"No crime happened here, within our jurisdiction," they'd say.
Which would seem to invalidate pretty much any extradition treaty, wouldn't it?
If you can commit what would be a crime in another country, and there's no law against it, you can't be extradited.
Clearly, nobody could be extradited from the US to the Netherlands for this, so why should anybody ever be extradited to the US for anything? If the stuff America does is outside of everyone else's law, then obviously, anything you do from outside the US to the US is clearly legal, right?
Oh, wait, this only gets applied to governments when they skirt around their own laws, not to the rest of us.
Yeah. You just keep telling yourself that your government would never do anything like this, that it's just an American thing.
Oh, you misunderstand me.
My government is part of the 5 eyes, and is guilty of this exact same kind of reciprocal arrangement.
I think it's all pathetic. But I also think it's being largely driven by the US, because since 9/11 it has become increasingly the case where the US will do anything for their own security. And I have great fears that they're the ones creating the global surveillance state.
But, make no mistake about it, I believe all governments participating in this are undermining rights and freedoms, including my own. The rest of the world hasn't consented to this, it's being done to us by secret treaties, and bypassing our own courts.
The problem is FAR too many people are saying "well, it's OK, as long as they're doing it for our security".
Sooner or later, with this level of widespread surveillance, we'll all be fucked. Because secret agencies will know every damned thing about you, and sooner or later, my worst tin-foil hat fears will come to be normal.
I don't think America is the only one doing this. But I do lay the blame squarely at the feet of the US for feeling it's their right to spy on every goddamned person on the planet.
When did the security of the US trump the rights of everyone else? Who the hell agreed to that?
Papers please, comrade. If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear.
I love how pretty much every country has come to the same conclusion: We can bypass our own laws if we have someone else do it for us.
They've all decided, well, we can't spy on our own people, but if the Americans do it for us it's all good.
Essentially reciprocity means that any laws which are intended to protect you will be bypassed as people get other actors to do it for them.
So, it's illegal for the Dutch to spy on their own people, probably illegal when the US spies on the Dutch, but since they've already for the information, why not?
Pathetic. Free societies aren't maintained by using loopholes to get around laws intended to control how your citizens get spied on.
What horsehit.
When governments are getting the take from the blanket surveillance the Americans (and really, the rest of the world), they have very little incentive to actually stop the surveillance in the first place.
Some days it seems like the US has more or less subverted the privacy and rights of everyone on the planet, and every other government is deciding the information sharing is too valuable to recognize they're just lying to us and doing it anyway.
At this point, I don't believe any elected official, or member of any of these state security entities deserves any privacy rights at all. Because they've all decided we don't.
The dystopian future is alive and well, and getting worse every day.
It's not hard not to get phished if you critically evaluate claims and requests as your SOP.
Of course, the problem with this is, anybody who does that more or less gets called a bit of a paranoid loon now and then.:-P
Not everybody understands that a certain level of paranoia is actually required to survive the internet and other scams.
Sometimes people look at you like you're over-reacting, right up until they realize they've given their credit card information to someone who was lying to them.
How did you know that others didn't click on it and then not mention it to anyone?
The company I work for does periodic in-house phishing/spam tests.
If you fail and click the link, you get sent for extra security training. They know, because they're the ones who own the machines you went to.
I gather a surprising amount of people actually fall for them. I find myself looking at "1 in 5800" and thinking "wow, you have some good training".
When my parents got on the interwebs, in so uncertain terms, I sat them down and had "the talk": The internet is a dark and scary place, and not something you just trust. I explained phishing and spam, as well as how to spot fake telemarketers and scams.
My parents have learned to be wary and a little skeptical when someone initiates contact with them, and know to ask for proof. On many occasions they've spotted stuff, though I still worry they might miss something.
But, I still remain amazed at how many people who work in technology fields still blindly click stuff. I expect senior citizens and the like to be less aware of this stuff, but if you've worked in technology for any period of time, you should know better.
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Either this stuff is real, with real benefits, or it's hype. Either way, someone will use it for marketing complete crap.
If the water is deep enough and the USV can dive deep enough, its trivial to wait it out. A submarine for instance has little fear of a hurricane unless its stuck trying to get out of port because they waited too long.
Except, the difference in this case is this thing is at the surface.
Which means it couldn't dive to wait it out.
It's submerged, but only a little, and it has a mast sticking out of the water.
So, how trivial is it to ride this out when you're barely under the water? It seems less so.
Don't suppose you also sell tinfoil hats that could protect me from the NSA's mind-reading rays?
The problem is, the current version of the rays can penetrate tin-foil.
What you need is a layer of pudding between your head and the tinfoil, chocolate works best. You'll need to shave your head first to be ensured of it working.
Well, James Gosling was mentioned, so that's pretty impressive, right?
You know, I've been trying to figure out WTF that mention was all about.
So far, I've got nothing other than it serves as a very oblique reference to 2011.
As 'news' reporting, I rank that right up there with "in 1984, the same year Sally Baker showed me her underwear, there was a chemical leak in Bhopal India".
It's just spurious junk.
Slashdot continues to decline, and the 'editors' continue to be a joke.
Don't forget the goofy comic relief character. There's always one of those.
Oh, and you need the military guy (or the guys in dark suits and sunglasses) in charge of making the weaponized version just in case, and who demonstrate that the good guys are sometimes crazy delusional bastards, and that morality is a grey area (especially when you think you're defending your country).
There needs to be the greedy capitalist only interested in profit, even if that means some loss of life.
You may also need a puppy to complete this trope. Or some other foil which has natural immunity that everybody needs to capture first.
You might also need Steven Seagal just in case things get testy, but if he's the sherrif you're covered.
If we voluntarily destroy all our samples, and some other nation doesn't, then there will be that much less smallpox. This is a valuable goal in itself, even if it doesn't mean that the virus has been completely eradicated.
Except that governments have essentially stated that they're not willing to get rid of their stuff, in case someone else uses it.
So, lots of research is conducted under the guise "well, we can find a cure in case someone else does it". The problem is, that same research can be used to make the weapons in the first place.
You're saying the GPs argument doesn't make sense, but in fact governments have been using it for decades.
It's real, and it's happening right now. If you don't think that's true, then you're somewhat out of touch.
The researchers were hoping to leverage the power of presence: the idea that people recognize another sentient being in the environment, and are more responsive as a result....
The interviewer isnâ(TM)t quite a sentient AI; it relies on a dialogue tree similar to telephone customer service: tell the computer all the simple things, then press 0 for a human to explain the story behind your streaking arrest.
> In other words, it won't understand you, has a limited set of responses it knows how to deal with, and will piss people off.
And some fed (who had to wait around for your interview and strap you into the electrodes anyway) will come back to an apoplectic interviewee who is tired of the stupid machine because it doesn't understand nuance, inflection, or anything else. Which is precisely why trained humans do this job.
Tell you what though, I hear they have this really cool program which pretends to be a 13 year old speaking his non native language.
I just don't see this being anything more than a gimmick to get funding, and will never actually amount to anything in the near term.
that you don't speak the L in solder is completely new to me, what would be the reason?
Well, the obvious answer is several hundred years of separation before we had any form of telephony or occasion to hear it spoken.
Take Newfoundland (a province of Canada), for example. There are Irish accents which haven't existed in Ireland for a few hundred years. Why? Because they were remote places, without a lot of interaction, and the accent remained intact even after it had died out in County Cork.
Why is there High German and Low German? Again, either geography, class, or something else. My guess is mostly class.
In North America you're talking about a huge land area, settled over time by people from all sorts of places, and with no fast transportation between them.
Even regionally the pronunciation can change quite a bit. Heck, I don't have the same inflections as most of my family does. I've actually been asked where I'm from by people who grew up in the same area.
In the UK, there's massive differences in accents -- some class based, apparently, and some region based. There are plenty of people in the UK who, as far as I understand, will say "hise" instead of "house". Why that would be, I have no idea.
For instance, I have known more than a few Brits who almost can't say "th". So, instead of "thought", it comes out as "fought". They don't even hold their mouth/tongue the way you would to make the "th" sound, they make an entirely different sound, essentially the way I'd make an "f" sound. Similarly, in my limited experience, a lot of German speakers turn the "th" into more of a "z" sound, so you can get "zinking" instead of "thinking".
Beyond that, you'd need to ask a linguist. Over time, what you grew up hearing and saying defines how you say it, and what you can say. I strongly suspect there are some sounds that some people simply cannot make if they didn't learn early enough.
Sometimes, I do wonder if accents aren't sometimes the equivalent of a regional speech impediment, and they will always affect how you speak.:-P
The longer I live, and the more non-native speakers of English I meet, the more I have a hard time explaining all of the corner cases in English, because it's made up of stuff from so many different languages.
Instead of talking about "malicious actors", the article should be talking about malicious developers.
Or, and I think this is more likely... malicious management who is more interested in getting something out the door than giving a damn about how much it sucks.
Find me a developer who has never been told to "just do it" and put some garbage out, and I'll show you a lucky (wo)man.
From what I've seen, this is caused by the people who make the decisions deciding they don't want to wait, or spend the time implementing security.
There's an easy answer: companies are more interested in "ZOMG, we have to have teh app" then they are in spending time and resources in making the app not suck.
Any app which goes out the door which is sending passwords in plaintext was either written by someone who was incompetent, or who was told by management to just ship the damned thing and get on with it.
In my experience, it's usually the latter.
And, since companies don't really bear any liability for implementing terrible security, I don't see this changing.
My bet, there were a few people who knew this, pointed it out, and got told to STFU. If nobody knew about this, well, then we'll revert back to incompetence and people who have no idea of how to write for security.
In order to compensate you for our insecure products and indifference to your privacy ... we're giving you more of our crappy, insecure products?
Wow, did Sony write this settlement themselves?
What a joke.
Sadly, in my experience, they blame it on their team, and get promoted.
Bad managers are surprisingly good at making it look like someone else's fault.
If it's legal for the US to spy on Dutch citizens, then isn't it also legal for the Dutch citizens to spy on and hack into Americans?
Because, clearly, if it's legal for the US to do the same to external entities, the reverse must be true, right?
Which would seem to invalidate pretty much any extradition treaty, wouldn't it?
If you can commit what would be a crime in another country, and there's no law against it, you can't be extradited.
Clearly, nobody could be extradited from the US to the Netherlands for this, so why should anybody ever be extradited to the US for anything? If the stuff America does is outside of everyone else's law, then obviously, anything you do from outside the US to the US is clearly legal, right?
Oh, wait, this only gets applied to governments when they skirt around their own laws, not to the rest of us.
Such bullshit.
It's not dead, it's pining for the fjords.
Hmmm, because of the rendering, I thought you'd replied to me, but I see you were replying to an AC.
Still, my point stands.
Oh, you misunderstand me.
My government is part of the 5 eyes, and is guilty of this exact same kind of reciprocal arrangement.
I think it's all pathetic. But I also think it's being largely driven by the US, because since 9/11 it has become increasingly the case where the US will do anything for their own security. And I have great fears that they're the ones creating the global surveillance state.
But, make no mistake about it, I believe all governments participating in this are undermining rights and freedoms, including my own. The rest of the world hasn't consented to this, it's being done to us by secret treaties, and bypassing our own courts.
The problem is FAR too many people are saying "well, it's OK, as long as they're doing it for our security".
Sooner or later, with this level of widespread surveillance, we'll all be fucked. Because secret agencies will know every damned thing about you, and sooner or later, my worst tin-foil hat fears will come to be normal.
I don't think America is the only one doing this. But I do lay the blame squarely at the feet of the US for feeling it's their right to spy on every goddamned person on the planet.
When did the security of the US trump the rights of everyone else? Who the hell agreed to that?
Papers please, comrade. If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear.
"There are four boxes to be used in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury and ammo. Please use in that order."
So, what box are we up to now again?
I love how pretty much every country has come to the same conclusion: We can bypass our own laws if we have someone else do it for us.
They've all decided, well, we can't spy on our own people, but if the Americans do it for us it's all good.
Essentially reciprocity means that any laws which are intended to protect you will be bypassed as people get other actors to do it for them.
So, it's illegal for the Dutch to spy on their own people, probably illegal when the US spies on the Dutch, but since they've already for the information, why not?
Pathetic. Free societies aren't maintained by using loopholes to get around laws intended to control how your citizens get spied on.
What horsehit.
When governments are getting the take from the blanket surveillance the Americans (and really, the rest of the world), they have very little incentive to actually stop the surveillance in the first place.
Some days it seems like the US has more or less subverted the privacy and rights of everyone on the planet, and every other government is deciding the information sharing is too valuable to recognize they're just lying to us and doing it anyway.
At this point, I don't believe any elected official, or member of any of these state security entities deserves any privacy rights at all. Because they've all decided we don't.
The dystopian future is alive and well, and getting worse every day.
Of course, the problem with this is, anybody who does that more or less gets called a bit of a paranoid loon now and then. :-P
Not everybody understands that a certain level of paranoia is actually required to survive the internet and other scams.
Sometimes people look at you like you're over-reacting, right up until they realize they've given their credit card information to someone who was lying to them.
The company I work for does periodic in-house phishing/spam tests.
If you fail and click the link, you get sent for extra security training. They know, because they're the ones who own the machines you went to.
I gather a surprising amount of people actually fall for them. I find myself looking at "1 in 5800" and thinking "wow, you have some good training".
When my parents got on the interwebs, in so uncertain terms, I sat them down and had "the talk": The internet is a dark and scary place, and not something you just trust. I explained phishing and spam, as well as how to spot fake telemarketers and scams.
My parents have learned to be wary and a little skeptical when someone initiates contact with them, and know to ask for proof. On many occasions they've spotted stuff, though I still worry they might miss something.
But, I still remain amazed at how many people who work in technology fields still blindly click stuff. I expect senior citizens and the like to be less aware of this stuff, but if you've worked in technology for any period of time, you should know better.
Well, around 80% of the time at least. ;-)
Microsoft switch IE to use components written by someone else?
I place the likelihood of that as pretty small.
Microsoft have always had a huge case of "Not Invented Here", and I don't see that changing.
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When connect to your tube amplifier, this provides a sound which is spunkier and enhanced in the pink spectrum, causing women to swoon. Achieve smooth bass response like never before.
For only eleventy zillion dollars, you too can get the most out of your sound system. :-P
Either this stuff is real, with real benefits, or it's hype. Either way, someone will use it for marketing complete crap.
Except, the difference in this case is this thing is at the surface.
Which means it couldn't dive to wait it out.
It's submerged, but only a little, and it has a mast sticking out of the water.
So, how trivial is it to ride this out when you're barely under the water? It seems less so.
The problem is, the current version of the rays can penetrate tin-foil.
What you need is a layer of pudding between your head and the tinfoil, chocolate works best. You'll need to shave your head first to be ensured of it working.
You know, I've been trying to figure out WTF that mention was all about.
So far, I've got nothing other than it serves as a very oblique reference to 2011.
As 'news' reporting, I rank that right up there with "in 1984, the same year Sally Baker showed me her underwear, there was a chemical leak in Bhopal India".
It's just spurious junk.
Slashdot continues to decline, and the 'editors' continue to be a joke.
Greedy. Corporate. Assholes.
You seem to underestimate the historical tendency of crazy tyrants to decide "if I can't win, everybody dies".
WTF do you think "mutually assured destruction" was all about? The premise that nobody would actually be crazy enough to destroy the entire world.
I think you attribute too much rationality to geopolitics. Now think of North Korea, and tell me just how much rationality you see.
Don't forget the goofy comic relief character. There's always one of those.
Oh, and you need the military guy (or the guys in dark suits and sunglasses) in charge of making the weaponized version just in case, and who demonstrate that the good guys are sometimes crazy delusional bastards, and that morality is a grey area (especially when you think you're defending your country).
There needs to be the greedy capitalist only interested in profit, even if that means some loss of life.
You may also need a puppy to complete this trope. Or some other foil which has natural immunity that everybody needs to capture first.
You might also need Steven Seagal just in case things get testy, but if he's the sherrif you're covered.
Except that governments have essentially stated that they're not willing to get rid of their stuff, in case someone else uses it.
So, lots of research is conducted under the guise "well, we can find a cure in case someone else does it". The problem is, that same research can be used to make the weapons in the first place.
You're saying the GPs argument doesn't make sense, but in fact governments have been using it for decades.
It's real, and it's happening right now. If you don't think that's true, then you're somewhat out of touch.
>
In other words, it won't understand you, has a limited set of responses it knows how to deal with, and will piss people off.
And some fed (who had to wait around for your interview and strap you into the electrodes anyway) will come back to an apoplectic interviewee who is tired of the stupid machine because it doesn't understand nuance, inflection, or anything else. Which is precisely why trained humans do this job.
Tell you what though, I hear they have this really cool program which pretends to be a 13 year old speaking his non native language.
I just don't see this being anything more than a gimmick to get funding, and will never actually amount to anything in the near term.
Well, the obvious answer is several hundred years of separation before we had any form of telephony or occasion to hear it spoken.
Take Newfoundland (a province of Canada), for example. There are Irish accents which haven't existed in Ireland for a few hundred years. Why? Because they were remote places, without a lot of interaction, and the accent remained intact even after it had died out in County Cork.
Why is there High German and Low German? Again, either geography, class, or something else. My guess is mostly class.
In North America you're talking about a huge land area, settled over time by people from all sorts of places, and with no fast transportation between them.
Even regionally the pronunciation can change quite a bit. Heck, I don't have the same inflections as most of my family does. I've actually been asked where I'm from by people who grew up in the same area.
In the UK, there's massive differences in accents -- some class based, apparently, and some region based. There are plenty of people in the UK who, as far as I understand, will say "hise" instead of "house". Why that would be, I have no idea.
For instance, I have known more than a few Brits who almost can't say "th". So, instead of "thought", it comes out as "fought". They don't even hold their mouth/tongue the way you would to make the "th" sound, they make an entirely different sound, essentially the way I'd make an "f" sound. Similarly, in my limited experience, a lot of German speakers turn the "th" into more of a "z" sound, so you can get "zinking" instead of "thinking".
Beyond that, you'd need to ask a linguist. Over time, what you grew up hearing and saying defines how you say it, and what you can say. I strongly suspect there are some sounds that some people simply cannot make if they didn't learn early enough.
Sometimes, I do wonder if accents aren't sometimes the equivalent of a regional speech impediment, and they will always affect how you speak. :-P
The longer I live, and the more non-native speakers of English I meet, the more I have a hard time explaining all of the corner cases in English, because it's made up of stuff from so many different languages.
Or, and I think this is more likely ... malicious management who is more interested in getting something out the door than giving a damn about how much it sucks.
Find me a developer who has never been told to "just do it" and put some garbage out, and I'll show you a lucky (wo)man.
From what I've seen, this is caused by the people who make the decisions deciding they don't want to wait, or spend the time implementing security.
There's an easy answer: companies are more interested in "ZOMG, we have to have teh app" then they are in spending time and resources in making the app not suck.
Any app which goes out the door which is sending passwords in plaintext was either written by someone who was incompetent, or who was told by management to just ship the damned thing and get on with it.
In my experience, it's usually the latter.
And, since companies don't really bear any liability for implementing terrible security, I don't see this changing.
My bet, there were a few people who knew this, pointed it out, and got told to STFU. If nobody knew about this, well, then we'll revert back to incompetence and people who have no idea of how to write for security.