Trouble is, its also their 17th floor. So unless they feel like throwing themselves out, this isn't really a thing that can be done short of revolution essentially.
"What you've seen" is obviously not much then. They're continually advertising (not just arguing for but actively advertising) their progressive democrat PAC and whatnot. I mean its not like they start every episode by disclaiming their political views but they definitely don't put on any airs of being unbiased.
That said, their bias isn't just "democrat" though, its "progressive democrat." So they like to call out Hillary Clinton and Tom Perez and others even in the democratic party that they perceive as too business-oriented. Look for any story with Bernie Sanders in it and they don't hold back singing his praises.
Really? Is the anthem a republican or a democrat? What's its stance on health care, climate change or bailouts for the wealthy?
Its a symbol. And certainly symbols can be adopted and used exclusively by one side of any particular issue to the point that the symbol itself does indeed become political, but the national anthem, the flag, the bald eagle and so forth are not such. For all of the political differences in the US, especially this past year, its just assumed that (well, almost) everyone loves the country in general. The only "other side" here is traitors to the country. There's really no reason to demand or expect national pride from them for obvious reasons.
For another, perhaps somewhat silly example lets switch to the NHL where teams from Canada are in the league. At the beginning of games that host teams from both countries, both anthems are sung. Does that imply Canada is taking over the US? Or vice-versa? Of course not, because its not political -- its simply a sign of respect.
Significantly less energy, less potential environmental contamination and so on. Burial is actually a pretty horrible way to dispose of bodies, but its easier emotionally. Seeing an urn and knowing that's all that's left is somehow more difficult than knowing there's an in-tact body in the coffin and having moved on in life (such as one can) before you really start thinking about decomposition. Basically an out-of-sight, out-of-mind thing.
But the big savings, especially in countries like Hong Kong and even parts of Europe, where there's a large population and little land area, is in real estate. A 8'x4' plot or whatever size they are is simply a lot of wasted space compared to an urn that, even if you bury it, only takes a hole a few inches in diameter. (And a lot of people don't even do that, opting to keep the urns in their home or whatever as a display piece/reminder.)
I would call it a gimmick more than an advertisement, but hey it never hurts to have alternatives I guess.
Personally I find the thought of being dissolved and then crushed more disturbing than being burned to ash, but maybe its just cause I'm more familiar with the latter. The liquifaction thing just makes me think far too much of movie killers getting rid of bodies in their bathtubs using essentially exactly that method..
Just from TFS, it sounds like that would be against their beliefs. Not that beliefs can't be changed when the need arises (they would just have to redefine what it means to "respectfully" put the to dead rest in their cultural context to include an enshrined urn or whatever.) But its probably a more difficult change than just taking the deceased a bit further away and continuing with existing practices.
I think you might be underestimating the strength of modern algorithms. Assuming there isn't a yet-to-be-discovered weakness (or NSA back door as some conspiracy nuts would believe,) standard 2048-bit RSA encryption takes a few dozen lifetimes of the universe to brute force a single key.
Of course if quantum computers get to the point where they can factor 2048 bit numbers reliably then all bets are off I suppose. I'm not sure we'll see them get there in 10 years.. though I also wouldn't place bets against the possibility at this point.
That said, people are of course already working on alternatives to RSA that don't use factoring or other quantum-computable functions as their underlying mechanism. Not sure what the state of that art is at this point though (and of course even if someone's successful, it would take time to disperse the new algorithm around the world.)
I believe 100% that companies who have the ability to provide/decrypt customer data with a court order should be required to do so
That's what the FBI believes too. Unfortunately the universe isn't so forgiving: Those companies literally cannot, from a purely technological point of view, give themselves the ability to do this without risking a malicious third party also being able to figure out how to do it.
All modern encryption is built on numbers, and numbers don't care about the intentions of the people using them. This is not a problem of political will, its a problem of mathematics and the way computers operate on a fundamental level. No amount of warrants can fix that, so we have to choose whether we'd prefer to live in a world where the FBI has to do a bit more work but the average person is protected, or a world where the FBI, as well as every random script kiddie on the planet, have potentially unfettered access to everyone's phone.
Pictures, videos, notes that may contain relevant addresses or phone numbers, contacts that you may have stored but never actually dialed, message history from IM apps that encrypt before sending, etc. Basically anything that doesn't get sent over the carrier's network (or is pre-encrypted before being sent.)
For pictures specifically since you brought it up, they could potentially be used to help identify additional suspects for example.
Its not really comparable. Those monuments and such are essentially security-by-obscurity algorithms -- sure they can be complex to figure out, but once you have the trick its entirely broken and nothing you can do will ever make it secure again.
Those are significantly easier to construct than a key-based algorithm where even if the attacker knows the exact details of the algorithm, getting a hold of one key gives them zero knowledge of messages encrypted with a different key.
What country do you live in? "Everyone else" barely registers in most debates never mind mattering. This is a case of a large federal agency going up against a smattering of large corporations. Individuals are mostly irrelevant to the discussion other beyond ostensibly being the motivation for the corporate side of the argument. Us peons definitely don't get much if any say in the matter.
Not to mention most people don't have a clue. You should look up John Oliver's episode on climate change where he discusses a similar "debate" in regards to that topic: Primarily the fact that "balanced" news sources tend to have one person from either side of the debate which makes the argument seem split even when the actual debate is heavily one-sided in reality.
No you don't. Getting a warrant to investigate a suspects phone contents isn't any more unconstitutional than getting a warrant to investigate the contents of their house.
The problem is technological, not constitutional. Its simply not possible to put in a back door that cares about or even knows whether or not you're legally allowed to access the device.
So right off the top if such a back door existed, the FBI would only need to get a warrant the very first time and after they get the key they could just keep using it and parallel-construct future cases without bothering with those pesky warrants.. not to mention that such a back door would almost certainly be discovered and exploited by the criminal element sooner or later, and history suggests it would be sooner.
Getaway cars weren't a problem before the invention of the automobile either.
Change happens, and the cops have to try and keep up with it just like everyone else. The main problem with encryption is that when you break it for one person (or in this case, agency,) its automatically broken for everybody because that's how math works.
This whole debate wouldn't have gone past "do we need a warrant?" if they could just individually break into encryption on one device at a time as needed in the same way they can kick down your door without affecting your neighbors' home security.
There's a huge difference when going from a "significant obstacle" to an "impossible obstacle."
Certainly breaking 18th century encryption with 18th century technology (ie: a smart dude just trying to figure it out) would have been a fairly daunting task, but ultimate it was probably doable in most cases.. when the criminal was smart enough themselves to encrypt their communications in the first place.
Phone encryption nowadays though is an out-of-the-box experience, no effort required, and breaking it is far beyond daunting -- it would take several spans of the universe' lifetime if you were stuck brute forcing it. And that's before you even consider the possibility of dead man switches wiping everything after some number of failed attempts and other such techniques that could theoretically be employed.
I'm not sure that's true. The US has a huge criminal conviction rate without doing any of those things.
The trick is to criminalize pretty much everything so that there's always an excuse to fill the beds when a jail's operator needs a bit of a cash infusion.
I'm pretty sure the FBI is wondering that too. That's kind of their entire point.
The question isn't whether they should get the data. The question isn't even whether they should have the right to get the data. The question is whether the FBI being able to get the data is worth essentially making all phone encryption worthless, as any intentional backdoor would likely be discovered and released by hackers within weeks if not days of someone finding out that its there (and that in itself would follow, at the very latest, not long after the first time its used to obtain evidence for a case.)
So the old "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" argument?
Say you get pulled over by a particularly obnoxious cop who really takes a dislike to you but can't find a legit reason to arrest you.. so he looks through your phone and finds a picture of your grandkid in the bath when they were 8 months old.. Bam! Child porn!
Even if that gets thrown out (you it almost certainly would because I've made the scenario intentionally extreme to the point of silly,) the fact that you even got arrested for it is now on your permanent record and is going to have to be explained any time you need to look for a new job or cross the border or any other such things where they want to look at your criminal record.
OK so you decide you won't show your phone to whatever beat copy happens to pull you over and will only show it after consulting with your lawyer.. so now they're going to arrest you for refusing to cooperate instead so that they can take you into the station while you make the call. And certainly refusing to cooperate may not sound as bad as child porn on your record but has a much better chance of being upgraded from "arrested" to "charged" since you technically did refuse to cooperate in that instance, whether or not they find anything more serious to charge you with.
They're about as legit as any other media these days. They slant heavily left and they make no secret about it, but they're not generally making shit up like a lot of the (actually fake) "news" that apparently was coming through the FB feeds (and other social media) that ended up getting traced to sweatshops in various cheap labor countries (probably paid for by Russia but I don't think that part was ever conclusively proven.)
That said, they're not investigative reporters. They mostly just collect reports and articles that other media outlets put out and frame them in a leftist light (though they did recently introduce an investigative channel.. no idea if there's anything of interest on there yet though.)
While I agree we shouldn't be forcing the players to do anything, I hardly consider playing the anthem to be an inherently political action.
Its only political now because a famous guy did something unusual on a public broadcast of an extremely popular event -- and then the president went on a rant about it to really make sure it was widely covered.
And really, its not about the anthem or whether he stands or kneels or does cartwheels. If Kaepernick said he'd knelt to show solidarity with say, a friend suffering from MS.. people would have been all over it and he'd have been praised.
But he did it to protest violence against black people, which is not something a lot of folk like to talk about or think about. We prefer to stay in our little bubbles and pretend that racism was last century's problem just because we know the name of that one black dude in the office and even talk to him once in a while, and we're pretty sure he's never been shot.
Anyway point of my ramble is that its not the anthem that's political, nor is it even the kneeling -- its the message Kaepernick was trying to put out there that's political. The rest of it is just a setting that he was able to make use of to do that.
Biometrics have the same problem. Once your face scan is taken, its just a bunch of ones and zeros same as your password is, and is subject to all of the same storage and security requirements in order to keep it safe.
And most importantly, it wouldn't be excessively hard to create a dummy device that emulates the biometric scanner's output once you know the expected input data.
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Trouble is, its also their 17th floor. So unless they feel like throwing themselves out, this isn't really a thing that can be done short of revolution essentially.
Technically 4th paragraph I guess since (the first sentence was a paragraph of its own. I wish /. had an edit function..)
You need to read what is said
Recommend taking your own advice. I dedicated the entire third paragraph to this part of the scenario.
"What you've seen" is obviously not much then. They're continually advertising (not just arguing for but actively advertising) their progressive democrat PAC and whatnot. I mean its not like they start every episode by disclaiming their political views but they definitely don't put on any airs of being unbiased.
That said, their bias isn't just "democrat" though, its "progressive democrat." So they like to call out Hillary Clinton and Tom Perez and others even in the democratic party that they perceive as too business-oriented. Look for any story with Bernie Sanders in it and they don't hold back singing his praises.
Really? Is the anthem a republican or a democrat? What's its stance on health care, climate change or bailouts for the wealthy?
Its a symbol. And certainly symbols can be adopted and used exclusively by one side of any particular issue to the point that the symbol itself does indeed become political, but the national anthem, the flag, the bald eagle and so forth are not such. For all of the political differences in the US, especially this past year, its just assumed that (well, almost) everyone loves the country in general. The only "other side" here is traitors to the country. There's really no reason to demand or expect national pride from them for obvious reasons.
For another, perhaps somewhat silly example lets switch to the NHL where teams from Canada are in the league. At the beginning of games that host teams from both countries, both anthems are sung. Does that imply Canada is taking over the US? Or vice-versa? Of course not, because its not political -- its simply a sign of respect.
Significantly less energy, less potential environmental contamination and so on. Burial is actually a pretty horrible way to dispose of bodies, but its easier emotionally. Seeing an urn and knowing that's all that's left is somehow more difficult than knowing there's an in-tact body in the coffin and having moved on in life (such as one can) before you really start thinking about decomposition. Basically an out-of-sight, out-of-mind thing.
But the big savings, especially in countries like Hong Kong and even parts of Europe, where there's a large population and little land area, is in real estate. A 8'x4' plot or whatever size they are is simply a lot of wasted space compared to an urn that, even if you bury it, only takes a hole a few inches in diameter. (And a lot of people don't even do that, opting to keep the urns in their home or whatever as a display piece/reminder.)
I would call it a gimmick more than an advertisement, but hey it never hurts to have alternatives I guess.
Personally I find the thought of being dissolved and then crushed more disturbing than being burned to ash, but maybe its just cause I'm more familiar with the latter. The liquifaction thing just makes me think far too much of movie killers getting rid of bodies in their bathtubs using essentially exactly that method..
Just from TFS, it sounds like that would be against their beliefs. Not that beliefs can't be changed when the need arises (they would just have to redefine what it means to "respectfully" put the to dead rest in their cultural context to include an enshrined urn or whatever.) But its probably a more difficult change than just taking the deceased a bit further away and continuing with existing practices.
I think you might be underestimating the strength of modern algorithms. Assuming there isn't a yet-to-be-discovered weakness (or NSA back door as some conspiracy nuts would believe,) standard 2048-bit RSA encryption takes a few dozen lifetimes of the universe to brute force a single key.
Of course if quantum computers get to the point where they can factor 2048 bit numbers reliably then all bets are off I suppose. I'm not sure we'll see them get there in 10 years.. though I also wouldn't place bets against the possibility at this point.
That said, people are of course already working on alternatives to RSA that don't use factoring or other quantum-computable functions as their underlying mechanism. Not sure what the state of that art is at this point though (and of course even if someone's successful, it would take time to disperse the new algorithm around the world.)
I believe 100% that companies who have the ability to provide/decrypt customer data with a court order should be required to do so
That's what the FBI believes too. Unfortunately the universe isn't so forgiving: Those companies literally cannot, from a purely technological point of view, give themselves the ability to do this without risking a malicious third party also being able to figure out how to do it.
All modern encryption is built on numbers, and numbers don't care about the intentions of the people using them. This is not a problem of political will, its a problem of mathematics and the way computers operate on a fundamental level. No amount of warrants can fix that, so we have to choose whether we'd prefer to live in a world where the FBI has to do a bit more work but the average person is protected, or a world where the FBI, as well as every random script kiddie on the planet, have potentially unfettered access to everyone's phone.
Pictures, videos, notes that may contain relevant addresses or phone numbers, contacts that you may have stored but never actually dialed, message history from IM apps that encrypt before sending, etc. Basically anything that doesn't get sent over the carrier's network (or is pre-encrypted before being sent.)
For pictures specifically since you brought it up, they could potentially be used to help identify additional suspects for example.
Its not really comparable. Those monuments and such are essentially security-by-obscurity algorithms -- sure they can be complex to figure out, but once you have the trick its entirely broken and nothing you can do will ever make it secure again.
Those are significantly easier to construct than a key-based algorithm where even if the attacker knows the exact details of the algorithm, getting a hold of one key gives them zero knowledge of messages encrypted with a different key.
What country do you live in? "Everyone else" barely registers in most debates never mind mattering. This is a case of a large federal agency going up against a smattering of large corporations. Individuals are mostly irrelevant to the discussion other beyond ostensibly being the motivation for the corporate side of the argument. Us peons definitely don't get much if any say in the matter.
Not to mention most people don't have a clue. You should look up John Oliver's episode on climate change where he discusses a similar "debate" in regards to that topic: Primarily the fact that "balanced" news sources tend to have one person from either side of the debate which makes the argument seem split even when the actual debate is heavily one-sided in reality.
No you don't. Getting a warrant to investigate a suspects phone contents isn't any more unconstitutional than getting a warrant to investigate the contents of their house.
The problem is technological, not constitutional. Its simply not possible to put in a back door that cares about or even knows whether or not you're legally allowed to access the device.
So right off the top if such a back door existed, the FBI would only need to get a warrant the very first time and after they get the key they could just keep using it and parallel-construct future cases without bothering with those pesky warrants.. not to mention that such a back door would almost certainly be discovered and exploited by the criminal element sooner or later, and history suggests it would be sooner.
Getaway cars weren't a problem before the invention of the automobile either.
Change happens, and the cops have to try and keep up with it just like everyone else. The main problem with encryption is that when you break it for one person (or in this case, agency,) its automatically broken for everybody because that's how math works.
This whole debate wouldn't have gone past "do we need a warrant?" if they could just individually break into encryption on one device at a time as needed in the same way they can kick down your door without affecting your neighbors' home security.
There's a huge difference when going from a "significant obstacle" to an "impossible obstacle."
Certainly breaking 18th century encryption with 18th century technology (ie: a smart dude just trying to figure it out) would have been a fairly daunting task, but ultimate it was probably doable in most cases.. when the criminal was smart enough themselves to encrypt their communications in the first place.
Phone encryption nowadays though is an out-of-the-box experience, no effort required, and breaking it is far beyond daunting -- it would take several spans of the universe' lifetime if you were stuck brute forcing it. And that's before you even consider the possibility of dead man switches wiping everything after some number of failed attempts and other such techniques that could theoretically be employed.
I'm not sure that's true. The US has a huge criminal conviction rate without doing any of those things.
The trick is to criminalize pretty much everything so that there's always an excuse to fill the beds when a jail's operator needs a bit of a cash infusion.
I'm pretty sure the FBI is wondering that too. That's kind of their entire point.
The question isn't whether they should get the data. The question isn't even whether they should have the right to get the data. The question is whether the FBI being able to get the data is worth essentially making all phone encryption worthless, as any intentional backdoor would likely be discovered and released by hackers within weeks if not days of someone finding out that its there (and that in itself would follow, at the very latest, not long after the first time its used to obtain evidence for a case.)
They never got AppleÃ(TM)s help. Kinda blows your little theory up, doesnÃ(TM)t it?
Uhh, no it doesn't. It just means Apple was successful in arguing their refusal.
Liar, liar pants on f.. oh wait nope its the truth this time.
So the old "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" argument?
Say you get pulled over by a particularly obnoxious cop who really takes a dislike to you but can't find a legit reason to arrest you.. so he looks through your phone and finds a picture of your grandkid in the bath when they were 8 months old.. Bam! Child porn!
Even if that gets thrown out (you it almost certainly would because I've made the scenario intentionally extreme to the point of silly,) the fact that you even got arrested for it is now on your permanent record and is going to have to be explained any time you need to look for a new job or cross the border or any other such things where they want to look at your criminal record.
OK so you decide you won't show your phone to whatever beat copy happens to pull you over and will only show it after consulting with your lawyer.. so now they're going to arrest you for refusing to cooperate instead so that they can take you into the station while you make the call. And certainly refusing to cooperate may not sound as bad as child porn on your record but has a much better chance of being upgraded from "arrested" to "charged" since you technically did refuse to cooperate in that instance, whether or not they find anything more serious to charge you with.
They're about as legit as any other media these days. They slant heavily left and they make no secret about it, but they're not generally making shit up like a lot of the (actually fake) "news" that apparently was coming through the FB feeds (and other social media) that ended up getting traced to sweatshops in various cheap labor countries (probably paid for by Russia but I don't think that part was ever conclusively proven.)
That said, they're not investigative reporters. They mostly just collect reports and articles that other media outlets put out and frame them in a leftist light (though they did recently introduce an investigative channel.. no idea if there's anything of interest on there yet though.)
While I agree we shouldn't be forcing the players to do anything, I hardly consider playing the anthem to be an inherently political action.
Its only political now because a famous guy did something unusual on a public broadcast of an extremely popular event -- and then the president went on a rant about it to really make sure it was widely covered.
And really, its not about the anthem or whether he stands or kneels or does cartwheels. If Kaepernick said he'd knelt to show solidarity with say, a friend suffering from MS.. people would have been all over it and he'd have been praised.
But he did it to protest violence against black people, which is not something a lot of folk like to talk about or think about. We prefer to stay in our little bubbles and pretend that racism was last century's problem just because we know the name of that one black dude in the office and even talk to him once in a while, and we're pretty sure he's never been shot.
Anyway point of my ramble is that its not the anthem that's political, nor is it even the kneeling -- its the message Kaepernick was trying to put out there that's political. The rest of it is just a setting that he was able to make use of to do that.
Biometrics have the same problem. Once your face scan is taken, its just a bunch of ones and zeros same as your password is, and is subject to all of the same storage and security requirements in order to keep it safe.
And most importantly, it wouldn't be excessively hard to create a dummy device that emulates the biometric scanner's output once you know the expected input data.
On the contrary, Weinstein's problem was too much erection. Especially if there was an attractive potted plant in the vicinity.