The judge can't compel you to do something illegal. Neither can a police officer.
That's begging the question slightly. "Following the directions of a peace officer" in an emergency is on the rulebooks in most states. This is why a cop can flip traffic around and tell you to go the wrong way down a one-way street because there's an accident in an intersection, despite the presence of a marked "One way" sign, which is usually what wrong-way laws are keyed off.
Don't confuse "illegal" with "unsafe" or "unreasonable"... The latter standards apply more broadly.
Red Hat made the decision to go with systemd for their own operating system. They didn't "force" it on anyone else. If you're unhappy with Debian / whoever else's decision to use systemd you'd better to talk to those maintainers. Obviously they see value in it or they wouldn't be using it.
The Fedora community (which includes a number of Red Hat employees) made the decision. A not-insignificant chunk of the Red Hat Enterprise *users* are not happy about that, but by the time EL 7.1 came out and anyone really cared the decision was long-since past.
In regards to Debian (and other distros) this is the bandwagon effect (or slippery slope, if you prefer). Debian did it because Fedora was already doing it and resistance seemed futile. The remaining distros even moreso.
If the overall linux community could call a do-over and revisit 2010-2011 knowing what we know now, there's no way the community would have stood for it. It *barely* was accepted then (and caused a mini-exodus then) when it could still call itself an "init system" with a straight face. The behemoth of interconnected components and lock-in designed to make it really inconvenient to resist or switch away from would never have been approved. I'd like to think that's "would never have been approved, even by RH EL engineers", but it's hard to say.
What I *can* say, though, is that enterprise sysadmins want predictability and determinism, and value unpredictable dynamic-ness and boot times far less. Incremental improvements on the initscripts package, following Debian's lead and switch/bin/sh to/bin/dash, a few added features to xinetd, and the addition of a couple of optional service managers (daemontools, or whatever you like) launched from an rc-init script of its own, would have meant far less churn and far less mess.
However, another Penn State researcher, glaciologist Richard Alley, said by email that “though this is one paper, it usefully reminds us that large and rapid changes are possible...
Is that the same "usefully" as "useful idiot"? Or perhaps never letting a crisis go to waste? It's "useful" to the extent that it can scare people into acting beyond what the argument has reasonably shown the case to be.
Whenever someone says X won't be needed or Y is the future, I'm always amazed by the assumptions they've unconsciously made about how X or Y is used across the country. (To the extent that "meddlers" tend to be Silicon Valley or New York residents, the mistakes are often similar.)
The US is a big country, San Francisco, CA and San Diego, CA are different, let alone San Francisco, CA and San Diego, TX.
In some places, no one drives unless they have to, and many don't even know how. In others, if you don't have a car you're insane, a child, or literally are unable to acquire one. In some places, it's 72 degrees F for 95% of the year, in others you spend 5 months surrounded by snow.
It's a big country. Take a road trip or three before you offer your prescription for what people 1000's of miles away from you need. And when describing "how things are", always pre-pend with the phrase "In my State,...."
Basically, in Grand Rapids, buildings are connected together at the second floor level. There are periodic pedestrian tunnels connecting across streets to adjacent buildings as well, also on the second(-ish) floor. As a result, you can walk from your hotel for a dozen blocks and never even see the street. Of course, sometimes, you have to go up or down a ramp that compensates for height differences, and if there's enough of a height difference, you might leave the second floor of one building and end up in the third floor of another, IIRC, but either way, you stay indoors.
It would be nice if that practice would spread to the rest of the U.S., because it is much safer than having pedestrians and cars share the same space.
Every time I visit anywhere that has those (downtown Dayton, OH has one) I always feel like I'm in some weird dystopian '70s sci-fi movie.
You should move to San Diego. We don't even build car or light-rail tunnels unless there's literally no other possibly option because we always want to be able to see the outside. We also have outdoor malls, which tourists seem to find astonishing.
Interesting, I moved to CA about 3 years ago, and I'm not sure I've seen a 2 way stop since coming. If it were like you said, here, it would be entirely sane.
2-way and 3-way intersections are common in suburban areas of CA. Typically where there's a large discrepancy in size/traffic between the two roads, but not so large that the side street can never enter (in which case, it'd usually get updated to a traffic light).
The more annoying thing to me is the overuse of traffic lights. There are many, many intersections near me where I wait for an average of a minute or more per trip and watch two cars pass. Now granted, a few of those intersections are busy enough at certain times of day to warrant a traffic light. Those lights should ideally go into a two-way-stop (flashing red), two-way-yield (flashing yellow) configuration except during rush hour.
Or, just make it a passively controlled junction - i.e. a roundabout.
Within California, traffic light deployment varies dramatically by county. In SD County, there are a fair number of traffic lights, but outside of the downtown core, most of them are sensor-based. They default to the primary thoroughfare and will trigger for a side street when the induction coil sees a car (or a pedestrian button is pressed). There are virtually NONE that degenerate down to flashing red/yellow during off-hours, although I've seen those during long road trips around the west (and they were very confusing at first).
Additionally, most traffic lights here in San Diego have protected left turns (also sensor controlled), whereas even going up to LA they're much less common.
"[T]he government's online surveillance programs may threaten the disclosure of minority views and contribute to the reinforcement of majority opinion." The NSA's "ability to surreptitiously monitor the online activities of U.S. citizens may make online opinion climates especially chilly" and "can contribute to the silencing of minority views that provide the bedrock of democratic discourse," the researcher found.
Sure, but I'd wager that hyper-sensitivity towards minority viewpoints is FAR more affected by the social effect of "political correctness" rather than than literal "political correctness" from a government body as an independent entity (unless the government is responding to specific social pressures, which is then a failure of 1st Amendment enforcement).
If you're plotting to overthrow the government, then yes there's a "chilling effect" if you know the FBI is listening in. That's debatably/arguably a good thing. If you have a mere "minority opinion" and you're hoping to engage in democratic discourse you have far more to fear from SJWs.
Hell, Proposition 8 was a majority opinion in 2008 and Brendan Eich still got fired for it.
As the saying goes, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." If a machine is doing its job, reliably and without error, then common sense dictates that you just shouldn't mess with it. This is doubly true for computers and quadruply true for government computers. This lends itself to an obvious question: what's the government computer most in need of an upgrade?
He goes on to talk about thriftiness, security, "obsolete", and "holding back"... but he doesn't seem to understand the difference. Those indeed are problems, but that doesn't mean the oldest, non-broken, computer is one of them. Windows XP on a public desktop is old; a mainframe data storage retrieval system might be 20 years older. The Windows box is probably "[more] in need of an upgrade."
This seems like a fun project (finding the oldest government computer system), but I'm not sure the author fully understands what that aphorism truly suggests.
No matter who you are, you're probably not the fish they want to fry.
Don't incriminate yourself. Then, wait for a deal which allows you to unload on specifically what was asked of you, when, how, and why, and what you said, and what your concerns were.
You're far more important as a neutral observer than as someone who configured a server.
As opposed to human beings, which never fail spectacularly. Especially never behind a wheel./s
Perhaps support for autonomous vehicles is not so much about believing autonomous vehicles are failsafe, but that autonomous vehicles are safer than human drivers. Human drivers are notoriously bad at driving.
And yet we do drive. Millions of us. Every day.
I'm far more of the belief that support for autonomous vehicles correlates with city/location and type of environment you live in. Dense urban environments, especially those planned (or un-planned) before the use of cars provide an entirely different upbringing than wide-open Western US areas. If all you ever do is take public transit, taxies, or (now) Uber's, then the switch to an autonomous car isn't that big. If you're used to driving, and don't have a particular need to be hands-off during your drives, then driving might represent something entirely different.
In San Francisco, ~30% of households don't have a car. In Los Angeles, it's ~13%, and in San Diego (where I live) it's ~7% and dropping now that the economy's been recovering and the delayed millennials are buying them. Most are happy to and enjoy being behind the wheel.
Well that's a pretty amazing endorsement of autonomous vehicles, if *already* 25% of the population is accepting of a new technology they haven't yet experienced.
Millennials.
I'd like to go into every single humanities class at my alma mater and start showing them a lot of 1970's and '80s sci-fi. It's like they've never even been exposed to the concept that it's possible for technology to fail spectacularly.
Specifically it would take Apple that long to do it. For someone else to try and do it would be much harder as they would have to figure out a way to sign the code without having access to Apple's distribution certs or steal them somehow.
*In best Wonka voice* Tell me again how Homebrewed PS3 CFW isn't available
I see no death spiral in Japan. They're adapting, in the way only a society with strong cohesion can.
They're adapting by inventing robots to do everything, but eventually the social safety net will have to give way. The trend is getting worse to, to the point that the birth rate might actually drop below 1.0, which is basically unheard of in any society that expects to still exist in 50 years.
Russia bad, but not anywhere near that. At this rate, China won't have to conquer the lands on either side of it, it'll just waltz over and settle the unoccupied space.
.... and our birthrate is low low low (around 1.1 or less, historical replacement rate was 4 babies) and theirs is high.
Historic, yes. Modern replacement rate for a society with generally first-world medical access (including those who've emigrated to such a country) would be ~2.1.
Modern (native) European birth rates are around 1.4-1.7, depending on the country. If you want to see a country that's probably already in the death spiral, take a look at Japan. (Also, read any of Mark Steyn's books for more.)
Didn't Citizen's United make it legal for a corporation to support a political candidate in any way they choose? Twitter can refuse to provide service for the opposition (delete every post) if it choose to do so, and there ain't shit any one can do about it.
Absolutely. That doesn't mean inhibition of speech shouldn't be called out though.
An enterprising lawyer might make a case about the Communications Decency Act and that entities seeking safe harbor shouldn't just be protected from liability when exercising discretion, but said discretion should be held to something higher than an arbitrary standard... Older FCC-style "equal time" discretion or something... But that probably wouldn't go very far. The market should and will decide these things.
FTR, it's not just "Hillary" stuff, the recent SJW wisdom has caused random Conservatives to get disappeared as well:
Twitter recently formed the Orwellian-named “Trust and Safety Council” to propose changes to the company’s use policies. The goal, according to a press release, was to find a middle ground between permitting broad free speech and restricting actual abuse.
But practically none of the 40 people chosen to be part of the council are all that concerned about free speech. In fact, most of them work for anti-harassment groups and seem likely to recommend further limitations on online expression.
There are a few. First is that the gov't is trying to compel Apple to make all of their phones vulnerable.
No, the search warrant is for this phone only. If that makes all phones vulnerable [which it doesn't, since firmware needs to be loaded onto it for it to get brute forced], then that's Apple's fuck up and no one else's. Apple should be getting the blame for making their shit insecure. A cynic might argue that the very public PR fuss they're making is intended to distract from that point.
Second is that the gov't is trying to compel Apple to actually do the work to make that possible, as opposed to just providing a simple service.
There's tons of common law and case law around this. For a live investigation, even a simple county sheriff can compel assistance from private citizens (and, by implication, corps) to assist in an investigation, apprehension, or something similar. If you've never had to respond to a subpoena of any type, trust me, it's more than a "simple service." Additionally, Apple was going to be compensated for their efforts.
Third is that they're trying to compel Apple to do this because the gov't didn't handle their evidence properly, leaving this overreach as their next resort to get at that data.
Although that's indeed very funny, it's irrelevant.
The reason to accept this happening is trust in the gov't. If the idea of handing them the keys to your house is unsettling, what they're trying to do with Apple is as well.
I don't trust "the government", but that doesn't mean the judicial branch doesn't get to issue search warrants and the executive branch doesn't get to execute them. I'm all for the slippery slope argument, but people are getting way ahead of themselves here and hand-waving away challenges.
That's a false analogy. The police want help from the local locksmith to get into this house, which he made the lock for, because they have a warrant to search the premises. And the tenant is dead. And the property owner consents.
Except that they're not asking for a key to that house. They're asking for a Master Key to 38.58% of the Houses in the country, along with the legal authority to demand a custom built master key for the other 60%.
Wrong.
First of all, you can't build a backdoor or a master key in after the fact -- the backdoor already exists in the 5C. If a there's a "Master Key to 38.58% of the Houses in the country", it's the locksmith's fault for creating that situation, not the police's fault for -- a Master Key being possible -- telling the locksmith to use it on this house they have a warrant for.
Furthermore, the FBI's own affidavit indicates that Apple can keep possession of the software (key).
“Apple may maintain custody of the software, destroy it after its purpose under the order has been served, refuse to disseminate it outside of Apple and make clear to the world that it does not apply to other devices or users without lawful court orders,” the Justice Department told Judge Sheri Pym. “No one outside Apple would have access to the software required by the order unless Apple itself chose to share it.”
If it helps, think of it this way: The iPhone 5C has a security vulnerability that's fixed in a later version. That security vulnerability enables the use of a search warrant in this case. Said search warrant was lawfully issued.
I want security, but if access to the data on the phone could potentially save lives, that seems pretty important too.
Would you be willing to give a copy of your house keys to the local police department? Afterall, if everybody did that, then lives could be saved by letting the police enter suspects' homes on a whim. In fact, you could even assume those that didn't volunteer their keys are suspect to begin with!
That's a false analogy. The police want help from the local locksmith to get into this house, which he made the lock for, because they have a warrant to search the premises. And the tenant is dead. And the property owner consents.
Irrelevant, call records are already available from the wireless carrier on demand with a valid warrant.
Call records, yes. Unfortunately, in our app-centric world, call records only help to a limited extent if the users are savvy, which it seems like these were.
Anytime a court issues a subpoena its a compulsion for some individual or organization to produce evidence (or show up and testify).
As best I can puzzle out, Apple is just resisting the order in hopes that a higher court will support them.
^This. It's a PR stunt, at this point. There's no legal justification for Apple's refusal at this time, having been presented with a valid warrant. If they're hoping to appeal a 225 year old statute as unconstitutional with a 4-4 SCOTUS, umm... Good luck with that.
Are you fucking serious? You think that letting old ladies throw out ballots for candidates they don't like is any better? I've watched them do it with my own eyes.
Then why didn't you do something about it?
Bonus points: At least you saw it. Electronic manipulation won't be visible. Those same ladies aren't everywhere at once.
Still, one could imagine something actually representing a real popular vote if everyone could just click to vote.
In today's app-centric culture, trust me... Having people have to make more effort than Swipe Left or Swipe Right to vote for government elections is a feature, not a bug.
In the late '80s there was a great series called Max Headroom, occurring "20 Minutes into the Future". In it, elections were held by counting ratings and clicking buttons on the remote control.
There are vaguely smart people here in Slashdot. At this point, I'm comfortable saying that there's NO mass-electronic voting system I'd want to adopt. The attack surface is too high, the rewards for a successful intrusion or intentional modification by the controlling interests are too high, and the benefits are too low.
Electronic voting is fine in small cases, where the number of votes is so low that it's not worth a massive effort to break.
If it's connected, it can be hacked. If it's electronic, it can be modified. Even WORM/DVD-burning systems can be altered via firmware that's not writing what you think it's writing (and falsely spits back info on a "read" to fool at-moment auditing).
You know what humans are good at securing? Little pieces of paper, often with Presidents on them. Usually it involves guns. Doing it at scale requires scaling up your investment. Altering the contents of one polling station's box doesn't mean you've also altered the contents of the other 85,000 that also have ballots. Intrusion is limited by physical restraints. And usually is easy to spot after-the-fact.
It definitely doesn't involve glibc bugs, Romanian hackers (or the State of Romania), and trusting the political process to the cloud.
Slashdot Mirror
The judge can't compel you to do something illegal. Neither can a police officer.
That's begging the question slightly. "Following the directions of a peace officer" in an emergency is on the rulebooks in most states. This is why a cop can flip traffic around and tell you to go the wrong way down a one-way street because there's an accident in an intersection, despite the presence of a marked "One way" sign, which is usually what wrong-way laws are keyed off.
Don't confuse "illegal" with "unsafe" or "unreasonable"... The latter standards apply more broadly.
Red Hat made the decision to go with systemd for their own operating system. They didn't "force" it on anyone else. If you're unhappy with Debian / whoever else's decision to use systemd you'd better to talk to those maintainers. Obviously they see value in it or they wouldn't be using it.
The Fedora community (which includes a number of Red Hat employees) made the decision. A not-insignificant chunk of the Red Hat Enterprise *users* are not happy about that, but by the time EL 7.1 came out and anyone really cared the decision was long-since past.
In regards to Debian (and other distros) this is the bandwagon effect (or slippery slope, if you prefer). Debian did it because Fedora was already doing it and resistance seemed futile. The remaining distros even moreso.
If the overall linux community could call a do-over and revisit 2010-2011 knowing what we know now, there's no way the community would have stood for it. It *barely* was accepted then (and caused a mini-exodus then) when it could still call itself an "init system" with a straight face. The behemoth of interconnected components and lock-in designed to make it really inconvenient to resist or switch away from would never have been approved. I'd like to think that's "would never have been approved, even by RH EL engineers", but it's hard to say.
What I *can* say, though, is that enterprise sysadmins want predictability and determinism, and value unpredictable dynamic-ness and boot times far less. Incremental improvements on the initscripts package, following Debian's lead and switch /bin/sh to /bin/dash, a few added features to xinetd, and the addition of a couple of optional service managers (daemontools, or whatever you like) launched from an rc-init script of its own, would have meant far less churn and far less mess.
However, another Penn State researcher, glaciologist Richard Alley, said by email that “though this is one paper, it usefully reminds us that large and rapid changes are possible...
Is that the same "usefully" as "useful idiot"? Or perhaps never letting a crisis go to waste? It's "useful" to the extent that it can scare people into acting beyond what the argument has reasonably shown the case to be.
Whenever someone says X won't be needed or Y is the future, I'm always amazed by the assumptions they've unconsciously made about how X or Y is used across the country. (To the extent that "meddlers" tend to be Silicon Valley or New York residents, the mistakes are often similar.)
The US is a big country, San Francisco, CA and San Diego, CA are different, let alone San Francisco, CA and San Diego, TX.
In some places, no one drives unless they have to, and many don't even know how. In others, if you don't have a car you're insane, a child, or literally are unable to acquire one. In some places, it's 72 degrees F for 95% of the year, in others you spend 5 months surrounded by snow.
It's a big country. Take a road trip or three before you offer your prescription for what people 1000's of miles away from you need. And when describing "how things are", always pre-pend with the phrase "In my State, ...."
Basically, in Grand Rapids, buildings are connected together at the second floor level. There are periodic pedestrian tunnels connecting across streets to adjacent buildings as well, also on the second(-ish) floor. As a result, you can walk from your hotel for a dozen blocks and never even see the street. Of course, sometimes, you have to go up or down a ramp that compensates for height differences, and if there's enough of a height difference, you might leave the second floor of one building and end up in the third floor of another, IIRC, but either way, you stay indoors.
It would be nice if that practice would spread to the rest of the U.S., because it is much safer than having pedestrians and cars share the same space.
Every time I visit anywhere that has those (downtown Dayton, OH has one) I always feel like I'm in some weird dystopian '70s sci-fi movie.
You should move to San Diego. We don't even build car or light-rail tunnels unless there's literally no other possibly option because we always want to be able to see the outside. We also have outdoor malls, which tourists seem to find astonishing.
Interesting, I moved to CA about 3 years ago, and I'm not sure I've seen a 2 way stop since coming. If it were like you said, here, it would be entirely sane.
2-way and 3-way intersections are common in suburban areas of CA. Typically where there's a large discrepancy in size/traffic between the two roads, but not so large that the side street can never enter (in which case, it'd usually get updated to a traffic light).
The more annoying thing to me is the overuse of traffic lights. There are many, many intersections near me where I wait for an average of a minute or more per trip and watch two cars pass. Now granted, a few of those intersections are busy enough at certain times of day to warrant a traffic light. Those lights should ideally go into a two-way-stop (flashing red), two-way-yield (flashing yellow) configuration except during rush hour.
Or, just make it a passively controlled junction - i.e. a roundabout.
Within California, traffic light deployment varies dramatically by county. In SD County, there are a fair number of traffic lights, but outside of the downtown core, most of them are sensor-based. They default to the primary thoroughfare and will trigger for a side street when the induction coil sees a car (or a pedestrian button is pressed). There are virtually NONE that degenerate down to flashing red/yellow during off-hours, although I've seen those during long road trips around the west (and they were very confusing at first).
Additionally, most traffic lights here in San Diego have protected left turns (also sensor controlled), whereas even going up to LA they're much less common.
Sure, but I'd wager that hyper-sensitivity towards minority viewpoints is FAR more affected by the social effect of "political correctness" rather than than literal "political correctness" from a government body as an independent entity (unless the government is responding to specific social pressures, which is then a failure of 1st Amendment enforcement).
If you're plotting to overthrow the government, then yes there's a "chilling effect" if you know the FBI is listening in. That's debatably/arguably a good thing. If you have a mere "minority opinion" and you're hoping to engage in democratic discourse you have far more to fear from SJWs.
Hell, Proposition 8 was a majority opinion in 2008 and Brendan Eich still got fired for it.
He goes on to talk about thriftiness, security, "obsolete", and "holding back"... but he doesn't seem to understand the difference. Those indeed are problems, but that doesn't mean the oldest, non-broken, computer is one of them. Windows XP on a public desktop is old; a mainframe data storage retrieval system might be 20 years older. The Windows box is probably "[more] in need of an upgrade."
This seems like a fun project (finding the oldest government computer system), but I'm not sure the author fully understands what that aphorism truly suggests.
No matter who you are, you're probably not the fish they want to fry.
Don't incriminate yourself. Then, wait for a deal which allows you to unload on specifically what was asked of you, when, how, and why, and what you said, and what your concerns were.
You're far more important as a neutral observer than as someone who configured a server.
As opposed to human beings, which never fail spectacularly. Especially never behind a wheel. /s
Perhaps support for autonomous vehicles is not so much about believing autonomous vehicles are failsafe, but that autonomous vehicles are safer than human drivers. Human drivers are notoriously bad at driving.
And yet we do drive. Millions of us. Every day.
I'm far more of the belief that support for autonomous vehicles correlates with city/location and type of environment you live in. Dense urban environments, especially those planned (or un-planned) before the use of cars provide an entirely different upbringing than wide-open Western US areas. If all you ever do is take public transit, taxies, or (now) Uber's, then the switch to an autonomous car isn't that big. If you're used to driving, and don't have a particular need to be hands-off during your drives, then driving might represent something entirely different.
In San Francisco, ~30% of households don't have a car. In Los Angeles, it's ~13%, and in San Diego (where I live) it's ~7% and dropping now that the economy's been recovering and the delayed millennials are buying them. Most are happy to and enjoy being behind the wheel.
Well that's a pretty amazing endorsement of autonomous vehicles, if *already* 25% of the population is accepting of a new technology they haven't yet experienced.
Millennials.
I'd like to go into every single humanities class at my alma mater and start showing them a lot of 1970's and '80s sci-fi. It's like they've never even been exposed to the concept that it's possible for technology to fail spectacularly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0WG0B2JYLQ
Specifically it would take Apple that long to do it. For someone else to try and do it would be much harder as they would have to figure out a way to sign the code without having access to Apple's distribution certs or steal them somehow.
*In best Wonka voice*
Tell me again how Homebrewed PS3 CFW isn't available
I see no death spiral in Japan. They're adapting, in the way only a society with strong cohesion can.
They're adapting by inventing robots to do everything, but eventually the social safety net will have to give way. The trend is getting worse to, to the point that the birth rate might actually drop below 1.0, which is basically unheard of in any society that expects to still exist in 50 years.
Russia bad, but not anywhere near that. At this rate, China won't have to conquer the lands on either side of it, it'll just waltz over and settle the unoccupied space.
.... and our birthrate is low low low (around 1.1 or less, historical replacement rate was 4 babies) and theirs is high.
Historic, yes. Modern replacement rate for a society with generally first-world medical access (including those who've emigrated to such a country) would be ~2.1.
Modern (native) European birth rates are around 1.4-1.7, depending on the country. If you want to see a country that's probably already in the death spiral, take a look at Japan. (Also, read any of Mark Steyn's books for more.)
Didn't Citizen's United make it legal for a corporation to support a political candidate in any way they choose?
Twitter can refuse to provide service for the opposition (delete every post) if it choose to do so, and there ain't shit any one can do about it.
Absolutely. That doesn't mean inhibition of speech shouldn't be called out though.
An enterprising lawyer might make a case about the Communications Decency Act and that entities seeking safe harbor shouldn't just be protected from liability when exercising discretion, but said discretion should be held to something higher than an arbitrary standard... Older FCC-style "equal time" discretion or something... But that probably wouldn't go very far. The market should and will decide these things.
FTR, it's not just "Hillary" stuff, the recent SJW wisdom has caused random Conservatives to get disappeared as well:
http://nypost.com/2016/02/23/twitter-targets-trolls-but-winds-up-silencing-conservatives/
There are a few. First is that the gov't is trying to compel Apple to make all of their phones vulnerable.
No, the search warrant is for this phone only. If that makes all phones vulnerable [which it doesn't, since firmware needs to be loaded onto it for it to get brute forced], then that's Apple's fuck up and no one else's. Apple should be getting the blame for making their shit insecure. A cynic might argue that the very public PR fuss they're making is intended to distract from that point.
Second is that the gov't is trying to compel Apple to actually do the work to make that possible, as opposed to just providing a simple service.
There's tons of common law and case law around this. For a live investigation, even a simple county sheriff can compel assistance from private citizens (and, by implication, corps) to assist in an investigation, apprehension, or something similar. If you've never had to respond to a subpoena of any type, trust me, it's more than a "simple service." Additionally, Apple was going to be compensated for their efforts.
Third is that they're trying to compel Apple to do this because the gov't didn't handle their evidence properly, leaving this overreach as their next resort to get at that data.
Although that's indeed very funny, it's irrelevant.
The reason to accept this happening is trust in the gov't. If the idea of handing them the keys to your house is unsettling, what they're trying to do with Apple is as well.
I don't trust "the government", but that doesn't mean the judicial branch doesn't get to issue search warrants and the executive branch doesn't get to execute them. I'm all for the slippery slope argument, but people are getting way ahead of themselves here and hand-waving away challenges.
That's a false analogy. The police want help from the local locksmith to get into this house, which he made the lock for, because they have a warrant to search the premises. And the tenant is dead. And the property owner consents.
Except that they're not asking for a key to that house. They're asking for a Master Key to 38.58% of the Houses in the country, along with the legal authority to demand a custom built master key for the other 60%.
Wrong.
First of all, you can't build a backdoor or a master key in after the fact -- the backdoor already exists in the 5C. If a there's a "Master Key to 38.58% of the Houses in the country", it's the locksmith's fault for creating that situation, not the police's fault for -- a Master Key being possible -- telling the locksmith to use it on this house they have a warrant for.
Furthermore, the FBI's own affidavit indicates that Apple can keep possession of the software (key).
Finally, nothing here is telling the locksmith to *build* Master Keys into future products -- that's a very separate debate: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2015/04/02/encryption-bill-tech-companies-federal-law-enforcement/70734646/
If it helps, think of it this way: The iPhone 5C has a security vulnerability that's fixed in a later version. That security vulnerability enables the use of a search warrant in this case. Said search warrant was lawfully issued.
That's a false analogy.
No, it isn't. It's a question of if you trust your government. Even your own reply is full of stipulations like having various forms of consent.
Yes. Trust comes from checks and balances. They have a warrant. No one is disputing any of the facts in this case. Where exactly is the problem?
I want security, but if access to the data on the phone could potentially save lives, that seems pretty important too.
Would you be willing to give a copy of your house keys to the local police department? Afterall, if everybody did that, then lives could be saved by letting the police enter suspects' homes on a whim. In fact, you could even assume those that didn't volunteer their keys are suspect to begin with!
That's a false analogy. The police want help from the local locksmith to get into this house, which he made the lock for, because they have a warrant to search the premises. And the tenant is dead. And the property owner consents.
Irrelevant, call records are already available from the wireless carrier on demand with a valid warrant.
Call records, yes. Unfortunately, in our app-centric world, call records only help to a limited extent if the users are savvy, which it seems like these were.
Anytime a court issues a subpoena its a compulsion for some individual or organization to produce evidence (or show up and testify).
As best I can puzzle out, Apple is just resisting the order in hopes that a higher court will support them.
^This. It's a PR stunt, at this point. There's no legal justification for Apple's refusal at this time, having been presented with a valid warrant. If they're hoping to appeal a 225 year old statute as unconstitutional with a 4-4 SCOTUS, umm... Good luck with that.
Are you fucking serious? You think that letting old ladies throw out ballots for candidates they don't like is any better? I've watched them do it with my own eyes.
Then why didn't you do something about it?
Bonus points: At least you saw it. Electronic manipulation won't be visible. Those same ladies aren't everywhere at once.
Still, one could imagine something actually representing a real popular vote if everyone could just click to vote.
In today's app-centric culture, trust me... Having people have to make more effort than Swipe Left or Swipe Right to vote for government elections is a feature, not a bug.
In the late '80s there was a great series called Max Headroom, occurring "20 Minutes into the Future". In it, elections were held by counting ratings and clicking buttons on the remote control.
It was supposed to be a dystopia :(
There are vaguely smart people here in Slashdot. At this point, I'm comfortable saying that there's NO mass-electronic voting system I'd want to adopt. The attack surface is too high, the rewards for a successful intrusion or intentional modification by the controlling interests are too high, and the benefits are too low.
Electronic voting is fine in small cases, where the number of votes is so low that it's not worth a massive effort to break.
If it's connected, it can be hacked. If it's electronic, it can be modified. Even WORM/DVD-burning systems can be altered via firmware that's not writing what you think it's writing (and falsely spits back info on a "read" to fool at-moment auditing).
You know what humans are good at securing? Little pieces of paper, often with Presidents on them. Usually it involves guns. Doing it at scale requires scaling up your investment. Altering the contents of one polling station's box doesn't mean you've also altered the contents of the other 85,000 that also have ballots. Intrusion is limited by physical restraints. And usually is easy to spot after-the-fact.
It definitely doesn't involve glibc bugs, Romanian hackers (or the State of Romania), and trusting the political process to the cloud.
No thanks.