The NSA is also supposed to ensure that US communications are secure. They've just been ignoring that part of their job, possibly because spying gave them more power.
If you are in control of your compiler, are you responsible for every compiler error?
That said, he *may* have given them "full Presidential approval". We don't know either way. And it's also possible that he knew, but was being blackmailed into letting them do whatever they felt like. There are *LOTS* of possibilities.
What's inside a black box? You can't know until you look, and then you may not be certain.
He's being pedantic. I often am, too, so I recognize it. And, in a pedantic sense, he's right. He probably doesn't doubt that it's only in a pedantic sense that he's right.
You've got to deal with the fact that a lot of programmers tend to be very picky about the exact statements used. It helps them deal with compilers, but it causes trouble when they're talking with people. One doesn't get very far by telling a compiler "you know what I mean".
That said, yeah, they can't charge you with treason...well, they CAN, but they wouldn't. That one's to easy to beat, and has a clear constitutional definition. As someone else has said, they might not charge you with anything. At one point they "suspended" Habeus Coprus. Did they ever reinstate it? If so, I didn't hear, so my guess is that they might not get around to charging you with anything for quite a long time. Quite likely years, but decades isn't beyond what's happend in history. Then they will charge you with something that is reasonably easy for them to prove (at least to the satisfaction of the court). You may be lucky and get sentenced to time already served.
Please note that everything I've said here has precedents within US history. (Consider the internment of US citizens of Japanese descent during WWII.) If I went out side US history I could find lots worse abuse of power by "police" who had no more authorization than do current US groups....not the NSA particularly, as I'm not really familiar with their "officially given powers", but the organizations that they work with. And note that it's public knowledge that they are quite willing to redefine the meaning of words to allow them to engage in activities that have been forbidden. Consider how they've redefined torture. (Again, they is not specifically the NSA, but rather the entire cooperating "US Intelligence Agencies".)
What actions do you propose as feasible? Few people want to go underground....it leads to a "Mikado" interpretaion of underground.
(See "I've got a little list" in G&S Mikado: As some day it may happen that a victim must be found,
Iâ(TM)ve got a little listâ"Iâ(TM)ve got a little list Of some modern-day offenders who might well be underground,
And who never would be missedâ"who never would be missed! )
unhhh.... the judge (the first judge) in the trial looked at their testimony, and went off, and when he came back, he believed that he had removed it from his copy of MSWind. I don't know whether he had actually removed it or not, of course.
Seamonkey is nice, but it doesn't appear to be maintained. The Debian repository has a version that claims to be obsolete, and the version on the Seamonkey web site won't compile. The executable won't run. (OTOH, I'm using Debian testing. Perhaps it works well with a stable install.)
Not so. Netscape officially charged for their browser, but I was never able to pay them for it. And it was based on Mosaic(?) which was free from the beginning.
They officially charged what, $30, for the browser. When I tried to buy it I ended up with a free browser and a communication telling me not to bother trying to buy it off them.
So, as far as I can tell, it was free. Possibly unless you were a business, but I tried to buy it for use at work. There was also an official free trial period that was a renewable 6 months, IIRC.
I suppose that you could argue that Netscape's browser was officially non-free, but in practice it was free. And Mosaic, or some such, was officially free.
It won't run on my computer, or it wouldn't a year or so ago. And more recent computers don't offer enough improvement over my current machine for me to want to change. (They've basically stopped even making multi-cpu desktops.)
KDE4 is now tolerable, especially when I look at the competition. But Gnome2 was better than it has yet become (presuming that it's still improving) and Gnome2 was clearly inferior to KDE3.
The odd thing is that I had no technical problems with the early KDE4 versions. My problems were entirely with the intentional design. Recently, however, technical problems have started to appear. So far it's merely an occasional random lockup, or the icons being spread all across the top menubar after a restart rather than collected together as I specified (and as they often are). Well, this may be due to running Debian testing (actually Jessie, as I don't want to auto upgrade once the release happens). But it's worrisome, especially as they're ramping up an entirely new version of KDE. Perhaps I'll check out QtRazor or some such. Always good to have your options open.
If you take a 12 volt battery and convert it's entire output to white noise EM, the signal strength at any particular wavelength will be too low to measure. And that's before any attenuation. (I'm not even considering how few watts would be carried by the signal...)
Perhaps if you plugged the device into the sub's power supply, and hooked it up to a honking big power supply...even so I have my doubts. And if you did that your IC device wouldn't last more than a couple of seconds. A spark-gap transmitter would be easier. You could even send morse code over it. But you still wouldn't get much range, and all the signal crew on board would know what was happening.
A regulation against private non-standardized electronics makes a lot of sense. Worrying about GPS in a sub doesn't. Private electronics can be used to record all sorts of information for later transmission. Wanting to avoid that risk is reasonable.
OTOH, it appears that this is intended to eventually be used outside of submarines, at with point GPS might be a reasonable concern.
If it's inside the sub and not hooked up to an antenna, then it's NOT broadcasting EM outside the sub...unless the hatches are open, and then not significantly unless it's taken out of the sub.
It's reasonable to avoid the problem when you're building a specialized device, but it's not worth losing sleep over if you aren't.
More to the poiint, though, they could report the location of the device to people who were not authorized to receive that information.
But this is truely trivial. The signals would be difficult to detect, and wouldn't work while the GPS was inside the sub. And such capabilities would be easy to disable, so they aren't grounds for a specialized device.
That said, it makes sense to have the specialized device. What doesn't make sense is limiting the library to 300 books. Limit it to, say 2TB of books, unless... Are the books being stored in a ROM? I was envisioning using a built in hard disk.
How can they log positions when inside a sealed metal tube? That requires an inertial compass.
That said, I agree that it makes sense to avoid the risk, even though it's extremely small. But only 300 books? That appears insane. Somebody must have decided that storage was limited, so the book collection should be limited...and not bothered to check what the reasonable limits were.
Yeah, but only 300 books? As was said previously, why not include the entire Gutenberg project. The entire thing will fit on one DVD, though I don't think a CD would hold it. And DVDs don't need to be writeable....though putting them on an internal hard disk would make more sense.
So given the purpose it could run a really stripped down Linux or BSD that didn't have any networking tools (and not network or USB, etc., ports on the device) or development tools or...well, basically nothing that wasn't required to support the built in stripped down html reader (unless you want to convert the files to pdfs). Have it boot up to the browser at an index page and you don't even need a file browser. No keyboard or muse needed. since you configure things for touch screen input.
I'm proposing pretty much the same device, just with a much larger library. And it would be pretty trivial to make. (Well, relatively trivial.) Changing the library in any way would require exchanging the hard disk, but a library of a couple of TB would be trivial.
Desertification is not obvious. Reports are that the models show that some areas turn into deserts, and others into jungles. So you might need to switch from wheat to rice or sugar cane. Or you might need to go into date palms.
OTOH, desertification CAN be handled, if you have enough energy. (Check out the California central valley. Used to be a desert.) But you need enough energy to move water around, and possibly to desalinate it. (YARG!!!) Jungles, though, are more difficult to deal with. It's better to adapt to it than to fight it. Mangroves, tropical fruits, rice, sugar cane, etc.
As for tundra soil not being particularly fertile....I have my doubts about that. I think the problem is the weather that causes you to have tundra in the first place, particularly permafrost. Tundra is reported to belch alarming amounts of methane when it gets warm and moist, and to me this sounds like a very fertile soil....though quite plausibly one that's deficient in minerals. But you probably can't just plow it. It probably needs to be aerated as well. And you would need to select the correct crops...I can't really say what they would be. (Jungle soil, however, is QUITE poor, because of the heavy flow of water that washes away all the nutrients.)
If people were seriously interested in security, nobody would ever choose closed source software or hardware. They prefer to ignore security in favor of convenience. Don't expect this to change.
Please note: Even when the (US) government mandates secure computers, it validates and approves things like MS Windows (HIPAA approved, despite unnumbered problems).
To be fair this should be rephrased as: "You lose the moral high ground when you resort to being no better than you claim that the dictators and terrorists are."
They'd do it because it's easier to put a backdoor in than it is to discover or break one. Much easier.
That said, there is no evidence I've seen that the Chinese do this for any reason other than incompetence. Some people claim that because of incompetence Chinese routers are less secure than are various US ones. Please note: I am not asserting this. I'm merely saying that there is no evidence that I've seen that this is a false statement.
OTOH, it would not surprise me to find out that it was common practice, and that the US has just spilled the beans on a common abusive practice of governments again.
Your point is good, but you still can't trust even open source. Open source is "more trustworthy", but there's a bit difference between more trustworthy and trustworthy. E.g., HeartBleed was found in an open source project. It had been there a long time and nobody who knew about it went public. Either nobody knew, or some people were keeping quiet. No evidence either way. It probably wasn't put there intentionally, but NSA, etc., can hire programmers to find bugs as well as to insert them.
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The NSA is also supposed to ensure that US communications are secure. They've just been ignoring that part of their job, possibly because spying gave them more power.
If you are in control of your compiler, are you responsible for every compiler error?
That said, he *may* have given them "full Presidential approval". We don't know either way. And it's also possible that he knew, but was being blackmailed into letting them do whatever they felt like. There are *LOTS* of possibilities.
What's inside a black box? You can't know until you look, and then you may not be certain.
He's being pedantic. I often am, too, so I recognize it. And, in a pedantic sense, he's right. He probably doesn't doubt that it's only in a pedantic sense that he's right.
You've got to deal with the fact that a lot of programmers tend to be very picky about the exact statements used. It helps them deal with compilers, but it causes trouble when they're talking with people. One doesn't get very far by telling a compiler "you know what I mean".
That said, yeah, they can't charge you with treason...well, they CAN, but they wouldn't. That one's to easy to beat, and has a clear constitutional definition. As someone else has said, they might not charge you with anything. At one point they "suspended" Habeus Coprus. Did they ever reinstate it? If so, I didn't hear, so my guess is that they might not get around to charging you with anything for quite a long time. Quite likely years, but decades isn't beyond what's happend in history. Then they will charge you with something that is reasonably easy for them to prove (at least to the satisfaction of the court). You may be lucky and get sentenced to time already served.
Please note that everything I've said here has precedents within US history. (Consider the internment of US citizens of Japanese descent during WWII.) If I went out side US history I could find lots worse abuse of power by "police" who had no more authorization than do current US groups....not the NSA particularly, as I'm not really familiar with their "officially given powers", but the organizations that they work with. And note that it's public knowledge that they are quite willing to redefine the meaning of words to allow them to engage in activities that have been forbidden. Consider how they've redefined torture. (Again, they is not specifically the NSA, but rather the entire cooperating "US Intelligence Agencies".)
What actions do you propose as feasible? Few people want to go underground....it leads to a "Mikado" interpretaion of underground.
(See "I've got a little list" in G&S Mikado:
As some day it may happen that a victim must be found,
Iâ(TM)ve got a little listâ"Iâ(TM)ve got a little list
Of some modern-day offenders who might well be underground,
And who never would be missedâ"who never would be missed!
)
If you're running flash, you have no need to worry about javascript, you're already vulnerable.
OK. I was talking about the browser, and a singleton license. I never tried to buy a 10-pack or a Server package.
unhhh.... the judge (the first judge) in the trial looked at their testimony, and went off, and when he came back, he believed that he had removed it from his copy of MSWind. I don't know whether he had actually removed it or not, of course.
Seamonkey is nice, but it doesn't appear to be maintained. The Debian repository has a version that claims to be obsolete, and the version on the Seamonkey web site won't compile. The executable won't run. (OTOH, I'm using Debian testing. Perhaps it works well with a stable install.)
Not so. Netscape officially charged for their browser, but I was never able to pay them for it. And it was based on Mosaic(?) which was free from the beginning.
They officially charged what, $30, for the browser. When I tried to buy it I ended up with a free browser and a communication telling me not to bother trying to buy it off them.
So, as far as I can tell, it was free. Possibly unless you were a business, but I tried to buy it for use at work. There was also an official free trial period that was a renewable 6 months, IIRC.
I suppose that you could argue that Netscape's browser was officially non-free, but in practice it was free. And Mosaic, or some such, was officially free.
Sorry, there's lots of other reasons to be anti-Obama. You didn't hit even one of mine. Mine are based around abusive centralization of power.
It's Gnome3 that won't run on my computer. And it's not speed, or RAM, it's video card requirements that are the problem.
KDE4 is actually what I'm currently running. It's not as good as KDE3, but it's slightly better than xfce.
It won't run on my computer, or it wouldn't a year or so ago. And more recent computers don't offer enough improvement over my current machine for me to want to change. (They've basically stopped even making multi-cpu desktops.)
KDE4 is now tolerable, especially when I look at the competition. But Gnome2 was better than it has yet become (presuming that it's still improving) and Gnome2 was clearly inferior to KDE3.
The odd thing is that I had no technical problems with the early KDE4 versions. My problems were entirely with the intentional design. Recently, however, technical problems have started to appear. So far it's merely an occasional random lockup, or the icons being spread all across the top menubar after a restart rather than collected together as I specified (and as they often are). Well, this may be due to running Debian testing (actually Jessie, as I don't want to auto upgrade once the release happens). But it's worrisome, especially as they're ramping up an entirely new version of KDE. Perhaps I'll check out QtRazor or some such. Always good to have your options open.
If you take a 12 volt battery and convert it's entire output to white noise EM, the signal strength at any particular wavelength will be too low to measure. And that's before any attenuation. (I'm not even considering how few watts would be carried by the signal...)
Perhaps if you plugged the device into the sub's power supply, and hooked it up to a honking big power supply...even so I have my doubts. And if you did that your IC device wouldn't last more than a couple of seconds. A spark-gap transmitter would be easier. You could even send morse code over it. But you still wouldn't get much range, and all the signal crew on board would know what was happening.
A regulation against private non-standardized electronics makes a lot of sense. Worrying about GPS in a sub doesn't. Private electronics can be used to record all sorts of information for later transmission. Wanting to avoid that risk is reasonable.
OTOH, it appears that this is intended to eventually be used outside of submarines, at with point GPS might be a reasonable concern.
If it's inside the sub and not hooked up to an antenna, then it's NOT broadcasting EM outside the sub...unless the hatches are open, and then not significantly unless it's taken out of the sub.
It's reasonable to avoid the problem when you're building a specialized device, but it's not worth losing sleep over if you aren't.
They *could* have been.
More to the poiint, though, they could report the location of the device to people who were not authorized to receive that information.
But this is truely trivial. The signals would be difficult to detect, and wouldn't work while the GPS was inside the sub. And such capabilities would be easy to disable, so they aren't grounds for a specialized device.
That said, it makes sense to have the specialized device. What doesn't make sense is limiting the library to 300 books. Limit it to, say 2TB of books, unless... Are the books being stored in a ROM? I was envisioning using a built in hard disk.
How can they log positions when inside a sealed metal tube? That requires an inertial compass.
That said, I agree that it makes sense to avoid the risk, even though it's extremely small. But only 300 books? That appears insane. Somebody must have decided that storage was limited, so the book collection should be limited...and not bothered to check what the reasonable limits were.
Yeah, but only 300 books? As was said previously, why not include the entire Gutenberg project. The entire thing will fit on one DVD, though I don't think a CD would hold it. And DVDs don't need to be writeable....though putting them on an internal hard disk would make more sense.
So given the purpose it could run a really stripped down Linux or BSD that didn't have any networking tools (and not network or USB, etc., ports on the device) or development tools or...well, basically nothing that wasn't required to support the built in stripped down html reader (unless you want to convert the files to pdfs). Have it boot up to the browser at an index page and you don't even need a file browser. No keyboard or muse needed. since you configure things for touch screen input.
I'm proposing pretty much the same device, just with a much larger library. And it would be pretty trivial to make. (Well, relatively trivial.) Changing the library in any way would require exchanging the hard disk, but a library of a couple of TB would be trivial.
Desertification is not obvious. Reports are that the models show that some areas turn into deserts, and others into jungles. So you might need to switch from wheat to rice or sugar cane. Or you might need to go into date palms.
OTOH, desertification CAN be handled, if you have enough energy. (Check out the California central valley. Used to be a desert.) But you need enough energy to move water around, and possibly to desalinate it. (YARG!!!) Jungles, though, are more difficult to deal with. It's better to adapt to it than to fight it. Mangroves, tropical fruits, rice, sugar cane, etc.
As for tundra soil not being particularly fertile....I have my doubts about that. I think the problem is the weather that causes you to have tundra in the first place, particularly permafrost. Tundra is reported to belch alarming amounts of methane when it gets warm and moist, and to me this sounds like a very fertile soil....though quite plausibly one that's deficient in minerals. But you probably can't just plow it. It probably needs to be aerated as well. And you would need to select the correct crops...I can't really say what they would be. (Jungle soil, however, is QUITE poor, because of the heavy flow of water that washes away all the nutrients.)
What alternative are you proposing?
If people were seriously interested in security, nobody would ever choose closed source software or hardware. They prefer to ignore security in favor of convenience. Don't expect this to change.
Please note: Even when the (US) government mandates secure computers, it validates and approves things like MS Windows (HIPAA approved, despite unnumbered problems).
To be fair this should be rephrased as:
"You lose the moral high ground when you resort to being no better than you claim that the dictators and terrorists are."
They'd do it because it's easier to put a backdoor in than it is to discover or break one. Much easier.
That said, there is no evidence I've seen that the Chinese do this for any reason other than incompetence. Some people claim that because of incompetence Chinese routers are less secure than are various US ones.
Please note: I am not asserting this. I'm merely saying that there is no evidence that I've seen that this is a false statement.
OTOH, it would not surprise me to find out that it was common practice, and that the US has just spilled the beans on a common abusive practice of governments again.
Your point is good, but you still can't trust even open source. Open source is "more trustworthy", but there's a bit difference between more trustworthy and trustworthy. E.g., HeartBleed was found in an open source project. It had been there a long time and nobody who knew about it went public. Either nobody knew, or some people were keeping quiet. No evidence either way. It probably wasn't put there intentionally, but NSA, etc., can hire programmers to find bugs as well as to insert them.