Like it or not, folks doing legitimate security assessments or building custom gadgets, etc. would do well to come up with term other than "Hacker".
Abandoning the word is only the first step. We must follow through: deny the word to everyone else. Salt the hacker earth, poison the hacker well, and burn the hacker buildings. If I can't have you, no one can.
Join me in redefining "hacker" to mean any bad person, and "hacking" to mean any undesirable activty, with no technical connotations.
That luddite political candidate you don't like? He's too hacker for you. Hitler and Stalin? Those were real hackers, titanic figures from World Hack II.
It would be legal under DMCA because bypassing whatever access controls are theoretically in PSD (AFAIK there aren't any, but let's hypothesize that there were) wouldn't be circumvention. DMCA defines circumvention in a certain way, an important part of that definition being "without the authority of the copyright holder," and the copyright holder it's talking about there, isn't Adobe; it's the copyright holder for whoever created the imagery that is in the PSD.
If PSDs contained DRM (false, but again, let's pretend they did), and you created a PSD containing your hand-drawn picture, you simply need to "authorize" the world to defeat the DRM, and then DMCA will allow anyone to defeat the PSD's DRM, anyone to create and traffic in tools that defeat the PSD's DRM, etc. These DRM-breaking acts wouldn't be exempted; they would simply not be covered in the first place. Authorization by the copyright holder removes DMCA.
Better yet, authorize everyone in the world except Adobe and their customers. Make Adobe use the interoperability clause in their defense when you're suing them over their infringement tool.
Both the stego and the crypto could actually be excellent and still be systematically weakened by a PEBKaC or even other layers. A few ideas off the top of my head...
Maybe the flash drive contained not only the data, but also some executable stego software (kind of like how having TrueCrypt installed, as an add-on rather than something coming in all default installs, is a way of announcing "hidden volumes very likely exist on this system").
Maybe the stego and crypto application software is excellent, but some other layer (e.g. the OS) left clues. Perhaps he occasionally updated the archive (it sounds like the movie contained multiple files), adding to it, and every time he used the stego software to write out a new file, the OS left copies of the file's previous contents sitting around in free space. (Ooh, or maybe the flash drive's own wear-levelling management: he copied the video to the drive once, then the video was updated and he copied the updated one "over" it onto the same drive -- bingo, this is my first guess as to what actually happened. I bet lots of not-necessarily-stupid people would make this mistake.) Then investigators notice two copies of the "same" video with different binary representations. Stego alert.
Maybe all the tools were perfect, but the user was an idiot. Perhaps after the guy's capture, they gave him back his flash drive and let him use a computer, and then he cooperatively typed his passphrase into the government's friendly computer, while thinking, "Muahaha, stupid infidels, now I will use this opportunity to delete my^H^H the only copy of the secret plans! I am so clever and they are so dumb!"
You can have good tools and still deploy them stupidly or use them stupidly. Or just foolishly enough, to tip your hand that you're hiding data. After that, decryption passphrase is recovered with a $10 wrench.
You really have to hand it to the entertainment industry. These guys aren't afraid to walk up to their customers, spit in their faces, piss all over them, and then hand them a bill for the privilege
Don't be absurd.
They would never hand you a bill. Paying them is what upset them so much and made them spit in your face. The spitting will continue until the bill-paying stops. The abuse will end when you finally give into their demands by ceasing and desisting doing business with them.
That's just anthropomorphizing. When HPL originally holy-ghost-wrote the scriptures, it was wildly unpopular because Yog-Sothoth never said anything. So they brought in August Derleth to breath some life into the characters, and he came up with all that vengeance crap. (I don't know why they used Derleth anyway; L Ron Hubbard would have been better.) But dude, it's not really canonical.
It does not excuse the god in the bible from being a vengeful, murderous entity.
You can't get into Yog-Sothoth's head or judge It, little insect. To understand this "better" (not that puny humans are really able to understand this, or anything, at all), imagine you're not an insignificant insect, but instead you're the ageless inscrutable giant with a brain the size of a planet, and you're casually observing a few trillion of your numbered specimens. A "thought" (sorry, I'm anthropomorphizing) strikes you: let's cull some of the specimens that have property X. With a near-effortless wave of a tent-- um, I mean, a hand -- the specimens are removed from the informal experiment.
This is not vengeful. "Vengeful" implies some amount of passion, probably even some actual empathy with your victim as you wish to feel yourself gain something as you feel them experience their loss. You may have a brain the size of a planet, but you can't really see from the specimens' point of view, any more than a cow knows what it's like for a bacterium to die. Indeed, you pretty much know that your specimens don't feel any pain or emotions at all, since their intelligence and capability to perceive anything is so absurdly limited.
It is not murder. "Murder" implies that someone's right to exist was violated. These specimens are not "someone"s; they are just material. The idea that a spec of sand or a spec of protoplasm or a puny human has "rights" in any way even remotely comparable (by many orders of magnitude) to the expectations in the eternal existence of the Great Old Ones, is not merely a joke, but an insult to the Great Old Ones. How dare you demean the gods' Rights by asserting that such insignificant specs as humans also have rights? I can't think of any way to be more irreverent to the very idea of rights.
That anyone would call one of the old ones "evil" for altering the state of a few thousand virtually inanimate carbon life forms, is ridiculous. Use the word "evil" where it really applies, such as.. hey, I can't event describe the scope of an evil act in this limited medium, but it involves breaking agreements on certain universal constants (establish billions of big bangs ago)that are relied upon various hyperdimensional constructions. Oh dear, now I am being irreverent by criminally understating things. Look, its just an analogy, ok?
my experience has been that a large (or at least largely vocal) part of that community is made up of idealists and professional bitchers who think everything should be open source and free
This involves a little bit of projection, but I disagree. I'm normally pretty rabid about things needing to stay open and maintainable, simply because I have my own personal history of constant disappointment with proprietary dependencies which landed me in the orphanage. I've used and loved proprietary OSes (goodbye, Amiga and OS/2) which were owned, owned by self-defeating companies that didn't allow them to keep up with hardware advances and other expectations. I made many years of paychecks writing and maintaining software in proprietary languages using proprietary compilers and proprietary runtime libraries (Clipper and VO, both of which sucked, by the way, but it was a living), sometimes going many years without some necessary bugfixes -- that one wasn't my decision (I knew it was wrong and constantly urged us to get out of it) but I still lived with it and had awkward moments with customers. All of these experiences made me decide: never again. I do everything I can to avoid relying on unmaintainable code.
Games are different.
You never rely on a game. If a few years after buying a game, you can no longer play that game, you may be unhappy but you still had those few years. Even as bad of a value as that seems, you have nothing going forward which requires that game. Now, that does mean I would never consider doing any sort of add-on work for a proprietary game (levels, plugins, whatever) but playing it as-is or with other suckers' add-ons, that's just no problem. I can give up any game at a moment's notice, unlike the investment in the sole compiler for code I sell (god damn that was awful) or a whole OS. I have some old Loki games I can't play anymore on my newer computers. I'm a little unhappy about it, but that's just not in same league as not being able to run a modernized Amiga OS on modern hardware, or having to tell a customer (yay, that was a job for the boss) that I can't (both practically or legally) fix an index locking bug.
Dwarf Fortress' closedness isn't a problem for me. iOS' closedness is. Those two situations are like night and day, with almost nothing in common at all. Don't get me wrong, I still prefer maintainable games so they'll tend to be worth more (i.e you could probably charge more for them) but proprietary isn't a total deal-killer that way it is for an OS or library.
There is one catch, though, where the relative "unimportantness" of games doesn't matter, so there is a way you could be right. Proprietary usually just means unmaintainable and unable to keep up with users' expectations, but does have a secondary meaning: potentially hostile. Proprietary systems do sometimes actively work against the interests of the owner/user (e.g. DRM) and can be a security threat (e.g. that fact that it's relatively unaudited, or only audited by parties who have conflict of interest, means it has more potential for exploitable bugs (yeah, I know that's controversial, but nevertheless that's my opinion and I think history supports it)). That's true, though, even for users who normally allow proprietary dependencies throughout all parts of their life. A Windows user has just as much to worry about with malware exploits and DRM as a Linux user, they're just less conscientious about it.
Valve will need to either allow their stuff to run sufficiently sandboxed if it's deemed unsafe (but ultimately, any user can implement that strategy by saying "this is my dedicated gaming machine and it's on the DMZ subnet"), and they'll really want to provide assurances that they'll try hard to keep their system from being an infection vector. I don't reallywant to have to put a games-only machine on
Go watch Star Trek TOS. If that isn't "leftist", I don't know what is: a utopian society with a big government where there's no poverty, no real use of money, etc. It basically seemed to show the supposed end-state of Marxism.
Huh, that's funny. I always took it as the supposed begin-state of.. maybe Marxism, or maybe something else. (It's not actually clear!) Tech appears to have wiped out poverty, and the resulting abundance has wiped out money and all the other things necessary in scarce-resource economic systems. How they got there (tech as opposed to proletariat seizing the means of production) is only implied (Star Trek rarely talks about its own history, except for throw-away references to a few past events) but nevertheless I felt it was implied. But hey, eye of the beholder and all that...
Now you've just given me an excuse to re-watch all of TOS yet again, imagining (or looking for clues) that the state of high tech and abundance was reached because the society had gone commie, rather than finally being able to go commie because of the abundance created by tech.
I still think you're wrong but am grateful for the pretense. ("Honey, we're watching this again to look for signs of Marxist causation.")
I know you're trying to use an extreme/absurd example here, but it brings up a point I've always found interesting about DMCA.
Other than indirectly through patents (and that's an important exception), there doesn't seem to be any law, DMCA included, which recognizes that a protocol or a DRM scheme can be "owned" by anyone. DMCA's language is always about who holds the copyright of the DRMed work, not who invented the DRM scheme. That party is whose authorization is always needed.
Even if someone did "own" HTTP, then visiting your web site with a browser would require your authorization according to DCMA, not HTTP's inventor's authorization. This has various consequences for DCMA which still remain unexploited (e.g. "Sony, you manufactured a TV which cracks the HDCP which protects my copyrighted video.").
If that were to happen, who loses? Nobody, I think. The states they move from wouldn't lose, because they would no longer have to provide the expensive services that selling things supposedly requires. The states they move to wouldn't lose, because their lack of sales tax indicates they've already thought of a better way to fund their services. The customers don't lose because they pay less. Every party breaks even or wins.
I'd build a decrypter into the client-side download engine
Your service sucks and zero people want to use it. Seriously, "download engine?" You might as well label your service as malware. Would you use any service that requires a "client-side download engine?"
It's the user's responsibility to pgp encrypt prior to upload and to decrypt after downloading. That's the right way to do it. At most, the service should refuse to store files that don't pass an entropy test.
Jury nullification wasn't the problem in those cases; people wanting injustice was the problem. You can't fix that by passing laws or tampering with juries. All of the "downsides" of empowered juries are downsides of democracy and humanity itself.
I think any argument against jury nullification can be made just as well against allowing people to vote in elections.
I think your math is off by a decimal. Approx 100W gets you what we're talking about, and can do a lot more than store photos.
A kiloWatt server sounds like something from the movies; it clearly has multiple GPU cards in order to render the awesome 3D password prompt, over which the hacker makes the word "override" appear.
Common sense?! You tell me, dude: without a government-granted monopoly, what incentive do researchers and musicians have, for going to the trouble of discovering digits of pi?
Anyone else thinking of the second episode of Black Mirror? Hey Microsoft, let me give you a hint: that story was intended as a joke or dystopia, not an ideal to strive for.
I'm baffled how educated judges could look at a situation where a drug-sniffing dog is sniffing around cars looking for drugs, and not construe that as a search.
It might be that they're not so much concerned with whether or not it's a search, but rather, whether or not it's an "unreasonable" search (whatever the hell that means) and whether or not the search violated the security of persons, houses, papers, and effects.
I think most people think that observing something in plain site is permitted. (Extreme example: you're conversing with a cop in public space, and suddenly turn and shoot someone, and the cop testifies in court that he saw you shoot someone.) So: is it permitted to notice chemicals in the air, in a public space? Does the concentration matter? Did the observer do something (e.g. blow air at you, or open your window) to disperse the chemicals from your space into the public one? People can go either way on that stuff, without necessarily being absurd.
Ridiculous and effective aren't antonyms. We could send cops house to house down every street and successfully catch a lot of people with their pants down (effective) but it would be ridiculous too.
Why would you go through a border checkpoint with marijuana unless you wanted to get caught?
It's not a border checkpoint; it's a Border Patrol checkpoint, and those aren't necessarily at borders. OTOH these checkpoints are at fixed and well-known locations (if you've either been there before or have researched it). I can't drive between Albuquerque and Las Cruces without going through one, so I know all about 'em, but naively look at a map and you'd probably never guess.
This is merely a symptom of inexperience, not stupidity. Even Khan's pattern indicated two dimensional thinking...
If you believe that GPS and signals from a phone to another device work, then there is strong reason to believe the victim when he claims he knows where his property is.
It's not just a question of whether you believe GPS is real tech or magic. It's also a question of whether or not you believe some coordinates someone gives you, are the GPS result (and an accurate and up-to-date result, as well as probably some other caveats that I can't think of off the top of my head)
If I go tell someone that I saw you steal my computer, and I want them to use force against you to get my computer back, the reliability of my eyesight is not their only concern.
I'm not saying my assertion that you stole my computer should be blown off (obviously I'd like that investigated) but we're talking about sending people to point guns at you or damage your locks based on my word. I might be motivated by malice or simple error (maybe I made a programming mistake when I told my computer to tell me where it is). How do you feel about that?
Slashdot Mirror
Abandoning the word is only the first step. We must follow through: deny the word to everyone else. Salt the hacker earth, poison the hacker well, and burn the hacker buildings. If I can't have you, no one can.
Join me in redefining "hacker" to mean any bad person, and "hacking" to mean any undesirable activty, with no technical connotations.
That luddite political candidate you don't like? He's too hacker for you. Hitler and Stalin? Those were real hackers, titanic figures from World Hack II.
It would be legal under DMCA because bypassing whatever access controls are theoretically in PSD (AFAIK there aren't any, but let's hypothesize that there were) wouldn't be circumvention. DMCA defines circumvention in a certain way, an important part of that definition being "without the authority of the copyright holder," and the copyright holder it's talking about there, isn't Adobe; it's the copyright holder for whoever created the imagery that is in the PSD.
If PSDs contained DRM (false, but again, let's pretend they did), and you created a PSD containing your hand-drawn picture, you simply need to "authorize" the world to defeat the DRM, and then DMCA will allow anyone to defeat the PSD's DRM, anyone to create and traffic in tools that defeat the PSD's DRM, etc. These DRM-breaking acts wouldn't be exempted; they would simply not be covered in the first place. Authorization by the copyright holder removes DMCA.
Better yet, authorize everyone in the world except Adobe and their customers. Make Adobe use the interoperability clause in their defense when you're suing them over their infringement tool.
Both the stego and the crypto could actually be excellent and still be systematically weakened by a PEBKaC or even other layers. A few ideas off the top of my head...
Maybe the flash drive contained not only the data, but also some executable stego software (kind of like how having TrueCrypt installed, as an add-on rather than something coming in all default installs, is a way of announcing "hidden volumes very likely exist on this system").
Maybe the stego and crypto application software is excellent, but some other layer (e.g. the OS) left clues. Perhaps he occasionally updated the archive (it sounds like the movie contained multiple files), adding to it, and every time he used the stego software to write out a new file, the OS left copies of the file's previous contents sitting around in free space. (Ooh, or maybe the flash drive's own wear-levelling management: he copied the video to the drive once, then the video was updated and he copied the updated one "over" it onto the same drive -- bingo, this is my first guess as to what actually happened. I bet lots of not-necessarily-stupid people would make this mistake.) Then investigators notice two copies of the "same" video with different binary representations. Stego alert.
Maybe all the tools were perfect, but the user was an idiot. Perhaps after the guy's capture, they gave him back his flash drive and let him use a computer, and then he cooperatively typed his passphrase into the government's friendly computer, while thinking, "Muahaha, stupid infidels, now I will use this opportunity to delete my^H^H the only copy of the secret plans! I am so clever and they are so dumb!"
You can have good tools and still deploy them stupidly or use them stupidly. Or just foolishly enough, to tip your hand that you're hiding data. After that, decryption passphrase is recovered with a $10 wrench.
Don't be absurd.
They would never hand you a bill. Paying them is what upset them so much and made them spit in your face. The spitting will continue until the bill-paying stops. The abuse will end when you finally give into their demands by ceasing and desisting doing business with them.
That's just anthropomorphizing. When HPL originally holy-ghost-wrote the scriptures, it was wildly unpopular because Yog-Sothoth never said anything. So they brought in August Derleth to breath some life into the characters, and he came up with all that vengeance crap. (I don't know why they used Derleth anyway; L Ron Hubbard would have been better.) But dude, it's not really canonical.
You can't get into Yog-Sothoth's head or judge It, little insect. To understand this "better" (not that puny humans are really able to understand this, or anything, at all), imagine you're not an insignificant insect, but instead you're the ageless inscrutable giant with a brain the size of a planet, and you're casually observing a few trillion of your numbered specimens. A "thought" (sorry, I'm anthropomorphizing) strikes you: let's cull some of the specimens that have property X. With a near-effortless wave of a tent-- um, I mean, a hand -- the specimens are removed from the informal experiment.
This is not vengeful. "Vengeful" implies some amount of passion, probably even some actual empathy with your victim as you wish to feel yourself gain something as you feel them experience their loss. You may have a brain the size of a planet, but you can't really see from the specimens' point of view, any more than a cow knows what it's like for a bacterium to die. Indeed, you pretty much know that your specimens don't feel any pain or emotions at all, since their intelligence and capability to perceive anything is so absurdly limited.
It is not murder. "Murder" implies that someone's right to exist was violated. These specimens are not "someone"s; they are just material. The idea that a spec of sand or a spec of protoplasm or a puny human has "rights" in any way even remotely comparable (by many orders of magnitude) to the expectations in the eternal existence of the Great Old Ones, is not merely a joke, but an insult to the Great Old Ones. How dare you demean the gods' Rights by asserting that such insignificant specs as humans also have rights? I can't think of any way to be more irreverent to the very idea of rights.
That anyone would call one of the old ones "evil" for altering the state of a few thousand virtually inanimate carbon life forms, is ridiculous. Use the word "evil" where it really applies, such as .. hey, I can't event describe the scope of an evil act in this limited medium, but it involves breaking agreements on certain universal constants (establish billions of big bangs ago)that are relied upon various hyperdimensional constructions. Oh dear, now I am being irreverent by criminally understating things. Look, its just an analogy, ok?
BTW, just in case: Hail Zorin! Zorin is awesome!
If people start studying how the planets move, it could lead to heresy yet also make sense, thereby undermining people's respect for authority.
This involves a little bit of projection, but I disagree. I'm normally pretty rabid about things needing to stay open and maintainable, simply because I have my own personal history of constant disappointment with proprietary dependencies which landed me in the orphanage. I've used and loved proprietary OSes (goodbye, Amiga and OS/2) which were owned, owned by self-defeating companies that didn't allow them to keep up with hardware advances and other expectations. I made many years of paychecks writing and maintaining software in proprietary languages using proprietary compilers and proprietary runtime libraries (Clipper and VO, both of which sucked, by the way, but it was a living), sometimes going many years without some necessary bugfixes -- that one wasn't my decision (I knew it was wrong and constantly urged us to get out of it) but I still lived with it and had awkward moments with customers. All of these experiences made me decide: never again. I do everything I can to avoid relying on unmaintainable code.
Games are different.
You never rely on a game. If a few years after buying a game, you can no longer play that game, you may be unhappy but you still had those few years. Even as bad of a value as that seems, you have nothing going forward which requires that game. Now, that does mean I would never consider doing any sort of add-on work for a proprietary game (levels, plugins, whatever) but playing it as-is or with other suckers' add-ons, that's just no problem. I can give up any game at a moment's notice, unlike the investment in the sole compiler for code I sell (god damn that was awful) or a whole OS. I have some old Loki games I can't play anymore on my newer computers. I'm a little unhappy about it, but that's just not in same league as not being able to run a modernized Amiga OS on modern hardware, or having to tell a customer (yay, that was a job for the boss) that I can't (both practically or legally) fix an index locking bug.
Dwarf Fortress' closedness isn't a problem for me. iOS' closedness is. Those two situations are like night and day, with almost nothing in common at all. Don't get me wrong, I still prefer maintainable games so they'll tend to be worth more (i.e you could probably charge more for them) but proprietary isn't a total deal-killer that way it is for an OS or library.
There is one catch, though, where the relative "unimportantness" of games doesn't matter, so there is a way you could be right. Proprietary usually just means unmaintainable and unable to keep up with users' expectations, but does have a secondary meaning: potentially hostile. Proprietary systems do sometimes actively work against the interests of the owner/user (e.g. DRM) and can be a security threat (e.g. that fact that it's relatively unaudited, or only audited by parties who have conflict of interest, means it has more potential for exploitable bugs (yeah, I know that's controversial, but nevertheless that's my opinion and I think history supports it)). That's true, though, even for users who normally allow proprietary dependencies throughout all parts of their life. A Windows user has just as much to worry about with malware exploits and DRM as a Linux user, they're just less conscientious about it.
Valve will need to either allow their stuff to run sufficiently sandboxed if it's deemed unsafe (but ultimately, any user can implement that strategy by saying "this is my dedicated gaming machine and it's on the DMZ subnet"), and they'll really want to provide assurances that they'll try hard to keep their system from being an infection vector. I don't really want to have to put a games-only machine on
Huh, that's funny. I always took it as the supposed begin-state of .. maybe Marxism, or maybe something else. (It's not actually clear!) Tech appears to have wiped out poverty, and the resulting abundance has wiped out money and all the other things necessary in scarce-resource economic systems. How they got there (tech as opposed to proletariat seizing the means of production) is only implied (Star Trek rarely talks about its own history, except for throw-away references to a few past events) but nevertheless I felt it was implied. But hey, eye of the beholder and all that...
Now you've just given me an excuse to re-watch all of TOS yet again, imagining (or looking for clues) that the state of high tech and abundance was reached because the society had gone commie, rather than finally being able to go commie because of the abundance created by tech.
I still think you're wrong but am grateful for the pretense. ("Honey, we're watching this again to look for signs of Marxist causation.")
Unfortunately the Autism vaccine causes Whooping Cough. I read it in a scientician paper.
I know you're trying to use an extreme/absurd example here, but it brings up a point I've always found interesting about DMCA.
Other than indirectly through patents (and that's an important exception), there doesn't seem to be any law, DMCA included, which recognizes that a protocol or a DRM scheme can be "owned" by anyone. DMCA's language is always about who holds the copyright of the DRMed work, not who invented the DRM scheme. That party is whose authorization is always needed.
Even if someone did "own" HTTP, then visiting your web site with a browser would require your authorization according to DCMA, not HTTP's inventor's authorization. This has various consequences for DCMA which still remain unexploited (e.g. "Sony, you manufactured a TV which cracks the HDCP which protects my copyrighted video.").
Would that bad?
If that were to happen, who loses? Nobody, I think. The states they move from wouldn't lose, because they would no longer have to provide the expensive services that selling things supposedly requires. The states they move to wouldn't lose, because their lack of sales tax indicates they've already thought of a better way to fund their services. The customers don't lose because they pay less. Every party breaks even or wins.
Your service sucks and zero people want to use it. Seriously, "download engine?" You might as well label your service as malware. Would you use any service that requires a "client-side download engine?"
It's the user's responsibility to pgp encrypt prior to upload and to decrypt after downloading. That's the right way to do it. At most, the service should refuse to store files that don't pass an entropy test.
It happened exactly when he stepped up and started talking about science and advocating the rare attitude of giving-a-shit.
"80% of life|success is showing up." -- Woody Allen
Literacy is over-rated. Ergo, the state's motto translates to "Tyranny forever."
Jury nullification wasn't the problem in those cases; people wanting injustice was the problem. You can't fix that by passing laws or tampering with juries. All of the "downsides" of empowered juries are downsides of democracy and humanity itself.
I think any argument against jury nullification can be made just as well against allowing people to vote in elections.
I think your math is off by a decimal. Approx 100W gets you what we're talking about, and can do a lot more than store photos.
A kiloWatt server sounds like something from the movies; it clearly has multiple GPU cards in order to render the awesome 3D password prompt, over which the hacker makes the word "override" appear.
Common sense?! You tell me, dude: without a government-granted monopoly, what incentive do researchers and musicians have, for going to the trouble of discovering digits of pi?
Anyone else thinking of the second episode of Black Mirror? Hey Microsoft, let me give you a hint: that story was intended as a joke or dystopia, not an ideal to strive for.
It might be that they're not so much concerned with whether or not it's a search, but rather, whether or not it's an "unreasonable" search (whatever the hell that means) and whether or not the search violated the security of persons, houses, papers, and effects.
I think most people think that observing something in plain site is permitted. (Extreme example: you're conversing with a cop in public space, and suddenly turn and shoot someone, and the cop testifies in court that he saw you shoot someone.) So: is it permitted to notice chemicals in the air, in a public space? Does the concentration matter? Did the observer do something (e.g. blow air at you, or open your window) to disperse the chemicals from your space into the public one? People can go either way on that stuff, without necessarily being absurd.
Ridiculous and effective aren't antonyms. We could send cops house to house down every street and successfully catch a lot of people with their pants down (effective) but it would be ridiculous too.
It's not a border checkpoint; it's a Border Patrol checkpoint, and those aren't necessarily at borders. OTOH these checkpoints are at fixed and well-known locations (if you've either been there before or have researched it). I can't drive between Albuquerque and Las Cruces without going through one, so I know all about 'em, but naively look at a map and you'd probably never guess.
This is merely a symptom of inexperience, not stupidity. Even Khan's pattern indicated two dimensional thinking...
But transcoding is lossy!
It's not just a question of whether you believe GPS is real tech or magic. It's also a question of whether or not you believe some coordinates someone gives you, are the GPS result (and an accurate and up-to-date result, as well as probably some other caveats that I can't think of off the top of my head)
If I go tell someone that I saw you steal my computer, and I want them to use force against you to get my computer back, the reliability of my eyesight is not their only concern.
I'm not saying my assertion that you stole my computer should be blown off (obviously I'd like that investigated) but we're talking about sending people to point guns at you or damage your locks based on my word. I might be motivated by malice or simple error (maybe I made a programming mistake when I told my computer to tell me where it is). How do you feel about that?
Understanding GPS is only part of this.