And China has been accused of it many, many times - they barely even bother to hide it. Every country does it, then acts outraged when all the others do too.
Though it was included in a bill mostly relating to copyright infringement, child porn was also a commonly cited justification. It failed, but if it had passed it would have required anyone operating a public hotspot take measures to verify and record the identitity of anyone using it - probably by contracting a service provider to run a captive portal and SMS unique activation codes to people before allowing them on, so their phone number becomes a record of identity.
But they still need an 'official excuse.' Drugs have been a good excuse for decades. Failing that, the more modern fall-backs of terrorism and pedophiles never fail.
Burner phones are getting hard. You can buy a phone second-hand for cash easily enough, but getting it on the cell network is trickier - even prepaid SIMs usually require a bank card for initial activation. It's a result of deliberate government pressure to eliminate untraceable cellphones - not for reasons of terrorism, but to make identifying drug traffickers and sellers easier.
Difference in scale. The LE database tracks known criminals and those associated with a crime. The NSA database just tracks *everyone* on the grounds that they may possibly be a suspect at some point in the future.
Obama isn't the one who started all this - he is just the one who is refusing to stop it. There's lots of blame to go around here, no need to pile it all on one person.
That's a consequence of a widespread and accurate cynicism: What exactly do you propose to do about it? There is nothing you or I could do that would make any significant difference.
The TSA needs to inconvenience people do they feel safe. If the passangers weren't made to feel like criminals getting on the plane, they wouldn't feel confident in the security measures.
The bomb detectors are a real bane for anyone in the agricultural sector. They key on ammonium nitrate, the high explosive also used as a fertiliser - so if you've been walking through a field fertilised with the industrialised world's most commonly-used fertiliser, you set of the chemical bomb residue detector.
The dock connector did. Couldn't change it easily, due to the need to retain compatibility with speaker dock accessories. The pins have changed function in places, but the physical connector has been the same from its introduction right up until the switch to Lightning in Apple's quest to shave milimeters off thickness.
And budget. Monitoring people used to require paying someone to listen to the tapes. The advent of computers has greatly brought down the cost of mass-monitoring by allowing the computers to sift through the vast collection and just flag the potentially interesting things for human examination.
Most of the calls are individual identifiers unique to the individual. Makes a lot of sense. A dolphin pod is essentially free-floating a lot of the time in an ocean with no navigational markers and little indication of direction. They need some way to track each other to keep the group from getting split up.
Depends on source corpus. If they trained it using one of the usual formal collections of publications, it would only have built up associations based on the slang-free usage and so would translate it as 'Tight cat.' If they have instead fed it a broader selection, perhaps culled from a web spider, it may pick up the other meaning.
Statistical translation is always going to have issues like that, but it can perhaps reach the 'good enough' point to hold a conversation with.
I can easily see it getting confused by formal vs informal use. If it goes on association, eventually it's going to get 'lawyer' and 'extortionist' confused.
"Do we go back to some EU overseer commission for approval again?"
Yes. That won't happen for a while though - micro-USB is as physically flat as it's possible to make a connector without it becoming as delicate as tissue paper.
Except for portability. USB cables are cheap and tiny little things. Charging pads are not. Sometimes people do have to go away from home for more than one day, and the charging pad takes valuable space in the bag.
I don't know about the iPhones, but the early iPods used a firewire interface rather than USB - same physical connector, but you couldn't charge nor transfer data from a USB port.
This was *old* though. The firewire version hasn't been made in many years.
Terrorists generally don't plan to win personally. Media coverage is part of the aim. There's no point killing people if the world doesn't get to hear why you did it.
Whatever you do, it'd only further inspire their follows. You just need to make the penalty something sufficiently *boring*.
It might help if the law stops treating terrorists some some super-elite league-of-their-own master criminals, and just throws them in with all the run-of-the-mill murderers and vandals.
Slashdot Mirror
That particular problem can be solved with simple encryption. No need for the fancy stuff - simple symmetric will do.
And China has been accused of it many, many times - they barely even bother to hide it. Every country does it, then acts outraged when all the others do too.
Don't forget the 'students shouldn't be doing anything the school could be blamed for' policy.
MPs in the UK already tried to ban anonymous wifi hotspots. http://gizmodo.com/5482141/uk-bill-would-outlaw-open-public-wifi-hotspots
Though it was included in a bill mostly relating to copyright infringement, child porn was also a commonly cited justification. It failed, but if it had passed it would have required anyone operating a public hotspot take measures to verify and record the identitity of anyone using it - probably by contracting a service provider to run a captive portal and SMS unique activation codes to people before allowing them on, so their phone number becomes a record of identity.
But they still need an 'official excuse.' Drugs have been a good excuse for decades. Failing that, the more modern fall-backs of terrorism and pedophiles never fail.
Burner phones are getting hard. You can buy a phone second-hand for cash easily enough, but getting it on the cell network is trickier - even prepaid SIMs usually require a bank card for initial activation. It's a result of deliberate government pressure to eliminate untraceable cellphones - not for reasons of terrorism, but to make identifying drug traffickers and sellers easier.
Difference in scale. The LE database tracks known criminals and those associated with a crime. The NSA database just tracks *everyone* on the grounds that they may possibly be a suspect at some point in the future.
Obama isn't the one who started all this - he is just the one who is refusing to stop it. There's lots of blame to go around here, no need to pile it all on one person.
That's a consequence of a widespread and accurate cynicism: What exactly do you propose to do about it? There is nothing you or I could do that would make any significant difference.
The TSA needs to inconvenience people do they feel safe. If the passangers weren't made to feel like criminals getting on the plane, they wouldn't feel confident in the security measures.
The bomb detectors are a real bane for anyone in the agricultural sector. They key on ammonium nitrate, the high explosive also used as a fertiliser - so if you've been walking through a field fertilised with the industrialised world's most commonly-used fertiliser, you set of the chemical bomb residue detector.
The dock connector did. Couldn't change it easily, due to the need to retain compatibility with speaker dock accessories. The pins have changed function in places, but the physical connector has been the same from its introduction right up until the switch to Lightning in Apple's quest to shave milimeters off thickness.
And budget. Monitoring people used to require paying someone to listen to the tapes. The advent of computers has greatly brought down the cost of mass-monitoring by allowing the computers to sift through the vast collection and just flag the potentially interesting things for human examination.
Unless the plot calls for a breakdown of communication, in which case the language will be too 'complex' for the universal translator.
It's already been partially decoded.
Most of the calls are individual identifiers unique to the individual. Makes a lot of sense. A dolphin pod is essentially free-floating a lot of the time in an ocean with no navigational markers and little indication of direction. They need some way to track each other to keep the group from getting split up.
Depends on source corpus. If they trained it using one of the usual formal collections of publications, it would only have built up associations based on the slang-free usage and so would translate it as 'Tight cat.' If they have instead fed it a broader selection, perhaps culled from a web spider, it may pick up the other meaning.
Statistical translation is always going to have issues like that, but it can perhaps reach the 'good enough' point to hold a conversation with.
I can easily see it getting confused by formal vs informal use. If it goes on association, eventually it's going to get 'lawyer' and 'extortionist' confused.
iOS = Apple's phone/tablet OS.
IOS = Cisco's router OS.
Confusing, yes. Capitalisation matters.
"Do we go back to some EU overseer commission for approval again?"
Yes. That won't happen for a while though - micro-USB is as physically flat as it's possible to make a connector without it becoming as delicate as tissue paper.
Except for portability. USB cables are cheap and tiny little things. Charging pads are not. Sometimes people do have to go away from home for more than one day, and the charging pad takes valuable space in the bag.
I don't know about the iPhones, but the early iPods used a firewire interface rather than USB - same physical connector, but you couldn't charge nor transfer data from a USB port.
This was *old* though. The firewire version hasn't been made in many years.
And all the propritary connectors I've seen in that size constraint are equally flimsy. Including the Apple dock.
I cannot comment on Lightning, never having examined one up close.
Terrorists generally don't plan to win personally. Media coverage is part of the aim. There's no point killing people if the world doesn't get to hear why you did it.
Whatever you do, it'd only further inspire their follows. You just need to make the penalty something sufficiently *boring*.
It might help if the law stops treating terrorists some some super-elite league-of-their-own master criminals, and just throws them in with all the run-of-the-mill murderers and vandals.
If you can post about zombies using bitcoins, you get four times as many hits. It multiplies.
Crypto-anarchism.
Victory through mathematics!