Are any of your points established in actual case law? Or just what you think they should be? I'm betting the "oh, because I think this is common sense" scenario, in which case it's merely a guess.
Because, since there is no case law around autonomous vehicles, there's simply no way that you can say that. Some lawyer can argue anything in court, and if the situation is novel enough, you have NO BASIS to say what will be decided.
Say I'm driving in the car, and it crashes... does my insurance pay for that? Or am I going to have to spend years in court to get Google to pay?
My bet is the latter. Because Google isn't going to assume liability and indemnify me. In fact, their asshole lawyers are going to try to make it that I was a week late in doing maintenance.
"I can make up plenty of wacky scenarios which may or may not ever happen, and it probably wouldn't be an exhaustive list of things which could happen " as I can with current vehicles.
Except, absolutely none of those scenarios currently include an AI being in control of the vehicle for some or all of the trip, and there is precisely zero precedent for the case law.
And, until such time as there is case law, and states establish specific laws to deal with it... you're in uncharted territory.
So, it's all well and good for us to say "the obvious answer is this", but obvious answers seldom are, and courts and juries will do whatever the hell they want to until there's sufficient amount of precedent to really define this.
At the end of the day, I don't think your average person will be buying one of these anytime soon. Both because they don't care, and because it will likely be an expensive novelty item for some time to come.
The people who blaze the trail on this? Let them sort out the legal landscape.
For me, even if one of these things showed up at a car dealer this year, I wouldn't even consider one for years to come, if ever.
Because I have no interest in a self driving car. Maybe someday it will be the futuristic Johnny Cab, but in the mean time, it's a novel piece of technology that almost nobody actually gives a damn about. For pretty much everybody else, this is just another piece of futurist technology which may or may not pan out.
And I'm still not convinced that your assertion the liability issues have been resolved holds any water.
Because until it's been through the courts, or specific laws have been passed around it, you're talking out of your ass, and you know it.
But, hey, this is Slashdot, and talking out of our asses it what we do.:-P
"effectively offer unlimited usage of our services because customers will have the ability to buy as much data as they want."
So our unlimited isn't unlimited, and our caps aren't caps.
This is like saying you have an all you can eat restaurant, where you pay for everything you eat individually under the notion that you can buy all you want.
This is lying to consumers, deceptive marketing, and just plain bullshit.
If the FTC or someone isn't giving them the smack down on this, then we can pretty much expect corporations to start making up their own meanings for words and getting away with it.
Ummm, because they move in 3 dimensions and have pitch and yaw, whereas a steering wheel does "left and right"? Jets also have a couple of pedals for some additional control surfaces. And buttons, and levers, and dials... oh, and operators which hugely more training.
I just don't think a joystick is a good input mechanism for a car.
You, however, are free to buy whatever kind of car strikes your fancy.. including an older Saab with a fly by wire joystick if you like.
But, really, if it was better for a car, I would have expected us to have all switched by now. You'll note we haven't.
I don't think you understand the topic of conversation here. We're not talking about situations in which the computer says, "Excuse me, Dave, but I'm not sure what to do here. Could you please drive for me?"
Oh, really now? I don't see anything which explicitly says your interpretation OR my interpretation,
California DMV has told the company it needs to add all those things back to their traditional locations so that occupants can take "immediate physical control" of the vehicle if necessary
So, either I'm monitoring everything this car is doing at all times in case I need to decide I'm driving (in which case I'm already driving), or this is to cover a failure mode in which the car has no idea what to do next, and if I wasn't paying attention I'd be screwed.
I'm saying, for me, I would never get into a driverless car UNLESS it was 100% responsible at all times. Because, I might as well be driving anyway if I have to be 100% aware of what it's doing in case that happens to be something stupid.
So why lull myself into a sense of complacency when it's misplaced?
It has to be an all or nothing thing... either I can have a nap, or I'm driving the car. And if I'm the one driving the car, WTF do I need the AI for?
Again, your issues become "what are these unknown complicated conditions and how can we know them in advance or that the default solution will work?", "who holds liability?", and "do you realistically expect to hand off control to a human who isn't paying attention and have that work out?"
If the answer to any of these questions is "don't know, but how hard could it be?", or "that's for the courts to decide", or "what could possibly go wrong?"... well, the in my opinion, your fancy driverless cars aren't ready for prime time and are just gimmicks.
See, if a human is operating a motor vehicle and gets themselves into deep doo doo.. they are ultimately responsible for their actions.
Google isn't going to take on your liability, and if there's the fallback of "OK, your turn now"... this really just means that you're still liable for the vehicle, even if you couldn't possibly have taken control in time.
I can make up plenty of wacky scenarios which may or may not ever happen, and it probably wouldn't be an exhaustive list of things which could happen -- but I'm not putting my life in the hands of some autonomous car to find out how it would respond in every possible situation. And I'm certainly not taking any liability for Google or any other vendor of these things.
If your software is driving, you are the ones responsible for loss of life or anything else. I'm only going to be in it if I'm just a passenger. If I'm in legally control of the vehicle, then I'll bloody well drive it.
I would say it's based on a rational fear of computers and automation, and a reasoned understanding that they have failure modes and won't be perfect in all situations.
The problem is that the transition time from being essentially cargo to the one operating the vehicle is going to be where most of the failures occur.
So, it's all fine and lovely to say "tag, you're it", but the human reaction time to re-engage with what the vehicle is doing, what is happening around you, and what needs to be done about it is going to be the critical window in which lives are lost, or accidents become inevitable.
And if the driver has to be engaged enough to do all of those things, they might as well still be driving... because humans are pretty terrible at making the context switch from not paying attention to making decisive action which has to happen Right Now.
So, as I said elsewhere, either I have a vehicle with no inputs from me and Google (or whomever) takes all liability, or I'll simply decide this is a gimmick and not really ready for anything other than a technology demo.
In my opinion, suddenly handing control back to the driver is the point at which things will go terribly wrong. And by the time that is happening, it's probably already too late.
California DMV has told the company it needs to add all those things back to their traditional locations so that occupants can take "immediate physical control" of the vehicle if necessary
The transition time from the computer giving up to the user having to take control is always going to mean this is impossible.
If you're reading the newspaper, you are not going to be able to transition to operating the vehicle in the event the computer gives up and says it's all up to you.
I've been saying for a while, that a driverless car needs to be 100% hands off for the people in the car, or serves no value at all other than as a gimmick.
I will believe driverless cars are ready for prime time when I can stumble out of a pub, crawl into the back seat and tell the car to take me home. Anything less than that is a giant failure of automation waiting to happen, and a convenient way of dodging liability by pretending that users are expected to be in control of the car even while the AI is driving.
As long as there is a pretense of handing back to the driver in even of an emergency, this is a glorified cruise control, and I'll bloody well drive myself.
If I'm ultimately responsible for the vehicle, I'll stay in control of the vehicle. Because if there's a 10 second lag between when the computer throws up its hands and says "I have no idea" and when the user is actually aware enough and in control, that is the window where Really Bad Things will happen.
They also fail to realize that many of the people that work in these calls centers believe they are working valid jobs to some degree or another.
No, that's not true.
The people who work in the call centers are the same pool of talent, and in many cases may be doing both.
But they know they're scamming when they're doing it.
The problem is that they often don't know they're scamming when they're offering real support, because they're unqualified to know that in many cases.
I've seen documentaries about the people doing these things, and they absolutely know they're scamming people. And the reality is, they simply don't care.
Nobody could possibly NOT know that they're just ripping people off.
The important thing to remember is to make sure your parents and friends who aren't from a tech background understand that this is a real thing, and that they're being lied to. Because way too many people fall for it when the nice friendly person calls to say they're gonna fix your problem.
One is at a network level, the other is at a device level.
When LEOs can brick your phone, it's more than disrupting your service, it's destroying your property.
Police can also use the tool, but only under the conditions of the existing section 7908 of the California Public Utilities Code. That gives police the ability to cut off phone service in certain situations and typically requires a court order, except in an emergency that poses "immediate danger of death or great bodily injury."
And they've demonstrated that they will expand the scope of that, or misuse it as they see fit. Because they always expand the scope of these things down the road for something else since they already have the mechanism.
They will have also built in a mechanism whereby malicious actors will be able to do this just for the fun on it.
I predict it will be less than a year before law enforcement decides to shut down all cell phones of people they disagree with (like protesters).
I predict it will be less than a year before hackers figure out how to brick or otherwise damage cell phones.
Because, as usual, when you try to pass a legal solution to a technical problem, you will introduce new technical problems, and if law enforcement can abuse something they will.
This will be misused, it's only a matter of time. And, since manufacturers will decide to make the phone the same for everywhere, we're all fucked because of a decision in California. And I don't trust that the carriers won't brick a phone you own if your bill is late, instead of just cancelling your service they'll kill your phone.
Everyone around the world will now have a phone which has a loop-hole allowing law enforcement, government, and private industry to brick it. Add to that the likely back doors for law enforcement to look into your phone, and suddenly your phone is controlled by entities which aren't you.
This is an incredibly bad design by Touch Bionics. Why would you make a $70,000 piece of equipment permanently dependent on a specific Ipod Touch?
You know, given the terrible kind of software we see in embedded software, and the terrible security implemented by most companies... I'm perfectly willing to believe this is an incredibly bad design, because there's plenty of evidence that these kinds of things tend to have incredibly bad designs.
Between companies using 10 year old Linux kernels, to having unpatchable systems, or just having really bad understandings of security, I've come to conclude this is the norm.
In an age of "parallel construction", you more or less have to assume that law enforcement has tools available to them to do exactly that -- or at least concoct enough evidence to make the confession irrelevant.
As soon as they started doing that, law enforcement became an entity which will lie and construct a new set of facts to match their story.
I would suggest that you more or less have to assume they're not trustworthy, and are willing to perjure themselves in court to say "why yes, your honor, that's how we found this information".
Parallel construction is basically a systematized way that law enforcement can illegally use information, and with no probably cause construct a scenario where it looks plausible on paper that they found it through legitimate means.
Trusting law enforcement at this point would be madness.
so they were on a fishing expedition to see if they could find anything good/relating to the silk road stuff. In all honesty, it sounded like due diligence to me
No, as you say, it's a fishing expedition.
Sorry, officer, do you have some evidence of wrong doing on my behalf, or are you just asking around to see if you can find out anything you can use?
The answer, in both cases, is talk to my lawyer and come back with a warrant. Because when the police are on a fishing expedition, the last place you want to be is innocently answering questions they'll twist against you.
With parallel construction and every other dirty trick law enforcement is using, you have to start from the premise they're either lying to you, or hoping you'll slip up. Because, quite frankly, they probably are.
Even if there's no evidence you committed a crime or otherwise broke the law, you're still quite likely to get screwed over. Answering open ended questions is a terrible idea, because they're just as likely to use it to fabricate something about you.
Law enforcement is no longer trustworthy. Stop treating them like they are. Even if they're smiling at you, they're probably hostile to your best interests.
IMHO, the problem with all those economical/political systems is that they rely on people playing according to the rules.
I agree. And the problem is nobody plays by the rules, and you need someone to enforce them -- government. Because you have to assume that left to their own devices people will not play by the rules, because they never have.
Each individual will play according to their own moral values instead of the system's rules.
And the problem becomes when corporations don't really have moral values, they have lawyers telling them what they can get away with, and it comes down to the collective malfeasance of the people running the corporations. Which, taken as a whole, is best described as a bunch of sociopaths.
They're not driven by any moral standard in most cases (despite what they claim), they're driven by a goal to get the most profits possible. They will form cartels, they will lie, cheat, and do anything they can. Corporations are inherently amoral.
Capitalism falls squarely on its nose when you expect people will follow the rules and not game the system. Because nobody ever has done this over any meaningful period of time.
And the people who game the economic system are also gaming the political system -- this is what happens when money == speech, the ones with the most money get the most speech.
In its simplest form, Capitalism means people own things. The problem becomes when someone treats getting that at any means necessary, even if it is to the detriment of other people, as a moral ideal.
The free market utterly fails because it's never actually a free market, and never can be.. because some of the actors will always form cartels, or outright cheat, or make backroom deals, or anything else they can think of to get ahead. You always need someone to keep them in check, but the people who want to undermine that either believe it is a self correcting system, or know it isn't but expect to profit from it.
As envisioned by the Koch brothers, Capitalism is a race to the bottom of climbing over the corpses of those around you, and as long as you come out on top it's a good thing.
Yes, sure, people have their own moral values. But you can't rely on people to follow them, or even have ones which are compatible with society. Which means if you don't have a government around to enforce the rules, the rules will simply get ignored, or they'll lobby governments to change the rules in their favor.
America has reached the point where lobbyists and corporations have more actual power than the citizens. And it will only get worse from here.
See, the people he's making this argument to will already go "yarg, Maxists". They're already going to think uncritically about what he says, because in their mind Capitalism is perfect and achieves the desired outcomes -- corporate profits.
Increasingly, even economists are saying "Hey, you know that Capitalism thing? It's got some serious systemic issues which lead to bad outcomes."
The claimed outcomes and results of Capitalism are a myth, and don't work nearly as well as planned.
But the 1% who gain the most from it are the ones telling everyone else that it's some kind of moral imperative that corporations and the wealthy get more money and the rest of us can eat cake.
It's a flawed economic model, full of assumptions which are provably not true, and which creates results which have been increasingly skewing more and more wealth into the hands of a few.
But, since they're on top of the pyramid, and it's working for them, they're going to continue to act like it's working and a good thing. The reality is anything but.
In its current incarnation, Capitalism is systemically broken, and largely beyond repair -- because any time someone tries to address any problems, idiots like this start screaming "ZOMG, it's teh socialism". And these are the people who are most in favor of corporate serfdom, government granted monopolies, and the general bad behavior we see from corporations.
Because these people have a romantic view that at one point there was no government regulations, and life was good for everybody.
Combine this unwavering zeal for a screwed up economic system which only benefits a small amount of people, and the increasing surveillance state where police can access all of this secretly gathered information and then lie about where they got the information... and you now have Big Brother who is beholden to the corporations.
The outcome is increasingly looking like the worst possible combination of the panopticon an an oligarchy.
When they start these things, they say "oh, this will only be used for this, under strict controls and nothing else".
People who say that they'll eventually abuse it are dismissed as ridiculous, but then eventually since they have all of this information they might as well use it for something.
And if they have to lie about how they did it to conceal what they have, so be it. Because, after, they're the good guys, right?
This is a complete and utter undermining of the fourth amendment and the notion that a just government doesn't spy on you "just in case".
The US has been transformed into a police state. Worse, they've helped turn the rest of the world into one too.
Congratulations, America, you've pretty much killed off free societies around the world, and brought in your own special kind of fascism.
Your spy agencies and law enforcement are truly living up to all of the scary imagery people have been decrying for years.
Papers please, comrade. If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear.
Roombas (and variants) are common household robots. YouTube has a lot of videos about Roombas cleaning a room while being ridden by a cat. Sometimes the cat is wearing a shark-suit.
If true, and I have no reason to doubt that it is, this is further evidence of why I consider YouTube to be a pointless web site.
Now, the video of someone trying to put a cat into a shark suit? Well, that sounds like the precursor to a Darwin award.
Why should we-the-people have to wait for a conglomerate to make the business case for bringing service to our communities?
Dear god, man, are you suggesting a consortium of taxpayers decide to compete with a corporation, and take away stock holder value and threaten executive bonuses in order to get better service and introduce competition is a good thing??
Are you some kind of communist bastard?
The corporations are entitled to ridiculous profits without having to work to preserve market share, to suggest anything else is un-American.
Why, corporations are people, and they're entitled to all the speech they can afford. People don't know what they want, it's up to corporations to tell them.
OK, seriously, I don't believe any of that drivel.
But there are a huge amount of people who believe that corporate profits is a moral imperative, and that they should be protected from being undercut by new entrants to the market, and that if it's tax-payer funded it's practically communism.
Those people are, of course, idiots. And they're the ones making damned sure existing corporations get more protection in law, and everyone else gets screwed.
American Democracy has largely become something which is in service of corporate goals.
That's been shown to be false over and over again. Why do these people get away with a provable false statement.
Uncritical audiences who want these statements to be true because it aligns with their ideology?
If you can equate it with socialism, you can count on a chunk of people agreeing with you even if it's a lie. It doesn't have to be true if the people who vote for you don't care if it's true, and don't want to know or believe it isn't.
This is just about entrenching the notion of corporate profits, and ensuring they never really have to work for it... because, stock holders. It doesn't matter if people get good service of it they're introducing state granted monopolies... they must be good.
Increasingly, politicians are entirely in the back pockets of corporations, and will simply not do anything which goes against that.
The oligarchy at this point is pretty much inevitable. Because they can bribe the politicians to do their bidding.
Slashdot Mirror
Are any of your points established in actual case law? Or just what you think they should be? I'm betting the "oh, because I think this is common sense" scenario, in which case it's merely a guess.
Because, since there is no case law around autonomous vehicles, there's simply no way that you can say that. Some lawyer can argue anything in court, and if the situation is novel enough, you have NO BASIS to say what will be decided.
Say I'm driving in the car, and it crashes ... does my insurance pay for that? Or am I going to have to spend years in court to get Google to pay?
My bet is the latter. Because Google isn't going to assume liability and indemnify me. In fact, their asshole lawyers are going to try to make it that I was a week late in doing maintenance.
Except, absolutely none of those scenarios currently include an AI being in control of the vehicle for some or all of the trip, and there is precisely zero precedent for the case law.
And, until such time as there is case law, and states establish specific laws to deal with it ... you're in uncharted territory.
So, it's all well and good for us to say "the obvious answer is this", but obvious answers seldom are, and courts and juries will do whatever the hell they want to until there's sufficient amount of precedent to really define this.
At the end of the day, I don't think your average person will be buying one of these anytime soon. Both because they don't care, and because it will likely be an expensive novelty item for some time to come.
The people who blaze the trail on this? Let them sort out the legal landscape.
For me, even if one of these things showed up at a car dealer this year, I wouldn't even consider one for years to come, if ever.
Because I have no interest in a self driving car. Maybe someday it will be the futuristic Johnny Cab, but in the mean time, it's a novel piece of technology that almost nobody actually gives a damn about. For pretty much everybody else, this is just another piece of futurist technology which may or may not pan out.
And I'm still not convinced that your assertion the liability issues have been resolved holds any water.
Because until it's been through the courts, or specific laws have been passed around it, you're talking out of your ass, and you know it.
But, hey, this is Slashdot, and talking out of our asses it what we do. :-P
So our unlimited isn't unlimited, and our caps aren't caps.
This is like saying you have an all you can eat restaurant, where you pay for everything you eat individually under the notion that you can buy all you want.
This is lying to consumers, deceptive marketing, and just plain bullshit.
If the FTC or someone isn't giving them the smack down on this, then we can pretty much expect corporations to start making up their own meanings for words and getting away with it.
Greedy bastards.
Why does this sound like remote desktop to me?
Just sayin'.
Ummm, because they move in 3 dimensions and have pitch and yaw, whereas a steering wheel does "left and right"? Jets also have a couple of pedals for some additional control surfaces. And buttons, and levers, and dials ... oh, and operators which hugely more training.
I just don't think a joystick is a good input mechanism for a car.
You, however, are free to buy whatever kind of car strikes your fancy .. including an older Saab with a fly by wire joystick if you like.
But, really, if it was better for a car, I would have expected us to have all switched by now. You'll note we haven't.
Oh, really now? I don't see anything which explicitly says your interpretation OR my interpretation,
So, either I'm monitoring everything this car is doing at all times in case I need to decide I'm driving (in which case I'm already driving), or this is to cover a failure mode in which the car has no idea what to do next, and if I wasn't paying attention I'd be screwed.
I'm saying, for me, I would never get into a driverless car UNLESS it was 100% responsible at all times. Because, I might as well be driving anyway if I have to be 100% aware of what it's doing in case that happens to be something stupid.
So why lull myself into a sense of complacency when it's misplaced?
It has to be an all or nothing thing ... either I can have a nap, or I'm driving the car. And if I'm the one driving the car, WTF do I need the AI for?
Again, your issues become "what are these unknown complicated conditions and how can we know them in advance or that the default solution will work?", "who holds liability?", and "do you realistically expect to hand off control to a human who isn't paying attention and have that work out?"
If the answer to any of these questions is "don't know, but how hard could it be?", or "that's for the courts to decide", or "what could possibly go wrong?" ... well, the in my opinion, your fancy driverless cars aren't ready for prime time and are just gimmicks.
See, if a human is operating a motor vehicle and gets themselves into deep doo doo .. they are ultimately responsible for their actions.
Google isn't going to take on your liability, and if there's the fallback of "OK, your turn now" ... this really just means that you're still liable for the vehicle, even if you couldn't possibly have taken control in time.
I can make up plenty of wacky scenarios which may or may not ever happen, and it probably wouldn't be an exhaustive list of things which could happen -- but I'm not putting my life in the hands of some autonomous car to find out how it would respond in every possible situation. And I'm certainly not taking any liability for Google or any other vendor of these things.
If your software is driving, you are the ones responsible for loss of life or anything else. I'm only going to be in it if I'm just a passenger. If I'm in legally control of the vehicle, then I'll bloody well drive it.
I would say it's based on a rational fear of computers and automation, and a reasoned understanding that they have failure modes and won't be perfect in all situations.
The problem is that the transition time from being essentially cargo to the one operating the vehicle is going to be where most of the failures occur.
So, it's all fine and lovely to say "tag, you're it", but the human reaction time to re-engage with what the vehicle is doing, what is happening around you, and what needs to be done about it is going to be the critical window in which lives are lost, or accidents become inevitable.
And if the driver has to be engaged enough to do all of those things, they might as well still be driving ... because humans are pretty terrible at making the context switch from not paying attention to making decisive action which has to happen Right Now.
So, as I said elsewhere, either I have a vehicle with no inputs from me and Google (or whomever) takes all liability, or I'll simply decide this is a gimmick and not really ready for anything other than a technology demo.
In my opinion, suddenly handing control back to the driver is the point at which things will go terribly wrong. And by the time that is happening, it's probably already too late.
Saab did that once. It was universally panned as a terrible idea.
I'm betting there's just some things you wouldn't be able to do with that joystick, like controlling a skid in the snow.
Me, I'll stick with the old fashioned steering wheel. I know it works.
Your jet fighter controls? Not so much.
The transition time from the computer giving up to the user having to take control is always going to mean this is impossible.
If you're reading the newspaper, you are not going to be able to transition to operating the vehicle in the event the computer gives up and says it's all up to you.
I've been saying for a while, that a driverless car needs to be 100% hands off for the people in the car, or serves no value at all other than as a gimmick.
I will believe driverless cars are ready for prime time when I can stumble out of a pub, crawl into the back seat and tell the car to take me home. Anything less than that is a giant failure of automation waiting to happen, and a convenient way of dodging liability by pretending that users are expected to be in control of the car even while the AI is driving.
As long as there is a pretense of handing back to the driver in even of an emergency, this is a glorified cruise control, and I'll bloody well drive myself.
If I'm ultimately responsible for the vehicle, I'll stay in control of the vehicle. Because if there's a 10 second lag between when the computer throws up its hands and says "I have no idea" and when the user is actually aware enough and in control, that is the window where Really Bad Things will happen.
No, that's not true.
The people who work in the call centers are the same pool of talent, and in many cases may be doing both.
But they know they're scamming when they're doing it.
The problem is that they often don't know they're scamming when they're offering real support, because they're unqualified to know that in many cases.
I've seen documentaries about the people doing these things, and they absolutely know they're scamming people. And the reality is, they simply don't care.
Nobody could possibly NOT know that they're just ripping people off.
The important thing to remember is to make sure your parents and friends who aren't from a tech background understand that this is a real thing, and that they're being lied to. Because way too many people fall for it when the nice friendly person calls to say they're gonna fix your problem.
Just wait, you'll see soon enough. ;-)
All I can say for now is ... Moosenado!
One is at a network level, the other is at a device level.
When LEOs can brick your phone, it's more than disrupting your service, it's destroying your property.
And they've demonstrated that they will expand the scope of that, or misuse it as they see fit. Because they always expand the scope of these things down the road for something else since they already have the mechanism.
They will have also built in a mechanism whereby malicious actors will be able to do this just for the fun on it.
I predict it will be less than a year before law enforcement decides to shut down all cell phones of people they disagree with (like protesters).
I predict it will be less than a year before hackers figure out how to brick or otherwise damage cell phones.
Because, as usual, when you try to pass a legal solution to a technical problem, you will introduce new technical problems, and if law enforcement can abuse something they will.
This will be misused, it's only a matter of time. And, since manufacturers will decide to make the phone the same for everywhere, we're all fucked because of a decision in California. And I don't trust that the carriers won't brick a phone you own if your bill is late, instead of just cancelling your service they'll kill your phone.
Everyone around the world will now have a phone which has a loop-hole allowing law enforcement, government, and private industry to brick it. Add to that the likely back doors for law enforcement to look into your phone, and suddenly your phone is controlled by entities which aren't you.
You know, given the terrible kind of software we see in embedded software, and the terrible security implemented by most companies ... I'm perfectly willing to believe this is an incredibly bad design, because there's plenty of evidence that these kinds of things tend to have incredibly bad designs.
Between companies using 10 year old Linux kernels, to having unpatchable systems, or just having really bad understandings of security, I've come to conclude this is the norm.
In an age of "parallel construction", you more or less have to assume that law enforcement has tools available to them to do exactly that -- or at least concoct enough evidence to make the confession irrelevant.
As soon as they started doing that, law enforcement became an entity which will lie and construct a new set of facts to match their story.
I would suggest that you more or less have to assume they're not trustworthy, and are willing to perjure themselves in court to say "why yes, your honor, that's how we found this information".
Parallel construction is basically a systematized way that law enforcement can illegally use information, and with no probably cause construct a scenario where it looks plausible on paper that they found it through legitimate means.
Trusting law enforcement at this point would be madness.
No, as you say, it's a fishing expedition.
Sorry, officer, do you have some evidence of wrong doing on my behalf, or are you just asking around to see if you can find out anything you can use?
The answer, in both cases, is talk to my lawyer and come back with a warrant. Because when the police are on a fishing expedition, the last place you want to be is innocently answering questions they'll twist against you.
With parallel construction and every other dirty trick law enforcement is using, you have to start from the premise they're either lying to you, or hoping you'll slip up. Because, quite frankly, they probably are.
Even if there's no evidence you committed a crime or otherwise broke the law, you're still quite likely to get screwed over. Answering open ended questions is a terrible idea, because they're just as likely to use it to fabricate something about you.
Law enforcement is no longer trustworthy. Stop treating them like they are. Even if they're smiling at you, they're probably hostile to your best interests.
I agree. And the problem is nobody plays by the rules, and you need someone to enforce them -- government. Because you have to assume that left to their own devices people will not play by the rules, because they never have.
And the problem becomes when corporations don't really have moral values, they have lawyers telling them what they can get away with, and it comes down to the collective malfeasance of the people running the corporations. Which, taken as a whole, is best described as a bunch of sociopaths.
They're not driven by any moral standard in most cases (despite what they claim), they're driven by a goal to get the most profits possible. They will form cartels, they will lie, cheat, and do anything they can. Corporations are inherently amoral.
Capitalism falls squarely on its nose when you expect people will follow the rules and not game the system. Because nobody ever has done this over any meaningful period of time.
And the people who game the economic system are also gaming the political system -- this is what happens when money == speech, the ones with the most money get the most speech.
In its simplest form, Capitalism means people own things. The problem becomes when someone treats getting that at any means necessary, even if it is to the detriment of other people, as a moral ideal.
The free market utterly fails because it's never actually a free market, and never can be .. because some of the actors will always form cartels, or outright cheat, or make backroom deals, or anything else they can think of to get ahead. You always need someone to keep them in check, but the people who want to undermine that either believe it is a self correcting system, or know it isn't but expect to profit from it.
As envisioned by the Koch brothers, Capitalism is a race to the bottom of climbing over the corpses of those around you, and as long as you come out on top it's a good thing.
Yes, sure, people have their own moral values. But you can't rely on people to follow them, or even have ones which are compatible with society. Which means if you don't have a government around to enforce the rules, the rules will simply get ignored, or they'll lobby governments to change the rules in their favor.
America has reached the point where lobbyists and corporations have more actual power than the citizens. And it will only get worse from here.
They don't need to be valid.
See, the people he's making this argument to will already go "yarg, Maxists". They're already going to think uncritically about what he says, because in their mind Capitalism is perfect and achieves the desired outcomes -- corporate profits.
Increasingly, even economists are saying "Hey, you know that Capitalism thing? It's got some serious systemic issues which lead to bad outcomes."
The claimed outcomes and results of Capitalism are a myth, and don't work nearly as well as planned.
But the 1% who gain the most from it are the ones telling everyone else that it's some kind of moral imperative that corporations and the wealthy get more money and the rest of us can eat cake.
It's a flawed economic model, full of assumptions which are provably not true, and which creates results which have been increasingly skewing more and more wealth into the hands of a few.
But, since they're on top of the pyramid, and it's working for them, they're going to continue to act like it's working and a good thing. The reality is anything but.
In its current incarnation, Capitalism is systemically broken, and largely beyond repair -- because any time someone tries to address any problems, idiots like this start screaming "ZOMG, it's teh socialism". And these are the people who are most in favor of corporate serfdom, government granted monopolies, and the general bad behavior we see from corporations.
Because these people have a romantic view that at one point there was no government regulations, and life was good for everybody.
Combine this unwavering zeal for a screwed up economic system which only benefits a small amount of people, and the increasing surveillance state where police can access all of this secretly gathered information and then lie about where they got the information ... and you now have Big Brother who is beholden to the corporations.
The outcome is increasingly looking like the worst possible combination of the panopticon an an oligarchy.
When they start these things, they say "oh, this will only be used for this, under strict controls and nothing else".
People who say that they'll eventually abuse it are dismissed as ridiculous, but then eventually since they have all of this information they might as well use it for something.
And if they have to lie about how they did it to conceal what they have, so be it. Because, after, they're the good guys, right?
This is a complete and utter undermining of the fourth amendment and the notion that a just government doesn't spy on you "just in case".
The US has been transformed into a police state. Worse, they've helped turn the rest of the world into one too.
Congratulations, America, you've pretty much killed off free societies around the world, and brought in your own special kind of fascism.
Your spy agencies and law enforcement are truly living up to all of the scary imagery people have been decrying for years.
Papers please, comrade. If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear.
LOL ... Then I choose FreeBSD. :-P
Or porn search engines ... because, rule #34.
It depends, if your 'specific' problem is getting funding for yourself by spreading FUD about the dangers ...
If true, and I have no reason to doubt that it is, this is further evidence of why I consider YouTube to be a pointless web site.
Now, the video of someone trying to put a cat into a shark suit? Well, that sounds like the precursor to a Darwin award.
Dear god, man, are you suggesting a consortium of taxpayers decide to compete with a corporation, and take away stock holder value and threaten executive bonuses in order to get better service and introduce competition is a good thing??
Are you some kind of communist bastard?
The corporations are entitled to ridiculous profits without having to work to preserve market share, to suggest anything else is un-American.
Why, corporations are people, and they're entitled to all the speech they can afford. People don't know what they want, it's up to corporations to tell them.
OK, seriously, I don't believe any of that drivel.
But there are a huge amount of people who believe that corporate profits is a moral imperative, and that they should be protected from being undercut by new entrants to the market, and that if it's tax-payer funded it's practically communism.
Those people are, of course, idiots. And they're the ones making damned sure existing corporations get more protection in law, and everyone else gets screwed.
American Democracy has largely become something which is in service of corporate goals.
Uncritical audiences who want these statements to be true because it aligns with their ideology?
If you can equate it with socialism, you can count on a chunk of people agreeing with you even if it's a lie. It doesn't have to be true if the people who vote for you don't care if it's true, and don't want to know or believe it isn't.
This is just about entrenching the notion of corporate profits, and ensuring they never really have to work for it ... because, stock holders. It doesn't matter if people get good service of it they're introducing state granted monopolies ... they must be good.
Increasingly, politicians are entirely in the back pockets of corporations, and will simply not do anything which goes against that.
The oligarchy at this point is pretty much inevitable. Because they can bribe the politicians to do their bidding.