Shotguns is also my initial answer but discharging firearms is often prohibited.
Except when justified. There was a recent case in which a judge ruled that a man's decision to discharge his shotgun within city limits to shoot down a drone flying over his property was justified.
Hunting and fishing licenses are also to ensure the proper level/age/gender of animals, or at least close to it, is hunted, for conservation, etc. purposes
No, no they are not. Licenses don't do that. The only thing licenses do is make sure that someone has spent money. Only enforcement does that. Enforcement already happens; they have wardens out all year making sure that people aren't poaching. I live in major hunting country, so there's lots of them here.
For most big game, there's also a tag attached to the license, which much be attached to the game animal when taken. Tags do serve (with enforcement) to ensure that the right number, age and gender of animals are taken. Other game species have daily limits, but those could be enforced without any sort of specific licensing. Of course, the license fees generally pay for the enforcement, so licenses do help manage hunting for conservation. License fees generally pay for lots of other conservation measures as well.
The process of copying and pasting an incompletely or not at all understood solution isn't in any way new. Back in the early 90s one of my colleagues coined the term I've used ever since for this and related programming anti-methods: buckethead programming. The metaphor is of programming with a bucket over your head so you can't see what you're doing but instead just stagger in random directions until you accidentally bump into something that appears to work... at which point you leave it and stagger your way through the next obstacle that arises.
I suppose you can argue that stackoverflow has made buckethead programming easier or more accessible, but people were grabbing random snippets of code from existing codebases, or from magazine articles, or blog articles, etc., long before it existed. If it weren't for stackoverflow concentrating such knowledge in one place, we'd be lamenting Google's role in enabling crappy programmers to find solutions they don't understand.
We could just hitch a ride on a comet that is flying close by both planets to avoid fuel costs and size of spacecraft limitations:)
At what relative velocity would you like your spacecraft to land on the comet?
I know that you are joking, but I've heard this idea proposed seriously more than once. This comment is for those people.
See... we just need a big net and a very large bungee cord...
What difference does book format make? Books full of child pornography are already illegal, for example. What makes you think 3D printed weapons would be any different, or generate a different reaction when banned?
It highlights the freedom of speech and press questions. It worked reasonably well with encryption a couple of decades ago. Of course, the encryption debate has come roaring back recently, but that doesn't mean the book idea didn't work, or that it can't work again.
The child pornography argument is something of a red herring sitting as it does right at the intersection of the most deep-seated, cross-ideology hot buttons there are.
That they made a 6 hour trilogy out of a FUCKING SHORT STORY?
Honestly.... what the hell, a single 2 hour movie is stretching it.
It wasn't a short story, it was a good-sized novel. I think it could have been done well in two movies. One would have required cutting some material. Three was too much.
Is it possible to make a secure product? Absolutely.
Stop right there. This statement is false, at least with respect to systems of significant complexity. This is completely obvious when you realize that software security defects are just bugs. You'll never have perfectly secure software until you have perfect software.
Unless we want to dramatically reduce the complexity (and hence capabilities) of the systems we use, to a point where we can produce formally-verifiable security and correctness proofs, there will always be vulnerabilities. If you accept your software to be orders of magnitude less functional and also orders of magnitude more expensive, then you might be get perfect security.
In the real world, settle in for a continual cat and mouse game. There will always be vulnerabilities, so the best we can do is design defense in depth with lots of firewalls so that hopefully one vulnerability won't be easy to chain into a full exploit, and to try to stay ahead of the bad guys for when the defensive measures break down. The second point is actually not unrealistic if the "bad guys" in question are criminals. While it may be slightly less lucrative to be a white hat security researcher, it's much safer and it's still a pretty good life, especially with the growing prominence of vulnerability reward programs. If the "bad guys" in question are nation states, however, forget it. They can and do hire people who are every bit as good as the public researchers, and their employees also have good, safe lives.
So, your cynical assumption that secure products cannot be allowed so that TLAs have access is wrong... but the true reasons that completely secure products are infeasible still do mean that TLAs will have access.
You are not an engineer. You are a software developer. Stop diluting the term because you want to be more than you are.
Bah. I'm not a certified professional engineer. But neither are most of the mechanical engineers, civil engineers, structural engineers, etc. The only difference between those engineering disciplines and software engineering is that the latter hasn't yet matured to the degree that PE certifications make sense.
But there is absolutely no doubt that what I do is engineering, even if I don't have to be certified, or to get a certified PE to sign off on it.
With self driving cars, we still have to maintain enough cars to meet peak demand. Therefore there are going to be many cars that spend most of their time idle. It will be less than current levels but not by much (a good estimate will be it will reduce by the average number of cars parked during peak hours).
True, we still have to meet peak demand, but I disagree that it won't be much less than current levels. For multiple reasons.
First, once we get the human-operated vehicles off the highway, we can greatly increase highway speeds. Tightly-packed "trains" of automated vehicles can cruise along at, say, 100 mph. Automated vehicles, particularly with radio frequency communications for coordination, will also not be subject to the typical rush-hour slowdowns; as density increases human drivers have to slow down, especially to manage entrance and exit ramps. Automated vehicles in constant communication with surrounding vehicles wouldn't need that. This means that a vehicle that currently makes a single journey during rush hour may make two or three, exploiting the small amount of spread in arrival times that does exist.
During the interim period when highways are shared with human-operated vehicles, we can still get some of the same effect by partitioning of automated-only lanes, separated with barriers and moving at much higher speeds. This is only feasible where there are already at least three, and preferably four, lanes of traffic, but many heavily-commuted corridors meet that requirement.
Second, and even before removing human-operated vehicles from the highway, self-driving cars make mass transit much more effective and accessible in sub-urban areas. Some regions have large parking lots near transit stations in an attempt to facilitate the personal vehicle to mass-transit transition, but that's expensive (for the transit system) and not always feasible. Given self-driving cars, self-driving buses and systems that know the actual location of the buses, it will be a simple matter to have a car pick you up and drive you to the bus stop (or, even better, train stop), arriving scant minutes before the transit vehicle.
Self-driving vehicles also facilitate smaller, more independent, transit vehicles. Rather than building a system around 40-seat buses, you can build it around 10-seat vans. When you have to pay a human driver, going bigger is far more efficient. Without a driver, smaller vehicles are still more expensive than big ones on a passenger-mile basis, but only if both are running full. Given how often buses are mostly empty, a larger fleet of smaller vehicles will be more cost-effective, and with automated routing and automated electronic interaction with future passengers can be much more efficient. Consider the opportunities for efficiency if passengers' personal digital assistants (e.g. Google Now) notify the system when and where the passenger is intending to board the van.
Third, right now the cost of vehicle transit is mostly independent of the time of day. It costs a little more to drive to work during rush hour because traffic results in higher fuel costs, but not much, and people don't think about it at all. But I expect that rush-hour transit in automated car service vehicles will be subject to "surge" pricing, because the level of peak demand translates directly into the single highest cost for such a service: vehicles that sit idle much of the day. Of course, the surge pricing will still be lower than current personally-owned-vehicle transportation costs, but because it will be so visible and easily measurable I expect it will provide a stronger incentive for employers to allow their employees to stagger their arrival times, spreading the surge and reducing peak usage.
On that last point, it's worth noting that most employers of highly-paid employees already allow them considerable latitude in arrival times, and many employees take advantage of that flexibility to reduce the time cost of commuting. Lower-paid employees tend to be required to punch the clock, and their time is considered less valuable, so employers are less receptive to complaints about transit times... but might be more receptive to complaints about transit surge pricing.
But it should surprise no one that engineers who gravitate to positions like mine are people think everything should be encrypted and that only the person who owns the data should have the keys.
Arguably, by ignoring some of these rules, Uber has an artificial advantage due to government regulation, and hence is rent-seeking.
But Uber isn't ignoring the rules in NYC, and it's the taxi companies who are trying to get the city to change the rules in order to preserve their business model.
there is a cost associated with waiting to get picked up if a car isn't available, too
Sure. But just as Google Now today tells me when I need to leave to get somewhere, I expect in the future it'll arrange for the car to be available. That won't help with spur-of-the-moment decisions, but I expect capitalism to do a good job of making cars readily available. Efficient allocation of scarce resources is what it's good at.
My car costs less than $10 a day (everything included)
Are you including the cost of parking? Including at retailers who have "free" parking, but must build into their prices the cost of buying the land and building and maintaining a parking lot? Or what about the cost of buying a house/renting an apartment that has parking space? That's just one example; I suspect there are a lot of other less obvious examples of societal costs that we all pay without realizing it to maintain widespread personal vehicle ownership.
And it would be fair to point out that people who share such privacy concerns do not gravitate to Google corporate management.
I don't think that's at all true. It's certainly not consistent with those in my management chain with whom I've interacted (which is all of them except Sundar). It's also fairly irrelevant, since Google is a very bottom-up organization. Management decided to staff an Android security team, but they really don't tell us what to do.
For example they of course believe it is quite legitimate to scan people's emails so that advertising may be more accurately targeted.
Sure, as long as the people in question have agreed to it. I have no problem with that, at all. Personally, as long as it's relatively unobtrusive, I'd much rather pay for content with my eyeballs than my dollars, and if I have to see advertising I prefer that it's relevant, so Google's model is a win/win for me. Not everyone feels the same way, of course, which is why Google provides tools to enable opting out of analytics and targeted advertising. In most cases while still allowing opted-out users to use Google's services.
Google as an organization is no champion of privacy, it is a targeted advertising company after all.
Those things aren't inherently opposed. There's nothing anti-privacy about a business model based on users voluntarily providing information to enable targeted advertising, as long as the company takes due care to protect user data. The key word there is "voluntarily", obviously. As for "due care", Google does an outstanding job of protecting user data.
it is a targeted advertising company after all.
It really isn't. That may seem a strange claim about a company that derives 90+% of its revenue from advertising, but it's true nonetheless. Google's biggest current products are most effectively monetized with advertising, true, but Google as a whole really isn't focused on advertising, and isn't particularly even concerned about building stuff that drives advertising. The mandate is to build stuff that the whole world will want to use, and then we'll figure out later how to make money from it. In many cases, advertising fits the bill. In others, SaaS is better (that's mostly what has driven advertising from 100% to 90%). Increasingly, I expect Google's revenues to start coming from hardware sales.
However, once self driving cars are a reality, I will certainly consider buying one.
I think it will go exactly the opposite direction. People who now own cars will get rid of them, instead calling a self-driving car to pick them up when they need a ride. When you remove the overhead of paying a driver, the car service model of transportation becomes really compelling. We spend so much money on vehicles that are parked 95% of the time... pure waste.
As a side benefit, it should be easy to achieve enormous data compression ratios along with the encryption. So not only would the messages be very secure, they'd also be very cheap and easy to transmit.
Here's the funny thing too: regardless of where you stop in this dangerous trend, you've still created two classes of people: those who can live in your country and those who can't. You've removed their freedom to "protect" yours.
It's a little worse than that.
However you go about deciding which people to exclude, you still have to solve the practical problem of how to effectively keep them out while allowing the privileged class to enter. This means gates, guards and ID checks, which in turn require processes to identify people and issue ID documentation, and creates opportunities for errors and abuse. All of which means that the privileged class must also sacrifice some amount of their own freedom in order to build the filter and make it work.
I can't find the link at the moment, but as I recall Google has articulated the same position, and said it some years ago. The maker of the autonomous care should be held liable for any errors made by the autonomous driving system. Really, who else could be liable?
They are doing this because, if they didn't, somebody else would offer apps to do it and then take over part of their ecosystem.
Heh. As one of the engineers at Google who builds Android device encryption, I'd say that we do it because that's how it should be. But it should surprise no one that engineers who gravitate to positions like mine are people think everything should be encrypted and that only the person who owns the data should have the keys.
While I'm ambivalent about Zero Knowledge Encryption
Personally, I'd really like to have an opinion on "zero knowledge encryption", but I can't figure out what the hell it is. From context I infer that he's using the term to describe device encryption, as done on Android and iOS. I know what that is, and wholeheartedly support it.
But I have no idea where this "zero knowledge encryption" label came from or what it's intended to actually mean. I know what zero-knowledge proofs are, and they're really cool, but they have nothing to do with device encryption.
I've got it! He's using the phrase "zero knowledge" to describe his understanding of encryption.
Slashdot Mirror
Shotguns is also my initial answer but discharging firearms is often prohibited.
Except when justified. There was a recent case in which a judge ruled that a man's decision to discharge his shotgun within city limits to shoot down a drone flying over his property was justified.
Hunting and fishing licenses are also to ensure the proper level/age/gender of animals, or at least close to it, is hunted, for conservation, etc. purposes
No, no they are not. Licenses don't do that. The only thing licenses do is make sure that someone has spent money. Only enforcement does that. Enforcement already happens; they have wardens out all year making sure that people aren't poaching. I live in major hunting country, so there's lots of them here.
For most big game, there's also a tag attached to the license, which much be attached to the game animal when taken. Tags do serve (with enforcement) to ensure that the right number, age and gender of animals are taken. Other game species have daily limits, but those could be enforced without any sort of specific licensing. Of course, the license fees generally pay for the enforcement, so licenses do help manage hunting for conservation. License fees generally pay for lots of other conservation measures as well.
No, you don't do engineering. You do software design, because you are not liable for the integrity of what you make.
People just started calling it engineering to feel special, but it's pretty distinct, and dishonest of you to call yourself such.
So, liability defines engineering, it has nothing to do with applying science to build things. Okay, whatever you say.
I remember when the goto source was dejanews....
Youngster :-)
The process of copying and pasting an incompletely or not at all understood solution isn't in any way new. Back in the early 90s one of my colleagues coined the term I've used ever since for this and related programming anti-methods: buckethead programming. The metaphor is of programming with a bucket over your head so you can't see what you're doing but instead just stagger in random directions until you accidentally bump into something that appears to work... at which point you leave it and stagger your way through the next obstacle that arises.
I suppose you can argue that stackoverflow has made buckethead programming easier or more accessible, but people were grabbing random snippets of code from existing codebases, or from magazine articles, or blog articles, etc., long before it existed. If it weren't for stackoverflow concentrating such knowledge in one place, we'd be lamenting Google's role in enabling crappy programmers to find solutions they don't understand.
We could just hitch a ride on a comet that is flying close by both planets to avoid fuel costs and size of spacecraft limitations :)
At what relative velocity would you like your spacecraft to land on the comet? I know that you are joking, but I've heard this idea proposed seriously more than once. This comment is for those people.
See... we just need a big net and a very large bungee cord...
What difference does book format make? Books full of child pornography are already illegal, for example. What makes you think 3D printed weapons would be any different, or generate a different reaction when banned?
It highlights the freedom of speech and press questions. It worked reasonably well with encryption a couple of decades ago. Of course, the encryption debate has come roaring back recently, but that doesn't mean the book idea didn't work, or that it can't work again.
The child pornography argument is something of a red herring sitting as it does right at the intersection of the most deep-seated, cross-ideology hot buttons there are.
That they made a 6 hour trilogy out of a FUCKING SHORT STORY?
Honestly.... what the hell, a single 2 hour movie is stretching it.
It wasn't a short story, it was a good-sized novel. I think it could have been done well in two movies. One would have required cutting some material. Three was too much.
And GM is definitely a great company to look at when you want an example of what NOT to do (for just about anything).
Except cash government checks.
They're good at that.
So is Tesla. Except then they pay the money back, ahead of schedule.
Uber is known to pay no attention to certain laws as long as the legal staff is fairly sure they can blame violations on the driver.
Cite?
Is it possible to make a secure product? Absolutely.
Stop right there. This statement is false, at least with respect to systems of significant complexity. This is completely obvious when you realize that software security defects are just bugs. You'll never have perfectly secure software until you have perfect software.
Unless we want to dramatically reduce the complexity (and hence capabilities) of the systems we use, to a point where we can produce formally-verifiable security and correctness proofs, there will always be vulnerabilities. If you accept your software to be orders of magnitude less functional and also orders of magnitude more expensive, then you might be get perfect security.
In the real world, settle in for a continual cat and mouse game. There will always be vulnerabilities, so the best we can do is design defense in depth with lots of firewalls so that hopefully one vulnerability won't be easy to chain into a full exploit, and to try to stay ahead of the bad guys for when the defensive measures break down. The second point is actually not unrealistic if the "bad guys" in question are criminals. While it may be slightly less lucrative to be a white hat security researcher, it's much safer and it's still a pretty good life, especially with the growing prominence of vulnerability reward programs. If the "bad guys" in question are nation states, however, forget it. They can and do hire people who are every bit as good as the public researchers, and their employees also have good, safe lives.
So, your cynical assumption that secure products cannot be allowed so that TLAs have access is wrong... but the true reasons that completely secure products are infeasible still do mean that TLAs will have access.
You are not an engineer. You are a software developer. Stop diluting the term because you want to be more than you are.
Bah. I'm not a certified professional engineer. But neither are most of the mechanical engineers, civil engineers, structural engineers, etc. The only difference between those engineering disciplines and software engineering is that the latter hasn't yet matured to the degree that PE certifications make sense.
But there is absolutely no doubt that what I do is engineering, even if I don't have to be certified, or to get a certified PE to sign off on it.
With self driving cars, we still have to maintain enough cars to meet peak demand. Therefore there are going to be many cars that spend most of their time idle. It will be less than current levels but not by much (a good estimate will be it will reduce by the average number of cars parked during peak hours).
True, we still have to meet peak demand, but I disagree that it won't be much less than current levels. For multiple reasons.
First, once we get the human-operated vehicles off the highway, we can greatly increase highway speeds. Tightly-packed "trains" of automated vehicles can cruise along at, say, 100 mph. Automated vehicles, particularly with radio frequency communications for coordination, will also not be subject to the typical rush-hour slowdowns; as density increases human drivers have to slow down, especially to manage entrance and exit ramps. Automated vehicles in constant communication with surrounding vehicles wouldn't need that. This means that a vehicle that currently makes a single journey during rush hour may make two or three, exploiting the small amount of spread in arrival times that does exist.
During the interim period when highways are shared with human-operated vehicles, we can still get some of the same effect by partitioning of automated-only lanes, separated with barriers and moving at much higher speeds. This is only feasible where there are already at least three, and preferably four, lanes of traffic, but many heavily-commuted corridors meet that requirement.
Second, and even before removing human-operated vehicles from the highway, self-driving cars make mass transit much more effective and accessible in sub-urban areas. Some regions have large parking lots near transit stations in an attempt to facilitate the personal vehicle to mass-transit transition, but that's expensive (for the transit system) and not always feasible. Given self-driving cars, self-driving buses and systems that know the actual location of the buses, it will be a simple matter to have a car pick you up and drive you to the bus stop (or, even better, train stop), arriving scant minutes before the transit vehicle.
Self-driving vehicles also facilitate smaller, more independent, transit vehicles. Rather than building a system around 40-seat buses, you can build it around 10-seat vans. When you have to pay a human driver, going bigger is far more efficient. Without a driver, smaller vehicles are still more expensive than big ones on a passenger-mile basis, but only if both are running full. Given how often buses are mostly empty, a larger fleet of smaller vehicles will be more cost-effective, and with automated routing and automated electronic interaction with future passengers can be much more efficient. Consider the opportunities for efficiency if passengers' personal digital assistants (e.g. Google Now) notify the system when and where the passenger is intending to board the van.
Third, right now the cost of vehicle transit is mostly independent of the time of day. It costs a little more to drive to work during rush hour because traffic results in higher fuel costs, but not much, and people don't think about it at all. But I expect that rush-hour transit in automated car service vehicles will be subject to "surge" pricing, because the level of peak demand translates directly into the single highest cost for such a service: vehicles that sit idle much of the day. Of course, the surge pricing will still be lower than current personally-owned-vehicle transportation costs, but because it will be so visible and easily measurable I expect it will provide a stronger incentive for employers to allow their employees to stagger their arrival times, spreading the surge and reducing peak usage.
On that last point, it's worth noting that most employers of highly-paid employees already allow them considerable latitude in arrival times, and many employees take advantage of that flexibility to reduce the time cost of commuting. Lower-paid employees tend to be required to punch the clock, and their time is considered less valuable, so employers are less receptive to complaints about transit times... but might be more receptive to complaints about transit surge pricing.
But it should surprise no one that engineers who gravitate to positions like mine are people think everything should be encrypted and that only the person who owns the data should have the keys.
ahem
And?
Arguably, by ignoring some of these rules, Uber has an artificial advantage due to government regulation, and hence is rent-seeking.
But Uber isn't ignoring the rules in NYC, and it's the taxi companies who are trying to get the city to change the rules in order to preserve their business model.
If you really believed that, you wouldn't work at Google.
And yet I do, and I know far more about Google than you.
there is a cost associated with waiting to get picked up if a car isn't available, too
Sure. But just as Google Now today tells me when I need to leave to get somewhere, I expect in the future it'll arrange for the car to be available. That won't help with spur-of-the-moment decisions, but I expect capitalism to do a good job of making cars readily available. Efficient allocation of scarce resources is what it's good at.
My car costs less than $10 a day (everything included)
Are you including the cost of parking? Including at retailers who have "free" parking, but must build into their prices the cost of buying the land and building and maintaining a parking lot? Or what about the cost of buying a house/renting an apartment that has parking space? That's just one example; I suspect there are a lot of other less obvious examples of societal costs that we all pay without realizing it to maintain widespread personal vehicle ownership.
And it would be fair to point out that people who share such privacy concerns do not gravitate to Google corporate management.
I don't think that's at all true. It's certainly not consistent with those in my management chain with whom I've interacted (which is all of them except Sundar). It's also fairly irrelevant, since Google is a very bottom-up organization. Management decided to staff an Android security team, but they really don't tell us what to do.
For example they of course believe it is quite legitimate to scan people's emails so that advertising may be more accurately targeted.
Sure, as long as the people in question have agreed to it. I have no problem with that, at all. Personally, as long as it's relatively unobtrusive, I'd much rather pay for content with my eyeballs than my dollars, and if I have to see advertising I prefer that it's relevant, so Google's model is a win/win for me. Not everyone feels the same way, of course, which is why Google provides tools to enable opting out of analytics and targeted advertising. In most cases while still allowing opted-out users to use Google's services.
Google as an organization is no champion of privacy, it is a targeted advertising company after all.
Those things aren't inherently opposed. There's nothing anti-privacy about a business model based on users voluntarily providing information to enable targeted advertising, as long as the company takes due care to protect user data. The key word there is "voluntarily", obviously. As for "due care", Google does an outstanding job of protecting user data.
it is a targeted advertising company after all.
It really isn't. That may seem a strange claim about a company that derives 90+% of its revenue from advertising, but it's true nonetheless. Google's biggest current products are most effectively monetized with advertising, true, but Google as a whole really isn't focused on advertising, and isn't particularly even concerned about building stuff that drives advertising. The mandate is to build stuff that the whole world will want to use, and then we'll figure out later how to make money from it. In many cases, advertising fits the bill. In others, SaaS is better (that's mostly what has driven advertising from 100% to 90%). Increasingly, I expect Google's revenues to start coming from hardware sales.
However, once self driving cars are a reality, I will certainly consider buying one.
I think it will go exactly the opposite direction. People who now own cars will get rid of them, instead calling a self-driving car to pick them up when they need a ride. When you remove the overhead of paying a driver, the car service model of transportation becomes really compelling. We spend so much money on vehicles that are parked 95% of the time... pure waste.
Nice!
As a side benefit, it should be easy to achieve enormous data compression ratios along with the encryption. So not only would the messages be very secure, they'd also be very cheap and easy to transmit.
How could this not be attractive to Jihadis?
Here's the funny thing too: regardless of where you stop in this dangerous trend, you've still created two classes of people: those who can live in your country and those who can't. You've removed their freedom to "protect" yours.
It's a little worse than that.
However you go about deciding which people to exclude, you still have to solve the practical problem of how to effectively keep them out while allowing the privileged class to enter. This means gates, guards and ID checks, which in turn require processes to identify people and issue ID documentation, and creates opportunities for errors and abuse. All of which means that the privileged class must also sacrifice some amount of their own freedom in order to build the filter and make it work.
I can't find the link at the moment, but as I recall Google has articulated the same position, and said it some years ago. The maker of the autonomous care should be held liable for any errors made by the autonomous driving system. Really, who else could be liable?
Does it mean encryption that can't be decrypted?
That would certainly be secure.
They are doing this because, if they didn't, somebody else would offer apps to do it and then take over part of their ecosystem.
Heh. As one of the engineers at Google who builds Android device encryption, I'd say that we do it because that's how it should be. But it should surprise no one that engineers who gravitate to positions like mine are people think everything should be encrypted and that only the person who owns the data should have the keys.
While I'm ambivalent about Zero Knowledge Encryption
Personally, I'd really like to have an opinion on "zero knowledge encryption", but I can't figure out what the hell it is. From context I infer that he's using the term to describe device encryption, as done on Android and iOS. I know what that is, and wholeheartedly support it.
But I have no idea where this "zero knowledge encryption" label came from or what it's intended to actually mean. I know what zero-knowledge proofs are, and they're really cool, but they have nothing to do with device encryption.
I've got it! He's using the phrase "zero knowledge" to describe his understanding of encryption.