The NSA plays word games all the time... Take for instance the statement "We don't search and store data on 10's of 1000's of Americans".
That statement is factually true if the NSA searches and stores data on the other 330 million Americans. If they exclude their buddies, federal judges, anyone in the FBI, CIA and other three letter government agencies, that would be your 10's of 1000's Americans.
No it's not. 330 million is 33,000 tens of thousands.
There are different ways you might be contacted by the government.
For example, maybe somebody who uses your website stole something. Suppose for example the FBI suspects that person of having sold it to someone else who uses your website and is looking for evidence of the same. So they get a warrant and go throught is one person's email, don't find the evidence they were looking for leave.
In another example, maybe one person who uses your website had his car washed by a guy who got an email from a dude who was seen in a cafe with a suspected terrorist. They issue a National Security Letter that threatens you with horrible consequences if you divulge anything, seize a copy of every record on your site going back to 2005, discover another 50 people who got messages from the guy whose car was washed and by the associative property of terrorism, they're terrorists, you're a terrorist and everybody who uses your site is a terrorist.
See the difference? It's not about being contacted by the government. It's about being swept up in a potentially vast and unwarranted (literally) investigation when you didn't do anything wrong.
Chinese is a... a bunch of mutually unintelligible but related languages, similar to the group of languages spoken in western Europe today that evolved in similar ways over a similar period of time. They're more able to communicate across the language barriers because their written language is ideographic.
A reasonable summary, based on various linguistically knowledgeable source that I've read. A useful comparison seems to be with the Romance languages. The Chinese politically-based practice of calling their languages "dialects" is often explained by imagining that Europeans did something similar: All the Romance languages would be considered "dialects" of Latin. Only Latin would be taught in schools, and other languages would be written using Latin spelling and grammar. This was tried for some time in Europe, but they finally came to their senses during the last few centuries, and developed reasonable spelling systems for each of the modern "Latin dialects" such as French, Portuguese, and R[ou]manian. Latin writing simply doesn't work well for those modern languges.
I've seen criticism of the "All Chinese dialects are written the same" based on this. It was true a few centuries ago that most literate people in Europe wrote the same, in Latin, but this only made communication possible with others who had learned Latin. It wasn't really usable as a way of writing Italian or Spanish, though; it was just writing in the predecessor language. Similarly, the various Chinese languages are different enough in grammar and vocabulary that using "standard Chinese" writing doesn't really constitute writing their native language; it is really just writing in the predecessor language (or its modern descendant spoken in one major northern city;-).
But it can be interesting to read discussions of such topics by linguistically-naive people, to see just how confused they usually are about language-related topics. And we've seen a bit of linguistic nonsense here, both by the native speakers of various Chinese languages, and by others just reporting what they've learned from other misinformed sources.
An interesting point about the Romance languages is that their speakers often do find the others' written forms easier to understand than the spoken forms. This is because the spelling systems have tended to preserve original Latin spellings that hide many of the phonetic differences in the way that letters are used. This makes understanding the writing possible in some cases where the pronunciation would be too different to understand without special study.
Something similar does seem to be partially successful with Chinese writing. But in both cases, the result is often misunderstandings, or simple confusion about what that funny writing could possibly mean. And, like the Romance languages, the Chinese have invented a lot of new characters to improve understandability. English has done this, too. Thus, Latin didn't have the letters 'J', 'K' or 'W', which many European languages find useful. Cantonese similarly has a long list of characters never used in Mandarin, to fix some of the major problems with using Mandarin to express Cantonese. Most of the other Chinese languages are simply not written, because the standard writing system doesn't work for them.
But I wouldn't expect the misunderstandings in such topics to disappear. People would have to pick up some actual linguistic understanding for that to happen, and that'd be too much work.
The only objection I have to that is that that Romance languages definite descendants of a language we know -- Latin. With Chinese the common ancestral spoken language is not so clearly identifiable. Also, I don't think it's known whether Chinese should be thought of as a group of languages that evolved from a common ancestor in historic times or whether their common roots are prehistoric and pre-written.
Chinese is a big group of spoken languages and calling the different languages dialects is misleading. They're a bunch of mutually unintelligible but related languages, similar to the group of languages spoken in western Europe today that evolved in similar ways over a similar period of time. They're more able to communicate across the language barriers because their written language is ideographic.
The trouble everyone is grappling with here is that they want a smart watch to be some kind of smartphone-like thing. We've seen it work in comics, right? Dick Tracey and all. The only trouble is that the size of things people want to put on their wrists isn't big enough for much of a display, isn't big enough for much of a data entry device and isn't big enough for much of a battery. You just can't pack a lot of function on there, much less do it attractively, much less do it in a form factor where it becomes a fashion accessory, particularly for ladies since ladies are used to tiny watches.
I think most useful to the public would be a list of what security standards and methods are presently believed to be most secure and those known to be insecure and/or backdoored.
It doesn't take reactive chemicals. Just seal a small amount of gas in the balloon when it's on Earth, say, less than 1cc of nitrogen. When it gets to space, it will inflate as soon as you let it out of the enclosure.
The inflatable antenna lets a CubeSat transmit data back to Earth at a distance seven times farther than that of existing CubeSat communications."
When are they going to be orbiting cubesats 7x higher than they do now? No, what such an antenna can do is allow you to operate at 50x less transmitter power (or 50x the data rate at the same power). Or receive at 50x the data rate. That's all good. but we won't be sending any cubesats past the moon. Spacecraft designed for high orbits must be designed for long missions, and cubesats are designed for short missions because they must compromise something to make things fit in tiny spaces.
Privacy is not the issue. Your license plate number is public information. Anybody can see it and the government already knows what it is because they issued it to you. They are already using it to record when you go on toll roads and the like. The issue is why would you, the driver, be willing to pay the extra $150 per vehicle (or whatever it is) for these new plates? What's in it for you?
Isn't it already illegal under the USC Title 18, Section 1030 subsections (a)(2)(A) and (C)
, (a)(6)(A)?
To answer my own question, it most certainly would except for this little gem: USC Title 18, 1030(f) This section does not prohibit any lawfully authorized investigative, protective, or intelligence activity of a law enforcement agency of the United States, a State, or a political subdivision of a State, or of an intelligence agency of the United States.
See they're "lawfully authorized" or so they claim. I would argue that planting back doors in commonly used encryption is fraud and isn't lawfully authorized, but hey, it's the government and who's going to prosecute them? The authority to do so under the law rests with the Secret Service and the Federal Bureau of Investigation and they're as complicit as anybody could possibly be.
The proposed legislation doesn't go far enough. It needs to not only prohibit them from backdooring, undermining, lying to the public about the security of or acting as a man in the middle with regard to encrypted communications and declassify and disclose to the public all such past actions.
It needs to make explicit in law the conditions under which any agency of the government may intercept, record or attempt to decrypt foreign or domestic communications and those conditions need to be very limited in scope: communications of individuals specifically named or otherwise individually identified as having been or suspected of being involved in crimes or conspiracies to violate US law, agents of foreign governments or criminal organizations (including terrorists) and their known or suspected associates and communication devices operated by the same. It should be specifically forbidden to scoop up general communications, with the intent of combing through it later to find bad guys and there should be a time limit on how long communications can be stored at all unless those specific communications are identified to a court as pursuant to a specifically identified investigation.
Unfortunately, we're stuck with a problem of who's watching the watchers unless we want to modify the Constitution to allow State governments to go after Federal officials for issues like this.
If you're not concerned, you should be. You might not be worried about the government having access to your private information because you figure you're not a target and if they come after you, there's a lot worse they can do than read your data. But in a year or two thieves will be able to crack what the NSA can crack now. They don't want to put you in jail. They just want your money and if you think the NSA hasn't much respect for the law, watch how little the thieves have.
Some of those issues are addressed in the marketplace if you count free sources like AOSP, xda-developers and cyanogenmod. With those, you can put a clean Android version on your phone with root access. Unfortunately, Android isn't designed to hide permissions information from the applications. They know if you've disabled a permission and most of them will simply crash if they don't have the permissions they want. Downgrading an app isn't possible through the store, but you can archive it either on your phone (e.g. with Titanium Backup) or on an external computer from which you can side-load once you have rooted your phone.
I'd also like an option for "Don't offer me any new versions of this app. I <3 <3 <3 it the way it is and want to keep it forever." and "Install new app alongside the existing installation instead of replacing it." The same goes for the OS, but with Android, there's a solution; with ClockWorkMod recovery or other similar bootloaders, you can save complete images of your phone's system, setup and installed apps so if you don't like the new system after you upgrade, you can downgrade your phone's system software and installs.
No, you're the one who's lying.
1. The 30pin iPod/iPhone connector was not and the Lightning connector is not a standard connector. Yes, they're easy to find because, fuck, it's Apple and they're popular for now.
2. It won't sync to YOUR computer via anything but iTunes. You can sync it to "the cloud" i.e. Apple's proprietary server and then sync THAT to YOUR computer. The iPhone doesn't want to mount as a mass storage device, though I suppose there must be some way (not provided by Apple) to make it do so or work around its proprietary interface. One way or another Apple wants to handle your data and doesn't want you to handle it yourself. You're happy being locked into their walled garden? Fine for you, until you want out.
3. Nobody I know who has an iPhone is happy with their syncing to a Windows or Linux computer. Maybe I just know people who expect better?
4. And you're happy with their controlling what software you're ALLOWED to put on YOUR PHONE. Might I point out that it's YOUR PHONE and nobody should have to ALLOW you to put software on your phone.
5. On iPhone, you don't have one-touch dial or text widgets or widgets that display useful data, like mailbox contents or weather. Check out what your buddy's Android phone can do to see what a more flexible interface can look like.
"take on former Nokia engineers and set them to building phones again — this time, running Android"
Nokia needed to innovate, and an example of this is to build the same phone everyone else is? Good luck with that.
It would get them in the mindset of building phones with modern hardware. A separate arm of the company could work on building a new OS with new software capabilities and they could run it when it's ready on their phones. Make it interable with Android apps and if possible also iPhone apps.
"Apple has arrived at a very safe place, it is responsible for something everybody loves, so it feels it has to keep it going."
Not quite. Apple is responsible for something many people love. Not me. I much prefer the features of Android to the point that I wouldn't consider an iPhone. iOS is an inferior product for functionality (specifically, customizability of the user interface) and it doesn't play well with non-Apple software and has excessively restrictive controls on what the user can do with their device. I have other issues with Google (their data use policies). There's room in my mind and wallet for a new player with better for the customer data use policies and an Android-like feature set.
Unfortunately, Trayvon Martin wasn't around to tell his side of the story, which certainly would have been that he was minding his own business when George Zimmerman approached him and threatened him. George Zimmerman at no point in even his own story was minding his own business and acting in a peaceable manner.
The military recruited Snowden and began training him to do what he did when he was a teenager. A young maleable mind and years of indoctrination and it didn't take.
Also the generalization fallacy was more on the part of petry who commented about the young being "still duped by propaganda."
All else aside, if you think the NSA breaks codes in order to prevent civilian casualties, or for "charity", you have another thing coming. They do it to provide intelligence to the US government to facilitate furthering its national interest, in whatever form that may take. And if you think civilian casualties or chemical weapons are the actual reason we are considering whether or not to attack Syria, you have yet another thing coming.
Well, yes. The NSA breaks codes to provide intelligence to the US government. We've known that for a long time. It's not a secret.
And I do think the chemical weapons are the issue -- not civilian casualties. The government hardly raised an eyebrow for two years while the Assad government murdered its citizens by the thousands with bullets, shells, grenades and fuel-air bombs and anything else they could think of. It's not like anything else changed. The chemical weapons are the only difference I see.
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The NSA plays word games all the time... Take for instance the statement "We don't search and store data on 10's of 1000's of Americans".
That statement is factually true if the NSA searches and stores data on the other 330 million Americans. If they exclude their buddies, federal judges, anyone in the FBI, CIA and other three letter government agencies, that would be your 10's of 1000's Americans.
No it's not. 330 million is 33,000 tens of thousands.
There are different ways you might be contacted by the government.
For example, maybe somebody who uses your website stole something. Suppose for example the FBI suspects that person of having sold it to someone else who uses your website and is looking for evidence of the same. So they get a warrant and go throught is one person's email, don't find the evidence they were looking for leave.
In another example, maybe one person who uses your website had his car washed by a guy who got an email from a dude who was seen in a cafe with a suspected terrorist. They issue a National Security Letter that threatens you with horrible consequences if you divulge anything, seize a copy of every record on your site going back to 2005, discover another 50 people who got messages from the guy whose car was washed and by the associative property of terrorism, they're terrorists, you're a terrorist and everybody who uses your site is a terrorist.
See the difference? It's not about being contacted by the government. It's about being swept up in a potentially vast and unwarranted (literally) investigation when you didn't do anything wrong.
Chinese is a ... a bunch of mutually unintelligible but related languages, similar to the group of languages spoken in western Europe today that evolved in similar ways over a similar period of time. They're more able to communicate across the language barriers because their written language is ideographic.
A reasonable summary, based on various linguistically knowledgeable source that I've read. A useful comparison seems to be with the Romance languages. The Chinese politically-based practice of calling their languages "dialects" is often explained by imagining that Europeans did something similar: All the Romance languages would be considered "dialects" of Latin. Only Latin would be taught in schools, and other languages would be written using Latin spelling and grammar. This was tried for some time in Europe, but they finally came to their senses during the last few centuries, and developed reasonable spelling systems for each of the modern "Latin dialects" such as French, Portuguese, and R[ou]manian. Latin writing simply doesn't work well for those modern languges.
I've seen criticism of the "All Chinese dialects are written the same" based on this. It was true a few centuries ago that most literate people in Europe wrote the same, in Latin, but this only made communication possible with others who had learned Latin. It wasn't really usable as a way of writing Italian or Spanish, though; it was just writing in the predecessor language. Similarly, the various Chinese languages are different enough in grammar and vocabulary that using "standard Chinese" writing doesn't really constitute writing their native language; it is really just writing in the predecessor language (or its modern descendant spoken in one major northern city ;-).
But it can be interesting to read discussions of such topics by linguistically-naive people, to see just how confused they usually are about language-related topics. And we've seen a bit of linguistic nonsense here, both by the native speakers of various Chinese languages, and by others just reporting what they've learned from other misinformed sources.
An interesting point about the Romance languages is that their speakers often do find the others' written forms easier to understand than the spoken forms. This is because the spelling systems have tended to preserve original Latin spellings that hide many of the phonetic differences in the way that letters are used. This makes understanding the writing possible in some cases where the pronunciation would be too different to understand without special study.
Something similar does seem to be partially successful with Chinese writing. But in both cases, the result is often misunderstandings, or simple confusion about what that funny writing could possibly mean. And, like the Romance languages, the Chinese have invented a lot of new characters to improve understandability. English has done this, too. Thus, Latin didn't have the letters 'J', 'K' or 'W', which many European languages find useful. Cantonese similarly has a long list of characters never used in Mandarin, to fix some of the major problems with using Mandarin to express Cantonese. Most of the other Chinese languages are simply not written, because the standard writing system doesn't work for them.
But I wouldn't expect the misunderstandings in such topics to disappear. People would have to pick up some actual linguistic understanding for that to happen, and that'd be too much work.
The only objection I have to that is that that Romance languages definite descendants of a language we know -- Latin. With Chinese the common ancestral spoken language is not so clearly identifiable. Also, I don't think it's known whether Chinese should be thought of as a group of languages that evolved from a common ancestor in historic times or whether their common roots are prehistoric and pre-written.
Why should anything impractical be done at all?
Keep telling yourself that, buddy.
Chinese is a big group of spoken languages and calling the different languages dialects is misleading. They're a bunch of mutually unintelligible but related languages, similar to the group of languages spoken in western Europe today that evolved in similar ways over a similar period of time. They're more able to communicate across the language barriers because their written language is ideographic.
You don't. Unless they present it at your trial.
I'm not sure about that. People survive poticial rallies all the time, the source of expanding hot gas directly behind the podium.
I've seen what that does to their behavior sometimes. It's not as harmless as you think.
The trouble everyone is grappling with here is that they want a smart watch to be some kind of smartphone-like thing. We've seen it work in comics, right? Dick Tracey and all. The only trouble is that the size of things people want to put on their wrists isn't big enough for much of a display, isn't big enough for much of a data entry device and isn't big enough for much of a battery. You just can't pack a lot of function on there, much less do it attractively, much less do it in a form factor where it becomes a fashion accessory, particularly for ladies since ladies are used to tiny watches.
it's coming for us. we're all dead! of course, we will be by the time it gets here.
I can tell you're excited because you're starting to sound a little squeaky.
I think most useful to the public would be a list of what security standards and methods are presently believed to be most secure and those known to be insecure and/or backdoored.
It doesn't take reactive chemicals. Just seal a small amount of gas in the balloon when it's on Earth, say, less than 1cc of nitrogen. When it gets to space, it will inflate as soon as you let it out of the enclosure.
The inflatable antenna lets a CubeSat transmit data back to Earth at a distance seven times farther than that of existing CubeSat communications."
When are they going to be orbiting cubesats 7x higher than they do now? No, what such an antenna can do is allow you to operate at 50x less transmitter power (or 50x the data rate at the same power). Or receive at 50x the data rate. That's all good. but we won't be sending any cubesats past the moon. Spacecraft designed for high orbits must be designed for long missions, and cubesats are designed for short missions because they must compromise something to make things fit in tiny spaces.
Privacy is not the issue. Your license plate number is public information. Anybody can see it and the government already knows what it is because they issued it to you. They are already using it to record when you go on toll roads and the like. The issue is why would you, the driver, be willing to pay the extra $150 per vehicle (or whatever it is) for these new plates? What's in it for you?
Isn't it already illegal under the USC Title 18, Section 1030 subsections (a)(2)(A) and (C) , (a)(6)(A)?
To answer my own question, it most certainly would except for this little gem:
USC Title 18, 1030(f) This section does not prohibit any lawfully authorized investigative, protective, or intelligence activity of a law enforcement agency of the United States, a State, or a political subdivision of a State, or of an intelligence agency of the United States.
See they're "lawfully authorized" or so they claim. I would argue that planting back doors in commonly used encryption is fraud and isn't lawfully authorized, but hey, it's the government and who's going to prosecute them? The authority to do so under the law rests with the Secret Service and the Federal Bureau of Investigation and they're as complicit as anybody could possibly be.
The proposed legislation doesn't go far enough. It needs to not only prohibit them from backdooring, undermining, lying to the public about the security of or acting as a man in the middle with regard to encrypted communications and declassify and disclose to the public all such past actions.
It needs to make explicit in law the conditions under which any agency of the government may intercept, record or attempt to decrypt foreign or domestic communications and those conditions need to be very limited in scope: communications of individuals specifically named or otherwise individually identified as having been or suspected of being involved in crimes or conspiracies to violate US law, agents of foreign governments or criminal organizations (including terrorists) and their known or suspected associates and communication devices operated by the same. It should be specifically forbidden to scoop up general communications, with the intent of combing through it later to find bad guys and there should be a time limit on how long communications can be stored at all unless those specific communications are identified to a court as pursuant to a specifically identified investigation.
Unfortunately, we're stuck with a problem of who's watching the watchers unless we want to modify the Constitution to allow State governments to go after Federal officials for issues like this.
Fuck Lyle Lovett, whoever the fuck that is. And fuck you too.
Isn't that what TechyImmigrant was getting at?
If you're not concerned, you should be. You might not be worried about the government having access to your private information because you figure you're not a target and if they come after you, there's a lot worse they can do than read your data. But in a year or two thieves will be able to crack what the NSA can crack now. They don't want to put you in jail. They just want your money and if you think the NSA hasn't much respect for the law, watch how little the thieves have.
Some of those issues are addressed in the marketplace if you count free sources like AOSP, xda-developers and cyanogenmod. With those, you can put a clean Android version on your phone with root access. Unfortunately, Android isn't designed to hide permissions information from the applications. They know if you've disabled a permission and most of them will simply crash if they don't have the permissions they want. Downgrading an app isn't possible through the store, but you can archive it either on your phone (e.g. with Titanium Backup) or on an external computer from which you can side-load once you have rooted your phone.
I'd also like an option for "Don't offer me any new versions of this app. I <3 <3 <3 it the way it is and want to keep it forever." and "Install new app alongside the existing installation instead of replacing it." The same goes for the OS, but with Android, there's a solution; with ClockWorkMod recovery or other similar bootloaders, you can save complete images of your phone's system, setup and installed apps so if you don't like the new system after you upgrade, you can downgrade your phone's system software and installs.
Most of those problems are the same in iOS, BTW.
No, you're the one who's lying. 1. The 30pin iPod/iPhone connector was not and the Lightning connector is not a standard connector. Yes, they're easy to find because, fuck, it's Apple and they're popular for now.
2. It won't sync to YOUR computer via anything but iTunes. You can sync it to "the cloud" i.e. Apple's proprietary server and then sync THAT to YOUR computer. The iPhone doesn't want to mount as a mass storage device, though I suppose there must be some way (not provided by Apple) to make it do so or work around its proprietary interface. One way or another Apple wants to handle your data and doesn't want you to handle it yourself. You're happy being locked into their walled garden? Fine for you, until you want out.
3. Nobody I know who has an iPhone is happy with their syncing to a Windows or Linux computer. Maybe I just know people who expect better?
4. And you're happy with their controlling what software you're ALLOWED to put on YOUR PHONE. Might I point out that it's YOUR PHONE and nobody should have to ALLOW you to put software on your phone.
5. On iPhone, you don't have one-touch dial or text widgets or widgets that display useful data, like mailbox contents or weather. Check out what your buddy's Android phone can do to see what a more flexible interface can look like.
"take on former Nokia engineers and set them to building phones again — this time, running Android"
Nokia needed to innovate, and an example of this is to build the same phone everyone else is? Good luck with that.
It would get them in the mindset of building phones with modern hardware. A separate arm of the company could work on building a new OS with new software capabilities and they could run it when it's ready on their phones. Make it interable with Android apps and if possible also iPhone apps.
"Apple has arrived at a very safe place, it is responsible for something everybody loves, so it feels it has to keep it going."
Not quite. Apple is responsible for something many people love. Not me. I much prefer the features of Android to the point that I wouldn't consider an iPhone. iOS is an inferior product for functionality (specifically, customizability of the user interface) and it doesn't play well with non-Apple software and has excessively restrictive controls on what the user can do with their device. I have other issues with Google (their data use policies). There's room in my mind and wallet for a new player with better for the customer data use policies and an Android-like feature set.
Unfortunately, Trayvon Martin wasn't around to tell his side of the story, which certainly would have been that he was minding his own business when George Zimmerman approached him and threatened him. George Zimmerman at no point in even his own story was minding his own business and acting in a peaceable manner.
The military recruited Snowden and began training him to do what he did when he was a teenager. A young maleable mind and years of indoctrination and it didn't take.
Also the generalization fallacy was more on the part of petry who commented about the young being "still duped by propaganda."
All else aside, if you think the NSA breaks codes in order to prevent civilian casualties, or for "charity", you have another thing coming. They do it to provide intelligence to the US government to facilitate furthering its national interest, in whatever form that may take. And if you think civilian casualties or chemical weapons are the actual reason we are considering whether or not to attack Syria, you have yet another thing coming.
Well, yes. The NSA breaks codes to provide intelligence to the US government. We've known that for a long time. It's not a secret.
And I do think the chemical weapons are the issue -- not civilian casualties. The government hardly raised an eyebrow for two years while the Assad government murdered its citizens by the thousands with bullets, shells, grenades and fuel-air bombs and anything else they could think of. It's not like anything else changed. The chemical weapons are the only difference I see.