Yeah, I've got to say; there's nothing wrong with a little escapism, but as a mode of therapy I don't think this is going to end well at all.
Games don't make people go nuts. Every minute spent gaming is a minute spent not seeking help, but that can be said for all sorts of activities, and gaming is no more harmful than any of those. But it doesn't help either; that much is becoming clearer with every study. We still don't understand exactly why online interactions can't substitute for real, interpersonal, face-to-face interaction, but that they can't do this is becoming clearer every day. Maybe they lack some currently-unknown aspect of communication that turns out to be vital to the human psyche. Or maybe they impose some kind of psychological barrier that prevents genuine connections from forming. We don't understand the phenomenon well enough right now. But GIFT is alive and well, and plain enough for anyone to see.
Considering obscurity as a part of a security apparatus involves making some very imprudent assumptions about your attackers: assumptions that inevitably involve downplaying their ability to attack. In obscurity's specific case, you're forced to assume that the attacker is unable to figure out things that you yourself have figured out. Even in the short term, assumptions like these are all too often wrong. In the long term, the odds of the assumption proving wrong approach 100%. The prudent thing to do is assume that the attacker knows everything, and once you make that assumption, the concept of obscurity not only ceases to be valid, it ceases to even make sense.
It is true that it's not always smart to publish the facts about one's security apparatus, but it is never smart to hold them back. All that accomplishes is to prevent benign parties from identifying weaknesses before attackers do, and over time, that becomes inevitable.
Gaming a communist system is trivial: in the basic scheme, all you have to do is do nothing at all. If you want to get more sophisticated, understate your abilities and overstate your needs.
Gaming a libertarian system is a little trickier, in that the basic scheme above doesn't really work: it does manage to guard against that much. But the mechanisms that theoretically make libertarianism work all depend on accurate information being available and ubiquitous, and this reveals its big weakness: poison the information. It's not exactly the same implementation as the more sophisticated scheme above, but the basic practice -i.e. deception- is the same.
The real problem with the capital-L sort of libertarianism is that frankly, we're not good enough to make it work. Much like communism, you essentially set up a system that's almost trivial to game, and then you ask people not to game it. Recorded history has shown all too clearly what humanity is in the dark: not enough people will uphold the system to be able to support the system.
You could do it in a culture with an absolutely ironclad notion of honor that was so all-pervasive and agreed upon that the people followed it instinctively. In the West nowadays, we actually see such cultures -either from our own histories or from elsewhere entirely- as exotic: we're that far removed from where we'd need to be for a libertarian system to work. But even in these cultures, honor is almost always confined to the warrior classes: finding a culture that actually practices it throughout borders on impossibility. And when you find these, the underlying philosophies don't even claim to be libertarian in nature.
Honestly, this is where libertarians really need to be spending their time. Their goal is a good one to strive for, but the culture simply is not ready. The real work right now is preparing the culture, and as much as political parties would love to think otherwise, you cannot do this from the top down. You have to work from the bottom up: learn how to produce honorable people in an honorless world, then get out into the dialogue and spread the memes. This is slow, but it's the only way cultural change has ever really worked.
And yeah, this means we're unlikely to see a true libertarian system in our lifetime. That's a shame, but honestly, it doesn't really change the odds. Plunk the modern populace down into a libertarian system, and you'll only wind up with Thunderdome. You've got to fix the people before you can fix the system.
I'm not the one confusing the Fourth Amendment with the Fifth.
Providing the password to decrypt a hard drive proves that you had control over the hard drive, but this is not incriminating in and of itself. The court records are full of people who have claimed that others secreted illegal or incriminating content on drives that they controlled. Sometimes that can even be verified, and even when it cannot, it still provides a wedge for reasonable doubt.
I bring this up because encrypted drives doen't provide any sort of protection against these sorts of attacks. Malware and exploits continue to function more or less unabated: they might not be able to extract data from individually encrypted files, but if they're running on a drive you encrypted (and, presumably, unlocked in order to use it), the full-drive encryption does nothing to prevent that.
The end result is that the same defenses used for unencrypted drives still work for encrypted ones. At most, proving that you had control of an encrypted drive demonstrates you have some measure of technological savvy, but a prosecutor won't be able to use that to prove you weren't hacked: even the best of us get hit from time to time.
Bottom line: decrypting a drive is not self-incrimination.
So which part of my post did you miss: the part where I insisted that these searches need to be properly warranted, or the part where I asserted that warrantless searches need to be stopped? Admittedly, I didn't mention the need for individualized suspicion as I normally do, but even without that, I in no way called for your straw argument of absolute ubiquitous search powers.
Decrypting a hard drive is no different from letting the police into your house for a search: something the law has the power to order a person to do, provided that the proper warrants are legally obtained. It has long been understood that this is not self-incrimination, even if evidence is later found.
Obviously, decryption orders should be held to the same limits as any other search, with the same requirements for warrants and the same limits. It can be argued that, given the government's recent propensity for warrantless searches, people's fear is reasonable. But calling a properly-warranted and properly-limited decryption order "self-incrimination" is more than a bit of a stretch. Besides which, including it under the umbrella of searches provides new avenues through which to attack the unethical practice of warrantless searches, which must indeed be stopped.
You can sue people for whatever you want. The lawsuit might not stand up in court, but if you can bankrupt the person with legal costs (or otherwise force them to settle with you), then you don't have to win the case.
This is called a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation, or SLAPP, and many states have laws against it. Unfortunately, not all of them do, and while I don't know what state PETA is suing in, worth noting is that Virginia (the state where the shelter in question is located) does not.
The problem is not a lack of standards: even in the last generation, game makers managed to paper over that with cross-platform engines. The problem is that HD has made games inherently too expensive to produce. Even shovelware on the Wii turned out to be more profitable than even most of the blockbusters, which is why companies (most notoriously Ubisoft, but others as well) used it to fund their unprofitable HD development.
No amount of standardization will fix this, because while standards do fix a problem, it's not the right problem domain. The art department is incurring the big costs nowadays, not the code. This is like performing micro-optimizations in the wrong loops.
Pretty much everybody has a hard time grasping English, even other speakers of Indo-European languages.
All languages pick up loanwords from other languages, but English has a couple of... special... habits as far as this is concerned. Loanwords are perhaps the toughest: all languages pick up words from other languages when they come into contact, but most languages adapt the spelling and surrounding grammar into their own systems. English doesn't normally do that: it preserves the original spelling and often the original grammar, which sounds great until you realize that now you've just grafted a new set of rules into the English language for this particular situation.
That's where a lot of the complexity of English really comes from. It's actually a lot more regular than many people think, but at any given time it can work according to any of a staggering number of different rulesets, and to know which ruleset you need to use, you have to know which languages your words are coming from, which English doesn't really have a way of encoding, and very few people, even among teachers of the language, actually know what all of the rulesets are, so you probably don't know them all either (nor do I).
Abram de Swaan identified a list of twelve "supercentral languages" that he believed serve as extremely common bridges among speakers of different languages in their native dialects. If one considers the region that people in English-speaking countries typically think of as "Asia," four of the supercentral languages are native to that region: Chinese (specifically Mandarin), Hindi, Malay (of which Indonesian is a dialect), and Japanese. This list was probably a strong factor when they were deciding which languages to use.
Geographically speaking, there are actually two other languages on the list that are native to the Asian continent: Arabic and Russian. I doubt, however, that the people drawing up these lists considered the regions these languages are from to be "real Asia." Make of that what you will.
(Incidentally, the other six languages are English, French, German, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swahili).
We've probably got a bunch of fakes too: they make good decoys for those who would try to attack or steal our weapons. They're probably better-made, but they're fakes all the same.
The real question is, does North Korea have any of these long-range missiles that aren't fake?
And where's the money to develop new versions coming from?
From sales of those versions. Business is a risk. That's how it works.
They have to find ways of forcing people to upgrade to pay for the development cost.
They could do it the old-fashioned way: by developing compelling new features that people want to use. Or has that become too difficult over the years?
The reason the world needs another mobile OS is the people making the current ones. Apple wants my money, Google wants my data, and Microsoft wants my patience, and frankly, I'm not inclined to give them these things. That leaves me out in the cold unless another mobile OS comes along.
I'm glad they got one of them alive. Not that I'd have shed any tears if they'd both died -living is better than what they deserve- but when one of these folks can be taken alive, it opens up opportunities for study that could prove valuable. Definitely preferable, when it can be helped.
Nothing so grand as all that. It's a price: it just happens that that the author (or team) accepts code, rather than money, as payment.
I see nothing wrong with that. Nowadays, contributing back is simply expected behavior, but this was not always so. The current BSD/MIT/CC0/etc regime would likely not have been possible if the GPL had not existed to create and enforce this behavior pattern in the first place. One could argue that it has outlived its necessity, but it was once necessary, and one can just as easily argue that it still is.
I'm curious now: what does BSD do to enforce openness of code that the public domain doesn't (presupposing the existence of a meaningful public domain, even though there are parts of the world there this doesn't hold)?
Actually, going BSD pretty much does mean you give up on copyleft. It doesn't mean you give up on open-source, of course, but copyleft -the idea of using copyright to enforce the openness of your code- is not a part of BSD, and is in fact the Big Sticking Point of the GPL for many people.
Unfortunately, the man has something of a point. There are a lot of 14-year-old basement dwellers in the anti-CISPA crowd, and a lot of people who just want to get their entertainment without paying for it. In short, a significant number of the people who oppose CISPA are doing it for the wrong reasons. CISPA is wrong, but so are they.
Those of us who care about the real issues might do well to disassociate ourselves from the creepers and the pirates. Even they need protection, but let's not kid ourselves, that's more a matter of logistics than principle: protection is meaningless if it doesn't protect everyone, and so they get a pass in order to make it work at all. Their voices in this debate only harm the side they fight for. But this presents a problem: how the heck would a community like this disassociate itself from its less savory members?
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I've got to say; there's nothing wrong with a little escapism, but as a mode of therapy I don't think this is going to end well at all.
Games don't make people go nuts. Every minute spent gaming is a minute spent not seeking help, but that can be said for all sorts of activities, and gaming is no more harmful than any of those. But it doesn't help either; that much is becoming clearer with every study. We still don't understand exactly why online interactions can't substitute for real, interpersonal, face-to-face interaction, but that they can't do this is becoming clearer every day. Maybe they lack some currently-unknown aspect of communication that turns out to be vital to the human psyche. Or maybe they impose some kind of psychological barrier that prevents genuine connections from forming. We don't understand the phenomenon well enough right now. But GIFT is alive and well, and plain enough for anyone to see.
Yeah, I've got to say: how much makeup do they have to DO on him nowadays?
Considering obscurity as a part of a security apparatus involves making some very imprudent assumptions about your attackers: assumptions that inevitably involve downplaying their ability to attack. In obscurity's specific case, you're forced to assume that the attacker is unable to figure out things that you yourself have figured out. Even in the short term, assumptions like these are all too often wrong. In the long term, the odds of the assumption proving wrong approach 100%. The prudent thing to do is assume that the attacker knows everything, and once you make that assumption, the concept of obscurity not only ceases to be valid, it ceases to even make sense.
It is true that it's not always smart to publish the facts about one's security apparatus, but it is never smart to hold them back. All that accomplishes is to prevent benign parties from identifying weaknesses before attackers do, and over time, that becomes inevitable.
If you're a developer who believes obfuscation is a valid layer of security, you shouldn't be in your field.
Gaming a communist system is trivial: in the basic scheme, all you have to do is do nothing at all. If you want to get more sophisticated, understate your abilities and overstate your needs.
Gaming a libertarian system is a little trickier, in that the basic scheme above doesn't really work: it does manage to guard against that much. But the mechanisms that theoretically make libertarianism work all depend on accurate information being available and ubiquitous, and this reveals its big weakness: poison the information. It's not exactly the same implementation as the more sophisticated scheme above, but the basic practice -i.e. deception- is the same.
The real problem with the capital-L sort of libertarianism is that frankly, we're not good enough to make it work. Much like communism, you essentially set up a system that's almost trivial to game, and then you ask people not to game it. Recorded history has shown all too clearly what humanity is in the dark: not enough people will uphold the system to be able to support the system.
You could do it in a culture with an absolutely ironclad notion of honor that was so all-pervasive and agreed upon that the people followed it instinctively. In the West nowadays, we actually see such cultures -either from our own histories or from elsewhere entirely- as exotic: we're that far removed from where we'd need to be for a libertarian system to work. But even in these cultures, honor is almost always confined to the warrior classes: finding a culture that actually practices it throughout borders on impossibility. And when you find these, the underlying philosophies don't even claim to be libertarian in nature.
Honestly, this is where libertarians really need to be spending their time. Their goal is a good one to strive for, but the culture simply is not ready. The real work right now is preparing the culture, and as much as political parties would love to think otherwise, you cannot do this from the top down. You have to work from the bottom up: learn how to produce honorable people in an honorless world, then get out into the dialogue and spread the memes. This is slow, but it's the only way cultural change has ever really worked.
And yeah, this means we're unlikely to see a true libertarian system in our lifetime. That's a shame, but honestly, it doesn't really change the odds. Plunk the modern populace down into a libertarian system, and you'll only wind up with Thunderdome. You've got to fix the people before you can fix the system.
Does this mean they've proven the past is mutable?
I'm not the one confusing the Fourth Amendment with the Fifth.
Providing the password to decrypt a hard drive proves that you had control over the hard drive, but this is not incriminating in and of itself. The court records are full of people who have claimed that others secreted illegal or incriminating content on drives that they controlled. Sometimes that can even be verified, and even when it cannot, it still provides a wedge for reasonable doubt.
I bring this up because encrypted drives doen't provide any sort of protection against these sorts of attacks. Malware and exploits continue to function more or less unabated: they might not be able to extract data from individually encrypted files, but if they're running on a drive you encrypted (and, presumably, unlocked in order to use it), the full-drive encryption does nothing to prevent that.
The end result is that the same defenses used for unencrypted drives still work for encrypted ones. At most, proving that you had control of an encrypted drive demonstrates you have some measure of technological savvy, but a prosecutor won't be able to use that to prove you weren't hacked: even the best of us get hit from time to time.
Bottom line: decrypting a drive is not self-incrimination.
So which part of my post did you miss: the part where I insisted that these searches need to be properly warranted, or the part where I asserted that warrantless searches need to be stopped? Admittedly, I didn't mention the need for individualized suspicion as I normally do, but even without that, I in no way called for your straw argument of absolute ubiquitous search powers.
Decrypting a hard drive is no different from letting the police into your house for a search: something the law has the power to order a person to do, provided that the proper warrants are legally obtained. It has long been understood that this is not self-incrimination, even if evidence is later found.
Obviously, decryption orders should be held to the same limits as any other search, with the same requirements for warrants and the same limits. It can be argued that, given the government's recent propensity for warrantless searches, people's fear is reasonable. But calling a properly-warranted and properly-limited decryption order "self-incrimination" is more than a bit of a stretch. Besides which, including it under the umbrella of searches provides new avenues through which to attack the unethical practice of warrantless searches, which must indeed be stopped.
You can sue people for whatever you want. The lawsuit might not stand up in court, but if you can bankrupt the person with legal costs (or otherwise force them to settle with you), then you don't have to win the case.
This is called a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation, or SLAPP, and many states have laws against it. Unfortunately, not all of them do, and while I don't know what state PETA is suing in, worth noting is that Virginia (the state where the shelter in question is located) does not.
The problem is not a lack of standards: even in the last generation, game makers managed to paper over that with cross-platform engines. The problem is that HD has made games inherently too expensive to produce. Even shovelware on the Wii turned out to be more profitable than even most of the blockbusters, which is why companies (most notoriously Ubisoft, but others as well) used it to fund their unprofitable HD development.
No amount of standardization will fix this, because while standards do fix a problem, it's not the right problem domain. The art department is incurring the big costs nowadays, not the code. This is like performing micro-optimizations in the wrong loops.
Pretty much everybody has a hard time grasping English, even other speakers of Indo-European languages.
All languages pick up loanwords from other languages, but English has a couple of... special... habits as far as this is concerned. Loanwords are perhaps the toughest: all languages pick up words from other languages when they come into contact, but most languages adapt the spelling and surrounding grammar into their own systems. English doesn't normally do that: it preserves the original spelling and often the original grammar, which sounds great until you realize that now you've just grafted a new set of rules into the English language for this particular situation.
That's where a lot of the complexity of English really comes from. It's actually a lot more regular than many people think, but at any given time it can work according to any of a staggering number of different rulesets, and to know which ruleset you need to use, you have to know which languages your words are coming from, which English doesn't really have a way of encoding, and very few people, even among teachers of the language, actually know what all of the rulesets are, so you probably don't know them all either (nor do I).
It's like playing Mao with words.
Abram de Swaan identified a list of twelve "supercentral languages" that he believed serve as extremely common bridges among speakers of different languages in their native dialects. If one considers the region that people in English-speaking countries typically think of as "Asia," four of the supercentral languages are native to that region: Chinese (specifically Mandarin), Hindi, Malay (of which Indonesian is a dialect), and Japanese. This list was probably a strong factor when they were deciding which languages to use.
Geographically speaking, there are actually two other languages on the list that are native to the Asian continent: Arabic and Russian. I doubt, however, that the people drawing up these lists considered the regions these languages are from to be "real Asia." Make of that what you will.
(Incidentally, the other six languages are English, French, German, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swahili).
We've probably got a bunch of fakes too: they make good decoys for those who would try to attack or steal our weapons. They're probably better-made, but they're fakes all the same.
The real question is, does North Korea have any of these long-range missiles that aren't fake?
From sales of those versions. Business is a risk. That's how it works.
They could do it the old-fashioned way: by developing compelling new features that people want to use. Or has that become too difficult over the years?
How do you put Gecko on an Android device?
The reason the world needs another mobile OS is the people making the current ones. Apple wants my money, Google wants my data, and Microsoft wants my patience, and frankly, I'm not inclined to give them these things. That leaves me out in the cold unless another mobile OS comes along.
I'm glad they got one of them alive. Not that I'd have shed any tears if they'd both died -living is better than what they deserve- but when one of these folks can be taken alive, it opens up opportunities for study that could prove valuable. Definitely preferable, when it can be helped.
Nothing so grand as all that. It's a price: it just happens that that the author (or team) accepts code, rather than money, as payment.
I see nothing wrong with that. Nowadays, contributing back is simply expected behavior, but this was not always so. The current BSD/MIT/CC0/etc regime would likely not have been possible if the GPL had not existed to create and enforce this behavior pattern in the first place. One could argue that it has outlived its necessity, but it was once necessary, and one can just as easily argue that it still is.
I'm curious now: what does BSD do to enforce openness of code that the public domain doesn't (presupposing the existence of a meaningful public domain, even though there are parts of the world there this doesn't hold)?
Actually, going BSD pretty much does mean you give up on copyleft. It doesn't mean you give up on open-source, of course, but copyleft -the idea of using copyright to enforce the openness of your code- is not a part of BSD, and is in fact the Big Sticking Point of the GPL for many people.
Unfortunately, the man has something of a point. There are a lot of 14-year-old basement dwellers in the anti-CISPA crowd, and a lot of people who just want to get their entertainment without paying for it. In short, a significant number of the people who oppose CISPA are doing it for the wrong reasons. CISPA is wrong, but so are they.
Those of us who care about the real issues might do well to disassociate ourselves from the creepers and the pirates. Even they need protection, but let's not kid ourselves, that's more a matter of logistics than principle: protection is meaningless if it doesn't protect everyone, and so they get a pass in order to make it work at all. Their voices in this debate only harm the side they fight for. But this presents a problem: how the heck would a community like this disassociate itself from its less savory members?
We do tend to draw pictures of globes with America in the center (or top-center), though.
They should totally photoshop KJU's head onto some Chris-Chan stuff.