Yes, you can be required to unlock a safe, unlock doors, et cetera. Essentially, if they have a warrant to search inside something where there is physical security preventing access, you can be required to provide that access.
The salient point is, of course, that the "stuff" that they're searching for isn't "stuff", it's information, and they can't reasonably bypass it without your assistance like they could with (most) physical security measures.
This is one of those situations on Slashdot where just because it's "on a computer", it's different. (Contrary to normal opinion where "on a computer" should not be a justification for new laws or patents.)
Where is it that the highway safety folks "lead with the high side number"? Or are you thinking of the Slashdot summary or the article (not the report) -- neither of which were written by "highway safety folks"?
Sure. I was just commenting on Google's opt-out system. I think they've auto-added services in the past, but for the majority of them, you have to click through an approval before it exists. So technically I suppose it's strictly opt-in. As far as I know, Google+ is currently solely opt-in.
To be fair, the PTO doesn't make the laws governing patents (though they do make some of the rules) and they're woefully behind schedule in processing patent and trademark filings -- which leads to annoying situations like having a two-year window where nobody is sure if some random bit of technology is going to be patented or not. If they're not going to improve the patent system, they might as well at least better-fund the agency that has to do the work.
You don't opt out of Google+, currently, you have to opt in to it.
I don't see what the big deal is. I don't recall private Google Profiles actually doing much of anything at all. If you can delete it, apparently there's no problem having no Google Profile at all. So, if you have a private Profile before, couldn't you just have none now?
The solar plants actually have a different albedo than the earth as a whole (and generally as the earth replaced by the solar plant), but it's a really trivial amount.
Access to data traditionally needs need-to-know in addition to clearance, though that was relaxed somewhat with post-9/11 information sharing. But in general, it's a hard problem. Lots of military and contractors need access to some kind of security-sensitive data.
That data is on SIPRNET, which is separated from the regular Internet. After 9/11 the government tried to adopt a culture of information-sharing between organizations, which led to a lot of data being easily accessible if you had the right access. The infamous Wikileaked data is available because Manning transferred it from SIPRNET to the Internet by means of a writable CD masquerading as a mix tape.
That gets tricky. Not all government data, just government work product. There are a lot of situations where direct public access to government data is a real problem. Not the bullshit "national security" reasons, but simple things like access to internal information about an ongoing FBI or SEC investigation. Eventually the information -- excepting things that could easily compromise future investigations -- should be public, but not necessarily immediately. Likewise, government officials should be able to have e-mail accounts without their e-mails being available in real time to the public. That's a bullshit claim that's a (somewhat fair) reaction to the everything-must-be-secret government culture. Data necessary for transparency and oversight needs to be available while maintaining a reasonable degree of privacy that enables individuals and organizations to do their jobs effectively. I think that if better government transparency isn't forthcoming, than this sort of vigilante exposure will only increase.
They may be guilty of breaking some law, but they can't be treated as such until they're found guilty by a court in the appropriate jurisdiction.
Of course, they're in the EU, and Visa and MC are in the US, and international law and trade are tricky, but they haven't been charged with anything in the US, either.
Plus, as others mentioned, it's not illegal to publish classified material. It's illegal, more or less, for someone who has legitimate access to classified material (clearance) to transmit it to people who don't. There are also other laws that can apply to that person -- and worse if they're in the military -- but once it's been leaked to the unclassified world, further transmission is legal.
BitTorrent is reasonably good at small files. Other people seem to be claiming that it's *as good*, but that's not quite true. Clients can be reluctant to try to download the same piece multiple times, so any torrent with a small number of pieces gets lower performance than one with a higher number of pieces. (That is, if the number of pieces is substantially below the number of peers you could be downloading from simultaneously, you can see a performance hit.) Also, the whole web browser -> download.torrent -> start download in client cycle is a bit of high overhead for a single small file, and most clients limit number of shared / downloading items by number of items rather than some measure of size, so for a lot of clients, they'll only download 4-8 small files at once if those files are in their own torrents (without reconfiguration).
Sort of. Bittorrent doesn't actually address search at all. Peer identification was centralized initially, which is incredibly efficient. Modern clients use out-of-band methods like DHT and PEX to either get additional clients (same torrent, but on a tracker not listed in the file you have) or to get clients when all available trackers are down (or not listing that torrent). They're much less efficient than a tracker.
But yeah, search isn't part of BitTorrent at all. It works well now that you can sort of run torrent-finding websites without being shut down. Back in the Gnutella days, you needed to provide search in order to have any hope.
Not very useful without persistence. A device might be able to use a cable firmware problem as some kind of bridge to exploit the computer, but given that the connection provided is PCIE, an evil device can be as evil as it wants without much help. Kind of like with Firewire, and Firewire doesn't even have active cables.
You need to think more Apple. How about a large monitor that contains a high-performance video card and all of those ports -- perhaps at the base, so you don't have a rat's nest of wires coming from the monitor. Add a bluetooth mouse and keyboard and call it iDock.
Another alternative is to take the Time Capsule / wireless base station and add that brick of ports and a Thunderbolt connector.
Unfortunately, power isn't nearly as big a limitation for GPGPU as the bandwidth between main memory and the graphics card. Thunderbolt is currently only what, about 10 Gbit/s? That's well below an 8- or 16-lane PCIE card.
(I could see for some applications, you could shove enough Teslas into a box to worry about the power, but have an application that didn't bottleneck on bandwidth.)
A niche market is a small market within a larger market for the same product. Not for different products.
Professional A/V studios are certainly a niche market in terms of the sale of general-purpose computer hardware. You're falsely thinking that a niche market is necessarily worthless.
I think I'd call that "in firmware", but fair enough. You can't transmit a message on the USB bus that indicates a disconnect and reconnect. (Okay, that's not surprising. Devices can't initiate messages on USB.)
But yes, that would be distinctly detectable if you don't disconnect the power lines, though nobody bothers detecting it. However, it's easy to disconnect all wires temporarily and reconnect them without physical removal. That's harder to detect, though not impossible.
That's nothing. If I transmit data across the country in my usual way, by writing it out in hex on the back of a postcard and mailing it (one byte, two hex chars per postcard), it costs me almost $300 / kB just in postage alone!
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Yes, you can be required to unlock a safe, unlock doors, et cetera. Essentially, if they have a warrant to search inside something where there is physical security preventing access, you can be required to provide that access.
The salient point is, of course, that the "stuff" that they're searching for isn't "stuff", it's information, and they can't reasonably bypass it without your assistance like they could with (most) physical security measures.
This is one of those situations on Slashdot where just because it's "on a computer", it's different. (Contrary to normal opinion where "on a computer" should not be a justification for new laws or patents.)
Where is it that the highway safety folks "lead with the high side number"? Or are you thinking of the Slashdot summary or the article (not the report) -- neither of which were written by "highway safety folks"?
They provide a system recovery disk or flash drive with the computer.
Sure. I was just commenting on Google's opt-out system. I think they've auto-added services in the past, but for the majority of them, you have to click through an approval before it exists. So technically I suppose it's strictly opt-in. As far as I know, Google+ is currently solely opt-in.
Maybe by you.
A common complaint is that the PTO is underfunded, which means long delays and less investigation per patent application.
To be fair, the PTO doesn't make the laws governing patents (though they do make some of the rules) and they're woefully behind schedule in processing patent and trademark filings -- which leads to annoying situations like having a two-year window where nobody is sure if some random bit of technology is going to be patented or not. If they're not going to improve the patent system, they might as well at least better-fund the agency that has to do the work.
NASA funding shouldn't be cut, though.
Incidentally, once you have a Google service, you can almost always use the Dashboard to delete that service and the data in it.
You don't opt out of Google+, currently, you have to opt in to it.
I don't see what the big deal is. I don't recall private Google Profiles actually doing much of anything at all. If you can delete it, apparently there's no problem having no Google Profile at all. So, if you have a private Profile before, couldn't you just have none now?
The solar plants actually have a different albedo than the earth as a whole (and generally as the earth replaced by the solar plant), but it's a really trivial amount.
Access to data traditionally needs need-to-know in addition to clearance, though that was relaxed somewhat with post-9/11 information sharing. But in general, it's a hard problem. Lots of military and contractors need access to some kind of security-sensitive data.
In this case, so you can send e-mail to people on the Internet (and the reverse).
That data is on SIPRNET, which is separated from the regular Internet. After 9/11 the government tried to adopt a culture of information-sharing between organizations, which led to a lot of data being easily accessible if you had the right access. The infamous Wikileaked data is available because Manning transferred it from SIPRNET to the Internet by means of a writable CD masquerading as a mix tape.
That gets tricky. Not all government data, just government work product. There are a lot of situations where direct public access to government data is a real problem. Not the bullshit "national security" reasons, but simple things like access to internal information about an ongoing FBI or SEC investigation. Eventually the information -- excepting things that could easily compromise future investigations -- should be public, but not necessarily immediately. Likewise, government officials should be able to have e-mail accounts without their e-mails being available in real time to the public. That's a bullshit claim that's a (somewhat fair) reaction to the everything-must-be-secret government culture. Data necessary for transparency and oversight needs to be available while maintaining a reasonable degree of privacy that enables individuals and organizations to do their jobs effectively. I think that if better government transparency isn't forthcoming, than this sort of vigilante exposure will only increase.
Or perhaps they'll remind Europe how much fun it might be if Visa and Mastercard suddenly became unavailable there.
It's not informative, it's speculative. It might be insightful, but there's no guarantee that insight is right.
It seems convenient, maybe even likely, that someone in the government told Visa and Mastercard to cut off Wikileaks. But there's no evidence of that.
You know, evidence. The sort of thing that people want against Assange. One of those legal things we like to have in the States, from time to time.
They may be guilty of breaking some law, but they can't be treated as such until they're found guilty by a court in the appropriate jurisdiction.
Of course, they're in the EU, and Visa and MC are in the US, and international law and trade are tricky, but they haven't been charged with anything in the US, either.
Plus, as others mentioned, it's not illegal to publish classified material. It's illegal, more or less, for someone who has legitimate access to classified material (clearance) to transmit it to people who don't. There are also other laws that can apply to that person -- and worse if they're in the military -- but once it's been leaked to the unclassified world, further transmission is legal.
BitTorrent is reasonably good at small files. Other people seem to be claiming that it's *as good*, but that's not quite true. Clients can be reluctant to try to download the same piece multiple times, so any torrent with a small number of pieces gets lower performance than one with a higher number of pieces. (That is, if the number of pieces is substantially below the number of peers you could be downloading from simultaneously, you can see a performance hit.) Also, the whole web browser -> download .torrent -> start download in client cycle is a bit of high overhead for a single small file, and most clients limit number of shared / downloading items by number of items rather than some measure of size, so for a lot of clients, they'll only download 4-8 small files at once if those files are in their own torrents (without reconfiguration).
Sort of. Bittorrent doesn't actually address search at all. Peer identification was centralized initially, which is incredibly efficient. Modern clients use out-of-band methods like DHT and PEX to either get additional clients (same torrent, but on a tracker not listed in the file you have) or to get clients when all available trackers are down (or not listing that torrent). They're much less efficient than a tracker.
But yeah, search isn't part of BitTorrent at all. It works well now that you can sort of run torrent-finding websites without being shut down. Back in the Gnutella days, you needed to provide search in order to have any hope.
Damn it. I of course thought of that as I was writing, and thought I could get away with simplifying the story. :p
Not very useful without persistence. A device might be able to use a cable firmware problem as some kind of bridge to exploit the computer, but given that the connection provided is PCIE, an evil device can be as evil as it wants without much help. Kind of like with Firewire, and Firewire doesn't even have active cables.
You need to think more Apple. How about a large monitor that contains a high-performance video card and all of those ports -- perhaps at the base, so you don't have a rat's nest of wires coming from the monitor. Add a bluetooth mouse and keyboard and call it iDock.
Another alternative is to take the Time Capsule / wireless base station and add that brick of ports and a Thunderbolt connector.
Unfortunately, power isn't nearly as big a limitation for GPGPU as the bandwidth between main memory and the graphics card. Thunderbolt is currently only what, about 10 Gbit/s? That's well below an 8- or 16-lane PCIE card.
(I could see for some applications, you could shove enough Teslas into a box to worry about the power, but have an application that didn't bottleneck on bandwidth.)
A niche market is a small market within a larger market for the same product. Not for different products.
Professional A/V studios are certainly a niche market in terms of the sale of general-purpose computer hardware. You're falsely thinking that a niche market is necessarily worthless.
I think I'd call that "in firmware", but fair enough. You can't transmit a message on the USB bus that indicates a disconnect and reconnect. (Okay, that's not surprising. Devices can't initiate messages on USB.)
But yes, that would be distinctly detectable if you don't disconnect the power lines, though nobody bothers detecting it. However, it's easy to disconnect all wires temporarily and reconnect them without physical removal. That's harder to detect, though not impossible.
That's nothing. If I transmit data across the country in my usual way, by writing it out in hex on the back of a postcard and mailing it (one byte, two hex chars per postcard), it costs me almost $300 / kB just in postage alone!