Why didn't the USA just change their constitution to allow for real trials? Allowing for a medieval type of trial just because one country happens to have a dated phrase in its constitution hardly strikes me as a good solution.
Wow. Trial by jury has tremendous support in the USA, I'd assume something like 98+%. Even people who supported torture and military tribunals for terrorism suspects supported their right to have a jury as part of the military tribunal. If you want the right to trial by jury to be eliminated that's a much more serious debate where a deeply held belief would need to change. There is nowhere near the level of support for an international court as their is for trial by jury.
However, the point is not whether it makes a difference or not, but that the US government is trying to get Microsoft to break the law.
GP was arguing it did make a difference that there was a real danger. If you think he's wrong and this is a question of principle with no practical threat then fine. But then your argument is with him not me.
Indeed. The difference is that the American government seeks to apply its laws and rules everywhere in the world, while other governments typically keep it to their own country.
I gave you an example already, the ICC. Another example is the restriction on Google. Or for that matter this very case, the attempt to impose restrictions on Azure.
I agree. I think 80% of what people wanted from systemd is in OpenRC with 0% of the risk. Had init changed some to add most of the functionality people want in systemd, systemd wouldn't have evolved. But it did and now we should be dealing with the world as it exists.
If someone wants something that is equally problematic today were individual solutions are evolving, we need a networking stack that has a better understanding of latency. Now is the time for the old school Unix guys to be fixing that, before the pot boils over.
The architecture doesn't matter too much. Systemd itself will be easily replaceable. For example FreeBSD is porting Apple's launchd over (openlaunchd). Given that systemd is based on launchd and that the FreeBSD people are going to want to run Gnome... I suspect that by 2020 or so openlaunchd would be an alternative, and likely one without the architectural issues.
You've heard time and time again why the foundation needs to be ripped up.
Init doesn't offer the range of services that modern daemon maintenance need nor does it offer a foundation for it. Thus modern daemons end up repeating boilerplate to add functionality that should be available in the init system to themselves. The Unix philosophy is "do one thing and do it well". Not meeting the needs of the direct users (daemons) means init no longer is "doing it well".
Actually at this point Linux's primary market share is on embedded. After that nodes for cloud computing. Then Android (approaching 10b). Then probably individual servers of the type you are thinking of.
In practice, there should be different distribution based on the server and desktop.
There are. But both the server oriented distributions like RedHat and Debian and the desktop oriented distributions like Ubuntu and Mageia are going in this direction. If it were a desktop only feature that's not the move you would expect.
There is a solution for that: containerization and virtualization. The end user for actual physical hardware should be the IT infrastructure management software not human end users. Genuine end users should't care about individual piece of hardware in 2014.
How is systemd proprietary? And how would it be difficult to replace systemd with another full featured init system a decade or two from now if that became desirable? Your comment doesn't make sense.
There is no issue. You can object to having the init system become complex but having the init system become complex doesn't make it proprietary it makes it complex.
Similarly init systems aren't designed by different developers. They are just going to use the norms in place.
I agree this is the same debate we are having on Wayland. The Unix luddite crowd hears about deep structural problems for years, then finally there is a fix and then they start objecting. If something like Gentoo's OpenRC, which is much more an init version 2, had been in place a decade ago systemd might never have evolved. But the people who are objecting to systemd fundamentally just like init and that's not an acceptable option.
The only major distribution that doesn't use systemd is Gentoo and that's because they have their own very interesting init replacement. There is no boycott. There are objections to a decision that's been made by some isolated individuals who object.
should read "addresses concerns of non-US populations"...about the ability of the US Government to pry into the private affairs of non-US citizens.
Well certainly they have some concerns about that. But mostly if you aren't a US citizen and don't have heavy involvement with the USA what difference does it make if your data gets transferred to a criminal court? They are just going to toss it.
Not that the US Government gives a flying fuck about the views of non-US citizens. If the US Government finally starts to behave decently and respect the views of non-US citizens (even for the most bogus of corporate-funded reasons), it's a start...
Your governments don't care about American people's opinion either. Governments answer to their own domestic population.
Mostly European governments have been unwilling to negotiate with the American government in good faith. For example In 2001 the Europe was pushing for the creation of an international criminal court. The USA agreed but constitutionally it would require the right to trial by jury. Europe refused to offer that concession which made the treaty completely unconstitutional and thus permanently shattered the ability for their to be a global justice system. And to what end? Your politics is simply too messy and too conflicted. I think you should look to the problems you can do something about.
If you don't want warrants then you are arguing for a vast increase in privacy beyond what ever existed for paper documents. That's not "taking into consideration the modern world" that's fundamentally eliminating the ability of the police to enforce the collection of evidence from private persons. The signers of the constitution would have understood your position, they just would have disagreed.
That's one of the things you get rid of. You don't have variables in a global sense, there is no mutable global data. Functions have arguments and those are local variables but that's more like a definition there are no state changes permitted in the bulk of your code.
If you need to change the variable type you create a monad. The key to a Monad is it lifts a variable. So for example if you want to have error code as a return type on function that before couldn't error you use the Either Monad.
So say for example f takes 2 Integers and a string and returns a float. The Mf (the monad version) takes either 2 integers and a string or it takes a error code. It returns either a float or an error code. The lift from f to Mf happens automagically there is only a few lines of code.
On the surface it seems easier, because things happen automatically, without having to be explicitely defined. The part I'm struggling with is how to keep the code clean and readable with all this stuff happening automatically.
Design your code so that order of execution isn't assumed. This is a functional programming idea, and while functional may not be right for your applications this is an easier concept to see in its native environment. I.E. learn Haskell even if you use something else for your code.
Say I do something which isn't a crime, yet an overzealous person drags me to court for it.
Let me clarify an assumption. A crime is a violation of criminal law punishable by fine paid to the state or imprisonment. A tort is an act for which a court may require you to pay compensation to another party. These are governed by civil law.
An overzealous person can't drag you to court for a crime at all. Only a prosecutor, which is an elected office can force you to face trial for a criminal act. If there was no law against something you were doing at the time you did the supposed criminal act that's a defense which would get the case dismissed from criminal court.
Now if civil law is trickier. In general though the courts look highly unfavorably on ex post facto application of civil law. But is isn't strictly forbidden. There can be retroactivity application of civil claims.
In the Microsoft case this is all criminal (yet again Microsoft is a witness they aren't on trial) so no ex post facto laws. But remember that Microsoft is engage in acts in the present. So for example the law could change tomorrow to make it a felony for Microsoft not to hand over the documents and then if they didn't do it on Tuesday on Wednesday they could be indicted.
Since always. Workstation users have always had higher expectations of competence and motivation in their choice of computing tools. Which means their operating systems can assume more background knowledge and a greater willingness for the end user to compensate and learn how to do things they don't know how to do. That changes the tradeoffs in UI design tremendously.
iPhoto and Photoshop aren't designed the same way. Quicktime edit and Final Cut Pro aren't designed the same way. A simple spreadsheet program and Quantrix aren't designed the same way. etc...
As a side note, I wonder about the legalities of passing a law that affects an ongoing case. How does this work in the USA?
Article 1 section 9 prevents ex post facto laws. But remember Microsoft isn't on trial here they are a witness not the accused. Generally though if the congress limited the scope of a court ex post facto the courts would voluntarily agree and dismiss a previous order.
If so why not do away with the judicial branch altogether? Why not just go straight to the politicians to have your problems solved, I mean you already vote for the judges.
You are being sarcastic here so I'm having a little trouble understanding what you are objecting to.
If the legislature believes the judicial interpretation is incorrect they pass laws making the correct interpretation explicit. You seem to be objecting to the system working how it is supposed to work.
Remember this case isn't about intelligence nor anything having to do with FISA. This is normal USA data collection during a criminal investigation under normal process.
When it comes to intelligence matters the goal isn't to prosecute crime but fight an enemy. Thus the courts have less ability to regulate because nothing ever hits the courts. So for example you don't have attorney-client privilege with respect to national security at all. What you do have though is an assurance that any information you give to attorney cannot be used in a criminal prosecution. If the government compels you to hand it over to an intelligence agency they can't give it to a prosecutor.
As for decryption keys. The courts have been split. Right now you can be forced to hand over decryption keys if the government knows you have committed a crime but are missing some specifics. They can't force you and then prosecute you for a new crime. This is clearly an are we could use some black letter law or that will ultimately have to go up to higher courts.
This boils down to can a US court force an american entity to break a foreign law.
That's not a complex question. The unambiguous law in the USA is yes.
it would be interesting to see if the US would allow extradition of a US citizen for charges based on this scenario.
Almost all extradition treaties, and in particular all signed by the USA, prevent extradition when the actions would not be a crime in the country doing the extraditing. Since obeying a warrant is legal, no the extradition request could be rejected under the treaty. The USA courts would reject it because they want to encourage Americans to obey court orders not encourage them to disobey them.
can the court force Microsoft to direct the foreign entity to comply.
Yes.
And the foreign entity (remember a Microsoft owned company) refuses, what can the court do to Microsoft?
At the extreme (assuming the executive were also onboard which remember they are the ones making the request) they could ultimately consider the foreign entity to be a criminal enterprise. If they did so, owning a criminal enterprise is racketeering which is a felony. So they could seize all of Microsoft's assets as well as arrest Americans involved (executives, board members, employees) involved in supporting MOIL.
I doubt things would go anywhere near that far, but they have done things like that to USA individuals who run foreign criminal enterprises. For example people involved in human trafficking, illegal environmental dumping, illegal arms sales or drugs outside USA borders.
The proposed bill presumably all about removing these ambiguities.
That's not the ambiguous part. The ambiguous part if what is the rightful scope for USA courts.
Congress has the express power to control the scope of what the courts have authority over. So if it creates black letter law taking an area (what resides on foreign servers involving non-citizens) outside their scope then that isn't a violation of separation of powers.
The 4th is a guarantee to the people that they cannot be searched without warrants. It doesn't say courts can do whatever they want with warrants.
The real issue is that if somebody in the US wants data from a foreign server then they should server warrants in that jurisdiction.
Why? Why should the location of the physical server be of any importance rather than the user? That seems nuts to me in a world of interconnected data. Obviously if they intend to physically grab the server then they need warrants in that jurisdiction, but to copy the data over? Let's say someone used a data lake which moved specific pieces of data constantly between locations while having the whole system available all the time, is it then unwarrantable?
The USA government is rejecting that and with good reason, that essentially eliminates warrants. It would allow USA companies and individuals to just hide their data in places where a warrant is not going to be granted.
Yes, but the US citizen accessing the data from the Irish servers might at that point be breaking Irish law.
So far those laws don't exist, though Ireland is treaty bound to create them. If you read the EU document that will likely drive the Irish law if and when it is created I would suspect the break in the law is when the data is uploaded to a service which is not run entirely from Ireland. The EU understands they can't regulate what non-EU people on non-EU systems, where non-EU means systems which aren't run entirely from EU member countries
Is is odd. Microsoft's literature couldn't be more clear about how Azure is organized and their privacy statements couldn't be more clear that all of Azure is subject to US court order. I can't explain how the EU keeps certifying a system which even Microsoft when forced to speak publicly says is structurally incapable of enforcing EU privacy mandates in and of itself.
Now I'm starting to think that EU/.ers may not understand EU law as it is currently practiced / enforced. For example they might just have a theoretical understanding of the law with some practical errors. That might come from EU politicians are talking out of both sides of their mouth. Telling EU voters that they are enforcing strong protections while telling companies not to worry.
The other possibility is that services like CloudLink (VM end to end encryption among other things) exist in Azure and thus Azure can be made compliant on a VM basis. That gets Azure certified and then Europeans run it without those services.
I don't know. What I do know is that what most European/.ers would need to enforce the level of protections they want is European hosting companies with no locations in the USA.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow. Trial by jury has tremendous support in the USA, I'd assume something like 98+%. Even people who supported torture and military tribunals for terrorism suspects supported their right to have a jury as part of the military tribunal. If you want the right to trial by jury to be eliminated that's a much more serious debate where a deeply held belief would need to change. There is nowhere near the level of support for an international court as their is for trial by jury.
GP was arguing it did make a difference that there was a real danger. If you think he's wrong and this is a question of principle with no practical threat then fine. But then your argument is with him not me.
I gave you an example already, the ICC. Another example is the restriction on Google. Or for that matter this very case, the attempt to impose restrictions on Azure.
I agree. I think 80% of what people wanted from systemd is in OpenRC with 0% of the risk. Had init changed some to add most of the functionality people want in systemd, systemd wouldn't have evolved. But it did and now we should be dealing with the world as it exists.
If someone wants something that is equally problematic today were individual solutions are evolving, we need a networking stack that has a better understanding of latency. Now is the time for the old school Unix guys to be fixing that, before the pot boils over.
The architecture doesn't matter too much. Systemd itself will be easily replaceable. For example FreeBSD is porting Apple's launchd over (openlaunchd). Given that systemd is based on launchd and that the FreeBSD people are going to want to run Gnome... I suspect that by 2020 or so openlaunchd would be an alternative, and likely one without the architectural issues.
You've heard time and time again why the foundation needs to be ripped up.
Init doesn't offer the range of services that modern daemon maintenance need nor does it offer a foundation for it. Thus modern daemons end up repeating boilerplate to add functionality that should be available in the init system to themselves. The Unix philosophy is "do one thing and do it well". Not meeting the needs of the direct users (daemons) means init no longer is "doing it well".
Actually at this point Linux's primary market share is on embedded. After that nodes for cloud computing. Then Android (approaching 10b). Then probably individual servers of the type you are thinking of.
There are. But both the server oriented distributions like RedHat and Debian and the desktop oriented distributions like Ubuntu and Mageia are going in this direction. If it were a desktop only feature that's not the move you would expect.
There is a solution for that: containerization and virtualization. The end user for actual physical hardware should be the IT infrastructure management software not human end users. Genuine end users should't care about individual piece of hardware in 2014.
How is systemd proprietary? And how would it be difficult to replace systemd with another full featured init system a decade or two from now if that became desirable? Your comment doesn't make sense.
There is no issue. You can object to having the init system become complex but having the init system become complex doesn't make it proprietary it makes it complex.
Similarly init systems aren't designed by different developers. They are just going to use the norms in place.
I agree this is the same debate we are having on Wayland. The Unix luddite crowd hears about deep structural problems for years, then finally there is a fix and then they start objecting. If something like Gentoo's OpenRC, which is much more an init version 2, had been in place a decade ago systemd might never have evolved. But the people who are objecting to systemd fundamentally just like init and that's not an acceptable option.
The only major distribution that doesn't use systemd is Gentoo and that's because they have their own very interesting init replacement. There is no boycott. There are objections to a decision that's been made by some isolated individuals who object.
Apple is the opposite. The last subversion (i.e. the highest possible Y in OS X 10.X.Y or iOS X.Y ) is always rather nice.
Well certainly they have some concerns about that. But mostly if you aren't a US citizen and don't have heavy involvement with the USA what difference does it make if your data gets transferred to a criminal court? They are just going to toss it.
Your governments don't care about American people's opinion either. Governments answer to their own domestic population.
Mostly European governments have been unwilling to negotiate with the American government in good faith. For example In 2001 the Europe was pushing for the creation of an international criminal court. The USA agreed but constitutionally it would require the right to trial by jury. Europe refused to offer that concession which made the treaty completely unconstitutional and thus permanently shattered the ability for their to be a global justice system. And to what end? Your politics is simply too messy and too conflicted. I think you should look to the problems you can do something about.
If you don't want warrants then you are arguing for a vast increase in privacy beyond what ever existed for paper documents. That's not "taking into consideration the modern world" that's fundamentally eliminating the ability of the police to enforce the collection of evidence from private persons. The signers of the constitution would have understood your position, they just would have disagreed.
That act instructs countries to pass laws which meet its directives. It isn't itself law.
That's one of the things you get rid of. You don't have variables in a global sense, there is no mutable global data. Functions have arguments and those are local variables but that's more like a definition there are no state changes permitted in the bulk of your code.
If you need to change the variable type you create a monad. The key to a Monad is it lifts a variable. So for example if you want to have error code as a return type on function that before couldn't error you use the Either Monad.
So say for example f takes 2 Integers and a string and returns a float.
The Mf (the monad version) takes either 2 integers and a string or it takes a error code. It returns either a float or an error code. The lift from f to Mf happens automagically there is only a few lines of code.
Design your code so that order of execution isn't assumed. This is a functional programming idea, and while functional may not be right for your applications this is an easier concept to see in its native environment. I.E. learn Haskell even if you use something else for your code.
Let me clarify an assumption.
A crime is a violation of criminal law punishable by fine paid to the state or imprisonment.
A tort is an act for which a court may require you to pay compensation to another party. These are governed by civil law.
An overzealous person can't drag you to court for a crime at all. Only a prosecutor, which is an elected office can force you to face trial for a criminal act. If there was no law against something you were doing at the time you did the supposed criminal act that's a defense which would get the case dismissed from criminal court.
Now if civil law is trickier. In general though the courts look highly unfavorably on ex post facto application of civil law. But is isn't strictly forbidden. There can be retroactivity application of civil claims.
In the Microsoft case this is all criminal (yet again Microsoft is a witness they aren't on trial) so no ex post facto laws. But remember that Microsoft is engage in acts in the present. So for example the law could change tomorrow to make it a felony for Microsoft not to hand over the documents and then if they didn't do it on Tuesday on Wednesday they could be indicted.
Since always. Workstation users have always had higher expectations of competence and motivation in their choice of computing tools. Which means their operating systems can assume more background knowledge and a greater willingness for the end user to compensate and learn how to do things they don't know how to do. That changes the tradeoffs in UI design tremendously.
iPhoto and Photoshop aren't designed the same way.
Quicktime edit and Final Cut Pro aren't designed the same way.
A simple spreadsheet program and Quantrix aren't designed the same way.
etc...
Article 1 section 9 prevents ex post facto laws. But remember Microsoft isn't on trial here they are a witness not the accused. Generally though if the congress limited the scope of a court ex post facto the courts would voluntarily agree and dismiss a previous order.
You are being sarcastic here so I'm having a little trouble understanding what you are objecting to.
legislatures pass laws
judges interpret laws
executives enforce laws
If the legislature believes the judicial interpretation is incorrect they pass laws making the correct interpretation explicit. You seem to be objecting to the system working how it is supposed to work.
Remember this case isn't about intelligence nor anything having to do with FISA. This is normal USA data collection during a criminal investigation under normal process.
When it comes to intelligence matters the goal isn't to prosecute crime but fight an enemy. Thus the courts have less ability to regulate because nothing ever hits the courts. So for example you don't have attorney-client privilege with respect to national security at all. What you do have though is an assurance that any information you give to attorney cannot be used in a criminal prosecution. If the government compels you to hand it over to an intelligence agency they can't give it to a prosecutor.
As for decryption keys. The courts have been split. Right now you can be forced to hand over decryption keys if the government knows you have committed a crime but are missing some specifics. They can't force you and then prosecute you for a new crime. This is clearly an are we could use some black letter law or that will ultimately have to go up to higher courts.
That's not a complex question. The unambiguous law in the USA is yes.
Almost all extradition treaties, and in particular all signed by the USA, prevent extradition when the actions would not be a crime in the country doing the extraditing. Since obeying a warrant is legal, no the extradition request could be rejected under the treaty. The USA courts would reject it because they want to encourage Americans to obey court orders not encourage them to disobey them.
Yes.
At the extreme (assuming the executive were also onboard which remember they are the ones making the request) they could ultimately consider the foreign entity to be a criminal enterprise. If they did so, owning a criminal enterprise is racketeering which is a felony. So they could seize all of Microsoft's assets as well as arrest Americans involved (executives, board members, employees) involved in supporting MOIL.
I doubt things would go anywhere near that far, but they have done things like that to USA individuals who run foreign criminal enterprises. For example people involved in human trafficking, illegal environmental dumping, illegal arms sales or drugs outside USA borders.
That's not the ambiguous part. The ambiguous part if what is the rightful scope for USA courts.
Congress has the express power to control the scope of what the courts have authority over. So if it creates black letter law taking an area (what resides on foreign servers involving non-citizens) outside their scope then that isn't a violation of separation of powers.
The 4th is a guarantee to the people that they cannot be searched without warrants. It doesn't say courts can do whatever they want with warrants.
Why? Why should the location of the physical server be of any importance rather than the user? That seems nuts to me in a world of interconnected data. Obviously if they intend to physically grab the server then they need warrants in that jurisdiction, but to copy the data over? Let's say someone used a data lake which moved specific pieces of data constantly between locations while having the whole system available all the time, is it then unwarrantable?
The USA government is rejecting that and with good reason, that essentially eliminates warrants. It would allow USA companies and individuals to just hide their data in places where a warrant is not going to be granted.
So far those laws don't exist, though Ireland is treaty bound to create them. If you read the EU document that will likely drive the Irish law if and when it is created I would suspect the break in the law is when the data is uploaded to a service which is not run entirely from Ireland. The EU understands they can't regulate what non-EU people on non-EU systems, where non-EU means systems which aren't run entirely from EU member countries
Exposing corruption in the USA is perfectly legal.
No right. The USA has always asserted a right to prosecute Americans for acts committed abroad.
Foreign from a USA perspective, read the context.
Is is odd. Microsoft's literature couldn't be more clear about how Azure is organized and their privacy statements couldn't be more clear that all of Azure is subject to US court order. I can't explain how the EU keeps certifying a system which even Microsoft when forced to speak publicly says is structurally incapable of enforcing EU privacy mandates in and of itself.
Now I'm starting to think that EU /.ers may not understand EU law as it is currently practiced / enforced. For example they might just have a theoretical understanding of the law with some practical errors. That might come from EU politicians are talking out of both sides of their mouth. Telling EU voters that they are enforcing strong protections while telling companies not to worry.
The other possibility is that services like CloudLink (VM end to end encryption among other things) exist in Azure and thus Azure can be made compliant on a VM basis. That gets Azure certified and then Europeans run it without those services.
I don't know. What I do know is that what most European /.ers would need to enforce the level of protections they want is European hosting companies with no locations in the USA.