Keep in mind that if the government legislates this, China, Russia and other foreign powers will have that private key in a week. And ordinary criminals will have it in a month.
If the police can break encryption without the owner's consent, then criminals and foreign powers can break it just as easily. There is no magic encryption that opens only for the "good" guys.
Because AGs in civilised countries have to take better care to prosecute the real criminal. If they jail the real criminal on their first try instead of some innocent bystander who will take the plea deal because he's too broke to make it through the full trial, there will be fewer crimes in the future. Also, civilised coutries have a system of public defenders that actually works. US public defenders are so overloaded that they have on average less than 5 minutes to prepare for each case.
Take another look at the bigger picture of the current copyright system:
Publishers keep trying to shove inferior products and services down consumers' throats because copyright essentially outlaws direct competition in the media market.
Publishers keep ripping off both consumers and authors.
Copyright enforcement tools provided by online platforms (as required by law) are frequently abused by trolls to silence political speech.
Copyright is increasingly being abused to restrict ownership of physical property.
The current copyright system is an evolutionary dead end. There is no way to improve it that would fix the above problems. The only way forward is to redesign the whole system from scratch.
And we're back to the question of how we assure that authors have a good chance to get paid. With free eBooks readily and legally available, who's going to buy a copy when they can wait a few months and get a free one? Either we have a reasonably long period of exclusivity, or we need to find another way to pay authors.
I'm all for experimenting with other ways of making money. Most of them are currently blocked by copyright bureaucracy. Why should the law prefer selling ebooks as if they were physical goods over other business models?
One thing authors often do is sell some sort of first publication rights to get some cash sooner rather than to wait for the royalties. One thing magazines etc. do is to buy first publication rights so they can ensure that they can publish before anyone else, rather than having the December issue come out with a featured story that the competitor had in their November issue.
First publication rights would still exist. The rules I've described above would apply only to works that have already been published with author's consent. A short period of commercial exclusivity (only a few months) would also be acceptable, but only if you register your work.
Also, it completely sidesteps the copyright issue. How do we make sure the 20% is paid? How do we deal with illicit free copies potentially hurting the commercial market?
There will be no such thing as "illicit free copies". Non-commercial use will be completely legal. Period.
The main problem of current copyright system for potential commercial users is that it's ridiculously difficult and expensive to actually get the copyright holder to take your money. Eliminate this hurdle and commercial pirates will be drowned out by legitimate services.
You are so obsessed with fighting freeloaders that you're completely forgetting about trying to actually make profit. Screw the freeloaders, they're irrelevant anyway. Focus on the best ways to make profit and nothing else. That's why this is good.
Here's my proposal how to fix the major flaws of copyright while ensuring that authors get paid:
Replace copyright with payright. Here's what it means:
The author gets a right to a clearly defined slice of revenue (e.g. 20% by default) from every commercial use of their work. If you register your work in a central registry, you get to set the percentage yourself and commercial users will have contact you. If you don't register it, statutory default applies and commercial users will just need to hold your slice of revenue in escrow until you contact them.
You as an author don't get to pick and choose who may or may not use your work. Anyone can use it as long as you get your share of revenue and they take care not to damage your reputation. You may not play favorites by charging some users less than others, either. Non-commercial use would be completely free in every sense of the word.
There is a good reason why everybody should have some basic coding skills (just like everybody learns some basic math, history, geography, science, etc. at school): A lot of businesses and government agencies have problems that can be easily solved by software. Coding illiterate managers are the single biggest obstacle to solving those problems properly for two reasons: 1) They either can't even imagine the problem being solved by software in the first place, or 2) if they can, they'll end up buying some overpriced bullshit that doesn't actually solve their problem.
Most of the article is just pointless storytelling that carries no useful information whatsoever. Here's the gist: The author has no fscking clue about programming. The problem: Yes, it's hard to keep all the invariants in your head (not to mention budget and time constraints) which leads to bugs. The proposed solution: Formal verification. So now instead of getting the code right, we just need to get the verification specs right. It's turtles all the way down.
Also, not just any formal verification but some supercool (read: idiotic) graphical system where you create the specs by connecting boxes with lines. Because that's somehow supposed to be easier than working with text. Anyway, good luck finding a mistake in a spec with more than 20 boxes. You're gonna need it with all that visual clutter in front of you.
The algorithm isn't faulty. It works exactly as designed. But it is also completely blind to the deeper meaning of the result. Take this as a cautionary tale against all software-augmented decision making. Software is not inherently fair and impartial. It just blindly follows a rigid set of rules that don't include any moral values. And sometimes, the developer may have even made the rules intentionally malicious.
Ummm, no. First of all, most of the tube will be at least several feet underground so where exactly is that air supposed to come from? Second, according to Musk, making the tube watertight already requires walls that can withstand 2 atmospheres of external pressure, which means that water will start leaking in long before you lose airtight seal. (I didn't check this claim).
The body can convert both ways between fat and sugar. It can also break down proteins into sugar (one-way). From a nutritional perspective, starch is sugar.
Because when you're dealing with complex feedback loops (and economics is full of those), common sense is often too lazy to finish even the first round of feedback, much less correctly solve the full recurrence.
It is so crazy to see people advocate for trickle down economics when it comes to minimum wage.
Says the guy who just advocated for the real trickle down economics.
The turning point where increasing minimum wage stops creating jobs is when minimum wage workers stop immediately spending the extra money and start saving it instead. U.S. economy has workers with full-time jobs who need food stamps to survive. You're way below the turning point.
I have never been in or seen a workplace that intentionally tried to treat any population group badly.
The thing is, mistreating a minority is a lot easier than mistreating the majority. You don't need to enshrine discrimination of minorities in written company policy. All it takes to create toxic workplace environment is letting a bunch of assholes get away with their toxic bullshit. Everybody who doesn't stand up to those assholes is complicit in creating toxic workplace environment, but especially the top management.
The guy didn't even identify himself as a conservative. He only mentions them to make a point about the echo chamber. He identified himself as a liberal, and explicitly said he was PRO-diversity.
Correction: He identified himself as a classical liberal. Which is someone considered liberal by the golden standard of the 18th century.
A multibillion dollar multinational corporation is shitting its pants because a full third of its work force is rightfully pissed off by that blog post. Google's HR department is going to need a truckload of aspirin just to deal with the toxic fallout inside the company.
That "manifesto" is news only because one Google engineer is questioning professional qualifications of a big group of other Google engineers because "biology". If it were posted by some outsider on the Internet, it'd get the exact amount of attention such nonsense deserves: None.
Slashdot Mirror
Keep in mind that if the government legislates this, China, Russia and other foreign powers will have that private key in a week. And ordinary criminals will have it in a month.
If the police can break encryption without the owner's consent, then criminals and foreign powers can break it just as easily. There is no magic encryption that opens only for the "good" guys.
Because AGs in civilised countries have to take better care to prosecute the real criminal. If they jail the real criminal on their first try instead of some innocent bystander who will take the plea deal because he's too broke to make it through the full trial, there will be fewer crimes in the future. Also, civilised coutries have a system of public defenders that actually works. US public defenders are so overloaded that they have on average less than 5 minutes to prepare for each case.
Take another look at the bigger picture of the current copyright system:
The current copyright system is an evolutionary dead end. There is no way to improve it that would fix the above problems. The only way forward is to redesign the whole system from scratch.
And we're back to the question of how we assure that authors have a good chance to get paid. With free eBooks readily and legally available, who's going to buy a copy when they can wait a few months and get a free one? Either we have a reasonably long period of exclusivity, or we need to find another way to pay authors.
I'm all for experimenting with other ways of making money. Most of them are currently blocked by copyright bureaucracy. Why should the law prefer selling ebooks as if they were physical goods over other business models?
First publication rights would still exist. The rules I've described above would apply only to works that have already been published with author's consent. A short period of commercial exclusivity (only a few months) would also be acceptable, but only if you register your work.
There will be no such thing as "illicit free copies". Non-commercial use will be completely legal. Period.
The main problem of current copyright system for potential commercial users is that it's ridiculously difficult and expensive to actually get the copyright holder to take your money. Eliminate this hurdle and commercial pirates will be drowned out by legitimate services.
You are so obsessed with fighting freeloaders that you're completely forgetting about trying to actually make profit. Screw the freeloaders, they're irrelevant anyway. Focus on the best ways to make profit and nothing else. That's why this is good.
Here's my proposal how to fix the major flaws of copyright while ensuring that authors get paid:
Replace copyright with payright. Here's what it means:
The author gets a right to a clearly defined slice of revenue (e.g. 20% by default) from every commercial use of their work. If you register your work in a central registry, you get to set the percentage yourself and commercial users will have contact you. If you don't register it, statutory default applies and commercial users will just need to hold your slice of revenue in escrow until you contact them.
You as an author don't get to pick and choose who may or may not use your work. Anyone can use it as long as you get your share of revenue and they take care not to damage your reputation. You may not play favorites by charging some users less than others, either. Non-commercial use would be completely free in every sense of the word.
I think that J. K. Rowling's attempt to make copyright sound reasonable to kids only managed to highlight the absurdity of the whole concept.
There is a good reason why everybody should have some basic coding skills (just like everybody learns some basic math, history, geography, science, etc. at school): A lot of businesses and government agencies have problems that can be easily solved by software. Coding illiterate managers are the single biggest obstacle to solving those problems properly for two reasons: 1) They either can't even imagine the problem being solved by software in the first place, or 2) if they can, they'll end up buying some overpriced bullshit that doesn't actually solve their problem.
Most of the article is just pointless storytelling that carries no useful information whatsoever. Here's the gist: The author has no fscking clue about programming. The problem: Yes, it's hard to keep all the invariants in your head (not to mention budget and time constraints) which leads to bugs. The proposed solution: Formal verification. So now instead of getting the code right, we just need to get the verification specs right. It's turtles all the way down.
Also, not just any formal verification but some supercool (read: idiotic) graphical system where you create the specs by connecting boxes with lines. Because that's somehow supposed to be easier than working with text. Anyway, good luck finding a mistake in a spec with more than 20 boxes. You're gonna need it with all that visual clutter in front of you.
Behold the true power of the Meh side.
The algorithm isn't faulty. It works exactly as designed. But it is also completely blind to the deeper meaning of the result. Take this as a cautionary tale against all software-augmented decision making. Software is not inherently fair and impartial. It just blindly follows a rigid set of rules that don't include any moral values. And sometimes, the developer may have even made the rules intentionally malicious.
As a long-time Linux user, I vote for going back to the good old Unix way of get-shit-done-friendly design.
Ummm, no. First of all, most of the tube will be at least several feet underground so where exactly is that air supposed to come from? Second, according to Musk, making the tube watertight already requires walls that can withstand 2 atmospheres of external pressure, which means that water will start leaking in long before you lose airtight seal. (I didn't check this claim).
Obligatory XKCD. There really is one for everything.
The body can convert both ways between fat and sugar. It can also break down proteins into sugar (one-way). From a nutritional perspective, starch is sugar.
Try Colobot. It's a simple game where you program robots in a C++/Java-like language to colonize new planets.
Because when you're dealing with complex feedback loops (and economics is full of those), common sense is often too lazy to finish even the first round of feedback, much less correctly solve the full recurrence.
Says the guy who just advocated for the real trickle down economics.
The turning point where increasing minimum wage stops creating jobs is when minimum wage workers stop immediately spending the extra money and start saving it instead. U.S. economy has workers with full-time jobs who need food stamps to survive. You're way below the turning point.
The thing is, mistreating a minority is a lot easier than mistreating the majority. You don't need to enshrine discrimination of minorities in written company policy. All it takes to create toxic workplace environment is letting a bunch of assholes get away with their toxic bullshit. Everybody who doesn't stand up to those assholes is complicit in creating toxic workplace environment, but especially the top management.
Here's a result of a 5 second Google search: Could black holes be the dark matter?
The guy didn't even identify himself as a conservative. He only mentions them to make a point about the echo chamber. He identified himself as a liberal, and explicitly said he was PRO-diversity.
Correction: He identified himself as a classical liberal. Which is someone considered liberal by the golden standard of the 18th century.
A multibillion dollar multinational corporation is shitting its pants because a full third of its work force is rightfully pissed off by that blog post. Google's HR department is going to need a truckload of aspirin just to deal with the toxic fallout inside the company.
That "manifesto" is news only because one Google engineer is questioning professional qualifications of a big group of other Google engineers because "biology". If it were posted by some outsider on the Internet, it'd get the exact amount of attention such nonsense deserves: None.
systemd badly needs somehow who understands security and who can get these issues the attention they deserve.
Anyone who fits that description already knows that systemd is an overengineered clusterfuck that should be avoided like the plague.