If you want security and liberty, at a minimum, you must stop importing people that want to destroy your culture. History suggests that you'd better
At one point, in US history, Chinese immigrants were looked upon as "destroying US culture." At another point, Irish immigrants were the folks to ban ("Irish need not apply" signs in windows). We even, in one sad time in US history, locked up everyone of Japanese descent because we were at war with Japan and feared they'd side with the enemy. There is always some group of immigrant who is "scary" because they are different. In every case, after we get over the "they are different and therefore they are scary" reflex, they become productive members of society and later generations don't even blink at their presence. Does absorbing immigrants change our culture? Sure, but it's a good thing. Our culture is something that is constantly evolving as we absorb the best of everyone who comes here. (See: Melting Pot.)
I'm fully aware that Brennan’s assumption was wrong. My point was that even if he were right (which he isn't), then requiring backdoors in all encryption in the US would destroy any dominance that exists (even if it exists solely in Brennan’s mind).
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), another committee member and staunch privacy advocate, has pilloried proposals to give law enforcement access to encrypted data, saying bad actors would simpy use foreign-based encrypted messaging apps. Brennan argued at the hearing that such a concern was theoretical because “U.S. companies dominate the international market as far as encryption technologies that are available through these various apps.”
Warner [Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.)] questioned Brennan’s assertion. “Two thousand apps a day are added to the phone store. Over half of those are foreign-based entities,” he said.
In a statement following the hearing, Wyden countered that allowing government access to encrypted platforms “would not stop terrorists from using strong encryption and it would undermine American competitiveness and Americans’ digital security at a time when the threat from foreign hackers and cyberattacks has never been greater.”
Let's allow the assumption that American companies currently dominate the encryption field. We'll say that's true. How long would that dominance that last if foreign companies used strong encryption and American companies used hobbled encryption left vulnerable to the American government and hackers? Thank goodness for Warner and Wyden for pointing out how idiotic Brennan 's assertion was.
Exactly this. Even if you could somehow, magically, prevent non-backdoored strong encryption from existing (and that would be some serious "rewrite the laws of physics" level magic there), your improved security from terrorists would be exactly 0. However, your vulnerability from criminals exploiting the backdoors for their own nefarious purposes would shoot through the roof. And that's not even getting into government abuse of their backdoor.
My one traffic ticket was failing to stop at a stop sign. (I did a "rolling stop.") When I was called, I was immediately told to speak to the prosecutor. He gave me a deal - they'd reduce the verdict to "parking on the pavement" if I entered a guilty plea. That charge wouldn't hit my insurance and would have a lower fine. They were doing this for everyone coming in with such fluidity that it was likely just Business As Usual. I suspect that very few "ran a stop sign" cases actually lead to "ran a stop sign" verdicts.
Except that, without summary judgement, a case could be dragged out by one party who simply didn't show up. Suppose Company X dumped waste products in a local river and you got sick. You sue Company X but they just decide not to show up. So the court date is rescheduled and rescheduled again. At some point, the court needs to say "look, you had fair warning and you either need to show up or you face punishment of some sort." If the court didn't say that, then no defendant would ever show up in court and the legal system would collapse from a) the increased load of "postponed for the 50th time" cases and b) the reduced authority to actually decide anything.
I's also easier to generate text than a video. Sure you can make an off-the-cuff video without a script and post it but 9 times out of 10 it'll look and sound like garbage. With text, you need to write your words, edit them, and then post. With video, you need to write what you're going to say, edit it, set up the video environment (is the lighting right, etc), video it, do-retakes when you flub your words, stitch the videos together, perhaps do further re-takes as needed, and then post it. I could have fifteen of these comments written before I'd have one video comment posted.
Text is also much more discrete to post. If I'm standing on a street corner in a crowd, I and fifteen other people can post text comments without worrying about background noise. Try doing a video comment with other people doing video comments right near you, though.
Video will have its place, don't get me wrong, but text will still reign supreme.
Putin shills instigating civil war in the US? Trump praising Putin and Putin all but endorsing Trump? Was Trump sent by the Russians to tear our country in two?
(Hey, it's not any crazier than the other conspiracy theories that Trump touts.)
I remember that one. Given Wheeler's background and the history of FCC chiefs in general, it wasn't unrealistic to assume that he would be a horrible FCC chief who would only think of what the industry wanted. A lot of people are very happy that he's not a dingo. (Well, except for the cable companies but I don't care about them!)
I'm not a Clinton supporter either. I was a Bernie Sanders supporter but - as much as I still like him, I'm realistic enough to know that Hillary's going to be the Democrat's nominee now. If I was forced to choose between the two, I'd choose Hillary, but only as a "lesser of two evils." My actual vote is likely going to be cast for Jill Stein.
In this case, the head of the FCC was a member of a cable company lobbying group and was widely expected to be yet another pro-cable company shill. Except, Tom Wheeler apparently missed the memo and was mistakenly handed one that said "protect the consumers" instead. His run as head of the FCC has been surprisingly fantastic and I hope he continues on to give the cable companies headaches for years to come.
Don't forget "charging more for Internet Alone than Internet+TV to discourage people from cutting the cord or from getting TV service from another provider like DirecTV."
It's settled, legally, but don't think the fight is over. The GOP in Congress will still try to prevent the FCC from enforcing Net Neutrality via methods like defunding the FCC. And, if Trump wins, expect that Wheeler will be pushed out in favor of someone who will do what the industry wants the FCC to do.
Stupid meteors... Coming to our planet and taking extinction level event causing jobs away from hard-working Earth-based calamities. Super Volcano would have the best eruptions. Fantastic. He's destroy the most people ever. He's getting tons of compliments for how much destruction he'd cause. He'll build a wall of smoke around the world and make us all pay for it... with our lives.
Except this was filed in patent-troll friendly East Texas. The judge would probably allow it and demand that Meyer keep whacking moles until he missed one.
The problem is that it took 3 years to get Claim 107 declared invalid. Even if they could get the other claims dismissed in 6 months, Uniloc could come back and decide that some of the other 110 claims are being violated now. If you were even able to knock them out at a rate of one per month (extremely quickly given how long the first one took), it would take over 9 years to get them all dismissed. At that point, they'd likely trot out another overly vague patent with a hundred claims.
According to this post by Meyer, they first claimed he violated one claim on the patent:
107. Computer code executable on an electronic device to prevent unauthorized access to electronic data stored on the electronic device, the computer code comprising: code for storing license data on a portable licensing medium configured to communicate with the electronic device; code for determining whether to allow access to the electronic data based on the license data; code for verifying the license data stored on the licensing medium by communicating with a registration authority having verification data; and code for providing updated license data received from the registration authority to the licensing medium.
Now, is it just me or could that describe any authorization system? For example, you install some software product, get a license key from the company, and use it to prove to the software that you actually bought it and should be allowed to run it.
So Meyer fought for three years and finally got this claim overturned. The patent office admitted this claim shouldn't have been approved. Victory, right? Nope. Uniloc is now claiming that he's violating:
21. A system according to claim 1, wherein the licensing medium comprises a memory installed in a cellular telephone. 22. A system according to claim 21, wherein the licensing medium is not removable from the cellular telephone.
This patent has 113 claims. Even if he took them out five at a time, at the current rate it would take him 68 YEARS for the patent to be tossed out entirely. Meanwhile, he'll rack up tons of legal fees (not to mention time/stress/life disruption) and Uniloc will just keep playing patent whack-a-mole.
BTW, that "claim 1" that #21 references?
1. A system for preventing unauthorized access to electronic data on an electronic device, the system comprising: a portable licensing medium configured to communicate with the electronic device and to store license data, the license data configured to be used by the electronic device to determine whether to allow access to the electronic data; and a registration authority configured to communicate with the electronic device, the registration authority having verification data for verifying the license data stored on the licensing medium, wherein the registration authority provides updated license data for the licensing medium.
This looks suspiciously like #107. It's like they built in redundancy in their patent trolling. "Take out a couple of our claims. No problem. We've got five more like them in the same patent and ten other patents just like this one waiting in the wings."
Not just Microsoft, but I would think Google would get involved with this. I can understand why the patent troll would go after the app developers instead of Google (take on the small fish and hope they're intimidated enough to give you money instead of challenging the giant shark to a biting contest). That said, Google should want to protect their developers from lawsuits like this. At the very least, they should want to make sure that no legal precedent was set saying that this patent troll "patented app stores."
Let's get Apple in on this too. They have an app store also. Unite Apple, Google, and Microsoft to take the patent troll down. I'd pay to see that happen!
They might even be communicating with each other but using a communications method that we can't detect. Imagine if you had a medieval civilization on a planet and an advanced civilization blasted radio waves all over to communicate. The medieval folks wouldn't have the technology to intercept and interpret the radio waves so the advanced civilization would be invisible to them.
I like the theory that Trump started his campaign as a publicity stunt. He intended to run, fail, and then parlay that into better ratings for The Apprentice and more profits for anything he tagged with his name. He said some outrageous things thinking he'd go down in flames. Instead, his popularity rose. So he said some outrageous things and got more popular. At some point, his ego took over and the "play the American politics game for profit" plan was ditched because Trump couldn't get enough of the attention he was getting.
As much as I agree with you that Trump would never be able to build the wall the way he says he would, do you really think he'd let something like an environmental impact survey stop him? He seems like he'd just write an executive order saying it's exempt from those (regardless of whether he has the political power to do so) or would get someone who is willing to sign anything for the right amount of cash ("He's the best surveyor! Fantastic!").
Seriously. That guy got 6 months because the judge factored in "he's not going to get to go to a prestigious school anymore" as part of his punishment? The father wrote a letter saying it was unfair for his son to get such harsh consequences for "20 minutes of action"? (Here's a hint, it's not "getting some action" if it's non-consensual. That's called rape.) The defense kept trying to make the case that the woman obviously consented because of what she was wearing.
I'm not a woman so I'll never feel the fear of being raped, much less the actual trauma of being raped. However, if I went through a trauma like that, I think I'd be reluctant to go through it all over again just for my attacker to get a light sentence and cry about how that light sentence was SO unfair. I wouldn't want to face accusations from people (either in court or in the community) that I somehow consented to the assault simply because my attackers social status meant he was regarded as a hero of sorts.
No, this doesn't mean that the accusations against Appelbaum are automatically true, but it is understandable that some people might not want to go public with a lawsuit and yet might want to warn others about his behavior.
In my ideal world, the government would break up Comcast and Charter/Time Warner into separate companies. One would deal with the physical network, one would deal with Internet/TV/etc service, and a third would deal with content (NBC, etc). The Physical Network company would sell bandwidth to the Consumer Services company and others. Those companies would compete to lower prices and improve customer service. The separate content companies would ensure that neither the physical network nor customer service company favored their own company's content over other people's content.
Of course, this will never happen, but it would solve a bunch of our problems.
As much as I'd like to keep the government out of the operations of the Internet, the ISPs:
1) Have local monopolies on high speed Internet access.
2) Have made it clear that they see nothing wrong in abusing said monopolies to hurt video services competitors where they aren't a monopoly (by pricing Internet-only higher than Internet+TV bundles and by capping Internet usage and instituting overage fees in order to penalize people who stream videos).
In this case, your average consumer has no recourse. They can't "vote with their wallet" because there's no alternative. They can't sue the cable company (good luck fighting the cable ISP's lawyers without going bankrupt). Their only hope is for the government to step in and say "This stuff isn't allowed." The government stepping in isn't ideal, but letting the companies do whatever they want is even worse.
Slashdot Mirror
At one point, in US history, Chinese immigrants were looked upon as "destroying US culture." At another point, Irish immigrants were the folks to ban ("Irish need not apply" signs in windows). We even, in one sad time in US history, locked up everyone of Japanese descent because we were at war with Japan and feared they'd side with the enemy. There is always some group of immigrant who is "scary" because they are different. In every case, after we get over the "they are different and therefore they are scary" reflex, they become productive members of society and later generations don't even blink at their presence. Does absorbing immigrants change our culture? Sure, but it's a good thing. Our culture is something that is constantly evolving as we absorb the best of everyone who comes here. (See: Melting Pot.)
I'm fully aware that Brennan’s assumption was wrong. My point was that even if he were right (which he isn't), then requiring backdoors in all encryption in the US would destroy any dominance that exists (even if it exists solely in Brennan’s mind).
Another article has more of the exchange:
Let's allow the assumption that American companies currently dominate the encryption field. We'll say that's true. How long would that dominance that last if foreign companies used strong encryption and American companies used hobbled encryption left vulnerable to the American government and hackers? Thank goodness for Warner and Wyden for pointing out how idiotic Brennan 's assertion was.
Exactly this. Even if you could somehow, magically, prevent non-backdoored strong encryption from existing (and that would be some serious "rewrite the laws of physics" level magic there), your improved security from terrorists would be exactly 0. However, your vulnerability from criminals exploiting the backdoors for their own nefarious purposes would shoot through the roof. And that's not even getting into government abuse of their backdoor.
My one traffic ticket was failing to stop at a stop sign. (I did a "rolling stop.") When I was called, I was immediately told to speak to the prosecutor. He gave me a deal - they'd reduce the verdict to "parking on the pavement" if I entered a guilty plea. That charge wouldn't hit my insurance and would have a lower fine. They were doing this for everyone coming in with such fluidity that it was likely just Business As Usual. I suspect that very few "ran a stop sign" cases actually lead to "ran a stop sign" verdicts.
Except that, without summary judgement, a case could be dragged out by one party who simply didn't show up. Suppose Company X dumped waste products in a local river and you got sick. You sue Company X but they just decide not to show up. So the court date is rescheduled and rescheduled again. At some point, the court needs to say "look, you had fair warning and you either need to show up or you face punishment of some sort." If the court didn't say that, then no defendant would ever show up in court and the legal system would collapse from a) the increased load of "postponed for the 50th time" cases and b) the reduced authority to actually decide anything.
I's also easier to generate text than a video. Sure you can make an off-the-cuff video without a script and post it but 9 times out of 10 it'll look and sound like garbage. With text, you need to write your words, edit them, and then post. With video, you need to write what you're going to say, edit it, set up the video environment (is the lighting right, etc), video it, do-retakes when you flub your words, stitch the videos together, perhaps do further re-takes as needed, and then post it. I could have fifteen of these comments written before I'd have one video comment posted.
Text is also much more discrete to post. If I'm standing on a street corner in a crowd, I and fifteen other people can post text comments without worrying about background noise. Try doing a video comment with other people doing video comments right near you, though.
Video will have its place, don't get me wrong, but text will still reign supreme.
Putin shills instigating civil war in the US? Trump praising Putin and Putin all but endorsing Trump? Was Trump sent by the Russians to tear our country in two?
(Hey, it's not any crazier than the other conspiracy theories that Trump touts.)
I remember that one. Given Wheeler's background and the history of FCC chiefs in general, it wasn't unrealistic to assume that he would be a horrible FCC chief who would only think of what the industry wanted. A lot of people are very happy that he's not a dingo. (Well, except for the cable companies but I don't care about them!)
I'm not a Clinton supporter either. I was a Bernie Sanders supporter but - as much as I still like him, I'm realistic enough to know that Hillary's going to be the Democrat's nominee now. If I was forced to choose between the two, I'd choose Hillary, but only as a "lesser of two evils." My actual vote is likely going to be cast for Jill Stein.
In this case, the head of the FCC was a member of a cable company lobbying group and was widely expected to be yet another pro-cable company shill. Except, Tom Wheeler apparently missed the memo and was mistakenly handed one that said "protect the consumers" instead. His run as head of the FCC has been surprisingly fantastic and I hope he continues on to give the cable companies headaches for years to come.
Don't forget "charging more for Internet Alone than Internet+TV to discourage people from cutting the cord or from getting TV service from another provider like DirecTV."
It's settled, legally, but don't think the fight is over. The GOP in Congress will still try to prevent the FCC from enforcing Net Neutrality via methods like defunding the FCC. And, if Trump wins, expect that Wheeler will be pushed out in favor of someone who will do what the industry wants the FCC to do.
Stupid meteors... Coming to our planet and taking extinction level event causing jobs away from hard-working Earth-based calamities. Super Volcano would have the best eruptions. Fantastic. He's destroy the most people ever. He's getting tons of compliments for how much destruction he'd cause. He'll build a wall of smoke around the world and make us all pay for it... with our lives.
This November, Vote Super Volcano 2016!
Except this was filed in patent-troll friendly East Texas. The judge would probably allow it and demand that Meyer keep whacking moles until he missed one.
The problem is that it took 3 years to get Claim 107 declared invalid. Even if they could get the other claims dismissed in 6 months, Uniloc could come back and decide that some of the other 110 claims are being violated now. If you were even able to knock them out at a rate of one per month (extremely quickly given how long the first one took), it would take over 9 years to get them all dismissed. At that point, they'd likely trot out another overly vague patent with a hundred claims.
It took some minor Googling, but I found the patent that Uniloc is claiming Austin Meyer violated.
According to this post by Meyer, they first claimed he violated one claim on the patent:
Now, is it just me or could that describe any authorization system? For example, you install some software product, get a license key from the company, and use it to prove to the software that you actually bought it and should be allowed to run it.
So Meyer fought for three years and finally got this claim overturned. The patent office admitted this claim shouldn't have been approved. Victory, right? Nope. Uniloc is now claiming that he's violating:
This patent has 113 claims. Even if he took them out five at a time, at the current rate it would take him 68 YEARS for the patent to be tossed out entirely. Meanwhile, he'll rack up tons of legal fees (not to mention time/stress/life disruption) and Uniloc will just keep playing patent whack-a-mole.
BTW, that "claim 1" that #21 references?
This looks suspiciously like #107. It's like they built in redundancy in their patent trolling. "Take out a couple of our claims. No problem. We've got five more like them in the same patent and ten other patents just like this one waiting in the wings."
Not just Microsoft, but I would think Google would get involved with this. I can understand why the patent troll would go after the app developers instead of Google (take on the small fish and hope they're intimidated enough to give you money instead of challenging the giant shark to a biting contest). That said, Google should want to protect their developers from lawsuits like this. At the very least, they should want to make sure that no legal precedent was set saying that this patent troll "patented app stores."
Let's get Apple in on this too. They have an app store also. Unite Apple, Google, and Microsoft to take the patent troll down. I'd pay to see that happen!
They might even be communicating with each other but using a communications method that we can't detect. Imagine if you had a medieval civilization on a planet and an advanced civilization blasted radio waves all over to communicate. The medieval folks wouldn't have the technology to intercept and interpret the radio waves so the advanced civilization would be invisible to them.
"Well, I believe I'll vote for a third-party candidate."
(All joking aside, this is my plan come Election Day.)
I like the theory that Trump started his campaign as a publicity stunt. He intended to run, fail, and then parlay that into better ratings for The Apprentice and more profits for anything he tagged with his name. He said some outrageous things thinking he'd go down in flames. Instead, his popularity rose. So he said some outrageous things and got more popular. At some point, his ego took over and the "play the American politics game for profit" plan was ditched because Trump couldn't get enough of the attention he was getting.
As much as I agree with you that Trump would never be able to build the wall the way he says he would, do you really think he'd let something like an environmental impact survey stop him? He seems like he'd just write an executive order saying it's exempt from those (regardless of whether he has the political power to do so) or would get someone who is willing to sign anything for the right amount of cash ("He's the best surveyor! Fantastic!").
Seriously. That guy got 6 months because the judge factored in "he's not going to get to go to a prestigious school anymore" as part of his punishment? The father wrote a letter saying it was unfair for his son to get such harsh consequences for "20 minutes of action"? (Here's a hint, it's not "getting some action" if it's non-consensual. That's called rape.) The defense kept trying to make the case that the woman obviously consented because of what she was wearing.
I'm not a woman so I'll never feel the fear of being raped, much less the actual trauma of being raped. However, if I went through a trauma like that, I think I'd be reluctant to go through it all over again just for my attacker to get a light sentence and cry about how that light sentence was SO unfair. I wouldn't want to face accusations from people (either in court or in the community) that I somehow consented to the assault simply because my attackers social status meant he was regarded as a hero of sorts.
No, this doesn't mean that the accusations against Appelbaum are automatically true, but it is understandable that some people might not want to go public with a lawsuit and yet might want to warn others about his behavior.
In my ideal world, the government would break up Comcast and Charter/Time Warner into separate companies. One would deal with the physical network, one would deal with Internet/TV/etc service, and a third would deal with content (NBC, etc). The Physical Network company would sell bandwidth to the Consumer Services company and others. Those companies would compete to lower prices and improve customer service. The separate content companies would ensure that neither the physical network nor customer service company favored their own company's content over other people's content.
Of course, this will never happen, but it would solve a bunch of our problems.
As much as I'd like to keep the government out of the operations of the Internet, the ISPs:
1) Have local monopolies on high speed Internet access.
2) Have made it clear that they see nothing wrong in abusing said monopolies to hurt video services competitors where they aren't a monopoly (by pricing Internet-only higher than Internet+TV bundles and by capping Internet usage and instituting overage fees in order to penalize people who stream videos).
In this case, your average consumer has no recourse. They can't "vote with their wallet" because there's no alternative. They can't sue the cable company (good luck fighting the cable ISP's lawyers without going bankrupt). Their only hope is for the government to step in and say "This stuff isn't allowed." The government stepping in isn't ideal, but letting the companies do whatever they want is even worse.