i'm attacking the notion that because the "war" goes on forever it is invalid. you also need to take the trash out every thursday. is that an argument to end "the war on trash"? no, some functions of society are just maintenance functions that never end
i'm not defending us drug policy, it's poor tactics. and some substances need to be legal. but i'm attacking the notion that just because there's demand and supply for something, therefore it needs to be accepted
example: something like meth has a lot of supply and demand. meth also creates horrible costs to individuals and society. such that attacking the meth supply and demand chain has direct costs, and secondary costs. but if meth use is minimized to some extent because of the "war", that pays dividends in the form of less overall costs for individuals and society in regards to the harm that meth does. such that fighting meth is worth it
it's a case-by-case basis. just because marijuana is legalized (and should be legalized) doesn't mean all drugs should be. each substance has to be evaluated individually
I never said that it had to or should be accepted. I said merely that where there is demand there will be supply. Someone, somewhere is going to step up quickly to fill the gap left by the takedown of the Silk Road. Economics 101.
... the story only shows that German media outlets are not familiar with US entry regulations. He says that he was denied a visa last year, which automatically disqualifies him from the visa waiver program. This is just a garden-variety ESTA issue, and most likely has nothing to do with his stance of the NSA surveillance.
No way to know as he was not given any reason for his visa rejection either.
Well perhaps the point isn't that any new algorithms are uncrackable so much as they present a more considerable obstacle to being deciphered. If the current NIST-approved cyphers have been deliberately weakened by the NSA, its so that its easier and more importantly faster for them to decipher the text - with their available computing power and budget they can probably do a lot of these on the fly.
If you increase the difficulty of that task, and if its implementation is more widely spread, then they may have to prioritize what they attempt to decipher because it isn't a weakened algorithm, therefore there might be some added security in that even if they *can* crack your ciphertext, its not worth bothering to do so unless some other factor marks you as a person of interest. Not much but better than nothing and we will likely never know the NSA's true capabilities anyways.
Agreed - the only comment I would have is that a data haven is automatically going to be a 'person of interest' and thus a target.
The funny thing is that can backfire. This was something talked about on the Cypherpunks list when it was on toad.com. One discussion recommended people use a service such as an offshore data haven (when they came about) for everything. The result would be that there would be so much chaff that any spying organization [1] would be spending a lot of time trying to crack stuff just to find that they just wasted a bunch of CPU time on a TrueCrypt volume of someone's MP3 stash.
There are plainer reasons for stashing items in an "offshore data haven". Protection against geographic events, so if something the size of Hurricane Tip slams against part of the US, critical data is still retrievable.
Of course, there is one big issue with offshore data havens... how are they recompensed for the data they store, and what keeps them from deciding to hold data for ransom. If they find that they have an encrypted data blob from a company whose offices are completely demolished, they can demand a price for access and a company would either pay up or close up.
[1]: NSA, ISI, FSS, PLA, etc. The US was outed, but there are numerous other players.
Well...arguably the US is big enough that no single disaster could knock out data centers at the far ends. For the next point, one might keep the data in two different havens in case one of them decides to hold it for ransom (which seems unlikely to me but okay, why not). One might argue that the data haven would sell the data to the US as well, for that matter.
I suspect that there is probably not much of anything - certainly nothing on the open market - that the NSA would not already have cracked anyway.
I'm not going to say that is impossible, but to believe it would require some serious high level paranoia. It would imply that the NSA is decades ahead of academia in not only cryptography but almost every area of computer science. Considering how inefficient and incompetent the rest of the government is (even the DoD, i.e. unencrypted drones) I just cannot believe that is the case. They don't have that many smart people working there, in comparison with ALL of the rest of the world.
Why would they have to be ahead in every other area of computer science? The key to encryption is cryptography and the NSA was formed to crack code - it is their entire reason to exist.
Yes I think that they have some of the smartest people in the world who do absolutely nothing but break codes and on top of that, yes I think that they have more budget and more computing power than anyone else in the world to do it with.
I know someone who used to work for the NSA and he told me that they are twenty years ahead of the commercial market. That was about ten years ago but I doubt that they've failed to continue to be well ahead.
While I think that NIST related crypto algorithms are probably well compromised by the NSA I suspect that there is probably not much of anything - certainly nothing on the open market - that the NSA would not already have cracked anyway.
Same thing for 'offshore data havens'. If it's visible it gives the NSA a target of interest and the fact that it's offshore isn't even going to slow them down when they attack it. People moving to such havens might find themselves being looked at all the more closely than someone keeping their data in less interesting places.
I think the best bet of keeping your info private (from the NSA) is going to be to avoid attracting attention to start with.
Oh I understood - was just pointing out that organized gambling is stealing in both ways it's just that in one direction it's legal to game the system and the other it's not.
On the other hand, every other smartphone seems to be working just fine with a $2 standard microUSB cable.
Not talking about the same thing. For charging, you are correct, however if the cable is used for data transfer then you have to take into consideration that the throughput of microUSB does not compare to the throughput (and arguably functionality) of 'lighting'.
Well I wonder how apple users will relate to this walled garden business now.
With post-hoc rationalization (and antipathy towards those who point it out).
Apple buyer here.
I am responding with annoyance at apple and resignation that if I want a nice machine / OS that works very well without having to spend too much time on administrative crap that I'll have to pay for it.
Do I like this kind of bullshit?
No.
Will I tolerate it because I haven't found an alternative that I prefer?
Regarding low quality goods being produced in china, the majority of these goods come into existence this way: 1. Company calls up a Chinese manufacturer to get a price quote for a doodad they designed. 2. Chinese manufacturer replies with a quote. 3. Company asks if they can make it cheaper. 4. Chinese manufacturer says yes 5. Company asks how cheap 6. Chinese manufacturer quotes a bottom price 7. Company says great, you got a deal. 8. Market is flooded with cheap and crappy doodads.
There is often a disconnect between western companies and Chinese manufacturers regarding how they negotiate and do business which leads to the above situation. Then there is those who really just want to manufacture really cheap doodads to make a quick buck.
There's a shorter path that occurs as well, yielding the same result: 1. Company outsources manufacturing to China 2. Company loses control of the manufacturing of the product 3. Some number of Chinese companies pop up making exactly the same product as cheaply as possible. 4. Market is flooded with cheap and crappy doodads
Why would a 'for profit' corporation go out of its way to protect the rights of consumers that don't even know they're having their privacy invaded to start with?
This is in the article "We tried to contact developers to notify our findings, but with no luck: we wrote an e-mail to Tencent technical support both on August 30th and on September 3th, but we got no reply."
This is a common problem when dealing with Chinese companies. They are so accustomed to dealing face to face that they forget to check other means of communication. I frequently find that I need to send an SMS to a Chinese person if I have sent them email, asking them to check their email.
I think this isn't actually a troll... but a REAL posit...
The first jobs to go when there are jobs automatable by real AI should be legislatures.
Let a real intelegence that can't be biased by the current bullshit lobbying system write laws balanced for the common good of EVERYONE and reduce legislatures to one or two people per state as that can vote up or down.
Obviously lots of holes in that half baked idea, but our major societal problem in the U.S. is a lack of real leadership. If you make the leadership job simpler and not affected by the plauge of the lobbyist then maybe we can have a society that works for everyone and not just the select few that can PAY for their free speech.
More likely the politicians will use the media to create a scare around AIs and the war against terror will become the war against AI.
How long will it take for the students to find out this is going on? My bet is that they already know.
So how long will it be before a student who isn't thrilled with having adults e-stalk them decides to leave a "private" comment about how Principal Lovegood is just a bit too handsy?
As creepy as this is, if you broadcast your life in the clear using social media then you relay are in no position to complain about people listening too you!
Depends.
If the [ private | public ] agency doing the spying on the kids uses false pretenses to encourage FB 'friendship' in order to snoop that wouldn't be the same thing as 'broadcasting your life in the clear'. More of a multicast to approved receivers.
The boy should be happy they didn't notice his weapon of mass destruction. A phone battery can explode and he very well could have used it to kill several classmates.
Slashdot Mirror
Did anyone else have an immediate image of choosing between a machine gun (ineffective) and a flame thrower (effective) on reading the summary?
i'm attacking the notion that because the "war" goes on forever it is invalid. you also need to take the trash out every thursday. is that an argument to end "the war on trash"? no, some functions of society are just maintenance functions that never end
i'm not defending us drug policy, it's poor tactics. and some substances need to be legal. but i'm attacking the notion that just because there's demand and supply for something, therefore it needs to be accepted
example: something like meth has a lot of supply and demand. meth also creates horrible costs to individuals and society. such that attacking the meth supply and demand chain has direct costs, and secondary costs. but if meth use is minimized to some extent because of the "war", that pays dividends in the form of less overall costs for individuals and society in regards to the harm that meth does. such that fighting meth is worth it
it's a case-by-case basis. just because marijuana is legalized (and should be legalized) doesn't mean all drugs should be. each substance has to be evaluated individually
I never said that it had to or should be accepted. I said merely that where there is demand there will be supply. Someone, somewhere is going to step up quickly to fill the gap left by the takedown of the Silk Road. Economics 101.
Where there is demand, there will be supply.
Even if Roberts goes down with the sinking of the Silk Road site, I give it a week before there's some replacement site up and running.
Probably more due to the fact that there simply isn't anyone around to process his visa and let him into the country.
Yes must have been lunchtime in New Delhi...
... the story only shows that German media outlets are not familiar with US entry regulations. He says that he was denied a visa last year, which automatically disqualifies him from the visa waiver program. This is just a garden-variety ESTA issue, and most likely has nothing to do with his stance of the NSA surveillance.
No way to know as he was not given any reason for his visa rejection either.
Well perhaps the point isn't that any new algorithms are uncrackable so much as they present a more considerable obstacle to being deciphered. If the current NIST-approved cyphers have been deliberately weakened by the NSA, its so that its easier and more importantly faster for them to decipher the text - with their available computing power and budget they can probably do a lot of these on the fly.
If you increase the difficulty of that task, and if its implementation is more widely spread, then they may have to prioritize what they attempt to decipher because it isn't a weakened algorithm, therefore there might be some added security in that even if they *can* crack your ciphertext, its not worth bothering to do so unless some other factor marks you as a person of interest. Not much but better than nothing and we will likely never know the NSA's true capabilities anyways.
Agreed - the only comment I would have is that a data haven is automatically going to be a 'person of interest' and thus a target.
The funny thing is that can backfire. This was something talked about on the Cypherpunks list when it was on toad.com. One discussion recommended people use a service such as an offshore data haven (when they came about) for everything. The result would be that there would be so much chaff that any spying organization [1] would be spending a lot of time trying to crack stuff just to find that they just wasted a bunch of CPU time on a TrueCrypt volume of someone's MP3 stash.
There are plainer reasons for stashing items in an "offshore data haven". Protection against geographic events, so if something the size of Hurricane Tip slams against part of the US, critical data is still retrievable.
Of course, there is one big issue with offshore data havens... how are they recompensed for the data they store, and what keeps them from deciding to hold data for ransom. If they find that they have an encrypted data blob from a company whose offices are completely demolished, they can demand a price for access and a company would either pay up or close up.
[1]: NSA, ISI, FSS, PLA, etc. The US was outed, but there are numerous other players.
Well...arguably the US is big enough that no single disaster could knock out data centers at the far ends. For the next point, one might keep the data in two different havens in case one of them decides to hold it for ransom (which seems unlikely to me but okay, why not). One might argue that the data haven would sell the data to the US as well, for that matter.
I suspect that there is probably not much of anything - certainly nothing on the open market - that the NSA would not already have cracked anyway.
I'm not going to say that is impossible, but to believe it would require some serious high level paranoia. It would imply that the NSA is decades ahead of academia in not only cryptography but almost every area of computer science. Considering how inefficient and incompetent the rest of the government is (even the DoD, i.e. unencrypted drones) I just cannot believe that is the case. They don't have that many smart people working there, in comparison with ALL of the rest of the world.
Why would they have to be ahead in every other area of computer science? The key to encryption is cryptography and the NSA was formed to crack code - it is their entire reason to exist.
Yes I think that they have some of the smartest people in the world who do absolutely nothing but break codes and on top of that, yes I think that they have more budget and more computing power than anyone else in the world to do it with.
I know someone who used to work for the NSA and he told me that they are twenty years ahead of the commercial market. That was about ten years ago but I doubt that they've failed to continue to be well ahead.
While I think that NIST related crypto algorithms are probably well compromised by the NSA I suspect that there is probably not much of anything - certainly nothing on the open market - that the NSA would not already have cracked anyway.
Same thing for 'offshore data havens'. If it's visible it gives the NSA a target of interest and the fact that it's offshore isn't even going to slow them down when they attack it. People moving to such havens might find themselves being looked at all the more closely than someone keeping their data in less interesting places.
I think the best bet of keeping your info private (from the NSA) is going to be to avoid attracting attention to start with.
Please re-read for comprehension....
The wrong people are the ones who will kill you.
In no way am I saying stealing is right.
Oh I understood - was just pointing out that organized gambling is stealing in both ways it's just that in one direction it's legal to game the system and the other it's not.
Seems to be a somewhat self-limiting problem. Users will die off fairly rapidly.
Which makes you wonder who gains from selling this product.
Certainly not drug dealers as they lose their market so quickly.
...when you've stolen too much from the wrong people.
So it's stealing when you control the odds but it's not stealing when the 'wrong people' control the odds?
Just who is stealing from whom here?
On the other hand, every other smartphone seems to be working just fine with a $2 standard microUSB cable.
Not talking about the same thing. For charging, you are correct, however if the cable is used for data transfer then you have to take into consideration that the throughput of microUSB does not compare to the throughput (and arguably functionality) of 'lighting'.
Well I wonder how apple users will relate to this walled garden business now.
With post-hoc rationalization (and antipathy towards those who point it out).
Apple buyer here.
I am responding with annoyance at apple and resignation that if I want a nice machine / OS that works very well without having to spend too much time on administrative crap that I'll have to pay for it.
Do I like this kind of bullshit?
No.
Will I tolerate it because I haven't found an alternative that I prefer?
Yes.
Regarding low quality goods being produced in china, the majority of these goods come into existence this way:
1. Company calls up a Chinese manufacturer to get a price quote for a doodad they designed.
2. Chinese manufacturer replies with a quote.
3. Company asks if they can make it cheaper.
4. Chinese manufacturer says yes
5. Company asks how cheap
6. Chinese manufacturer quotes a bottom price
7. Company says great, you got a deal.
8. Market is flooded with cheap and crappy doodads.
There is often a disconnect between western companies and Chinese manufacturers regarding how they negotiate and do business which leads to the above situation. Then there is those who really just want to manufacture really cheap doodads to make a quick buck.
There's a shorter path that occurs as well, yielding the same result:
1. Company outsources manufacturing to China
2. Company loses control of the manufacturing of the product
3. Some number of Chinese companies pop up making exactly the same product as cheaply as possible.
4. Market is flooded with cheap and crappy doodads
Why would a 'for profit' corporation go out of its way to protect the rights of consumers that don't even know they're having their privacy invaded to start with?
USA needs to get rid of the secret courts.
Now we can CHANGE carriers.
Maybe...
Presumably you're still locked into some contract that went along with getting that shiny new phone.
This is in the article
"We tried to contact developers to notify our findings, but with no luck: we wrote an e-mail to Tencent technical support both on August 30th and on September 3th, but we got no reply."
This is a common problem when dealing with Chinese companies. They are so accustomed to dealing face to face that they forget to check other means of communication. I frequently find that I need to send an SMS to a Chinese person if I have sent them email, asking them to check their email.
Or they might just be ignoring you :-)
So why are you blaming the availability of guns a few posts up when the problem is letting drooling morons run schools.,/p>
Because if guns were not so easily available then there wouldn't be so many random shootings and people would not be overreacting.
Gun availability is no excuse for schools acting like kids going BANG BANG are public enemy number one.
It's not an excuse. It's a mentality - and a lack of intelligence / education / common sense.
"For example, the NSA said it will fire 90% of sysadmins and replace them with automation. Anyone in IT knows that idea is 100% stupid. "
Assuming the NSA uses the same level of AI that we have access to...which is likely but not certain.
I think this isn't actually a troll... but a REAL posit...
The first jobs to go when there are jobs automatable by real AI should be legislatures.
Let a real intelegence that can't be biased by the current bullshit lobbying system write laws balanced for the common good of EVERYONE and reduce legislatures to one or two people per state as that can vote up or down.
Obviously lots of holes in that half baked idea, but our major societal problem in the U.S. is a lack of real leadership. If you make the leadership job simpler and not affected by the plauge of the lobbyist then maybe we can have a society that works for everyone and not just the select few that can PAY for their free speech.
More likely the politicians will use the media to create a scare around AIs and the war against terror will become the war against AI.
How long will it take for the students to find out this is going on? My bet is that they already know.
So how long will it be before a student who isn't thrilled with having adults e-stalk them decides to leave a "private" comment about how Principal Lovegood is just a bit too handsy?
Brilliant :-)
As creepy as this is, if you broadcast your life in the clear using social media then you relay are in no position to complain about people listening too you!
Depends.
If the [ private | public ] agency doing the spying on the kids uses false pretenses to encourage FB 'friendship' in order to snoop that wouldn't be the same thing as 'broadcasting your life in the clear'. More of a multicast to approved receivers.
The boy should be happy they didn't notice his weapon of mass destruction. A phone battery can explode and he very well could have used it to kill several classmates.
They're probably saving that for the Fart Bomb...