Oh, I certainly agree that it's not necessary that Rossi understands his magic box for it to be real. Just that it's highly, highly unlikely that he managed to build something useful with no conception of how it does what it does. And it's certainly not necessary for us to fully understand it before putting it to use... but I think, again, that it's highly improbable that we would be able to build them without understanding something about how they accomplish what they accomplish.
Perhaps this is true for GPS and nuclear plants, but in general engineering does not require theory.
Of course it does. It's not necessary to have the theory fully elaborated and to calculate the interactions to the nth degree, but you have to have some basis for believing that putting objects together in such-and-such a way will produce such-and-such a result, and why. That's theory.
You don't need chemistry or physics to make invent a distiller
No, but you do need to understand that different liquids condense at different temperatures... or need to use a design created by someone who does.
or E&M to make a compas
No, but you do need to understand that lodestones always point north, and that you can induce similar behavior in a piece of metal. That then gives you the idea of suspending one so it can rotate freely and point directions. Yes, you're doing so without most of the theory as to why lodestones behave the way they do, but you still have a theory of operation of your compass, which is based on the observed behaviors of lodestones plus the notion that configuring one in a particular way would allow it to rotate and act as a pointer.
Of course you could say that experimentation and observation give you theory, but then anything that has been engineered and built more than once has some theory behind it.
The key is that there is some theory (which need not be modern physics, or even mathematical in nature) that motivates the engineer to believe that building this thing in this way will accomplish that. In some very rare circumstances (the compass may be such a circumstance, actually), you could notice that materials you found randomly assembled or randomly assembled yourself do something interesting, but that's definitely the exception. Generally, you build a machine because you have ideas about how its parts will collaborate to produce the hoped-for result. That's theory preceding implementation.
All of your examples support my argument. It's not necessary that the theory be fully detailed, but the structure of the processes are generally understood.
In the example of the dynamo and the motor, much of the behavior of electric currents was already understood, and quantified, as was the fact that a current moving through a wire produces a magnetic field and vice versa. From that point it was an engineering effort (a brilliant one, including the observation that the effects could be usefully scaled up) to construct the useful devices. Faraday knew before he built them how he expected them to work, and why.
The steam engine definitely supports my argument. It was designed as a way to harness the power of expanding steam which was already very well understood, even if the Ideal Gas Law and other supporting theories related to thermodynamics, expansion coefficients, etc. were not. Regardless of all that wasn't known, the designers of steam engines (in their various stages) could explain quite clearly how and why they worked, all the way back to Hero's aeopile.
Rossi's inability to offer an explanation of the E-Cat makes me highly, highly skeptical that it works. Oh, he says words which he calls an explanation, but they fly in the face of already-understood theory, and he offers no explanations about why already-understood theory is wrong.
Because not everyone wants to broadcast what they're writing. The silence is nice for the people around the user as well.
Have you ever been stuck around some yahoo talking way too loud on their mobile? It's irritating.
I find that it most situations I can talk to my watch without annoying anyone. I just hold it right next to my mouth and speak softly enough that only someone standing very close could hear, and then not well. This works well even in very noisy environments.
There are some circumstances in which this would be nice because neither talking to the watch nor pulling out my phone are workable. But it's a pretty small set.
Personally, I like how everyone has completely lost their shit over Ebola overseas and oh my god we have to do something about it and blah blah blah blah.
But as soon as there's a case of it state-side, these same people are all "oh, this could never become an issue here and more people die from sneezing themselves to death each year in this country than have died of Ebola blah blah blah".
I mean, pick your concern and try to be consistent about it.
I haven't seen that pair of positions at all. I wish I had, because those are consistent. Ebola is so dangerous in Africa because sanitary conditions and medical facilities are so poor there. All of those deaths are a tragedy, and the deaths of healthcare workers sacrificing themselves are a tragedy that tugs the heartstrings.
On the other hand, Ebola is truly not dangerous here, because we do have good public health infrastructure.
There's nothing at all inconsistent about those two perspectives, unless you assume that people worried about death in Africa should only care if they fear that it's going to threaten them personally.
It's funny how our media chooses something a few times a year that can tell a story and scare the public.
It's not so much that they "choose" something. It's the fundamental difference between "news" and "not news" colliding with the way humans have evolved to give cognitive weight to things they hear about frequently and which can be associated with strong narratives.
C. dificile killing 16K people annually isn't news, because it's been happening for years. It's part of the background, not something which jumps up and begs to be called out. If a few thousand people in Africa had been dying at a steady pace from Ebola, for decades, it would also likely be part of the background... just like malaria is. Outbreaks are news, even if the death rates are small, while a steady year in and year out death toll is not, even if it's killing a lot more people. Unless, of course, there is news about initiatives to eradicate the "normal" disease, or interesting new research or something that makes a change worth talking about.
Ebola is also particularly powerful from a narrative perspective. The graphic imagery it produces, plus the horrific nature of bleeding to death from the inside out, makes for a strong story. Then when you add in self-sacrificing health care practitioners risking their lives and working in horrific conditions to try to help the sufferers, and then themselves suffering the same horrible death, it becomes a really compelling narrative. Throw in government corruption resulting in basic protective measures being unavailable to said self-sacrificing practitioners and it's a blockbuster.
C. difficile, not so much. People don't usually die of diarrhea, and it's an experience all of us are familiar with, and don't really want to talk or think about. Lousy narrative, no great changes to make it news, so it gets ignored, until someone decides to try swallowing human feces as a treatment. That's news, and it has a narrative we can all relate to and be disgusted by. Which is why we're talking about it now.
If you notice the stories that the media "chooses" to scare the public, they're all "news with a powerful narrative". These things resonate with people and get their interest -- including members of the media -- so the media provides them. The nice story plus the repetition of seeing the story daily causes people to dramatically overestimate the danger.
We all need to learn more about how our brains work so we can compensate for our inherent biases.
Of course, everything is a hoax and scientifically impossible until the day it is proven to actually work.
Nonsense.
Most real inventions go the other direction... first the theory, then the gradual working-out of the engineering processes required to make it work, a a little, then more hard work to refine it into something really useful and usable.
Most claimed inventions without theoretical justification also go a different way... they're thought a hoax and then are proven to be a hoax. The reason they're thought to be a hoax is exactly because nearly all of them are.
It is looking more possible that the E-Cat may not be a hoax. Further study may gradually exclude all other explanations, and eventually we may start to see conjectured mechanisms, one of which may emerge as the best explanation. Perhaps along the way we'll learn some new physics.
Or, we may find that the E-Cat is a hoax. That will be the less surprising (but sadder) outcome. Time, and further study, will tell. But if it does turn out to be real, your snark will still be completely wrong. Most everything that is real is known to be real before it works, and most everything that is a hoax actually is a hoax.
Seriously, starting to experiment with uncertain approaches in a time of crisis is about the most stupid thing that can be done. Stick to what is known to work, there is no time to come up with anything better.
It's not a question of experimentation with uncertain approaches. The alternatives are all well-understood... actually the mathematics is straightforward enough that the characteristics of virtually any approach you can invent can easily be calculated.
The question is whether they should use the approach that provides the fastest route to a given level of certainty at the expense of deliberately leaving a significant percentage of sufferers untreated, or whether to use other methods that provide the treatment to everyone possible but will take longer to achieve the required level of certainty. There's a legitimate question here, particularly if the researchers strongly believe that the vaccine does work. In that case, using randomized treatment will needlessly allow many people -- and, in particular, healthcare workers -- to die. If, on the other hand, the vaccine really isn't very effective, then delaying the discovery of that fact, and therefore delaying evaluation of alternative vaccines (assuming they exist) will cost more lives.
In any case, this isn't a question of experimenting with uncertain approaches. The pros and cons of all of the options are fully understood. It's just a question of deciding which set of tradeoffs is the best for this situation.
Rather than forcing bittorrent users off the network entirely, it would be better if the access point itself limited the number of connections per MAC address to something reasonable.
Or if we killed NAT. This is one of many ways in which NAT breaks the Internet.
Barring a federal law that specifies that US courts do take jurisdiction in such cases, that seems like judicial activism to me. I suppose that if I were a judge I'd be tempted towards activism in such a case, but I think it's wrong. Do you have a citation? I'd like to read the opinions.
Funny that ebola has been in existence in the modern world since the 70s, yet only now this is coming to light. Oddly enough, this is perfectly timed with someone in the US getting infected.
"Shit, this is on OUR turf now!??! Better do something about it!"
There is a causal relation driving this correlation, but it's not the one you cynically postulate. Both the appearance of someone in the US with the disease and the attempt to create a vaccine have been caused by the scale of the latest outbreak.
But it also means that if someone does hack into US computers, the US should not be looking to extradite or otherwise seek redress.
No, what it means is that if foreign police hack into a US computer to gather evidence on a foreign criminal, the US should not be looking to extradite or otherwise seek redress... and the US may actually agree with this argument.
But, that's OK. Because the US will just call in a drone strike, and if a few civilians have to die, that's just the cost of doing business.
Not likely. Note that I'm sickened by my government's tendency to bomb with abandon, but there's no way the US is going to be targeting drone strikes at legitimate officials of recognized foreign governments.
Papers please comrade. In my lifetime, America has begun to morph into what they've always stood against. And they're fast becoming scarier than what they used to stand against.
I wish I could disagree... I do have some hope, though, that the pendulum is beginning to swing the other direction.
It is not a violation of US law to hack into Chinese computers.
Are you sure? How does that work? I'm assuming you mean that hacking into Chinese computers while being in the US is not a violation of US law. If the acting person is in the US, then US law should generally apply. Does every law against hacking have an exception like "unless the target is in a foreign country, then it's OK"?
No exception is required. It's a question of jurisdiction. Hacking of computers in China is in the jurisdiction of Chinese courts and handled under Chinese law.
Suppose I (a US citizen) fly to China and commit a murder. Would you expect US law to be used to convict me in a US court? Obviously not. It's up to China to police murders in their own country, even if the murderer is a foreigner. In the case of breaking into a computer the question of jurisdiction is a little trickier, since I can sit in my bedroom in the US and hack a computer in China. Where did the break-in take place? Under whose jurisdiction is the crime?
As a matter of legal theory and pragmatism, the crime is assumed to have taken place in China, not in my bedroom. The legal theory part is that criminal prosecution is about reducing crime, not about punishing criminals. The US has no reason to be concerned in general about reducing crime in China, including hacking, and so has no interest in prosecuting one of its own citizens for that crime (though if the US learns of it, the government may well have an interest in keeping an eye on me in case I decide to hack domestic computers). The pragmatic part is that US officials can't effectively investigate crimes on foreign soil, since they have no authority there. It's hard for US officials to even know that a crime was committed in China, much less to gather the evidence required for a prosecution.
Another, related, issue, is that many acts that I might be able to commit by remote control in another country may not be illegal there, or may be illegal there but not here. Laws differ.
On top of all this domestic criminal law, we have to overlay international law and the international agreements that support it, as well as other international agreements and issues of international relations. The US could enter into an agreement with China saying that the governments will not hack one another. That still wouldn't make it a crime under US law for me (a private citizen) to hack a computer in China, unless that was part of the terms of the treaty, and the treaty was properly ratified by the Senate (or, more likely, separate legislation was passed to criminalize hacking of computers in China). Or the agreement could just specify that in cases of computer hacking on Chinese soil the US would agree to extradite US citizens to China for prosecution in China. That's more likely, due to the pragmatic difficulty-of-investigation issue above.
The US and China haven't made any such agreements, of course, which means hacking incidents, particularly those carried out by government agents, end up being a point for international political posturing and negotiation. That's what the US was doing when it accused members of the Chinese military of hacking US computers. In the case at hand, the FBI is (correctly) arguing in domestic court that what they did is not a crime, and the US government is arguing on the international stage that this sort of thing is okay and shouldn't make anyone mad because it's needed to bring criminals to justice. That's a shaky argument, but there are no questions of law, just of international relations.
No. Aliens in the US have essentially the same civil rights as citizens. Non-citizens outside of the US are not subject to the restrictions or the protections of US law, obviously.
Sustainability does not imply stasis - it just means that whatever something is doing, that it can keep doing it. That can be growth, stagnation, decline, ballet dancing, shooting monkeys into space, teaching badgers to dance, whatever.
That's nonsense. Infinite growth is impossible, as is infinite decrease. So growth is, by your own definition, unsustainable.
The answer is: Hardly any performance impact. It's measurable when reading big files, but not noticeable, even without any hardware acceleration.
When you first encrypt your device, especially on older devices with larger storage, it can take a while. Sometimes up to an hour in really extreme cases. The long time isn't because the encryption is actually slow, though... it's I/O bound, not CPU bound. Reading and re-writing every byte of your storage takes a while. L does some clever things to address this, otherwise everyone would have to wait for 20+ minutes before they could use their phone the first time they turn it on, since L enables encryption for everyone. That would be a bad user experience, so L fixes it, making the initial encryption of a new data partition very fast.
TrustZone-based devices also have fused per-device keys which act as the root of trust. The devices that I'm familiar with also have a hardware AES coprocessor which can load and use these per-device keys but will not reveal the actual key bits, not even to secure world code. Secure world code can request operations be performed with the keys, but not see them. Non-secure world code can't do anything except make requests of the secure world code.
I did not know this. That changes a lot - if even the TrustZone can't access the per device key directly then it would appear to give equivalent security (or actually better) to what Apple is doing.
I'd say it could give equivalent security, if it were applied in the right way. I'm not saying it is applied the right way to achieve that in L:-)
It would be nice to know which devices implement exactly what kind of security, but it seems everything is heading in the right direction, which is very good to hear.
It's not too hard to figure that out from looking at device logs with "adb logcat". I'm hoping to get some UI changes eventually to make it more clear without resorting to developer tools. And, yes, I completely agree that it's heading in the right direction -- up to and including a little competition with Apple to see who can lock their devices down the most thoroughly. It doesn't really matter which company "wins" that competition because, like most actual competition between products, the real winner is the consumer.
I have a question about Android encryption: I've "encrypted" this morning, but I can't tell if it actually worked. Instead of an hour, it only took about 2 minutes.
Is there a way to verify that the phone actually did anything?
What does it say under "Encryption" in Settings->Security? If it says "Encrypted", it is.
If you want confirmation, probably the best way is to enable USB debugging, install adb on a handy laptop or desktop, plug it in, reboot the device and run "adb logcat Cryptfs:V *:S" (the Cryptfs:V means show verbose logs from Cryptfs and the *:S means make everything else silent). Then read the log messages.
There may be a more user-friendly way, I don't know.
I'm saying that counting instances of an old technology in your house tells you absolutely nothing about what you'll want or (think you) need in the future.
Who's enough of a fool to believe acronyms agencies will let Apple, Google or Microsoft decide on their own?
As one of the guys who builds this stuff at Google... I am. You can choose what you believe, of course, but keep in mind that excessive cynicism can be just as effective as rose-colored glasses at misleading.
Android's, even without the upgrades in L, is strong enough in many contexts and it'll be even better after L, but still not as strong as iOS.
Could you expand on that? FDE with a hardware keystore is pretty decent. What more is iOS doing?
Unfortunately, I can't expand on it, not until L is actually released. Once the code is available I'll be happy to talk about the pros and cons, but it's not my place to reveal details of unreleased Android code, and I can't usefully discuss the differences without getting into the details. Ideally, a real discussion would be based a deep understanding of the details of both. We'll probably never have that deep insight into iOS, but once L is released we can at least compare known details of L with good guesses about iOS.
We won't make it to 10 billion. There aren't enough resources to do so, even if climate destabilization wasn't going to add further havoc.
Meh. That has been said about two billion, three billion, etc.
All our "plans" have been burning the candle at both ends, with hardly any thought being directed to building a sustainable civilization.
Sustainability is a crock. Sustainability implies stasis, and nothing is static. We don't need and can't have sustainability, what we need is continual improvement in efficiency and ability to control our environment, addressing problems as they arise -- and undoubtedly creating new ones in the process which will also have to be addressed.
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Oh, I certainly agree that it's not necessary that Rossi understands his magic box for it to be real. Just that it's highly, highly unlikely that he managed to build something useful with no conception of how it does what it does. And it's certainly not necessary for us to fully understand it before putting it to use... but I think, again, that it's highly improbable that we would be able to build them without understanding something about how they accomplish what they accomplish.
Perhaps this is true for GPS and nuclear plants, but in general engineering does not require theory.
Of course it does. It's not necessary to have the theory fully elaborated and to calculate the interactions to the nth degree, but you have to have some basis for believing that putting objects together in such-and-such a way will produce such-and-such a result, and why. That's theory.
You don't need chemistry or physics to make invent a distiller
No, but you do need to understand that different liquids condense at different temperatures... or need to use a design created by someone who does.
or E&M to make a compas
No, but you do need to understand that lodestones always point north, and that you can induce similar behavior in a piece of metal. That then gives you the idea of suspending one so it can rotate freely and point directions. Yes, you're doing so without most of the theory as to why lodestones behave the way they do, but you still have a theory of operation of your compass, which is based on the observed behaviors of lodestones plus the notion that configuring one in a particular way would allow it to rotate and act as a pointer.
Of course you could say that experimentation and observation give you theory, but then anything that has been engineered and built more than once has some theory behind it.
The key is that there is some theory (which need not be modern physics, or even mathematical in nature) that motivates the engineer to believe that building this thing in this way will accomplish that. In some very rare circumstances (the compass may be such a circumstance, actually), you could notice that materials you found randomly assembled or randomly assembled yourself do something interesting, but that's definitely the exception. Generally, you build a machine because you have ideas about how its parts will collaborate to produce the hoped-for result. That's theory preceding implementation.
All of your examples support my argument. It's not necessary that the theory be fully detailed, but the structure of the processes are generally understood.
In the example of the dynamo and the motor, much of the behavior of electric currents was already understood, and quantified, as was the fact that a current moving through a wire produces a magnetic field and vice versa. From that point it was an engineering effort (a brilliant one, including the observation that the effects could be usefully scaled up) to construct the useful devices. Faraday knew before he built them how he expected them to work, and why.
The steam engine definitely supports my argument. It was designed as a way to harness the power of expanding steam which was already very well understood, even if the Ideal Gas Law and other supporting theories related to thermodynamics, expansion coefficients, etc. were not. Regardless of all that wasn't known, the designers of steam engines (in their various stages) could explain quite clearly how and why they worked, all the way back to Hero's aeopile.
Rossi's inability to offer an explanation of the E-Cat makes me highly, highly skeptical that it works. Oh, he says words which he calls an explanation, but they fly in the face of already-understood theory, and he offers no explanations about why already-understood theory is wrong.
Because not everyone wants to broadcast what they're writing. The silence is nice for the people around the user as well.
Have you ever been stuck around some yahoo talking way too loud on their mobile? It's irritating.
I find that it most situations I can talk to my watch without annoying anyone. I just hold it right next to my mouth and speak softly enough that only someone standing very close could hear, and then not well. This works well even in very noisy environments.
There are some circumstances in which this would be nice because neither talking to the watch nor pulling out my phone are workable. But it's a pretty small set.
Personally, I like how everyone has completely lost their shit over Ebola overseas and oh my god we have to do something about it and blah blah blah blah.
But as soon as there's a case of it state-side, these same people are all "oh, this could never become an issue here and more people die from sneezing themselves to death each year in this country than have died of Ebola blah blah blah".
I mean, pick your concern and try to be consistent about it.
I haven't seen that pair of positions at all. I wish I had, because those are consistent. Ebola is so dangerous in Africa because sanitary conditions and medical facilities are so poor there. All of those deaths are a tragedy, and the deaths of healthcare workers sacrificing themselves are a tragedy that tugs the heartstrings.
On the other hand, Ebola is truly not dangerous here, because we do have good public health infrastructure.
There's nothing at all inconsistent about those two perspectives, unless you assume that people worried about death in Africa should only care if they fear that it's going to threaten them personally.
It's funny how our media chooses something a few times a year that can tell a story and scare the public.
It's not so much that they "choose" something. It's the fundamental difference between "news" and "not news" colliding with the way humans have evolved to give cognitive weight to things they hear about frequently and which can be associated with strong narratives.
C. dificile killing 16K people annually isn't news, because it's been happening for years. It's part of the background, not something which jumps up and begs to be called out. If a few thousand people in Africa had been dying at a steady pace from Ebola, for decades, it would also likely be part of the background... just like malaria is. Outbreaks are news, even if the death rates are small, while a steady year in and year out death toll is not, even if it's killing a lot more people. Unless, of course, there is news about initiatives to eradicate the "normal" disease, or interesting new research or something that makes a change worth talking about.
Ebola is also particularly powerful from a narrative perspective. The graphic imagery it produces, plus the horrific nature of bleeding to death from the inside out, makes for a strong story. Then when you add in self-sacrificing health care practitioners risking their lives and working in horrific conditions to try to help the sufferers, and then themselves suffering the same horrible death, it becomes a really compelling narrative. Throw in government corruption resulting in basic protective measures being unavailable to said self-sacrificing practitioners and it's a blockbuster.
C. difficile, not so much. People don't usually die of diarrhea, and it's an experience all of us are familiar with, and don't really want to talk or think about. Lousy narrative, no great changes to make it news, so it gets ignored, until someone decides to try swallowing human feces as a treatment. That's news, and it has a narrative we can all relate to and be disgusted by. Which is why we're talking about it now.
If you notice the stories that the media "chooses" to scare the public, they're all "news with a powerful narrative". These things resonate with people and get their interest -- including members of the media -- so the media provides them. The nice story plus the repetition of seeing the story daily causes people to dramatically overestimate the danger.
We all need to learn more about how our brains work so we can compensate for our inherent biases.
Of course, everything is a hoax and scientifically impossible until the day it is proven to actually work.
Nonsense.
Most real inventions go the other direction... first the theory, then the gradual working-out of the engineering processes required to make it work, a a little, then more hard work to refine it into something really useful and usable.
Most claimed inventions without theoretical justification also go a different way... they're thought a hoax and then are proven to be a hoax. The reason they're thought to be a hoax is exactly because nearly all of them are.
It is looking more possible that the E-Cat may not be a hoax. Further study may gradually exclude all other explanations, and eventually we may start to see conjectured mechanisms, one of which may emerge as the best explanation. Perhaps along the way we'll learn some new physics.
Or, we may find that the E-Cat is a hoax. That will be the less surprising (but sadder) outcome. Time, and further study, will tell. But if it does turn out to be real, your snark will still be completely wrong. Most everything that is real is known to be real before it works, and most everything that is a hoax actually is a hoax.
Seriously, starting to experiment with uncertain approaches in a time of crisis is about the most stupid thing that can be done. Stick to what is known to work, there is no time to come up with anything better.
It's not a question of experimentation with uncertain approaches. The alternatives are all well-understood... actually the mathematics is straightforward enough that the characteristics of virtually any approach you can invent can easily be calculated.
The question is whether they should use the approach that provides the fastest route to a given level of certainty at the expense of deliberately leaving a significant percentage of sufferers untreated, or whether to use other methods that provide the treatment to everyone possible but will take longer to achieve the required level of certainty. There's a legitimate question here, particularly if the researchers strongly believe that the vaccine does work. In that case, using randomized treatment will needlessly allow many people -- and, in particular, healthcare workers -- to die. If, on the other hand, the vaccine really isn't very effective, then delaying the discovery of that fact, and therefore delaying evaluation of alternative vaccines (assuming they exist) will cost more lives.
In any case, this isn't a question of experimenting with uncertain approaches. The pros and cons of all of the options are fully understood. It's just a question of deciding which set of tradeoffs is the best for this situation.
Rather than forcing bittorrent users off the network entirely, it would be better if the access point itself limited the number of connections per MAC address to something reasonable.
Or if we killed NAT. This is one of many ways in which NAT breaks the Internet.
Even more important, his Erdos Bacon number is 7
Six, actually. More important than that: His Erdos Bacon Sabbath number is 10.
Barring a federal law that specifies that US courts do take jurisdiction in such cases, that seems like judicial activism to me. I suppose that if I were a judge I'd be tempted towards activism in such a case, but I think it's wrong. Do you have a citation? I'd like to read the opinions.
Your first sentence and second sentences are true, but only within certain contexts. Your third sentence is a non-sequitur.
Funny that ebola has been in existence in the modern world since the 70s, yet only now this is coming to light. Oddly enough, this is perfectly timed with someone in the US getting infected.
"Shit, this is on OUR turf now!??! Better do something about it!"
There is a causal relation driving this correlation, but it's not the one you cynically postulate. Both the appearance of someone in the US with the disease and the attempt to create a vaccine have been caused by the scale of the latest outbreak.
So if I come visit US I have zero rights?
No. Aliens in the US have essentially the same civil rights as citizens.
So if he comes to visit the US he has zero rights.
Nonsense. Oh, I'll grant that we've seen significant and worrying erosion of our rights, but hyperbole is not helpful.
But it also means that if someone does hack into US computers, the US should not be looking to extradite or otherwise seek redress.
No, what it means is that if foreign police hack into a US computer to gather evidence on a foreign criminal, the US should not be looking to extradite or otherwise seek redress... and the US may actually agree with this argument.
But, that's OK. Because the US will just call in a drone strike, and if a few civilians have to die, that's just the cost of doing business.
Not likely. Note that I'm sickened by my government's tendency to bomb with abandon, but there's no way the US is going to be targeting drone strikes at legitimate officials of recognized foreign governments.
Papers please comrade. In my lifetime, America has begun to morph into what they've always stood against. And they're fast becoming scarier than what they used to stand against.
I wish I could disagree... I do have some hope, though, that the pendulum is beginning to swing the other direction.
It is not a violation of US law to hack into Chinese computers.
Are you sure? How does that work? I'm assuming you mean that hacking into Chinese computers while being in the US is not a violation of US law. If the acting person is in the US, then US law should generally apply. Does every law against hacking have an exception like "unless the target is in a foreign country, then it's OK"?
No exception is required. It's a question of jurisdiction. Hacking of computers in China is in the jurisdiction of Chinese courts and handled under Chinese law.
Suppose I (a US citizen) fly to China and commit a murder. Would you expect US law to be used to convict me in a US court? Obviously not. It's up to China to police murders in their own country, even if the murderer is a foreigner. In the case of breaking into a computer the question of jurisdiction is a little trickier, since I can sit in my bedroom in the US and hack a computer in China. Where did the break-in take place? Under whose jurisdiction is the crime?
As a matter of legal theory and pragmatism, the crime is assumed to have taken place in China, not in my bedroom. The legal theory part is that criminal prosecution is about reducing crime, not about punishing criminals. The US has no reason to be concerned in general about reducing crime in China, including hacking, and so has no interest in prosecuting one of its own citizens for that crime (though if the US learns of it, the government may well have an interest in keeping an eye on me in case I decide to hack domestic computers). The pragmatic part is that US officials can't effectively investigate crimes on foreign soil, since they have no authority there. It's hard for US officials to even know that a crime was committed in China, much less to gather the evidence required for a prosecution.
Another, related, issue, is that many acts that I might be able to commit by remote control in another country may not be illegal there, or may be illegal there but not here. Laws differ.
On top of all this domestic criminal law, we have to overlay international law and the international agreements that support it, as well as other international agreements and issues of international relations. The US could enter into an agreement with China saying that the governments will not hack one another. That still wouldn't make it a crime under US law for me (a private citizen) to hack a computer in China, unless that was part of the terms of the treaty, and the treaty was properly ratified by the Senate (or, more likely, separate legislation was passed to criminalize hacking of computers in China). Or the agreement could just specify that in cases of computer hacking on Chinese soil the US would agree to extradite US citizens to China for prosecution in China. That's more likely, due to the pragmatic difficulty-of-investigation issue above.
The US and China haven't made any such agreements, of course, which means hacking incidents, particularly those carried out by government agents, end up being a point for international political posturing and negotiation. That's what the US was doing when it accused members of the Chinese military of hacking US computers. In the case at hand, the FBI is (correctly) arguing in domestic court that what they did is not a crime, and the US government is arguing on the international stage that this sort of thing is okay and shouldn't make anyone mad because it's needed to bring criminals to justice. That's a shaky argument, but there are no questions of law, just of international relations.
So if I come visit US I have zero rights?
No. Aliens in the US have essentially the same civil rights as citizens. Non-citizens outside of the US are not subject to the restrictions or the protections of US law, obviously.
Sustainability does not imply stasis - it just means that whatever something is doing, that it can keep doing it. That can be growth, stagnation, decline, ballet dancing, shooting monkeys into space, teaching badgers to dance, whatever.
That's nonsense. Infinite growth is impossible, as is infinite decrease. So growth is, by your own definition, unsustainable.
Not stupid at all.
The answer is: Hardly any performance impact. It's measurable when reading big files, but not noticeable, even without any hardware acceleration.
When you first encrypt your device, especially on older devices with larger storage, it can take a while. Sometimes up to an hour in really extreme cases. The long time isn't because the encryption is actually slow, though... it's I/O bound, not CPU bound. Reading and re-writing every byte of your storage takes a while. L does some clever things to address this, otherwise everyone would have to wait for 20+ minutes before they could use their phone the first time they turn it on, since L enables encryption for everyone. That would be a bad user experience, so L fixes it, making the initial encryption of a new data partition very fast.
I did not know this. That changes a lot - if even the TrustZone can't access the per device key directly then it would appear to give equivalent security (or actually better) to what Apple is doing.
I'd say it could give equivalent security, if it were applied in the right way. I'm not saying it is applied the right way to achieve that in L :-)
It would be nice to know which devices implement exactly what kind of security, but it seems everything is heading in the right direction, which is very good to hear.
It's not too hard to figure that out from looking at device logs with "adb logcat". I'm hoping to get some UI changes eventually to make it more clear without resorting to developer tools. And, yes, I completely agree that it's heading in the right direction -- up to and including a little competition with Apple to see who can lock their devices down the most thoroughly. It doesn't really matter which company "wins" that competition because, like most actual competition between products, the real winner is the consumer.
I have a question about Android encryption: I've "encrypted" this morning, but I can't tell if it actually worked. Instead of an hour, it only took about 2 minutes. Is there a way to verify that the phone actually did anything?
What does it say under "Encryption" in Settings->Security? If it says "Encrypted", it is.
If you want confirmation, probably the best way is to enable USB debugging, install adb on a handy laptop or desktop, plug it in, reboot the device and run "adb logcat Cryptfs:V *:S" (the Cryptfs:V means show verbose logs from Cryptfs and the *:S means make everything else silent). Then read the log messages.
There may be a more user-friendly way, I don't know.
I'm saying that counting instances of an old technology in your house tells you absolutely nothing about what you'll want or (think you) need in the future.
Who's enough of a fool to believe acronyms agencies will let Apple, Google or Microsoft decide on their own?
As one of the guys who builds this stuff at Google... I am. You can choose what you believe, of course, but keep in mind that excessive cynicism can be just as effective as rose-colored glasses at misleading.
Android's, even without the upgrades in L, is strong enough in many contexts and it'll be even better after L, but still not as strong as iOS.
Could you expand on that? FDE with a hardware keystore is pretty decent. What more is iOS doing?
Unfortunately, I can't expand on it, not until L is actually released. Once the code is available I'll be happy to talk about the pros and cons, but it's not my place to reveal details of unreleased Android code, and I can't usefully discuss the differences without getting into the details. Ideally, a real discussion would be based a deep understanding of the details of both. We'll probably never have that deep insight into iOS, but once L is released we can at least compare known details of L with good guesses about iOS.
We won't make it to 10 billion. There aren't enough resources to do so, even if climate destabilization wasn't going to add further havoc.
Meh. That has been said about two billion, three billion, etc.
All our "plans" have been burning the candle at both ends, with hardly any thought being directed to building a sustainable civilization.
Sustainability is a crock. Sustainability implies stasis, and nothing is static. We don't need and can't have sustainability, what we need is continual improvement in efficiency and ability to control our environment, addressing problems as they arise -- and undoubtedly creating new ones in the process which will also have to be addressed.