Fortunately, almost nobody lives in cold areas up north...
Sure... in the same way that "almost nobody" lives in North America when you compare it to populations like China and India.
My point is, saying that many millions of people are effectively "almost nobody" is going to come across as being very suggestive of the idea that their feelings or experiences do not matter. It is liable to be seen as both dismissive and possibly even a bit insulting.
I don't dispute that Java is entrenched, and it might stick around for a while, but it's a naive misconception to think it would ever be for the same reason as COBOL.
COBOL was entrenched too, but the primary thing that kept it hanging around was that it was not only entrenched, but also more often than not impractical to attempt to translate any old COBOL program into another modern language without simply transliterating it, and basically copying all of the undesirable COBOL paradigms into the new language, which defeat the point of using the newer language. The resulting code would resemble the output of an automated tool such as compiler, even if done by hand, and be far less maintainable than even the original COBOL code, so the only practical thing to do would be to basically rewrite the entire application from scratch if you wanted it to be properly implemented in another language, adopting that language's paradigms from the beginning. Modern COBOL has some extensions which enable COBOL programs that take advantage of the newer capabilities to be vastly more straightforward to translate them into another language without sacrificing readability as I explained above, but of course, that does not amount to much of the volume of COBOL programs that are still in use today.
You can translate complex programs written in Java into another modern language with *FAR* less difficulty, because Java's design has enough similarity to many other modern languages that it is much more straightforward to implement a java program in something new, and not lose any readability or maintainability in the new language.
It isn't necessarily going to be cheap, but at least it is tractable enough that it could still be worthwhile to spend the money to do if someone is so inclined.
Have you ever actually used COBOL? Rewriting a java program is going to be at *LEAST* an order of magnitude cheaper than rewriting an equivalently functional COBOL program. Rewriting even quite complicated java programs in another modern language so that you can take advantage of its features, while perhaps not necessarily incredibly cheap, is going to at least be a tractable problem. I wouldn't want to make the same statement about anything but the simplest (also probably useless for all practical purposes) of COBOL programs.
To be fair, "the tech doesn't work" applies to the human driven cars that hit people too... and it never will either, because people will always make mistakes.
The best we can hope for in self-driving cars is to reduce the number of people that get hit to be low enough that when someone gets hit by a car at all, it's so outside the norm that it becomes real news.
Sure, but that doesn't mean that his mom developed the strong opinions she held about vaccination more than 18 years ago. All it means is that she developed those opinions sometime before the subject came up at his school and he needed parental permission to get the vaccination. Up until surprisingly recently, a person didn't generally have to be *opposed* to vaccination to have not had their kid vaccinated when they otherwise could have been.... but the number of kids that this would have applied to to would be pretty small... much less than the kids who couldn't get vaccinated on account of known medical conditions, and easily small enough that herd immunity would still be in effect, so it might go unnoticed for many years. As recently as only 10 or so years ago, it was still virtually unthinkable in most developed countries to not allow your child to get vaccinated unless there was a specific diagnosed medical condition that the child had which precluded it. If a parent had not given permission for a vaccination when a time actually came for it to otherwise happen, it was generally assumed that there was a valid medical reason, and until very recently, this was not typically questioned.
Where did you get the impression that the kid's mom refused to allow him to get vaccinated 18 years ago, or that her attitude about vaccines was 18 years old?
When they are 18, they don't need parental consent.
Before they are 18, they do... there won't be any "sneaking behind parent's backs" in this case, unless the people administering the vaccinations to rebellious kids are doing so without state endorsed approval, and believe me, that's the *LAST* thing you want to be encouraging.
Where, may I ask, did you get the impression that the mom's false impressions were made 18 years ago?
The study that McCarthy quoted wasn't written 18 years ago either. In fact, Facebook was around for at least four years *BEFORE* that study was even published.
Those "idiotic beliefs" about the alleged links between vaccination ant autism that you see everywhere today are barely more than 10 years old today in popular culture. The concept could easily have been well entrenched in Facebook at the time that the kid's mom started buying into that crap.
Those protections will always exist, regardless of the law. The law can, at best, only attempt to prohibit you from using them.
It is even possible (easy even) to make encryption that is undetectable to anyone who doesn't know *EXACTLY* what to be looking for, so there's no way for anyone else to detect people using it. There's further literally no upper limit to how many of these encryptions that could ever exist, it's as unbounded as human imagination... and considering that we can imagine things like infinity, I'm not so sure that someone who thinks what they believe "should" be the case has any correlation to reality.
In the case of a warrant canary, the act of contempt happens *after* you've received the order, by deliberately changing some internal policy so that the canary dies, thereby informing anyone who is looking for the canary of the existence of the investigation.
It is absolutely no different than explicitly communicating the existence of the investigation through any other covert communication mechanism, be it sign language, flag semaphores, or a fictional language like Klingon or Tolkien's Elvish. The only reason one might get away with it is if nobody else happened to notice that this information was communicated as a direct result of a deliberate change in policy that was most likely motivated by the beginning of the investigation, or if the investigators are gullible enough to believe that it was all just a mere coincidence. The fact that one might be able to argue this without being disproven doesn't change reality.
It's contempt, just contempt that you have some significant non-zero chance of getting away with.
I would suggest that while the canary itself certainly can't be contempt, whatever changes in policy that a person deliberately makes that communicates the information they are supposed to be prohibited from disclosing would be. Allowing a canary to die in response to a secret government investigation *IS* still ultimately willful disclosure, it is simply disclosure that is being attempted via a covert communication mechanism.
So yes.... it's contempt. It's just contempt that one might have a fair chance of getting away with if everybody else actually perceives it as a form of communication that is not reliable enough to qualify as disclosure, they do not happen to notice it in the first place, or if they happen to believe that any simultaneity of the beginning of the investigation with the change in policy which might have otherwise communicated its existence is supposedly more likely to be a coincidence than not. One could try and make the latter argument if pressed, but would it be the truth? The mere fact that this may not be distinguishable should not be taken as a license to be dishonest... particularly if one cares enough about the truth to deliberately let their canary die as a means to inform someone else.
And it's worth further noting that any "unreliability" it might be ascribed to have is not a consequence of the mechanism itself but because of the fact that only some (presumably) small subset of the population to whom this raw information was conveyed might extract any particular meaning to it (the canary dying meaning an investigation has started). For the intended recipients of the communication, the mechanism is not unreliable at all. It is entirely isomorphic to having explicitly communicated that one is being investigated via any other otherwise covert channel.
.... the uploader from linking to a website or facebook page where people can contribute their thoughts on the video and some asshat ends up posting shit there instead? Will the video still get demonetized?
First, there's no law against putting canaries up before you get a secret request.
Of course not.
Second, the government cannot force you to lie.
Also true, but if you've contrived your circumstances beforehand so that only way you can avoid communicating that you're being investigated if or when it happens to you is to lie, is that the government's fault?
By having a canary, you aren't telling anyone that you've got a secret request.
Not by merely having a canary in the first place, no.... but by deliberately permitting it die where you otherwise would not have, particularly if you had ever previously announced that such a change in operation would be an indication of that situation, you *ARE*, in fact, telling people about the existence of the request when the canary dies, just as certainly as if you had communicated that information through natural language.
So, again, what legal mechanism is going to stop this?
If a secret request comes with a penalty for communicating the existence of the request to anyone else, it doesn't matter how you do it... the fact that you did it would still be an infraction. The changing of some internal policy (ie, letting a canary die) to alert people outside of an organization to the situation is nothing more or less than a covert signalling system, and as far as I can see, the only reason you'd get away with it is if nobody else happened to perceive it that way.
So, what legal mechanism is going to stop this? Canaries are legal under normal circumstances. The government has some legal means to make you say nothing, and that's exactly what you're doing.
If they say that you are not to disclose to anyone that the investigation is happening, because canaries would be one way to disclose such information, their utilization (or more specifically, their expiration) could still be considered deliberate disclosure, because you are still wilfully altering some operational policy (that keeps the canary alive) which effectively communicates information that you are supposedly forbidden to communicate. This would be particularly troublesome if you had already previously explicitly communicated to the public that such a change in operational policy, if it were to ever occur, would only be brought about by such investigation. If you had never made such a statement, I think you may have a bit more wiggle room, but in all honesty, without such a statement, I'm not sure why one would bother with a warrant canary in the first place.
As I have said, this has nothing to prove with intent to disclose, it has to do with the fact that not maintaining a canary such that it expires effectively *IS* disclosure.
If you can show how a warrant canary dying is not entirely equivalent to any other form of disclosure that happens to only be applicable if someone else knew what to look for, then illustrate how, instead of simply repeating your point about the NSL and contract law endlessly.
As I said... one could potentially disclose through semaphores, or sign language, or using ancient Aztec symbols... but it's all still disclosure. The fact that perhaps only a subset of the population will even know what the heck it actually indicates is irrelevant.
How do you figure that simply repeating what was already said and I have already provided counter to actually negates what I had said, above?
As I said... anything that they may deliberately choose which in some way effectively does disclose that they are under investigation is isomorphically equivalent to any other manner of disclosure, which again, one could be forbidden from doing.
.... a technology that is inferior in *EVERY* way to other things that are commonly and cheaply available is incomprehensible to me.
Originally, cassettes were somewhat preferable to vinyl because they were more portable. One made a sacrifice in terms of audio quality for that convenience, but for many it was worth it.
However, in today's digital age, you can store thousands of songs within the space that a single cassette would take up, and at *vastly* higher quality. It's still more portable (and apparently now, less expensive) than vinyl, but when there are cheaper and no less portable mechanisms available that do not compromise on quality, honestly, any preference for the obsolete tech is going to come across more like Luddism than genuine nostalgia.
As I said, even *IF* you assume that it was because of stupidity or ignorance or what have you, that does not absolve the person from consequences.
It is important, however, that if one is to accept that it was unintentional, however stupid, then it not be treated as deliberate.
Even his original comment that caused this whole thing never struck me as a statement he made with any intent to manipulate stock prices.. it was simply a thoughtless remark that he did not anticipate the response to. This is ignorance to the point of incompetence, and is why, as I also said, it is clear that this guy cannot both continue to be affiliated with Tesla and abide by the terms of the settlement.
And honestly, you can't tell me that basically firing the guy or forcing him to permanently resign would not be a pretty hefty consequence.... so don't think I'm suggesting that the "I'm stupid" defense should necessarily get one out of any negative consequences for their actions, but it should, where such a defense is sufficiently probable, be still treated as an accident.
I'm not even particularly wanting to defend the guy, but anyone who thinks that even brilliant people can't say spectacularly stupid shit from time to time have no idea what people are like in real life. When he made that first tweet, honest to God, the very first thing I thought was "Musk needs to take a long vacation... it's clear to me that stress is starting to take a toll on his sanity". Then people reacted to it as if it was deliberate attempt to manipulate stock prices, and honestly, I always felt like that was an overreaction.
Slashdot Mirror
needlessly jargony?
Why not say what it is in plain english... a newly discovered or previously unheard of exploit or vulnerability.
And if it's not that, then it's not zero-day, by definition.
Sure... in the same way that "almost nobody" lives in North America when you compare it to populations like China and India.
My point is, saying that many millions of people are effectively "almost nobody" is going to come across as being very suggestive of the idea that their feelings or experiences do not matter. It is liable to be seen as both dismissive and possibly even a bit insulting.
I don't dispute that Java is entrenched, and it might stick around for a while, but it's a naive misconception to think it would ever be for the same reason as COBOL.
COBOL was entrenched too, but the primary thing that kept it hanging around was that it was not only entrenched, but also more often than not impractical to attempt to translate any old COBOL program into another modern language without simply transliterating it, and basically copying all of the undesirable COBOL paradigms into the new language, which defeat the point of using the newer language. The resulting code would resemble the output of an automated tool such as compiler, even if done by hand, and be far less maintainable than even the original COBOL code, so the only practical thing to do would be to basically rewrite the entire application from scratch if you wanted it to be properly implemented in another language, adopting that language's paradigms from the beginning. Modern COBOL has some extensions which enable COBOL programs that take advantage of the newer capabilities to be vastly more straightforward to translate them into another language without sacrificing readability as I explained above, but of course, that does not amount to much of the volume of COBOL programs that are still in use today.
You can translate complex programs written in Java into another modern language with *FAR* less difficulty, because Java's design has enough similarity to many other modern languages that it is much more straightforward to implement a java program in something new, and not lose any readability or maintainability in the new language.
It isn't necessarily going to be cheap, but at least it is tractable enough that it could still be worthwhile to spend the money to do if someone is so inclined.
Have you ever actually used COBOL? Rewriting a java program is going to be at *LEAST* an order of magnitude cheaper than rewriting an equivalently functional COBOL program. Rewriting even quite complicated java programs in another modern language so that you can take advantage of its features, while perhaps not necessarily incredibly cheap, is going to at least be a tractable problem. I wouldn't want to make the same statement about anything but the simplest (also probably useless for all practical purposes) of COBOL programs.
Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence.
Who would want to murder Al?
To be fair, "the tech doesn't work" applies to the human driven cars that hit people too... and it never will either, because people will always make mistakes.
The best we can hope for in self-driving cars is to reduce the number of people that get hit to be low enough that when someone gets hit by a car at all, it's so outside the norm that it becomes real news.
Sure, but that doesn't mean that his mom developed the strong opinions she held about vaccination more than 18 years ago. All it means is that she developed those opinions sometime before the subject came up at his school and he needed parental permission to get the vaccination. Up until surprisingly recently, a person didn't generally have to be *opposed* to vaccination to have not had their kid vaccinated when they otherwise could have been.... but the number of kids that this would have applied to to would be pretty small... much less than the kids who couldn't get vaccinated on account of known medical conditions, and easily small enough that herd immunity would still be in effect, so it might go unnoticed for many years. As recently as only 10 or so years ago, it was still virtually unthinkable in most developed countries to not allow your child to get vaccinated unless there was a specific diagnosed medical condition that the child had which precluded it. If a parent had not given permission for a vaccination when a time actually came for it to otherwise happen, it was generally assumed that there was a valid medical reason, and until very recently, this was not typically questioned.
Where did you get the impression that the kid's mom refused to allow him to get vaccinated 18 years ago, or that her attitude about vaccines was 18 years old?
When they are 18, they don't need parental consent.
Before they are 18, they do... there won't be any "sneaking behind parent's backs" in this case, unless the people administering the vaccinations to rebellious kids are doing so without state endorsed approval, and believe me, that's the *LAST* thing you want to be encouraging.
Where, may I ask, did you get the impression that the mom's false impressions were made 18 years ago?
The study that McCarthy quoted wasn't written 18 years ago either. In fact, Facebook was around for at least four years *BEFORE* that study was even published.
Those "idiotic beliefs" about the alleged links between vaccination ant autism that you see everywhere today are barely more than 10 years old today in popular culture. The concept could easily have been well entrenched in Facebook at the time that the kid's mom started buying into that crap.
So to play devil's advocate here, you are wanting things to be easier, just like law enforcement, right?
Those protections will always exist, regardless of the law. The law can, at best, only attempt to prohibit you from using them.
It is even possible (easy even) to make encryption that is undetectable to anyone who doesn't know *EXACTLY* what to be looking for, so there's no way for anyone else to detect people using it. There's further literally no upper limit to how many of these encryptions that could ever exist, it's as unbounded as human imagination... and considering that we can imagine things like infinity, I'm not so sure that someone who thinks what they believe "should" be the case has any correlation to reality.
So saying that they don't use the artificial one either isn't news.
And by the way... although this is just a personal pet peeve here, it's actually written as "A.I.", not "AI". It is an abbreviation, not an acronym.
There is a difference. While the former can be just an indication of a healthy economy, the latter can be an indication of an imminent housing crisis.
S, 3, X, Y..... I wonder if Musk is trying to send a subliminal message here.
In the case of a warrant canary, the act of contempt happens *after* you've received the order, by deliberately changing some internal policy so that the canary dies, thereby informing anyone who is looking for the canary of the existence of the investigation.
It is absolutely no different than explicitly communicating the existence of the investigation through any other covert communication mechanism, be it sign language, flag semaphores, or a fictional language like Klingon or Tolkien's Elvish. The only reason one might get away with it is if nobody else happened to notice that this information was communicated as a direct result of a deliberate change in policy that was most likely motivated by the beginning of the investigation, or if the investigators are gullible enough to believe that it was all just a mere coincidence. The fact that one might be able to argue this without being disproven doesn't change reality.
It's contempt, just contempt that you have some significant non-zero chance of getting away with.
I would suggest that while the canary itself certainly can't be contempt, whatever changes in policy that a person deliberately makes that communicates the information they are supposed to be prohibited from disclosing would be. Allowing a canary to die in response to a secret government investigation *IS* still ultimately willful disclosure, it is simply disclosure that is being attempted via a covert communication mechanism.
So yes.... it's contempt. It's just contempt that one might have a fair chance of getting away with if everybody else actually perceives it as a form of communication that is not reliable enough to qualify as disclosure, they do not happen to notice it in the first place, or if they happen to believe that any simultaneity of the beginning of the investigation with the change in policy which might have otherwise communicated its existence is supposedly more likely to be a coincidence than not. One could try and make the latter argument if pressed, but would it be the truth? The mere fact that this may not be distinguishable should not be taken as a license to be dishonest... particularly if one cares enough about the truth to deliberately let their canary die as a means to inform someone else.
And it's worth further noting that any "unreliability" it might be ascribed to have is not a consequence of the mechanism itself but because of the fact that only some (presumably) small subset of the population to whom this raw information was conveyed might extract any particular meaning to it (the canary dying meaning an investigation has started). For the intended recipients of the communication, the mechanism is not unreliable at all. It is entirely isomorphic to having explicitly communicated that one is being investigated via any other otherwise covert channel.
Of course not.
Also true, but if you've contrived your circumstances beforehand so that only way you can avoid communicating that you're being investigated if or when it happens to you is to lie, is that the government's fault?
Not by merely having a canary in the first place, no.... but by deliberately permitting it die where you otherwise would not have, particularly if you had ever previously announced that such a change in operation would be an indication of that situation, you *ARE*, in fact, telling people about the existence of the request when the canary dies, just as certainly as if you had communicated that information through natural language.
If a secret request comes with a penalty for communicating the existence of the request to anyone else, it doesn't matter how you do it... the fact that you did it would still be an infraction. The changing of some internal policy (ie, letting a canary die) to alert people outside of an organization to the situation is nothing more or less than a covert signalling system, and as far as I can see, the only reason you'd get away with it is if nobody else happened to perceive it that way.
If they say that you are not to disclose to anyone that the investigation is happening, because canaries would be one way to disclose such information, their utilization (or more specifically, their expiration) could still be considered deliberate disclosure, because you are still wilfully altering some operational policy (that keeps the canary alive) which effectively communicates information that you are supposedly forbidden to communicate. This would be particularly troublesome if you had already previously explicitly communicated to the public that such a change in operational policy, if it were to ever occur, would only be brought about by such investigation. If you had never made such a statement, I think you may have a bit more wiggle room, but in all honesty, without such a statement, I'm not sure why one would bother with a warrant canary in the first place.
As I have said, this has nothing to prove with intent to disclose, it has to do with the fact that not maintaining a canary such that it expires effectively *IS* disclosure.
If you can show how a warrant canary dying is not entirely equivalent to any other form of disclosure that happens to only be applicable if someone else knew what to look for, then illustrate how, instead of simply repeating your point about the NSL and contract law endlessly.
As I said... one could potentially disclose through semaphores, or sign language, or using ancient Aztec symbols... but it's all still disclosure. The fact that perhaps only a subset of the population will even know what the heck it actually indicates is irrelevant.
How do you figure that simply repeating what was already said and I have already provided counter to actually negates what I had said, above?
As I said... anything that they may deliberately choose which in some way effectively does disclose that they are under investigation is isomorphically equivalent to any other manner of disclosure, which again, one could be forbidden from doing.
Originally, cassettes were somewhat preferable to vinyl because they were more portable. One made a sacrifice in terms of audio quality for that convenience, but for many it was worth it.
However, in today's digital age, you can store thousands of songs within the space that a single cassette would take up, and at *vastly* higher quality. It's still more portable (and apparently now, less expensive) than vinyl, but when there are cheaper and no less portable mechanisms available that do not compromise on quality, honestly, any preference for the obsolete tech is going to come across more like Luddism than genuine nostalgia.
As I said, even *IF* you assume that it was because of stupidity or ignorance or what have you, that does not absolve the person from consequences.
It is important, however, that if one is to accept that it was unintentional, however stupid, then it not be treated as deliberate.
Even his original comment that caused this whole thing never struck me as a statement he made with any intent to manipulate stock prices.. it was simply a thoughtless remark that he did not anticipate the response to. This is ignorance to the point of incompetence, and is why, as I also said, it is clear that this guy cannot both continue to be affiliated with Tesla and abide by the terms of the settlement.
And honestly, you can't tell me that basically firing the guy or forcing him to permanently resign would not be a pretty hefty consequence.... so don't think I'm suggesting that the "I'm stupid" defense should necessarily get one out of any negative consequences for their actions, but it should, where such a defense is sufficiently probable, be still treated as an accident.
I'm not even particularly wanting to defend the guy, but anyone who thinks that even brilliant people can't say spectacularly stupid shit from time to time have no idea what people are like in real life. When he made that first tweet, honest to God, the very first thing I thought was "Musk needs to take a long vacation... it's clear to me that stress is starting to take a toll on his sanity". Then people reacted to it as if it was deliberate attempt to manipulate stock prices, and honestly, I always felt like that was an overreaction.