The kill switch mechanism that I described would use a password that was set by the authorized owner of the device... and would need to be re-entered on the physical device in order to change it. If, when purchasing a device, you are unable to set that password yourself because there is apparently already one in place that you did not set yourself, then you will know immediately that you do not actually have any control over the device and it could be bricked underneath you. Certainly you would be able to realize it within any remotely reasonable warranty period... you could do it within minutes of unboxing it. If no such warranty is offered that you would have the opportunity to try to do this before retuning it, then simply do not buy from that supplier.
I wasn't suggesting that the mechanisms above would ever be legislated by the government, but there's no theoretical reason that current device manufacturers could not implement a mechanism that did what I described... potentially negating much of the marketability of any device that was stolen, since an authorized owner may still be able render it useless in anyone else's hands.
And if the government did legislate a kill switch, they would need to explicitly say in the law that agents acting on behalf of the law or government should be able to turn off any device without the consent of the owner in order to disable it, plainly exposing the government's intentions for such a law, since unless they did so, the kill-switch mechanism that I described would definitely be compliant to a more generally worded law.
The point of the mechanism that I suggested is to put the responsibility of final control of the device into the hands of the authorized owner of the device. If the owner of the device is not actually competent enough to exercise that control in a useful manner, that's not really the fault of the mechanism itsef. Either way, it's nothing that a would-be thief has any control over.
I suspect people would promptly learn to not use the default password when their phone gets shut down without their consent.
But hey... maybe have the ability to unbrick it by entering the current password into the device would be a way for the user to get their device back... and if somebody else really had done this without their consent, they should know that they need to change their password right after unbricking it, since it was hacked. The password should not be possible to change remotely.
The point behind what I was suggesting is to put the control of their device into the hands of a legitimate user. If the user is not competent enough to remember what they need in order to actually enforce that control, that's their own fault.... but either way, it's still not something a thief or a person who may want to try to brick somebody else's phone has any direct control over.
The first way is to make the device irrecoverable... utterly and completely. Customer service could no more make a bricked phone operational again than it could fix one that had been run over by a train. But the disadvantage of this is that it probably wouldn't stop customers from asking.
The second way, and probably a preferable one, is to make the bricking recoverable by the end user, who must enter a password that they chose for their phone to unbrick the device. The password should not be of any pre-determinable length so that a hacker who wanted to unbrick the phone would not even know what the domain to try to guess the password by brute force might be. Ideally, such a password should not get reset simply by changing the sim card in the device, and changing it would require that the old password be entered first.
A bricked phone would be utterly useless for virtually any task... even using the apps that might be installed on it... the only thing it would be able to do is call emergency/911, which would remove much of the incentive to bother to steal phones.
What happens when your angry girlfirend falsely reports your phone stolen? What happens if the carrier's network get breached and someone sends the kill commands to all devices. What if its just a leak like Verizon's text portal awhile back and someone just spams the system with tons of false reports?
Ther most obvious way to circumvent all of these is if the kill command requires a password that was created by the user of the device... and the password does not get reset by doing things like changing the sim card, so you can still brick your own phone if a thief has stolen it and changed the sim card, but arbitrary people cannot brick your device unless they know your password. Resetting the pasword to something else would, of course, require that the old one be entered first.
There are, theoretically, quite secure ways of implementing this... although I would not be surprised if nobody bothers.
One mechanism that most immediately occurs to me would be that a device with a remote-brick feature would have a password, created and assigned by the user of the device, which would not get reset by wiping the firmware or installing a new sim card. To brick a device would require transmitting not only the unique code that physically identifies that particular piece of hardware, but also the password that is supposed to be associated with it. The physical device, if it received an intent-to-brick signal that was actually intended for it, would compare the pasword in the signal to that which was set for the device, and if they matched, the device would be bricked at a level that is irrevocable. The phone could only be used to call 911, and that's it. Legitimately selling a phone would require the user to reset that password to a default state... but doing that, in turn, would require that the old password be entered first.
in fact, since you can't prove the nonexistence of anything
May I introduce you to the Michelson Morley experiment, which disproved the existence of the Aether?
Granted, more specifically, it really disproved the existence of an Aether which possessed the properties that it was already presumed to have. It did not disprove the existence of an Aether which may have had other properties... but that was not the point of the experiment.
This is explicitly why I used the phrase "biblical god", because likewise, by making certain assumptions about the nature of God and his alleged plans for humanity and the future of creation, and in particular, those properties ascribed to him in what we commonly know as the bible today, if it really were true that a god with those characteritics and agenda does not actualy exist, then it is entirely possible to disprove the existence of that particular notion of god. It's just that the lengths to which one would have to go to establish such proof is not practical.
That doesn't mean you can't do it.
You can disprove the existence of absolutely anything when you have made a fixed set of specific assumptions about it... when you have disproven any of the assumptions, you have also disproven the existence off something that conforms to those assumptions, since something that actually exists cannot conform to assumptions that can be provably shown to be false (presumably by contradiction).
It would still mean that the biblical notion of god was wrong... and that he did not exist....
The Muslim Jesus is not the same person as the Christian Jesus either... since one group describes him as a human prophet, while the other describes him as a deity who came to earth to live in human form. That's a pretty darn fundamental difference.... it doesn't mean Jesus didn't exist, but it does mean that at least one of those two groups is definitely wrong, and the person that they claim to believe in is not real.
So basically, ban everything that can be used to augment and improve the human memory beyond what is feasible without instrumentality unless it is visible?
What does that do for people who will some day have chips installed in their brains? The first generation of which will doubtlessly be for medical purposes, such as perhaps preventing dementia in old age, but as the technology advances, such implants would likely ultimately end up offering a mnemonic advantage over unassisted memory.
If you think that future is too far away to worry about, you are probably mistaken. I give it maybe as much as 20 years. Tops.
The reason they travel more distance than most other sports require is because being on ice actually enables them to do so within human limitations. The exact same game played without skates, and otherwise using a playing area that is the same size is *FAR* more physically debilitating. Watching such a game would be like watching hockey in slow motion.
You don't have to be able to throw or jump in hockey except *after* you score a goal, or your team has won the game.
More seriously, skating does not consume anywhere nearly as much energy per unit of time as running at the equivalent speeds... and since you did say it was only "arguably" more athletic, I figured that meant it would be okay to argue with you.
If you got enough details wrong, then yes... I would claim to not be the person that you wrote about.
Humanity no longer existing while the universe carries on is a sufficiently large enough detail to be wrong about when it comes to the biblical notion of who god is and what his plans for the future of humanity allegedly are that it would mean that the biblical god was imaginary, about on par with claiming to write a biography about someone in particular, and saying that they never married or had any children, when the facts actually show that the person was married for 50 years and had 4 children and 7 grandchildren.
They wouldn't necessarily concealed... just not necessarily obvious.
And the reason for their inobviousness would have far less to do with actually wanting to hide that one is using them and much more to do with simple comfort and ergonomics... something that a person can be comfortable with wearing them an entire day, probably putting it on in the morning and taking it off at night, like clothes.
Ultimately, technology is going to progress far enough for the form factor of this thing to be indiscernible to all but the most attentive of individuals. Places will be able to politely ask that patrons not use such devices, but unless they install xray and full-body scanners at the entrances to them, I'm not terribly sure what they are going to do about users of such technology when they don't even know for sure who even has it on their person, let alone who is actively using it..
We are, I think, less than 10 years away from this.
FLIR wouldn't work through the exterior of most modern houses, since their walls contain far too much stuff that would readily block them from being reliable. Thermal insulation alone would completely defeat such imaging technologies, and such insualation is required in a home to be conforming to building code when you live above certain lattitudes, so it's not going to be that uncommon.
At most, it would disprove the Bible's accuracy regarding those particular aspects of God...
That is exactly what I was saying... In fact, it is why I explicitly used the term "biblical god", as opposed to just "god"... if god happens to exist and the bible is wrong about him, then that still means that the biblical god doesn't exist, because the biblical god, by definition, is a god as described by the bible.
I said the biblical god... not just god. There are aspects about the god as described in the bible which, if humanity actually ceased to exist before the universe itself ended, would categorically disprove the existence of such a being. That would not mean there may not be another god, however.
Slashdot Mirror
The kill switch mechanism that I described would use a password that was set by the authorized owner of the device... and would need to be re-entered on the physical device in order to change it. If, when purchasing a device, you are unable to set that password yourself because there is apparently already one in place that you did not set yourself, then you will know immediately that you do not actually have any control over the device and it could be bricked underneath you. Certainly you would be able to realize it within any remotely reasonable warranty period... you could do it within minutes of unboxing it. If no such warranty is offered that you would have the opportunity to try to do this before retuning it, then simply do not buy from that supplier.
I wasn't suggesting that the mechanisms above would ever be legislated by the government, but there's no theoretical reason that current device manufacturers could not implement a mechanism that did what I described... potentially negating much of the marketability of any device that was stolen, since an authorized owner may still be able render it useless in anyone else's hands.
And if the government did legislate a kill switch, they would need to explicitly say in the law that agents acting on behalf of the law or government should be able to turn off any device without the consent of the owner in order to disable it, plainly exposing the government's intentions for such a law, since unless they did so, the kill-switch mechanism that I described would definitely be compliant to a more generally worded law.
The point of the mechanism that I suggested is to put the responsibility of final control of the device into the hands of the authorized owner of the device. If the owner of the device is not actually competent enough to exercise that control in a useful manner, that's not really the fault of the mechanism itsef. Either way, it's nothing that a would-be thief has any control over.
I suspect people would promptly learn to not use the default password when their phone gets shut down without their consent.
But hey... maybe have the ability to unbrick it by entering the current password into the device would be a way for the user to get their device back... and if somebody else really had done this without their consent, they should know that they need to change their password right after unbricking it, since it was hacked. The password should not be possible to change remotely.
The point behind what I was suggesting is to put the control of their device into the hands of a legitimate user. If the user is not competent enough to remember what they need in order to actually enforce that control, that's their own fault.... but either way, it's still not something a thief or a person who may want to try to brick somebody else's phone has any direct control over.
There are two solutions to that.
The first way is to make the device irrecoverable... utterly and completely. Customer service could no more make a bricked phone operational again than it could fix one that had been run over by a train. But the disadvantage of this is that it probably wouldn't stop customers from asking.
The second way, and probably a preferable one, is to make the bricking recoverable by the end user, who must enter a password that they chose for their phone to unbrick the device. The password should not be of any pre-determinable length so that a hacker who wanted to unbrick the phone would not even know what the domain to try to guess the password by brute force might be. Ideally, such a password should not get reset simply by changing the sim card in the device, and changing it would require that the old password be entered first.
A bricked phone would be utterly useless for virtually any task... even using the apps that might be installed on it... the only thing it would be able to do is call emergency/911, which would remove much of the incentive to bother to steal phones.
Have you seen the cost of theft insurance for cell phones?
You'd spend less buying about a dozen more phones.
Ther most obvious way to circumvent all of these is if the kill command requires a password that was created by the user of the device... and the password does not get reset by doing things like changing the sim card, so you can still brick your own phone if a thief has stolen it and changed the sim card, but arbitrary people cannot brick your device unless they know your password. Resetting the pasword to something else would, of course, require that the old one be entered first.
There are, theoretically, quite secure ways of implementing this... although I would not be surprised if nobody bothers.
One mechanism that most immediately occurs to me would be that a device with a remote-brick feature would have a password, created and assigned by the user of the device, which would not get reset by wiping the firmware or installing a new sim card. To brick a device would require transmitting not only the unique code that physically identifies that particular piece of hardware, but also the password that is supposed to be associated with it. The physical device, if it received an intent-to-brick signal that was actually intended for it, would compare the pasword in the signal to that which was set for the device, and if they matched, the device would be bricked at a level that is irrevocable. The phone could only be used to call 911, and that's it. Legitimately selling a phone would require the user to reset that password to a default state... but doing that, in turn, would require that the old password be entered first.
Air.
May I introduce you to the Michelson Morley experiment, which disproved the existence of the Aether?
Granted, more specifically, it really disproved the existence of an Aether which possessed the properties that it was already presumed to have. It did not disprove the existence of an Aether which may have had other properties... but that was not the point of the experiment.
This is explicitly why I used the phrase "biblical god", because likewise, by making certain assumptions about the nature of God and his alleged plans for humanity and the future of creation, and in particular, those properties ascribed to him in what we commonly know as the bible today, if it really were true that a god with those characteritics and agenda does not actualy exist, then it is entirely possible to disprove the existence of that particular notion of god. It's just that the lengths to which one would have to go to establish such proof is not practical.
That doesn't mean you can't do it.
You can disprove the existence of absolutely anything when you have made a fixed set of specific assumptions about it... when you have disproven any of the assumptions, you have also disproven the existence off something that conforms to those assumptions, since something that actually exists cannot conform to assumptions that can be provably shown to be false (presumably by contradiction).
[nt]
It would still mean that the biblical notion of god was wrong... and that he did not exist....
The Muslim Jesus is not the same person as the Christian Jesus either... since one group describes him as a human prophet, while the other describes him as a deity who came to earth to live in human form. That's a pretty darn fundamental difference.... it doesn't mean Jesus didn't exist, but it does mean that at least one of those two groups is definitely wrong, and the person that they claim to believe in is not real.
I don't think tattooing the elderly is going to go over particularly well.
So basically, ban everything that can be used to augment and improve the human memory beyond what is feasible without instrumentality unless it is visible?
What does that do for people who will some day have chips installed in their brains? The first generation of which will doubtlessly be for medical purposes, such as perhaps preventing dementia in old age, but as the technology advances, such implants would likely ultimately end up offering a mnemonic advantage over unassisted memory.
If you think that future is too far away to worry about, you are probably mistaken. I give it maybe as much as 20 years. Tops.
The reason they travel more distance than most other sports require is because being on ice actually enables them to do so within human limitations. The exact same game played without skates, and otherwise using a playing area that is the same size is *FAR* more physically debilitating. Watching such a game would be like watching hockey in slow motion.
You don't have to be able to throw or jump in hockey except *after* you score a goal, or your team has won the game.
More seriously, skating does not consume anywhere nearly as much energy per unit of time as running at the equivalent speeds... and since you did say it was only "arguably" more athletic, I figured that meant it would be okay to argue with you.
If you got enough details wrong, then yes... I would claim to not be the person that you wrote about.
Humanity no longer existing while the universe carries on is a sufficiently large enough detail to be wrong about when it comes to the biblical notion of who god is and what his plans for the future of humanity allegedly are that it would mean that the biblical god was imaginary, about on par with claiming to write a biography about someone in particular, and saying that they never married or had any children, when the facts actually show that the person was married for 50 years and had 4 children and 7 grandchildren.
They wouldn't necessarily concealed... just not necessarily obvious.
And the reason for their inobviousness would have far less to do with actually wanting to hide that one is using them and much more to do with simple comfort and ergonomics... something that a person can be comfortable with wearing them an entire day, probably putting it on in the morning and taking it off at night, like clothes.
Ultimately, technology is going to progress far enough for the form factor of this thing to be indiscernible to all but the most attentive of individuals. Places will be able to politely ask that patrons not use such devices, but unless they install xray and full-body scanners at the entrances to them, I'm not terribly sure what they are going to do about users of such technology when they don't even know for sure who even has it on their person, let alone who is actively using it.. We are, I think, less than 10 years away from this.
FLIR wouldn't work through the exterior of most modern houses, since their walls contain far too much stuff that would readily block them from being reliable. Thermal insulation alone would completely defeat such imaging technologies, and such insualation is required in a home to be conforming to building code when you live above certain lattitudes, so it's not going to be that uncommon.
That is exactly what I was saying... In fact, it is why I explicitly used the term "biblical god", as opposed to just "god"... if god happens to exist and the bible is wrong about him, then that still means that the biblical god doesn't exist, because the biblical god, by definition, is a god as described by the bible.
I've always been partial to the term "minions".
I said the biblical god... not just god. There are aspects about the god as described in the bible which, if humanity actually ceased to exist before the universe itself ended, would categorically disprove the existence of such a being. That would not mean there may not be another god, however.
Equal? Not hardly... one is a crime, for which you can be prosecuted and sent to jail. The other can at worst result only in ostracization.