And, if we can learn how to build a self-sustaining colony on the Moon, it will be much easier to build one on Mars. Not only will we know what to do, we won't have to do all of the exterior work in hard vacuum.
Mars atmospheric pressure is 99.4% of a vacuum compared to Earth so there is no practical difference.
Unless there was a court order to preserve the evidence the wiping may have been normal maintenance. TFA makes it sound dubious... but it could just be bad timing.
Georgia state law does not require a specific court order. Just the lawsuit or anticipation of a lawsuit is enough.
Given that the show is supposedly set about a decade before TOS, and that nobody in the whole Star Trek universe heard of Spore Drive until Discovery, should mean that Spore Drive technology will fail so spectacularly that nobody ever mentions it again
What the show really needs is Picard facepalm drive.
Spore Drive could be fixed via Q dimension. Turns out it involves traveling through Q's moldy infra-dimensional fridge, and once he threw away old pizza at the back it stopped working.
So then Q finally cleans out his refrigerator causing the the Spore Drive to stop working explaining why it became unavailable by Kirk's time? I like it.
Let's say we've reached step. one. We've recorded our customer and we now have a record and a ball of ionised plasma. Why not beam the record to two receivers? Now we've got a duplicator. The legalities get sticky. We could get around them by permitting one, say, one Isaac Asimov to a planet; but who gets the royalties on the FOUNDATION trilogy?
Similarly, you can keep the record. You fire the signal at the receiver, but you store the tape. Ten years later the passenger walks in front of a bus. You can recreate him from tape, minus ten years of his life. But-aside from questions concerning his soul-can he collect his own life insurance?
Suppose we change our mind after step one. We store the tape instead of firing it. Is it kidnapping? Or, in view of the fact that we have mortally vaporized a man, is it murder? Does it cease to be murder if we reconstitute him before the trial?
Finally, we assume an advance whereby we needn't destroy the model to get the record. Shouldn't we destroy him anyway? Otherwise he hasn't gone anywhere.
...
THE ASSUMPTION: We don't need a transmitter. Our teleport receiver will bring anything to itself, from anywhere. Limitations may exist as to distance or mass of cargo. THE RESULT: Thieves capable of stealing anything from anyone in perfect safety.
...
THE ASSUMPTION: No receiver is needed. Our teleport transmitter will place its cargo anywhere we choose. THE RESULT: We can put a bomb anywhere.
Little of this happens or is addressed in Star Trek but why? It is right up there is why being out of phase allows you to pass through walls but not carpet glue.
That's because the FBI doesn't have the cool kids toys like the NSA/CIA which has all the backdoors into these devices.
Since the NSA forwards intelligence to the DEA for domestic law enforcement purposes, it is safe to assume that they forward intelligence to the FBI as well.
From the agency that utilizes parallel construction. Any law abiding citizen should rightfully wish to encrypt as much as their data as possible to give themselves at least some small measure of protection from these agencies, who demonstrate utter contempt for both the spirit and the letter of the very law they are tasked to enforce.
And an agency which uses civil assets forfeiture, and uses dragnet surveillance, and compromises security standards by controlling the standards process, and interrogates people via torture, and denies attorney-client privilege, and employs the purgery trap by not recording interrogations, and loses exonerating evidence,...
Next up, steel reinforced front doors should be outlawed, because it interferes with early-am no-knock armed raids on people suspected of jay walking.
Physically secure doors are often unlawful. Check your building codes.
I believe 100% that companies who have the ability to provide/decrypt customer data with a court order should be required to do so.
The problem with this, and what Apple did, is that the companies can design the applications so it is not possible for the company to provide the encryption keys or the plaintext. And even if the companies arrange things so they they can provide the encryption keys or plaintext, a third party application could step in to do the same thing unless the companies actively defeated it which opens a whole new can of worms.
Carriers don't have access to text message *contents*,
Oops, you let slip a bit of FUD there. Text messages, email, SMS, and all travel unencrypted and can be stored at any point in the transmit chain by the carriers of either the sender, recipient, or network paths. The difficulty of capturing, storing, analyzing, and searching for content of the actual voice audio of phone calls is a not so significant task for three letter agencies, and has not been so for quite some time. (See Snowden and other wikileaks for documentation of this capability) The complaints about encryption of the devices as it emanates from the FBI appears to me as a thinly veiled complaint that the NSA wont just give access to the collected data, or a forum for arguing to gain a method they can publicly acknowledge and use to identify sources of information that they can use in open court.
This may be true (and I would assume it is true) for the carrier's own applications but not necessarily for third party applications. In that case, the carrier would need to compromise the phone and compromise third party applications. I cannot say that this has not happened but if so, they sure would want to keep it quiet and discovery would be inevitable.
The reason they want this power is because, unlike us, the providers have very deep pockets and lots of lawyers. They can tell the government to go to hell, where "we" can't. We don't have the money to fight the government.
The CEOs sure cannot. If the FBI is having a problem getting the telecommunication companies to cooperate, then they are not trying hard enough.
So no, crypto should not be outlawed, but yes, if it were banned the ban could be effective, what's with all you people saying laws don't work ?
When this subject originally came up at about the time Clipper was being considered, it was pointed out that banning encryption means also banning secure authentication because secure authentication can be used to make encryption. That means the government would be able to forge false authentication; digital signatures would be useless. It would also be impossible to secure a digital chain of evidence.
... so now they're going to arrest you for refusing to cooperate instead so that they can take you into the station while you make the call. And certainly refusing to cooperate may not sound as bad as child porn on your record but has a much better chance of being upgraded from "arrested" to "charged" since you technically did refuse to cooperate in that instance, whether or not they find anything more serious to charge you with.
Not cooperate with what? If you do it right, then they will not be able to prove that the phone is yours negating inevitable discovery.
That actually leads to less security. Because prior to fingerprint sensors, about 50+% of phones had no passcode system enabled whatsoever.
The reason? It turns out passcodes are the antithesis to how these devices are operated - often glanced at (unlocked) hundreds of times a day, with each interaction lasting a few seconds, tops. Entering a passcode is enough of a bother that people don't actually... bother.
That's why they have biometric sensors - the goal is to turn that 50% of devices with no lock into a very low percentage - the biometric allows for quick and easy unlocking of the phone (basically without getting in the way) but have the benefits of a locked phone.
You see this in real life too - next time, check out the password your retail guy uses when they check you out - because the checkout kioss are typically locked, you'll find they have a quick password they can enter so they can get your transaction done quickly.
This depends on the threat. Biometric security is sufficient to prevent access from non-government actors. It is useless for preventing government access in violation of the 4th and 5th amendments. A passcode protects against both but as you point out, it must be actually used to be effective.
What I wish is that there was a stock way to program a panic print, such that you enter that print and the phone locks requiring a PIN to unlock.
If this is a security consern, then do not use biometric security in place of a passcode. What is needed is an option that *all* biometric security methods for a given device deniable lock it so it is not possible to tell if it was a biometric failure or deliberate.
I wonder if this push for biometric security is a way to mollify the FBI or has been encouraged by the FBI since it defeats security.
I'm wondering how they would secure against altered video that implicates the innocent or exonerates the guilty if they are not pulling the video directly from the source.
They can treat the video like the Miranda warning; incriminating videos are evidence and exonerating videos are hearsay.
If money is speech, corporations have a lot more of it than you do.
It is not so much that they have more but that their money and interests are concentrated. The same applies to wealthy people.
A corporation has a great interest in pushing for legislation which taxes the population a small amount and delivers it to the corporation, otherwise known as rent seeking. In many industries, the payoff from this is greater than any other investment a company could make including research and development or capital investment. But the individuals in the population being fleeced have little interest in preventing such small individual losses because it is not worth their effort. In most cases, it is not even worth their effort to become educated about it; they are rationally ignorant.
This is magnified when candidates for elections are deliberately limited lowering the already marginal influence that voters have. How many politicians does a corporation have to own to control the government? Why buy one politician when you can buy two for twice the price.
I always built my own systems so they are more reliable, easier to maintain, and have features not available in "consumer" systems. This is also less expensive in the long term.
Ah... so of course all of the experts who are completely dumbfounded as to the actual cause of this even are overlooking this perfectly obvious explanation. Cool.
How did you get so smart?
Did you mean the engineering experts at the embassy? I bet they have a lot of those. Any expert can be defeated with politics.
The question was about "any known technology" and I answered it. There is a trivial test which could have immediately identified if this was the cause yet it has not been done and this is months later. My conclusion is that there are no experts involved or at least there were none during the extended time that whatever it was was going on. Is that so surprising when politicians are in charge?
Slashdot Mirror
And, if we can learn how to build a self-sustaining colony on the Moon, it will be much easier to build one on Mars. Not only will we know what to do, we won't have to do all of the exterior work in hard vacuum.
Mars atmospheric pressure is 99.4% of a vacuum compared to Earth so there is no practical difference.
It's not illegal because there was no protective order in place (WHY that didn't happen is another question all together)...
Georgia state law does not require a specific court order. Just the lawsuit or anticipation of a lawsuit is enough.
Unless there was a court order to preserve the evidence the wiping may have been normal maintenance. TFA makes it sound dubious... but it could just be bad timing.
Georgia state law does not require a specific court order. Just the lawsuit or anticipation of a lawsuit is enough.
Given that the show is supposedly set about a decade before TOS, and that nobody in the whole Star Trek universe heard of Spore Drive until Discovery, should mean that Spore Drive technology will fail so spectacularly that nobody ever mentions it again
What the show really needs is Picard facepalm drive.
Spore Drive could be fixed via Q dimension. Turns out it involves traveling through Q's moldy infra-dimensional fridge, and once he threw away old pizza at the back it stopped working.
So then Q finally cleans out his refrigerator causing the the Spore Drive to stop working explaining why it became unavailable by Kirk's time? I like it.
First, I'd like whoever decided an 'all-male' species could be a thing without cloning or somesuch to take a basic biology course.
They covered that without explaining it and established that the situation is artificial and deliberate.
If you want to complain about biology, then how about Klingons, Romulans, Vulcans, Humans, and some others all apparently being the same species.
I am less concerned with the hand-waving behind teleportation via transporter technology than the resulting effects which Star Trek barely touched. ...
Let's say we've reached step. one. We've recorded our customer and we now have a record and a ball of ionised plasma. Why not beam the record to two receivers? Now we've got a duplicator. The legalities get sticky. We could get around them by permitting one, say, one Isaac Asimov to a planet; but who gets the royalties on the FOUNDATION trilogy?
Similarly, you can keep the record. You fire the signal at the receiver, but you store the tape. Ten years later the passenger walks in front of a bus. You can recreate him from tape, minus ten years of his life. But-aside from questions concerning his soul-can he collect his own life insurance?
Suppose we change our mind after step one. We store the tape instead of firing it. Is it kidnapping? Or, in view of the fact that we have mortally vaporized a man, is it murder? Does it cease to be murder if we reconstitute him before the trial?
Finally, we assume an advance whereby we needn't destroy the model to get the record. Shouldn't we destroy him anyway? Otherwise he hasn't gone anywhere.
THE ASSUMPTION: We don't need a transmitter. Our teleport receiver will bring anything to itself, from anywhere. Limitations may exist as to distance or mass of cargo.
THE RESULT: Thieves capable of stealing anything from anyone in perfect safety.
THE ASSUMPTION: No receiver is needed. Our teleport transmitter will place its cargo anywhere we choose.
THE RESULT: We can put a bomb anywhere.
Little of this happens or is addressed in Star Trek but why? It is right up there is why being out of phase allows you to pass through walls but not carpet glue.
It only seems to be America where pork is supposed to be "the other white meat".
This is because the primary white meat in America since World War 2 is chicken.
https://practicingresurrection...
That's because the FBI doesn't have the cool kids toys like the NSA/CIA which has all the backdoors into these devices.
Since the NSA forwards intelligence to the DEA for domestic law enforcement purposes, it is safe to assume that they forward intelligence to the FBI as well.
From the agency that utilizes parallel construction. Any law abiding citizen should rightfully wish to encrypt as much as their data as possible to give themselves at least some small measure of protection from these agencies, who demonstrate utter contempt for both the spirit and the letter of the very law they are tasked to enforce.
And an agency which uses civil assets forfeiture, and uses dragnet surveillance, and compromises security standards by controlling the standards process, and interrogates people via torture, and denies attorney-client privilege, and employs the purgery trap by not recording interrogations, and loses exonerating evidence, ...
Next up, steel reinforced front doors should be outlawed, because it interferes with early-am no-knock armed raids on people suspected of jay walking.
Physically secure doors are often unlawful. Check your building codes.
I believe 100% that companies who have the ability to provide/decrypt customer data with a court order should be required to do so.
The problem with this, and what Apple did, is that the companies can design the applications so it is not possible for the company to provide the encryption keys or the plaintext. And even if the companies arrange things so they they can provide the encryption keys or plaintext, a third party application could step in to do the same thing unless the companies actively defeated it which opens a whole new can of worms.
Carriers don't have access to text message *contents*,
Oops, you let slip a bit of FUD there. Text messages, email, SMS, and all travel unencrypted and can be stored at any point in the transmit chain by the carriers of either the sender, recipient, or network paths. The difficulty of capturing, storing, analyzing, and searching for content of the actual voice audio of phone calls is a not so significant task for three letter agencies, and has not been so for quite some time. (See Snowden and other wikileaks for documentation of this capability)
The complaints about encryption of the devices as it emanates from the FBI appears to me as a thinly veiled complaint that the NSA wont just give access to the collected data, or a forum for arguing to gain a method they can publicly acknowledge and use to identify sources of information that they can use in open court.
This may be true (and I would assume it is true) for the carrier's own applications but not necessarily for third party applications. In that case, the carrier would need to compromise the phone and compromise third party applications. I cannot say that this has not happened but if so, they sure would want to keep it quiet and discovery would be inevitable.
I wonder how the FBI scored prosecutions before mobile devices were invented? I guess they must not have solved any crimes at all?
They did not have the option of dragnet surveillance before. Now that it is possible, they want it and that means compromising encryption.
The reason they want this power is because, unlike us, the providers have very deep pockets and lots of lawyers. They can tell the government to go to hell, where "we" can't. We don't have the money to fight the government.
The CEOs sure cannot. If the FBI is having a problem getting the telecommunication companies to cooperate, then they are not trying hard enough.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
So no, crypto should not be outlawed, but yes, if it were banned the ban could be effective, what's with all you people saying laws don't work ?
When this subject originally came up at about the time Clipper was being considered, it was pointed out that banning encryption means also banning secure authentication because secure authentication can be used to make encryption. That means the government would be able to forge false authentication; digital signatures would be useless. It would also be impossible to secure a digital chain of evidence.
"Sorry officer, it's a Samsung phone..."
It is safer not to answer questions, any questions except those required by law like for identification.
... so now they're going to arrest you for refusing to cooperate instead so that they can take you into the station while you make the call. And certainly refusing to cooperate may not sound as bad as child porn on your record but has a much better chance of being upgraded from "arrested" to "charged" since you technically did refuse to cooperate in that instance, whether or not they find anything more serious to charge you with.
Not cooperate with what? If you do it right, then they will not be able to prove that the phone is yours negating inevitable discovery.
That actually leads to less security. Because prior to fingerprint sensors, about 50+% of phones had no passcode system enabled whatsoever.
The reason? It turns out passcodes are the antithesis to how these devices are operated - often glanced at (unlocked) hundreds of times a day, with each interaction lasting a few seconds, tops. Entering a passcode is enough of a bother that people don't actually... bother.
That's why they have biometric sensors - the goal is to turn that 50% of devices with no lock into a very low percentage - the biometric allows for quick and easy unlocking of the phone (basically without getting in the way) but have the benefits of a locked phone.
You see this in real life too - next time, check out the password your retail guy uses when they check you out - because the checkout kioss are typically locked, you'll find they have a quick password they can enter so they can get your transaction done quickly.
This depends on the threat. Biometric security is sufficient to prevent access from non-government actors. It is useless for preventing government access in violation of the 4th and 5th amendments. A passcode protects against both but as you point out, it must be actually used to be effective.
What I wish is that there was a stock way to program a panic print, such that you enter that print and the phone locks requiring a PIN to unlock.
If this is a security consern, then do not use biometric security in place of a passcode. What is needed is an option that *all* biometric security methods for a given device deniable lock it so it is not possible to tell if it was a biometric failure or deliberate.
I wonder if this push for biometric security is a way to mollify the FBI or has been encouraged by the FBI since it defeats security.
If only there was a responsible trustworthy agency which could handle this like NOTHING THE US GOVERNMENT TOUCHES!
The FBI has only themselves to blame for this. Fuck them.
Congress cannot pass a law protecting civil rights including the 4th amendment which they cannot break.
But that would not be nearly as courageous as assembling the Mac Mini and then filling it with glue before the cover is closed.
I'm wondering how they would secure against altered video that implicates the innocent or exonerates the guilty if they are not pulling the video directly from the source.
They can treat the video like the Miranda warning; incriminating videos are evidence and exonerating videos are hearsay.
If money is speech, corporations have a lot more of it than you do.
It is not so much that they have more but that their money and interests are concentrated. The same applies to wealthy people.
A corporation has a great interest in pushing for legislation which taxes the population a small amount and delivers it to the corporation, otherwise known as rent seeking. In many industries, the payoff from this is greater than any other investment a company could make including research and development or capital investment. But the individuals in the population being fleeced have little interest in preventing such small individual losses because it is not worth their effort. In most cases, it is not even worth their effort to become educated about it; they are rationally ignorant.
This is magnified when candidates for elections are deliberately limited lowering the already marginal influence that voters have. How many politicians does a corporation have to own to control the government? Why buy one politician when you can buy two for twice the price.
I always built my own systems so they are more reliable, easier to maintain, and have features not available in "consumer" systems. This is also less expensive in the long term.
Nothing wrong with the FLAT UI. There is a reason everyone is copying the concept, including google and the open source community.
Idiocy?
Ah... so of course all of the experts who are completely dumbfounded as to the actual cause of this even are overlooking this perfectly obvious explanation. Cool.
How did you get so smart?
Did you mean the engineering experts at the embassy? I bet they have a lot of those. Any expert can be defeated with politics.
The question was about "any known technology" and I answered it. There is a trivial test which could have immediately identified if this was the cause yet it has not been done and this is months later. My conclusion is that there are no experts involved or at least there were none during the extended time that whatever it was was going on. Is that so surprising when politicians are in charge?