Countries spy on each other all the time. Even allies. It has ever been thus, for centuries even. Heck, when I had a summer job at the DoD, we were sternly warned that spies can come from any country, and were provided a list of the current "hot spots." More than a couple close allies were up there in the rankings.
From my perspective, Edward Snowden would have been a whistle-blowing hero if he restricted his disclosures to borderline-illegal domestic spying. But apparently he's done a document dump of every electronic intelligence program he could get his hands on... that ain't whistleblowing, that's espionage. If the US ever gets his mitts on him, he'll almost surely never leave prison, and rightly so. Why did he EVER take a job with the NSA if he thought all forms of electronic intelligence were bad and worthy of spilling the details about to the whole world?
You are launching something into the air... quite high up, in fact. Yes, you need to file appropriate paperwork with the local equivalent of the FAA. Space issues aside, there's plain old airspace regulation to contend with.
There are two main types of cancers Mammograms detect:
A slow-growing type you'd be able to notice yourself (because of the lump) before it's too late The fast-growing type where treatment is largely futile, as it starts spreading before it can be caught by a mammogram.
There ARE some cancers detected where mammograms are useful, but the cost of the scans, biopsies, and worry for all the false positives mean it's an awful expensive (in more ways than one) way to save lives.
I price out data center space (among other things) for a living, and punching in a rack consuming that amount of power in our considerably more remote data center, and using our default profit margins, it didn't come out that much cheaper.
Wait a minute: by being called a "newspaper", a website is magically transformed from a place that should be able to post comments at will to a place that should ruthlessly police them with an iron fist?
Opinion columns/pieces are actively chosen by editorial staff. I don't know of any comments section of any website that has even implied there was any editorial control. No "editor" publishes comments on newspaper websites, no more than Slashdot's editors "publishes" comments here.
As long as the comments are clearly delineated from editorial content, I don't think it makes a whole lot of sense to hold the paper responsible for the content of the comments. (Not to mention that holding a newspaper liable under human rights laws for "offensive" speech would be laughed out of nearly any court in the US. That wouldn't stop some clowns from trying, or a particularly brain-addled judge from occasionally issuing an injunction, but it'd never stick.)
Yes, the comments of many news websites are worthless cesspools of scum and villainy. But there's better ways to prevent that than holding newspapers legally liable for comment content.
They aren't exactly asking for pocket-change here. They want fairly extensive funding in order to produce a product that will be utterly worthless in the marketplace... (running a GPU on an FPGA isn't exactly going to be at the upper-right of the price/perf graph.) It'd be nice if the top contributors at least got a copy of a reference design, not just a USB stick with source on it.
It's nice that it will be "open", but I kind of think they'll have trouble getting funding for a "hobby" project that few, if any, of the backers will even be able to use. (And even if they could, would they want to?) This would be like contributing money to a new car company so they could design (but not actually build) a hand-built, but otherwise generic, mid-size sedan, but with a riding lawnmower engine in it instead a car engine. Yeah, the whole world will get a copy of the blueprints, but why would anyone ever want to build it?
Lets see... create a website pretty much solely dedicated to the black market and money laundering (not even Russia will be too thrilled with you), attach a big "find and arrest me as soon as possible!" sign to yourself, connect it only to an anonymized network, but then leave the data on your server unencrypted?
Somebody had an over-inflated opinion of the ability of technology to protect him from law enforcement.
I never said the NSA should have the right to spy on American citizens. They shouldn't. They've done a poor job not spying on Americans.
All I said was that to perform one of their most basic functions, figuring out who is talking to whom (this is a bedrock of spycraft, going back centuries), requires Tor to be de-anonymized. They don't even have the opportunity to do the right thing (or anything) without knowing even which country the traffic is from.
And it's not as if "the terrorists" are the NSA's sole reason for existing... they do, you know, spy on foreign governments (and their agents) too. I could see Tor being a very useful method for an agent to relay information home. It's certainly a lot safer than a courier chain. (Heck, I spotted one myself once, and I ain't even a spook... saw some guy putting a single paper INTO one of those real estate flyer boxes at a Metro station near DC.)
Again, it's not all about the content of the message. Spy agencies run into encryption they can't break all the time (steganography, hash tables, one-time-pads, whatever); it's an expected part of the job. Which is why so much effort is spent on at least figuring out who is talking to whom when.
Figuring out who is talking to whom is a basic function of any functioning intelligence organization. We are talking spycraft going back centuries here... If they don't de-anonymize Tor, how are they even supposed to know if the communications are foreign or domestic?
I'm not saying the information cannot be mis-used, or that it's impossible for them to retain records they should not be retaining. All I'm saying is that an anonymous Tor utterly keeps them from doing one of their most basic jobs. They don't even have the opportunity to do the right thing (or anything, really) without knowing where the members are from.
Gee, an organization tasked with intercepting and interpreting electronic communications wants to intercept and interpret electronic communications! Who woulda thunk it?
The NSA has certainly done a poor job keeping it's nose clean, but personally, I'd be rather disappointed if they weren't trying to de-anonymize Tor! Figuring out who is talking to who, and how often, called Signals Intelligence, is the bedrock of intelligence analysis (and has been even before the NSA existed), and in many ways is more important than knowing what they are saying.
In addition, if the NSA were to suddenly be hit with a clue-by-four by federal judges actually doing their job, they would need the de-anonymizing information to perform proper filtering of domestic communications.
Unless you are shipping huge crates, your parcels likely pass through a carry-on style x-ray, to which film is a lot less sensitive. Up to ISO 800 (or is it 1600?) is ok.
Sealand has been a joke pretty much since it's founding. They are about as much of an independent nation as if I row a dinghy a couple of miles out from the beach and announce it is now the sovereign nation of SirWiredia. The British govt. ignores him because he's not worth their time to mess with; that would change were he to do something besides hang out there.
That said, a floating data center would indeed be outside the effective jurisdiction of pretty much any govt. But that doesn't mean you'll be able to find an ISP to connect to your anarchotopia. In addition, it's kind of hard to avoid the "jurisdiction" of a torpedo or anti-surface missle if you really piss the wrong people off.
If the picture is uploaded to Craigslist with the caption: "For a good time, call..." or to one of the several services that exist to serve this exact market (with fields for name and contact info of the victim, no less!), no, intent is not hard to prove at all.
I didn't say this was a good thing or fiscally prudent. Just that using it to agure: "Look at how horrible our government is." it's not really a good example, as it occurs in pretty much every single large organization that uses annual budgets and breaks them into pieces.
We use annual budgets because "making things up as you go along" (expense planning on an "as-needed" basis) gets quite exhausting and makes advance planning difficult. In response, pretty much every large organization uses annual budges, and expecting something other than this would happen is simply not realistic, given human nature.
Civil forfeiture laws are kind of funny... there IS some due process involved, but the case is lodged against the property, not the owner of the property. This leads to hilarious case names like United States v. a 1978 Ford Mustang.
As far as legality goes: The consititution does not require a criminal conviction before property is seized; it merely requires "due process." To incarcerate you, you must be convicted, but property directly involved in an alleged law violation (as opposed to property acquired through ill-gotten gains) is a civil matter, not a criminal one.
I think it's marginal, but still passes constitutional muster. After all, if you sue somebody for fraud, the court can award you damages without you being convicted of criminal fraud. This is little different. (You can even hire a lawyer to represent the property if you so choose.)
Pretty much any large organization with annual budgets burns through any remaining money before the fiscal year runs out. The reasoning is simple: if you don't spend every penny, budget planners inevitably use that as evidence you didn't need the money and will give you less the next year, even if you then turn out to need it.
In addition, there may be special projects the authorization for which expires at the end of the fiscal year.
Lastly, the people selling the stuff have targets of their own to meet and will often give special deals if you close the deal before the end of their fiscal year.
His early books, (all in the Jack Ryan) series, up to and including Cardinal of the Kremlin, were excellent, as was Red Storm Rising and some of his non-fiction books were excellent. Well-written, tightly-plotted, thrillers with interesting characters. I think Sum of All Fears was the start of the slide (Clear and Present was borderline...)
I was first introduced to his books when reading a copy of Hunt for Red October in my high-school library. In retrospect, I should have stolen it, as it was a first-edition copy from the Naval Institute Press. (His jacket photo was of him as a dorky clerk in his Father-in-law's insurance office.)
I think his later books suffered from his success, as they were written like he no longer paid any attention to his editor (I once saw the same sentence repeated on consecutive pages), and his books become overlong, sloppy, and too packed with rambling polemic. (Although I suppose you can argue that for the audience that enjoys polemic, they were too mild.)
Every incoming (or, I guess, in the case of Canada, outgoing) mail parcel goes through an x-ray (I'm not saying they actually pay a lot of attention to each one; it's kind of luck-of-the-draw.) If the inspector sees a package containing a bunch of plastic cards and something that looks like a passport, they are naturally going to wonder what that's doing being sent via international mail. It's not as if you can accidentally leave your passport at home when leaving the country.
Because customs facilities are on international borders, they don't need anything but the barest suspicion to take a peek in your package, certainly not a warrant.
But yeah, hosting SR in SanFran was not very bright. Of course, given that what he was doing would get him arrested in pretty much every country in the land, there's not really any good location for the servers. Even in Russia, you would have needed some pretty good underworld connections to keep those servers out of govt. hands.
The feds have never taken the position that BitCoins are invalid or valueless. A vehicle for money laundering? Yes. Something that is likely to attract regulatory and legal attention if you deal in a lot of them? Yep. But valueless? Nope; they've never said that.
Going after somebody under money-laundering or securities laws (which has been done already) would be kind of difficult if you argued they weren't moving money.
Assuming the civil forfeiture proceedings go as planned, the BitCoins will likely be sold at auction just like any other seized property that isn't actual fungible currency (at least, BitCoins aren't fungible on any platform the feds deal with...) They might sell a USB stick containing the wallet so they have something in-hand to pass on to the buyer.
It includes just about any diagnosed mental illness, high blood pressure, diabetes, excess weight, asthma, etc.
Oh, and don't forget that horrible malady of having a functioning female reproductive system. You can either pay through the nose for a horrible childbirth rider, or you can risk being driven to bankruptcy if you get pregnant.
If you have a "serious" pre-existing condition (and the criteria for what that means is VERY broad), absent Obamacare, it's VERY difficult (and in many cases impossible) to obtain insurance. And what insurance is available is often utterly unaffordable and or horrible. (Any pre-existing condition you have will usually be outright excluded, along with childbirth.)
With Obamacare, those in excellent health will indeed pay more for coverage, but those in anything less than excellent health will now be able to obtain usable insurance outside of an employer group plan.
Read the laws again. The law merely requires facilities that accept Medicare and provide emergency care to provide "stabilizing" treatment to emergency conditions without regard to ability to pay. Once you are stable, it is perfectly legal to toss you out the door. Your friend likely found a facility that was willing to cover her cancer under their charitable care program (some level of unpaid care is required in most states for non-profit hospitals.) If your friend had needed a transplant, she would have discovered the limits of that care. (People routinely die due to inability to get transplants covered; they are just too expensive for most hospitals to write off.) Dialysis is ALWAYS covered by Medicare as soon as four months elapse, no matter your age. But you need to find somebody to cover those four months, unless you want to head to the ER every time you crash. This is by no means guaranteed. You most certainly can be refused "essential" care, as long as you are not in danger of dying right there in the lobby. (As in, they'll treat you if you are about to fall into a diabetic coma, but aren't at all required to provide you with a monitor and strips (much less insulin) long-term to keep it from happening again.)
Next, there is no law saying that hospitals (or anybody) cannot collect on debt as long as you are making minimal payments. They can pursue debt collection equal to the efforts of any other unsecured creditor. And yes, if you show up and offer up what you can, the judge may take you up on your payment plan... but that's not set in stone and varies widely by state.
And yes, being out of work drives people to bankruptcy, but so do unaffordable co-pays and deductibles, policies with horrible annual limits, policies with limited coverage, unaffordable drugs, sudden catastrophe without insurance (it doesn't take much), etc. The paths to medical bankruptcy are many.
Slashdot Mirror
Countries spy on each other all the time. Even allies. It has ever been thus, for centuries even. Heck, when I had a summer job at the DoD, we were sternly warned that spies can come from any country, and were provided a list of the current "hot spots." More than a couple close allies were up there in the rankings.
From my perspective, Edward Snowden would have been a whistle-blowing hero if he restricted his disclosures to borderline-illegal domestic spying. But apparently he's done a document dump of every electronic intelligence program he could get his hands on... that ain't whistleblowing, that's espionage. If the US ever gets his mitts on him, he'll almost surely never leave prison, and rightly so. Why did he EVER take a job with the NSA if he thought all forms of electronic intelligence were bad and worthy of spilling the details about to the whole world?
You are launching something into the air... quite high up, in fact. Yes, you need to file appropriate paperwork with the local equivalent of the FAA. Space issues aside, there's plain old airspace regulation to contend with.
There are two main types of cancers Mammograms detect:
A slow-growing type you'd be able to notice yourself (because of the lump) before it's too late
The fast-growing type where treatment is largely futile, as it starts spreading before it can be caught by a mammogram.
There ARE some cancers detected where mammograms are useful, but the cost of the scans, biopsies, and worry for all the false positives mean it's an awful expensive (in more ways than one) way to save lives.
I price out data center space (among other things) for a living, and punching in a rack consuming that amount of power in our considerably more remote data center, and using our default profit margins, it didn't come out that much cheaper.
HFT is innocuous when it works. When it goes haywire, it can have very real consequences. Have you already forgotten the "flash crash"?
Wait a minute: by being called a "newspaper", a website is magically transformed from a place that should be able to post comments at will to a place that should ruthlessly police them with an iron fist?
Opinion columns/pieces are actively chosen by editorial staff. I don't know of any comments section of any website that has even implied there was any editorial control. No "editor" publishes comments on newspaper websites, no more than Slashdot's editors "publishes" comments here.
"Other experts say Apple cannot continue to go it alone"
Cannot. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
As long as the comments are clearly delineated from editorial content, I don't think it makes a whole lot of sense to hold the paper responsible for the content of the comments. (Not to mention that holding a newspaper liable under human rights laws for "offensive" speech would be laughed out of nearly any court in the US. That wouldn't stop some clowns from trying, or a particularly brain-addled judge from occasionally issuing an injunction, but it'd never stick.)
Yes, the comments of many news websites are worthless cesspools of scum and villainy. But there's better ways to prevent that than holding newspapers legally liable for comment content.
They aren't exactly asking for pocket-change here. They want fairly extensive funding in order to produce a product that will be utterly worthless in the marketplace... (running a GPU on an FPGA isn't exactly going to be at the upper-right of the price/perf graph.) It'd be nice if the top contributors at least got a copy of a reference design, not just a USB stick with source on it.
It's nice that it will be "open", but I kind of think they'll have trouble getting funding for a "hobby" project that few, if any, of the backers will even be able to use. (And even if they could, would they want to?) This would be like contributing money to a new car company so they could design (but not actually build) a hand-built, but otherwise generic, mid-size sedan, but with a riding lawnmower engine in it instead a car engine. Yeah, the whole world will get a copy of the blueprints, but why would anyone ever want to build it?
Lets see... create a website pretty much solely dedicated to the black market and money laundering (not even Russia will be too thrilled with you), attach a big "find and arrest me as soon as possible!" sign to yourself, connect it only to an anonymized network, but then leave the data on your server unencrypted?
Somebody had an over-inflated opinion of the ability of technology to protect him from law enforcement.
I never said the NSA should have the right to spy on American citizens. They shouldn't. They've done a poor job not spying on Americans.
All I said was that to perform one of their most basic functions, figuring out who is talking to whom (this is a bedrock of spycraft, going back centuries), requires Tor to be de-anonymized. They don't even have the opportunity to do the right thing (or anything) without knowing even which country the traffic is from.
And it's not as if "the terrorists" are the NSA's sole reason for existing... they do, you know, spy on foreign governments (and their agents) too. I could see Tor being a very useful method for an agent to relay information home. It's certainly a lot safer than a courier chain. (Heck, I spotted one myself once, and I ain't even a spook... saw some guy putting a single paper INTO one of those real estate flyer boxes at a Metro station near DC.)
Again, it's not all about the content of the message. Spy agencies run into encryption they can't break all the time (steganography, hash tables, one-time-pads, whatever); it's an expected part of the job. Which is why so much effort is spent on at least figuring out who is talking to whom when.
Figuring out who is talking to whom is a basic function of any functioning intelligence organization. We are talking spycraft going back centuries here... If they don't de-anonymize Tor, how are they even supposed to know if the communications are foreign or domestic?
I'm not saying the information cannot be mis-used, or that it's impossible for them to retain records they should not be retaining. All I'm saying is that an anonymous Tor utterly keeps them from doing one of their most basic jobs. They don't even have the opportunity to do the right thing (or anything, really) without knowing where the members are from.
Gee, an organization tasked with intercepting and interpreting electronic communications wants to intercept and interpret electronic communications! Who woulda thunk it?
The NSA has certainly done a poor job keeping it's nose clean, but personally, I'd be rather disappointed if they weren't trying to de-anonymize Tor! Figuring out who is talking to who, and how often, called Signals Intelligence, is the bedrock of intelligence analysis (and has been even before the NSA existed), and in many ways is more important than knowing what they are saying.
In addition, if the NSA were to suddenly be hit with a clue-by-four by federal judges actually doing their job, they would need the de-anonymizing information to perform proper filtering of domestic communications.
Unless you are shipping huge crates, your parcels likely pass through a carry-on style x-ray, to which film is a lot less sensitive. Up to ISO 800 (or is it 1600?) is ok.
Sealand has been a joke pretty much since it's founding. They are about as much of an independent nation as if I row a dinghy a couple of miles out from the beach and announce it is now the sovereign nation of SirWiredia. The British govt. ignores him because he's not worth their time to mess with; that would change were he to do something besides hang out there.
That said, a floating data center would indeed be outside the effective jurisdiction of pretty much any govt. But that doesn't mean you'll be able to find an ISP to connect to your anarchotopia. In addition, it's kind of hard to avoid the "jurisdiction" of a torpedo or anti-surface missle if you really piss the wrong people off.
If the picture is uploaded to Craigslist with the caption: "For a good time, call..." or to one of the several services that exist to serve this exact market (with fields for name and contact info of the victim, no less!), no, intent is not hard to prove at all.
I didn't say this was a good thing or fiscally prudent. Just that using it to agure: "Look at how horrible our government is." it's not really a good example, as it occurs in pretty much every single large organization that uses annual budgets and breaks them into pieces.
We use annual budgets because "making things up as you go along" (expense planning on an "as-needed" basis) gets quite exhausting and makes advance planning difficult. In response, pretty much every large organization uses annual budges, and expecting something other than this would happen is simply not realistic, given human nature.
Civil forfeiture laws are kind of funny... there IS some due process involved, but the case is lodged against the property, not the owner of the property. This leads to hilarious case names like United States v. a 1978 Ford Mustang.
As far as legality goes: The consititution does not require a criminal conviction before property is seized; it merely requires "due process." To incarcerate you, you must be convicted, but property directly involved in an alleged law violation (as opposed to property acquired through ill-gotten gains) is a civil matter, not a criminal one.
I think it's marginal, but still passes constitutional muster. After all, if you sue somebody for fraud, the court can award you damages without you being convicted of criminal fraud. This is little different. (You can even hire a lawyer to represent the property if you so choose.)
Pretty much any large organization with annual budgets burns through any remaining money before the fiscal year runs out. The reasoning is simple: if you don't spend every penny, budget planners inevitably use that as evidence you didn't need the money and will give you less the next year, even if you then turn out to need it.
In addition, there may be special projects the authorization for which expires at the end of the fiscal year.
Lastly, the people selling the stuff have targets of their own to meet and will often give special deals if you close the deal before the end of their fiscal year.
His early books, (all in the Jack Ryan) series, up to and including Cardinal of the Kremlin, were excellent, as was Red Storm Rising and some of his non-fiction books were excellent. Well-written, tightly-plotted, thrillers with interesting characters. I think Sum of All Fears was the start of the slide (Clear and Present was borderline...)
I was first introduced to his books when reading a copy of Hunt for Red October in my high-school library. In retrospect, I should have stolen it, as it was a first-edition copy from the Naval Institute Press. (His jacket photo was of him as a dorky clerk in his Father-in-law's insurance office.)
I think his later books suffered from his success, as they were written like he no longer paid any attention to his editor (I once saw the same sentence repeated on consecutive pages), and his books become overlong, sloppy, and too packed with rambling polemic. (Although I suppose you can argue that for the audience that enjoys polemic, they were too mild.)
Every incoming (or, I guess, in the case of Canada, outgoing) mail parcel goes through an x-ray (I'm not saying they actually pay a lot of attention to each one; it's kind of luck-of-the-draw.) If the inspector sees a package containing a bunch of plastic cards and something that looks like a passport, they are naturally going to wonder what that's doing being sent via international mail. It's not as if you can accidentally leave your passport at home when leaving the country.
Because customs facilities are on international borders, they don't need anything but the barest suspicion to take a peek in your package, certainly not a warrant.
But yeah, hosting SR in SanFran was not very bright. Of course, given that what he was doing would get him arrested in pretty much every country in the land, there's not really any good location for the servers. Even in Russia, you would have needed some pretty good underworld connections to keep those servers out of govt. hands.
The feds have never taken the position that BitCoins are invalid or valueless. A vehicle for money laundering? Yes. Something that is likely to attract regulatory and legal attention if you deal in a lot of them? Yep. But valueless? Nope; they've never said that.
Going after somebody under money-laundering or securities laws (which has been done already) would be kind of difficult if you argued they weren't moving money.
Assuming the civil forfeiture proceedings go as planned, the BitCoins will likely be sold at auction just like any other seized property that isn't actual fungible currency (at least, BitCoins aren't fungible on any platform the feds deal with...) They might sell a USB stick containing the wallet so they have something in-hand to pass on to the buyer.
Here's a list of what can put you in that "small subset":
http://www.vaughns-1-pagers.com/medicine/pre-existing-conditions.htm
It includes just about any diagnosed mental illness, high blood pressure, diabetes, excess weight, asthma, etc.
Oh, and don't forget that horrible malady of having a functioning female reproductive system. You can either pay through the nose for a horrible childbirth rider, or you can risk being driven to bankruptcy if you get pregnant.
If you have a "serious" pre-existing condition (and the criteria for what that means is VERY broad), absent Obamacare, it's VERY difficult (and in many cases impossible) to obtain insurance. And what insurance is available is often utterly unaffordable and or horrible. (Any pre-existing condition you have will usually be outright excluded, along with childbirth.)
With Obamacare, those in excellent health will indeed pay more for coverage, but those in anything less than excellent health will now be able to obtain usable insurance outside of an employer group plan.
Read the laws again. The law merely requires facilities that accept Medicare and provide emergency care to provide "stabilizing" treatment to emergency conditions without regard to ability to pay. Once you are stable, it is perfectly legal to toss you out the door. Your friend likely found a facility that was willing to cover her cancer under their charitable care program (some level of unpaid care is required in most states for non-profit hospitals.) If your friend had needed a transplant, she would have discovered the limits of that care. (People routinely die due to inability to get transplants covered; they are just too expensive for most hospitals to write off.) Dialysis is ALWAYS covered by Medicare as soon as four months elapse, no matter your age. But you need to find somebody to cover those four months, unless you want to head to the ER every time you crash. This is by no means guaranteed. You most certainly can be refused "essential" care, as long as you are not in danger of dying right there in the lobby. (As in, they'll treat you if you are about to fall into a diabetic coma, but aren't at all required to provide you with a monitor and strips (much less insulin) long-term to keep it from happening again.)
Next, there is no law saying that hospitals (or anybody) cannot collect on debt as long as you are making minimal payments. They can pursue debt collection equal to the efforts of any other unsecured creditor. And yes, if you show up and offer up what you can, the judge may take you up on your payment plan... but that's not set in stone and varies widely by state.
And yes, being out of work drives people to bankruptcy, but so do unaffordable co-pays and deductibles, policies with horrible annual limits, policies with limited coverage, unaffordable drugs, sudden catastrophe without insurance (it doesn't take much), etc. The paths to medical bankruptcy are many.