and kept a copy of those modifications for himself. Under the terms of most open source licenses... this is a permissible act that cannot be restricted in any way. Whether he chooses to publish such a modification or not is a secondary issue. This alone should have provided legal immunity from prosecution in this fashion... it is the company in breach of contract, not the employee. Any such NDA signed by the employee would be legally unenforceable, ergo, not proprietary or trade secret, ergo not covered by the laws he was prosecuted under. IANAL however... maybe the law was just very badly written (or interpreted by people who have no technical training).
That said, "they" loaded multiple copies of his program onto internal servers, thus satisfying the requirements of the term 'distribution'... and obviously this was not for personal/private use... it was placed on a server that executed trades, a rather public thing.
Looks more to me like the 3-letter agencies have decided to BREAK THE LAW.
The laws are sufficiently complex and vague that you can readily make an argument both ways that would have legal standing. The law has completely ceased to function either as a deterrent to crime, or as a guideline for moral and ethical conduct. It now exists purely as a tool for law enforcement to selectively target and remove people for arbitrary reasons.
So the argument that they were breaking, or following, the law, is now really a moot point. The only reasonable alternative is to judge people (and by extensions, government agents and agencies) based on commonly-held values, and ignore whatever rationalization is put forward for their behavior.
Ultimately, this can all be reduced to a cost-benefit analysis: Do the rewards of this action outweigh the risks and collateral damage? It is this reader's strong assertion that they do not, and you may find a detailed summary of why in my comments elsewhere in this thread.
I'm not saying this to disagree with OP's rant, just to point out an easily-correctable issue.
I'll give you that. I was really angry when I wrote that. Still am, actually. Tor was originally designed by the US Navy. To my knowledge, several organizations within the military still recommend its use, or variant technology, in order to obscure source IP addresses that could identify the person browsing as being part of the US military. Needless to say, installing malware onto a computer that belongs to someone with a high security clearance is a security problem in and of itself. But it gets even worse; Tor is also widely used by political activists in countries like Iran, China, North Korea (okay, maybe not as much, since their internet is next to non-existant...), etc. These people depend on this technology so that they can advocate democracy in their country and provide intelligence that we actually use in this country... like, for example, reporting someone who might be planning a terrorist attack, and who for obvious reasons wants to submit such a report anonymously. But all of that is topped by the fact that now people know where the vulnerability is, and that it can't be easily fixed... we've just handed a large number of criminals carte a loaded gun, all so we can go after a small number of criminals, most of whom aren't a threat to anyone but themselves (drug users).
The FBI's little war on drugs and pedophilia here will cause considerable collateral damage, and in fact poses a clear and present danger to actual national security. Any gains they could have made by catching a few druggies and kid-fuckers is and will be completely buried by the damage. Cyberwarfare should be the domain of the military, not a civilian law enforcement agency. And that's what this is: This isn't just surveillance, this is a military attack against sovereign interests both domestic and foreign, as defined by our own recently enacted laws on cyberwarfare and terrorism... and while I disagree with a lot of the language of those laws, I do agree that when we're talking about anything not tightly bracketed and targetted to domestic activities alone, authority should remain with the military.
The FBI has so completely screwed the pooch here I am giving serious consideration to printing this out, writing down some notes, and driving downtown to meet with my representatives. I really, truly feel that what the FBI is doing is harmful to national security, foreign relations, and is also overstepping its judicial boundaries severely. Anyone who has given serious thought to what the rules of engagement might or should be regarding cyberwarfare would recognize this is a cluster fuck; Not only because they're publicly admitting it, but because even if they didn't, they're endangering the lives of foreign nationals who may in fact be intelligence assets, if not cultural, abroad. Political activists fighting for democracy could be killed because of this -- this is a very real threat. Those people should have our country's support, not suspicion and derision.
This is weapons grade stupidity. Normally I give law enforcement the benefit of the doubt -- a lot of what I read (for example, an article just two days ago on slashdot about the FBI interviewing someone over their browser history), has a grey area, or is missing key facts. I try very hard not to judge people until all the data is in. But this time... there's ample evidence that this was deliberate and it was done with a complete disregard for not just civil liberties, but national security. I mean, it doesn't really matter which side of the debate you're on here: They fucked all of it up.
So basically, if you're legally accessing a website while browsing with Tor, making use of legal services in a legal fashion... the FBI will install a wiretap on your computer, without a warrant, in order to monitor all your activities, on the off chance that you might be up to no good. This is rather like walking out into rush hour traffic, pointing at random cars, and saying "Search that car! We know terrorists use cars, so let's start searching them all."
Dear FBI,
Fuck you. That's a terrorist's mentality. You're worse than the lowly pieces of shit you hunt, because we expected you to uphold principles of integrity, honor, and those other words you got plastered on your slimy logo that used to mean something. You are, in fact, worse than a terrorist: You're a corrupt law enforcement organization with a bigger budget than any terrorist organization out there, and you are doing more harm to this country than catching a hundred Bin Ladens could accomplish.
-_- The internet is a global and international community and you need to show some restraint, otherwise you're going to create large amounts of resentment and anger throughout the world. No wait: You already have created this. You are endangering the infrastructure and the people you are oath-bound to protect with your actions. I don't give a flying fuck through a rolling doughnut what authority or law you think gives you the right to act in this fashion... you're a public menace. You're just giving everyone who doesn't like this country piles of ammunition and sympathy from the general public that can be used to attack MY country.
Of all the people who wasted and squandered the money of thousands, if not millions, nobody did time in prison, the only person who did was actually not stealing from decent people but from the thieves, and for THAT he goes to jail?
Actually, that's not even entirely accurate. First, he was borrowing open source software. Goldman Sachs liked this because it meant faster development times, which meant faster profits. They didn't re-release modified code, even if it was only a few lines, of course, violating the licensing terms. Parts of the code he was working on he uploaded to an external server, because his company didn't have a proper code versioning system -- there was no way to track changes being made, and so he utilized an open source repository to store changes to chunks of code he was working on. This wasn't publicly available, it was simply put "in the cloud".
Unfortunately for him, overzealous managers and clueless FBI agents didn't understand what any of this meant, and frequently, and horribly, misinterpreted or misunderstood, what their own experts were telling him. His own attempts to explain what he had done weren't any better understood and were perceived as a confession.
This is a story of how law enforcement was criminally stupid, and believed what a middle-manager with no expertise in the subject and about five layers removed from what he was panic-striken over... that some immigrant they hired was "up to no good", when in truth, it was business as usual. Naturally, the FBI swung into action, believing the worst possible thing -- he was a terrorist, he was trying to destroy america, he was some kind of muslim radical... because the software he used was called Subversion, and when you add in terms like delete, modify, copy, remove... suddenly it looks like a bona fide CSI episode full of shadowy men exchanging pen drives with knowing winks and nods and death to america would surely follow if their crack investigative team didn't interrogate the suspects while brainy people in the forensics lab tossed around complex terminology and zoomed in on single pixels before saying "AH HA! We've got you now! This single pixel here proves he was the murderer!"
Criminal. Stupidity. That was the only crime here. It was CSI: FBI Edition... only without the special effects and soundtrack, and by people with their sense of humor surgically removed, rather than having actual personality and interesting dialogue.
I'd quietly take them into custody and interrogate the shit out of them.
Ah. Yes. Torture. Very nice.
Torture has never been a reliable way of getting accurate information out of people. Inflict any amount of pain for a long enough time, and people will say anything just to make it stop. However, interrogations lead to confessions -- the overwhelming majority of cases never make it to trial because for some damn reason, if you give a person a chair and some sustained attention they're gonna want to tell you their side of the story. You don't even need to be particularly good at detective work, just leave an open mic and pretend like you care.
That said, those who are intent on harming others because they believe it is in the service of some higher power, aren't exactly well-adjusted. For them, threats, intimidation, and emotional duress to wear down all those carefully constructed walls has shown some success. I'm not talking about beatings, dunking their head under water, or any of that other shit... I'm talking things like inviting your mom down to the jail house. You might remember the Boston Bomber case... they flew his mom in from Russia, special delivery. So even for the big bad terrorists... torture doesn't really happen. It doesn't happen because its ineffectual.
Torture isn't done to extract information from the enemy; It's to demoralize the enemy. The government is making examples out of them. And let me say, cutting people loose every few years, a couple at a time, and letting them take stories back home of pain and horror... well, historically it's been pretty effective. Unless you're some political revolutionary and people flock to your cause because you're charismatic... the odds of you being tortured are pathetically low.
So in summary, yes, torture does happen, rarely. But it's not what I was suggesting, and it's not something widely practiced. Mostly because it's a shit way to get accurate information out of people.
Slashdot Mirror
Probably just that this is a friggen PROTOTYPE (FTS), indicating that they WILL build a deadly version of this. Shit, who the fuck doesn't understand how "progress" works?
I'm pretty sure our first ICBM prototype wasn't a water-pump model with a warhead on the top of it. The mature versions of this technology are typically ship- or airplane-mounted, and require huge amounts of energy. Simply put, there won't be a personal-use version of this technology until a revolution in battery technology happens. The energy densities are several orders of magnitude too low right now.
Bottom line here is it's a nice science project for bored electrical engineers. But that's it. It's the EE's version of your 3rd grade "volcano"... pour in some baking soda, vinegar, and food coloring, and hope you get a passing grade.
Saying that this contributes to the "3-D printed gun/rifle controversy" is a falacy.
*Fallacy. Anyway... it does contribute, just not in the way the author thinks: So far, attempts to produce a reliable 3-D printed gun have resulted in spectacular failure. This one manages to unleash a metal slug at a speed you can literally out run if you're in shape. I can throw a baseball faster than this thing, and it'll cause more damage too. If this is the best 3-D printed "gun/rifles" can do, then I think we can rest easy for awhile. There is no controversy when the best you can produce is a gun that might tickle you...
okay, a .22 averages around 1,120 f/s. 3% of that is 33.6 feet per second. That translates to around 23 MPH. Yes, I can see how this highly dangerous weapon might add to the controversy of 3D printed guns. It is only slightly slower than an olympic sprinter running at full tilt.
...we'd be in so much trouble. It seems like there's a never ending list of surprises from these creatures.
You think you're so special because you have thumbs and built cities and cars and rockets and all that. The dolphins, meanwhile, think they're special... because they didn't have to do any of that.
US citizens are advised to flee the planet.
In other news, US citizens will be punished either by the government for the actions of other citizens, or by other countries' citizens for the actions of the government. However, in no way and at no time, should this reflect that the government is in any way wrong. Meanwhile, police everywhere would like to remind women that if they were raped, it must be because of how they were dressed. "Lady Liberty was asking for it! She was showing leg."
-_- My point is that if the government is concerned that its actions may be inviting wide-spread reprisals, they ought to be asking whether or not those actions have public support. Afterall, isn't this supposed to be a democracy? When most of your citizens are saying "Dude, you fucked up," it might be time to, I don't know... hold a meeting at least?
TL;DR - their lawyer must be having a seizure over the potential liability exposure they seem to be asking for
It's peanuts compared to the marketing potential. Scareware is a booming industry -- look at how much malware we have to scrub off our computers now. The average computer is more likely than not to be infected with some kind of rogue application at this point, and the problem is accelerating.
Now we have ISPs injecting HTML into web pages to scare them into purchasing digital media "legally" and threatening to report them to the police if they do not... we've legitimized this whole ecosystem. The internet has become a place where you are either predator or prey.
Fits in rather nicely with our imperialist views that we can engage in cyberwarfare whenever we want, and then loading aircraft carriers full of automated drones. The corporate-military supraorganization is marrying the idea of greed and profit to abstract murder on the basis of algorithmic determinism. Soon it won't be people killing people, it'll be algorithms killing people. In a world like that, what's a little advertising? What's a little dystopia when there's profit to be had?
History may well remember that the information age was just the prelude to a whole new dark age. And it'll be recorded that we doomed ourselves trying to protect ourselves from pedophiles, murderers, terrorists, and every other boogieman. But... it's not exactly the first time in human history that a sudden leap forward in technology or industry created a power vaccum that led to social collapse. Actually... this would be the first time it hasn't happened, in case it doesn't. :/
Buying more bandwidth is out of the question is too expensive, but dropping a fortune on the hardware to do deep packet inspection is no problem.
That's because the hardware to do that you can stuff in a closet somewhere. The hardware to create more bandwidth on a coaxial network that is continuously being pushed and prodded into doing something it wasn't designed to do -- two-way communication, is considerably more complex to deploy and maintain. To add a server, you just need a port on a wall and some space in a rack. To add another 100 mhz of bandwidth to a coaxial network, you need to rip out every repeater, run down every possible source of signal leakage, and then yank out all the equipment at the head-end... and nevermind that many customers are using their own equipment that may or may not be compatible with the new protocols, equipment, etc.
Now, all that said... Comcast should have been incrementally upgrading this whole time, like any other utility provider. Unfortunately, like every other utility provider, they don't upgrade their infrastructure until there's no other choice. Our power grids are maxed out, our sewers are rotting, our bridges are falling into rivers, our cell phone service is the laughing stock of the first world... and we are paying more and more every year for them. All because short term profit isn't just a mentality... for a publicly-traded company, it's a legal requirement. The problem here is that our method of economic incentives and government regulations about infrastructure/utility services is, achem... broken. Badly.
So it's not technically Comcast's fault... they're just doing what everyone else is doing: Doing anything possible to avoid biting the bullet and investing in infrastructure. So long as the government isn't willing to simply revoke their licenses and tell them to get the fuck out, and start inking non-exclusive contracts for services, and making regulatory demands for regular and timely upgrades... businesses will continue to profit at your expense. But of course, that is how they want it, though we did, by remaining politically inert, allow it to be this way.
There's plenty of blame to pass around.
What exactly, does proving P = NP have to do with the price of tea in China? We knew when RSA was created that advances in computation power would eventually make it feasible for us to decrypt its contents. We even know what that boundary is.. and we're coming up on it now.
No encryption algorithm is immune to the fact that the faster you can run an algorithm, the sooner you'll get a result. That's all encryption is. I don't need to be a math major to figure out that if I have a car that can go 200 MPH it'll get there twice as fast as a car that can only do 100 MPH.
Your first sentence sounds weird to me, and it isn't supported by your second. AES can't be a suitable replacement for RSA because AES is a secret-key system and RSA is a public-key one.
Sigh. We're discussing an encryption algorithm that is aging and was designed to run under limited computational resources... and now that resources have increased many-fold since the original, it is no longer secure. I then compared it to other encryption schemes that are less resource-constrained which have been coming into wider use. I said nothing about key exchange systems or anything else... I was making a general comment about encryption schemes; Your confusion is because you are drawing your own conclusions, rather than staying on point: Which is that every encryption algorithm, regardless of type or usage-scenario, has a shelf life.
The RSA encryption has been depreciated for years now. Hell, back in 2000 we were saying that DES was insecure, and triple-DES was just a stop-gap. Everyone's been switching to AES for awhile now. This isn't news.
Every encryption scheme has to balance performance and security; And we balance it so that in the next 5, 10, 50, or however many years, advances in technology won't render the data vulnerable in the interim. It's basic engineering. It's like building a safe -- you can't stop it from being broken, but you can make it so that it takes time. Hopefully enough time to get additional resources to the site to stop the thieves. There is no such thing as an uncrackable safe... or an encryption scheme.
The goal is to make sure it takes long enough that by the time they get in, either the men with shotguns have arrived, or whatever it was protecting is now useless to them. If you don't understand this fundamental rule of security, then perhaps this article is newsworthy... but to anyone who works with information security... it's just confirmation of existing methodology.
I think the key phrase there is "superconducting computing", not "super-cooled". If your mom's garage has a custom semiconductor fab working on a non silicon process, you won't have space for the car.
No. It just had some old pentium chips from the days when overclocking was possible because all chips were unlocked... and a big dewer of liquid nitrogen. Of course, you couldn't just pour it on the computer... you had to cool it using isopropyl alcohol and dry ice first... cool it in stages to prevent thermal fracturing. But once you got the whole unit submerged and powered it on, it was effectively supercooled... just like they were doing in the 80s with Cray supercomputers.
You don't need a fab lab to supercool something... you just need a friend at the college science lab to bring you a dewer of liquid nitrogen, and half a brain not to spill it on yourself.
Now, if instead of engaging in this selfdefeating every-man-to-himself canned-goods-and-ammo mentality users would actually stand up for their rights actively, which means, engaging in politics - that could work.
I already contacted my legislator to point out that attacks like this risk having other governments, like those of Iran or China, expose people who are using Tor to be politically active against an oppressive regime. In other words, we're denying those people democracy because we're worried about, ah, what was the justification this week? Pedophiles, I think it was... yes. That seems enough reason to throw tens of thousands who just want freedom under the bus.
'significant technical obstacles prevented exploration of superconducting computing,
Those "significant technical obstacles" haven't prevented people from creating super-cooled computers in their mom's garages. I have to wonder how the NSA missed that one. Especially since two minutes with Google will show you plenty and it's my understanding they've already built several "super computers" to download, store, and analyze the whole internet, all of our phone calls, and blah blah, yeah.
More likely, the obstacles were solved years ago, and now that everyone else has too, they don't have to keep the fact that they're building one classified, so they claim "significant technical obstacles" prevented them before now. -_-
What an amazingly arrogant thing to say. So you read Toynbee, and that makes your opinion better than everyone else's? (More "humbled and enlightened", as you say?) Interesting.
It's amazingly arrogant to suggest that simply because nobody has yet achieved immortality, you will? Interesting.
Further, your assertion that some things are inevitable over time is not a support of your earlier argument, which clearly implied that the United States is in its "inevitable decline". To say that something is inevitable is no proof that it is happening NOW. That is merely your opinion.
You're the kind of person who won't take any amount of evidence as fact. You'll continue to handwave and hem and haw no matter how stacked the facts are against you, because you're one of those hopelessly optimistic types that actually thinks the universe gives a fuck what happens to you.
Correct. I am not wrong, and screaming won't change that.
The Pee Wee Herman defense. Interesting. You're not just arrogant, stupid, and incapable of critical thinking, you're actively hostile to anyone who isn't.
What judge? I read all three links given by OP and I saw no suggestion anywhere that a judge approved the javascript exploit.
That would be the administrative person who signed off on this scheme, typically referred to as a judge. Not that it matters, since I'm sure like most secret courts and administrative oversight bodies, it was rubber stamped. But trust me, somewhere in the chain, there was a judge.
Wow. You believe in absolute determinism too? How really, really depressing. How do you stand it?
In the words of Tyler Durden, "over a long enough time frame, everyone's life expectancy drops to zero." Of course, being the cheerful and optimistic sort, I'm sure you feel you'll live forever. The rest of us, however, read books, and are appropriately humbled and enlightened.
I think if anything is clear, is that we disagree over whether what you are saying represents a "clear view of what is happening".
Yeah; A lack of validation of your cheerful and ignorant worldview probably does seem a bit... unclear.
I'm not confused in the slightest. I simply disagree with you. And I repeat: you have repeatedly demonstrated a gloomy, fatalistic attitude.
Well, you can scream it at the sky if you want, but it won't change how wrong you are. I mean, really... how are you more of an expert on how I feel than me? You aren't just preaching blind optimism, you're arrogant to boot.
Well, I could use them for a faux-brick facade or something. How cheap are those bricks again?
$100 less than my previous offer. But I should warn you these bricks are irregularly sized and incompatible with most types of houses. Attempting to install them could destroy your house, or at the very least make your neighbors laugh at you.
In THIS CASE, if the situation has been described accurately, no, they aren't.
The judge, obviously, disagreed.
The logical extension of this is that there is no law at all, and therefore we are in a state of anarchy. I don't think it has gotten quite that bad. I sympathize with the feeling, though.
Not quite. Civilizations all go through phases; Romans chiseled out stone tablets lamenting that there were so many laws nobody could keep track of them all. Fifty years later, the Visigoths came over the 7th hill and ended that empire. And then the process started over. An overly-complex legal system is an indication that an empire has passed its peak and is in decline, nothing more, nothing less.
Man... I know I've said this before but you sure have a depressing, fatalistic attitude. I do not believe the facts support such a gloomy outlook, and so I cannot honestly agree.
A clear view of what is happening is not in itself a cause for optimism or pessimism. Every mistake made is still progress, provided you don't make the same mistake. The fact that our legal system is broken is simply an opportunity to analyze what went wrong, sift through the wreckage for the useful pieces still left, and then to begin the healing process.
I know that my attitude can be confusing to people so used to political and belief bias. To them, alternating between praise and condemnation of allies and enemies alike must seem, at the very least, disengenuous. But when you understand my values, it makes a lot more sense. I value logical self-consistency, efficiency, and a clear connection between motive and action. I do not often judge the "rightness" of an action, but rather how well it is executed. I don't care so much that law enforcement wants pervasive surveillance of the entire internet... so long as they do it in a way that is consistent with stated values and goals. Invariably, my criticism is because a course of action is rationalized by one thing, but achieves another. And my praise is most always because of the reverse. What I despise and try to avoid most in my life is hypocricy, rationalization, and inefficiency.
When you understand these things, then you will understand that my attitude is neither optimistic nor pessimistic, neither liberal nor conservative. It is, quite simply, a demand that we be true to ourselves. As to which truths are more valued than others, ah, well... it's refreshingly rare to get dessert with people because they don't like eating their vegetables.
The NSA reports it just upgraded the terror alert level to brown after receiving numerous reports that people are using single-ply and not washing their hands after. Remain calm, citizen. The NSA is not in your toilet. Only metadata on your toilet habits are being collected. Remember, a courtesy flush isn't just patriotic, It's The Law(tm).
Quick question:
I have a pile of bricks for sale. You're building a wood house. If I cut the price of the pile of bricks, does that make you more interested in buying them?
Of course not; You still have no use for a pile of bricks.
Ok, I'll pull a "Citation required" card. Please show an OSS license that requires releasing code modifications if you have only just modified a private copy of the code and have not redistributed it.
Er, this programmer took a copy, made some modification to it, and kept a copy of those modifications for himself. Under the terms of most open source licenses... this is a permissible act that cannot be restricted in any way. Whether he chooses to publish such a modification or not is a secondary issue. This alone should have provided legal immunity from prosecution in this fashion... it is the company in breach of contract, not the employee. Any such NDA signed by the employee would be legally unenforceable, ergo, not proprietary or trade secret, ergo not covered by the laws he was prosecuted under. IANAL however... maybe the law was just very badly written (or interpreted by people who have no technical training).
That said, "they" loaded multiple copies of his program onto internal servers, thus satisfying the requirements of the term 'distribution'... and obviously this was not for personal/private use... it was placed on a server that executed trades, a rather public thing.
Looks more to me like the 3-letter agencies have decided to BREAK THE LAW.
The laws are sufficiently complex and vague that you can readily make an argument both ways that would have legal standing. The law has completely ceased to function either as a deterrent to crime, or as a guideline for moral and ethical conduct. It now exists purely as a tool for law enforcement to selectively target and remove people for arbitrary reasons.
So the argument that they were breaking, or following, the law, is now really a moot point. The only reasonable alternative is to judge people (and by extensions, government agents and agencies) based on commonly-held values, and ignore whatever rationalization is put forward for their behavior.
Ultimately, this can all be reduced to a cost-benefit analysis: Do the rewards of this action outweigh the risks and collateral damage? It is this reader's strong assertion that they do not, and you may find a detailed summary of why in my comments elsewhere in this thread.
I'm not saying this to disagree with OP's rant, just to point out an easily-correctable issue.
I'll give you that. I was really angry when I wrote that. Still am, actually. Tor was originally designed by the US Navy. To my knowledge, several organizations within the military still recommend its use, or variant technology, in order to obscure source IP addresses that could identify the person browsing as being part of the US military. Needless to say, installing malware onto a computer that belongs to someone with a high security clearance is a security problem in and of itself. But it gets even worse; Tor is also widely used by political activists in countries like Iran, China, North Korea (okay, maybe not as much, since their internet is next to non-existant...), etc. These people depend on this technology so that they can advocate democracy in their country and provide intelligence that we actually use in this country... like, for example, reporting someone who might be planning a terrorist attack, and who for obvious reasons wants to submit such a report anonymously. But all of that is topped by the fact that now people know where the vulnerability is, and that it can't be easily fixed... we've just handed a large number of criminals carte a loaded gun, all so we can go after a small number of criminals, most of whom aren't a threat to anyone but themselves (drug users).
The FBI's little war on drugs and pedophilia here will cause considerable collateral damage, and in fact poses a clear and present danger to actual national security. Any gains they could have made by catching a few druggies and kid-fuckers is and will be completely buried by the damage. Cyberwarfare should be the domain of the military, not a civilian law enforcement agency. And that's what this is: This isn't just surveillance, this is a military attack against sovereign interests both domestic and foreign, as defined by our own recently enacted laws on cyberwarfare and terrorism... and while I disagree with a lot of the language of those laws, I do agree that when we're talking about anything not tightly bracketed and targetted to domestic activities alone, authority should remain with the military.
The FBI has so completely screwed the pooch here I am giving serious consideration to printing this out, writing down some notes, and driving downtown to meet with my representatives. I really, truly feel that what the FBI is doing is harmful to national security, foreign relations, and is also overstepping its judicial boundaries severely. Anyone who has given serious thought to what the rules of engagement might or should be regarding cyberwarfare would recognize this is a cluster fuck; Not only because they're publicly admitting it, but because even if they didn't, they're endangering the lives of foreign nationals who may in fact be intelligence assets, if not cultural, abroad. Political activists fighting for democracy could be killed because of this -- this is a very real threat. Those people should have our country's support, not suspicion and derision.
This is weapons grade stupidity. Normally I give law enforcement the benefit of the doubt -- a lot of what I read (for example, an article just two days ago on slashdot about the FBI interviewing someone over their browser history), has a grey area, or is missing key facts. I try very hard not to judge people until all the data is in. But this time... there's ample evidence that this was deliberate and it was done with a complete disregard for not just civil liberties, but national security. I mean, it doesn't really matter which side of the debate you're on here: They fucked all of it up.
So basically, if you're legally accessing a website while browsing with Tor, making use of legal services in a legal fashion... the FBI will install a wiretap on your computer, without a warrant, in order to monitor all your activities, on the off chance that you might be up to no good. This is rather like walking out into rush hour traffic, pointing at random cars, and saying "Search that car! We know terrorists use cars, so let's start searching them all."
Dear FBI,
Fuck you. That's a terrorist's mentality. You're worse than the lowly pieces of shit you hunt, because we expected you to uphold principles of integrity, honor, and those other words you got plastered on your slimy logo that used to mean something. You are, in fact, worse than a terrorist: You're a corrupt law enforcement organization with a bigger budget than any terrorist organization out there, and you are doing more harm to this country than catching a hundred Bin Ladens could accomplish.
-_- The internet is a global and international community and you need to show some restraint, otherwise you're going to create large amounts of resentment and anger throughout the world. No wait: You already have created this. You are endangering the infrastructure and the people you are oath-bound to protect with your actions. I don't give a flying fuck through a rolling doughnut what authority or law you think gives you the right to act in this fashion... you're a public menace. You're just giving everyone who doesn't like this country piles of ammunition and sympathy from the general public that can be used to attack MY country.
Knock it the fuck off. Now.
Of all the people who wasted and squandered the money of thousands, if not millions, nobody did time in prison, the only person who did was actually not stealing from decent people but from the thieves, and for THAT he goes to jail?
Actually, that's not even entirely accurate. First, he was borrowing open source software. Goldman Sachs liked this because it meant faster development times, which meant faster profits. They didn't re-release modified code, even if it was only a few lines, of course, violating the licensing terms. Parts of the code he was working on he uploaded to an external server, because his company didn't have a proper code versioning system -- there was no way to track changes being made, and so he utilized an open source repository to store changes to chunks of code he was working on. This wasn't publicly available, it was simply put "in the cloud".
Unfortunately for him, overzealous managers and clueless FBI agents didn't understand what any of this meant, and frequently, and horribly, misinterpreted or misunderstood, what their own experts were telling him. His own attempts to explain what he had done weren't any better understood and were perceived as a confession.
This is a story of how law enforcement was criminally stupid, and believed what a middle-manager with no expertise in the subject and about five layers removed from what he was panic-striken over... that some immigrant they hired was "up to no good", when in truth, it was business as usual. Naturally, the FBI swung into action, believing the worst possible thing -- he was a terrorist, he was trying to destroy america, he was some kind of muslim radical... because the software he used was called Subversion, and when you add in terms like delete, modify, copy, remove... suddenly it looks like a bona fide CSI episode full of shadowy men exchanging pen drives with knowing winks and nods and death to america would surely follow if their crack investigative team didn't interrogate the suspects while brainy people in the forensics lab tossed around complex terminology and zoomed in on single pixels before saying "AH HA! We've got you now! This single pixel here proves he was the murderer!"
Criminal. Stupidity. That was the only crime here. It was CSI: FBI Edition... only without the special effects and soundtrack, and by people with their sense of humor surgically removed, rather than having actual personality and interesting dialogue.
I'd quietly take them into custody and interrogate the shit out of them.
Ah. Yes. Torture. Very nice.
Torture has never been a reliable way of getting accurate information out of people. Inflict any amount of pain for a long enough time, and people will say anything just to make it stop. However, interrogations lead to confessions -- the overwhelming majority of cases never make it to trial because for some damn reason, if you give a person a chair and some sustained attention they're gonna want to tell you their side of the story. You don't even need to be particularly good at detective work, just leave an open mic and pretend like you care.
That said, those who are intent on harming others because they believe it is in the service of some higher power, aren't exactly well-adjusted. For them, threats, intimidation, and emotional duress to wear down all those carefully constructed walls has shown some success. I'm not talking about beatings, dunking their head under water, or any of that other shit... I'm talking things like inviting your mom down to the jail house. You might remember the Boston Bomber case... they flew his mom in from Russia, special delivery. So even for the big bad terrorists... torture doesn't really happen. It doesn't happen because its ineffectual.
Torture isn't done to extract information from the enemy; It's to demoralize the enemy. The government is making examples out of them. And let me say, cutting people loose every few years, a couple at a time, and letting them take stories back home of pain and horror... well, historically it's been pretty effective. Unless you're some political revolutionary and people flock to your cause because you're charismatic... the odds of you being tortured are pathetically low.
So in summary, yes, torture does happen, rarely. But it's not what I was suggesting, and it's not something widely practiced. Mostly because it's a shit way to get accurate information out of people.