Because the places operate carefully in order to not meet the exact legal definition of a gambling establishment, even if they are one for practical purposes. It's one of those instances of someone circumventing the intention of a law by finding a way not to violate the exact wording.
Research first. Macbooks aren't made for linux, and just different enough from normal PCs that things don't run smoothly. You can run linux on them, it just takes a little hackery.
Technology changes though. Technology is what made mass-monitoring possible - without modern communications and computers, the USSR could only dream of recording every conversation. They were limited by how many agents they could afford. Just a technology make mass-monitoring possible, it can also provide the countermeasure: Encryption and decentralised, anonymous communication protocols.
To Technology: The cause of, and solution to, all of our problems.
It's a matter of scale. The UK didn't launch any wars in response to the attack. The only wars we are busy with right now are providing generous assistance to the US.
Not enough. If intelligent life exists, it must be rare or it'd have been found already. We'll need to do more than just beam a radio signal to a few planets. We'd need to build one really big transmitter and start systematically beaming to every star that even might harbor civilisation.
Something simple. 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13 in unary. Easily understood, and the meaning is obvious: 'We are here, please reply.'
The only way to detect non-intelligent alien life would by via the spectrum of their planet showing lines characteristic of chemicals unlikely to be formed by non-biological processes. Very hard to pick up - it's hard enough to just detect extrasolar planets.
Intelligent life, if it exists, might be easier to find. It might find us first. Even easier if it wants to be found and can build a signalling beacon of some sort.
I've seen the idea played like that, as well as being subverted (Aliens appear attractive, but have wildly incompatible reproductive anatomy), and in one case the subversion subverted (Alien disables shape-changing cloak technology and is revealed as a mass of tentacles; human character shrugs and goes ahead anyway).
It's a field rich for comic potential. There's a Babylon Five episode where a human diplomat is required to mate with a representative of an alien culture to seal a peace agreement, but finds him to be distasteful. Simply rejecting the mateing and explaining that her people reject sex as a political ritual would be a major offense. She deals with it be realising he has no idea how human anatomy works and thus couldn't actually tell sex from a silly dance... which is exactly what she does. As it's a comic B-plot, there is no consideration of what happens when he eventually finds out.
Plus the many, many stories to pull the 'man has sex with hot space babe, man gets pregnant' idea. Hyperdrive had some amusing scenes of the crew watching a manditory warning tape telling in graphic detail why sex with aliens is a bad idea.
I suspect this may be to avoid concerning parents. Give a device a web browser and an internet connection, and there will be porn. Lots of minors have xbox consoles in their bedrooms. Put the two together and in about four months you'd start seeing the tabloids running with 'Microsoft turned my son into a porn addict' and the self-appointed guardians of family values would be claiming Microsoft is enabling pedophiles somehow.
The coins vanish. They aren't replaced. Fortunately they are also highly divisible. Extreme deflation is to be expected. This makes economists rather annoyed - inflation, the bane of savers, is required for the proper functioning of an economy. This isn't really an issue with bitcoins (yet) because they are primarily used as a medium of exchange rather than as a value store. No-one asks for a loan in bitcoins, or makes an investment longer than a few days.
There's some truth in those. Not the pharmaceutical industry part, but the others.
US prisons are largely privately owned for-profit facilities. As might be expected, this means they put a little effort as possible into rehabilitation. To them, a repeat offender is a repeat customer - rehabilitation costs too much money, and does nothing to turn a profit. This also plays well politically - votes are easily gained by a show of being 'tough on crime' and casting the criminal population as demons to be hunted down, but a focus on rehabilitation or lighter sentencing leaves a politician open to accusations of weakness and endangering public safety.
Law enforcement above the very lowest levels is a political job, and drug busts are an easy way to advance a career. Minimal investigation needed, a nice two-dimensional evildoer to catch without any public sympathy, usually a quick and simple trial or plea bargin. Your basic good-vs-evil thing, great for impressing the public with minimal risk.
I'm not saying that there is any sort of grand conspiracy or shadow council running the drug war - just that, for a lot of people in key positions, keeping it going is to their benefit. They can't win (because any idiot can grow pot), but profit from the constant effort. Either financially or via career advancement.
Police auctions are commonplace in the US. So are accusations of police stretching the grounds for seizing assets so they can have more to sell.
In the case of bitcoins, there is nothing stopping the coins being sold once the case is over - but there is a strong possibility that word will come down from the higher levels of government, concerned that a government sale of the coins could be interpreted as an 'endorsement' of the currency. If that happens, the wallet will be simply deleted (removing the coins from circulation) once the case is over any any legal minimum period for retaining evidence is over.
Lincoln has the good excuse of fighting an actual domestic war that threatened the unity of the country.
All Bush, Obama and modern congresses have to justify their actions are a few rather ineffectual attacks by a terrorist group and some troublesome insurgency campaigns halfway around the world.
All those things didn't happen because Al Quida attacked. They happened because people overreacted to the attack.
Compare 9/11 to, for example, the July bombings in London. Look at what the UK government did: Grumbled, cleared up the wreckage that was obstructing roads, and got things back to normal. Within a couple of days the city was running as normal again. A criminal investigation was launched, the surviving conspirators charged, and the issue done with. That's the appropriate response to a terrorist attack: Clean up and get over it.
The death toll from 9/11 was equal to approximately one month of traffic accident fatalities in the US. Even 9/11 just didn't manage to kill enough people to be statistically noticeable. It was the panic that did the real damage - overreaction cost far more in every way than the attack itsself.
There's no way 2) will happen at goggle. The problem isn't the NSA: It's that Google's business model is based around their ability to process your information for marketing purposes. If google can't read it, they don't get paid, they can't run the service.
One idea would be to have the client include the public key in all emails sent, as a header. That way only the first email each way between two users would be sent unencrypted. It's entirely transparent... until something goes wrong.
Which brings us to another problem: My mother. A typical example of a user. When she forgot her mail password, it took her two weeks to figure out how to reset it. The typical user has no idea what a key is, and there's a good chance they'll lose the private part at some point (drive failure, thrown away old laptop after upgrade, uninstalled email client to use another). Putting them in a situation where they can't get any emails until they explain to everyone they know what happened - and they won't do that, because they won't know what the problem is, only that their new computer can't get emails right.
Skype does have some good encryption in it. But it has two deep flaws: 1. Metadata is still easily intercepted. That alone can be used or abused quite well. 2. It has backdoors which allow the operator (Microsoft, now) to intercept communications on behalf of the NSA - and quite likely a backdoor for the NSA to use any time they want, too.
There's a common conspiracy theory claiming that Ebay's purchase of Skype was at the request of the US government in order to gain intercept and metadata-recording capability - before the purchase it was run from Luxembourg, out of the NSA's control. It seems a plausible conspiracy - there doesn't seem any other reason for an internet auction company to purchase an IM platform, and they sold it on in turn to Microsoft just four years later.
Can't trust the SMTP servers - they are run by ISPs or mail services, the NSA could change the key on those with a polite email. It has to be handled by the client.
Try Retroshare. I've set up a little network for myself and a few friends. Aside from its concerningly weak default key size, it seems good. I've had it working reliably doing file-sharing, chat and email. Not tested the forums much yet.
I expect the NSA could break it, but it'd take enough effort that they aren't going to bother without a specific reason.
It stops trawling. Even if they have or will have enough computing power to break encryption, it's not going to be cheap - even the NSA doesn't have an infinite money cheat. Encrypting everything means they'd be forced by simple practicality to only snoop on people they have some grounds to suspect, rather than just collecting anything and everything they can get hold of for analysis in the hope they'll stumble upon something they can use.
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Given the volatility of exchange rates, that could be considered gambling too.
Because the places operate carefully in order to not meet the exact legal definition of a gambling establishment, even if they are one for practical purposes. It's one of those instances of someone circumventing the intention of a law by finding a way not to violate the exact wording.
*silence*
Research first. Macbooks aren't made for linux, and just different enough from normal PCs that things don't run smoothly. You can run linux on them, it just takes a little hackery.
Just the new interface is going to mean a lot of disruption while users learn how to use it.
Technology changes though. Technology is what made mass-monitoring possible - without modern communications and computers, the USSR could only dream of recording every conversation. They were limited by how many agents they could afford. Just a technology make mass-monitoring possible, it can also provide the countermeasure: Encryption and decentralised, anonymous communication protocols.
To Technology: The cause of, and solution to, all of our problems.
That, and even at the best of situations it's only possible to sue the government if they consent to be sued.
Which does happen. Just not in this case.
What are we going to do with them now?
It's a matter of scale. The UK didn't launch any wars in response to the attack. The only wars we are busy with right now are providing generous assistance to the US.
Not enough. If intelligent life exists, it must be rare or it'd have been found already. We'll need to do more than just beam a radio signal to a few planets. We'd need to build one really big transmitter and start systematically beaming to every star that even might harbor civilisation.
Something simple. 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13 in unary. Easily understood, and the meaning is obvious: 'We are here, please reply.'
The only way to detect non-intelligent alien life would by via the spectrum of their planet showing lines characteristic of chemicals unlikely to be formed by non-biological processes. Very hard to pick up - it's hard enough to just detect extrasolar planets.
Intelligent life, if it exists, might be easier to find. It might find us first. Even easier if it wants to be found and can build a signalling beacon of some sort.
I've seen the idea played like that, as well as being subverted (Aliens appear attractive, but have wildly incompatible reproductive anatomy), and in one case the subversion subverted (Alien disables shape-changing cloak technology and is revealed as a mass of tentacles; human character shrugs and goes ahead anyway).
It's a field rich for comic potential. There's a Babylon Five episode where a human diplomat is required to mate with a representative of an alien culture to seal a peace agreement, but finds him to be distasteful. Simply rejecting the mateing and explaining that her people reject sex as a political ritual would be a major offense. She deals with it be realising he has no idea how human anatomy works and thus couldn't actually tell sex from a silly dance... which is exactly what she does. As it's a comic B-plot, there is no consideration of what happens when he eventually finds out.
Plus the many, many stories to pull the 'man has sex with hot space babe, man gets pregnant' idea. Hyperdrive had some amusing scenes of the crew watching a manditory warning tape telling in graphic detail why sex with aliens is a bad idea.
I suspect this may be to avoid concerning parents. Give a device a web browser and an internet connection, and there will be porn. Lots of minors have xbox consoles in their bedrooms. Put the two together and in about four months you'd start seeing the tabloids running with 'Microsoft turned my son into a porn addict' and the self-appointed guardians of family values would be claiming Microsoft is enabling pedophiles somehow.
The coins vanish. They aren't replaced. Fortunately they are also highly divisible. Extreme deflation is to be expected. This makes economists rather annoyed - inflation, the bane of savers, is required for the proper functioning of an economy. This isn't really an issue with bitcoins (yet) because they are primarily used as a medium of exchange rather than as a value store. No-one asks for a loan in bitcoins, or makes an investment longer than a few days.
There's some truth in those. Not the pharmaceutical industry part, but the others.
US prisons are largely privately owned for-profit facilities. As might be expected, this means they put a little effort as possible into rehabilitation. To them, a repeat offender is a repeat customer - rehabilitation costs too much money, and does nothing to turn a profit. This also plays well politically - votes are easily gained by a show of being 'tough on crime' and casting the criminal population as demons to be hunted down, but a focus on rehabilitation or lighter sentencing leaves a politician open to accusations of weakness and endangering public safety.
Law enforcement above the very lowest levels is a political job, and drug busts are an easy way to advance a career. Minimal investigation needed, a nice two-dimensional evildoer to catch without any public sympathy, usually a quick and simple trial or plea bargin. Your basic good-vs-evil thing, great for impressing the public with minimal risk.
I'm not saying that there is any sort of grand conspiracy or shadow council running the drug war - just that, for a lot of people in key positions, keeping it going is to their benefit. They can't win (because any idiot can grow pot), but profit from the constant effort. Either financially or via career advancement.
Police auctions are commonplace in the US. So are accusations of police stretching the grounds for seizing assets so they can have more to sell.
In the case of bitcoins, there is nothing stopping the coins being sold once the case is over - but there is a strong possibility that word will come down from the higher levels of government, concerned that a government sale of the coins could be interpreted as an 'endorsement' of the currency. If that happens, the wallet will be simply deleted (removing the coins from circulation) once the case is over any any legal minimum period for retaining evidence is over.
Lincoln has the good excuse of fighting an actual domestic war that threatened the unity of the country.
All Bush, Obama and modern congresses have to justify their actions are a few rather ineffectual attacks by a terrorist group and some troublesome insurgency campaigns halfway around the world.
All those things didn't happen because Al Quida attacked. They happened because people overreacted to the attack.
Compare 9/11 to, for example, the July bombings in London. Look at what the UK government did: Grumbled, cleared up the wreckage that was obstructing roads, and got things back to normal. Within a couple of days the city was running as normal again. A criminal investigation was launched, the surviving conspirators charged, and the issue done with. That's the appropriate response to a terrorist attack: Clean up and get over it.
The death toll from 9/11 was equal to approximately one month of traffic accident fatalities in the US. Even 9/11 just didn't manage to kill enough people to be statistically noticeable. It was the panic that did the real damage - overreaction cost far more in every way than the attack itsself.
If google can read mail, so can the NSA. All they need to do is ask Google.
Automateable, but computationally expensive. Breaking every TLS onversation isn't going to be practical, even for them.
There's no way 2) will happen at goggle. The problem isn't the NSA: It's that Google's business model is based around their ability to process your information for marketing purposes. If google can't read it, they don't get paid, they can't run the service.
One idea would be to have the client include the public key in all emails sent, as a header. That way only the first email each way between two users would be sent unencrypted. It's entirely transparent... until something goes wrong.
Which brings us to another problem: My mother. A typical example of a user. When she forgot her mail password, it took her two weeks to figure out how to reset it. The typical user has no idea what a key is, and there's a good chance they'll lose the private part at some point (drive failure, thrown away old laptop after upgrade, uninstalled email client to use another). Putting them in a situation where they can't get any emails until they explain to everyone they know what happened - and they won't do that, because they won't know what the problem is, only that their new computer can't get emails right.
Never underestimate the ignorance of users.
Skype does have some good encryption in it. But it has two deep flaws:
1. Metadata is still easily intercepted. That alone can be used or abused quite well.
2. It has backdoors which allow the operator (Microsoft, now) to intercept communications on behalf of the NSA - and quite likely a backdoor for the NSA to use any time they want, too.
There's a common conspiracy theory claiming that Ebay's purchase of Skype was at the request of the US government in order to gain intercept and metadata-recording capability - before the purchase it was run from Luxembourg, out of the NSA's control. It seems a plausible conspiracy - there doesn't seem any other reason for an internet auction company to purchase an IM platform, and they sold it on in turn to Microsoft just four years later.
Can't trust the SMTP servers - they are run by ISPs or mail services, the NSA could change the key on those with a polite email. It has to be handled by the client.
Try Retroshare. I've set up a little network for myself and a few friends. Aside from its concerningly weak default key size, it seems good. I've had it working reliably doing file-sharing, chat and email. Not tested the forums much yet.
I expect the NSA could break it, but it'd take enough effort that they aren't going to bother without a specific reason.
It stops trawling. Even if they have or will have enough computing power to break encryption, it's not going to be cheap - even the NSA doesn't have an infinite money cheat. Encrypting everything means they'd be forced by simple practicality to only snoop on people they have some grounds to suspect, rather than just collecting anything and everything they can get hold of for analysis in the hope they'll stumble upon something they can use.